The First Billion

by Christopher Reich

  “Keep them there,” ordered Panetti. “Be there in ten.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Passing the Hotel President. Why?”

  “I’m hungry. Be a pal and get me a brioche. Uh, hold on a sec. And grab a half dozen pain-au-chocs for the boys.”

  “Eh, Claude?” said Panetti, ramming his foot against the accelerator and throwing the siren onto the roof. “Fuck your pain-au-chocs.”

  There she is.”

  Claude Metayer pointed at a white Gulfstream parked two hundred meters across the tarmac from the control tower. “N278721. That your bird?”

  Panetti checked the numbers against those written on the fax. “Yep. That’s it. See anyone get out? A man and woman, maybe?”

  “No,” said Metayer. “But I wasn’t looking.”

  Panetti studied the plane through a set of binoculars. Mince, but she was a beauty. His first thought was “expensive.” Whoever owned that plane had to be very wealthy. The words “filthy rich” crossed his mind, and instinctively he sucked in his gut and stood a little straighter. A second later he relaxed. Sometimes he hated being Swiss.

  “Where are the pilots?” he asked.

  “Downstairs,” answered Panetti’s brother-in-law. “But go easy. I don’t want any blood like last time.”

  Panetti had the Information he needed in sixty seconds. No blood. No threats. Not even a raised voice, thank you very much. The suspect, John J. Gavallan, and his accomplice, Catherine Elizabeth Magnus, had rented a car from Hertz. They were expected back at the plane sometime that afternoon. The pilots had instructions to be refueled and ready to take off at 4 P.M. More than that, they said they didn’t know, and Panetti believed them. A five-minute stroll took him to the Hertz desk. He flashed his badge and asked for the make, model, and license number of the car the Americans had rented. The answer came immediately. A black Mercedes 420S, Vaud license 276 997 V.

  Panetti thanked the employees for their help. He was lighting cigarette number seven of the shift when the manager appeared from his office, waving a fey hand to get his attention.

  “Attendez. Attendez. Officer, thank goodness you’re here.”

  “Oh?” asked Panetti through a blue haze.

  “You are interested in the Americans?”

  “Banh oui.” Panetti raised a brow, curious as to what the Americans might have done to so disturb this fat old poof.

  “Ils sont terribles, les Amis. Come, I show you.” The manager led Panetti to a bank of phone booths, pointing archly at the third in line. “There. Look. See for yourself.”

  Panetti sauntered over to the booth. He picked up the receiver and put it to his ear. The dial tone sounded as innocuous as ever. He flicked the coin return. A-OK. “What’s wrong?”

  “Non, non, les annuaires,” puffed the manager breathlessly. The phone books. And pushing Panetti aside, he pulled open the registry for the canton Vaud. “They stole a page. They ripped it right out. I saw them.”

  “A page? The whole thing? And you didn’t call right away? Next time, I’ll have to arrest you for not reporting the incident.”

  The manager curled his face into a sour smirk. “Very funny.”

  “Okay. Off you go. Your poodle is waiting.”

  “I don’t own a…” The manager hoomphed, then spun on his heel and hurried back to his office.

  When he was out of sight, Panetti sat down on the stool and laid the phone book on his lap. He flipped through the directory several times until he spotted the frayed pennants of the missing page. He had no idea whom Mr. Gavallan might be looking for, but the missing page might indicate where that person—or business, for that matter—might be. Swiss directories were divided alphabetically by city or town, with the locale’s name printed on the top outside corner of each page.

  Panetti was in luck. The same town was listed at the top of the preceding and succeeding pages.

  Lussy-sur-Morges.

  He had the local police on the line within fifteen seconds. And Mr. Howell Dodson of the FBI a minute after that.

  42

  You’re saying you work for Novastar, too?” Gavallan asked Jean-Jacques Pillonel on the way to Silber, Goldi, and Grimm’s headquarters in downtown Geneva.

  “As their accountants, we do all of their bookkeeping,” replied Pillonel. “As their fiduciare, we counsel them on setting up offshore accounts, shell companies, the usual song and dance to help our customers avoid paying too much tax.”

  “And how much is that?” asked Cate from her post in the backseat.

  “Why, any, of course,” answered Pillonel, who was driving. “When Mr. Kirov purchased Novastar Airlines last year, he came to me to set up a holding company outside of Russia where he could deposit the shares.”

  “Why would he want to deposit Novastar’s shares outside of Russia?” asked Gavallan.

  Pillonel smirked, but didn’t take his eyes off the road. “You’ll see soon enough.”

  Silber, Goldi, and Grimm’s headquarters were located on the Rue du Rhône, one block from the lake. The newly remodeled building was a symphony of brushed steel and exposed girders. The lines were spare, the profile vibrant and supremely confident. One moment Gavallan thought he was looking at the Beaubourg in Paris; the next, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on Hong Kong Island. Modernism had trumped tradition. Prudence had been declared a four-letter word. So had conservatism, stability, and any other trait that implied the slightest resistance to change.

  Once, on the third floor, Pillonel guided them along a dim corridor. Stopping in front of an anonymous doorway, he placed an eye to a retinal scanner. The lock disengaged and the door swung open.

  “The funny thing is I knew this would happen,” he said, allowing Cate and Gavallan to pass and enter the storage room. “I did it anyway, and I’m still not sure why. Foolish, wasn’t it?” He looked at Cate. “You wanted to know how much Kirov was paying me? Fifteen million.”

  “Dollars, I hope.”

  “No. Francs.”

  Cate gave him a sad look. “Was it worth it?”

  Even now, Pillonel’s venal nature demanded he think on the answer. “Alors, non.”

  The first roadblock was set up one hundred meters north of Silber, Goldi, and Grimm’s office at the intersection of Rue du Rhône and Place les Halles. The second was erected fifty meters south, at an intersection not visible from the silver and steel office building. Plainclothes policemen filtered down the busy streets, quietly demanding pedestrians to leave the area, in a few cases forcibly escorting them off the streets. A crisis headquarters was established in the shopping gallery below the Confederation Centre, the office complex that housed the Geneva Stock Exchange. Two armored personnel carriers painted a royal blue arrived. The back doors opened. Twenty-four policemen from the elite Division D’Intervention Rapide, or DIR, of the Geneva Police Department, clad in full battle gear, jumped to the ground, forming into two squads and moving out toward their target. Snipers scrambled up stairwells in adjacent buildings and established shooting platforms with a clear line of sight of Silber, Goldi, and Grimm’s lobby.

  Watching the activity unfurl around him, Detective Sergeant Silvio Panetti stroked his mustache. “Mince,” he whispered to himself. “C’est sérieux.”

  It had been simple to track down Mr. John J. Gavallan. Lussy-sur-Morges had but two hundred twenty residents. One by one he had read their names to Mr. Howell Dodson of the FBI. Dodson recognized Jean-Jacques Pillonel’s name immediately. A team was sent to the man’s chalet. Pillonel’s wife did not know where her husband had gone. Ten minutes later, a patrol car spotted Gavallan’s rental on the Rue du Confédération, a block from Silber, Goldi, and Grimm. The rest Panetti figured out for himself.

  A walkie-talkie near him crackled. “In place,” said a crisp voice.

  “Entendu,” replied Captain Henri L’Hunold, commander of the DIR. “Await my signal.”

  Stepping into the document storage room, Jean-Jacques Pillonel took up his ta
le where he had left off in the car ten minutes earlier.

  “As I said, it is part of our job as fiduciaries to keep a permanent record of our customers’ accounts. This means keeping copies of the bank confirmations showing all monies that flow into and out of them: every deposit, every wire transfer, every cash withdrawal.”

  “But you’re not a bank yourself?” asked Cate.

  “Good Lord, no. But as their accountants we require the confirmations to perform the audits of our customers’ accounts. We scan them immediately and transfer them to hard drive. Every month, we download the new confirmations onto our customers’ private CDs.”

  The three were snaking through aisles of chest-high filing cabinets colored a wan yellow. Pillonel was their leader, and he moved like an automaton through the metallic maze, drawing first one CD, then another, his destinations memorized long ago.

  “What was Kirov’s game?” Gavallan asked. “Didn’t he want to pay the tax man his due?”

  “Forget the tax man,” said Cate. “Kirov didn’t even plan on giving the money to Novastar. As far as he was concerned, Novastar’s revenues were his, and he made sure they didn’t turn up anywhere on the company’s ledgers.”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” cautioned Pillonel. “Once Kirov won the auction for Novastar, he transferred the company’s headquarters from Moscow to Geneva. Moscow was too parochial, he said; an international airline needed an international presence. He asked me to set up a holding company for his forty-nine percent stake in the airline. We were happy to oblige. The company is called Futura. It is domiciled in Lausanne.”

  “Is Kirov the sole shareholder?” Cate demanded.

  “No. There is a second man. His name is Dashamirov. Aslan Dashamirov. You know him?”

  Gavallan and Cate said they didn’t.

  “He is trouble, this man.” Pillonel offered a secret smile. “He is Chechen. Not so polished as Mr. Kirov. From the bandit country. Anyway, at the same time as we opened Futura for Mr. Kirov, he asked us to set up a second company, this one offshore in the Dutch Antilles—Curaçao, I believe. That company is named Andara. Now of course we all know why he did this, but I was surprised at his audacity. First, he instructs all of Novastar’s foreign offices to transfer their revenues to Futura, instead of to the company’s old accounts in Moscow. This means all the money Novastar earns from sales of plane tickets made in Los Angeles or Rio or Hong Kong come to Switzerland.”

  “I have a feeling we’re getting to the good part,” said Gavallan, giving Cate a fateful glance.

  “If you mean the part that concerns Mercury, you are right,” said Pillonel. “From Futura, Kirov would transfer the money into Mercury’s accounts here in Geneva. But only at certain times during the year, and just briefly—one day in, the next day out. He timed it so that Mercury’s quarterly bank statements showed the effect of the transfer. Usually, the inflows increased Mercury’s revenues by around thirty percent.”

  “Thirty percent? Not kidding around, was he.” It was Gavallan’s policy to involve himself in the due diligence being done on Black Jet’s larger deals, and he remembered poring over Mercury’s banking statements, corroborating the balance held at the bank with the sum shown on Mercury’s books. In one day, out the next. Clever, but you could only get away with it with the complicity of your accountant.

  Then again, fifteen million francs bought a lot of complicity.

  Cate said, “So once Mercury booked the funds as revenues, they wired the money back to Futura?”

  “Only about ten percent, actually. The rest was always transferred to Andara, the company in Curaçao, for the personal benefit of Mr. Kirov and Mr. Dashamirov.”

  “That explains why Baranov and the Russian government are so pissed off,” Cate said. “The revenues from the foreign rep offices never made it to Moscow. The government privatized Novastar to increase its profitability and bring it up to Western business standards. They expected the fifty-one percent they retained to earn them a decent chunk of hard currency.”

  Pillonel had completed his rounds of the filing cabinets and was heading toward the back wall, where a long desk divided by partitions into carrels offered a dozen personal computers and printers for everyday use. Next to the desk stood a row of IBM mainframes, their blinking red and green pinlights the only indication they were in service. Sitting down at a carrel, he selected a CD and slipped it into the PC’s disc drive. “It’s all here. See for yourself.”

  Gavallan watched from behind Pillonel’s shoulder as copies of Novastar’s transfers to Futura flashed onto the screen. Two hundred thousand dollars from New York. Three million French francs from Paris. Four hundred thousand deutsche marks from Frankfurt. All the money headed for Switzerland. Pillonel flipped through the transfers, taking the three of them on a paper trail across the globe. Shanghai, Mexico City, Toronto, Chicago, Paris again. Around the world in eighty seconds.

  “Like I say, it’s all here.” Suddenly, Pillonel laughed, a high-pitched, hysterical whinny. “I don’t know who is going to be madder—the Swiss because I break the secrecy law, or Kirov because I violated his trust.”

  Oh, I can tell you the answer to that one, buddy, declaimed Gavallan silently: Kirov by a long shot.

  Pillonel switched discs, and a new set of transfers scrolled onto the screen. “Here are the transfers you are most interested in, Jett: the funds injected into Mercury.” The amounts were larger, the transfers less frequent. It would be an easy task to back out the amounts Kirov had transferred into Mercury’s accounts and arrive at a true reckoning of Mercury’s revenues, and thus its market value.

  Pillonel switched discs again, and the screen was filled with transfer after transfer out of Mercury and into Andara, Kirov’s private strongbox. The sums were staggering. Ten million dollars. Thirty-two million. Six million.

  It’s the gold seam, thought Gavallan. A hard copy trail showing Konstantin Kirov’s meticulously executed efforts to divert Novastar’s revenues to his personal account. A how-to manual on stealing from Mother Russia. He found Cate’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “I don’t suppose Mr. Kirov will be too keen for Baranov to get his hands on these.”

  “Forget Baranov,” said Pillonel acidly. “He’s powerless. Kirov will flee the country if any charges are filed against him. He’ll set up shop in Marbella with the other Russian expats. They’ve got a whole little community down there. Like I said, forget Baranov . . . he’s a paper tiger. You want to hurt Kirov, I show you something that hurts him.”

  Pillonel slipped the third compact disc into the e-drive. Once again, the screen was filled with scanned copies of bank transfers. Gavallan leaned closer. It took his middle-aged eyes a few seconds before he could read the names and numbers on the screen. He recognized the account number of Andara, the Curaçao holding company, but the beneficiary was an anonymous numbered account at the Banque Prive de Geneve et Lausanne.

  “Isn’t that your brother’s bank?” Gavallan asked. Pierre Pillonel was Jean-Jacques’s fraternal twin. One had chosen banking, the other accounting. What more could a Swiss mother desire?

  “Yes. Pierre is managing partner for two years now.”

  Cate put a finger to the screen. “And to whom may I ask does account number 667.984Z belong?”

  “Who do you think?” Pillonel scalded her with a reproving glance. “Mr. Kirov, he trusted no one—not even his partner, Mr. Dashamirov. After the Chechen left our meeting, Kirov asked me to open a private account for him here in Switzerland. This man is not content simply to steal from the Russian government—he wants to steal from his partner, too. If I were Kirov, I wouldn’t be afraid of the prosecutor general, Mr. Baranov. Baranov can only put him in jail. Me, I am afraid of Mr. Dashamirov. Mr. Dashamirov catches Kirov stealing, he will kill him.”

  Cate lowered herself to her knees and spun Pillonel in his chair so that he faced her. “You’re saying that these transfers show Kirov siphoning off money from Andara to his own private account?”<
br />
  “Exactement.” Suddenly, he stood, forcing his way past her, the compact discs clutched between the fingers of one extended hand. “Take them. Take them all. They’re yours. Use them quickly. As I said, I’m not doing this for you—it’s for me. I am only safe once Kirov is in jail, or if he is dead. I ask you only one favor. You give me time.”

  “Time for what?” Gavallan accepted the discs and passed them to Cate, who slipped them into her purse.

  “I am not sure yet. If I am a coward, I go to Brazil. Maybe Kirov finds me. Maybe he doesn’t. One more man in jail, what does it change? Who’s the better off? I’ve played the game the way I was supposed to. I helped you, my friend. Save your company. Save your friend. I’ve earned a chance to save myself.”

  Gavallan realized he didn’t have much choice in the matter. Having Pillonel arrested would only alert Kirov to the fact that he was intent on canceling the IPO. He couldn’t tell Pillonel to stay home and wait for the police until Tuesday or whenever he was able to find Grafton Byrnes. It boiled down to this: Pillonel was a free man until Gavallan was ready to turn over his evidence to the authorities.

  Even then, he couldn’t be sure whether the Swiss would arrest him. Though Mercury was technically a Swiss company, the fraud had taken place in conjunction with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. That was a lot of borders to cross. Borders meant red tape and red tape meant delay.

  “Go home,” said Gavallan, frustrated. “Go to Brazil. I don’t care. But whatever you do, take my advice and keep a low profile. And stay clear of Kirov.”

  Grabbing one of his arms, Gavallan half pushed Pillonel down the corridor to the elevator. They rode in silence to the lobby, then the elevator opened and Gavallan stepped out. “Cate,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “How far to the airport?”

  “Police! Arrêtez!”