I nodded. “Let’s hope this has more of use in it than that one did.”
There was a wooden bench against the opposite wall. We settled on it, and I opened the journal. There was a date—14 October—written on the inside cover, but no year. Beneath it were several dates. Beside each one was a place and two names. The second name was in parentheses.
“This is a debrief,” I said.
“Looks like it.”
I turned to the next page, where he’d made connections. Vasiliev’s name sat at the head of the second, third, and the fourth chains.
“This looks like routing structures, all moving in the same direction.”
“The photo of the single page Dagger had must have been taken from this book.”
The fifth page showed all four lists converging on a single entity—Hellmer Privatbank. He’d underlined it twice, and beneath it, he’d added,Founded 1988. Vaduz.
Bishop pulled out his mobile and typed the name. “Vaduz is in Liechtenstein. It is where the small private banks live. The kind that operate behind real bank-secrecy law.”
“So anything parked there does not show up on a Russian service’s radar.”
“Not unless the Russian service already knows the bank exists and has a reason to look at it. For an FSB man, that means it may as well not exist.”
I put my finger on the underlined name. “Vasiliev is FSB. The FSB is his employer. Anything he moves through a bank, his own service watches, his own service sees. A bank his own service cannot see is a bank he is hiding from the people he works for.”
“That is the whole point of picking Vaduz,” said Bishop.
“The Kremlin won’t look the other way.” The ramifications of this were mind-blowing. “They’ll forgive a lot from a man like Vasiliev, but not a private war chest sitting off their books since the late eighties. If Moscow learns he has been running his own bank in Liechtenstein for almost four decades, they’ll put a round in him themselves.”
“This is not exposure for him. It is a death sentence.” Bishop tapped the page with two fingers. “Walk me through the four chains again.”
“If he were only a customer of Hellmer, he would show up on one chain, which is the one that moves his money in. That is what a customer looks like on paper. One line in, one line out. There are four chains in this book. Four separate routing structures, built four different ways, all ending at the same bank. Hellmer isn’t a bank he uses. It’s a bank he built to use.”
“And the founding date was 1988?” he asked.
“Vasiliev had to have been in his thirties or right around there. There’s no way someone like him becomes a client of a brand-new Liechtenstein private bank in its first year of operation. He wouldn’t know the bank existed unless he started it himself.”
Bishop set his mobile down on the bench. “Dagger found the loop yesterday. He couldn’t find where it ends. This might be it, Katarina.”
I nodded once. “And Horatio and Mikhail found it all those years ago.”
“They were the only two who ever did.”
“And Vasiliev killed them for it.”
Bishop exhaled. “This goes to Doc tomorrow. Not today.”
“Agreed.”
I closed the journal, held it against my chest, and followed him up the stone steps. While he put the Thanksgiving boxes where Anna told him to, I set Horatio’s book on the side table, out of the way.
Anna wasat the stove when we came up from the basement, and she didn’t turn around.
“What took so long?” she asked.
“We were in the basement—” Bishop began.
“Yes, I know where you were. I’m asking why it took so long.”
“We found something that took us a minute,”I explained.
