Now he sat with his hands clasped behind his head, slouching almost off his chair, looking at the wall and wondering what he would do when he ran out of space. He had his own chart. It was made up of eight sheets of flip-chart paper and took up one wall of his office. On it he was writing in soft dark pencil everything of note about Project Snowdrop (Ikertu, ever hungry for project names, was working its way through flowers). He had a box for Malin at the top left; at the bottom left, one for Faringdon; top right, Lock; bottom right, Grachev. In each, in slanting capitals, were growing lists of ideas, attributes, facts. In the middle of the chart and expanding outward was what looked like a complex molecule, circles of different sizes connected by arrowed lines, and within the circles names of people, companies, organizations, places: Lock, Malin, Faringdon, Langland, Uralsknefteprom, Rosenergo, the Ministry of Industry and Energy, the Kremlin, Berlin, Cayman, Ireland. At least a dozen circles had been ringed in red: Dominic Swift, Ken McGee, Savas Onder, Mikkel Friis, Marina Lock, Dmitry Gerstman, and others.
His researchers thought his pencil and paper approach primitive and even ridiculous; they had database programs that would map this information in moments and never miss anything. Webster would patiently explain to them that this wall of notes wasn’t a calculation but an inching toward the truth, something requiring experience and intuition, patience and a soft eye. This was at once grander and murkier than an investigation of anything as mundane as a crime: it was a battle, silently fought, where victory would come to the man who could best understand his enemy’s weakness. Laid out here was Malin’s world, and until you really saw it—knew how it looked to him—you couldn’t hope to unpick it.
But after four weeks he had only a faint and frustrated sense of it. He had had four researchers reading every newspaper article they could find in Russian and English. Two had taken Malin and the ministry; one had taken Faringdon, Langland and all the companies connected to them; and one had focused entirely on Lock and Grachev. A further two had been deep in company registries, reconstructing the network that Lock had created and trying to work out from the scant information available what the companies within it actually did.
They had started with Faringdon. The corporate registry in Dublin gave them the names of its directors (Lock and a Swiss national called Ulrich Rast), an address, and its shareholders: nine further offshore companies, each several degrees more obscure than their Irish offspring. There was little else. The address belonged to a company that existed solely to set up and administer other companies and was therefore of no consequence; the company secretary worked for the same firm; Herr Rast too was merely a professional administrator, if of a rather exalted Swiss variety. The only point of interest was the nine shareholders; to have so many was unusual, and the purpose of the structure wasn’t clear. It suggested the work of someone clever or someone cautious. At least Faringdon itself was active; at least it did something. It bought companies, or stakes in them. From scouring the press—in Russia, in Azerbaijan, in Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Ukraine—Webster’s researchers found eighteen deals that Faringdon had made, and carefully noted the timing and circumstances of each. Then they researched every counter-party, every co-shareholder, and recorded all their findings on an ever-growing plan in the hope of finding patterns, coincidences, meaning of any kind.
Its lesson was not immediately clear. Looking down from Faringdon, you saw eighteen investments with no obvious commercial theme or logic to link them, lumped together rather than arranged. Looking up, you saw little at all. Between them, the nine shareholders were based in five tiny islands that had their own sovereignty and similarly stubborn ideas about the availability of information. For each, all Webster’s people had been able to find was an address and some directors (Lock again among them, the rest mere cutouts). There was no straightforward way of knowing who owned these companies, how much money passed through them, where it came from and where it went. Every project hit this wall, and Webster was used to it. There were ways of getting around it, but they were underhand and difficult, and the information they produced was seldom as useful as you wanted it to be. What was he expecting to find there, after all, except another layer of the same?
In Russia itself he was inclined to be cautious for a while. He and Hammer had discussed this at length. Hammer wanted him to let Lock, in particular, know that people were asking questions about him, but Webster wanted to wait until he knew his subject better. For now, then, all he had done was to ask Alan Knight, the oddest Englishman in the Urals, to do a little work for him.
So this was what was on the wall. First, he knew that few people knew anything about Malin. In Russia you had to look hard to find him at all, and in the West, nothing. His name was on a list of attendees at a Kremlin meeting in 2000 that had brought together managers of energy companies with academics and policy-makers. In 2002, he had attended talks in Budapest as part of an official Russian delegation that had included the then Minister of Industry and Energy; the following year he had been in Almaty as part of a similar group. He had been mentioned on a Ukrainian blog as one of a number of Kremlin insiders influencing the Russians’ decision to block gas supplies to Ukraine in 2006, and later that year he had been awarded The Order of Honor by the state, for “high achievements in economic production and for promoting the true value of Russia’s economic resources.” Real Five Year Plan stuff, Webster had thought, but the Russian press had barely shown any interest.
Webster had expected to find dirt on Malin, because there was dirt on everyone of note. If you were powerful you had enemies and your enemies wrote bad things about you—made them up if that was easier. This, in Russian, was kompromat, or compromising material. There was no kompromat on Malin—it was difficult to believe that someone quite so corrupt could appear quite so polished—and without it it was difficult to know where to start.
Nor was there much of interest on Lock. His name was on a thousand corporate documents and countless press articles but none was instructive. Whenever Faringdon bought something, or sold something, or formed a partnership, he was there as a spokesman for the company, providing a quote—always bland, always taken from the approved press release. Webster’s researcher had found two photographs in Profil, the gossip magazine of Moscow, that showed Lock at gaudy parties with improbably glossy young women. Webster was pleased to know what he looked like, at least: ash-blond, broad-faced, his thin lips, almost entirely disappeared, suggesting someone who had said “no” too often to the world. His skin was lightly pockmarked around the cheekbones but his eyes were blue and clear. Less worn, his face would have been handsome. In both pictures he was smiling and looking studiedly carefree, and in both was wearing well-cut suits that somehow contradicted his casual expression and seemed out of place amid the Moscow glitz.
This was all that Webster knew about Lock’s life now. He knew a little about his life before he went to Russia as well, but the two ends hardly matched. He was born in 1960 in Den Haag. His parents were Dutch, but had moved to London in the late 1960s when his father was transferred there by Royal Dutch Shell. In Britain Lock had had a good, regular, middle-class education—boarding school, history at Nottingham University, law conversion at Keele—and on leaving had joined a decent second division London law firm called Witney & Parks, which specialized in shipping and commodities work. He had a sister but Webster hadn’t found her yet. In his last year at school his parents had moved back to Holland but he had stayed on in England. In 2002 his mother had died in the same hospital where Lock had been born; his father now lived in the seaside town of Noordwijk.
Otherwise there was nothing: no profiles in the newspapers, no public spats with competitors, no scandals of any kind. No one had stopped to find this man interesting before—or no one had seen the use in doing so. Grachev was worse, a complete nonentity; and while the companies were busier, there was nothing that caused Webster’s instincts to spark. His researchers had given him histories of
Faringdon and Langland but each was merely a list of transactions, on the surface irredeemably dry and impenetrable underneath. He imagined reporting so little to Tourna and realized just how much they had taken on.
There was no story here, and he knew the story was essential. What he was hoping to find was a route, the first few feet of a path: it might be a hint of a character, a glimpse of some hidden incident. He didn’t have it yet. Hammer was fond of saying that if what you needed wasn’t within reach on a piece of paper it would be in someone’s head. So perhaps he would simply have to talk to people sooner than he would have liked. The names circled on the wall knew Lock or Malin and had done business with them. Some would be loyal to them, and some would not, and he would have greatly preferred to leave them until he was sure of his plan and their allegiances. So be it. And in the meantime there was always Alan Knight.
THE ONLY SIGNS that Alan Knight was English were his name, his briefcase and his accent, a soft Derbyshire burr that when nervous lowered to a mumble. Otherwise, he was Russian; he had steadily become so over the last twenty years. Even now, in a barely autumnal London, he wore heavy rubber-soled black shoes and a thick quilted coat that ended well below his knees. Underneath that, Webster knew, would be a blazer, and his shirt would be short sleeved. His trousers were half an inch too short, mid-gray, and pressed to a military finish. He had metal-framed glasses with light brown lenses, and the only color in his face was in his ruddy nose and, just detectable, in his gray-blue eyes. He was fifty, or thereabouts, and walked with a stoop, bowed by the weight of what he knew.
Knight lived in Tyumen, in the eastern Urals, the capital of Russia’s oil industry, a thousand miles from Moscow on the edge of the rich, bleak flatlands of western Siberia. There were many Westerners in Tyumen, but they all lived in expatriate compounds, sent their children to the American school, and left as soon as they could. Knight was a local. He had met his future wife there in the last days of the Soviet Union and when it became possible had married her and stayed. He had three children, all of whom were in the local Russian school. He supported his family by writing about oil for the Western press, and by working for companies like Ikertu.
Webster had no idea whether this had made him wealthy or poor, but he was valuable, without doubt. Knight knew oil and gas better than anyone but the Russians themselves. How he was suffered to know so much was a question that had always intrigued Webster: either he was in the pay of someone, or he was merely too lowly to be noticed. But Webster had known him for fifteen years, since his own days in Russia, and had never detected any bias in his information. In any case it hardly mattered here: if Knight failed to tell him anything interesting no damage would be done, and if he knew that Ikertu was investigating Malin and told people, that would merely accelerate things.
Knight resembled his adopted countrymen in one other respect: he was authentically scared of power. Giving him instructions was complicated and expensive. E-mail correspondence to his Russian account about anything of substance was forbidden. He came to London regularly; Webster knew his schedule, but if he had an urgent task he had to send him an e-mail inquiring when he would next be in England. Knight would then leave Tyumen and fly to Istanbul, where he would retrieve from a Turkish e-mail account the real brief that Webster had also sent him. Until Knight flew out of Russia to report, any further correspondence about the case was impossible unless Webster was prepared to bring him to London for the purpose. Clients who breached these rules were struck off. Webster and others put up with this degree of caution because Knight was good and because he had no competitors. If Russian business was famously opaque, energy was its dark center, and Knight was one of the few peering in from the very rim.
This time they met in the Chancery Court Hotel in Holborn. Webster had chosen it because it was anonymous and quiet and because no Russians ever stayed there. Knight wouldn’t go to the Ikertu offices. It was mid-morning and the lobby was more or less empty. Webster was early; he took a chair and started playing idly with his BlackBerry. This was an important moment. Knight had better know something useful.
After five minutes he arrived, looking agitated and hot in his coat. As Webster greeted him and shook his hand he remembered his sour, soft smell of tobacco and must.
“Good to see you, Alan,” said Webster. “You look well.”
“Hi, hi,” said Knight, looking around at the three or four guests checking out or sitting waiting themselves. “Can we go somewhere else? Let’s go somewhere else.”
“Why? We’re fine. There’s no one here.”
“That’s not it. Who knows we’re meeting?”
“One or two people at Ikertu. Alan, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing. No, nothing. I just need to be sure.”
“Really?” said Webster, the subtlest shade of exasperation in his voice. “All right. Let’s go.”
They left the hotel and Webster hailed a taxi. “Ludgate Circus please.” He turned to Knight. “I know a café about ten minutes from here,” he said. “There’s never anyone there between breakfast and lunch, and if there is it’s big enough for no one to overhear us. If you think we’re being followed let me know.” He sat back and watched the world through the window, wondering what on earth went on in Alan’s mind. Knight shifted in his seat from time to time to look at the cars behind.
In the café, which was indeed empty but for them, they ordered teas and took a table in the farthest corner, away from the window. Knight took his coat off and sat with his back to the wall, monitoring the door.
“Is this better?” said Webster.
“I’m sorry. Yes. Yes, this is better.”
“Did you get my e-mail?”
“I did. I should have deleted it. Actually, what I should have done is just tell you no.”
Webster looked at him, not understanding.
“Have you got your phone on you?” said Knight.
“Yes.”
“We should take the batteries out.” Knight took a phone from an inside pocket and after a struggle with the case removed its battery. Webster did the same and waited for Knight to speak.
“Your Russian friend—the big one. Christ, Ben. He’s the real deal. I’m not kidding.”
“You mean Malin?”
“Are you working for Tourna?” Knight was talking down into the table and so quietly now that Webster could hardly make out what he was saying.
“Do you want to know?”
“Christ. No. I don’t, no.” Knight played with his spoon in both hands, staring hard at it and occasionally glancing up.
“Alan, I know you think I’m a greenhorn who plays with things he doesn’t understand but you can be too sensitive. No one’s here. No one can hear us. If anyone knows we’re together they don’t know what we’re talking about. You clearly know something about all this. Knowing you it’s a lot. And so far I haven’t found a sodding thing. What can you tell me?”
Knight looked up and at Webster, as if trying to gauge his honesty once and for all. After a moment he said, “I don’t want a fee, no contract, nothing. What I tell you here is just what I know now. I’m not doing any work on this. And no notes.”
“All right. That’s disappointing but I understand. Just tell me what you can.”
“OK. OK.” Knight was still fiddling with the spoon. “OK.” He leaned forward again, as if there were people at the next table intent on every word. The café was still empty. “First of all, he’s powerful. In his own right. He’s been in the ministry for longer than anyone else. He runs it. Has done for the last seven or eight years.”
“How did he manage that?”
“New minister, new administration. He saw his chance and took it. He knew more than anyone else. Controlled it all already, really. And he sold the Kremlin an idea of what Russia could be.” Knight looked up at the door and back to Webster, who
drank his tea and waited for Knight to go on.
“Mighty once more. Not a second-class world citizen. Do you know how much gas Russia’s got? A fifth of the lot. Some days it produces more oil than Saudi. You look at how output’s gone up since Yeltsin went. That’s not private sector dynamism, that’s Kremlin pressure. And your friend is at the heart of it. He’s in the Kremlin directing policy and in the ministry enforcing it.”
Knight put his spoon down and looked at Webster steadily for the first time.
“So why is he so frightening?” said Webster, returning his gaze.
“Because of what he wants to do.”
“Which is?”
“Every winter Russia switches off the pipelines to Ukraine, right? The press goes nuts, the Ukrainians make a lot of noise, not much happens in the negotiations and then the tap’s on again. That’s not about how much Ukraine pays for its gas. That’s Russia reminding the world that it’s there, and that it can’t be trusted. Anything might happen. Maybe they’ll stop supply to Europe altogether. Last winter the Romanians were freezing, next time it might be the Germans.”
“OK. So what does Malin have in mind?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“I am.”
“It’s not going to help your case.”
“Alan, just tell me. I need something. If I can’t use it you have nothing to worry about.”
“OK,” said Knight and looked set to begin when he called the waitress over and ordered more tea. “Do you want anything?”
“No, thank you.”
When the waitress was at the other end of the room he resumed. “OK. This is the thing. He wants to make Russia more powerful still. That’s what Faringdon’s for. Your friend was right.”
“Which friend?”
“The girl. The journalist. In her article.”
“Inessa?”
The Silent Oligarch: A Novel Page 7