‘Is it my imagination or did I hear a sous-entendre in that reply?’
Jenny laughed. ‘Let’s just say that I’ve had a few dates which might develop into something more.’
‘Well don’t leave me hanging out like the washing. Who is it?’
‘Here. Bring the tray out and I’ll tell you, but promise you won’t say a word to anyone.’
Emma poured the tea. ‘Right. I’m all ears.’
‘You remember the bankers I work with in London, Fletcher, Rice? Well, one of the partners, Bill Redman, has a house on the beach at Los Monteros. It’s just a few kilometres from here, along the A7 towards the airport. He’s in the middle of a divorce and comes and goes from London by himself, the same as I do. We’ve seen each other there and here in Marbella. He’s a lovely guy, clever and very funny.’
‘And here I am, writing blogs for TWM and seeing you every month and you haven’t breathed a word about him.’
‘There’s not a lot to say, except that,’ she paused dramatically, ‘last month I slept with him, for the first time in about a hundred years, and we’ve managed to get together a few times since then. Apart from that, nothing’s happened. He hasn’t gone down on one knee or anything like that, but I really do like him.’
‘Wow, wow, wow. My sister’s having sex again!’ She grabbed Jenny in a tight embrace. ‘What’s it like?’
‘It’s marvellous, actually. But I don’t want to make you jealous. And I don’t want you to say a word to anyone. Promise?’
‘Not a word, guide’s honour. I hope you’re on the pill? You don’t want any accidents.’
Jenny frowned, ‘I thought you knew. After Ron and I lost our baby, the doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to have another. That’s why we were thinking of adoption.’
Emma felt like biting her tongue off. ‘I’m sorry, Jenny, how stupid, I wasn’t thinking. Of course I remember.’ She tried to hide her embarrassment. ‘Does Bill have any children?’
‘Two, a boy and girl. They live with their mother, although they’ve been down here and we had lunch together at the beach. They’re nice, normal kids. I think it’s a very civilised divorce from what I can tell, but it’s taking a long time to get sorted.’
‘Do you know what brought it about?’
‘He hasn’t said much about it and I don’t pry, but from what little I know it sounds like she met someone else. He was travelling a lot until a couple of years ago and I think she just got lonely. It happens.’
‘Well, I want regular reports in London when we have our publication meetings. If I have to buy a new wedding outfit, I’ll need plenty of warning.’
‘Don’t rush out and spend your money yet. Never forget I’ve been married before, and I know it’s not all milk and honey. Men are just overgrown little boys and they take a lot of looking after. At the moment, I’ve got the perks without the problems, so we’ll just wait and see what happens.’
After a quick shower, Leo pulled on a T-shirt and shorts and went down to the terrace. It was now four in the afternoon and the sun cast a warm, friendly sheen across the sea.
‘Back to paradise,’ he said, sitting on a rattan chair beside the women. He took a sandwich from a plate on the glass-topped table, biting hungrily into it. ‘I haven’t had anything to eat since this morning. Slept all the way to London and again on the Malaga flight.’
‘Right,’ Emma said, ‘if you’re not too exhausted, let’s have an update on why, when and how you decided to take the job.’
‘Hmm. Good tea, Jenny, you still can’t get a decent cup over in the States. Do I really have to undergo a cross-examination so soon after arriving?’
‘We’ve heard nothing since your email about coming here, so we’re bound to be inquisitive. Anyway, it’s to show we care about you. We’re waiting.’
‘OK, Mum. Where to start? You remember I hadn’t decided to go down for the interview when I called you right after speaking to Tom Connor in San Diego. Well, I had dinner that night with a retired US Air Force General, called Billy Chillicott. He’s a big wheel at the Homeland Security Agency and he’s sure lack of Internet security will bring the end of the world. I was actually in San Diego attending a lecture given by him and an English guy called Dr Hugh Middleton when Tom called. Billy talked me into going down for the interview, and I’m glad he did. The XPC people are working on some really cool stuff and I want to be a part of it.’
‘Is it the same work you explained to me? Building billions of microprocessors to manage machines all over the world?’
Emma looked querulously at her sister. ‘You’ll have to explain it to me when you have time. I haven’t a clue what he does.’
‘It’s similar. Except I’ll be responsible for the whole process: development and design.’ He gave them a simplified explanation of the job. ‘And they’ve also got a really neat encryption-transmission technology, called ACRE, that could revolutionise the whole Internet industry. Tom wants me to oversee that project as well. He’s appointed me as a Senior VP, to give me seniority over the other VP of product development.’
‘You mean you’ll be helping to make the Internet safer?’
‘I’m gonna try my best. Chillicott and Middleton made a very convincing job of putting the frighteners on everyone at the conference. The whole Internet and Cloud computing scenario is an accident waiting to happen, according to them.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Emma. ‘We know lots of people who’ve been defrauded online. It makes you afraid to use a credit card.’
‘They’re not talking about just credit cards. They think it’s a lot more dangerous, that there’s a big disaster brewing, ready to explode. The stakes are very high. That’s why this job is a really good opportunity to make a difference, to create technology that helps to make things safer.’
His mother went quiet. ‘What’re you thinking?’ Leo asked.
Emma replied, ‘Did you hear what happened to the other man, the one who died?’ Jenny looked at her in surprise. She hadn’t been aware of the death.
‘I asked Connor about that. It was just a fluke accident, the guy, Scotty Fitzgerald, got food poisoning from a curry dinner and it was very virulent and killed him.’
Jenny suddenly had a vision of a young man lying on his bed with his mouth open, trying in vain to scream for help. A cold shiver went up her back, but she hid the feeling and asked, ‘I suppose there was an inquest?’
‘Of course, Aunt Jenny. It’s not a tin-pot dictatorship or a Third World country, you know. The verdict was accidental death by poisoning. I heard he’d had a lot to drink and they think that was part of the reason. Anyway, I don’t like curry and I hardly drink at all, so I doubt it’ll happen to me.’
She tried to lighten the conversation. ‘Where will you live when you get there?’
‘They’ve got a really cool apartment for me, I went to see it. Brand new, fully furnished with everything you can imagine, including a great sound system.’ Leo was a heavy metal fan, starting with Led Zeppelin and moving on to Metallica, whose gig at San Francisco’s AT&T Park he’d attended in May the previous year. Emma, a classical music lover, didn’t understand his passion, even when he had played her their 2014 version of ‘One’ with Lang Lang on piano, but Jenny had fond memories of the music. Ron, her husband, had played guitar quite badly and spent hours practising Jimmy Page’s legendary solo on ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
‘It’s right by Jumeirah Beach,’ he continued enthusiastically, ‘very posh, a concierge and cleaning lady. A bit like Aunt Jenny’s lifestyle.’ He avoided her attempt to slap his face. ‘I’ll get a motorbike so I can get through the traffic and to the office easily. There’s a great gym with a fight ring, squash, badminton, everything you could want.’
‘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 lik
e 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.
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