Nor did Russia’s plutocratic elite—its ruling oligarchs—oppose Putin with impunity. Witness Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2003, he was “the Richest Man in Russia.” After he complained personally to Putin about the Russian economy’s pervasive corruption, however, Putin jailed Khodorkovsky and liquidated his assets, including Yukos Oil, the biggest oil firm in Russia. Yukos ended up as part of Rosneft, which was owned by one of Putin’s friends.
The lesson was clear: Not even “the Richest Man in Russia” was safe from Putin’s wrath.
Putin sipped his cognac and stretched. He remembered how U.S. business magnate William Browder had hired the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky to investigate a massive fraud case involving Putin’s government. His evidence implicated the Russian police, among others.
After his first full day on the job, Sergei was found beaten to death in police custody.
All investigations ceased.
Boris Berezovksy, a Russian tycoon in exile and an outspoken Putin critic, was found hanging in his ex-wife’s shower in London.
Russian oligarch Alexander Perepilichny, after dying suddenly at forty-four years of age, was found to have been poisoned.
In 2006, Putin had even paved the way for such extrajudicial killings by passing laws allowing him to hunt down and kill his perceived enemies.
As much as he despised his chief American critic, Anne Applebaum of The Washington Post, he had to admit she had accurately summarized his career in four blistering sentences, calling it part of “the remarkable story of one group of unrepentant, single-minded, revanchist KGB officers who were horrified by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the prospect of their own loss of influence. In league with Russian organized crime, starting at the end of the 1980s, they successfully plotted a return to power. Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves. Once in charge, they brought back Soviet methods of political control—the only ones they knew—updated for the modern era.”
Lucky for Applebaum she wasn’t a Russian journalist.
He’d have made short work of her, too.
Still, one of the multitudinous advantages of a Putin-run press was that he could keep his private life private—especially his financial private life. With the Russian people suffering so much economic hardship, it would not do for them to learn how opulently he lived. That was one of the reasons he kept his sumptuous lifestyle a secret. For one of Russia’s leaders to be known as one of the world’s richest men would not be proper. Anyway, now, as he grew older, he realized there was more to life than just the accumulation of wealth. He couldn’t even spend it all if he wanted to. Instead he wanted to think about the future and how he would be remembered. He was confident that once this operation in Estonia was over and his country emerged victorious, he would be remembered as modern Russia’s greatest leader.
He took another sip of brandy and enjoyed the temperate weather.
Derek Walsh shuttled through the empty lobby of the run-down hotel. There was only one desk clerk on duty, and he wondered if the others had chosen not to come into work. The young woman behind the counter didn’t even glance up at him as he bypassed the sketchy elevator and started up the three flights of stairs.
Alena was just stirring as he put down the now-cool coffee and the bagels. She got up and inched her way around the tight space into the claustrophobic bathroom. When she got out, still wearing the towel she had gone to bed in the night before, she looked beautiful. How did she do it? She started gathering her clothes and said, “What are we going to do first?”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you have to do something with the security plug from work. Do you need to get anything else from your apartment? We need to make sure we gather anything that could incriminate you.”
“Incriminate me? I told you I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“In the part of the world I’m from, that never keeps anyone from being arrested. From what I’ve seen here in the U.S., it still won’t keep you from going to jail. We need to be aggressive and gather any material related to your work or the money transfer.” She took his face in her hands and said, “Let me help you. Use my debit card. Get the money you need. We can go on the run.”
He liked her new proactive attitude. That was why he felt guilty when he said, “I’m not about to get you involved in this. You’re going to have to wait here for me.”
“Here, in this crappy hotel? Is this now my prison?”
“It’s not exactly Guantanamo.”
“It’s not the W Hotel, either.”
He didn’t mean it to, but it came out as a whine when he said, “Please, just one day.”
“You mean I can’t even go to any classes?”
Walsh shook his head. “They might wait for you at Columbia. I still don’t know how they found your apartment. But they know we’re connected, and I can’t risk your safety.”
Now she looked at him with those big brown eyes and said, “What are you going to do?”
“Whatever I have to.”
Bill Shepherd had sat in the simple officers’ mess a thousand times, but tonight it felt entirely different. He was nervous. The normally busy dining room was nearly empty as everyone prepared for protests or rested from their sleepless nights. He sat in the far corner at a table for two with the delightful Maria Alonso sitting across from him. He didn’t know if his nerves came from having a first dinner with a pretty woman or not wanting anyone else from the inquiry board to see him eating with the FBI agent.
It’d been a quiet meal so far, and they’d just chatted about their somewhat similar backgrounds. Her father had also been in the navy, and she spent time at bases on Puerto Rico, in San Diego, and in Virginia.
He liked the way her dark eyes met his and her hair would slip into her face occasionally. She had a very athletic build and soft, flawless skin.
He said, “I’m sorry we had to eat on base, but there’s no telling what they might need me for, and I’m not sure it’s safe off base.”
“This is lovely. I don’t mind at all.”
There had been few protesters outside the gate. The story about someone from the U.S. military throwing a hand grenade into the crowd persisted in the German media. Even though there was no truth to it whatsoever, it had kept the protesters away. Shepherd would remember that for the future. Maybe a hand grenade once in a while wasn’t a bad idea.
Maria said, “You really handled yourself well today at the inquiry. I couldn’t believe they threw it together so quickly. From what I understand the representative from the German ministry insisted that it go forward.”
“She didn’t seem too happy when she left.”
“She filed an official protest. She said that I was just siding with my country and that we had falsified forensic information.”
“Will it have any effect?”
Maria shrugged. “Another German ministry official filed a complaint against a DEA agent who linked her son to a heroin-smuggling ring. Just to save the hassle, they sent the poor guy home. I doubt it’ll get that far with this complaint.”