Relieved that the situation back in Luxembourg had stabilized, Jack next thought about calling his mother at the White House, asking for her take on Ysabel’s medical situation. He knew his mom would know a lot more about the care Ysabel would need than Jack would, but Jack ultimately decided against it. There was really no way he’d be able to explain to his mother that a woman he was involved with had just been beaten and stabbed to within an inch of her life without Jack’s mom needing a lot more information.
He told himself when he got back home he’d run over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and drop in on his parents. Maybe when they saw he was safe Jack could ask for a little bit of medical advice “for a friend.”
He wasn’t looking forward to that conversation at all, but he felt like he owed it to Ysabel to help in any way he possibly could.
He’d just completed a scan of a group of men near the gate when his phone rang. He looked down and saw it was Gavin calling. There was no one close to him at the gate, but he was careful to keep his voice low nonetheless. “Wow, Gavin. It’s early there. Must be midnight.”
“Yeah, I’ve been working through the evening.” He paused a moment. “Heard about what happened to your girl. I’m sorry, man.”
“Thanks.” Jack wasn’t used to tender moments with Gavin Biery. It made him uncomfortable. “Uh… You have something for me?”
“I’ve got info on that plane out of Lux City you asked me to track.”
Jack had all but forgotten about Gavin’s promise to find out where Limonov and Kozlov went next. “What about Salvatore? Clark said he’d get you to look into him.”
“We’re on him. Nothing yet. It will take a little time.”
Jack didn’t try to mask the annoyance in his voice. “What’s the holdup?”
“He doesn’t have anything to latch on to. No network to crack. He’s not employed officially, just a freelancer. He has a mobile phone — who doesn’t? But so far we haven’t gotten into the network to check his contacts or movements. We’re working on getting into the police systems there, checking him against Interpol, that sort of thing, but it is going to take a little time.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “I understand.” Distractedly, he asked, “What about Limonov’s plane? Did it go back to London?”
“Nope. That tail number took off from Lux City just after eight p.m. last night. They blocked his flight plan, which I thought you might find interesting, because you said they didn’t block the flight into Luxembourg. So I lost them for a couple of hours, but I found a flight heading out over the Atlantic on a southerly route that reported a tail number that didn’t correspond to any departures anywhere in Europe. Not the one you gave me, but some aircraft will actually file under a different identity to hide the movement. Anyway, there were other ghost flights up and around Europe at the time, but nothing else that fit perfectly, time- and distance-wise, from Luxembourg, considering the cruising speed of a Bombardier 6000.”
Jack wanted to just tell Gavin to get to the point, but he was too sapped of energy at the moment to resist the computer geek’s intense desire to ramble. “Okay.”
“So this one looked good, but I had to rule out another that was heading out over the Med with a similar profile. Took a half-hour to determine the other flight was a Citation owned by a shipping concern in Sardinia, so I went back to the plane over the Atlantic. For a couple more hours I thought it was flying down to South America, but eventually it checked in with ATC over Bermuda, and by then I determined it was heading to the Caribbean.”
Jack felt his excitement rising. He wasn’t sure why Limonov would need to go in person to the Caribbean if he was planning on moving accounts offshore there, but Jack knew he could keep an eye on the man there better than he would have been able to watch over him if he returned to Moscow.
“Where in the Caribbean? Antigua? Grand Cayman?”
“Nope. They flew twelve hours straight, landed in the British Virgin Islands.”
“British Virgin Islands?” It was a known offshore location, although not one commonly used by Kremlin-associated Russians. Again, he didn’t have a clue why the Russians needed to personally visit the location, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Any more info?”
“Just that the jet landed at Terrance B. Lettsome International six minutes ago, taxied to Beef Island Air Services, a fixed-base operator at the airport. Don’t know where they will head from there. Just looking online, there aren’t a ton of hotels in the BVIs, but there are hundreds of private apartments and villas to rent.”
“Okay, thanks for the info.”
“Anything you need, Jack, you just shout.”
There was unmistakable empathy in Biery’s voice.
Jack thanked him, hung up, then he boarded his own transatlantic flight, the whole time wondering why two Russians working for the Kremlin would go to the British Virgin Islands, especially right after meeting with a lawyer in Luxembourg.
Most of the siloviki money he and the other analysts at The Campus had been following had gone through Cyprus or Switzerland or Gibraltar or Singapore. Cyprus had gone through severe financial hardships but there were still tens of thousands of offshore companies there owned by Russian entities, completely free of regulation. Cyprus’s money problems had nothing to do with Russia’s money, other than the fact that the newly flush-with-cash Cypriot banks had invested heavily in Greek bonds, which were rendered worthless due to Greek financial mismanagement.
The BVIs, on the other hand, were a place where many Chinese billionaires parked their accounts on the way to moving them back into China as investment capital.
Jack thought about it while he sat down in his first-class seat. Softly he said to himself, “If I was a big-shot Russian billionaire, I’d keep my money away from shell banks in the same neighborhood as the Chinese.”
Even if the money was in numbered accounts, some shell corporation or bank in the BVIs could make deductions about where it was coming from, and while they were sworn to secrecy, the power of the tens of billions coming out of China could encourage someone to say something about this other client.
China and Russia had come to blows in the past decade, and even when they were allies, their partnerships were fragile.
Jack muttered, “No way would I move my Kremlin money into China’s offshore turf.”
Jack wondered if there was some other reason Limonov and Kozlov had gone to the British Virgin Islands.
He doubted it had anything to do with their suntans.
After takeoff he pulled out his laptop and opened his IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook analytics software. He looked again through his data sets on Frieden, trying to find something in the British Virgin Islands that looked like it might warrant a trip down.
But he found nothing. None of Frieden’s known associations seemed to have anything going on in the BVIs, nor did any of his contacts. Sure, some of his clients had gone there, for what reason he did not know, but they didn’t seem to have any connection to banks down there.
Jack knew there had to be something. Limonov didn’t seem to be connected to Rome, and he didn’t show up in anything he had on Mikhail Grankin’s network.
Jack widened his search, pulled in data on known financial networks used by other members of the siloviki from Justice Department and Campus investigations going back years.