persecution. It comes from industrial production from the factories and mines and oilfields constructed from the blood and death of Stalin’s slaves. The thousands of pounds’ worth of wine we are pouring down our gullets like Coca-Cola is the blood of those men and women who worked under the lash fifty, sixty years ago to construct an industry which has been stolen from their children and their grandchildren.
‘This is Putin’s great public relations coup- to focus on such thieves as these- while silently seizing their ill- gotten gains, not for the benefit of the people who made it, but for a new set of oligarchs, the KGB, which is now taking shape in the Kremlin.
‘And me? How different am I? Here I am taking their stolen money in order to expose this new crime that I so passionately believe is now unfolding in the Kremlin. So, for me, the means justify the ends too. But do they? For me, but not for anyone else?
‘Sometimes, all we need to guard against is our own pious morality. But it’s hard to see that when you’re sitting at the rich man’s table with a bunch of crooks and killers.’
When I see Finn’s picture at the Forest the day after the dinner, I can hardly contain my excitement. He seems so close and I can feel his plan unfolding. The company he’s keeping doesn’t matter. I forgive Finn more easily than he forgives himself. There he is, the man who a little more than a year ago told me I could say he loved me. I smile again at the memory.
The whereabouts of Finn and these photographs of the company he’s keeping are so important to us that they arrive at the Forest a few hours later. It isn’t Liakubsky we are watching. Or the Little Yakut, just released from an American jail. Or Danny, the Russian trader from Geneva. It is Finn. The Forest is watching Finn in the hope he will lead us to Mikhail.
Gennady Liakubsky is thirty-eight years old. He was born in Komi out to the north-east of Moscow in western Siberia where there is nothing but tundra and oilfields, great winding rivers and the herds of reindeer that are still taken from one feeding ground to the next by the dwindling ethnic peoples of this inhospitable region.
As a student in the Engineering School in Moscow, Liakubsky had been a part-time informer for the KGB before perestroika in the 1980s. But then he’d seen the opportunity of marrying his qualifications with the new business opportunities that arose in the nineties. He’d traded on the Moscow stock exchange in any commodity he could get his hands on, but always looked east, where Russia’s money is born, to the oilfields and mines that are strewn across the vast, empty Siberian plains ten time zones wide that reach up eventually a few miles from America in the Bering Strait.
When Yeltsin began to auction off the state’s industrial property in 1996, Liakubsky was one of those who seized their chance. He bought oil production in Komi where his local KGB and mafia connections ensured a smooth transition, then branched out into a gold mine outside Yakutsk, the place where he struck up his partnership with the Little Yakut. A coal mine in the Kuzbass region was added, then iron mines, steel foundries and more oil. Like the others, Liakubsky amassed whatever he could get while the going was good. And like the others, he took his profits out of Russia to the West in a financial drain that has cost Russia up to five hundred billion dollars, all told. Bleeding the country was their insurance against the future.
But when Putin came to power in 2000, Liakubsky, unlike Boris Berezovsky, was one of those who prostrated himself to the new power. His chateau in France was not an exile’s home. He paid and paid the new administration in the Kremlin, he agreed to Putin’s new injunction to stay out of politics, he repatriated Russian art to St Petersburg from all around the world, and supported Putin’s pet projects in Petersburg. It is said he gave over twenty million dollars to the refurbishment of Putin’s home city and its palaces.
But even after all this, Liakubsky could never feel safe, as long as there were new, more trusted acolytes that Putin wished to put in control of the country’s wealth at the centre of power, in the Kremlin.
We knew at the Forest that Liakubsky, like all of his kind, spent a great deal of his resources amassing
But Liakubsky was not alone in this. They all did it, they all still do it, as long as Putin and his KGB clan tighten the noose around Russia’s throat and are the power to be reckoned with. They support Putin’s political party, United Russia, which is now, six years later, the only real party; they pay up when asked. But always, always they continue their search for insurance.
And Finn, for Liakubsky, is just one more agent of his insurance, one brick in the wall of the
But we’re not watching Liakubsky, back at the Forest nor the Little Yakut, with his yellowed Asian features pinched from generations of Siberian cold and his string of murders behind him. Nor Danny the Geneva trader. We are watching Finn and I am being briefed to join with him again and find Mikhail, the enemy within.
After some financial arrangement has been reached with Liakubsky, the next morning Finn takes a train to Annecy. But in Annecy, we lose him. As I read now, I see the trail of Finn’s route at the moment it went dead for us.
Somehow and un-recounted by Finn, he makes his way to the Swiss border and, crossing without a passport through the deserted frontier post above Grenoble, he travels to Geneva.
19
ON A FINE CLEAR SUMMER MORNING, when the outlines of the mountains seem to have been painted on glass, Finn walks up a pleasant leafy road in Cologny, a suburb of Geneva reserved for the world’s wealthy, and its diplomats and the lords of the international agencies and organisations that have taken root in the city. Here they huddle halfway to heaven on a rolling hill above the lake. Above them, neat domestic vineyards embroider the fields all the way to the sky, while below them the city of Geneva stands at the head of the flat blue lawn of its lake.
Finn has parked a small white van at the top of the street, killing the reverberating volume of Elastica as he cuts the engine. In the stunned silence, he walks across the road, turns into a cul de sac that curves in an arc rejoining the road further down from where he’s parked. He wears old blue overalls and carries a metal workman’s box.
He’s already seen the car he is looking for as he drove by. It is a silver grey Lexus with diplomatic plates, parked on the kerb outside white wrought-iron gates. As he walks back up the hill, without breaking step he takes a roll of black electrical tape from the box, bites into the plastic-tasting end, and pulls off a two-inch strip. When the car is level with him he places the strip in a vertical position at the side of the curved back window and walks on, continuing up to where he parked the van twenty minutes earlier.
He throws the toolbox into the back, switches on the engine and with it the blasting music, and drives back down the hill and into the city. He returns the van to the hire company less than two hours after he’s rented it for cash from a bored representative, and boards a tram by the shopping plaza on the west bank. The tram winds its way up and around a hill, offering glimpses of the lake through side streets, and on to another suburb, south of the city this time, called Chene Bougeries.
Finn steps off the tram, along with some Scandinavian backpackers, just a few hundred yards from the French border. He walks across the road unchallenged by the border guards, and into the Bar des Douanes, where he sits at a table in the back and orders a black coffee.
It is just after ten o’clock in the morning and the striking blue summer day is visible like a cinema screen from the dark gloom at the back of the bar.
Five minutes later a short, tubby, bearded man wearing jeans and a faded grey T-shirt, and carrying a battered leather knapsack slung over his left shoulder, enters the bar. When they see each other Finn rises from the plastic seat and they embrace in the surprised way the English have, no matter how many times they’ve embraced foreigners. The man grunts an indecipherable and half-suspicious greeting. He sits, orders a coffee and brandy, unrolls a newspaper and slaps it with the back of his hand.
‘Read that,’ he says and, as Finn reads, the man takes a pouch from the leather knapsack and rolls a cigarette from some dry Drum tobacco he grumpily scrapes up from the corners of the pouch.
