Hidden Man (23 page)

Mark put his elbows on his knees.

‘London Libra is owned by an offshore company registered in Cyprus, to limit tax liability. Same thing
goes for New Yorkand Paris, two separate holding companies in Jersey controlling all the money from both clubs.’

‘And what else?’ Quinn was confident and eager for information in a way that encouraged Mark. There was an idealistic quality to him, a young man’s zeal. ‘What do you know about private investors, Macklin’s role in all of this, the structure of the new Russian operation? How much do you know about that side of things?’

‘The Russian club is going through Cyprus and our regular bankin Geneva. Same with the money from Ibiza in the summer and the cash from merchandising. France and Manhattan are two separate entities. Otherwise everything gets paid out of Switzerland. Staff, ground rent, booze, DJs, hardware. Everything.’ He felt like a corporate whistleblower, spilling all the secrets. The feeling of this was intoxicating. ‘As for private investors, Seb still owns about sixty-five per cent of the stock. Tom just looks after him, signs the cheques and all that. Probably has a bit of equity, too. I don’t know. Those two are like brothers.’

Taploe stood up from the sofa and moved towards the window.

‘Brothers,’ Quinn muttered. ‘But Macklin has power of attorney over Roth’s affairs, is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So in theory he can do whatever he likes?’

‘In theory,’ Mark said. ‘But I’m not a lawyer, so I wouldn’t know.’

‘Well, I am a lawyer and I’m telling you that’s the situation.’ For the first time Quinn grinned, a crease at the edge of fat lips. Mark liked him. ‘When it comes to his relationship with Roth, Macklin is the main man, the
consigliere
, if you like. We reckon he’s been buying up chunks of London real estate on behalf of the Russian mob, small businesses too. As of this moment I have him as the main signatory on two hotels in Paddington, an entire residential blocknorth of Marble Arch, a couple of bureaux de change out at City Airport, a minicab operation based not too far from here, even a chain of laundrettes in fucking Manchester. He’s also looking into buying out a majority share in a Bayswater casino. Might have even done so by now. In other words, operations with a high-volume cash element which can be used to facilitate money laundering on a massive scale.’

Suddenly Mark felt heavy in the stomach. He leaned backon the sofa so that his head was resting against the wall.

‘Where’s he getting the cash from?’ he asked. ‘The Russians?’

‘Exactly.’ Taploe had interrupted, frustrated at having remained silent for so long. In Quinn’s company he often felt second-rate, shamed by the younger man’s greater self-confidence and expertise. ‘We think Macklin is operating as one of several frontmen for the Kukushkin syndicate, buying up properties on their behalf and helping to clean illegal money.’

‘Which is what you suspected he was up to all along.’

‘Yes it is.’ Taploe’s eyes softened, as if he had been paid an unexpected compliment. ‘But now I have proof.’

‘Still,’ Quinn said, rubbing his scalp, ‘that’s just one side of a more complicated situation.’ He began removing rubber bands from the red folder and placing them at the edge of the coffee table. ‘Do you know what I mean by the term “double dip”?’

‘No idea,’ Mark said.

‘Well…’

Taploe cut him off in mid-sentence.

‘In the model double-dip operation an individual - or group of individuals - pretends to be depositing cash sums in a legitimate bank account while in reality he - or, of course, it could be she - is making payments into a separately located dummy account of exactly the same name.’

Mark, confused, instinctively looked to Quinn for confirmation of this.

‘That’s actually right,’ he said, deferring uneasily to the boss. ‘Now, London Libra is owned by a single asset offshore based in Cyprus?’

‘Right.’

‘Only when it came to your new venture in Moscow, Macklin devised what you might call a new strategy.’ Quinn moved forward heavily in his chair, to the point where Mark began to worry that it might actually topple over. ‘He seems to have convinced
Roth not to own the club in his own name and not to be a signatory on any of the accounts.’

‘Why?’ Mark asked.

‘Simple. Same as what you were saying before. Because it would limit Roth’s liability for creditors if Moscow went tits up. At the same time he reduces his capital gains bill in Russia. Roth apparently agreed - makes sense, after all - so Macklin went ahead and set up a second separate holding company in Cyprus. Called it Pentagon Investments, just so no one would pay much attention. He then appointed a small number of nominee directors - under his own control - and got his hands on a couple of bent accountants to cookthe books.’

Mark was struggling to keep up. His brain was a mulch of facts and theories, a puzzle he could not solve. He thought backto all the days and nights he had spent with Macklin, the restaurants and nightclubs in Moscow and St Petersburg, all those endless plane journeys out of Heathrow with nothing to do but listen to Tom’s stories. When had it all started? Macklin had led a double life wildly more dangerous and clandestine than his own, right under the noses of men who trusted him like a brother.
All of us are spies
, his father had once told him:
all of us inhabit a private world, a place of secrecies and evasion.

‘I’m not getting this,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Where does the double dip come in?’

Quinn scraped his trainers against the carpet and coughed, folding bulky arms across his chest.

‘Basically,’ he said, ‘like this. The main Libra holding company in Cyprus - the one you’ve all been told about - is still operational for London, Ibiza, T-shirts, compact discs.’ He pronounced ‘Ibiza’ as ‘Eye Beetha’, an affectation for which Mark had always lacked the courage. ‘Then there’s Pentagon Investments, which is used for Moscow. But Macklin has been playing both ends. Unknown to the Russians he’s also set up an identically named dummy Pentagon account in the Cayman Islands. Every now and again, when he thinks no one’s looking, Macklin has been redirecting some of the Russian cash into that account for his own personal enrichment.’

‘That’s the double dip,’ Taploe said, stating the obvious.

Quinn ignored him.

‘At a guess,’ he said, ‘there’s now something in the region of one point eight million buried away out there. Give or take.’

‘Holy fuck,’ Mark said, language Quinn seemed to enjoy. ‘And the Russians have got enough money they don’t notice that’s gone missing? How’s this all getting generated?’

‘Lot of ways.’ The room was now very warm and Quinn’s face looked cooked beside the bright yellow walls. He was flying. ‘Narcotics, prostitution, arms deals, precious metals, oil, timber, stolen cars, icon smuggling, you name it. He’s entrepreneurial, your average Russian mafioso, and he robs people for a living. About thirty per cent of the capital flight out
of Russia these days is illegally earned.
Thirty per cent
. And it has to get washed. Now and again a man like Viktor Kukushkin will try and improve his public image by donating a couple of million dollars to local charity. Generally speaking, though, he wants to hold on to his cash. And that’s where blokes like Macklin come in. He’s been cleaning Kukushkin’s money through the hotels, through the cab company, through the bureaux de change. There’s lots of it and it’s moving all the time. You’d need a hundred officers working round the clock just to keep track of half of it.’

‘And Libra is a part of this?’ There was resignation in Mark’s voice, still a sickening loom in the stomach. ‘Tom’s been laundering through the club, hasn’t he?’

”Fraid so.’ Quinn lifted several pages from the file and scratched at his left ear. ‘Nightclubs make ideal cover. Again the high cash element, again the rapid turnover. You charge punters sixteen quid for a couple of gin and tonics with ice and lemon, you’re gonna make a lot of money very fast. Those invoices you’ve been signing off - most probably faked. Macklin has been doubling your weekly turnover for more than eighteen months, drawing up fake balance sheets, inventing staff and security personnel, saying he sold a hundred crates of Bacardi when he only sold fifty. That kind of thing.’

‘But I
saw
all of those,’ Mark insisted. ‘I see it all the time. Everything goes across my desk.’

‘You’ve been away a lot,’ Taploe said quickly, as
if there were a way of letting Mark down gently. ‘Travelling overseas, delegating responsibility, seeing to your father’s probate…’

‘We also suspect that Macklin has other people working for him on the inside,’ Quinn continued. ‘But it’s too early to tell.’

‘Inside
Libra
?’ Mark stood up out of the sofa. The room was so small he barely had space to move. So much of his anger at Macklin and Roth had grown out of a conviction that they were in some way responsible for his father’s death. And yet the scale of the deception purely within Libra, the liberties Macklin had taken with Mark’s friendship and trust, momentarily seemed worse even than any involvement he or Roth might have had in the murder.

‘One of these is a former employee of yours,’ Taploe said. ‘Left the company some time ago. A Mr Philippe d’Erlanger.’

Mark looked up.

‘
Philippe?
’

‘He’s been running an Italian restaurant out of Covent Garden and - how can I put this? -
assisting
Mr Macklin with his business affairs.’

‘Assisting in what way?’

Taploe moved towards the window and pinched a clump of curtain fabric in his hand.

‘He’s one of the nominee directors of Pentagon, for a start. For the moment, however, what we’re most interested in is his rapid turnover of female staff.’

‘Rapid turnover of female staff,’ Mark repeated.

‘That’s right.’ Quinn now tookover. ‘Waitresses, bar staff, cloakroom attendants, the pretty girls on reception who smile at you when you walkin then don’t speakany English. Birds from Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, the Balkans. They find jobs at the restaurant, then disappear when they’re offered more lucrative ways of making a living.’

‘You mean prostitution.’

‘I do mean prostitution, yes. We know that Kukushkin has control of a network of apartments all over London that are being used by call girls with connections to organized crime. We’ve had d’Erlanger under surveillance for some time, although at present his role seems to be limited.’

‘Limited to what?’

‘He simply acts as a middle man. The gangs organize to bring girls to the UK from locations right across central and eastern Europe, promising them jobs as au pairs, waitresses, dancers. D’Erlanger is one of several businessmen in London who offer them work so that they can remain in the country, then they run up debts, get their passports taken away by the gangs and discover that the only way to breakeven is spending fourteen hours a day sucking cocks in South Kensington. Maybe you’ve noticed this with staff at Libra - barmaids or girls in admin who were given workby Macklin and then farmed out to Vladimir Tamarov.’

‘Tamarov?’ Mark said. ‘The lawyer?’

‘For lawyer, read gangster.’ Quinn spoke the word with relish. ‘Tamarov is number two in the Kukushkin organization and certainly their main player on the UK mainland. We thinkhe’s the one who controls the girls. There are three known Tamarov-controlled escort agencies on the Internet, all of them based in London.’

‘And you’ve been following him?’

‘Him and others, yes.’ Taploe came forward, encouraged Mark to sit down and then looked across at Quinn. ‘This is part of the reason why I’ve brought you here today. Tamarov has a bodyguard, a middle-aged Latvian thug by the name of Juris Duchev. In the past Macklin tended to meet him as a first point of contact in London or Moscow. Increasingly, however, he’s been seeing Tamarov in person. Both Tamarov and Duchev are in London for the next three weeks. How would you feel about getting close to them, forging some kind of relationship?’

Mark laughed.

‘You want me to make friends with the Russian mob?’

Taploe opted for flattery.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘So far you’ve shown a real facility for winning people over. It’s one of the reasons Paul and I are so grateful to have you on board.’ Tellingly, Quinn looked at the floor. ‘You obviously have your father’s gift for intelligence work. The personal connections you could make would be worth months of surveillance.’

Mark frowned. ‘What makes you think they’d trust me?’

‘Just that,’ Taploe said, as if the simple fact of Mark’s good nature provided him with the answer. ‘And we have fresh sigint which suggests that Macklin is now looking to bring someone in.’

‘You’ve heard him say that? That he wants me?’

‘Not in so many words. But it’s clear that the relationship between Libra and Kukushkin has become so complex, so far-reaching, that Macklin needs a partner. Someone other than d’Erlanger. Someone like yourself, in fact.’

And so Mark found himself lured, flattered, finessed into a new area of intelligence workin which he had not anticipated being involved. From informer to plant, the ghost in the machine. It felt at first like a promotion, and appealed as much to his vanity as to any sense of duty towards his family. Yet Mark must have looked unsettled at the prospect because Taploe said, ‘There’d be no danger. You’d be under our watchful eye all the way.’

‘But why do you even need me to do it?’ He was beginning to wonder if he had the nerve, the where withal to pull it off. ‘Why don’t you just arrest all three of them? It sounds like you’ve got more than enough evidence.’

‘For legal reasons, mostly.’ Quinn stretched and a white, hair-scattered bulge of stomach appeared briefly beneath his shirt. ‘What the Yanks like to call attorney-client privilege. We had no right to do what
we did at the Libra offices. Any information gathered from the premises under those conditions couldn’t be presented in a court of law.’ He scratched a patch of fatty, dry skin on his arm. ‘We’d have to go through due process, obtain a writ, even get formal permission from the Law Society to go through Macklin’s files again.’