The Genesis Plague (2010)

say we may soon embark on a modern Holy War. A new crusade between West and East. In your opinion, will military intervention ever change the dynamic in the Middle East?’
    His reply was anything but direct. ‘Not until every human being has accepted Christ as humankind’s saviour will the war for souls end.’
    Stalemate.
    The desk phone buzzed quietly - a ring-tone assigned to a secure, dedicated line. ‘Excuse me.’ Hiding his alarm, Stokes stiffly picked up the phone. He listened as the caller calmly reported without preamble: ‘They’ve found the cave.’
    Chirp. Delay.
    ‘I see,’ he replied. ‘Hold a moment.’ Stokes glanced up to the reporter. He covered the receiver and said to her, ‘I’m afraid we’ll need to stop here.’

4
IRAQ
    While Camel and Jam scoured the interiors of the four pickup trucks the Arabs had abandoned on the roadside, Jason strode towards the rectangular mobile command shelter his team had erected in east-west orientation at the bottom of the foothill. From a distance or from the sky, the structure’s black goat-hair sheathing and simple wood framework were easily confused for Bedouin - a purposeful ruse since Arabs shunned nomads in much the same way as Westerners spurned gypsies.
    However, nomads weren’t as common in the north as in southern desert regions like the Ash Sham, the Sahara, the Sinai and the Negev. Plus a Bedouin bayt , or family unit, typically travelled with women, children and small livestock such as sheep or goats. So it was no surprise when four months earlier the team had been approached by an overly eager Iraqi Security Force patrol unit. Luckily, a pair of marines had been shadowing the Iraqis, and Jason had pulled them aside to explain in great detail how they were all playing for the same team. The marines quickly herded the ambitious Iraqis into the Humvee and the patrol disappeared as quickly as it had come.
    Jason pulled back the door flap and dipped inside the tent’s cool interior.
    Provisions were stacked around its interior perimeter, leaving just enough room to accommodate three sleeping mats at nighttime (two men always remained awake and rotated watch duty). A section of the roof had been peeled back to let in some light. Crammed into a camping chair, Meat sat in front of a folding table that hosted his laptop and techno gear.
    Jason swilled some water from his canteen and watched Meat tap away on the laptop’s keyboard. The guy looked like the ultimate terrorist, with his chequered headscarf, cocoa tan, bushy jet-black beard and eyebrows, and determined dark eyes searing with suppressed rage. But, unlike the jihadists who simmered on rigid interpretations of the Qur’an or gummy Middle East politics, Dennis Coombs struggled to reconcile an alcoholic mother, an absentee father, sibling rivalry, rural poverty and a fiancee’s serial infidelity. All of which had made him easy pickings for the marine recruiters’ notorious ‘poverty draft’.
    ‘Any luck?’ Jason asked.
    ‘Yeah, actually. The outside was cooked.’ He motioned with his head to the cracked-open plastic casing. ‘But the inside was raw.’ Pinched between tweezers, he held up the extracted circular, wafer-thin computer chip that was no bigger than the fingernail on his pinky. ‘Just like I prefer my steak cooked: black and blue.’
    Jason smiled.
    Next, Meat examined each side of the chip with a magnifying loop. ‘No stamps. Nothing. The data’s probably encrypted too. RSA or something similar, I’d bet.’
    ‘What do you think it was used for?’
    ‘It’s no library card, I’ll tell ya that. I’m thinking it’s an IPS chip.’
    The Identity and Passport Service data chip, Jason recalled, was a smart card for biometric access systems - encrypted files containing a user’s retinal scan, fingerprints and other unique identifiers.
    ‘No worries, though,’ Meat said. ‘I’m sure we can crack it.’
    Jason watched as Meat hooked a rectangular USB device, no bigger than a deck of playing cards, into his laptop - a hi-tech data reader developed by the NSA, which Meat commonly used to skim embedded information off passports.
    Meat placed the chip on the reader’s flat surface.
    The software interface launched on the laptop screen. It took only seconds before the chip reader identified the protocol, matched its key, and brought up the data.
    ‘That was fast,’ Jason said.
    ‘There’s good reason to be worried about cyber terrorism.’ Scrolling through