Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  Over blackish cliffs

  Falls drunk with death

  The glowing bride of the wind

  The blue wave of the glacier.

  During these days, Finn paints and varnishes where neglect and weather damage demand. He mends a broken pulley block, replaces some worn-out halyards and services the engine. Fuelled and watered, he leaves the river on a spring tide under the nearly full moon and sails to France, to a little fishing port on the Brittany coast where they love old working boats and where, if you sail in one, nobody bothers to ask for your passport.

  He spends the evening with an old aquaintance, a red-headed Breton boat builder, in a tiny, black-tarred fisherman’s bar up the hill from the harbour. After two o’clock in the morning there are just three of them, Finn, the redhead and the moustached patron with a fat belly, who is a grumpy old misanthrope, but who warms up slowly after midnight like a rusty night storage heater. It is into the patron’s spare room that Finn collapses into bed sometime in the early hours.

  The next day he catches a series of trains that take him by late evening to the Côte d’Azur.

  In August along the coast from La Napoule to Monte Carlo, wealthy Russians, both exiles and those close and loyal to the Putin regime, are displaying their riches and their women in the hotels and casinos, and in the private châteaux and yachts they have bought for themselves in the previous ten years.

  But Finn isn’t going south for a summer holiday. He writes just three words on this journey. Building A Network.

  18

  FOR TWO WEEKS Finn criss-crosses southern Europe, from the Russian châteaux on the Côte d’Azur to private banking halls in Geneva, to a small and poor canton in Switzerland. His final stop, before departing the mainland of Europe on Bride of the Wind as the equinoctial storms set in, is Tegernsee where he discreetly sets up his hideaway in the pink house under the name of a brass-plate company domiciled in the Caribbean, which he had quietly created for himself while working in London. He is laying the ground for the work ahead.

  The network he sets up could be described as ramshackle. It consists of one or two angry, self-pitying Russian billionaires, both wanted for imprisonment in Siberia; of money-laundering prosecutors and Swiss bankers; disgruntled KGB agents engaged in clan warfare; foreign intelligence malcontents from various countries; figures from the political fringes of the European Union who’ve been passed over for promotion or who are afraid of where the European Union is treading in its relations with Russia; private investigators, like Frank, who know the ins and outs of Europe’s clearing banks and offshore shell companies; and others on the fringes of the intelligence world, one or two of whom provide a small but significant insight into Finn’s quest, and the rest who talk a lot and say nothing. Many of these contacts have private motives, or grander geopolitical ideas that either crush them under the weight or distort their reason. A few are good, clear, honest people. These Finn treats as family.

  He begins on that August night, after a day on trains bound for the south, at a party in Antibes, thrown by an acquaintance from Moscow in the 1990s. Boris Berezovsky, until a little over a year before the senior figure among the seven bankers who ruled Russia, is now firmly in exile in one of his many homes in the West, the grand Château de la Garoupe, where he nurses his dreams of a triumphant return.

  On this night, however, Finn isn’t after information. He wants some of this cash that washes the Côte d’Azur more brightly than the phosphorescence on its beaches. What he wants is funding. Here, among the Russians disenchanted with Putin, he will find the cash that will pay for the lease in Tegernsee and fund the subsequent years of his investigations.

  But he goes to Berezovsky’s party for a second reason. He knows his presence in the house of Putin’s enemy will filter back to Moscow, the Forest and the Kremlin. Even Berezovsky can’t invite two hundred and fifty guests without there being an informer among them. So Finn goes along to lay the ground for his reunion with me. He wants us, at the Forest, to know exactly where he is. He knows that they will send me after him.

  Whether he finds any of the funds he needs from Berezovsky or from one of the many other billionaires, multimillionaires and also-rans at this party- or whether he takes a hat round and gets a sub from more than one of them- he doesn’t say.

  But the next night he has dinner at the Hermitage Hotel in Monte Carlo with one of the guests from the night before. He is a Russian oil baron, Gennady Liakubsky, and Finn meets him along with one of Liakubsky’s cronies from the Russian underworld, and another man.

  And this is where we at the Forest begin to pick him up on our radar. One of our SVR agents on the Côte d’Azur is a real-estate agent who deals in many of the high-end properties the Russian rich are buying. He has been at the party where Finn appeared and has put a tail on him.

  And so I knew Finn was dining with Liakubsky and his mob friends that night.

  Within twelve hours we had the photographs of this dinner back with us at the Forest; Liakubsky, in the company of a Russian mafioso recently released from prison and known as Yakutchik- ‘the little Yakut’–and another man, a Russian trader living in Geneva who calls himself Danny.

  Finn is sitting at a private table at the Hermitage in Monte Carlo with five waiters for the four of them, who are drinking thousand-dollar bottles of wine decanted and poured by a sixth waiter. Finn is laughing and toasting with a billionaire thief and the best of the Russian underworld.

  He’s in his element, relishing this role that will later that night or the next day engender that curious brand of guilt and sorrow that is always mixed with pride.

  He’s telling filthy jokes and indulging in the back-slapping bonhomie with the best of them. But it is an unhappy union of a disgraced British spy and two thieves and a murderer, disguised as a convivial supper between colleagues.

  ‘I am taking their money; money stolen off the backs of the Russian people. These people stole it from other thieves and murderers, but ultimately it comes from the poor, the old, the veterans of war and Communist persecution. It comes from industrial production from the factories and mines and oilfields constructed from the blood and death of Stalin’s slaves. The thousands of pounds’ worth of wine we are pouring down our gullets like Coca-Cola is the blood of those men and women who worked under the lash fifty, sixty years ago to construct an industry which has been stolen from their children and their grandchildren.

  ‘This is Putin’s great public relations coup- to focus on such thieves as these- while silently seizing their ill-gotten gains, not for the benefit of the people who made it, but for a new set of oligarchs, the KGB, which is now taking shape in the Kremlin.

  ‘And me? How different am I? Here I am taking their stolen money in order to expose this new crime that I so passionately believe is now unfolding in the Kremlin. So, for me, the means justify the ends too. But do they? For me, but not for anyone else?

  ‘Sometimes, all we need to guard against is our own pious morality. But it’s hard to see that when you’re sitting at the rich man’s table with a bunch of crooks and killers.’

  When I see Finn’s picture at the Forest the day after the dinner, I can hardly contain my excitement. He seems so close and I can feel his plan unfolding. The company he’s keeping doesn’t matter. I forgive Finn more easily than he forgives himself. There he is, the man who a little more than a year ago told me I could say he loved me. I smile again at the memory.

  The whereabouts of Finn and these photographs of the company he’s keeping are so important to us that they arrive at the Forest a few hours later. It isn’t Liakubsky we are watching. Or the Little Yakut, just released from an American jail. Or Danny, the Russian trader from Geneva. It is Finn. The Forest is watching Finn in the hope he will lead us to Mikhail.

  Gennady Liakubsky is thirty-eight years old. He was born in Komi out to the north-east of Moscow in western Siberia where there is nothing but tundra and oilfields, great winding rivers and the herds of reindeer tha
t are still taken from one feeding ground to the next by the dwindling ethnic peoples of this inhospitable region.

  As a student in the Engineering School in Moscow, Liakubsky had been a part-time informer for the KGB before perestroika in the 1980s. But then he’d seen the opportunity of marrying his qualifications with the new business opportunities that arose in the nineties. He’d traded on the Moscow stock exchange in any commodity he could get his hands on, but always looked east, where Russia’s money is born, to the oilfields and mines that are strewn across the vast, empty Siberian plains ten time zones wide that reach up eventually a few miles from America in the Bering Strait.

  When Yeltsin began to auction off the state’s industrial property in 1996, Liakubsky was one of those who seized their chance. He bought oil production in Komi where his local KGB and mafia connections ensured a smooth transition, then branched out into a gold mine outside Yakutsk, the place where he struck up his partnership with the Little Yakut. A coal mine in the Kuzbass region was added, then iron mines, steel foundries and more oil. Like the others, Liakubsky amassed whatever he could get while the going was good. And like the others, he took his profits out of Russia to the West in a financial drain that has cost Russia up to five hundred billion dollars, all told. Bleeding the country was their insurance against the future.

  But when Putin came to power in 2000, Liakubsky, unlike Boris Berezovsky, was one of those who prostrated himself to the new power. His château in France was not an exile’s home. He paid and paid the new administration in the Kremlin, he agreed to Putin’s new injunction to stay out of politics, he repatriated Russian art to St Petersburg from all around the world, and supported Putin’s pet projects in Petersburg. It is said he gave over twenty million dollars to the refurbishment of Putin’s home city and its palaces.

  But even after all this, Liakubsky could never feel safe, as long as there were new, more trusted acolytes that Putin wished to put in control of the country’s wealth at the centre of power, in the Kremlin.

  We knew at the Forest that Liakubsky, like all of his kind, spent a great deal of his resources amassing kompromat-black propaganda–against Putin and his clique. One day, who knows, possession of the President’s secrets, and those of his allies, might be all that stands between Liakubsky and a Siberian prison camp.

  But Liakubsky was not alone in this. They all did it, they all still do it, as long as Putin and his KGB clan tighten the noose around Russia’s throat and are the power to be reckoned with. They support Putin’s political party, United Russia, which is now, six years later, the only real party; they pay up when asked. But always, always they continue their search for insurance.

  And Finn, for Liakubsky, is just one more agent of his insurance, one brick in the wall of the kompromat, the black propaganda the oil baron needs. His financial contribution to Finn isn’t even petty cash for Liakubsky.

  But we’re not watching Liakubsky, back at the Forest nor the Little Yakut, with his yellowed Asian features pinched from generations of Siberian cold and his string of murders behind him. Nor Danny the Geneva trader. We are watching Finn and I am being briefed to join with him again and find Mikhail, the enemy within.

  After some financial arrangement has been reached with Liakubsky, the next morning Finn takes a train to Annecy. But in Annecy, we lose him. As I read now, I see the trail of Finn’s route at the moment it went dead for us.

  Somehow and un-recounted by Finn, he makes his way to the Swiss border and, crossing without a passport through the deserted frontier post above Grenoble, he travels to Geneva.

  19

  ON A FINE CLEAR SUMMER MORNING, when the outlines of the mountains seem to have been painted on glass, Finn walks up a pleasant leafy road in Cologny, a suburb of Geneva reserved for the world’s wealthy, and its diplomats and the lords of the international agencies and organisations that have taken root in the city. Here they huddle halfway to heaven on a rolling hill above the lake. Above them, neat domestic vineyards embroider the fields all the way to the sky, while below them the city of Geneva stands at the head of the flat blue lawn of its lake.

  Finn has parked a small white van at the top of the street, killing the reverberating volume of Elastica as he cuts the engine. In the stunned silence, he walks across the road, turns into a cul de sac that curves in an arc rejoining the road further down from where he’s parked. He wears old blue overalls and carries a metal workman’s box.

  He’s already seen the car he is looking for as he drove by. It is a silver grey Lexus with diplomatic plates, parked on the kerb outside white wrought-iron gates. As he walks back up the hill, without breaking step he takes a roll of black electrical tape from the box, bites into the plastic-tasting end, and pulls off a two-inch strip. When the car is level with him he places the strip in a vertical position at the side of the curved back window and walks on, continuing up to where he parked the van twenty minutes earlier.

  He throws the toolbox into the back, switches on the engine and with it the blasting music, and drives back down the hill and into the city. He returns the van to the hire company less than two hours after he’s rented it for cash from a bored representative, and boards a tram by the shopping plaza on the west bank. The tram winds its way up and around a hill, offering glimpses of the lake through side streets, and on to another suburb, south of the city this time, called Chêne Bougeries.

  Finn steps off the tram, along with some Scandinavian backpackers, just a few hundred yards from the French border. He walks across the road unchallenged by the border guards, and into the Bar des Douanes, where he sits at a table in the back and orders a black coffee.

  It is just after ten o’clock in the morning and the striking blue summer day is visible like a cinema screen from the dark gloom at the back of the bar.

  Five minutes later a short, tubby, bearded man wearing jeans and a faded grey T-shirt, and carrying a battered leather knapsack slung over his left shoulder, enters the bar. When they see each other Finn rises from the plastic seat and they embrace in the surprised way the English have, no matter how many times they’ve embraced foreigners. The man grunts an indecipherable and half-suspicious greeting. He sits, orders a coffee and brandy, unrolls a newspaper and slaps it with the back of his hand.

  ‘Read that,’ he says and, as Finn reads, the man takes a pouch from the leather knapsack and rolls a cigarette from some dry Drum tobacco he grumpily scrapes up from the corners of the pouch.

  ‘They’re trying to get rid of Stelzer,’ the man says, gesticulating at the newspaper. ‘He’s doing his job too well.’

  Finn has met Jean-Claude many times in the past five years. He’s a man at home in one environment and completely at odds with all others. His plane of existence is a dark bar or, best of all, the wreck of his windowless office where he sits on a swivel chair with a torn and dirty nylon seat and hunches over a plywood door that is his desk and is piled with paperwork, ashtrays, half-empty beer bottles, scraps of paper scribbled with telephone numbers, half-drunk cups of coffee and thousands of coloured paperclips he seems to collect like semi-precious stones. His beard is dappled with the white blossom of cigarette ash from the cigarettes he wedges, until long after they’re burnt out, between two brown and very crooked front teeth. His bulbous nose is somehow fitted on to his face, red and greasy, and it doesn’t appear to obey the normal physics of noses.

  In any environment other than his office or a bar, Jean-Claude is diminished. Finn walked with him once into the mountains outside Geneva and up there he looked like an ugly troll, with his nose and straggled beard, who’d had his fairy tale ripped out from under him. He seemed to be struggling to come to terms with a landscape that once, in another world perhaps, was his, but had now been tamed by roads and bridges and gas stations and hotels and all the other human forces more progressive than his own.

  But in the dark cave of a bar, or of his study, he lost the uncertainty, the unease he felt in the wider, brighter modern world. Finn is the only person w
ho calls Jean-Claude ‘Troll’ to his face.

  ‘And they’ve just killed my documentary,’ Jean-Claude puffs while Finn finishes reading the article. ‘Help me sell it in England, Finn,’ he says. ‘They’re serious in England,’ he continues, with a nostalgia for British investigative journalism that is at least thirty years out of date. ‘Anyway, why are you here? What do you want?’

  When he senses Jean-Claude has finished with his tirade, Finn looks up from the newspaper, the Zürcher Zeitung, and grins broadly. ‘Hello, Troll,’ he says.

  ‘What the fuck is there to say “Hello” about?’ Jean-Claude grumbles. ‘You’ve read that, haven’t you?’

  ‘It’s two years,’ Finn laughs. Jean-Claude looks at him in astonishment, as though time is some devilish human construct which now even this, one of his few remaining and trusted friends, has fallen for.

  Jean-Claude, Finn told me, would spend a year, two years- ten years, even–tracking one secret money trail through a hundred different destinations until he found where it all began, the hidden owner, the motherlode. He could follow a financial pipeline as a water diviner traces water. His fellow enthusiasts, who Finn imagined as a band of trolls, lived in other Swiss mountain towns, as well as in Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Channel Islands, the Cayman and Virgin Islands. Jean-Claude had spent nearly fifty years obsessed with secret money.

  First it was Nazi gold and the stolen cash hoards that found their way out of Germany at the end of the war, then the Camorra-the Naples mafia–and their Sicilian cousins, and then the KGB and Stasi secret money pipelines from East Germany. He has been spending fifteen years by the time Finn meets him on this morning in the Bar des Douanes, looking at the financial networks of Russian front companies and banks which were said to have been wound up when the Wall came down, but which were constructed so intricately, bound so tightly, that no one could be sure- and Jean-Claude, for one, didn’t believe- that they had really been wound up at all; companies like Exodi.