Ark Angel - Anthony Horowitz [56]
“And this was when he had his big idea. His work with the army and the KGB had brought him into contact with the Russian underworld – I’m talking about the mafiya. He knew all the big names and so he went to them for a loan. You see, he was a respectable businessman. He’d seen the future, and with their support he could buy into it big time. He needed about eighty million dollars, enough to buy a controlling interest in Novgerol, one of the big Russian oil companies. The mafiya met with him and decided they liked him, but they didn’t have enough money, so they turned to their friends in Japan. You’ve heard of the yakuza? Well, they were interested too, and just to round things off, the Chinese triads also decided to join the party. Between the three of them they raised the finance and Drevin was in. Suddenly he was a major player.
“So he bought into Novgerol. He got it for a song and the people who suffered in the end were the Russian people. It was their oil and it was more or less stolen from them. I doubt that Drevin lost any sleep over that. His shares doubled and trebled and multiplied by about a hundred, and he was able to pay back all his criminal friends with interest, and that was the end of that. Of course, there were people who got in his way. There were protesters. The police launched an inquiry. And do you know what? They were all murdered. You only had to sneeze at Drevin and someone would call round at your house with a machine gun. Kill you. Kill your family. Kill everyone who knew you. It was easier to keep quiet and, believe me, after a while, people did just that.
“So Drevin is in with the mafiya. He’s in with the yakuza. And he’s in with the triads. And of course, once these people know him, they’re not going to leave him alone. Not that Drevin cares. He’s got as much money as anyone could possibly want; but the funny thing is, people like that – they always want more. So he keeps working with them. He becomes, if you like, the banker for half the criminal organizations in the world. The yakuza are selling Russian energetics weapons to terrorist groups; the triads are running drugs out of Burma and Afghanistan; the mafiya are moving into drugs and prostitution throughout the West: Drevin provides the cash flow. I would say that around the world there are hundreds of dirty deals done every day and Drevin’s money is behind just about all of them.”
“If you know so much about him, why don’t you arrest him?” Alex asked. His head was spinning. He had just spent almost a week living with this man and he was trying to marry what Byrne was saying with what he had himself observed. He had guessed that Drevin was no saint; but he had never suspected anything like this.
“We’re going to arrest him,” Byrne replied. “I told you. We’ve been investigating him for over a year. But when you’re dealing with the really big criminals, Alex, it’s not as easy as you might think. I mean, look at Al Capone. He was one of America’s worst gangsters. Nobody knows how many people he had killed. But despite all the work of the FBI, in the end all they could get him for was fiddling his income tax. It’s the same with Drevin.
“He’s clever; he’s covered his back. A deal here, a deal there – he leaves no trace. We get whispers and hints that he’s involved, but it’s like trying to build a castle out of individual grains of sand. Witnesses are too scared to talk. Anyone who comes forward gets killed. Even so, slowly but surely, we’ve been building a case against him. The State Department has collected over two thousand documents. There are transcripts, tape and video recordings, photographs. There’s been a team of thirty people working round the clock for months; there still is. And they’ve all had to be protected. From the start, we’ve been afraid