Chapter 39
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There was one person left on his list that Jack had to talk to face-to-face. Michael Andreevich Kalashnikov. He was a bagman for one of the most powerful groups of the Russian Mafia. Kalashnikov would have tried to get a piece of an organized plot anywhere on the planet generating large money. Kalashnikov was scheduled to be in Hong Kong in two days. This meant spending twenty-seven hours in the air over the next five days, not counting runway time. The way his back felt, he’d be in traction by the time he made it home.
He had put Lee on a plane a week before. It felt as if part of his heart had been ripped from his body and carried away with her as the plane rose into the sky. He had to see her again. Soon.
He first met Kalashnikov during a money manager’s conference in Zurich a day before his thirty-third birthday. They made eye contact and nodded, Jack thinking he knew him and couldn’t connect the face to a name, Kalashnikov being polite, he thought. They walked outside at the same time to escape the overwhelming amount of bullshit and get a little fresh air.
Kalashnikov strode back and forth in only his suit, hands clasped behind his back, chin up, head thrust forward into the wind, enjoying the blast of Arctic air down off the mountains from the east.
The man inhaled a huge lungful of air and said, “I love the cold here. It feels so clean. They used to have a saying in Zona, “Cold enough to clean up the worst crime.”
Michael was about Jack’s age, his face more weathered, his frame not as big, but still broad through the shoulders, with the thick wads of muscle from a wrestling career. His sandy-blond hair and sharp features made him look more Germanic than Slavic.
Jack said, “You look familiar, but I can’t place the face.”
Michael laughed, his English Americanized and easy. “I wouldn’t expect you to. You might have seen me on your news. I am Michael Andreevich Kalashnikov. You know how your liberal press is. They call any of the new Russian capitalists “Mafia” because they are so disappointed communism failed.”
What Michael said was partially true. The Russians had no history of clean business. What they did now was normal to them. They went from a totalitarian state to no rules at all in weeks. In the US there had been a rule of law and a history of at least a bastardized form of capitalism. To the Russians, a few bribes here, some extortion there, and a hit on a corporate director or two, were all normal business practices.
Michael explained he knew Jack by reputation. After Perestroika the KGB and GRU started marketing their information-gathering abilities to anyone in the former Soviet Union who could steal hard currency. Kalashnikov had ratted out some of the competition in exchange for files on everyone attending the conference.
They talked until Jack’s teeth chattered. He liked Michael’s sense of humor. His years in Zona had made him a cynic and a fatalist, but he was a raconteur with superb sense of timing, even in English. They had kept in touch over the years, trading information and rumors. Michael would know if anything was going on, but Jack might not be willing to pay his price.
Thinking about Kalashnikov got him through the takeoff, but he still had a fourteen-hour flight to go. He stood up to stretch his legs, walking back to the little lounge off First Class.
The big high-definition TV was tuned to Bloomberg. The market had tanked again and the good ol’ boys sitting around the bar were explaining to each how they knew it was going to take a beating and what was going to happen next. He didn’t want to get sucked into the conversation.
He turned to head back to his seat and almost knocked over a flight attendant, grabbing her arm to keep her from falling. She let out a girlish squeal and apologized. Steadying herself, she’d managed to press much warm woman-flesh against him. She held his arm longer than needed as she smiled.
The flight attendant’s nametag said Mai. Her eyes were huge and she got all the mileage she could out of the violet contacts. The dry air inside the plane must kill her eyes. She had the slim look of a runner through her hips. The double bong of a signal sounded from another one of the First Class passengers. She excused herself. He watched her walk away.
Mai Ling knew he was watching and put some effort into the walk. He asked questions as he watched her walk away. How many lunges did she have to do to get that level of firm softness in her butt? Had she tailored the uniform skirt herself? Did she instinctively know the real players or had she checked his D & B? Could she deliver on the promise of the walk, or was she all show and no go?
Mai turned at the head of the stairs, making very direct eye contact. She grasped the pole that supported the stairs and slid her hand down it, then slightly up, letting her nails brush the pole as she let go. She gave him another smile and a look. The smile was good: not too much promise, instead a hint of what she could deliver. The look was different.
He had seen that look before. It had been a lifetime ago on a blast furnace of a day, mid-August, in California’s Central Valley. His motorcycle broke down on the side of a county road that wasn’t on his map. A turkey vulture finished checking some roadkill a quarter of a mile off. She circled high overhead, then settled on a branch high in the mostly dead cottonwood next to the live oak he was using for shade. That turkey vulture looked down at him ripening in the sun with the same hopeful, hungry look as Miss Mai the flight attendant.
Jack dove back into stock histories, hoping he could see the relationships if he just looked hard enough. He was now certain that whoever was playing the stocks was also pushing out enough disinformation to publish a sizable novel. And, he knew there was something he just wasn’t seeing. He went over the information for two more hours and achieved wonderful results in the way of eyestrain and a splitting headache.
There was no way to stop a disinformation campaign. They could stop the campaign from working. Execution would be complicated, but the idea was simple. The cabal would watch rumors hit the wire services, news websites, blogs, high-volume tweets, LinkedIn, Facebook or any of the other myriad and unregulated ways to plant rumors. They would fact-check, counter with a higher volume of positive information and go long the stocks. It would be logistics from hell. In the US it was completely illegal. The same thing passed for standard business practice in the rest of the world, but US regulatory agencies made it a felony.
The first step would be to set up a spy network. They would use existing computer programs for most of it, but he hated leaving information gathering to a computer. Simply setting up a program to do the search left a path across the ether. People screwed up, but they were flexible, some of them anyway. An ongoing net search, a clipping service and the contacts, Bob, Alice, Lee, and Jack had would be enough to get all the information they’d need.
The next step would be to check the information, which could only be done one way. A money manager, someone with a perceived present or future stake in the stocks, had to call the companies in question and ask questions only shareholders could ask. Jack didn’t have a candidate for that. He could pay a money manager to do it, someone already in the field, but it was going to be hard enough to keep the plan secret without adding more people. He tabled that part of the plan.
The third step would be to execute the opposing trades. Again, execution would have to be offshore. Alice laughed at the Feds and the FINRA, but with the volume of transactions their group would have to make, even the Feds would spot the activity quickly if it were in the States.
If he were caught and convicted, Jack would face wire fraud, securities fraud, and multiple racketeering violations. Conservatively figured, counting plea-bargaining, he’d still be looking at a lot of years in prison. He fell asleep thinking he’d better not get caught.
He dreamed he was a rat in a maze. He made it to what he thought was the end of the maze and a barrier would rise in front of him, revealing even more maze off into the distance. He was a tough, battle-scarred rat, and didn’t have the patience for the game. Right before he woke up, he was a going-crazy kind of rat, chewing on his tail and whining in a corner.
Mai woke him as she put his seat in the upright position. He didn’t have to worry about the-fasten-the-seat-belt part of the drill. She did that for him, making sure the fit was comfortable, safe, and snug on his hips. This was the part of the flight he hated the most. Usually his back hurt so badly by the time they turned in to land, he almost hoped for a crash.
Today his back felt like someone was stabbing him with sharp, white-hot branding irons and he still cared. The plane came in from the ocean giving a view of Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong’s Islands and the Kowloon Peninsula that looked like something out of a travel video. Parts of the harbor were polluted enough to kill, but from the air it was bright, and blue-green that day. The hills that separated the New Territories from the PRC were green. The elderly sisters sitting across the aisle thought the view was precious. The new airport was pretty and clean, but nowhere near as exciting as the landing at the old Kai Tak airport.