‘I’m sorry, Tom, but I don’t agree. We still don’t know for sure who are the good guys and bad guys up there, and we can’t take the risk of harming Leo’s chances. Anyway, he’s on his way there right now, so my vote is we leave it to him and the others to do their best.’
Daniel spoke up, ‘I agree with Ed. We don’t have enough information to take any decision here. He’ll be the man on the spot and he’s smart enough to handle things without our interference. We should let him get on with it.’
Finally, Tom agreed to wait for further news, but he wasn’t happy with the situation.
Oberhart went to his office to call his father in Zurich. ‘Looks like there might be a chance of avoiding the trigger upload. I’ll keep you informed.’
FIFTY-FOUR
Ipswich, England
Saturday, 17 July 2017
It was a warm evening, but compared to Marbella it seemed positively fresh and cool to Jenny. Still feeling tired and a little sickly, she wondered if she’d picked up a bug in Spain and resolved to pay a visit to her doctor in London if she didn’t shake it off soon. In the back of her mind, Jenny realised it might simply be a delayed reaction to her break-up with Bill Redman. While in Spain, she’d kept herself too busy to think about her own situation, and she was still trying to do the same. It had been painful, but hopes of a new life with the banker were gradually fading from her mind.
She was sitting in her garden with a sandwich and a cup of tea when her sister called her on FaceTime.
‘I hear Patrice worked miracles in Hong Kong.’
‘He was brilliant. With hardly any notice he was on a plane, and then found out everything we needed just in time. I was really impressed with his family commitment.’
‘It must be nice to have all these international bankers around at your beck and call.’
Jenny laughed and avoided the subject. ‘What’s the latest news, I’ve lost touch a bit.’
‘I had a chat earlier with Leo. Thanks to your infuriating efficiency, he’s on his way to Hong Kong to meet with Patrice and Junjie. They’re flying straight to Shanghai to meet the Lee-Win board and try to prevent the download, or upload, or whatever you call it. Apparently the Chinese were duped by Shen like everyone else.’
Jenny was relieved, her arrangements seemed to be working out. ‘How much time do they have? Leo said they were under the cosh.’
‘They found some kind of message that mentioned midnight tomorrow. He’s hoping to get there by seven in the evening, they’re seven hours ahead over there.’
‘They’ll only have five hours? My God, that’s much too tight for comfort. I hope they can pull it off. That cyber-attack will cause chaos if it’s not stopped. Marius told me the Russians have already got their forces in position to grab back the ex-USSR regions. The western powers won’t know what’s hit them.’
‘They’ll think it was a joint attack by China and Russia, a new détente between them to change the balance of power in the world. There’ll be a massive retaliation and we’ll end up in World War III. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
Jenny put on a confident tone. ‘I’m sure Leo will be up to the task and find a way of preventing the attack. If not, don’t forget, we’re talking about countries a long way away which don’t affect us here at all.’
‘Well, I suppose there’s nothing we can do except “lie back and think of England”, as we used to say. Speaking of which, how are things progressing with Bill?’
‘Sorry, Emma. There’s the house phone ringing. I’ll call you back later or tomorrow. Love you, bye.’ She put her mobile down and drank a swallow of the now lukewarm tea. Not a good day to share bad news, she thought. It’ll keep.
* * *
Jenny sat thinking about their conversation, and she wasn’t happy. She hadn’t been entirely honest with her sister, not what she’d said about the international threat and potential consequences, but what she hadn’t said: about the risks of Leo’s position. He was in China, a far-away, savage country he didn’t know, with a company whose director had put him in prison in Dubai, where he would still be festering without the intervention of Marius Coetzee. The man responsible was determined to deploy this devastating cyber-attack and Leo was going to go head-to-head with him to prevent it.
The dream she’d had a week ago came back to her, the woman and the Chinese man dressed as a sheikh. After Leo’s incarceration and then release, she’d assumed the couple must be Angela da Sousa and Shen Fu Liáng, but now she wasn’t so certain. Worrying thoughts flitted through her mind, shadowy faces she couldn’t pin down. She knew there had to be other players in the background. It’s not all as it seems, it can’t be, it never is.
Jenny went online and checked out a number of alternatives, then confirmed the most suitable. She picked up her mobile and made a call.
Delmas, Mpumalanga, South Africa
‘How are you, Jenny? I hear you’ve been busy, and effective, as usual.’ Coetzee listened for a while, interspersing her monologue with comments like, ‘I see. Maybe. You could be right. You think so? Fair enough.’
After several minutes of this, he said, ‘You’re right. I should have thought of that. What do you want me to do?’
He listened again and looked at his watch. ‘Why am I not surprised? OK, text me the details and I’ll get moving. Take care, and I’ll get back to you asap. Meanwhile, can you call Dr Middleton’s office and update them on Leo’s meeting in Shanghai? Thanks.’
Coetzee went into the kitchen to negotiate with Karen. He hated these difficult discussions.
FIFTY-FIVE
Hong Kong International Airport
Sunday, 18 July 2017
‘Patrice, great to see you again. Thanks for staying on and organising this trip.’
‘You’re looking well Leo, despite everything. Let me introduce a new friend, Mr Junjie Chongkun Lee-Win. He’s agreed to go up to Shanghai with us.’
The Chinese man standing next to him was almost as tall as Leo. He bowed low then shook his hand. ‘Leo Stewart, I am happy to meet you, and to help you if I can to save my father’s illustrious reputation and our family name.’
‘Nǐ hǎo ma? How do you do?’ Leo bowed in turn. ‘It’s an honour to meet you, Junjie, thank you for coming on such short notice.’
‘You speak Chinese?’
Leo laughed. ‘You just heard my entire vocabulary. I speak three words of several languages, not exactly multi-lingual.’
‘Let’s get something to eat and you can give us the full story while we wait for our flight.’ Patrice led the way to the VIP lounge. It was almost one p.m. local time in Hong Kong and their connection to Shanghai was at three-twenty. They settled down and Leo launched into his narrative, keeping the others’ rapt attention for almost an hour.
‘So, we’re missing one last piece of the puzzle. The names of the people behind this plot, Shen Fu Liáng’s partners.’
‘The people you think murdered my father and stole our company. It seems my mother was right all along.’
‘Probably, Junjie. We think they killed Scotty Fitzgerald as well, the guy who took over the ACRE development. Your father would have admired his work, but he was in the way, like I was. Only I was lucky enough to get out alive.’
‘Do you know the Lee-Win board members personally, well enough to convince them of the truth and to take action?’ Patrice asked.
‘Some of them, but not all,’ Junjie reflected. ‘There are only five active members, all the others are lawyers. Han Wang Tāng is the managing director, he worked for my father, he’s a clever man, helped him to invent the ACRE concept. They were a great team and I know he’s still devoted to my family. Bohai Cheong is older, an influential businessman who came in as chairman after the acquisition. He was a close friend of my parents and has an honest reputation, but I don’t know him well. Two of the others were also in my father’s team and I think they’ll listen, but they don’t have a lot of influence. Then there’s Liáng, who seems t
o be the mastermind behind this whole plan.’
‘If we’ve guessed right, he won’t be there. We know he left Shanghai and didn’t go to Dubai, so chances are he’s in Moscow.’
‘They’re calling our flight. We’ll see what we find at Lee-Win in a few hours.’
London, England
‘I had to call in some serious favours to see these files, Hugh. When I tell you the names, you’ll understand why. Like we already figured out, there’s dozens of camouflage proxy companies and trusts all over the place, but they made a mistake. Those six charitable trusts are the loophole and I can tell you who are the real money people behind those payments. The guys who really own Lee-Win along with Shen Fu Liáng.’
‘It sounds as if our modest predictions have been validated. Please end the unbearable suspense and reveal all.’
Dr Hugh Middleton and Ilona Tymoshenko had come into the office on a Sunday, in the hope that they would get this call from General Chillicott. Besides which, they still hadn’t caught up on her list of outstanding matters.
‘First off, as usual, you didn’t get this information from me. Understood?’
He didn’t wait for their agreement, and slowly and distinctly pronounced six names, the last being Shen Fu Liáng.
Ilona was the first to comment. ‘It reads like a dinner invitation to the president’s five closest friends. I wonder how Shen managed to be the sixth at the table?’
‘That still remains to be ascertained, my dear. For the moment, I believe General Chillicott has provided the evidence that young Leo Stewart will require in Shanghai. I haven’t yet informed you of this Billy, but Jenny Bishop called Ilona with the news that the Lee-Win board has agreed to receive a contingent of Leo, his banker friend Patrice and Chongkun’s son, Junjie, this evening. They’re all scheduled to arrive in Shanghai for the meeting in a short while.’ Once again, Middleton had difficulty in believing he was on the same side as Jenny Bishop and her nephew.
‘That’s great news, well done Leo. If the names of these characters don’t convince the Chinese to help them, nothing will. I hear their people were worried enough about the Russkies’ military intentions to send someone to listen in at the NATO meeting in Brussels last night.’
‘Speaking of which, did you have any success in convincing the UNSC to convene to discuss that unusual Russian military activity?’
‘I’m still working on it. You know as well as I do how tough it is to get them to do anything except fly around the world making photo-stops in airports.’
Ilona interrupted what she considered to be their idle chat. She wanted to get home and enjoy what was left of her Sunday. ‘I’ll make a list of these names with photos and a brief description and send them to Leo right away. Thank you, General Chillicott.’
‘You guys did more than I did, Ilona, so I guess it’s thanks all round. Let me know as soon as there’s anything new.’
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Although he didn’t have a lot to do, it was a working day, and Ed Muire was in his office at XPC when he got a call from Abby.
‘Hi, Ed, I think I’ve made a bit of a break-through, how the Russians keep up the triggering without the Lee-Win people seeing it. It’s the Hub Manager code Shen was exchanging with Moscow. I don’t know who wrote it, maybe he was only testing it and it wasn’t finished. But I managed to get my head around the changes and produce a final version, and it’s pretty neat code. It’s a handover of an upload from one hub to another. I tried it out on Leo’s network; sent it out from one hub via a second one, and when it was in shutdown mode, I got it to automatically hand the signal back to the first hub to keep sending the trigger signal and maintain the shutdown. Once the code was downloaded, the devices accepted the trigger transmissions from the first hub and the second hub couldn’t override it.’
‘That’s pretty smart, I’ve never heard of anything like that. Well done you. So, Shen sends the A2 trigger upload from Moscow via the Shanghai hub, and when it’s accepted as genuine, that guy Hoi passes the control back to him in Moscow to keep sending it.’
‘Not quite. I don’t think Hoi actually does anything, because he doesn’t have the code, probably to prevent him from trying to blackmail them or something like that. His job is simply to receive the upload and send it out to the regional hubs. Then the control automatically switches back to Moscow and the trigger keeps going out from there until they stop it. Now I understand how they can keep up the threat without Lee-Win seeing it and switching it off. And why they’d send it from Moscow in the first place. The Lee-Win people must know nothing about this, the automatic handover explains everything.’
‘Sounds like you’re right on the button. What does your father say about it?’
‘He’s not here. I was busy reprogramming and he rushed off somewhere without saying goodbye. But I’m pretty sure we know what’s going to happen now.’
‘Did you find a way to rewrite it, override the trigger function?’
‘That was the easy part. We just changed the address from the S470 cell to a different cell and it has no effect on the network at all.’
‘Duh!’ He laughed. ‘Wish I’d been smart enough to think of that. But you can still only do it by accessing the Lee-Win hub?’
‘That’s right. We still depend on Leo getting into that hub. And there’s something else I was wondering. There’s five hours’ difference between Moscow and Shanghai. That message to Hoi Wei said only Sunday 12 p.m. It didn’t specify where.’
‘That’s five in the morning in Shanghai, a lot more time. He may not have thought of that with all the flying around between time zones. Better drop him a mail, so he’s prepared for the two options.’
‘Sure. And I’ll send him this handover file, so he knows we’ve confirmed our theory. I’ll copy you on it and I’ll keep thinking about it. Thanks, Ed.’ She was about to ring off, then asked, ‘Do you think Leo’s in danger over there?’
Ed said nothing for a moment. He was just as worried as Abby. ‘It sounded to me as if the Lee-Win people were genuinely in the dark about Shen, so if they can clobber Hoi Wei, the mole, Leo shouldn’t be in any real danger. Anyway, I heard about his reaction to danger from a Polish guy called Oskar who was in the prison with him.’
‘And?’
‘I wouldn’t like to meet him on a dark street corner.’
‘Really?’ Abby tried to imagine what that meant. She rang off, Ed wondering whether he should be worried more about Leo, or Abby.
Shanghai, People’s Republic of China
For reasons best known to China Eastern Airways, flight 720 arrived thirty minutes late at Pudong Airport and, thanks to the permanent traffic jam on the S1 into the city, it was seven-thirty in the evening when the three men walked into the Lee-Win building near Century Park in central Shanghai. Although it was a Sunday, the offices were open, employees rushing busily around the enormous entrance and corridors. A security officer took them up to the twentieth floor, where they waited the obligatory fifteen minutes in a luxuriously furnished conference room.
Leo was looking at his phone. He’d received two new messages, from Abby and Ilona. He asked the receptionist for the WiFi password and brought them up on his laptop. Abby had sent him the rewritten Hub Manager file with an explanation of the handover process. He read her description of the process then skimmed through the completed code. Shaking his head in admiration, he said out loud, ‘Brilliant woman!’
He explained the software to the others. ‘I figure that must mean the senior Lee-Win people are not involved,’ he told them. ‘They won’t even know what’s going on in their hub, because the control will revert to Moscow to keep the shutdown in place until Shen gets whatever it is he wants.’
‘That’s good news.’ Junjie looked relieved. ‘I couldn’t believe my father’s friends and colleagues would damage his reputation in this way.’
‘And it makes our job a lot easier,’ Patrice added.
The second message contained
Ilona’s list with photos of the oligarchs behind the Lee-Win acquisition. The names meant nothing to him, but the others sat back in amazement when he showed them.
‘This is being planned from the very top,’ the Frenchman said. ‘These are five of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Russia, and amongst the president’s closest allies. They’re playing for very high stakes.’
‘So, Dr Middleton was right again. It’s all about money and power.’
‘And that’s why my father was murdered. If he had agreed to sell, he would still be alive today. These men made this plan five years ago and for some reason they needed to start with the purchase of our company, and they killed him to achieve it.’
‘I think it was Chungkin’s invention of ACRE and the huge number of government and industrial networks with Lee-Win processors that was the attraction,’ Leo answered. ‘If they introduced the A2 cell into millions of those installations and perfected a downloadable version of ACRE, they’d create a link that could be used to blackmail just about the entire world.’
‘And XPC was set up in Dubai to develop and test this cyber-attack capability without it being seen by the Lee-Win people here in Shanghai.’ Patrice shook his head. ‘What a terrifying and ambitious long-term plan. Billions of dollars and five years to get to this point.’
‘I was fooled into helping them. ACRE is now running on millions of networks all over the world, so their plan is ninety per cent done. We’ve got to stop them from finishing it. It’s up to us now, guys, there’s no one else who can stop this happening.’
Patrice put out his hand, ‘I’m in. Whatever it takes, let’s get it done.’
‘Me too. I want nothing more than to avenge my father’s death.’ Junjie reached out and they shook hands.
Leo looked at the time. ‘Abby’s pointed out another thing I didn’t think of. We don’t know if Shen’s sending the upload at midnight local time here or in Moscow. If it’s here, we’ve got only four hours; if it’s Moscow, it’s nine. But whichever it is, we’re running out of time.’
The African Diamond Trilogy Box Set Page 147