Hydt had been to Dubai several times but had not met her before. The woman’s accent was American. Hydt supposed she was clever, hard-headed and typical of a common phenomenon in this part of the world, one that went back hundreds of years: the Westerner in love with Arab culture.
Al-Fulan said, ‘Stella worked up most of the algorithms.’
‘Did you now?’ Hydt asked, with a smile.
She blushed, the ruddy colour stemming from her affection for her mentor, whom she glanced at quickly, a supplication for approval, which al-Fulan provided in the form of a seductive smile; Hydt was not a participant in this exchange.
As the decorations on the walls suggested, al-Fulan’s speciality was optics. His goal in life was to invent an artificial eye for the blind that would work as well as those ‘Allah – praise be to Him – created for us’. But until that happened he would make a great deal of money designing industrial machinery. He had come up with most of the specialised safety, control and inspection systems for Green Way’s sorters and document- destruction devices.
Hydt had recently commissioned him to create yet another device for the company and had come here today with Dunne to see the prototype.
‘A demonstration?’ the Arab said.
‘Please,’ Hydt replied.
They all walked back into the garden of machines. Al-Fulan led them to a complicated device, weighing several tons, sitting in the loading bay beside two large industrial refuse compactors.
The Arab hit buttons and, with a growl, the machine slowly warmed up. It was about twenty feet long, six high and six wide. At the front end a metal conveyor-belt led into a mouth about a yard square. Inside all was blackness, although Hydt could just make out horizontal cylinders, covered with spikes, like a combine harvester. At the rear, half a dozen chutes led to bins, each containing a thick grey plastic liner, open at the top to catch whatever the machine disgorged.
Hydt studied it carefully. He and Green Way made a lot of money from destroying documents securely, but the world was changing. Most data resided on computer and flash drives nowadays and this would be increasingly the case in the future. Hydt had decided to expand his empire by offering a new approach to destroying computer data storage devices.
A number of companies did this, as did Green Way, but the new approach would be different, thanks to al-Fulan’s invention. At the moment, to destroy data effectively, computers had to be dismantled by hand and hard drives had to be wiped of data with magnetic degaussing units, then crushed. Other steps were required to separate the other components of the old computer – many of them dangerous e- waste.
This machine, however, did everything automatically. You simply tossed the old computer on to the belt and the device did the rest, breaking it apart while al-Fulan’s optical systems identified the components and sent them to appropriate bins. Hydt’s sales people could assure his customers that this machine would make certain not only that the sensitive information on the hard drive was destroyed but that all the other components were identified and disposed of according to local environmental regulations.
At a nod from her boss, Stella picked up an old laptop and set it on the ribbed conveyor- belt. It vanished into the dim recesses of the device.
They heard a series of sharp cracks and thuds and finally a loud grinding noise. Al-Fulan directed his guests to the rear, where after five or six minutes they watched the machine spit the various sorted bits of scrap into different bins – metal, plastic, circuit boards and the like. In the bin liner marked ‘Media Storage’ they saw fine metal and silicon dust, all that was left of the hard drive. The dangerous e-waste, like the batteries and heavy metals, was deposited in a receptacle marked with warning labels and the benign components were dropped into recycling bins.
Al-Fulan then directed Hydt and Dunne to a monitor, on which a report about the machine’s efforts scrolled past.
Dunne’s icy facade had slipped. He seemed almost excited.
Hydt, too, was pleased, very pleased. He began to ask a question. But then he looked at a clock on the wall. It was six thirty. He could concentrate on the machinery no longer.
28
James Bond, Felix Leiter and Yusuf Nasad were fifty feet from the factory, crouching beside a large skip, observing Hydt, the Irishman, an Arab in a traditional white robe and an attractive dark-haired woman through a loading-bay window.
With Bond and Leiter in the American’s Alfa, and Nasad in his Ford bringing up the rear, they’d started to follow the Lincoln Town Car from the Intercontinental but both agents immediately recognised that the Arab driver was starting evasion techniques. Worried that they’d be spotted, Bond used an app in his mobile to paint the car with a MASINT profile and took its co-ordinates with a laser, then uploaded the data to the GCHQ tracking centre. Leiter eased off the accelerator and let the satellites follow the vehicle, beaming the results to Bond’s mobile.
‘Damn,’ Leiter had drawled, looking at the phone in Bond’s hand. ‘I want one of them.’
Bond had followed the Town Car’s progress on his map and directed Leiter, with Nasad following, in the general direction that Hydt was going, which was proving to be a very circuitous route. Finally the Lincoln headed back to the Deira, the old part of town. A few minutes later Bond, Leiter and his asset arrived, left the cars in an alleyway between two dusty warehouses and sliced their way through the chain-link fence for a closer view of what Hydt and the Irishman were up to. The driver of the Lincoln had remained in the car park.
Bond plugged in an earpiece and trained his phone’s camera eye on the foursome, eavesdropping with an app that Sanu Hirani had developed. The Vibra-Mike reconstructed conversation observed through windows or transparent doors by reading vibrations on glass or other nearby smooth surfaces. It combined what it detected sonically with visual input of lip and cheek movement, eye expression and body language. In circumstances like this it could reconstruct conversations with about 85 per cent accuracy.
After listening to the conversation, Bond told the others, ‘They’re talking about equipment for the Green Way facilities, his legitimate company. Dammit.’
‘Look at the bastard,’ the American whispered. ‘He knows that around ninety people are going to die in a half-hour and it’s like he’s talking to a store clerk about pixels on big-screen TVs.’
Nasad’s phone buzzed. He took the call, speaking in staccato Arabic, some of which Bond could decipher. He was getting information about the factory. He disconnected and explained to the agents that the place was owned by a Dubai citizen, Mahdi al-Fulan. A picture confirmed he was the man Hydt and the Irishman were with. He was not suspected of having any terrorist ties, had never been to Afghanistan and seemed to be merely an engineer and businessman. He did, however, design and sell his products to, among others, warlords and arms dealers. He had recently developed an optical scanner on a land mine that could differentiate between enemies’ and friendlies’ uniforms or badges.
Bond recalled notes he’d found up in March:
As conversation in the warehouse resumed, Bond cocked his head and listened once more. Hydt was saying to the Irishman, ‘I want to leave for the… event. Mahdi and I will go there now.’ He turned to his Arab associate with eerie, almost hungry, eyes. ‘It’s not far, is it?’
‘No, we can walk.’
Hydt said to his Irish partner, ‘Maybe you and Stella could work out some of the technical details.’
The Irishman turned to the woman as Hydt and the Arab vanished into the warehouse.
Bond closed down the app and glanced at Leiter. ‘Hydt and al-Fulan are going to the site
