In for a Ruble (10 page)

Some issues with my son at his school,
Leitz had said.

Foos was packing his messenger bag.

“I want to do a little research on the Leitz kid.”

“Wondered when you were going to get around to that.”

“You know something I don’t?”

“That strange computer activity corresponds with school vacations. I told you that.”

I was going to point out he’d said nothing of the sort, but he was already halfway across the floor, bidding good night to Pig Pen. Then it occurred to me that in his way, he had. He’d told me August, November, and December—summer, Thanksgiving, Christmas. That’s Foos. Like his creation, he connects data—and expects the rest of us to be as quick as he is.

I fired up the Basilisk and fed in Andras Leitz. I don’t know what I was looking for, but had I been given any notice of what I’d find—and where it would lead—I’d have shut down the computer, packed up the Repin, sent it back, and sought refuge with one of my Mexican friends south of the border.

It’s not a proverb that I know of, but it should be—you can’t peel back the layers of an onion without drawing tears.

CHAPTER
8

Things started innocently enough. Andras Leitz presented a typical profile of a typical child of wealthy, New York parents—private school, generous allowance, Caribbean Christmases, too many material possessions. Nothing surprising there. Until the beast served up accounts at twelve different banks with balances aggregating $11.2 million.

One account, at Citi, held $2,200 and was the recipient of what appeared to be a regular allowance, a hundred dollars a week, via electronic transfer from his father’s account at the same bank. The others were funded by monthly transfers from a corporate account at State Street Bank in Boston. Those had been increasing steadily over time and now averaged about $20,000 each. They stretched back two and a half years. The most recent was a week earlier—$22,887.63. In all, they totaled just over $7 million. The other $4 million had been deposited, again electronically, in two installments, one in August ($1.5 million) and one at Thanksgiving ($2.5 million). The source of these two transfers was a bank in Estonia. And, as Foos said, the timing lined up with school vacations.

Hard to see how a seventeen-year-old came into that kind of money. Hard to guess what he was up to in the Baltics. Perhaps he copied a few of his old man’s trades. The Basilisk guffawed at that idea. So did twenty years of Cheka training and experience. But even assuming for the sake of argument that he was as bent as a world-class crook, how was a high school kid pulling down that kind of dough? I wondered, not idly, whether the elder Leitz had any inkling of his offspring’s success.

Back to the data. The Boston connection was explained, possibly, by the fact that Andras was a student at a boarding school in Gibbet, Massachusetts, fifty miles west of the capital, with the same name as the town. Tuition, room and board were setting his old man back $48,000 a year. Andras could have easily picked up the tab himself. I brought up the phone records. Calls to his father in New York, mother in Minneapolis, and a handful of what appeared to be friends. Most went to a woman named Irina Lishina. That surname rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it.

I sent the beast back with a new assignment. He (I’ve always assumed he’s a he) came back with another profile.

Irina was also a student at the Gibbet School. Like Andras, she lived in New York City, at 22 East Ninety-second Street, with her mother, Alyona, and her stepfather, Taras Batkin. That name rang a bell too.

Google jogged my memory. Batkin was chairman of the Russian-American Trade Council. At the time I left the Cheka, he’d been a fast-rising officer, a comer. We’d never met, but he got talked about a lot. In more recent years, he was rumored to be a Kremlin fixer, one of those people trusted with looking after the government’s connections with private enterprise—legal and otherwise. Irina’s father was Alexander Lishin, and I remembered why I recognized his name. He was a regular fixture on Ibansk.com—a crook, major league. I could access more information on them at home. I went back to the girl.

She had a BMW 328i registered in her name in New York. She carried three credit cards with aggregate average monthly charges of about $900. Her checking account contained just over $10,000. Typical child of a typical Russian official—if said official is in a position to have his hand in all kinds of extracurricular enterprises.

That was before the savings and brokerage accounts. Like Andras, more than a dozen spread among eight banks as well as Fidelity, Schwab and E-Trade. They totaled more than $11 million and were fed by the same corporate account at State Street Bank. Just like him, she had two deposits from Estonia, $1.5 mil in November and $2.5 million a month later. Russia’s producing some very accomplished young women these days, but a self-made high school multimillionaire seemed a reach. Unless she’d joined the family firm. That seemed a bigger reach. And what was Andras doing?

I went home to continue my research, after the detour to West Forty-eighth Street. Timid and Bold were nowhere among the gathering cleaners. None of those getting ready for work professed ever to have heard of them. I wasn’t surprised. Having gotten everything they could from both Nosferatu and me, they’d doubtless decided another cleaning job at another building—probably in Pittsburgh—was in order. Their countrymen were quick to forget all about them.

Dinner was a solitary affair—me, takeout Chinese washed down by Russian vodka and Czech beer, Herbie Nichols on the CD player, and Ibansk.com on the computer. Nichols is an overlooked hard-bop pianist who didn’t make many records, but the ones he did get down swing harder than Paul Bunyan’s ax.

Ivanov swings his own ax, and tonight Efim Konychev was again the target.

Konychev Spotted—in the United States!

Whither Efim Konychev?

New York, Ivanov’s told. Washington too. Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles as well.

Nothing odd about that, you say? Well, for one thing, Konychev hasn’t been seen since the Tverskaya attack. In hiding, Ivanov hears. For another, civil war reigns among the partners of the Baltic Enterprise Commission. A bad time to be out of town, but maybe right now the rest of the world is safer than staying home.

Intriguing to Ivanov—for the last three years the United States has denied Konychev entry. We hear the Kremlin at its highest levels intervened with the U.S. authorities more than once on Konychev’s behalf. No dice—repeated visa applications, made through the U.S. Department of State, were returned to Moscow DOA—dead on arrival, as they say in America, “dead” there having a different meaning than here in Ibansk. Alleged involvement in organized crime is the reason given by the U.S. Department of Justice. (For his part, Ivanov, of course, remains shocked—SHOCKED!—at the idea of organized crime in Ibansk.)

So what’s changed?

The Department of Homeland Security appears to have taken up his case. Konychev’s recent visits have been under special dispensation from DHS—and against the wishes of the State Department. Why DHS wants Konychev in America is a mystery—unless the oligarch had made some kind of a deal.

But, Ivanov asks, what kind of deal could Konychev offer the U.S. government agency charged with protecting American soil?

A question sufficiently stimulating to engage Ivanov’s efforts. Don’t stray far.

I searched the Ibansk database for mentions of Konychev, Alexander Lishin, and the BEC. It returned more than two hundred posts. Some contained just a mention, in others, Ivanov ran on at his histrionic and long-winded best. I sent the full lot to the printer while I finished my takeout, rinsed the dishes, and opened another Pilsner Urquell. Then I settled in on the sofa with the beer, a thick stack of printed pages, and a notepad. Two hours and another Pilsner later I had as good a picture of the BEC as one was likely to get.

Konychev and Lishin were the founding partners. Konychev had already made one fortune in TV and radio. He was one of the first to appreciate the Web’s potential for criminal enterprise and, more significantly, that criminals would need places—holes in the cyberspace wall, if you will—to run their scams from. Lishin, according to Ivanov, was the technical genius, the man who connected servers spread all over Eastern Europe, and more important, told them what to do when ordered.

The genius of the BEC is that, technically, it does nothing illegal itself. It simply provides services—Web hosting, data storage—to those who need them. Spammers need memory and processing power to send all those billions of e-mails advertising everything from cheap drugs to bigger body parts. Phishers need the same capabilities from which to con unsuspecting recipients—
Danger! Your account is about to be closed!
—into giving up their user names, passwords, and Social Security numbers. Higher-tech crooks have similar requirements—putting together zombie networks to launch distributed denial of service attacks, the basis for their blackmail schemes, aimed at shutting down companies’ or countries’ Web presences by swamping them with bogus inquiries. Ditto pornographers.

The thing about computers, they don’t care what they do. Memory is memory, it can store whatever it’s ordered to store. A CPU is a CPU, it can run any app it’s given. Having set up the technical infrastructure, the incremental cost to the BEC of expanding into other lines was virtually nil. Konychev built the client contacts, Lishin built out the network and the software. All kinds of Internet scum were only too happy to avail themselves of BEC facilities. The BEC blew through the dot-com crash in 2000, and when the global economy sunk like the
Titanic
in 2008, the BEC kept swimming in a rising sea of cash. The business just kept growing.

That inevitably attracted the Kremlin’s attention. In most Western countries—those governed by the rule of law, for instance—the government would have invested money and manpower trying to shut such a network down and prosecute those behind it. In Russia, where rule of force equals rule of law, the Kremlin summoned Konychev and Lishin to a meeting and put a deal on the table. Cut us in or spend the next twenty years in a cell down the hall from Khodorkovsky in Siberia.

They were quick to agree. A third partner joined the firm, Taras Batkin. His Cheka background and Kremlin contacts gave the BEC another layer of insulation. Business grew faster than ever. Somewhere along the line, Konychev’s younger sister, Alyona, who had been married to Lishin for more than a decade, took up with Batkin. The divorce and new marriage, about six months apart, had taken place three years earlier, apparently without incident. Nobody wanted to upset the apple cart carrying the golden goose, or so my cynical mind suggested. I put the mixed metaphor down to too much Pilsner Urquell.

I finished reading and went back to the computer. Ivanov had no pictures of either Lishin or his ex-wife, but he did have one of Konychev, accompanying his latest post. Taken with a long telephoto lens, it showed the same man I’d seen on Tverskaya, wearing an overcoat and scarf, climbing out of the backseat of another armored Mercedes. A bodyguard held the door from behind, another stood in front, partially blocking the camera’s view. His hand reached under his overcoat, no doubt wrapped around a large caliber firearm. Konychev looked straight at the camera, unaware of its presence. Handsome face, soft features, intelligent eyes. Hard to read much into them.

Something behind his head caught my attention, and I leaned in for a closer look. The number of the building, large brass digits affixed to a marble façade—140. The same “1” and “4” and “0” that adorned the exterior of 140 West Forty-eighth Street—Leitz’s building. That could be coincidence, plenty of buildings with the number “140” in plenty of cities. Maybe even one or two that used the same stencils. The Mercedes had New York plates. Still, Konychev could be going to visit any one of a score of tenants. He could have been going to the building next door. Everything about his presence in New York could have been coincidence, but I was ready to bet my newly acquired Repin that Konychev was paying a visit to Sebastian Leitz.

CHAPTER
9

I got up at my usual 6:00
A.M.
and ran a half mile downtown until I found a pay phone I hadn’t hit in a while. I used a prepaid card to dial Aleksei’s office in Moscow.

“Good morning,” I said. “Feel like coffee? I’m buying.”

A brief pause, then, “Give me forty-five minutes. Usual place?”

“Fine.”

I continued my run, five miles through the cold, dark, empty streets, thinking about the Leitzes, Efim Konychev, the honesty of my client, and how far I wanted to take this. A million dollars is a million dollars, I reminded myself more than once, and I still had a clear vision of
Suprematist Composition
on Leitz’s wall that I could transfer easily enough to my own. A stiff wind kept me away from the rivers, I ran fast and was early getting back so I reversed direction and trotted up to City Hall where I found another pay phone and dialed another number, this one belonging to a disposable cell phone.

Aleksei answered on the first ring. I wouldn’t describe either of us as paranoid, at least not overly so. I spied on the United States for twenty years, and I suspect there are some old members of the U.S. intelligence community who are sufficiently curious about what I’m up to these days to listen in to the occasional phone call. Aleksei has more immediate reasons to worry. He’s an honest cop in a system where honesty is not only shunned but feared. That makes him a target, and there’s little question that his phone is tapped. We’d agreed on one thing when we saw each other in Moscow—a system for getting in touch, using phones that can’t be traced and a fake coffee date to set a time.

“How’re you doing?” I said.

“Don’t ask.”

“Bad day?”

“One more in a sequence.”

“Sorry. Work?”

“Among other things.”

I didn’t want to ask the next question, but I didn’t want to appear uncaring either.