Free Snowdrops by A. D. Miller

shipped him out. I haven't heard of him since. I guesshe did so well in fish that they promoted him to the oil team. Crime, business, politics, spookery--the usual Russian merry-go-round."
    "Maybe he quit the FSB and went into business," I said.
    "They're all in business," Steve said, "but they never quit. There are no ex-KGB men, just like the president says."
    I asked him whether he knew anything about the oil terminal scheme in the north that our loan was financing. The deal seemed to be going smoothly: the Cossack was on course to get the first tranche of his money soon. The banks that were lending it to him had cash-flow models and feasibility studies for the project, drawn up by the usual swarm of consultants, and a hundred pages of waivers and indemnities drawn up by us. As a matter of form we were seeking guarantees of cooperation from the governor of the region where the terminal was being built, from Narodneft about the amount of oil they'd pump through it after it was constructed, and from the Cossack about the revenue that would be set aside for repayments in an escrow account. All of these were on their way, we were assured. Everything was on track on the site, the Cossack told us: he was sure that the terminal would be pumping its first oil cargoes into the tankers that would dock with it by the end of the following summer. The only glitch was thatwhen Vyacheslav Alexandrovich the surveyor had been getting ready to visit, the Cossack's people said there had been a small fire and that he'd better hang on for a few weeks.
    "Sounds plausible," Steve said. "The Russians have more or less run out of pipeline capacity, so they're desperate for new export routes. The president was on about it in his last television phone-in--'This is one of the great challenges for Russia's economy. We welcome help and investment from our foreign partners,' the usual claptrap. And seaborne oil is supposed to be the next big thing. Gets it out to the European market without relying on the bolshy neighbours who the Russkis keep falling out with. They've got an ice-free bay up there somewhere--I think it's on the Gulf Stream--that must be what they're using. Who are the partners?"
    It was just the logistics firm and Narodneft, I said.
    "Interesting. Listen, I'm sure your banks will be okay. The Russians have got the oil and they need to sell it. They know the rules: they can keep ripping their own people off, so long as they play nice with the foreigners. But there's always an angle in it for them somewhere, Nick. I'm guessing they'll use the logistics outfit to cream off some of the takings, when they start making money, so Narodneft doesn't have to share it all with the public. You know what Narodneft means?"
    "Yes."
    " 'People's oil.' Fucking joke."
    Steve had once been summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be screamed at for going down to Chechnya without permission, then writing up the chats he'd had with self-confessed Russian war criminals for his newspapers. The ministry had threatened to revoke his visa, and in reply, so legend had it, he'd told them to go ahead, throw him out, make his day. If that really happened, he'd been bluffing, because like all the journalists I ever met in Moscow, Steve loved Russia. It had all the plush restaurants and imported beer that they could wish for, but it had preserved enough old-school bad habits to keep the hacks in column inches and on the other side of the world from whatever it was they were running away from. Most of them, Steve especially, disguised their love with a sort of moral machismo. It was as if he had a contractual obligation to see the worst in everyone and everything, or pretend to. For a degenerate he could sometimes be a real pious asshole.
    "I don't know, Steve," I said. "It's standard practice for oil majors, you know that--they set up a separate company for new investments to keep the debts off the balance sheet. It isn't just Narodneft, the big Western firms do