The Russian Pink

by Matthew Hart

  Two Botswanan soldiers stood under the nearby palms, their backs to the house as they surveyed the grounds. The US Secret Service detail stood nearby, sweating in their dark suits. A hundred yards away a secretary bird, its long quill-pen feathers trembling on its head, stalked watchfully across the grass.

  Bolt gestured to her detail to stay where they were. “Let’s walk.”

  We went down the steps and followed a terracotta path that wound through the sparse trees to a concrete fountain. A trickle of water dribbled from a rusty spout. Sluggish koi drifted through the turbid water.

  “You know the story of the diamond as a Russian treasure,” she said. “That worked for us. If the pink came from the imperial treasure in the Kremlin, and Harry got it cheap, then we were outsmarting the Russians.” She stirred a finger through the water. “Whether the story was true or not didn’t matter. Voters liked it.” She pushed aside a patch of algae to peer deeper into the dull green water. “But try to change the story and you have a problem. Because now the original story looks like a lie. The people who believed it feel like suckers, which of course they were. So when Harry changes his story, as he now plans to do, I think we have a problem.”

  “What’s the story now?”

  “That the stone might have been a recent discovery. He says he just found out, but I think he probably knew all along.”

  He did. I could hear Davy’s gravelly voice. The Chinese one with the blue eyes. Honey Li had seen the rough. She’d been there in Antwerp when the stone blew up. According to Davy, the Russians had called it the Chicapa Pink. So they’d known where it came from. If they did, so did Honey, and that meant Nash too.

  Bolt’s skin was papery and drawn. She looked dessicated. Her yellow eyes shone with anger. “I loathe that diamond. It’s the magic mirror that tells them they’re the fairest in the land.”

  It wasn’t the diamond she hated. It was Nash and Honey Li.

  “If the diamond wasn’t stolen,” Bolt continued grimly, “and it was a recent discovery, then Harry’s purchase from the hedge fund smells. Because why do they give him a deal if the diamond’s not stolen? The other investors are Russian oligarchs. They’re not people who grant favors without getting something in return.”

  The secretary bird paused in its hunt and stood stock-still. Its long head-feathers shivered in the breeze. Bolt surveyed the lawn with a bleak expression.

  “I need the company charter for First Partners. That’s the only record of who controls it. The company is registered in the Channel Islands. That’s where the charter is.”

  “Remind me why I’m going to get it. I must have missed that part.”

  She gave me an icy stare.

  “Because now you know about it.”

  A dark shape in the grass had caught the secretary bird’s attention. For a moment the shadow remained as still as the bird, then slithered a foot, then stopped again.

  “If you’re worried about authority to act,” she said, “call Tommy Cleary.”

  I have to admit, that hurt. So she owned Tommy too. She knew I wasn’t expecting that. She didn’t gloat. It was a card turned over at a poker table.

  “You think you’ve got this worked out, but I doubt it, Senator. OK, I’ll get the charter. But I cut both ways. I will not find out what helps you and ignore what doesn’t. I keep looking until I find out everything, including who killed Amy Curtain and attacked my kid. And when I do, I won’t need Tommy Cleary to tell me what to do.”

  We walked back to the veranda. The secretary bird was locked in concentration on the grass. I could see the snake clearly now. A bright green boomslang, four feet long. A current of air stirred the bird’s long feathers, and it drew back its lethal beak. But the snake struck first.

  * * *

  I spent an hour in my room composing a long message to Patrick Ho, and a shorter one to Tommy and DeLucca. Last, I sent a short query to Tabitha asking if she’d turned up anything on Vanderloo.

  Gaborone twinkled in the night. A cool evening breeze was blowing off the desert when I joined Chuck and Lily on the roof.

  We took a table at the edge of the terrace. A few waiters gossiped at the bar. On a distant hill the red lights of a communications mast winked against the stars.

  “Kgale Hill,” said Chuck. “They call it the sleeping giant.”

  Nobody called it that but the tour-bus drivers. In the Tswana language kgale means “the place that dried up,” although you had to wonder how effectively that distinguished one location from another in a country mostly covered by the Kalahari Desert.

  We made plans to leave in the morning, catching the early hopper to Johannesburg. Lily and I would take the Air France flight to Paris and Chuck would return to New York.

  While we waited for our food I filled them in on my conversation with Bolt. Chuck had earlier objected to me sharing information with Lily, but had bowed to what he called the “operational exigencies” when I pointed out that Lily knew more about what was going on than he did. As I’d discovered when I saw that clip from the Chicapa, she knew more than I did too.

  A puff of desert air stirred Lily’s hair. Just looking at her, a sense of loss came over me. I had made her my instrument. Who would I blame if that instrument was now aimed at me?

  Our talk turned to Great Pipe.

  “The company that owns the deposit,” Chuck said, “what would it be worth on the market right now?”

  “Pennies a share,” I said.

  “But if it’s just a penny stock,” Chuck said, “how does it play into some dark scheme? Say Nash did buy the Russian Pink with the plan in mind to goose the stock of Great Pipe, because that’s where it was discovered. If the stock was chump change to begin with, he could double his money and it’s still chump change.”

  I explained how a mineral exploration worked. The odds were long against any venture succeeding. That’s why the stocks traded in pennies. Investors tended to buy large blocks. If Nash were in any way involved, he could easily have a million shares, for which he’d paid pennies a share. If suddenly it were announced that the greatest diamond in the world came from that property, the stock could easily go to $100 a share. Say Nash had a million shares for which he’d paid ten cents a share. That hypothetical holding of a million shares would go from its original value of $100,000 to $100 million.

  “In a week,” I said.

  Chuck thought about it for a moment. “So if Nash did own Great Pipe shares, even if it turned out to be through Lime, you could say he had used his celebrity as a presidential candidate to increase the value of the Russian Pink, and in turn drive up the price of Great Pipe stock when the connection was revealed.”

  “And you’d be right.”

  * * *

  The waiters had cleared the table. Chuck waited until Lily left before he spoke.

  “It’s a fine line we have to walk, Alex. Bolt is certainly manipulating us, and we can’t be sure of her end game. If she’s recruited Tommy to her cause, who else?”

  If you didn’t listen carefully you could miss the duplicity that lurked behind Chuck’s bone-headed cautions. I had figured Bolt out long ago. She feared Nash, and was determined to understand what game he was playing. Bolt I understood. It was Chuck who had me buffaloed. I’d never mentioned Tommy.

  17

  The night drive from Paris took five hours in the rain. We hardly spoke.

  “You own stock in Great Pipe,” I said when we were near the coast.

  “There, was that so hard?” she said coldly. “Really, Alex. You sulk like a child.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to tell me? After the meeting with Fonseca?”

  “Yes, it occurred to me,” she said in the same cold voice. “But common sense prevailed.”

  A semi blazing with lights hurtled out of the rain and almost blew us off the road.

  “You knew I’d find out about the pipe,” I said. “And if I could tie the pink to it, you’d make a windfall.”

  “God, Alex,”
she shook her head. “Sergei Lime raped me. He brutalized me and tried to ruin me. Any money I can make from him, I will. I didn’t even know where we were going until we got to the Chicapa. He wanted my opinion on the rough. I made him pay in stock.”

  “It’s a scam, Lily. Somebody, somehow, is going to get ripped off.”

  “Diamonds are diamonds!” she shouted. “Somebody always gets ripped off. We polish that away and make them sparkle. Nash and Lime are going to make a lot of money? Fine! So is Lily!”

  The storm was still lashing the port when we arrived. We drove down through the gray stone streets of Saint-Malo and parked behind the hotel. Inside, the light from old-fashioned storm lanterns filled the bar with a silky, orange glow. I got us espresso and a small carafe of marc. We took a table by the window.

  I drank the espresso and poured us each a shot of marc, a spirit distilled from the dregs of the wine-making process. It’s not for everybody, but on a cold, wet night it goes down like a lit fuse.

  Lily stared out unseeingly at the driving rain, occupied with her fury.

  “Stop fuming,” I said irritably. I was tired too. “Let’s just execute the plan. It’s a good one.”

  She turned from the window. “It’s a risky, stupid, insane plan. The whole point of that island is bank secrecy. That’s what it exists for. A plan that involves stealing those secrets and examining accounts connected to a man on his way to becoming the most powerful man in the world—I don’t call that a great idea.”

  She glared at me, tipped another shot of marc into her glass, and tossed it down.

  “Too bad,” I said harshly, “because here we are. Somebody’s yanking us around. They’re yanking you and they’re yanking me, and while they were warming up they slapped an innocent kid so far out of her world I doubt she’ll ever get all the way back.”

  Lily poured herself another shot. She filled my glass too and wrapped my hand around it, which is when I realized that I was shaking.

  “Is it Bolt pulling the strings,” I said, “or Nash? I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. So we’re going over to that island. We’re going to steal secrets and spread alarm and dismay. Because guess what. I fucking feel like it.”

  Fifteen minutes later a woman in a denim jacket came into the bar and looked around. She caught my eye and nodded. Lily and I got up and put on our coats and headed out into the rain.

  The big white ferries that run out to the Channel Islands were tied up in their berths waiting for the morning tourists. We followed a stone quay to an anchorage in the oldest part of the harbor, where an eclectic fleet of bateaux touristiques heeled before the driving wind. We stopped at an old trawler with a high bow and a rounded wheelhouse topped with a sign that identified the boat as CHANNEL ISLAND CHARTERS.

  In the dim light of the wheelhouse the captain stared at his instruments, ignoring us. He had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and a bottle of clear liquid on the ledge in front of the wheel. I hoped it wasn’t marc.

  Lily and I crossed onto the heaving boat. The woman untied the lines from the bollards on the quay and leapt on board. The skipper spun the wheel and we motored out of the harbor.

  Past the breakwater, the boat met the full force of the gale. The wind charged out of the English Channel, driving six-foot waves. The boat reared and plunged as it struggled through the wild sea.

  The 10,000-ton ferries of the Condor line make the crossing from Saint-Malo to Saint Helier in twenty-five minutes, but it took us a couple of hours to beat our way across. A gray pre-dawn light was seeping into the sky when the lights of Jersey twinkled into view. The seas dropped as the skipper brought us into the lee of the island. The harbor appeared, packed with the kind of yachts that have room on the afterdeck for the owner’s helicopter.

  In its secret bank accounts, the island of Jersey holds more wealth than some of the first-world countries nearby. Trillions of dollars flow through Jersey’s opaque financial structure. A dependency of the British crown, but not part of the United Kingdom, the island is a tax haven.

  A winking blue light appeared to port. The captain throttled back and docked at a concrete jetty. I arranged for him to take us off again at eleven. If we weren’t through by then, we’d be in jail.

  Lily and I climbed into a blue Vauxhall idling on the road.

  “Jolly good,” the driver said when we got in, an idiotic phrase, even for a recognition code.

  “You say the target documents are in Lime’s name?” said Lily.

  “Yes. The Russians left him as front man. He was the figure known to investors and the banking people.”

  The Vauxhall whisked us up a hill to a sprawling old inn. The gale was blowing itself out at last, and a shaft of dawn light caught the white gables on the front of the hotel.

  “Eight forty-five,” I told the driver, and we went inside.

  The large parcel from DeLucca was waiting at the desk. We checked in and went upstairs. They’d given us a corner room with big sash windows looking across the strait to the coast of France. Lily disappeared into the bathroom and shut the door. I called down to the desk for an iron and ironing board, unpacked the parcel, and spent half an hour taking every crease out of the charcoal gray suit and the pale blue dress shirt. I used the steamer to take the wrinkles out of a dark silk tie.

  I went through the laborious procedures for logging into the dark-net mailbox set up by Patrick Ho. There was one message from him, with the alphanumeric formula I’d asked for. He’d hacked into Lime’s laptop and logged the keystrokes when Lime accessed accounts. The code changed every day, and Patrick had cracked the date-based formula that changed it.

  An hour after Lily went into the bathroom she came out again, this time as an ash-blonde killer in a black Balenciaga dress that stopped just above the knees. I’d been with her when she bought that dress in Paris.

  She was wearing contacts that made her eyes look bloodshot. When it came time to depose witnesses to the crime that we were planning to commit, all they’d remember about Lily would be those bloodshot eyes. And maybe the diamond ring—a twenty-carat, top-color white in an emerald cut. When your associates are diamond thieves, you can afford the best.

  She sat down at a desk by the windows. I snapped open the tiny plastic case that DeLucca had included, found the tweezers, and spent the next ten minutes carefully applying Lime’s prints to Lily’s fingers. Even in a strong light it would be impossible to detect the synthetic skin that carried the prints.

  * * *

  The driver dropped us two blocks from our destination. I told him where to wait for us.

  Like a lot of other tourist destinations, Saint Helier’s small downtown was crammed with the things that day-trippers like to buy—alcohol, T-shirts, and the lethal sweets that conduct a war of attrition on British teeth. But the people who bring the real business to the Channel Islands don’t come over on the French ferries or the hydrofoil from Dover. They arrive in private jets that make the flight from London in twenty-five minutes. There are no T-shirts for sale in the buildings that house the bankers, lawyers, and accountants these people come to see.

  The Channel Islands Directorate of Companies is located in a four-story glass-and-steel office block. Within fifteen minutes of entering we were sitting in front of a portly man in a navy chalk-stripe suit. He wore a gold signet ring on his right pinkie, the finger he was now running through one document after another. He kept shooting covert glances at Lily’s spectacularly bloodshot eyes.

  “Most irregular,” he would murmur every sixty seconds, in case we’d forgotten he’d just said it. But he was a civil servant, and a civil servant loves a piece of paper. To the rest of the world it is a tiresome document; to him, a pearl to be threaded lovingly onto the necklace of plausibility we needed him to accept. The forger in Paris had done well: company minutes on the letterhead of First Partners. A letter from a Wall Street law firm introducing me as Lily’s attorney. Notarized copy of Mrs. Nina Lime’s power of attorney to act for he
r husband. That one carried the bright red wax seal of a notary “in and for the City of London, by Royal Authority duly appointed,” as it said in huge gothic capitals across the top. The pinkie with the gold ring caressed the seal with particular affection.

  “Most irregular,” he murmured again, but you could see that he was in a rapture over the stack of documents.

  He nodded and peered at me once more through his rimless spectacles.

  “And you are Mister…”

  “Griffon,” I said, sliding across the engraved card that identified me as a managing partner in the law firm Ames, Ames, Lowenthal, and Griffon, whose letter he already had.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, inspecting the card and then clipping it to the impressive pile with a satisfied flourish, as if he had just squeezed a final dab of icing onto the decoration of a splendid cake. He cocked his head at the paperwork, then looked at me.

  “Still,” he said, “strange that we didn’t have your name in the file.”

  “Most irregular,” I said.

  The rest went quickly. He buzzed for his secretary. The young man came through the door carrying a small black device with a keypad. The code was the crucial, final step to access the records we wanted to inspect. Lily punched it in. The man took the device back, entered a code of his own, waited for a number to appear, and scribbled it in a log beside the date.

  He opened the top drawer of his desk, took out a thin, purple file stamped in gold with the crest of the Channel Islands, and placed it in front of Lily. She opened it. We were sitting side by side, and bent over the contents as if we knew what we would find there and were only verifying it for the legal purposes that our documents stipulated.