Betrayed: (A Financial and Conspiracies Thriller – Book 1 in the Legacy Thriller Series) (7 page)

Her clandestine work successfully completed, she got up and hurried out. In a flurry of confidence in the value of this information, she left far more cash on the counter than was needed for the time she had spent on their machine.

As she left the internet café she had no qualms of conscience or feelings that she betrayed the trust Number Eleven had placed in her when they gave her a job – to her this was just business, a lucrative side-line and she even hummed a favourite Italian song to herself as she headed for a very quick pub lunch before going back to Number Eleven.

Strange that she had ignored some of her training from Wheeler whilst in the café. In her excitement at what she was sending, she had allowed that thrill to overcome her trained caution. In writing her long email, she had forgotten that the ever-watchful eyes of the world’s surveillance teams would be on the lookout for a number of words that she had used in it – not least “cyber-weapons” and “Athena”.

Chapter 7

Thursday, mid - afternoon,

The SVR, Yesenevo, Moscow

Igor Komarov had taken great care when setting up his personal links to the Federation’s various intelligence services. The arrangement meant that his assistant, Pavel Rostov, looked after all matters connected with internal affairs. This meant mainly keeping a close watch on the President’s list of dissidents. Until Angus Macrae had moved Komarov’s money this morning, both Boreyev and Mikhail Vassilov, had been on this long list of dissidents. Naturally, Komarov said nothing to anyone in the office about his financial dealings with Macrae, but hinted that it was the President’s wish that the two of them be removed from the list because of some personal rapprochement. Apart from this one instance of personal intervention, Komarov left the boring dissident matters to Rostov.

The exciting activity, and potentially that from which the glory would come, was the hunt for the new cyber weapon and this Komarov took for himself. This hunt was almost exclusively handled by his own personally fostered connection with Danil Morozov in the SVR.

Much of the strength of the link between Morozov and “mentor Komarov”, rested on Morozov’s near hero-worship of Komarov’s close connections to the President and, in his own mind, lifted Morozov above the rest of his co-workers. Indeed, by inference, Komarov allowed Morozov to feel that he himself was but a step and a half from the President. Thus, whereas many on electronic stake-out duties might easily have allowed the hours’ of boredom to take the edge off vigilance, Morozov’s dedication on his mentor’s behalf was devoted and meticulous.

Danil Morozov’s main areas of his expertise were the monitoring of all foreign communications - emails, telephony – both landline and mobile. His computer surveillance programmes were also set up to keep a watch on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. All of his work had recently been greatly enhanced with yet another reorganisation of the SVR’s capabilities and was now supposedly able to match those of any of his counterparts in the UK’s GCHQ or the US at Langley and the NSA.

Morozov’s search programmes – sophisticated algorithms - were capable of spotting words or phrases which “popped up” in emails, documents, or telephone conversations almost anywhere on the internet or over the airwaves – that is to say, anywhere in the world. It was therefore of considerable excitement when, just after three in the afternoon, a small red-light alarm went off when one of his key search words “Athena” had been picked up more than once in an email that had just been sent in the UK. Morozov quickly focussed more machine power on this UK search which had found this first occurrence. Soon more of his key words and phrases began to appear. By looking through not just emails, but databases on the laptops and computers involved in the first email – Mina’s to Wheeler – ever more data came flowing into Morozov’s files where his internal systems began to sort and organise them.

To make even greater use of information, Morozov was able to ask other machines to expand on new names as they appeared. It was the fruits of these expanded searches that got Morozov’s pulse to quicken, for he soon found that Mina was listed as working for the office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom and the recipient as being the partner of a London PR company. Further searches through the contents of attachments of Mina’s email seemed to indicate that this “Athena” was almost sure to be the new generation software Komarov had been trying to hunt down for the past year.

His usual method of working with Komarov was to put his findings into documentary form and email them twice a day. Now, with this exciting breakthrough, he picked up the telephone in the hope that Komarov too would be excited by the news and would not want to wait for one of the usual emails late that evening. To his disappointment, Komarov was out of the office and not expected back till much later. Morozov’s excitement prevented him from just leaving matters at that and asked the junior in Komarov’s office if he could leave a message.

‘It’s Morozov here from the SVR,’ he said, ‘could you alert him the moment he gets in to look at an email and attachments I’ve just sent him. It is of great importance and also urgent.’

Chapter 8

Thursday Lunchtime

Struthers, Wheeler & Co, The Strand, London

As Max Wheeler was due to receive Mina’s email, he told his secretary that he was not to be disturbed and did not want any calls put through to him till further notice. He wanted to study what Mina was sending him before telling his partner, John Struthers - for a start, his partner was not even aware of Mina’s existence.

He and Mina had met a couple of times and he had also got her an introduction to Cape at a party given specifically for that purpose. Spiked drinks combined with Mina’s charms were all that were needed and Mina eventually got the job at Number 11. Mina was delighted. Though she had learned well how to manipulate Cape so as to get information needed by Wheeler, she had also learned how to manipulate Wheeler who was still under the impression that the bonuses she got from him were important to her impoverished family in southern Italy and were also her entire motivation. This background story she enhanced each time she and Wheeler communicated and she always bargained for more than he offered. She even went as far as giving Wheeler her boyfriend’s address as being hers, whereas she lived nearby in a very comfortable furnished apartment within a security-guarded block of flats. Her boyfriend’s apartment was in an insalubrious old block and when Wheeler was initially vetting her apparent poverty was one aspect of her life that convinced him he could maintain a strong hold on her. Mina had soon come to understand the cynical ways in which Wheeler used her and it amused her that he still believed that he had recruited her – though, of course, it was her family who had sought out Wheeler to use his expertise to get her into Number 11. And as Wheeler had two of the large Accountancy firms as clients and even the Mafia needed to keep up to date with changing financial rules, it was working well for them as well.

The information that Wheeler got from his team of informers varied considerably – as might be expected. In Mina’s case, it was for her to get advance information on the government’s intentions in world of finance and finance law. Whereas his army of spies were not always good judges of the importance or indeed the relevance if the information they were passing on and sometimes, without telling them, their offerings went straight into the bin. On many other occasions – as with this one of Mina’s – the information from Cape’s memory stick and conversations was sure to be of direct relevance to several of Wheeler’s clients.

Advance and secret information on a new kind of software and its launch at a Bank of England conference was interesting enough, but her specific mention of hedge funds had caught his attention and he now settled himself comfortably at his desk and opened Mina’s newly arrived email. As he read, he jotted an occasional note. Struthers & Wheeler had two hedge funds as clients, three companies involved in internet security and the contents of the email could well impinge on any or all these. It was as he was reading through that he suddenly dropped his pen. He read the sentence a second time.

“The demonstration on the Matthews Finch Hedge Fund this afternoon will show beyond any doubt Athena’s mastery of the internet and its unique ability to hack right into the core programmes of organisations, however well protected they may think they are from cyber-attack.”

As he got his handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his forehead, he noticed to his horror that his hand was trembling. Fine beads of sweat had formed round his pale, freckled forehead, just beneath his close-cropped red hair. The Matthews Finch account was one of their most important clients and any adverse publicity on them – such as this – could reflect badly on him as well. He quickly read on the end of the email and its attachments. To make sure that he had not misunderstood what was happening, he read through the passage yet again and then picked up the telephone and asked for John Struthers.

As one of their clients put it,
“if you want good press coverage, a reliable job well done or a well-managed launch event, go to John Struthers, but if it’s flair you need or someone on your side in a scandal, Max Wheeler’s your man”
. Although Struthers did not mind this widely accepted view of the two of them, he was wary of Wheeler’s sometimes unconventional methods - already this year he had need to step in to sort out a mess that Max had got the company and a client into. So when he got an excited Max asking for an urgent meeting, he was already on the defensive.

Wheeler’s account of the email,
“from a reliable source”
was hurried and emotional and Struthers sat back nodding his head, not entirely sure why Wheeler was so hyped-up over some new software, cyber-attacks, or a Bank of England’s conference the next day. But he sat up and leaned forward across the desk at Wheeler’s next part of the tale.

‘This demonstration this afternoon is using Matthews Finch as a guinea pig to show off this new software,’ Wheeler said, ‘quite how the Bank of England has come to be endorsing illegal computer-hacking is beyond me and I hope to learn more when I meet my source this evening,’

‘Maybe Nat Matthews or Paul Finch personally authorised this tampering with their trading software?’ suggested Struthers, ‘Perhaps they offered their company for demonstration purposes, in exchange for something we don’t know about?’

‘Never, not a chance,’ replied Wheeler, ‘Nat Matthews is paranoid about anyone getting anywhere near his unique trading software, he’d never let that happen – besides, what could they offer him to make him agree to break that principle?’

‘Well, in that case, the whole thing’s quite extraordinary,’ said Struthers, ‘so we’d better get in touch with Matthews. I happen to know that Paul Finch was in New York this week and going down after that to Florida for the long weekend, so he’ll be virtually impossible to contact.’

‘I’ll try and get hold of Nat Matthews then,’ said Wheeler, ‘as usual around this time of year, he’s staying at the Palace Hotel in St Moritz for his annual skiing holiday.’

‘When you make contact with him, why not ask him about stopping this demonstration,’ said Struthers, ‘I mean shutting down the company’s trading at the time of this demonstration is due to start.’

‘Wouldn’t doing that look worse to his clients and the markets than allowing the demonstration to go ahead?’ said Wheeler, ‘Let’s face it, any major unscheduled interruption to trading is going to get people asking questions. Anyway, it’s getting hold of him that’s going to be the problem. From past experience, I know that he bans all communications with him whilst he’s on holiday. Still, leave that with me – I’ll get hold of him somehow.’

* * * * *

Wheeler knew that Matthews did not spend that much of his now very substantial earnings on himself – unless, that is, you were to include his Turbo Bentley, his Quattroporte Maserati and his house in Wilton Crescent. His only other personal extravagances were his two holidays each year. On these, he always went alone – St Moritz usually around Easter, and Italy – usually Tuscany followed by Rome in the late summer. The cognoscenti might not consider the skiing facilities in St Moritz as being the best in Switzerland, but it had the Cresta Run, the horse racing on the lake, and, above all, the cachet of being one of the oldest and grandest ski resorts in the world. It was that aspect of it that appealed the most to Nat Matthews. When possible, he always stayed in the same room at the Palace Hotel. He liked familiarity and had come to regard it, with its wonderful views out over the lake and across the mountains the far side of the valley, as though he owned it.

Wheeler considered himself to be outside Matthews’s embargo on communications from the office, since he was neither a partner nor staff. He also considered that he had a special relationship with Matthews. As his PR advisor, he had managed to extricate Matthews more than once from one indiscretion or another – he had even once managed to put his errant client in a good light after a tawdry tale involving a lady of the night and a nightclub of poor repute. For these ‘extra’ services, Matthews was always genuinely grateful.

Having done his duty by briefing his partner, Wheeler got back to his own office and set about contacting Matthews. Naturally he tried the obvious first. He telephoned him at the Palace Hotel. As he had anticipated, Matthews was out skiing and not expected back till after dark. He was also told that Mr Matthews usually left skiing back down to the last safe moments, just as the pistes were beginning to ice up and that, on getting back down into St. Moritz, before returning to the Palace Hotel, he nearly always went to Hanselmann’s for its ridiculously rich but delicious cakes and tea.

Failing the easy approach, Wheeler then sent him a text message
“ring Wheeler immediately, business threatening situation”.
From reports of his previous holidays in St Moritz, Wheeler also knew that Gustave, the concierge, was the epitome of a great fixer and looked after Matthews every outlandish whim – so he also sent a message to Gustave, urging him to get Matthews to contact Mr Wheeler urgently.

This second message eventually had the desired effect, and Matthews rang him back shortly after three. Gustave had managed to track him down to the Corviglia Club half way up the mountain behind St. Moritz and Matthews had responded immediately, taking the funicular down to St Moritz rather that skiing back down.

‘This had better be bloody important,’ said Matthews as soon as he spoke to Wheeler from his Palace Hotel room, ‘I’ve cut short my usual afternoon programme to respond to the text message you sent to Gustave – so what’s this all about?’

Wheeler recounted the whole thing, Mina’s emails, what she had told him she had overheard from telephone conversations – even including the connection between Athena, Sir Jeremy Towneley and his nephew now running the team that had hacked into his company.

Wheeler finished by saying, ‘John Struthers and I didn’t do anything to stop the demonstration, because we felt sure that either you or Paul must have agreed to it – I mean we assumed that …’

‘Of course I didn’t bloody agree to it,’ shouted Matthews, ‘do you think I’d suddenly go mad enough to agree to such a hare-brained idea? Christ, you weren’t joking when you texted the words “business threatening”. Don’t you realise that if we aren’t trading completely normally on Tuesday morning when the Stock Exchange reopens, we could lose all our bloody clients – millions draining out of the company like a severed bloody artery.’

‘Look, as soon as we’ve finished this conversation,’ he continued, his voice calmer, ‘I’m going to get myself back to London the fastest way that Gustave can arrange it for me. As soon as I am away from St Moritz, I’ll have him to text you the time I’m expected to get home – by then I’ll probably be in an effing helicopter arriving in Zurich. But, here’s the important bit, by the time I get back home, I want you, Struthers, the office, my lawyers, the wholly bloody lot of you to have started on a plan to get me free of bloody computer clutches of Jeremy Towneley and his effing nephew. I also expect you to have found a way which allows me to tell all our clients, first thing Easter Tuesday morning, that whatever happened this afternoon was just a hiccup. They need to hear that our trading is entirely under our complete control again. Is all of that crystal clear?’

‘Crystal clear,’ repeated Wheeler as he heard the telephone click dead the other end of the line.

The message was stark. Get the company shot of the influence of Macrae’s lot or there would be no company – legal redress or recompense could wait for another day, but no one could postpone the arrival of Tuesday.

Wheeler bit his lower lip and for just a few seconds wrestled with his duty to tell Struthers of a plan that was forming in his mind. A moment’s further thought persuaded him that Struthers’s innate caution would scupper his emerging plan. There would be time enough to inform him later; right now he decided to get on with what he needed to do. His excuse for not telling Struthers everything right now, would be to tell a white lie and use the excuse that he was still having difficulty reaching Matthews.

He looked up a number on his mobile phone, having decided there was just one person ideally suited to meet Matthews’s demands; he rang, but his man was out.

He left a message, ‘
Max Wheeler calling, need you and your unusual contact’s special skills urgently. Ring me back on this mobile as soon as you can, thanks
’. Whether or not the recipient of this message would come up with a
legal
way of helping mattered far less than that he should be available. It would be a difficult wait till he got an answer to this.

There was little doubt in his mind, however that he was going to have to step outside the strict confines of the law if he was going to solve Nat Matthews’s problem by Tuesday morning’s trading.