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APPROACHING ZERO

It was clearly time for the unit to throw its resources into tracking down the author of the trojan.

The publishers of PC Business World told the police they had sold this particular mailing list for about £1,000 to a Mr E. Ketema of Ketema & Associates, who purported to be an African businessman representing a Nigerian software company. The transaction had been carried out by post; no one had ever met Ketema.

Ketema & Associates operated out of an accommodation address in Bond Street, London. Company documents revealed that the firm had three other directors, supposedly Nigerian: Kitian Mekonen, Asrat Wakjiri and Fantu Mekesse. The owners of the accommodation bureau had never seen the three Nigerians, but they had met a Mr Ketema. Far from being an African businessman, he was described as white, bearded and probably American.

Computer Unit detectives then turned their attention to PC Cyborg Corporation of Panama City. Through inquiries to the Panamanian police, it was discovered that the company had been registered a year previously. The Panamanians had also found out that the company had a local telephone number.

Waiting until the early evening in London, when it would be 10 a.m. in Panama, a detective put a call through and was rewarded by the sound of an American voice when the phone was answered. ‘Mr Ketema?’ asked the detective tentatively. ‘Who?’ answered the voice. It turned out to be an American marine. On that very day Panama had been invaded.²

Simultaneous inquiries in Nigeria did not turn up any evidence of the three Nigerian businessmen who were registered as directors of Ketema & Associates. Indeed, the Unit discovered that the three names didn’t sound very Nigerian at all. They might just have been made up.

Despite the dead ends, the Computer Unit’s detectives were by then convinced they were chasing one man. Probably one American man.

The arrest happened almost by accident. New Scotland Yard had routinely circulated details of the case to Interpol, the international police intelligence agency. Four days before Christmas in 1989, just two weeks after the diskettes had been posted from London, the

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