REVENGE of the DEAD E-Book

Tom Crown

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

All we wanted to do was get even for some crooked business practices, but when the Chinese economy was nearing collapse, we were afraid it was our fault.

Leseprobe

Tom Crown

REVENGE of the DEAD

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

The Start

I handed Ken the check for $500,000, Ken and his wife signed the paperwork, and our arrangement was finalized. I invited Ken and Jody to, ’Come out on the patio and enjoy the sunset. Dinner will be served shortly.’ With the proceeds from mortgaging their home, their sons’ college funds, and what he could borrow from relatives, Ken now had the million he needed to make his company expand and grow. When the maid announced that dinner was served, we sat down to the dinner that my chef had prepared. ‘Ken, in five years with your efforts and your family’s help, you’ll have paid me back and the company will be all yours. In ten years you and Jody will have the penthouse next door and the boys will be in Harvard or Yale. Enjoy the Champagne!’ I should never have made that prediction.

Five years later, Ken was dead, Jody had had a total breakdown, and Carl, their son, had been killed in Afghanistan. And both Ken’s and my half million were gone.

We had found Ken and his small company – we – that’s me, my staff of one researcher, a computer ex-hacker turned search and security genius and two secretaries. I won’t use my name or the name of my company. I don’t want the United States government agencies knocking on our doors again. We want to remain anonymous and invisible. So let’s say, ‘My Name, LLC’ is the name of the company, Athena Kurdopolis, is our researcher, and Mark Xiu, is our computer guru. That’s not their names, either.

‘My Name, LLC’ finds small sometimes struggling, sometimes successful companies, and helps make them large, successful, and very profitable companies. We don’t need you coming to us, that’s one reason we keep a very low profile, the more anonymous the better. We work in the background of the Internet, always searching for the ‘Ten Hitter,’ the company that can provide a return of $10 for every dollar invested. It really is a ‘Win-Win’ game we play, companies grow, there are more jobs, and a better, less expensive product is available. Customers, workers, and owners all participate. And so do the people with enough capital to risk to build the company. So when we found Ken with a great industrial product that could be made efficiently with the process he devised and patented, his company had all the earmarks of success.

Unit 61398 of the Peoples’ Liberation Army of the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of China is the source of the largest amount of industrial, military, and political espionage that the world has ever seen. Espionage is carried out by accessing computer systems throughout the English-speaking world. This is possible because the original design for what became the Internet, DARPA, was a communication system intended to allow a few giant computers at Universities and government installations to share information quickly and without restriction. The ‘Without Restriction’ is the killer. No one expected DARPA to mutate into YouTube, World of Warfare, and the “Cloud”, and to allow your wife to buy shoes on line. We now have Public Key Encryption to keep information like account numbers secret. Good, but not perfect.