At ten the next morning, Friday, the Filipino cleaning lady employed by XPC entered his apartment for the twice-weekly service. Mr Fitzgerald was a particularly tidy person and she was surprised to find some of his clothes on the living room sofa. She collected them and went through to the bedroom, where she found Scotty lying motionless on the bed. After trying unsuccessfully to wake him, she panicked and ran out of the apartment to find the building manager. When he saw Scotty’s condition his first reaction was to think about the effect it would have on the other tenants and his reputation. He sent the crying woman away and tried to resuscitate him, in vain. Finally, he called the emergency service for an ambulance. Scotty was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, and the next morning his corpse was transferred to the police mortuary in Al Twar.
The autopsy was carried out that morning, Saturday, at eight o’clock. Shen Fu Liáng, his immediate boss, was stuck in San Francisco, but Tom Connor, the CEO, had learned the news when he returned on Friday evening. He’d immediately contacted Scotty’s parents in Fort Lauderdale, where they were now living in retirement. The distraught couple couldn’t get to Dubai until Monday and he agreed to attend the autopsy on their behalf. He was now sitting with Dr Alzahabi, a young, voluble pathologist who was explaining the cause of death to him.
‘I’m still awaiting some analysis of food and tissue samples, but I can already inform you that Mr Fitzgerald died from an abnormally aggressive form of botulism. It’s a neurotoxin, a very virulent type of food poisoning. Analysis of his stomach contents shows that he ate a meal of curried lamb the previous evening, and that could be the source of the attack.’
‘That’s right. He had a curry supper with a colleague, after a game of squash.’ Tom had already quizzed Sharif on their Thursday evening activity. ‘But I’ve never heard of anyone dying from food poisoning. I’ve had it myself and you feel like you’re dying, but you don’t. At least not that I’ve ever heard.’
‘There are several types of food poisoning. Botulism is by far the most dangerous, but I agree it’s seldom fatal. His blood alcohol level was also high, he must have had a lot to drink.’
‘I didn’t know that. Maybe the alcohol increased the likelihood of his death by poison?’
‘Well, it wouldn’t have helped. Alcohol always exacerbates any other harmful condition.’
‘Would it be very painful?’ Tom grimaced. He had personally hired Scotty away from San Francisco, and now he would have to explain to his parents what had happened to their only son. What a way to die, he said to himself. How am I going to tell them? He wasn’t looking forward to it.
‘It would be disagreeable and distressing for the first few hours, but then he would gradually lose all feeling until he was unable to breathe. Botulinum toxin causes flaccid paralysis by blocking motor nerve terminals. It’s used a lot in medicine to temporarily paralyse muscles, so they don’t cause damage. That’s why Botox is very effective in creating temporary improvements in the facial appearance. It’s the same basic material, just a tiny dose that paralyses the facial muscles so that you look more relaxed and youthful.’
‘But this dose was so large that the paralysis spread through his body?’
‘I believe so. The paralysis usually starts with the eyes and face then progresses downward, to the throat, chest and extremities. When the diaphragm and chest muscles become affected, respiration is inhibited and death from asphyxia can result. I think that’s what happened.’
‘You mean he suffocated? But why didn’t he call for help? He’s got all the emergency numbers in his mobile: ambulance, police, hospital, everything. We’ve all got the contact details, it’s company procedure.’
‘If he fell into an alcohol-induced sleep, he may have slept through the first symptoms until it was too late for him to react. But that wouldn’t explain why the attack was so virulent, Mr Connor. I’ll call you as soon as I get the final results from the lab. Now, I have a lot of further work to perform, so I have to leave you.’
When Tom got back to XPC, Nora, his PA, was waiting in reception for him. He had called her to come in and help out with the crisis. She took him to one side. ‘The police are waiting in your office,’ she whispered, eyes wide with concern.
‘What do they want?’
‘They just said it was in connection with Scotty’s death.’
Tom’s face turned pale. ‘Shit, that’s all we need. As if we haven’t got enough to do, sorting things out here. And his parents arrive on Monday.’ He sighed. ‘Call Hatim and tell him what’s happened so he’s up to speed.’ Hatim Ackerman was the local attorney for the company. ‘If it’s like everything else here, we’re bound to need a lawyer.
‘Right. Time to face the music, I’m going up. There’s nothing I can tell them that’ll change anything, but they’ve got to conduct a proper enquiry – for everybody’s sake, especially poor Scotty’s.’ The two police officers had just left his office when Tom received the call from Dr Alzahabi. ‘Good afternoon, Doctor, I hope you’ve got some good news for me.’ He listened for a few minutes. ‘So what does that mean exactly?’
Tom put the phone down and called Nora into his office. ‘Tell Hatim to drop everything and get over here asap. Apparently the amount of toxin in Scotty’s stomach couldn’t have occurred naturally. It was enough to paralyse a horse. There’s going to be a full police enquiry and I want us to be ready for whatever happens.’
By now, the whole building was awash with rumours and counter-rumours. Tom called a staff meeting in the gym to officially announce that Scotty had succumbed to a severe bout of food poisoning and the matter was being investigated. ‘He was a brilliant guy and a great team leader, we’re going to miss him a lot, as both a friend and a colleague.’ He asked everyone to join him in one minute of silence, then finished by saying, ‘I want everyone to cooperate fully with the police investigation. It’s vital that we find out how Scotty was exposed to the poison, so if you know anything that could help in any way, please talk to me or to Shen. He’ll be taking over Scotty’s functions until other arrangements can be made. In the meanwhile, I’ll keep everyone informed whenever there’s any information to share.’
He fielded the various questions as best he could, then exhorted everyone to get back to work. ‘Sales of the Mark VI range are going through the roof, and the marketing people are already screaming for Mark VII and the new ACRE upgrade. We need to keep focused. Thank you, guys. Let’s get it done for Scotty. That’s what he would have wanted.’
At midday, the Karachi House restaurant was closed down and cordoned off. Under Dr Alzahabi’s watchful eye, two laboratory workers were taking samples of all the food in the kitchen for analysis. The police were back in the office, interviewing everyone who had worked with Scotty, and especially those who had been with him on Friday.
Sharif was subjected to a thirty-minute interrogation, emerging in a state of panic. ‘They think I killed him, I know they do,’ he said, fighting back tears. ‘He wasn’t just a colleague, he was my friend as well.’
‘Don’t worry. They’re just doing their job, you were the last person to see him. The staff from the restaurant are being questioned as well. They have to talk to everyone until they find out what happened.’ Hatim, the lawyer, had been present during the interview.
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 some 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.’
The African Diamond Trilogy Box Set Page 112