There were, however, lines that Jia and her men were not willing to cross. Clients demanding weapons were told ‘no’, clients demanding paedophilia were told ‘sure’ – and then their virtual lives were hacked into tiny pieces, evidence handed over to the authorities, and their actual lives destroyed.

The Company’s reputation for secure and high-performance delivery soon turned it into a world-class organisation. In the beginning, clients brought their legal business with them to mask their illegal purchases, but when the firm began delivering slicker products than its competition, and solving unsolvable tech problems, it found itself with new and lucrative accounts that were only interested in its software development skills. They built niche apps, taking a chance on ideas that mainstream venture capitalists would pass on. From social media to salah, their cultural knowledge gave them insight into the markets of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, countries whose tech users were hungry for relevant content. Living in extended family systems gave these users deep pockets and made them early adopters of technology. Then there was the billion-dollar Muslim market. Jia’s company understood their needs instinctively.

New business was always carefully scrutinised before being taken on. Users were given unique invite codes to websites only after vetting procedures had been carried out. As the clean money stream flowed in, it laundered the black money that flowed alongside it.

Clients that were trying to break into emerging markets across South Asia found themselves in a multilingual, highly skilled hub, working with men and women with chameleon-like abilities to switch cultures. Eventually, what had started as a front organisation soon became a lucrative business.

It was only six months before employees were being headhunted by multinationals, start-ups and Silicon Valley’s biggest exports. Jia was clever. Because dirty money secretly holds hands with clean, she encouraged the men and women to take up the offers, knowing that they were planting the seeds of a powerful network. The Company celebrated their success. The plan to expand the network and make it global in the next ten years was right on track. No one asked questions. The police stayed away; the streets were being cleaned. The unemployment figures were going down. No one knew what was really going on. They were running the country’s biggest drugs delivery operation all from the centre of this city.

Jia had agreed with Idris that the best place to hide something was in plain sight. ‘The best cons are the biggest ones,’ she told her cousins. ‘The ones that everyone can see but can’t prove. People won’t believe we have the guts to be so brazen. They’ll see it and ignore it. And the ones that won’t, we buy them. Buy enough people and they’ll drown out the voice of dissent.’ By the end of the year they were cleaning money for international syndicates and some of the world’s biggest crime families.