Upon A Pale Horse

TWENTY-EIGHT Zurich

Jeffrey’s first impression of Zurich was “clean.” The entire city was spotless, as though God’s own janitorial crew had worked overtime to keep the buildings and surroundings pristine for the good Swiss people. The airport was a marvel, the hotel efficient and sparkling, and the people glowed with the prosperous sheen of natural superiority.

His room wasn’t ready for check-in yet, so he left his bag with the courteous bell staff and headed down to the lower hotel level where the symposium was being held. The first hour or so would be orientation, so he wasn’t worried that he’d missed much when he slipped into the panel discussion on the safety of bank deposits in the new fiscal climate of the European Union. The moderator was a renowned German economist well known for his bearish view of the Union’s future, and the hour turned into two of parsing the minutiae of the new banking regulations that had been put into place and the likelihood that the next big systemic shock would wipe out depositors, rather than being backstopped by governments.

The next meeting was more of the same, and as the day wore on he developed a splitting headache — a function of stress, dehydration from the flight, sleep deprivation, and jet lag. At a break between sessions at three o’clock, he called Soderbergh Bank on a lobby pay phone and arranged to be admitted after hours, with an appointment scheduled at six-thirty that evening. The vice president he spoke with, a Gunther Rundquist, was extremely accommodating, and assured Jeffrey that at Soderbergh Bank, service to its private clientele was its top priority. With advance notice the safe deposit vault could be accessed up to nine o’clock at night, provided his name was on the account and he could supply proper identification.

The final roundtable discussion of the day was on the changing reporting requirements and the aggressive new information-sharing being rammed down the EU participant countries by their high-tax brethren. It was generally agreed that in a few years it would be almost impossible to have true bank secrecy anymore, which was both positive in criminal cases and negative for anyone engaging in legal asset protection. The revenue authorities routinely overstepped their charters and treated any tax avoidance as being equivalent to tax evasion, leaving the innocent and guilty alike to mount expensive legal battles to defend themselves. For the gathered attorneys it was good news, as their area of specialization would get a huge boost from the deluge of lawsuits the trend would generate.

When the meeting broke up, Jeffrey returned to his room and stripped off his suit. The room’s walls and door were mercifully thick, so he wasn’t disrupted by his fellow conference-goers returning to their rooms. He lay prone on the comfortable bed and closed his eyes, and in five minutes was drowsing, anticipation over finally discovering what was in the box replaced by the numb embrace of slumber.

Soderbergh Bank at Bahnhofstrasse 622 was a staid affair, its conservative, understated façade giving no hint that it was one of the more renowned private banks in Switzerland. Jeffrey surveyed the dark street, noting that the daytime pedestrian traffic had all but disappeared now that normal business hours were over, and then approached the ornate wrought-iron door and pressed a small white button beneath a ten-inch-wide engraved brass plaque with a single word inscribed upon it: Soderbergh.

He shifted from foot to foot, the cold slicing through his casual clothes and jacket. A tall, gray pinstripe-suited man in his fifties opened the inner glass door and peered through the ironwork at him.

“Ja?” the man asked.

“Jeffrey Rutherford. I have an appointment with a Herr Rundquist at seven-thirty.”

“Ach, just so. One moment please,” the man replied in slightly accented English, and then swiped a card through a reader at his side. The heavy sound of multiple bolts sliding open was accompanied by the whirring of electric motors, and then the door swung wide. “Mr. Rutherford. Please. Come in. Herr Rundquist is expecting you.”

Jeffrey stepped into the large marble-floored foyer, noting the antique tables along each mahogany-paneled wall, oil paintings of pastoral landscapes adorning the space and lending it an aura of formality he would have expected in a castle, not a modest building in the center of Zurich. The door closed behind him. His escort pressed a series of buttons, and the lights increased in intensity as the man beckoned to him, indicating a long hall to his right.

They walked three quarters of the length of the corridor and stopped at the oversized door of one of the offices, where Jeffrey could see a man sitting at a desk in the office beyond the outer reception area. He glanced up from his computer screen and straightened, then rose and called to Jeffrey.

“Mr. Rutherford! How nice to meet you. Come, have a seat.”

Jeffrey moved through the empty antechamber and into the office. Rundquist stood and reached across the desk, and shook his hand with polite restraint. Jeffrey sat and studied the banker — perhaps sixty years old, thinning steel hair combed straight back with pomade, ruddy jowls and pudgy hands, a Swiss doughboy who looked like he’d never sullied his life with a day of exercise.

“Before we begin, let’s get the formalities over, yes? Do you have your passport and another form of identification?” Rundquist asked, his voice tuned to a pleasant timbre.

Jeffrey slid his papers across the table to him, and watched as he scanned both and then printed a hard copy.

“Please sign here, and here,” the banker said, handing him a pen that cost as much as Jeffrey’s hotel room.

He dutifully scrawled his name in the indicated spots and then took back his passport and driver’s license, pocketing them as he stood.

“Where are the boxes?” he asked as Rundquist stepped out from behind his desk.

“Follow me. In our secondary vault area. At the basement level.”

They walked together to the doorway at the end of the hall. The Swiss swiped another card reader with his access card and the door opened inward with a hydraulic hiss. Lights flickered on automatically, and Rundquist led him down an endless flight of stairs to a level two stories below the street. Another door, at least six feet wide, loomed at the far end of the room, and the banker stopped at a screen at the door’s edge and stood still while the optical scanner verified his retinal map. A green light blinked twice, and then he pulled the heavy lever. The two-foot-thick solid steel door eased open on massive lubricated hinges, and Rundquist indicated another portal to his right.

“Your box is in there. I hope you remember your code, yes? You’ll be unable to open it if you don’t have it.”

“I have everything I need.”

“Very well, then. Take your time. I’ll be here waiting for you. When you wish to exit the vault, press 22446 on the keypad and the door will open.”

“Should I enter that on this one, too?”

“Yes. We reset the code after each entry, and we don’t have many visitors, so that is your code for this evening. 22446. I’ve taken the liberty of writing it down for you so you don’t have difficulty exiting.” The banker handed him a business card with the digits printed neatly on the back.

Jeffrey punched in the code and another set of bolts clanked, then the ponderous slab eased open as if of its own volition. Jeffrey pushed by it and found himself in a brightly lit room with row after row of boxes, their red LED displays glowing in futuristic symmetry, a smaller alcove off to his right with a steel table and chair for his use. The door hissed closed behind him, the locking mechanism seated a set of bolts back into place, and he was alone in the room.

He moved along the nearest row, scanning the numbers, and then turned and edged to the far wall, where his brother’s box was near the center, at shoulder height. He coded in his secret password; for a moment nothing happened, and then something in the compartment whined almost inaudibly and a latch released.

Jeffrey extracted the long container and carried the metal box to the table, unsure what he was going to find. He lifted the lid, reached in, and removed the contents: a Canadian passport with his brother’s photo but the name Richard Muller embossed on the identification page; a glass bottle with an unreadable label; a sheaf of documents bundled together, held with a rubber band, a yellow note visible on the top. He slipped the note from beneath the binding and read it quickly, his brother’s familiar script as orderly as ever.

Jeffrey unwrapped the sheaf of papers and began reading them, taking his time — some kind of printout, page after page of columns of numbers. At the end were a diagram, a row of horizontally oriented bar charts, and a long sequence of seemingly random letters. Jeffrey wished at that moment he’d paid more attention in math and science class, because it was all gibberish to him and might as well have been written in Mongolian. Still, he committed the unintelligible strings of numbers to memory, closing his eyes after each page and verifying that he could instantly recall the whole document as if it were in front of him, the numbers and symbols clear.

Finished, he placed the pages back into the box and opened the bottle, taking care not to splash any of the corrosive liquid on himself, and carefully poured the fluid into the bottom, where it instantly began bubbling the gray paint as it soaked into the paper. An acrid chemical smoke drifted from the container, easily sucked away by the vault’s air purification system, and after a few minutes the sodden roll of paper had dissolved into a white, formless goo.

He debated taking the passport, but decided to honor his brother’s instructions and replaced it before lowering the lid and returning it to the open compartment. He closed the door, and the LED flashed and displayed the box number again.

Jeffrey punched in the exit code and walked into the outer vault, where Rundquist was sitting patiently. He rose when Jeffrey appeared and faced him with an impassive expression.

“I trust everything was satisfactory?” Rundquist asked.

“Yes, all was in order. Thank you again for agreeing to meet me. I appreciate it.”

“My pleasure. We are always available for our customers.”

The banker led him through the vault entrance and heaved the door closed, the locks securing with a muted thump after he’d inserted his card in the scanner. They ascended the stairs to the ground floor level, where another card swipe got them back into the administrative area. Rundquist showed him to his office and offered a perfunctory smile.

“So, Mr. Rutherford. Is there anything else we can do for you?”

“No, thank you. Many thanks for accommodating me.” Jeffrey extended his hand and shook the banker’s, who then motioned for Jeffrey to accompany him to the entrance. The second man was standing there as if frozen in place. No sooner was Jeffrey on the street than the heavy barrier snicked back into place, and then he was alone on the darkened sidewalk, the cold his only companion as he walked to the nearest large intersection.

A shuffling from a doorway behind him startled him; just as he registered a fast-moving form approaching from the shadows of a nearby building, a starburst of pain shot through his head and he crumpled to the sidewalk, his vision already dimming before he hit the concrete, unconscious.