The Silent Oligarch: A Novel (6 page)

Marina put her hand on his forearm. “Thank you for coming. It’s nice to see you.”

“I should have been before.”

Marina didn’t reply; she was watching Vika below. After a moment she said, “She’s so pleased to see you.”

“I know. It’s a relief.”

“I’ve been careful not to blame you.”

Lock wanted to thank her but it didn’t feel appropriate. They were quiet for a while.

“What happened to ballet?” he asked.

“She does that on Wednesdays. But she loves this now. She practices all the time.”

“I bet she’s good.”

Marina smiled and looked down at the dancers. They had lined up, in two rows of ten, and were listening to their teacher, a woman of twenty or so who wore a baggy gray T-shirt and held herself in a way that was somehow set and sprung at the same time. The chattering had stopped and the children watched her closely as she walked back and forth. Vika’s face was grave with concentration.

“Good morning, everybody.” She had a teacher’s voice, ringing and clear. “Lovely to see you all looking so well. Let’s hope you’re feeling fit.” One or two of the children grinned, but Vika’s expression didn’t change. “I see we’ve got quite a few new faces, which is lovely. Welcome to St. Luke’s Dance. I’m Jennifer. What I think we’ll do is let the new dancers see what they’re going to be able to do. So everyone who was here last year, let’s have a go at our routine from the show. Let’s see what you can remember. We’ll be missing some dancers but just do your part and don’t worry too much.”

Lock watched Vika walk to the left of the group, bend fluidly down on one knee and crouch in a ball, her hands clasped over her head. Beside her, the other children shaped themselves carefully into their starting positions, some curled up like Vika, some in stars, some arching backward, their arms stretched to the corners of the room. At a nod from the teacher the hall filled with the thump of bass-heavy music. For four bars the dancers were still, almost uncannily so, until with great precision they broke into a syncopated rush of movement, spinning, leaping, kicking, arms and legs making intricate patterns in the air, some keeping better time than others. Each dancer had a style. Vika’s was serious but light, the intent in her eyes at odds with the easy grace of her steps, resembling her mother even in this. She was an inch taller than the others and despite her naturalness more stately, as if something from all those ballet lessons, something of Russia perhaps, would never leave her.

Lock felt tears starting to rise from his chest; he didn’t know why. He was not a sentimental man. When he was on his own in Moscow he missed Vika, but what he missed most plainly was practical: being with her, talking to her, teaching her things, hearing her laugh. What he realized now was that he had fallen behind in his idea of her. She was a different person now, different for being in London, different for being eight years old, different for dancing in this way that was so new and yet so fully her. Watching her move with the music, at once free and in command, he felt some small hint of terror at the thought that he might never really know her again. But the tears that he held in check were not for himself, and had nothing to do with sadness, or fear.

He swallowed, consciously, smiled at Marina and looked away. Down below the dance came to an end, Vika sliding to a stop on her knees with her arms and head thrown back. He clapped, and the handful of parents in the gallery followed. Vika got to her feet and smiled up at him.

“Are you OK?” Marina said.

He turned to her and smiled again, not wholly convincing himself. “It’s just lovely to see her.”

“We’re very lucky.”

“We are.”

Lock paused. He was faintly aware of needing to air a question he couldn’t frame. “Is she happy? Here in London.”

“I think so. She loves London.” Marina looked at him closely, a slight frown across her brow. “Is that what you mean?”

“I don’t know.” He looked down. The teacher was telling the children to form a circle. “I worry about what I’ve done to her.”

“She doesn’t see it as your fault.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t. She’ll know one day.”

Marina crossed her arms and watched the dancers. “Is this leading somewhere?”

“I . . . I suppose I’d like to say I’m sorry.”

“She wouldn’t understand.”

“I don’t mean actually say it.”

“What, then?” Marina glanced at him and then turned back to the lesson.

Lock thought. He couldn’t find the words, because he didn’t yet know what he wanted to say. Marina always knew what was in her heart, and the more complicated the situation—where he would grope around among desires and fears that sat forever in shadow, reticent, unassuming—the more clearly she knew it. This was what he remembered of their arguments. What he had since come to realize was that there can have been no sense of triumph for Marina in these easy victories, that they must have been at best an additional disappointment, and he was conscious now, at least, of wanting to show her that he had changed.

So: what did he want? Some knowledge must have been distilled from the slow, dripping process of the last four years. In his mind a pair of images sat juxtaposed: his flat in Moscow, hard and bright, its marble floors polished to a shine, the leather furniture unworn, the kitchen redundant, the whole thing empty now and always empty; and his daughter in her T-shirt dancing and spinning below him.

He wanted to be away from money. That he did know. In his world every act was a transaction, every relationship a wary contract. He had always thought himself a shrewd if minor player of the game, but since Monaco he had become aware for the first time of the price of competing, of the steep and perhaps unavoidable cost.

He looked at Marina. How often had he sat like this, watching her in profile and failing to find the words that would turn her to him? He felt a flush of guilt and then of failure at the thought.

“I’d . . . I’d like to see more of you,” he said. “Of both of you.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“I haven’t. I’ve said I’d visit more often. This is different.” Marina closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. He went on. “I want to see more of you. Not just visit but spend time together. Do things.” Marina didn’t reply. “Normal things.”

She turned to look at him and he felt the coolness that was sometimes in her eyes.

“You have work to do, Richard. You know that.” She paused. “Leave Moscow. Find a way. I don’t want that in our family anymore.”

Lock nodded gently, his eyes down. “And if I do?”

Her eyes softened. At times like this they seemed to suggest that there were greater sorrows than her own. “The worst part of this was seeing you lost. I still hate it.”

He nodded again. Below him the dance teacher was counting out a four-four rhythm and Vika, watching her intently, was trying to follow a new move. Lost. It was a good word for him. He had drifted way off course; perhaps too far.

Four

S
OMETIMES WHEN A JOB BEGAN
you surveyed the ground, found it undisturbed, and simply had to start digging to see what was there; sometimes you arrived to find it churned up by others before you, and set to it with enthusiasm in the loose earth they had left behind. But this was new to Webster. He could guess what was buried and where, almost see it, but he couldn’t get near enough to dig.

Now he sat with his hands clasped behind his head, slouching almost off his chair, looking at the wall and wondering what he would do when he ran out of space. He had his own chart. It was made up of eight sheets of flip-chart paper and took up one wall of his office. On it he was writing in soft dark pencil everything of note about Project Snowdrop (Ikertu, ever hungry for project names, was working its way through flowers). He had a box for Malin at the top left; at the bottom left, one for Faringdon; top right, Lock; bottom right, Grachev. In each, in slanting capitals, were growing lists of ideas, attributes, facts. In the middle of the chart and expanding outward was what looked like a complex molecule, circles of different sizes connected by arrowed lines, and within the circles names of people, companies, organizations, places: Lock, Malin, Faringdon, Langland, Uralsknefteprom, Rosenergo, the Ministry of Industry and Energy, the Kremlin, Berlin, Cayman, Ireland. At least a dozen circles had been ringed in red: Dominic Swift, Ken McGee, Savas Onder, Mikkel Friis, Marina Lock, Dmitry Gerstman, and others.

His researchers thought his pencil and paper approach primitive and even ridiculous; they had database programs that would map this information in moments and never miss anything. Webster would patiently explain to them that this wall of notes wasn’t a calculation but an inching toward the truth, something requiring experience and intuition, patience and a soft eye. This was at once grander and murkier than an investigation of anything as mundane as a crime: it was a battle, silently fought, where victory would come to the man who could best understand his enemy’s weakness. Laid out here was Malin’s world, and until you really saw it—knew how it looked to him—you couldn’t hope to unpick it.

But after four weeks he had only a faint and frustrated sense of it. He had had four researchers reading every newspaper article they could find in Russian and English. Two had taken Malin and the ministry; one had taken Faringdon, Langland and all the companies connected to them; and one had focused entirely on Lock and Grachev. A further two had been deep in company registries, reconstructing the network that Lock had created and trying to work out from the scant information available what the companies within it actually did.

They had started with Faringdon. The corporate registry in Dublin gave them the names of its directors (Lock and a Swiss national called Ulrich Rast), an address, and its shareholders: nine further offshore companies, each several degrees more obscure than their Irish offspring. There was little else. The address belonged to a company that existed solely to set up and administer other companies and was therefore of no consequence; the company secretary worked for the same firm; Herr Rast too was merely a professional administrator, if of a rather exalted Swiss variety. The only point of interest was the nine shareholders; to have so many was unusual, and the purpose of the structure wasn’t clear. It suggested the work of someone clever or someone cautious. At least Faringdon itself was active; at least it did something. It bought companies, or stakes in them. From scouring the press—in Russia, in Azerbaijan, in Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Ukraine—Webster’s researchers found eighteen deals that Faringdon had made, and carefully noted the timing and circumstances of each. Then they researched every counter-party, every co-shareholder, and recorded all their findings on an ever-growing plan in the hope of finding patterns, coincidences, meaning of any kind.

Its lesson was not immediately clear. Looking down from Faringdon, you saw eighteen investments with no obvious commercial theme or logic to link them, lumped together rather than arranged. Looking up, you saw little at all. Between them, the nine shareholders were based in five tiny islands that had their own sovereignty and similarly stubborn ideas about the availability of information. For each, all Webster’s people had been able to find was an address and some directors (Lock again among them, the rest mere cutouts). There was no straightforward way of knowing who owned these companies, how much money passed through them, where it came from and where it went. Every project hit this wall, and Webster was used to it. There were ways of getting around it, but they were underhand and difficult, and the information they produced was seldom as useful as you wanted it to be. What was he expecting to find there, after all, except another layer of the same?

In Russia itself he was inclined to be cautious for a while. He and Hammer had discussed this at length. Hammer wanted him to let Lock, in particular, know that people were asking questions about him, but Webster wanted to wait until he knew his subject better. For now, then, all he had done was to ask Alan Knight, the oddest Englishman in the Urals, to do a little work for him.

So this was what was on the wall. First, he knew that few people knew anything about Malin. In Russia you had to look hard to find him at all, and in the West, nothing. His name was on a list of attendees at a Kremlin meeting in 2000 that had brought together managers of energy companies with academics and policy-makers. In 2002, he had attended talks in Budapest as part of an official Russian delegation that had included the then Minister of Industry and Energy; the following year he had been in Almaty as part of a similar group. He had been mentioned on a Ukrainian blog as one of a number of Kremlin insiders influencing the Russians’ decision to block gas supplies to Ukraine in 2006, and later that year he had been awarded The Order of Honor by the state, for “high achievements in economic production and for promoting the true value of Russia’s economic resources.” Real Five Year Plan stuff, Webster had thought, but the Russian press had barely shown any interest.

Webster had expected to find dirt on Malin, because there was dirt on everyone of note. If you were powerful you had enemies and your enemies wrote bad things about you—made them up if that was easier. This, in Russian, was
kompromat,
or compromising material. There was no
kompromat
on Malin—it was difficult to believe that someone quite so corrupt could appear quite so polished—and without it it was difficult to know where to start.

Nor was there much of interest on Lock. His name was on a thousand corporate documents and countless press articles but none was instructive. Whenever Faringdon bought something, or sold something, or formed a partnership, he was there as a spokesman for the company, providing a quote—always bland, always taken from the approved press release. Webster’s researcher had found two photographs in
Profil,
the gossip magazine of Moscow, that showed Lock at gaudy parties with improbably glossy young women. Webster was pleased to know what he looked like, at least: ash-blond, broad-faced, his thin lips, almost entirely disappeared, suggesting someone who had said “no” too often to the world. His skin was lightly pockmarked around the cheekbones but his eyes were blue and clear. Less worn, his face would have been handsome. In both pictures he was smiling and looking studiedly carefree, and in both was wearing well-cut suits that somehow contradicted his casual expression and seemed out of place amid the Moscow glitz.

This was all that Webster knew about Lock’s life now. He knew a little about his life before he went to Russia as well, but the two ends hardly matched. He was born in 1960 in Den Haag. His parents were Dutch, but had moved to London in the late 1960s when his father was transferred there by Royal Dutch Shell. In Britain Lock had had a good, regular, middle-class education—boarding school, history at Nottingham University, law conversion at Keele—and on leaving had joined a decent second division London law firm called Witney & Parks, which specialized in shipping and commodities work. He had a sister but Webster hadn’t found her yet. In his last year at school his parents had moved back to Holland but he had stayed on in England. In 2002 his mother had died in the same hospital where Lock had been born; his father now lived in the seaside town of Noordwijk.

Otherwise there was nothing: no profiles in the newspapers, no public spats with competitors, no scandals of any kind. No one had stopped to find this man interesting before—or no one had seen the use in doing so. Grachev was worse, a complete nonentity; and while the companies were busier, there was nothing that caused Webster’s instincts to spark. His researchers had given him histories of Faringdon and Langland but each was merely a list of transactions, on the surface irredeemably dry and impenetrable underneath. He imagined reporting so little to Tourna and realized just how much they had taken on.

There was no story here, and he knew the story was essential. What he was hoping to find was a route, the first few feet of a path: it might be a hint of a character, a glimpse of some hidden incident. He didn’t have it yet. Hammer was fond of saying that if what you needed wasn’t within reach on a piece of paper it would be in someone’s head. So perhaps he would simply have to talk to people sooner than he would have liked. The names circled on the wall knew Lock or Malin and had done business with them. Some would be loyal to them, and some would not, and he would have greatly preferred to leave them until he was sure of his plan and their allegiances. So be it. And in the meantime there was always Alan Knight.

T
HE ONLY SIGNS
that Alan Knight was English were his name, his briefcase and his accent, a soft Derbyshire burr that when nervous lowered to a mumble. Otherwise, he was Russian; he had steadily become so over the last twenty years. Even now, in a barely autumnal London, he wore heavy rubber-soled black shoes and a thick quilted coat that ended well below his knees. Underneath that, Webster knew, would be a blazer, and his shirt would be short sleeved. His trousers were half an inch too short, mid-gray, and pressed to a military finish. He had metal-framed glasses with light brown lenses, and the only color in his face was in his ruddy nose and, just detectable, in his gray-blue eyes. He was fifty, or thereabouts, and walked with a stoop, bowed by the weight of what he knew.

Knight lived in Tyumen, in the eastern Urals, the capital of Russia’s oil industry, a thousand miles from Moscow on the edge of the rich, bleak flatlands of western Siberia. There were many Westerners in Tyumen, but they all lived in expatriate compounds, sent their children to the American school, and left as soon as they could. Knight was a local. He had met his future wife there in the last days of the Soviet Union and when it became possible had married her and stayed. He had three children, all of whom were in the local Russian school. He supported his family by writing about oil for the Western press, and by working for companies like Ikertu.

Webster had no idea whether this had made him wealthy or poor, but he was valuable, without doubt. Knight knew oil and gas better than anyone but the Russians themselves. How he was suffered to know so much was a question that had always intrigued Webster: either he was in the pay of someone, or he was merely too lowly to be noticed. But Webster had known him for fifteen years, since his own days in Russia, and had never detected any bias in his information. In any case it hardly mattered here: if Knight failed to tell him anything interesting no damage would be done, and if he knew that Ikertu was investigating Malin and told people, that would merely accelerate things.

Knight resembled his adopted countrymen in one other respect: he was authentically scared of power. Giving him instructions was complicated and expensive. E-mail correspondence to his Russian account about anything of substance was forbidden. He came to London regularly; Webster knew his schedule, but if he had an urgent task he had to send him an e-mail inquiring when he would next be in England. Knight would then leave Tyumen and fly to Istanbul, where he would retrieve from a Turkish e-mail account the real brief that Webster had also sent him. Until Knight flew out of Russia to report, any further correspondence about the case was impossible unless Webster was prepared to bring him to London for the purpose. Clients who breached these rules were struck off. Webster and others put up with this degree of caution because Knight was good and because he had no competitors. If Russian business was famously opaque, energy was its dark center, and Knight was one of the few peering in from the very rim.

This time they met in the Chancery Court Hotel in Holborn. Webster had chosen it because it was anonymous and quiet and because no Russians ever stayed there. Knight wouldn’t go to the Ikertu offices. It was mid-morning and the lobby was more or less empty. Webster was early; he took a chair and started playing idly with his BlackBerry. This was an important moment. Knight had better know something useful.

After five minutes he arrived, looking agitated and hot in his coat. As Webster greeted him and shook his hand he remembered his sour, soft smell of tobacco and must.

“Good to see you, Alan,” said Webster. “You look well.”

“Hi, hi,” said Knight, looking around at the three or four guests checking out or sitting waiting themselves. “Can we go somewhere else? Let’s go somewhere else.”

“Why? We’re fine. There’s no one here.”

“That’s not it. Who knows we’re meeting?”

“One or two people at Ikertu. Alan, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing. No, nothing. I just need to be sure.”

“Really?” said Webster, the subtlest shade of exasperation in his voice. “All right. Let’s go.”

They left the hotel and Webster hailed a taxi. “Ludgate Circus please.” He turned to Knight. “I know a café about ten minutes from here,” he said. “There’s never anyone there between breakfast and lunch, and if there is it’s big enough for no one to overhear us. If you think we’re being followed let me know.” He sat back and watched the world through the window, wondering what on earth went on in Alan’s mind. Knight shifted in his seat from time to time to look at the cars behind.