Shen began to argue the matter, but surprisingly, Tom supported his proposal and called the meeting to a close.
‘Thanks guys,’ Leo said. ‘You won’t regret this. Now we can get on with our jobs.’ Back in his office, he circulated the email he’d already written, with the reporting chart, to everyone concerned, including Tom and Shen. Then he went to see Daniel Oberhart, hoping this organisational change wasn’t going to upset their working relationship.
Tom Connor was sitting in his office reading Leo’s message when Shen came back in. ‘What did you think of all that?’
Tom walked to the window. An Asian man in overalls was pushing a vacuum cleaning hose around the pool. He kept his gaze downwards, didn’t look towards the office. Tom always felt sorry for the manual workers in the Emirates. They had no real status, worked at menial jobs, earned a pittance, sent money home to their families and lived in crowded, shitty little apartments in compounds with others like them. What kind of an existence is that? he asked himself. And we westerners are living off the fat of the land. No wonder there’s so much trouble in the world.
He sat back at his desk. ‘What do you mean by “all that”?’
‘That kid, Leo. Taking over the whole show and you just sat there and let it happen. He’s the youngest employee in the division and now he’s suddenly telling us all what to do. Why did you let him get away with it?’
Tom had been expecting this reaction and had already considered his response. ‘Three reasons, Shen. First of all, he’s right. He’s right on the reporting, he’s right on the planning and he’s right on the button in prioritising our work. Secondly, we can’t afford to have him walk out and look as if we completely screwed up. It would be a catastrophe for the company and for us personally. And the third reason is, no one else has come forward with a clear plan of action and the balls to present it like he did. You haven’t done it, I haven’t done it either and frankly, it had to be done.
‘Let’s face the facts, Shen. We fell into sleepy mode when Scotty was here. Between him and Sharif we didn’t have to worry about any of that, they were a great team combination. They made it happen and as long as they delivered we just went along with it. I spent all my time on marketing, operations and finance and I didn’t have to worry about development. But since he died we haven’t faced up to the situation. Things on the development side are out of hand and we’ve got to get it sorted. Leo’s right, it’s not a way to run a business. I don’t give a shit how old he is. If he’s got the balls to talk to us like that, to see what needs to be done as clear as he does and be ready to take it on, then I’ll back him, and I want you to do the same.’
Shen seemed not to notice the CEO’s indirect criticism of his stewardship of the development division. ‘OK, I’ll go along with your decision, but I want it to be noted that I disagree with you. If things go wrong, I want to be on record that I warned you and you ignored my warning. Understood?’
‘Understood. I’ll dictate a minute of this discussion to Nora to type up and we can both sign it. But what do you mean by “things going wrong”. What do you expect to go wrong?’
‘Let’s just wait and see. That kid is young and arrogant. He’s taking on an awful lot and he doesn’t have the experience of running multi-project programmes. I hope it works out, but I’m not convinced.’
‘I’m fine with that, so long as you don’t try to step on my toes. Just sort out the programming side and leave me to worry about my responsibilities.’ Daniel Oberhart had listened to Leo’s summary of the meeting and delivered his fairly lukewarm opinion of the result.
‘I know how to respect boundaries,’ he replied. ‘I’ve done a lot of that in my life.’
Oberhart said nothing. He filed away the chart and Tom’s memo and looked back at his computer screen, apparently waiting for Leo to leave.
Strange guy, he thought to himself. He doesn’t seem at all interested in anyone. Never asked me a question; where do I come from, what have I done, how did I get the job, nothing at all. Maybe it’s my fault, I’ve been too busy to get to know him. Well, someone has to make an effort. He said, ‘Tom told me you’ve been with XPC since the start-up in 2014?’
Daniel tore his gaze away from his computer. ‘That’s right, I was in the set-up team.’
‘Came over from MicroCentral in Geneva, right?’
‘Zurich. I’m Suisse Allemand, not Romand, different mindset altogether.’
‘Sorry, Daniel. I guess that’s like calling a German an Italian.’
He gave a slight smile. ‘Something like that.’
It took Leo ten minutes to prise any personal information out of the Swiss man, finally learning MicroCentral had been founded by his father and was now majority owned by a Chinese hedge fund. He’d been with them for ten years before leaving to come to XPC.
‘Wow! That must have been one hell of a decision, what made you check out of the family business?’
Oberhart’s expression didn’t change. ‘Money.’ He saw Leo’s eyes widen with surprise and added, ‘Have you ever worked for your father?’
‘I didn’t even know him. He left my mum when I was a baby.’
‘Oh, well, ten years was enough, believe me. When Lee-Win asked me to come over here, it was just a question of what’s in it for me? Then, how quickly can I come?’
‘Do you see your folks, now that you’re out of the stress of working together?’
‘My mother died five years ago and no, I haven’t seen my father since I came down. Now, I’ve got to get the night schedule out, so I’ll see you later.’ He turned back to his keyboard and started typing.
Leo went over to the elevator, What a character, he’s just like a cold fish. To walk away from your father and not even go to see him. He calculated that Oberhart was in his mid- thirties, that meant his father would be coming up to sixty. How can you not visit your only remaining parent for almost three years? He’d lied to Oberhart about his own father leaving his family, it wasn’t like that at all. His mind drifted back to his childhood in Newcastle, living in a tiny flat with his mother, wondering who his father had been, where he’d gone, where he was, if he was even still alive and why he was just another one-parent kid at school. It wasn’t until after his abduction in 2010 that Emma had decided it was time to tell him about his Rwandan mother, Mutesi, and her rape at the hands of a Hutu genocider. How after her death, Emma had smuggled the newborn baby into England and somehow managed to get him registered as a UK citizen.
Leo had known there was a great mystery around his birth, but for sixteen years Emma had kept her secret, and when finally he learned the whole story, the dreadful truth was almost too much to cope with. But the one thing he had to cling on to, the only thing that mattered, was that his adoptive mother had moved heaven and earth to find him, and with Aunt Jenny’s and Marius Coetzee’s help had brought him back to safety and a loving, stable home. Leo knew he could never give up his adoptive family for anything, or anybody.
He felt sorry for Daniel Oberhart. He still has his father, but he’s lost that magical family love, and it doesn’t sound as if he’s very bothered about it.
That afternoon, Sharif came to see him. ‘Shen told me you’re taking over the ACRE programme. There’s no need, I can do it, I worked with Scotty on the encryption development.’
‘I haven’t really had time to look at the progress on it, Sharif, so I’m not criticising or even commenting on the status. My thinking is only that you’ve got a huge job to get the new product out and it’s our top priority, even more important than ACRE,’ he emphasised, hoping that would defuse Sharif’s disappointment. ‘Ed Muire’s arriving next week. He comes from ARM, so he should be shit-hot. He’ll work alongside you and we’ll have two really strong teams to deliver Mark VII, and I’ll have time to look after ACRE properly.’
Sharif supressed his annoyance at Leo’s decision and the two men shook hands on the matter. Leo wasn’t very happy about the conversation. Why would he want to try
to manage two massive projects at the same time? He knows he can’t do it. He was having trouble understanding the players in the game; what were their motives, why were they being so counter-productive, what were their real objectives? Don’t we all work for the same company?
The first meeting of the planning committee was called for the following afternoon. Sharif seemed to have put the previous day’s argument behind him. He was positive and keen to take responsibility for his team’s input, and Leo was impressed with his contribution to the discussion. Daniel Oberhart was also a useful contributor, with his expertise in network planning and scheduling. Shen, on the other hand, said virtually nothing, and Leo was obliged to run the meeting himself. I wonder why the guy was sent down from Shanghai? He adds no value at all.
THIRTEEN
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
June 2017
It was nine at night and Leo Stewart was still working in his office on the second floor of the XPC building. Apart from the night shift customer support staff, he and the man sitting opposite him were the only people in the building. He’d just finished marking up the critical path chart prepared by his planning committee against the status from the week’s performance report. After two weeks, they were two days behind schedule. At that rate they’d be a week late by the end of July. Unacceptable, and not what he wanted to tell Tom and Shen at their management meeting on Sunday. He’d have a serious talk the next morning with Sharif and Kurt Reiner, the senior programmer in the firmware team.
He turned his attention to the second report on his desk, from Ed Muire, who’d arrived from the UK that week to take over Mark VII as soon as he was settled in. Leo had given him a test mission to assess the ACRE upgrade status and produce a ‘warts and all’ report for him. It should tell him a lot about the technology, and probably a lot more about Ed. As far as he could find, this was the first report ever produced by the team, he’d been unable to discover any other. Once again, he despaired at the lack of organisation and control he’d faced when he arrived, and vowed he’d either lick everyone into shape or leave them to wallow in their own incompetence. He was glad he had only the development division to worry about, I certainly hope the rest of the business is better organised, he thought. Tom can’t leave everything to chance as he seems to have done in this area.
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.’
The Dark Web: The stunning new thriller from the author of The Angolan Clan (African Diamonds Book 3) Page 9
