Liz Carlyle - 07 - The Geneva Trap (3 page)

Chapter 4

Liz was sitting in a Eurostar train somewhere under the Channel. She had caught an early train so that she’d be back at her desk in good time to face the backlog of phone messages and emails that would have accumulated while she’d been away. But the train had been stationary for the last twenty minutes and, in the absence of any explanation, uneasy conversations had begun as people asked each other what they thought was happening.

She’d gone to Paris to be with the man she had met more than a year ago, when an operation that had begun in Northern Ireland had unexpectedly taken her to France and close collaboration with Martin Seurat of the DGSE, the French Military Intelligence Service. The professional relationship had become something more, and they now spent most of their free time together. They had just passed a happy week, spending a couple of days staying at Martin’s flat in Paris, then going off to a small country hotel in the Loire, where spring was just arriving. Good food, good books to read, and each other’s company. It had been perfect. Until now.

Three hours later Liz arrived at Thames House. The train had stop-started its way to St Pancras after a disembodied voice had explained that the one in front had broken down. She dropped her bag in the corner of her office and sat down at her desk with a sigh to face the rest of the day. She had just turned on her screen when the phone on her desk rang.

‘Good afternoon,’ said a chirpy female voice. ‘It’s Molly here from Geoffrey Fane’s office. He’s coming across to Thames House for another appointment in an hour and would like to look in on you, if that’s convenient.’

Liz groaned to herself. The last person she wanted to see right now was Geoffrey Fane. ‘What’s it about? I’m rather snowed under today.’

‘He didn’t say,’ replied Molly, ‘but he did say it was urgent. I think it’s something to do with a message that came in from Geneva this morning. But don’t tell him I told you,’ she added cheerfully. ‘You know how he likes to play things close to his chest. ’Bye now.’

Liz smiled as she put the receiver down. Molly’s got the measure of him all right, she thought. Poor old Geoffrey. But Liz was also intrigued. What could a message from Geneva have to do with her?

An hour later she was still working her way through emails when Peggy Kinsolving stuck her head round the door.

‘Hi, Liz. Good holiday? Can I come and brief you on a few things when you’ve got a moment?’

Liz liked the young researcher and was always pleased to see her. ‘I’d say come in now but I’m threatened with an imminent visit from G. Fane. I’ll give you a buzz when he’s gone.’

‘Lucky you.’ And Peggy’s head disappeared, to be replaced after a short time by another.

‘Good afternoon, Elizabeth. Sorry to disturb you on your first day back. I’m here to see DG but wanted to tell you about something rather intriguing that’s just come in.’

How typically Geoffrey, thought Liz, to remind me that he’s a big fish accustomed to swimming with other big fish, and that he’s doing me a favour by letting me into his pond.

‘How was France?’ he went on. ‘I hope our friend Seurat was in good form.’

A second Fane ploy: he loved to show that he knew everything about everyone’s private life – particularly hers.

Ignoring this, Liz said sharply, ‘Molly said something urgent had come up.’

‘Have you had much to do with the Russian Services in recent years?’

She’d worked on a Russian case a few years ago, in which Fane had also been involved. He knew about that, especially as it had ended disastrously for him. She didn’t want to remind him of it.

As though he was reading her thoughts he said, ‘I don’t mean the oligarch. I was wondering about other cases.’

‘I helped uncover a British scientist who was selling secrets to the Russians a few years ago. I had to give evidence in court. He got ten years.’

‘What about earlier on in your career? Weren’t you in counter-espionage in your first years here?’

What on earth is this about? thought Liz. But she knew Geoffrey Fane too well to try to hurry him. He would tell her in his own good time.

‘Yes. In my first three years. Then I moved to counter-terrorism,’ she replied.

‘You didn’t deal with an approach from any Russian intelligence officer? Or run anyone here who’d been recruited?’

‘No. I was far too junior. I didn’t do agent running until I went to counter-terrorism.’

‘Hmm,’ said Fane. Then he went on, ‘Some people thought the end of the Cold War would mean the end of espionage. How naïve. Motives change, allegiances change, but spying goes on …’ Liz listened impatiently as Geoffrey droned on, expounding his familiar theme about the perennial need for intelligence work. I don’t know why he’s telling me all this, she thought. I agree with him. Perhaps sensing her impatience, he said suddenly, ‘Anyway, this chap Sorsky says he wants to speak to you. In fact, he won’t talk to anyone else.’

‘I don’t know anyone called Sorsky. Are you sure he really meant me?’

‘He’s reported to have said “Lees Carlisle”. There is only one Lees in either Service, and the only other Carlyle, Rex, has been our man in Uruguay for the last sixteen years. And in any case, Sorsky clearly indicated his Lees Carlisle was a woman. So yes, I rather think he does mean you.’

‘But how’s he got my name?’

‘I was hoping you could answer that. You must have met him somewhere.’

Liz racked her brains, but nothing emerged. Fane was looking at her sceptically, but she could only shrug. ‘What can you tell me about him?’

‘We don’t know anything more than that he’s suspected SVR, under commercial cover at the Trade Delegation in Geneva. As far as our records go, he’s never served here, though you’ll want to do your own Look Up. ’ Fane reached down for his briefcase. ‘I have a photograph. Not a very good one but perhaps it will jog your memory.’ He handed over the group shot from the Geneva Mug Book. ‘We could improve this, of course, but have a look at it and see if it means anything.’

She stared at the small group of men, standing on the steps of a large institutional-looking building, and in particular at the figure that had been arrowed. A man a little older than she was, wearing a dark suit and looking sombre.

‘Mean anything?’ asked Fane. His tone was light but he was staring keenly at her.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

But she kept looking at the photograph, and in particular the eyes. They were dark and unusually large. There was something familiar in the gaze, something she had seen before.

Fane started to say something, but she shook her head for silence. Memories were stirring, a confused collection of them slowly starting to take form in her mind. It had been a long time ago – a world away. But where? She’d joined the Service straight after university and had come to London. Apart from a posting in Belfast, she hadn’t lived anywhere else for longer than a month or two. Surely she couldn’t have met him at home, when she’d been visiting her parents in Wiltshire. But she had the feeling she had been young when she met him. Could it have been before she joined the Service?

Chapter 5

Otto Bech liked to come into the office on Bern’s Papiermühlerstrasse very early. He got up at five each morning, walked the dog along the shoreline of the Wohlensee, ate a healthy bowl of muesli, kissed his still-dozing wife goodbye, then sat reading the paper in the back of his Audi saloon as his driver took him to work. Bech’s office was on an upper floor of a small complex of modern buildings known as the Egg Boxes, from the dimpled indentations in the external concrete along the line of the windows. The name reminded him of when he was a boy growing up on his father’s farm in the foothills of the mountains outside Geneva.

Bech thought that coming in at the crack of dawn set a good example to his staff; it showed that their boss worked longer hours than anyone else and if they wanted to get on they must work hard too. But the real reason he was usually at his desk at 6.30 was that it was quiet; no one else was around except the security guard and the night duty officer. He had peace and time to think.

Thinking, planning, analysing situations was what he did best. Not that he was bad at management – the staff of the FSI found him approachable and fair for the most part; and he had led them effectively through the disruption when this new intelligence service had been created by merging the two existing agencies.

It helped that Bech hadn’t come originally from either of them; he was an ex-policeman, though that had not been a recommendation in the eyes of most of those he now led. But he wasn’t an ordinary cop. He had run the National Fraud Squad, working for over two decades in the labyrinthine world of hidden bank accounts and anonymous tax shelters. Bech knew his way through his country’s arcane rules and banking practices, and in twenty years he had learned when to keep his eyes shut and when to investigate. But things were starting to change now, he reflected, looking out of the window across the Mingerstrasse at the parkland beyond. Terrorism had seen to that. Swiss banking laws had toughened, and there was unprecedented cooperation with foreign authorities, tracking down and freezing suspect bank deposits. It was difficult work; money could be moved at the click of a mouse, and keeping pace took foresight and speed.

This morning Bech was examining an interesting case. He was used to watching strange transfers of funds in and out of his country, but the movements recorded in this file seemed especially baffling. Twelve months ago an account had been opened in Switzerland’s second largest bank by a foreign national, and a significant deposit was moved into it from another Swiss bank. Checked in a random audit, the money had been traced back to a holding fund in one of the ex-Soviet Republics, Belarus. The bank had put an audit tag on the account, which meant that each deposit (and they came in monthly from various reputable European banks) was traced to its origins, which turned out to be other former Soviet Republics: one month Azerbaijan; the next Kazakhstan, and so on until eventually six or seven seemed to be involved, and the total sum in the account was over 5 million Swiss francs.

There the money had sat, drawing the negligible interest on offer during the worldwide recession. Then it started to be moved, initially in a series of transfers to the branch of a French bank in the city of Lyons. Then withdrawals from the Geneva account started to be made by a man who came into the Head Office and showed credentials proving him to be the same individual who had originally opened the account. He had made four withdrawals, each for 100,000 Swiss francs, before Bech’s officers had been alerted under money-laundering regulations. The identity details of the man, passed over by the bank, showed him to be one Nikolai Bakowski.

There was just one problem: when Bech’s officers attempted to trace Bakowski, they found that he didn’t seem to exist. At the Geneva address he had given, no one had heard of him; the mobile phone number had been terminated, and Swiss Immigration had no record of anyone entering the country under that name. All of which suggested that the Polish passport he had shown at the bank was false, and that it had been used only to create the account.

Bech idly scratched his cheek. The whole thing smelled, and the bank seemed to have been very casual in not checking Bakowski’s credentials properly. If this was ‘funny’ money – the receipts from drug trafficking or mafia activity in the old Soviet bloc – investigation would get them nowhere. The Belarus authorities weren’t going to cooperate in an investigation of the sort of activity that half their own government was probably involved in, nor were the Kazaks nor the Azerbaijanis.

But this felt different, Bech thought. Why had this Bakowski character started to show up at the bank in person instead of continuing to transfer money electronically? For a man with a false identity he was taking a big risk. How could he be sure that the bank was not on to him? He must know that at the very least the CCTV cameras would have photographed him as he withdrew the money. Perhaps he was relying on traditional Swiss banking secrecy. If so, he was out of date. He must need clean cash for some purpose. It must be for paying someone, and it wasn’t his window cleaner. An intelligence operation of some kind perhaps, brooded Bech.

This wouldn’t have bothered him very much if he could have been sure that whatever he’d stumbled on was being carried out somewhere else, but that seemed unlikely – after all, the cash was being withdrawn in Geneva.

The next step, Bech decided as he looked out of the window and saw members of his staff starting to arrive for work, was to find out who this Bakowski really was. The bank had supplied a very blurred CCTV photograph – their camera looked as though it could do with some attention – but he needed something better.

‘Monsieur Bech?’

He looked up with annoyance, since people knew he didn’t like to be disturbed this early. It was the night duty officer, Henri Leplan.

‘What is it?’

‘Forgive the interruption but I thought you should know. There’s been an accident.’

The man paused, ill at ease. Bech prompted him, ‘What kind of accident?’

‘A car ran off the road last night, not far from Lausanne. It was being driven by Dieter Steinmetz.’

‘Is he all right?’ Steinmetz was a good officer, thoroughly reliable, very experienced.

Leplan shook his head. ‘He’s dead, I’m afraid. There was a long drop off the side of the road, and the car rolled over several times.’