Eide took his time. Finally he took the bottle from Grafton’s hand and pocketed it. “For my mother,” he said.
Jake Grafton nodded.
Eide Masmoudi walked out of the men’s room.
For his mother, Jake thought, who was murdered in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, by suicidal fanatics. A man couldn’t have a better reason to fight.
Rolf Gnadinger was still at his office at the bank in Zurich when he received a telephone call from Oleg Tchernychenko. Gnadinger had financed numerous oil field deals for Tchernychenko and Huntington Winchester in the last ten years. They were willing to pay top rates— and did — in return for loans granted with a telephone call and closed within hours. Speed was the name of their game, and Gnadinger had made millions for the bank because he was willing to play. He was willing because he trusted both men, who were solid as rocks.
After the telephone encrypters were turned on and had timed in, Oleg said, “I had a visit yesterday from Jake Grafton. He told me this Abu Qasim villain is real and evil as a heart attack. He believes Qasim killed Alexander Surkov and Wolfgang Zetsche and may have murdered Isolde Petrou’s son, Jean.”
“Have you talked to Hunt?” Rolf asked. Yes. He is plainly worried, but put a good face on it. These deaths are evidence, he said, that our war against the terrorists is hurting them. ‘Money well spent,’ was his phrase.”
“I have taken precautions,” Rolf assured Oleg. That was a lie, one that came readily to his lips. He was being more watchful than he used to be, but that was the extent of it. The truth was that he didn’t want to think of someone hunting him. To kill him. He refused to even look at that vision from the ancient, primeval past. After all, he told himself, I am just another face in the crowd.
“So have I,” Tchernychenko responded. “I’m too good a client for you to lose. And truth be told, I don’t want to go to the trouble of breaking in another banker.”
They said their good-byes and hung up. Gnadinger spent a sober moment staring at the telephone. Then his gaze wandered to the portraits on the wall. The chief operating officer of the bank rated a big corner office, with lots of wall space, which he had filled with portraits of his predecessors.
He studied them, one by one. He had joined the bank in the mid-1960s, about the time the furor over the money the Holocaust Jews deposited in Swiss banks began to bubble. His predecessors had been officers and employees of this bank, or other Swiss banks, when those deposits came in during the late 1930s and early 1940s. They met the German Jews, shook their hands, accepted their money. Then the Nazis murdered them. The banks kept the money.
That is, they kept the money until the survivors and relatives of the Jews got organized and raised a huge stink. Even then, the banks held on to the bulk of the funds by demanding records that the officers knew didn’t exist.
The portraits were of the men who refused to return the money. Gnadinger glanced at every face. When he was young, Gnadinger wondered what those men thought about themselves in the wee hours of the night when they were alone with their consciences… and with God, if indeed He had survived the Holocaust. Gnadinger had watched for decades as they wrestled with their consciences, or refused to do so, assuring any who asked that they were absolutely certain they were doing the right thing, the right thing for their banks, the right thing for Switzerland. They were right, right, right! Except for the stinky little fact that they weren’t.
Hitler murdered the Jews, seven million of them, whole families, whole clans, and the Swiss banks profited from that stupendous crime.
The Islamic terrorists were out to do it again, those new Nazis, who prayed to Mecca five times a day and murdered infidels when they weren’t on their knees with their foreheads on the carpet.
Rolf Gnadinger had no intention of winding up like one of those men in the portraits.
He finished the paperwork on his desk, arranged it neatly in piles and in-baskets and files just so, the way the secretaries knew he would arrange it. He had climbed the banking ladder by being logical and detail-oriented, and he was now. Even his anxiety couldn’t force him from the habits of a lifetime. He finished his workday around six thirty in the evening by signing some late-afternoon correspondence, then capped the pen, put it in its place in his drawer, locked the drawers of his desk and rose from his chair.
It had snowed early this morning, but this afternoon had been unseasonably warm, with sunshine and slush in the streets and melting icicles. He stood at the window for a moment looking at nature’s handiwork, which hadn’t intruded into the quiet offices and corridors of the executive suite.
He donned his coat and arranged his hat just so, then opened the door and left his office. He nodded at his secretary as he glanced at his watch. He was leaving right on the dot, at his usual departure time, not a minute too early nor a minute too late. Timing is everything in life, a wise man once said.
Gnadinger rode the elevator down from the executive suite to the main floor of the bank, where he found the tellers finishing their accounting and filling out their day sheets. The guard at the door touched his cap as Gnadinger approached, then turned to unlock the door.
Well, Oleg was right: He needed a bodyguard. Tomorrow he would call the security service that had the bank contract and ask for a man with a gun. If the man was competent, no one would realize he was an armed bodyguard. The banker reminded himself to demand a man who looked and dressed as if he belonged in Gnadinger’s social circle. No tattooed or pierced persons, please.
The uniformed guard opened the door for Rolf; he stepped outside into the evening gloom. The temperature was still well above freezing. The sidewalks were shoveled, the icicles on the building were dripping copiously, and slush filled the gutters.
He looked around nervously. Away from the safety of the office, outside in raw nature, with water and wind and slush and people moving randomly, Oleg’s warning about assassins seemed more real, more possible.’
He set off along the sidewalk toward the parking garage that held his car as he glanced warily at pedestrians and passing cars.
Really, in the twenty-first century, in safe, civilized Switzerland, in this ancient old city by the lake, the nightmare of killers and murderers and religious fanatics seemed like something from one of those trailers for a horror movie that he would never watch. A lot of people did watch the horror films, of course, to be titillated, because even they could not accept at a gut level the fact that the evil depicted on the screen might be a part of the world in which they lived.
The banker paused at the door to the garage. Took a deep breath and opened it. The stairwell was empty, the overhead light burning brightly. He climbed the stairs, his leather shoes making grinding noises with every step, noises that reverberated inside that concrete stairwell.
His car was on the third level, right where he always parked. In fact, the parking place had a number and was reserved for him: The bank rented it by the year.
No one was in sight amid the cars when he came out of the stairwell. About half the spaces were empty. He forced himself to walk calmly toward his car. He already had the keys in his hand, his thumb on the button of the fob that would open the locks.
His eyes moved restlessly, looking for a lurking figure, anything out of the ordinary. Of course he saw nothing.
Fear is a corrosive emotion, and Gnadinger knew that. In time he would become more and more jumpy, more and more nervous, as the acid of fear worked on his nerves. He knew that, too.
Approaching the car Gnadinger pushed the button on the fob. He heard the click, audible and distinctive in that concrete mausoleum, as the door locks released.
Then he realized that someone might have put a bomb in his car. He stopped, stood frozen, waiting, wondering what he should do. He realized that he was holding his breath, waiting for the bomb to explode.
It didn’t, of course. He stood there in that ill-lit, dingy garage until he felt foolish; then he opened the door to the car, the interior lights illuminated just as they should, and he climbed in. Closed the doors and locked them and put on his seat belt. Inserted the key into the ignition.
The bomb might be wired to explode when he turned the ignition!
Several seconds passed before a wave of disgust washed over him and he turned the key. The engine caught immediately and the vehicle’s headlights came on automatically. So did the CD player, from which emanated the lively tones of classic jazz, which he had listened to on the way to work this morning.
As he put the transmission into drive and inched out of his space, Rolf Gnadinger chastised himself for being a fool. Oleg had spooked him, and his imagination had done the rest.
