by Hammond, Ray
Lynch poured a coffee for his guest and seated him at the small conference table. ‘Here, this is why I suggested you come down this morning.’ He pushed the printout of an e-mail message towards Deakin.
The UNISA officer flipped through the pages before settling down to read them carefully. When he reached the third page he started flipping again. Then he skimmed through the remaining sixty sheets.
‘I extracted everything from Tye’s files that was in plain text or unencrypted video,’ explained Lynch. ‘There was over a terabyte of it. Then I searched for two key words: “encryption” and “decryption” plus all possible stems, suffixes and contractions. This e-mail printout was the only hit.’ He looked up. ‘And the next unencrypted communication was this one . . .’
He pressed a remote on the desktop and the wall screen lit. Deakin saw a young man with unruly fair hair.
‘Mr Tye.’
‘Doctor Larsson?’
The young man nodded.
‘Can you verify, please?’
‘Let’s both do it.’
Deakin watched as the man called Larsson leaned forward and touched the fingerprint pad on his system. There was a few seconds’ delay and then Deakin saw the message:
Identity of caller confirmed as Rolf Linquist Larsson, born 13 January 1980, Stockholm, Sweden. Present location Järntorgsgatan 1–3, Stockholm, Sweden. GPS location 57.6042°N, 17.1619°E. Identity Certificate on file.
‘Please encrypt, if you don’t find that too funny,’ said Tye.
Deakin saw Larsson nod and then the screen dissolved into white noise.
Deakin whistled. ‘Why would he find the idea of encrypting funny?’ he asked.
He picked up the text of the message that had preceded the videoconference and read it again with more care, this time paying greater attention to the thick wad of pages at the back of the message. As he read, Lynch rose, walked to the coffee percolator and refilled his friend’s coffee mug. He had a huge smile on his face; not just because of the messages he had found, but also because the simple act of standing and walking to the coffee machine still gave him the most exquisite pleasure. He knew the incredible mental processing and feats of mechanical engineering that are required to keep the top-heavy human body upright, to move balance from one ten-by-three-inch platform to the other; to control the thousands of muscle, bone, temperature, blood, oxygen and sensory inputs, outputs and parameters required for such an apparently simple process to occur. He wondered how long it would be before he became blasé again and took his brain’s astonishing information-processing capabilities for granted.
After a few minutes Deakin put the papers down.
‘Want a replay?’ asked Lynch. Deakin nodded and they watched again as Thomas Tye began his videoconference with an unknown Swede in Stockholm at three a.m. local time, over seven years earlier.
When the white noise reappeared Deakin picked up the printout again. ‘So this Rolf Larsson sends an e-mail to Thomas Tye that says “New software. Want to discuss?” and with it he sends these Tye corporate annual accounts and these memos about marketing plans and office relocations – all in plain text. Then Tye calls him back and thinks Larsson might find it funny to encrypt their conversation. You’ve definitely got something.’
Lynch smiled. ‘There’s one more thing,’ he added. ‘I did some checking. Those accounts are getting on for eight years old. See the date on the e-mail message?’
Deakin flipped back to the top page and nodded.
Lynch pulled a folder towards him and took out a glossy document. ‘I borrowed this from the library,’ he explained as he handed the booklet to Deakin. ‘This is the annual report and accounts that the Tye Corporation did actually publish that year – just over two weeks later! They’ve been tweaked a bit here and there; the bottom line is different with more money in a forward contingency fund, but they’re basically the same accounts.’
Deakin put the booklet down. ‘Do your men friends kiss you often?’ he asked with a laugh. ‘I suppose you’ve traced this Larsson. Don’t tell me, he’s outside the door waiting to help us.’
Lynch grinned. ‘No, he’s not. But I know who he is. He’s a maths genius. Honours graduate in pure maths from Stockholm University at age seventeen, first doctorate in pure maths when he was twenty-one. A nationally acclaimed prodigy. He was working on a second PhD in quantum mechanics when he had that conversation with Tye. Since then he’s disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’
‘Well, from the networks,’ Lynch explained. ‘There’s not a trace of him. Even his entry with the World Certification Authority has lapsed. It looks like he didn’t finish his second doctorate. There are no publications, no Web references, no university citations or news, no conference presentations, no guest lectures – nothing.’
‘What does his university say?’
Lynch held up his hand. ‘Whoa, Ron! You know I don’t do legwork,’ he said, grinning.
*
Furtrado snapped off the holo-image and uttered a particularly graphic Portuguese oath. He slumped back in his chair and wondered how best to break the news. Tom had been on a high on his way back from Moscow but this morning, the day after, when they should have been laying plans for the public announcement of the new state of Sybaria and the launch of the Phoebus Project, he had been in a foul mood.
‘Get Jack Hendriksen in here now,’ the tycoon had shouted at Connie without further elaboration.
Furtrado had made an excuse for getting back to his office along the corridor. He knew his boss well enough to steer clear until this storm had blown over.
The lawyer looked down at his notes and wondered if the news could keep. It couldn’t, so he pushed himself out of his chair and walked back to Tye’s suite. He crossed the outer office with its gaggle of male and female executive assistants all dictating or involved in conferences, both physical and virtual, and entered Connie’s office. As he did so Jack Hendriksen emerged from Tom’s room, nodded pleasantly and sauntered out of the office in his peculiar, lithe way.
Connie was involved in her viewpers and she waved Furtrado through – there were only rare occasions when Tom’s office door was closed to his most senior counsellor. As Furtrado stuck his head inside, Tom was standing by the picture window, staring out over the Atlantic ocean. The windows in the suite had darkened to eliminate the worst of the sun’s glare. Tye heard Furtrado enter and he turned.
‘Do you trust Hendriksen?’ he asked abruptly.
Furtrado considered. ‘Trust in what way?’ He couldn’t think that the security chief would be involved in any of the corporation’s commercial deals. Hendriksen struck Furtrado as being a fit, watchful man, something of an outsider in the company, but the sort you would want on your side if there was ever any real trouble: a little dangerous, perhaps.
‘He broke into my office upstairs while we were in Moscow,’ said Tye quietly.
Furtrado whistled. ‘How the hell did he do that?’ he asked.
‘Said it was part of a security review, did it to prove my security is no good. Swam up my swimming pool drain. Helped Tommy write me a fucking birthday card!’ Tye picked a card up from his desk and waved it. ‘And now he’s given me these brochures advising on new household security systems!’
Furtrado had to stop himself smiling. He knew that even Tom wouldn’t dare lose his temper on Hendriksen. He wished he had been present during their meeting.
‘Take a look at him,’ said Tye. ‘He could be selling information.’
The lawyer nodded. He knew everything Tye did would be fully encrypted and he doubted that Hendriksen was a spy. It sounded more as if Tom was being taught a sharp lesson.
‘There’s some news from New York,’ he ventured. ‘Some outfit called Sloan Press has contracted to publish that libellous British book – the unauthorized biography.’
‘Just swamp it in legals,’ ordered Tye distractedly.
‘The New York attorneys have done all that,’ explained Fu
rtrado. ‘They’ve got twenty-one injunctions, but it looks like Sloan Press is prepared to publish and meet us in court – then the media will get it.’
Tye’s attention snapped back. ‘Who the hell is Sloan Press?’ he asked. He pondered for a minute. ‘Buy them, Marsello. We can always sell them on once we’ve dealt with this.’
‘They’re privately held, Tom,’ explained Furtrado. ‘They’ve turned down two good offers in the last year.’
‘THEN BUY THE FUCKING BOOK,’ shouted Tye, now getting seriously irritated. ‘It will be cheaper and faster than doing the legals. Go and see this English writer, and buy her off.’
*
The housing estate was new – still under construction in some sections – but it looked like a safe place to raise children. The large lake, an inland extension of one of the many watery fissures that penetrated the Swedish mainland, provided a natural focus for the horseshoe-shaped community of houses. Children played in the streets and on the grass at the edge of a gently sloping lake shore. Chevannes smiled at the setting of sunshine, peace and safety, automatically comparing it to the dangerous Jamaican wasteland of the Kingston yards where he had spent his early years, before his family had won an immigration lottery and moved to America.
He had to ask twice for directions because these streets were so new they had not been included on the map he had bought at the airport in Stockholm.
He knew the woman’s married name and he carried a wedding picture that was only three years old. He hadn’t called ahead, partly because all case-related network communication was banned but mainly because his experience had taught him that better results were usually achieved when questions were asked without advance notice.
Chevannes identified the house, walked up to the front door and found it ajar. He pressed the bell push and waited. There were sounds from within and then a pretty woman with flyaway blonde hair appeared. It was definitely her. She was wearing a white blouse and loose-fitting tan trousers.
‘Mrs Astrandh? Laila Astrandh? Formerly Laila Hagstrom?’
Laila smiled at the well-dressed man on her doorstep. ‘What can I do for you?’ she asked in the near-perfect American-English common to most Scandinavians. He realized he wouldn’t need to use auto-translation and, not for the first time, reflected that it was a shame such devices were rapidly reducing the need to learn foreign languages.
Chevannes showed his badge and watched as the housewife unclipped a VideoMate from her narrow belt and ran his ident signal past the World Digital Certification Authority. She smiled when she received confirmation and handed back the card.
‘What can I do for you, Officer Chevannes?’ she asked. She pronounced his name in the correct French way. There was a child’s cry from within the house. ‘Come in,’ she invited. ‘You’ll have to excuse the mess.’
Chevannes followed her into a bright living room cluttered with children’s toys. A small girl with golden curls stood in a corner telling off a Furry. Chevannes didn’t understand her Swedish.
Her mother reproached the child gently, stroked the berated Furry and then sat with her daughter on her lap. She gestured for Chevannes to sit on the couch opposite.
‘This is Aya-Karin. Say hello to Mr Chevannes,’ Laila told her daughter in English. The child’s pale blue eyes fastened on the elegant visitor. She half smiled and then nuzzled her face into her mother’s blouse.
Laila said something else in Swedish to her daughter and the child turned her head towards Chevannes again. ‘Hello,’ she said with a bouncing intonation.
‘Hi, Aya-Karin,’ replied Chevannes in what he hoped was his softest tone. He waggled his big fingers at her. The girl just stared at him and then looked up at her mother.
‘I’ll take her next door for a minute,’ said Laila, rising with the child in her arms. She started for the door and then stopped when the Furry called out something after them. She returned and bent over so her daughter could scoop up the green rabbit. With a dazzling smile in Chevannes’s direction, Laila left the room with both daughter and Furry.
The intelligence officer took in his surroundings. He had never been inside a Scandinavian home before. Even the most ordinary of objects seemed designed with flair: the bay window had a curve at the top that made it resemble a church window. The natural-stone fireplace doubled as a divider between the living room at the front of the house and a dining area at the rear. Despite the clutter of toys, the place was clean and comfortable. Chevannes sat back in the sofa enjoying this brief sojourn in what he might imagine was true domestic bliss.
‘I left her with my neighbour,’ Laila explained as she re-entered the room, pushing a lock of fair hair back behind one ear. ‘So what can I do for you?’ she asked as she sat down again. ‘What does the United Nations want in Solna?’
‘It’s about Rolf Larsson,’ said Chevannes, coming directly to the point. ‘Do you know where he is currently?’
Laila raised her fair eyebrows and pursed her lips. She didn’t seem overly surprised. ‘No,’ she said finally, ‘I don’t.’
‘You two were . . . close friends,’ prompted Chevannes. ‘Or so I was told at the university.’
The Swede smiled at his propriety. ‘He was my boyfriend, for two years,’ she confirmed. ‘But I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in over five years.’
‘Did he ever have any dealings with Thomas Tye and the Tye Corporation back then?’
Laila smiled again and nodded. ‘That’s what changed him. He sold something to Thomas Tye – and made a lot of money. It completely messed him up. After that deal he began throwing money around as if he was insane. At first he went off on the star trail – you know, the Greek Islands, Thailand, China, New Zealand, Peru.’
Chevannes shook his head and shrugged. He didn’t know.
‘The places where you can view the stars best, away from urban lights and the main satellite networks,’ explained Laila. She sighed as she recalled: ‘At first it was all very professional. The best portable telescopes, cameras, computers and so on. Then . . . well, we were staying up all night, sleeping all day. He started using drugs and stopped bothering with his telescopes. He’d just lie there on the beach or on a mountainside and stare up at the stars all night, every night. He seemed very unhappy in spite of all the money.’
She tailed off – back there with him again, in the time before she had met her husband Benji.
‘We were only twenty-seven,’ she offered by way of explanation. ‘You know his parents had died in a boating accident three years before?’
Chevannes nodded. That was why she was the second stop on his visit, after the university. ‘Do you know what it was he sold to Thomas Tye?’ he prompted.
Laila shook her head. ‘He wasn’t allowed to talk about any of it. He said he’d signed a contract that forbade him to discuss it. After a few months he started ranting about how it had ruined his career. He’d just lie on his back and stare up at the stars, and go on and on. That’s when he really started on the drugs and drinking.’
‘What was he working on before he sold this thing to Tye?’ asked Chevannes.
Laila had been examining the hands folded in her lap. Now she looked up. ‘Would you like some tea or coffee?’ she asked.
‘That would be nice,’ smiled the intelligence officer. ‘Coffee would be good.’
‘Come into the kitchen, we can talk there,’ she said.
Chevannes followed her into a light and airy room, more of a conservatory, with a large informal eating area and another open log fireplace.
‘He was a mathematician and an astrophysicist, not somebody in business,’ Laila explained as she snapped the kettle on. She turned to face him, leaning back against the work surface. ‘I think it was some sort of mathematical formula, or some sort of software. He kept it all to himself.’ She hesitated. ‘To be truthful, I wouldn’t have understood it anyway. He was highly gifted mathematically, but to me it was all a foreign language.’
‘You speak at least
one foreign language very well,’ said Chevannes, rather taken aback by his own gallantry. ‘I spoke earlier to his supervisor at the University who said that one minute Doctor Larsson was working for a second PhD – in particle physics – then he was called away to do jury service. He never returned to the college, and he never explained why. The professor wasn’t very happy to be reminded of this. He thought Doctor Larsson had a unique brain and could easily have become the youngest full maths professor in Europe. It seems he represented a massive loss to the university, and they were furious at the time.’
‘I don’t think he ever did any jury service,’ recalled Laila as she spooned coffee into two mugs. ‘He just cut himself off for a few weeks and then he went to visit Thomas Tye. The company even sent a private jet to collect him. When he came back he couldn’t get over talking about how rich he was. He claimed he’d been paid billions of dollars, but at the time I rather thought . . . well, Je ne l’ai pas pris au pied de la lettre.’
Chevannes looked at her, not understanding.
She smiled. ‘I’m sorry, what’s an equivalent saying in English? I didn’t take it literally. I mean, I took it with a . . .’
‘. . . A pinch of salt?’ guessed Chevannes.
Laila nodded. ‘But he did have a lot of money. We travelled everywhere first class, stayed in the most wonderful hotels . . .’ She tailed off as she poured the boiling water, then stirred the granules absently. ‘Milk?’
Chevannes shook his head, and they both sipped their black coffee. ‘When did you last see him?’ he prodded.
‘It was about eighteen months later. We had continued to travel and he had got hooked on some really strong acid in Northern California – a special form of hallucinogenic developed in some remote lab near Mendocino. I tried the stuff and I didn’t like it. But Rolf said it allowed him to set the motor free.’
She tapped the side of her head. Chevannes nodded.
‘He would binge for a week at a time – totally out of it – then stop completely for a few days. Then he’d start again. Eventually we ended up at some exclusive resort island on the Great Barrier Reef. We had this giant villa on stilts down on the beach. The domestic staff came over from a nearby island three times a day to leave food and change the laundry – not that Rolf cared about food or laundry by this time. I decided I couldn’t take any more. I took the boat across to the main island one day while he was still passed out and caught the seaplane out – to Cairns on the Australian mainland. Then I headed down to Sydney and bought a ticket back to Stockholm. Just before I got on the plane I called the police and told them where Rolf was and about the drugs he had with him. He had brought everything from California – I think the stuff was too new to be categorized as really illegal. I hoped they’d get him some medical help.’
