Free The Silent Oligarch: A Novel by Christopher Morgan Jones Page B

complex molecule, circles of different sizes connected by arrowed lines, and within the circles names of people, companies, organizations, places: Lock, Malin, Faringdon, Langland, Uralsknefteprom, Rosenergo, the Ministry of Industry and Energy, the Kremlin, Berlin, Cayman, Ireland. At least a dozen circles had been ringed in red: Dominic Swift, Ken McGee, Savas Onder, Mikkel Friis, Marina Lock, Dmitry Gerstman, and others.
    His researchers thought his pencil and paper approach primitive and even ridiculous; they had database programs that would map this information in moments and never miss anything. Webster would patiently explain to them that this wall of notes wasn’t a calculation but an inching toward the truth, something requiring experience and intuition, patience and a soft eye. This was at once grander and murkier than an investigation of anything as mundane as a crime: it was a battle, silently fought, where victory would come to the man who could best understand his enemy’s weakness. Laid out here was Malin’s world, and until you really saw it—knew how it looked to him—you couldn’t hope to unpick it.
    But after four weeks he had only a faint and frustrated sense of it. He had had four researchers reading every newspaper article they could find in Russian and English. Two had taken Malin and the ministry; one had taken Faringdon, Langland and all the companies connected to them; and one had focused entirely on Lock and Grachev. A further two had been deep in company registries, reconstructing the network that Lock had created and trying to work out from the scant information available what the companies within it actually did.
    They had started with Faringdon. The corporate registry in Dublin gave them the names of its directors (Lock and a Swiss national called Ulrich Rast), an address, and its shareholders: nine further offshore companies, each several degrees more obscure than their Irish offspring. There was little else. The address belonged to a company that existed solely to set up and administer other companies and was therefore of no consequence; the company secretary worked for the same firm; Herr Rast too was merely a professional administrator, if of a rather exalted Swiss variety. The only point of interest was the nine shareholders; to have so many was unusual, and the purpose of the structure wasn’t clear. It suggested the work of someone clever or someone cautious. At least Faringdon itself was active; at least it did something. It bought companies, or stakes in them. From scouring the press—in Russia, in Azerbaijan, in Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Ukraine—Webster’s researchers found eighteen deals that Faringdon had made, and carefully noted the timing and circumstances of each. Then they researched every counter-party, every co-shareholder, and recorded all their findings on an ever-growing plan in the hope of finding patterns, coincidences, meaning of any kind.
    Its lesson was not immediately clear. Looking down from Faringdon, you saw eighteen investments with no obvious commercial theme or logic to link them, lumped together rather than arranged. Looking up, you saw little at all. Between them, the nine shareholders were based in five tiny islands that had their own sovereignty and similarly stubborn ideas about the availability of information. For each, all Webster’s people had been able to find was an address and some directors (Lock again among them, the rest mere cutouts). There was no straightforward way of knowing who owned these companies, how much money passed through them, where it came from and where it went. Every project hit this wall, and Webster was used to it. There were ways of getting around it, but they were underhand and difficult, and the information they produced was seldom as useful as you wanted it to be. What was he expecting to find there, after all, except another layer of the same?
    In Russia itself he was inclined to be cautious for a while. He and Hammer