The way you secretly seized control of the second-largest bank in Russia, then used it to take over the aluminum industry. It was clever.”
He blinked, nodded, unwilling to show me how much he enjoyed the blandishment. But men like that were unusually susceptible to flattery. It was often their greatest vulnerability. And I could see that it was working.
“The way you stole Marcus Capital Management was nothing short of brilliant. You seized control of the bank that handled all of Marcus’s trades. You actually bought the Banco Transnacional de Panamá. Their broker-dealer. It was … genius.”
I waited a few seconds.
Strategic deception, in war or in espionage, is just another form of applied psychology. The thing is, you never actually deceive your target—you induce him to deceive himself. You reinforce beliefs he already has.
Roman Navrozov lived in a state of paranoia and suspicion. So he was automatically inclined to believe that I actually had a shooter positioned in an empty office across the street—not just a remote-controlled light switch that I could turn on and off by hitting a pre-programmed key on my cell phone. George Devlin, of course, had designed it for me and had a colleague in New York set it up: That kind of technology was far beyond my capabilities.
And he had no reason to doubt that I had people in the adjoining rooms. Why not? He’d do it too.
Same for the staged video that Darryl had taped earlier, with the help of a buddy of his who’d agreed to wear a straitjacket wired with a squib and a condom full of blood. A buddy who trusted Darryl’s assurance that his H&K was loaded with blanks, not real rounds.
Roman Navrozov believed the whole charade was real. After all, he’d done far worse to the spouses and children of his opponents; such cruelty came naturally to him.
But what I was attempting now—to pull information out of him by convincing him I knew more than I did—was much riskier. Because at any moment I might slip and say something that would tip him off that I was just plain lying.
He watched me for a few seconds through the haze of his cigarette smoke. I saw the subtle change in his eyes, a softening of his features, a relaxing of his facial muscles.
“Well,” he said, and there it was, the proud smile that I’d been hoping to provoke.
In truth, it was sort of genius, in a twisted way.
If there’s some hedge fund you want to loot, all you have to do is buy the bank that controls its portfolio. Obviously that’s not going to happen with most normal hedge funds, which use the big investment banks in the U.S. But Marcus Capital wasn’t a normal hedge fund.
“So tell me something,” I said. “Why did you need to kidnap Marshall’s daughter?”
“It was a salvage operation. A desperation move. Because the original plan didn’t work at all.”
“And the original plan…?”
He sucked in a lungful of smoke, let it out even more slowly. Then fell silent.
“You wanted the Mercury files,” I said.
“Obviously.”
It made sense. Roman Navrozov was a businessman, and certain businessmen at the highest levels traffic in the most valuable commodities. And was there any commodity rare than the deepest darkest intelligence secrets of the world’s sole remaining superpower?
“So were you planning on selling the black-budget files to the Russian government?”
“Black budget?”
“Maybe that’s a term you’re not familiar with.”
“Please. I know what black budget is. But you think the Mercury files have something to do with America’s secret military budget? I am a businessman, not an information broker.”
“They contain the operational details of our most classified intelligence operations.”
He looked at me in surprise. “Is that what you were told? Next you will tell me you believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy as well.”
Then his mobile phone rang, emitting that annoying default Nokia ringtone you used to hear everywhere until people figured out how to select a different one.
He glanced at the display. “The cutout,” he said.
My heart began to thud.
78.
Kirill Aleksandrovich Chuzhoi drove up the long dirt road, chest tight with anticipation.
He didn’t enjoy wet work, but sometimes he had no choice, and he did it efficiently and without hesitation. Roman Navrozov paid him extremely well, and if he wanted loose ends tied up, Chuzhoi would do whatever it took. For God’s sake, he’d even gone down to Boston to take out a low-level drug dealer inside FBI headquarters! He had attracted too much attention and would very soon have to