The First Billion (42 page)

Cate shrugged, laying the Uzi on the table with a professional’s ease.

“Sure you never fired one of those before?” he asked.

“I never said that.”

“I just assumed . . .”

Cate gave a crisp shake of the head. “Don’t assume too much. Remember, you didn’t even know my real name until yesterday.”

Gavallan knew she meant it as a joke, but he could not laugh. He was upset, jittery, waiting for the adrenaline to run down, for the electric colors to fade. “Come on. There’s someone here who’s very anxious to see us.”

“Oh, Jesus, I almost for—” Cate bolted out the door, jumping off the porch and making toward the shed. “Graf!” she called. “We’re coming, Graf!”

58

Mind explaining this?”

Gavallan rested on a knee next to Grafton Byrnes, fingering the frayed bullet hole in his friend’s jacket.

Pale, unshaven, dark circles denting his eyes, Byrnes sat on the bare earth outside the shed, legs spread, sipping from a cup of water. His lower lip was cracked and swollen. A minute earlier, he’d smiled to show Cate and Gavallan the incisor he’d lost after he’d been recaptured the night before and returned to the camp.

“All you need to know is I wasn’t wearing it when it happened,” he said.

“I hope the guy that was got what he deserved.”

Byrnes looked away, his voice as distant as his gaze. “Oh yeah.”

“All right then,” said Gavallan, seeking to rouse the fighting spirit in Byrnes. He knew their freedom was an illusion, a temporary gift that might be yanked away at any time. It was a long trek to the border and he needed Byrnes at his side, not lagging behind.

Gavallan’s eyes kept coming back to his friend’s hands. The bandages covering his thumbs were torn, the gauze stained black with dirt and blood. His palms were colored rust, dried blood tattooing the flesh. “You okay, pard?”

Byrnes caught his glance. “Six months,” he said, raising his right hand, turning it over in the sunlight. “That’s how long I’ve heard nails take to grow back. Tell you one thing. I’m not ever getting another fucking manicure in my life.”

“Amen to that,” said Gavallan, patting him on the shoulder. He knew he could never appreciate the barbarity his friend had suffered. A glance at the bandages, at the wounded eyes, told him enough.

A breeze came up, rustling the trees, scattering pine needles across the dirt, and freighting the air with the scent of turned earth, loam, and, somewhere distant, burning leaves. It was a melancholy scent, and Gavallan was overcome with sorrow and sadness and a sense of failed responsibility.

“You ready?” he asked, getting to his feet. “Time to saddle up.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Byrnes stood shakily, throwing an arm to Gavallan’s shoulder for support. He took a few steps toward the clearing to better see the shot-up cabin, the bullet-riddled Suburban, the corpses sprawled pell-mell in the dirt. He stopped. Turning, he fixed Gavallan with a stunned, disquieted gaze, almost as if looking through him. Then he rushed forward and wrapped his arms around his friend, hugging him tightly. “Thank you,” he said, pushing his cheek into Gavallan’s hair, and Gavallan knew he was crying. “Thank you for coming to get me.”

Gavallan returned the hug. He tried to say, “Anytime—that’s what brothers do for each other,” but something was blocking his throat and he couldn’t trust himself to speak.

The second Suburban had survived the shoot-out intact. Not a dent in its black armor, nor a streak of dirt marring the high-gloss finish. Gavallan and Byrnes walked toward it, Cate following a step behind.

“Why didn’t you just cancel the deal after I left you the message?” Byrnes asked.

“What message was that?”

“About the network operations center.”

“It’s a wreck. We know that. Just like the Private Eye-PO said.”

“No,” protested Byrnes, stopping short, waiting for Cate and Gavallan to face him. “It’s not a wreck at all. On the contrary. That’s what I called to tell you. It’s a state-of-the-art facility. The NOC is Kirov’s beard. Don’t you see? It’s his disguise. It’s what fooled us.”

“Fooled us?” asked Gavallan. “How?”

Byrnes described the vast room filled with row upon row of personal computers logging on and off Red Star, Mercury’s wholly owned and operated Internet portal. “There were a thousand in there, maybe two thousand. I couldn’t count them all. Each logs onto Red Star, then visits a site or two—Amazon, Expedia, the high-traffic sites. Some make a purchase, then they log off. A minute later, they dial Red Star back up again. Over and over, ad infinitum. All running off some master program.”

“Metrics,” explained Cate, pushing a comma of hair off her forehead. “Has to be.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” said Byrnes.

“You knew?” Gavallan demanded.

“God, no. But it makes sense. I just wrote about the same kind of shenanigans for the paper. You know . . . how websites use metrics to manipulate the tally of monthly visitors. It’s a gag to fool the firms that measure Red Star’s traffic. Make them think Mercury has more customers than it really does. Jett, when you were doing your due diligence on Mercury, didn’t you talk to a metrics firm to validate Kirov’s claims about Red Star’s size?”

“Jupiter in San Jose. Their report tallied perfectly with Mercury’s figures. Two hundred thousand subscribers in Moscow alone.”

“Of course it did,” said Cate. “He knew Jupiter or someone like them would be called in to check how many hits Red Star got every day. He couldn’t risk there being a discrepancy. He needed two hundred thousand subscribers to justify his sky-high revenues, and two hundred thousand he got. Only his customers weren’t customers at all. They were straw men, or maybe I should say ‘straw machines.’ ” Cate took a breath. “Don’t you see? It’s a twenty-first-century Potemkin village.”

“You’re saying he set up shop out here and created a cybercommunity of Red Star fanatics?” asked Gavallan.

Cate nodded disgustedly. “Kirov had it worked out to a fault so you wouldn’t question how rapidly the company’s revenues were increasing. He knew from the beginning the kind of revenues Mercury had to post to max out its IPO. He could get the money easy. He stole it from Novastar. The subscribers were the hard part. That’s what required the creative thinking.”

“My God,” muttered Gavallan, shaken. “He played us like a fiddle.”

“More like a Stradivarius,” said Cate. “But his performance is over. And there will be no encore, thank you very much.”

Grafton Byrnes signaled his incomprehension. “Hold on, I’m missing something here. What’s Novastar Airlines got to do with this?”

Cate explained to him about her dealings with Ray Luca and what had happened in Delray Beach, about the trip to Geneva and Jean-Jacques Pillonel’s complicity with Konstantin Kirov to hide transfers from Novastar Airlines to Mercury Broadband and then to Kirov’s personal accounts.

“But what put you onto Kirov’s case in the first place?”

“Don’t ask,” said Gavallan, and Cate elbowed him.

“Actually, he’s my father,” she answered.

Byrnes’s eyes registered shock. “You said ‘father.’ You don’t mean . . . ?”

Cate nodded.

“Can’t say I see a resemblance.”

“Thank God for that.” She went on with her explanation: “I don’t think we’ll ever learn who Detective Skulpin’s informant was, but whoever it was that had the guts to go up against my father, I’d like to thank him.”

“I think you can forget about that,” said Byrnes reticently. “On Friday, Kirov—er, your father—showed up here with a nasty piece of work named Dashamirov. They had three employees of Mercury with them. Dashamirov went to work on them. . . .” The words trailed off. “Anyway, you can figure it out.”

Cate Magnus shut her eyes, and a chill seemed to pass through her. “I’m sorry, Graf. I’m sorry about my father. About everything that’s happened to you.”

“Don’t be,” Byrnes said. “You didn’t have a damned thing to do with this. You’re a good egg—I can’t imagine the guts it must have taken to come back and face him. The hardest thing a kid can do is step outside the shadow of a parent, especially a father. And then if he happens to be a rogue like Kirov, well . . .” Byrnes shook his head, then leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you for coming, too.”

Cate shrugged forlornly. “Tell me I’m forgiven?”

Byrnes brought her to his chest. “You’re forgiven, kid. Big time.”

The speedometer rose steadily. 180 . . . 190 . . . 200 kilometers per hour. Hands clutched to the steering wheel, Gavallan kept his heel hard against the accelerator and sent the Suburban hurtling across the green Russian plains. They’d left the dacha an hour ago and were headed back to Moscow.

A cell phone lying on the front seat between Cate and Gavallan chirped. She picked it up and read the digital readout. “Him again.”

For the last thirty minutes the phones they’d taken off Boris, Tanya, and the two drivers had rung more and more frequently. The digital readout indicated that it was the same caller every time—no doubt Kirov calling from his private jet, eager to know how the interrogation of “Mr. Jett” was proceeding.

“Jett, we’ve got to answer. He’ll know something’s wrong if we don’t.”

“No,” said Gavallan. “Not yet he won’t. When you’re forty thousand feet up it’s a crapshoot if your call will go through. Besides, what are you going to say—’Hi, Dad. Having a great time. Wish you were here’?”

“He’s right,” said Grafton Byrnes. “It’ll buy us some time.”

Cate cut off the call. “Have it your way.”

“Look, he’s still at least four hours outside of New York,” said Gavallan. “Believe me, he’ll put it off to atmospherics. Now get on with your story. How can you be so sure you heard right?”

“I was there. Right next to the study. Everyone was going every which way. The door was open. I got every word.” Cate pinched her voice and added her father’s nasal timbre. “ ‘I thought he deserved my personal attention. I gave him the full clip.’ Animal,” she added angrily, pounding the sideboard with her fist.

“And your uncle Leonid said the president was pleased?”

“It sounded as if Father was doing him a favor. Like the president wanted Baranov out of the way too.”

“Of course he did,” said Byrnes from his post in the backseat. “The president made his career as a spy. He’s just looking out for his cronies who are still in the trade. It’s the old boy network, Volga style. If Kirov’s promised him some money from the offering, you can bet the president will do what he can to help him.”

“ ‘An exercise in prevention,’ Uncle Leonid said,” Cate informed them. “Something to keep oil prices high and stop America from developing its own resources.”

“What do you think it is?” wondered Gavallan aloud. “The only major resources we have are in Texas and Alaska, and I’d scratch off Texas from the git-go—most of those are old wells with a only few good years left in them. Alaska’s our treasure trove. If we ever get around to developing it.”

Byrnes laughed bitterly. “Hell, I can think of a dozen ways to stop us from opening the land up there to drilling. All Kirov has to do is hire himself a few good lobbyists. That’ll tie up Congress for a couple years right there.”

Cate didn’t share in the humor. “But Leonid was going to Siberia. They’re going to do something!”

“Prevention, huh?” said Gavallan. “Only way to prevent us from exploiting our reserves is to keep us from drilling in the Arctic National Refuge. I mean, what other new resources do we want to exploit? Sons of bitches. If they try anything to ruin that land . . .”

Gavallan didn’t know if he should laugh, cry, or scream bloody murder. He shouldn’t have worried about the bush-league charges of defrauding his investors. Dodson’s accusations of murder didn’t amount to anything. No, he’d really hit the jackpot this time. He’d moved up to the big time—the bulge bracket all the way. Black Jet Securities was underwriting the KGB in its efforts to economically sabotage the United States, however they intended to do it. He had set his company on a line to commit a crime that was tantamount to treason. Willingly or not, he was abetting his nation’s oldest, and still its most formidable, enemy. A country that until recently spied on its citizens as a matter of course, that tortured, imprisoned, and executed men and women without trial or benefit of counsel, that believed human freedoms were secondary to the will of the state. A country that even now was on the slippery slope to fascism.

Cate handed Gavallan the cell phone. “Call your office, Jett. Tell them they’ve got to cancel the offering.”

It was 4 A.M. in San Fran. The office was just coming to life. A voice answered, “Black Jet,” and Gavallan hung up. “Graf,” he said urgently, looking over his shoulder, “when did you leave me that message?”

“Same day I got into Moscow. I got spooked by Tatiana at a dinner club and decided to check out the NOC for myself, then and there. I was sure you’d gotten it.”

“Well, I didn’t.” Gavallan paused, thinking of Kirov’s spy. He recalled the first intimations in San Francisco that someone had to be slipping Kirov information, then the Russian’s gloating confirmation last night that he’d lured one of Gavallan’s lieutenants to his side. “Who took the call?”

Byrnes fixed him with a cynical glance. “Who’s always loitering around your office the last six months waiting to have an urgent word? Who’d we catch looking in your drawers before Memorial Day? Who’s the one attending all of Mercury’s due diligence meetings when they never had before?”

“Jesus,” said Gavallan as a face came to mind. Family. One of the inner circle. A small part of him died, and he swore revenge. “Never said a word.”

“Fucking ingrate,” murmured Byrnes.

“Call back,” Cate implored. “Cancel the offering. Tell them all—Bruce, Tony, Meg. Call the SEC, too. And the stock exchange. If you won’t, I will.”

“And then what?” asked Gavallan, throwing the cell phone onto the seat between them. “What happens to Kirov after we cancel the offering? You think that’s going to put an end to him? Hell, it won’t even put a crimp in his style.”

He could see the events of the following days unspooling like clips from the evening news. Kirov being detained in Manhattan, then handed over to the Russian authorities. Kirov being set free as Russian prosecutors bemoaned a lack of hard evidence. Kirov appearing triumphant a year later, trumpeting his latest highflyer. There would follow an IPO in Paris or Frankfurt. A private placement in London. The world was full of believers. Gavallan knew it for a fact, firsthand.

“We have the Novastar evidence,” said Cate. “The proof he stole from the country. That ought to land him in jail.”

“And we’re going to keep it,” declared Gavallan. “We’re going to use it for ourselves.”

“But we have to give it to the prosecutor general,” Cate protested.

“Baranov’s dead with the president’s consent,” Gavallan said in disgust. “If his successor has any sense, he’ll give your father and Novastar Airlines a wide berth.”