The African Diamond Trilogy Box Set

by Christopher Lowery

  ‘Seemed logical. Given our time frame, I figured that was my best option.’

  ‘I got a tip about someone who might be available quickly. Encryption specialist, like Scotty, great reputation. He’s young, very young actually, but he’s already made quite a name for himself in the industry, knows a lot about the IoT.’

  ‘But he’s not in Europe, I suppose?’

  ‘He’s English, but working in California, that’s probably why you haven’t come across him. And he’s not actively looking for a change, but I know his contract’s coming up for renewal and he’s the kind of kid who’d be attracted by a challenge like ACRE.’

  ‘You have a file on him?’

  ‘I’ll bring it up for you after I finish my coffee.’

  Tom got up to go. ‘Great, thanks Daniel, I appreciate it.’

  The CEO left him, and he called a Zurich number. ‘I’ve put Tom Connor onto your suggestion. I hope you’re right about him. We need to get this sorted fast.’

  London, England

  ‘How do you like the circulation numbers for March?’ It was eleven o’clock and Jenny was in the office of Josephine Greenwell, the founder and editor of Thinking Woman Magazine, a business in which she owned a thirty per cent share.

  ‘I think a glass of champers is called for. One hundred thousand has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?’

  ‘When I consider how long it took to get to ten thousand, it certainly does.’

  Jenny’s company, BPE, had first invested in Jo’s business two years ago, and it had been a tough struggle, requiring several additional funding rounds to get to this point. Now, not only had the January circulation finally broken through the 100,000 mark, the magazine had made an operating profit for the first time since Jo had started it four years before. There was a lot to celebrate.

  The two women had met in 2015 at a cocktail party at Bill Redman’s bank, Fletcher, Rice & Co. After inheriting a substantial fortune in 2008, due to the deaths of her husband Ron and his father Charlie Bishop at the hands of the psychopathic killer Ray d’Almeida, Jenny had led a very quiet life for the next two years. Apart from travelling occasionally between her home in the UK and the house she had inherited from Charlie in Spain, she had done nothing useful. Then, in 2010, the abduction in South Africa of her only sister Emma Stewart’s son, Leo, had galvanised her into a period of frenetic activity until he was safely returned to his mother. As harrowing as the experience had been, it had served to reunite the three remaining members of the Stewart family and strengthen the bonds between them. And in a strange way, Jenny had enjoyed the experience; being instrumental in bringing her nephew safely back from Africa had made her feel useful and needed again.

  Jenny was single and only thirty-six years old. Since Ron’s death she hadn’t had a serious relationship, and she missed having someone to share her life with. The reconciliation with her sister and nephew had helped to ease that feeling of loneliness, but it didn’t replace the pleasure of mutual companionship. I have to find something to keep myself busy, get out and meet new people, she told herself. I’m still able to make a contribution to society.

  She thought about it for a long while, considering possible options that might be available to her, trying to assess her personal qualities and defects. Strong-minded, pragmatic, not good at taking orders, creative thinker. (All useful when dealing with pathological murderers) she remembered. Numerically competent with a good education. (She had taught children with learning difficulties, and then managed her husband’s garage business.) Financially independent with no family ties. (Is that a quality or a defect?) she wondered.

  On her next trip to Marbella, Jenny confided in Leticia de Moncrieff, her close friend, co-beneficiary of Charlie Bishop’s will and mother of his son Emilio. As usual, she was impressed with the Angolan woman’s ability to lecture her in one of her adopted languages.

  ‘It’s about time you decided to do something, Jenny. You’re far too clever to spend your time travelling all over the place for no special reason. Why don’t you talk about it with Patrice when you come for dinner tonight? He’s very good at advising people about all kinds of things. I think that’s why he got promoted to manager.’

  Although she still had an apartment there, Leticia had moved out of the house she co-owned with Jenny when she married Patrice. They now lived with Emilio and their second son Joachim in a villa in Puente Romano, a luxurious urbanisation on the beachfront a few kilometres away. Jenny had never been keen on Patrice and they had a rather prickly relationship, but he had obviously been prompted by his wife before her arrival that evening and was bent on fulfilling his task to her satisfaction.

  Knowing she hated prevarication, he came straight to the point. ‘One of my jobs at the bank is to examine investment opportunities for our clients. We get a lot of would-be entrepreneurs with bright ideas, or businesses in early stages who are looking for funding to develop. A few years ago, we allocated some of Leticia’s funds into some of these opportunities and they’re doing really well.

  ‘Because of the Internet, there are more and more of these start-ups coming along. Many of them are specialised hi-tech businesses which I don’t understand, so I leave them alone. But there’s a lot of non-technical opportunities too that would have been difficult to introduce before the Internet, now they’re much easier. They use the Web to commercialise and manage them, but you don’t need to be a technical genius to analyse and assess their potential. They’re regular businesses, like online stores for retail distribution, specialised products, travel services, real estate or insurance brokerage, the kinds of goods and services that can be sold over the Internet without reinventing the wheel.

  ‘I turn away most of the requests I get because I don’t have the time to look at them, and some I just don’t want to get involved. That’s why we’ve done only eight deals in almost two years. But in France and the UK the demand is so great our banks have set up separate private equity divisions. Same thing in Hong Kong. I went over there to help them set up an Asian operation and it’s growing exponentially. My point is, there’s a lot of opportunity for clever people who have funds available to invest.

  ‘If you want to find a new activity and make money in the process, then think about this avenue. It’s something you can do yourself, trusting your own instincts and knowledge. You’re a smart person, Jenny, and you could do well in any kind of business, but in this way you can be involved in several businesses as an investor, with oversight, but without committing yourself full-time to any of them. I’d be happy to help you to identify opportunities and vet them before introducing you, to reduce your exposure.’ He paused, wondering what her reaction would be.

  Before she could respond, Leticia interrupted, ‘Jenny, that’s exactly what you should do, and you know it is.’

  That conversation sparked the creation, in 2014, of Bishop Private Equity Plc; BPE, a UK company that she formed when Patrice sent her a financial dossier from Accessibiliti, a struggling online business selling holiday packages: flights, hotels and rental cars. She immediately saw their problem came from poor cash management, and made them a funding proposal which they desperately needed. Patrice then introduced her to Fletcher, Rice & Co, where she met Bill Redman, who assisted her in setting up BPE and organising relations with her other banks in Marbella and Geneva. With a modest investment and some hands-on involvement, she acquired twenty-five per cent of the business and helped them to turn the corner to profitability. Since then, BPE had funded six businesses, each in a different area of activity. One of them had gone bust, due to a crooked manager who embezzled every penny he could lay his hands on, but the other five were doing well. Her most audacious choice was Lady Knick Knack, an online store selling erotic clothing and sex toys. Its headquarters were in Sunderland, which brought back fond memories, since Jenny had worked there as a teacher. Since her involvement, the company had outperformed all forecasts, and on the way won a government award for overseas sales.

&nbs
p; Jo Greenwell’s magazine business was Jenny’s fourth investment, and it had not been an easy road to success. Jo was a highly successful model who, at twenty-five, had called time out on that phase of her life to launch her own fashion/social women’s magazine. She had been dedicated full-time to the project for two years when Jenny met her, with very little success. Sadly, she had also just lost her mother to cancer and was close to calling it a day.

  Jenny had taken an immediate liking to the young woman. She was beautiful, clever and devoted to her business, and all she needed was some help and direction to turn it around. Her other participations in BPE had given Jenny a crash course in Internet marketing and social media techniques, both essential to developing new businesses. Thinking Woman Magazine, she reasoned, was perfectly suited to this approach, and she was right. Her first investment provided money for the company to steal a media expert from the competition. Then her funds were ploughed into targeted marketing campaigns, supported by celebrity endorsements, blogging sites, et cetera. Jo was still a stunningly beautiful young woman, and she encouraged her to appear in a limited number of modelling shoots to represent the face of the magazine. Another of Jenny’s ideas was to ask her sister Emma Stewart, a successful novelist, to write a monthly blog on creative writing, a sure-fire winner with women who had ambitions to write. Slowly but surely, they saw a steady rise in advertising space, media recognition and above all, circulation and revenues.

  She and Jo went to celebrate that evening at Club Gaston, a popular French restaurant near Smithfield Market, and toasted their success with a glass of Moët & Chandon. They didn’t order a whole bottle. Jenny was very careful with her money.

  At that time of night, the taxi to Heathrow took only forty minutes. Jenny had booked into the Marriott on Bath Road, just off the airport property. Her BA economy flight to Malaga was at nine the next morning. Travelling with only a carry-on bag, she should be at her house in Marbella in time for lunch. Sitting back in the darkened cab, she reviewed her new-found status with satisfaction. She had investments in five successful businesses and a new man in her life. Patrice and Leticia had been right: Jenny was smart, and she was enjoying her new vocation.

  SIX

  San Diego, California, USA

  April 2017

  Leo Stewart was sitting in the Pacific Ballroom of the Hilton Garden Inn, Mission Valley, San Diego, with one hundred and thirty other attendees. The ballroom had been organised as a conference room, and the title on the screen in front of them read:

  SECURITY THREATS IN INTERNET AND

  CLOUD COMPUTING.

  The room was full of senior executives and high-ranking technicians from telecoms and Internet providers, or equipment and microcircuit manufacturers and software design companies. The man standing by the screen, Four-Star General William R. ‘Billy’ Chillicott, an ex-US Air Force officer and NATO ambassador, was now a low-profile senior officer with the US Homeland Security Agency. He was dressed in casual clothes, a large, barrel-chested man with an abrasive voice and manner. He was also the acting chairman of the UN Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security, or GGE Cyber Security by its snappier abbreviation.

  There was a smaller TV screen on the platform, which showed a portly, bespectacled man in a Savile Row pinstriped suit sitting waiting. Chillicott had introduced him as, ‘Dr Hugh Middleton, Director of Research at the Institute for Global Internet Security in London, who’s joining us on our video link. We’ve been collaborating with them for a couple of years now. They’re pretty savvy folk.’

  Chillicott’s first admonition was to keep all questions for a two-way session at the end, ‘’Cos answering questions during the presentation defeats its own object. No one can remember where the hell they were up to. Second, please switch off your cell phones, and I mean completely off, no cheating. And lastly, I’m well aware that most of what I have to say you already know, but I want you to listen anyways, because knowing about something and fully understanding its potential consequences are two quite different matters.’ He looked around, waiting for an argument. No one dared speak. ‘Right, let’s get started.’ He tapped the screen to bring up the first slide.

  ‘First off, I want you to look at a few statistics on the increase in Internet crime:

  ‘Global cyber-attacks – For six years, Red October collected billions of pieces of information from governments, research firms, military installations, energy providers, nuclear and critical infrastructures around the world. And they did it through Microsoft Internet programmes.

  ‘Intellectual Property – There’s a trillion dollars-worth stolen every year.

  ‘Websites – More than 30,000 are infected by viruses or malware every day.

  ‘Businesses – 90% suffered computer hacks in 2016, costing over a billion dollars, mainly using “ransomware” where they block the systems until a ransom is paid.

  ‘Identity Theft – 10 million Americans had their identities stolen last year.

  ‘Personnel Data Theft – over 70 million records stolen from US healthcare providers this year.

  ‘Consumer Fraud – $16 billion was stolen from 15.4 million US consumers in 2016.

  ‘Espionage – At NATO, we neutralise over 2,000 cyber-attacks each year and it costs a fortune of money.

  ‘Fake News – This is the latest fashion. Announcing on social media or specialised Internet groups news, events that never happened, or happened in a different way to what’s presented. We’ll talk about that later.

  ‘Major Heists – I’ll mention only one. Last year, the Bangladesh central bank’s account at the Fed was hit by a series of transfer instructions totalling $951 million. Almost a billion dollars! Talk is, it was Pyongyang trying to accumulate dollars for arms purchases. In the end, $81 million was stolen in that one Internet hacking event. That’s almost as much as some of you guys make in a year.’

  He paused for the inevitable nervous laughter, then brought up another slide with a chart showing a hockey-stick rise in value. ‘Here’s my last item:

  ‘Crypto-currencies – These crypto-currencies, like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Blackcoin, let you buy anything you want in total anonymity: drugs, weapons, trafficked prostitutes, you name it. Sites like AlphaBay and Hansa, operating on the Tor network, a filthy corruption of the Internet, turn over millions of dollars a day in their immoral dealings. And over the last year, the Bitcoin has almost tripled in value from $375 to $1,055, so you get a double whammy: anonymous crime with a fictitious currency that looks set to outdo any of the old-fashioned kind. Talk about tulips from Amsterdam,’ he added, wondering if anyone present would understand the allusion.

  Chillicott looked round at the young executives; women in T-shirts and short skirts, crew-cut men, in short-sleeved shirts and blue jeans. The Digital Generation, he thought to himself. They’ve never known anything else. How can we expect them to understand?

  He stood tall, commanding their attention. ‘That’s just a few examples of the millions of Internet crimes occurring just about every day and it brings me to the reason for this conference. In the considered opinion of Dr Middleton and myself, in addition to all this crap we already have to deal with, the world is facing two new threats with grave potential consequences that deserve our immediate attention.’

  He tapped the screen. ‘Here’s the first.’ A Financial Times headline came up, entitled:

  THE INTERNET OF DANGEROUS THINGS.

  The sub-heading was:

  CYBER SECURITY BREACHES THREATEN GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURES.

  ‘It’s this new phenomenon, IoT, The Internet of Things. Or Connected Living, as some people call it. You all are involved in it and know more about it than I do, but our guest will show you some real scary parts we think are being neglected.’ He turned to the second screen, ‘OK, Hugh, can you take over for a while?’

  Middleton stood up and addressed the camera. ‘Good morning, ladies and g
entlemen. Our purpose today is not to try to convince anybody that the Internet isn’t a valuable and efficient tool for twenty-first-century communications. It’s to highlight the existing and potential dangers of this technology, and to create awareness of the need for better and new management, security and control. The truth is that despite its obvious advantages, the Internet is already a minefield of potential disasters, and this new technology will make it more and more dangerous. So, let’s get straight to the point.’

  He tapped his laptop and a map of the US filled the main screen, showing a single large edifice in the centre with no doors or windows. ‘This building looks like an impenetrable fortress, you can get neither in nor out, impossible to find out what’s inside. Now I’ll put in one IoT application, an automated meter reading system.’

  He gave a tap and a green door opened in the front of the building and a green skylight in the roof. Two more buildings appeared on the screen, each with a green door wide open. A dotted red line appeared, connecting the green doors and the skylight together.

  ‘The green doors and window are the vulnerable entry points created when an application is implemented. The red line is the Internet. It connects the meter reader to the energy company, and the billing system to the customer’s bank for the direct debit payments. With that one application, you’ve just opened up two entry points into the customer’s confidential online information, and an entry point into the bank and the energy company.

  ‘Now let’s list a cross section of businesses, service providers and government departments that the average person is likely to deal with.’

  A number of services appeared across the bottom of the screen, each enclosed in a black box with the lid shut:

  Energy

  Banking

  Telecommunications

  Information & Television

  Tax/Pension Departments

  Defence & Military

  Air, Rail & Road Transport