The Jerusalem Puzzle. Laurence O’Bryan

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      15

      The screen on Mark Headsell’s laptop was glowing blue. He’d dimed the lights in the suite on the fifteenth floor of the Cairo Marriot on El Gezira Street as soon as he’d entered it.

      The hotel was a difficult landmark to miss if you were aiming to bring down a symbol of Western decadence, but as it had hardly been 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?