by Tom Clancy
Sandy looked at the translation of the tender, scanning it for information. His eyes went wide. “The psychiatric hospital is buying two million rubles’ worth of mink coats and hats?”
Ryan said, “Think of how many crooks have to be involved in that to where they can post an open bid for something so obviously inappropriate.”
“It’s reached a level of shamelessness over there that I thought I’d never see,” Sandy admitted. “I’ll give you a good example. For the past few years one of the most coveted majors in Russian universities is the program that trains students to be government tax inspectors. They get a lousy salary, but it is a job where corruption is a piece of cake. You look over a company’s books, tell them they owe ten million rubles, then ‘allow’ them to skate for only five million rubles if they slide you a briefcase with one million rubles. It’s pretty much a license to steal.”
Jack asked, “Why doesn’t Volodin stop it?”
“Because he needs satisfied government employees more than he needs government revenue. Each corrupt member of the apparatus is another powerful person in society who has a stake in the status quo. People are making money off of his administration. That is pure job security for the siloviki.”
Ryan sat in the low light of business class, and he thought over everything he’d learned about Russia in the past two months. He wished he’d been more focused on that region for the past several years, but he’d been led along by events more pressing to the United States at the time.
Jack asked, “Why do you suppose Valeri Volodin was the one wealthy businessman who was able to successfully parlay his financial power into political power, when all the others had either stayed in the shadows or else were destroyed by the Russian government?”
“I don’t know, to tell you the truth.”
“You know more about his history than I do. How did Volodin get all his money in the first place?”
Lamont lowered his seat back a little and yawned. “You’d have to go back to the last days of the Soviet Union. Volodin was the money behind one of the first private banks in Russia. He doled out the cash that the other oligarchs used to buy up property when Russia went on sale and privatized everything. He loaned a million here, a million there, plus he bought up his own piece of the pie. Soon the Soviet Union had been sold off for pennies on the dollar, as you Yanks like to say, and Volodin and his bank’s clients owned controlling pieces in virtually every industry.”
Jack asked, “But he was KGB at the end of the USSR, right? How the hell did he get the dough to start this bank?”
“No one knows for sure. He claims he had foreign investment, but at the time Russia had no private property laws to speak of, so he didn’t have to prove where his money came from.”
Jack wanted to know more about Volodin’s past, but Sandy looked again at his watch. “Sorry, Jack. I’m going to get a little shut-eye so I can be fresh on landing. You should pry yourself away from those thrilling government tenders and dream of all the island girls we’ll meet tonight.”
Ryan laughed. He had dramatically different ideas of what the two of them would be doing on the ground in Antigua, but he didn’t want to tamper with any pleasant dreams Sandy might have on the flight down, so he just went back to his laptop to do some more reading, and he left Sandy to his nap.
* * *
They landed at Antigua’s V. C. Bird International Airport shortly after two p.m., and they took a short ride in a Jeep taxi across the northern tip of the tiny island into Saint John’s, the capital.
It was a warm and sunny afternoon, strikingly different from London, and a strong wind from the east blew across the island. Ryan thought Saint John’s to be no more or less developed than most of the other Caribbean capitals he had visited, which was to say it was simple and small. Passing through the business district, he didn’t see more than a handful of buildings higher than four or five stories tall.
He had read that the town’s population was only 25,000, but when cruise ships were in port the downtown streets could be thick with traffic. As they neared the port, Ryan checked the harbor and saw nothing but fishing boats, sailboats, and small cargo ships, and the ride through the narrow streets of the city was quick and easy.
They checked into two rooms in the Cocos Hotel. Sandy wanted time to freshen up and answer some work e-mails, so Ryan dropped off his luggage and returned downstairs alone.
By four p.m. Ryan was already walking along the sidewalk on Redcliffe Street in front of CCS Corporate Services, the registered office used by IFC Holdings.
He had no plans on entering, at least not yet. Instead, he found a tiny open-front fish shack a block up Redcliffe just past Market Street. He reached into a cooler and grabbed a bottle of Wadadli, a beer he’d never heard of, paid at the counter, and then sat down in a rickety wooden seat, back away from the open entrance. After a few minutes to settle in, he glanced back up the street. There, up half a block and across two lanes of light traffic, was a three-story turquoise-colored cinder-block building. A single man stood just inside a glass doorway, wearing a cheap blue blazer a few sizes too large for him. Jack pegged him as security, but just a lobby guard.
Ryan took in the entire scene. Next to the turquoise building on one side was a small meat market. Lamb shanks and beef cuts hung in the sun from ropes, and people walking by swatted at flies. On the other side of the building was a lazy-looking trinket shop set up for the cruise-ship passengers who happened to wander the five blocks up from the port.
Jack took a long swig of his beer while he continued to scan. Hard to believe, he had to admit, that this place was linked to a corporate entity involved in a multibillion-dollar natural-gas deal on the other side of the world.
The building itself had two dozen signs attached to it, but most of them told Jack nothing of what went on inside. In addition to the vaguely descriptive CCS Corporate Services, Jack saw ABV Services, Caribbean World Partners Ltd, and Saint John’s Consulting Group.
There seemed to be more than a dozen law offices in the building. Each one had one or two names and a phone number, and every third had a website or e-mail address listed as well.
Jack couldn’t read many of the signs from where he was without help, but of course, he had brought help. He pulled a small monocle from his pocket and held it up to his eye, and with this he could easily make out even the Internet addresses at forty yards.
He also noticed a spaghetti-like weave of wires into and out of the building strung along poles. He presumed the wires delivered electricity, Internet, and telephone to the building, and in addition to them, there were several satellite dishes and antennas on the roof.
While he sat sipping his beer, he used his camera phone to take pictures of every sign he saw. As he was in the middle of doing this, a text message popped up on his phone’s screen.
It was Sandy.
“Where are you? Fancy a drink?”
Jack tapped back, “Way ahead of you, boss.” And he added his location.
It took Lamont a while to arrive, so Jack spent the time taking clandestine pictures of all of the names, numbers, and e-mail addresses he could see, not only for the building that housed CCS Corporate Services, but also for another building on the northeast corner of Market and Redcliffe. It looked like it was full of the same type of services as the turquoise building, so he figured he’d pull all this data as well and throw it into his database back in the hotel room.
Finally Jack looked up and saw Lamont heading down the street toward him, perspiring heavily from his forehead as he approached.
Jack headed to the cooler, grabbed another beer, and paid for it. He passed it over to Lamont as the Englishman sat down.
Sandy cooled his brow with the bottle. “You can bloody well give me London’s fog any day.”
He looked across the street at the building and then back to Ryan. He drank from the bottle and said, “Feel like a regular double-oh doing this sort of thing. Being here with the son of the Presiden
t adds another layer to the intrigue.”
Jack just chuckled. He said, “I wonder how many buildings there are like this in town.”
“Antigua makes itself available for those who need to establish shells and launder money. Other nations, like Panama, for example, have tightened their controls a little in order to gain more legitimacy. Antigua is more of the Wild West. Yeah, they pay a little lip service here and there to international regs, but if you have the money you can bring it here so that it can begin its journey through the great big laundry service of planet earth’s integrated banking system.”
“But the criminals, the drug cartels, the Russian OC people, they don’t physically have to come here, do they?”
“Might, might not. Lots of people insist on the face-to-face. Some blokes don’t trust the help, others feel like getting in front of the government officials they are bribing helps them get their point across. The lawyers down here are used to meeting with some scary people, and then doing exactly what they’re told. But before you start weeping for them, remember, they make a lot of money for their trouble.”
A large black pickup truck that seemed to Jack to be newer and cleaner than many of the other vehicles driving around on Redcliffe Street pulled into view. Ryan noticed there were two young black men in the front cab, and he saw that the driver was looking toward the fish shack where Ryan sat with Lamont. Jack turned away from them, and the pickup disappeared up the street.
Jack finished his beer. “I don’t think there could be one hundred people who work in that building. One of them, at least one of them, knows who owns IFC and where his bank is.”
“They at least know which transfer bank IFC uses. My guess is they send funds from here to Panama, but it could be any one of a dozen places.”
Jack muttered to himself, “Wish we had a crew to tail everybody who comes and goes.”
Lamont laughed. “Tail them. You sound like a double-oh yourself.”
“I probably watch too many movies.”
* * *
Sandy Lamont finished his beer, and the two men went exploring the neighborhood. Jack put his Bluetooth earpiece in his ear and hit a record feature on his phone. He didn’t want to be seen taking pictures around here, so he softly read aloud every sign they saw in the business district that looked, in any way, interesting, along with reading off license plate numbers of any of the many expensive cars that rolled through traffic. The Bluetooth would record his notes, and he had speech-to-text software that would put it in his database once he got back to his laptop in his room.
They wandered the streets doing this till nearly eight, then they ate dinner in a harborside restaurant. Just after nine they returned to the hotel, but Jack told Sandy he would download all the data he’d collected into IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook and run it with the data points he had on the Galbraith Rossiya Energy deal.
Sandy retired to his room, took a long shower, and then changed for bed. He imagined Ryan would have him up at the crack of dawn for another day of skulking around the steamy streets of Saint John’s, and his feet were killing him already.
Just as he kicked his legs into bed, however, there was a knock at his door. He opened it to find Ryan standing there, a laptop under his arm, and dressed in black cotton pants and a black T-shirt.
“It’s not bedtime yet.”
“It’s not?”
“We’re going back out.”
“Where?”
“Let me come in a second and I’ll show you.”
“Do I have a bloody choice?” Lamont opened the door, and Ryan made a beeline for the desk at the far corner of the room. He had his computer open a moment later.
“Look at this,” Jack said. “I got all the new unstructured data in the system and started comparing it to the information I’ve compiled on the Galbraith deal.” He clicked on some buttons and a box came up. Thousands of data points were represented by little dots on a white screen. Lines grew between the different points, and then different colors of points and lines began to pop up. Jack said, “Disparate data points, several degrees of separation.” Then CCS Corporate Services, the Antigua-based registered agent, appeared with both blue and red points over the name.
Seconds later, a name appeared on the chart. Randolph Robinson, attorney-at-law. It had several colored dots on it.
“Who’s this bloke, and what’s his connection?”
“I saw his shingle today on a building on Redcliffe several blocks north of CCS. I popped it in the system, and he shows up as being a lawyer used by CCS.”
Sandy shrugged. “A local company uses a local lawyer. Probably for nominee services. Contracts, and that sort of thing.”
“That’s nothing in itself, and his name doesn’t turn up anywhere else. But I ran him through all social media and business listings, and I found his mobile number. Analyst’s Notebook ties it to two other companies involved in the Galbraith deal, as well as a shell set up by a Saint Petersburg restaurant group.”
“Okay. But what does that prove? That a Russian company has dealings here in Antigua? We know that already.”
“One layer to go,” Ryan said with a smile. “His suite address ties him to a P.O. box associated with a trust that serves as a local executor for Shoal Bank Caribe, which is owned by a holding group in Switzerland. This holding group also owns several other companies, mostly inside Russia and Ukraine. One of these companies has a physical mailing address. That address is the liquor store in Tver, Russia. The one IFC Holdings uses as a drop box.”
Now Sandy was on board. “Bingo.”
Ryan looked at Sandy. “This ties him to the Russian mob.”
Sandy agreed. “This bloke is involved with a bank used to wire funds from IFC.”
Jack was all smiles, but Sandy asked, “What is it you plan to do now?”
“You said it yourself, Sandy: I’m going looking in his trash. He might shred it, but if he doesn’t, then there could be tens of thousands more data points just waiting for me to get my hands on them. I just need you to watch the street for me.”
“You really are a regular double-oh, aren’t you?”
20
Just days after Gerry Hendley agreed to the reactivation of The Campus, the five operations officers flew to Kiev, Ukraine, on board the Hendley Associates Gulfstream G550. As cover, The Campus used a company created and maintained for the purposes of providing legends to Campus operators in the field. The company, OneWorld Productions, billed itself as a new-media organization based in Vancouver, which reported on world affairs from a left-of-center perspective and distributed its stories to news outlets around the globe via the Internet.
OneWorld Productions had a website, an actual office location with a receptionist in Vancouver, and had even published some pieces of reportage, although very close scrutiny of its online videos would reveal they were actually created by freelance journalists who had no idea all their work was for the purposes of backstopping a private intelligence agency.
In addition to a veteran pilot and copilot, the Hendley Associates Gulfstream operated with help from their director of transportation, a no-nonsense ex–Navy medic named Adara Sherman. When in the air she served as a flight attendant, but she also worked as a team medic in the field, a security officer, and a general facilitator of all things having to do with both the flight and ground transport.
Once Adara cleared the dinner plates out of the way, she helped the men go through some of the equipment they would be using on their mission. Of course they had cameras, iPads, and satellite phones with two-way communications capabilities—all items that any group of journalists wouldn’t be caught without—but they also had brought along several other items that would not hold up so well to close scrutiny by Ukrainian customs personnel.
There was a case full of slap-ons, metallic boxes each not much larger than a box of matches, which held mini–GPS receivers. These gadgets were great for tracking vehicles via apps on the men’s phones and iPads.
Also with them—and these certainly were not contraband, although they would be damn hard to explain—were several hobby-grade electric-powered radio-controlled cars specially designed as delivery vehicles for the slap-ons.
The team had no firearms with them other than Adara’s short-barreled carbine and pistol, and a second of each, all concealed under one of many hidden access panels in the jet, where they would remain. That said, the four operations men of The Campus would have a few other weapons available to them while they were in Kiev. They each carried a multi-tool with a hidden four-inch switchblade. The pens they would carry in their pockets were made of hardened plastic and could easily penetrate clothing and skin, they wore necklaces made out of a covered wire that could be employed as a garrote, and even their satellite phones had an external battery that supplied very little extra juice to the phone, but actually served as a powerful stun gun that could incapacitate someone at contact distance.
With Adara’s help, they hid the more clandestine items in the aircraft’s access panels just so they could pass through a customs inspection on landing. Then the men spent some more time on their laptops reviewing FalconView, a high-tech map system available to military and intelligence, and also available to The Campus, since Gavin Biery had accessed the files back before he’d lost access to the feed between Fort Meade and Langley. But even though their FalconView had not been updated in a few months, Gavin was certain it would still be a hell of a lot more helpful than Google Maps.
As they raced across the Atlantic at more than four hundred knots, Clark looked at the aircraft’s position on the main monitor in the plush cabin. He said, “Touchdown in five and a half hours. Let’s try and catch a few hours’ sleep. We’re going to need to hit the ground running tomorrow.”