BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
Wednesday 5 May
Royce Hoskins was a short, well-built man whose eyes said he had seen tougher people than Peter Rena.
His office, in the wood-shingled journalism building on the Berkeley campus, was crammed with piles of papers, which were perched in haphazard stacks on every available surface. Rena had the feeling of being inside the man’s brain.
Hoskins was the second-to-last person Kim Matsuda had seen before she headed for the airport on the trip she didn’t survive. At least that Rena knew of.
It seemed from what Rena had read that Hoskins was part advocate, part journalist, part crazy, and two parts pain in the ass. A South African former anti-apartheid activist, he had moved to the United States to become an investigative reporter. His résumé included a string of exposés and a half dozen employers. When no more publishers apparently would hire him, he switched to teaching.
At Berkeley, he ran an “institute” that used graduate students as diggers on investigative reporting projects. The projects took years and usually involved publications in different countries. He had also been working on an unfinished book about corrupt money in Silicon Valley for more than a decade. Most Silicon Valley executives treated Hoskins as a crank or denounced him as an antitech polemicist.
Hoskins stood behind his desk. He didn’t offer Peter a seat. “Who are you exactly, Mr. Rena?”
“I told you on the phone,” Rena said. “And I’m sure by now you’ve looked me up.”
Hoskins smiled sarcastically. “You’re a kind of investigator,” he said, “but the details are a little hazy.”
“We’re in the same business.”
“We’re not even in the same galaxy,” Hoskins snapped. “You work for private clients to keep things secret. I do it for the public.”
“I was working with Kim Matsuda.”
“Then why do you want to talk to me?”
“Last thing we heard from Kim is she had something important to tell us that she could only say in person. You were one of the last people to see her alive.”
Hoskins didn’t look surprised at the news of Kim’s death. Her demise wasn’t exactly a secret, but it wasn’t front-page news either: a little-known government official having a heart attack on a plane.
“Who is us, Mr. Rena? Who is it you work for—exactly?”
“We off the record?”
“Off the record?”
“As in, you can’t publish what I tell you.”
“I know what it means. That’s useless to me.”
“On the contrary, it’ll be enormously useful for both of us.”
Hoskins gave Rena a glower, but there was curiosity in it now. He offered Rena a chair, too, remaining standing himself; the reporter liked to play power games. Rena settled in.
“I was working with Kim,” Rena said. “We report directly to the president of the United States. And we don’t know how she died.” Rena studied Hoskins’s expression. “Because you’re one of the last people who saw her alive, I need to know what you talked about.”
At this Hoskins took a seat behind his desk. “She die of natural causes?”
“We don’t know yet. That’s one of the reasons I need to know what she came here to talk about.”
“How do I know you’re not here to silence me?” Hoskins said.
Rena sighed. “Record the conversation, Royce. Post it to the cloud or whatever you do to protect yourself. But I don’t have a lot of time to waste persuading you.”
Hoskins took a moment calculating what he might learn versus what he might risk. Then he took out his phone and pushed a button.
“What did Kim ask you about?” Rena asked.
“She wanted to know about investors in the Valley.”
“Which ones?”
“People whose money isn’t really what they say it is.” Hoskins was still trying to get more than he gave.
Rena leaned closer to the reporter. “Stop playing games, Royce,” he said, almost in a whisper.
Instead of antagonizing Hoskins, Rena’s anger seemed to make him relax a little. He understood anger.
“You ever hear of the Pandora Papers?” Hoskins asked.
“No.”
It was the name of an investigative journalism project that Hoskins’s institute at Berkeley was a part of, one of several projects of the International Reporting Collaborative, Hoskins explained. In the collaborative, publications from different countries shared documents and resources in order to conduct more ambitious and expensive investigations than one publication could mount alone. The group had done four projects so far, the so-called Cayman Papers, the Utopia Papers, and a couple of others. They’d uncovered international money-laundering schemes that implicated major banks and some of the world’s richest people.
“The Pandora Papers is a new project of the collaborative. I’m an advisor on it. Because of my book.” The one Hoskins couldn’t seem to finish. “The Pandora Papers is looking at whose money is behind the biggest venture capital firms in the world. Who really owns tech?”
Rena had heard of the collaborative and knew its methods were controversial. They involved leaked emails and whistleblowing employees from financial institutions. But their facts held up.
“It’s dangerous work, Mr. Rena. They kill journalists these days—even in the United States. Most Americans have no idea. You call the press the enemy of the people enough times, eventually the public believes you.”
“Who did Kim ask you about?”
“So you can hide what she found out and protect the people she was looking at?”
Rena balled his hands into fists. “If I were the man you imagine me to be, would I be here saying please?”
Hoskins took a second to let that spin around his mind.
The reporter would talk, Rena thought. Journalists usually did; they were storytellers, not secret keepers. And Hoskins’s curiosity about why Rena was here would be too much for him to resist. But he wasn’t quite done resisting yet.
“I find it’s best to assume the worst about people until they can prove otherwise,” Hoskins said.
“Royce, if what I think happened is true, you’re in danger.”
Rena said it coolly, like a promise rather than a threat, and as Hoskins’s curiosity rose, the resistance finally started to drain out of the journalist’s face.
“She gave me a list of names. And asked if any of them were surfacing in the Pandora Papers research or my book.”
“And had they?”
Hoskins didn’t answer. His last stand.
“If you trusted Kim, Royce, you should trust me.”
After a moment Hoskins said, “Three of her names are coming up in our research in a significant way.”
“Which three?”
Hoskins gave Rena another look and then opened his laptop. He called up a document and turned the screen toward Rena. Then he read the three names aloud from memory.
James Wei of GCM Investments, the series one investor in Helios. The Russian financier Anatol Bremmer, whose firm was an investor in Ignius. And a name they hadn’t focused on much before, Omar Abbad, the Bahrainian prince.
“What do you know about them?” Rena asked.
More than the FBI did evidently. Hoskins had tracked meetings Bremmer had overseas with Russian oligarchs. He had emails establishing that Abbad was acting as the front man for a government group, not acting as an individual investor as he pretended. And Hoskins was convinced, with some evidence, that Jimmy Wei’s firm was a front for the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
“Does Jimmy Wei know who he really works for?”
“You think these people are naive?” Hoskins said.
“I think the Chinese might tell a well-placed American only as much as they need to.”
“For all I know, Jimmy Wei wears a uniform when he’s in Beijing,” Hoskins said.
“But you don’t know.”
“No. We follow money. Bank transactions. Paper. We leave the eavesdropping and hacking to you government people. And we leave stealing people’s private information to the platform companies.”
“What about this Abbad?”
“He’s part of a faction in his family that is trying to get their money out of oil. The family is at war with itself. Cousins killing cousins. Very brutal. Very Ancient World. And Abbad is like a mafia don who leaves no fingerprints. He is trying to move from oil to renewable energy, and some of his family doesn’t like it.”
“Are you writing that in your book?”
“I will.”
“Who interested Kim most?”
“All three.”
“She didn’t seem more concerned about any one more than the others?”
“I just told you no.” The hostile edge was returning to Hoskins’s voice.
“And which of these men do you fear most?”
Hoskins gave a strange smile. “I don’t fear any of them. But the most interesting is Bremmer.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s the smartest. And because I learned a long time ago if something seems too good to be true, it usually is.”
“Which means what?”
“That Anatol Bremmer is a brilliant man. But nobody gets that rich that fast.”
Rena looked at a picture of Bremmer on Hoskins’s screen. It showed a fireplug of a man in his late forties with a balding square-shaped head.
“Why are you the only person who seems to doubt him?”
“People have a funny habit of lying to themselves about the people who can make them rich.”
Then Hoskins told Bremmer’s story: the Moscow-born Jew who became one of Russia’s richest people, who fled Russia to get away from Putin, and who became a Silicon Valley superstar.
“You don’t believe that he really fled?”
“How did he manage to bring his money with him?”
“Maybe he hid it from the Kremlin.”
“You really think he could?” Hoskins gave Rena an incredulous look. “Or that he could operate here, as freely as he does, without Putin’s blessing? Bremmer could not be so rich, or appear so independent and critical of Russia, unless Putin is getting something in return.”
“How do you know?”
“In what I do, you look at facts and you look at context and see what fits. And you keep gathering facts until you have enough to understand the context.”
“And what context fits?”
“Anatol Bremmer used to control the Internet in Russia. Now he influences many of the most important tech companies and technology entrepreneurs in the world. It’s a much wider sphere of influence than just the Russian web. In exchange for a little information now and again, that is a good arrangement for both Bremmer and the Russian government.”
“You have proof in the Pandora Papers that Bremmer’s a Kremlin asset?”
“Let me put it this way: By the time we’re done, Bremmer’s picture will be on page one.”
Were Hoskins’s suppositions about Bremmer, if Matsuda believed them, enough to get her killed? Rena doubted it. Nothing had happened to Hoskins. These were informed suspicions, not proof. Either the gadfly professor was holding something back, or Kim had learned more somewhere else.
“What did you tell Kim? Or give her? It had to be something more than this.”
Another moment of hesitation and Hoskins said, “You ever heard of Yevgeny Lenovsky?” Rena hadn’t. “A Russian journalist in Ukraine,” Hoskins said. “Lenovsky was beginning to investigate Bremmer. His publication was firebombed. Then he moved to Paris, where he contracted a terrible cancer. Doctors found traces of a naturally occurring chemical and couldn’t prove what killed him. But it was the Kremlin.”
“How do you know?”
“You ever heard of Talia Rudin?”
Again Rena hadn’t, but he was getting tired of this game.
“She was looking into Bremmer’s history, too. She died in Berlin. Same cancer.”
“Are you going to write that?”
“Should I be afraid of you asking, Mr. Rena?”
“You should be comforted.”
“You’re not a comforting person.”
“What did you tell Kim you’re not telling me?”
Hoskins studied Rena’s face. “You have enough,” the journalist said. “Go do your job.”
“What was the poison you think killed Lenovsky and Rudin?”
With a sigh, Hoskins said: “You ever heard of Unit 21966?”
Rena said no.
“What do you government people do?” Hoskins said with a self-satisfied scowl. “It’s a specialized group of Russian intelligence operatives. Their job is to carry out killings and political disruption campaigns, largely in Europe. Our government claims to know barely anything about the unit. Officially, U.S. intelligence just learned the name of the head of the unit a few months ago. I hope to God they’re lying. I hope for our sake they know more than they can say.”
“What’s the point, Royce?”
“Unit 21966 operatives have been linked to polonium, ricin, sarin, and mercury. Lenovsky and Rudin died from a derivative of polonium. Same one. I know it sounds like a movie. But you could look it up.” Hoskins leaned back in his chair.
“You worry about yourself being safe?” Rena asked him.
Hoskins gave a strange little laugh. “Sometimes it can be a comfort to be considered a broken-down paranoid.”
“I can send people here to protect you.”
“Go to hell,” Hoskins said. “I’d think they were here to hurt me.”
“You really think Bremmer is dangerous?”
“I think all three of these men—Wei, Bremmer, Abbad—are dangerous in the right circumstances. Or the people around them are. The Chinese kill. So does the Abbad family. And we already know about the Russians. Because these men are rich and promise to make other people rich, no one is willing to believe it. That’s the real evil, Mr. Rena.”
Hoskins’s eyes were fierce.
“Did Kim tell you where she was going next?”
Hoskins shook his head. “No. Nothing. I’d never met her before. And she was hard to read.”
Yes, Rena was thinking. And he and Randi had read her wrong.
BACK IN HIS RENTAL CAR, RENA USED HIS PHONE TO LOOK UP Yevgeny Lenovsky and Talia Rudin and Unit 21966. It was all there. They were dissident Russian journalists murdered in Europe, suspected to be poisoned by this unit of the Russian secret police. He couldn’t find out much about Abbad. He used a secure system to text Brooks, who was at the FBI office in Palo Alto, and told her to find out more. Then he headed off to the last person that, as far as he knew, Kim had seen.