The Outer Circle (The Counterpoint Trilogy Book 3) (6 page)

Los Angeles, USA

Maggie looked out the window. Alejandro was outside, talking to men all dressed in workman’s clothing, wearing hats and heavy boots. Three pickup trucks were parked there, with what looked like gardening tools in their beds. Two people were carrying packages out of the garage and placing them in trucks. Alejandro was laughing, gesticulating, and patting men on their shoulders. Even in a casual conversation, he stood very straight, with confidence and power. The way he was looking at her last night... she’d have to handle him carefully.

Maggie walked down the stairs and found her way into the kitchen. Seeing David’s figure at the counter, she tiptoed in. He was sipping his coffee, staring out the window with thick metal bars. The last two years were hard on him. He aged, hair turning gray, stooped some more. She knew David held himself responsible for things not working out as planned, for not being able to protect her, for not giving her the child she so desperately wanted. Maggie quietly came to him, put her arms around his waist, squeezed her face into the space between these familiar shoulder blades and closed her eyes.

“All right, lovebirds, you are making me jealous!” Alejandro’s voice brought them out of the moment. “How did you sleep?”

They both turned to him. Maggie felt Alejandro looking straight at her, lips curled in a smile, eyes serious.

“I slept like a baby, thank you,” said David. “Although, there was a sound in the middle of the night that woke me up. It came with a vibration and felt like an engine was starting.”

“Ah, it was the generator,” explained Alejandro. “The power grid has not been too reliable lately so we have a combination of solar panels with a battery plus a generator to handle any interruptions. There must have been one during the night. I am afraid I am used to them by now so I just sleep straight through. We also have a water cistern in the basement. There are ongoing water disputes between Northern and Southern California and sometimes our faucets would run dry. We are set for at least a week here.”

“Alejandro, I was curious about the windows,” asked David, “they look kind of dark, like it’s an evening outside even though it’s still early.”

“Good observation. All our windows are covered with a reflective mirror film. These windows are effectively one-way mirrors. You can see outside, nobody can see inside. The windows are also laminated and shatterproof and have external security screen sensors. Yeah, this may seem like overkill but as the old saying goes,
only the paranoid survive
. I’d rather survive. If you can’t live in a gated community with armed guards – and I can’t because of what I do – you’ve got invest into security. I chose this location because I can run the neighborhood. Still have to be careful.”

Oleg noisily walked in, pulled out a chair and set at the table:

“All right, how do you get a cup of coffee in this place?”

The next second, he jumped in response to a whirring noise on his left:

“What the...”

What looked like a rectangular column in the corner suddenly came alive with lights and movement, rolled to Oleg and asked in a British-accented voice:

“Sir, how do you like your coffee?”

David laughed:

“I had the same reaction. Turns out it’s a kitchen robot.”

“I like mine black,” Oleg cautiously replied to the thing.

“And I want mine with milk and sugar,” requested Maggie.

Everyone was looking at the robot while it made some pouring and mixing sounds, then produced two cups full of steaming liquid.

“Thank you, Cumba, now go back to your place,” instructed Alejandro and the robot returned to the corner and shut down.

“Is that all he does, makes coffee?” asked Oleg.

“No, he can clean floors, set the table, unload the dishwasher, that kind of stuff. Now that you have your coffee, can we go back to my question from yesterday – why are you taking this crazy risk of returning to LA?”

Oleg exchanged glances with the others, sipped his coffee.

“David and Maggie found some new names of those that were involved in the 2019 crisis.”

“Oleg, my friend,” Alejandro sat across from him, “this is an old news. “Everyone now is angry at the Chinese and the Russians. The narrative is that while there were a few bad apples here in the USA, it was all a foreign staged affair. Most people don’t even care to dig deeper, they are busy trying to survive. College football creates more emotion than a five-year old financial crisis.”

“Perhaps, but if there is an incontrovertible evidence of someone illegally profiting from the crisis – and profiting quite substantially – the information can be used to blackmail such a person,” David sat next to Oleg.

“David, you don’t strike me as a blackmailing type,” Alejandro shook his head.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean that we want to blackmail anyone. I meant that someone else can blackmail.”

“Alejandro, imagine that the president of the United States can be threatened like this!” jumped in Maggie impatiently. “Just imagine the power that a blackmailer would have!”

“Are you saying that President Maxwell has been in on the scheme?” Alejandro asked incredulously. “I am not a fan of his but I think he is an honest man.”

“No, not Maxwell,” replied David. “Potentially worse and more dangerous. We think that John Dimon was involved.”

Alejandro rubbed his forehead. “He is pretty popular now, most people think he’ll be the next president. People like what he says and that Robert Treadwell media character is pounding the tables for Dimon. Still, why do you think he is dangerous?”

“He reminds me of the leaders I’ve seen growing up in Eastern Europe,” Maggie had her palms on the table, eyes locked on Alejandro. “Blaming ‘others’ for the problems, simplistic slogans, building up the enemies to focus on rather than look inside. People like that start wars!”

“OK, OK,” conceded Alejandro. “What do you want to do about this? What can you do? You are right; everything’s been so distorted and compromised that simply publishing this information won’t do any good. He might even spin it to his advantage, proof of ‘enemies’ trying to destroy him.”

“Yes, and I don’t have strong evidence,” admitted David. “No accounts with his name or that of his close relatives.”

“So what do you have?”

David visibly hesitated, “Alejandro, do you want me to get into gory details?”

“Yeah, I’m harboring fugitives, I want all the details!”

David sighed, “All right. I came across a private investment company that seemed to have made some prescient bets in 2019. In looking at the ownership, Dimon’s name came up a year earlier as a beneficial owner, and then disappeared. As I dug in deeper, did some pattern matching, I found names of people linked to Dimon, friends, extended family, this sort of thing. I put together a list of names and companies; there were dozens of accounts indirectly linked to Dimon, with tens of millions in gains during that period.”

“And how were they making money?”

“Companies paid out distributions, dividends,
etc.
There are myriads of creative ways to do that, without raising questions. But there was another bothersome issue: many transactions we could not trace because the trail ended up at SOFI.”

“Who is she?”

Maggie laughed, then explained, “It’s not a ‘she.’ The SOFI is an acronym for the system of exchanging financial information,
systema obmena finansovoiy informatzii
in Russian. You see, until 2015 the vast majority of such data was communicated through the SWIFT, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. For a banking institution to succeed in a global environment, it had to be a part of the SWIFT. Which in turn helped law enforcement to track down money laundering. At some point the U.S. started using access to the SWIFT as a weapon, blocking the Iranians from the system. And when in 2015 they tried to block the Russians as a part of the standoff over Ukraine, Russia deployed its own interbank system and called it SOFI. The rest of the BRICS countries – China, India, Brazil, and South Africa – also adopted the SOFI as a second interbank system and tied it to the hundred billion dollars New Development Bank they set up in Shanghai that year.”

“And why is that a problem?”

“Now we have two separate systems that are opaque to each other. Moreover, in order to entice people to join the SOFI, Russia imposed very tight data security. Only a few people in the BRICS leadership can access the transactions data,” continued Maggie. “After the SOFI gained adoption with banks covering half of the world’s population, in 2018 the SWIFT had no choice but to agree to establish a number of gateways to the SOFI so at least some authorized transactions for the banks participating in both systems can go across. But once the transaction goes into the SOFI, it might as well fall into a black hole. We can’t trace it any further. Quite a bit of the data that Schulmann collected back in 2020 stops at the border to the SOFI.”

“And why is this important?”

“It implies a possible funding from abroad. Which would be not only suspicious, but likely outright illegal.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“We really have two separate issues here,” David jumped back in. “Firstly, we worked with Schulmann’s data that only goes through the early 2020. I want more transaction data for the accounts that I have identified, going to the current year. A person with a proper security access, such as the SEC or the FBI, should be able to get it. Secondly, we would like to peek behind the SOFI’s veil. That would be harder.”

“And once you have such data?”

“We think that if we gather enough evidence, we should get to the top. Perhaps even to Maxwell,” responded David. “He can stop Dimon.”

“Look, you’ll be surprised, but we have developed quite a bit of computer expertise here. However, getting this kind of data is beyond our reach,” Alejandro shook his head. “How are you planning to get it?”

“Two years ago, Maggie and I were in Dallas, following Schulmann’s trail. His friend John Platt guided us; we would have never found the file without him. Platt got help from the head of local FBI office, Jim Brobak. We thought of trying to find Jim again, we’re just not sure how.”

“Why not ask that Platt guy?”

“John Platt was killed a few days after meeting with us.”

“Yes, helping you can be dangerous,” nodded Alejandro. “I’ll see if we can find a way to Mr. Brobak, assuming he is still alive. But even if we do, how do you get to the President?”

“Well, that’s where things get interesting,” jumped in Oleg, who’d been listening quietly until now. “When I was a teenager in St. Petersburg, every year on June 22
nd
my uncle would take me and his son to the Museum of Breaking the Leningrad Blockade.”

“Why June 22
nd
?”

“That’s the day that Nazi Germany attacked Russia. The four of us – my uncle, his father, his son, and me – would get into his car and drive to Shlisselburg, where the museum is located. That one year, in 2006, it was crowded because we had another passenger, Pavel Rostin. I remember because Rostin was a subject of conversations between my uncle and his father for a few years afterwards.”

“OK, who is Pavel Rostin and why does it matter?”

“Pavel Rostin was married to Karen Baker, the daughter of Sam Baker. One of the longest serving U.S. congressmen, head of powerful committees.”

“So you want to contact Pavel Rostin and through him get to Sam Baker?” asked Alejandro.

“Pavel Rostin died – or, likely, was killed – a few days after I met him. He left behind a wife and two children, a boy and a girl.”

“I am completely lost,” Alejandro shook his head.

“You heard of Jeff Kron? Yes, that Jeff Kron, the presidential candidate. Jeff’s wife Jennifer’s maiden name is Rostin.”

“So you want to contact Jennifer Kron in order to convince her grandfather to take the information to Maxwell? Or you want Jeff Kron to go after Dimon?”

“Yeah, whichever one works.”

“Why do you think Jennifer Kron would even talk to you?”

“I don’t know if she will. The fact that I’ve met her father, who died under suspicious circumstances soon thereafter, might help to get her interest. And her husband is Dimon’s political rival. Kron hates what Dimon stands for. He called Dimon a ‘dangerous demagogue.’ Jennifer must feel the same way. If we convince her that we are who we are and the information is genuine, perhaps she’ll help us. To be believed, David, Maggie and I have to do this in person.”

Alejandro sat quietly for a minute, a frown creasing his handsome face. He then looked up:

“It makes some sense but overall I’d say it’s crazy. Too many dependencies, too many things must fall into place. Too risky. I am sorry, but I think you are better off going back to Mexico.”

He got up to walk away. Maggie stood up and grabbed his arm:

“Alejandro, please, help us. Please. I know we’ll need some luck to make this happen. We’ve earned that luck. You helped us two years ago – do it again, I beg you.”

Alejandro hesitated, looked at her through narrowed eyes for a minute:

“All right, I guess we can give it a try. Worse comes to worst, she won’t talk to you. The Krons are now public figures; I am sure they are being followed. We’ll have to be careful and creative. Is this it or do you have other insane ideas up your sleeve?”