The Enemy Inside

by Steve Martini

  “Because no one wanted the information to be made public,” he says. “There were serious concerns that disclosure would threaten political stability in a number of countries, not the least of which was your own. There was also concern as to the effect on financial markets,” says Korff.

  “He’s got a point,” says Harry. “How do you explain to the common folk who are grubbing for a living that half of their leaders are on the take?”

  “Precisely,” says Korff. “It was a very big problem. But still there should have been other ways to deal with it. I became a thorn because I kept pointing that out. Because, you see, I had no choice. As the bank’s compliance officer, if I said nothing and suddenly the news came out as to what was happening, I would be the one who was responsible. Gruber’s president and his friends on the board would claim they knew nothing. So what else could I do? I papered their walls with my complaints. When it was over they fired me. So there you have it. How I became unemployed. Now, what is this job you are looking to fill?”

  “Why didn’t you take the information to the media?” I ask.

  “This is not the United States, my friend. If I said anything they would have had me in jail, charged under the bank secrecy statutes.”

  “But the statutes didn’t apply because of the criminal acts,” I tell him.

  “They do if the Swiss government says they do. And the banking industry in Switzerland is very powerful.”

  “Let me see if I understand what you’re saying.” I lean over the table. “The bank has all the information on these PEP accounts, numbers as well as the identities of the clients holding those accounts?”

  “That is correct.”

  “But the bank can’t be forced to give up the information, even though there is clear evidence of money laundering and probable corruption, because they’re shielded by secrecy. Not because it’s covered by Swiss law, but because other governments have decided not to challenge the issue since their own politicians are involved?”

  “There you have it. Now you understand,” he says. Korff takes another swig from the stein and swallows it.

  “And a private party seeking this information, bringing suit from outside the country . . .”

  “Would have no chance at all,” he says. “Without support from their own government, Switzerland would simply refuse to cooperate. Secrecy is the first rule. The only reason it has been relaxed is because of outside pressure from other governments. Take that pressure away and we go back to the first rule.”

  I shake my head. If he’s right, Harry and I have hit a stone wall. A long trip for nothing.

  “Excuse me,” says Korff, “but I’m getting the sense that you’re not really here to offer me a job. Instead, you’re looking for information. Am I right?”

  “Yeah,” says Harry. “But you have to admit that the beer in this place is pretty good.”

  “I thought so.” The German’s happy expression collapses. “Yes. The beer was good. And I enjoyed the meal,” he says. “And it is good to get out of my son’s apartment, to give them some time alone. So for that I thank you. I have enjoyed the conversation. When you get to be my age, it is good to be listened to by people who, at least for the moment anyway, think you have something important to say.”

  I am feeling like a heel.

  “It is difficult to lose one’s job when you get old,” he says. “There are not a lot of opportunities.”

  “I’m sorry that ours was a lie,” I tell him. “Sorry that we had to deceive you. If there had been an easier way we would have taken it.”

  “I understand,” he says. “I’m not going to ask you why you’re doing what you’re doing. Looking at your faces, listening to your questions, I assume that your motives are proper and correct. For whatever reason you are doing this, I hope you get them.”

  By “them” I am assuming he means the PEPs. That’s not our mission, but if they should happen to tumble along the way, neither Harry nor I would shed any tears.

  “So do we,” says Harry.

  “All of this, the money, the PEPs, the corruption, it troubled me greatly.” He uncouples his hand from the beer stein, looks down at the table for a moment. When he lifts his head there is a tear running down one cheek.

  “It is difficult, very difficult to do the right thing, and to end up as I do. I had worked for Gruber for twenty-two years. I knew the original owners. Nice men. To watch and see other people do what these people have done. To see them prosper. And to watch as society cloaks them with protection. . . .”

  I reach across the table, grab one of his fat hands before he can say anything more. “I’m not going to lie to you again and tell you that I feel your pain,” I say. “But I do understand. We both understand,” I tell him. “You need not have any doubts. You did the right thing. I think you know that and so do we. And if your family is any judge of character, and my guess is that they are, they know it as well. Whatever these other people did, they have to live with it. Take it to the grave with them.”

  “I may not be much of an audience,” says Harry. “But I’ve been around long enough to know that it wasn’t the beer talking tonight. Sometimes life sucks,” he says.

  “Yes, it does. But not always.” Korff lifts his head and wipes the tear away with his sleeve. “Sometimes you get lucky, as you have tonight.”

  “How’s that?” says Harry.

  “Because you see, there is another set of records.”

  “What do you mean?” I look at him.

  “I had to be sure I could trust you,” he says. “I am not the good person you think I am. I want my pound of flesh. The American PEPs used a broker. He would have his own set of files, account numbers, names, all of it. I assume he was a broker, at least that’s what I was told.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because I saw him. Everything about the way these accounts were handled was unusual. Normally an account is opened and funds are deposited, everything done between the bank and the client. No one else involved.

  “But this, the transfer of all these accounts, the use of cash so that there would be no paper trail. To say nothing of the amounts involved. That and the fact they had such a short period of time to complete everything. That is probably why they used the broker. In fact, there were two of them. The actual broker and his lawyer. They were in the bank every day for almost two months.”

  “Did you know them?” says Harry.

  “No. They were both Americans, US passport holders. I know that. I was told that the broker was an acquaintance of Gruber’s president, that they had done business over the years, that the broker once worked for an American branch of a large Swiss bank headquartered in Zurich. They kept most of the staff at Gruber away from them, including myself. Only those in direct support had any contact.”

  “Can you remember any names, anything about them?” I ask.

  “You know, after he left, I thought about it, and I realized I forgot to tell your friend Graves about the woman, the lawyer. I only saw her a couple of times and always at a distance. I never heard anyone call her by her Christian name. They referred to her only as Fraulein Zerna.”

  “You spell that with a Z?” says Harry.

  “No. First letter S.”

  “You mean Serna.” Harry looks at me.

  “My English is not always good,” says Korff.

  “Can you describe her?” I ask.

  “As I say, I didn’t see her up close. I would estimate she was maybe . . . a hundred and seventy centimeters in height.”

  “In feet and inches?” says Harry.

  He thinks for a moment, a quick conversion, banker’s brain. “About five foot seven in inches. She had short dark hair. Medium build. She spoke both English and Spanish. I remember that. Oh, and she worked for a law firm in Washington, D.C. I’m sorry I don’t know the name.”

  “Well, we won’t be talking to her,” says Harry.

  “Why not?”

  “She’s dead,” I tell
him.

  “Oh.” Korff flashes a look at Harry, then back to me, weighs what is left unstated and says, “How did she die?”

  “Officially?”

  He looks at me and nods.

  “An accident.”

  “But you don’t think it was?”

  “We know it wasn’t,” I tell him.

  This doesn’t seem to surprise him. “I wondered,” he says, “how long it would take before this kind of thing began to occur. With that much money and these kinds of clients, it was certain to happen.”

  “Why is that?” I ask.

  “It’s the nature of the animal,” he says. “The thing about PEPs. They commit bad acts, they take money, and because of it they are highly vulnerable to extortion. It’s how they got the name ‘Politically Exposed Persons.’ Depending on the power they possess, there is a high correlation to violence. From what you’re saying, I take it then you knew these people, the broker and his lawyer? I expect that he is probably dead as well.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Rubin Betz.”

  I think about it for a moment and suddenly it all makes sense. The whistleblower. It was little wonder they had him locked up. It was probably the only reason he was still alive, that and the radioactive pile of information he had salted away.

  FORTY

  The two Libyan mercenaries took turns watching from a rooftop across the river with a pair of 20×80 binoculars, powerful field glasses that brought everything up close. The location five stories up gave them a good line of sight through the windows along the second-story balcony into the restaurant.

  They had located and identified the American lawyers earlier in the day from photographs soon after their quarry had checked into the hotel. In the evening the lawyers were joined by another man, an older European who arrived on foot. They saw him cross the wooden bridge and head toward the hotel until finally all three ended up in the restaurant.

  The Libyans had been fully briefed on what to do. Anyone meeting and talking with the lawyers was in their cross hairs. But now they were getting stiff lying out in the open air on the cold hard roof. Whatever the three men were discussing, it was taking far too long to suit the Libyans out on the roof.

  Finally the man with the field glasses observed one of the lawyers as he paid the bill. “Wake up. They are getting ready to leave.”

  The other Libyan stirred, cleared his eyes, and started to get up.

  “Wait.” They spoke in Arabic.

  Across the river the three men got up from the table. They shook hands and walked toward the back of the restaurant, where they disappeared.

  “All right. You know what to do?” The man with the field glasses looked at his partner.

  “Yes.”

  “I will stay and watch to make sure the other two go to their rooms. If they follow the old man I will call to warn you.”

  “Good.”

  “Check your phone. Make sure it’s on.”

  The one holding the glasses said, “Go!”

  The other Libyan scurried across the roof and clambered down a fire escape at the back of the building. There was no reason to hurry. He knew that the old man would cross the wooden footbridge moving toward him. All he had to do was get to the end of the bridge on this side of the river and wait.

  He reached the ground, walked briskly toward the bridge, and checked his watch. It was after one in the morning. The narrow winding back streets of the old town were almost completely deserted. The shops along the way were all closed, the interiors dark. The open-air street vendors had long since shuttered the stalls, hauled away their perishables, and headed for home.

  Occasional traffic could be heard on the four-lane auto bridge a hundred meters or so to the east, where the waters of Lake Lucerne flowed into the river.

  The Libyan quickly found a position near the end of the wooden footbridge. He hunkered in the shadows near one of the closed stalls on the curving cobbled quay along the riverbank. He waited as he listened to the lonely whine of a motor scooter somewhere off in the distance as it shifted gears until it was swallowed by the silence of the night.

  We left Korff in the lobby. He was a few sheets to the wind, uneasy on his feet. Still, for a man who had downed an ocean of beer, the fact that he was standing at all was itself an Olympian feat. We gave him some cash, three hundred Swiss francs, for his time, for the information, and to hire a taxi to take him home. Harry and I offered to go with him. But he said no. He took the cash, thanked us profusely, and headed to the counter to call the night clerk to get a cab.

  Harry and I headed up to our rooms. European style, each of the adjoining rooms has a tiny bath with a shower and a window overlooking the river, comfortable but small and very expensive.

  Tonight I don’t care. I could sleep in a tent. I’m exhausted, finally losing the battle over the nine-hour time difference between the West Coast and Lucerne.

  In the hallway outside his door Harry stops, looks at me, and says, “I just had a thought. Why don’t we head back?”

  “What?”

  “Home,” he says.

  “What, you mean now?”

  “Why not? We stick around, we’re just gonna swallow a big load of jet lag. If we head back now, we stay on California time and we’ll be fine. We sleep on the train to Zurich and all the way home on the plane. You heard the man. There’s nothing more we’re gonna get here.”

  “I’m tired. I want to sleep. We paid for the rooms, let’s use them. Besides, how can you be so sure there’s nothing more?”

  “Unless you think he was lying,” says Harry. “What else is there? We need hard evidence and there’s only two sets of records. The bank has one. The other is buried somewhere, probably stateside, and the only man who knows where is locked up in a federal pen.

  “You think he was lying?” says Harry.

  “You mean Korff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. I think he told us everything he knew.”

  “So then we know almost everything there is to know. We just can’t prove any of it.” Harry puts the key in the lock and opens the door to his room. Harry disappears inside, but he keeps on talking and doesn’t close the door. Harry’s wound up. He wants to chat. “What else is there? Tell me?” he says.

  I ignore him, open the door to my own room, and flip on the light. I can hear him still jabbering away in the other room. I yawn, cover my mouth, and make my way around the bed toward the window on the other side. When I get there I pull the curtains closed. All I want to do is collapse on the bed and sleep. I’ll shower in the morning.

  “I’m talking to you,” he says. “Where’d you go?” I hear him hollering, top of his lungs in the other room. If he doesn’t tone it down they’re going to throw us out. I stumble back around the bed into the hallway toward his room. When I get to his open door I tell him as much.

  “Good,” he says. “They throw us out, we can go home.” Harry has his back to me, opening the window, taking in some fresh air. With Harry, a few beers and he gets a second wind. He pulls the curtains closed as he turns to look at me. “If we stay here we’re just wasting more time. You heard the man. There are no records to be had. Not here at least.”

  “There is the bank,” I tell him. “It’s a shot.”

  “You mean Gruber? Yeah, right through your head. You don’t actually think they’re gonna share anything with us. You heard him. Swiss banking secrecy is carved in stone. Put there by the fiery finger of God. We go wandering over to Gruber asking questions about any of the information he gave us tonight, they’re gonna throw our asses in the Swiss pokey until we tell them who ratted them out. Then the three of us can share a cell,” says Harry.

  He may be right. But at the moment I’m not thinking too clearly. “OK, but why don’t we get some sleep first?”

  Harry stops talking. Instead he is looking down at something with the kind of expression you might save for a snake.

  “What is it?�
��

  “That.”

  “What?”

  “My comb. On the bed.”

  “Jeez, you had me scared.” There’s a small pocket comb lying near the head of the bed halfway under one of the pillows.

  “I didn’t leave it there,” he says.

  “Maybe you did and you forgot.”

  “No. I didn’t open my bag.” He lifts the rolling piece of luggage up and tosses it onto the bed. Harry unzips it and throws back the cover. He looks but he doesn’t touch anything.

  “Is everything there?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s not the way I packed it,” he says. Harry would know. He is phobic about such things.

  I head to my room and check my bag. Before I even get it open I realize he is right. The running shoes I’d packed in the side pocket are no longer there. When I unzip the bag I find them inside, on top of my other clothes.

  I leave the bag unzipped on the bed and head back to Harry’s room. When I get there he is folding up a piece of paper, something from his travel folder.

  “We can sleep on the train,” he says. He’s already chugging around the bed toward me. “There’s one that leaves for Zurich at two.” He grabs the comb, tosses it in the suitcase, and zips it up.

  Before I can say another word, Harry has the lights off, pulling his suitcase behind him. He closes the door to his room and ushers me down the hall to get my bag and lock up.

  At this point the adrenaline has kicked in. I am no longer arguing with him. My weariness seems to have fled, driven off by my natural instinct of flight rather than fight.

  The ancient covered footbridge was lit by incandescent lights high up under the gable of the wooden roof. The bright light seemed trapped inside the long span over the dark water.

  But even with the illumination it was difficult from outside to see much on the bridge at night. There was only a small gap between the eaves of the roof and the solid plank walls that lined each side of the walkway. If a person fell on the bridge, unless you were walking on it yourself, you would not be able to see them.

  The Libyan hiding in the shadows on the other side realized this almost immediately. He had been waiting almost ten minutes by the time he saw the old man stumbling along the quay across the river. In that time not a single soul had crossed the footbridge. The man was getting tired of waiting. Besides, from the look of it, the old guy might pass out before he got across.