Black Ops

Chapter 7

7

Tom woke with a start a few hours later and immediately felt the pain pulsing through his body. It was still morning, but he felt he had slept through the rest of the day and the whole night. He abandoned all thought of his routine jog around to Shark Bay or working out in the garage gym.

Vic was still in the office working but the house was quiet, and he remembered that the girls were at school. He contemplated what his life would be like without them and recognised that because of his foolishness he could have lost them all—Vic, the house, and God forbid, the girls. That evening’s dinner was not going to be ordinary. Tom also knew the bedtime kisses for the girls would be long-lasting and Vic’s talk time even longer.

It had been several years after Helen’s death since he and Vic had found each other in the same bed as if by accident. Victoria had joined Tom’s business seven years earlier and when Helen died, she was basically the only woman he knew. She was always there to help him with the girls and after a few months, it seemed absurd for her to go home at all, so she started spending nights in the spare room.

Then, one afternoon, Tom found a note from Vic on his desk. She had offered to resign, confessing that her feelings for Tom were clouding her business acumen and that she felt more like a nanny than a partner in a company. Lost in a haze of grief since Helen’s death, Tom had been blind to the fact that Victoria had developed feelings for him.

Tom had resolved to stop his seasonal dalliances, aware that he was betraying Vic. But then he met Natasha. The thought of telling Vic was totally out of the question. Natasha was just a stranger who had accidentally crashed into his car on a stormy night, nothing else. His life had been so filled with grief he doubted it would matter anymore. Besides, he was now a minor celebrity, at least in the business world, because of what he had uncovered with ScamTell.

ScamTell had called Tom out of the blue one day nearly seven years ago, asking for a meeting. He had not heard of the company before, but a little bit of research revealed they were owned by two young men who had built their entire business around identifying scams and listing them on an advertisement-free website. All they asked in return for this worldwide service was a small donation from anyone who had managed to avoid a scam by first checking the ScamTell website. The ‘Tell’ part of their name was an insider’s joke—they ‘told on’ the scammers.

Within a year of their launch, ScamTell was a million-dollar operation, simply through donations. The articles that Tom read about the rise of the company and the two chief executives, Michael Ho and Daniel Jackson, showed that they put their first million into the development of an anti-phishing app and software that tracked outgoing payments from any computer, funnelled the payment through a system of security checks and then approved or denied the payment based on a percentile risk factor.

After meeting Ho and Jackson, Tom was even more impressed. They were bright young men, neatly dressed in an Ivy League fashion and their employees were not carbon copies of themselves but instead were African, Arab, Chinese, and Indian men and women of various ages. Business awards littered the hallways, and plaques from grateful charities were displayed in the foyer.

The men chatted informally for a long time and revealed to Tom their plans to expand the scope of their operations. They thought they had something to offer big business and government in terms of internet safety. Tom couldn’t follow all their technical language, but the young men seemed confident that their next project would be of as much benefit to organisations worldwide as their first venture had been.

“We can’t, of course, tell you more than that, Tom. I’m sure you understand,” Ho said.

“Yes, I get it, but I just don’t see what use I would be to you.”

“We did our research just as I’m sure you did yours. We know you trained at Duntroon and served in the army and that you built your own business based on not only financial fraud but moral fraud.”

“We know that you alerted East Bank that one of their investments was indirectly funding a firm that exploited coffee bean growers in PNG. And a year later, you uncovered an investment firm that was channelling funds from a Brazilian p**********n ring to a mining giant in the Kimberley,” Jackson chimed in.

“None of that was ever in the press.” Tom looked at them suspiciously.

“No, we delved into what happened when that bank pulled out of an investment with us. You see, we were doing a similar investigation, but we hadn’t dug as deep as you did. Consequently, we made reparations to all those farmers.”

“Yes, I had to go to Port Moresby to find out where funds were mysteriously being diverted. And the Brazilian thing was easy to spot but no one wanted to look,” said Tom.

“Let’s cut to the chase. We are about to make a huge proposal to the Australian government regarding our new product. We think it will revolutionise and make transparent much of how the government, banks, insurance companies, etc. use their money. Our money, that is. We want to show the mouth of the river, the river itself and all its tributaries,” Jackson said.

Ho and Jackson claimed that Tom’s credentials were top notch and that it had become known around the country that he had built his business on his ethical dealings with clients and had a reputation for uncovering frauds that were well hidden in the minutiae of contracts.

“For our proposal to even be considered, we have to make sure we are spotless, no funds going off to places we don’t know about, no shadows over any of our accounts or dealings, nothing hidden. And every cent traced and accounted for. We know we have no skeletons in our closet but it’s no good for us to tell people that, we need an independent and respected report, a moral audit, so to speak,” said Jackson.

“Tom, we want you to investigate us. We’ll pay you a one-off fee of one million up front. We want you to find any and all our faults. We need you to find all our faults,” said Ho.