LOS ALTOS HILLS, CALIFORNIA
Friday 7 May
“I just want to see the man react,” Rena had said.
They were heading to Anatol Bremmer’s house, and, as far as Randi was concerned, they didn’t have much of a plan. Rena had suggested they “poke a stick in the hornets’ nest.” She didn’t have a better idea. So they were going up there with a stick.
They had spent the last eighteen hours learning everything the FBI knew about Anatol Bremmer, Omar Abbad, and James Wei. Abbad was out of the country. Wei would come next.
So Bremmer was first.
Randi tried to lighten her sense of dread. “I’ve always wanted to see a house worth a hundred fifty million dollars,” she said.
That was how much public records showed Anatol Bremmer had paid for his Los Altos Hills home, the wooded suburb in the southern part of the Valley. “How many bathrooms you think he has?”
“Maybe not that many,” Rena said, playing along. “Remember, he did pay double the asking.”
That was the story at least. When Bremmer moved from Russia in 2010, he bought the most expensive house ever listed in California, which had an asking price of $70 million. To make sure he wasn’t outbid he then paid double the list, a decision that seemed to impress people in the Valley more than raise suspicions and helped raise Bremmer’s profile immediately. That, Rena had learned from one of Damon Williams’s books, was a clear signal of a culture shifting.
Bremmer met them at the door. He had a square face and piercing indigo eyes, and he seemed different from the science geek he projected in the videos Brooks had watched of him, doing talks about space travel at tech conferences. He was more charming and more intimidating.
He greeted them with a slight bow, an old-world formality. “Welcome to my home,” he said, and with a wave of his arm invited them inside.
The house was enormous, the grounds behind it even bigger. This was a compound, Randi realized, a place where Bremmer and his family could be protected, probably by an electric fence and armed guards.
He led them to a home office large enough for its own conference table. The three of them sat around one corner of the table, which gave the meeting a sense of intimacy while reminding them of Bremmer’s power.
“Why, if I may, the pleasure of this visit?”
When they called ahead, they’d tried to make him worry. They were working for the president, they’d said, and wanted to ask him about a classified research program President Traynor had started, in which he was an investor.
“You saw David Traynor the day before he was inaugurated,” Brooks began.
“Yes. David and I were friends.”
“What did you two talk about?”
Anatol paused, taking time to read his visitors’ faces.
“I told him he should keep away from me,” Bremmer answered. A self-deprecating smile. “A president trying to heal the country shouldn’t be seen with an ex-Russian billionaire.”
They didn’t smile back.
“Was that all?”
“He told me about the classified battery program. I told him he shouldn’t have. David was not good at keeping secrets. Most Americans aren’t.”
Bremmer’s accent was thicker than it sounded in the videos.
“You want to know if I am a leaker stealing secrets for Russia. Do you not?”
Was Bremmer trying to shock them? To gain the upper hand? Randi wondered what Peter was thinking.
“Among other things,” she said.
“Everyone wonders this of me. Because I live in more than one culture.”
Rena spoke now for the first time. “What does that mean?”
“I am a scientist, for example, but also a businessman. Two different cultures. I am Russian and American. I play chess but love baseball. You see?”
Brooks could sense Rena next to her quickly developing a dislike for the man.
“Which culture comes first for you, Anatol?” Peter asked. “Russian or American?”
Bremmer shrugged. “In Russia, I dream in Russian. In America, in English.”
It was the kind of answer Rena would loathe, one that sounded scripted.
Rena said, “I don’t believe anyone can be equally loyal to two countries at the same time. Especially when those countries are enemies.”
Bremmer studied Rena, the performer becoming the observer.
“My heart breaks because my two countries cannot be friends.”
“You don’t look like you’re suffering,” Rena said.
Oooh-kay, time to tone it down, Brooks thought. Peter was going too fast. Bremmer would shut down.
“Why did you leave Russia?” she asked, trying to get between them.
“When I was a boy in the Soviet Union, everything was controlled. The party used to register every typewriter in the country so the censors who opened all the mail could know who had written every letter. Imagine. When the Internet came, we hoped it would change all that. End the surveillance society. The web was not so easy to control—at least back then. That’s why I helped build the Russian Internet. Eventually I realized what remained of the Soviet Union would never die. It would seize control of the web and turn it into a weapon. So I left.”
It was a good story.
“I know why you doubt me,” Bremmer said.
“Why would we doubt you?” Brooks asked.
“Because I have an accent and look like Putin.” They were both bald, but Brooks didn’t see the resemblance.
Rena leaned toward Bremmer now and said softly, “Where did your money come from?”
“This again?”
“Yes, this again.”
“It was 1996,” said Bremmer, “and I could see the Internet coming like it was memory, something I had always known. I was twenty-two.” Bremmer paused. “But I was a student and had no money. If I were to build Russia its own Internet, I would need financing. Who had money? The oligarchs and gangsters. And since they knew nothing of computers, they had to trust us, even though we were only children and also Jews. My family knew someone at Stoya Bank, which was connected to the government. So, yes, our first millions were, what’s the American word . . . tainted. They usually are. There’s an old saying in the Valley: never look too hard at someone’s first million. You will always find dirty money.”
“If you already were partners with these people, why did you leave?” Rena said.
“When Putin came to power, I knew he would bring Soviet ways and the cult of personality back. He is KGB. So I gave them the Internet I built for them and came here.”
“And kept your money,” Rena said.
“I sold my company.”
“In the middle of the recession?”
“It was still worth a good deal.”
“And here you invested even more wisely.”
Bremmer smiled. His first two U.S. investments were record setting. A few million into Y’all Post became a billion with the company’s public offering. He repeated the pattern two years later with Little Bird. No one knew where the money came from. In those days after the recession, no one had quite so much of it to spend. His investment firm now had more than fifteen billion dollars in capitalization.
“You think we are trying to steal the technology we invest in? And give it to Russia?” Bremmer said.
“Are you?”
“That would diminish the value of our investments.”
“How did you come to invest in Ignius so early, before David Traynor launched his program?”
Bremmer’s smile this time was thinner. “I had been telling David for years that this century would belong to the countries that controlled two technologies: renewable energy and space travel. So that’s where we were investing.”
Rena and Brooks suspected Bremmer wanted to own the mineral rights in space, too.
“Why are you two really here?” Bremmer asked.
Brooks later would think it was almost as if she’d heard something snap in Rena’s head.
“To decide whether you should be deported,” Peter declared.
They had never discussed making a threat like that.
“You live in a black-and-white world, Mr. Rena.”
“It makes it easier not to get lost.”
Bremmer rewarded that with no smile at all.
“Did you have Kim Matsuda murdered?” Rena asked.
Whoa now, Brooks thought. This needed to end.
“No.”
But Bremmer evinced no surprise at the news of Kim’s death.
“Did the Russian government kill her?”
“I have no idea.”
“Did Unit 21966?”
Bremmer took an extra moment. “I have never met Kim Matsuda.”
“Are you lying to me?”
“This is like the riddle about the man who says he will never lie, isn’t it,” Bremmer said. “Once he says that, you do not know whether to believe anything he says.”
They should go, Brooks thought.
“People who look into your history have a habit of dying,” Rena said.
“I have heard those stories, too. They are made up by people in Russia who want to hurt me. I left to get away from all that.”
“Or you were sent.”
They needed to leave. Now.
“Are you threatening me officially?” Bremmer asked.
“I’m threatening you because Kim Matsuda was my friend,” Peter said. “And that should worry you more.”
That was when Brooks ended it.
“Okey dokey, boys, that’s enough,” she said.
She stood up. “Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Bremmer.” Peter slowly rose, too.
“WHAT WAS THAT?” SHE DEMANDED AS THEY DROVE AWAY.
“We were poking a stick in the hornets’ nest.”
Yeah, and that plan had sucked from the jump, she thought.
“I think we’re going to get stung,” she said.
“I think we’re going to see which direction the hornets fly.”