“Plus, of course, the profit from the sale of the horses,” I said.
“If there is any,” said Toby. “He would have to buy them in South America and pay for the transportation. I don’t suppose there would be that much profit. Unless horses are very cheap in Argentina.”
“How would we find out?” I asked.
Toby went out again, and I thought he was going to somehow find out the answer to my question. But he didn’t. He came back with a book. It was like a large, thick paperback. “This is a catalog from the Horses in Training sale at Newmarket last October, when I bought a horse from Komarov. I thought I’d look it up.” He flicked through the pages. “Here it is.” He studied it. “It says here that it was sent to the sale by a company called Horse Imports Ltd. But I know it was Komarov’s horse. He was there. He congratulated me afterwards on my purchase.”
“You mean you spoke to this man?” said Sally, disturbed. “Does he know who you are?”
“Not really,” said Toby.
“I hope not,” she said to him. “Not if he’s trying to kill your brother.” She looked at me. “You shouldn’t have come here.” I could see that for the first time she really did believe I was in danger, and, consequently, so was she, and so was her family.
Toby was actually my half brother. We shared the same mother, but my father had been her second husband. Toby was the son of a newly qualified accountant who had died of kidney failure when Toby had been two. Toby’s surname wasn’t Moreton. It was Chambers.
“Komarov won’t know that Toby is my brother,” I said.
“I hope you’re right,” Sally said.
So did I.
19
T oby spent much of the evening going through the sale catalog page by page. He came up with the fact that sixty-eight of the fifteen hundred or so horses sold at that sale were from Horse Imports Ltd. And every single one of them was female, either a mare or a filly. And that couldn’t be a coincidence.
That sale was just one of eleven similar sales held each year at Newmarket. There were also many major bloodstock auctions at Doncaster, and at Fairyhouse and Kill in Ireland, not to mention many others around the world. Then there were the horses sold privately. The horse-selling business worldwide was enormous. Lots and lots of jumbo jetfuls, each producing millions.
As Toby had studied the catalog, Caroline and I had sat in front of his computer screen and run searches on Horse Imports Ltd on the Internet. It was a British subsidiary of a Dutch company. It had an annual turnover that ran into tens of millions, but it seemed to have liabilities to its parent company equal to its gross profit and so it showed no net profit and hence paid no UK tax. I didn’t know how many horses it sold each year, but if they were all as reasonably priced as Toby had said there must have been thousands of them. I wondered if they all had a uterus, and whether they had all arrived in the UK with it containing drug-filled metal balls. And those were just the British-bound horses. I knew he also sold horses in the United States, and I suspected he did too in his native Russia, if only to his polo club. Where else? I wondered. Would there be enough female horses in the whole of South America?
I tried to use the computer to trace the parent company into the Dutch system, but without any success. I was fairly confident that the Dutch company would, itself, prove to have a parent company, and so on. I suspected that the overall parent, the matriarch company at the top of the tree, would prove to have a Dutch Antilles base, to be an offshore entity where such considerations as corporate taxes were not a worry.
Bernard had made an interesting little speech before he had taken himself back to London. “One of the major problems for drug dealers,” he had said, “is what to do with the vast amounts of cash generated by the trade. Nowadays, governments have wised up and put anti-money-laundering measures in place. You know how difficult it is now to open a bank account? Well, that’s because the banks are required to prove not only who you are but that funds in your accounts are come by in a legal and tax-reported fashion. These days, you can’t buy things with cash, not really expensive things like cars and houses. Even bookmakers won’t take a large bet in cash anymore, and they certainly won’t pay you out in cash if you win. It has to be by bank transfer or credit card. So cash is a problem. It’s all right if it’s only a few hundred or even a few thousand. That’s easy to spend. But millions, in cash? You can’t just buy your luxury Mediterranean yacht with suitcases full of cash. The yacht broker won’t take it, because then he has the same problem.”
“Can’t you take the suitcases of cash into the Cayman Islands or somewhere and put it in a bank?” I had asked.
“No chance,” he’d replied. “It’s now more difficult to open a bank account in the Cayman Islands than it is here. They are subject to all sorts of regulations laid down by both the United States and the European Union.”
“But I thought they were an offshore center for saving tax. What have the U.S. and Europe got to do with it?”
“If the offshore centers don’t comply with the rules, the U.S. won’t allow its citizens to go there. It would be like Cuba,” he had gone on. “And the Cayman Islands rely on the tourism industry to survive, and nearly all their tourists come from the United States, mostly on cruise ships.”
I sat playing with the computer and thinking about how I would deal with millions of pounds in cash if I had been Mr. Komarov.
“Suppose,” I said to Caroline, “he sends the cash back to South America along with the empty balls. The customs don’t care about cash leaving. They’re too busy looking out for drugs arriving.”
“So,” she said, “what good would that do? Bernard said you can’t transfer large amounts from South America to banks over here without having to prove first it’s not drug money.”
“I know,” I said. “But how about if you don’t transfer it back. How about if you use the cash to buy horses as well as drugs.”
She sat there looking at me with her mouth open.
“No one,” I went on, “is going to worry about being paid in cash for a moderately priced horse or two in Argentina, Uruguay or Colombia. I bet that Komarov has hundreds of small horse breeders who regularly provide him with the horses for cash in hand. You simply send the profit generated from the drug smuggling back to South America as cash to buy more female horses to continue the trade in a never-ending cycle. It’s self-perpetuating. Remember, Toby said he doubted that the sale of the horses would make much profit. It doesn’t have to. It’s not there to make a profit. It’s there to launder the cash. In the end, you have legitimate money from the legitimate sale of the horses at the prestigious Newmarket Bloodstock Sales, where Mr. Komarov is seen as a pillar of society, and is, no doubt, welcomed with open arms and a glass of champagne because he brings sixty-eight horses to every sale.”
“But we don’t actually know he smuggles drugs,” Caroline said.
“It doesn’t matter what he’s smuggling,” I said. “It could be anything of high value that can fit into those balls. Provided someone is prepared to pay, it could be computer chips, explosives or even radioactive materials.”
“Wouldn’t that injure the horses?” she said.
“Not if they were alpha particle sources,” I said. “Alpha particles can be stopped by a piece of paper, and the horse would easily be shielded from them by the metal of the ball. But they are very deadly if they enter the body without any shield at all. Remember that ex-KGB spy who was murdered in London with polonium-210? That stuff is an alpha source, and it had to have been smuggled here from Russia or somewhere in Eastern Europe. These metal balls easily could have been used to smuggle polonium-210 here without any harm being done to the horse.”