‘There’s something else you need to know. Barbara Simpson’s uncovered something peculiar that’s relevant to this problem. She was checking back through some of the historic data you’d supplied and she noticed an anomaly. Nearly three years ago an Arab male with an Iraqi passport arrived in Baltimore on a flight from the UK. Also on the flight were two Chinese nationals, and the odd thing is that the Arab passenger’s ultimate point of departure was Beijing, and those two Chinese men were also passengers on every flight he took from China all the way to Baltimore.’
‘That could just be a coincidence,’ Rogers suggested, not sounding entirely convinced.
‘It could be, but Simpson thought it looked odd, so she did a bit more checking through her contacts back in the UK. The people at Six – James Bond-land in London – discovered that the two Chinese passengers were officers in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and they’d almost certainly been working at Unit 61398 in Shanghai. That’s one of the most persistent and dangerous of all the Chinese hacking outfits. Then she checked some of the details over here in the States and found that the two Chinese men had dropped off the grid almost as soon as they’d arrived.’
Roger shook his head. ‘That doesn’t make sense. Cyber’s more your thing than mine but I do know that these hackers can run their attacks from anywhere in the world, so why would they travel to America if that was their target? They could have stayed in Shanghai and done everything from there.’
‘That,’ Morgan agreed, ‘is the anomaly. What could they be doing here that they couldn’t be doing just as well from the other side of the world? But the fact that according to your records they haven’t used credit cards or driving licences or any other kind of document that could identify them suggests that they’ve gone to ground somewhere and somebody has been providing them with cash for their living expenses.’
‘So why do you think they could somehow be involved in this attack?’
‘The thing about passports is that the days when you could just wave a reasonable facsimile at an immigration officer and hope that that would do the trick are long gone. These days, at least in the developed world, every passport is scanned electronically and if it doesn’t match what’s in the linked databases it won’t be accepted. So the passports the two Chinese men produced were the real thing, or at least they were genuine People’s Republic of China passports, and the document produced by the Arab was also genuine. Whether or not the names given in those passports match with the actual birth certificates of the three individuals is another question altogether.
‘What I’m getting at is that these days even an international terrorist needs to use genuine travel documentation, and it’s difficult to obtain multiple genuine passports. So we do know that for at least the last three years the Arab male who flew out of Beijing with the two Chinese hackers has been travelling on the same passport. And the important thing is the name inside that document.’
Rogers looked interested. ‘And the name is?’
‘Mahdi Sadir. The same name as the man Bill Clark here thinks is the leader of this bunch of four terrorists here in DC. The one calling himself Abū Tadmir.’