The African Diamond Trilogy Box Set

by Christopher Lowery

  Leo glanced quickly through the update. He wasn’t expecting much, but was pleasantly surprised at the sparse but clear summary prepared by the Liverpool man. ‘Better than I expected, Ed. How much time did you have to give it the once over?’

  Ed chewed on his gum a moment. Leo assumed he must have given up smoking recently, since he seemed to consume a lot of chewing gum. He made no comment, waiting for the new man’s answer. ‘Not a lot, frankly. By the time I got settled in and did the “Hail fellow, well met” routine, I’ve had a couple of days to go through the files and run a few basic tests on the new software. I wanted to make sure it’s stable, but I haven’t worked through the test logs so I can’t substantiate any of that. It’s a work-in-progress for the minute.’

  ‘What’s your gut feeling about the recurring encryption algorithm?’

  ‘The short version? It really rocks. I’ve never seen anything so cool in my life, it’ll totally change the way the Internet works and I bet it’ll make Lee-Win and XPC unbeatable in the marketplace.’

  ‘It already has. Scotty Fitzgerald was a genius, a legend. He wasn’t very organised, but I would have loved to work with a maverick like him.’

  ‘Yep, tragic accident and a great waste of talent, it’s up to us to carry on the good work. Anyway, so far I’ve got a good idea of the overall envelope and it looks sensible, subject to any surprises when I go through the test logs. My main concern is the remote implementation; it’s still in the solution stage and that’s not my speciality.’

  Leo knew that all Lee-Win processors were built with the same constant foundations, so that any improvements in future models were backwards compatible to upgrade previous versions. They also incorporated a connectivity module that, when activated, would permit all their devices and machines to connect together in a mesh network using any form of local transmission. In the new Mark VII product with ACRE, the connectivity module would be activated before deployment from the Shanghai factory, but Ed was referring to the remote Internet process for the billions of Lee-Win processors already installed all over the world. The upgrade of Mark VII had to activate the connectivity modules and the new version of ACRE would be uploaded at the same time. The combination of the two upgrades would provide customers with a totally encrypted communications network throughout their devices and systems, wherever they were installed.

  ‘OK. I’m starting to see the trees from the forest now and I know a little bit about the remote side of things, that was my main focus at M2M. I’ll start looking at the upgrades and that connectivity problem. If you can spend a little more time in the lab this week to finish your tests on ACRE, I’ll be ready to take it over from Sunday. That’ll let you get involved full-time on finishing the rest of the Mark VII development with your new team. It’s the fastest way to make progress on all fronts. Thanks for writing up this initial assessment for me, it’s saved me a lot of time. If I need your help, I’ll shout. Deal?’’

  ‘Deal.’ Ed was pleased to have his situation clarified. He wanted to get on with his principal job: managing the firmware team.

  ‘Cool. What do you say to a beer and a quick bite at the Corner House?’

  Ed hadn’t yet acquired a vehicle, and a few minutes later he was hanging on to Leo’s waist as they roared along the coast road on his Harley to the most popular café on the stretch.

  ‘Fabulous ride,’ Ed admired the bike as Leo parked it outside the restaurant. It was black with red trim, old-fashioned styling that reminded him of the English Triumphs and Nortons of the fifties and sixties.

  ‘Thanks, it’s a Softail Slim. I got it in SF before I left and had it shipped over. Saved about ten grand.’

  ‘If I’d known you then, you could have brought two.’

  It was still too hot to sit outside, and they found a table in the air-conditioned interior from which they could see the action. As usual, the music from the speakers was so loud they had to shout to have a conversation. An English-looking waitress, about twenty, came for their order and they both asked for medium hamburgers and beers.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Ed asked the girl when she brought the drinks.

  ‘Lynne,’ she replied. ‘I’m new, haven’t even got a name tag yet. I just arrived at the weekend.’

  ‘Hi, Lynne. This is Leo and I’m Ed. You English?’

  ‘From Wrexham, just on the Welsh border. My name is Welsh, but my mam and dad are English. How about you guys?’

  ‘Leo’s just come from California and I was almost your next-door neighbour, from Liverpool, but you probably already guessed that.’

  Leo was impressed with Ed’s introduction routine. He must have spent a lot of time picking up waitresses, he figured. The girl left them, and he asked, ‘Where did you get the chat-up lines?’

  ‘I’m twenty-six and you learn that in junior school in Liverpool, so I’ve picked up a few more birds than you. And the US doesn’t prepare you for English totty. Totally different ball game.’

  ‘You’re right, American girls really are different from Europeans, even I noticed that.’ Leo had gone out with only three girls in the US. None of them had been memorable experiences. He’d had sex a few times with Joanna, the last one, but it hadn’t been serious enough for him to stay in San Francisco. She’d driven him to the airport and he’d promised to write, but so far he hadn’t found the time, or the inclination, if he was honest.

  Lynne brought their hamburgers with two more beers, and Leo chatted with Ed over their meal. He was a grammar school boy who’d gone through a three-year apprenticeship with British Telecom and stayed there until he was twenty-two. He’d then spent four years with ARM, the largest microchip software designer in the world, in their Cambridge headquarters. He was already looking for a new challenge when Leo spotted him on LinkedIn, and after seeing his CV and references he approved Ed’s job offer proposed by the HR department without even meeting him. Prior to his showdown with Tom and Shen, he felt under such pressure to deliver Mark VII that he had to cut some corners if he was going to make it happen.

  After talking with him for an hour, Leo was convinced he’d taken the right decision. Ed had specialised in the same development areas that Leo was managing and was well qualified for the job. Lynne brought them a couple more beers, and by the time they paid the bill, Ed had fixed up a date with her for the following Sunday, her day off.

  FOURTEEN

  London, England

  June 2017

  ‘I couldn’t manage another mouthful, thanks, Emil.’ Jenny Bishop took a last sip of Savigny les Beaune and regretfully watched the head waiter wheel away the dessert trolley. She was having dinner with her sister Emma and Jo Greenwell, her partner in Thinking Woman Magazine, at the Langham Hotel on Portland Place, where she stayed when Bill Redman wasn’t in town. They hadn’t yet got to the stage when she gave up her independence and stayed in his flat. The evening was ostensibly to celebrate the latest company numbers, which were starting to go through the roof, but there was another, more personal reason that Jenny and Emma hadn’t disclosed to the younger woman.

  She opened up the subject. ‘Where’s Alan, Emma? I thought he was coming this week.’

  ‘He’s in Stockholm, signing up the Scandinavian rights for one of his up-and-coming writers. Too busy as usual, but otherwise fine. We’re coming down together next week and we’ve got a couple of shows booked. The summer exhibition’s on at the RA, so there’s plenty to do. London in July, paradise. Then it’s back to Durham to finish the latest tome by August. How about you and Bill?’

  ‘I was with him last night and he surprised the life out of me. He’s booked us on a cruise in September, from Venice to Istanbul. Three days in Venice in a six-star hotel that I can’t remember the name of, then ten days in a grand suite on the Silver Dream, floating down the Dalmatian coast, through the Greek Islands to Istanbul.’

  ‘Wow! Seems like he means business.’ Jo grabbed Jenny’s hand. ‘Well done you, about time.’

  ‘Speaking of
which,’ Emma came, not too subtly, to the point of their pantomime, ‘what news from you, Mademoiselle Greenwell?’

  ‘You mean, in the romance department? No news is good news for the moment. I’ve got too much to do, and you both know that as well as I do. I can’t afford to lose my focus now the magazine is really starting to take off, or we’ll be back to where we were last year at this time. If the business continues to grow like this, Jenny and I have agreed to take on another editorial assistant in September to free me up a bit. So you can ask me the question again in October.’

  ‘I’m only concerned that you work too hard and play too little. You’re a young, beautiful woman and you shouldn’t be stuck in an office all day and night. You’ve got to get out and have some fun, meeting people of your own age. A healthy balance is what we all need.’

  ‘You sound just like my mother,’ Jo laughed, a little uncomfortably. ‘Would you two get off my case? I’ll decide when I’ve got the time to go man-hunting, and I promise you’ll be the first to know when I find myself one. Now, Emma, I want to know all about your new book.’

  London, England

  Hugh Middleton was studying the dossier on Leo Stewart and XPC given to him by Ilona. It was extremely complete and confirmed what he already knew. It was too much of a coincidence to imagine that there was another Leo Stewart with a mother who had been in Rwanda.

  His mind went back to the aborted abduction in July 2010. It had ended in complete catastrophe, and the young boy had somehow managed to escape when he should have been safely transported and held in Zimbabwe. Middleton, or as he was known at the time, Lord Arthur Dudley, was fortunate there was no definite proof linking him directly with the kidnapping or the associated murders, nor with a drug smuggling plot in France which he had deliberately sabotaged, but an unlucky coincidence had led the UK police to his door. After a long and complicated investigation, and a very distasteful public trial, he had finally been convicted of money laundering. Since there was no proof that the funds in his Lugano bank account came from any criminal activity, and the recipients of his transfer of $25,000 to a Panamanian account could not be identified, the judge’s decision was fairly lenient. But Dudley suffered the shame and embarrassment of being convicted and imprisoned. After serving six of his twelve-month sentence in Ford Open Prison in West Sussex, he emerged in June 2011, a changed character in many important ways.

  His conversion was partly due to one man, the Rev. David Morpeth, the prison chaplain, who befriended Dudley and took it upon himself to convince him to use his considerable intellect in the service of good, rather than evil. Morpeth, a petty criminal, had undergone a similar change when he’d been jailed for manslaughter for killing a young woman while driving away from a robbery. Both men were proof that prison doesn’t always change villains for the worse. But in Lord Arthur Dudley’s case, the motivation to go straight was a primitive emotion: pride. He was an exceptionally intelligent man and his long, successful criminal career had given him a feeling of superiority and invulnerability. Outwitting the inferior intellect of international police forces had become a game to him; until he was caught. Being incarcerated was, for Dudley, a sign that the game was up; he had no doubt that he was still superior, but he knew he was no longer invulnerable. He couldn’t face the prospect of a return to prison, and determined to find a way of using his particular skills to make an honest and profitable living.

  Before acquiring a taste for criminality, Dudley had held the post of Professor of Connected Machines Eco System Studies at Cambridge College of Digital Computing, and he was an extremely competent and innovative head of department. The college achieved a number of outstanding academic firsts and business start-up successes in Machine-to-Machine Communications, and the board of governors were greatly saddened when they were forced to ask for his resignation after complaints from a number of students, both male and female.

  The world of M2M had evolved enormously since then, and Dudley spent the last three months of his ‘holiday’ in the open prison swatting up on what had become IoT, the Internet of Things. Dudley’s conviction, due to an online transfer of funds from an account he wasn’t supposed to have, had marked him. Now, every day he saw newspaper and TV stories exposing the lack of Internet security that was causing loss and damage all over the world. An idea formed in his mind and gradually became a concrete project for his next vocation. He would re-enter the world of IoT, this time not in the academic arena, where his reputation might create unsurmountable barriers, but in a commercial environment where he could help to protect the world from the inherent dangers of the Internet.

  For the next six months, Dudley continued his IoT studies and transferred his offshore cash to the UK to fund the new business. He realised he needed a competent and experienced partner to ‘front’ the company, and in this he was rewarded by a fortunate coincidence. Ilona Tymoshenko was an information security official at the Ukraine Security Service, whose investigatory work had led to the arrest of five Ukrainian hacker kingpins in 2010. The hackers had used Conficker, a fast-spreading worm, to steal over $70 million from US bank accounts, and faced up to six years in prison. Within a year, all five were released, the official explanation given as: ‘A lack of modern legislation covering cybercrime.’ Distraught at this result, Ilona left the world’s Cyber Crime Centre and moved to London. Dudley struck gold when she saw his job offer on an online employment site. As well as her native language, she spoke Russian, English and French, and had more experience of the real dangers of the Internet than anyone he’d ever met.

  In January 2012, Lord Arthur Dudley, now reincarnated as Dr Hugh Middleton, opened his consulting practice, the Institute for Global Internet Security, in Bolsover Street, London W1. The first contract signed by Ilona Tymoshenko was with the Security Service of Ukraine.

  Ilona’s report on the Stewart family was ten pages long, starting with Leo’s school, college and employment history. It was an impressive account, and Middleton read it with increasing admiration for Leo Stewart. Thank God he didn’t end up in Zimbabwe, I almost deprived the world of a very clever young man who might make a real contribution. General Chillicott had a high opinion of him, and he could see why. Someone to watch closely, he told himself.

  He was amused to read that Emma’s writing career had taken off after the publication of My Son the Hostage. The book had come out while he was in prison and he’d been unaware of it. He had no doubt he’d recognise the storyline and decided to acquire a copy. There was no information in the report about Leo’s birth or his father, and he wondered once again what the real truth was. It had caused a number of deaths. Admittedly, all bad people who deserved their fate, he rationalised. (Dudley’s conversion didn’t include the past, only the future.) Although, he remembered, there was one exception. An exception that he regretted and, strangely, was what had put him in prison. The fatal transfer of $25,000, his last act before the police had arrived, was from Lugano to his contact in Harare, to buy a contract on the life of Marius Coetzee, the South African security man who had derailed Leo’s abduction. He learned subsequently that Coetzee had been executed by two Zimbabwe agents at his farm in Delmas. A foolish thing to do, he chastised himself, for many reasons.

  Jenny Bishop’s story brought him few surprises. He’d known from the beginning that she might prove to be the fly in the ointment. Now she’d become a successful entrepreneur, investing in private equity opportunities. He knew she had inherited a substantial fortune and a thought flashed through his mind: She might be interested in investing in my business. Middleton laughed out loud at the idea. Ships that pass in the night. He suddenly saw an image of Esther Rousseau, the only woman he had ever loved and who had caused him to lose his usual sang froid, with far-reaching and life-transforming consequences.

  He took the second document from the dossier, the report on Lee-Win Micro-Technology and XPlus Circuits. It comprised only two pages and revealed very little that he couldn’t have found online. Although Dubai co
rporate law required a fifty-one per cent majority ownership by UAE nationals, this was circumvented by a pledge of forty-seven percent of the stock to Lee-Win against a billion-dollar loan, required to build the new facility. In reality, Lee-Win was clearly the beneficial owner of ninety-six per cent of XPC, the remaining fraction being owned by a Dubai lawyer, who presumably also held these shares for their account. However, it was quite impossible for him to ascertain who owned Lee-Win.

  Middleton was a complex character, full of contradictory motivations. Having unsuccessfully attempted to abduct Leo Stewart and ship him off to a fairly certain death in Zimbabwe, he now felt a kind of responsibility of care towards him. Chillicott’s story about the poisoning of Leo’s predecessor at their Dubai facility was still fresh in his mind. As he had previously informed the general, death intrigued him, and he was not a great believer in accidental death by poisoning. He would find out what he could about Leo’s new employers and try to ensure that the young man didn’t risk suffering the same fate.

  He called Ilona back into his office. ‘Thank you for the Stewart report, it is most exhaustive and informative. However, I see that the ownership of Lee-Win is shrouded in mystery. Were you unable to discover more?’

  ‘About the company history, yes, but virtually nothing about the ownership. It looks as if it changed hands about five years ago, and behind the entities listed on my report, there is a complex web of companies, all over the world, which own various other companies and so on, until it’s impossible to know who the ultimate owners are. I don’t know why you asked me to do this research,’ she paused, waiting in vain for a response, ‘but I think you’ve stumbled on an interesting situation. You know I’m usually quite good at digging into puzzles and finding what I’m looking for, but this one seems unsolvable, if there is such a word.’