Tom added, ‘We’ll have to wait for the food analysis. I’m sure that’ll be conclusive, it’s the only possible explanation. There must be something that’s been contaminated.’ He was quietly praying that there would be a breakthrough before Scotty’s parents arrived on Monday morning. He didn’t want to face them without some kind of explanation.
He went back to his office to think about the situation. Whatever the outcome of the investigation, one thing was clear: he needed to find a new team leader to replace Scotty. And, he realised, maybe a replacement for Sharif. He started looking at competitors’ websites.
Zurich, Switzerland
‘Scheisse, shit! I thought things were going too well. How did it happen?’ The caller was speaking Schwyzerdütsch, the Swiss German dialect.
Daniel Oberhart replied, ‘Seems like he died of food poisoning, but a mega-dose, so the police are involved. There’ll be an inquest in a couple of days and we’ll find out for sure.’
‘Have they got anything to go on?’
‘Not that I’ve heard, but I don’t want to ask too many questions, it might look suspicious. As far as I know, there’s no evidence at all, so I guess it’ll be filed away as death by misadventure or whatever they call it here.’
‘You realise this could kill the whole plan? If it holds up the launch, or the publicity affects XPC’s reputation in the industry, the Chinese might get cold feet and then we’re screwed.’
‘If the verdict is accidental death there’ll be no publicity, accidents happen all the time and it’s in no one’s interests to make a big noise about it. And Tom Connor told us he’s going out next week to look for a replacement for Scotty. In the meantime, Shen’s taken charge. God help us all!’
‘Can you do anything to speed things up?’
‘I don’t want to get involved until the inquest’s over, it wouldn’t look right. Then I’ll talk with Tom to see where his head’s at. Do you have anyone in mind?’
‘Let me think about it and do some research. I’ll have to call Julius at Hai-Sat, they’re bound to find out soon. They’ll be worried about meeting the delivery date, and the possible bad publicity. We can’t let this mess things up. Call me when you know the result of the inquest and we’ll talk about our options.’
THREE
Marbella, Spain
March 2017
‘So what exactly do you do? You explained it to me once before, but I don’t remember.’ Jenny Bishop put aside her monthly business reports and looked across at her nephew, Leo Stewart.
Leo gave an imperceptible smile. People often said ‘remember’ when they really meant ‘understand’. Although he was used to having to explain what he did, it was never easy. He turned away from his laptop. ‘The simple answer is that I manage a team of computer programmers for a US company called M2M Microtech Corp. We develop CPUs and microprocessors for conventional machines and for the Internet of Things.’ He waited for the inevitable reaction.
‘If that’s the simple answer, I’d hate to hear the complicated one,’ she laughed. ‘Come on, you can do better than that. I understand the commercial aspects of the Internet; most of the companies I’m involved with depend on it for marketing, distribution and customer services, but I have no idea how it actually works. So, assume I’m dumb and split the question into two parts. What is a microprocessor, and what is the Internet of Things?’
Jenny, in her late thirties, was his mother Emma’s younger sister, and they had become close after she organised his escape from a gang of kidnappers in South Africa. She always insisted that they never talk about it, but he knew she had probably saved his life and it had cost her a lot of money. Besides that, the truth couldn’t be shared with anyone. It might be dangerous for him and the others concerned. It would always be a well-guarded secret between them and their friend Pedro Espinoza, the Spanish private detective. Even now, seven years after the traumatic events, there could be a possibility that a careless word might alert the UK authorities that he had been brought into the country illegally. Considering the wave of self-serving and unfounded lawsuits that was sweeping the country, his mother could face criminal charges. Let sleeping dogs lie had been their decision, and it would always remain so.
But his mother was a crime writer and the events had spawned a fictional account called My Son, the Hostage, which had become a bestseller, reinvigorating Emma’s career. The book’s success had funded his college education at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had emerged with a degree in Applied Computer Sciences, graduating Summa Cum Laude after four years of study.
Leo had been approached by M2M during his final year. They regularly poached the best computer scientists from the top universities and rewarded them with long, exhausting days and nights and more money than they had time to spend. The company manufactured microprocessors and designed software and firmware for applications in modems, smart cards, SIMs and embedded chips in all types of equipment. Leo had been with them in San Francisco for eighteen months, plus the six months’ part-time work experience he had been enlisted to after the job offer.
Working and studying that last year of college had almost killed him, but the experience got him off to a flying start in the company. Then, three months into the internship, he had the luckiest break he could have hoped for when he stumbled across the solution to a problem facing their encryption team. Someone leaked the story to the Silicon Valley press, and suddenly he became the most celebrated intern in history. On the first day of his full-time employment, he was immediately promoted to Programme Development Manager, leading the encryption development team. He was happy with M2M and they were excited about him. The future was bright.
Presently, Leo was on a week’s vacation in Europe and had chosen to spend a few days with his aunt at York House, the magnificent property in Marbella she had inherited from her father-in-law, successful businessman Charlie Bishop.
Now, he gave Jenny a sheepish grin. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t trying to impress. M2M is a big US technology company. We make the tiny brains that are in all kinds of machines to carry out lots of complicated instructions. They’re called Central Processing Units – CPUs, semiconductors and microprocessors, and we design, build and sell them all over the world.’
‘So they’re really miniature computers?’
‘Dead right. Computers so miniscule you can hardly see them, but that have more memory and computing power than a room full of massive IBM machines used to have. Each unit has hundreds of millions or billions of components, connected together in a network on a tiny piece of silicon. Every one of those components is less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair, so you can’t really get your head around how small they are. But just about every machine that’s produced nowadays has at least one microprocessor in it, like your fridge or iron, all the machines you’ve got in this house. Cameras, TVs, phones, cars and so on can have a number of them, all linked together to provide different parts of the management process. You don’t think about it, you just press a button and they work out what to do. It’s a really cool business. There’s hundreds of billions of these tiny computers in machines all over the world, and we’re inventing new solutions and ways to reduce their size and increase power and memory all the time.’
Jenny was thinking quietly. ‘So these are machines that everyone has in their homes all over the world?’
‘Not just in homes; in businesses, government departments, energy and water companies, hospitals, cinemas, every place where intelligent machines are used. And there’s also billions of remote devices around the world that communicate via a mobile network. That’s what we call IoT, the Internet of Things. It’s fairly recent technology and one of the fastest-growing industries in the world.’
‘I don’t understand that bit. What kind of devices?’
‘They’re machines that have a connectivity module in them linked to a mobile data network, instead of being cabled to a fixed network. It could be a SIM, a WiFi, Bluetooth or s
ome other type of low power radio transceiver. They’re managed over the Internet, just like a mobile phone. You use this technology with a tablet or a smartphone in the street, or to make a credit card payment from a cordless swipe machine, or find your destination on the satnav in your car. There’s so many new applications coming out it’s hard to keep track of them. Things like mobile parking meters, automated meter reading, ‘Tap & Pay’ mobile phone payment systems, connected cars, remote home alarm systems.’
‘Then I’ll repeat my first question. What exactly do you do?’
This time he laughed out loud. ‘Fair enough. My job at M2M is to make sure that our encryption team keeps pace with the improvements in our designs. That means finding better ways of protecting people’s data in these devices, wherever they are in the world.’
‘So, there are billions and billions of machines out there, with even more billions of computer chips in them? Does anybody know where they all are?’
‘I never really thought about that. I suppose every manufacturer or distributor has some kind of a record of where their stuff is, but I don’t think there’s any kind of overall control.’
‘Hmm. Does M2M have a large percentage of them?’
‘We’ve got about three per cent of the fixed market and about seven percent of the IoT market, so it’s a few billions. But there’s some huge players around. ARM is the biggest by far and they’re English, which is great, then there’s Intel, Qualcomm and AMD in the US and Samsung in Korea. Lee-Win out of Shanghai is very strong in the institutional arena, governments, banks, public services, and the word is they’ve just perfected an incredible new encryption technology. But the market’s growing like crazy so there’s plenty room for everyone, and M2M is growing fast. Now do you get the picture?’
‘I think so.’ She paused, assembling her thoughts. ‘There are hundreds of billions of machines, both fixed and mobile, all over the world, inside and outside of homes, businesses and public organisations, being managed over the Internet by mini computers designed and manufactured by companies like M2M. And no one knows where they all are.’
‘That’s a pretty fair summary of the industry, Aunt Jenny. So what do you think?’
‘I think it’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’
FOUR
Dubai International Airport
March 2017
‘Goodbye, Arthur. Goodbye Thelma.’ Tom Connor shook hands with Mr and Mrs Fitzgerald, Scotty’s parents, who thanked him tearfully then joined the check-in line for their Qatar Airways flight from DXB to Miami. The refrigerated casket containing their son’s body was already on the plane, and the funeral had been arranged in three days’ time at a crematorium in Fort Lauderdale. The complicated paperwork for the death certificate, registration and repatriation had all been handled by Nora and Hatim.
Tom had spent most of the last few days with them, doing his best to assuage the sadness and despair that would engulf them sooner or later. It also helped a little to alleviate the sense of guilt that he couldn’t help feeling, for having convinced their son to leave his home to seek success and fortune, but instead to suffer a horrible and painful death. There’s nothing left for them to do in Dubai, thought Tom. All they face is returning home to bury their son. Shit! Why did that have to happen to them? He walked back to his car, cursing the bad luck that had brought death and distress to all of them.
His mind shifted to the problems Scotty’s death had caused at XPC. Shen Fu Liáng had returned from San Francisco on Monday, but he had been of little help. His attitude to Scotty’s death seemed to be one of disinterest. Tom’s relationship with the Chinaman was complex, and often made him feel uncomfortable. Shen had been with Lee-Win for five years and was a member of the holding company main board. He had been sent down from Shanghai as their representative to work with Tom, which sometimes led to disagreements, or misunderstandings. He understood that his Chinese masters needed some ‘eyes on the ground’ and they’d sent Liáng, but it was sometimes difficult to know who was in charge. Tom found him a dispassionate and reserved man, whose most extreme expression, appropriately, seemed to be inscrutability. Despite living in the US for several years and speaking perfect English, he often seemed to have difficulty reconciling himself with the subtleties of the workings of the western mind. But now Tom observed a cold, uncaring side of the Chinaman that he’d never shown before, and he had kept him away from Scotty’s distraught parents.
Liáng was also totally convinced that Sharif had nothing to answer for. ‘You can discount him from being involved in the poisoning,’ he asserted forcefully. ‘I’ve known him for five years and he’s one of the nicest guys you could find.’ Tom was aware that when he was in Shanghai, Liáng had outsourced work to Sharif’s software services company in Pakistan and they had worked on projects together, although he didn’t consider that it qualified him to judge anyone in such desperate circumstances. But he didn’t have time to discuss the matter, he had too many other problems to worry about. It was now Thursday, the whole week had been lost, and he knew the next months would be filled with challenges. Not the normal, or even abnormal, business challenges that he faced every day and relished because he could do something about them, but worries about people and outside events over which he had no control and which gave him a deep sense of foreboding.
Tom Connor was a common-sense man from south Boston who had come up the hard way, and didn’t care who knew it. His parents, third generation Irish, could just about feed and clothe their four children and there was no money for costly education. He worked his way through school, then college, obtaining an MBA in Finance at the Boston University Questrom School of Business when he was twenty-four. He went to work as a management trainee with T-Mobile US in 2002, a year after Deutsche Telekom, the German telecoms giant, purchased VoiceStream and Powertel, creating T-Mobile, one of the largest US wireless telecoms businesses. His timing was good, they needed management talent to sort out their 60-billion-dollar acquisitions and he benefited from a crash course in wireless technology.
Tom was a Senior VP of T-Mobile’s new product development division when Lee-Win approached him to head up their soon-to-be-opened XPC subsidiary in Dubai. Within two months he’d moved his family to the Emirates State, and a few months later he watched a member of the ruling family cut the ribbon at the official opening. Tom was not a specialist, either in telecoms or micro-technology. He was a business developer and a people manager, who succeeded by hiring people with the right skills and creating the appropriate creative and cultural environment. He knew this disaster had to be managed well or it would spiral out of control and cause irreparable damage to the business. Thank God I’ve got three key people I can count on, he reflected. Shen can hold things together with Daniel and Sharif until I can find a replacement for Scotty.
He summoned up in his mind what information had been discovered to date. The forensic examination of the food from his stomach had shown that the lamb eaten by Scotty was highly infected by the toxin, abnormally so. There was no doubt of the origin of the poisoning, but how it got there was a mystery. The wholesalers who supplied all the restaurant’s meat products welcomed the technicians who arrived to inspect the premises, but there was no trace of contamination of any kind on their products. The same applied to their refrigerated vehicles and to the various pieces of equipment used during the preparation and delivery procedure.
‘Miraculously, no one else in the restaurant who ordered the lamb curry suffered any ill-effects,’ Dr Alzahabi had told him. He was still helping the police with their enquiries and was fully informed of their progress, or lack of. ‘Apparently, they had a special three-course dinner on, a popular chicken speciality, and most customers chose that. Only five people ordered the lamb, but we don’t know who they were and we’ve had no reports of illness. The restaurant’s not open on a Friday, so there were no other customers before the police closed them up on Saturday morning.’
‘Thank G
od for small mercies.’ Tom had been so preoccupied with the aftermath of Scotty’s death and looking after his parents that he hadn’t considered the possibility of other deaths. He thought of the implications for a moment. ‘I suppose they pre-prepare their curries in large batches and keep them frozen, then heat them up in servings when they’re ordered. That means the toxin must have been in the container that they took the portion from?’
‘That was my expectation, but it wasn’t. There is no trace of the toxin anywhere in the kitchen, the container, the pans or the oven, nothing. The plates have been through a very efficient washing machine, so there’s no trace there either, but that’s the only place it can have been. It can only have been on the portion that was served to Scotty, there’s no other possible explanation.’
‘But that means…’
‘Exactly. It means that somehow, that dish of curry was contaminated somewhere between the kitchen and Scotty’s table. The police are questioning the restaurant staff again, but they’re getting nowhere. It’s a big place, about one hundred and fifty seats, and there are forty employees. Thursday night is always busy, there were over a hundred customers, many of whom they can’t identify. They had a lot bookings and regular clients, but there’s just as many casual diners who come in without reserving. So if the toxin was administered deliberately, there are seventy or eighty suspects, most of whom cannot be traced.’
‘I know the place, it’s fairly upmarket, I’ve been there quite a few times. If I remember, they bring the dishes of food out on trays and place them at a serving station until the waiter comes and serves them to the customer. So anyone going by could poison the food. What does it look like?’
‘A fatal dose could be contained in a few drops of water. Just about anyone in the restaurant could have done it.’
The Dark Web: The stunning new thriller from the author of The Angolan Clan (African Diamonds Book 3) Page 3