Washington DC, USA
Monday, 19 July 2017
‘Two days in a row. Welcome back, Viktor. Take a seat.’ Mel Ritterbrand, US State Secretary, showed the ambassador to the same couch he’d vacated the previous day. ‘What’s so urgent you need to come here to see me so soon?’ He paraphrased the Russian’s question of their last meeting.
Kopeykin cleared his throat uncomfortably and sat forward on the edge of the seat. Ritterbrand noticed one of his knees trembling nervously. ‘It’s about our earlier discussion. I reported your comments to my superiors and they understand your concerns. This morning, instructions were given to terminate the exercises and return all troops and vessels to their homeland bases. We have no desire for our security practice sessions to be misinterpreted as belligerent activity. You can monitor these movements over the next few days to confirm my words.’
Ritterbrand said nothing. General Chillicott had called him an hour before to tell him to expect this news.
After waiting vainly for a response, the ambassador went on. ‘I also checked on your reports of a cyber-attack supposedly being prepared by our Intelligence Directorate. I can confirm there’s no truth in this rumour, we don’t have the resources to engineer such an attack and we have no intention of trying to build such a capability. We have more important objectives to achieve, many of them working together with our international partners like yourselves.’
He sat back, trying to look more comfortable. ‘As a matter of fact, my country is experiencing a wave of hacking right at this moment. The attacks are aimed at the Main Intelligence Directorate itself. Virtually every computer network in the department is affected by some kind of stop-start interference, and we can’t identify the cause. Frankly, it’s a national emergency which could damage the fragile stability of our global relationships. Can you interrogate your intelligence channels to assist us in our endeavours to find the cause? It would be greatly appreciated and a sign of our continually improving entente.’
‘Stop-start interference, eh? Sounds tricky. I’ll do what I can, Viktor. If I find anything out, I’ll get straight back to you.’
‘Thank you, Mel. I’ll relay that encouraging news to General Lukyanenko, the new Director of the Intelligence Directorate.’
Ritterbrand’s ears pricked up. ‘General Gavrikov’s been replaced?’
‘So I was informed. It seems he suffered a fatal injury in a car accident last night. I understand he was being driven by a friend and they were both killed in the crash. Most regrettable, he was a highly capable officer.’
‘That’s too bad, coming on top of General Belinsky’s resignation.’
‘You already heard about that?’
Ritterbrand was enjoying the moment. ‘Modern communications, Viktor. Shame, I hear he was a clever guy. I guess he was ready for retirement, making way for the next generation.’
London, England
It was Monday evening, and Dr Hugh Middleton was still in his office. Ilona had gone home to her flat in Bayswater. They both lived alone, he by choice and her because after being in England for almost six years, she was still looking for the right partner.
Middleton was in a melancholy mood. He was looking at the image of the woman, Tsunami, on his screen. He hadn’t seen Esther Rousseau since July 2010, seven years ago. She was still just as beautiful as in his memory and he was still as much in love with her. In retrospect, he considered her last acts, to steal from him and try to blackmail him, to have been perfectly justifiable behaviour. She had expected him to deliver a result, namely a large ransom, and he had failed. Naturally, she had needed to compensate herself, and he was the obvious source of compensation; he would likely have done exactly that in similar circumstances.
But that was all water under the bridge. Since then, he had suffered the indignity of paying his debt to society, he had reorganised his life, reinvented himself and had created a successful, useful and profitable business, with an honest and dedicated partner. And now, due to a series of unpredictable and unimaginable events, everything he had rebuilt could suddenly be in jeopardy. First, Leo Stewart and Jenny Bishop, then Marius Coetzee, and now Esther had reappeared in his life. It was beyond a joke.
Fortunately, he convinced himself, Ilona doesn’t suspect anything. When this Lee-Win business settles down, it will all fade into insignificance and we can get on with our normal, banal, uneventful lives. Patience is all that’s required.
He closed his computer, switched off the lights and locked the front door. It was still bright and warm, and he decided to walk through Hyde Park on the way back to his apartment. In the darkened offices behind him, Ilona Tymoshenko’s laptop received a message from Chief Inspector Lucas Meyer, head of the Antwerp SICAD.
SIXTY-ONE
Shanghai, People’s Republic of China
Tuesday, 20 July 2017
Leo’s mobile woke him at four on Tuesday morning. He and Coetzee were sleeping on camp beds in the hub room, having been alternately switching the A2 trigger programme on and off since Sunday evening. Patrice and Junjie were now comfortably ensconced in a nearby hotel. Han Wang Tāng and Hoi Lei had been expelled from the premises by the security officers under Bohai Cheong’s instructions. They’d convinced the chairman that involving the police would be massively complicated and wouldn’t serve any purpose. The two traitors could take their chances out in the cold. And Leo now had an interesting scar where a half-dozen stitches had closed up the wounds on his thigh.
He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and pressed the speaker button. ‘Morning, Billy.’
‘It’s four in the afternoon here, a beautiful day, in more ways than one,’ General Chillicott replied. ‘How’re you feeling?’
‘Knackered, actually. It’s been a pretty eventful couple of days.’
‘But you guys delivered the goods. Congratulations guys, there’s a lot of happy folk over on this side of the pond.’
Coetzee said, ‘I was just a spectator, it was a one-man show, starring Mr Leo Stewart.’
‘I got a call from Mel Ritterbrand at the State Department a little while ago. He’d just had a visit from the Russian ambassador. Mel told me a few interesting facts. First, they’re bringing their military back home, the “exercises” have been terminated. I believe the guy, there’d be no interest in him lying when we’ve got GRU by the short and curlies.’
‘You heard Wei’s confession. He had instructions to send the upload to fourteen ex-USSR countries,’ Coetzee said. ‘You were right, that’s what the army and navy presence was for, to persuade them to cooperate and rejoin the Soviet Club if they wanted their countries’ infrastructures working again. It was a close call.’
‘Too damn right it was. Anyways, he asked for my help to find the cause of a cyber-attack they’re suffering at the Directorate. Can they find out where it’s coming from?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Leo answered. ‘I sent the upload back to the same hub address it came from. We figured it was GRU. It was signed as a Lee-Win minor upgrade, so they downloaded it without question. Now, we’re managing their hub from here. It’s a pretty neat situation, actually.’
‘So you took control of the GRU hub? You outspooked the spooks? Boy oh boy, that’s really neat, even for a non-techy like me.’
‘It was a variation of the handover code that Abby worked out, just slightly different. I don’t think there’s anything they can do about it until we stop.’
‘Well, even if they find anything, I guess I don’t see them saying they suspect Lee-Win or China, when we’ve got a file three feet thick with the goods on Tsunami, Shen, the hidden Russian ownership, the A2 code and the confessions you sent me. That’s a lot of shit. They’re gonna want to kick this into the long grass and bury it.
‘Speaking of which,’ Chillicott went on, ‘I hate to be the one to break the news, but it seems your friend Shen Fu Liáng and General Piotr Gavrikov were involved in a fatal car accident last night. And the Minister of Defence has stepped down.’
Leo caught his breath and said nothing, and Coetzee replied, ‘That was pretty fast work, even for the Soviets. They want to keep this whole thing quiet.’
‘Right on, Marius. And Leo’s gonna love this last item,’ Chillicott paused dramatically. ‘Remember the arm-wrestling? Well, I think I just won a round. The Russians want to cooperate with us in petitioning the UN Security Council to instigate an Internet security programme. How do you like them apples?’ His uproarious laugh reverberated from the speaker, then his tone became serious. ‘That Rwandan story was a timely reminder, catastrophes come in many guises. We just weren’t expecting it to happen again so soon, or like this. But maybe we’ve learned a lesson this time around. And it was averted mainly due to you, Leo, thanks a ton. And about that job offer we discussed in San Diego, you want to chat?’
They said goodbye, and Leo was about to switch off his phone when General Chillicott added, ‘By the way, you can stop the A2 triggering now. See you guys.’
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
‘We just got a message from Leo Stewart. The cyber-attack has been thwarted, ACRE is an outstanding worldwide success.’
‘Wunderbar! Finally, the news we’ve been waiting for, thanks and well done, Daniel. I’ll call Julius right away. I’m going to ask for a telephone board meeting this morning to approve the offer. It could even be delivered today.’
‘You should be thanking Leo, looks like it was him who managed to prevent the attack. It turns out that Han Wan Tāng in Shanghai was also a saboteur, what an incredible setup we got involved in. But Leo seems to have sorted it for good.’
‘We certainly backed the right guy last March. We’ll bear that in mind if our offer is accepted, we’ll need a first-class team.’
‘I hope that doesn’t mean I have to stay here. I want to come back to Zurich, I’m really tired of all this good weather.’
London, England
Ilona Tymoshenko was catching up on her overnight emails. It was seven in the morning and the office was quiet. The message from General Chillicott was very satisfying. It seemed the dossier she’d sent to Leo Stewart had put paid to the Tsunami business, and he’d been able to foil the Lee-Win cyber-threat. She breathed a sigh of relief. This confirmed a report she’d received from her friend Ilya, that a hacking attack in Moscow that had disabled the GRU networks had been resolved. Ilona was sure the price had been the retreat of their forces from the borders of many countries, including her own.
No doubt Hugh will be fully informed when he comes in, she thought. I’ll wait for him to give me his own interpretation of events. Anyway, it won’t be bad for our security business.
There was also a long message from Lucas Meyer in Antwerp, with several attachments, including photographs. She went through the documents one by one, her pulse quickening with every disclosure, hardly believing what she was reading. The first revelation was that Elodie Delacroix’s photograph had matched the image of a French woman called Esther Rousseau, who was wanted by Interpol. She had been on the run since 2008, when she’d been employed by a Swiss bank and was involved in a robbery with Raymundo d’Almeida, an Angolan psychopath who was killed in a shoot-out with the police in Marbella, Spain. The woman had reappeared briefly in 2010, linked to investigations into the murder of a pilot in Australia and several murders in South Africa.
The last item in Meyer’s report was a Daily Telegraph article from six years before. The headline was, ‘Peer convicted of Money Laundering’. The piece concerned a man called Lord Arthur Selwyn Savage Dudley, who had been sentenced to twelve months imprisonment for non-declaration of accounts with foreign banks. The original charges against Dudley also related to involvement in the South African murders in 2010, but these accusations were not proven and he had pleaded guilty to the lesser charges.
Meyer’s notes stated that Esther Rousseau had never been found, and the police were keen to get any information that Ilona might have to open up the search. Photographs of Lord Dudley and Esther Rousseau were attached to the file. She recognised the woman’s face from Ed’s photo, and she also recognised Lord Arthur Dudley.
Ilona couldn’t believe her eyes. She was staring at her partner, Dr Hugh Middleton.
Her mind digested these pieces of information: Tsunami/Elodie Delacroix was Esther Rousseau, who was obviously a career criminal. As Dudley, Middleton seems to have known her. Coetzee was from South Africa, Hugh would never speak to Coetzee. He was a close friend of Leo Stewart who was born in Rwanda. She remembered further items from the research she’d done for him: Leo’s mother wrote a book called My Son the Hostage, his aunt was a wealthy private equity businesswoman, Middleton-Dudley was keenly interested in Leo Stewart. Where did all this lead?
Ilona had worked for almost twenty years in the information-gathering business. She knew that knowledge was power. The information she had received about Hugh was potentially damaging, even fatally so. It gave her power over him, great power. She sent a thank-you note to Meyer, adding that she had heard nothing further from Elodie Delacroix, but would contact him if she had any further information. Then she copied everything to the files in her personal tablet and deleted it from the office system. Hugh would never know what she knew, nor how she knew it. Not unless, or until, she decided to tell him.
An hour later, Middleton arrived at the office. ‘Good morning, Hugh.’ She welcomed him with a warm smile. ‘Have you seen General Chillicott’s report? It seems we won a great victory. Well done to your lateral thinking. I’ll get you a coffee.’
‘Thank you, Ilona dear, I’m delighted to hear it. Coffee would be welcome indeed.’ He went into his office to read the report for himself. She’s being rather effusive with her praise, he reflected. I wonder what’s going on in her mind.
Shanghai, People’s Republic of China
Wednesday, 21 July 2017
‘Goodbye, Bohai. I’m sorry our visit wasn’t exactly enjoyable.’ Leo and the others were ready to leave for the airport, where they would go their separate ways, Patrice to Hong Kong to catch up on his business meetings, Junjie to Macau and Coetzee to South Africa. Leo was flying to London, then going up to Durham to spend some time with his mother.
‘Wait just a moment, Leo. I have some interesting news to share. Today, we received a proposal from a Chinese hedge fund called Hai-Sat, to purchase Lee-Win and XPC. They already own MicroCentral, a Swiss processor company, and we believe it could create a very successful combination. I’ve spoken to our lawyers about the consequences of this conspiracy, and I intend to send them a full dossier with instructions to have the purchase of the company by that consortium of Russian criminals annulled. Not only did they commit murder to accomplish their strategy, but they broke the Chinese laws about foreign ownership.’
He turned to Junjie. ‘Would you like to join me in getting back your father’s company and making a transaction with this hedge fund?’ He patted Leo on the shoulder. ‘I have in mind a first-class CEO.’
So that’s what Daniel Oberhart was doing at XPC, scouting for an acquisition! Leo laughed. ‘Guys, whatever happens, our first priority is pretty clear. The A2 cell is still sitting in millions of networks all over the world. We have to find a way to neutralise it before someone else gets ideas.’
‘Or,’ Coetzee said, ‘we could sit on it until someone decides to make the next global power play.’
Moscow, Russian Federation
Esther Rousseau was queuing at immigration control in Moscow Domodedovo International Airport. She’d seen the news on TV that morning of the death of General Piotr Gavrikov and an unknown man, and she knew exactly what it meant. Somehow, that interfering African nephew of the putain, Jenny Bishop, had managed to foil Shen, Piotr and the spooks at GRU. All day Monday she’d tried their mobiles, but both went unanswered and she’d feared the worst, not for them, but for herself.
Her plane to London was at eleven a.m. and there were plenty of flights from there to Dublin. The booking had been made in her maiden name
of Esther Bonnard, which she had never revealed to anyone in the Russian organisation. Her French passport in that name had been renewed before she’d left for Dubai. Esther was always prepared for the worst.
Nervously, she handed the passport over, keeping her features expressionless, wondering how quickly GRU would spread out its tentacles. The immigration officer spent several moments checking it against his computer records. Finally, he stamped it and gave it back with a smile. ‘Bon voyage, Mademoiselle Bonnard,’ he said.
She walked to her departure gate with mixed emotions, saying to herself, When I left Arthur Dudley, I had only $50,000. Now, I have $300,000. I must be heading in the right direction. Esther went to the bar next to the gate and ordered a glass of champagne. She figured she’d earned it.
EPILOGUE
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
August 2017
‘Hi, Lynne, you look great.’ Ed Muire helped her onto the back of Leo’s Harley. She wrapped her arms around his waist as they roared along the coast road towards Club 27.
The place was quiet and they sat at the bar. Ed ordered two glasses of champagne, and the barman poured them into long-stemmed flutes.
‘What are we celebrating? Something special?’
‘Maybe. I had a long talk with Tom today. He was thinking of quitting, but Lee-Win have asked him to stay on. There’s a big shake-up going on there after all the crap with Shen and Han. They had everyone fooled, so Tom’s not getting any stick from Shanghai. The other thing is, it looks like we could be merging with MicroCentral, that’s Danny Oberhart’s previous company in Zurich.’
‘Is that good?’
‘I guess so, we’d be one of the biggest players around. Looks like a great opportunity. Tom likes the deal, that’s why he’s staying.’
The African Diamond Trilogy Box Set Page 152
