Command Authority (13 page)

J
ack Ryan, Jr., and Sandy Lamont boarded a British Airways Triple Seven for the eight-hour flight to the West Indies nation of Antigua and Barbuda. As they checked their boarding passes and headed to the front of business class, they saw the flight itself was only half full, but Ryan and Lamont quickly saw their section was packed.

The luxurious leather seats were arranged to face one another at an offset so they could convert into beds for the transatlantic crossing. Ryan faced rearward, so he could not help scanning the other passengers on the flight. Business class was full of Indians, Asians, British, and Germans. There were a large number of Swedes on board as well, which confused Ryan until he heard a flight attendant mention the 777 had started its day in Stockholm before stopping off at Heathrow.

Coach seemed like it was mostly tourists, but up here in business, and presumably in the completely separate first-class cabin, the aircraft would be full of men and women who did their banking, either in whole or in part, in the offshore tax haven of Antigua. Ryan’s work of the past two months made him incredibly suspicious of those around him, and he discreetly eyed the passengers one at a time, making guesses as to their identities and the dark secrets they held.

Jack hadn’t heard any Russian accents, but he wouldn’t have been surprised at all to learn that first class behind him was full of Eurasian oligarchs and organized-crime lords.

After a few minutes of all this speculation he realized he could drive himself crazy being so suspicious of those around him, so shortly after takeoff he forced himself to concentrate on the lunch menu.

Jack decided he’d work through the majority of the long flight. As soon as the china had been removed from his table after his sumptuous lunch, he pulled out his laptop and began looking through interactive maps of Saint John’s, their destination. He did his best to memorize major streets and transportation centers, and he scanned the route from his downtown hotel to the registered agent’s office just a few blocks away. He jotted down addresses of other buildings that showed up on SPARK as being involved in the offshore banking and commerce realm, because he wasn’t certain just what he was looking for on this trip, so he wanted to go to as many locations as possible.

While Jack was engaged in all this, Sandy watched a movie. Jack couldn’t see the film from his seat, but it must have been a riot, because Lamont’s nearly constant belly laugh bled through Jack’s noise-canceling headphones.

After Ryan read up on his destination for more than an hour, he started looking through some business intelligence resources he’d downloaded to his encrypted laptop. It was an Analyst’s Notebook database of translated Russian government tenders, and he kept it updated every day, hoping to find new clues to lead him in his Galbraith investigation.

Despite warnings from Sandy that focusing on Gazprom itself was a futile endeavor, Jack was determined to get a clearer picture of how the largest company in Russia conducted business—specifically, with the government. To this end, he scanned through contract offers across a wide spectrum of industries in which Gazprom dealt, searching for any bids by either companies owned by Gazprom or else one of the firms who had made money off Gazprom’s auction-payoff scheme.

—

H
e’d been at this for nearly two hours when Sandy took off his headphones and climbed out of his seat for a bathroom break. The blond Englishman returned, ready to get back into the comedy he was watching.

Jack said, “Sandy, you won’t believe what I’ve found.”

Lamont leaned closer to his colleague so he could speak softly. The lights were off, and many were sleeping around them. “What are you looking at?”

“Russian government contract offers.”

“Oh. And I thought the movie
I
was watching was a laugh.”

Jack said, “Actually, some of this shit is so outrageous it’s almost funny.”

Sandy raised his seat and then moved over next to Ryan so he could see his laptop. “Go on, then. What outrageous financial shenanigans have you managed to uncover since takeoff?”

Jack scrolled through the database and clicked on a link. “Look at these translated documents. They are Russian government tenders.” He picked one and highlighted it; it expanded to the size of the screen. “Here’s one offering a three-hundred-million-ruble contract for public-relations consulting for a Gazprom subsidiary in Moldova.”

Sandy looked it over. “That’s ten million U.S. for public relations for a natural-gas company in a tiny nation, a product for which there is zero competition. Looks like a typical inflated government contract tender.” He shrugged. “Wish I could say we don’t have the same thing in the UK.”

Jack said, “I’m sure we have the same sort of crime going on in my country, although my dad would hang anyone by the balls he caught involved with something like this. But this deal is even more brazen than it looks. Check out the posting date, and then look at the application deadline date.”

Sandy looked, then looked at the date on his watch. “It was posted today, and all applications must be in by tomorrow. For a ten-million-dollar tender. Bloody hell.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say there is something shady with that contract.” He went to another page on the database and highlighted another contract offer. “And it’s not just Gazprom, the entire Russian government is doing shit like this. Here’s another request for tender for a two-million-ruble bid for a state-run psychiatry institution.”

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.

—

T
hey 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 President 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.”