Andrei Limonov just nodded a little. “All my actions will, of course, be utterly transparent to you.”
Volodin stood. “Good.” He leaned over Limonov, and his thin smile came back. “Because there are two ways this ends for you, Limonov. Only two. Either you become rich beyond your wildest imagination and you have a job for life managing my assets… or I gut you like a fucking fish.”
The threat was completely out of phase with the rest of the conversation. It stunned Andrei Limonov, and as Volodin turned and walked out of the beautiful sitting room in his customary quick gait, Limonov realized that had been the man’s intention. He found himself frozen with fear, unwilling to even let himself consider for an instant any outcome other than success in the contract he had just agreed to.
After Limonov had sat there for a few minutes, one of Volodin’s beautiful assistants returned to the room. It was nearly three a.m., but she looked perfectly made up and wide awake. She said, “Can I walk you back to your car, sir?”
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.
20
Jack 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.