Commander-In-Chief (16 page)

Limonov stood on shaky knees.

The job was impossible, but he’d done the impossible before. He wasn’t sure where to start. He knew it would take some time to create a new and impenetrable network of companies, banks, accounts, trusts, agents, and cutouts. He’d get started tonight, and he would work straight on through for weeks before giving the president his proposal.

Valeri Volodin wasn’t a man to be kept waiting.

Present day

J
ack Ryan, Jr., was on his second day here in Luxembourg City, sitting in a tiny and dark sixth-floor office on Avenue Émile Reuter and peering up the street through a spotting scope set up to a video camera pointed at a fifth-floor window in a building on Boulevard Royal. There a man in his shirtsleeves sat hunched over his desk while his frumpy secretary sat at her own desk across the room and talked on her telephone.

Jack felt like he was looking through a soda straw at the world’s most boring zoo exhibit, watching the nearly still-life experience of a European attorney at work.

The tiny nation known officially as the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg kept itself out of the world headlines, but in some respects it was the heart of Europe. For starters, it was the third-wealthiest nation on the planet. Even though this was the case, most of the money that passed through Luxembourg, certainly the vast majority of it, did not belong to the Luxembourgers themselves. It was instead owned by offshore corporations, companies who used
Luxembourg only for their banking and registration, so they could avoid revealing information to the actual home country of the companies’ owners.

Luxembourg had been at this game a long time. It became a purveyor of offshore corporations in 1929 and today it is one of the largest tax havens in the world.

Ten percent of all wealth on earth is held offshore, somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 trillion, and there were dozens of offshore financial havens; experts had pegged sixty that fit into the category of secrecy jurisdictions. There were differences in how the jurisdictions operated, but their mission was all the same. These nations were able to make money by doing things for citizens of other nations who wished to get around the laws in their home countries. The secrecy jurisdiction was happy to oblige in this endeavor . . . for a cut of the winnings.

Of course these financial haven nations did not afford the same rights and privileges to their own citizens. No, they were taxed and tracked and held completely accountable for their finances. The foreigners were treated with deference, and the locals were “ring-fenced,” kept away from the financial goodies.

The process was done through offshore banks. In nations with little regulation, any physical address could be registered as a bank. A guy sitting in a windowless cube with his feet on a cardboard box and a mobile phone in his hand could be a bank.

You could go on the Internet and buy a bank. A service would set you up in a tax haven with two employees—a director and an assistant director—a filing cabinet, and a physical address. Money could be moved through accounts from one place to the other, and the two bank employees would never even see the amounts, the sending bank, or the receiving banks. They served only as ways for
the owner of the money to check off a box on a regulatory document in the nation where the money was coming from, and another box on a regulatory document where the money was going.

Not all offshore companies were involved with laundered money, not by any stretch, but those that were usually set up a complicated network, or ladder, using secrecy jurisdictions to get around revealing the details that would make experts like Jack Ryan, Jr., suspicious.

The point of the ladder was very simple: It took money, made it disappear, and then made it reappear somewhere respectable and clean. A hundred million dollars from a heroin deal in Afghanistan between Chinese and Pakistanis, for example, could turn up in a Chicago bank, totally separate from the crime, the criminals, and, most important, those looking for the culprits.

The criminals could access their money, and in doing so, they would not look like criminals. They would look like businessmen.

And then there was something in the financial world called a “flee clause.” A flee clause in a trust agreement states that if the assets of a trust come under inquiry—if a financial examiner in Grand Cayman poses an inquiry about the trust’s ownership, for example—then the trust would automatically transfer out of the Caymans and into Panama.

Jack understood why business in this field was booming. The business of money, not surprisingly, came down to money. Simply stated, the people hiding the money were paid a lot more than the people looking for the money.

Jack was one of the lookers, and he felt the title particularly apt today while he stared through his scope and wondered how he was going to get closer to the answers bouncing around in the head of the man in the office down the street.

Jack enjoyed the puzzle, even if several times a day he wanted to pull his hair out trying to piece together the murky parts of the relationships among all the players.

He did know one thing above all. Next to the actual holder of the assets—the individual attempting to launder money—no one in the ladder was more important than the attorney. Rarely did they know the entire picture—only the person who set up the network did—but attorneys usually knew more than anyone else along the ladder.

Lawyers were integral to financial shenanigans for one reason above all. With an attorney, Jack knew, a person attempting to hide assets from regulators had one more tool in the toolbox. A lawyer could represent a shell company as a nominee in lieu of the actual owner of the assets and keep things organized, all with the get-out-of-jail-free card of attorney-client privilege.

Guy Frieden was just such an attorney. He was involved, at what level Jack still didn’t know, in a complicated scheme to launder money for Mikhail Grankin, a powerful government intelligence official in Russia. And Jack told himself he wasn’t leaving Luxembourg until he knew where to find the next rung in the ladder.

When Jack was just fifteen minutes into his surveillance of Guy Frieden’s office, he realized something that had held true for the past forty-eight hours.

Surveillance, even surveillance of one man, was no one-man job.

Although Jack’s target didn’t move around the city during the workday other than his daily eleven a.m. foray for coffee with his secretary and his afternoon lunches with clients, it was damn difficult to keep eyes on someone all day long in hopes of identifying his associates.

After two weeks of sitting outside art galleries in Rome while Ysabel hobnobbed with those inside, and now two more days’
worth of nine-hour stretches peering into cameras, binos, and night-observation devices, he was bored stiff.

Jack told himself the next time Frieden went to the bathroom, he would do five minutes of yoga on the floor to loosen up his aching muscles.

But for now, while he watched and waited, he thought about Ysabel down in Rome. He missed his romantic evenings with her, and each night as he walked the fifteen minutes from his rented space across the street from Frieden’s office to his rented apartment, he made mental note of the nicer restaurants he passed, hoping he’d have an opportunity to take Ysabel out to dinner a few times when she finally made it up here.

Jack’s apartment here wasn’t as spectacular as the place they’d shared in Rome, but it was in a great neighborhood, in the Old Town, overlooking the small and serene Place de Clairefontaine. It met all his requirements, which were not necessarily the things he would personally look for in an apartment. The Campus maintained a long list of security criteria that needed to be satisfied any time one of their people rented a safe house, so Jack had to make sure from his first arrival there that he’d be as protected as possible. He’d been relatively impressed with the building he’d found, the apartment inside, and the options for dining and exploring in the quarter around it. But still, his place wasn’t anything like his place in Rome.

Jack thought about Ysabel now while he looked through his spotting scope at the back of Guy Frieden’s bald head. He worried about her, hoped she was keeping an eye out for anything out of the ordinary that might spell danger. They’d spoken on the phone each of the last three evenings and they exchanged texts throughout the day. While half their correspondence was just the idle chat of two people who missed each other and enjoyed each other’s company, the other half was work-related; she’d managed
to track even more sales back to the trust maintained by Guy Frieden, putting the total amount of the sales well above ten million U.S. dollars.

More than satisfied Frieden was a willing participant in the Russian/Roman art world money-laundering scheme, Jack had e-mailed Gavin Biery the night before, asking him to research the man’s office computer network to see if The Campus could get a look at his files. Jack had learned from digging into the art galleries’ systems that it was a hit-or-miss proposition, and often Biery would come back to him and tell him he’d have to physically plant a remote access tool to give The Campus the on-ramp into the network they needed to begin the encryption process.

Jack hoped that wasn’t going to be the case here, since he was alone, and while Frieden’s office didn’t look that terribly secure, Frieden’s building did have standard security measures that would take time to defeat.

Jack sat up, taking a break from looking through his scope at the office across the street. He checked his watch and realized it was two p.m. here, which meant it was eight a.m. in Virginia. Gavin Biery would just be arriving in the office.

Jack pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed the number.

As he expected, the portly IT director answered his phone just slightly out of breath.

“Biery.”

“Morning, Gavin. Sorry for hitting you right as you come through the door. Do you at least have your coffee and your doughnut in front of you?”

“It’s a bear claw, but yes.” Jack heard the squeak of Gavin’s chair as he sat at his desk. “I got your e-mail last night and spent some time looking into the network of this Guy Frieden character.”

“How did you do that?”

“I just used a secure Linux system at home and pinged Frieden’s network, took a look at his firewall, tried to find some open ports, all the basic stuff. Bad news, Ryan, he’s locked down tight.”

“Damn,” Ryan said.

Biery said, “Yeah. I’m a genius, but I’m not a freaking magician. Whoever set his computer network up knows enough to keep it safe from outside vectors. You are going to have to gain physical access to his system and plant a RAT on it for me to hack into it. Even then, that will just get me into his network. I can’t promise he won’t have good encryption on his actual files, so you’ll need to allow me some time to get into them.”

Ryan deflated. “How do I get a RAT onto his system?”

“You are the secret agent man. I’m the computer guy. Remember?”

“Right.” He thought a moment. “Has Clark made it in yet?”

“Saw him in the elevator.”

“Good. Can you transfer me?”

“Now I’m the freakin’ switchboard?”

“Gavin!”

“Just kidding.”

Clark came on the line seconds later. “John Clark.”

“Hey, John, it’s Jack. I’d like permission to take Gavin off your hands for a day or two.”

“Okay. Tell me why.”

Ryan briefly explained what he needed.

When he finished, Clark said, “You keep telling me that what you’re doing over there in Europe is mostly analysis. But what you are talking about sounds suspiciously like espionage.”

“Yeah, I know. This is going to take a bit more subterfuge than what we’ve been up to recently, but this will be a lot less than normal Campus fieldwork. Guy Frieden works with one secretary in a
busy office building; security to get into that building is controlled by RFID badges. I just need to get Frieden out of his office and in a situation where I can steal the electronic data on the badge, then have Gavin make me a quick working copy of it. This can be done in a day. At that point Gavin can go back home, and I can slip into Frieden’s office while he and his secretary run out. They go out for coffee together each morning, and their office is totally empty for at least twenty minutes.”

“You can see their entire office from your vantage point?”

“Not exactly. I can’t see the door to the hall, and he has a little conference room to the left of his secretary’s desk that I can’t see into. But when Frieden and his secretary step out of the building, they shut off all the lights. I’m sure they aren’t leaving anyone in his office behind.”

Clark asked, “How are you going to manipulate Frieden so you can be in a position to clone the badge?”

“I haven’t worked that out yet. I’ll have to get him someplace where I can be within a couple of feet from him, but I can’t let myself get compromised, because who knows how close I’ll have to get at other times? Maybe you could send Ding or Dom over with Gavin, they can help me out.”

Clark said, “No can do. They are on a business trip.”

Jack knew that meant his mates were operational, and he suddenly felt an immediate twinge of regret bordering on jealousy. He preferred working on the team with the other ops officers of The Campus, and all three hadn’t operated together since Sam’s death. Still, he’d gone to Iran on his own volition, then Dagestan, and then Rome. He’d put himself here, and he believed in his work.

He didn’t regret anything other than the fact that he wasn’t there, in an obviously dangerous theater, to help his friends. “Everything okay?” he asked.