For several minutes the footpath was deserted. Finally, two figures appeared at the distant end of the image, a man wearing a fedora and a large dog of no discernible breed. Man and beast walked backward toward the camera, pausing briefly next to a rubbish bin, from which the man appeared to extract a small plastic bag. They paused again next to the lamppost, where the canine crouched on the verge of the footpath. What happened next was rendered in reverse order.
“I wish I could unsee that,” groaned Christopher.
The evening turned to dusk, and the dusk to a goldensummer afternoon. A fallen leaf rose like a resurrected soul and attached itself to a limb of the poplar tree. Lovers strolled, joggers jogged, the river flowed—all in reverse. Gabriel grew impatient and increased the speed of the playback. Christopher, however, appeared mildly bored. While serving in Northern Ireland, he had once spent two weeks watching a suspected IRA terrorist from a Londonderry attic. The Catholic family living beneath him had never known he was there.
But when the time code reached 14:27, Christopher sat up suddenly in his chair. A figure had slithered over the wooden rail and was walking backward toward the bank of the river. Gabriel clickedpauseand zoomed in, but it was no use; the camera was too far away. The figure was little more than a digital smudge.
He clickedrewind, and the smudge removed the backpack it was wearing. At the base of the poplar tree, it retrieved an object.
A rectangular parcel wrapped in heavy plastic and sealed with clear packing tape...
Gabriel clickedpause.
“Hello, Mr. Nobody,” said Christopher quietly.
Gabriel clickedrewindagain and watched as Mr. Nobody placed the parcel in the backpack and sat down on one of the aluminum benches. According to the video time code, he remained there for twelve minutes before returning to the footpath.
“Walk this way,” whispered Gabriel. “I want to have a look at you.”
The distant smudge seemed to hear him, because a momentlater it was walking backward toward the lamppost upon which the CCTV camera was mounted. Gabriel increased the speed of the playback and then clickedpause.
“Well, well,” said Christopher. “Imagine that.”
Gabriel zoomed in. Shoulder-length blond hair. Stretch jeans. A pair of stylish boots.
Mr. Nobody was a woman.
Fluorescent lights flickered to life as Gabriel and Christopher followed Bittel along a corridor to the NDB’s operations center. A single technician was playing computer chess against an opponent in a distant land. Bittel gave him a camera number and a time code reference, and a moment later the woman who called herself Mr. Nobody appeared on the main video screen at the front of the room. This time they watched the drop in its proper sequence. Mr. Nobody approached from the east, sidled over the wooden rail, and spent twelve long minutes contemplating the river before placing the parcel at the base of the poplar tree and departing to the west.
The technician switched to a new camera, which captured her ascent up a flight of concrete steps to the edge of the Old City. There she made her way to the rail station, where at 3:10 p.m. she boarded a train for Zurich.
It arrived exactly one hour later. In the Bahnhofplatz she boarded a Number 3 tram and rode it to the Römerhofplatz in District 7, a residential quarter on the slopes of the Zürichberg. From there it was a pleasant walk up the incline of the Klosbachstrasse to the small modern apartment block at Hauserstrasse 21.
Two minutes after she entered the building, a light appeared in a third-floor window. A rapid check of a government property database indicated that the unit in question was owned by an Isabel Brenner, a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany. A further check revealed that she served as a compliance officer in the Zurich office of RhineBank AG, otherwise known as the world’s dirtiest bank.
15
NDB Headquarters, Bern
As a general rule of thumb, spies from different countries rarely play nicely together. Sharing a juicy piece of regional gossip or a warning about a terrorist cell is commonplace, especially between close allies. But intelligence services avoid joint operations whenever possible, if only because such endeavors inevitably expose personnel and cherished field techniques. Spymasters guard these secrets jealously, like family recipes, and reveal them only under duress. Moreover, national interests rarely align seamlessly, never less so than where matters of high finance are concerned. It was true what they said about money. It definitely changed everything.
Like ultrafine Novichok powder, it was odorless, tasteless, portable, and easy to conceal. And sometimes, of course, it was deadly. Some men killed for money. And when they had enoughof it, they killed anyone who tried to take it away from them. Increasingly, much of the money that flowed through the veins and arteries of the global financial system was dirty. It was derived from criminal activity or drained from state coffers by kleptomaniacal autocrats. It poisoned everything it touched. Even the healthy were not immune to its ravages.
Many financial institutions were all too happy to soil their hands with dirty money—for a substantial fee, of course. One such institution was RhineBank AG. At least that was the rumor; money laundering was one of the few financial misdeeds for which the bank had not been punished. Its most recent brush with regulators came in New York, where the state’s Department of Financial Services fined RhineBank $50 million over its dealings with a convicted sex trafficker. One red-hot RhineBank derivatives trader remarked that the payment was smaller than his annual bonus. The trader was foolish enough to repeat the claim in an email, which ended up in the pages of theWall Street Journal. During the mini-scandal that followed, RhineBank’s spokeswoman sidestepped questions as to whether the trader had in fact earned such an astronomical amount of money. And when the bonus was disclosed in a subsequent corporate filing, it ignited a scandal as well.
The bank was headquartered in a menacing tower in the center of Hamburg that architectural critics had derided as a glass-and-steel phallus. Its busy London office was in Fleet Street, and in New York it occupied a sparkling new skyscraper overlooking the Hudson. Because RhineBank was a truly global bank, it answered to an alphabet soup of regulatory agencies. Any one of them would have been interested to learn that a compliance officer from the Zurich office was leaving packets of sensitivedocuments at drop sites scattered across Switzerland. Were the nature of those documents ever to become public, RhineBank’s share prices would likely tumble, which in turn would adversely impact its infamously overleveraged balance sheet. The damage would quickly spread to RhineBank’s business partners, the banks from which it received loans or lent money in return. Dominoes would fall. Given the fragile state of the European economy, another financial crisis was a distinct possibility.
“Obviously,” said Christoph Bittel, “such a scenario would not be in the interests of the Swiss Confederation and its all-important financial services industry.”
“So what shall we do about her?” asked Gabriel. “Pretend she doesn’t exist? Sweep her under the rug?”
“It’s a tradition here in Switzerland.” Bittel eyed Gabriel across the shimmering rectangular table in the conference room. “But then, you already know that.”
“We closed my Swiss accounts a long time ago, Bittel.”
“All of them?” Bittel smiled. “I recently had occasion to rewatch the interrogation I conducted with you after the bombing of that antiquities gallery in St. Moritz.”
“How was it the second time?”
