The First Billion

by Christopher Reich

  “Business as usual,” answered Panetti, sounding half in the bag. “We pick up your Mr. Gavallan Saturday afternoon. A formal arrest on the Interpol mandate cannot be filed until Monday. Through their contacts, Mr. Gavallan’s lawyers were able to secure his release before the charges were ever filed. Officially, Gavallan was never apprehended. It is a triumph of technicalities.”

  Dodson thought it was a crock of shit, pardon his French, and he planned on filing a formal complaint. “Any idea where he went, Detective Sergeant?”

  “You know, Monsieur Dodson, I am on vacation,” Panetti protested perfunctorily. “I am not supposed to discuss official police business. On the other hand, I was not planning on taking this vacation, so what the hell, I tell you. After leaving the station, Gavallan drive directly to the aeroport. Please understand, I did not see him, not with my eyes, but my friend say he climb on a private jet.”

  “Was Miss Magnus with him?”

  “Yes. She go, too.”

  “Any destination?”

  “Je ne sais pas. I don’t know and I don’t ask. I am already too much involved, I think. I am smart, Mr. Dodson, not brave. You want to know where Gavallan go? You find out for yourself.”

  “Surely you can phone the airport. . . .”

  “Surely you can, too. Au revoir, Monsieur. Bonne chance.”

  Dodson hung up the phone.

  “Where is he?” asked DiGenovese. “Is he headed back this way?”

  “Gone,” said Dodson, taking Jefferson from his assistant and laying him on his shoulder. “Vanished into the night.”

  50

  The plane touched down at Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport just after midnight. A light rain fell, collecting into greasy puddles on the tarmac. The air smelled stubbornly of smoke and exhaust. Deplaning, they were led to a convoy of black Chevrolet Suburbans. A corps of rugged, sloe-eyed men in navy tracksuits lined the path. One waved his hand at Gavallan, pointing the way to an opened door. A funeral cortege, thought Gavallan as he slid into the backseat. A day or two and the same cars will be taking me to the cemetery.

  The ride into the city took forty minutes. Cate sat up front, sandwiched between the driver and Boris. Tatiana slouched next to Gavallan, sullen and listless after the flight. The driver turned on the radio and a mishmash of wailing voices, discordant guitars, and arrhythmic tambourines filled the car. Top 40 from the Muslim republics to the south, Gavallan thought. It was brash, unsettling, and foreign, and it made him feel alone and abandoned. Stretching an arm forward, he found Cate’s shoulder. A moment later, she took his hand, intertwining her fingers with his.

  For a time they drove dead straight along a quiet four-lane highway. Billboards advertising a variety of products kept them company. Samsung. Volvo. Fisherman’s Friend. Cate asked the driver a question and he answered politely, as if she were a guest, not a prisoner. She’d picked up two languages in a day: French, now Russian. Waiting for her translation, he thought, This is the real Cate, and I don’t know her at all.

  “We’re going to my father’s clubhouse in Sparrow Hills,” she said, turning and meeting his eye. “Across the river where all the nomenklatura used to live. Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov.”

  “Just like Pacific Heights, huh?” Gavallan said icily.

  They were in the city now, and it looked like the other parts of Russia he’d visited, only larger, more impressive, more desolate. The highway had been swallowed by a boulevard eight lanes across and they continued without regard for traffic signals. Green meant “go”; red meant “go faster.” The grand avenues craved a dignified audience—skyscrapers of steel and glass, noble town houses, even a decent minimall. Instead, they were awarded stooped stone apartments and crumbling office buildings weeping soot and grime, all wedged together, all the same height, all devoid of personality. And then Gavallan remembered why: Personalities were allowed only inside the Kremlin. Or, maybe these days in Sparrow Hills.

  Suddenly everyone was sitting straighter, stiffly even. The driver turned off the music. Cate’s shoulders left the seat. Even Tanya lifted her head from the glass to look. The motorcade descended a long slope, and ahead he could make out a bridge and, running beneath it, the choppy, evanescent surface of a broad, fast-moving river. To his left, the night sky softened, lit with a warm chiffon glow.

  And then he saw it too. Bathed in the arc of a hundred discreet spotlights, a tall, curving fortress wall ran the length of the riverbank. The wall was painted an imperial yellow, with stone battlements rising every fifty feet, and behind it, silhouetted against the blue black sky, soared the swirling onion domes and proud towers that housed the seat of the Russian government.

  The Kremlin.

  He was in the heart of Mother Russia, and to his eye, it still looked every bit the evil empire.

  Jett, my friend. How nice to see you again.”

  “Cut the bullshit, Konstantin,” said Gavallan, walking past the man, ignoring the outstretched hand, the offer to play it as if the events of the past five days were nothing more than a difference of opinion. “We’re not friends now. We never were.”

  “I suppose we weren’t,” replied Kirov. He looked fatigued. His pallor was funereal, his eyes pouchy and rimmed with wine black circles. “Come and sit. I’ll be brief, then we can go to bed.”

  “I’d rather stand.”

  The two men faced each other in a stark, glacial space the size of an emperor’s ballroom. The floor was a sea of pale travertine, the walls painted a glossy white. A sleek Italian couch and matching chair, both an incongruous orange, sat in the center of the room, a low-slung coffee table showing too much chrome between them. The only other furniture was an antique cocktail cabinet miles away at the far end of the room. If they seemed alone, it was an illusion. A brace of security guards stood outside the door, ready to enter at a moment’s notice.

  Cate had been shown to a study across the foyer. “I haven’t seen my father in six years,” she’d said. “I’ll happily wait a few more minutes.”

  “A drink?” asked Kirov. “I heard you had a rough flight in. Something to calm your stomach? Cognac? Brandy? A Fernet, perhaps?” He strode to the liquor cabinet and poured two snifters of brandy from a cut-glass decanter. Even at one in the morning, he was his usual elegant self, dressed in a tailored navy suit and solid maroon tie.

  “No,” said Gavallan. “I want to talk to Graf Byrnes.”

  “I’m afraid that isn’t possible. He’s spending a few days at my dacha in the country. It’s quite remote. No electricity. No phones. But don’t worry: I’ll make sure you two see each other tomorrow.”

  “That won’t do. I want to speak to him now. You and I have nothing to discuss until I know he’s alive and well.”

  “Oh, he’s alive. You have my word. As for ‘well,’ that’s a different matter altogether. I’d like to say his condition rests squarely upon you. What you do. What you don’t do.”

  “News flash, Kirov: Mercury isn’t going near the market until either Graf or I say so. Without our go-ahead, the deal will be pulled. Enough controversy has surrounded it already. My disappearance will be the last straw.”

  “Will it?” Kirov sneered, lifting the snifter to his lips and taking a generous draft. “There seems to be some concern that you’ve gone a little crazy. Hitting Mr. Tustin on the trading floor. Flying to Florida without alerting your staff. Fleeing the FBI. I have it on good authority that the offering will go forward as planned without your go-ahead.”

  “Whose authority is that?”

  “Now, now, Jett. You don’t expect me to show you all my cards, do you? Suffice it to say it’s someone who can run the show perfectly well in your absence. Besides, you shouldn’t be too angry if your friends decide not to follow your orders.”

  Seething, Gavallan circled the grouping of furniture. Who did Kirov have his hooks into? Bruce? Tony? Meg? Had the words not come from Kirov’s mouth, Gavallan never would have thought it possible. Despite his fury, his heart beat slowly. His
hands were cool and dry. His vision had sharpened. It had been eleven years since he’d felt this way. It was his calm in the face of a coming storm. “Battle-bright,” they called it.

  “And just what do you think is going to happen down the road?” he asked. “Mercury won’t last two weeks once it goes public. You’ll have analysts crawling over your operations like flies on shit. They’re a tough group—nosy, ambitious, eager to make their reputation at your expense. They’ll suss out the company’s problems in no time.”

  “I’m not worried. With proceeds from the offering, we’ll quickly shore up any remaining operational deficiencies.”

  “The money Mercury receives from the offering is slated for acquisitions that will insure you meet your forecast growth rate. That’s cash to move forward, not to come up to speed. Miss one quarter’s estimates and the stock will fall into the cellar. Miss two and it’s all over. The price will dip below a dollar and you’ll be delisted from the Exchange.”

  “I can assure you we have no intention of missing our estimates,” said Kirov. “As per your own instructions, we have a few surprises in the pipeline. ‘Unexpected’ good news that will increase our earnings and allow us to beat our own optimistic expectations. What did you call it, Jett? ‘Sandbagging’?”

  “Sandbagging” was a common enough practice, a simple trick designed to goose the price of new issues six months out. The idea was to keep a little good news in your back pocket: a juicy contract about to be signed, word of another cable route about to be granted, a new and unforeseen use for a company’s proprietary technology—anything that would augment your revenue stream and boost your earnings. Six months down the road, when the time came to issue your first earnings report, you peeled away the blinds and announced that “due to the dramatic customer response” to your new software or router or “fill-in-the-blank,” your earnings had beat forecasted estimates by a nickel. The stock jumped 10 percent and everyone was smiling. Bankers. Customers. The investing public.

  “Sandbagging’s one thing,” retorted Gavallan. “Lying about your customers and your revenues is another. What are you going to say about your problems with Novastar? Having the prosecutor general riding your tail doesn’t quite fit with your investment scenario. It’s my experience that investors prefer to see CEOs of newly listed companies in the boardroom, not in jail.”

  Kirov laughed softly, but his irritation was beginning to show. He was blinking incessantly, his fingers appraising the knot of his tie. “I agree that jail isn’t part of our ‘investment scenario.’ If you’re talking about Mr. Luca’s article, I read it, too. ‘Mercury in Mayhem,’ I believe it was titled. A shame no one else will have the pleasure. Boris is very thorough. He promises me he erased the story from Mr. Luca’s computer and that he confiscated every copy in the apartment.”

  “Wrong again,” said Gavallan. “Even Boris couldn’t stop Luca from E-mailing the article to his friends before he was killed. It’s a matter of time until it turns up on the Net.”

  “So what?” spat Kirov. “One more rumor floated by a dead lunatic. One more piece of jetsam drifting over the ether. The public will pay it no mind. As for Yuri Baranov, I don’t think he’s going to be holding office much longer. I have it from a reliable source that the president is dissatisfied with his performance. Let me be the first to proclaim the investigation into Novastar Airlines closed.”

  Gavallan stared into Kirov’s eyes, catching a glint of real malice. He wasn’t sure what Kirov was hinting at—Baranov’s impending firing or his murder. He knew only that he was dealing with a killer, a man utterly without morals for whom murder was a legitimate business tool.

  “I think there’s been a little misunderstanding between us,” he said, walking up to the oligarch, standing close to him to emphasize the difference in their heights, in the beams of their shoulders. “I’m the guy’s got you by the short and curlies, not the other way around.”

  “Is that right?” Kirov kept his eyes locked on Gavallan’s, neither man giving an inch.

  “Before I visited Silber, Goldi, and Grimm’s offices this morning, I took a few precautions to cover my ass, just in case something like this happened. You see, I’m pretty thorough, too. First thing I did was make a copy of Pillonel’s original due diligence report and send it to my lawyer. We spoke, and I filled him in on everything that’s gone on over the past couple of days. I told him that if I didn’t get in touch by Tuesday morning at the opening, he should contact the stock exchange and the SEC’s enforcement division. I gave him instructions to hand over the real due diligence report and to inform them that Black Jet was pulling the Mercury IPO.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Am I?” Gavallan picked up the brandy and downed it in a gulp. Fuck it. He needed a drink even if the poison came from a scoundrel like Kirov. “Pillonel was a big help too. Sang like a canary, Jean-Jacques did, right into my attorney’s tape recorder. I wouldn’t say the confession was entirely of his own free will, but so what—it’ll do in the short run.”

  “You’re lying.” Kirov broke off his stare and retreated behind the sofa. “You didn’t have time to make a copy.”

  “We had plenty of time.”

  “No, no. It’s not possible. It simply isn’t.” The words were high-pitched, almost hysterical. Kirov’s mouth twitched and his eyes furrowed in thought. “Why should you have bothered taping a confession? Was it not your intention to turn Pillonel over to the police? No. No. You’re lying.” And as he reasoned through Gavallan’s actions, his voice calmed, the steady confidence returning. “You couldn’t have known you were being followed. You had every intention of flying back to the States with your precious evidence. Maybe even with Pillonel. There was no reason to take precautions at that point. I wouldn’t have. You’re lying. I know it.”

  Gavallan shook his head, his iron gaze letting Kirov know he was not. Putting down the snifter, he pointed a blunt finger at his host, his jailer, his willing executioner. “Here’s the deal: Tomorrow morning, you will wire me the fifty million dollars you borrowed from Black Jet. With interest. Graf, Cate, and I climb on board a commercial airliner and fly back to the States. And you will issue a statement that due to unforeseen market conditions, you’ve decided to postpone the offering to a later date.” Gavallan thought about Ray Luca and the others at Cornerstone, enraged that no one would ever be brought to trial for the crimes. “Believe me, you’re getting off easy.”

  Kirov’s eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets, to expand with boiling hatred. “So now you’re issuing ultimatums? Look around you—you’re hardly in the right place. If you like ultimatums, however, I’ll be happy to give you one of my own: The Mercury offering will go through. It will be a bigger success than any of us dares imagine. We shall earn our two billion and then some. And you, dear friend, will help see to it. Do you know why? Do you? Because if you don’t, Mr. Grafton Byrnes will die. Slowly. Terribly. Very, very painfully. And you will be on hand to watch it.”

  “Fuck you, Konstantin. You’ve got the wrong guy. I don’t respond well to extortion.”

  Kirov laughed, an ugly derisory snort. “We’ll see very shortly what you do or do not respond to. Personally I think your story about Pillonel is utter shit. But not to worry: One way or another we’ll ferret out the truth. Either Jean-Jacques Pillonel will tell me or you will.” He smiled invitingly. “I guarantee it.”

  51

  This was where all paths led.

  To Russia.

  To Moscow.

  To her father.

  Cate waited alone in the wood-paneled den off the entry hall. The lights were dim, and the room smelled of new carpet and worn leather. Through the heating vents, murmurs of a violent conversation drifted to her ears. Jett and her father were arguing, and it made her afraid. She’d spent her last teenage years here. Something about the Edwardian house seemed to goad its inhabitants into perfectly dreadful behavior. “She used to lie with her ear to the floor, listening to every word of
her parents’ fights, wincing, crying, silently ordering them to stop and make up.

  The past.

  Everywhere she looked it was crowding in on her, suffocating her with nightmares and obligations.

  Moving to the window, she drew a curtain and peeked outside. If she lifted her eyes, she could make out the top floors of Moscow State University, towering above a stand of trees. Well past midnight, the building’s lights were ablaze. Built in the late 1940s as one of seven “Stalin Skyscrapers” meant to showcase Soviet prowess in architecture and engineering, the university was ever the brilliant trophy. The stern spires and bold, conformist tower were masterpieces of their kind and stirred in her pangs of nostalgia so strong as to be painful. It was not the first time this evening she’d been overcome with sentiment.

  Passing St. Basil’s, the Novodevichy Monastery, the Kremlin, even the most mundane of office buildings, she’d found her throat choked with emotion. These were the landmarks not only of the city but of a childhood she’d willed dead and buried, and each in turn provoked a cascade of memories. Cate and her mother pausing for a tea in one of the unsmiling cafes that dotted the upper levels of the GUM department store. Cate skating for the first time on an impromptu ice rink in the courtyard of their apartment building, the result of a broken main that had spewed water into the air for two weeks running. A reverent Cate, barely thirteen, passing through Lenin’s tomb for the first time, frightened for the life of her to stare down at the great man’s embalmed face, her teacher stopping her and forcing her to look, berating her in the sacrosanct hall to open her eyes and gaze upon the motherland’s savior. She’d obeyed and fainted straightaway.

  But the stirring went deeper than nostalgia. It went to her heart. To her blood. It was her history awakening inside her. The past beckoning her to return. She was no longer Catherine Elizabeth Magnus, but Ekaterina Konstantinovna Elisabeth Kirova, a Russian woman born in Leningrad to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father almost thirty years ago. There was nothing her devotion to the West could do about it. Nothing her love for Ayn Rand or her addiction to Bruce Springsteen could do to rectify the error of her birth. All were accessories she’d acquired to paper over her true colors. Garments designed to deceive, to camouflage, to lie. The intended victim, of course, being none other than Katya Kirov herself.