Betrayed: (A Financial and Conspiracies Thriller – Book 1 in the Legacy Thriller Series) by William Wield Read Free Book Online Page B

morning
    Towneley Vassilov Bank, Isle of Man
     
    The launch of Athena to the City of London had been planned to take place during the long Bank Holiday weekend while the markets were closed – this would allow for any early difficulties to be ironed out. It would also dampen City traders’ initial concerns over major changes to banks’ security arrangements.
    The launch was being hosted by the Bank of England, and the details of the agenda, and communications had been thoroughly checked by the team on Craithe and by Fisher at the bank. Macrae had also checked everything with Kim. The helicopter taking them up to Glasgow Airport to meet up with Tatiana, the au pair Anastasia and little Jerry was not due till just after lunch so Kim returned to Angus’s office to finish off his briefing of her on Athena matters’. She sat down opposite him and waited till he finished a call to the bank’s general manager and as soon as Angus put down the receiver she took the initiative.
    ‘Before we were interrupted by Mr Boreyev’s second call, you were going to finish telling me a bit more of Athena background matters, In the meantime I was wondering how such a small team, however well-funded between ourselves and the conglomerate no one names, managed to get ahead of everyone else in quantum computing.’
    ‘One reason I believe,’ said Angus, ‘is the unusual mix of people in our team. First there’s Professor Henry Hapsley − probably the world’s leading expert in the new quantum computing technologies. He came to us after my uncle financed some of his research when university funding took a dive after the 2008 crash. Our secretive conglomerate partners wanted only him for their quantum research and so they became our partners us as well.’
    ‘Quite a catch, then,’ said Kim.
    ‘Yes and then there’s our young genius hacker, Perry; deserted by his father when he was twelve; he had to support his alcoholic mother with large quantities of booze, pay for the food, the house-hold bills, all the jobs of a head of the family. I wonder what would you or I would have done in his shoes?’
    ‘No idea,’ said Kim, ‘especially if you’re too young to claim benefits and your mother’s too drunk to do anything about them either. What a hole to find oneself in.’ She gave a faint shudder, ‘so what did he do?’
    ‘The short answer is that he found he had a natural talent with computers and at learning off the internet,’ replied Angus, ‘taught himself everything, improved all the time, upgraded his equipment regularly; by the time he was twenty he had a substantial income from syphoning money from the accounts of organised crime syndicates and the Mafia – chose them as he guessed that they’d never create a fuss over the money – all of it stolen, of course. To get away with this he developed unique computer software to cover his tracks – no one could see who he was or where he’d been – the Craithe Team uses the same technology to this day.’
    ‘He seems quite difficult to talk to sometimes,’ said Kim, ‘I don’t know if that’s just me or…’
    ‘No he has a touch of Asperger’s syndrome, makes him shy, even distant to some,’ said Angus, ‘but he’s fine with people he knows,’
    ‘That’s a relief I thought it might be me.’
    ‘My uncle who provided him with a QC his hacking trial, got him a mere community service sentence. Got it in exchange for valuable information on the mafia and organised crime syndicates. To avoid mafia reprisals, however, he needed new names and Peregrine was both a name used by many Towneleys in the past, and in gratitude that’s what he chose – though shortened to Perry.’
    ‘Well, it suits him,’ said Kim, ‘I’ll be meeting all of the team won’t I? What about some of the others?’
    ‘There’s the other hacker, Marty, and the brilliant mathematicians, Johnno but rather than going through the whole list just now, why not do that face to face when I