Command Authority (11 page)

“Why would it go back to Russia?”

The Englishman said, “It’s a classic money-laundering scheme called round-tripping. Basically, they take money earned from corruption—theft of property, bribes, organized-crime proceeds, whatever—then they send the money to holding companies in one of these offshore financial centers, where the money is moved to another holding company and then back into Russia as clean funds in the form of foreign investments.”

“Damn,” muttered Ryan. “I still have a lot to learn.”

“You do, lad. But you’re a quick study.” Lamont looked at his watch. “All of this is very interesting, from an academic point of view, but these shell companies pop up and disappear with such ease, if you don’t have a handle on the actual ownership structure, meaning names of real people, you’ll never get anywhere near the money. We’ll never know who is on the board of this IFC company, or any of its entities. They work very, very hard to keep that information secret, and they are bloody good at it. You’ve seen all the documentation.”

Jack’s eyes slowly began to relight. “I have. All the documents are designed to hide the owner, but what if we know where his bank is?”

Sandy scratched his head. “What are you on about?”

“All these companies in Antigua I mentioned. They are all registered in the same building.”

“Not uncommon at all. There will be a registered agent, a company that can help you get a passport, lawyers to help you set up your tax-haven accounts. They will use a physical address set up just for that purpose. No real affiliation with the ownership.”

Jack said, “The bank will be close by, won’t it?”

“It won’t be a retail location, lad. No cash machine and tellers. It will just exist on paper, with accounts in other transfer banks. There will be a lawyer who set the whole thing up, but these guys don’t exactly advertise on the Internet or post on Facebook. They play this game quietly.”

Jack said, “I want to look at the registered agent more closely. I mean, see the building for myself.”

Sandy shrugged. “Sure. I do that, just for fun. Google Maps will get you a picture of the building.”

Jack shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. I want to go down there. Poke around a little.”

Lamont just stared for a moment. “
Physically?
You want to physically go?”

“Sure.”

“Why not hire a local investigator in Antigua to go for you?”

“Sandy, you said yourself I’m still a babe in the woods. I can read the paperwork or study the structure of the shells on SPARK, and I can hire someone to investigate in country, but I’ll get a better understanding of it all if I just fly down there on my own. Take a day or two to see the locations, get a feel for these offshore operations. Maybe even learn something about IFC Holdings and the other entities with corporate addresses there.”

Sandy didn’t like the idea. He tried once more to dissuade Ryan. “What do you plan on doing? Looking through the bloody garbage of the registration agent?”

Jack smiled. “That’s a good idea.”

Sandy blew out a long sigh. “I don’t think you understand what you’re dealing with. I’ve been on-site before. Trust me, mate, these sketchy Third World financial operations centers will be protected by some rough-and-tumble characters. On top of this, there are mob and drug gangs down there who have a vested interest in keeping the prying eyes of foreign investigators away from the companies they use to launder their proceeds. You are the son of the President of the United States. You aren’t used to mixing it up with hooligans.”

Jack did not answer.

“You might not get the full picture from a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint, but it’s a lot safer to sit at your desk and learn what you can.”

“Sandy, tourists go down to Antigua and Barbuda all the time. I’m not planning on pushing my luck. Trust me, I’ll fit right in.”

Sandy leaned his head back in the chair and stared at the ceiling for a long time. Finally he said, “If you do this, I can’t let you go alone.”

Jack had been thinking the same thing. “Then come with me.”

Sandy hesitated some more, but Ryan could tell his English colleague was already thinking about beaches and piña coladas. “All right. We’ll fly down and take a look, but at the first sign of trouble we pack it in and run back to the lobby bar of our hotel, understood?”

“Understood, Sandy.” He held his hand up for a high five and said, “Road trip!”

Sandy looked at the hand in the air. “I beg your pardon?”

Jack lowered his hand. He’d overestimated the moment. “It will be fun. You better pack some sunscreen, though—you don’t look like you’d last long in the Caribbean without it.”

Sandy Lamont couldn’t help laughing.

I
t was past ten p.m. at the Emmitsburg, Maryland, farm of John Clark. John and his wife, Sandy, had spent the evening watching a rented movie, and they were getting ready for bed when the phone on the nightstand rang.

Clark scooped it up.

“Hello?”

“John Clark, please.”

“Speaking.”

“Hi, Mr. Clark. Sorry to disturb you so late. This is Keith Bixby, calling from U.S. embassy, Kiev.”

Clark ran the name through the massive database of contacts in his mind. It didn’t ring a bell, and, as far as he knew, he didn’t know anyone working in Kiev at the moment.

Before he could admit he’d drawn a blank, Bixby said, “Jimmy Hardesty suggested I give you a call.” Hardesty was CIA, he and Clark went back decades, and Clark trusted Hardesty.

“I see. What do you do at the embassy there, Keith?”

“I’m cultural attaché to the ambassador.”

This meant, to Clark, that Bixby was the CIA’s chief of station in Ukraine, and it also meant, to Clark, that Bixby was freely giving him this information. He would know that Clark would know he was COS.

“Got it,” said Clark, not missing a beat. “What can I do for you?”

“A name came up in my work over here, and we didn’t have much on the guy, so I did some digging. As I’m sure you know, Jimmy is the chief archivist at your former employer, and he’s pretty much my go-to guy when I have a question of this nature.”

“Understandable.”

“Jimmy didn’t have any more on this personality I’m looking at than I do, but he suggested I check with you. He says he recollects you
might
have run into him in your . . . travels.”

“Who’s the personality?”

“A Russian guy, I’d put him about fifty-five to sixty-five years old, an organized-crime big shot from Saint Petersburg, known as Scar.”

Clark said, “Haven’t heard that name in a while.”

“So you know him?”

“I know a little about him . . . but I don’t know
you
. Nothing personal, but let me give Hardesty a buzz, and I’ll call you back.”

Bixby said, “If you’d said anything else, I would have thought you were slipping.”

Clark chuckled into the phone. “Only physically, not mentally.”

“I doubt that. Let me give you my direct number.”

After Clark hung up, he called James Hardesty, established the bona fides of Keith Bixby, and confirmed the man was, in fact, chief of CIA’s Kiev Station. Hardesty spoke highly of the man, and Clark knew the CIA’s archivist was a hell of a judge of both ability and character.

Five minutes later, John Clark was back on the phone with Keith Bixby.

“Jimmy says you are both legit and a stand-up guy, but I want to make sure I’m talking to the right person. When and where did you last have a beer with Jimmy?”

Bixby did not hesitate. “A year ago last month. Crowne Plaza, McLean. I was in town for some meetings. I had a Shock Top and Jimmy had a Bud Light, if I’m not mistaken.”

Clark laughed. “Okay, you pass. Jimmy was surprised I didn’t know you already.”

“Keeping my ass under the radar has served me in my career to this point,” Bixby said. “I’ve probably slammed into the ceiling already working out in the sticks, but the seventh floor has never called to me like it has some of my colleagues.”

“You and me are cut from the same cloth. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, but keep in mind my intel is going to be several years old.”

“Fresher than anything I’ve got. Who is he?”

“I knew him as Gleb the Scar. A mob boss, but you probably know that already.”

“I had my suspicions. Can I send you a photo to see if you can ID him?”

“I’m afraid there is no need. I’ve never seen him.”

“Wow. He really is low-profile.”

Clark said, “He’s camera shy, but I do know something of his CV. He was born in Dzhankoi, in the Crimea, Ukraine, but he’s ethnic Russian. He moved to Saint Petersburg in the early nineties after doing a stint in a gulag for some mob murders, and then came out of Siberia tougher than when he went in.”

“Don’t they all?”

“Pretty much. He is an underboss in Saint Pete, working for one of the largest Slavic crime gangs, the Seven Strong Men: extortion, smuggling, heavy-handed things. I was running Rainbow for NATO several years back when his organization turned up on our radar. A group of armed gunmen busted into the city administration building, they were after some municipal ministers. A typical mob hit. But the police response was uncharacteristically fast, and the gunmen were surrounded. They took hostages. After two days of negotiations, we were called, and we came over from the UK. We monitored calls out of the building, and intercepted comms between the gunmen and their leader, none other than this Gleb the Scar character. He ordered them not to surrender, to stay and fight. It sounded to us like he was sacrificing them so they couldn’t implicate him in the hit.”

Clark continued, “Rainbow went in, we cleaned them out. We saved all the remaining hostages, but they’d executed three of the state ministers and a half a dozen building security. We took a couple of light casualties of our own on the takedown.” Clark paused, thinking back with regret on the incident. “It wasn’t as clean as we would have liked it to be. If we had gotten the green light from the Russians a few hours quicker, we could have saved a lot more lives.”

“And Gleb was never captured?”

“Negative. He likes to send his people to do all his dirty work. He’s a big shot, a hands-off type. Stays as clean as possible while letting the little fish take the risks.”

Bixby hesitated for a long moment. “Well, that’s interesting, because he’s over here in Kiev now, and he seems to be very much an on-scene commander.”

“That’s odd. From what I remember about him, Kiev wasn’t his turf. The Seven Strong Men aren’t active there, are they?”

“No, they aren’t. They run the show inside of Russia, and they are big in Belarus, but if they are operating here in Ukraine, that is a new development. Gleb was photographed with a crew of young guys who looked like ex-Spetsnaz. They were meeting with Chechen mob guys here in the city.”

“That really doesn’t track with what I remember about Gleb the Scar. His crew was all Slav. Before Volodin came in and cracked down on the mafia, Georgian and Chechen OC was all over the place in Russia. But the Gleb I remember didn’t have any dealings with them.”

“Maybe he’s become less bigoted as he’s gotten older.”

Clark chuckled. “My guess is he’s taking orders from someone who sent him on this mission. Moving to Kiev, running with ex-mil, working with ethnic OC. It doesn’t sound like Seven Strong Men, it sounds like a whole new business plan.”

“That’s a distressing thought, Clark.”

“Yeah, you got problems. You need to find out who he’s reporting to—that son of a bitch will be your real troublemaker.”

Bixby blew out a long sigh.

Clark thought the man was disappointed in the intel Clark had passed on. “I wish I could be more help.”

“No, you’ve helped a great deal. You’ve given me some things to think about.”

“Hope you can do more than think about them.”

Bixby chuffed into the phone. “As I’m sure you can imagine, Kiev has turned into a hotbed of intelligence activity in the past few months, with all the issues brewing between the Kremlin and Ukraine. Gleb the Scar is a person of interest, but really only a curiosity at this point, because I’m short on resources. He is going to have to do something really impressive to make himself a high-value target.”

“I understand,” said Clark, but he found himself damn curious about what a high-ranking Russian mobster was doing working in Kiev, apparently slumming as an order-taker for someone else.

“Thanks for your help.”

“Anytime at all, Bixby. Keep your head down over there. If the news reports are right, you are right in the middle of the next world flash point.”

“I wish I could say the media is exaggerating, but things at ground level look pretty bleak.”

R
ussian television was not officially state-controlled, as it had been during the time of the Soviet Union, but it was effectively state-controlled, as the largest networks were all owned by Gazprom, which not coincidentally happened to be partly owned by President Volodin and other members of the
siloviki
.

Those stations and newspapers that were not owned by the powers in the Kremlin were subject to constant harassment, scurrilous lawsuits, and absurd tax bills that took years to contest. More ominous than these measures to keep the media outlets in line, physical threats and acts of violence against journalists who broke ranks from the official propaganda were commonplace. Beatings, kidnappings, and even assassinations had greatly stifled the notion of a free press in Russia.

On the rare occasion when someone was arrested for a crime against a journalist, the accused was discovered to be a thug in a pro-Kremlin youth group, or a foreign-born henchman for a low-level mobster. In other words, no crimes against the fourth estate were ever linked back to the FSB or the Kremlin.

The vanguard of the Kremlin’s public-relations posture was Channel Seven, Novaya Rossiya, or New Russia. Broadcast in Russia and around the globe in seventeen languages, it served effectively as the Kremlin’s mouthpiece.

This was not to say Novaya Rossiya was always pro-Kremlin in its reporting. To create an air of impartiality, the network ran news pieces that were somewhat critical of the government. But these were mostly trifling matters. “Hit pieces” on corrupt politicians, but only those who’d fallen out of favor with Volodin, or on niggling municipal and state matters, such as garbage collection, union rallies, and other less consequential matters where the network could portray itself as objective.

But when it came to matters of national importance, especially revolving around Valeri Volodin and policies in which he personally intervened, New Russia’s prejudices showed through. Almost every night there were long “investigative journalism” reports concerning the conflict in Georgia and the potential for conflict in Ukraine. The Estonian government, which was staunchly pro-Western and a NATO member state, was a near-constant target of the station; seemingly every possible innuendo of financial, criminal, or sexual impropriety had been ascribed to the leadership in Tallinn. A poorly educated but faithful viewer of New Russia’s evening broadcast could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the Estonians were nothing more than a nation of thieves and deviants.

Although the moniker “Volodin’s megaphone” had been given to the network as a pejorative, on occasion this became an especially relevant description, because Volodin himself often appeared live on set during the
Evening News
.

And tonight was one of those evenings. With no hint that it would be coming, the producers of the six p.m. news broadcast received a call from the Kremlin at five-thirty in the afternoon, announcing that President Valeri Volodin was, at that moment, climbing into his car at the Kremlin and would be arriving shortly to conduct an interview live on the
Evening News
. The topic, the producers were informed by the Kremlin, would be the assassination of Stanislav Biryukov by the CIA, and the just-announced alleged polonium poisoning of Sergey Golovko in the United States.

Although this immediately set in motion a frantic chain of events in the Novaya Rossiya building, it was something akin to controlled chaos, because the
Evening News
staff had dealt with nearly two dozen impromptu drop-in interviews in the year Valeri Volodin had been in power, and by now they had their procedures planned like a choreographed dance.

Once they learned the chief of state was on his way to the studio, the first order of business for the producers was to call Volodin’s favorite on-air personality and let her know that even though she had the evening off, regardless of where she was and what she was doing at that moment, she would be on the set performing a live interview with the president in roughly half an hour.

Tatiana Molchanova was a thirty-three-year-old reporter and newscaster, and though he had never said it outright, it was clear to everyone that the married Volodin was smitten with the raven-haired, well-educated journalist. The producers learned the hard way that interviews conducted by any newscaster other than Tatiana Molchanova would be met with displeasure by the president.

As much as her beauty surely attracted him, many secretly thought it was the fawning gaze Molchanova bestowed on Volodin while she feigned impartiality. She clearly found Volodin to be the sex symbol that he made himself out to be, and their own on-air chemistry was undeniable, even if it shattered respectable boundaries of journalistic acceptance.

As soon as Molchanova was reached by phone and notified, one of the station’s traffic helicopters was dispatched to pick her up at her Leningradskaya apartment.

With the chopper on its way, the show’s producers got to work writing the questions for the interview, pulling together graphics, and preparing the involved procedure used to make the president’s always dramatic arrival appear smooth and seamless for the tens of millions of viewers who would be watching live.

Everyone in the building knew that Volodin did not take direction from anyone, so they had to be ready to go on-air with his interview the instant he arrived. To facilitate this, the halls of Novaya Rossiya were lined with young men and women with walkie-talkies. As soon as Volodin entered the building after bolting out of his limousine, the walkie-talkie brigade began reporting his entourage’s progress through the lobby, directing him into an elevator that had been held for him, then up to the sixth-floor studio he had visited more than twenty times since he became president of Russia.

The brigade worked well this evening, and by the time Volodin strode confidently into the sixth-floor studio at 6:17 p.m., the floor director was ready for him. Volodin was a small man, only five-eight, but fit and energetic, like a coiled spring ready to burst through his dark brown suit. He walked past the cameras and right onto the set without hesitation or prompting from the floor staff. Any issue involving catching him in a camera shot or disrupting what was happening on live television was clearly the studio’s problem and not the problem of the president.

The producer of the news program stopped a story in the middle of a remote broadcast and went to commercial the instant Valeri Volodin appeared in the wings of the set. Although this would look unprofessional to all those watching, it was the lesser of two evils, because it also meant Volodin’s segment would begin in a smooth and uninterrupted fashion.

Tatiana Molchanova had arrived just two minutes before her guest, but she was a pro, especially at this part of her job. She’d done her makeup in the helicopter, had listened to a producer read the questions three times en route to the station so she could be prepared for them, and she went through some practice follow-up questions she would use if President Volodin showed an interest in conducting a real interview.

She had to be prepared for any eventuality.

Sometimes Volodin sat down for his segment, did little more than make a statement, and then took off, leaving the station staff scrambling to fill the time they’d allotted for him. Other times he seemed as though he had no place to be; he would answer all of Molchanova’s questions, engage in lengthy discussions about Russian life and culture, and even the weather and hockey scores. The producers didn’t dare cut to commercial, nor did they move on with their regularly scheduled program if the “Valeri Volodin Hour” ran past seven o’clock.

They had no idea which of his two extreme moods would strike him tonight, but Tatiana and her producers were ready in either case.

While Volodin greeted Tatiana Molchanova, an audio engineer clipped a microphone to his lapel. He shook his interviewer’s hand warmly; he had known Molchanova for several years, there were even rumors of affairs in the subversive blogs of Moscow, but these rumors were derived more from a few photographs of the two of them sharing innocuous hugs at parties and other public events and the impressions given by her dreamy eyes and wide smiles while he spoke.

As soon as Volodin was in his seat, the producer of
Evening News
cut the commercial that was playing, and the cameras were back live on the set.

Molchanova appeared poised and ready; she spoke to her viewers about the bombing death of Stanislav Biryukov, and she asked President Volodin for his reaction.

With his hands on the desk in front of him, and a forlorn expression, Valeri Volodin spoke in his trademark voice: soft but self-assured, vaguely arrogant. “This looks very much like a Western-backed assassination. Stanislav Arkadyevich did not have real enemies in organized crime here in Russia. His work was abroad, he held no great interest to the criminal scum of the Caucasus and the near abroad.”

He looked away from the camera and toward Tatiana Molchanova. “Stanislav Arkadyevich worked tirelessly to protect the Motherland from the pervasive threats coming from the West. Fortunately, thanks to the impressive efforts of our Interior Ministry police, we learn the perpetrator of Stanislav Arkadyevich’s assassination was none other than a known agent of the West. A Croatian employee of the CIA. I do not think one must search very hard to determine who is culpable for this heinous crime against the Motherland.”

A passport photo of Dino Kadic appeared on the television screen, across which the words “Central Intelligence Agency,” in English, were superimposed in red in a font very similar to the rest of the passport’s typeface, giving the impression the document was some sort of official CIA identity card. It was a simple trick good for fooling the low end of the station’s viewers, of which there were tens of millions.

Molchanova fed Volodin his next talking point. “And now, Mr. President, on the heels of Director Biryukov’s assassination comes word from America of the radiation poisoning of Sergey Golovko, Biryukov’s predecessor at SVR.”

“
Da.
The case of Sergey Golovko is also very interesting. Although I had my differences with the man, I can forgive him for some of the ludicrous things he has said. After all, he is quite old and he comes from an earlier time. Still, I find his proven ties to financial corruption very unpalatable. He is a darling of the Americans, of course, a friend of Jack Ryan’s, until which time the Americans poisoned him.”

“Why would they do this, Mr. President?”

“To blame Russia, of course. Clearly they intended for him to show the effects of his poisoning only after he returned to the United Kingdom. Their scientist assassins made an error in their math. Perhaps they need new calculators or scales or something like that.” Volodin chuckled at himself, and the interviewer smiled right along with him. Laughter could be heard off camera in the studio. Volodin continued, “I don’t know if the scientists used too much polonium, or if the assassins poisoned him at the wrong time. Imagine, though, if their plan had worked. He would have returned to the United Kingdom, and he would have become sick there. America would have been held blameless, and Russia would appear to be culpable.
That
was their intention.” He waved an angry finger in the air.

“Since the necessary police action we took in Estonia in January, where our small and lightly equipped expeditionary force met a NATO force much larger, and ground them into the dirt, the Americans have seen Russia as an existential threat. They feel that if they can implicate Russia, blaming us for crimes in which we had no culpability, they can marginalize us to the world.”

Volodin looked at the camera. “It will not work.”

On cue, Tatiana Molchanova asked her next softball question: “What measures will our government take to keep order and security in this time of heightened foreign threats?”

“I have decided, after careful consideration and consultation with key members of the security services, to make some important changes. It has been said that Stanislav Arkadyevich Biryukov was irreplaceable in his post as director of SVR, and I agree with this. It is for this reason that I have decided not to replace him. As evidenced by the domestic terrorism that led to the death of Biryukov, and several completely innocent civilians, as well as the international terroristic nature of the poisoning of Golovko, it is clear to see our nation’s threats, from within and from without, are one and the same.

“The threats against our nation are such that we cannot diffuse the two intelligence organizations any longer. We need cohesion in all aspects of our security services, and to this end I have ordered the reintegration between the SVR and the FSB. The organization will retain the name Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, but the FSB will now take over responsibility for all foreign intelligence collection.

“FSB director Roman Talanov will continue in his present duties and assume responsibility for the foreign component as well. He is highly capable, and he has my full confidence.”

Even Tatiana Molchanova seemed surprised; she certainly had no follow-up questions prepared in advance that were relevant, but she covered well. “This news will be very interesting to all our viewers, both here in Russia and the near abroad, where Director Talanov has protected Russia from foreign threats, and internationally, where Russian interests have been so ably protected by the late Director Biryukov.”

Volodin agreed, of course, and he began a twelve-minute impromptu speech that delved into past conflicts in Georgia, the current disputes with Ukraine, and other nations in what Volodin referred to as Russia’s privileged interests.

His speech expanded to rail against NATO, Europe, and the United States. It mentioned commodity prices for natural gas and oil, and there was even a brief Russo-centric history lesson involving Russia saving Western Europe from fascism during the Second World War.

When the president finished, after the lights dimmed and a commercial for Ford began running on the studio monitors, Volodin removed his own microphone and stood up. He shook Molchanova’s hand with a smile. She was the same height as the president, and she had the good manners to always wear flats when he came to the studio.