The Silent Oligarch: A Novel (5 page)

Griffin and the junior left the room with the air of schoolboys who aren’t sure what they have done wrong.

“Look,” Kesler said, staring hard at Lock, his palms open on the table, “leaving aside legal niceties, can we agree that our interests are aligned? What works for you works for Faringdon and that works for Konstantin. For now. We both know that you don’t own Faringdon and we both know who does. The world knows it. Tourna definitely knows it. But I have to know what lies between, because I have to know how likely Tourna is to prove that.”

“I’ve told you everything to a certain point. If it becomes necessary I can tell you more.”

Kesler looked at his watch. Now he was emphatic. “Richard, we’ve been talking for barely an hour. In Paris you’re likely to be on the stand for a day or two at least. Do you think their QC will get bored and just stop? Thank you very much, Mr. Lock, I think that will do? He will be much less nice than me. Much less. Now, we’ll be coaching you for that, but in the meantime,” slowly now, each word stressed, “you need to open up.”

“Konstantin has nothing to worry about,” said Lock airily, with a small wave of his hand. He wasn’t sure whether this communicated the right air of unconcern. He didn’t trust Kesler; or, more precisely, he didn’t trust what Kesler had been asked to do.

“I know, Richard. OK, I see. Christ.” Kesler looked down at his notes, resting his forehead on his hand, then slowly back to Lock. “Let me reassure you. I’m not here to conduct an audit. I’m not here to inspect the quality of your work and tell him to get a new man to plug the holes. You’ve had a big job to do for Malin but you are not the boss, and you don’t get to decide what to tell me. It’s already been decided.”

So he was no longer the client. Malin and Kesler were talking directly. That wasn’t surprising—he knew that much from the meeting in Théoule—but he had still expected to play a role.

There was a time, Lock thought, when I wasn’t this constricted, when my first response wouldn’t have been colored by fear. He asked himself what his old self would do now. Leave with a humiliating put-down to Kesler? Hire new lawyers? His old self would have had choices. But now, as Kesler had correctly identified, he was as frightened of Malin as he was of the law, and not to cooperate with Kesler was to invite the fury of both.

He leaned forward and took another biscuit, still trying to project confidence.

“All right. But you know how delicate this is.”

“I do.”

“Do you trust him?” Lock, delaying, nodded to the empty space where Griffin had sat.

“Completely. He’s worked with me for five years.”

“Why haven’t I seen him before?”

“Because it hasn’t been a criminal defense matter before. Which is what this is.”

“It’s an arbitration, for God’s sake. An arbitration. We’ve sat through or settled a dozen of them.” Lock was becoming a little louder and sarcastic now, beginning to gesticulate.

“This is different, Richard. Because of where it may end up. Because they’re accusing you of being a criminal. Even if Tourna isn’t shit-stirring, and he will be, if that tribunal thinks you’re a money-launderer—even hints at it—you can guarantee that the Swiss will be all over it, the Americans—God knows who else.”

The Swiss. The Americans. The unnamed others. With unassailable authority, indefatigable, righteous, rooting out the wrongdoers and sending them to jail. But if Lock went down, so would Malin, and Malin, therefore, wouldn’t let him. Therefore he was safe. There was logic to this. For a brief time he even welcomed the idea of relinquishing control of this mess to Kesler.

O
VER THE COURSE
of the next six days Lock tried to tell Kesler everything. Six days and five evenings with Kesler, Griffin and the junior, describing a professional lifetime of routine, dishonest transactions. Almost a whole week in Bryson’s offices. Bored but nervous, he insisted on sitting opposite the large window that looked east toward Liverpool Street, so that while he talked he could watch London become lower and sparser as it faded into the east, finally giving hints of the countryside beyond. It was hot out there, clearly, but in their conference room (still quite a sizable one, Lock noted—he might no longer be a client, he might even be a criminal, but at least his boss was important enough to run up impressive fees) the temperature was steadily just above chilly.

Lock didn’t have access to his files, but this hardly mattered because he knew it all. He explained to Kesler that his first piece of work for Malin had been in 1993, when Malin was head of the Ministry of Industry and Energy’s Transportation department. He had told Lock that he wanted to take advantage of some opportunities in the private sector, and for this would need an offshore company capable of making investments in Russia. It would also need an offshore bank account, into which payments could be made. This first company was Spirecrest Holdings, now defunct, and it had been a minor mistake. It had soon been replaced by a Cyprus company, Arctec Holdings, which for a while had done exactly what Malin had wanted. Money from Russia flowed into it and was then funneled back into Russia, to be invested in small independent gas producers and oil equipment manufacturers.

Kesler wanted to know where the money had come from. Lock explained that at the beginning he didn’t really know. He only saw payments coming in. His job wasn’t to worry about where the money was made but simply to process it and make sure it didn’t attract the attention of the taxman—or anyone else. He knew that payments were sometimes made in cash (in the days when cash wasn’t a problem), sometimes from other offshore companies, sometimes from more established Western companies, but in every case its precise origin he could only guess.

Arctec had had the most simple of structures. It had few assets—cash, mainly, safely stowed in a Swiss account—and was owned by a Liechtenstein
anstalt,
a particularly impenetrable form of company which was in turn owned by a Liechtenstein trust: Longway Trust, the beneficiary of which was not named. Any taxman or investigator trying to find out who owned Arctec would be lucky to get as far as Liechtenstein, but there would meet a thick wall of impenetrable Mitteleuropean discretion.

Arctec would have taken a morning, at most, to discuss. Now, though, the whole affair was very much more complex. It was its own world. Faringdon Holdings, right in the middle, held assets in over forty different companies in Russia and its neighbors. Up above it was a consortium of nine shareholders, each of which owned a roughly equal share. These shareholders were companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, in Cayman, in Malta, in Gibraltar, all over. Lock had set up each of these and each one had its own shareholders in many different places. And above these was another layer still, every company lovingly incorporated by Lock. Draw the whole thing, and it would look like an hourglass, if you stood far enough back. Finally, when it seemed like there was no end to it, everything came together in the airless heights of the scheme in the only constant, Longway, the same unbreakable trust that Lock had set up almost fifteen years earlier. A finial, of sorts.

Kesler and Lock went over every company in the scheme. Griffin had eventually counted and announced that there were eighty-three of them. (These were just the live ones—they ignored for now the dozens that had done their job and been discarded.) Each had a bank account, which Lock, with help, had set up. Each had its directors, whom Lock had had to find. Each required that its fees be paid every year to the local company register; Lock estimated that the annual expense was well over a million dollars. Most had a story that Kesler was determined to know.

On it went. When they had systematically worked their way from the middle of the hourglass to the top and then back to the bottom, Kesler again relieved his colleagues and came to settle on the three questions that seemed to exercise him most of all.

“So, Richard, where does Malin get his money?” he asked when Griffin and the junior had left the room.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, in the ministry he earns what, a thousand dollars a month? But that’s not how he lives. How does he get cash?”

Lock looked down at his hands and then back at Kesler. “There are two Russian consulting companies that provide services to companies in the group. They lend money to him sometimes.”

“Is that all?”

“The companies I look after don’t pay for anything. He’s very careful about that. If money is made in Russia and comes to him in Russia, I wouldn’t know about it. I don’t see it. I only know about everything outside Russia. That’s my job.”

Then Kesler wanted to know who owned Longway. Lock told him that he, Lock, owned it.

“You mean that you own Faringdon?”

“All of it,” said Lock.

“You’re rich.”

“I am. I sometimes wonder why I don’t feel better about it.”

“Why?”

“Well, it’s not always the most comfortable place to sit.”

“No. No. Why do it that way?”

“Why did we do it that way? We changed it three years ago. Think about it. If anyone ever sees the deeds of that trust and Malin’s name is on them he has nowhere to fall back to. Everything is clearly his. There’s nothing left to deny. My name on it creates an extra layer. And you have to prove a negative—that I don’t own it. That’s not easy.”

“He must trust you.”

Lock laughed grimly. “It’s not like I can run off with it all.” More to the point, he thought, Malin knows that I’m a coward. The whole scheme depends on it.

But for the rest of that day, most of an afternoon and into the evening, Kesler grilled Lock on what he called “the real crux”: how the money was made. Where did it come from? What of value was exchanged for it? Could it be shown that it was made honestly? More to the point, could it be shown that it wasn’t? Over and over, Lock said that he really didn’t know.

“I’m not holding out on you, Skip. Really. I take the money offshore, bring it back again, and then make sure it’s invested where Konstantin wants it. That’s it. I may have been in Moscow for fifteen years but I’m not an honorary Russian. There’s a lot they don’t tell me.”

“OK.” Kesler thought for a moment. “Tell me this. If you wanted to prove that Malin was defrauding the Russian state, where would you look?”

“I wouldn’t begin to.”

“Of course not.” Kesler betrayed a touch of impatience, then collected himself. “Let me tell you why this is important. Tourna says that Faringdon exists only to process money. That you are a money-launderer. Now, to prove that, he needs to show—with evidence—that the money flowing through Faringdon is dirty. And there has to be a crime that creates the money in the first place—in the jargon, a predicate crime. Without it, all you have is something that
looks
like a money-laundering scheme, and that’s not enough. So if anyone is going to destroy Malin—or you for that matter—they have to show an offense. No way around it. So my question is: where is it? Where’s the crime?”

Lock felt his shoulders relax, and felt the urge to stretch. This was heartening. The crimes were deep in Russia, buried under layers of permafrost. If he didn’t know about them—and he really didn’t, not in any detail—then even the Americans would struggle to get close. How often had Moscow fallen to invading powers? Never, he was fairly sure. Not since the Mongols anyway. Russia was impregnable. The Ministry of Internal Affairs would never cooperate with the FBI, and no private investigation would get close. No crime was ever discovered in Russia unless someone more powerful than you wanted to hurt you, and Malin would have to fall badly out of favor to begin to be vulnerable.

“I don’t know,” he said, smiling at Kesler for the first time that week. “I think Tourna’s got his work cut out. He really has.”

F
OR TWO HOURS
on Saturday morning Lock was released to watch his daughter dance. He arrived early and waited outside in the cool morning light, ill at ease in the only casual clothes he had brought with him on this trip: tan corduroys, a pale-blue work shirt, heavy brown shoes. The church hall was some way north of Marina’s apartment in an area less refined, less pristine: it was a box of stained yellow brick set among older houses, its uniform walls segmented with long, narrow windows of frosted glass. Lock watched the mothers and fathers arriving with their children and wondered how many lived alone.

“Daddy!” Vika’s voice cut through the noise of traffic passing and he turned to see her running to him from the corner. As she reached him, he crouched a little to receive her hug and in one movement picked her up, his back stiff and weak. She was so much heavier than he expected, and the plumpness he remembered had given way to ribs and muscle. She was strong.

“Hello, rabbit.” He put her down and smiled at Marina as she walked toward them. “Morning.”

“Morning. How are you?”

“Daddy, are you going to stay and watch?”

“Of course. If I’m allowed.”

Vika pushed him playfully, as if he must be joking.

“Mummy, he can, can’t he?”

“I didn’t mean . . .” said Lock.

“It’s fine,” said Marina, smiling. “I know. We’ll watch from upstairs.”

Vika took Lock’s hand and led him into the hall. “Come on, Daddy.” Inside, parents were saying good-bye to their children or taking stairs up to a gallery that ran the length of the building. The walls were bare brick, the floor a scuffed parquet.

“Don’t you have to get changed?” said Lock.

“Into what?” said Vika.

“I don’t know. Dancing clothes.”

“These are my dancing clothes.” She was wearing sneakers, gray leggings and a grass-green T-shirt with a stylized oak tree on the front, its roots reaching down to the word “growth” printed in bold white letters.

“Come on,” said Marina, and with her hand on his arm guided Lock toward the stairs. “Have fun, darling.”

Vika ran into the hall, turning halfway to wave. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, and Lock thought how much older she looked, how like her mother—her nose straight, her neck slight but strong. She was less like him now.

He and Marina sat on a bench in the gallery. He rested his forearms on the railing in front of him and looked down at Vika, who was in a cluster of children talking excitedly about their holidays and practicing moves: squatting on their haunches, striking poses. She was on the edge of the group, listening to the others interrupt each other in their need to get their stories out and waiting for her moment.