The Silent Oligarch: A Novel

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  Spravka simply meant “certificate.” Every area of Russian life had its spravki: you needed one to sell your house, to register with a doctor, to have a telephone installed, to import goods, to export goods, to secure a passport, to take one’s place at the university. In Webster’s world it meant a summary of a person’s life taken from Russian intelligence agencies, so routinely that while the practice was illegal the information itself was now a mere commodity. They were seldom a colorful read. Date of birth, job, immediate family, house, car, education, career. Business interests inside Russia, business interests outside Russia. Observations concerning career and character. Evidence of or speculation concerning wrongdoing. Speculation about sexuality (half the reports he had ever read concluded that, in a favorite, equivocal construction of Russian bureaucracy, “it was not excluded” that the subject was homosexual). A life narrowed to its basic coordinates and its susceptibility to blackmail or corruption. He was always impressed by the discipline required to be so reductive.

  As a rule the more significant you were—the more wealthy, the more politically lively, the more trublesome—the longer and fuller your spravka. Every person living in Russia had a file, of course, but most contained little beyond mundane details gathered from other government departments. Anything richer or deeper suggested that at some point you had been the subject of attention from the intelligence authorities themselves, and through the blankness of the language it was sometimes possible to see the phone calls overheard, the neighbors quietly consulted, the bank accounts inspected, the lives slowly but inevitably opened up to view. Russia might feel itself diminished but in this easy power over its people it seemed hardly to have changed at all.

  The rule broke down, though, on the largest scales: no oligarch or government minister would be so careless as to leave his file intact. Through money or influence his spravka would be edited and cleaned until it said little at all, the information it had once contained now so far inside the deep dark vault of the Russian state that only those equivalently powerful could ever get it out.

  The first spravka he had ever seen, so many years before, was about Inessa; she had shown it to him herself. It began with bare paragraphs about her upbringing, her family, her education, but what she was proud of was the four or five pages describing her writing and the threat she posed to the Russian state. Someone, she had explained, was keeping an active watch on her: she was being taken seriously. All her articles were attached. Corruption in Togliatti, pollution in Norilsk, smuggling in Vladivostok, aluminum murders in Krasnoyarsk, workers striking in Rostov, Tyumen, Yekaterinburg, Tomsk: a sampler for Russia’s first free decade. Next to her Webster had felt like a dabbler.

  Inessa Kirova, the file had said, was a “politically committed journalist with a tendency to address sensitive subjects,” a freelancer who wrote about crime and corruption and sold most of her articles to the campaigning newspaper Novaya Gazeta. She had connections with “difficult . . . independent” foreign journalists—“that’s you!” she had told Webster, gleefully—and a special interest in the relationship between “big business” and politics: in other words, who was bribing whom. He wondered whether her file was still there, on a numbered shelf in some dank basement, and whether anyone still had reason to refer to it.

  The two spravki in front of Webster now suggested less interesting, less productive lives. They had been faxed in a poor translation, gave no clue to their origin and conformed wholly to type. Lock’s was the file of an unremarkable expat, Malin’s of a career bureaucrat. His father was an administrator at a mining equipment company in Novosibirsk and had had two children: Konstantin in 1948, and Natalya in 1952. Malin had married Katerina Karelov in 1971, and they had had two children. They lived, officially, in an apartment of thirty square meters near Leningradsky station in Moscow, but it was highly unlikely they were ever there; the Malins’ real apartment would almost certainly be a rather grander affair.

  He had been educated at the Tyumen Industrial Institute, and later at the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas in Moscow. Since 1971 he had worked at what was now the Ministry of Natural Resources, in what positions it did not say. He was a very old hand.

  It went on. Malin was a man of “high inner discipline” who had through “loyalty and clear purpose” risen to a position of “total trust and positive influence” within the ministry. His contribution was valued “at highest levels” and had resulted in his being awarded an Order of Merit for the Fatherland in 2003. He was a man of “true principle” and this had allowed him a career “free of the fighting of political factions.”

  This was instructive—such a clean file told him that Malin was well protected—but useless nevertheless; even a little discouraging. Webster’s brief from Tourna had a crazed simplicity about it, and was probably impossible, not to say dangerous. He would need something rather stronger than an intelligence file that Malin had probably approved himself.

  He turned from the source material to the summary of the whole report. Langland Resources, it seemed, was Malin’s oil trading company and was based in Vienna. It had been run by a Dmitry Gerstman, but he had left three years before and another Russian, Nikolai Grachev, had taken his place. There were profiles of each, and a description of Langland, which employed twenty people, or thereabouts, and sold Russian oil into markets around the world.

  Webster skipped a long paragraph on Malin’s background, taken not quite verbatim from the spravka. The next section was more interesting.

  Langland’s profit margin is believed to be artificially high because it engages in transfer pricing with its suppliers in Russia. Producers sell oil to Langland at reduced prices and Langland sells at normal prices to its customers, taking the difference. Any losses are borne by the state-owned suppliers affected and ultimately by the state itself.

  Sources close to Russian intelligence have indicated that Langland’s profits are channeled back into Russia through a series of offshore companies and funds and ultimately through another Malin-controlled entity, Faringdon Holdings Ltd. Faringdon is an Irish offshore company . . . that owns majority stakes in a number of oil and gas exploration and production companies in Russia and Kazakhstan. Media reports state that Faringdon was set up and is managed by Richard Lock, a lawyer of Dutch descent qualified in England. Lock has lived in Moscow since 1993 and is understood to work full-time for Malin.

  Not too bad, thought Webster, for what it was. A useful start.

  At the very back of the file was a cutting from a magazine, neatly folded and kept in a plastic wallet. It showed a group of Russian dignitaries, perhaps a dozen, posing for a photograph. Malin was in the front row, third from the left. Webster peered at the likeness; he had never seen a picture of him before. With his eyes half closed, in black and white, his jaw set, unsmiling, he could have been a Soviet functionary from any decade of Communism. But there was a difference. Malin was rich—had grown rich stealing from the state; his money was Russia’s money. Webster dared to imagine for a moment Malin paraded through the streets of Moscow as a traitor to the people, his image on every newspaper front page below fat black headlines proclaiming his demise.

  UNTIL TWO MONTHS EARLIER, Ikertu Consulting Limited had occupied three floors of a Georgian building on Marylebone Lane. Webster had loved it there, and so had everyone else. Next door on one side was a tiny Japanese restaurant; on the other a haberdasher’s; and opposite in a row a delicatessen, a pub and a launderette. Snaking through a grid of sober streets Marylebone Lane was insistently London: various, high and low, apparently unplanned.

  The company had grown too big for such levity, however, and had moved two miles east to a modern building on Cursitor Street, just off Chancery Lane. Hammer liked being in among the lawyers; Webster did not. He preferred being near the crooked square mile of Mayfair, with its front companies and its brass plates and the strong smell of unexplained wealth, because that, in a ci
ty that invited them, was where intrigues tended to begin and end. Here in Holborn lawyers earned their money in transparent six-minute units and worked hard to extinguish intrigue wherever they saw it.

  Webster was back in the office. He stared at his e-mail, thought in a disconnected way about the cases he had left behind while on holiday, and waited for Hammer, who came to work late and left late and was no doubt still running in. Hammer lived in Hampstead so that he could run on the Heath. He ran to work, and he often ran home from work. He was fifty-seven and must have run fifty miles a week, unmistakably a New Yorker in his short shorts and his baseball cap. His small frame carried no weight, and he had the clipped, straight-legged style, neck forward, almost a speed-walk, of a man who had been running all his life. When he got to the office he would shower straightaway and dress in clothes that were too big for him and unconsciously American (pleated trousers, tasseled loafers, boxed jackets with boxy shoulders and wide lapels) before wandering around greeting his staff, still aglow, his yellow shirt newly spotted with sweat.

  Ikertu was everything to Hammer. He lived alone, with a housekeeper, ate badly, read books about military campaigns and game theory, and worked for his clients, who adored him. What Hammer and Ikertu did best, and liked to do to the exclusion of all else when times were good, was contentious work, in the jargon of their legal neighbors. They fought for their clients. They fought to recover money, to redeem reputations and dismantle them, to expose corruption, to overtake the competition, to right wrongs and sometimes to cover them up. Most of the time they worked for the right side.

  On the wall of Webster’s office hung a political map of Europe and Asia, and into it he had stuck colored pins to mark the heart of each project. He looked at it now and wondered where this case would take him. There were tight clusters over Kiev and Almaty, Warsaw and Vienna; looser groups across the Urals, the Caucasus and southern Siberia; four or five apiece in Prague, Budapest, and Sofia; and solitary outliers in Tallinn, Ashgabat, Yerevan, Minsk. It was a heat map of money and trouble. He had stopped sticking pins in Moscow, a thick dark mass in the middle.

  His phone rang.

  “Hi,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “Downstairs. Come for a coffee.”

  “There’s nowhere to go for a coffee.”

  Hammer laughed. “Meet me in Starbucks.”

  Webster started to say that he didn’t think Starbucks was a good place to discuss anything, let alone what they had to discuss, but the line had gone dead.

  Hammer had bought him a coffee, which he didn’t really want. He drank it anyway, absentmindedly. He noticed that behind his birdlike keenness and thick-rimmed black spectacles Hammer was beginning to look old. But there was still something daunting there, and Webster as always felt the need to perform well for him.

  “Jesus, you were less grumpy before your holiday,” said Hammer, emptying a packet of sugar into his coffee. “How was it?”

  “Wet and short. But lovely, thank you. Spent most of it pottering about in a bass boat in the drizzle trying to catch mackerel.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Elsa caught six on our first outing. Then nothing. Nancy ate it raw off my penknife. I was amazed.”

  “And how was Turkey?”

  “Hot. Tourna’s a piece of work.”

  “What does he want?”

  They were sitting at a counter in the window. Before he began, Webster instinctively looked around behind him to make sure no one could hear. He leaned in to Hammer a little and spoke softly.

  “Do you know who Konstantin Malin is?”

  “I know he’s come up before. Oil?”

  “Oil. He’s the power behind the throne at the energy ministry. He advises the Kremlin on energy policy—some say he pretty much sets it. And he enforces it. He’s also extremely rich—one of the new breed. A silent oligarch.”

  “What does the minister think about that?” Hammer was a fiddler, a tapper, a chewer of pens. He found it difficult to sit altogether still. Now he was blowing on his coffee to cool it, letting his glasses mist up and then clear, not looking at Webster.

  “I suspect he gets his share, but a fraction of what Malin is taking. He’s been there for decades. He must have served under dozens of ministers.”

  Hammer drank some coffee and watched people pass by on the street, then turned to Webster with a look of fresh concentration.

  “How powerful is he?”

  “A government intimate. For ten years or more, as far as I know, which is very rare. He may be unique. Every case we do in energy he’s there, somewhere. He’s the gray cardinal of the Kremlin.”

  “Who looks after his affairs?”

  “In Russia, I don’t know. A guy called Lock has been his lawyer for fifteen years or so. He manages an Irish company that seems to own most of the assets. And there’s a Russian called Grachev who runs a trading operation in Vienna.”

  Hammer thought for a moment, tapping out a precise rhythm with his thumb and forefinger on the counter. His shirt collar, far too big, hung around his neck like a noose.

  Webster continued. “I know Lock. Or know of him. There’s a joke in Moscow: why did Malin lose all his money? Because it was Locked up.”

  “Hilarious.”

  “It’s a pun. Lock means sucker.”

  After a pause, Hammer said, “Who’s he fallen out with?”

  “Malin? Besides Tourna? There’s an ex-employee who looks interesting. No obvious animus. There must be a few Russians who don’t like him, inside the Kremlin and out. Otherwise I don’t know. As far as I can see there’s no litigation we might follow.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “It is?”

  “And what does Tourna want?”

  Webster told him. The fall of Malin.

  “Is that all?” Hammer sat back and thought, tapping on the rim of his cup with his thumbs. “Did you discuss fees?”

  “No. I told him I’d need to speak to you first about whether we do the work.”

  Hammer frowned. “Why wouldn’t we?”

  “Because being seen to work for Tourna is grubby. I don’t mind that but you might. But the main thing is, Malin’s a real player. He’ll have his own security people, good ones, and he has a lot to lose.”

  “What’s the worst he might do?”

  “Set his people on us, rake muck, make life difficult, especially in Russia. Revoke my visa, which would be a pain.”

  “Will he shoot you?”

  Webster laughed. “No, I shouldn’t think so. They tend not to kill Westerners. But thanks.”

  “What about our sources in Russia?”

  “I think the same applies. If Malin gets wind of us, and he will, he’ll disrupt life for them, maybe put them out of business. But we may not need to do that much in Russia. If Malin’s vulnerable it’ll be offshore somewhere. Perhaps in his past, but I doubt it.”

  Hammer folded his arms and beamed at Webster. “This is juicy, isn’t it? Have you had any thoughts?”

  “God yes. My head’s spinning with ideas. For once I need you to keep me in check.”

  “That’ll be novel.”

  Webster paused. Outside two men were getting out of a taxi, struggling with boxes of legal papers. He turned to Hammer. “Look. I need to be straight with you. I’ve been waiting for this case. Or one like it. I may not be the best judge.”

  “You want to afflict the corrupt?”

  “Something like that.”

  Neither said anything for a moment.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t take it,” said Webster at last.

  “Can we do what he wants?”

  “We’d have to be very lucky and very clever.”

  Hammer leaned in confidentially, lowering his voice. “I think this has the making
s of a landmark project.”

  “I thought you might say that.” Webster felt a flutter in his chest.

  “Tell Tourna we want two million U.S. up front. We’ll keep that on account and bill him a million a month until the end of the project. If we help him get his fifty back we want five percent. If we finish off Malin, we want another ten million.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “I am. You said it. If we can crack this without doing much in Russia, fantastic. If we can’t, we haven’t lost anything and we’ll probably help Tourna get his money back at least. If Malin kicks up a fuss it’ll die down and in the meantime you can do a few Kazakh cases. It’s not like we’ve got an office in Moscow to raid or employees to imprison.” He paused. “Where does Lock live?”

  “Moscow.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he started to work for Malin before either of them knew what they were doing. That means he knows where the mistakes are. And if you’re right, he’s not exactly battle-hardened. Get him out of Moscow. He’s protected there.”

  “With pleasure.”

  “He’s worth a lot to us. Go after him.”

  Three

  LONDON WAS A GATEWAY FOR LOCK; he passed through it often on the way to his island world, where the sun shone and he was in charge. But in a broader sense it led to a life that was closed to him in Moscow. He would buy his suits there, from Henry Poole—the oldest tailors on Savile Row, he had once discovered with satisfaction—and the shirts and ties, shoes and socks that set him apart, he liked to think, from his Russian colleagues. There he would boss his lawyers, have his hair cut, dine well with the very few friends he still had, and feel briefly his old self, part of a confident, distinguished fraternity, the equal of his peers. In London, too, he would occasionally see his family.

  But he hadn’t seen Marina or Vika on his recent visits. He told himself that there were good reasons for this: he was usually passing through and was seldom in town for long; the greater the size of Malin’s secret empire the more meetings he was forced to have; Vika was in bed by eight, just as his working day tended to finish. Today, however, on his way to Holland Park to see them, scenes from the Riviera playing in his mind, he found guilt mixed in with the usual apprehension.