I Am Pilgrim(17)

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.