“Jupiter in San Jose. Their report tallied perfectly with Mercury’s figures. Two hundred thousand subscribers in Moscow alone.”
“Of course it did,” said Cate. “He knew Jupiter or someone like them would be called in to check how many hits Red Star got every day. He couldn’t risk there being a discrepancy. He needed two hundred thousand subscribers to justify his sky-high revenues, and two hundred thousand he got. Only his customers weren’t customers at all. They were straw men, or maybe I should say ‘straw machines.’” Cate took a breath. “Don’t you see? It’s a twenty-first-century Potemkin village.”
“You’re saying he set up shop out here and created a cybercommunity of Red Star fanatics?” asked Gavallan.
Cate nodded disgustedly. “Kirov had it worked out to a fault so you wouldn’t question how rapidly the company’s revenues were increasing. He knew from the beginning the kind of revenues Mercury had to post to max out its IPO. He could get the money easy. He stole it from Novastar. The subscribers were the hard part. That’s what required the creative thinking.”
“My God,” muttered Gavallan, shaken. “He played us like a fiddle.”
“More like a Stradivarius,” said Cate. “But his performance is over. And there will be no encore, thank you very much.”
Grafton Byrnes signaled his incomprehension. “Hold on, I’m missing something here. What’s Novastar Airlines got to do with this?”
Cate explained to him about her dealings with Ray Luca and what had happened in Delray Beach, about the trip to Geneva and Jean-Jacques Pillonel’s complicity with Konstantin Kirov to hide transfers from Novastar Airlines to Mercury Broadband and then to Kirov’s personal accounts.
“But what put you onto Kirov’s case in the first place?”
“Don’t ask,” said Gavallan, and Cate elbowed him.
“Actually, he’s my father,” she answered.
Byrnes’s eyes registered shock. “You said ‘father.’ You don’t mean…?”
Cate nodded.
“Can’t say I see a resemblance.”
“Thank God for that.” She went on with her explanation: “I don’t think we’ll ever learn who Detective Skulpin’s informant was, but whoever it was that had the guts to go up against my father, I’d like to thank him.”
“I think you can forget about that,” said Byrnes reticently. “On Friday, Kirov—er, your father—showed up here with a nasty piece of work named Dashamirov. They had three employees of Mercury with them. Dashamirov went to work on them…” The words trailed off. “Anyway, you can figure it out.”
Cate Magnus shut her eyes, and a chill seemed to pass through her. “I’m sorry, Graf. I’m sorry about my father. About everything that’s happened to you.”
“Don’t be,” Byrnes said. “You didn’t have a damned thing to do with this. You’re a good egg—I can’t imagine the guts it must have taken to come back and face him. The hardest thing a kid can do is step outside the shadow of a parent, especially a father. And then if he happens to be a rogue like Kirov, well…” Byrnes shook his head, then leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you for coming, too.”
Cate shrugged forlornly. “Tell me I’m forgiven?”
Byrnes brought her to his chest. “You’re forgiven, kid. Big time.”
The speedometer rose steadily. 180… 190… 200 kilometers per hour. Hands clutched to the steering wheel, Gavallan kept his heel hard against the accelerator and sent the Suburban hurtling across the green Russian plains. They’d left the dacha an hour ago and were headed back to Moscow.
A cell phone lying on the front seat between Cate and Gavallan chirped. She picked it up and read the digital readout. “Him again.”
For the last thirty minutes the phones they’d taken off Boris, Tanya, and the two drivers had rung more and more frequently. The digital readout indicated that it was the same caller every time—no doubt Kirov calling from his private jet, eager to know how the interrogation of “Mr. Jett” was proceeding.
“Jett, we’ve got to answer. He’ll know something’s wrong if we don’t.”
“No,” said Gavallan. “Not yet he won’t. When you’re forty thousand feet up it’s a crapshoot if your call will go through. Besides, what are you going to say—‘Hi, Dad. Having a great time. Wish you were here’?”
“He’s right,” said Grafton Byrnes. “It’ll buy us some time.”
Cate cut off the call. “Have it your way.”
“Look, he’s still at least four hours outside of New York,” said Gavallan. “Believe me, he’ll put it off to atmospherics. Now get on with your story. How can you be so sure you heard right?”
“I was there. Right next to the study. Everyone was going every which way. The door was open. I got every word.” Cate pinched her voice and added her father’s nasal timbre. “‘I thought he deserved my personal attention. I gave him the full clip.’ Animal,” she added angrily, pounding the sideboard with her fist.
“And your uncle Leonid said the president was pleased?”
“It sounded as if Father was doing him a favor. Like the president wanted Baranov out of the way too.”
“Of course he did,” said Byrnes from his post in the backseat. “The president made his career as a spy. He’s just looking out for his cronies who are still in the trade. It’s the old boy network, Volga style. If Kirov’s promised him some money from the offering, you can bet the president will do what he can to help him.”
“‘An exercise in prevention,’ Uncle Leonid said,” Cate informed them. “Something to keep oil prices high and stop America from developing its own resources.”
“What do you think it is?” wondered Gavallan aloud. “The only major resources we have are in Texas and Alaska, and I’d scratch off Texas from the git-go—most of those are old wells with a only few good years left in them. Alaska’s our treasure trove. If we ever get around to developing it.”
Byrnes laughed bitterly. “Hell, I can think of a dozen ways to stop us from opening the land up there to drilling. All Kirov has to do is hire himself a few good lobbyists. That’ll tie up Congress for a couple years right there.”
Cate didn’t share in the humor. “But Leonid was going to Siberia. They’re going to do something!”
“Prevention, huh?” said Gavallan. “Only way to prevent us from exploiting our reserves is to keep us from drilling in the Arctic National Refuge. I mean, what other new resources do we want to exploit? Sons of bitches. If they try anything to ruin that land…”
Gavallan didn’t know if he should laugh, cry, or scream bloody murder. He shouldn’t have worried about the bush-league charges of defrauding his investors. Dodson’s accusations of murder didn’t amount to anything. No, he’d really hit the jackpot this time. He’d moved up to the big time—the bulge bracket all the way. Black Jet Securities was underwriting the KGB in its efforts to economically sabotage the United States, however they intended to do it. He had set his company on a line to commit a crime that was tantamount to treason. Willingly or not, he was abetting his nation’s oldest, and still its most formidable, enemy. A country that until recently spied on its citizens as a matter of course, that tortured, imprisoned, and executed men and women without trial or benefit of counsel, that believed human freedoms were secondary to the will of the state. A country that even now was on the slippery slope to fascism.
Cate handed Gavallan the cell phone. “Call your office, Jett. Tell them they’ve got to cancel the offering.”