Charlie clicked on the browser and found a website that searched for email addresses. A whole list came back and he scrolled down through the various incarnations before he got to one that said alex. grant@mac. com and then Sydney, NSW, Australia.
‘Is that our guy?’ asked Charlie, jiggling his leg.
‘Looks like it,’ said Mac. ‘Is that good or bad?’
‘If he has a. mac email address then he probably has an iDisk account.’
‘What’s an iDisk account?’ asked Mac, watching as Charlie downloaded an application called iDisk Utility for Windows.
‘It’s Apple’s backup servers in California,’ said Charlie. ‘You subscribe to the service and you can back up into those servers from anywhere in the world and only you can access it. Your target might be backing up emails and documents to iDisk, especially when he travelling in Indonesia, yeah?’
When it was downloaded, Charlie double-clicked on iDisk Utility and input alex. grant into the username fi eld.
‘Now comes fun part,’ smiled Charlie, pulling out a drawer by his right thigh, withdrawing a black steel object the size of a cigar box, and plugging it into a USB port. A pale blue box came up on screen and Charlie typed some words into the boxes which were arranged in a list.
‘What’s this?’ asked Mac.
‘Password defeat,’ said Charlie, lighting a cigarette and slamming the lighter on the desk. ‘We put in what we know. You know his date of birth?’
Squinting, Mac tried to remember the fi le on Alex Grant. ‘He was born 1953 and I think it was November. Yep, November 1953, but I can’t remember the day.’
‘Kids? Pets? Wife? Phone number? Street address?’ asked Charlie.
‘You won’t believe this, but that’s what most passwords come down to.’
He couldn’t remember any other numbers associated with Grant, so he just added what he could. ‘Put in Bennelong and Thomas and Systems and Technology, okay?’
Charlie did, asking if there was anything more. Mac shook his head and Charlie clicked on the ‘run’ box to the right of the boxes where he’d typed in the information. A wheel spun in the middle of the pale blue box, stopping after just seven seconds when a red box sprang up with the white letters b e n n e l o n g arrayed along it, and the words defeat successful blinking above.
They were in. Alex Grant’s iDisk was a listing of about thirty folders and Mac asked Charlie to scroll the list. In the ‘N’ section they found one labelled NIME and another labelled NAVEED.
Mac’s heart rate escalated as he turned to Charlie. ‘That’s it? He uses Bennelong as his password?’
‘Yep. Remember it and you’ve got open access to Alex Grant’s iDisk.’
CHAPTER 33
The Shangri-La’s room service guy brought a tennis racquet to the door and Mac tipped him, just as Diane emerged in her tennis shorts and blue tank.
He wanted her out fast so he could check on the Grant iDisk before seeing the Bennelong team at the lagoon bar at fi ve, but he sensed that she needed something from him, and he hoped that it was just friendship. There was a haughtiness and hardness to Diane, but vulnerability showed itself in small fl ashes. Beautiful women were pigeonholed at an early age and they had to fi ght to be taken seriously.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t think any less of you for doing the charm offensive on Vitogiannis.’
‘You don’t?’ she sparked up.
‘No, mate. Any more than you think I’m a sleazy little weasel for sneaking into people’s lives.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Hmm, now you mention it, that is pretty sleazy.’
They both laughed, and an uneasy silence hung between them.
Mac had been so focused on his own hurt after Diane betrayed him with Peter Garrison – the CIA rogue – that he had missed the whole marriage thing. It wasn’t until the previous night that he’d seen how it must have been for her to have a man lying in her bed telling her how he had been about to propose marriage, but had decided not to.
He didn’t hate her. ‘Diane, it takes more than looks to do this job.’
‘You think?’
‘I -‘ he started.
‘Yes? Come on,’ she interrupted, moving closer, crossing her arms.
‘Well, there were always good sorts hanging around, but with you it was really about the laughs and the company, you know?’
Her expression eased, the hardness draining from her eyes. She looked at her feet, mouthed the words thank you and moved towards the door.
The fi rst thing Mac got from the Grant iDisk was Naveed’s name: Syed Ali Naveed, better known as S.A. Naveed.
Then he found a fax that Alex Grant had scanned into a PDF. It named Naveed’s organisation as Ocean Technologies Company, which had a Kuala Lumpur address. The fax referred to agreements and verifi ed the meeting in Jakarta on 13 December 2008. A Saturday
– today: the lunch meeting that was making Grant and Vitogiannis so antsy.
The top of the scanned document caught Mac’s attention. It was a fax number, stamped along with the date. Squinting at it, he deciphered the prefi x numbers, +971 4: Naveed was sending his faxes from the United Arab Emirates, Dubai to be exact. There was something else beside the number, but the scanning to PDF had taken defi nition out of it. Enlarging the document, the fax stamp came alive.
It said Gulf Precision Metals.
He gulped. Gulf Precision Metals was one of the front companies under the umbrella of Gulf Technical Industries, a Dubai company used right up till 2004 to ship electrical cabinets and voltage regulators from Turkey, hi-tech furnaces from Italy, vacuums from Germany, but particularly P-2 centrifuges, uranium hexafl uoride and other enrichment technologies from Pakistan. Their ultimate destination?
Libya, Iran and North Korea, to help create clandestine nuclear weapons programs for those countries.
Gulf Technical Industries was used by Dr A.Q. Khan to run his network of illicit uranium-enrichment technologies. Khan’s government-funded organisation, KRL, made the centrifuges that enriched uranium to weapons-grade. Khan sold the centrifuges, thousands at a time, to places like Iraq and Libya, and Khan had even sold the stolen plans of a Chinese nuclear bomb to North Korea.
Mac rocked back in his seat, a little freaked. The scariest thing about the A.Q. Khan network was the support it had received not only from the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus, but also from the United States. Even after the 9-11 massacre in 2001 and the Bali bombings a year later, the US State Department had refused to issue sanctions against the Pakistanis for the illegal nuclear trade. When American spy satellites had discovered Pakistani planes loading missile components into cargo planes outside Pyongyang – widely thought to be in exchange for their latest shipment of Pakistani enrichment centrifuges – the US administration had refused to act.
By December 2001, while the World Trade Center was still cooling, Khan’s business partner, B.S.A. Tahir, signed an order from Malaysian company SCOPE for $13 million worth of aluminium centrifuge components. Hidden as oil and gas drilling parts, they were shipped to Dubai and then to Libya via the various mini-fronts under Gulf Technical Industries, of which Gulf Precision Metals was one.
Moving down Grant’s documents, Mac found one fi lled with Track Changes. It was the acquisition manifest and sale document for Bennelong’s sale of the naval C and C systems and the Type-3 enrichment algorithms not to NIME, but a Dubai company called Desert Enterprises. The manifest had all the technology in it and the fi nal sale document increased the price from US$8 million to US$60 million, provided Bennelong sold the whole parcel to Desert Enterprises.
The sale document mentioned today’s ‘physical handover’.
Grant and Vitogiannis had folded immediately when faced with so much money. This wasn’t a joint venture spin-off, it was a buy-out of enrichment algorithms, probably signed off hours ago. Mac assumed the enrichment
