His office on the sixty-third floor of the Rohloff Tower building looked out over the water towards Staten Island. The view, as Rupert Rohloff had once described it to his mistress, was 'truly exceptional.' And it was. Rupert never failed to lose interest in the view of the world outside. From here he could see the merchant ships arriving in the harbour, bringing their goods to America from every corner of the globe; tourists flocking to the Statue of Liberty on the pleasure craft that brought them to see the greatest symbol of freedom in the world, and the ocean liners arriving and disgorging their cargos of rich playboys, excited about arriving in the best city in the world.
Rupert Rohloff loved America. Only in the United States could he have arrived as a poor student thirty years ago, armed only with a degree in Electronic Engineering and a will to succeed, and turned his dream into a reality that spanned every state of the country, and overflowed into Europe and beyond. Rohloff Enterprises Worldwide was one of the most powerful conglomerates on the planet. The companies hidden under the banner of Rohloff Enterprises had interests which spanned electronics, computers, networking, telecommunications, semi-conductors, health-physics, bio-medicine, genetics, and most recently bio-science. In the past three years during the collapse of the stock market which accompanied the dot.com technology crisis, an aggressive campaign of acquisitions had brought many household names under the control of his holding-companies. Yet, he preferred to keep the extent of his wealth and power a well-protected secret.
Rupert Rohloff was not a vain man. It mattered not to him that people did not understand the true scope of his power. Politically, it was often more prudent that way. Economically, it made things much easier.
Rohloff Enterprises Worldwide was a private company. There were very few shareholders. Rupert Rohloff himself owned 78% of the stock. That made him the undisputed owner, CEO and boss of over three hundred thousand people in the world.
Yet, if you asked the average man on the street, hardly anybody had ever heard of his name. Although, those who had, never forgot it.
Rupert Rohloff was not what you could realistically call a good looking man. He was only five foot six tall, what most women would describe as small, and he was almost completely bald. Only a few patches of brown hair still clung to the sides of his head above his ears, but they too were beginning to disappear. Rupert's brown eyes were a little too close together, and this sometimes made people a bit uncomfortable when they looked at him. His nose, broken in a fight when he was a child, had never been professionally reset and now the bridge angled down obliquely to a bent and flattened tip. His round and extended belly protruded a few inches over the edge of his trouser belt. Rupert knew that he looked a little odd, and to compensate he spent a fortune on clothes. His expensive designer suits went some way to making up for his lack of stature and good looks, but not far enough to attract woman on their own. What attracted the women was his money.
It was unfortunate for them that Rupert had little interest in women. True, he had a mistress, but he saw her only once every few weeks, and shared little or no real emotion with her. Rupert was an insular man, not able to make friends easily, and not able to establish any real bond of affection with anyone apart from his dog, Sam, a small Scottie that he took with him everywhere.
He had little time for sex or friendships. His life was his work, his goal to extend the scope and success of his company, REW, from strength to strength and to make it the largest single company within the matrix of the Chymera Corporation. His mistress was money, his aphrodisiac was power.
The green phone buzzed, and when Rupert leant across his desk and pressed the speak button, his secretary's voice came across the loudspeaker.
"I've got that call for you that you wanted, Rupert. Can you take it now?"
"Yes, put him through…and could you rustle me up some fresh coffee? Cuban? Thanks…"
There was an electronic beep, and Rupert was through.
"Nigel, it's Rupert. How are you?"
"I'm fine. What can I do for you?"
Rupert had been trying to get hold of Nigel Small for over two days. He had either been very busy, or had been evading his calls. The Phase Two trials should have just started, and Rupert wanted to know exactly how things were going.
Since the day of its incorporation, the board of Chymera had run the company more like an army than a profit making organisation. Responsibility and power within the Corporation was divided up in two ways. Firstly, according to the economic might and assets controlled by each of the board members, and secondly, according to geographical area. The territory around the globe across which the Corporation wielded power and had investments in was divided into twelve main sectors. North America, one of the main sectors, was itself further sub-divided into four cells: The Northern States and Canada, The Southern States and Mexico, and The Western and The Eastern Seaboards. That meant that in the divisional structure of the Chymera Corporation, the Gen8tyx Company based in California now came under the auspices of the Western Seaboard Cell, which was Nigel Small's authority. Rupert held overall responsibility for all four of the cells making up North America, and as such, Nigel reported directly to Rupert.
Rupert had been invited to present on the Orlando Project at the next board meeting of the Chymera Corporation in three weeks time. Before he walked into the board meeting Rupert needed to be fully briefed by Nigel, and convinced that he had no surprises up his sleeves.
"I want to know how the trial is coming along with Gen8tyx, and how the integration into Chymera is progressing. I don't want any surprises."
"I know Rupert. Please be assured that…"
"Thank you. I accept. I will be assured…and I want you in New York in two weeks time. I will expect you in my office on Wednesday 28th. At that time I will give you the whole morning, and you can 'assure me' then."
"I'll be there."
"I know you will."
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Nigel Small was fuming. Why was Rupert Rohloff calling and chasing him up? Had someone gone above him and said something they shouldn't have? The Phase Two trials had already started and were going excellently.
Problems? Yes, there were a few, but none that he couldn't deal with. He hated relying on other people. Sonderheim had the responsibility of sorting this mess out, but he was dragging it out too long and getting nowhere. Nigel couldn't rely on him to wrap it up, and if he didn't sort it out quickly, it would look bad on him. It would be better if he took the initiative and took a few precautions of his own. After all, if there was one thing he had learned in business it was never to put all your eggs in one basket.
Nigel was CEO of Small Holdings, a utilities company and an oil distributor which was headquartered in Seattle. Their business dealt mainly with energy and water in the US, and exporting and importing oil to and from Asia. Last year his organisation had turned over $5 billion dollars. Perhaps he was still small fry in comparison to some of the others in the Chymera's Western Seaboard Cell, but he had plans. He knew where he was going. And nobody, especially Sonderheim and his mistakes, was going to hold him back.
It was time to call in a favour.
The phone rang in the office of Cheng Wung in the CIA's new southern headquarters in Tampa. Cheng saw the code flash up on the LCD display and realised that he wanted to take this call.
"Excuse me gentleman, could you please wait outside, I'm afraid I have to take this. Grab yourselves a fresh coffee…be back in five?" He explained politely to the section heads in his office. They were in the middle of a briefing for an up-and-coming sting on a huge heroin trafficking ring which had been newly uncovered in the Keys.
"Mr Small? It's good to hear from you again…it was a pleasure doing business with you before. Is this just a courtesy call, or can I be of some assistance to you again?"
"Mr Wung, I have no doubt that it was a pleasure for you the last time we did business. I'm sure that such 'assistance' is always most beneficial to you." Nigel was sarcastica
lly referring to the $2m it had cost him, the last time he had asked for the honourable Mr Wung to indulge in a little bit of freelancing and use his government backed resources to help him out.
"Mr Small, I will not deny that your patronage is appreciated. I trust that you appreciate my help in return, otherwise you would not ask me to assist you again."
"Enough of this bullshit double entendre. When did you last have this line sweeped? Can we talk freely?"
"If my lines are not secure, then none are. "
Cheng Wung was head of the Southern Section of the CIA. He reported personally to the Director in Washington.
"Okay… I have another job for you…"
Every man has a price. Cheng's was higher than most, but since the resources at his disposal were unique, he believed his price to be fair value.
Cheng called the other section heads back into his room. While they carried on with the presentation, detailing the planning and time-scales for the sting, Cheng paid little attention to what they said and in his mind he began to plan the next extra-curricular project he would soon be carrying out with the help of Uncle Sam.
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Sonderheim was nervous. Normally he wasn't a particularly nervous man, but he knew that this time there was more at stake than ever before.
"So what is the state of play just now?" He was talking to two other men and a woman on a conference call. "Adam, you go first."
"In the weeks before their deaths, we discovered that all of those who died had downloaded copies of the Orlando File, the main database of information which contains all the information necessary to recreate the Orlando Project. It turns out that each of them had downloaded copies of the Orlando File onto their hard drives, just as you had suspected. It goes without saying that if we’re to keep the lid on this thing, we have to recover all six copies of the Orlando File before their contents are made public. "
"And, what is the progress so far?"
"Good. Very good. At this point we're pretty confident that we've now recovered all the computers, including all the personal home computers, from all six suspects. The last two to be recovered were from Alex Swinton and Martin Nicolson. We originally believed that Martin was carrying the Orlando File with him out of the country on his Lear, and hence the necessity to ensure we intercepted his flight. But to complete the operation and secure all the copies of the Orlando File in Nicolson's possession, yesterday afternoon we visited his home and removed his home PC and all his storage disks."
"And Swinton?"
"Yesterday we finally managed to find where Alex Swinton had been staying before he disappeared and we recovered a computer from the apartment. It's just arrived back at the lab this morning. And we have recovered the Orlando File from the hard-drives of all the other computers we secured."
"Good job Adam. Your section has done well. Laura, have you been able to track down the location of Alex Swinton yet?"
"Not yet. We know he was in South Africa a week ago. Our men are in South Africa now. He must be moving around. We haven't been able to find him yet, but we think he's still in the country…We're working on something at the moment. Hopefully we will have something for you soon."
"Let me know the moment anything develops."
Laura was part of the same cell as Adam, but her forte was dealing with the security agencies. Information gathering was her specialty. It helped that she worked for the FBI.
"John, what have you to offer?"
The last person on the call had remained silent throughout. The cell he led was based in the North East.
"My team is on standby. As soon as we get the authority, we are ready to go, but I believe that at this stage it would be wrong to initiate any action so close to home. As Laura pointed out on our last call, the man who had been doing the rounds of the widows is Kerrin Graham. Formerly a police officer in Miami, and now a reporter for the Washington Post. Until we know what he knows, and whom he has told it to, we cannot and should not, do anything. A reporter for one of the most powerful newspapers in the world is not someone we should underestimate…"
"Thanks John. Your point is taken. Which is why for now, we all have to leave Graham alone. But make sure your men are ready to go, as soon as I give the word!"
"However, there could be a new problem to take care of…" Laura interrupted.
"And what is that?" David asked.
"…It seems that there is a policeman in Miami asking lots of questions…I don't know why yet, but I have started my investigations."
"Okay Laura. It could be nothing…there were a number of deaths after all…or it could be something…in which case I want you to deal with it. I will trust your judgement."
Laura understood exactly what he meant.
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F.B.I. Offices
Day Twelve
Miami
Florida
As soon as the call finished, Laura left the conference centre, and took the elevator to the 3rd Level of the underground bunker. As she stepped out of the elevator, she showed her badge to the armed security guard behind the desk, and then stepped towards the bullet proof glass doors.
She pressed her hand against the palm and finger scanner, then bent forward so that the retinal scanner could examine the back of her eyeball.
The light above the security gate flashed green, and she stepped through the doors, which opened with a characteristic 'swoosh', which always reminded her of the sound made by the elevator doors opening in the old Star Trek films.
She stepped lightly through the air-conditioned computing complex, knowing full well that through the glass partitions many male heads would be turning as she walked past. It was no accident that her white blouse opened just a little lower than it should, deliberately but somewhat erotically exposing the top of her white bra and the curves of her ample cleavage, or that she wore a smart Gucci suit that hugged her figure and showed off her incredible stocking clad legs.
She knew the power of female sexuality. She had never understood the term 'female exploitation.' She only believed in 'male exploitation.' She oozed sexuality from every pore. She made sure she did. Not surprisingly promotion had come quickly to Laura over the years. She knew what she wanted and she got it. Yet still she was bored. To satisfy her hunger for risk and adventure, she got her kicks by combining lucrative extra-curricular activities with her FBI work. They were a marriage of convenience, and a relationship which had the blessing of both her bank manager and her stockbroker.
As she entered one of the many secure surveillance rooms, one of the young computer nerds at the back of the room looked up, smiled and took the walkman off his head.
"Agent Samuels? How are you today?" the young man asked, sitting up straight, and swivelling his chair round towards her.
"Excellent Agent Rodriguez, just excellent, and you?"
Laura put her hands on a waist high filing cabinet beside the young man, and eased herself backwards up onto it, sitting down and crossing her legs slowly but carefully so that her skirt rode up and exposed a fraction too much of her thighs.
"Getting better every moment! You know, Agent Samuels, how the hell are any of us meant to get any work done, when you keep coming round…?" He asked her, his eyes quickly scanning her body so that she understood exactly what he was referring to. He may be young, and a nerd, but the young man knew how to flirt with the best of them.
"Sorry, I didn't know I had that effect on you…" Laura smiled. " So, do you think you will be able to do it or not?"
"I've done it."
"Already?"
"Sure…it wasn't exactly hard…"
"Good, I don’t want to make things too hard for you…"
"…Well, you may be too late for that…," the young nerd replied, smiling back at her without blushing.
Laura ignored him. She wasn't about to be upstaged by a twenty two-year old.
"What have you got then, and how did you get it…", she said nod
ding her head towards the computer, indicating that he should show her.
"Okay…let's get down to business…" he said, turning to the computer screen. He minimised the application he was in, and brought up four new screens, toggling between them as he went.
"Okay, it was you who did the hard part really, Agent Samuels. Once you gave me the registration number of his car, the rest was easy. All I did was dial into the Hertz system. Hertz are really friendly, they co-operate with us on almost anything we want to do. It only took a few minutes to get his details. Look, here's the rental agreement…and here's his driving licence, complete with picture."
Laura bent forward towards the screen, the curvature of her breasts coming very close to Agent Rodriguez's head. He could smell the faint musk rising from her cleavage. Laura realised why the young man was smiling, and slapped him playfully on his head.
"Naughty boy. Show me what else you've got…"
"I will if you will…The problem was that two days ago he took his car back and swapped it for another one. That fooled me for a little bit. It was only yesterday morning, when I checked the Hertz system again that I realised what he had done. This is the new rental agreement…Okay, what I did next was put the new registration number into the main Computer Automated Vehicle Visual Recognition System, …we call it CARS for short…anyway, as you may know, every time a vehicle passes a CARS camera on the freeway or on a street, the camera photographs the number plate, digitises it and then compares the registration with the CARS database…if there a match it sends us a message telling us where the vehicle was sighted…"
Laura was beginning to be impressed. The boy knew his stuff.
"We started tracking the new rental car he was driving in the Orlando area. After it left the address you gave me yesterday it was picked up by five different CARS cameras in the next two hours…"
Agent Rodriguez switched to another screen and a map came up.
"…Here you can see the places he was spotted…" he said, pointing to the screen.
"The interesting thing is that between the sighting here, and the sighting there, an hour had elapsed. Which means that he probably stopped the car and did something somewhere along the way.
Rodriguez closed down the map, and brought up another screen. It was a analogue tracing of a speech pattern. At the bottom of the screen there was a play button, a fast forward and rewind, and a stop button. A series of numbers at the top of the screen indicated that it was a recording of a phone conversation taken from a telephone number in one of the Orlando suburbs.
"What's this?"
"All telephone and email conversations in the US are automatically recorded. This is the telephone number of the house at the address you gave me. I took the liberty of looking at the calls that were made to and from that number yesterday. There were no outgoing calls all day…maybe the people are away on holiday or something…or at least I thought so until in the afternoon one of the incoming phone calls was answered. This is the conversation…"
He hit the play button, and Laura could hear the conversation that had taken place the day before between Kerrin and Alex Swinton, the suspect they were looking for.
"Okay, so you'll notice he said that he would email him in an hour from then? Right? Okay, so if you look back at the map, you'll see that he was somewhere between here and there during that time…right…now he could have been dialling into the internet from a laptop with a cell phone, or from a smartphone or tablet with wireless, …or from an Internet Café. I monitored his cell phone number, there were no more calls, so it wasn't a laptop or a handheld. Just out of interest, I took the zip code of that part of town, and cross-referenced it against the business directory for Orlando…Bingo…Three internet cafés in that area."
Laura smiled.
"So, using this little piece of code…" Rodriguez flicked to another screen,"…I entered the details and the Calling Line Identities of the internet cafés into my network probes and sniffers…sorry, am I going too fast?…The CLI is basically the telephone number from where the dial-up modems call when dialling into the internet, and probes are just complicated devices that listen to all the internet traffic and break it down into its component data packets…they can identify things like destination and source email addresses, and source and destination telephone numbers where the dial-up or broadband DSL modems are connected to…okay?…good. Well, the probes help us keep records of all the internet messages and emails that are sent…And through a combination of looking at the signals stored on the probes, sniffers, and the large database which stores all the internet traffic going to and from the US for the past month, what we shall see next are all the messages and emails that were sent during the next two hours coming from the three internet cafés we looked at…"
A screen came up showing three separate boxes, each containing a list of the titles of the emails and messages that were sent from those internet cafés.
"The next thing was to run a little program to look at the text of the messages from the three cafes, to try and identify any source words we cared to include. I chose the names of the people we were looking for…'Alex'…'Swinton'…'Kerrin'…'Graham'…and other words like 'Gen8tyx' and 'Genetics' etc…"
'And this is what we got…' Agent Rodriguez proudly displayed a new list of messages and emails, all coming from the same, single, internet café.
"What you can see here is internet chat…these are the messages that were sent back and forward between Graham and Swinton. These guys are quite clued up…refusing to talk on the phone and using the internet instead was a really smart move…there's no way we would have been able to eavesdrop on them if we hadn’t got a good idea which CLI numbers Graham was using."
Laura wasn't listening to him. She was more interested in the messages displayed on the screen. The last one was of particular interest:
"Fair point. And no I didn't. Forgive the precautions, but if you are who you say you are, then you can ask your sister's son a question. Ask her to tell you where I went on vacation last year? Her son kept the postcard. The postcard comes from the town where I am now…find the postcard…find the town…and find the entrance to the place mentioned on the postcard…I will meet you there at 2 p.m. in five days from now. Come alone."
When she had read it, she pointed to the screen and asked Rodriguez,
"Can you identify where Alex sent the message from?"
"Sure can…" he replied, while bringing the image of another map onto the screen.
"Alex is using Messenger to communicate with Kerrin across the Internet, but he's logged onto the Internet using a dial-up connection. I've tracked the CLI number of the call to an internet café near Langebaan. It's a windsurfer's paradise in South Africa, near Cape Town. They’re still using a dial-up connection and don’t have broadband yet. It’s probably somewhere in the middle of nowhere."
It made sense. The last place they had been able to track Alex to was the town of Wilderness, a windsurfers hangout too. Alex Swinton must be a keen windsurfer.
She turned to Agent Rodriguez..
"Can you print the email messages out for me, and give me a copy of the map. Also, keep an eye-out to see if Alex sends any more emails from that café. The moment you get anything, let me know. Can you put all of this into a proper report format, and send it to me later today?"
"Sure thing."
"Thanks. You've done great!"
She stood up, and leant forward, kissing him playfully on top of his head, then she ruffled his hair with her right hand, smiled and left.
Agent Rodriguez watched Laura as she walked down the corridor, following the sexy to and fro of her hips, and thinking the same thoughts as all the other men whose gaze followed after her.
Perhaps one day…just perhaps…
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As Laura rode the elevator back up to her office she quickly calculated her next move. Alex Swinton was in South Africa. He would be meeting Kerrin Graham somewhere in Langebaan in
four days time. They had to get to him before Graham, i.e. the Washington Post, managed to talk to him first.
In other words, they had four days to get down there, find him, and kill him.
Chapter 16
Day Twelve
Miami