‘Have you kept up your training?’ Jenny was referring to Leo’s Black Belt in Chun Kuk Do, a form of Taekwondo developed and taught by the American actor and martial artist, Chuck Norris.
‘Three times a week without fail. Oh, I don’t think I told you, I went in for the UFAF world championship tournament in Las Vegas last year.’
‘How did you get on?’ Now, Emma was intrigued. Leo had taken up self-defence sports after hearing tales from Leticia da Costa about Jenny. Her sister would never talk about it, but Leticia described how she bested a knife-wielding mugger in the park, then later saved all their lives by throwing the Angolan murderer, Ray d’Almeida, down the stairs of the house.
‘I got kicked to shit, sorry, in the second round, which was cool, those guys were so much better than me.’
‘I hope you won’t need to do anything except practise it in Dubai.’
‘Some chance. It’ll be fine, don’t worry. I’ll be paid a fortune to enjoy myself. What more could I ask for?’
Relieved to have gotten over that hurdle, Leo decided to change the subject. He picked up the Daily Telegraph from the table. ‘What about Brexit? It’s not going so well, is it? Are you sorry for voting out?’
Both women started speaking at the same time and it was obvious they didn’t agree. Safe and sound, he said to himself. They’ll have forgotten all about my job by the time they get through their arguments. After a while he went up to his room to listen to his all-time favourite music, Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, with ‘Stairway to Heaven’. He put on his Bose earphones and lay on the bed, enjoying the present moment, full of hopeful anticipation for the future. He couldn’t wait to get to Dubai.
ELEVEN
London, England
May 2017
The brass plaque outside the office entrance read Institute for Global Internet Security, and General Billy Chillicott pressed the intercom button and announced his name. The door was opened by an attractive woman of about forty. ‘Good morning, General. Welcome back.’
‘Hello Ilona. You’re looking very beautiful this morning.’
The woman smiled. She was used to Chillicott’s unsubtle approach, which she found flattering, but he wasn’t her type. ‘Thank you, General,’ she replied. ‘Dr Middleton is waiting in the small conference room.’ She led the way through a large open plan office populated by a series of earnest-looking men and women at workstations with multiple computer screens in front of them.
‘How’s business? Seems like you’ve hired a few more people.’
‘Looking up. The consumer side of the business is growing nicely. We’ve had a lot of success from our magazine and newspaper articles on bank fraud. And the governmental contracts are growing nicely. We just received a mandate to do a study for the World Bank in Washington. They’re worried about banking security in developing nations.’
He laughed. ‘“To do a study”. So they’re still paying lip service. We know what usually happens to the study: it gets published, they have a big meeting to discuss it, it gets filed away, nothing gets done. No change there.’
Chillicott knew that Ilona Tymoshenko was more than just the institute’s receptionist-secretary. She was Middleton’s minority partner in the business and had been instrumental in obtaining many of their contracts. He wasn’t surprised. She could charm the apples off the trees, he said to himself. When she feels like it.
Hugh Middleton was sitting at the conference table, drinking tea and reading the Financial Times. ‘Billy, how nice of you to visit.’ He jumped up and they shook hands. ‘What brings you to London?’
‘The short answer is Brexit. It looks to us more and more likely you guys will crash out of the EU without a deal in place. You know what that means in terms of security and defence, NATO, the whole works. And even if you do come to an agreement, when it finally happens it’ll still affect just about every defence agreement we have with Europe and the UK, and especially NATO. Jim Mattis is in the middle of a pretty big shake up of the Defence Department and he’s got those shitholes, Iraq and Syria, to worry about, so he asked me to pay an informal visit to talk with some of your MoD people. We had a session all day yesterday and I didn’t sleep a lot last night. I guess you’ll understand I can’t say much more than that.’
‘Perfectly understandable discretion, which I applaud. If you slept badly I expect you need a gallon of weak American coffee. Ilona dear, can you arrange that?’
She left the room and the two men sat at the table. ‘I hear you’re going to get some money from the World Bank. You should set up a small country, you’ll get even more.’
‘Amazingly, we currently have twelve small countries paying us. It’s becoming quite a trend.’
‘To write reports they light the fire with?’ Chillicott smiled cynically.
‘Unfortunately, we cannot force them to actually do anything that we recommend. I’m not even convinced that they read what we send them. In any event, I’m quite sure that they request reimbursement of our not-unsubstantial fees from some supranational organisation which is partly funded by them in the first place. So it’s like all circular discretionary government spending, what I refer to as “OPM, Other People’s Money”. In the end, you and I pay for it with our taxes.’
Ilona heard this last comment as she came back into the room with the coffee. ‘My, my, aren’t we becoming cynical?’ She poured a cup for Chillicott.
‘Mm, thanks, hot and sweet. What Hugh means is our constant bitching and moaning is having no effect at all, nichts, rien, nada, but they keep paying us to do it. It’s insane.’
‘As long as we can cover the salaries and costs, I don’t mind the insanity. I’ve got jobs to do, call if you need me.’ She left the room.
‘By the way, I thought our San Diego presentation went quite well. How many of those hi-tech executives signed up on the website afterwards?’
‘Don’t even ask. There were about a hundred and thirty attendees, and twelve of them have signed up. That’s less than ten per cent, including the kid I met for dinner after the presentation, so maybe we need to do one-on-one sessions in future.’
‘You must have forgotten to tell me about that. Is the story worth relating?’
‘It was the young guy who had to leave the hall to take a phone call. Just when we were starting that crappy question and answer session.’
‘I didn’t notice the incident. You’re forgetting that I was in London, and although the audience could see me, I couldn’t see them.’
‘Right, sorry, I guess I’m trying to forget the whole fiasco. It was a young African kid, Leo Stewart. He got a phone call offering him a new job in the middle of our Q&A. At least something good came out of it.’
Middleton gave an imperceptible blink. ‘Leo Stewart, you say? That’s not a very African name.’
‘He was a Rwandan genocide baby, apparently. I didn’t go into that. Too personal, bloody dreadful time. He’s one hell of a smart kid, he’ll do well.’
‘What was the job? Did he tell you?’
‘He asked my opinion about the offer. XPlus Circuits in Dubai wanted to make him a Senior VP. He’s only twenty-three, hardly old enough to vote, for Christ’s sake.’
‘XPC, that’s the subsidiary out of Lee-Win in China? What was the reason for the frantic phone call, it seems a little impetuous?’
Chillicott gave a quick resumé of his conversation with Leo, including the death of the previous VP at XPC and the imminent deadline for the new software launches.
‘An unexplained death, you say? How did it happen?’
‘It was an accidental death by food poisoning. Why the sudden interest, Hugh?’
‘No special reason, Billy, I have a curious mind, that’s all. Death in all its various manifestations interests me, especially the accidental variety. Enough of such talk, where was the boy previously?’
‘At M2M in San Francisco. He seems to be a bit of a prodigy. I was talking to the president and he told me they tried everything
not to lose him. Offered him a promotion and big pay rise, but he left a couple of weeks ago when his contract was up.’
‘I see. So XPC needed his encryption expertise for their new software products and he took the job and moved to Dubai, just like that.’ Middleton looked thoughtful. ‘What advice did you give him?’
‘It wasn’t much in the way of advice. I told him it was worth going over there to check things out. Seems like he did that and the trip paid off.’ He took another swallow of coffee. ‘Thing is, Hugh, the kid gave me some very smart advice himself. His mother was in Rwanda after the genocide and she told him a million people were slaughtered while the rest of the world stood by and watched it happen. Nobody was prepared to say that genocide was being committed until it was too late.
‘His opinion was that it could be the same thing with the Internet, that people don’t want to be confronted by the truth, however bad it is. They concentrate on the good it can do and do jack-shit about the security measures we talk about until it’s too late. So we’re just spinning our wheels until some global catastrophe occurs to wake them up. Then they’ll come crying to us to fix it.’
‘It sounds as if that young man is a very intelligent and mature person, and I agree with his analogy. Unfortunately, we are like Aesop’s fabled boy who called wolf too often. When finally the wolf comes, no one believes it until the whole flock of sheep is ravaged. I fear that is what may happen, and all of our warnings will have been of no avail.’
‘It made me think, if we can’t convince anyone by our words, maybe we should organise a catastrophe of our own. That might get the world’s attention and finally force governments to take some action.’
Middleton smiled. ‘It’s fortunate that I know your sense of humour. Such remarks could be interpreted as treason or instigation to commit heinous crimes. Are you still in touch with young Mr Stewart?’
‘I gave him both our email and phone details, but I’d be surprised if he ever makes contact. He’s got his hands full in a shit-hot job with a fast-growing company, too busy for old farts like us.’
Dr Middleton invited Ilona Tymoshenko to join them, and they talked about global developments; Brexit, the increasing threat of African immigration, growing political instability in Europe and the uncertainty caused by the US election results. International cyber security concerns were discussed at length, Ilona cleverly gleaning from the conversation a number of potential business opportunities for their Internet consulting practice. Finally, they discussed the planning of yet another visit to the UN Security Council’s New York headquarters in July. It was becoming difficult to find anything new to say at these events, although, as Chillicott reminded them, ‘There’s bound to be plenty of new disasters to talk about, but probably none bad enough to get their attention.’ As usual, the Englishman apologised that he wasn’t able to come over in person, he’d have to participate by teleconferencing again.
Chillicott declined an invitation for lunch at Middleton’s club, he’d been before and hated the staid atmosphere and English food; not a hamburger on the menu. Ilona took him to the door and he embraced her, then climbed into the car waiting to take him back to Whitehall.
As she closed the door, Dr Middleton called, ‘Ilona, could you come back in here please, I’d like to dictate some notes.’ She sat at the table beside him. ‘Oh, and I’d like you to find out everything you can about a young man named Leo Stewart and his immediate family. He’s with XPlus Circuits in Dubai.’ He thought for a moment. ‘And do some research on XPC as well as their parent, Lee-Win Micro-Technology in Shanghai, please.’
TWELVE
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
May 2017
‘Apart from a few points I want to cover this morning, things seem to be going fine, but I don’t have to remind you the timing’s really tight. First off, I had to find a new VP to replace Scotty on the Mark VII firmware development, and we’ve been really lucky with that. His name’s Ed Muire, he was a senior programmer with ARM, and he’ll be here in ten days. With his experience, I’m betting he’ll be up and running in no time.’
Leo Stewart was reviewing his first two weeks as SVP at XPC with his immediate boss, Shen Fu Liáng and their CEO, Tom Connor. At just twenty-three years of age, Leo was responsible for three work-teams, thirty-six people in all, including Sharif, the VP who now reported to him. They were sitting in Tom’s office on the fourth floor of the building, looking out onto a terrace area with a small swimming pool and bar. Reserved for VIP guests, Leo imagined, feeling quite flattered to have been invited up. The air conditioning was hardly noticeable, since a violent storm had come in the night, bringing the temperature down from thirty-eight Celsius to a more tolerable twenty-five. The African blood in Leo’s veins meant that he could withstand the hot weather better than most, but it was a lot hotter than San Francisco and he was still acclimatising to it.
Leo had asked for this meeting for two main reasons. The first was that, probably due to Scotty’s disappearance, the reporting structure between Tom, Shen, Sharif and himself wasn’t working and needed sorting out. Then there was the planning system, or rather, lack of it. At M2M he’d been used to a well-defined work programme, with constant performance reviewing and measuring, rewarding or correcting where necessary, but planning at XPC was almost non-existent, with no clearly defined separation between the immediate priorities of delivering Mark VII and ACRE. The final specifications and designs had to be in Shanghai by the end of July for the 1 September launch date, just three months away, and they were running late, but Tom and Shen seemed to take the approach that ‘it’ll be alright on the night’.
This meeting was not going to be easy, but he didn’t think he’d been hired to take the easy way out and that wasn’t his way of working. It also wasn’t his way of viewing life, you either did things properly to the best of your ability, or you didn’t do them at all. He plugged the projector into his laptop and addressed the second problem first:
THREE-MONTH WORK PROGRAMME
‘Here’s the short version,’ he said. ‘If we want to deliver the full software package to Shanghai by July 31st we need to create, right now, a critical path work plan, as well as a review and correction procedure. It’s necessary and urgent, so if there are no comments, I’ll just get on with it and sort it out.’
The three men spent the next two hours going through the report and discussing Leo’s concerns. He had expected little or no input from Shen, but he was disappointed with Tom Connor, who seemed to be ambivalent about what Leo considered to be a black-and-white choice of alternatives. He kept repeating the same simple message time after time until he got it across, ‘Either you plan properly then measure and correct regularly, or you have no idea of how or when you’ll be able to deliver your assignment, if you ever do.’ He finally got the others to agree to create a planning committee of Shen, Sharif, Ed Muire and himself. Daniel Oberhart would also be involved when necessary. By the end of the week, the committee would issue a plan for the three months up to the launch date.
Relieved, Leo moved onto his most pressing worry:
REPORTING STRUCTURE
Here, he was even more dismayed at the CEO’s lack of decisiveness and apparent dithering. It seemed he didn’t want to clarify the relationship between the four people principally involved: himself, Leo, Sharif and Shen.
When he saw he was getting nowhere, Leo said, ‘Listen guys, this is a very simple problem. I don’t want to spend my time running around making sure that Sharif is doing what I tell him to and not what Shen tells him. And Tom, the same thing applies to you and Shen, you have to remember he’s my boss, otherwise it will be just one enormous crapshoot. That’s not the way to run a corner shop, never mind a hi-tech, multimillion-dollar business. If it doesn’t change I won’t have time to get close to the development teams to do the job I was hired for, so I should simply get on the next flight back to SF and let you get on with things without me.’
Tom could see that Leo w
as serious. After the business with Scotty, he couldn’t afford another screw-up in the new products division, it would cost him his job. ‘What exactly do you want us to do?’
‘OK. First, no offence, Tom, but I don’t want you to talk to me about operational matters and I don’t want to receive any direct instructions from you. Anything you want to say to me you should say it through Shen, or we have a three-way meeting to discuss it.
‘Second, Shen, I want you to stay away from Sharif and his team. Please make it clear to them that they report to me and we’ll avoid any further confusion. If you have something to suggest or discuss, you do it with Sharif and I together. The same rules will apply to the Mark VII team. Ed Muire will be arriving next week and that’ll simplify everybody’s life.
‘Third, to make sure that you guys are up to speed on everything and can kick my ass when I screw up, I suggest the planning committee meets with Tom every Sunday to catch up on the previous week and plan for the current one. I’ll prepare a weekly summary report so everyone’s on the same page.’
Tom and Shen finally agreed Leo’s proposals, although he could see Shen wasn’t happy to cut his ties with Sharif. He’ll get used to it, he said to himself, and I can forget all the political crap and get on with some productive work. ‘I’ll get Daniel Oberhart on board. I know he feels the same way as I do, it’s not what he was used to in Zurich.’ Privately, he wasn’t enjoying working with the Swiss man. He was uncommunicative and inflexible and could be cold and hostile when he felt his area of responsibility was being infringed, but Leo knew he had to toe the line to make the whole programme work.
Finally, Leo brought up the ACRE upgrade programme. He insisted on being personally tasked with this project, heading the separate four-man team. ‘Otherwise it’ll just get lost in the rush to get the Mark VII products finished. I think it’s by far our prime go-to market asset, and encryption happens to be my strongest suit. We should aim to bring out a new version at least every two years. Each upgrade is an uptick in our monthly revenue and makes our customers feel warm and cosy and looked after by XPC. Once Ed takes over Mark VII, I’ll be able to work on nothing else but ACRE. We have to prove we can fulfil our timetable, just like we promised.’
The Dark Web: The stunning new thriller from the author of The Angolan Clan (African Diamonds Book 3) Page 8