The Silent Oligarch: A Novel (7 page)

In the café, which was indeed empty but for them, they ordered teas and took a table in the farthest corner, away from the window. Knight took his coat off and sat with his back to the wall, monitoring the door.

“Is this better?” said Webster.

“I’m sorry. Yes. Yes, this is better.”

“Did you get my e-mail?”

“I did. I should have deleted it. Actually, what I should have done is just tell you no.”

Webster looked at him, not understanding.

“Have you got your phone on you?” said Knight.

“Yes.”

“We should take the batteries out.” Knight took a phone from an inside pocket and after a struggle with the case removed its battery. Webster did the same and waited for Knight to speak.

“Your Russian friend—the big one. Christ, Ben. He’s the real deal. I’m not kidding.”

“You mean Malin?”

“Are you working for Tourna?” Knight was talking down into the table and so quietly now that Webster could hardly make out what he was saying.

“Do you want to know?”

“Christ. No. I don’t, no.” Knight played with his spoon in both hands, staring hard at it and occasionally glancing up.

“Alan, I know you think I’m a greenhorn who plays with things he doesn’t understand but you can be too sensitive. No one’s here. No one can hear us. If anyone knows we’re together they don’t know what we’re talking about. You clearly know something about all this. Knowing you it’s a lot. And so far I haven’t found a sodding thing. What can you tell me?”

Knight looked up and at Webster, as if trying to gauge his honesty once and for all. After a moment he said, “I don’t want a fee, no contract, nothing. What I tell you here is just what I know now. I’m not doing any work on this. And no notes.”

“All right. That’s disappointing but I understand. Just tell me what you can.”

“OK. OK.” Knight was still fiddling with the spoon. “OK.” He leaned forward again, as if there were people at the next table intent on every word. The café was still empty. “First of all, he’s powerful. In his own right. He’s been in the ministry for longer than anyone else. He runs it. Has done for the last seven or eight years.”

“How did he manage that?”

“New minister, new administration. He saw his chance and took it. He knew more than anyone else. Controlled it all already, really. And he sold the Kremlin an idea of what Russia could be.” Knight looked up at the door and back to Webster, who drank his tea and waited for Knight to go on.

“Mighty once more. Not a second-class world citizen. Do you know how much gas Russia’s got? A fifth of the lot. Some days it produces more oil than Saudi. You look at how output’s gone up since Yeltsin went. That’s not private sector dynamism, that’s Kremlin pressure. And your friend is at the heart of it. He’s in the Kremlin directing policy and in the ministry enforcing it.”

Knight put his spoon down and looked at Webster steadily for the first time.

“So why is he so frightening?” said Webster, returning his gaze.

“Because of what he wants to do.”

“Which is?”

“Every winter Russia switches off the pipelines to Ukraine, right? The press goes nuts, the Ukrainians make a lot of noise, not much happens in the negotiations and then the tap’s on again. That’s not about how much Ukraine pays for its gas. That’s Russia reminding the world that it’s there, and that it can’t be trusted. Anything might happen. Maybe they’ll stop supply to Europe altogether. Last winter the Romanians were freezing, next time it might be the Germans.”

“OK. So what does Malin have in mind?”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“I am.”

“It’s not going to help your case.”

“Alan, just tell me. I need something. If I can’t use it you have nothing to worry about.”

“OK,” said Knight and looked set to begin when he called the waitress over and ordered more tea. “Do you want anything?”

“No, thank you.”

When the waitress was at the other end of the room he resumed. “OK. This is the thing. He wants to make Russia more powerful still. That’s what Faringdon’s for. Your friend was right.”

“Which friend?”

“The girl. The journalist. In her article.”

“Inessa?”

“Yes.”

“What article? She never wrote about it.” He was thrown, and annoyed to think that Knight knew something about Inessa that he did not. Even now any mention of her gave him a sharp jolt of parallel emotions: an urge to protect her memory; a need, still raw, to know who had killed her; a terrible lingering fear, almost an assumption now, that he would never be sure; and behind it all a thread of shame that he hadn’t done enough to find out. He hadn’t felt it in a long time, but here it was, familiar and fresh.

“She was the only one who did. Years ago.” He looked at Webster for a moment, genuinely puzzled. “You haven’t read it?”

Webster shook his head. He knew all Inessa’s work. In the months after her death he had read every article, taking them apart, organizing them into themes, searching behind every word for some sort of certainty. Had he forgotten something? Or was Alan confused, finally addled by twenty years immersed in oil and conspiracy theories?

“In
Energy East Europe.
Must have been summer ’99,” said Knight.

“No.” Come to that, how had his researchers missed it?

“Well read it. There wasn’t much of it but it caused a stir in my world.”

Webster nodded. He hated to feel foolish; particularly, he hated to be unprepared. “I will.”

“I don’t mean to open old wounds.”

“It’s fine.” He unclasped his watch, took it off his wrist and began to wind it. “I will.” He looked up at Knight. “Tell me about Faringdon.”

The look of incredulity hadn’t wholly left Knight’s face but he consciously changed mode and began. “It’s a vehicle. It buys things. Look at everything it owns. What we know it owns. Refineries in Bulgaria and Poland, new fields in Uzbekistan, producing fields in the Caspian and the Black Sea—Christ, PVC manufacturers in Turkey for God’s sake.” Knight was excited now, talking faster but no louder than before. “Upstream, downstream, midstream. It’s huge. It must be the biggest private energy consortium in the world, and I probably don’t know half of it. You definitely don’t. Your friend caught it when it was newborn, more or less. It’s been growing ever since. Now, what do you think it’s for?”

“A nest egg for Malin? Somewhere to put all that money he’s skimming.”

“That’s part of it, but no. It’s for winning back what Russia lost in 1989. It’s part of the new economic empire. Put Faringdon together with everything that the oil majors own, and Gazprom, and everything else, and you get Russia controlling half its neighbors’ energy industry—more even.”

“Frightening thought.”

“Isn’t it? It means they know everything that’s going on. And if the shit hits they own half the companies that matter.”

Webster sat and thought about it. He wasn’t sure any of this made sense.

“I can see some logic in it. What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why they’d bother. If there’s a real crisis they won’t be able to control what they own. And if they’re hiding the fact that they own it, it won’t make anyone more afraid of them.”

“It’s about influence, Ben. And having options. And they know they own it, which makes them feel clever. Which they are, of course.”

“And making money.”

“And making money.”

“What about Lock? Why involve him?”

“The dummy oligarch? Because someone has to own everything. Or be seen to.”

“But why him?”

“Why any of those people? There’s always one. I don’t think it matters who it is.”

Knight was right, thought Webster: this is less than useful to me, no matter how much of it is true. I need to expose Malin for corruption, not megalomania. Knight’s tea arrived. The first two fingers on his left hand were orange with nicotine. Usually by now, thought Webster, he’d have had at least one cigarette. He remembered him ranting inconsolably after Aeroflot finally banned smoking on all its flights.

“Do you know Grachev?” said Webster.

“Nikolai? Yes. He’s a stooge. And a spook. He’s an old FSB man. Not a trader at all. Unlike his predecessor.”

“Yes, what was that about? If what you say is right why would they let Gerstman leave?”

“That,” said Knight, “is an excellent question. I tried to interview him once, about a year before he went. Not very cooperative. Only a nipper, mind. He was different, more of a technocrat. Different breed, that—no oilman. He’d not have been out of place in a bank. A Western one at that.”

“Have you spoken to him since?”

“Since he left? No, no reason to. Too delicate. I hear he really did leave, though, didn’t just pretend. He’s in Berlin now, I think. God knows what he’s doing but word was he and Malin fell out.”

“Over what?”

“I’ve got no idea, Ben. None at all. Could be anything.”

That was better, at least.

Webster ran through in this head all the questions he might ask Knight and discarded most of them, partly because he didn’t want to reveal too much and partly because he could predict the answers. There was one, though.

“How secure is Malin? Politically?”

“That’s another good one.” Knight drank some tea. “As far as I know, rock solid. Well, solid as someone like him can be in Russia. I dare say Trotsky felt pretty comfortable at one point. Put it this way, I can’t imagine what would do for him.”

“Then why are you so nervous?” This was a more intimate question than Webster had ever asked him before, and he watched carefully for Knight’s reaction.

“That’s the bit I’d rather not discuss, if you don’t mind.”

“You can’t leave it at that.”

“I can, Ben, I can. Christ. You’ve got no idea, have you? None at all.” He took a last gulp of tea. “That’s all. That’s your lot.”

“Alan. Tell me this at least. Is it something that could hurt him?”

Knight sighed in frustration. “Christ, Ben.” A pause. “No, it isn’t. Quite the bloody reverse. Now that’s enough.”

Webster looked at him for a moment and saw that he meant it. “OK, Alan. Sorry. Thanks for saying as much as you have. I appreciate it.”

“Just promise me you won’t send me any more e-mails.”

“Promise. Are you sure you don’t want any money?”

“Quite sure, my lad. Quite sure. You can pay for my tea.”

Webster did, and they parted outside the café, Webster to walk back to Ikertu, Knight off in the sunshine to see his next client, stooped in his coat.

O
N HIS RETURN,
checking the urge to shout at his team, Webster shut himself away in his office and began to look for the article. He set about searching every database he knew, vast repositories of articles taken from the newspapers, magazines and unimaginably obscure trade journals of every country in the world. Most of Inessa’s writing was there—the straightforward early work, growing in commitment over time; the longer investigations for
Novaya Gazeta;
the handful of pieces in English—but he darted past it in fruitless pursuit of this one piece he half suspected did not exist, except, perhaps, in the increasingly fantastic mind of Alan Knight. He looked for Inessa’s name, for Faringdon, for Lock, for Malin. He tried every possible transliteration of her name and several outright misspellings. He searched in Roman text and Cyrillic. It simply wasn’t there.

Finally, desperate to find it and desperate not to, he researched
Energy East Europe
itself, a journal he only dimly knew. Its articles first appeared in March 2001 but stopped in April three years later, suggesting that it no longer existed. Some of its reporting had found its way on to the Internet, referenced or stolen by other sites, and there Webster found enough to explain why he hadn’t been able to find what he was looking for. The earliest pieces he saw had been published in 1998, which meant that for its first three years its output hadn’t found its way into any electronic file; quite simply, the databases had taken a while to pick it up.

EEE
seemed to have been largely the work of one man. Half the articles had been written by Steve Elder, an American who now worked for a lobbying company in Washington. Webster thought he remembered him as one of the many journalists who had come to Moscow for a season or two and then left before it took full hold of them. His or not, the magazine had been published in London, and that, at least, was good news.

He found it after twenty minutes at the microfiche readers in Westminster Reference Library. He went himself because he wanted to be the one who read it first.

“Irish Company Buys Assets On Behalf of Russian State” was the title, halfway through the August edition. It was four pages, probably two thousand words, and there was the byline: “Inessa Kirova, Russia Correspondent.” Webster read it through three times, forcing himself to concentrate on the text and ignoring the voice that kept asking why he hadn’t known about this before.

The Irish company was Faringdon, which in recent months had been busy buying assets across what the article called “Russia’s near-abroad”: a Romanian refinery on the Black Sea, a petrochemical plant in Belarus and a gas storage facility in Azerbaijan. Inessa had found Faringdon as anonymous then as he found it now—more so, perhaps, because back then it had done less. She gave its address, its date of incorporation, its directors (Lock was dismissed in a sentence as a “lawyer of little reputation”) but went no further, content, perhaps, to leave it mysterious.

The second half of the article was fascinating, not for what it said (Knight had intimated as much, and more) but for what it left out. Faringdon, she wrote, was a vehicle directed by factions within the Ministry of Industry and Energy to channel Russian influence over its neighbors’ energy industries. Where companies had once been used for espionage, to provide cover or logistics, the newly open arms of capitalism now allowed the Russians to own what they had once only thought to observe. The plan had taken on fresh urgency when the financial crisis of 1998 left assets cheap and Russia looking weak and foolish in the eyes of the world. The article finished with some well-reasoned speculation about what Faringdon would turn its attention to next.