‘I was with him last night and he surprised the life out of me. He’s booked us on a cruise in September, from Venice to Istanbul. Three days in Venice in a six-star hotel that I can’t remember the name of, then ten days in a grand suite on the Silver Dream, floating down the Dalmatian coast, through the Greek Islands to Istanbul.’
‘Wow! Seems like he means business.’ Jo grabbed Jenny’s hand. ‘Well done you, about time.’
‘Speaking of which,’ Emma came, not too subtly, to the point of their pantomime, ‘what news from you, Mademoiselle Greenwell?’
‘You mean, in the romance department? No news is good news for the moment. I’ve got too much to do, and you both know that as well as I do. I can’t afford to lose my focus now the magazine is really starting to take off, or we’ll be back to where we were last year at this time. If the business continues to grow like this, Jenny and I have agreed to take on another editorial assistant in September to free me up a bit. So you can ask me the question again in October.’
‘I’m only concerned that you work too hard and play too little. You’re a young, beautiful woman and you shouldn’t be stuck in an office all day and night. You’ve got to get out and have some fun, meeting people of your own age. A healthy balance is what we all need.’
‘You sound just like my mother,’ Jo laughed, a little uncomfortably. ‘Would you two get off my case? I’ll decide when I’ve got the time to go man-hunting, and I promise you’ll be the first to know when I find myself one. Now, Emma, I want to know all about your new book.’
London, England
Hugh Middleton was studying the dossier on Leo Stewart and XPC given to him by Ilona. It was extremely complete and confirmed what he already knew. It was too much of a coincidence to imagine that there was another Leo Stewart with a mother who had been in Rwanda.
His mind went back to the aborted abduction in July 2010. It had ended in complete catastrophe, and the young boy had somehow managed to escape when he should have been safely transported and held in Zimbabwe. Middleton, or as he was known at the time, Lord Arthur Dudley, was fortunate there was no definite proof linking him directly with the kidnapping or the associated murders, nor with a drug smuggling plot in France which he had deliberately sabotaged, but an unlucky coincidence had led the UK police to his door. After a long and complicated investigation, and a very distasteful public trial, he had finally been convicted of money laundering. Since there was no proof that the funds in his Lugano bank account came from any criminal activity, and the recipients of his transfer of $25,000 to a Panamanian account could not be identified, the judge’s decision was fairly lenient. But Dudley suffered the shame and embarrassment of being convicted and imprisoned. After serving six of his twelve-month sentence in Ford Open Prison in West Sussex, he emerged in June 2011, a changed character in many important ways.
His conversion was partly due to one man, the Rev. David Morpeth, the prison chaplain, who befriended Dudley and took it upon himself to convince him to use his considerable intellect in the service of good, rather than evil. Morpeth, a petty criminal, had undergone a similar change when he’d been jailed for manslaughter for killing a young woman while driving away from a robbery. Both men were proof that prison doesn’t always change villains for the worse. But in Lord Arthur Dudley’s case, the motivation to go straight was a primitive emotion: pride. He was an exceptionally intelligent man and his long, successful criminal career had given him a feeling of superiority and invulnerability. Outwitting the inferior intellect of international police forces had become a game to him; until he was caught. Being incarcerated was, for Dudley, a sign that the game was up; he had no doubt that he was still superior, but he knew he was no longer invulnerable. He couldn’t face the prospect of a return to prison, and determined to find a way of using his particular skills to make an honest and profitable living.
Before acquiring a taste for criminality, Dudley had held the post of Professor of Connected Machines Eco System Studies at Cambridge College of Digital Computing, and he was an extremely competent and innovative head of department. The college achieved a number of outstanding academic firsts and business start-up successes in Machine-to-Machine Communications, and the board of governors were greatly saddened when they were forced to ask for his resignation after complaints from a number of students, both male and female.
The world of M2M had evolved enormously since then, and Dudley spent the last three months of his ‘holiday’ in the open prison swatting up on what had become IoT, the Internet of Things. Dudley’s conviction, due to an online transfer of funds from an account he wasn’t supposed to have, had marked him. Now, every day he saw newspaper and TV stories exposing the lack of Internet security that was causing loss and damage all over the world. An idea formed in his mind and gradually became a concrete project for his next vocation. He would re-enter the world of IoT, this time not in the academic arena, where his reputation might create unsurmountable barriers, but in a commercial environment where he could help to protect the world from the inherent dangers of the Internet.
For the next six months, Dudley continued his IoT studies and transferred his offshore cash to the UK to fund the new business. He realised he needed a competent and experienced partner to ‘front’ the company, and in this he was rewarded by a fortunate coincidence. Ilona Tymoshenko was an information security official at the Ukraine Security Service, whose investigatory work had led to the arrest of five Ukrainian hacker kingpins in 2010. The hackers had used Conficker, a fast-spreading worm, to steal over $70 million from US bank accounts, and faced up to six years in prison. Within a year, all five were released, the official explanation given as: ‘A lack of modern legislation covering cybercrime.’ Distraught at this result, Ilona left the world’s Cyber Crime Centre and moved to London. Dudley struck gold when she saw his job offer on an online employment site. As well as her native language, she spoke Russian, English and French, and had more experience of the real dangers of the Internet than anyone he’d ever met.
In January 2012, Lord Arthur Dudley, now reincarnated as Dr Hugh Middleton, opened his consulting practice, the Institute for Global Internet Security, in Bolsover Street, London W1. The first contract signed by Ilona Tymoshenko was with the Security Service of Ukraine.
Ilona’s report on the Stewart family was ten pages long, starting with Leo’s school, college and employment history. It was an impressive account, and Middleton read it with increasing admiration for Leo Stewart. Thank God he didn’t end up in Zimbabwe, I almost deprived the world of a very clever young man who might make a real contribution. General Chillicott had a high opinion of him, and he could see why. Someone to watch closely, he told himself.
He was amused to read that Emma’s writing career had taken off after the publication of My Son the Hostage. The book had come out while he was in prison and he’d been unaware of it. He had no doubt he’d recognise the storyline and decided to acquire a copy. There was no information in the report about Leo’s birth or his father, and he wondered once again what the real truth was. It had caused a number of deaths. Admittedly, all bad people who deserved their fate, he rationalised. (Dudley’s conversion didn’t include the past, only the future.) Although, he remembered, there was one exception. An exception that he regretted and, strangely, was what had put him in prison. The fatal transfer of $25,000, his last act before the police had arrived, was from Lugano to his contact in Harare, to buy a contract on the life of Marius Coetzee, the South African security man who had derailed Leo’s abduction. He learned subsequently that Coetzee had been executed by two Zimbabwe agents at his farm in Delmas. A foolish thing to do, he chastised himself, for many reasons.
Jenny Bishop’s story brought him few surprises. He’d known from the beginning that she might prove to be the fly in the ointment. Now she’d become a successful entrepreneur, investing in private equity opportunities. He knew she had inherited a substantial fortune and a thought flashed through his mind: She might be interested i
n investing in my business. Middleton laughed out loud at the idea. Ships that pass in the night. He suddenly saw an image of Esther Rousseau, the only woman he had ever loved and who had caused him to lose his usual sang froid, with far-reaching and life-transforming consequences.
He took the second document from the dossier, the report on Lee-Win Micro-Technology and XPlus Circuits. It comprised only two pages and revealed very little that he couldn’t have found online. Although Dubai corporate law required a fifty-one per cent majority ownership by UAE nationals, this was circumvented by a pledge of forty-seven percent of the stock to Lee-Win against a billion-dollar loan, required to build the new facility. In reality, Lee-Win was clearly the beneficial owner of ninety-six per cent of XPC, the remaining fraction being owned by a Dubai lawyer, who presumably also held these shares for their account. However, it was quite impossible for him to ascertain who owned Lee-Win.
Middleton was a complex character, full of contradictory motivations. Having unsuccessfully attempted to abduct Leo Stewart and ship him off to a fairly certain death in Zimbabwe, he now felt a kind of responsibility of care towards him. Chillicott’s story about the poisoning of Leo’s predecessor at their Dubai facility was still fresh in his mind. As he had previously informed the general, death intrigued him, and he was not a great believer in accidental death by poisoning. He would find out what he could about Leo’s new employers and try to ensure that the young man didn’t risk suffering the same fate.
He called Ilona back into his office. ‘Thank you for the Stewart report, it is most exhaustive and informative. However, I see that the ownership of Lee-Win is shrouded in mystery. Were you unable to discover more?’
‘About the company history, yes, but virtually nothing about the ownership. It looks as if it changed hands about five years ago, and behind the entities listed on my report, there is a complex web of companies, all over the world, which own various other companies and so on, until it’s impossible to know who the ultimate owners are. I don’t know why you asked me to do this research,’ she paused, waiting in vain for a response, ‘but I think you’ve stumbled on an interesting situation. You know I’m usually quite good at digging into puzzles and finding what I’m looking for, but this one seems unsolvable, if there is such a word.’
‘Insoluble is an alternative word, if you wish,’ from habit, Middleton corrected her and she nodded appreciatively. ‘I vaguely remember a story about the Lee-Win family, is that what you refer to?’
‘Possibly. It’s a fascinating but peculiar story. Over several generations, the Lee-Win family built a number of manufacturing plants in China. White goods, car components, industrial equipment, all kinds of machines. They started the microprocessor business in the mid-seventies, and in the eighties Chongkun Lee-Win, the great-grandson of the founder, took over the dynasty. He was quite a visionary and he made an amazing prophesy which was the key to their success. He forecast that the growth and diversity of applications requiring solutions would quickly exceed the memory and speed capabilities of Central Processing Units. Machines would become like businesses, with a CPU as general manager and several microprocessors as specialised members of the management team, like a corporate structure. More and more secondary processors with specific software would be needed to perform these tasks alongside the CPU. This would have two effects: it would reduce the need for CPUs to double or triple in speed or memory every year, and create a whole new industry to build processors to manage solutions for specific applications.’
‘And he was absolutely right. In fact, the CPU has mostly been replaced by one extremely complex microprocessor, or several of them. So, he started designing and building them for specific industries?’
‘Exactly. He concentrated on machines used by the biggest businesses in the world, multinational manufacturing and banking institutions and, of course, government departments, infrastructure and essential service providers. That’s why Lee-Win now has such a huge international client base and a great reputation in those vital areas.’
‘A brilliant pioneer. I was aware of the company’s virtual monopoly in such hallowed circles, but I didn’t know it was down to one man’s foresight all those years ago. However, what I was trying to recall had somehow to do with his death.’
‘That’s what’s peculiar about the history. In 2012, when the company was achieving great success, he was killed in a car accident. He was only sixty, such a tragic waste of a brilliant man. What you probably remember is that his widow claimed he was murdered, but nothing was ever proved. A short while later, she left Shanghai with her two sons and moved to Macau, and they’re now involved in the gambling and casino business. It seems certain that the ownership changed hands after Chongkun’s death, but I can’t get the details of what happened; if the family did sell the business, who bought it and why she left Shanghai.’
‘Very well, we’ll spread our net a little wider. Can you call your friend, Billy Chillicott, and ask him to assist in our research? He does still owe us a debt of gratitude, if not more.’
For several years, Washington had been aware of Russian intentions toward Ukraine. Until 2012, they were limited to cyber espionage attacks, using a ‘Trojan Horse’ named BlackEnergy, which opened up a back door to hack into Ukraine industry and government computer control systems. In 2013, increased protests against the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and calls for his resignation resulted in mass demonstrations, with the death and injury of thousands of protestors. Yanukovych’s ousting in February 2014 caused Vladimir Putin to immediately execute the annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol by the Russian Federation, on 18 March 2014. The pro-European candidate, Petro Poroshenko, was inaugurated as Ukranian President in June 2014 and Ukraine and Crimea entered into hostilities. Russian cyber-attacks on Ukraine began in earnest and Soviet–US relations hit an all-time low. That was when General Billy Chillicott contacted Ilona Tymoshenko.
The US and Ukraine had been less than friendly since the early 2000s, when the Americans were suspected of accidently ‘losing’ the plans of a Ukrainian defence system which had somehow fallen into the hands of Saddam Hussein, ruler of Iraq. With Ilona’s help, Chillicott gained access to the head of the Ukrainian Security Service, Bohdan Kolisnyk, and information began to be exchanged. Relations between the two nations improved and the Ukraine’s long and painful experience of Russia’s cyber-warfare was of great value to the US in creating defence mechanisms against such attacks. At the same time, Dr Hugh Middleton’s Institute for Global Internet Security became a valued partner of the US Homeland Security Department and GGE Cyber Security. Shortly afterwards, Dr Middleton was invited to join General Chillicott to make their first joint presentation of their concerns about cyber security to the UN Security Council, albeit to no avail.
Chillicott’s friendship had been of great value to their business. His network of contacts was impressive, and Ilona was expert at wheedling out of him bits of information which often generated new business, especially at governmental level – the most profitable level of all.
Now, she replied, ‘I’ll drop him a note about the August meeting with the UNSC and tag the request on the end. And if it’s that important, I’ll contact an old friend at the Ukrainian SS to take a look. They’re very good at looking into complicated structures. With the Russians up their noses, they have to be.’ She waited for Middleton’s response to ‘if it’s that important’, wondering why he was so interested in Leo Stewart and his employer.
‘Thank you, Ilona. That will be very helpful,’ was his only reply.
Disappointed, she left him and went to compose a message to Chillicott. There’s more to this than just simple interest, she thought. Nothing in the Stewart family file seemed of the slightest importance, certainly not enough to justify asking a US general to look into Leo’s employer, but for some reason it is to Hugh. I’d better go through it again and try to find what I’m missing. No secrets between partners, she said to herself.
FIFTEEN
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London, England
June 2017
‘What about proxy shareholder names? Any that you recognise?’ Ilona Tymoshenko was speaking with Ilya Pavlychko, one of her ex-colleagues and a former lover at the Ukrainian SS. He had been doing some digging around the ownership of Lee-Win and had so far drawn a blank.
‘None. All the proxies I’ve found are offshore companies or trusts and, before you ask, the shareholders or trustees of those entities are also companies or trusts. Lee-Win has thirty shareholders, of whom fifty-one per cent are domiciled in China, according to company law. But that means nothing, the Chinese shareholders are also companies and behind them are other proxies, so we don’t know who controls them. The forty-nine per cent is owned by six offshore companies and it’s the same there, multiple proxies behind each one. Lee-Win was definitely sold, but on the face of it, there’s not one beneficial owner who is a human being.’
‘And the board of directors?’
‘There are ten of them. The two top guys are the chairman, Bohai Cheong, a sixty-five-year-old businessman who was appointed after the apparent change of ownership, and the managing director, Han Wang Tāng. He and two other technical directors were part of the previous board, but the others are all new. Shen Fu Liáng is in Dubai managing XPC, and the other five are Chinese lawyers. Probably all straw men controlled by the same interests as the ownership. It tells us nothing about who really owns or runs the company.’
‘OK. It’s pretty well what I found myself. For some reason the real owners are desperate not to be identified. That makes me even more inquisitive. Can you put what you’ve found into my Dropbox and let me think about it some more? Thanks Ilya, talk soon.’
The Dark Web_The stunning new thriller from the author of The Angolan Clan Page 10
