Commander-In-Chief (31 page)

Walker knew that Popov and Ivanov were two of the most common surnames in Russia. Virtually a third of the mysterious Russians he’d ever had dealings with had called themselves Ivanov, and probably one in six had gone by Popov. Walker assumed they were not the men’s real names; the Ivanovs and Popovs he’d met in the past had not really been named that either, any more than a couple Americans introducing themselves as Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones would really be named that.

Walker found himself completely unfazed to learn he was probably being lied to. It went with the job.

When they sat down, Ivanov said, “I appreciate your time.”

“It’s my pleasure. Either of you care for a cup of tea?”

Ivanov shook his head, as did Popov, and they both sat down in simple chairs across from Walker. Ivanov said, “I represent a client who wants to convert a large amount of his assets, an extremely large amount, into cryptocurrency. He then would like the currency traded on BlackHole for U.S. dollars and he would like me to enter his new account numbers for disbursal of the funds.”

Walker stifled a yawn and told himself he should have had a second Red Bull after lunch. He said, “Mr. Frieden contacted me yesterday and said you’d be coming right over. I don’t normally work this quickly, but he assured me this would be something I wouldn’t want to pass up.”

“I should think not,” Ivanov said.

Walker just nodded. He reached for a pen. “How much?” He knew better than to ask who the client was.

“There will be future transactions. But for now, let’s say eight billion.”

With wide eyes Walker reached for his calculator. “Good Lord. That is . . . that
is
a lot of money, indeed. I’ll just need to check the exchange rate and convert that from rubles to U.S. to get an idea of—”

Ivanov said, “Eight billion U.S. dollars.”

Walker stared at Ivanov, then put his pen down with a little sigh. “Eight billion dollars. Is this a fucking joke, mate? Because I’ve no time for jokes.”

“No joke.”

“Mr. Ivanov, the entire market capitalization of Bitcoin is barely six billion dollars.”

“I understand that. That’s why this must be done piecemeal,
but it still must be done quickly. You could transfer two hundred sixty-six million dollars a day into the market, in which case you would have the transfers completed in thirty days. This is five percent of the market capitalization.”

“That’s ridiculous! All the activity on BlackHole combined is less than five hundred million a day.”

“So our transactions would be less than three-fifths your normal daily trades.” Ivanov added, “People watching the cryptomarkets will immediately recognize there are new big players involved, it will push the value of the currency up, and it will increase the total market value, and the total trading volume. That happens, and we will increase our daily transactions. Our thirty-day plan will become a twenty-day plan, or even a fifteen-day plan. It all depends on how others in the markets react.”

Walker sighed again. “You aren’t thinking this through, mate. As this money is introduced into the markets so quickly, so dramatically, the increase of the price of one Bitcoin will be dramatic. Others in the market will react by freaking out.”

•   •   •

A
ndrei Limonov had taken his cover identity from his father’s name, Ivan—he went by Ivanov. He had no idea why Kozlov called himself Popov, but he hadn’t asked.

He had expected Walker to say exactly what he had said. Limonov replied, “My client requires the conversion. He is willing to pay you a premium in addition to your normal rate. He is offering an additional ten million dollars U.S. to you when this is completed.”

Walker hesitated for nearly a minute. Finally, he said, “Often it benefits me to beat around the bush a little. To avoid being too direct. It’s good business. And it’s good for my relationships. But right now I feel the need to be quite direct.”

Limonov said, “I welcome that, Mr. Walker.”

“Good.” He leaned closer. “You are out of your
fucking
mind, mate. Whoever your client is, it is obvious he is doing this for the sole purpose of laundering money. And that amount of money, it’s safe to say, is bad news.” Walker pointed an accusatory finger out. “That’s bad bloody business for me. If eight B U.S. enters into the market and then disappears out of the market in a bloody month, Bitcoin will be known as nothing more than a money-laundering transfer vehicle. It will bring in more regulators, it will push away nervous clients, and it will attract more nefarious blokes like you who cause trouble. We don’t fuckin’ need any of that, mate, and we will be better off without your eight billion than we would be with your eight billion popping in and out of the market.”

Andrei Limonov was surprised by the words of the man in front of him, and the ethics they implied.
Of course
cryptocurrency was a money-laundering tool.

He said, “This client of mine is not laundering money. He is using this vehicle to liquidate assets abroad so that the Russian government cannot confiscate them. The money was legally acquired, but it cannot be protected where it is.”

There was irony in the fact that Limonov was fingering the Russian government as the villains, but he wasn’t thinking about that now.

Walker said, “Look. I understand. I really do. If you would like, I can, perhaps, take a portion of these assets and buy Bitcoin with them. Maybe three, four hundred million U.S. I’m just not ready to draw the attention to myself by dealing with the amount of money you’re talking about.”

“You won’t be drawing attention, Mr. Walker. BlackHole’s daily trades are averaging more than we need to trade. If you simply do not make the purchases for your other large clients for the next few
weeks, you can take this money and not draw the attention to yourself that you fear. You will purchase our Bitcoin, in lieu of making purchases for your other clients. Only for a short time. I doubt your clients would know, or even much care, if you waited a week or two to make their trades.”

“Are you mad? I can assure you they will both know and care.”

Limonov leaned closer. “A year ago you had a two-week-long break in trading. A technical glitch, you called it in the media. What was that?”

Walker looked blankly back at the man. Finally, he said, “It was a technical glitch.”

“I think not. I think you were making trades for Vadim Rochenkov, a Ukrainian billionaire. I think the amount he had you trading made you worry you would remove liquidity from the Bitcoin market and reveal what you were doing, so you faked a technical issue. Your other clients were annoyed, but you were the only game in town, as it were, so you continued on. I merely ask you to repeat the system that you yourself invented and utilized.”

Walker stood up from his desk. “I don’t know how else to tell you this. No. Not interested. You need to find some other avenue, Mr. Ivanov. Surely the world is full of schemes that will work for you.”

He stepped toward the door. “Now, if you will excuse me.”

•   •   •

T
he Russians climbed back into their SUV outside. Around them sat four other men, all called up by Vlad Kozlov as protection after the incident with Jack Ryan, Jr., in Luxembourg the day before. They were private contractors from Steel Securitas LLC. They were as tight with the Russian government as any Spetsnaz unit, although their allegiance was financial, not ideological or patriotic.

Steel Securitas was one of the largest private security contractors in the world. Based in Dubai, it was big in executive protection, site security, tactical training, and even direct-action operations, and it was used by small governments and large corporations all over the planet.

Its vetting process was robust, but with 40,000 employees around the world, a few bad apples were to be expected.

The Kremlin Security Council, run by Mikhail Grankin, had actively sought out these bad apples and their managers, paid them dearly for no-questions-asked work, and ensured their trust with the not-so-veiled threats that these men were now working for the FSB, and the FSB could fucking ruin them if they didn’t take their money and keep their mouths shut about the work and their clients.

Another Land Cruiser with four more Steel Securitas men idled in the street behind them.

As they rolled off down the street, Kozlov pulled out his phone and held it up toward Limonov. He said, “I see no alternative.”

Limonov looked like he was going to be sick. He said, “Perhaps if we wait a day and call on Walker again. Maybe I can—”

Kozlov shook his head, turned away from Andrei Limonov, and dialed a number on the mobile. After a moment he heard someone answer. A male voice spoke English. “Yes?”

Kozlov spoke English as well. “Pick them up. Carefully. We need them alive.”

Limonov thought he heard a sniff, like that of laughter, on the other end.

“Of course,” said the man, and the phone went dead.

T
he Hendley Associates jet touched down on Beef Island in the mid-afternoon, and after the jet cleared customs, John Clark and Adara Sherman climbed into a jeep left for them on the tarmac. Together they drove to a marina in East End Bay in the adjoining island of Tortola. They were met at the dock by a man standing next to a floating dinghy, and after handshakes he handed over a set of keys to Adara.

“Everything you asked for is already stocked and on board. You’re moored at number fifty-three. It’s the 1978 fifty-two-foot Irwin ketch you picked from the rental photos.”

“Excellent,” Adara said, and she tipped the man $200 for his quick work.

The man looked Adara and John over for a second. She was in her mid-thirties and he in his mid-sixties, and John caught the inference by the look—he clearly thought John and Adara were a couple. Clark felt a twinge of anger that this stranger took him for a geezer with a trophy wife or—because Adara wasn’t wearing a ring and Clark was—perhaps the marina employee assumed Clark
was taking his girlfriend down to the islands for some frivolity away from his wife back home.

Clark didn’t like it, but he did nothing to dissuade the man’s assumptions. He figured he wasn’t the first rich old philandering bastard renting a sailboat in the marina here.

It was a good cover story.

As John sat at the helm of the dinghy and pulled out into the marina with Adara next to him, he leaned closer to her. “I hope you didn’t have him stock this boat with too many things. With a little luck we’ll only need it for one night.”

“Not too much. There’s enough for a few days, because I thought it might look fishy if we went to all this trouble just for a twenty-four-hour cruise.”

“Good thinking.”

Adara added, “I think that guy back there was rendering judgment on us both.”

Clark nodded. “Yeah, but he sure took our money, didn’t he?”

Adara laughed. “Yes, he did. Maybe I should have dressed differently, played into my cover story a little.” Sherman wore khakis and a white polo. Her short blond hair was pulled back in a small ponytail. She was young and attractive, but hardly the image of a gold digger on a Caribbean vacation with her sugar daddy.

“And maybe I should wear more rings on my fingers and a fat chain around my neck,” Clark said. “I could get some Botox, too.”

Adara laughed at the thought.

They piloted out into a field of mooring balls, most of which had sailboats or catamarans attached to them. Quickly they found mooring ball number 53, and they motored slowly around the white monohull sailboat attached to it.

Clark liked what he saw. It was big enough to be comfortable, but not too big to be difficult to captain. It wasn’t new and flashy.
Adara had told him on the plane it was nearly forty years old, but it looked like it had been lovingly maintained.

They tied the dinghy off on a cleat on the Irwin’s gunwale and climbed up onto the deck. Another dinghy, this one a little smaller, was tied off on the back of the boat.

Together they walked around the deck, then went through the cockpit and stood at the helm. Adara said, “She’ll do twelve knots on her engines. More under sail, depending on the conditions.” She raised a finger as she thought of something else. “These Irwins heel over pretty dramatically in the wind, though, so don’t forget to hold on.”

Clark just smiled. He told himself no thirty-five-year-old was going to teach him anything about boating, but he caught himself. She wasn’t patronizing him, she was looking out for him, and he knew he should appreciate it.

After a walk around belowdecks and a quick survey of the navigation area, the radios, engines, and emergency pumps, Clark rendered his judgment on the boat. “You’ve done well, Ms. Sherman.”

“Good. Ready to head out?”

Clark looked at his watch. It was just after five p.m. He figured the cruise from East End Bay in Tortola to Tarpon Island would take four hours under engine power. Once there, he’d wait a few hours more to head to shore, timing his arrival to avoid anyone else on the water in the bay or walking along the sand.

“Let’s do it.”

•   •   •

I
t was a beautiful afternoon on Tarpon Island, but that was no surprise to anyone. This was paradise; even when it rained it was beautiful here.

Today there was no rain; the weather was characteristically
perfect, the sky a deeper blue than usual, the ocean clear as glass in the foreground and perfectly aquamarine in the distance.

Seven-year-old Noah Walker splashed as he swam in the shallow surf. His mother, Kate, watched him from her beach chair, looking over the top of her book at him from time to time, just to assure herself he hadn’t wandered too far out in the deep. His snorkel, his tuft of jet-black hair, and the backside of his red swim trunks were the only things sticking out of the water anywhere in the bay.

Kate knew she was in heaven here, and she hoped Noah was able to appreciate it. She’d come from a lower-middle-class family; she’d worked for everything she’d ever had in life. It was hard for her to get her head around her son’s utterly different childhood experience, but she did her best to keep him as grounded as possible.

That was hard here in paradise, of course, with the maids and cooks and other attendants. With the seaplanes and fine dining, and daily celebrity sightings at the dining pavilion.

Noah knew nothing different from this life; even in London and Sydney they’d had it extremely good since he was three or so, but Kate still had a hard time accepting it all as part of her own existence.

She was no trophy wife, and nothing on earth infuriated her more than when she felt someone treated her as such. She’d worked as a waitress in Sydney while she went through school, then she’d met Terry when they were both programmers at a small software company.

When they were first married, neither of them owned their own car, and within a year they were parents, which made their financial situation even more precarious. Kate left work to take care of Noah, and soon after that Terry, much to Kate’s consternation, quit his job to spend his time developing new software products for
the new virtual-currency exchanges cropping up on the Internet. They moved to London, where prices were even higher than in Sydney.

It had taken him years to bring his first piece of software to market, and he’d made a lot of money off it, and five years after that his masterpiece was finished and live—BlackHole.

For the first years of BlackHole they’d been rich beyond her wildest imagination, but then Terry explained to her that he needed to relocate from London, move to the Caribbean, and there he could
truly
realize the dream of making BlackHole the biggest and best virtual-currency exchange on earth. She agreed, provided he put a time limit on their relocation, and the next thing she knew, they were here and her husband was making $2 million a month.

The Walkers’ lives had changed dramatically, to put it mildly, but Kate often caught herself feeling wistful about those days in London when they were scrounging coins in the sofa cushions to pay for Noah’s diapers. At least they were together. These days, in order to keep Terry’s system up and running he had to work seven days a week; he had a never-ending array of clients to meet and trades to execute, and there was nothing but promises from him of when he would take a break, when they would get to enjoy their lives, when they would finally get a vacation from paradise.

Six more months was his promise, and it was a promise she planned on holding him to.

The beach here was nearly empty this afternoon, but that was usually the case. She came out here with Noah most every day around this time, after the worst of the sun’s rays, and she read while her son swam around, hunting shells in the shallow water of the bay.

She was just thinking about how boring paradise could be when a woman’s voice startled her. “Oh, hello there. Mind if I join you?”

She turned to find an attractive smiling woman sitting down in the next beach chair, a piña colada in her hand. She wore a conservative bikini with a wrap around her waist, and a wide-brimmed hat on her head. The woman’s European accent was noticeable, but Kate couldn’t place it.

“Hi,” Kate said. “Of course not. You must be new.”

“Just in today. We’re on the other side, in the little cottages. I hope it’s okay for me to be here.”

Usually this stretch of beach was reserved for the three villas up on the hill above them, and the cottages on the far end of the bay had their own, less exclusive stretch of sand. But it was not Kate’s job to enforce the rules of the resort, so she wasn’t about to send this lady packing. Plus, she realized she was happy for the adult company. She extended a hand. “Of course you can be here. Kate Walker.”

“I’m Julia.”

Kate thought the woman was beautiful, and she assumed she was someone famous. Most of the vacationers here on Tarpon Island were not rock stars or actors, but a significant portion were, and this lady sure had the looks, bearing, and confidence of a celebrity. The fact she’d given only her first name also contributed to Kate’s suspicion that Julia fully expected to be recognized.

Not wanting to appear to be a typical starstruck civilian, Kate didn’t ask her anything else. There was an unspoken rule here on the island: You didn’t question anyone about what they did for a living. At a place where many people went in order to get away from attention, it was seen as improper to peer into private lives.

Julia looked out to the water at Noah. “He’s got so much energy. All I want to do is lie around and sun.”

Kate smiled. “Same here.” She raised her own glass. “With a drink in hand.”

Julia tapped her glass to Kate’s. “You’re here on vacation?”

Kate could have answered simply “Yes” and shut down further inquiry, but she didn’t have many opportunities to talk about her life. “Not really. My husband is in the BVIs on business, and I homeschool Noah, so we are living here, for the time being.” She realized the tone she’d affected, and quickly added, “Not that I’m complaining. We’re living in a villa. This place is wonderful.”

Julia said, “It’s wonderful enough in the cottages.” She looked over her shoulder. “But I suspect that villa is exquisite.”

Kate nodded. “Sure is. We’ve been here quite a while, though, so I am looking forward to returning to Sydney.” She motioned to Noah. “He could stay right here forever.”

The two ladies were the same age, give or take a couple years, and it was bothering Kate that she couldn’t place Julia. She tried to picture her on a stage with a microphone in her hand, or in an ad in a glossy magazine, or even in a movie.

Nothing. She didn’t look familiar at all.

She decided she’d break Tarpon Island protocol. “How about you, Julia? What brings you here?”

“I’m here for work as well.”

“I see,” Kate said, but she didn’t. That Julia added nothing, just sipped her piña colada and looked out at the water, kept Kate from making any further inquiries.

It was quiet for several seconds, only the breeze and the squawks of a few grackles in the distance.

Finally, Julia broke the stillness. “My boyfriend and I are thinking about getting a tour of one of the villas before we leave. He has a big family, he’s Italian, Catholic, you know what I mean.”

“Sure,” Kate said. Now she was trying to picture the woman’s boyfriend. Maybe
he
was the famous one.

“Anyway, we thought on our next visit to the BVIs we might try to bring everyone down for a family reunion.”

Kate knew all three villas were occupied at the moment. A well-known film producer was in one; from the rumors Terry had picked up at the pavilion cigar bar, he was spending his days with a constant rotation of starlets.. And a French winemaker was with his family in the other. The management here at Tarpon wouldn’t dream of giving a tour through the occupied villas, not even for other guests staying on the island.

Kate held her tongue for a minute, but as she weighed the situation, she decided she could just take Julia up the hill herself and give her a quick tour. Hell, she was bored, and it would be fun to show her around.

“Would you like to come up and take a look at our place? Noah and I were just about to leave. My husband usually gets home by seven, and the cook will be here to make dinner by six-thirty. I have to run up anyway.”

Julia’s eyes widened dramatically. “That would be wonderful, but I don’t mean to intrude.”

“Not at all. I’ll show you around and we can have a glass of wine. You’ll love the view of the bay from up there.”

Julia stood with her drink in her hand. “Well, then, lead the way.”

Twenty minutes later, the tour of the villa complete, Kate poured two glasses of Chardonnay in the kitchen and took them out to Julia, who sat in the living room on a sofa by the window overlooking the bay. Noah lay on the floor in front of the television, playing Xbox on the large-screen TV on the wall.

Julia took a glass from Kate with a smile and then took a sip.

“Very nice.”

Kate sat down next to her, looked out into the bay, and noticed a large slate-gray sailing catamaran at anchor a few hundred yards from shore. She couldn’t see anyone topside.