David Duffy - In for a Ruble

Dinner was a solitary affair—me, takeout Chinese washed down by Russian vodka and Czech beer, Herbie Nichols on the CD player, and Ibansk.com on the computer. Nichols is an overlooked hard-bop pianist who didn’t make many records, but the ones he did get down swing harder than Paul Bunyan’s ax.

Ivanov swings his own ax, and tonight Efim Konychev was again the target.

Whither Efim Konychev?

New York, Ivanov’s told. Washington too. Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles as well.

Nothing odd about that, you say? Well, for one thing, Konychev hasn’t been seen since the Tverskaya attack. In hiding, Ivanov hears. For another, civil war reigns among the partners of the Baltic Enterprise Commission. A bad time to be out of town, but maybe right now the rest of the world is safer than staying home.

Intriguing to Ivanov—for the last three years the United States has denied Konychev entry. We hear the Kremlin at its highest levels intervened with the U.S. authorities more than once on Konychev’s behalf. No dice—repeated visa applications, made through the U.S. Department of State, were returned to Moscow DOA—dead on arrival, as they say in America, “dead” there having a different meaning than here in Ibansk. Alleged involvement in organized crime is the reason given by the U.S. Department of Justice. (For his part, Ivanov, of course, remains shocked—SHOCKED!—at the idea of organized crime in Ibansk.)

So what’s changed?

The Department of Homeland Security appears to have taken up his case. Konychev’s recent visits have been under special dispensation from DHS—and against the wishes of the State Department. Why DHS wants Konychev in America is a mystery—unless the oligarch had made some kind of a deal.

But, Ivanov asks, what kind of deal could Konychev offer the U.S. government agency charged with protecting American soil?

A question sufficiently stimulating to engage Ivanov’s efforts. Don’t stray far.

I searched the Ibansk database for mentions of Konychev, Alexander Lishin, and the BEC. It returned more than two hundred posts. Some contained just a mention, in others, Ivanov ran on at his histrionic and long-winded best. I sent the full lot to the printer while I finished my takeout, rinsed the dishes, and opened another Pilsner Urquell. Then I settled in on the sofa with the beer, a thick stack of printed pages, and a notepad. Two hours and another Pilsner later I had as good a picture of the BEC as one was likely to get.

Konychev and Lishin were the founding partners. Konychev had already made one fortune in TV and radio. He was one of the first to appreciate the Web’s potential for criminal enterprise and, more significantly, that criminals would need places—holes in the cyberspace wall, if you will—to run their scams from. Lishin, according to Ivanov, was the technical genius, the man who connected servers spread all over Eastern Europe, and more important, told them what to do when ordered.

The genius of the BEC is that, technically, it does nothing illegal itself. It simply provides services—Web hosting, data storage—to those who need them. Spammers need memory and processing power to send all those billions of e-mails advertising everything from cheap drugs to bigger body parts. Phishers need the same capabilities from which to con unsuspecting recipients— Danger! Your account is about to be closed! —into giving up their user names, passwords, and Social Security numbers. Higher-tech crooks have similar requirements—putting together zombie networks to launch distributed denial of service attacks, the basis for their blackmail schemes, aimed at shutting down companies’ or countries’ Web presences by swamping them with bogus inquiries. Ditto pornographers.

The thing about computers, they don’t care what they do. Memory is memory, it can store whatever it’s ordered to store. A CPU is a CPU, it can run any app it’s given. Having set up the technical infrastructure, the incremental cost to the BEC of expanding into other lines was virtually nil. Konychev built the client contacts, Lishin built out the network and the software. All kinds of Internet scum were only too happy to avail themselves of BEC facilities. The BEC blew through the dot-com crash in 2000, and when the global economy sunk like the Titanic in 2008, the BEC kept swimming in a rising sea of cash. The business just kept growing.

That inevitably attracted the Kremlin’s attention. In most Western countries—those governed by the rule of law, for instance—the government would have invested money and manpower trying to shut such a network down and prosecute those behind it. In Russia, where rule of force equals rule of law, the Kremlin summoned Konychev and Lishin to a meeting and put a deal on the table. Cut us in or spend the next twenty years in a cell down the hall from Khodorkovsky in Siberia.

They were quick to agree. A third partner joined the firm, Taras Batkin. His Cheka background and Kremlin contacts gave the BEC another layer of insulation. Business grew faster than ever. Somewhere along the line, Konychev’s younger sister, Alyona, who had been married to Lishin for more than a decade, took up with Batkin. The divorce and new marriage, about six months apart, had taken place three years earlier, apparently without incident. Nobody wanted to upset the apple cart carrying the golden goose, or so my cynical mind suggested. I put the mixed metaphor down to too much Pilsner Urquell.

I finished reading and went back to the computer. Ivanov had no pictures of either Lishin or his ex-wife, but he did have one of Konychev, accompanying his latest post. Taken with a long telephoto lens, it showed the same man I’d seen on Tverskaya, wearing an overcoat and scarf, climbing out of the backseat of another armored Mercedes. A bodyguard held the door from behind, another stood in front, partially blocking the camera’s view. His hand reached under his overcoat, no doubt wrapped around a large caliber firearm. Konychev looked straight at the camera, unaware of its presence. Handsome face, soft features, intelligent eyes. Hard to read much into them.

Something behind his head caught my attention, and I leaned in for a closer look. The number of the building, large brass digits affixed to a marble façade—140. The same “1” and “4” and “0” that adorned the exterior of 140 West Forty-eighth Street—Leitz’s building. That could be coincidence, plenty of buildings with the number “140” in plenty of cities. Maybe even one or two that used the same stencils. The Mercedes had New York plates. Still, Konychev could be going to visit any one of a score of tenants. He could have been going to the building next door. Everything about his presence in New York could have been coincidence, but I was ready to bet my newly acquired Repin that Konychev was paying a visit to Sebastian Leitz.

I got up at my usual 6:00 A.M. and ran a half mile downtown until I found a pay phone I hadn’t hit in a while. I used a prepaid card to dial Aleksei’s office in Moscow.

“Good morning,” I said. “Feel like coffee? I’m buying.”

A brief pause, then, “Give me forty-five minutes. Usual place?”

“Fine.”

I continued my run, five miles through the cold, dark, empty streets, thinking about the Leitzes, Efim Konychev, the honesty of my client, and how far I wanted to take this. A million dollars is a million dollars, I reminded myself more than once, and I still had a clear vision of Suprematist Composition on Leitz’s wall that I could transfer easily enough to my own. A stiff wind kept me away from the rivers, I ran fast and was early getting back so I reversed direction and trotted up to City Hall where I found another pay phone and dialed another number, this one belonging to a disposable cell phone.