by Daniel Silva
“We chose it specially for you.”
Two men were seated in armchairs near one of the windows. One wore the inscrutable expression of a Swiss banker, though the cut and quality of his suit suggested he worked for the government rather than the private sector. The second man looked like a character in an English country-house mystery—villain or protagonist, Isabel could not decide.
Neither appeared to have noticed her arrival. The same was true of the man standing before a still life of fruit and freshly cut flowers, a hand pressed to his chin, his head tilted slightly to one side. His eyes were an unnatural shade of green. Like jade, thought Isabel. She tried to guess his age, but could not settle on a number. When at last he spoke, it was in German, with the distinct accent of someone who had been raised in Berlin.
“Do you like paintings, Isabel?”
“Good paintings. But not second-rate junk like that.”
“It’s not so bad. It’s just very dirty.” He paused. “Like the bank for which you work. Fortunately, the painting can be restored. I’m not sure the same can be said for your employer.”
“Who do you work for?” she asked. “BaFin or one of the German intelligence services?”
“None of the above. In fact, I’m not even German.”
“You certainly speak like one.”
“I was taught to speak German by my mother. She was born in the Mitte district of Berlin. I, however, was born in Israel. Once upon a time, I would have given you a pseudonym rather than my real name, which is Gabriel Allon. A simple Internet search would reveal that I am the director-general of Israel’s secret intelligence service, but please resist the temptation to type my name in the little white box. There is no such thing as private browsing.”
The two men seated near the window were each staring into a private space, like extras in a stage production. “What about them?” asked Isabel. “Are they Israeli, too?”
“Unfortunately, no. The handsome gray-haired gentleman is Graham Seymour, my counterpart at MI6.”
“And the other one?”
“A senior Swiss intelligence officer. He would prefer to remain anonymous for now. Think of him as a numbered account.”
“They’re rather passé.”
“What’s that?”
“Numbered accounts. Especially for people with real money to hide.”
He approached her slowly. “I must admit, we enjoyed listening to your performance a few nights ago. Bach’s Cello Suite in D Minor. All six movements. And not a single mistake.”
“I made several, actually. I just covered them up well.”
“You’re good at hiding your missteps?”
“Most of the time.”
“We didn’t hear the rustle of sheet music.”
“I don’t need any.”
“You have a good memory?”
“Most musicians do. I’m also rather good at math, which is how I ended up at RhineBank.”
“But why did you stay?”
“For the same reason ninety thousand other people do.”
He returned to the painting and placed his hand to his chin. “And if you had a chance to do it over again?”
“I’m afraid life doesn’t work that way.”
He licked the tip of his forefinger and rubbed it against the dirty canvas. “Wherever did you get an idea like that?”
19
Erlenbach, Switzerland
He settled Isabel in a place of honor and took up residence before the dormant fireplace. There he recited the basic details of her impressive curriculum vitae, which he and his friends had unearthed from her mobile phone and personal computer. For the benefit of the non-German-speaking members of his audience, he addressed Isabel in English. His accent was faint and entirely unplaceable. His tone was that of an auctioneer presiding over the sale of a painting. The evening’s final lot.
“Isabel Brenner, thirty-four years of age, born in the ancient German city of Trier into a solidly upper-middle-class family. Your father is a prominent lawyer, a man of distinction. Your mother, a devotee of Bach, gave you your first piano lesson at the age of three. But on the occasion of your eighth birthday, she acceded to your wishes and presented you with a cello. Under private instruction, your talent blossomed. At the age of seventeen you were awarded a third prize at the prestigious ARD International Music Competition for your performance of Brahms’s Cello Sonata in E Minor.”
“That’s not true.”
“Where did I go wrong?”
“It was the F-major sonata. And I could play both parts.”
He frowned at the diminutive man who reminded Isabel of a rare-book dealer. The MI6 chief and Swiss intelligence officer were observing the proceedings from their outpost near the windows. The blue-eyed Englishman was scrolling through the contacts in Isabel’s phone. He had not bothered to ask her for the passcode.
“One of Germany’s most sought-after instructors offered to take you on as a pupil,” Gabriel continued. “Instead, you enrolled at Berlin’s Humboldt University, where you studied applied mathematics. You earned your master’s degree at the London School of Economics. While completing your dissertation, you met with a recruiter from RhineBank and were offered a job on the spot. Your starting salary was one hundred thousand pounds a year.”
“Before bonuses,” she pointed out.
“That’s a great deal of money.”
“It was a pittance by RhineBank’s standards, especially in London. But it was three or four times what I would have earned if I was playing the cello in a European orchestra.”
“I thought you wanted to be a soloist.”
“I did.”
“Then why did you study mathematics?”
“I was afraid I wasn’t good enough.”
“You played it safe?”
“I earned degrees from two prestigious institutions of higher learning and secured a high-paying position with one of the world’s largest banks. I don’t think of myself as a failure.”
“Nor should you. I’m only sorry you allowed your extraordinary talent to go to waste.”
“Obviously, it hasn’t.” Her face flushed with anger. “But what about you? Was it always your dream to be a spy?”
“I did not choose this life, Isabel. It was chosen for me.”
“And if you had a chance to do it over again?” she asked provocatively.
“I’m afraid that’s a topic for another discussion. You’re the reason we’re gathered here tonight. You summoned us when you left that message in Bern. You’re the star of the show.”
She surveyed the room. “It’s not exactly the Berliner Philharmonie or Lincoln Center.”
“Neither is RhineBank.”
“But at least there’s never a dull moment.”
“You arrived there in 2010.”
She nodded. “Two years after RhineBank and its competitors brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse.”
“And your first position?”
“Junior analyst in the risk management department of the London office. Rather appropriate, don’t you think?” She smiled sadly. “Risk management. The story of my life.”
But first, Isabel had to go back to school—the Risk Academy, RhineBank’s monthlong training seminar, held at a rented conference center on Germany’s Baltic coast. It was presided over by the appropriately named Friedrich Krueger, RhineBank’s chief risk officer, a former German paratrooper with a penchant for online pornography and far-right neo-fascist politics. Pupils were lodged in dormitories and subjected to merciless hazing rituals inflicted by Herr Krueger’s band of sadistic instructors. One made explicit sexual advances toward Isabel. A week into her stay, she packed her bags and threatened to leave if the conduct did not cease. Herr Krueger convinced her to stay, though later he inserted a report into her file that suggested she was not a team player. It would be the first of her many black marks.
The goal of the course was to simulate Informationsflut, or information over
load. On the final day, trainees were given one hour to rework the bank’s balance sheet to account for a once-in-a-lifetime combination of financial and political calamities. Isabel completed the assignment in just thirty minutes and then used the remaining time to perform Beethoven’s Cello Sonata in A Major.
“Where?” asked Gabriel.
She laid the long fingers of her left hand across the upper portion of her right arm. “In my head.”
She achieved the highest score possible on the final examination and returned to London in the autumn to take up her new position at RhineBank’s offices in Fleet Street, the headquarters of the bank’s global markets division. As a German citizen, Isabel was an oddity; most of the traders were American imports. Where once RhineBank made the bulk of its profits the old-fashioned way—by lending to creditworthy businesses—it was now a major player in volatile derivatives. Indeed, the Economist had declared that RhineBank was nothing more than a $2 trillion hedge fund engaged in high-risk, high-yield proprietary trading, much of it with borrowed money. The Council of Ten had set a goal of a twenty-five-percent return on every dollar, pound, or euro invested, an exorbitant sum. The London traders accepted the challenge. They viewed the markets as casinos and were encouraged to push the envelope on every deal.
“How did they feel about risk managers?”
“We were the enemy. If we raised an objection to a trade, we were told to keep quiet. Freddy Krueger wasn’t much interested in our concerns, either. The money was rolling in—hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees alone. He wasn’t about to pull the plug. Besides, if the London trading floor lost money on one deal, they would make it up on the next. Or so Hamburg assumed.”
Occasionally, however, the traders went too far. One was betting hundreds of millions of dollars each day on tiny movements of the Libor index, the interbank lending rate. Isabel took her concerns to the head of the London office and was told in no uncertain terms to mind her own business; the Libor trades were incredibly lucrative. She persisted in her inquiry nevertheless and discovered that the trader in question was conspiring with counterparts at other banks to manipulate the rate itself, thus creating a no-lose investment. The trader was eventually shown the door, and RhineBank was forced to pay a hundred-million-pound fine to British regulators, a small fraction of what it had earned through the dirty dealing.
“One would have thought that I would have been rewarded for my efforts. Instead, Freddy Krueger reprimanded me for putting my concerns in a chain of emails that was later obtained by the British Financial Conduct Authority. Black mark number two.”
Even so, Isabel received regular promotions and salary increases. After four years at the bank, she was earning two hundred thousand pounds a year, twice her starting pay. She was also quite miserable. The long hours, pressure-cooker atmosphere, and regular battles with the ethically challenged traders had taken a toll. She took refuge in London’s vital classical music scene. She found three women like herself—musicians who worked in the financial services industry—and they formed a string quartet. Two evenings a week she took advanced lessons from an instructor at the London Cello Institute. Before long, she was playing better than ever before.
Isabel’s colleagues knew nothing of her double life. Nor would they have cared. For the most part, they were an uncultured lot. She avoided extracurricular office gatherings whenever possible—especially the alcohol-soaked weekend getaways to luxurious European destinations—but her attendance at a risk management retreat in Barcelona in the autumn of 2016 was mandatory. Freddy Krueger was in rare form. RhineBank’s share price, which reached a zenith of ninety-seven euros in 2007, was bumping along in the low twenties. The Council of Ten was in a panic; the CEO’s head was on the block. Freddy’s, too. He told his risk managers that they needed to stand aside and let the traders make money. Otherwise, RhineBank faced the prospect of a painful downsizing.
“The message was unmistakably clear. The bank was in trouble. Investors were heading for the exits. So were some of our biggest clients. Freddy blamed it all on the regulators. He ordered us to mislead them about the amount of risk on RhineBank’s balance sheet. He never once used the word regulators alone. It was always the fucking regulators.”
Isabel returned to London, secure in the knowledge that the bank for which she worked was in serious trouble and that it was hiding something. The reckless traders on the global markets desk had all but stopped returning her calls and emails. Having little else to do, she embarked on a private review of the firm’s balance sheet—at least the portion of the balance sheet she was allowed to see. What she discovered shocked even her. The bank’s leverage ratio was more than fifty to one, leaving it dangerously dependent on borrowed money. Worse still, the traders had used that money to purchase derivatives, which were notoriously hard to value. Isabel constructed a computer model to predict their performance during a crisis. The model concluded that many of the derivatives on the bank’s books were worthless, a fact it was concealing from regulators in Europe and America.
“The bank was a house of cards, a two-trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that was dependent on its ability to borrow money at extremely low rates. If market conditions changed . . .”
“The bank would fail?”
“In all likelihood.”
“What did you do?”
She wrote a detailed report—twenty thousand words in length, with accompanying charts and graphs—and forwarded it to Freddy Krueger. Freddy summoned her to Hamburg the next day and subjected her to an hourlong dressing down. He then suggested that Isabel might want to find employment elsewhere.
“Why didn’t he simply fire you?”
“I was far too dangerous to fire. If I had made my findings public, it might well have led to a run on the bank. I had to be handled with the utmost care.”
A return to her old job was out of the question; the head of the London office didn’t want her in the building. Freddy didn’t want her, either. The beleaguered head of compliance, however, was in desperate need of warm bodies, as RhineBank’s many ethical lapses had led regulators to demand stronger internal safeguards. Isabel returned to Hamburg for six months of training, which bore no resemblance to the madness of Freddy’s Risk Academy. Once again, she received the highest possible marks on her final exam. As a result, she was allowed to select her assignment. After careful deliberation, she chose Zurich, the dirtiest outpost of the world’s dirtiest bank.
20
Erlenbach, Switzerland
Herr Karl Zimmer, the head of RhineBank-Zurich, welcomed Isabel to his fiefdom as though she were an unwanted houseguest. During a tense introductory meeting, he made it clear he had objected to her transfer but had been overruled by headquarters. Nevertheless, he claimed he was ready and willing to give Isabel a chance to salvage her career, provided she keep her nose clean and do nothing to interfere with the essential business of the Zurich office, which was making obscene amounts of money by any means necessary. He gave her a windowless cell of an office two levels beneath the trading floor. It was just down the hall from a cipher-and-biometric-protected door, behind which toiled the gnomes of a secret unit of the wealth management department known as the Russian Laundromat.
RhineBank’s ties to Russia, she explained, dated to the late nineteenth century, leaving the bank uniquely positioned to take advantage of the corrupt and oftentimes violent return to capitalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. RhineBank-Moscow opened during the final years of the Yeltsin era, and in 2004 the Council of Ten approved the purchase of Metropolitan Financial, a small bank that catered to newly rich Russian oligarchs and criminals. RhineBank also extended a billion-dollar line of credit to MosBank, a Kremlin-owned lender directly controlled by the Russian president. MosBank used a portion of the money to fund the overseas activities of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. It also allowed SVR agents to operate undercover from MosBank branches throughout the world.
“Which meant that
RhineBank AG of Hamburg was indirectly facilitating Russian intelligence operations targeting the West. And it was making millions of dollars a year in profits in the process.”
That paled in comparison, however, to the profits the bank earned by operating the Russian Laundromat—a smooth-running conveyor belt that funneled dirty money out of Russia and deposited clean money throughout the world, all beneath impenetrable layers of shell companies that shielded the client’s identity from regulators, law enforcement, and, of course, investigative journalists. Much of the money began its journey at either MosBank or Metropolitan Financial. From there, it would make its way to dubious financial havens such as Latvia or Cyprus before arriving in Zurich, where the gnomes of the Laundromat worked their magic. They offered their clients a broad range of services, including legal and corporate advice subcontracted through a network of unscrupulous lawyers in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and London. A unit of the Laundromat searched out investment opportunities. Luxury real estate, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, was prized. But in many cases, the money was simply repackaged by other divisions of the bank and lent to other customers.
“As you can imagine, the arrangement is highly lucrative. Not only does the bank collect fees for the initial cleaning service, it then collects massive fees from the borrowers as well.”
“What kind of cleaning fees are we talking about?”
“That depends on how much soap is required. If the laundry is only lightly soiled, RhineBank pockets about ten percent. If the laundry is bloodstained, RhineBank might demand as much as half of it. Not surprisingly, the gnomes of the Laundromat like dirty customers. The dirtier the better.”
“Dealing with Russian mobsters can be a dangerous business.”
“Herr Zimmer is well protected. So is Lothar Brandt.”
“The chief of the wealth management department.”
She nodded. “Head washer boy.”
“You were aware of the Russian Laundromat before you arrived in Zurich?”