and turning a few heads.
* * *
—
Jack and Liliana rode along in silence.
Liliana felt she might have crossed a line with her impassioned history lessons, and Jack was still fighting jet lag; his eyelids felt like lead weights. She focused on the road while he buried his nose in his smartphone, researching about Stapinsky and his business.
Other than a few advertisements for firms that he thought Stapinsky might have owned, or, at least, someone named Stapinsky did own, he didn’t come across much. He couldn’t even make a connection between Baltic General Services and Stapinsky Transportowe, let alone with Stapinsky and Christopher Gage or, for that matter, Senator Dixon, the true target of his investigation.
He wished Gavin was available for a search. He could ferret out anything if it had a digital footprint. But Gerry said Gavin was off-limits for this assignment, so no point walking down that road.
It was starting to feel like a wild-goose chase, and he had better things to do than waste time chasing his tail. He had an obligation to Cory to fulfill. The sooner, the better.
Hitting yet another dead end, Jack yawned and set his phone between his legs. His eyes wandered to the scenery sliding past his window. The roadside businesses, strip malls, warehouses, and billboards—some of them in Chinese—diminished the farther they got from Warsaw, giving way to tractor dealerships, greenhouses, and nurseries.
Liliana pointed at the radio. “Music?”
“Sure.”
She punched the Bluetooth button on her audio console. Piano music poured through the Bang & Olufsen sound system.
“Chopin?” Jack asked.
Liliana smiled, delighted. “You know him?”
“Not well enough. I know he’s Poland’s most famous composer.”
“I hope you don’t mind. This piece is Piano Concerto Number One in E minor. That’s Martha Argerich on the piano. Just brilliant.”
The music was a perfect accompaniment to the pastoral landscape emerging outside his window. The gray clouds were shot through with blue sky and sunlight that illuminated the variegated greens all around them.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
Jack sat up straighter; slumping in the plush leather seat wasn’t helping him to stay awake.
“What else can you tell me about OstBank?”
“What I am allowed to tell you is that OstBank is a German financial institution headquartered in Berlin, with branches in the Federal Republic, Italy, Spain, and Poland.”
“And off the record?”
“There is no such thing as off the record. But I suppose you can read a newspaper? Especially the financial section?”
“Not without moving my lips.”
“Did you ever read about the ‘Russian Laundromat’? From a few years ago?”
“Refresh my memory.”
“Because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, your government and mine and several other Western countries levied harsh economic sanctions not only on the country but on the individual oligarchs that empowered President Yermilov. But the last thing a Russian wants to do if he wants to remain rich is keep his money in Russia. He needs to get his rubles converted into dollars and out of the country before the currency collapses entirely.”
“Otherwise, all that ill-gotten cash turns to Monopoly money.”
“The Russian Laundromat was an ingenious scheme that moved out over twenty billion dollars from inside Russia to fake shell companies the Russians set up. Those fake companies secured fake loans secured by Russian ‘investors.’ Then the fake companies declared bankruptcy and the ‘investors’ were forced to pay back the fake loans by the Western bankruptcy courts.”
“You mean they figured out a way for our judges to force them to send their money out of the country? That’s freaking slick.”
“In the reports I read, laundered money was found in seven hundred and thirty-two Western banks, everything from small regional institutions to the biggest international giants. Many of them are accused by their respective governments of being complicit.”
“And would one of those banks happen to be OstBank?”
“Funny you should ask.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“That would be a mistake.”
Jack frowned, confused. What was she trying to tell him?
Oh. Okay. Yeah.
“But that doesn’t mean OstBank couldn’t be involved in some other kind of money-laundering scheme, though. Right?”
“As a financial analyst, I leave you to draw your own conclusions.”
“And you think the German agent was killed because he was getting close to whatever scheme was going on inside of OstBank?”
“That’s our assumption, but the German government isn’t confirming or denying at this point. OstBank has powerful friends in the Bundestag.”
“Banks have powerful friends in every legislature, and they’re seldom held accountable for the issues that really matter. Even Thomas Jefferson said that private banks are more dangerous than standing armies.”
“Strange that a financial