The Geneva Trap

Chapter 5

Otto Bech liked to come into the office on Bern’s Papiermühlerstrasse very early. He got up at five each morning, walked the dog along the shoreline of the Wohlensee, ate a healthy bowl of muesli, kissed his still-dozing wife goodbye, then sat reading the paper in the back of his Audi saloon as his driver took him to work. Bech’s office was on an upper floor of a small complex of modern buildings known as the Egg Boxes, from the dimpled indentations in the external concrete along the line of the windows. The name reminded him of when he was a boy growing up on his father’s farm in the foothills of the mountains outside Geneva.

Bech thought that coming in at the crack of dawn set a good example to his staff; it showed that their boss worked longer hours than anyone else and if they wanted to get on they must work hard too. But the real reason he was usually at his desk at 6.30 was that it was quiet; no one else was around except the security guard and the night duty officer. He had peace and time to think.

Thinking, planning, analysing situations was what he did best. Not that he was bad at management – the staff of the FSI found him approachable and fair for the most part; and he had led them effectively through the disruption when this new intelligence service had been created by merging the two existing agencies.

It helped that Bech hadn’t come originally from either of them; he was an ex-policeman, though that had not been a recommendation in the eyes of most of those he now led. But he wasn’t an ordinary cop. He had run the National Fraud Squad, working for over two decades in the labyrinthine world of hidden bank accounts and anonymous tax shelters. Bech knew his way through his country’s arcane rules and banking practices, and in twenty years he had learned when to keep his eyes shut and when to investigate. But things were starting to change now, he reflected, looking out of the window across the Mingerstrasse at the parkland beyond. Terrorism had seen to that. Swiss banking laws had toughened, and there was unprecedented cooperation with foreign authorities, tracking down and freezing suspect bank deposits. It was difficult work; money could be moved at the click of a mouse, and keeping pace took foresight and speed.

This morning Bech was examining an interesting case. He was used to watching strange transfers of funds in and out of his country, but the movements recorded in this file seemed especially baffling. Twelve months ago an account had been opened in Switzerland’s second largest bank by a foreign national, and a significant deposit was moved into it from another Swiss bank. Checked in a random audit, the money had been traced back to a holding fund in one of the ex-Soviet Republics, Belarus. The bank had put an audit tag on the account, which meant that each deposit (and they came in monthly from various reputable European banks) was traced to its origins, which turned out to be other former Soviet Republics: one month Azerbaijan; the next Kazakhstan, and so on until eventually six or seven seemed to be involved, and the total sum in the account was over 5 million Swiss francs.

There the money had sat, drawing the negligible interest on offer during the worldwide recession. Then it started to be moved, initially in a series of transfers to the branch of a French bank in the city of Lyons. Then withdrawals from the Geneva account started to be made by a man who came into the Head Office and showed credentials proving him to be the same individual who had originally opened the account. He had made four withdrawals, each for 100,000 Swiss francs, before Bech’s officers had been alerted under money-laundering regulations. The identity details of the man, passed over by the bank, showed him to be one Nikolai Bakowski.

There was just one problem: when Bech’s officers attempted to trace Bakowski, they found that he didn’t seem to exist. At the Geneva address he had given, no one had heard of him; the mobile phone number had been terminated, and Swiss Immigration had no record of anyone entering the country under that name. All of which suggested that the Polish passport he had shown at the bank was false, and that it had been used only to create the account.

Bech idly scratched his cheek. The whole thing smelled, and the bank seemed to have been very casual in not checking Bakowski’s credentials properly. If this was ‘funny’ money – the receipts from drug trafficking or mafia activity in the old Soviet bloc – investigation would get them nowhere. The Belarus authorities weren’t going to cooperate in an investigation of the sort of activity that half their own government was probably involved in, nor were the Kazaks nor the Azerbaijanis.

But this felt different, Bech thought. Why had this Bakowski character started to show up at the bank in person instead of continuing to transfer money electronically? For a man with a false identity he was taking a big risk. How could he be sure that the bank was not on to him? He must know that at the very least the CCTV cameras would have photographed him as he withdrew the money. Perhaps he was relying on traditional Swiss banking secrecy. If so, he was out of date. He must need clean cash for some purpose. It must be for paying someone, and it wasn’t his window cleaner. An intelligence operation of some kind perhaps, brooded Bech.

This wouldn’t have bothered him very much if he could have been sure that whatever he’d stumbled on was being carried out somewhere else, but that seemed unlikely – after all, the cash was being withdrawn in Geneva.

The next step, Bech decided as he looked out of the window and saw members of his staff starting to arrive for work, was to find out who this Bakowski really was. The bank had supplied a very blurred CCTV photograph – their camera looked as though it could do with some attention – but he needed something better.

‘Monsieur Bech?’

He looked up with annoyance, since people knew he didn’t like to be disturbed this early. It was the night duty officer, Henri Leplan.

‘What is it?’

‘Forgive the interruption but I thought you should know. There’s been an accident.’

The man paused, ill at ease. Bech prompted him, ‘What kind of accident?’

‘A car ran off the road last night, not far from Lausanne. It was being driven by Dieter Steinmetz.’

‘Is he all right?’ Steinmetz was a good officer, thoroughly reliable, very experienced.

Leplan shook his head. ‘He’s dead, I’m afraid. There was a long drop off the side of the road, and the car rolled over several times.’

‘Good Lord. Was anyone with him?’

‘No. And it doesn’t look as if another car was involved.’

‘There were no witnesses?’

‘None. A local farmer discovered Steinmetz’s car. There’s no way of knowing how long after the accident. We’ve sent a team to assist the police, but right now we think Dieter somehow lost control of the vehicle.’

‘Has his family been notified?’

Leplan nodded. ‘We’ve managed to contact his wife. She’s in Basle seeing her mother. She says Dieter had taken their daughter to the airport and should have gone straight home.’

‘I thought he lived in Geneva.’

‘He did.’

‘So what was he doing near Lausanne?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out. Madame Steinmetz says she can’t understand it.’

Bech raised a suggestive eyebrow. ‘Maybe he’d planned a rendezvous while his wife was away.’

Leplan stiffened and shook his head. ‘I’ve known Dieter for years, sir. You couldn’t find a more devoted husband. We even used to tease him about it. There has to be another reason why he was up there.’