The money trail remained as mysterious as ever and, unless we could track it successfully, we would never know how far the plumes of infection had spread. As a result, I resolved to throw everything we had at the problem but, in the end, none of that mattered: it was a shy forensic accountant and a dose of serendipity that came to our rescue.
Ploughing one last time through the mountain of material seized from my predecessor’s London home before it vanished into The Division’s archives, the accountant found a handwritten grocery list stuck in the back of a chequebook. About to throw it away, he turned it over and saw it was written on the back of a blank FedEx consignment docket – strange because none of our investigations had shown any evidence of a FedEx account. Intrigued, he called the company and discovered a list of pick-ups from the address, all of which had been paid for in cash.
Only one turned out to be of interest – a box of expensive Cuban cigars sent to the luxurious Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. It quickly transpired that the name of the recipient on the FedEx docket was fake, and that would have been an end to the matter – except for the moment of serendipity. A woman working with the accountant had once been a travel agent and she knew that all hotels in the United Arab Emirates are required to take a copy of every guest’s passport.
I called the hotel under the guise of an FBI special agent attached to Interpol and convinced the manager to examine their files and give me the passport details of the guest who had been staying in suite 1608 on the relevant date.
It turned out to be a person called Christos Nikolaides. It was an elegant name. Shame about the man.
Chapter Nine
EVERYONE AGREED ON one thing – Christos would have been handsome if it weren’t for his height. The olive skin, wave of unruly dark hair and good teeth couldn’t overcome legs that were far too short for his body. But money probably helped, especially with the women he liked to run with, and Christos Nikolaides certainly had plenty of that.
A flurry of police database searches showed that he was the real deal: a genuine low-life with no convictions but a significant involvement in three murders and a host of other crimes of violence. Thirty-one years old and a Greek national, he was the eldest son of uneducated parents who lived outside Thessaloniki, in the north of the country. It’s important to stress ‘uneducated’ here, as opposed to stupid – which they most certainly were not.
In the following weeks, as we delved deeper into his life, the family became increasingly interesting. A close-knit clan of brothers, uncles and cousins, the family was headed by Christos’s sixty-year-old father, Patros – the family’s ruthless enforcer. As they say in Athens, he had a thick jacket – a long criminal record – but this had been accompanied by great material success. An adjustment to the orbit of a US satellite monitoring the Balkans provided photos showing the family’s compound in stunning detail.
Set amid rolling acres of lavender, the complex of seven luxurious homes, swimming pools and lavish stables was surrounded by a twelve-foot wall patrolled by what we believed to be Albanians armed with Skorpion machine pistols. This was strange, given that the family was in the wholesale floristry business. Maybe flower theft was a bigger problem in northern Greece than most people realized.
We theorized that, like Colombia’s Medellín cartel before them, they had adapted the complex high-speed air and road network needed to transport a perishable product like flowers to include a far more profitable commodity.
But what did a family of Greek drug dealers have to do with my predecessor, and why would he be sending the eldest son a box of cigars at a seven-star hotel in the Middle East? It was possible the former Rider had had a drug habit and Christos was his dealer, but it didn’t make much sense: the Greeks were definitely on the wholesale side of the business.
I was about to dismiss the whole investigation as another dead end – maybe Christos and my predecessor were nothing more than friendly scumbags – when, by good luck, I could not get to sleep on a grim London night. I looked across the rooftops from my apartment in Belgravia, thinking of how the two men probably ate together at one of the area’s Michelin-starred restaurants, when I realized that the answer to our most difficult problem might be staring me in the face.
What if the Russians weren’t responsible for paying our rogue agents at all? Say Christos Nikolaides and his family were responsible for making the payments. Why? Because they were running drugs into Moscow and that was the contribution they had to make to the cash-strapped Russians for the licence to do so. Call it a business tax.
It meant the Greeks would be using their black cash and money-laundering skills to transfer funds from their own accounts into ones in the names of our traitors – and the Russian intelligence agencies wouldn’t show up anywhere near the process. Under such a scenario, somebody who had received a large payment – the Rider of the Blue – might send an expensive box of cigars to the man who had just paid him: Christos Nikolaides, on vacation in Dubai.
I put all thoughts of sleep aside, went back into the office and launched an intense investigation – with the help of the Greek government – into the Nikolaides family’s deeply subterranean financial arrangements.
It was information discovered during this process that led me to Switzerland and the quiet streets of Geneva. Despite the city’s reputation for cleanliness, that’s a dirty little town if ever I’ve seen one.
Chapter Ten
THE OFFICES OF the world’s most secretive private bank lie behind an anonymous limestone facade in the centre of Geneva’s Quartier des Banques. There is no name displayed, but Clément Richeloud & Cie has occupied the same building for two hundred years, counting among its clients countless African despots, numerous corporate criminals and the rich descendants of a few prominent members of the Third Reich.
Richeloud’s was also the Greek family’s bankers and, as far as I could see, offered our only way forward. They would have to be persuaded to give us a list of the Nikolaides family’s transactions over the last five years – documents which would show if Christos was acting as the Russians’ paymaster and, if so, which Americans were on the payroll.
Of course, we could make an application in court, but Richeloud’s would claim, correctly, that it was illegal to divulge any information because of the Swiss government’s banking secrecy laws – legislation which has made the nation a favourite with tyrants and criminals.
It was for this reason that I contacted the bank as the Monaco-based lawyer for interests associated with the Paraguayan military and arrived on their marble doorstep prepared to discuss a range of highly confidential financial matters. Carrying an attaché case full of forged documents and the prospect of what seemed to be deposits worth hundreds of millions of dollars, I sat in a conference room full of faux antiques and waited for the bank’s managing partner.
The meeting turned out to be one of the most memorable events of my professional life – not because of Christos Nikolaides, but thanks to a lesson I learned. My education started with the opening of the oak-panelled door.
It is fair to say a lot of my work has been a row through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat, but even by those low standards Markus Bucher was memorable. Despite being a lay preacher at Geneva’s austere Calvinist cathedral, he was, like most of his profession, up to his armpits in blood and shit. Now in his fifties, you could say he’d hit a home run – a big estate in Cologny overlooking the lake, a Bentley in the garage – but given that he had started on second base, it wasn’t really much of an achievement: his family were the largest shareholders in the privately held bank.
He made a big deal of the fact that the room we were in was soundproofed to ‘American intelligence agency standards’ but failed to mention the hidden camera I had registered in the frame of a portrait on the wall. It was positioned to look over a client’s shoulder and record any documents they might be holding. Just to be bloody-minded, I casually rearranged the chairs so that all the lens could see was the back of my br
iefcase. Amateurs, I thought.
As Bucher worked his way through the forgeries, probably mentally tallying the management fees they could earn on such huge sums, I looked at my watch – three minutes to one, almost lunchtime.
Unfortunately for the Nikolaides family, they had overlooked one salient point as they funnelled more and more money into Richeloud’s – Bucher’s only child had also entered the banking trade. Twenty-three and without much experience of men or the world, she was working in the more respectable end of the business – for Credit Suisse in Hong Kong.
I glanced at my watch again – two minutes to one. I leaned forward and quietly told Bucher: ‘I wouldn’t know anybody in the Paraguayan military from a fucking hole in the ground.’
He looked at me, confused – then he laughed, thinking this was an American version of humour. I assured him it wasn’t.
I gave him Christos’s full name, what I believed to be his account number and said I wanted a copy of the banking records concerning him, his family and their associated companies for the last five years. In a dark corner of my mind I was hoping I was right about this, or there would be hell to pay – but there was no going back now.
Bucher got to his feet, righteous indignation swelling in his breast, blustering about people gaining entry by false pretences, that he had immediately recognized the documents as forgeries, how only an American would think that a Swiss banker would divulge such information, even if he had it. He came towards me and I realized I was being given the singular honour denied to so many dictators and mass murderers: I was going to be thrown out of a Swiss bank.
It was one o’clock. He paused, and I saw his eyes flick to his desk: his private cellphone, lying with his papers – the number he believed known only to his close family – was vibrating. I watched in silence as he stole a glance at the caller’s number. Deciding to deal with it later, he turned and bore down on me, wearing his outrage like body armour.
‘It’s eight o’clock at night in Hong Kong,’ I said, without shifting in my chair, ready to break his arm if he tried to touch me.
‘What?!’ he snapped back, not really comprehending.
‘In Hong Kong,’ I said more slowly, ‘it’s already late.’
I saw a flash of fear in his eyes as he grasped what I had said. He looked at me, questions flooding in he couldn’t answer: how the hell did I know it was Hong Kong calling? He turned and grabbed the phone.
I kept my eyes fixed on him as he heard that not only was I right about it being Hong Kong but that his daughter – fighting to keep the panic out of her voice – told him she was confronting a major problem. It may have been only lunchtime in Geneva, but for Markus Bucher, the day was growing darker by the second.
It seemed that, two hours earlier, all communications within his daughter’s luxury high-rise had suffered a major failure – phone, cable TV, Wi-Fi, high-speed DSL had all gone down. A dozen crews from Hong Kong Telecom had started trying to find the fault. One of these maintenance crews – three men, all wearing regulation white boiler suits and necklace ID cards – had found their way into Clare Bucher’s apartment.
By the time she called her father she was of the view that they were not, perhaps, what they claimed to be. Her first piece of evidence was that two of them didn’t seem to speak any Chinese at all – in fact, they sounded like Americans. The second clue concerned communications equipment. Although she didn’t know much about such things, she was pretty sure you didn’t need a NATO-style 9mm Beretta pistol fitted with a silencer to fix a line fault.
I watched her father’s face turn an unhealthy shade of grey as she explained her situation. He looked up at me with a mixture of pure hatred and desperation. ‘Who are you?’ he said, so quiet as to be almost inaudible.
‘From what I’ve overheard,’ I said, ‘I’m the only person in the world who can help you. By good fortune, the head of Hong Kong Telecom owes me a favour – let’s just say I helped him bid for a successful phone contract in Paraguay.’
I thought at that moment he was going to hurl himself at me, so I got ready to hurt him badly if necessary, and kept talking. ‘I’m certain, in the right circumstances, I could call and ask him to have the technicians look elsewhere.’
Somehow Bucher managed to master himself. He looked at me, deeper now in the forest than he had ever thought possible, at a crossroads that would determine the rest of his life.
I watched the battle rage on his face: he could no more abandon his daughter than he could violate everything he thought he stood for. He was paralysed, and I had to help him make the right decision. Like I mentioned, it was a terrible morning. ‘If I could just say this – if you decide not to cooperate and the technicians have to eliminate your daughter, I can’t influence what they might do to her before-hand, if you understand. It’s out of my power.’
I didn’t like to use the word ‘rape’, not to a father. He said nothing then turned aside and vomited on the floor. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and got shakily to his feet. ‘I’ll get the records,’ he said, lurching forward.
People say love is weak, but they’re wrong: love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things – patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And of every kind of love – the epic and the small, the noble and the base – the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all. That was the lesson I learned that day, and I’ll be forever grateful I did. Some years later, deep in the ruins called the Theatre of Death, it salvaged everything.
By the time I grabbed his arm, Bucher was already halfway to the door, willing to surrender anything, desperate to save his daughter. ‘Stop!’ I told him.
He turned to me, close to tears. ‘You think I’ll call the police,’ he shouted, ‘with your “technicians” still in her apartment?!’
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘You’re not a fool.’
‘So let me get the records, for Chrissake!’
‘What’s to stop you giving me phoney ones or another client’s? No, we’ll go and look at the computer together.’
He shook his head, panicking. ‘Impossible. Nobody’s allowed in the back office – the staff will realize.’
It was true except for one thing. ‘Why do you think I chose one o’clock, the Friday of a holiday weekend,’ I said. ‘Everybody’s at lunch.’ I picked up my bag, followed him out of the conference room and watched as he used an encrypted ID card to unlock a door into the inner offices.
We sat at a terminal; he used a fingerprint scanner to open the system and keyed in the digits of an account number. There they were – pages of Christos Nikolaides’ supposedly secret bank records, linked to a matrix of other family accounts. Within minutes, we were printing them all out.
I stared at the pages for a long time – the ledgers of so much corruption and death. The family were billionaires – or close enough not to matter – but the records also proved beyond doubt that Christos was the Russians’ paymaster. More than that, just as I’d hoped, the documents also prised open the rest of the enterprise. Regular transfers into other accounts at the bank revealed the names of six of our people whom I would never have imagined were traitors.
Two of them were FBI agents involved in counter-espionage and the other four were career diplomats at US embassies in Europe – including a woman I had once slept with – and for what they had done there was usually only one tariff. In a corner of my heart I hoped they would get good lawyers and manage to plea-bargain it down to life imprisonment. Don’t believe what they tell you – it’s a terrible thing to hold another person’s life in the palm of your hand.
So it was with less satisfaction than I had anticipated that I put the material in my briefcase and turned to Bucher. I told him that in two hours I would call the head of Hong Kong Telecom and have the technicians reassigned. I stood up and, under the circumstances, decided against offering him my hand. Without a word I walked out, leaving him alone – vomit smearing his suit, one hand trembling, trying
to decide if the palpitations he could feel in his chest were just nerves or something far more serious.
I didn’t know if the man would ever recover, and maybe I would have felt some sympathy for him except for a strange event which occurred in my childhood.
Accompanied by Bill Murdoch, I had made a trip to a small French village called Rothau on the German border. Twenty years and countless adventures have passed but, in a way, part of me has never left that place – or maybe I should say part of it has never left me.
Chapter Eleven
IF YOU EVER find yourself in the part of the world where france and Germany meet and want your heart broken, drive up the twisting road from the village, through the pine forests and into the foothills of the Vosges mountains.
Sooner or later you will come to an isolated place called Natzweiler-Struthof. It was a Nazi concentration camp, almost forgotten now, never making it on to the misery-with-a-guidebook tours like Auschwitz and Dachau. You come out of the pine trees and at an intersection there is a simple country road sign: one way points to a local bar and the other to the gas chamber. No, I’m not kidding.
Tens of thousands of prisoners passed through the camp’s gates, but that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is hardly anybody has heard of it – that amount of grief just isn’t big enough to register on the Richter scale of the twentieth century. Another way of measuring progress, I suppose.
I was twelve when I went there. It was summer vacation and, as usual, Bill and Grace had taken a suite at the Georges V hotel in Paris for most of August. They were both interested in art. She liked Old Masters that told people entering the house that this was a woman of wealth and taste. Bill, thank God, was out on the edge – dancing on the edge half the time. He was never happier than when he was finding some new gallery or wandering around a young kid’s studio.