Command Authority Read online

  Jack decided he’d work through the majority of the long flight. As soon as the china had been removed from his table after his sumptuous lunch, he pulled out his laptop and began looking through interactive maps of Saint John’s, their destination. He did his best to memorize major streets and transportation centers, and he scanned the route from his downtown hotel to the registered agent’s office just a few blocks away. He jotted down addresses of other buildings that showed up on SPARK as being involved in the offshore banking and commerce realm, because he wasn’t certain just what he was looking for on this trip, so he wanted to go to as many locations as possible.

  While Jack was engaged in all this, Sandy watched a movie. Jack couldn’t see the film from his seat, but it must have been a riot, because Lamont’s nearly constant belly laugh bled through Jack’s noise-canceling headphones.

  After Ryan read up on his destination for more than an hour, he started looking through some business intelligence resources he’d downloaded to his encrypted laptop. It was an Analyst’s Notebook database of translated Russian government tenders, and he kept it updated every day, hoping to find new clues to lead him in his Galbraith investigation.

  Despite warnings from Sandy that focusing on Gazprom itself was a futile endeavor, Jack was determined to get a clearer picture of how the largest company in Russia conducted business—specifically, with the government. To this end, he scanned through contract offers across a wide spectrum of industries in which Gazprom dealt, searching for any bids by either companies owned by Gazprom or else one of the firms who had made money off Gazprom’s auction-payoff scheme.

  —

  He’d been at this for nearly two hours when Sandy took off his headphones and climbed out of his seat for a bathroom break. The blond Englishman returned, ready to get back into the comedy he was watching.

  Jack said, “Sandy, you won’t believe what I’ve found.”

  Lamont leaned closer to his colleague so he could speak softly. The lights were off, and many were sleeping around them. “What are you looking at?”

  “Russian government contract offers.”

  “Oh. And I thought the movie I was watching was a laugh.”

  Jack said, “Actually, some of this shit is so outrageous it’s almost funny.”

  Sandy raised his seat and then moved over next to Ryan so he could see his laptop. “Go on, then. What outrageous financial shenanigans have you managed to uncover since takeoff?”

  Jack scrolled through the database and clicked on a link. “Look at these translated documents. They are Russian government tenders.” He picked one and highlighted it; it expanded to the size of the screen. “Here’s one offering a three-hundred-million-ruble contract for public-relations consulting for a Gazprom subsidiary in Moldova.”

  Sandy looked it over. “That’s ten million U.S. for public relations for a natural-gas company in a tiny nation, a product for which there is zero competition. Looks like a typical inflated government contract tender.” He shrugged. “Wish I could say we don’t have the same thing in the UK.”

  Jack said, “I’m sure we have the same sort of crime going on in my country, although my dad would hang anyone by the balls he caught involved with something like this. But this deal is even more brazen than it looks. Check out the posting date, and then look at the application deadline date.”

  Sandy looked, then looked at the date on his watch. “It was posted today, and all applications must be in by tomorrow. For a ten-million-dollar tender. Bloody hell.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say there is something shady with that contract.” He went to another page on the database and highlighted another contract offer. “And it’s not just Gazprom, the entire Russian government is doing shit like this. Here’s another request for tender for a two-million-ruble bid for a state-run psychiatry institution.”

  Sandy looked at the translation of the tender, scanning it for information. His eyes went wide. “The psychiatric hospital is buying two million rubles’ worth of mink coats and hats?”

  Ryan said, “Think of how many crooks have to be involved in that to where they can post an open bid for something so obviously inappropriate.”

  “It’s reached a level of shamelessness over there that I thought I’d never see,” Sandy admitted. “I’ll give you a good example. For the past few years one of the most coveted majors in Russian universities is the program that trains students to be government tax inspectors. They get a lousy salary, but it is a job where corruption is a piece of cake. You look over a company’s books, tell them they owe ten million rubles, then ‘allow’ them to skate for only five million rubles if they slide you a briefcase with one million rubles. It’s pretty much a license to steal.”

  Jack asked, “Why doesn’t Volodin stop it?”

  “Because he needs satisfied government employees more than he needs government revenue. Each corrupt member of the apparatus is another powerful person in society who has a stake in the status quo. People are making money off of his administration. That is pure job security for the siloviki.”

  Ryan sat in the low light of business class, and he thought over everything he’d learned about Russia in the past two months. He wished he’d been more focused on that region for the past several years, but he’d been led along by events more pressing to the United States at the time.

  Jack asked, “Why do you suppose Valeri Volodin was the one wealthy businessman who was able to successfully parlay his financial power into political power, when all the others had either stayed in the shadows or else were destroyed by the Russian government?”

  “I don’t know, to tell you the truth.”

  “You know more about his history than I do. How did Volodin get all his money in the first place?”

  Lamont lowered his seat back a little and yawned. “You’d have to go back to the last days of the Soviet Union. Volodin was the money behind one of the first private banks in Russia. He doled out the cash that the other oligarchs used to buy up property when Russia went on sale and privatized everything. He loaned a million here, a million there, plus he bought up his own piece of the pie. Soon the Soviet Union had been sold off for pennies on the dollar, as you Yanks like to say, and Volodin and his bank’s clients owned controlling pieces in virtually every industry.”

  Jack asked, “But he was KGB at the end of the USSR, right? How the hell did he get the dough to start this bank?”

  “No one knows for sure. He claims he had foreign investment, but at the time Russia had no private property laws to speak of, so he didn’t have to prove where his money came from.”

  Jack wanted to know more about Volodin’s past, but Sandy looked again at his watch. “Sorry, Jack. I’m going to get a little shut-eye so I can be fresh on landing. You should pry yourself away from those thrilling government tenders and dream of all the island girls we’ll meet tonight.”

  Ryan laughed. He had dramatically different ideas of what the two of them would be doing on the ground in Antigua, but he didn’t want to tamper with any pleasant dreams Sandy might have on the flight down, so he just went back to his laptop to do some more reading, and he left Sandy to his nap.

  —

  They landed at Antigua’s V. C. Bird International Airport shortly after two p.m., and they took a short ride in a Jeep taxi across the northern tip of the tiny island into Saint John’s, the capital.

  It was a warm and sunny afternoon, strikingly different from London, and a strong wind from the east blew across the island. Ryan thought Saint John’s to be no more or less developed than most of the other Caribbean capitals he had visited, which was to say it was simple and small. Passing through the business district, he didn’t see more than a handful of buildings higher than four or five stories tall.

  He had read that the town’s population was only 25,000, but when cruise ships were in port the downtown streets could be thick with traffic. As they neared the port, Ryan checked the harbor and saw nothing
but fishing boats, sailboats, and small cargo ships, and the ride through the narrow streets of the city was quick and easy.

  They checked into two rooms in the Cocos Hotel. Sandy wanted time to freshen up and answer some work e-mails, so Ryan dropped off his luggage and returned downstairs alone.

  By four p.m. Ryan was already walking along the sidewalk on Redcliffe Street in front of CCS Corporate Services, the registered office used by IFC Holdings.

  He had no plans on entering, at least not yet. Instead, he found a tiny open-front fish shack a block up Redcliffe just past Market Street. He reached into a cooler and grabbed a bottle of Wadadli, a beer he’d never heard of, paid at the counter, and then sat down in a rickety wooden seat, back away from the open entrance. After a few minutes to settle in, he glanced back up the street. There, up half a block and across two lanes of light traffic, was a three-story turquoise-colored cinder-block building. A single man stood just inside a glass doorway, wearing a cheap blue blazer a few sizes too large for him. Jack pegged him as security, but just a lobby guard.

  Ryan took in the entire scene. Next to the turquoise building on one side was a small meat market. Lamb shanks and beef cuts hung in the sun from ropes, and people walking by swatted at flies. On the other side of the building was a lazy-looking trinket shop set up for the cruise-ship passengers who happened to wander the five blocks up from the port.

  Jack took a long swig of his beer while he continued to scan. Hard to believe, he had to admit, that this place was linked to a corporate entity involved in a multibillion-dollar natural-gas deal on the other side of the world.

  The building itself had two dozen signs attached to it, but most of them told Jack nothing of what went on inside. In addition to the vaguely descriptive CCS Corporate Services, Jack saw ABV Services, Caribbean World Partners Ltd, and Saint John’s Consulting Group.

  There seemed to be more than a dozen law offices in the building. Each one had one or two names and a phone number, and every third had a website or e-mail address listed as well.

  Jack couldn’t read many of the signs from where he was without help, but of course, he had brought help. He pulled a small monocle from his pocket and held it up to his eye, and with this he could easily make out even the Internet addresses at forty yards.

  He also noticed a spaghetti-like weave of wires into and out of the building strung along poles. He presumed the wires delivered electricity, Internet, and telephone to the building, and in addition to them, there were several satellite dishes and antennas on the roof.

  While he sat sipping his beer, he used his camera phone to take pictures of every sign he saw. As he was in the middle of doing this, a text message popped up on his phone’s screen.

  It was Sandy.

  “Where are you? Fancy a drink?”

  Jack tapped back, “Way ahead of you, boss.” And he added his location.

  It took Lamont a while to arrive, so Jack spent the time taking clandestine pictures of all of the names, numbers, and e-mail addresses he could see, not only for the building that housed CCS Corporate Services, but also for another building on the northeast corner of Market and Redcliffe. It looked like it was full of the same type of services as the turquoise building, so he figured he’d pull all this data as well and throw it into his database back in the hotel room.

  Finally Jack looked up and saw Lamont heading down the street toward him, perspiring heavily from his forehead as he approached.

  Jack headed to the cooler, grabbed another beer, and paid for it. He passed it over to Lamont as the Englishman sat down.

  Sandy cooled his brow with the bottle. “You can bloody well give me London’s fog any day.”

  He looked across the street at the building and then back to Ryan. He drank from the bottle and said, “Feel like a regular double-oh doing this sort of thing. Being here with the son of the President adds another layer to the intrigue.”

  Jack just chuckled. He said, “I wonder how many buildings there are like this in town.”

  “Antigua makes itself available for those who need to establish shells and launder money. Other nations, like Panama, for example, have tightened their controls a little in order to gain more legitimacy. Antigua is more of the Wild West. Yeah, they pay a little lip service here and there to international regs, but if you have the money you can bring it here so that it can begin its journey through the great big laundry service of planet earth’s integrated banking system.”

  “But the criminals, the drug cartels, the Russian OC people, they don’t physically have to come here, do they?”

  “Might, might not. Lots of people insist on the face-to-face. Some blokes don’t trust the help, others feel like getting in front of the government officials they are bribing helps them get their point across. The lawyers down here are used to meeting with some scary people, and then doing exactly what they’re told. But before you start weeping for them, remember, they make a lot of money for their trouble.”

  A large black pickup truck that seemed to Jack to be newer and cleaner than many of the other vehicles driving around on Redcliffe Street pulled into view. Ryan noticed there were two young black men in the front cab, and he saw that the driver was looking toward the fish shack where Ryan sat with Lamont. Jack turned away from them, and the pickup disappeared up the street.

  Jack finished his beer. “I don’t think there could be one hundred people who work in that building. One of them, at least one of them, knows who owns IFC and where his bank is.”

  “They at least know which transfer bank IFC uses. My guess is they send funds from here to Panama, but it could be any one of a dozen places.”

  Jack muttered to himself, “Wish we had a crew to tail everybody who comes and goes.”

  Lamont laughed. “Tail them. You sound like a double-oh yourself.”

  “I probably watch too many movies.”

  —

  Sandy Lamont finished his beer, and the two men went exploring the neighborhood. Jack put his Bluetooth earpiece in his ear and hit a record feature on his phone. He didn’t want to be seen taking pictures around here, so he softly read aloud every sign they saw in the business district that looked, in any way, interesting, along with reading off license plate numbers of any of the many expensive cars that rolled through traffic. The Bluetooth would record his notes, and he had speech-to-text software that would put it in his database once he got back to his laptop in his room.

  They wandered the streets doing this till nearly eight, then they ate dinner in a harborside restaurant. Just after nine they returned to the hotel, but Jack told Sandy he would download all the data he’d collected into IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook and run it with the data points he had on the Galbraith Rossiya Energy deal.

  Sandy retired to his room, took a long shower, and then changed for bed. He imagined Ryan would have him up at the crack of dawn for another day of skulking around the steamy streets of Saint John’s, and his feet were killing him already.

  Just as he kicked his legs into bed, however, there was a knock at his door. He opened it to find Ryan standing there, a laptop under his arm, and dressed in black cotton pants and a black T-shirt.

  “It’s not bedtime yet.”

  “It’s not?”

  “We’re going back out.”

  “Where?”

  “Let me come in a second and I’ll show you.”

  “Do I have a bloody choice?” Lamont opened the door, and Ryan made a beeline for the desk at the far corner of the room. He had his computer open a moment later.

  “Look at this,” Jack said. “I got all the new unstructured data in the system and started comparing it to the information I’ve compiled on the Galbraith deal.” He clicked on some buttons and a box came up. Thousands of data points were represented by little dots on a white screen. Lines grew between the different points, and then different colors of points and lines began to pop up. Jack said, “Disparate data points, several degrees of separation.” Then CCS Corporate Service
s, the Antigua-based registered agent, appeared with both blue and red points over the name.

  Seconds later, a name appeared on the chart. Randolph Robinson, attorney-at-law. It had several colored dots on it.

  “Who’s this bloke, and what’s his connection?”

  “I saw his shingle today on a building on Redcliffe several blocks north of CCS. I popped it in the system, and he shows up as being a lawyer used by CCS.”

  Sandy shrugged. “A local company uses a local lawyer. Probably for nominee services. Contracts, and that sort of thing.”

  “That’s nothing in itself, and his name doesn’t turn up anywhere else. But I ran him through all social media and business listings, and I found his mobile number. Analyst’s Notebook ties it to two other companies involved in the Galbraith deal, as well as a shell set up by a Saint Petersburg restaurant group.”

  “Okay. But what does that prove? That a Russian company has dealings here in Antigua? We know that already.”

  “One layer to go,” Ryan said with a smile. “His suite address ties him to a P.O. box associated with a trust that serves as a local executor for Shoal Bank Caribe, which is owned by a holding group in Switzerland. This holding group also owns several other companies, mostly inside Russia and Ukraine. One of these companies has a physical mailing address. That address is the liquor store in Tver, Russia. The one IFC Holdings uses as a drop box.”

  Now Sandy was on board. “Bingo.”

  Ryan looked at Sandy. “This ties him to the Russian mob.”

  Sandy agreed. “This bloke is involved with a bank used to wire funds from IFC.”

  Jack was all smiles, but Sandy asked, “What is it you plan to do now?”

  “You said it yourself, Sandy: I’m going looking in his trash. He might shred it, but if he doesn’t, then there could be tens of thousands more data points just waiting for me to get my hands on them. I just need you to watch the street for me.”

  “You really are a regular double-oh, aren’t you?”

  20