Herr Fritsch excused himself and left the office. When he returned he held a slim folder.
‘I have conferred with colleagues, Sir Adrian,’ he began. Nothing flickered in Adrian Weston’s face, but he knew he was being lied to. So the buttery Herr Fritsch was part of the scam. A bought man.
‘A month ago a gentleman came here and sat exactly where you now are. He was from the Russian embassy in Bern, across the border. He opened a deposit account. A nominal sum was used for that. A week later the equivalent in euros of five million US dollars was paid in by electronic transfer. No source.’
‘A tidy sum. And the beneficiary?’
‘A week after that another man came. No name. It was not necessary. Under the terms of the account, only a sequence of letters and numbers was required. This man had exactly the necessary identification. But he was certainly a fellow countryman of yours.’
‘And he withdrew it all to cash.’
‘He did indeed. I am authorized to reveal this solely on the basis that I have your word it will go no further.’
‘You have my word, Herr Fritsch. But as he crossed the lobby, the CCTV camera I noticed there would have secured a picture.’
‘You are very astute, Sir Adrian.’
‘One does one’s best, Herr Fritsch.’
‘You understand that I cannot permit this file to leave this room. But if you happened to glance at it, I could hardly prevent you.’
The file lay between them. Herr Fritsch rose and turned his back to stare out of the window at the town below. Adrian Weston leaned forward and flicked open the file. It contained a single print-out of the lobby and the man crossing it. He glanced, closed the file and pushed it back across the desk. Herr Fritsch resumed his seat.
‘Herr Fritsch, I and indeed my country are enormously grateful. I assure you, what I have seen today will go no further. Steps will be taken, but nothing will come back to this bank.’
They shook hands in well-simulated camaraderie. An escort was summoned and the Britisher was accompanied back to the front door. He glanced up towards the mounted camera that had photographed the man carrying the bulging Gladstone bag containing $5 million in high-denomination euro bills.
His rented car was in the bank’s car park. He began the long drive back to Zurich airport. From his second-floor office, Herr Ludwig Fritsch watched him go and reached for the phone.
On the drive, Sir Adrian mulled over what he had seen. The photo image showed a middle-aged senior civil servant in the lobby where he had been a few moments earlier. The face was unmistakeable and he knew it well. It was Julian Marshall, the Assistant Cabinet Secretary in London.
It had long occurred to Sir Adrian that the guilty party must have left London to visit Vaduz and retrieve his Judas money. But it was a needle-in-a-haystack shot. Virtually everyone at the very top of the tree had a country home, regularly visited at weekends. Any mandarin could slip away unnoticed, board a private executive jet, fly there and back, and reappear unspotted. Nothing had come up in his investigations. He stared again at the photo in his mind’s eye. There was something wrong, some tiny detail. Then he saw it.
The Russian in Yasenevo who had concocted the photo had done a brilliant job. The shoes were probably from Lobb’s in St James’s, the beautifully cut suit undoub
tedly from Savile Row. And the face that had been photoshopped on to the torso was certainly that of the civil servant who had chaired the meeting of the National Security Council when the name Chandler’s Court had been mentioned.
The image-creator had been very clever, apart from a single error. The concocted figure was wearing the wrong tie.
Chapter Nine
FOR MOST MEN worldwide, the tie, if worn at all, is a strip of cloth wound around the neck under the collar, knotted at the front and allowed to fall down the chest. The pattern or motif, if any, is at the choice of the wearer. But in England they can be a bit more than that.
The pattern and colours of the stripes or the nature of the design woven into the cloth can indicate in a moment which school the wearer went to, the military unit he served with or the club he belongs to. It is a sort of code, a kind of recognition key.
Julian Marshall had undoubtedly attended Eton College, one of Britain’s most exclusive private academies or ‘public schools’. And those who have attended are entitled to wear the Old Etonian tie. Actually, there are three ties: the standard OE tie on black with slanting pale-blue stripes, and two even more exclusive because they indicate athletic achievement within the school.
There is the Eton Ramblers tie: magenta with purple and green stripes and fine gold lines, so carefully clashing it has to be deliberate. This is for those who have played cricket for their school. And this is what the figure in the photo was wearing.
And there is the Eton Vikings tie: dark red and black stripes with light blue lines, for those who have rowed for the college. The two sports occupy the summer term and thus exclude each other.
Sir Adrian recalled years ago standing on the banks of the Thames at Henley, weekending with an MI6 colleague who had a Thames-side cottage, watching Eton win the Princess Elizabeth Cup. Rowing at stroke in the Eton Eight was a very young Julian Marshall.
Before reaching Zurich airport, he realized he had been looking in the wrong place. He had presumed that a senior mandarin was the Judas. That was what Krilov had wished him to think and why they had gone to all that trouble to bribe Herr Fritsch to put out word of a fictional bank account and a fictional visit by a genuine British civil servant. He had been almost out-calculated. What he had forgotten is that there is another category of person who sits at the heart of the British establishment – the invisible underling.
As one of life’s compulsive observers, he had noted that those styled as the great and the good often overlooked the army of good and loyal men and women who really made the machine of commerce, the professions and of government work: the drivers, the secretaries, the note-takers, the file copiers, the archive-keepers, the interpreters, even the white-jacketed coffee-servers.
They came, they went, they stood and served, and they were generally ignored. But they were not wooden statues. They had eyes and ears, brains to remember, deduce, and certainly a capacity to feel affronted, ignored, belittled by the snobbish and arrogant.