The Silent Oligarch: A Novel (3 page)

Webster saw something heated, something childish in Tourna’s gaze: he gave the impression of being ill-equipped to deal with reverses. He kept his smile but didn’t say anything. For a moment the two men looked at each other.

“Tell me about Malin,” said Webster.

Tourna nodded to himself again and took a deep breath.

“He sold me a company. Well, one of his stooges did. It was meant to own a package of exploration licenses. Some oil, some gas, all in Yamal-Nenets. We did the due diligence and everything was fine. Then when the deal’s done, the licenses aren’t there. They’ve been transferred to another company. Incorporated in Cayman two months before. It had some made-up option on them.”

“How much did you pay?”

“Fifty million. Bucks. That was my money, too.”

Webster nodded. “And you want the licenses back.”

“No. I’ve had it with Russia. Should have known better. I want my money back. But that’s not why you’re here. I have lawyers for that.”

Webster waited. Tourna looked him in the eye.

“What I want from you,” he went on, “is the downfall of Konstantin Malin. The man is a crook. He’s meant to be the great strategist. The grand vizier, the man who made Russia powerful again. But all he cares about is his empire, and his money. He’s a fat crook, and he doesn’t deserve any of it. I want him gone.”

Webster said nothing for a moment. He could feel excitement rising in him, in his shoulders and his chest. A chance to take on Malin. This was worth coming here for. This was even worth the waiting.

“What do you mean by gone?”

“Out of the ministry. Humiliated. Under investigation in a dozen countries. I want him strung up from a lamppost.”

“I see. And how would we do that? He’s a powerful man.”

“I was hoping to hear your ideas.”

“You must have pictured it.”

“Look, everything he does is bent. But he smells of roses. There must be so much dirt on this guy somewhere. We find it and we use it.” When Tourna talked, his lips, an unexpected pink against the tan, pushed out slightly. They, thought Webster, rather than the eyes, are what tell you not to trust him.

He nodded again. He took a notebook and a pencil from his jacket pocket.

“You mind?”

“No, get it all down. Just don’t lose it.”

For an hour Webster questioned Tourna about the story and all the people in it. When had all this happened? How had the deal come about? Had he met Malin? Who else had he dealt with?

By the time he had finished it was ten o’clock and he could feel the sun hot on his shoulders. There was a flight at three. He wanted to leave this place and think about what he had just heard.

“I think that’s everything. Thank you.” He looked at his watch. “I should go.”

“You’re not staying? Stay as long as you want. I could drop you in Bodrum tomorrow.”

“Thank you, no.”

Tourna stretched and put his hands behind his head.

“So do I pass?”

Webster smiled. “I don’t know. I’ll speak to my boss.”

“You think you can help?” said Tourna, looking up at Webster and shielding his eyes.

Webster thought for a moment.

“You’re asking a lot. If we take it on we’ll do the same.” It occurred to him as he said it that he would take this on for no money at all. This was the sort of case he had signed up for: the sort that makes a difference.

Tourna laughed. Webster went to collect his things and start the long journey back to London, thinking hard, imagining how this might work.

Malin. Quite a prize.

T
OURNA HAD GIVEN
Webster a thick file before he left. He read it on the plane—a breach of protocol, but the child asleep next to him was hardly likely to be interested.

In it were all manner of documents, carefully organized: news articles, company reports, transcripts of radio programs, photocopied excerpts from books. Throughout, passages had been marked in fluorescent ink and annotated with exclamation marks and energetic underlinings. Tourna had explained that this was his personal file: he had compiled much of it himself. The most substantial item was a report for a bank that was thinking of lending money to a Viennese company called Langland Resources. It had been written three years earlier by a competitor of Ikertu, but how Tourna had got hold of it wasn’t clear.

Webster began with the appendices; they were always more interesting. To his surprise he found two
spravki
there, one on Malin, one on a lawyer called Richard Lock who had sold Tourna the company. He wasn’t sure that he would ask for a
spravka
on Malin now, and even three years ago it would have carried some risk—perhaps no one had appreciated how much. No doubt all content had been officially approved.

Spravka
simply meant “certificate.” Every area of Russian life had its
spravki:
you needed one to sell your house, to register with a doctor, to have a telephone installed, to import goods, to export goods, to secure a passport, to take one’s place at the university. In Webster’s world it meant a summary of a person’s life taken from Russian intelligence agencies, so routinely that while the practice was illegal the information itself was now a mere commodity. They were seldom a colorful read. Date of birth, job, immediate family, house, car, education, career. Business interests inside Russia, business interests outside Russia. Observations concerning career and character. Evidence of or speculation concerning wrongdoing. Speculation about sexuality (half the reports he had ever read concluded that, in a favorite, equivocal construction of Russian bureaucracy, “it was not excluded” that the subject was homosexual). A life narrowed to its basic coordinates and its susceptibility to blackmail or corruption. He was always impressed by the discipline required to be so reductive.

As a rule the more significant you were—the more wealthy, the more politically lively, the more trublesome—the longer and fuller your
spravka
. Every person living in Russia had a file, of course, but most contained little beyond mundane details gathered from other government departments. Anything richer or deeper suggested that at some point you had been the subject of attention from the intelligence authorities themselves, and through the blankness of the language it was sometimes possible to see the phone calls overheard, the neighbors quietly consulted, the bank accounts inspected, the lives slowly but inevitably opened up to view. Russia might feel itself diminished but in this easy power over its people it seemed hardly to have changed at all.

The rule broke down, though, on the largest scales: no oligarch or government minister would be so careless as to leave his file intact. Through money or influence his
spravka
would be edited and cleaned until it said little at all, the information it had once contained now so far inside the deep dark vault of the Russian state that only those equivalently powerful could ever get it out.

The first
spravka
he had ever seen, so many years before, was about Inessa; she had shown it to him herself. It began with bare paragraphs about her upbringing, her family, her education, but what she was proud of was the four or five pages describing her writing and the threat she posed to the Russian state. Someone, she had explained, was keeping an active watch on her: she was being taken seriously. All her articles were attached. Corruption in Togliatti, pollution in Norilsk, smuggling in Vladivostok, aluminum murders in Krasnoyarsk, workers striking in Rostov, Tyumen, Yekaterinburg, Tomsk: a sampler for Russia’s first free decade. Next to her Webster had felt like a dabbler.

Inessa Kirova, the file had said, was a “politically committed journalist with a tendency to address sensitive subjects,” a freelancer who wrote about crime and corruption and sold most of her articles to the campaigning newspaper
Novaya Gazeta.
She had connections with “difficult . . . independent” foreign journalists—“that’s you!” she had told Webster, gleefully—and a special interest in the relationship between “big business” and politics: in other words, who was bribing whom. He wondered whether her file was still there, on a numbered shelf in some dank basement, and whether anyone still had reason to refer to it.

The two
spravki
in front of Webster now suggested less interesting, less productive lives. They had been faxed in a poor translation, gave no clue to their origin and conformed wholly to type. Lock’s was the file of an unremarkable expat, Malin’s of a career bureaucrat. His father was an administrator at a mining equipment company in Novosibirsk and had had two children: Konstantin in 1948, and Natalya in 1952. Malin had married Katerina Karelov in 1971, and they had had two children. They lived, officially, in an apartment of thirty square meters near Leningradsky station in Moscow, but it was highly unlikely they were ever there; the Malins’ real apartment would almost certainly be a rather grander affair.

He had been educated at the Tyumen Industrial Institute, and later at the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas in Moscow. Since 1971 he had worked at what was now the Ministry of Natural Resources, in what positions it did not say. He was a very old hand.

It went on. Malin was a man of “high inner discipline” who had through “loyalty and clear purpose” risen to a position of “total trust and positive influence” within the ministry. His contribution was valued “at highest levels” and had resulted in his being awarded an Order of Merit for the Fatherland in 2003. He was a man of “true principle” and this had allowed him a career “free of the fighting of political factions.”

This was instructive—such a clean file told him that Malin was well protected—but useless nevertheless; even a little discouraging. Webster’s brief from Tourna had a crazed simplicity about it, and was probably impossible, not to say dangerous. He would need something rather stronger than an intelligence file that Malin had probably approved himself.

He turned from the source material to the summary of the whole report. Langland Resources, it seemed, was Malin’s oil trading company and was based in Vienna. It had been run by a Dmitry Gerstman, but he had left three years before and another Russian, Nikolai Grachev, had taken his place. There were profiles of each, and a description of Langland, which employed twenty people, or thereabouts, and sold Russian oil into markets around the world.

Webster skipped a long paragraph on Malin’s background, taken not quite verbatim from the
spravka
. The next section was more interesting.

Langland’s profit margin is believed to be artificially high because it engages in transfer pricing with its suppliers in Russia. Producers sell oil to Langland at reduced prices and Langland sells at normal prices to its customers, taking the difference. Any losses are borne by the state-owned suppliers affected and ultimately by the state itself.

Sources close to Russian intelligence have indicated that Langland’s profits are channeled back into Russia through a series of offshore companies and funds and ultimately through another Malin-controlled entity, Faringdon Holdings Ltd. Faringdon is an Irish offshore company . . . that owns majority stakes in a number of oil and gas exploration and production companies in Russia and Kazakhstan. Media reports state that Faringdon was set up and is managed by Richard Lock, a lawyer of Dutch descent qualified in England. Lock has lived in Moscow since 1993 and is understood to work full-time for Malin.

Not too bad, thought Webster, for what it was. A useful start.

At the very back of the file was a cutting from a magazine, neatly folded and kept in a plastic wallet. It showed a group of Russian dignitaries, perhaps a dozen, posing for a photograph. Malin was in the front row, third from the left. Webster peered at the likeness; he had never seen a picture of him before. With his eyes half closed, in black and white, his jaw set, unsmiling, he could have been a Soviet functionary from any decade of Communism. But there was a difference. Malin was rich—had grown rich stealing from the state; his money was Russia’s money. Webster dared to imagine for a moment Malin paraded through the streets of Moscow as a traitor to the people, his image on every newspaper front page below fat black headlines proclaiming his demise.

U
NTIL TWO MONTHS EARLIER,
Ikertu Consulting Limited had occupied three floors of a Georgian building on Marylebone Lane. Webster had loved it there, and so had everyone else. Next door on one side was a tiny Japanese restaurant; on the other a haberdasher’s; and opposite in a row a delicatessen, a pub and a launderette. Snaking through a grid of sober streets Marylebone Lane was insistently London: various, high and low, apparently unplanned.

The company had grown too big for such levity, however, and had moved two miles east to a modern building on Cursitor Street, just off Chancery Lane. Hammer liked being in among the lawyers; Webster did not. He preferred being near the crooked square mile of Mayfair, with its front companies and its brass plates and the strong smell of unexplained wealth, because that, in a city that invited them, was where intrigues tended to begin and end. Here in Holborn lawyers earned their money in transparent six-minute units and worked hard to extinguish intrigue wherever they saw it.

Webster was back in the office. He stared at his e-mail, thought in a disconnected way about the cases he had left behind while on holiday, and waited for Hammer, who came to work late and left late and was no doubt still running in. Hammer lived in Hampstead so that he could run on the Heath. He ran to work, and he often ran home from work. He was fifty-seven and must have run fifty miles a week, unmistakably a New Yorker in his short shorts and his baseball cap. His small frame carried no weight, and he had the clipped, straight-legged style, neck forward, almost a speed-walk, of a man who had been running all his life. When he got to the office he would shower straightaway and dress in clothes that were too big for him and unconsciously American (pleated trousers, tasseled loafers, boxed jackets with boxy shoulders and wide lapels) before wandering around greeting his staff, still aglow, his yellow shirt newly spotted with sweat.