The First Billion

by Christopher Reich

  “Young man, are you all right?” the porter asked.

  Nick spun to face him, banishing the disconcerting images from his mind. “I’m fine,” he said. “Just fine.”

  The porter placed a foot into the elevator. “You’re sure you are ready to begin work today?”

  Nick raised his chin and fought the porter’s inquisitive stare. “Yes,” he said gravely, giving an imperceptible nod of his head. “I’ve been ready for a long time.”

  Offering an apologetic smile, he let the elevator door close and pressed the button for the second floor.

  “Marco Cerruti is ill. Out with some virus or bug, who knows what,” explained a tall, sandy-haired executive well on the downslope to forty, who was waiting for Nick on the second-floor landing. “Probably the lousy water in that part of the world—Middle East, that is. The Fertile Crescent: that’s our territory. Believe it or not, we bankers did not give it that name.”

  Nick stepped out of the elevator and offering the required smile, introduced himself.

  “ ’Course, you’re Neumann. Who else would I be waiting for?” The sandy-haired man thrust out his hand and gave a vigorous shake. “I’m Peter Sprecher. Don’t let the accent fool you. I’m Swiss as William Tell. Did my schooling in England. Still know the words to ‘God Save the Queen.’ ” He pulled at an expensive cuff and winked. “Old Man Cerruti is just back from his Christmas run. I call it his yearly Crusade: Cairo, Riyadh, Dubai, and then off to points unknown—probably a sunny port where he can work on his tan while the rest of us back at head office wilt. Guess it didn’t work out as planned. Word’s come down he’ll be out at least a week. The bad news is you’re with me.” Nick listened to the rambling outpouring of information, doing his best to digest it all. “And the good news?”

  But Peter Sprecher had disappeared down a narrow corridor. “Ah, yes, the good news,” he called over his shoulder. “Well, the good news is that there is a mountain of work to be done. We’re a bit shorthanded at the moment, so you won’t be sitting on your duff reading a sackful of annual reports. We’re sending you out into the blue, pronto.”

  “Into the blue?”

  Sprecher stopped at a closed door on the left-hand side of the hallway. “Clients, chum. We have to put somebody’s pretty mug in front of our trusting customers. You look like an honest type. Got all your teeth, do you? Should be able to fool them.”

  “Today?” Nick asked, ruffled.

  “No, not today,” Sprecher answered, grinning. “The bank usually likes to provide a little training. You can count on at least a month to learn the ropes.” He leaned on the handle and opened the door. He walked inside the small meeting room and tossed the manila envelope he’d been carrying onto the conference table. “Take a seat,” he said, flinging himself into one of the quilted leather chairs. “Make yourself at home.”

  Nick pulled out a chair and sat across the table from his new boss. His momentary panic settled, giving way to the usual vague unease that accompanied his arrival at a new post. But he recognized a new sensation, too—a stubborn disbelief that he was actually there.

  You’re in, Nick told himself in the admonishing tone that had belonged to his father. Keep your mouth closed and your ears open. Become one of them.

  Peter Sprecher pulled a sheaf of papers from the envelope. “Your life in four lines, single spaced. Says here you’re from Los Angeles.”

  “I grew up there, but I haven’t called it home for a while.”

  “Ah, Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one. Love the place, myself.” Sprecher shook loose a Marlboro and offered the pack to Nick, who declined. “Didn’t figure you for a tobacco fiend. You look fit enough to run a damned marathon. Some advice? Calm down, boy. You’re in Switzerland. Slow and steady, that’s our motto. Remember that.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Liar,” Sprecher laughed. “I can see you’ve got a bee buzzing about your bonnet. Sit too damn straight. That will be Cerruti’s problem, not mine.” He lowered his head and puffed on his cigarette while studying the new employee’s papers. “Marine, eh? An officer. That explains it.”

  “Four years,” said Nick. He was trying hard to sit more casually—drop a shoulder, maybe slouch a little. It wasn’t easy.

  “What d’ya do?”

  “Infantry. I had a reconnaissance platoon. Half the time we trained. The other half we floated around the Pacific waiting for a crisis to flare up so that we could put our training to use. We never did.” That was the company line, and he’d been sworn to keep it.

  “Says here you worked in New York. Four months only. What happened?”

  Nick kept his answer brief. When lying, he knew it best to stay within the shadow of the truth. “It wasn’t what I had expected. I didn’t feel at home there, at work or in the city.”

  “So you decided to seek your fortune abroad?”

  “I’ve lived in the States my whole life. One day I realized that it was time for something new. Once I made the decision, I got out as quickly as I could.”

  “Wish I’d had the guts to do something like that. Alas, for me it’s too late.” Sprecher exhaled a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Been here before?”

  “To the bank?”

  “To Switzerland. Someone in your family is Swiss, isn’t he? Hard to pick up a passport any other way.”

  “It’s been a long time,” said Nick, purposely keeping his answer oblique. Seventeen years, actually. He’d been eleven, and his father had brought him inside this same building. It had been a social visit, the great Alex Neumann poking his head into the offices of his former colleagues, exchanging a few words before presenting little Nicholas as if he were an exotic trophy from a far-off land. “The passport comes from my father’s side. We spoke Swiss-German together at home.”

  “Did you? How quaint.” Sprecher stubbed out his cigarette and brought his chair closer to the table so that he sat directly facing Nick. “Enough small talk, then. Welcome to the United Swiss Bank, Mr. Neumann. You’ve been assigned to Finanz Kundenberatung, Abteilung 4. Financial Client Management, section 4. Our small family deals with private individuals from the Middle East and southern Europe, that is Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Right now we handle approximately seven hundred accounts with assets totaling over two billion U.S. dollars. In the end that’s still the only currency worth a damn.

  “Most of our clients are individuals who hold numbered accounts with the bank. You might see their names penciled somewhere inside their files. Penciled, mind you. Erasable. They are to remain officially anonymous. We don’t keep permanent records regarding their identity in the office. That information is kept in DZ, Dokumentation Zentrale. Stalag 17, we call it.” Sprecher wagged a long finger at Nick. “Several of our more important clients are known only to the top brass of the bank. Keep it that way. Any inclination you may have about getting to know them personally had better stop now. Understood?”

  “Understood,” said Nick. The help does not mix with the guests.

  “Here’s the drill: A client will call, give you his account number, probably want to know his cash balance or the value of the stocks in his portfolio. Before you give out any information, confirm his or her identity. All our clients have code words to identify themselves. Ask for it. Maybe ask their birthday on top of that. Makes them feel secure. But that’s as far as your curiosity runs. If a client wants to transfer fifty thousand deutsche marks a week to an account in Palermo, you say, ‘Prego, Signore. Con gusto.’ If he insists on sending monthly cash wires to a dozen John Does at a dozen different banks in Washington, D.C., you say, ‘Of course, sir. It’s my pleasure.’ Where our clients’ money comes from and what they choose to do with it are entirely their own business.”

  Nick kept his wry comments to himself and concentrated on keeping straight all the information being tossed his way.

  Sprecher stood from his chair and walked to the window, which overlooked the Bahnhofstrasse. “Hear the drums?” he asked, tilting
his head toward the demonstrators who paraded in front of the bank. “No? Get up and come over here. Look down there.”

  Nick rose and walked to Sprecher’s side, from where he could see the assembly of fifteen or twenty protesters.

  “Barbarians at the gate,” said Sprecher. “The natives are growing restless.”

  “There have been calls for greater disclosure of the bank’s activities in the past,” Nick said. “The search for assets belonging to customers killed during the Second War. The banks handled that problem.”

  “By using the nation’s gold reserves to set up a survivors’ fund. Cost us seven billion francs! And still we stonewalled them over direct access to our records. The past is verboten. You can be sure of one thing: Swiss banks must be built of the hardest Bernadino granite, not of porous sandstone.” Sprecher glanced at his watch, then dismissed the demonstrators with a wave. “Now more than ever we have to keep our mouths shut and do as we’re told. Granite, Neumann. Anyway, that’s enough of Saint Peter’s pap for now. You’re to go to Dr. Schon at personnel to have an identification card made up, get a handbook, and take care of all the other niceties that make our beloved institution such a wonderful place to work. Rules, Mr. Neumann. Rules.”

  Nick leaned forward, listening carefully while directions to the personnel director’s office were given. Rules, he repeated to himself. The admonition sent him back to his first day at Officer Candidate School. The voices here were softer and the barracks nicer, but all in all it was the same. New organization, new rules, and no room to mess up.

  “And one last thing,” said Sprecher. “Dr. Schon can be a little testy sometimes. Americans are not a favorite topic. The less said the better.”

  From his window on the Fourth Floor, Wolfgang Kaiser stared down upon the damp heads of the demonstrators gathered in front of his bank. Forty years he had worked at the United Swiss Bank, the last seventeen as chairman. In that time, he could recall only one other demonstration taking place on the steps of the bank—a protest against the bank’s investments in South Africa. He had frowned on the practice of apartheid as much as the next man, but politics simply didn’t factor into a business decision. As a rule, Afrikaners were damned good clients. Paid back their loans on time. Kept a decent amount on deposit. Lord knows they held gold bars up to their eyeballs.

  Kaiser gave each end of his mustache a brief tug and moved away from the window. Though of medium height, he was a formidable man. Clothed, as was his custom, in bespoke navy worsted, he could be mistaken only for Lord of the Manor. But his broad shoulders, plowman’s back, and stout legs testified to a common upbringing. And of his less than noble parentage he carried a permanent reminder: his left arm, damaged at birth by the enthusiastic forceps of a drunken midwife, was thin and limp, a paralyzed appendage. Despite constant exercise during his early years, the arm had remained atrophied and would always be two inches shorter than the right.

  Kaiser circled his desk, staring at the telephone. He was waiting for a call. A brief message that would bring the past into the present. Word that the circle was closing. He could not expel from his mind the message written on one of the crude placards below. “Child Killers,” it read. He didn’t know what exactly it made reference to, but still the words stung. Damned press! Vultures were thrilled to have such an easy target. The evil bankers so eager to accommodate the world’s baddies. Horseshit! If not us, then somebody else. Austria, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands. The competition was closing in.

  The phone on his desk buzzed. He pounced on it in three swift steps. “Kaiser.”

  “Guten Morgen, Herr Direktor. Brunner speaking.”

  “Well?”

  “The boy has arrived,” said the hall porter. “He came in at nine o’clock sharp.”

  “And how is he?” Kaiser had seen photographs of him over the years. More recently, he had viewed a videotape of the boy’s interview. Still, he could not stop himself from asking, “Does he look like his father?”

  “A few pounds heavier, perhaps. Otherwise, a spitting image. I sent him to Mr. Sprecher.”

  “Yes, I’ve been informed. Thank you, Hugo.”

  Kaiser hung up the phone and took a seat behind his desk. He turned his thoughts to the young man sitting two floors below him, and soon a faint smile pushed up the corners of his mouth. “Welcome to Switzerland, Nicholas Alexander Neumann,” he whispered. “It’s been so long since we last met. So very, very long.”

  A Q & A WITH AUTHOR CHRISTOPHER REICH

  UPON THE PUBLICATION OF THE FIRST BILLION

  Q: You’ve written two thrillers that break open a fairly covert world—in NUMBERED ACCOUNT it is the world of private Swiss banking and in THE FIRST BILLION it is the high-stakes business of bringing a company public. How do you assess what information to present to the reading public in order to tease their interest, and what to “embellish” for the sake of page-turning plotting?

  A: Any business where on a daily basis men and women stand to gain or lose millions of dollars—sometimes in just minutes—is by definition interesting. Nowhere is the tension higher than in the IPO game. IPO stands for initial public offering. Bringing a company public is a long process and involves many different parts of an investment bank. You could write a whole book about the process itself, but I don’t know if it would be a thriller. The exciting part comes at the beginning—winning the business—and at the end—taking the deal to market. In between is the hard part, the grunt work that fills most I-bankers’ days: due diligence, number crunching, road shows, etc. In THE FIRST BILLION I keep to the exciting parts.

  Q: Tell us about THE FIRST BILLION: Was this novel inspired by a true event? A trend? Or something you see in the future?

  A: In fact, THE FIRST BILLION was inspired not by any goings-on in the stock market but by a paper I read about the disastrous state of the Russian KGB, the equivalent to our CIA. During the 1990s, the once-vaunted spy agency suffered from devastating budget cuts and fell on very hard times. Simply put, they had no money. No longer could they fly agents around the world on commercial aircraft. Federal Express canceled their account for nonpayment. At their headquarters outside Moscow they had no photo paper to develop microfilm. The list goes on. All I could think was “My God, these guys must be angry. They must desperately want to get back on the playing field.”

  That, along with my interest in the wild and woolly world of the Russian oligarchs, the group of ten to fifteen businessmen who have taken control of more than half the Russian economy, set the story in motion. The more I read about these guys, the more I knew there was a great thriller to be written.

  Q: What is the impact of technology on the global market? What is the impact on a writer such as yourself? Has the process changed since you first put pen to paper on your debut novel, NUMBERED ACCOUNT?

  A: Quite simply, technology has made the world move faster, mostly through the increased speed of communications or information transfer. It has also created a whole class of information spectators. There are people who live their lives on the Internet, viewing others’ actions as a proxy for their own, a kind of vicarious cyberexistence. The world has become a much smaller place. Too small, by my reckoning. But there is no going back. I still wonder, though, whether we’re getting that much more done, or if knowing so much makes us happier. Still, I wouldn’t trade my PC for a paper and quill for anything!

  Q: You’ve said in the past that your writing heroes are authors as diverse as Crichton, DeMille, Franklin W. Dixon, and especially John le Carré. Why these? And are you ready to reveal any new names you admire? What are you reading right now?

  A: There are so many wonderful authors; it’s not a question of finding them but of finding the time to read them all. Recently I’ve been drawn to Irwin Shaw, author of The Young Lions and Rich Man, Poor Man. Great stories, great insight into the human condition, vivid prose. Le Carré is and always will be my favorite author. Simply put, a genius and one with a giving heart. Anton Myrer is an author of t
hose big, juicy epics that I love. Once an Eagle is a masterpiece. But who is better at that than James Clavell? Tai-Pan, Shogun, Noble House. Page-turners at their finest! The list of contemporary authors whom I rush out to buy is shorter: Martin Cruz Smith, Nelson DeMille, Thomas Harris, Scott Turow. Right now I’m reading The Big Breach by Richard Tomlinson, the memoirs of a former MI6 agent, who spent a year in jail for trying to get the book published. It’s a great read—very informative about the kind of training a spy gets these days. Next up, though, is something fun: The Emperor of Ocean Park.

  Q: Do you find that the process of preparing to write has changed, now that you have three very successful yet different suspense novels under your belt?

  A: There are four phases to writing a book. Coming up with the idea. Outlining the story. Writing the book. Then rewriting it. Experience has sharpened the skills needed during each phase. Coming up with the idea is the most fun. And rewriting it is where you earn your money. But you still have to spend eight hours a day trying to get the right words onto the page. There is no substitute for working. Elmore Leonard said easy reading means hard writing. Boy, is that the truth.

  Q: The company featured in THE FIRST BILLION is a media/communications company making its way onto the global stage. Was there a reason you picked a media/communications company? Do you see the role of major corporations and major corporate executives changing in our ever-more-intimate world economy?

  A: I chose the media industry because more than any other single sector, it has the power to affect our daily lives. Everybody watches TV, goes online, reads magazines, and listens to the radio on a daily basis. Think about your life without media. There’s a big hole, right? Personally, I find that a shame. I do not own a television. As a father of two young girls, I don’t have the time or the inclination. Anyway, media is a good area to write about. It’s sure a lot sexier than meat products.