by Rod Reynolds
‘“The scheme was in place 2011 to 2015”.’
Michael flicked his eyes to the wall, coming to the realisation. ‘So…’
‘So are we supposed to believe that whoever was moving money wholesale out of Russia just gave up when Deutsche got busted?’
He set his phone down on the table, the movement so slow and deliberate it was as if it might shatter on contact.
‘This is…’ She shook her head, struggling for the words. ‘Who moves money out of Russia on that scale? We’re talking about people with connections all the way up.’
‘State-connected?’
‘There are capital controls on moving money out of Russia. The rules are it’s fine to loot the place, but you have to keep the money in the country. The government was worried about capital flight, so no one could get that much out without someone’s approval. It has to go to the top – oligarchs, Russian mafia. The FSB…’
‘As in the old KGB? As in Putin?’
She sat back in her chair, picturing Jamie Tan coming to Tammy, threatening to blow the whistle on all of it. ‘Fucking hell.’
She waited to see if he’d say something but he kept his eyes on the wall, a thousand-yard stare that gave away nothing. She stood her phone up to read aloud the second passage that’d jumped out:
‘“Investigators believe the Deutsche Bank mirror trades scheme may be just one of several employed by wealthy Russians to expatriate their fortunes, which they estimate have been used to illicitly move up to a hundred billion dollars out of the country in the last two decades. The Russian central bank itself indicated the involvement of other international banks, which it declined to name.”’
‘Moscow and Cyprus,’ Michael said.
‘What?’
‘Tan was backwards and forwards to Frankfurt all the time, but he made trips to Moscow and Cyprus too. It says there were Cypriot banks acting as middle men as well.’
She pushed her hair off her forehead, the drab walls a counterpoint to the rush that was gripping her – a place as mundane as a Starbucks basement to learn the extent of the shit she was caught up in. ‘This is crazy – are we honestly saying Russia killed Jamie Tan?’
‘After the Skripal thing in Salisbury? Litvinenko?’
Two KGB defectors, two state-sponsored hits carried out on British soil. Sergei Skripal and his daughter survived, despite exposure to the weapons-grade nerve agent Novichok. Alexander Litvinenko wasn’t so lucky; suspected Russian agents laced his tea with radioactive polonium in a London restaurant, and he died three weeks later. A 2015 public inquiry concluded his assassination was an FSB operation – likely authorised directly by Vladimir Putin. ‘But they were spies…’ She trailed off saying it, a limp protest that didn’t stand up to what she knew.
‘The method was different but it’s just as brazen as the others. They want the Brits to know they did it, even while they deny it.’
Michael tapped his fingers on the table, something moving behind his eyes. They stared at each other, the burble of conversations around them overlaid with the piped-in music coming from unseen ceiling speakers, a folksy guitar number in the requisite minor key. Lydia picked at the cardboard seam of her coffee cup to stop her eyes from straying to his mottled wrist. ‘Why did you ask Finch about Tan’s wife?’
He shrugged.
‘She’s missing, isn’t she?’
He nodded, looking down.
‘What’s your real interest in her?’
‘Her safety. I told you.’
She stared at him, trying to discern anything from his expression. He looked like he was fighting to keep everything bottled up. ‘Was that stuff about the stripper true?’
He tilted his cup to study the side of it. ‘Which part?’
‘Any of it.’
He said nothing at first. Then he set his cup down and pushed it away. ‘Jamie Tan didn’t do that to her. She’s separate to all this – but Finch doesn’t know that.’
‘So who is she?’
‘A friend.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Some asshole used her for a punch bag. She’s got nothing to do with—’
‘And what did you do?’
‘Why does it matter?’
Because I need to know I’m right about you.
He reached for his cup again but she took it away, making him look up at her. ‘What?’
‘Did you buy her off for someone?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No.’ He picked a grain of sugar off the tabletop with the end of his finger, concentrating his gaze on it as he dropped it to the floor. ‘The guy that did it – I took him for every penny. I gave her as much as I could.’
‘His money?’
He nodded.
She picked up her cup but put it down again without taking a sip. ‘You really did that?’
‘Why do you say it like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Disappointed.’
She reached out and tapped his phone screen. ‘Because you’d let him buy his way out of what he did to that poor woman?’
‘She didn’t want the police involved. It was her call.’
‘Sure. And now what’s she got?’
‘Enough to start over.’
She looked away, shaking her head. ‘At least we’re clear now about what “corporate intelligence” means.’
‘I did what I could. Are you whiter than white?’
She could feel his eyes on the side of her face, like there was something more to say. She checked the time on her phone, buying herself a second. ‘Why did you try to warn Tan?’
‘I don’t know.’ He said it immediately, a faraway look in his eyes that made it seem genuine. ‘He wasn’t … It didn’t seem fair.’ He stopped himself, his jaw muscles pulsing as if he was still trying to work it out. ‘It was a fuck-up.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of how it looked. I should’ve realised…’
‘What?’
‘I gave them an excuse.’
‘To kill him?’
‘No. Me.’
She leaned in close. ‘Who the fuck are you working for? That they’d do that?’
‘I told you, it’s better not to know.’
She set her hands on the table to push her chair back. ‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Go where?’
‘I need to go to work.’
‘That’s a mistake.’
‘I don’t have a choice.’
‘It took me three seconds to find out where your office is.’
‘I’m safe inside the building.’
‘After what we just talked about?’
She ignored him and got out of her seat. He watched her as she turned to go.
‘I know about Tammy Hodgson.’
She was facing away from him but the name froze her on the spot. ‘What?’
‘Did she put you on to Adam Finch?’
She spun around. ‘No. How do you know about her?’
‘She sent you the video.’
‘But it was anon—’ She closed her eyes, the only possible answer coming clear – that he’d traced it back to Tammy somehow.
‘They murdered her. You know it as well as I do.’
‘Who? You throw that out there as if it’s nothing, just fucking tell me—’
‘Whoever killed Tan. Hear me out: if she put you on to Finch, maybe she’d got as far as mirror trades to—’
‘She hadn’t.’
‘You’re certain?’
‘About Finch, yes. And almost so about mirror trades.’
‘Then there’s no fucking way they leave us alive.’
She stared at him, her chest tightening, battling to keep her voice level. ‘Why?’
‘Because she didn’t know a fraction of what you know – we know – and they killed her anyway.’
CHAPTER 44
‘Fuck’s sake.’ Lydia slapped her keyboard and jumped up in a
rage, sending her chair rolling across the floor until it crashed into the bank of desks behind her.
The email was from an agent representing the wife of a Premier League player. According to the pitch, her husband had beaten the shit out of her when she confronted him over messages she’d found on his phone, and now this agent was selling the woman’s exclusive, including the chance to do a photoshoot to capture, what he described as, ‘her shocking injuries, while they’re still fresh’.
She pushed her hair out of her face, swimming in all the words she’d read about mirror trades overnight. Investigations in the wake of the Deutsche scandal indicated they were one of a number of similar schemes with exotic names – the Azerbaijani Laundromat, the Russian Laundromat, the Global Laundromat – all aimed at moving and laundering the dirty billions flooding out of Russia and the former Soviet states. The money flowed into an impenetrable maze of shell companies around the world, facilitated by international banks and front companies with innocuous names like Indigo and Gabledown – many of them UK-based. The American trader implicated as the mastermind at Deutsche was last seen in Bali, a jurisdiction that – surprise – had no extradition agreement with the US. He’d gotten out in time, and she wondered how he’d been tipped off, and by whom.
She rubbed her eyes as if she could chase away her tiredness, then gazed across the open office, mostly empty. There was a flat-screen mounted to a pillar in her line of vision, showing one of the news channels. She caught a glimpse of a familiar face on the screen and got up to move closer. The sound was muted, subtitles running across the bottom. The pictures showed James Rawlinson, former mayor of London, in a hard hat being guided around a construction site somewhere in Haringey, a standard press op to remind prospective voters – and his own party – that he’d been a big hitter during his eight years in power. The grandee leading the tour looked equally ridiculous in his suit/hard hat/hi-vis combo; she recognised him as Sir Oliver Kent, the long-time politician and former council leader who’d jumped the fence to take up big-money consultancy gigs with corporate developers. The two were a natural fit – Kent and Rawlinson had worked hand in glove on various planning and regeneration initiatives over the years. But it was the group following them that drew her in – media relations people, advisers, hacks, all watching where they put their feet crossing the building site. And there at the front of the pack was Peter Goddard.
Seeing him now seemed like her own warning. Of course he’d been in the news since the day she’d approached him at City Airport, and more frequently since Rawlinson announced his bid to become an MP – but now he served as a reminder of past mistakes. Impatience; impetuousness; getting ahead of the evidence. It ran too close to Stephen’s words about the business looking for maturity and professionalism. That was all well and good, but Goddard was dirty and she knew it, and one day she’d make him pay for it. Revenge the only emotion she wanted to feel right now.
She went to the kitchen and made a coffee, took it back to her desk. Checking her phone absently, she toyed with the idea of messaging Michael. All this tired energy, and no one to bounce it off. But the email waiting at the top of her personal inbox was one she wasn’t expecting – Dietmar Stettler, the German investigative journo she’d asked about Arpeggio Holdings. The connection sparked as she read his name, and she couldn’t believe she hadn’t made it earlier: there was no one better placed to give her the German perspective on HFB.
She opened his email, just two lines:
Lydia, it’s good to hear from you. I can give you some background in this instance, but better to talk on the phone, I think. Email me to say when is a good time to call.
She wrote back saying she could speak anytime – the sooner the better. She signed off with her mobile number.
As she put the phone down on the desk it started to buzz. An international dialling code.
‘Hello?’
‘Lydia, it’s Dietmar.’
‘Hi, how … What time is it there? I didn’t mean to disturb you in the middle of the night.’
‘It’s okay, I was awake anyway. I find I don’t sleep so much these days. And the same for you, it seems.’
‘I’m working nights. Hopefully not much longer.’
‘Hmm. A good time to work, though, no? I always liked a quiet office. Anyway, you did not answer to discuss sleeping habits. How did you come to be interested in our friend Simon Shelby?’
‘Shelby? I was expecting you to say you knew something about Arpeggio Holdings.’
‘Arpeggio, no. It’s in the files, but it’s one of very many similar shell companies. There’s nothing that makes it stand out. How does it link to Shelby?’
‘They’re both directors of an investment company that owns a property connected to a story I’m working. I could do with knowing who the ultimate owner is.’
‘Alright. So, Simon Shelby is a name we used to see a lot – he was connected to numerous offshore tax and investment schemes of questionable legality. I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a criminal, but it’s hard to be a clean cloth in dirty water, you understand?’
‘Who was he working for?’
‘Anyone with money,’ Dietmar said, ‘the same cast as always – Chinese, Russians, Americans, and of course the Brits. A lot of his schemes were connected one way or another to the Ukrainian financier Andriy Suslov. Do you know Suslov?’
A bell was ringing somewhere deep in her memory, but it wasn’t much more than an echo. ‘I’ve heard the name.’
‘He shies away from publicity, but I can never be sure if that’s because of his dubious reputation, or the reason for it. You can Google him.’
‘You said you used to see Shelby’s name a lot. Not anymore?’
‘Not so much, but what does that mean? The leaks we have are only glimpses of the whole.’
‘Does he still work with Suslov?’
‘Impossible to know.’
She rubbed her neck, planting one knee on her seat. ‘What about the other term – Withshaw?’
‘Nothing, I’m afraid. This is another shell company?’
‘Yes. And the name of the property I was talking about.’
‘This story – Suslov has significant business interests in Germany. If he is a part of it, you will let me know?’
‘Yes, of course, absolutely. Listen, Dietmar, one other thing – what do you know about mirror trades?’
‘The Deutsche Bank scandal?’
‘Yeah. Sort of.’
‘Well, I could speak all day on this, but maybe you have something specific you’re thinking of…?’
‘Did you hear anything about HFB being involved too? Or something similar?’
‘HFB? No, this is new to me. A very staid bank, here in Germany, but then so was Deutsche believed to be. What makes you say that?’
She pushed back off her chair to stand straight again. ‘I’ve got a source telling me – with no evidence, no corroboration – that HFB were mirror trading too.’
He laughed at her emphasis, acknowledging how shabby it sounded. ‘A few years ago I would have told you there is no way. Now…’ There was a pause, as if he was switching the phone to his other ear. She remembered him once telling her that he didn’t like to ‘radiate’ one side of his brain for too long. ‘If you want to know more about Deutsche, I’m happy to answer any questions you put to me. If, of course, you’ll do the same for me with HFB.’
She laughed, rolling her head around her shoulders to work the kinks out of her neck. ‘Of course. Thanks, Dietmar, I owe you a beer.’
‘I’d prefer a glass of wine. And a story about HFB…’
‘I’ll call you when I know more.’
She set the phone down and looked up at the TV screen again, but the news had moved on to a sports roundup, a golfer making a putt on a course too vivid and picture-perfect to be anywhere but America.
Simon Shelby and Andriy Suslov. Where did she know his name from? She put Suslov into Google and sorted through what came back. Basic
background on him and where he’d made his money, infrequent profiles from business magazines over the years, his ties to the Kremlin through ex-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Buried further down, a link that made her click the second she spotted it: ‘Was Ukrainian billionaire Andriy Suslov behind the murder of journalist Irina Voronova?’
She raced through the article, a piece for an online journal penned by an anonymous writer who claimed their identity had to be hidden for their own safety. Voronova’s name wasn’t familiar, but it was more than possible Lydia had heard about her murder over the years and that was why Suslov’s name struck a chord. The piece detailed how Moscow-based Voronova had been investigating the 2003 drowning death of Leon Kozlov, a high-up at a Russian fund specialising in emerging markets – and a direct competitor of Suslov. According to the article, Voronova had evidence implicating Suslov in Kozlov’s death and was on the brink of publishing her claims at the time she was killed – speculation that had been reported at the time.
Her own murder was unsolved, the Russian authorities attributing it to a botched street robbery. No one had ever been charged. The writer went on to allege that the actual culprit was an ex-FSB agent suspected of involvement in two previous contract killings and who could be placed near Voronova’s apartment on the day of the hit. The author claimed the man had, until three months before, been employed as a security consultant for Andriy Suslov, and the report went into some detail substantiating its claims. Two weeks ago Lydia would’ve dismissed the author as another Internet nutjob. Now, it felt all too real. When she put the article’s title into Google, it spat out another dozen pieces linking Suslov to Kozlov and Voronova’s deaths.
She crossed the office to the windows and looked down at the streets. Lights moved everywhere below her, cars and buses, the city alive in the dead of night. She’d never felt scared down there before all this started; the one upside of working nights was seeing the city keep buzzing, keep moving, a machine always ploughing forward even while most people slept. Now all that was slipping, her sense of safety and confidence being stripped away from her.