Page 96

Like all mafia chieftains, the leader of the Chechen clan had two personae. The more public one was that of a highly successful “biznizman” controlling a score of prosperous companies. In the case of Gunayev his chosen specialty was that of property.
In the early years he had simply bought prime development sites all over Moscow by the simple expedient of purchasing or shooting the bureaucrats who, as Communism collapsed and state property became available for public purchase, had the sales of these prime sites at their disposal.
Having taken title to the development sites, Gunayev was able to take advantage of the wave of collaborative planning ventures set up between the Russian tycoons and their Western partners. Gunayev provided the building sites and guaranteed strike-free labor, while the Americans and West Europeans erected their office buildings and skyscrapers. Ownership then became a shared venture, as did the profits and rents from the offices.
With similar procedures, the Chechen took over control of six of the top hotels in the city, branching out into steel, concrete, timber, bricks, and glazing. If one wanted to restore, convert, or build, one dealt with a subsidiary owned and controlled by Umar Gunayev.
That was the overt face of the Chechen mafia. The less visible side of the operation, as with all Moscow gangsterdom, remained in the provinces of black marketeering and embezzlement.
Russian state assets such as gold, diamonds, gas, and oil were simply purchased locally in rubles, at the official rate and even then at knockdown prices. The “sellers,” being bureaucrats, could all be bought anyway. Exported abroad, the assets were sold for dollars, pounds, or deutsche marks at world market prices.
A fraction of the sale price could then be re-imported, converted into a blizzard of rubles at the unofficial rate, and used to purchase the next consignment and pay the necessary bribes. The balance, in the region of eighty percent of the foreign sale, was the profit.
In the early days, before some of the state officials and bankers got the hang of things, a number refused to cooperate. The first warning was verbal, the second involved orthopedic surgery, and the third was permanent. The successor official to the one who had shuffled off the mortal coil usually grasped the game rules.
By the late 1990s violence against members of officialdom or the legitimate professions was hardly ever necessary, but by then the growth of private armies meant that every underworld chieftain had to match all his rivals if need be. Among all the men of violence none matched the speed and unconcern of the Chechens if they felt they were being crossed.
From the late winter of 1994 a new factor had entered the equation. Just before Christmas that year Boris Yeltsin launched his incredibly foolish war against the homeland of Chechnya, ostensibly to oust the breakaway president Dudayev who was claiming independence for it. If the war had been a quick surgical operation, it might have worked. In fact, the supposedly mighty Russian Army took a pasting from lightly armed Chechen guerrillas, who simply headed for the mountains of the Caucasus and fought on.
In Moscow any semblance of hesitation the Chechen mafia might have felt toward the Russian state vanished. Ordinary life became almost impossible for a law-abiding Chechen. With every man’s hand turned against them, the Chechens became a tightly knit and fiercely loyal clan within the Russian capital, far more impenetrable than the Georgian, Armenian, or native Russian underworlds. Within that community the head of the underworld became both a hero and a resistance leader. In the late autumn of 1999 this was the former captain of the KGB, Umar Gunayev.
And yet as businessman Gunayev he could still circulate freely and live like the multimillionaire he was. His office was in fact the entire top floor of one of his hotels, a collaborative enterprise with an American chain, situated near the Helsinki Station.
The journey to the hotel was accomplished in Umar Gunayev’s Mercedes limousine, proofed against bullet and bomb. He had his own driver and bodyguard, and the three from the café came behind in the Volvo. Both cars drove into the underground garage of the hotel, and after the basement area had been searched by the three from the BMW, Gunayev and Monk walked to a high-speed elevator that took them to the tenth and penthouse floor. The electric power to the elevator was then disconnected.
There were more guards in the lobby on the tenth floor, but they finally found privacy in the Chechen leader’s apartment. A white-jacketed steward brought food and drink at a command from Gunayev.
“There is something I have to show you,” said Monk. “I hope you will find it interesting, even educational.”
He opened his attaché case and activated the two control buttons to release the false base. Gunayev watched with interest. The case and its potential clearly excited his admiration.
Monk handed over the Russian translation of the verification report first. It comprised thirty-three pages between stiff gray paper covers. Gunayev raised an eyebrow.
“Must I?”
“It will reward your patience. Please.”
Gunayev sighed and began to read. As he became more involved in the narrative he left his coffee untouched and concentrated on the text. It took twenty minutes. Finally he put the report back on the table between them.
“So. This manifesto is no joke. The real thing. So what?”
“This is your next president talking,” said Monk. “This is what he intends to do when he has the power to do it. Quite soon now.”
He slipped the black-covered manifesto across the table.
“Another thirty pages?”
“Forty, actually. But even more interesting. Please. Humor me.”
Gunayev ran his eye quickly over the first ten pages, taking in the plans for the single-party state, the re-commissioning of the nuclear arsenal, the re-conquest of the lost republics, and the new Gulag archipelago of slave camps. Then his eyes narrowed and he slowed his pace.
Monk knew the point he had reached. He could envisage the messianic sentences as he had first read them in front of the sparkling water of Sapodilla Bay in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
“The final and complete extermination of every last Chechen on the face of Russia ... the destruction of the rat-people so that they will never rise again ... the reduction of the tribal homeland to a wild-goat pasture … not a brick on brick nor a stone on stone … forever ... the surrounding Ossetians, Dagomans, and Ingush will watch the process and learn due and proper respect and fear of their new Russian masters. …”
Gunayev read to the end and put the manifesto down.
“It’s been tried before,” he said. “The Czars tried, Stalin tried, Yeltsin tried.”