Commander-In-Chief (28 page)

There were little bank accounts, shell companies, and trusts registered there, no doubt every last one of them money-laundering vehicles, but Jack didn’t see any obvious connection to Limonov, nor did he see why a Russian private equity manager and the ex-FSB goon shadowing him would have any reason to go down physically to move money there.

On a whim he ran the rest of Frieden’s contacts, looking to see if, perhaps, Limonov had met with Frieden to find information that led him to the Caribbean. This wasn’t an easy endeavor, because only a portion of Frieden’s contact list had physical addresses for the contacts listed. Jack threw these known addresses into a spreadsheet and searched for BVI references, and then, after finding none, he looked up the phone code for the British Virgin Islands.

Seconds later, he ran a search of the number 284 in the database.

He got two hits. The first was a business registration firm on the island of Tortola. The second, Jack saw, was a man named Terry Walker.

Jack didn’t recognize the name, so he ran it through his database of people involved in the world of international finance. He found no hits on a Terry Walker of the British Virgin Islands, so, assuming there were probably fifty thousand references in Google for both men and women named Terry Walker, he simply typed in the phone number.

Nothing.

With nothing else coming to mind, Jack typed the name into Google, ready to refine it by adding “British Virgin Islands” after his initial search, but he didn’t have to.

The first reference to the name in Google was the man Limonov
had gone down to the BVIs to see, Jack knew this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The flight attendant leaned over him, distracting him from his computer. “Can I get you anything?”

Jack looked up. “Yeah. Scotch. Neat.” And then, “Better make it a double.”

J
ack sipped his scotch, reading about Terry Walker on the Internet. The Australian was the inventor and owner of BlackHole, the world’s largest and most notorious Bitcoin exchange. Jack found a recent article about the man, and learned his company was registered in the British Virgin Islands, and Walker was a resident of Tarpon Island, an exclusive beachside resort popular with millionaires and billionaires.

Jack knew about Tarpon Island because it was a famous retreat for famous people, and he knew about BlackHole because it was, without exaggeration, a nightmare for those in the world of anti–money laundering. It was something referred to as a hopper, or a tumbler, where all virtual currency transactions could be jumbled together to completely disguise both the buyer and the seller of the currency.

Bitcoin was difficult to trace on its own, Jack knew, but if someone used BlackHole, the best forensic accountants in the world couldn’t trace the transactions back to their origin.

Jack wasn’t certain why Limonov would physically need to meet
with Terry Walker to use BlackHole, but he’d obviously gotten the name from Frieden, and he’d obviously made the BVIs his next stop, so Walker
had
to be the reason for Limonov’s trip.

Jack Ryan suddenly felt his entire operation slipping away from him.

•   •   •

J
ack thought for a moment, then pulled out his mobile phone. He was on a European airline, so there was no prohibition against making a call in the air. It was two a.m. in Maryland, and Clark had clearly been asleep, but he answered quickly; a lifetime of never being far away from a crisis meant he knew how to flip his “on switch” at a moment’s notice. It took a second for him to say anything, but Jack knew that was just because John was stepping out of his bedroom so he didn’t wake up Sandy.

“You okay, Jack?” Clark finally asked.

“Yeah. I’m over the Atlantic, inbound to Dulles. Sorry for the late call, but I think I’ve got some actionable intel.”

“Not a problem,” he said, and then, “We’ll get to your intel in a second, but first . . . I’m glad to hear you got on that aircraft.”

“You ordered me to. It’s not often I don’t follow orders.”

“I just know how you feel right now. Trust me, I do. As soon as you get home you can start looking for the men who attacked Ysabel.”

“Actually, I’m calling about something else. Gavin has tracked Limonov and Kozlov to the British Virgin Islands.”

Clark took a minute to change gears. Jack figured Clark was surprised he was working on something other than finding Salvatore and Ysabel’s attackers. But finally Clark asked, “What are they doing there?”

“I think they are going to meet with an Australian national
named Terry Walker. He is the world’s leading trader of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin and others like it.”

There was a pause. “Jack, I’m old. I understand the financial markets, more or less, but I haven’t been keeping up in this computer-currency stuff. Sounds like a bunch of nonsense.”

“I can explain it to you in a couple of minutes.”

There was a slight pause. Then, “Clock is ticking, kid.”

Jack said, “The first way to buy things was trade, right? I have a cow, I want your wheat, so I give you milk for the wheat.”

Clark chuckled. “For the record, I’m not old enough to remember that part firsthand, but yeah, I’m with you.”

“Somebody had to come up with a way strangers could trust each other to give them something else of value. Otherwise everybody would be lugging their yak or whatever to the market.”

“Right.”

“Money came along. Coins at first, but there was no known, specific intrinsic value in the metal. Intermediaries had to insure it. Middlemen—banks, who were like referees. They said, ‘This guy you’ve never met is going to hand you a little chunk of metal for something of value, but you can use that chunk later to buy something of value. It’s okay, it’s legit, we’ll cover it.’ Of course, the banks took their cut for this service, and of course the banks had to have a little information about you if they held on to your chunks of metal for you or loaned you other chunks of metal so you could exchange them for goods or services that you wanted to pay back over time. Borrowers and savers.”

“I’m still with you,” Clark said.

“And it’s been like this for a thousand years. Works pretty well, unless you don’t feel like paying someone in the middle, and unless you don’t want anyone to know who you are.”

“And I guess there are a lot of people who fall into that category.”

“Damn right there are,” Jack said. “World economic output is ninety trillion a year. Think about how much of that goes to middlemen. Banks are necessary and extremely powerful. So along comes cryptocurrency. It cuts away the middlemen. It removes centralized financial institutions and replaces them with self-directed computer networks, decentralizing the process. Once someone figured out how to ensure transactions without recording any identity data about the payer or payee, the system began to grow quickly.”

“How does that work?”

“It’s an independent network-based ledger. It’s called a blockchain. It automatically tells one party that the other party in the transaction is legitimately paying for a good or service. It’s completely computerized, completely peer-to-peer. No third party involved.”

Clark said, “And no real regulation.”

Jack said, “It’s complicated, but yet it’s awesome in its simplicity, and its potential. It reduces fees in doing business, and it completely eliminates the corruption in intermediating institutions, because there is no one in the middle who can misuse information or steal money.”

“So how do you get the little coin into the computer?” Clark asked.

Jack assumed he was being sarcastic, but he explained anyway. “Bitcoin is not a physical coin. It’s digital cash—a long number that you enter. It’s not tangible, not issued by a government, it’s not a semiprecious metal with a dead person’s face on it. It resides nowhere, but it can be accessed anywhere.”

“But who controls the system?”

“The system is set up, and then it is monitored by everyone. Each person who takes part in cryptocurrency commerce has the same ability to oversee the operation. There is this blockchain, this
ledger, which is updated in real time, and everyone can see. It won’t show me that John Clark just bought a pizza, but it will show me that the holder of this Bitcoin just bought something from someone who received this Bitcoin. Once that person buys something it will show the movement of the Bitcoin itself, not the product.”

Clark whistled. “A money launderer’s dream.”

“Yeah. I love the brilliance of this system, but as a guy who chases corrupt money around the world, I’ve got to say . . . it sucks for me.”

Clark said, “You are telling me all this at two a.m. because you want me to understand that once this money is converted into Bitcoin, it will be even harder to track.”

“No. Not harder. Impossible. We have to stop this from happening.”

“How do you know Limonov is going to see Walker?”

Jack explained how he had come to his conclusion.

Clark asked, “You think Limonov is working with him?”

“I think it’s a strong possibility. I don’t see any other reason for him to go down there to set up accounts for the money. There will be dozens of locations of these accounts around the world, no way he’d visit them all.”

Clark was confused. “So he’s going down to buy Bitcoin from Walker? To do what with it?”

“The Bitcoin isn’t a destination. It’s just a vehicle to get the money out of Russia without it being tracked by other finance people in the FSB. Once he has the digital currency, he can just sit at a computer and exchange it for government-backed currency. He’ll just buy dollars or euros or something, and he’ll plop that into accounts. The new money won’t be tied to Russia. He can put it in Chicago if he wants. I guess he won’t own the Bitcoins for any time at all.”

“What can you do to track it, then?”

“There’s only one thing. I have to get to Terry Walker before he agrees to work for Limonov, and I have to turn him, to get him to work for us.”

Clark said, “I see why this is important. Your whole case looks like it’s racing headlong into a dead end.”

“I’m not going to let that happen, John. I want to go down there. I assume Limonov is going to approach Walker at his office, but I found out he is staying with his family on Tarpon Island.”

Clark had heard of the place. “Fancy.”

“Yeah, I was thinking we could slip ashore as soon as possible and then we can talk to him at his house. If we can convince him to work with us, maybe we can unwrap Limonov’s network and figure out where he’s getting his money from.”

“You keep saying ‘we.’”

“John, to get to that island quietly, I’m going to need a boat. I don’t know a thing about boats, but that’s not a problem, because I know somebody who does.”

“Me?”

“Yep.”

“Jack. There is no way in hell Gerry is going to let you out of the country again before we know what happened in Luxembourg, and why.”

Jack said, “Let’s get Gerry in on this conversation.”

A moment later Clark conferenced Gerry Hendley onto the call. He had been sleeping as well, and he wasn’t as easy to wake up as Clark had been, but finally he understood the situation. He also understood that Jack Ryan, Jr., was asking to take John Clark and the Gulfstream to the BVIs.

Hendley said, “The problem I have with all this, Jack, is that you don’t have any way of knowing who Limonov is working for, do you?”

“No. I wish I could say he was definitely Volodin’s cashier, but I can’t. Suffice it to say this money that’s about to be moved belongs to someone high up at the Kremlin, and time is critical if we are going to have a chance to intercede. Limonov is hiding the money, and I think that is interesting.”

Gerry was confused. “Of course he’s hiding money. That’s what laundering is all about.”

Jack said, “No, I mean he is hiding it from the others in the
siloviki
. He’s avoiding traditional routes for Russian money. Instead of using a financial network, he goes way out of his way to use Bitcoin to steer clear of other Russian transit means.”

“Who is he hiding from?”

“The only people who have the power to see into the Russian offshore transit networks.”

Gerry Hendley said, “The FSB.”

“Bingo. Whoever Limonov is moving money for, it is someone who doesn’t trust the FSB. Someone who is getting his money the hell out of Russia. Someone with enough time to set up his golden parachute with care, but someone with concerns about the FSB learning what he is doing.”

“Who does that sound like?” Gerry asked, knowing the answer to his question.

“It’s very possible this could be Volodin’s money. Limonov could be the personal cashier for the president of the Russian Federation.”

Now Clark asked, “Do you think Limonov and Kozlov were involved in the attack at your apartment last night?”

Jack didn’t answer for a moment. When he did, he was equivocal. “I wish I knew. It’s clear to me there were two different groups we ran across. One in Rome and one in Luxembourg. It looks to me like the people from Rome tracked Ysabel to me, and they might
not have any connection to Limonov. But I don’t know. The fact his plane took off right after the attack . . . and it blocked its flight number . . . It looks suspicious.

“I am going to find the sons of bitches who hurt her, and I’m going to hurt them. But right now I know we don’t have a minute to lose in stopping Limonov.”

Gerry thought about it for a long time. Finally he said, “Jack, your plane doesn’t land in Dulles until eleven a.m. If you turned right around and jumped on the Gulfstream, you still wouldn’t make it to the BVIs before evening. It seems to me the faster someone gets down there, the better the chance we get to Walker before Limonov does.”

“What do you suggest?”

Gerry said, “I’m approving the G550 to travel to the BVIs, but John will go down alone. He can be there and set up before nightfall, and waiting for you will only slow that down. Jack, I want you here, in Alexandria. You can brief John on what to say to Walker over the phone while he’s en route.”

This wasn’t Jack’s first choice, but he recognized that Gerry was right. If Clark could get to Walker before Walker even came into contact with the Russians, then maybe he could avoid whatever the Russians had planned from coming to pass.

Jack said, “That’s fine, Gerry.”

Gerry said, “Of course, John, this is up to you. I know you have stayed out of operations for the past few months. This does look important, though.”

Clark said, “Agreed. I’ll call Adara and get myself packed.”