Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Sandy Lamont was worried about his young and high-profile employee for a couple of reasons. Number one, since returning from the West Indies, Jack had been working so hard he was starting to look like a bit of a zombie, and Lamont was concerned that one of the principals of his firm might pass young Ryan in the hall and then pull Lamont into his office to read him the riot act for abusing his employee.

And the other reason Sandy was concerned was that he was getting calls from Moscow, all basically saying the same thing. Some of the work they had been doing on behalf of Jack Junior was starting to earn them unwarranted attention from the local authorities.

Jack was back on Gazprom, it was clear from the calls. In the course of his investigation, the young American had been sending investigators from Castor and Boyle’s Moscow office out to tax offices to request records. This was causing trouble at the tax offices, and Sandy knew he needed to gently persuade his highly motivated new employee to take it a little slower for both his own health and the good of C&B Risk Analytics. Sandy knew there would be serious hell to pay once Castor found out Jack was focusing his investigative efforts on the cash cow of the siloviki .

Sandy found Jack right where he knew he would be at the end of the day, hunched over his computer keyboard with his phone to his ear. Sandy waited for the young man to get off the phone with one of the in-house translators, and then he knocked on Jack’s office door.

“Hey, Sandy.”

“Got a minute?”

“Sure. Come on in.”

Sandy came into Jack’s little office, shut the door, and sat in the one other chair in the room. “What are you working on?” he asked, but Sandy knew the answer.

“A Swiss shell that does business with Gazprom.”

Sandy feigned surprise. “Remember, mate, Gazprom was the ultimate beneficiary of the Galbraith theft, true, but they weren’t the ones who stole the company.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Lad, if you buy a piece of property that someone else has stolen, you might be forced to hand it back over if it was acquired illegally, but that doesn’t mean you are a criminal yourself. We need to help Galbraith and his lawyers prove culpability of one of the companies that actually pulled off the deal, not Gazprom, the firm that bought up the assets after the deal was done.”

Ryan said, “This thing is big, Sandy. It might go all the way up to Gazprom and the big shots who own it. I know Castor has some trepidation, so I’m proceeding as carefully as I possibly can.”

Sandy knew he had his work cut out for him trying to get his energetic analyst to take his foot off the gas pedal. He stifled a sigh. “What have you learned?”

Ryan said, “In all the data I found in the paperwork from Randolph Robinson’s garbage, I came across one document for Shoal Bank, the bank we think is owned by the people behind IFC. It was an account transfer from a company in Germany to Shoal Bank. I looked into that company, and from shareholder information I just swam upstream, following names, addresses, looking into holding companies it deals with and loan signatories for purchases it’s made.”

“What sort of company is this?”

“Germany buys natural gas from Gazprom. This Swiss-registered German firm receives the payments from the German government, and then processes the payments for Gazprom.”

“ Processes them?”

Jack chuckled. “Yeah. They are just an intermediary. Germany wires money to the Swiss account of this company, and then they wire it on to Russia, minus their processing charge. Gazprom uses them for no discernible reason.”

Sandy said, “Clearly, the reason is to overcharge the Germans for their gas so that someone gets a payoff.”

“Yep,” Jack said. “But it’s even worse than that. I found the Germans, on Gazprom’s request, made a ten-million-dollar payment to a consulting company in Geneva, and they used Shoal Bank of Saint John’s to do it. There are attempts to obfuscate the owners of the consulting company, I’m still working on that, but I’m sure it is nothing more than a shell, or a shell of a shell. It was a kickback of some kind. As near as I can tell, the only reason this Geneva firm is around is to facilitate below-board payments.”

“Makes paying bribes extra-easy,” Sandy said. “Companies like that only exist on paper, and they produce nothing but illegal invoices.”

“Right,” said Jack. “Some German official who okayed the natural-gas contract with Gazprom sets up an untraceable company in Geneva so his own country can pay him off.”

Ryan knew Sandy had been at this a lot longer than he had, and he was going to be hard to surprise. He said, “And this is just one payment, for ten million. Over four billion has gone from the Germans to Gazprom via this Swiss intermediary. There is no telling how much has been skimmed and where it all has gone.”

Sandy said, “Well done, lad. When old man Castor told me I’d have Jack Ryan, Jr., working under me, I thought you’d be just a pretty face with a powerful name. Now I’m starting to look over my shoulder thinking you might be sitting in my seat before too long.”

Ryan appreciated the compliment, but he had the sense he was being buttered up for some reason. He said, “I inherited a lot of curiosity from my dad. I love digging into a good mystery, but to tell you the truth, all I want to do is solve these riddles. I have no ambition of running a department, much less a company.”

Sandy replied, “I was a pit bull myself back in the day. This was the late nineties, Russia was a different animal then. Blokes with gold chains shooting each other in the back of the head. Might seem grim now with all the financial shysters about, but nothing like the nineties.”

“Well, we did get jumped the other day in Antigua.”

“You’ve got a point there. That was all the rough stuff I ever want to see.” Lamont prepared himself to start his lecture, but Jack interrupted.

“Anyway, I found something else in the Robinson data. I found a note stating Shoal Bank’s board of directors flew to Zug, Switzerland, on March first of this year for a meeting with the bank there. I decided the key to blowing the entire gas deal open is finding out who showed up from the board.”

Lamont’s eyebrows rose. “Travel records?”

“Yes, but it’s tricky.”

“I would suspect so. The nearest airport is Zurich, and there must be a hundred flights a day.”

Ryan nodded. “I looked at the commercial flights that arrived from any point in Russia in the seventy-two hours before the meeting. I just checked first class because, well, because these people were involved in a one-point-two-billion-dollar swindle, so I figured if they went commercial, they weren’t back in steerage.”

“Safe assumption.”

“There were CEOs and CFOs flying into Zurich all day long, but nobody with the connections or the juice to be involved in this level of an operation.”

Lamont said, “I assume you checked out private jets.”

“Of course. I figured from the beginning I’d probably need to investigate private jets. I looked into all the declared flights, but not very hard, because I figured these guys would be coming in on a blocked flight.”

“What is that?”

“The FAA of Switzerland is called Skyguide. Skyguide can block a flight so that the public can’t find out any trace of it. We have the same thing in the USA. All you have to do is ask nicely and FAA will hide the identity of your private aircraft and its flight path. Businesses need to be able to conduct business without their competitors tracking the movements of the CEO, movie stars want to avoid paparazzi, plus, there are security concerns.”