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

by Christopher Lowery

  ‘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 to 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.’

  At that moment, four men came into the room. Han Wang Tāng, the MD, introduced himself, Chairman Bohai Cheong, and the two previous colleagues of Chongkun, Junjie’s father. They greeted Junjie like long-lost friends, asking after his mother and their families. Patrice, they welcomed respectfully, and with Leo they were barely courteous. ‘We have not disturbed the other directors,’ Tāng said. ‘If this is a technical matter, they would not be helpful.’

  They sat on opposite sides of the conference table and Leo weighed up the two senior men. The chairman carried an air of wisdom and gravitas, scrutinising the visitors through thick-lensed spectacles. Tāng appeared to be in his forties, slim and fit-looking with sharp, shrewd eyes. He murmured something to Cheong, who nodded his agreement.

  His manner became frigid and his tone severe as he addressed his remarks to Leo. ‘What is the purpose of your visit, Mr Stewart? We have agreed to this meeting only as a courtesy to Junjie and to Tom Connor, since we have a great respect for the CEO of our Dubai subsidiary. However, he informed me that you have made allegations against our fellow director, Shen Fu Liáng, whose successful work at XPC created the most innovative software in the history of microprocessing. And this was done despite you, Mr Leo Stewart, leaving the company at the most vulnerable and crucial moment of the development. Before you begin to malign our good friend and colleague, who is not here to defend himself, kindly explain your actions and we will decide whether or not to continue with this discussion.’

  Leo saw their chances of getting past this stone wall by lengthy explanations were negligible, and time was short. He decided to take a risk to get their attention quickly. ‘I understand your position, Mr Tāng. Like you, we didn’t want to believe the truth, because it is frankly unbelievable. I’m going to show you a video which was the evidence that convinced us, and you can judge for yourselves. Tom informed you that I was shoved in prison in Dubai to get me out of the way. Well, that’s because I discovered something that pointed to a sabotage attempt at XPC. Or at least, that’s what I thought. Let me show you what actually happened.’

  The room was silent as Angela’s confession played on his laptop. He ran it all the way to the end, including her last message to him. Then he said, ‘You’re right that Shen was instrumental in delivering the new software, but that was only the first step in his plan. After my arrest, we realised he was planning something else, but we didn’t know what it was.’

  Bohai Cheong leaned over and whispered something to Tāng, who nodded and said, ‘So you expect us to be convinced by the words of a young woman who prostituted herself for money? We Chinese are not so gullible as you may believe, Mr Stewart. If this is all you have to show us, then we can end this conversation immediately.’

  He started to rise from his chair, and Junjie said, ‘Please wait one moment, Han. What do you know about Shen Fu Liáng?’

  He sat down again. ‘I’m not sure what you mean. He’s the son of Qiang Fu Liáng, who was governor of Sichuan Province, until he was sadly lost in an aeroplane accident with Shen’s mother and brother. That was just before he was proposed by the new owners of our company to join us as a board member, and he was immediately involved in creating our successful Dubai subsidiary.’

  ‘Leo, show Mr Tāng the copies of the passports I saw this morning.’

  Leo took out the printed copies he’d made from Ilona’s attachments, the Chinese document in the name of Shen Fu Liáng and the Russian passport of Grigori Vedeneyev. Tāng’s eyes opened wide and he passed the photocopies to his chairman and the other two directors. ‘I don’t understand. Who is this man Vedeneyev? His picture is the same as Shen’s.’

  ‘That’s because he’s the same man, Mr Tāng.’ Leo rapidly described Shen’s life history, ending with, ‘We believe that’s why he’s implicating Lee-Win and China in this conspiracy.’

  ‘What conspiracy, Mr Stewart? You haven’t yet told us what this is all about, and you’ve given us no proof that Shen has done anything but enhance our company’s global reputation. How do we know this photocopy isn’t a fake?’

  ‘OK, you’re right. I can demonstrate the proof of the plot if you let me use one of your test networks. It’s easier to show it than to explain it.’

 
Junjie said, ‘I would like to see this proof also, Han. I haven’t seen it and I think we owe it to my father’s memory to find out what this is really about.’

  They sat silently as the Chinese began to argue around the table, Junjie and the two ex-colleagues of Chongkun wanting to see the demonstration, with the chairman and MD remaining loyal to Shen. Finally, Tāng said, ‘Very well. You have come all this way to show us something and it would be discourteous not to let you do so. We’ll go down to the laboratory level. What kind of a network do you need, Mr Stewart?’

  FIFTY-SIX

  Moscow, Russian Federation Sunday, 18 July 2017

  Piotr Gavrikov was in the headquarters of the Ministry of Defence, situated on Arbatskaya Square at the junction of Znamenka Street. The 200-square-metre office on the eighth floor, the top level, was the domain of the minister, Army General Leonid Mikhail Belinsky, head of all Russian military forces, reporting directly to the Russian president. The heads of the three sections of the armed forces were sitting on the other side of a large oval table that could seat twelve. A giant screen was attached to the wall behind them and several laptops were open on the table.

  Belinsky was saying, ‘We are now just twelve hours away from launching the A2 attack which will shut down the infrastructures of all fourteen of our lost territories. This is a defining moment in our lives. If it succeeds, the world will witness the resurgence of the greatest socialist confederation in history and our names will become legend. However, if it fails, none of us in this room will be immune from the consequences, there will be no place to hide from the wrath of both our enemies and our friends alike. What is the final status of the programme? General Gavrikov?’

  ‘I will attend a last demonstration of the software this afternoon, but I’ve seen it several times already and I cannot envisage a failure of any kind. On each occasion the deployment, the hub transfer and the efficiency of the shutdown commands were faultless, just as efficient and faultless as the new Lee-Win software we received yesterday. Based on our estimates of the proliferation of those processors in our target countries, we calculate a failure rate of above seventy per cent of all networks. They will have no option but to accept our terms.’