“I’ve already laid claim to them.”
“Who gets the money?”
“Anyone but the Tsar.”
“If we seize it, the blowback from Moscow will be intense.”
“That money is a weapon of mass destruction, Morris. He’s using it to weaken the West from within. The West’s internal political divisions are real, but the Russians have been fanning the flames. They’re good at this game. They’ve been playing it for more than a century. But now they have a new weapon at their disposal. The supremacy of the dollar gives the United States the power to disarm them. You must act.”
“Not me. I’m out of here on January twentieth at noon.” Payne paused, then added, “If I survive that long.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“Apparently, I haven’t shown sufficient loyalty in the aftermath of the election.”
“What did he want you to do?”
“Next subject,” said Payne.
“The mirror trades.”
“I’ll talk to Treasury and the Fed.”
“Quietly, Morris.”
“The Agency knows how to keep a secret.”
“It’s not you I’m worried about,” said Gabriel. “Do you remember that code-word operation I was running in Syria against the Islamic State? The one your boss described in great detail to the Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office?”
“I turned purple,” said Payne.
“That makes two of us, Morris.”
44
Geneva
Next morning the operation shifted into high gear. No longer constrained by the threat of American financial surveillance, Gabriel instructed Isabel to pressure Anil Kandar into making ever larger mirror trades. The daily hauls of laundered dollars increased sharply, and by week’s end there was enough cash in the till to finance another purchase. This time it was the rumored office tower on West Monroe Street in Chicago, which Martin purchased for $500 million from a Charlotte-based real estate trust. He turned over management of the building to the same company that was looking after 1395 Brickell Avenue. No one involved in the deal ever considered the possibility that the true owner of the property was Arkady Akimov and his childhood friend from Baskov Lane. No one, that is, but the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, whosent Gabriel a secure cable of congratulations over his latest move in the American commercial real estate market.
Gabriel’s Russian partner, however, appeared blissfully unaware that his financial empire—not to mention his private intelligence service—was in grave peril. Each afternoon he welcomed the instrument of his demise into his office and signed the documents that would seal his fate. So complete was Arkady’s trust of Isabel that by the second week of December she was no longer required to place her phone in the signal-blocking box on Ludmilla Sorova’s desk. The recordings lent support to her concerns about the state of Arkady’s emotions. In a bid to cool the Russian’s ardor, Gabriel dispatched Isabel to Paris for a Wednesday-evening tryst with Martin, but the ruse seemed to have the opposite of its intended effect. A billionaire many times over, Arkady Akimov was used to getting what he wanted. And what he wanted was Isabel Brenner in his bed.
Gabriel had no intention of allowing his agent to be drawn into a love triangle—even a fictitious one. Used judiciously, however, Arkady’s affections could be put to good use in helping to run out the operational clock. Gabriel had already engineered more than enough financial misconduct to smash NevaNeft and the Haydn Group to pieces. All he needed now was a change of administration in Washington. On December 14, the Electoral College officially affirmed the president’s defeat. The final step in the process, a largely ceremonial congressional certification, would take place in three weeks’ time, on Wednesday, January 6. The defeated president called on Republicans in the House and Senate to use the occasion to overturn the results of the election. “Too soon to give up,” he wrote on Twitter. “People are really angry.” They were also dying ofthe coronavirus in record numbers. But the president, desperate to remain in power, seemed not to notice or care.
Nor did he seem to notice that the Swiss financier and left-leaning political activist Martin Landesmann had dipped his toe into the American commercial real estate market. Martin’s next acquisition, however, was more in keeping with his track record: an Arizona-based manufacturer of wind turbines. The very next day he snapped up SunTech, a maker of solar panels headquartered in Fort Lauderdale. AeroParts of Salina, Kansas, was next, followed soon after by Columbia River Organic Foods of Portland.
His final purchase of the year, an office tower in London’s Canary Wharf, came on the Friday of that week, the unofficial start of what promised to be the most depressing winter holiday since the darkest days of the Second World War. Isabel delivered the accompanying documents to NevaNeft headquarters at half past five, and for the first time in many days, Ludmilla Sorova demanded she surrender her phone before entering Arkady’s office. One hour later, when she emerged into the Place du Port, her handbag was hanging from her left shoulder rather than the right, a signal there was a problem. While crossing the rue du Purgatoire, she rang Martin and calmly explained what it was.
“You’ll never guess who invited me to dinner tomorrow night.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said I would give him an answer in the morning.”
“Who else is going to be there?”
“No one.”
“What are you talking about?”
