resources into gold to take advantage of a perceived upturn in the precious metal.
‘Our client is seeking in the short term a major acquisition in Europe and other further investments over a short- to mid-term period. Our client wishes to secure the best, most advantageous rates of return for so high a deposit and in addition to know the security arrangements that he can expect from the bank are adequate.
‘In the meantime, he also requests that a Swiss franc account be prepared for his signature, references supplied, so that, if favourable terms can be reached at this meeting, there will be no delay. Our client requests a meeting solely with the president of the bank at this delicate stage.’
All Finn doesn’t write is, ‘Are you interested?’
A warm reply from the bank’s president arrives, via the Swiss lawyers, and then via the circuitous routes of Finn’s mailbox arrangements.
‘The president, Clement Naider, will be delighted to invite Mr Robinson to his office at a time convenient to him.’
Two days later, after what Finn considers to be an unhurried interval, Finn’s Swiss lawyers telephone the bank and make his appointment for the following Thursday, just under three weeks since we were sitting in the hotel room with the pictures.
In the meantime, we watch Clement Naider. We follow him from his home, a smart bachelor apartment in Geneva’s old town, to his bank and, on Saturday, out to Vevey to see his wife at the sanatorium. In Vevey, I walk the same path he walks through the woods after lunch. We watch primarily to see if Naider is watched by others.
Naider has a driver who doubles as a bodyguard and after some time observing him I see that he is armed. He drives the banker to the sanatorium every Saturday and sits in the car while Naider lunches with his wife and then walks alone. In the weekdays, the bodyguard sits in the car behind the bank or, when he wants to smoke a cigarette, which is often, stands in a wooden hut that collects payments for a car park across the road from the rear of the bank. Here he stands chatting to the car-park attendant, jabbing the sports pages of the daily papers with his finger. He seems to have some kind of horse syndicate going, as far as we can judge.
Occasionally the chauffeur sits in the bank’s fine entrance hall reading a dedicated sporting paper and every so often he drives Naider to a meeting elsewhere in town, or to a club overlooking the lake on the edge of the city where Naider takes a sauna and massage, and where he usually dines alone. To all, he is the respected Herr Naider, the martyr who has sadly lost his wife to a debilitating illness, and who cares for her regularly on a Saturday like a good husband.
Otherwise, apart from Naider’s driver, Finn and I and James, and later the grumbling Troll, cannot detect anyone tailing the banker, either from my side, or the Swiss side or from anywhere else. We are, finally, sure of that.
But inside the bank, it will be a different matter. James has a detailed chart of the bank’s internal security arrangements, which he has procured from one of his Geneva thieves. For a whole day he sits in a van in the car park at the rear of the bank, half a ton of concealed electronic equipment behind him, and ‘looks’ at the bank’s circuits, trips and cut-offs until he knows them by heart. But, under Finn’s questioning, he angrily acknowledges that there is little he can do apart from fuse the whole system, and that might cause more problems than it solves. James’s role is now to disable the chauffeur’s mobile phone–and the chauffeur too, if necessary. But once inside, Finn is on his own.
In the event of complete disaster, and if Finn is able to signal from the inside, we decide that the Troll will set off a fire alarm inside the bank, in preference to a general breakdown of security cameras which might automatically seal doors shut with Finn inside. To his dismay, it requires him to wear a suit and tie. The three of us spend an afternoon choosing a suit for the Troll. Finn calls it our ‘family day out’ and, at the sight of the Troll trying on ill-fitting suits, we laugh for the first time since the pictures arrived, and eat a huge tea.
But at least, with the Troll inside and able to set off the fire alarm, it will soak up the ground-floor security for perhaps a few vital moments.
James’s job is to stay in the car park at the back and watch Naider’s top-floor office window for any signal and then, when Finn exits, to cover him and remove anyone who follows him. James is adept at the management of chaos, Finn says.
It is the worst type of operation. Naider is on his home ground, Finn deep inside it. The banker might well panic and do something he regrets, but it will be too late for both him and Finn by then. There are too many open questions; Finn’s insistence on meeting alone with Naider–will the bank’s procedures allow it? And there is the possibility of an accidental or impromptu entrance by an employee or secretary. How will Naider react? An operation like this one contains what we would normally have considered, in our professional modus operandi, to be an unacceptable risk.
27
ON THE MORNING of the meeting, it is innocently bright, the sunlight dapples the street through the branches of the trees. On Geneva’s bridges couples are walking, hanging around each other’s shoulders, and tourists wander aimlessly or look over on to the huge fountain and Lac Leman.
Finn is staying in a different hotel now under his new name of Robinson.
On this morning Finn dresses, as he puts it, ‘like one of your
He has ordered a chauffeured black Mercedes limousine, with darkened windows, and he has been to the barber.
At just after ten o’clock, he leaves in the limousine for a drive around town. He tells me he needs to settle his nerves. I take a car James has procured and pick up James and the Troll at a cafe in the old town. We park up near Geneva’s railway station and the Troll sits drinking coffees and smoking cigarettes in the car, while James buys a paper and strolls back down the hill towards the bank. At eleven, the Troll and I drive past the bank to see James chatting at the car park’s booth with the chauffeur and the attendant. Once they have become acquainted he will ask to use the chauffeur’s mobile phone, and leave it unable to receive calls.
We see Finn stepping out of the limousine, his driver holding the door, and then he walks up to the bank’s front entrance. The Troll gets out of the car and leans against it looking at a map. I watch James leave the booth, the chauffeur’s phone disabled, and walk around to the far side of the car park nearest the bank.
The bank’s doorman, evidently expecting Finn, nods to him and presses a buzzer and that is the last we see of him as he enters the building.
From the car where I’m sitting–a little too far from the bank for my liking–I scan the front of the building and look for anything unusual. The Troll is back in the car smoking incessantly and rattling through several puzzles in a newspaper before it is time for him, too, to enter the bank. As I watch him finally crossing the road, I think that nobody will believe he has ever worn this suit or any other suit in his life.
Less than three minutes after Finn entered the building he was in the lift to the top floor in the company of a dark-suited man Finn later described as the maitre d’hotel or butler. The Banque Leman devoted a sizeable proportion of its staff to the greeting and general welfare of its wealthy clients, rather than to actual banking.
The two of them emerged on to a thick-carpeted hallway, a private floor within the private bank, dotted with priceless antiques, Chinese vases, prints and paintings collected during the bank’s illustrious history. Another uniformed butler appeared to receive Finn from the first man, who silently disappeared, and the butler beckoned him to an ornate Louis Quatorze chair. The butler made the quietest knock on a pair of black lacquered double doors, gesturing to Finn to step inside the president’s office. The butler announced Finn like a hushed party greeter and silently withdrew, closing the doors behind him.
The room was in a different style to the hallway, decorated with early Art Deco masterpieces and French Empire furniture. A lion’s head, the bank’s symbol, was mounted on a wall to the far left of the room, and a drinks cabinet was tucked away discreetly in the opposite corner. In the centre of the far wall was a long, finely polished
