Christopher Jones - The Silent Oligarch

For perhaps a full minute Tourna sat pulling at his lip.

“What happens to your fees?”

Webster fielded it. “We’ve spent a lot of money so far because we had to have a lot of people doing a lot of work. Where this case is now, the only person billing hours to it is me. We’ll probably need some surveillance as well. We’re going to need to know where Lock is and what he’s doing. When he comes west. But we can scale back the monthly payment quite hard. The success arrangement remains the same.”

“How long do you think you need?”

“I’d say two months,” said Webster, “perhaps one.”

“What if Lock doesn’t go for it?”

“No harm done,” said Webster. Hammer nodded.

Tourna thought for a moment longer, pulling at his lip again.

“This is the only way,” said Webster.

Tourna nodded. “OK. Let’s do it. I want a cap on surveillance, though. I know what that shit can cost. If I need to follow my second wife I’ll just give her the money in alimony. It’s about the same.” He gave another short laugh and stood up to leave. “Mr. Webster. Mr. Hammer, nice to meet you. Do this for me, gentlemen. At any time this looks like it’s not working, stop the clock, yes? I know you’re having fun but not at my expense, OK?” Hammer smiled.

Webster saw Tourna out and then returned to the boardroom. Hammer was still there, still smiling.

“What was that about the Bureau?” said Webster, half enjoying one of Ike’s occasional surprises, half irritated by it.

“Sorry. I meant to tell you before he arrived. I called when you were in Berlin.”

“Are they interested?”

“Oh yes,” said Hammer. “They are.”

NO ONE COULD get you in the air, thought Lock. No one could point out your mistakes. No one could politely criticize your performance. Best of all, no one could treat you with that embarrassed delicacy that suggested you were already incurable.

It was only a brief recess. Four hours from Paris to Moscow in the sun above the clouds. Then at Sheremetyevo airport he would switch his BlackBerry back on and it would all start again. The calls from Cayman, from Cyprus, from Gibraltar, everyone nervous about those people from Ikertu; e-mails from Kesler and Griffin about the horrors of Paris and what on earth we do next; maybe for good measure a call or two from a journalist late to the party. He wondered which had been the worst moment of this relentlessly grim week: being unpicked piece by piece by the acid Mr. Lionel Greene, QC; learning from his secretary that Malin had asked to see him immediately on his return; or being told by the dependable and normally untroubled Herr Rast, the oldest and calmest of Lock’s cohorts in Switzerland, that the Zurich prosecutor had been asking him questions about Faringdon and Langland. Probably the call from Rast, by a shade. Greene had done his worst, and at least Malin was the devil he knew; Swiss prosecutors, however, were a new and frightening apparition.

God, these Queen’s Counsels were good. As he looked at the virgin world of sunshine and deep blue and pure white outside his window it occurred to him that he had been in awe of Greene, and that even while he was being savaged a small part of him had been held rapt by his agility, his utter sureness. Lock wondered whether, in another life, he could ever have been that good. He wasn’t sure he had the appetite to scoop all the meat from a man’s bones as Greene had done to him, like a surgeon eating a crab.

There were faint reasons for hope; Kesler, at least, was forcing himself to be optimistic. Lock may have failed to convince anyone that he was an oil tycoon but Tourna had failed to demonstrate that he had been defrauded. Paris was unlikely to be the end of it by any means. Kesler had also reminded Lock that it was not his plausibility that was on trial, which was just as well, and that none of it would be reported in the press. And that was the greatest relief.

But Malin. Christ. Lock wondered how much he would know. Presumably Kesler would report how the hearing had gone, and it was in his interests to spare the direst details. But that wouldn’t be like Kesler. He could feel the shame of it all rising from his chest into his throat.

Still, at least it was done, and he wouldn’t have to do it again. Malin would be angry, that was certain, but there was little he could do. Little he could say, perhaps, since hadn’t he, after all, hired Lock in the first place for this ridiculous job? Ultimately Malin was responsible, in every sense. Lock smiled, without enthusiasm.

He looked at his watch. Half past ten by French time, half past one in Russia. A respectable time for another drink. He finished the one in front of him.

To distract himself, he took a notebook from his briefcase, cleared pretzel wrappers from the flimsy drop-down table, passed all the rubbish across the empty seat beside him to a stewardess and asked her for more gin. He opened the book at a fresh page and took a pen from his pocket. He started with the date, and was about to write “Dossier” before he decided that was imprudent and changed it to “Ideas.” Then he sat for a while, looking at the words, waiting for inspiration to come, doodling on the opposite page. Under his original heading he drew three boxes and annotated each: What Malin Knows, What I Know and What I Need to Know. Concentrating now, he wrote in each box. The last slowly began to fill up.

What he needed to know was where the money came from. This was difficult. What he saw was only the first layer. His offshore companies received transfers from a dozen companies incorporated all over Russia, and it was only beyond these that real businesses generated the money itself. From sitting in a thousand meetings Lock knew roughly what these did: they overcharged their captive, state-owned clients for goods and services; they bought product cheap and sold it on at market rates; they secured licenses that they never intended to use and could sell on at vast profit. But that was all. He had never been shown the workings.

Finally he drew a fourth box: Where That Information Exists. He thought for a while. Malin’s head; it existed there. He wrote it down. Government files. Probably, somewhere, deep inside some unimaginable part of the Kremlin, there was a file that he and many others would dearly love to see. Where else? Malin’s office at the ministry. Malin’s home? Possibly. He wrote that down. Chekhanov’s office. What about the Russian lawyers? Yes, there might be something there.

Chekhanov’s office. Everything must be in that office, surely? If you were going to pick someone to testify against Malin, it would be Chekhanov. He knew everything. Every corrupt payment, every shaky transaction, every fraud Malin had ever committed.

That was the place. Could he break in? A crazy idea. But he could have others do it for him. Any one of those former government security companies that advertised in the Moscow papers would do it. They would have to do it discreetly, of course; any indication that the office had been breached might lead back to him. Was there some way of making it look like Ikertu? Leave a trace back to London. He could ask those half-soaked London investigators to engage the Russians on his behalf.

Lock sat back in his seat, wondering dizzily about the plan. It wasn’t bad. In fact it was good. This, after all, was the sort of thing that happened in Moscow every day. He was beginning to think like a Russian.

But then he began to think like a lawyer. The loyalty of Lock’s investigators, of InvestSol, could that be relied upon? All it would take was for one of them to realize what was going on and he could end up being blackmailed. Or, more likely and far more dangerous, someone would mess up the job and the fearsome Horkov, or some even more frightening creature from Malin’s crack regiment of brutal old spooks, would track it all back to him.