And certainly not Kremlin big shots.
Frustrated, Jack began to scan down through Slavic names he did not recognize in the hopes there would be someone who, somehow, had been missed by the link analysis. He checked through the graphs that showed the relationships among the different names, and when he did this, he immediately noticed something curious. Almost every single person had at least four or five affiliations to someone else in the group, but one name stood to the side of the others. No lines went to it or emanated from it.
The name Andrei Limonov looked like a little island off to the side of the graph.
Ryan knew nothing about Limonov, and that was curious. Clearly, whoever he was, he’d managed to keep his name out of any list of Russia’s most notorious offshore finance experts, and Jack wondered if that in itself was notable.
Ryan looked him up on SPARK by Interfax, a database of information on tens of thousands of Russian companies, hundreds of thousands of businessmen. There were quite a few hits on Andrei Limonov, but it wasn’t a particularly uncommon name in Russia, so he had to keep digging. After a while, he decided the man who showed up in Guy Frieden’s appointment book was the same Andrei Limonov who directed Blackmore Capital Partners, a Moscow-based private equity enterprise with a decidedly British name, no doubt to give it an air of panache.
Ryan dug around in a database of Russian newspapers and magazines for more information on Limonov, using automatic translation software that, although nowhere near as good as a real translator, at least would tell him basic information if any existed.
But he found nothing. The man did not exist in Russian social or media circles.
Another database Ryan had access to proved more helpful. It held information of attendees of business schools around the world. From here he saw Limonov graduated with honors from Lomonosov Moscow State University Business School, and then he received a degree from Saint Petersburg University Graduate School of Management. The dates on the degrees told Ryan the man was probably still in his mid-thirties, and from SPARK he saw that Blackmore Capital Partners had come into existence ten years prior.
Impressive, thought Jack. It looked like this guy walked out of business school and into the world of international finance as the head of a private equity firm.
And there was one more matter of note regarding Limonov. According to Frieden’s appointment calendar, the man was here in Luxembourg, right this very moment. He had held a meeting at four p.m. yesterday afternoon with Frieden, and he was due to lunch with him today at two p.m. at a place called La Lorraine, in the Place Guillaume II.
Jack realized he must have photographed Limonov entering the office the day before. He’d taken dozens of pictures during the day, but unless this guy had missed his meeting and Frieden’s secretary had failed to strike it through on her blotter, he should have an image of the man.
Jack went back through his notes. Yes, at four p.m. exactly the day before, Frieden had entered his conference room for a meeting.
He’d found not a single photograph of the Russian online, so he had no idea who he was looking for. Nevertheless, he began to scan the men who entered the bank building between three-thirty and four p.m. There were nearly five dozen images to go through, and he did this one at a time, ruling out any men or groups of men where at least one of the men was not in his thirties, possibly Slavic, and male. A few men had entered in blue-collar work clothes, and one duo had paint cans and a ladder, and all these men were omitted as well.
When he was finished going through the images a second time, he had it narrowed down to only four pairs of men. These he sent to Gavin for processing through a Department of Justice classified database of known faces, culled from Interpol and individual “Five Eyes” national crime information, as well as open-source media files.
It was a couple hours too early to reach Gavin at the office in Virginia, and Jack did not want to just sit around and wait in his office, so he decided to head out to La Lorraine to see if he could get eyes on Frieden’s mystery man, Andrei Limonov. Normally he would need to clear an operational move like this with John Clark, but Jack justified his lapse of OPSEC; he knew there was a McDonald’s on the Place Guillaume II, and he hadn’t had a greasy American hamburger for months. There was no Campus protocol that said Ryan had to call in to HQ to request permission to go to lunch.
At five minutes till one Jack sat outside the McDonald’s on the other side of the Place Guillaume II, Luxembourg’s central square, eating a Big Mac and drinking a Diet Coke. It was a frigid afternoon, but he wasn’t alone. A dozen or more locals and tourists sat around the McDonald’s, and this gave Jack the comfort that his surveillance position would remain undetected.
At just after one in the afternoon, Guy Frieden entered the restaurant alone, looking dapper in a gray suit and carrying a briefcase. Jack glanced up and down the square on the offhand chance there was some countersurveillance around the meeting location, but he saw nothing.
Ten minutes later a black Jaguar XF sedan pulled to the curb next to the restaurant. Two men climbed out and headed directly to the door of La Lorraine. They both wore dark suits; the shorter one had thinning blond hair and appeared to be younger than the other, who was tall and broad and had spiked gray hair. The Jaguar turned right, leaving the square, and Jack was unable to get a look at the driver.
He lifted his burger and took a bite, but his eyes remained up on the men until they disappeared into the restaurant. He gazed again around the area before pretending to check his phone for messages, making a show of being just one more working stiff on his lunch break.
Just as he put his phone back into his coat it started buzzing. He pulled it out and saw it was John Clark calling. “Hey, John.”
“Actually, it’s John and Gerry. We’ve got you on speaker in the conference room.”
“Oh… okay. Good morning, Gerry. Hey, this isn’t about that Bugatti I put on the company card, is it? I can explain that.”
Gerry Hendley ignored Ryan’s joke. “What are you up to over there, kid?”
Jack walked away from the others sitting outside the McDonald’s and found a quiet bench on the Place Guillaume II, fifty feet from anyone else. “I thought you knew. I’ve got eyes on an attorney here in Luxembourg City who is part of the Grankin money-laundering ladder.”
“Tell me about the photos you sent Gavin.”
“I sent Gavin some faces to push through the DOJ facial-recog system. That’s it. You can ask him.”
Clark said, “Don’t have to. Gavin brought them to us a few minutes ago.”
“Is something wrong?” Jack asked, confused by the interrogation.
Gerry said, “You are looking for a private equity guy named Andrei Limonov. No known criminal ties.”
“Right.”
“One of the pictures was interesting. One guy came up with nothing, but that might be Limonov, because there are no other images of him anywhere.”
“Okay. What about the other guy? Any idea who he is?”
Clark responded to this. “We know exactly who he is. He’s Vladimir Kozlov.”
The name didn’t mean anything to Jack. He was a little embarrassed by this, because he was supposed to know names in the Russian banking and investment world, and he’d drawn a blank on both men. He said, “He’s some kind of a banker or something?”