Page 122 of The Oligarch's Daughter

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“This is a golden opportunity,” said Special Agent Mark Addison. He was wearing another one of his nondescript gray suits with a nondescript blue tie. The normally phlegmatic Addison was more excited than Paul had ever seen him. The two were sitting in a coffee shop a few blocks from Grand Central, a short walk from Paul’s office. It was a crunchy sort of place—brick walls, battered leather sofas, Latin music on the playlist.

“Opportunity for what?” Paul asked.

Addison lowered his voice. “Galkin sails with family and close friends and certain business associates, and we want to know who. Names, nationality, passport numbers, port of embarkation, all that.”

“How the hell am I supposed to get passport numbers?”

“They’ll be on the ship’s manifest. Maybe IMO Form 98. Or the IMO FAL Form. And take note of names when you meet people.”

Paul exhaled. “How am I supposed to get the ship’s manifest?”

“It’s always on file in the captain’s office, and it’s often posted around. You’ll find a way.”

“Is there security on the boat?”

“Nothing like at his office. Because his passengers are his friends, and he trusts them.”

“I don’t think Arkady trusts anyone.”

“He’s starting to trust you.”

“I think he did, for a while. But then I went to his institute in Moscow, and I took a trip upstate to the offsite files, and . . . his people suspect me, and I can tell he’s wary of me. I feel like something’s changed.”

Addison didn’t say anything.

“So what is Phantom, do you think?” Paul said. He’d handed Addison the little silver object when he arrived, and the agent now palmed it like a magician doing legerdemain.

“We’ll see when we examine the flash drive. But our working theory is that ‘Phantom’ is the code name for the entity that sent all that money to Galkin. This little doodad might well contain all the financial records. It’s like gene sequencing—it will likely reveal the actual origin of the funds.”

“If there’s anything on it,” Paul said. He wondered if it was okay for him to admit that he’d inserted the drive and looked at it, that it was all garbage text, or so it seemed. Or that he had made a copy. He decided against it.

He changed tack. “Let me ask you something . . .” he began.

He’d once heard from his uncle Thomas that hundreds of seafarers went missing every year and were never heard from again. Dozens of people went missing from cruises.If you want to kill someone, Uncle Thomas had said,do it on the high seas. Under maritime law, he explained to Paul, you’re not required to report a murder you witness aboard a ship. Turns out, prosecuting crimes committed at sea is extremely difficult. It’s often unclear who has jurisdiction when you’re in international waters. Governments may occasionally attempt to investigate, but their chief motivation is always to clear their names. That’s why bodies tend to disappear at sea.

“Yes?” Addison said.

There was a long pause while Paul’s mind revved with paranoia. But this line of thinking seemed so farfetched, so implausible and fantastical, that he decided to keep it to himself. “Nothing. Never mind,” he said.

81

Paul and Tatyana boarded a Bell 430 helicopter at the East Thirty-Fourth Street Heliport. They landed at Teterboro a few feet from the Gulfstream.

Four other people were already on board the jet, two couples who appeared to be old friends of the Galkin family. They spoke to Tatyana in rapid-fire Russian, and she didn’t bother translating for him. He found out that they were bound for Bermuda. The yacht was sailing from Bermuda to St. Lucia, where the two couples would remain on the yacht. Paul and Tatyana would fly back, commercial, to New York.

“Where’s your father?” Paul asked Tatyana during a break in the conversation.

“He’s already on the boat.”

Tatyana, for her part, had brought Pushkin with her in his plaid carrier. He mostly slept: she had given him a sedative.

The flight to St. George’s, on the east end of Bermuda, took a little over two hours. The six of them plus Pushkin got onto another helicopter, which flew them over rows of neat pastel cottages and then to what looked like a cruise ship that was docked in the harbor.

This was Galkin’s private yacht, thePechorin. One of the Russian men, Leonid something—he had to get the man’s last name—explained on the flight that the yacht was named after the protagonist of a novel by Mikhail Lermontov calledA Hero of Our Time. Pechorin, a young czarist officer, is handsome, brave, and strong. A hero. But he is also, apparently, sort of a jerk, an asshole to women, prone to duels and playing Russian roulette.

Leonid was an accountant of some sort and apparently knew Galkin from the old country. He made the point that owning a yacht was the ultimate status symbol. “I mean, everyone flies private and has a car and driver, but not everyone has a mega-yacht.”