Mikhail “Misha” Grankin was a key player in Volodin’s inner circle, and currently under sanction by the West. As the new director of the Kremlin’s Security Council, Grankin had in the past year become Volodin’s principal go-to adviser on all matters diplomatic, military, and intelligence. But in addition to his duties for the government, like a lot of Volodin’s cronies, he was also part owner of several large private companies with government contracts. By tracing funds paid by the government for these contracts tied to Grankin, The Campus identified a shell company in Rome as a money-laundering vehicle for several works of art at galleries across the Italian capital. The company had used Russian government money to purchase several dozen paintings, and the art was still physically here in Rome, still displayed in the galleries from which it was purchased. If and when the artwork sold, the gallery would get a hefty commission, and then payments would go to a private trust to be deposited into some offshore bank somewhere.
The entire scheme seemed plain enough to Jack and his fellow analysts at The Campus: Mikhail Grankin’s people had purchased the paintings with the sole intention of expatriating millions of dollars of his nation’s wealth by laundering the money through the sale.
The opacity of the art world meant a person could walk into a gallery or an auction house, purchase a painting for a million dollars in cash, and walk out with it without even giving a name. It was an excellent way to launder money, and a terrific way to hide the portfolio of a man who was on America’s list of sanctioned members of the Kremlin.
Jack had come to Rome to dig into the transactions and to try to identify the facilitators of the purchase. Whoever offered up the money for the paintings, Jack knew, would be deeply involved in the scheme, and Jack didn’t think for a second this would be a one-off crime. His working theory was that whoever was involved in the operation was part of the intricate network the Kremlin used, and it stood to reason that Valeri Volodin himself might use such a conduit to hide his money.
His goal had been to identify the next link in the chain, and then to pass his intelligence about Grankin’s money on to the U.S. Justice Department, so they could lock down these funds, same as they had all the other accounts of Mikhail Grankin that they had found outside Russia.
There was another reason Jack had come to Rome, though he tried to deny it, even to himself. Rome was pretty damn romantic, and Ysabel had been helping him in his investigation.
They had planned on taking a vacation to Tahiti together after their last operation, but the Mikhail Grankin information had cropped up suddenly, and Jack realized he instead needed to go to Rome. He’d talked to his higher-ups, explained the situation, and reminded them what Ysabel had just pulled off in Dagestan. John Clark and Gerry Hendley allowed her to support Jack on his operation, and she had jumped at the chance to meet Jack in the Eternal City and help.
Ysabel’s part of the op was straightforward enough. She simply served as the face of Jack’s investigation; she went from one gallery in the city to another, places where Grankin’s front company was selling the art on commission. She posed as a representative for a buyer, and she used a hidden camera and a mike to look at the goods, to see what had sold already, and to try to get a feel for whether the prices asked and the prices paid indicated the whole scheme was indeed some sort of a payoff.
And Ysabel had one more role. It was her job to film enough of the computer systems in the establishments to work out what sort of technology the galleries used to store their account data.
Jack then did what he could to identify the buyer of the art. The director of information technology at The Campus was an MIT grad and a hacker of the first order; at most galleries, he had been able to simply break into their files to glean sales information. But at some of the galleries Ysabel herself had needed to plant RATs — Remote Administration Tools — on the systems, so that connections could be created between the network at the gallery and Gavin Biery’s own system.
Ysabel had been up for the work from the start. In fact, Jack realized, she loved this sort of thing. At first he worried she could be in some danger, but all the research he had done into the specific art galleries they were targeting indicated no relationship with organized crime or any real nefarious elements. These were just retail establishments that were unwittingly laundering money for the top goons in the Kremlin.
Ysabel’s only danger was being seen by a security guard poking around behind a counter while a gallery manager stepped into the kitchen to make her a cup of tea.
For these awkward moments Jack had always remained close by, outside the gallery in a vehicle, with eyes on Ysabel’s real-time camera feed — ready to swoop in and get her out of any jam, though she’d been so slick with her tradecraft he’d not once been called to sort out a problem.
As Campus operations went, this one had been a breeze.
And it had recently borne fruit. All three galleries Campus IT director Gavin Biery had hacked the sales info of showed the same thing. Pieces of art being sold on commission by the Russian front company were bought by a single entity. A trust based in Luxembourg.
Ryan’s digging into the trust had taken some time, but he’d successfully identified an attorney in Luxembourg who managed the trust’s finances. Although Jack didn’t know where the money came from that went into the trust to buy the paintings, he assumed this was nothing more than a way to take the Russian money that went into the art and launder it with the clean Luxembourg money. If the money purchasing the art at inflated prices was simply payoffs, then there would be other people and business entities involved. Many more. Ryan knew he had a long way to go to untie this Gordian knot, but he was happy he’d managed to swim downstream this far at least, from Grankin, to the art galleries, to the Luxembourg trust, to the individual lawyer.
His next step, he knew, was to dig into this lawyer in Luxembourg himself, identify what other companies he worked with, and identify who was helping Grankin in this deal.
If he was lucky he would be able to trace this scheme right back around to Grankin himself, but that was a long shot. He knew from his experience as a financial investigator that a well-resourced and well-backstopped money-laundering structure would involve dozens of companies, blind trusts, registering agents, banks, and even nations. By the time Grankin profited personally from the money expatriated from Russia, it would have moved around the world like a shell in a fifty-cup shell game.
But that didn’t matter to Jack. Even if Rome, Luxembourg, or the next five places Grankin’s money went didn’t give up the evidence he needed to disrupt the network, little by little he was removing layers of the onion, and someday he’d have the man at the top of the illegal enterprise.
Jack wanted to invite Ysabel to Luxembourg, but he’d need the approval of Hendley and Clark for that. He’d ask them tomorrow, and he was pretty sure they would say yes.
She’d done a great job so far; she and Jack had worked hard every day and into the evenings, but they did not miss this opportunity altogether. The young couple was getting to know the restaurants and amorous corners of the city as they got to know each other better in the process.
Jack smiled a little as he checked his six again. John Clark’s commanding voice was always there in his mind, telling him to watch his back.
He was clean.
Luxembourg, even with Ysabel, would not be as much fun as Rome. Jack would need to move on from the beautiful art galleries and into static surveillance operations on office buildings and conference rooms to identify the associates of the lawyer.
Not quite the same thing he’d done in the past couple weeks, but at least he and Ysabel would be together.