Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

“You must be Paul.”

They shook hands. He was working on a drink already, something brown on the rocks.

His name was Paul Ashmont, and he was some kind of muckety-muck in counterintelligence at the CIA. He’d gone to Yale with Martie Connolly. Besides that, she knew only that he was a Russia expert and pretty high up the ladder. He was in his seventies and looked as though he enjoyed a hard-drinking, hard-smoking life.

She started at the beginning, told him about how she’d been entrapped. Ashmont nodded and smiled. “What the Russians call kompromat ,” he said. “Compromising material. Blackmail. They’re skilled at the art. And of course they used a cutout.”

“I’m surprised you were willing to meet me,” she said. “I’m not exactly getting the welcome wagon in DC.”

Ashmont chuckled. “Any friend of Martie Connolly’s is a friend of mine.” He took a sip of his drink. “Though I understand you tried my friends at the Bureau and got turned away.”

“And yet you’re here.”

“Call it a personal interest of mine. Mention Yuri Protasov and you sure as hell get my attention.”

“Why’s that?” she said.

“How much do you know about the guy?”

“I think I know the basics. Philanthropist, investor, billionaire...”

“That’s right. Estimated wealth of fifteen billion dollars, which puts him at number sixty-one on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires. Owns the largest private bank in Russia. Owns a Siberian natural gas company. Owns the largest private house in London — Paragon House, in Mayfair.”

“I know.”

“He owns a Manhattan penthouse and a villa in Sardinia and, last I heard, a Greek island. Guy’s got houses in California, Aspen, Montana, Nantucket, Paris, Moscow...” He counted out with his fingers. “And he’s a sailor. Owns the world’s biggest superyacht. Two hundred forty meters long. Cost a half billion dollars. Two swimming pools and two helicopter pads on deck. Sorry, I’m kind of a yacht freak. What else? Two kids at Yale — my alma mater, like most Ivy League colleges, sure loves those oligarch kids. Good for the endowment.”

“Sure.”

He drained his drink and signaled the waitress for another.

“His private Boeing 767 has a dining room that seats thirty, okay? Beyoncé sang at his wedding. Party like a Russian , dude. It’s a song.”

She laughed. “I’m getting the picture.” He was an odd duck, but she was starting to like him.

“But here’s the thing — he’s a good guy. You can’t hate him. You go to his business headquarters, and the walls are lined with books. Why? Because Yuri loves reading. And he loves dogs, right? He paid for a bunch of kennels to house stray dogs left by the construction workers who did the Sochi Olympics. The guy owns six dogs at his house outside Moscow.”

“Okay.”

“He’s a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. His foundation promotes the love of chess among youth. It also supports the elderly and also orphans. He owns the Tottenham Hotspur football club in Britain. He gave a wing of the Tate and too many hospital pavilions to list. And then there’s the Protasov Peace Prize, the richest prize in the world, for contributions to peace and amity among the nations.”

“I get the point,” she said politely.

“No, I haven’t even gotten to my point. Which is that Yuri Protasov is a myth.”

“A myth?”

“A creation. A notion. A Potemkin oligarch.”

She furrowed her brow. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Okay. Protasov is different from the other Russian oligarchs.”

“How so?”

“The other oligarchs basically stole what used to be state-owned enterprises as the Soviet Union was going private. They were all friends of Putin — it was an inside job. The biggest theft in the history of the world. I mean, Putin’s stolen hundreds of billions of Russia’s wealth and in the process helped enrich his closest friends. The guy is probably one of the richest men in the world. There’s a cellist in Russia who’s a childhood friend of Putin’s, he’s the godfather to Putin’s daughter, and he’s got a Swiss bank account worth two billion dollars.”

She nodded.

The waitress set down his drink.

“Whereas Protasov is a creation of Putin. He poses as a brilliant investor, but he’s basically underwritten by the Kremlin. The Kremlin secretly owns all these companies like Wheelz, through a straw. A cutaway named Yuri Protasov. Who everyone thinks is worth fifteen billion dollars.”

“Okay.”

“He’s an invention,” Ashmont said. “A stooge. He’s a childhood friend of Vladimir Putin’s, played ice hockey with him. See, Protasov isn’t independently wealthy. All his money comes from the Kremlin. And all his investments — all the companies he supposedly owns? All owned by the Kremlin.”

“You know this for sure?”

“We have a lot of signals intelligence. And human intelligence — people talk. Then there’s our eavesdroppers over at Fort Meade.”

“The NSA?”

“Exactly. We discovered some really interesting bank records, the movement of billions of dollars from Russian state banks into thousands of shell companies linked to Protasov. Basically, Yuri Protasov gets to live the life of a stratospherically rich man, one of the greatest philanthropists in history, as long as he does whatever his old judo partner Vladimir Putin asks. He gets to play a combo of Warren Buffett and Mother Teresa, right?”

Juliana was puzzled about something. “Is this the kind of secret the KGB, or whatever, will kill to protect?”

Ashmont cocked his head, looked at her curiously. He gave a quizzical smile, which quickly disappeared. His expression became somber. “What do you know?”

“About what?”

“People dying. Why do you say they’ll ‘kill’? What do you know?”

“I know that a Chicago lawyer named Matías Sanchez was recently killed.” She didn’t feel the need to get into who Matías was. Or whether he had committed suicide. “And a lawyer in London named Fiona Charteris.”

He nodded. He seemed to know about these deaths. “Yeah, the law’s a dangerous profession recently. Then there was Kevin Mathers, who had the misfortune to be the last lead investor in Wheelz and who died in an accident on the slopes.” He drained his drink and signaled the waitress for another. “These guys don’t mess around.”

“These guys being — who? The oligarchs, like Protasov?”

He shook his head. “All the signs say it’s their foreign intelligence service. FSB. Which you may know is the reincarnation of the KGB. Roughly speaking.”

“You think these people were killed by the Russian intelligence service?”

“That’s the speculation. To be specific, URPO.” He pronounced it “urp-oh.” “The FSB’s kill squad. But they’re very careful when they’re dealing with non-Russians. They have no compunctions about blatantly killing off Russians who get in their way. Feeding them polonium, shit like that. Make them suffer long and painful deaths. But when it comes to foreigners — it always has to be done subtly. With plausible deniability. All done through cutouts.”

Greaves, she thought. “But what I don’t get is why Protasov is so concerned about keeping his ownership of Wheelz under wraps. Yes, his money comes from a bank under US sanctions — but so what? Doesn’t sound like anyone much cares about sanctions, or sanctioned banks, in DC these days.”

“No, people care. There’s just no capacity to do anything about it. The Russia experts are thin on the ground.”

“I see.”

“As usual with the Russians, it’s all about secrets within secrets. Let’s start with this: Yuri Protasov has eighty percent of that investment round in Wheelz. Series D convertible preferred.”