The Dark Web: The stunning new thriller from the author of The Angolan Clan (African Diamonds Book 3)

by Christopher Lowery

  Tom had only met the chairman once, when he’d taken the job, and knew he wasn’t comfortable in English. ‘It’s an honour to have you on this call, Mr Chairman. How can I help you, Han?’

  ‘You have already helped us more than we can acknowledge, Tom. As I said to Shen Fu Liáng this morning, your XPC team in Dubai has done a wonderful job. The new software is now in billions of our processors all over the world and the customer reaction is incredibly positive. Mr Cheong and I are aware that you have experienced several unfortunate events during the last few months, but you have overcome those problems and reinforced our global reputation once again. Thanks to you and your colleagues from everyone here at Lee-Win. Thank you, Tom.’

  Connor was trying to find the right words to respond when the Chinaman went on, ‘As you know, we sent out the upload at eleven o’clock this morning to respect the sixty-fifth birthday of our sadly deceased founder, Chongkun Lee-Win. Before leaving for his flight, Shen joined us for two minutes of silence at the celebration, and he advised us that your staff did the same thing in Dubai. Mr Cheong and I wish to thank you and your team members personally for your great endeavours, and for the respect and honour you have shown to the great Lee-Win tradition.’

  Ed wrote on a sheet of paper, Shen’s gone? Where? Celebration?

  Tom shrugged and said, ‘Han, Bohai, on behalf of our great team here at XPC, I thank you. Your call has given me enormous pleasure and I’ll be sure to share your remarks with all of them.’

  Han continued, ‘We want you to share more than just our praise with your team. Next week you will receive a special bonus amount to distribute to everyone according to your own judgement. This is a more tangible way of showing our appreciation and gratitude.’

  Ed wrote, These guys may be clean??

  Tom managed to continue, ‘I am so overwhelmed, I cannot find the words to express myself. With your permission, I’ll call you back tomorrow when I have had time to appreciate this moment.’

  The call ended in mutual thanks and congratulations, and he put the phone down. ‘What the hell is going on?’

  ‘You’re learning how to be Chinese, that’s what’s going on. Well done, you gave nothing away. Now we have to work out what it all means. We still don’t know who we can trust.’

  ‘Where has Shen gone? I’m sure he’s not returning to Dubai, he wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘Who was he flying with?’

  ‘Probably Emirates. Company policy, best prices. I’ll check with Nora.’ Connor called his PA. ‘He had an open return with them.’

  ‘Let me take a look on your system.’ Ed went online on Tom’s laptop. ‘If he left shortly after eleven, he would have had a flight in the early afternoon. All the Dubai flights leave in the early morning, that’s out.’ He kept checking, then looked at Tom. ‘There’s a flight to Moscow at one o’clock.’

  Emirates Airline Terminal 3, Dubai

  The Emirates flight attendant showed Elodie Delacroix to suite 1A, in the front of the Airbus A380, and placed her only piece of luggage, her wheelie bag, in the rack above. She’d been advised that morning that the software had been deployed successfully, so her job in the Emirates was over. She hadn’t packed anything from the apartment, she wanted to forget Dubai, Shen and the last five years. Elodie was a beautiful, intelligent and experienced thirty-five-year-old woman. It’s time for me to start a brand-new life, without any baggage and with a big bank balance, she said to herself. She settled down for the six-hour flight to Moscow with a glass of champagne. Cheers. Here’s to a well-earned five-year dividend.

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates

  ‘We could have saved a lot of time if I’d thought of this earlier.’ Ed was embarrassed he hadn’t remembered that all their email correspondence was stored in the XPC server. Tom and Sharif were listening to the loudspeaker.

  ‘We’re rushing about like mad ferrets, so it’s nobody’s fault. Did you find what we need?’

  ‘There’s a whole raft of information on the server. Our upgrades package that Shen sent on Tuesday went to the Shanghai hub and I’ve got those coordinates, I’m sending them to you right now. Between us and Chillicott, we might be able to find a way in there.’

  ‘That’s cool. We’ll get working on it right away.’

  ‘Hang on, Leo. There’s some weird stuff on there we can’t figure out. Tom and Sharif are here with me.’

  ‘We’re getting good at doing weird. What is it this time?’

  ‘First, as well as the official stuff Shen was sending to Han Wang Tāng, there were some encrypted messages to another address in China: hoi.wei@sina.com.’

  ‘The guy who we think wrote the A2 code.’

  ‘Exactly. Problem is, we can’t see what they’re about, the encryption is good, that’s maybe why he risked sending from the XPC address.’

  Coetzee said, ‘Or maybe he just got careless when he thought everything was going so well.’

  ‘Maybe, Marius, he’s arrogant and stupid enough. Anyway, we didn’t want to send them down to you, you’ve got enough on your plate.’

  ‘Send them over, and Rod can have a look at them.’ Leo added, ‘He wrote a bombardment programme the other day, we might get lucky. Anything else?’

  ‘This next piece is really weird. There’s a file with a Russian name sent by Shen containing two unencrypted sheets of code. One looks like an early effort, and the other seems to be a corrected version. They’re both marked up, not final, which might be why he didn’t encrypt them, in case they got corrupted.’

  ‘Did you translate the file name?’

  ‘Sure did. It’s called Hub Manager, but we haven’t had time to try to rewrite the code to see what it does.’

  ‘You think the guy at Lee-Win’s been sending code to Shen, and he’s been testing and correcting? I didn’t think he had the capability.’

  ‘It’s not clear who was doing what, but that’s not the point. The thing is, he didn’t send them to Shanghai.’

  ‘Where did they go to?’

  ‘An address in Russia: patch@rostelcom.ru.’

  Coetzee interjected again, ‘Another Russian connection, that makes sense. But why would he send messages like this from XPC and not his personal address?’

  ‘Marius, you know better than any of us that everybody makes a mistake some time or another, that’s how criminals get caught. Remember?’ Leo went on, ‘And I guess you’re right, Shen never expected anyone to catch on to him until it was too late.’

  ‘Let’s get back to the point, guys,’ Tom Connor said. ‘It looks like there’s a definite Russian connection here and I’ve got some news that might confirm that.’ He recounted his conversation with the Lee-Win senior management. ‘We’ve checked the flights and Shen wasn’t flying back to Dubai. My PA went around to their apartment and there’s nobody there, it looks like Elodie’s gone missing as well. Chances are they’re meeting up somewhere, and we reckon it might be Moscow.’

  Ed added, ‘And it sounds like Lee-Win might be in the clear on all this, he was still lying to them today. Maybe they’ve been kept in the dark just like we have.’

  ‘We’re still making too many guesses,’ Coetzee said. ‘Send us everything you’ve got and Abby’ll get the team working on it, see if we can find out anything more. We’ll try to make sense of it, then have another talk.’

  Delmas, Mpumalanga, South Africa

  ‘Marius, Jenny just sent me the Lee-Win bank extracts with a note about Patrice’s meeting with Mme Lee-Win. What do you want me to do with them?’

  ‘Print them out and we’ll have a look at them. And forward everything to General Chillicott, and to Ilona at Dr Middleton’s office.’

  Leo sent the files on, and while the documents were printing, he said, ‘What do think about Shen going AWOL, and this Russian address he was sending stuff to?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m not surprised. Since we found that file with the Russian name I’ve been expecting something like this to turn up, Billy was alr
eady suspicious. We need to talk to him and Ilona as soon as they’ve had a chance to look at those documents.’

  Abby came over. ‘We’ve been testing our idea for the modified cell instruction, and it works. We can reconfigure it if we can get to it. But…’

  ‘But? It sounds like there’s a problem.’

  ‘Not with that, it’s something else. Rod’s been hammering away at those email files Ed sent over, without much progress, but he’s managed to open one file that wasn’t properly encrypted. It’s a message in Chinese that Shen sent to the hoi.wei address on Wednesday.’

  ‘That’s when he left for Shanghai.’

  ‘Right. I think he must have sent it in a hurry. Either that or he thought he’d won and was just getting careless. The translation is, “Expected Sunday, 12 p.m.”’

  ‘And your interpretation is?’

  ‘We’re wondering if Shen’s communications with that Russian patch address and this guy Hoi in Shanghai are linked. If Shen’s now in Moscow, that Hub Manager code might mean the trigger will go out from Russia via Shanghai, on Sunday at midnight.’

  ‘Have you been able to run the code?’

  ‘It’s a mess, Leo. We have to reconstitute it to find out what it does, and we haven’t had the time yet.’

  Coetzee put his arm around her shoulders. ‘That’s a pretty clever theory, Abby. It fits the facts pretty well. Unfortunately, it’s just a theory, and we’ve no way of validating it without more information.’

  ‘That’s the whole problem.’ Leo shook his head. ‘There’s still so many unknowns, and we can’t be expected to work it all out without some professional help. I think it’s time Homeland Security got involved. We’ve got to improve our chances of success.’

  ‘Do you want us to try to sort out that code now?’

  ‘You’ve all been here since dawn, Rod and Julia must be exhausted. If you’ve finished the work on the cell, send them home. We can start in the morning, fresh and alert.’ Coetzee stood up and stretched. ‘We’ll see what these printouts tell us, then call Billy. It’s time he got off the pot. If he can’t get the US intelligence machine cranked up over everything we’ve discovered, then the world’s a much less safe place than I’d like. Leo, can you send him an up-to-date summary so he gets up to speed? Then we’ll see if he can walk the walk.’ He gathered up the documents and went into his office.

  ‘How’s it going, Marius?’

  ‘It’s going well, Karen, thanks to these brilliant kids. The problem is, I don’t know where the hell it’s going to end up.’

  Marbella, Spain

  It was a scorching day and Jenny still wasn’t feeling well, which was unusual for her. She had a headache and was feeling tired and listless. The prospect of a cool, shady corner in her little garden in Ipswich beckoned, and she decided to return to England. There was nothing further she could do in Marbella. Patrice had done his bit to help Leo and Coetzee, she just hoped they could use the information to stop whatever it was Shen Fu Liáng was planning. And she decided to have a stern word with her nephew when she got the chance, she didn’t like his line of business.

  She went online and found a last-minute flight for London the following afternoon. Jenny was looking forward to getting home.

  FIFTY-ONE

  London, England

  Friday, 16 July 2017

  Ilona Tymoshenko called on the phone. ‘It’s General Chillicott on the line, with Mr Coetzee and Leo Stewart. Do you want to speak to them, or should I?’

  Hugh Middleton had managed to recover from the shock of seeing that face on his computer screen. His interview with the journalist had helped, he’d enjoyed the opportunity to refute the man’s basic premise, that the Internet was a government tool introduced by the Conservative Party to create a right-wing fascist dictatorship in the UK.

  Since then, he and Ilona had studied the documents sent by Patrice, via Jenny and Coetzee. The sale and purchase agreement told them nothing more than they already knew, the myriad of offshore, onshore and proxy companies behind the acquisition. The bank statements showed the names of six companies, each transferring $400 million on 20 October 2012 to the BIP in Hong Kong for Mme Lee-Win. Middleton remembered Jenny Bishop’s comment about the price having been reduced. They probably forced her to take a bargain offer, he reflected. The statements gave no details of the names or account numbers of the transferring banks.

  ‘Typical,’ Ilona said. ‘The less money you’ve got, the more details you have to provide, even for small bank payments. Obviously, that’s not the case if you’re a billionaire making huge transfers. Mind you, in 2012 there wasn’t so much information provided on bank statements as nowadays.’ She immediately sent copies to her friend, Ilya Pavlychko, in Kiev, who promised to pass on any information he could glean from his sources.

  Now, Middleton was faced with a new problem: he couldn’t let Marius Coetzee hear his voice. He replied, ‘Since you have now effectively taken over the investigation, with the assistance of your Ukranian ex-colleague, I think it would be better for you to handle the conversation. I’ll listen on the speaker and intervene if necessary.’

  She took the call. ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. Dr Middleton is busy, but he’s listening in his office.’

  ‘Hi, guys. First off, listen up, Leo. We did a limited download of the Lee-Win ACRE software, and I just got confirmation from our IT folk that it was one hundred per cent OK. You guys at XPC wrote some pretty awesome technology, our people love it.’

  ‘It also confirms our theory about the second upload, Billy.’

  ‘I know. I’ve had to tell my folks about that, ‘cos we’ve got thousands of machines with those processors, so we’d be a massive target. That’s why we downloaded only to non-essential networks until we see what’s going to happen. We still have no real proof of anything, but I’ve got people looking at different scenarios to find a solution.’

  ‘Thanks General, that’s good to hear. Between us we’ve got a lot of smart brains focused on the problem.’

  ‘I just hope they work something out. Anyway, do you have any news for me, Ilona?’

  After explaining that Ilya was looking into the bank accounts, she added, ‘I suppose you noticed that the six payments came from companies who are not listed anywhere as shareholders or proxies?’

  ‘You bet we noticed. That just might mean we have a better chance of tracking them down if we can find the banks that made the payments. It’s easy to set up anonymous hundred-dollar proxy outfits, but hiding huge payments is more difficult.’

  ‘That’s why I asked Ilya to look at them. They have a team of forensic banking experts. And all the companies have English names, so he’s filtering his search parameters.’

  Leo interrupted, ‘There’s some things you don’t know, Ilona.’ He brought her up-to-date on the Tsunami file and the hub coordinates found by Ed. ‘And there’s some emails to a guy called Hoi Wei, in China, mentioning Sunday twelve p.m. We’re assuming he’s Shen’s accomplice in Shanghai. But the text file on the stick is called Shutdown Code, in Russian, not Chinese. There’s also emails and software coding, called Hub Manager, sent to an address in Russia. And it looks like Lee-Win’s people are in the clear and Shen may have done a runner to Moscow. There’s definitely some kind of Russian link here, but we can’t work out what.’

  Ilona thought quickly. That name, ‘Tsunami’, has cropped up in both Chillicott’s and Leo’s investigations. There has to be a connection. Dr Middleton wasn’t in the room to countermand her, and for some reason he didn’t want to speak to Coetzee or Leo. She decided to tell them everything they suspected about Tsunami, GRU, the death of Shen’s Chinese family and him possibly inheriting two fortunes.

  There was a long silence on the line, then Coetzee said, ‘So, Dr Middleton’s theory is that Shen killed his Chinese family to increase his inheritance from his Russian father, then used his fortune to acquire Lee-Win. The purchase was related to GRU, through this Tsunami person, and they’re now p
lanning a global cyber-attack. This is linked to the Russian military moves around the Soviet satellite countries, and the beneficiary of this whole complicated conspiracy is going to be Mother Russia, getting her children back?’

  ‘It’s starting to make sense, Marius, listen up. We’ve got Russian connections on all sides of the equation now. Tsunami and Shen arranged Chongkun’s death to acquire Lee-Win. He set up XPC as a camouflage in Dubai to develop malicious software, and he’s been sending files to Russia to create a cyber-threat via that software. The Lee-Win people have been hoodwinked, just like XPC was. It looks like the whole Shanghai thing is a red herring to frame China, and the strings are being pulled in Moscow, by some very high-up people.’

  ‘I get the logic, Billy. But why the hell would Shen go to these lengths, investing probably hundreds of millions of dollars into Lee-Win and spending five years of his life preparing a cyber-attack that could start a third world war? If Dr Middleton’s right, he’s already got more money than he knows what to do with. What’s in it for him? Why would he help Russia take back its territories, and set up this whole imbroglio just to frame China for the attack?’

  Lord Arthur Dudley, alias Dr Hugh Middleton, could no longer restrain himself. He pressed the speaker button and said, ‘Because he was the second son.’

  Moscow, Russian Federation

  It was seven p.m. local time when the young woman walked out of the arrivals hall at Moscow Domodedovo International Airport. She waved to a man wearing a cashmere overcoat and fedora waiting near the exit door, and he walked across to meet her. ‘My darling Tsunami. It’s been months since I held you.’ He took her in his arms and kissed her passionately.

  ‘Piotr, mon chéri. I’ve missed you so much, I promise I won’t leave you again.’

  She took his arm and they walked across the hall. ‘Is everything in place?’

  ‘Everything is arranged. By Monday, it will all be over.’

  ‘And that idiot Shen doesn’t have a clue what’s happening. I almost feel sorry for him, he’s going to be so disappointed.’