Read Online The Jerusalem Puzzle by Laurence O’Bryan - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Laurence O’Bryan
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scratched in the Arab Spring that had overturned Mubarak and his family, it was probably as safe a place as any in this turbulent city.
Being only forty-five minutes from the airport helped too, as did the fact that it was built on an island in the Nile and that it had excellent room service and bars full of expatriates. You could even fool yourself for an hour in Harry’s Pub that you were back in London.
What was keeping Mark out of Harry’s Pub that night was a series of Twitter posts that an astute colleague had been tracking. The one that particularly interested him was one that had been sent an hour ago from an unknown location in Israel.
Whoever was sending the Tweets was covering their tracks well. The fake IP address they’d been using had been broken through, but it had only left them with a generic address for an Israeli internet service provider. Whoever was logging in to make the posts was being very careful. That alone ticked the warning boxes.
We are ready to hatch the brood
, was the latest message. It was an innocent enough Tweet on its own, it could have been about pigeons, but the cryptic nature of the others in the stream from the same source gave more cause for concern, as did the trouble they were having locating where the messages were coming from.
The fact that Twitter could be monitored anywhere in the world meant that it could be used to receive signals as to when to commence a whole range of activities. Such things weren’t unknown. The Portuguese Carnation coup of 1974 had been triggered by the singing of the nation’s Eurovision song contest entry in that year’s program.
And this was where things got interesting. His colleague had managed to uncover that over a hundred people across Egypt were following this particular series of messages.
And most of the people searching and watching the Twitter feed were registered to IP addresses on Egyptian military bases or air force bases. It was that final piece of news that prompted his colleague to pass the details of what they’d been tracking onto him and place URGENT in the subject line.
If the Egyptian air force were planning something, then a source inside Israel could be useful to them.
But what were they planning?
16
The apartment building on Jabotinsky had four floors and eight apartments, two on each floor. It had been easy to figure out which building was likely to be Kaiser’s; there was a big black stain above the balcony at the front. We’d also walked all the way up to the roundabout and back. It was the only building with any smoke damage, never mind anything worse.
It looked like a giant bat had wiped itself out against the front wall, halfway up.
The windows of the apartment were smeared with soot, and the door to the small balcony was blackened as if smoke had streamed through it.
The entrance to the apartments was at the side of the building. The main door was wooden and painted black; secure and sturdy looking. After three failed attempts of pressing the buzzer on each apartment and saying we needed entry to a party, we got in.
We went up in a tiny metal elevator. The door to what had been Kaiser’s apartment was locked. Nobody answered when I knocked lightly. There was blue and white tape barring to it, so I hadn’t really expected anyone to come. The door was also a different colour to the other ones on the floor. The door to what had been Kaiser’s apartment was unpainted.
It looked as if someone had battered the original door down and then replaced it. The people in the rest of the block had been lucky that the fire hadn’t burnt the whole building down. Someone must have called the fire brigade pretty quickly.
‘I bet one of the tenants calls the police because we pressed all those buzzers,’ said Isabel. ‘We shouldn’t hang around. They’ll think we’re back to burn the rest of the building.’
‘Ain’t nothing like being an optimist,’ I said.
‘I wasn’t being an
Being only forty-five minutes from the airport helped too, as did the fact that it was built on an island in the Nile and that it had excellent room service and bars full of expatriates. You could even fool yourself for an hour in Harry’s Pub that you were back in London.
What was keeping Mark out of Harry’s Pub that night was a series of Twitter posts that an astute colleague had been tracking. The one that particularly interested him was one that had been sent an hour ago from an unknown location in Israel.
Whoever was sending the Tweets was covering their tracks well. The fake IP address they’d been using had been broken through, but it had only left them with a generic address for an Israeli internet service provider. Whoever was logging in to make the posts was being very careful. That alone ticked the warning boxes.
We are ready to hatch the brood
, was the latest message. It was an innocent enough Tweet on its own, it could have been about pigeons, but the cryptic nature of the others in the stream from the same source gave more cause for concern, as did the trouble they were having locating where the messages were coming from.
The fact that Twitter could be monitored anywhere in the world meant that it could be used to receive signals as to when to commence a whole range of activities. Such things weren’t unknown. The Portuguese Carnation coup of 1974 had been triggered by the singing of the nation’s Eurovision song contest entry in that year’s program.
And this was where things got interesting. His colleague had managed to uncover that over a hundred people across Egypt were following this particular series of messages.
And most of the people searching and watching the Twitter feed were registered to IP addresses on Egyptian military bases or air force bases. It was that final piece of news that prompted his colleague to pass the details of what they’d been tracking onto him and place URGENT in the subject line.
If the Egyptian air force were planning something, then a source inside Israel could be useful to them.
But what were they planning?
16
The apartment building on Jabotinsky had four floors and eight apartments, two on each floor. It had been easy to figure out which building was likely to be Kaiser’s; there was a big black stain above the balcony at the front. We’d also walked all the way up to the roundabout and back. It was the only building with any smoke damage, never mind anything worse.
It looked like a giant bat had wiped itself out against the front wall, halfway up.
The windows of the apartment were smeared with soot, and the door to the small balcony was blackened as if smoke had streamed through it.
The entrance to the apartments was at the side of the building. The main door was wooden and painted black; secure and sturdy looking. After three failed attempts of pressing the buzzer on each apartment and saying we needed entry to a party, we got in.
We went up in a tiny metal elevator. The door to what had been Kaiser’s apartment was locked. Nobody answered when I knocked lightly. There was blue and white tape barring to it, so I hadn’t really expected anyone to come. The door was also a different colour to the other ones on the floor. The door to what had been Kaiser’s apartment was unpainted.
It looked as if someone had battered the original door down and then replaced it. The people in the rest of the block had been lucky that the fire hadn’t burnt the whole building down. Someone must have called the fire brigade pretty quickly.
‘I bet one of the tenants calls the police because we pressed all those buzzers,’ said Isabel. ‘We shouldn’t hang around. They’ll think we’re back to burn the rest of the building.’
‘Ain’t nothing like being an optimist,’ I said.
‘I wasn’t being an
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