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 would wink at me and say, ‘She’s right – whatever it is, you can’t call it art. I call it charity – some people give to the United Way, I support starving artists.’