The Silent Oligarch: A Novel by Christopher Morgan Jones
Authors: Christopher Morgan Jones
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industries. Where companies had once been used for espionage, to provide cover or logistics, the newly open arms of capitalism now allowed the Russians to own what they had once only thought to observe. The plan had taken on fresh urgency when the financial crisis of 1998 left assets cheap and Russia looking weak and foolish in the eyes of the world. The article finished with some well-reasoned speculation about what Faringdon would turn its attention to next.
Malin wasn’t mentioned. It seemed odd that Inessa should have learned so much from such a good source and not know the name of the person within the ministry pulling the strings. But then the whole article rang false. Unusually for Inessa’s work it made no mention of its sources, not even to say that they couldn’t be revealed, and the story read as if it had been brought to her already half-formed by someone who had an interest in seeing it in print. But if that was the case, why publish it in an obscure London trade magazine with a tiny and specialist audience? Why fail to name Malin? Why write it without any form of substantiation? Why, for heaven’s sake, give it to Inessa, of all people?
That was the strangest thing of all. It didn’t read like Inessa’s work. It was unbalanced; it failed to convince; it wasn’t good enough. It was no wonder that no one else had thought to take up the story.
Webster spent another half hour checking earlier and later editions for any further mention of Inessa’s name, found none, and left less wise and more preoccupied than after his conversation with Alan Knight.
Almost ten years earlier, in the days after Inessa’s funeral, he had made a list of the stories that might have killed her. Eventually he had trimmed it, according to wherewithal and motive, from a dozen to three: a story about a corrupt Duma member and the head of organized crime in Sverdlovsk, the killing of a chemicals executive in Moscow, and the series about the owners of the Kazakh aluminum factory. But the same problem undermined each. It made no sense for a Russian to kill a journalist on foreign soil, even just across the border in Kazakhstan, because to do so was to complicate what had become almost routine. In Russia journalists seemed to die in two places—in Chechnya, where law did not exist and violence came to everyone; and in their homes, mugged on the landings of their apartments, robbed, dashed to their deaths by their own hand—and convictions followed either too quickly or not at all. During his time in Russia three or four journalists a year had died this way, and for every murder that was filed neatly away as an opportunist crime by vagrants or drunken neo-Nazis there were half a dozen that would simply never be solved. Whoever had felt threatened by Inessa would have been wise to finish her at home, because that’s where she was least safe and they most protected.
But this story was different. There was enough at stake here, and enough that was already strange, for its ending to be an anomaly. Webster imagined Malin at the beginning of his great project, the patient loyalist, national glory and untold profit ahead of him, threatened by a young woman who knew so much more than she should. For him it might make sense. Webster could feel unseen components of the puzzle rearranging themselves in his subconscious, moving into place, tempting him to believe that this, at last, was the knowledge he had been missing for ten years.
T O HAVE A THEORY, though, was not unusual. He had had theories before and nothing had come of them. The important thing with a theory was to let it settle, resist its charms, interrogate it quietly and see if it held up.
But before being disciplined about it he called Steve Elder at his new job and found him happy to talk. Elder had indeed been in Moscow: stringer for The New York Times from 1993 to 1994; they had met once, at a British embassy reception. He could remember the article, and Inessa, even though
Malin wasn’t mentioned. It seemed odd that Inessa should have learned so much from such a good source and not know the name of the person within the ministry pulling the strings. But then the whole article rang false. Unusually for Inessa’s work it made no mention of its sources, not even to say that they couldn’t be revealed, and the story read as if it had been brought to her already half-formed by someone who had an interest in seeing it in print. But if that was the case, why publish it in an obscure London trade magazine with a tiny and specialist audience? Why fail to name Malin? Why write it without any form of substantiation? Why, for heaven’s sake, give it to Inessa, of all people?
That was the strangest thing of all. It didn’t read like Inessa’s work. It was unbalanced; it failed to convince; it wasn’t good enough. It was no wonder that no one else had thought to take up the story.
Webster spent another half hour checking earlier and later editions for any further mention of Inessa’s name, found none, and left less wise and more preoccupied than after his conversation with Alan Knight.
Almost ten years earlier, in the days after Inessa’s funeral, he had made a list of the stories that might have killed her. Eventually he had trimmed it, according to wherewithal and motive, from a dozen to three: a story about a corrupt Duma member and the head of organized crime in Sverdlovsk, the killing of a chemicals executive in Moscow, and the series about the owners of the Kazakh aluminum factory. But the same problem undermined each. It made no sense for a Russian to kill a journalist on foreign soil, even just across the border in Kazakhstan, because to do so was to complicate what had become almost routine. In Russia journalists seemed to die in two places—in Chechnya, where law did not exist and violence came to everyone; and in their homes, mugged on the landings of their apartments, robbed, dashed to their deaths by their own hand—and convictions followed either too quickly or not at all. During his time in Russia three or four journalists a year had died this way, and for every murder that was filed neatly away as an opportunist crime by vagrants or drunken neo-Nazis there were half a dozen that would simply never be solved. Whoever had felt threatened by Inessa would have been wise to finish her at home, because that’s where she was least safe and they most protected.
But this story was different. There was enough at stake here, and enough that was already strange, for its ending to be an anomaly. Webster imagined Malin at the beginning of his great project, the patient loyalist, national glory and untold profit ahead of him, threatened by a young woman who knew so much more than she should. For him it might make sense. Webster could feel unseen components of the puzzle rearranging themselves in his subconscious, moving into place, tempting him to believe that this, at last, was the knowledge he had been missing for ten years.
T O HAVE A THEORY, though, was not unusual. He had had theories before and nothing had come of them. The important thing with a theory was to let it settle, resist its charms, interrogate it quietly and see if it held up.
But before being disciplined about it he called Steve Elder at his new job and found him happy to talk. Elder had indeed been in Moscow: stringer for The New York Times from 1993 to 1994; they had met once, at a British embassy reception. He could remember the article, and Inessa, even though
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