Page 109 of The Oligarch's Daughter

Nothing in his email inbox was urgent. Nothing from Vova in IT; nothing from Mr. Frost. He had not been discovered, yet.

He answered a few emails, forwarded a few, checked on his portfolio, checked the time. Half an hour later, the door opened and a guy in a Hudson DataVault uniform wheeled in two brown cardboard boxes on a hand truck. He lifted them onto the table in front of Paul. At one end of each carton was an RFID label, a long sticker with what appeared to be a barcode on it. Underneath the sticker, Paul knew, was a metallic strip that contained a computer chip and the antenna for receiving and transmitting signals.

“That was fast,” Paul said. He’d been expecting to wait over an hour.

“Slow day,” the guy said. He scanned the RFID label on the box with a hand scanner, then removed the security band. The box had Hudson DataVault’s logo on it and a three-inch-tall lid.

When the delivery guy had left the room, Paul opened the first storage carton. In a large, loopy hand on each end of the box was scrawled “FAN-FANZ.” The files were organized alphabetically, with plastic tabs sticking up for each one. Each file was barcoded, Paul saw. He pulled out the six folders labeled “FanStars.” They contained research and reports and printed-out emails on this company in which AGF had once seriously considering investing. Obviously, somebody had done the work. His predecessor, probably.

Most of the files were six-year-old documents of the sort of financial research he’d just done himself on FanStars. Nothing surprising there. Boring stuff—familiar, if now out of date. He leafed through them to make sure he hadn’t missed anything important, and he saw that he hadn’t. It was the folder of email printouts that was worth spending time on, and he did, reading over each email.

And then he knew he had discovered a ticking time bomb.

There at the bottom of one page—so small and seemingly innocuous that he’d nearly missed it—was a signature that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

The person who had originally brought the FanStars deal to Arkady Galkin, and who’d get 10 percent if the deal happened, was someone named Maxim Kagan. That name was disturbingly familiar to Paul. He pulled it up on his phone to confirm his suspicions.

Maxim Kagan was a Russian citizen wanted by the FBI. Not back then, not at the time AGF was working on the FanStars deal, but now. He was what was known as an SDN, a specially designated national. Which meant he was on a long list put out by a little-known office in the Treasury Department. Do business with an SDN, and you could be fined millions of dollars and put in prison for up to thirty years.

Paul wondered if his father-in-law knew Kagan’s background. Galkin might not mind being fined a couple million dollars, but he would definitely mind being in prison for thirty years. If Maxim V. Kagan was behind the FanStars deal now, and AGF invested, Paul’s bosses would be in serious legal peril and would soon be visited by the guys in windbreakers.

He removed from the file folders every email print-out from and to Maxim Kagan, laid the pages out on the table, and carefully photographed each page with his phone camera.

Then, his heart rate quickening, he picked up the second file box, the one labeled, in big blue Sharpie, “PHAM-PHAT.” He opened the box and quickly flipped through the plastic file tabs.

There was no “Phantom.”

Of course not. That would have been too easy.

He went through the file tabs again, more slowly, to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, and he hadn’t. No such file.

Oh, well. At least he had a trophy to bring home: Maxim Kagan.

And then he had a thought. In the Russian transliteration, Phantom was spelled “Fantom.” Beginning with the letterF. He opened the first box again. Went through the file tabs again, in alphabetical order: FAI . . . FAL . . . FAM . . .

A tab nearly hidden by the ones around it. Maybe he’d missed it the first time. A slender folder.

??????.

He pulled open the folder and found no paper files in it. Just a small silver thumb drive Scotch-taped to the inside of the folder.

It was labeled, with a black marker, ??????.

He thought a moment and then slipped the thumb drive into his pocket.

PART NINE

WOODSMEN

Present Day

72

“Mind putting down that tarp before you sit?” the woman said when she saw him, mud-spattered, in the light of her truck’s cab.

Paul took the folded tarp from the floor of the cab and, unfolding it, placed it carefully over the seat and the floor. Then he set down his go-bag, already crusty with dried mud. He hopped up inside and pulled the door shut.

“Thank you,” he said.

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