by Tom Clancy
37
Ding Chavez and Dominic Caruso had been working twelve-hour days for the past week, scrambling all over the central eastern portion of Lithuania, photographing streets, fields, villages, creeks, even brick walls.
They had no idea why they were doing what they were doing, but they’d both spent the majority of their careers working for the U.S. government, so they had some background in following curious orders that didn’t seem to make a hell of a lot of sense.
Today they worked along the banks of the Neris River, beginning in the northern suburbs of Vilnius, and then heading north and east, going to nearly two dozen locations designated by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Following the river through the villages of Skirgiškės and Bratoniškės, and ending on the second of two bridges at Nemenčinė. The photographs today were much the same as all the others they had taken this week, although the two men were noticing some trends they hadn’t picked up on before. Several of the photos, maybe twenty-five percent of the total, seemed to be different positions of high ground looking north and east. They were even tasked with photographing from building rooftops and upper-level balconies in the towns.
And Herkus Zarkus was with them every step of the way. At each stop he contributed to their cover, usually just unpacking and prepping equipment, but occasionally actually digging trenches and climbing poles when the Campus men ran into unexpected delays.
He’d gotten them into private apartments, behind locked gates, and once even came up with a ruse to have them set up their “survey” equipment in a drainage culvert while curious traffic passed, claiming to the most inquisitive onlookers that a plan was in place to dredge below the culvert to expand the super-high-speed network.
While they worked, Ding and Dom had kept their eyes out for anything out of the ordinary, and this was tough for a couple guys who weren’t familiar with the area, but the pair had both been in Ukraine the year before, just prior to the invasion there, so they had some recent experience operating in similar territory.
An hour before nightfall they ran into another group of suspicious locals when they were parked on Highway 108. Just like last time, after convincing the locals they were fiber-optic linemen from America and not Little Green Men from Russia, Dom, Ding, and Herkus were told about suspicious vehicles in the area. It was anecdotal evidence that something was going on, nothing more, but the Campus men had no reason to doubt what they were hearing.
Tonight, once it got too dark for any more high-res photographs, the men headed south, taking a roundabout route back to the capital just to get a look at the area. The military presence they encountered to the east of Vilnius was impressive from a quantity standpoint. Lots of troop trucks, sandbagged positions, and young men carrying HK G36 battle rifles filled parking lots, roadsides, and other congregation points, but there were no roadblocks or any armor positions in sight.
As they drove along the E28, the main highway that went west from Kaliningrad, passed through Vilnius, and continued on to the Belarusan border, a pair of MI-17 helicopters churned the air above the DataPlanet truck.
Herkus looked up through the truck’s windshield as he drove. “You won’t believe it, but you guys are looking at about fifteen percent of Lithuania’s entire air force.”
Caruso said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope. They only have one fighter, an old Czech trainer from the seventies. That and a few transport planes and helicopters. A few years ago we didn’t have any money, so we couldn’t spend it on defense. Now we are more prosperous, but we joined NATO, so our leaders told us we didn’t need to spend money on defense.”
Caruso said, “Figures.”
Chavez said, “No offense, but the military equipment we’ve passed on the road doesn’t make your army look a hell of a lot better than your air force.”
Herkus agreed. “Not a single tank in the Lithuanian Land Force. We’ve got some antitank weapons, a few artillery pieces, and a bunch of mortars. If the Russians come, and nobody shows up to help us . . .” Herkus surprised the Americans with a smile. “Well, at least everyone will get the news quickly with our superfast Internet.”
• • •
Jack Ryan, Jr., sat at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, waiting for his seven a.m. flight to Dulles. He’d positioned himself in a corner of the waiting area at the gate, his back to a wall and his eyes scanning those around him.
He’d arrived from Luxembourg City less than a half-hour earlier, which meant he was probably out of danger, but failures in his OPSEC had led to the situation he now found himself in, so even though he was in an airport terminal where no one should have a gun or a knife, and even though he was hundreds of miles from where he’d been attacked the afternoon before, he wasn’t going to let his guard down for one second.
Not again.
As soon as his flight from Luxembourg landed he called Christine von Langer at the hospital to check on Ysabel. Christine told him his injured friend had made it through surgery with flying colors. Ysabel was still in a medically induced coma because of the dangers of swelling of her brain, but all her vital signs were stable and the doctors felt she would make a slow but full recovery.
Christine also mentioned that a pair of very polite but very tough-looking Frenchmen who were friends of John Clark’s had arrived at the hospital and presented themselves as friends of Ysabel’s family. Out of earshot of the doctors and nurses, they assured Christine that they would take good care of her, but Christine insisted on staying around, at least for the first few days, to make sure the doctors knew Ysabel had a lot of people watching out for her.
Relieved that the situation back in Luxembourg had stabilized, Jack next thought about calling his mother at the White House, asking for her take on Ysabel’s medical situation. He knew his mom would know a lot more about the care Ysabel would need than Jack would, but Jack ultimately decided against it. There was really no way he’d be able to explain to his mother that a woman he was involved with had just been beaten and stabbed to within an inch of her life without Jack’s mom needing a lot more information.
He told himself when he got back home he’d run over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and drop in on his parents. Maybe when they saw he was safe Jack could ask for a little bit of medical advice “for a friend.”
He wasn’t looking forward to that conversation at all, but he felt like he owed it to Ysabel to help in any way he possibly could.
He’d just completed a scan of a group of men near the gate when his phone rang. He looked down and saw it was Gavin calling. There was no one close to him at the gate, but he was careful to keep his voice low nonetheless. “Wow, Gavin. It’s early there. Must be midnight.”
“Yeah, I’ve been working through the evening.” He paused a moment. “Heard about what happened to your girl. I’m sorry, man.”
“Thanks.” Jack wasn’t used to tender moments with Gavin Biery. It made him uncomfortable. “Uh . . . You have something for me?”
“I’ve got info on that plane out of Lux City you asked me to track.”
Jack had all but forgotten about Gavin’s promise to find out where Limonov and Kozlov went next. “What about Salvatore? Clark said he’d get you to look into him.”
“We’re on him. Nothing yet. It will take a little time.”
Jack didn’t try to mask the annoyance in his voice. “What’s the holdup?”
“He doesn’t have anything to latch on to. No network to crack. He’s not employed officially, just a freelancer. He has a mobile phone—who doesn’t? But so far we haven’t gotten into the network to check his contacts or movements. We’re working on getting into the police systems there, checking him against Interpol, that sort of thing, but it is going to take a little time.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “I understand.” Distractedly, he asked, “What about Limonov’s plane? Did it go back to London?�
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“Nope. That tail number took off from Lux City just after eight p.m. last night. They blocked his flight plan, which I thought you might find interesting, because you said they didn’t block the flight into Luxembourg. So I lost them for a couple of hours, but I found a flight heading out over the Atlantic on a southerly route that reported a tail number that didn’t correspond to any departures anywhere in Europe. Not the one you gave me, but some aircraft will actually file under a different identity to hide the movement. Anyway, there were other ghost flights up and around Europe at the time, but nothing else that fit perfectly, time- and distance-wise, from Luxembourg, considering the cruising speed of a Bombardier 6000.”
Jack wanted to just tell Gavin to get to the point, but he was too sapped of energy at the moment to resist the computer geek’s intense desire to ramble. “Okay.”
“So this one looked good, but I had to rule out another that was heading out over the Med with a similar profile. Took a half-hour to determine the other flight was a Citation owned by a shipping concern in Sardinia, so I went back to the plane over the Atlantic. For a couple more hours I thought it was flying down to South America, but eventually it checked in with ATC over Bermuda, and by then I determined it was heading to the Caribbean.”
Jack felt his excitement rising. He wasn’t sure why Limonov would need to go in person to the Caribbean if he was planning on moving accounts offshore there, but Jack knew he could keep an eye on the man there better than he would have been able to watch over him if he returned to Moscow.
“Where in the Caribbean? Antigua? Grand Cayman?”
“Nope. They flew twelve hours straight, landed in the British Virgin Islands.”
“British Virgin Islands?” It was a known offshore location, although not one commonly used by Kremlin-associated Russians. Again, he didn’t have a clue why the Russians needed to personally visit the location, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Any more info?”
“Just that the jet landed at Terrance B. Lettsome International six minutes ago, taxied to Beef Island Air Services, a fixed-base operator at the airport. Don’t know where they will head from there. Just looking online, there aren’t a ton of hotels in the BVIs, but there are hundreds of private apartments and villas to rent.”
“Okay, thanks for the info.”
“Anything you need, Jack, you just shout.”
There was unmistakable empathy in Biery’s voice.
Jack thanked him, hung up, then he boarded his own transatlantic flight, the whole time wondering why two Russians working for the Kremlin would go to the British Virgin Islands, especially right after meeting with a lawyer in Luxembourg.
Most of the siloviki money he and the other analysts at The Campus had been following had gone through Cyprus or Switzerland or Gibraltar or Singapore. Cyprus had gone through severe financial hardships but there were still tens of thousands of offshore companies there owned by Russian entities, completely free of regulation. Cyprus’s money problems had nothing to do with Russia’s money, other than the fact that the newly flush-with-cash Cypriot banks had invested heavily in Greek bonds, which were rendered worthless due to Greek financial mismanagement.
The BVIs, on the other hand, were a place where many Chinese billionaires parked their accounts on the way to moving them back into China as investment capital.
Jack thought about it while he sat down in his first-class seat. Softly he said to himself, “If I was a big-shot Russian billionaire, I’d keep my money away from shell banks in the same neighborhood as the Chinese.”
Even if the money was in numbered accounts, some shell corporation or bank in the BVIs could make deductions about where it was coming from, and while they were sworn to secrecy, the power of the tens of billions coming out of China could encourage someone to say something about this other client.
China and Russia had come to blows in the past decade, and even when they were allies, their partnerships were fragile.
Jack muttered, “No way would I move my Kremlin money into China’s offshore turf.”
Jack wondered if there was some other reason Limonov and Kozlov had gone to the British Virgin Islands.
He doubted it had anything to do with their suntans.
• • •
After takeoff he pulled out his laptop and opened his IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook analytics software. He looked again through his data sets on Frieden, trying to find something in the British Virgin Islands that looked like it might warrant a trip down.
But he found nothing. None of Frieden’s known associations seemed to have anything going on in the BVIs, nor did any of his contacts. Sure, some of his clients had gone there, for what reason he did not know, but they didn’t seem to have any connection to banks down there.
Jack knew there had to be something. Limonov didn’t seem to be connected to Rome, and he didn’t show up in anything he had on Mikhail Grankin’s network.
Jack widened his search, pulled in data on known financial networks used by other members of the siloviki from Justice Department and Campus investigations going back years.
There were little bank accounts, shell companies, and trusts registered there, no doubt every last one of them money-laundering vehicles, but Jack didn’t see any obvious connection to Limonov, nor did he see why a Russian private equity manager and the ex-FSB goon shadowing him would have any reason to go down physically to move money there.
On a whim he ran the rest of Frieden’s contacts, looking to see if, perhaps, Limonov had met with Frieden to find information that led him to the Caribbean. This wasn’t an easy endeavor, because only a portion of Frieden’s contact list had physical addresses for the contacts listed. Jack threw these known addresses into a spreadsheet and searched for BVI references, and then, after finding none, he looked up the phone code for the British Virgin Islands.
Seconds later, he ran a search of the number 284 in the database.
He got two hits. The first was a business registration firm on the island of Tortola. The second, Jack saw, was a man named Terry Walker.
Jack didn’t recognize the name, so he ran it through his database of people involved in the world of international finance. He found no hits on a Terry Walker of the British Virgin Islands, so, assuming there were probably fifty thousand references in Google for both men and women named Terry Walker, he simply typed in the phone number.
Nothing.
With nothing else coming to mind, Jack typed the name into Google, ready to refine it by adding “British Virgin Islands” after his initial search, but he didn’t have to.
The first reference to the name in Google was the man Limonov had gone down to the BVIs to see, Jack knew this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
The flight attendant leaned over him, distracting him from his computer. “Can I get you anything?”
Jack looked up. “Yeah. Scotch. Neat.” And then, “Better make it a double.”
38
Jack sipped his scotch, reading about Terry Walker on the Internet. The Australian was the inventor and owner of BlackHole, the world’s largest and most notorious Bitcoin exchange. Jack found a recent article about the man, and learned his company was registered in the British Virgin Islands, and Walker was a resident of Tarpon Island, an exclusive beachside resort popular with millionaires and billionaires.
Jack knew about Tarpon Island because it was a famous retreat for famous people, and he knew about BlackHole because it was, without exaggeration, a nightmare for those in the world of anti–money laundering. It was something referred to as a hopper, or a tumbler, where all virtual currency transactions could be jumbled together to completely disguise both the buyer and the seller of the currency.
Bitcoin was difficult to trace on its own, Jack knew, but if someone used BlackHole, the best forensic accountants in the world couldn’t trace the transactions back to the
ir origin.
Jack wasn’t certain why Limonov would physically need to meet with Terry Walker to use BlackHole, but he’d obviously gotten the name from Frieden, and he’d obviously made the BVIs his next stop, so Walker had to be the reason for Limonov’s trip.
Jack Ryan suddenly felt his entire operation slipping away from him.
• • •
Jack thought for a moment, then pulled out his mobile phone. He was on a European airline, so there was no prohibition against making a call in the air. It was two a.m. in Maryland, and Clark had clearly been asleep, but he answered quickly; a lifetime of never being far away from a crisis meant he knew how to flip his “on switch” at a moment’s notice. It took a second for him to say anything, but Jack knew that was just because John was stepping out of his bedroom so he didn’t wake up Sandy.
“You okay, Jack?” Clark finally asked.
“Yeah. I’m over the Atlantic, inbound to Dulles. Sorry for the late call, but I think I’ve got some actionable intel.”
“Not a problem,” he said, and then, “We’ll get to your intel in a second, but first . . . I’m glad to hear you got on that aircraft.”
“You ordered me to. It’s not often I don’t follow orders.”
“I just know how you feel right now. Trust me, I do. As soon as you get home you can start looking for the men who attacked Ysabel.”
“Actually, I’m calling about something else. Gavin has tracked Limonov and Kozlov to the British Virgin Islands.”
Clark took a minute to change gears. Jack figured Clark was surprised he was working on something other than finding Salvatore and Ysabel’s attackers. But finally Clark asked, “What are they doing there?”
“I think they are going to meet with an Australian national named Terry Walker. He is the world’s leading trader of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin and others like it.”