“I’m sorry it took a while,” Casales said. “We’ve had an insane morning. Total chaos.”
“Here too,” Grane said politely, but looking at her watch.
“But I do have something important to tell you, as I said, at least I think I do. It isn’t that easy to analyse. I just started checking out a group of Russians, did I mention that?” Casales said.
“No.”
“Well, there are probably Germans and Americans involved as well and possibly one or more Swedes.”
“What sort of group are we talking about?”
“Criminals, sophisticated criminals who don’t rob banks or sell drugs any more. Instead they steal corporate secrets and confidential business information.”
“Black hats.”
“They’re not just hackers. They also blackmail and bribe people. Possibly they even carry out old-fashioned crimes, like murder. I don’t have much on them yet, to be honest, mostly codenames and unconfirmed links, and then a couple of real names, some young computer engineers in junior positions. The group is active in suspected industrial espionage and that’s why the case has ended up on my desk. We’re afraid that cutting-edge American technology has fallen into Russian hands.”
“I understand.”
“But it isn’t easy to get at them. They’re good at encryption and, no matter how hard I try, I haven’t been able to get any closer to whoever leads them than to catch that their boss goes by the name of Thanos.”
“Thanos?”
“Yes, derived from Thanatos, the god of death in Greek mythology, the one who’s the son of Nyx — night — and twin brother to Hypnos — sleep.”
“Real cloak-and-dagger stuff.”
“Actually, it’s pretty childish. Thanos is a supervillain in Marvel Comics, you know that series with heroes like the Hulk, Iron Man and Captain America. First of all it’s not particularly Russian, but more than that it’s... how shall I put it...?”
“Both playful and arrogant?”
“Yes, like a bunch of cocky college kids messing around, and that really annoys me. In fact there’s a whole lot that worries me about this story, and that’s why I got so worked up when we learned through our signals surveillance that someone in the network may have defected, somebody who could maybe give us some insight — if only we could get our hands on this guy before they do. But now that we’ve looked more carefully at this, we realize it wasn’t at all what we thought.”
“Meaning what?”
“The guy who quit wasn’t some criminal, but the opposite, an honest guy who resigned from a company where this organization has moles, someone who presumably happened to stumble on some key information...”
“Keep going.”
“In our view this person is now seriously under threat. He needs protection, but until recently we had no idea where to look for him. We didn’t even know which company he’d worked at. But now we think we’ve zeroed in,” Casales said. “You see, in the last few days one of these characters mentioned something about this guy, said that ‘with him all the bloody Ts went up in smoke’.”
“The bloody Ts?”
“Yes, cryptic and strange, but it had the advantage of being specific and highly searchable. While ‘bloody Ts’ didn’t give us anything, Ts generally, words beginning with T in conjunction with companies, high-tech firms of course, kept leading us to the same place — to Nicolas Grant and his maxim: Tolerance, Talent and Teamwork.”
“We’re talking Solifon here, right?” Grane said.
“We think so. At least it felt like everything had fallen into place, so we began to investigate who had left Solifon recently. The company always has such a high staff turnover, it’s actually part of their philosophy — that talent should flow in and out. But then we started to think specifically about those Ts. Are you familiar with them?”
“Only what you’ve told me.”
“They’re Grant’s recipe for creativity. By tolerance he means that you need to be open to unconventional ideas and unconventional people. Talent — it doesn’t just achieve results, it attracts other gifted people and helps create an environment that people want to be in. And all these talents have to form a team. As I’m sure you know, Solifon’s been a remarkable success story, producing pioneering technology in a whole series of fields. But then this new genius popped up, a Swede, and with him...”
“... all the bloody Ts went up in smoke.”
“Exactly.”
“And it was Frans Balder.”
“Exactly. I don’t think he’d normally had any problem with tolerance, or with teamwork for that matter. But from the beginning there was apparently something toxic about him. He refused to share anything, and in no time at all he managed to destroy the rapport among the elite researchers at the company, especially when he started accusing people of being thieves and copycats. There was a scene with the owner too. But Grant has refused to tell us what it was about — just that it was something private. Soon after, Balder gave notice.”
“I know.”
“Most people were probably relieved when he took off. The air at work became easier to breathe, and people began to trust each other again, at least up to a point. But Grant wasn’t happy, and more importantly his lawyers weren’t happy either. Balder had taken with him whatever he had been developing at Solifon, and there was a rumour — maybe because no-one really knew what it was — that he was on to something sensational that could revolutionize the quantum computer, which Solifon was working on.”
“And from a purely legal point of view, whatever he’d produced belonged to the company and not to him personally.”
“Correct. So even though Balder had been going on about theft, when all was said and done he himself was the thief. Any day now things are likely to blow up in court, as you know, unless Balder manages to use whatever he has to frighten the lawyers. That information is his life insurance, he says, and it may well be true. But in the worst-case scenario it could also be...”
“... the death of him.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Casales said. “We’re picking up stronger indications that something serious is getting underway, and your boss tells me that you might be able to help us with the puzzle.”
Grane looked at the storm that was now raging outside, and longed desperately to go home and get away from all this. Yet she took off her coat and sat down again, feeling deeply uneasy.
“How can I help?”
“What do you think he found out?”
“Do I take that to mean that you haven’t managed either to bug him or hack him?”
“I’m not going to answer that one, sweetheart. But what do you think?”
Grane remembered how Frans Balder had stood in the doorway of her office not so long ago and muttered about dreaming of “a new kind of life” — whatever he may have meant by that.
“Perhaps you know,” she said, “that I met him before he joined Solifon, because he claimed that his research had been stolen from him. I didn’t take to him much. Then when he came back there was talk in-house of getting him some form of protection, so I met him a couple of times more. His transformation over the last few weeks was actually incredible. Not only because he had shaved off his beard, tidied up his hair and lost some weight. He was also mellower, even a little bit unsure of himself. I could tell that he was rattled, and at one point he did say that he thought there were people who wanted to harm him.”
“In what way?”
“Not actually physically, he said. It was more his research and his reputation they were after. But I’m not so sure that, deep down, he believed it would stop there, so I suggested that he get a guard dog. I thought a dog would be excellent company for a man who lived out in the suburbs in far too big a house. But he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I can’t have a dog now,’ he said rather sharply.”