Then he twigged.
There was something there.
A small scooter, three cars back – occupying the same distance behind him on both occasions. The whole purpose of a scooter in a city was, surely, to beat the traffic – to enable the rider to weave in and out of slower-moving cars, wasn’t it? Few scooter riders would subject themselves to travelling at the same speed as the slow cars all around them.
Straker waited for one more change of direction.
When he looked backwards again, he was pretty sure.
The scooter was still there – maintaining its position a discreet distance behind the Brandeis car.
‘Dimitri?’ he said to the driver. ‘When we get to the hotel, I’m just going inside to pack. Could you wait for me – out in front of the main entrance?’
Straker's car pulled up on the sweep of the Hotel Baltschug Kempinski and stopped under the grand portico. Not looking around, Straker climbed from the car and walked straight inside. While careful not to give away his alertness, he listened out over the background noise of the free-moving traffic along the waterfront, trying to hear a noise that might give away his tail.
Sure enough, it came.
It was definitely out of place.
A small two-stroke engine was audible, running slowly right to left behind him. The Doppler effect indicated it was clearly slowing down.
Passing through the glass doors of the porch, a side window allowed Straker a fleeting view out onto the road fronting the river. The scooter was trundling by, its driver peering over his shoulder back in the direction of the hotel entrance.
As Straker showered, he thought about ways to deal with that tail.
The effect of the shower was refreshing, making Straker more comfortable – to the extent he was happy not to replace the bandages.
Straker prepared to leave. On one of the tables was the usual file of hotel facts, internal numbers and notices. Leafing through it, he managed to find what he wanted: a page giving details of private functions that could be held at the Baltschug Kempinski.
Picking up the phone by his bed, Straker rang Reception and asked for a taxi – but for it to collect him from the ballroom entrance.
He was told it would be there in five minutes.
Straker moved over to the window of his bedroom and looked down. Sure enough, there was the scooter, parked up on the roadside opposite. Waiting.
Straker left his suite and made his way down to the ballroom entrance of the hotel. Its glass-panelled doors allowed him to see out onto the side street.
Straker waited until he saw the taxi pull up directly outside.
In a matter of seconds, he was able to open the rear door of the taxi and climb straight in. Once inside, he glanced up and down the street. He was comfortable there wasn’t a watcher on this side of the hotel.
As the car pulled away, Straker leant back against the rear seats – so his head would be behind the solid sloping part of the roof, preventing him from being spotted from the outside. It did still enable him to see that the Brandeis Mercedes was waiting for him – parked up on the hotel forecourt as requested. Directly opposite it was the scooter – its rider sitting astride, wearing a helmet, watching the front of the hotel and Straker's car.
The taxi merged with the traffic.
Straker rang McMahon: ‘Can you ring Dimitri in about half an hour,’ he asked, ‘and tell him that he can come back to the Brandeis office?’
‘Why, what's happened? Aren’t you going to Finland?’
‘Nothing's wrong. I was followed from the office. I’ve taken a taxi to the airport instead. I’ve left the scooter – that was following me – watching your car outside the front of my hotel.’
‘You were followed?’
‘I’m afraid so. We’re going to have to be careful. From now on, you’ve got to change cars – or at least travel by taxi.’
McMahon paused.
The line went silent.
Then, her voice sounding strained, she asked: ‘Who the hell are these people?’
FIFTY
Straker didn’t drop his guard at the airport, either. Climbing from the taxi, he scanned the drop-off zone and kept looking around as he walked on into the terminal building. He was pleased to see the place was crammed full of people. While queueing for security, Straker conducted several scans of the crowds and building, and was comfortable there was no one there for him. Only when Straker was through security and airside was he able to relax.
In the departure lounge, he found that McMahon had emailed Pokrovsky's background note about Avel Obrenovich. He transferred the Brandeis report to his iPad. Throughout most of his hour-and-three-quarters-long flight, he read and thought about what it contained.
AVEL OBRENOVICH
Avel Obrenovich, 57, is an oligarch. Forbes Magazine lists him as the twenty-fifth richest man in the world, and the third richest in Russia, with a fortune valued at $25.8 billion.
Obrenovich, along with the other oligarchs, emerged during the corrupt sell-off (privatization) of state assets under President Yeltsin. A lack of transparency or formal bidding process saw assets sold off at massive discounts to their real values – the so-called voucher privatization programme. Insiders got prior warning of impending sales and lodged bids themselves, or sold information to individuals or consortia who did. Billions of rubles were made overnight by those acting on such inside information. Blatant corruption inherent in this process earned it the nickname of the “kleptocracy”.
Obrenovich, from a lower-middle class family in Volchansk on the steppes to the east of the Ural Mountains, got into the Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg where he studied chemistry. Aged 32, Obrenovich was an established but not-very-successful geological surveyor for the state-owned Trans Uralian Oil Company (“TUOC”). It is thought his department was approached by the Ministry of Energy (Minenergo) in Moscow to prepare a national schedule of all the oil assets owned by the Ministry ahead of possible privatizations. Somehow, possibly through a school friend sitting as a deputy in the Legislative Assembly of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Duma, Obrenovich discovered the price at which tracts of his own company were to be sold off. The prospective discounts to net asset value (NAV) were unarguably substantial.
Obrenovich sought to make a bid for himself, choosing to fund it by bank debt. Allegedly, to facilitate his funding, he offered to cut the manager of the local Urals branch of the United Bank of Siberia in, personally, for 20 per cent of the equity if he secured approval for the loans. Obrenovich's bid at the equivalent of $50 million was successful.
With most such sell-offs, there proved to be a number of systemic factors of undervaluation at work. Post-privatization, the kleptocrats were able to exploit sizeable arbitrage opportunities: valuations for these sell-offs had been based on domestic Russian prices; once in private hands, inventory held by these companies could then be valued or sold at international prices for a sizeable premium. Most of these former state assets were immediately revalued to multiples of their purchase prices: from $50 million, the Trans Uralian Oil Company was revalued – a matter of only days after its acquisition – to a figure in excess of $300 million.
