“My associate is Danish.”
“Your hacker, you mean?”
“She has other skills as well.”
“Such as?”
“I’d remove that Patek Philippe Perpetual from your wrist, if I were you. And hide your billfold as well.”
“A pickpocket, is she?”
“The best I’ve ever seen.”
“How did you meet her?”
“She stole a Vermeer from a villa on the Amalfi Coast. And then she stole your wife’s jewelry.”
“Well,” said Martin. “That explains everything.”
***
The woman who admitted Martin Landesmann into her beachfront home in Kandestederne one hour later did not live up to advance billing. Indeed, in dress and aspect she was by all appearances a model citizen who had never once put a foot wrong. Martin was so taken by her that he failed to notice the admiring glance she cast toward his costly Swiss timepiece—or the subtle brush of her hand that located the billfold in the breast pocket of his gray sport jacket. Perhaps he recognized in her a kindred spirit. They were, thought Gabriel, two sides of the same coin.
The pleasantries complete, they filed into the sitting room, where a printed copy of SBL’s most recent balance sheet waited on the coffee table. It was a detailed version, some three hundred pages in length. Martin reviewed the document line by line, pausing occasionally to circle an entry with his fat Montblanc pen or to make a margin note. His survey complete, he looked up from the document and announced his preliminary findings.
“It won’t surprise you to learn that SBL PrivatBank SA of Lugano has emerged from its recent period of turbulence with flying colors. Its turnaround is nothing short of miraculous. It is the very picture of financial and moral health.”
“Do you believe it?” asked Gabriel.
“Not for a minute. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Camorra Incorporated. And it’s being propped up by dirty Camorra money.”
To prove his thesis, Martin required real-time access to SBL’s most sensitive internal data—its deposits, its trading book, its portfolio of loans, the compensation paid to senior executives, even the bank’s insurance records. He was granted that access by Ingrid, who was logged into SBL’s internal network. He spent an hour in the private banking division, perusing the accounts of high-net-worth individuals at will, and another hour rummaging through the files in the asset management division. With the exception of the occasional raised eyebrow, he offered no commentary on the nature of his findings.
He reviewed the bank’s trading book next and then conducted a loan-by-loan survey of the lending division. His last stop was the email inbox of Franco Tedeschi, the Camorra’s man on SBL’s senior management team. Tedeschi’s correspondence included a lengthy exchange with an executive vice president from the Zurich Insurance Group, Switzerland’s largest insurer.
“I found it,” Martin announced.
“Found what?” asked Gabriel.
“Your Leonardo.”
“Where is it?”
“Locked in an underground vault at SBL headquarters. But the more important question is, how did it get there and why?”
“And the answer?”
“Someone lost a great deal of the Camorra’s money. And someone had to pay.”
“Who?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
***
But there were important clues, added Martin, scattered throughout the bank’s records, especially in the asset management division. The firm’s clients included individuals, institutions, and businesses, many of which were anonymous shell corporations or holding companies. It bought, sold, and managed investments on behalf of those clients with the goal of increasing their wealth over time. It also lent the clients’ money, in some cases extremely large sums of money. To manage its risk, the bank then sold portions of those loans to other investors, oftentimes to its own clients—sometimes, even, to the client who had taken the loan in the first place.
“Why would it do a thing like that?” asked Gabriel.
