documents I selected. I signed a receipt and left.
“I’ll see you tomorrow at eleven A.M.,” he said.
I returned to my hotel, ordered room service, and concentrated on reading the documents.
An alarm bell sounded. “ Feuer, evakuieren Sie bitte alle Raume…
Fire, please evacuate all rooms.” I opened my room door. People were running in the hallway. I didn’t see or smell fire or smoke. I looked out the window: there was no fire engine or any special activity in the street.
“Another fire drill,” I muttered. I’d already been through one in Islamabad-I should have been considered exempt. I was in shorts and a T-shirt and didn’t feel like leaving my room again. I had no intention of playing. I closed the door. Seconds later came a series of strong bangs on my door. I opened it.
A man with a flashlight and fireman’s hat said in a thick German accent, “You must to leave now.”
“What?” I asked, pretending not to understand.
“You must to leave,” he repeated.
Reluctantly I stepped into my pants, took my laptop and my personal documents, and went to the door. I stopped, turned around, and took the copies of the bank documents I’d had made at the storage facility. Maybe I could find a corner to go over them while this stupid, untimely drill was going on. The elevator door was blocked, and I had to use the stairs.
About a hundred people were in the lobby, some in night clothing and some wrapped in blankets. Twenty minutes later I heard, “Falsche Warnung” -false alarm, said the guy who had ousted me earlier from my room, as he entered the lobby. “Somebody pressed the alarm button. We shall report this to the police. It’s illegal to do that,” he announced in German, then repeated it in English. I had no patience or interest to hear the rest of the things he had to say and ran first to the elevator.
I opened my door and took a step back. My room had been ransacked-every drawer thrown open, the suitcase shaken out. I opened the door wide, placed a shoe to stop it from shutting, and gingerly walked inside. If the intruder was still inside my room, I didn’t want to be locked in with him. He could be armed, and there could be more than one intruder. I checked the bathroom and the closet. They were empty. I looked around. The bed linens were thrown on the floor, and my clothes in the closet were piled up in the corner. Somebody had pressed the fire-alarm button to get me out of my room.
I called security. The same “fireman” came over. He must have been their jack-of-all-trades. “Mein Gott,” he exclaimed when he saw the mess. “Is anything missing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I was still holding my laptop computer and the stack of documents. “Please check to see if other guests were victimized as well,” I said. If I was the only one, then the conclusion would be clear: I’d been singled out. Someone wanted something I had. And the only things I had were the papers and my laptop. It wasn’t my fashionable attire.
“I need another room,” I told him. “I can’t stay here.”
He went to the night table and used the phone. A few minutes later a chambermaid came and gave me a room key for a room on a different floor. I quickly packed and moved there. I left my luggage in my new room and went to the twenty-four-hour business center, still carrying my laptop computer and the documents. I faxed the documents to my New York office and shredded the copies I had, taking the confetti-like pieces with me.
Whoever had broken into my room was either interested in the documents because he didn’t have the information they contained, or he wanted to see how much I’d found. I could have been wrong, of course, but so far there was nothing to contradict me. The alarming conclusion was that someone knew to expect me in Switzerland, knew where I had gone that day, knew where I was staying, and had used the alarm-bell button to get me out of my room. Had my talents for identifying followers rusted? I hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Frankly, though, I hadn’t been paying much attention. For once I’d arrived in Switzerland for something that was so aboveboard that I was relieved to not have to constantly look behind me. And of all my cases, this visit-the perfectly clean one-had to be marred by a hostile entry? I threw the confetti into the fireplace in the lobby and waited to see it blaze.
I called Casey Bauer to report. He was more alarmed than I had been. “Dan, leave the hotel immediately. Cancel tomorrow’s meeting at the ware house. You may have to return to the U.S., but not just yet. We need to arrange security before you can return to the ware house.”
I called Lufthansa Airlines using my room telephone, asking the switchboard operator to connect me. I spoke with the airline representative and bought a one-way ticket to Frankfurt. I asked the desk to prepare my bill and send up a bellman, although all I had was one small suitcase. I told the bellman I was going to Frankfurt and asked him to get me a taxi. I paid the hotel bill and mentioned I needed to fly urgently to Frankfurt.
At the airport, when I’d made sure I wasn’t observed, I took the elevator down to the arrival hall, pressing all the buttons to make the elevator stop on every floor. I was alone in the elevator, but anyone looking at the lit numbers above the elevator door wouldn’t see on which floor I’d exited. I went to the taxi line and took a taxi to Zurich, where I checked into the Hilton hotel using my Anthony P. Blackthorn documents.
I called Casey Bauer, reported my new location, and fell asleep in front of the television. I was angry and surprised that I’d been spotted. Field security was lax somewhere. Next time the consequences could be more serious.
Two hours before my scheduled meeting with Heinrich Andrist, my chaperon at Tempelhof Bank’s ware house, I called with my cell phone to apologize. “I had to fly unexpectedly to Frankfurt to meet another client. I’m sorry for any inconvenience I may have caused you.”
“Will you be back?”
Now he misses me? “In a few days. I’ll call ahead.”
Casey Bauer called my cell phone. “There’s no question there was a security leak,” he said. “Did you tell anyone where you were going?”
Sometimes I feel like kicking the bureaucrats who ask stupid questions. But Casey didn’t qualify-he was a trained CIA officer covering all bases. “Nobody in New York but my office administrator.”
“Weren’t you involved with the courts in New York and in Switzerland?”
“Yes, but they didn’t know if and when I was coming to Switzerland. My contacts at the bank didn’t know where I was staying. That leaves only Dr. Liechtenstein, the Swiss attorney I hired to help me get the Swiss court order. He knew when I was arriving, and knew where I was staying.”
Casey sighed. “Let me check on him,” he said grimly. “But it seems whoever it was wanted something from your room, and not you personally. Otherwise they’d have been waiting for you inside your room.”
Once stretched on the sofa in my spacious room I was finally able to analyze the documents I had retrieved from the bank’s ware house. I turned on my laptop and logged into my New York office. In less than one minute I was connected, passing through four sets of different username and password screens. I opened the data files and read the documents I had faxed my office computer earlier.
The conclusion was unavoidable. In 1988 Reza Nazeri, aka Christopher Gonda, aka Philip Montreau, had moved millions of dollars between Switzerland and the U.S., and back. During that time money-laundering laws had been reserved for drug lords and corporate frauds, and the phrase terror financing hadn’t been coined yet or thought of. Most of the transfers had gone through Al Taqwa in Lugano and Tempelhof Bank in Zurich, and in all of them the name used was Gonda, not the two other names, Nazeri and Montreau. But although I found 1988 records, he’d had an account with Tempelhof Bank at least as early as 1981. Was there an explanation?
Perhaps the answer was simple. Since he’d used the stolen identity of Christopher Gonda to open the account, and Gonda disappeared at about the same time, I assumed that 1981 was in fact the year the account was opened. Why had Nazeri/Gonda needed the account before the banking scams had begun? Since my first quick review of the earlier files at the ware house didn’t reveal anything suspicious, I went on to the next year. I was locked into an assumption connecting Nazeri/Gonda to McHanna. Therefore, I may have overlooked Gonda’s activities before his account was used to launder money transferred between McHanna and Al Taqwa. I’d have to go back to the ware house to look again in the files, including those I’d already reviewed, but definitely those of the years subsequent to 1988.
Casey called me again. “There’s no point in your hanging around in Switzerland until we resolve the security issue. We can’t get you much protection without drawing unnecessary attention.”
I was really eager to return to the ware house and solve the puzzle, but as instructed, I returned to New York the following morning. I went straight to the office, where Bob Holliday was waiting for an update.
“Did you have a good flight?” he asked, wryly avoiding the crisis at hand.
