The Dark Web_The stunning new thriller from the author of The Angolan Clan

by Christopher Lowery

  ‘What about the agent, this Chinese traitor. Is his loyalty beyond question?’

  ‘Without any doubt. He has invested almost half a billion dollars, murdered his own family and others besides and dedicated five years of his life to this act of revenge. But just in case, I’ll be with him when he sends his instructions. And he knows what awaits him if he misbehaves.’

  ‘And his accomplice in Shanghai?’

  ‘The same. He has been well paid and he is also aware of the consequences of failure. But don’t forget the additional precautions I’ve personally foreseen. Nothing can prevent a successful execution of the attack.’

  ‘Very well, Piotr, we must rely on your usual efficiency.’ He turned to the man to the right. ‘Stanislav, are you ready?’

  Army Commander General Stanislav Dorokhin stood to attention. ‘Minister, we now have more than 800,000 troops in strategic border positions from Estonia to Kazakhstan, as per the deployment plan we agreed on.’ He pointed his cursor at the map on the giant screen. ‘Additionally, I have positioned twelve of your Spetnaz Special Forces units, in close proximity to the army command positions. They can be sent in to deal with any local insurgence quietly and efficiently, without raising too much outside interest. We are ready for this historic moment and we will not fail Mother Russia.’

  Admiral Bolotnikov was the next to report. Pointing at a new map, he said, ‘As of last night, the whole fleet was in place as planned. The Admiral Grigorovich group is in the North Sea off the Swedish coast at the entrance to the Skaggerak. All of the Baltic targets, from Estonia to Belarus, are in range of their cruise missiles. With Stanislav’s troops in front of them and our missiles behind, they’re not in a position to argue. The same goes for the two destroyers we sent from the Crimea, they’re sitting in the Black Sea, off the coast of Moldova and Georgia. The Kuznetsov and the Gorshkov are still on manoeuvres in the North Atlantic, ready to launch aircraft or missiles, if and when we so decide.’

  The admiral stood proud and tall when he made his last announcement, ‘We believe the deciding factor will be the threat of the Dmitry Donskoy. It is presently waiting quietly 450 metres under the Baltic Sea, near the island of Gotska Sandön.’ He laughed deferentially. ‘What you call “NATO’s swimming pool”, minister.’ Bolotnikov was referring to the world’s largest submarine, with a crew of 160, an arsenal of 200 weapons, including 20 nuclear missiles, and the capability of remaining submerged for 120 days. ‘No one can argue with the Dmitry Donskoy.’ He sat down, looking extremely pleased with himself.

  ‘Well done, Admiral, exemplary planning, as usual. Can the same be said for your pilots, Alex?’

  Colonel General Alexandr Zhigunov, Commander of the Aerospace Forces, smiled and remained sitting. ‘I confirm that our pilots, our aircraft, our drones and our ground personnel throughout the area are itching to take part in this momentous event. As well as forty bases within rapid response capability on our own territory, we are on high alert at those in our strategic allies’ back gardens. We have strike aircraft and bombers on standby at Khmeimim Air Base in Latakia, Syria; Gyumri in Armenia; Kant in Kyrgizstan and seven more. I believe fifty bases with 750 aircraft at our immediate disposal should provide enough support for my colleagues, if they need to call on us.’

  ‘Thank you, Alex, nothing less than I expected. So, Piotr, the moment is almost upon us. Our military resources are, as Alexandr phrased it, “itching to take part”. My overriding concern has been that the NATO members would, for once, show some concerted desire to defend their partners under attack. It’s now clear to us that this won’t happen. Apart from a pathetic display of US soldiers and a few battleships around the Baltic states, they have shown no interest in our movements. I think we can assume they are otherwise occupied with their domestic upheavals and will react too late and with no credible display of force.

  ‘Everything now depends on you and your partners in crime. I suggest you go and ensure that this last due diligence demonstration is as faultless as on the previous occasions. If all goes well, we may be invited to a celebration in Red Square tonight for the rebirth of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Vsem udachi, good luck everyone.’

  Washington DC, USA

  Anatoly Viktor Kopeykin, the Russian Ambassador to the United States of America, stepped out of his official limousine and entered the Harry S. Truman building, the headquarters of the US State Department, at 2201 C Street NW, a few blocks away from the White House in the Foggy Bottom neighbourhood of Washington. He was quickly escorted through the security procedures, taken up in an elevator and shown into the John Quincy Adams State Drawing Room, one of the diplomatic reception rooms on the seventh and eighth floors of the building which contain the nation’s foremost museum collections of American fine and decorative arts. The incumbent secretary of state, Melvin ‘Mel’ Ritterbrand, was sitting on one of a matching pair of gold-coloured settees framed by exquisite furnishings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He stood up and shook hands with the Russian, inviting him to sit opposite.

  After the usual small talk and accepting a coffee, Kopeykin said, ‘It’s always a pleasure to visit you, Mel, even at such short notice. But I don’t understand what can be so urgent that you need to summon me here on a Sunday morning?’

  ‘That’s what we call a rhetorical question, Viktor. Can’t you think of a logical answer? After all, it’s your side that’s been moving all the chess pieces, not ours.’

  ‘You’re surely not still concerned about the military exercises we’re carrying out? I’m surprised at your suspicious interpretation of our purely housekeeping procedures. And don’t you think your accusation is a little hypocritical? You’ve been moving some impressively big assets yourselves over the last few weeks.’

  ‘You mean our North Atlantic Fleet? They roam that ocean all year long, there’s nothing unusual about that. We’re doing some exercises with a few thousand troops in the area, but that’s all, nothing special. What is unusual is what’s in these reports.’ He picked up a dozen messages and waved them at the Russian. ‘Let me summarise, to help your memory. Close to a million troops massed around the borders of most of the ex-USSR states, two carriers and eight battleships in the Baltic and Black Sea, and it appears from our satellite pictures that one of your subs has gone missing. We’ve also seen a lot of unusual activity at your southern airbases on home ground and in your ex-Soviet territories.’

  ‘Just as we have observed at your NATO members’ bases in Northern Europe, the Baltic and Balkans. Troops, aircraft, battleships. Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?’

  ‘As I just said, minor exercises, though I’m glad you noticed we’re not just sitting on our hands, Viktor. Some people might think NATO’s a busted flush, but there’s a lot more willingness to engage than you may imagine. Anyway, I didn’t ask you here to compare the size of our dicks.’ He swigged back the last of his coffee. ‘We’ve heard talk of some kind of cyber-attack being prepared by your spooks at GRU. What do you know of it?’

  Kopeykin looked puzzled. ‘A cyber-attack being prepared at the Main Intelligence Directorate? Against who? Where did you hear that?’

  Ritterbrand had graduated cum laude from Harvard in psychology and psychiatry and he was good at reading people, especially when they were lying. In this case, he was certain the other man was telling the truth. Viktor doesn’t know what I’m talking about, he told himself. In fact, neither did he. He’d been woken at six that morning by a call from a General W. R. Chillicott, whom he didn’t know, at Homeland Security, with a request to invite the Russian ambassador in and ask him that question. The general had told him it was an urgent matter he was investigating personally, it was ultra-confidential and extremely urgent, ‘Could you call the ambassador in this morning?’ It was an unconventional approach, but Chillicott had pressed all the right buttons, and after the disastrous NATO conference the previous night, Ritterbrand had been keen to try to do something useful. Before ringing off, he�
�d asked the general if the cyber-attack was linked to the Russian manoeuvres, and the reply had been, ‘In a worst-case scenario, yes.’

  He got rid of Kopeykin as soon as he decently could and called Homeland Security. Chillicott came on the line immediately. ‘Thank you, Mr Secretary. Unfortunately, that’s what I expected. It’s above his pay grade, and that’s a very bad sign. I’ll keep you informed as soon as I know something more definite.’

  Ritterbrand didn’t press him, he had enough on his plate and the general seemed to be on top of the situation. He couldn’t know that Chilicott’s only hope was a twenty-three-year-old Rwandan man named Leo Stewart.

  Moscow, Russian Federation

  ‘Shen’s coming here to give me a final demo of the A2 software before we upload it tonight. I’ve seen it already. It’s a brilliant solution, he can’t be as stupid as you make out.’

  ‘Piotr, darling, I’m glad to hear it. If it works, it will be a happy ending to the longest five years of my life. When are you coming home?’ It was just four in the afternoon and Elodie Delacroix was on her third glass of champagne.

  ‘I’m staying here until I see the trigger code successfully deployed. This is too important to risk anything going wrong. When the shit hits the fan, I should be invited to the Kremlin. I’ll call you, see if you want to come. It’ll be around twelve-thirty tonight and there’ll be one hell of a celebration.’

  ‘I’ll be ready waiting in my finery. Udachi, dorogaya, good luck, darling.’

  Esther Rousseau, née Bonnard, alias Tsunami, alias Elodie Delacroix, put down her phone and took another swallow of champagne. One more day, just one, then I’ll be rid of all these bloody posturing, impotent, second-rate excuses for men. Only the thought of the fortune she had been promised had kept her going all this time. With that money I can start again; a new place, a new life with a new man, a real man. No one could replace, or even come close to matching Ray d’Almeida, her Angolan lover, who had taught her lovemaking skills that drove men mad with desire, while planning and executing a brilliant plan to regain his rightful inheritance. But in 2008 his plan had somehow been foiled by Jenny Bishop, and he and his fortune had been lost to her. Since then she had been with other men, always using them to try to recover that fortune, and always seeing them fall short. So many men, such great plans, ending in such great failures. She poured herself another glass, thinking about the lost years of her life.

  The 2010 abduction in South Africa of Jenny Bishop’s nephew, Leo Stewart, had been another masterpiece of planning. Together with her shrewd partner and funder, the amoral Lord Arthur Dudley, they had succeeded in capturing the boy and blackmailing the Stewart family for a fortune. Yet, once again, the plan had failed, and she had been forced to save herself from the fallout. After the incident, Esther had kept her head down, living and working as a waitress in The Liffey Landing, a pub in Dublin, a city she loved.

  Then, as the meagre capital she had managed to beg, borrow and steal began to run out, a series of lucky opportunities presented themselves and she took full advantage of them. First, she managed to capitalise on a brief romantic encounter with a UN delegate who was in Dublin for a conference and happened to visit the historic pub. Esther spoke four languages fluently and the besotted man helped her obtain a post as a translator in the Geneva headquarters. Her life changed again for the better in March 2011, at a UN Security Council meeting, when she met Colonel-General Piotr Gavrikov, newly-appointed head of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate, GRU. It didn’t take Esther long to captivate Gavrikov and become his personal assistant, lover and many things besides. An exaggerated account of her work as a senior officer at a Swiss private bank with experience of offshore company structures convinced him she was the perfect intermediary to manage the Kremlin’s international offshore activities, and Tsunami was born.

  The next and most life-transforming piece of good fortune was the return, in April 2012, of a GRU undercover agent, Shen Fu Liáng, or Grigori Vedeneyev as he preferred to be known in Moscow, currently head of the Russian Trade Delegation in Washington. Liáng had come to Moscow with an incredible proposal. The seeds of a strategy that could restore the Motherland’s former glory, recover its lost territories and demonstrate its power and relevance in the new world order.

  Gavrikov was impressed, excited and seduced by the proposal. It could elevate him to one of the highest positions in the Soviet hierarchy. But he was deeply wary of this Chinese-Russian agent who had spent the last four years in the United States. He instructed Esther to gain Liáng’s confidence, find out if he should be taken seriously. Was the plan feasible, how much would it cost, how long would it take, what were the risks of it backfiring? But most of all, was this a genuine opportunity or a clever trap, set up by the Americans? Was he really a US mole, or if not, what was his motivation for proposing such an outlandish, ambitious scheme?

  Back in Washington, waiting for a response to his proposal, Shen received an invitation to a charity dinner at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue. Sitting next to him was a highly intellectual, beautiful young woman, who introduced herself as Elodie Delacroix, a Belgian political journalist. She was writing a series of articles about Russian–US relations for Le Point de Vue, a French left-wing political news magazine. Her current theme was the failure of the US government to enter into meaningful talks with Russia about their rightful claims to Ukraine. When Shen checked her out online, he was duly impressed with her credentials, and the many pro-Russian articles published under her name in a wide range of newspapers and magazines that the Soviet fake news/propaganda machine had worked overtime to produce. He called her the next morning and they had lunch at Le Diplomate, a French restaurant on 14th Street, a choice she thought would impress him.

  Although there was something in his character which reminded her slightly of Ray d’Almeida, Esther took an immediate dislike to the man. He seemed humourless and unfeeling, and she wasn’t sure about his sexual inclinations. But within a month, she had bewitched him, moved into his apartment and learned everything about his birth and life, the reasons for his hatred of China and love of Russia, and his plan to redraw the geographical borders of his adopted country. She revealed to him her alter-ego, Tsunami, and her international activities for the Soviet regime, and convinced him he had found the right partner to help him achieve his impossible dream. Her report to Gavrikov was impressively thorough and convincing, and the A2 cyber-blackmail project was approved. Shen explained to her how Lee-Win, a leading Chinese microprocessor manufacturer with a vast global government and industrial installed base and a potentially devastating encryption-transmission innovation, was the perfect vehicle for the attack.

  With a substantial budget and the shiny new Belgian passport from her Russian paymasters, she went back to Dublin as Elodie Delacroix, and rented an apartment just off Fitzwilliam Square, twenty minutes’ walk from the Ha’penny Bridge over the River Liffey and near the National Concert Hall. As she was walking past it one morning, Esther suddenly thought of the enigmatic Lord Arthur Dudley, the most intriguing and complex man she’d ever known. It was he who had introduced her to music, ballet and the love of beautiful things, a love which, sadly, she’d never been able to indulge. Until now, she told herself, now I can live the life Ray and I should have lived. I’m going to make the most of it.

  Shen followed her a week later, flying from Washington to Paris in his own name, then on to Dublin, as Gyeong Park, using a Korean passport he’d been given by his new sponsors at GRU. Not only was his project approved, but at Esther’s suggestion General Gavrikov had prepared a list of pro-USSR multi-billionaires, the ‘oligarchs’, who might be interested in financing the operation. The bait was two-fold: an investment into a successful high-tech company with a potentially industry-changing innovative development, and an opportunity to cherry-pick the valuable pieces of the fourteen ex-USSR satellites when they were taken back into the Russian fold.

  Over the next few months,
the unlikely partners perfected their plan and began to execute the preliminary stages, starting with the acquisition of Lee-Win Micro-Technology. Chongkun Lee-Win proved to be incalcitrant in his refusal to sell the business, but it was not difficult to replace him in the transaction with his widow. His ‘accident’ also brought them a price reduction of twenty per cent and the oligarchs couldn’t resist the combined opportunity. Esther, as Tsunami, set up the charitable trust structure hidden behind a myriad of proxy companies, and only Shen’s share of the funding was required to consummate the transaction. When he revealed his murderous scheme to obtain the balance of his investment from his Chinese family inheritance, she finally understood what it was he had in common with Ray d’Almeida. He was a psychopath, prepared to do anything to fulfil his dream, to exact his revenge on the family who had thrown him out like a stray dog, to lay to rest the feeling of failure and rejection and to enjoy the taste of success and belonging, at last.

  The greatest shock Esther had to cope with was when Shen mentioned that Scotty Fitzgerald, whose removal had been scrupulously planned by her, would be replaced by a brilliant young encryption programming specialist called Leo Stewart. The same Leo Stewart who had been kidnapped and then released in Johannesburg in 2010, and who now reappeared in her life at the most crucial moment of their project. But thanks to Angela da Sousa, she’d neutralised him for long enough to get the project through, and now it was too late for him to cause further problems.

  She took another swig of Laurent Perrier. I’m not going to let Jenny Bishop’s family steal another fortune from me, she told herself. No. This time, it’s going to be Esther Rousseau who wins.