DravisWrites

2019

BERLIN

Just before the pandemic, in Berlin at the behest of MI6 on a bitter December day, John Drake spent the morning treading the streets where the Wall once ran, seeking the spot where his father died.

He’d expected an unhealed wound, an urban disfigurement carved into the city’s skin and made part of its identity forever. Instead, he found a discreet line marking the route–like a long-faded scar on a Prussian officer who’d once taken a dueling cut–made of double rows of cobblestones labeled “Berliner Mauer 1961-1989.” There were walking tours for sightseers, plaques at spots like Checkpoint Charlie, and kiosks selling rubble as tourist keepsakes, alleged to be chunks of the One True Wall. The city had moved on. The world had moved on.

Drake was there for a get-acquainted lunch with Hans Traurig, his German intelligence contact from the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), at an outdoor cafe in Potsdamer Platz. He found Traurig to be dour and literal, as well as one of those men unaffected by cold, the type who could wear shorts through a Northern European winter. Even sitting beneath a heater at the café, Drake was chilled inside his dark woolen topcoat while Traurig seemed entirely at his ease in a lightweight suit.

Drake’s father had been murdered nearby to Potsdamer, three months before Drake’s birth on November 9, 1988. On Drake’s first birthday the Wall fell, and over the years stories of his father had come to Drake like the feeble light from a distant star.

PART ONE

THE MISSING MONEY

July 2021

The Samovar

St. Petersburg, Russia

The tall silver samovar in the cavernous main hall of Peter the Great Bank was at once a celebration of Russian identity and a point of distinction for the bank. It stood on an elevated platform at the far end of the room, before a grid of sixty wooden desks arranged in rows of five. When PTG was formed in the late Nineties, one of the founders acquired the samovar to bring a touch of elegance to the workspace, and no one else in St. Petersburg had one.  

Yuri, gathering his courage, poured tea from the Tsarist relic into the pale green ceramic mug his boy had given him, marked garishly with “World’s Best Father” written in red Cyrillic. Then carrying his steaming cup and a sheaf of papers Yuri approached his superior.  Obradovic’s desk was at one corner of the grid at the other end of the room from the samovar.  Yuri was a small and slender young man, and deferential.  

“Sir?”  He began quietly.  “I have discovered a discrepancy in some accounts, something that may be very serious.”

“Go on,” Obradovic said, without looking up from what he was doing.

“I used to work for the Volga funds group, which is how I discovered it, you see.” 

“Yes, what is it?”  

“I saw that many of our large customers have Euro-based assets in the Volga funds.  I noticed that the management fees they paid were too large, higher than what I know Volga charges.  I think these account statements are wrong, by quite a lot,” Yuri said.

“And you think the bank is making erroneous statements to its customers?” 

“No, no, the statements come from Volga, but the amounts are wrong.  And by millions of Euros! A hundred and twenty!” Yuri said.

“A hundred twenty million Euros?” Obradovic looked up, suddenly attentive.  

“Yes!  A quarter of a percent wrong on the management fee, going back at least four years. The accounts, all together, are several billion Euros.  Over time, the fees on accounts that size add up considerably.” Yuri became enthusiastic.  He was clever, and since he had not been immediately dismissed by Obradovic, he hoped to impress him.

“Which accounts?” asked Obradovic.

Yuri handed over the printouts.  “You see?  Here are other accounts, not so big, that have the right amount of fees charged.  These numbers are printed straight from the Volga website.  I fear a terrible mistake.” 

Obradovic looked across the account names.  Yuri sipped his tea, waiting as Obradovic read. The fee difference, once one knew to look for it, jumped out.  Yuri also was right about the amount of money involved. 

“Yuri, you may have made an important discovery.  I must ask you, now, to let me handle this, to make inquiries.  Tell no one else, as reputations may be at stake, and we don’t want to take action until we understand all the facts.” 

“Yes, yes, of course,” Yuri said.

Obradovic immediately carried the paperwork to his own superior, Borozin, in Borozin’s private office next to the main floor.  “I have something to show you,” Obradovic began.  “One of my new clerks brought this to me.  He says, and I think correctly, that some of our clients are overcharged by more than a hundred million Euros for their accounts at Volga.” 

“Yes?”

“The problem is who the clients are.” Obradovic handed over the papers.  “The accounts on the right have the lower management fee—you see the highlighting?  The accounts on the left, for the same investments, are charged a higher fee,”    

Borozin looked.  “Very well.” 

“Now look at the names on the accounts.” 

On Borozin’s face, Obradovic could see the light dawn.

“Ah,” said Borozin.  “This clerk, which one was it?” 

“Yuri.  Recent hire.” 

“He’s a bright one.”

“He’s a fucking chipmunk,” Obradovic said.  “A puppy dog.  He is a constant flatterer.”

“He wants your good opinion.” 

“No, he wants me to like him, and I resent it.    My affection is mine to bestow, on my terms and not because he’s begging. But he is meticulous, and he meets deadlines.”

“It could be worse.” Borozin passed the sheaf of papers back to Obradovic. “He could be indifferent to his work.  What did you say to him about this?”

“I told him to say nothing, and that I would make inquiries.” 

“Good.  I suggest that you bury him in work.  A rush project to keep him occupied and out of mischief for a week or two.  I’ll need to figure out how to make some quiet inquiries—right now I don’t have any ideas on how–and I don’t want something coming back that blows up on us,” Borozin said. 

“Of course.  If there is a problem, it must be Volga’s, not ours.”  

“Correct.”   

“It could be a mistake, and if it is the bank’s, we want to be able to fix it before we draw attention to it.  Or if it is not a mistake…..”  Obradovic shrugged. “Maybe we act like we just don’t know.”

“Exactly,” said Borozin.  “Thank you for your careful handling of this.”

Obradovic returned to his desk, and summoned Yuri.  “I need a report by the beginning of next week on these accounts.”  He handed Yuri 200 names.  

“What about the problem I found?” Yuri asked.

“I have referred it internally to be investigated. In the meantime, focus on this assignment, and if something comes back on the other matter, I will let you know.”

Yuri left Obradovic’s desk deflated.  He’d hoped for praise for his initiative and forthrightness.  Yuri had imagined congratulations, and instead received make-work.   

In the morning, Obradovic looked in on Yuri, who appeared busy with the stack of material he’d been assigned the day before.  Instead, without Obradovic’s knowledge, Yuri called a former colleague at the Volga investment firm.  “I want to ask a question.  Can we talk, confidentially?”

His friend agreed.  Yuri asked Volga’s current management fee Volga for the accounts in question, whether the fee had changed, or perhaps might vary depending on the size of the account.  He was assured that no matter how large the account got, the fee was the same.   This confirmed Yuri’s suspicion that the large fees he had spotted were at least an error, and perhaps even a serious problem.  

Yuri then took his friend through a list of 50 account names.   Some Yuri knew were an issue, and others not.  He asked his friend to follow as he read down the list over the phone, and to tell him what the account balances were, and what activity had been for the past year.  Yuri’s computer was open to the Volga account page and he was reading the accounts listed on his screen at the same time as his friend.

As they went down the list, the pattern emerged:  When Yuri asked about an account that worried him, his friend read a lower number for management fees than the one Yuri found displayed on his own screen.  Somehow, even though they both were connected to the same account statements from Volga’s online records at the same time, they were presented with different amounts for the deduction of management fees.     

Moreover, in each problem account, the account balance read by his friend matched the balance shown on Yuri’s screen, even though it should have been higher.  In each case, his friend read to him transfers out of the account equal to the discrepancy in management fees.  

Yuri did not say on the phone what he was examining, nor which accounts he thought were off.

“Thank you, my friend,” said Yuri.  “I was checking whether we have an internal computer problem at the bank.  This helps me very much.”

The whole matter bothered Yuri greatly.  He liked the orderliness of accounting, and the mystery felt like a splinter he couldn’t remove. Yuri took his notes from his phone call, and then prepared an email that he sent to his friend at Volga, with a copy to Obradovic.   His email excluded the specifics, but closed with the words, “We should arrange a face to face meeting soon, between Volga funds and representatives of the Peter the Great Bank.  In some cases, our records do not match regarding the holdings of our clients who hold Volga funds, and you have told me of transfers that do not show up when we at PTG access Volga’s records online.  We must determine the source of these discrepancies, which I calculate to be a substantial amount in the aggregate, exceeding one hundred million Euros.”   

Obradovic leaped from his desk and came to Yuri upon reading the email.

“What have you done?” he demanded.  

“I followed up with a friend to confirm whether there was a problem with those accounts I told you about.  They were not charged higher management fees, by Volga’s records.  Volga showed that the money was transferred out of the account entirely, but here at the bank we can’t see it, we see something else.  We don’t know what our clients have authorized.” 

“Yuri, I told you to leave it alone, and tell no one.  And you did the opposite.”

“I want to make sure our clients don’t lose their money. How can that be wrong?”

“Yuri….our clients are very important people,” Obradovic said.

“Yes, I know.”  

“Many of them are friends of Vladimir Putin,” Obradovic said. 

“Yes.”  

“Many of them may, in fact, be holding money for Putin himself,” Obradovic said.

“All right.”

“Sometimes, things that look like problems, may not be problems.  They may be very deliberately done, with secrecy being the whole point. We may not know everything they are doing, because they may want us not to know,” Obradovic said.

“You mean, for state activities?”  

“It could be anything. It could be hiding a mistress.  It could be tax evasion.  It could be financing an army to invade Turkey. We don’t know.” Obradovic leaned to bring his face closer to Yuri, and lowered his voice. “And sometimes, if our customers don’t want us to know, we don’t want to know.”  

“I see. That is a very different view of the situation.  I didn’t think of that.”

“No, you didn’t. That’s why you need to do only what you are told.”

“But what if there is theft in the accounts?  It looks like some kind of embezzlement.” Yuri’s consternation was plain.  

“As I told you yesterday, we are checking on the situation,” Obradovic said.  “We don’t want to hurt our customers.  We don’t want to hurt the bank.  But we should step carefully when we are around tigers, don’t you agree?”  

“Oh no, no,” moaned Yuri.  Obradovic saw that, finally, his words and the implications were sinking in to Yuri.  So eager to please, and now he may have made a giant error.  

“Now, now.  When your friend calls, put him off.  We won’t have any meetings until we know that we actually have something to meet about.  If it turns out these transfers are no problem, then we won’t have any meeting at all, and in a few weeks, this will all be forgotten.”    

Yuri looked sick to his stomach. 

“This will not be serious,” Obradovic said.   “It’s only one small email.”