I Am Pilgrim(16)
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 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.’