Dark Watch

“Next, we checked the corporate structure of each company. These are public records and fortunately kept on a database. My hope was we would find the same names on the boards of each company.”

“You didn’t think it was going to be that easy?” Juan chided.

“Well, I’d hoped. As you can imagine, no such luck. There was one common element, though. Of the seven companies that own the Maus and the forty people listed as directors of those companies, every one of them is Russian.”

“Russian? I thought they would be Chinese.”

“Nope, Russkies to a man. Which ties in with Linda’s suspicion about the men guarding the Maus being from the land of the tsars. I have a search under way through Interpol right now. So far, I’ve already gotten hits on a few of these guys. They’re members of the Russian mafia. No one highly placed, but they’re definitely connected.”

“So this whole thing is a Russian enterprise,” Juan said, thinking aloud. “I can see how they’d benefit from the hijackings, but what about the human trafficking? The snakeheads are well organized and entrenched in China. I can’t see them allowing competition from the Russian mob.”

“I had an idea about that,” Max interjected. “What if the snakeheads have a contract with the Russians? Could be they use Russian ships or allow the Chinese to use Russia as a conduit to get the illegals into western Europe.”

“That could be,” Juan agreed. “They could use the port of Vladivostok. Dump the Chinese there, then send ’em across on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Once in Moscow or Saint Petersburg it’s a simple matter of some forged documents, and they’re on their way to Berlin, London, or New York. I’ve heard that customs police all over the world have closed a lot of the old back channels, so this could be their new route.”

Cabrillo was already thinking ahead. He didn’t know many people in the cold water port city of Vladivostok, but he still had contacts in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. In fact, several of his old Cold War foes worked in private security for the new-generation capitalist oligarchs, and more than a few were wealthy oligarchs themselves.

“So I’m headed to Moscow,” Juan said.

“Not so fast, Chairman,” Mark countered. “You might end up there, but there could be another way.”

“I’m listening.”

“I thought about how hard it would be to track down forty Russian gangsters and what leverage we could use to get them to talk. Mike Halbert and I talked about it at length, and we both came to the conclusion that the Russians probably don’t have a clue what these companies do. It’s likely that whoever set up D Commercial Advisors and Ajax Trading and the others paid the Russians a fee to use their names, and they know nothing beyond that.”

“You’re talking a dummy board of directors for a dummy company.”

“Exactly. Complete deniability.”

“So where does that leave us?” Juan asked, slightly irritated that Murphy seemed to be leading him along.

“The guy who set up the companies.”

“Wait. Guy? You said guy?”

“Yup.”

“They screwed up,” Cabrillo exclaimed, irritation turning to excitement as he grasped what Murph had just said.

“Sure did, boss.” Mark agreed, a smile in his voice. “Every one of the dummy companies had two things in common. They all own part of the Maus, actually on the documents it’s called Mice, but I think it’s a translation problem. And the other thing is they were all set up by the same lawyer in Zurich. Guy by the name of Rudolph Isphording.”

“Never heard of him.”

“No reason you should have, at least not until a few months ago.”

“What happened a few months ago?” Juan had suddenly become wary.

“Isphording was named as a star witness in the biggest financial scandal to hit Switzerland since it was discovered they had hoarded gold for the Nazis. He was caught up in a money laundering net, quickly saw the writing on the wall, and made a sweetheart deal with Swiss prosecutors. The scope of the investigation is expanding every day. A few bank presidents are under indictment, a couple of government ministers have tendered resignations, and now the investigators are looking into the Swiss representatives at the United Nations for potential bribe-taking. And there might be a link to the billions of dollars the late PLO chief Yasir Arafat hid away in Swiss banks that has yet to surface. It seems there’s no limit to how high or far the scandal goes.”

“All because of this Isphording character?”

“He had a very long reach into some very dirty pockets.”

“If the PLO is involved, I’m surprised he hasn’t been killed by now.”

Max Hanley spoke up with a low chuckle. “He’ll get a grateful hug by a suicide bomber only after the Palestinians find their money.”

“So where’s Isphording now?”