The African Diamond Trilogy Box Set

by Christopher Lowery

  ‘So you think we’ll make the deadline?’

  ‘He’s hired another English guy, Ed Muire from ARM. That’s just the background we need for the Mark VII firmware. If Stewart can get ACRE sorted out, we should be OK. It’ll be tight, but I think we can make it.’

  ‘Does anyone suspect what’s going on?’

  ‘Not a chance. I gave Leo the cold shoulder the other day and we hardly ever speak. The only guy I’m friendly with is Sharif, and he’s not very intuitive.’

  ‘Was there any further noise about Scotty’s food poisoning?’

  ‘Nothing I’ve heard. Tom and Shen never mention it. It’s strange, as if it never happened.’

  ‘I’ve got to take another call. I’ll ring you next week unless I hear from you. Good luck, Daniel, keep it up.’

  SIXTEEN

  London, England

  Friday, 2 July 2017

  ‘Hugh’s not here right now, he’s in Cambridge for a weekend conference and won’t be in the office until Monday morning. If you email him I’m sure he’ll see it sometime over the weekend.’ Ilona Tymoshenko was on the phone with General Chillicott. He was calling about Lee-Win and XPC, and she was more interested than she sounded.

  ‘It’s not a great idea to put this in writing. That’s why I’m calling on the encrypted line, it’s very sensitive information.’

  Now she was really intrigued. ‘I’ll record the call and play it for him on Monday.’

  There was a pause, as though Chillicott was weighing up her answer. ‘This is ultra- confidential, Ilona, it stays with you and Hugh. Anything you write gets shredded and you erase this message as soon as he hears it, understood?’

  ‘I understand, no records of any kind. This call never happened.’

  ‘Agreed, so here goes. You were right about the secrecy around the ownership of Lee-Win Micro-Technology. The short version is that after Chongkun Lee-Win died in 2012, or more likely was assassinated from what I can tell, a short while later his widow sold the business. The family kept the other manufacturing companies, but not the microprocessor unit.’

  ‘I knew it, that’s when she moved to Macau. How did you confirm that?’

  ‘I had to call in some really serious favours to find a back door into the shareholders behind the offshore holding companies. There’s dozens of proxy companies spread around just about every crappy little offshore jurisdiction in the world. Seemed like looking for a needle in a haystack for a while. Then we found four of the sub-proxies located at a registered agent’s office in Delaware. I know, don’t say it. We’re not supposed to harbour those kinds of shady outfits, but Delaware still has the most business-friendly legal system in the US, especially for offshore companies. They can’t operate in the States, but they don’t want to anyway, it would defeat the object. These companies still don’t give us the identity of the ultimate beneficiaries, but it might get us one step closer.’

  ‘It does sound promising.’

  ‘We’ve had stuff on one of the directors of that outfit for a couple of years, nasty stuff he won’t survive if it gets out. I won’t give you the agent’s name, ‘cos I’m not finished with them and I don’t want them to get cold feet, OK?’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Well, this week I had a friendly pow-wow with him and he gave me just one name, nothing more. I know I had the guy frightened for his life, but he was even more scared to give me anything more than that. It’s the name of the person who instructed them five years ago to set up the proxy companies as shareholders in the next level of ownership of Lee-Win. He told me he’s set up dozens of companies for that same person over the last six years. He’s never met them, and the only thing he knows about those companies is that person was the common denominator.

  ‘It didn’t take me long to find a connection on our side. Several of our departments have got files on the name, big files, with nothing in them we can prove. For five years it’s been cropping up in investigations of drug-running, people trafficking, money laundering, cyber-fraud; you name it, the dirtiest businesses you can imagine, and all linked to offshore companies and the same name behind the scenes. We know so little about this person I can’t even tell you if it’s a man or a woman; we just don’t know. But there is one fact we’ve found out and we’re sure of it. There has been a direct connection between this anonymous person and GRU since 2011, still continuing as we speak.’

  Ilona’s mind was racing as she analysed Chillicott’s revelations. ‘You’re saying there’s some kind of link between XPC and the Russian foreign military intelligence agency?’

  ‘That’s not what I said, Ilona. You might jump to that conclusion, but I’m not in a position to agree or disagree with you. We have a brittle level of entente with our Russian friends and I can’t be seen to be sabotaging it. Not unless I have some specific knowledge in my possession, but I have no such knowledge.’ He spoke quietly and carefully, weighing every word, emphasising his enforced neutrality on the subject, but leaving her to draw her own conclusions.

  ‘I understand, General. I understand your predicament, it was foolish of me to make such a suggestion.’

  ‘Good. All I can do is to give you the name I was given by the guy in Delaware.’

  Ilona waited, hardly breathing in her anticipation.

  ‘The name is Tsunami. Did you get that?’

  ‘I got it, Tsunami.’ She stopped the recording. ‘Thank you, General, thank you very much. Is there anything else you need to say to Dr Middleton?’

  ‘One last thing, Ilona. I want to know from Hugh the truth behind his interest in Lee-Win, XPC and Leo Stewart. I don’t buy this “commercial information” crap. There’s something he knows and if I’m going to be useful in this business, I need to know it too.’

  Exactly my feelings, Ilona thought. Hugh won’t be too happy with that. Fortunately, it’s not on the tape. ‘I understand, General,’ she answered. ‘I’ll give him your message word for word.’

  ‘Good. That’s all for now. By the way, thanks for your clean-up of the presentation, it looks great.’

  ‘I’ll have the June data ready before your meeting, so we can include that and bombard them with current warnings they can’t ignore. Goodbye General, and thanks for your help.’

  Ilona sat back and reviewed the unexpected news. 2011, that’s just after General Piotr Gavrikov took over as head of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate: GRU. The following year, Lee-Win was sold into unknown hands and the Delaware proxies were created. Chillicott said it’s still continuing, that must mean Gavrikov has maintained the relationship with Tsunami. He said he needs specific knowledge before he can take any action. He’s asking me to help him to find something he can act on. He helped me, now he wants my help to get Tsunami. And somehow, Lee-Win and therefore XPC are involved in the jigsaw puzzle.

  She sent the call to Hugh Middleton’s laptop and to her personal tablet, then erased it from the main phone system. That’s what I promised, she rationalised. I’ve erased it and I didn’t write it down.

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates

  ‘Right, Ed. You’ve had enough time this week to discover the origin of the universe. What do you think?’

  The two men were in Leo’s office, looking at the logs and results of the tests run by Ed with the ACRE upgrade group over the last couple of days. He had now officially taken over the firmware team, and this was his last look at the encryption software before Leo took it over completely.

  ‘Frankly, apart from a couple of specific areas that need attention, it’s looking very good. Sharif made some good progress over the last few months before you arrived, well done him.’

  Leo made a mental note to compliment the Pakistani, he still seemed a little unhappy with all the changes that were going on around him. ‘What’s worrying you in particular?’

  ‘I think the algorithms still need tweaking, I have a feeling there’s a bug in there somewhere. But it’s mainly what I mentioned about the connectivity module and the r
emote implementation. If we want to upgrade all the previous models out there, we need a totally ubiquitous set of instructions, and we don’t have that. There’s so many moving parts involved, we need to have a catch-all solution to get through to all the Lee-Win pieces in the networks. Like I told you last time, that’s not really my area, I haven’t had a lot to do with the IoT.’

  They talked over Ed’s concerns, and Leo prepared a list of ideas and tests he would carry out himself the following week. ‘Right, you can forget about ACRE and get on with the last upgrades for the final Mark VII firmware. Leave the connectivity module to me as well, I’ve got it under control from now on.’ He looked at his watch, it was almost ten p.m. ‘What about a quick beer at the Corner House and then an early night? You must be shattered.’

  Ed walked to the door, ‘Sorry, no can do, I’m going straight over to pick Lynne up. Big night out. We’re going to Club 27.’

  Leo had heard a lot about the club, on the beach near the Burjal-Arab hotel. The venue was renowned for its visits by celebrity DJs, and the star of that week’s Dubai Summer BeachFest was the latest club-busting record spinner from London, Deejai D.

  ‘You’d better get moving. Have a great night and say hi to Lynne for me.’

  ‘Why don’t you come with us? It’s a fabulous gig and you’ve been working hard enough to earn a good night out.’

  ‘You know that’s not my kind of music. I’m a classics man. Metal or nothing.’

  ‘Leo, you’re never going to get a metal concert in Dubai, it just won’t happen. So does that mean you can never go out and party? You’ve been here for five weeks and you haven’t seen anything except the office, the gym and a couple of restaurants. Forget what kind of music it is, just come and see people and enjoy yourself. You never know, if we get a request in, he might play a Robert Plant track for you.’

  ‘OK, if you really want a hanger-on I’ll join you, but don’t expect me to strip off and dance to some puerile crap with no lyrics or recognisable tune.’

  ‘Cool. We’ll take the rental and pick Lynne up at home. She’ll be chuffed, she thinks you’ve been avoiding her.’

  ‘Bullshit. I don’t have time to avoid anyone, I’m too busy.’

  Leo was impressed with Club 27, more impressed than he’d like to admit to Ed. The scene wasn’t as wild as some of the parties he’d been to in San Francisco, where some kids ended up half naked and out of their minds on drugs. Here, they were loud and flashy, obviously a crowd of wealthy young people, but much more respectful and well behaved. Although there was alcohol available, and he thought he could detect the effect of drugs on some people, there was no roudiness or brawling. Being in a police state has its advantages, he realised. He also liked DeeJai D, a London-based musician turned party host who had a very esoteric taste in music. He proved to have a talent for picking out great individual tracks from otherwise unmemorable albums and produced a constant sequence of musical vignettes, each one leading into the other, even when they were totally disparate music types.

  Leo nursed a beer, enjoying the show and glad he’d let Ed twist his arm into coming. During a quieter moment, he went up to the podium and managed to have a few words with the host. To his surprise, he detected a Geordie accent.

  ‘Newcastle, Jesmond actually,’ DeeJai answered to his question.

  ‘I thought so, I lived there ‘til I was seventeen,’ he told him.

  ‘So how come the west coast accent?’

  They chatted for a few moments and Leo asked if he was a Led Zeppelin fan. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘You want “Stairway to Heaven”.’ Leo just smiled and he went on, ‘It’ll have to be my interpretation, I’m the only guy who can play that song the way it should be heard. Trust me, OK?’

  The resulting production blew Leo’s mind. DeeJai D had created a multi-tracked, multi-rhythmed and multi-danceable version of the song that twisted and turned through its full ten minutes, two minutes longer than the original. Midway through the number, a young, coffee-skinned woman came up to Leo, who was standing near the podium, lapping up the ever-changing variety of sound and rhythm.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I saw you ask for this, it’s cool isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure is, I love Led Zeppelin. Are you a fan?’

  ‘My father was, so I was brought up with it. I’m Angela.’

  He noticed an accent, Sounds Spanish or Portuguese, he thought. ‘I’m Leo, Leo Stewart, nice to meet you.’

  ‘Do you dance?’

  ‘Only when I’m asked.’

  ‘Come on then, I’m asking.’ He let her pull him onto the crowded floor and they gyrated for a while. They made a good-looking but incongruous pair; at five-eight she was shorter than him by eight inches, but she didn’t seem to notice. Leo wasn’t a bad dancer but he felt a little subdued, he’d never been comfortable with pushy women, although it wasn’t unusual for him to be targetted in clubs. He managed to find out that she was from Sao Paulo and had been in Dubai for six months, before DeeJai’s gradual increase in volume prevented any further conversation. Angela was like a contortionist, seemingly moving in every direction at the same time, and after a while he began to mimic her moves. She was wearing a close-fitting dress with shoulder straps and a short skirt which showed off her beautifully lithe, dark-skinned limbs. He realised it was the first time he’d let himself free his mind up and forget his work since he’d arrived at XPC, and he gave himself up to the enjoyment of the moment. Now DeeJai was piling on the sound and the mood, with a reverberating effect on Jimmy Page’s final guitar solo, building up the pace until the whole room was a mass of cavorting bodies.

  As the last chord faded away, Angela collapsed into his arms. ‘Deos, that was awesome, thanks Leo.’ She brushed his cheek with her lips then walked away. He watched her sway across the floor. She’s beautiful, he decided.

  ‘Who was that?’ Ed and Lynne had come over to him.

  ‘That was Angela, and that’s all I know about her, she just picked me up.’

  ‘You looked great together, she loved every minute,’ Lynne said. ‘Everybody was watching you, what a mover. Who would have known?’

  ‘It’s my African blood,’ Leo laughed. ‘Come on, I need a beer.’

  Leo looked around the club for the rest of the evening, trying to spot the woman again, but she seemed to have disappeared. Disappointed, he left with the others at two in the morning, wondering who she was, what she did, where she lived, and why she’d walked away like that.

  SEVENTEEN

  Ipswich, England

  Sunday, 4 July 2017

  Jenny Bishop was on a ship at sea, not far from the shore. She could see sand dunes and a huge expanse of desert leading off to mountains in the distance. Leo and Emma and an attractive coffee-skinned, brown-haired woman she didn’t know were sitting at a table with her. There was a white cloth and cutlery on the table and she realised it was a restaurant ship sailing off the North African coast. Leo and the woman were holding hands and murmuring to each other in a romantic way. In the centre of the table was a laptop, the screen showing an old-fashioned water boiler with a pressure gauge on the front like an antique clock, with two hands and pressure measurements in Roman numerals around the face. The heading at the top of the screen was ‘INTERNET PRESSURE POINTS’ and she knew it was Leo’s computer. The hour hand was moving to twelve and the other was at quarter past, showing 250lbs of pressure. At 600lbs, two-thirds of the way around the face, was a red line, with the word ‘DANGER’ written in large red capitals.

  Jenny looked around her and saw there was only one other table, occupied by a couple on the other side of the deck, although every table had a ‘Reserved’ sign on it. They had their backs to her, but Jenny thought there was something familiar about the woman. A large golden cage stood in the middle of the deck with a green and red monkey in it. An old Arab man in a turban was turning the handle of a music box and she recognised the tune, it sounded like the first part of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, with the acousti
c guitar and recorders. The monkey was dancing around inside the cage, juggling plates in the air.

  The woman with Leo took her hand away from his, snapped her fingers, and a waiter rushed over, dressed in jodhpurs, an old-fashioned pleated linen jacket and a riding helmet. She barked out an order and he ran off to the kitchen. Taking the mouthpiece of a hookah standing by the table, she sucked in a deep breath, blowing some of the smoke into Leo’s face. Jenny recognised the waft that blew past her: it was cannabis, something she hadn’t smelled since her days teaching difficult students at Sunderland Secondary School. She looked disapprovingly at the woman, who drew another deep swallow and blew it out across the table at her. Before she could say anything, the waiter came back, carrying a polo stick and pushing a trolley loaded with dishes of curried meat and vegetables, which he placed on the table. The woman put aside the hookah and served the food onto their plates, while the waiter poured red wine from a decanter into large crystal glasses for each of them. Jenny looked at the pressure gauge on the computer screen, the minute hand had moved further round the face and was sitting over the red ‘DANGER’ line.

  ‘Bon appétit,’ said Leo, raising his glass. As the others responded, a tall man walked across the deck to the table. Incongruously, he looked Chinese, but was dressed as an Arab sheikh, in a long flowing cape and robes. The woman stood up and he kissed her passionately.

  ‘Do you have the money?’ she asked him.

  ‘Here it is.’ He took his hand out from the robes and showed her a wad of $100 bills.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Let’s go, I’ve had enough of these stupid people.’ He picked up the wine decanter and they walked towards the entrance. At the same moment, the old man stopped playing the music box. The monkey dropped the plates, which shattered all over the deck. Jenny glanced across at the table on the other side of the deck. The couple had disappeared. She looked back at the laptop just in time to see the minute hand reach twelve and the water boiler explode into smithereens.