Reamde

Csongor. They seemed to take her point. Zula continued, “So I’ll bet Wallace contacted you and said ‘I need secure email, no questions asked.’”

“Exactly,” Csongor said. “I knew he worked for Ivanov. But. A Scottish accountant in Vancouver. What could possibly go wrong?” He chuckled and slapped his thigh, hoping that the others would join him in a little round of ironic laughter, but Peter was having none of it.

“Who is Ivanov? What did Wallace do for him?” Peter asked.

Csongor leaned back in his seat, suddenly feeling tired, and rubbed his eyes. “I had been working for these people for six years before I ever met Ivanov. Then he showed up in Budapest one day and took me to a hockey game and dinner, and then it was obvious who was really the boss.”

“But it was too late then.”

“Yes, I already knew too much and so on. In Russia there are a few such groups as the one that Ivanov is part of. Some are ethnic Russians. Ivanov belongs to one of those. Others are Chechens or Uzbeks or what have you. The Russian ones are very old, dating back to perhaps Ivan the Terrible. If you are a member of such a group, you live your whole life in it.”

Peter snorted. “That’s not saying much.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“If you’re a mobster, your life expectancy is what, thirty years?”

“On the contrary,” Csongor said. “Precisely because so many of their activities are routine and boring, many of the members die of old age. Which is the problem.”

“What problem?”

“It’s a problem for Ivanov, that is.”

“How so?”

“It has always been the practice for groups like this to have a fund, called the obshchak, which is a common pool of money that they use for all kinds of purposes, including benefits.”

“Benefits!? Are you telling me that Russian mobsters get dental!?”

Csongor shrugged. “I don’t see why you are so surprised. A man who gets a toothache must have it seen to, no matter what he does for a living. In the system of these groups, the money for the dentist is paid out of the obshchak. When a member reaches the age of retirement, the obshchak takes care of him. And, of course, the obshchak is also used to fund…”—and Csongor looked around at the plane—” operations.”

“So we are guests of the obshchak right now,” Peter said.

“Yes, but I do not think that we are authorized guests,” Csongor returned.

“What do you mean?”

“I think that Ivanov is basically stealing the funds that are being used to rent this plane,” Csongor said. “Because this is not how these guys operate. They are extremely conservative investors for the most part. They don’t do crazy shit like this.”

Peter snorted.

Zula said, “A pension fund is a pension fund.”

“Precisely,” said Csongor, turning to her. “Most of the obshchak is invested in proper financial instruments. Wallace is a, here my vocabulary fails me—”

“Money manager?” Zula guessed.

“He is one who manages the money managers,” Csongor said. “He distributes his clients’ funds among several different professional managers, evaluates their performance, moves money from one account to another as necessary.”

“That’s not all he does,” Peter said. “When I met him, he was buying stolen credit card numbers from me.”

“This is unusual for Wallace.”

“I sort of got that impression.”

“Wallace’s boss is—was—Ivanov. I believe that Ivanov made some mistakes. Of the money he controlled, some was supposed to be invested legitimately. This he entrusted to Wallace. Other money was put into schemes that we would call organized crime. I can only guess, but I think that Ivanov got into trouble.”

“Some of his schemes failed,” Zula said.

“Or perhaps he simply embezzled from the obshchak,” Csongor said. “Maybe he was not the right man to be managing this money.”

Peter laughed.

Csongor allowed himself the barest trace of a wry smile and continued: “The quarterly numbers were looking not so good. He knew he was in trouble, needed to take some risks in order to bring those numbers up. Guys like him are maybe addicted to taking risks anyway. He and Wallace set up some complicated transactions and at the same time invested some of the money Wallace controlled in schemes such as your stolen credit card numbers. When Wallace lost all his files—”

“The house of cards collapsed,” Zula said.

“Yes.”

“So why haven’t they come down on Ivanov yet?”

“They don’t know,” Csongor said. “Ivanov has a long leash and has moved with too great speed. By the time his bosses know that something strange is going on, we’ll be in Xiamen.”

“So we are going to Xiamen,” Zula said.

“This is what I was told,” Csongor said. “To find the Troll.”

“Are they going to kill us?”

Csongor thought about it rather too long for Zula’s taste. “I think this depends on Sokolov.”

“What is the deal with him?”

“Another private contractor, like Wallace. Except that he does security.”

“I’m afraid to even ask about his background.”

“Twice a hero,” Csongor said. “Once in Afghanistan and once in Chechnya.”

“Military,” Peter translated. “Not a gangster.”

“There is a bit of a, what do you call it, revolving door. It’s complicated.”

“But if it’s true that Ivanov has gone off the reservation,” Zula said, “then a military man isn’t going to approve of that, is he? He doesn’t have to keep following orders if it’s clear that his boss has gone bananas.”

“I don’t know Sokolov” was all that Csongor said to that.

SOKOLOV STEPPED ABOARD and then backed halfway into the cockpit to let others go by him. One by one, short-haired Russian security consultants came aboard and distributed themselves around the cabin according to suggestions from Sokolov. These were younger than Sokolov, but not precisely young; their ages seemed to range from late twenties to late thirties. They all had interesting faces, but Zula was disinclined to gaze directly at them since she did not want to be caught looking. Peter, Zula, and Csongor were allowed to keep their own space in the aft part of the cabin. Sokolov’s crew filled up the other available spaces and, when all seats were taken, resorted to sitting on the floor in the aisle. There were seven of them including Sokolov.

A car pulled up alongside. The two Russian pilots came aboard and began doing paperwork. More stuff was loaded from the vehicle to the plane’s cargo hold, and when that got full, additional items were handed up from below and passed down into the passenger cabin and stuffed wherever they would fit. Ivanov came aboard, smelling of alcohol, and went into his compartment in the back. Sokolov handed Zula a shopping bag that turned out to contain a pair of Crocs, a few T-shirts, and underwear.

The pilots closed the door. Sokolov issued a directive to raise the window shades. The plane taxied to the runway, took off north, and banked south. Several minutes later, as they were climbing toward cruising altitude, Zula got a good long view of what she took to be Vladivostok: a sizable port city built around a long inlet, shaped like a crooked finger, at the end of a beefy peninsula.