The African Diamond Trilogy Box Set

by Christopher Lowery

  ‘That’s a pretty fair summary of the industry, Aunt Jenny. So what do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’

  FOUR

  Dubai International Airport

  March 2017

  ‘Goodbye, Arthur. Goodbye Thelma.’ Tom Connor shook hands with Mr and Mrs Fitzgerald, Scotty’s parents, who thanked him tearfully then joined the check-in line for their Qatar Airways flight from DXB to Miami. The refrigerated casket containing their son’s body was already on the plane, and the funeral had been arranged in three days’ time at a crematorium in Fort Lauderdale. The complicated paperwork for the death certificate, registration and repatriation had all been handled by Nora and Hatim.

  Tom had spent most of the last few days with them, doing his best to assuage the sadness and despair that would engulf them sooner or later. It also helped a little to alleviate the sense of guilt that he couldn’t help feeling, for having convinced their son to leave his home to seek success and fortune, but instead to suffer a horrible and painful death. There’s nothing left for them to do in Dubai, thought Tom. All they face is returning home to bury their son. Shit! Why did that have to happen to them? He walked back to his car, cursing the bad luck that had brought death and distress to all of them.

  His mind shifted to the problems Scotty’s death had caused at XPC. Shen Fu Liáng had returned from San Francisco on Monday, but he had been of little help. His attitude to Scotty’s death seemed to be one of disinterest. Tom’s relationship with the Chinaman was complex, and often made him feel uncomfortable. Shen had been with Lee-Win for five years and was a member of the holding company main board. He had been sent down from Shanghai as their representative to work with Tom, which sometimes led to disagreements, or misunderstandings. He understood that his Chinese masters needed some ‘eyes on the ground’ and they’d sent Liáng, but it was sometimes difficult to know who was in charge. Tom found him a dispassionate and reserved man, whose most extreme expression, appropriately, seemed to be inscrutability. Despite living in the US for several years and speaking perfect English, he often seemed to have difficulty reconciling himself with the subtleties of the workings of the western mind. But now Tom observed a cold, uncaring side of the Chinaman that he’d never shown before, and he had kept him away from Scotty’s distraught parents.

  Liáng was also totally convinced that Sharif had nothing to answer for. ‘You can discount him from being involved in the poisoning,’ he asserted forcefully. ‘I’ve known him for five years and he’s one of the nicest guys you could find.’ Tom was aware that when he was in Shanghai, Liáng had outsourced work to Sharif’s software services company in Pakistan and they had worked on projects together, although he didn’t consider that it qualified him to judge anyone in such desperate circumstances. But he didn’t have time to discuss the matter, he had too many other problems to worry about. It was now Thursday, the whole week had been lost, and he knew the next months would be filled with challenges. Not the normal, or even abnormal, business challenges that he faced every day and relished because he could do something about them, but worries about people and outside events over which he had no control and which gave him a deep sense of foreboding.

  Tom Connor was a common-sense man from south Boston who had come up the hard way, and didn’t care who knew it. His parents, third generation Irish, could just about feed and clothe their four children and there was no money for costly education. He worked his way through school, then college, obtaining an MBA in Finance at the Boston University Questrom School of Business when he was twenty-four. He went to work as a management trainee with T-Mobile US in 2002, a year after Deutsche Telekom, the German telecoms giant, purchased VoiceStream and Powertel, creating T-Mobile, one of the largest US wireless telecoms businesses. His timing was good, they needed management talent to sort out their 60-billion-dollar acquisitions and he benefited from a crash course in wireless technology.

  Tom was a Senior VP of T-Mobile’s new product development division when Lee-Win approached him to head up their soon-to-be-opened XPC subsidiary in Dubai. Within two months he’d moved his family to the Emirates State, and a few months later he watched a member of the ruling family cut the ribbon at the official opening. Tom was not a specialist, either in telecoms or micro-technology. He was a business developer and a people manager, who succeeded by hiring people with the right skills and creating the appropriate creative and cultural environment. He knew this disaster had to be managed well or it would spiral out of control and cause irreparable damage to the business. Thank God I’ve got three key people I can count on, he reflected. Shen can hold things together with Daniel and Sharif until I can find a replacement for Scotty.

  He summoned up in his mind what information had been discovered to date. The forensic examination of the food from his stomach had shown that the lamb eaten by Scotty was highly infected by the toxin, abnormally so. There was no doubt of the origin of the poisoning, but how it got there was a mystery. The wholesalers who supplied all the restaurant’s meat products welcomed the technicians who arrived to inspect the premises, but there was no trace of contamination of any kind on their products. The same applied to their refrigerated vehicles and to the various pieces of equipment used during the preparation and delivery procedure.

  ‘Miraculously, no one else in the restaurant who ordered the lamb curry suffered any ill-effects,’ Dr Alzahabi had told him. He was still helping the police with their enquiries and was fully informed of their progress, or lack of. ‘Apparently, they had a special three-course dinner on, a popular chicken speciality, and most customers chose that. Only five people ordered the lamb, but we don’t know who they were and we’ve had no reports of illness. The restaurant’s not open on a Friday, so there were no other customers before the police closed them up on Saturday morning.’

  ‘Thank God for small mercies.’ Tom had been so preoccupied with the aftermath of Scotty’s death and looking after his parents that he hadn’t considered the possibility of other deaths. He thought of the implications for a moment. ‘I suppose they pre-prepare their curries in large batches and keep them frozen, then heat them up in servings when they’re ordered. That means the toxin must have been in the container that they took the portion from?’

  ‘That was my expectation, but it wasn’t. There is no trace of the toxin anywhere in the kitchen, the container, the pans or the oven, nothing. The plates have been through a very efficient washing machine, so there’s no trace there either, but that’s the only place it can have been. It can only have been on the portion that was served to Scotty, there’s no other possible explanation.’

  ‘But that means…’

  ‘Exactly. It means that somehow, that dish of curry was contaminated somewhere between the kitchen and Scotty’s table. The police are questioning the restaurant staff again, but they’re getting nowhere. It’s a big place, about one hundred and fifty seats, and there are forty employees. Thursday night is always busy, there were over a hundred customers, many of whom they can’t identify. They had a lot bookings and regular clients, but there’s just as many casual diners who come in without reserving. So if the toxin was administered deliberately, there are seventy or eighty suspects, most of whom cannot be traced.’

  ‘I know the place, it’s fairly upmarket, I’ve been there quite a few times. If I remember, they bring the dishes of food out on trays and place them at a serving station until the waiter comes and serves them to the customer. So anyone going by could poison the food. What does it look like?’

  ‘A fatal dose could be contained in a few drops of water. Just about anyone in the restaurant could have done it.’

  ‘A needle in a haystack. Unless the police find a motive, they’re never going to solve it.’

  ‘They’ve given permission for the restaurant to open again tomorrow, but it’s bound to suffer enormously from the bad publicity. Most of these independent businesses don’t have much capital in
reserve and it could go under. Another unfortunate result of the incident.’

  ‘That could be a motive for a competitor, I suppose. But a bit drastic to poison someone to put your competition out of business.’

  ‘The police followed that line of enquiry too. There’s a lot of competition with the owners of the Taj Mahal, just along the street, but there again there’s no proof of anything untoward. It looks like a dead end.’

  The inquest had been held the next day, where the only witnesses were the police chief in charge of the short enquiry and Dr Alzahabi. Tom had attended on behalf of Scotty’s parents, who were too distressed to cope with the formal procedure. There had been no pre-inquest review hearing and it was clear to him that the police had given up on the investigation. They had no more time to spend on the death of a foreigner, but wanted to get the case filed away as soon as possible. Despite the obvious implication that the toxin had been deliberately administered by someone in the restaurant, the coroner returned a verdict of ‘accidental death by poisoning’. Tom conveyed the verdict to the Fitzgeralds as gently as he could, and they received the news stoically.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Scotty’s father said. ‘We’re in a foreign country where we don’t understand the procedure. And the sad fact is, our son’s gone and nothing will bring him back. Whatever happened, it’s too late to change it. We just have to try to put it behind us and go back to our life in Florida.’

  Driving back to the XPC building, Tom forced himself to put the poisoning problem out of his thoughts. He reflected again on Shen’s recent attitude. Not only had he shown little sympathy for Scotty’s death, but he immediately suggested that it wasn’t really necessary to replace him. In his opinion, Sharif could run both teams, he was more capable than the Welshman and could fulfil both roles. Daniel Oberhart could help him reorganise the work programme to compensate for Scotty’s absence. He, Shen, would work closer with the teams to ensure that Scotty wasn’t missed. He could also assist Sharif in managing the ACRE upgrade programme. ‘Problem solved,’ he told Tom confidently.

  The American immediately saw the motivation behind this suggestion, and the dangers of accepting it. Shen was a good administrative manager and his overall grasp of the programme requirements was adequate, but he wasn’t up to the complexities of the security algorithms created by Scotty, and was even less able to manage the long-term projects. In Tom’s opinion he was also lazy, preferring to attend sales and industry events and conferences rather than running his department. Although Scotty had never said anything, he was aware that several of Shen’s interventions had caused more problems than they’d resolved. And for some reason he’d always supported Sharif, even when he was wrong, and any criticism he had was reserved for Scotty. But although Sharif was good, he was only as good as the combination of him and Scotty. He was also wary of giving the Swiss SVP any increased responsibilities. He was effectively holding down three jobs and seemed to only just be coping, his recent attitude had been almost unpleasant, he was not a man who engendered affection in his employees. In his areas of responsibility, network management and support services, this was less of a problem, but programmers could be prickly and touchy and needed a lot of stroking. Oberhart was not the guy to provide that.

  No, Tom decided, I need a new team leader strong enough to resist Shen’s ambition to sidestep the structure. Or maybe we need to change our current structure altogether. He wasn’t looking forward to the future discussions, but he knew he had to be flexible. The main – only – objective, was to get the right person to replace Scotty as soon as possible. It would be nigh on impossible to find someone as good as the Welshman, but whatever transpired, he couldn’t afford to lose or alienate any other key people in the process.

  He called Nora into his office and started on his reports. The next few weeks were going to test his mettle, but he was confident he was up to the task.

  Zurich, Switzerland

  ‘The official verdict was accidental death, so don’t worry about bad publicity,’ Daniel Oberhart was speaking on the phone in Swiss German. ‘XPC won’t want to make a big thing of it and the police are obviously disinterested, so I would just forget about that problem.’

  ‘Have you talked to Connor about a replacement?’

  ‘I spoke to him this morning. He’s already looking. We’re ninety per cent away from finishing and the delivery date is end July. That’s more than four months, so if he finds someone quickly, we should be OK.’

  ‘I’ll send you files on a couple of names I’ve dug up. You might be able to point Connor in their direction.’

  ‘OK, I’ll see what I can do and get back as soon as I know anything definite.’

  ‘I’ll call Julius and try to calm him down. He’s been a bit highly strung for the last few days. Have a good evening, Daniel.’

  FIVE

  London, England

  April 2017

  ‘Oh yes, that’s good! Oh yes, darling, don’t stop!’

  Jenny Bishop was in an unusual situation. After nine years of celibacy since the death of her husband Ron, she was having wonderful sex. But that was not the most unusual aspect of the event. Jenny didn’t trust bankers or divorced men, and Bill Redman, the man she was in bed with, was both.

  Jenny was in London for a meeting with one of her business partners, and Bill had a flat in Gloucester Place, near the Hyatt Regency Churchill Hotel, and had managed to get a table for dinner at Locanda Locatelli, the hotel’s Michelin-starred Italian restaurant. She was not a regular drinker, and after sharing a fine bottle of Vino Nobile de Montepulciano, from Tuscany, Jenny accepted his invitation to go back to his flat for a nightcap and one thing had led to another.

  She was not at all unhappy at the turn of events. She hadn’t been affected by the wine as much as it seemed, and used it as an excuse to let down her guard and see what happened. And what happened was better than she had hoped for, much better. Bill was an ardent but considerate lover, more concerned with her pleasure than his own. After so many years, Jenny had forgotten what it was to drop her defences and enjoy the moment. Several moments, in fact. It seemed she was determined to make up for lost time, and the night had been one long delightful journey of discovering each other’s desires and fulfilling them. Jenny was sated, replete and happier than she could remember being for a very long time.

  She had known Bill for three years, since Patrice de Moncrieff had introduced her to Fletcher, Rice & Co, the UK subsidiary of BIP, Banque Internationale de Paris, a global financial institution. Jenny had severed her relations with their Swiss bank, Klein, Fellay, several years ago but still banked with their Spanish arm, Banco de Iberia in Marbella, where Patrice, the husband of her friend Leticia, was now branch manager. Bill Redman was a senior UK partner, and because of her long-standing relationship with BIP, he decided to give her his personal attention. Jenny was an attractive and intelligent woman and he continued as her personal advisor. The substantial funds to be handled justified his decision to the other partners. She’d since learned that he’d previously lived with his family in Bury St Edmonds, just twenty miles from her home in Ipswich. He was now involved in prolonged divorce proceedings, so he spent most of his time at his London flat. By coincidence, like many UK businessmen, he also had a house near Marbella, and they started to meet from time to time for a meal in London or Spain.

  Bill was good company, and she gradually became fond of him. He was thoughtful and funny, unlike some bankers she had met in the past, notably in Switzerland. Also, from the little he mentioned about his divorce she was convinced that he hadn’t and didn’t intend to act badly. He was principally concerned about the effect on his two children, and that was the reason the split-up was quite protracted. Jenny was wary of entering into a complicated liaison, and until last night their relationship had been totally platonic. Now, she was glad she’d changed that. What’s the worst thing that can happen? she asked herself. I’m not getting any younger. I’ll make the most of it as
long as it lasts.

  They both had meetings in London the next morning, so after a shower and coffee, Jenny kissed him goodbye. ‘I hope that’s the start of something and not the end,’ he said.

  ‘I hope so too,’ she replied. ‘I’ll call you when I get to Marbella. Let me know your plans.’ She went out to find a taxi, feeling quite radiant. In the cab, she felt a pang of guilt, having planned the event so carefully. But she didn’t regret it, not for a moment.

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates

  ‘Good morning, Tom. Mind if I join you, unless you’re busy?’ Daniel Oberhart put his coffee cup on the table and plonked his backside on the chair across from his CEO in the canteen.

  ‘Oh, hi Daniel. No problem, I’m just catching up on last night’s emails.’ He finished flicking through the messages on his mobile. ‘Most of them are hardly worth reading, mostly people just reminding me they exist and they’d be happy to see me sometime. I guess I haven’t had much time to socialise these last few weeks, too many problems to sort. Anything special you wanted to talk about?’ Connor looked tired, dark shadows under his eyes. He sipped his coffee, looking expectantly at the Swiss man.

  ‘I was wondering about Scotty’s replacement. No progress on the headhunting I suppose?’

  ‘Nothing worth reporting.’ He frowned. ‘Between you and me, it’s a lot more difficult than I expected. Seems like I’ve looked at a thousand job search sites and CVs and had a hundred phone interviews and I’ve got nothing to show for it. Scotty was an outstanding encryption programmer, but I didn’t think it’d be impossible to replace him. Any suggestions?’

  Oberhart shrugged. ‘I’ve had a few thoughts, but it’s not really my field.’

  ‘At this juncture, any help would be welcome. What were you thinking?’

  ‘I suppose you’ve been looking mainly in Europe?’