I Am Pilgrim (7 page)

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 briefcase. 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.

Grace, completely disinterested, had long ago forbidden him to hang any of his purchases, and Bill