The African Diamond Trilogy Box Set

by Christopher Lowery

  Chillicott seemed mollified by the apology and they ended the call in agreement. Middleton put down his phone. I hope this matter doesn’t end badly for Leo Stewart, he reflected. Or for me.

  NINETEEN

  London, England

  Tuesday, 6 July 2017

  ‘I think we’ve had a stroke of luck with XPC.’ It was ten o’clock on Tuesday morning when Ilona Tymoshenko went into Dr Middleton’s office with a printout in her hand.

  ‘From your ex-colleague in Kiev?’

  ‘Ilya Pavlychko, yes. He’s a bloodhound once he gets on the trail of someone or something. He hasn’t found any trace of General Chillicott’s Tsunami character, but he’s got a lot on XPC.’

  ‘And what has Pan Pavlychko sniffed out that may interest us?’

  ‘He was following up your suggestion actually, so well done your lateral thinking. We already know that Lee-Win is the beneficial owner of XPC. In terms of local management, there are six registered officers in Dubai. I’ll discount their lawyer, the CFO and COO and one SVP, none of whom are involved with Leo Stewart or his area of work. That leaves: Tom Connor, the CEO who hired him, he’s an American from Boston; Shen Fu Liáng, the Executive VP who Leo reports to, he’s a Chinese national from Shanghai; and Daniel Oberhart, a Swiss SVP from Zurich who was with MicroCentral.’

  ‘An American, a Chinaman, a Swiss German and an Englishman! It sounds like the beginning of a typically English joke. I hope it has an amusing ending.’

  Yesterday he was in his erudite mood, today it’s slapstick. What’s going on in Hugh’s mind, Ilona wondered. She ignored the interruption and went on, ‘Oberhart was one of the rising stars with MicroCentral, his father was founder of the business and he’d been there for ten years since he left university. I understand Lee-Win had to give him a substantial golden handshake to get him to Dubai.’

  ‘Does his family still retain a large stake in the Zurich company?’

  ‘They were bought out by Hai-Sat, a Chinese hedge fund, four years ago with a $3 billion valuation, but I understand they kept a minority shareholding. His father is still chairman.’

  ‘Hmm, interesting. The son of the chairman and a substantial shareholder of a large competitor owned by Chinese investors came to XPC, itself owned by the Chinese, when they were developing a revolutionary new encryption technology. Then, just when they are preparing to launch the product on the market, the senior programmer dies of poisoning. Most intriguing, don’t you find?’

  ‘Perhaps, but I think the man who interests us most is Shen Fu Liáng, and I’ll explain why.’ She read from the printout. ‘According to Ukrainian intelligence, Shen was the second of two brothers born to a family in Chengdu in 1978 and 1980. Unfortunately, he was born after the one child per family rule was introduced by Song Jian in 1979. His father, Qiang, was Chinese and his mother, Olga, was from Minsk in Belarus, as you know at that time part of the Soviet Republic and still today a close partner of Russia. Quiang was governor of Sichuan Province, an important and presumably corrupt and wealthy government official. Because of his lofty status, he could have kept both sons, but he decided to show an example by giving up one of them. He chose Shen, and shortly after his birth he was taken to be adopted by Olga’s family in Minsk. His adopted name was Grigori Vedeneyev.

  ‘The family stayed in Minsk, where the adoptive father, Akmal, was vice president of the Ministry of Energy, until the break-up of the USSR in 1992. They then moved to Moscow and he retired there, because of ill health. His widow and daughter are still in Moscow but Akmal died in 2000.’

  ‘Do you know the cause of death?’

  ‘There’s a newspaper cutting stating that he had been suffering from lung cancer. They all smoke like chimneys there.’

  ‘And what happened to Liáng after Akmal’s death?’

  ‘He was twenty then and went back to live with his parents and brother in Chengdu, and attended college there for three years. By now he had a Russian passport in his Belarus name, Grigori Vedeneyev, but while in Chengdu, he obtained a Chinese passport in his original name of Shen Fu Liáng. I’ve got copies of all of these documents.’

  ‘But he didn’t remain there either, I suppose?’

  ‘Correct. In 2003, he went back to his second mother and sister in Moscow until 20O8, and I can even tell you what he did there.’ She paused, but this time Middleton didn’t intervene. ‘He was employed, as Grigori Vedeneyev, by SITRA, the State International Trade Research Agency.’

  His eyes gleamed behind his spectacles. ‘Which we know is part of GRU, the Russian foreign military intelligence agency.’

  ‘Exactly, he was with GRU in Moscow for five years then he was sent to Washington DC as head of the Russian Trade Delegation, also part of the secret service. He was there for four years, and then in November 2012 he went back to China and joined Lee-Win in Shanghai, as Shen Fu Liáng, of course.’

  ‘Which is when Tsunami was creating proxy companies, presumably for GRU, and shortly after the Delaware people set up the proxies for the acquisition of Lee-Win. A most provocative coincidence, one might think.’ Middleton was silent for a moment. ‘Did he come down to Dubai when XPC was set up?’

  ‘Yes. He was sent by Lee-Win from Shanghai as their board representative in 2014.’

  Middleton looked at her in astonishment. ‘He’s the only person in touch with the Shanghai board?’

  ‘I don’t know. As CEO, Tom Connor should be the official contact with Shanghai, but he’s not on the Lee-Win board. Shen Fu Liáng is the only person in Dubai who is a board member.’

  ‘So, despite his title of CEO, Connor actually reports to Liáng?’

  ‘I don’t know how it works in practice, but it’s certainly an unusual arrangement.’

  ‘And is he married, children, anyone else in his life?’

  ‘He’s unmarried, but I don’t know about any other relationship.’

  ‘Do you know if his Chinese parents and brother in Chengdu are still alive?’

  ‘I’ll have to check on that, it’s not mentioned here.’

  ‘And his adoptive father, Akmal. Was he a wealthy man?’

  ‘I can enquire, but as vice president of a Communist state organisation, I’d be astonished if he wasn’t extremely wealthy. If not, he must have been completely stupid.’

  ‘Quite, well reasoned. That means both his first and second fathers were probably wealthy and influential men. Please continue, Ilona, this is fascinating.’

  ‘There’s one more peculiar thing Ilya hasn’t yet found out.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘Between leaving Washington in May 2012 and joining Lee-Win in the following November, Shen Fu Liáng vanished off the face of the earth. For six months Ilya could find no information about him, no trace at all. He flew from Dulles International Airport to Paris Charles de Gaulle on 12 May then disappeared, turning up again at London Heathrow on 15 November to fly to Shanghai. In the interval, no one seems to know where he was.’

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates

  ‘Nailed it!’ Leo Stewart had just finished the last in a series of tests of his rewritten versions of the upgrade and Internet upload programme suites for ACRE and Mark VII, and they worked. The instruction to switch on the connectivity module was also now incorporated. Finally, he’d investigated Ed’s concerns about the encryption algorithms and had found and rectified a rare error of logic in the basic formulae. He didn’t know if it came from Scotty’s original work, or had been caused by Sharif’s subsequent intervention, but it didn’t matter. He’d found it and fixed it and that was all that counted.

  He was in one of the basement labs at XPC, where he’d linked up several pieces of equipment containing Lee-Win processors from all versions prior to Mark VII, some with the previous version of ACRE, all with the connectivity module, but some without the encryption software at all. A wireless router was connected to create a mini mesh network. He had also included devices without Lee-Win processors, so he could observe how they r
eacted to the new software. He labelled the network, Leo 1.

  Next to this arrangement were two more networks, Leo 2 and 3, comprising different pieces of equipment linked by other types of router. He had uploaded the new versions of the software from his laptop to a wireless hub similar to the main XPS hub, as it would be done on a general deployment. The hub was instructed to pass the uploads to the three routers, which downloaded them to each mini-network. He then tested the networks with messages in many different forms: alphabetic, numeric, formulae, coded, etc.

  Leo spent the day mixing and replacing the routers and equipment with other devices, right up to network Leo 10, almost two hundred variations, always with a mix of Lee-Win supported devices and others. He ran hundreds of tests and messages, each time examining the data running through all these primitive mini mesh networks. Every Lee-Win managed device on the network was now running Mark VII and the updated ACRE encryption and transmission management, which tested perfectly on every type of message. When activated by the connectivity module, ACRE caused the data to pass from one piece of equipment to the next and so on, of its own volition, a perfect data stream, perfectly encrypted.

  He sat back, considering what this meant; that he, Leo Stewart, had just created the first truly secure encrypted mesh data network in the history of the Internet. ACRE was no longer a live test innovation. After being deployed around the world by the Lee-Win hubs, it would become the future of encrypted data transmission.

  Leo texted his colleagues with an invitation to attend a demonstration of his rudimentary ‘Heath Robinson’ mini-networks test environment at five o’clock. He knew that Tom and Shen were leaving for New York the next day, and he wanted their buy-in before they left so the production and marketing teams could get moving.

  ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Incredible!’ ‘Well done, Leo!’ The accolades from Tom, Sharif, Shen and Ed were embarrassingly loud and enthusiastic. Even Daniel looked a little less unhappy than usual and patted him on the back. The demonstration had gone just as well as the tests, and there was a palpable sense of excitement and relief in the lab.

  ‘Guys, I’ve just arrived here. Scotty started this development and you’ve been working on it for two years, I just walked in and dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s. And I was lucky that the last links in the chain were the connectivity module and the upload software, ‘cos that’s all I really know how to do.’

  Tom Connor shook his head. ‘You may be right, Leo, but someone had to get it sorted and you’ve certainly lived up to your reputation. This means we’ve got almost a month to tweak and test the whole end-to-end process before sending Shanghai the final design and spec. Can we make it, Ed, Sharif ?’

  ‘We’re bound to now. Leo’s got nothing more to do on this end, so he can help us sort out the rest of our problems.’

  ‘No rest for the wicked. OK, I’m at your disposal every afternoon after I’ve looked at your test results. And guys, I want you both to test and tweak my code to death tomorrow, before we put it into the remote upgrade envelope. I’ll prepare complete files with everything you need this evening, so you can start first thing.’

  Tom was beaming with delight, ‘How about we celebrate with a drink up on my terrace? There’s champagne in the fridge.’

  Leo nursed a glass of champagne, and at eight o’clock he came back down to the lab. He printed out three sets of his test logs, so that Ed and Sharif could run their own tests with the copies the next day, make sure he hadn’t screwed up somewhere. He took all the documents up to his office then went home to get changed. He had a date with Angela, and he had something to celebrate.

  Zurich, Switzerland

  ‘That’s great news. So we picked the right man for the job?’

  ‘It looks like it, thanks to your contacts.’ Daniel Oberhart was speaking to his father, Max, chairman of MicroCentral, one of Lee-Win’s largest competitors. ‘It didn’t take him long to pick up Scotty’s theories and convert them into practical solutions. It’s an impressive set of software. Our customers are going to be delighted.’

  ‘Not to mention the effect it will have on the company’s reputation, and value.’

  ‘Right. The demo I saw today still needs some cleaning up, but Leo told me we’ll deliver the final package on time.’

  ‘And he still doesn’t suspect anything?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m still unfriendly with him and he doesn’t like it much. It’s a shame actually, he’s a likeable guy, but I guess it’s necessary.’

  ‘Once the deployment is done successfully, you’ll be able to drop the act.’

  ‘The sooner the better, I need to come home. I’ve had enough of Dubai.’

  TWENTY

  London, England

  Wednesday, 7 July 2017

  ‘Your lateral thinking seems to be working overtime.’

  ‘Thank you, Ilona. To which particular example are you referring?’ Middleton was impervious to the faintly sarcastic tone of Ilona’s compliments.

  ‘I’ve got some interesting news about Shen Fu Liáng’s Chinese father and brother.’

  ‘I see, as I was expecting. May I be permitted to disclose to you my presentiment before you reveal all?’

  ‘I suppose I can’t prevent it. What were you expecting?’

  ‘Simply that they both died between 2008 and 2012, most likely 2012.’

  She was silent for a moment. ‘I must admit, that was quite impressive, Hugh. How did you guess, or did you know?’

  ‘I’m afraid it was nothing more than a logical conclusion, sadly based on my very cynical view of the world in its present iteration. Please continue with the inevitably gory details.’

  Ilona looked at her notes. ‘Liáng’s father, Qiang, owned a summer palace on the Tuojiang River, near Zigong, about 200 kilometres south-east of Chengdu. He kept a light aircraft, a Beachcraft four-seater, which he enjoyed piloting himself.’ She put down her notepad and looked at the ceiling. ‘I was surprised at this when I remembered that he was sixty-five at the time, it seems quite old to be still flying a plane. I’d love to learn to fly, myself.’

  She was silent for a moment until Middleton’s harrumph, then continued, ‘In September 2012, Qiang was flying to Zigong for the Mid-Autumn Festival, with his wife and son, a servant and bodyguard. The plane came down on a mountainside near the river and burst into flames. Everyone was lost, Shen’s father, mother and brother were killed along with the two retainers.’

  ‘September 2012, yes, that fits with my theory. That was during the mysterious six-month gap between Shen leaving the Russian Trade Delegation in Washington in May and starting at Lee-Win in Shanghai in the following November, if memory serves.’

  No longer surprised, she nodded in agreement, and he asked, ‘The verdict was accidental death by misadventure, I imagine?’

  ‘Which you don’t agree with? How did you work all this out?’

  ‘It was not as clever as you would like to imagine, Ilona. Let me ask you a question. Were you a happy child in a happy family?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘On the whole, I’d have to answer yes. We didn’t have much money, but we were a very close and loving group. In Ukraine, the family usually includes grandparents, lots of uncles, aunts, cousins and almost anyone who lives nearby. I have three brothers and we got on really well, even after they married. They’re still there, all with decent jobs and kids. My dad died two years ago, but my mum lives with her sister, who’s also a widow, and we’re always in touch and they’re planning to come to London to see me next summer. So, yes, I was and still am a member of a happy family. Why did you ask?’

  ‘Because that’s the reason that you were unable to see the emotional scars that must have festered for years in the mind of our Chinese friend, Shen Fu Liáng. Can you imagine the pain and mortification of being separated from your natural family shortly after birth and growing up in a different country with another family, not even of the same nationality, speaking a different language? Being unable to see
your mother or your brother, just two years older than yourself ? Learning, when you are old enough to understand, that your parents had the choice of keeping you with them and your brother, or sending you away, just to ingratiate themselves with the fashionable political insanity of the day, and they chose the latter?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right, he must have ended up hating his parents.’ A thought flitted across her mind, I wonder if Hugh is relating to his own childhood experience? She asked him, ‘And you think he eventually got his revenge?’

  ‘I’m beginning to think that was only the first of a sequence of revenges.’

  ‘And XPC is the next?’

  ‘I’m not yet sure. As you know, I find accidental death by poisoning to be something of an oxymoron, it happens seldom except in novels with badly constructed plots. But apparently we have a case in hand at XPC, and that concerns me. If it was not an accident, on the face of it there may be two persons on whom suspicion could fall.’

  ‘Shen Fu Liáng and Daniel Oberhart, I suppose?’

  ‘Exactly. One can easily imagine that Oberhart’s family and their hedge fund investors are worried about the launch of this ACRE encryption software. They have a lot to lose if XPC increases its share of the very substantial processor market at their expense. And don’t forget there’s a Chinese connection there. Perhaps that is the reason that the son came to work with XPC, to keep his eye on, and possibly try to prevent, the development programme.’

  ‘You mean by getting rid of their top encryption expert?’

  ‘That was not what I expressed, but you must agree it’s a possibility? However, the death, again by accident, of Shen’s natural father during the period in which he was missing is highly pertinent. It may well have resulted in him inheriting a second fortune, assuming his adoptive father was also as rich as Croesus. I don’t imagine we can discover any details, these wealthy people have many ways in which to obfuscate their true situation, trusts and similar arrangements, but I think it’s highly likely and may be of significant importance to our enquiries.’