Sandy thought it over for a moment. “The quick-and-easy answer is the real owner of this constellation of enterprises has a connection to Antigua.”
“What sort of connection?”
“Citizenship would be my guess.”
Ryan looked at Lamont as though he’d lost his mind. “Sandy, I hate to be accused of racial profiling, but I can promise you the oligarch, government bigwig, or mob boss who just made one-point-two billion dollars in a Kremlin-backed scheme in Vladivostok was not born in some Third World town in the West Indies.”
Sandy shook his head. “No, Ryan. Didn’t say he hails from there. Antigua is one of the few nations where you can show up on a plane, hand someone some cash . . . I’d say fifty thousand U.S. dollars would cover it, and then get yourself a brand-new passport. They hand out citizenship for a price.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“A few reasons. Probably the most relevant is that only citizens of a nation can open up banks in that nation.”
Jack was thoroughly confused now. “Why would you open your own bank? Even with banking secrecy laws inside a nation, if you want to do business with another bank—and banks pretty much have to do business with other banks—the other bank needs to be able to trust you. Some shady Russian with a suspicious passport isn’t going to be transferring cash to Citibank from the Antigua Bank of Ivan or whatever the hell he calls it.”
Sandy laughed. “I love your energy, Jack, but you are a babe in these woods, aren’t you? You are correct, many offshore banks lack the licenses to trade with the big boys, but there are ways around that. The Antigua Bank of Ivan, as you call it, just needs to find itself an intermediary bank, someone just slightly better positioned in the banking world that is willing to do business with shady characters. A handsome bribe to a bank official should do the trick. That intermediary will transfer Ivan’s funds to another intermediary—by now we should have the money upstream to Switzerland or Liechtenstein or Madeira, somewhere still nontransparent but more respected than bloody Antigua. And from here the money can go anywhere—USA, UK, or, as I would venture to guess in the Galbraith Energy case, back to Russia.”
“Why would it go back to Russia?”
The Englishman said, “It’s a classic money-laundering scheme called round-tripping. Basically, they take money earned from corruption—theft of property, bribes, organized-crime proceeds, whatever—then they send the money to holding companies in one of these offshore financial centers, where the money is moved to another holding company and then back into Russia as clean funds in the form of foreign investments.”
“Damn,” muttered Ryan. “I still have a lot to learn.”
“You do, lad. But you’re a quick study.” Lamont looked at his watch. “All of this is very interesting, from an academic point of view, but these shell companies pop up and disappear with such ease, if you don’t have a handle on the actual ownership structure, meaning names of real people, you’ll never get anywhere near the money. We’ll never know who is on the board of this IFC company, or any of its entities. They work very, very hard to keep that information secret, and they are bloody good at it. You’ve seen all the documentation.”
Jack’s eyes slowly began to relight. “I have. All the documents are designed to hide the owner, but what if we know where his bank is?”
Sandy scratched his head. “What are you on about?”
“All these companies in Antigua I mentioned. They are all registered in the same building.”
“Not uncommon at all. There will be a registered agent, a company that can help you get a passport, lawyers to help you set up your tax-haven accounts. They will use a physical address set up just for that purpose. No real affiliation with the ownership.”
Jack said, “The bank will be close by, won’t it?”
“It won’t be a retail location, lad. No cash machine and tellers. It will just exist on paper, with accounts in other transfer banks. There will be a lawyer who set the whole thing up, but these guys don’t exactly advertise on the Internet or post on Facebook. They play this game quietly.”
Jack said, “I want to look at the registered agent more closely. I mean, see the building for myself.”
Sandy shrugged. “Sure. I do that, just for fun. Google Maps will get you a picture of the building.”
Jack shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. I want to go down there. Poke around a little.”
Lamont just stared for a moment. “Physically? You want to physically go?”
“Sure.”
“Why not hire a local investigator in Antigua to go for you?”
“Sandy, you said yourself I’m still a babe in the woods. I can read the paperwork or study the structure of the shells on SPARK, and I can hire someone to investigate in country, but I’ll get a better understanding of it all if I just fly down there on my own. Take a day or two to see the locations, get a feel for these offshore operations. Maybe even learn something about IFC Holdings and the other entities with corporate addresses there.”
Sandy didn’t like the idea. He tried once more to dissuade Ryan. “What do you plan on doing? Looking through the bloody garbage of the registration agent?”
Jack smiled. “That’s a good idea.”
Sandy blew out a long sigh. “I don’t think you understand what you’re dealing with. I’ve been on-site before. Trust me, mate, these sketchy Third World financial operations centers will be protected by some rough-and-tumble characters. On top of this, there are mob and drug gangs down there who have a vested interest in keeping the prying eyes of foreign investigators away from the companies they use to launder their proceeds. You are the son of the President of the United States. You aren’t used to mixing it up with hooligans.”
Jack did not answer.
“You might not get the full picture from a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint, but it’s a lot safer to sit at your desk and learn what you can.”
“Sandy, tourists go down to Antigua and Barbuda all the time. I’m not planning on pushing my luck. Trust me, I’ll fit right in.”
Sandy leaned his head back in the chair and stared at the ceiling for a long time. Finally he said, “If you do this, I can’t let you go alone.”
Jack had been thinking the same thing. “Then come with me.”
Sandy hesitated some more, but Ryan could tell his English colleague was already thinking about beaches and piña coladas. “All right. We’ll fly down and take a look, but at the first sign of trouble we pack it in and run back to the lobby bar of our hotel, understood?”
“Understood, Sandy.” He held his hand up for a high five and said, “Road trip!”
Sandy looked at the hand in the air. “I beg your pardon?”
Jack lowered his hand. He’d overestimated the moment. “It will be fun. You better pack some sunscreen, though—you don’t look like you’d last long in the Caribbean without it.”
Sandy Lamont couldn’t help laughing.
15
It was past ten p.m. at the Emmitsburg, Maryland, farm of John Clark. John and his wife, Sandy, had spent the evening watching a rented movie, and they were getting ready for bed when the phone on the nightstand rang.
Clark scooped it up.
“Hello?”
“John Clark, please.”
“Speaking.”
“Hi, Mr. Clark. Sorry to disturb you so late. This is Keith Bixby, calling from U.S. embassy, Kiev.”
Clark ran the name through the massive database of contacts in his mind. It didn’t ring a bell, and, as far as he knew, he didn’t know anyone working in Kiev at the moment.
Before he could admit he’d drawn a blank, Bixby said, “Jimmy Hardesty suggested I give you a call.” Hardesty was CIA, he and Clark went back decades, and Clark trusted Hardesty.
“I see. What do you do at the embassy there, Keith?”
“I’m cultural attaché to the ambassador.”
This meant, to Clark, that Bixby was the CIA’s chief of sta
tion in Ukraine, and it also meant, to Clark, that Bixby was freely giving him this information. He would know that Clark would know he was COS.
“Got it,” said Clark, not missing a beat. “What can I do for you?”
“A name came up in my work over here, and we didn’t have much on the guy, so I did some digging. As I’m sure you know, Jimmy is the chief archivist at your former employer, and he’s pretty much my go-to guy when I have a question of this nature.”
“Understandable.”
“Jimmy didn’t have any more on this personality I’m looking at than I do, but he suggested I check with you. He says he recollects you might have run into him in your . . . travels.”
“Who’s the personality?”
“A Russian guy, I’d put him about fifty-five to sixty-five years old, an organized-crime big shot from Saint Petersburg, known as Scar.”
Clark said, “Haven’t heard that name in a while.”
“So you know him?”
“I know a little about him . . . but I don’t know you. Nothing personal, but let me give Hardesty a buzz, and I’ll call you back.”
Bixby said, “If you’d said anything else, I would have thought you were slipping.”
Clark chuckled into the phone. “Only physically, not mentally.”
“I doubt that. Let me give you my direct number.”
After Clark hung up, he called James Hardesty, established the bona fides of Keith Bixby, and confirmed the man was, in fact, chief of CIA’s Kiev Station. Hardesty spoke highly of the man, and Clark knew the CIA’s archivist was a hell of a judge of both ability and character.
Five minutes later, John Clark was back on the phone with Keith Bixby.
“Jimmy says you are both legit and a stand-up guy, but I want to make sure I’m talking to the right person. When and where did you last have a beer with Jimmy?”
Bixby did not hesitate. “A year ago last month. Crowne Plaza, McLean. I was in town for some meetings. I had a Shock Top and Jimmy had a Bud Light, if I’m not mistaken.”
Clark laughed. “Okay, you pass. Jimmy was surprised I didn’t know you already.”
“Keeping my ass under the radar has served me in my career to this point,” Bixby said. “I’ve probably slammed into the ceiling already working out in the sticks, but the seventh floor has never called to me like it has some of my colleagues.”
“You and me are cut from the same cloth. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, but keep in mind my intel is going to be several years old.”
“Fresher than anything I’ve got. Who is he?”
“I knew him as Gleb the Scar. A mob boss, but you probably know that already.”
“I had my suspicions. Can I send you a photo to see if you can ID him?”
“I’m afraid there is no need. I’ve never seen him.”
“Wow. He really is low-profile.”
Clark said, “He’s camera shy, but I do know something of his CV. He was born in Dzhankoi, in the Crimea, Ukraine, but he’s ethnic Russian. He moved to Saint Petersburg in the early nineties after doing a stint in a gulag for some mob murders, and then came out of Siberia tougher than when he went in.”
“Don’t they all?”
“Pretty much. He is an underboss in Saint Pete, working for one of the largest Slavic crime gangs, the Seven Strong Men: extortion, smuggling, heavy-handed things. I was running Rainbow for NATO several years back when his organization turned up on our radar. A group of armed gunmen busted into the city administration building, they were after some municipal ministers. A typical mob hit. But the police response was uncharacteristically fast, and the gunmen were surrounded. They took hostages. After two days of negotiations, we were called, and we came over from the UK. We monitored calls out of the building, and intercepted comms between the gunmen and their leader, none other than this Gleb the Scar character. He ordered them not to surrender, to stay and fight. It sounded to us like he was sacrificing them so they couldn’t implicate him in the hit.”
Clark continued, “Rainbow went in, we cleaned them out. We saved all the remaining hostages, but they’d executed three of the state ministers and a half a dozen building security. We took a couple of light casualties of our own on the takedown.” Clark paused, thinking back with regret on the incident. “It wasn’t as clean as we would have liked it to be. If we had gotten the green light from the Russians a few hours quicker, we could have saved a lot more lives.”
“And Gleb was never captured?”
“Negative. He likes to send his people to do all his dirty work. He’s a big shot, a hands-off type. Stays as clean as possible while letting the little fish take the risks.”
Bixby hesitated for a long moment. “Well, that’s interesting, because he’s over here in Kiev now, and he seems to be very much an on-scene commander.”
“That’s odd. From what I remember about him, Kiev wasn’t his turf. The Seven Strong Men aren’t active there, are they?”
“No, they aren’t. They run the show inside of Russia, and they are big in Belarus, but if they are operating here in Ukraine, that is a new development. Gleb was photographed with a crew of young guys who looked like ex-Spetsnaz. They were meeting with Chechen mob guys here in the city.”
“That really doesn’t track with what I remember about Gleb the Scar. His crew was all Slav. Before Volodin came in and cracked down on the mafia, Georgian and Chechen OC was all over the place in Russia. But the Gleb I remember didn’t have any dealings with them.”
“Maybe he’s become less bigoted as he’s gotten older.”
Clark chuckled. “My guess is he’s taking orders from someone who sent him on this mission. Moving to Kiev, running with ex-mil, working with ethnic OC. It doesn’t sound like Seven Strong Men, it sounds like a whole new business plan.”
“That’s a distressing thought, Clark.”
“Yeah, you got problems. You need to find out who he’s reporting to—that son of a bitch will be your real troublemaker.”
Bixby blew out a long sigh.
Clark thought the man was disappointed in the intel Clark had passed on. “I wish I could be more help.”
“No, you’ve helped a great deal. You’ve given me some things to think about.”
“Hope you can do more than think about them.”
Bixby chuffed into the phone. “As I’m sure you can imagine, Kiev has turned into a hotbed of intelligence activity in the past few months, with all the issues brewing between the Kremlin and Ukraine. Gleb the Scar is a person of interest, but really only a curiosity at this point, because I’m short on resources. He is going to have to do something really impressive to make himself a high-value target.”
“I understand,” said Clark, but he found himself damn curious about what a high-ranking Russian mobster was doing working in Kiev, apparently slumming as an order-taker for someone else.
“Thanks for your help.”
“Anytime at all, Bixby. Keep your head down over there. If the news reports are right, you are right in the middle of the next world flash point.”
“I wish I could say the media is exaggerating, but things at ground level look pretty bleak.”
16
Russian television was not officially state-controlled, as it had been during the time of the Soviet Union, but it was effectively state-controlled, as the largest networks were all owned by Gazprom, which not coincidentally happened to be partly owned by President Volodin and other members of the siloviki.
Those stations and newspapers that were not owned by the powers in the Kremlin were subject to constant harassment, scurrilous lawsuits, and absurd tax bills that took years to contest. More ominous than these measures to keep the media outlets in line, physical threats and acts of violence against journalists who broke ranks from the official propaganda were commonplace. Beatings, kidnappings, and even assassinations had greatly stifled the notion of a free press in Russia.
On the rare occasion when someone was arrested for a crime against
a journalist, the accused was discovered to be a thug in a pro-Kremlin youth group, or a foreign-born henchman for a low-level mobster. In other words, no crimes against the fourth estate were ever linked back to the FSB or the Kremlin.
The vanguard of the Kremlin’s public-relations posture was Channel Seven, Novaya Rossiya, or New Russia. Broadcast in Russia and around the globe in seventeen languages, it served effectively as the Kremlin’s mouthpiece.
This was not to say Novaya Rossiya was always pro-Kremlin in its reporting. To create an air of impartiality, the network ran news pieces that were somewhat critical of the government. But these were mostly trifling matters. “Hit pieces” on corrupt politicians, but only those who’d fallen out of favor with Volodin, or on niggling municipal and state matters, such as garbage collection, union rallies, and other less consequential matters where the network could portray itself as objective.
But when it came to matters of national importance, especially revolving around Valeri Volodin and policies in which he personally intervened, New Russia’s prejudices showed through. Almost every night there were long “investigative journalism” reports concerning the conflict in Georgia and the potential for conflict in Ukraine. The Estonian government, which was staunchly pro-Western and a NATO member state, was a near-constant target of the station; seemingly every possible innuendo of financial, criminal, or sexual impropriety had been ascribed to the leadership in Tallinn. A poorly educated but faithful viewer of New Russia’s evening broadcast could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the Estonians were nothing more than a nation of thieves and deviants.
Although the moniker “Volodin’s megaphone” had been given to the network as a pejorative, on occasion this became an especially relevant description, because Volodin himself often appeared live on set during the Evening News.
And tonight was one of those evenings. With no hint that it would be coming, the producers of the six p.m. news broadcast received a call from the Kremlin at five-thirty in the afternoon, announcing that President Valeri Volodin was, at that moment, climbing into his car at the Kremlin and would be arriving shortly to conduct an interview live on the Evening News. The topic, the producers were informed by the Kremlin, would be the assassination of Stanislav Biryukov by the CIA, and the just-announced alleged polonium poisoning of Sergey Golovko in the United States.