Tom Clancy - Command Authority

These two pieces of bad news might have slowed down the zeal of many, but they only encouraged Jack to work harder. He soldiered on, and through his work on the theft of Galbraith’s company he discovered that Gazprom had purchased the pieces of the Scottish-owned gas firm from a series of small foreign companies that sprang up out of nowhere to bid in the auction.

To unravel it all, Ryan had a few weapons he could call on. His main tool was SPARK, a corporate investigation database run by Interfax, a Russian NGO news agency that compiled virtually every nugget of information on every company operating in Russia.

Jack didn’t speak Russian—C&B had translators on staff to help him with that—but he’d taught himself Cyrillic in a day, and by now he could sound out the words on the SPARK database quickly and confidently. He’d picked up nearly three hundred Russian words, all related to business, taxes, banking, and corporate structuring. He couldn’t ask for the bathroom or tell a girl she had pretty eyes in Russian, but he could read a notation on SPARK giving the address and square footage of the headquarters of a new start-up company in Kursk doing business with Russia’s nationalized timber industry.

Another tool Jack made use of was IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook. It was a data analysis tool that allowed him to put in all manner of different data sets, and then generate quick visual representations via graphs and charts that he could manipulate to track trends, see relationships between people in a target network, and allow himself a more dynamic way of interpreting whichever environment he was studying.

Pattern analysis had become part and parcel with intelligence work; Jack had used it at The Campus with great effect. But when he started working with Castor and Boyle he immediately saw the need to use similar tactics in business intelligence, and Jack knew good data organized effectively was the most important commodity for any analyst.

After an hour going over the database this morning, feverishly adding notes to his database as well as the two legal pads’ worth of chicken scratch he’d created over his weekend marathon work session, he looked away from his screen to sip the dregs of his cold coffee. Just then, Sandy Lamont leaned into his office. The big blond man had just made it in to work, and he held his day’s first cup of tea in his hand. “Morning, Jack. How was your weekend?”

“It was fine.” He thought for a moment. “Well, it was okay. I worked from home.”

“Why on earth would you do such a thing?”

“You told me going up against Gazprom itself was a losing proposition, so I am digging into the front companies involved in the Galbraith deal, trying to find who actually owns them.”

“That will be tough going, mate. They’ll be owned by trusts and private interest foundations, all in offshore financial havens, and the only names you will find attached to them will be the corporate nominees, not the real ownership.”

“You’re right about that, but I did find that the registered agent for several of the auction winners was the same company.”

Sandy shrugged. “The registered agent is paid to find the nominee to stand in for the real owners on the corporate documents. One register might work with ten thousand companies. Sorry, lad, but you won’t get any valuable information from a registered agent.”

Ryan essentially mumbled the next sentence to himself: “Someone needs to put a gun to the head of the registered agent. I bet he’d suddenly come up with some valuable information.”

Sandy’s eyebrows rose. After a moment he stepped into the office and shut the door. After a sip of his tea he said, “I know it’s a frustrating slog. How ’bout you let me serve as a sounding board so you can talk over what you’re doing?”

“That would be great, thanks.”

Sandy looked at his watch. “Well, I’ve got an appointment in twenty with Hugh Castor, but I’m yours till then. What have you got?”

Jack grabbed a stack of paperwork off his desk and started looking through it while he talked. “Okay. In order to prove the funds stolen in Russia from the auction of Galbraith’s company are now somewhere in the West, where Galbraith can have any chance of laying claim to them, I needed to trace these foreign corporate holdings. We know there is involvement by the Russian government in the theft, so we’ll never get the cash out of Russia itself.”

“Not in a million years.”

“The government accused Galbraith’s gas-extraction concern of owing twelve billion dollars in back taxes. The annual tax bill exceeded revenues.”

Sandy knew the story. “Right. They owed more in taxes than they earned. It was bollocks, but when the crooks own the courts, that’s what you get.”

“That’s correct,” Jack said with a nod. “The tax office gave Galbraith twenty-four hours to come up with the money, which was an impossibility, so the government ordered the company’s assets to be sold and the money collected by the state. A hastily arranged series of auctions was set up, and at each auction, only one company showed up to bid on the assets.”

“How convenient that must have been for them,” Sandy said sarcastically.

“I struck out with most of these phantom companies, but I did learn something about one of them. It’s called International Finance Corporation, LLC. One week before the auction, IFC was registered in Panama and claimed its total listed capital assets to be valued at three hundred eighty-five dollars. Yet they were somehow able to go to a Russian bank and borrow seven billion dollars to bid in their auction.”

“They must have been bloody persuasive,” Sandy said. There was no surprise in his voice about any of this; he was a man well versed in the kleptocracy of Russia.

Ryan continued, reading from notes: “The presumed capital value alone of Galbraith’s assets in this auction was roughly ten billion dollars. The auction took five minutes, and IFC won with their opening bid of six-point-three billion. Four days later, they sold their interest to Gazprom for seven-point-five.”

He looked away from his notes and up at Sandy. “Gazprom makes an easy two and a half billion just in capital acquisition, and the government retains control of the assets, since Gazprom is government-run. The two and a half billion in added value makes Gazprom’s stock go up, and this all gets divvied up between the shareholders of Gazprom.”

Sandy said, “Who just happen to be the siloviki . Fancy that.”

“And, don’t forget, whoever the hell runs IFC made one-point-two billion for their trouble.”

Jack looked back down at his papers. “Since the Galbraith deal, IFC has continued its run of good luck. This little Panamanian-registered firm has branched off into a bunch of different corporate entities, and each one has an uncanny ability to purchase critical infrastructure at knockdown prices, using their newfound wealth to secure bank loans, mostly in Swiss and Russian banks.”

He looked up at Sandy and noticed the man looking down into his mug of tea.

“You following me so far?”

Sandy chuckled. “Sadly, old boy, you aren’t exactly tripping me up with the complexity of the scheme just yet. I see this sort of thing every day.”

Jack looked back down at his papers. “Okay, well, using SPARK, I managed to trace one of these corporate entities through a series of blind P.O. boxes, trusts, and private interest foundations. I finally made my way to a concrete address.”

Sandy Lamont’s eyebrows rose. “Really? Now, that’s something. Where?”

“It’s a liquor store in Tver, a hundred miles northwest of Moscow. I sent an investigator from Moscow to go up and poke around. The people at the store seemed to have no idea what the investigator was talking about, but he feels certain the place is, wittingly or otherwise, serving as a drop box for organized crime.”