The Gomorrah Gambit Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2019 by Tom Chatfield

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: July 2019

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  The passage quoted from Vice magazine in Chapter 21 is an extract from “The Vice Guide to Athens 2014,” first published on www.vice.com on July 2, 2014.

  ISBN 9780316526517

  E3-20190604-DA-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  January 2014

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

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  January 2014

  Before, they were cousins. Now, they are brothers—bonded in this moment of terror and hope. Nineteen years old, a month between them, yet they are men bestriding the world.

  Hamid watches his breath hang in the air. It is cold here, something he once thought impossible. Back home, he assumed Syria was like Egypt in the Indiana Jones movies—hot sand, bright desert light, gratefully grinning locals. Now, this is his icebreaker with the Islamic Republic’s more terrified citizenry: pointing to his gloves, miming surprise and saying the word for cold, barid, with raised eyebrows. Once they are sure he’s not blaming them for the temperature, they always laugh. Nervously.

  His unit is fighting to consolidate control of the city. They are winning. Heavy weapons—their side’s heavy weapons, brought from Iraq, manned by real soldiers who fought under Saddam—periodically shake the air and then the earth. Hamid has grown up fast. He closes his eyes, and there they are: the limbs lodged in rubble, the blood, the detonated mess of taken life. None of it is as much like a movie as he had hoped.

  Yet his own life, much of the time, is good. Violence and comradeship suit him. There are rewards, both expected and unexpected. Drugs and women are plentiful, within sanctioned bounds: narcotics within houses used by troops working the trafficking routes, sex within houses holding women enslaved for the purpose. After some encouragement from more hardened recruits, he has got into both. Hamid, unlike his cousin, is a fighter. Kabir is more accustomed to keyboards than guns.

  Then again, the internet is both a priority and a blessing in their war. For Hamid and the other foreigners, there are social media and online gaming sessions, chocolate spread, good winter clothes. They are the special ones: walking adverts for the global groundswell. Before long, he and his brothers from a hundred nations will eat fast food and drive fast cars and pray and shoot well-oiled Kalashnikovs together. They will grow old and honored in the glow of their victories. Just as soon as they finish capturing this cold, dirty city, blow the shit out of the remaining rebel forces, and sweep across the region.

  Today there was a crucifixion. It was his first. Hamid probes his conscience for shock—and his stomach for the sickness he struggled to master at his first beheading—but there is nothing. This may be because the victim’s head wasn’t mounted on a spike afterwards, but he feels he is making progress. As promised, experience has begun to bring wisdom. If only he could reach the same accommodation with his craving for cigarettes, which are outlawed. Actual tears have filled his eyes only once since his arrival in November, when a young man was given twenty lashes on the street for possessing a pack of Akhtamar Classic. It was unbearable to watch the precious tobacco ground into dust.

  Right now, Hamid is on edge, hefting his weapon from hand to hand without being sure where to point it. They are waiting for the signal to advance from their current cover behind a half-destroyed apartment complex on the city’s outskirts. Its breeze blocks gape like rotten teeth. In his mind, he enacts a routine that brings comfort at such moments of boredom and fear. He visualizes lighting a Lucky Strike, breathing it in, then cycling the smoke out through his nose to mask the burned and bloodied smell of this place.

  Then, suddenly, he is dead.

  Hamid’s forehead caves in, puckered around a raw hole as the sniper’s bullet exits the back of his skull. His body takes a curiously long time to collapse sideways, sprawled like a drunk’s onto building dust and asphalt.

  Cursing and throwing themselves to the ground, the men beside him try and fail to return fire. Only Kabir doesn’t move, staring at the unmoving chest and limbs, the surprised face and weeping skull. This wasn’t supposed to happen, a childlike voice in his head whispers. Don’t the enemy know what spoilsports they’re being?

  More high velocity rounds punch the nearby ground and masonry. Men are screaming. Kabir finally tears his eyes away and squirms towards deeper cover, brandishing his iPhone as he does—capturing a burst of photos of his cousin’s corpse. With luck, the right angle will flatter the scene into something enduring.

  His training was very clear about this. Every life, every death, is now a message. Just add social media and wait for the shares to begin.

  One

  Pro tip: in life as in software, always start with the
Frequently Asked Questions. It will stop you looking stupid later.

  Here are the top three questions for getting to know Azi Bello. Who the hell is he? What’s a darknet? What is wrong with the modern world?

  We’ll take them in reverse order.

  There is little inherently wrong with the planet in this year of our Lord two thousand and fourteen that a medieval peasant wouldn’t recognize from the wrong end of famine, rape and pillage. Thanks to a few centuries of unparalleled human ingenuity, everyone now gets to spend their time doing what only a few people used to do: reading, writing, trading, bitching about celebrities. The real novelty, however, resides in the fact that everything from child pornography and drugs to deadly weapons and even deadlier ideologies can be accessed on demand from several billion desks and pockets.

  This is what darknets are all about. They’re the places you go to get whatever society doesn’t want you to get: the internet’s midnight zones, hidden in plain sight, accessed through tools that, if you’re doing it right, conveniently conceal your identity and location, alongside whoever you’re sharing alt-right hard-core Nazi Islamist disinformation porn with. Bad people, good times.

  Naturally, the most popular software for doing all this was developed by the US Navy. As some hackers like to mutter, there is nothing the United States government likes more than fucking with global rivals to their industrial military-surveillance complex. What do Chinese dissidents, Iranian freedom-lovers, New Zealand geeks shifting soft drugs across oceans and the North Korean government’s discretionary procurement arm have in common? They all use The Onion Router, also known as Tor: an easily downloaded piece of software that will bury every click under dozens of digital relays between anonymous servers. It’s like an onion, if onions were world-spanning networks: layer after layer of packed concealment. It has also been known to induce tears.

  Anonymity is the theory. In practice, unless a user knows their stuff, they might as well launch a website featuring full name, home address and a flashing gif reading NSA please target me! Being anonymous doesn’t make you safe. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog—but the trail of bone-shaped biscuits leading to your front door permits an educated guess.

  Just ask Azi. Despite being a member of the hacking fraternity (very few ladies, rampant and rancid trolling by gender, toilet seats left permanently up) he goes under a version of his own name. AZ. People think it’s a pseudonym, because no security-conscious specialist in their right mind would ever, ever use anything linked to any aspect of their actual identity online, but it’s in fact just two-thirds of the name he got thirty-four years ago, south of south London, in the architectural equivalent of an arsehole, East Croydon.

  Depending on what mood you catch Azi/AZ in, sticking so close to his real name is either a double bluff of rare cunning, a badge of pride, a mark of stupidity, or a mixture of all three. A high-functioning fuckup is how Azi usually describes himself. Good with big ideas, bad with little ones.

  Today is a good day, because Azi is sitting at his desk eating Nando’s finest—half a chicken with chips, dowsed in his own Sriracha hot sauce to the point where he can no longer feel his face—sipping a mug of cold coffee, and pretending to be a neo-Nazi.

  Specifically, he is chatting away in a members-only social media group, pretending to be a recent but impressively active member of a global political movement called Defiance. The group is pledged to protect the Western way of life from the mounting threat of Islam, while maybe, just maybe, beating up people of the non-white persuasion and blaming societal ills upon the Transnational Conspiracy of Persecuted Minorities.

  Defiance-baiting is a side-project which Azi has been working on for some time now. If pushed, he would describe it as an obsession, but nobody is pushing him, so he pretends it’s a hobby. Nazis in general are bad news in good clothes. Smart neo-Nazis, with long-term ambitions involving the ballot box and a charismatic German figurehead affectionately known as Tomi, are a special class of trouble.

  A political figure described in chummy abbreviation even by his enemies is worth fearing, Azi reckons—and this one is worse than any posh Brit. There’s a serious chance Tomi could play a leading role in the next German government. Unless, of course, someone were anonymously to release detailed and incredibly compromising information about him during the next two months. And wouldn’t that be a shame?

  As Azi would be the first to admit, his base of operations is not your typical mastermind’s lair. From the outside, it looks like an ordinary garden shed. From the inside, it looks like a crummy, cramped garden shed, into which someone long ago wedged an oversized IKEA desk and a pair of folding chairs, followed by the contents of several second-hand computer stores—because this is exactly what Azi did. Van Halen splutters through a pair of hidden speakers. Dismembered laptops, PCs and external hard drives sprawl around three large monitors, garlanded by cables. The only concession to comfort is coffee: a Hario V60 Dripper brewing Union’s Revelation Blend on a tiny corner table, its wafting aroma Azi’s antidote to the dust-and-ozone fug of constantly running hardware.

  Azi himself is sporting an oversized hoodie, trainers, jeans distressed by time rather than designer intent, and half a week’s worth of stubble. He might pass for a decade younger, borderline handsome, if he shaved and disarrayed his hair more artfully. But that isn’t going to happen any time soon. So far as he’s concerned, the material world is a largely regrettable series of coincidences. It’s what’s onscreen that matters.

  Exhibit A in this lifestyle philosophy is the standard lamp Azi has been expertly unseeing for over fifteen years, its ragged chintz drooped above his coffee station. Exhibit B is the fact that two of the people he feels closest to—fellow hackers with the handles Milhon and Sigma—might be male or female, cynical teenagers or bored Gen Xers, and located anywhere on Earth that English-speakers and the internet are found together. He has a hunch that they’re both female, and a further hunch that Sigma has a soft spot for the enigmatic AZ, but he’s savvy enough to know that this says a lot about him and little about reality.

  Overall, life is good, even if his alleged career in penetration testing has taken an increasingly distant back seat to neo-Nazi enticement. Three thousand unread emails lurk in Azi’s professional ProtonMail inbox, an impatient series of subject lines from his principal employer woven through them. Azi has started to regard these with abstract interest—as if they were a natural phenomenon whose accretion it would be a shame to disturb.

  Because this is 2014, and zealots of all flavors have been using the internet since before web browsers were a thing, it is impressively difficult to get the members of groups like Defiance to admit that they would like to see brown, black and—oh why not—Jewish people repatriated with extreme prejudice, and that anyone who disagrees with them is equally expendable. Instead, they spend most of their time reminding each other to look reasonable, to make a strident public case that the elite have lost touch with ordinary decent people’s justifiable economic anxieties, and to avoid violence unless they’re certain it will be both discreet and decisive.

  Azi has thus spent many months befriending some useful idiots who seem likely to tell him what is going on and to initiate him to higher levels within their hierarchy, so long as he, too, comes across as the kind of hearty ideologue who can’t help speaking his mind among friends. And he has a sweetener to drop into the mix—a guarantee that he is the real deal. Guns, drugs and darknet contacts. Or, to be precise, the expertly prolonged promise of all of the above—because there are some lines which aren’t prudent to cross, let alone turn into a profitable side hustle.

  Between bites of wince-inducing chicken, Azi is busy showcasing a cornucopia of banned goods to one of the more evangelical young men of his online acquaintance, a recent British recruit from Blackpool called Gareth. Gareth claims to work in a betting shop and to spend all day watching Zionist front organizations buy up and then sell off assorted properties along his high street. Garet
h also talks about international pedophile conspirators taking over children’s computers and using their webcams to watch them at home—but, because Azi knows of at least one occasion on which this has actually happened, he has chosen to file that particular concern in a part of his brain marked “worry about horrible shit like this another time.” It’s a compartment that has become alarmingly full in recent months.

  So far as Gareth from Blackpool is concerned, Azi isn’t Azi. He’s a white, strikingly handsome man called Jim. And the story of how Jim came into being spells out the two most important considerations in Azi’s philosophy of hacking. First, you need to be so many steps ahead of your opponents that you’ve basically won before they even notice a battle has started. Second, whatever assumptions or expectations are out there, it’s your job to break them. You lie, you cheat, you beg, you borrow, you distract and deceive.

  This is the hacker’s ethos: taking things apart and then putting them back together your way. You do it for the lulz, the naked curiosity, the chance to make other people look stupid and yourself feel clever. Plus, a bunch of neo-Nazis busy making the world a worse place deserves the mother of all hacks. A dose of righteous truth so vast and compromising that even their mothers will disown them.

  Two

  Here is how Azi laid his plans.

  Eighteen months ago, at the start of 2013, Azi found a dead child. As a rule, the best untruths begin with a truth, which, in this case, meant the name of someone very young, their dates cribbed from a Tooting headstone.

  James Denison died on 8 July 1982, at the age of two years and two days. Dearly loved, forever missed, he sleeps with the angels now. He was born again on 27 January 2013, in time for his thirty-third birthday, with a new face and a new story told backwards through time.

  How is a thirty-two-year-old man called up out of the air? First, Azi sent off for the death and birth certificates. A bit of research—sifting the debris of his mother’s life, her maiden name—a few very polite emails and letters, and the Register Office provided the lot. Azi had got his hands on some powerful paper, and so the real work began.