The six-story mirrored-glass Banca Privada d’Andorra was on the corner of a dense commercial block nestled into the base of a mountain. The building reminded Kammeyer of a D-cell battery. It shone with distended reflections of the trio of Gothic buildings across the street. She entered the lobby, fifteen minutes late for her five o’clock appointment with private banking officer Xavier Belmonte. She’d let the time lapse, in keeping with her character, deliberating on the purchase of a silk scarf in one of Andorra’s incredible array of duty-free shops — the tiny country had 2,000 in total, one for every four of its citizens.
If not for the PC tower and chip-thin flat-screen monitor in Belmonte’s office, Kammeyer might have believed she’d stepped through a wormhole in time to the House of Rothschild in its heyday. Dropping into the wing chair in front of the red-leather-topped Louis XV desk, she said, in the Catalan of a native Barcelonan, “I totally love your décor.”
“Gràcies, senyora,” Belmonte said, his reserve suggesting that he’d had nothing to do with it.
His charcoal business suit revealed a broad-boned athlete gone soft. He had a small chin, a slit for a mouth, and sunken cheeks offset by a bulbous nose. His smooth skin was either olive to begin with or had recently taken some sun. His prematurely gray hair and thick, steel-rimmed glasses would have made it hard for Kammeyer to guess his ethnicity if she hadn’t read the standard cradle-to-today dossier on the Marseille native. He switched to his mother tongue, which Kammeyer also understood, to relay her request of a café crème over the intercom.
After inquiring about her trip up to the city and her shopping experience, Belmonte deftly segued to her banking needs, beginning by proposing she open what the bank termed an Advisory Account. “We make our skills available to any client who wishes us to actively participate in the management of her assets,” he said. “Our top-rated team of advisers is at your service.” The leading alternative was the so-called Custody Account, “for clients who prefer to manage their assets directly and make their own investment decisions.”
“I wouldn’t be too smart if I passed up the one with the top-rated advisers,” Kammeyer said — or, rather, Penélope Piera said. Wendy Kammeyer knew that 99 percent of Belmonte’s clients were his clients because they wanted no noses but their own in their accounts.
Opening the account required the digital equivalent of paperwork, which Kammeyer filled out on a tablet computer provided by Belmonte. As soon as she finished, he looked it over along with her passport. Under European Union pressure, Andorran banks had recently agreed to inspect prospective clients’ passports. A glance was the extent of their inspections, however. Belmonte only looked at Kammeyer’s passport a second time so as to avoid staring when she plucked six stuffed letter-size envelopes from the pockets inside her parka.
She withdrew a total of €160,000 in €100 notes from the envelopes. She was stacking the bills on Belmonte’s desk when his secretary hurriedly delivered coffee on a silver tray along with a selection of sweeteners and a perfunctory cookie, then bid him bonne soirée.
Excellent, thought Kammeyer. The late hour of the appointment was the key to her plan. She let the coffee sit until certain she and Belmonte were alone; then she took a sip and reacted as if it contained vinegar.
“I asked for skim milk,” she said. “I beg your pardon, but dairy fat and my skin are archenemies.”
“I am terribly sorry, senyora,” Belmonte said, his focus elsewhere, probably on trying to get a handle on how she could have misinterpreted café crème. “My assistant must have made an error. Would you allow me to run to the pantry?”
Kammeyer lit up. “You don’t know what that would mean to me.”
The moment he left, she shot a hand to her left eye and pinched out the contact lens. When his hasty steps faded down the marble corridor, she rounded his desk and placed the lens over the uppermost USB drive on his computer tower. The lens launched a six-legged spiderlike robot one-fiftieth the size of the head of a pin. Originally intended for the targeted delivery of medication, the nanobot had been adapted by Langley’s “toy makers” to deploy spyware. The nanobot might now invisibly penetrate the Banca Privada d’Andorra system, capturing the BIC of the institution that had wired funds to the account of gun-for-hire Ronny Brackman. The spyware would infiltrate the system at that institution when Penélope Piera decided to wire €10,000 there tomorrow.
The nanobot needed about thirty seconds to do its job. Success and the blue iris overlay on the lens would temporarily turn green. Kammeyer watched from a squat behind the desk, lest any passersby see her from the hall. Failure was a 1-in-25 proposition, a function of the inability of the lens to gain recognition by the USB port.
After twenty-five seconds, the inner circle of the lens was red like a bull’s-eye. Make that 1 in 25 in ideal conditions at a Langley lab, Kammeyer thought.
She wasted no time replacing the dud with the contact lens from her right eye. Twenty seconds later, she extracted the lens from the USB port. This time the inner circle glowed a green as lovely as any she’d ever seen, just as Belmonte returned, a fresh mug of coffee in one hand, a plastic container of llet desnatada—skim milk — in the other, and understandable circumspection in his eyes.
“I lost a contact lens,” Kammeyer said. Rising, she opened her hand to display the lens. “But don’t worry, I found it.”
The next day at noon, Lamont met Garrison at Giorgio’s on Chambers Street. The place had the look of a run-down cafeteria, but busy FBI agents came here and stood on line for fifteen minutes because the pizza was the best in the city. The CIA man had called Lamont and said he had good news and that, to celebrate, he was going to take a holiday from his low-cholesterol diet. Enjoying a pepperoni slice now, Garrison talked sports, leaving Lamont to wonder whether the “Eagles’ shitty offense” was code for troubles encountered in penetrating the Andorran bank.
As soon as they were back on the sidewalk, wading into the thick lunch-hour pedestrian traffic on Chambers, Garrison said, “Good news and bad news. The good is the eighty grand to the liquidator came out of a numbered account at the Bank of Reykjavik, where, according to our ‘research,’ the account holder is a corporation called Windward Actuarial.” Garrison halted as the sign on the far side of Broadway turned to the red hand — DON’T WALK. “The bad news is, we have no idea who Windward Actuarial is.”
“Doesn’t incorporation require listing a verifiable human owner?” Lamont asked.
“It did, past tense. Now you can get anonymous bearer share corporations in three places — Belize, Nevis, and Guatemala. Because those governments are eager for the business, they don’t ask for any ownership information and don’t keep any kind of public registry or database, except for a list of the physical mailing addresses they send the certificate to.”
The street sign clicked to an icon of a man walking. Pedestrians shot across Broadway, but disappointment held Lamont in place. “So after all that, the Bank of Reykjavik is of no use to us, even if it wanted to be?” he asked.
“Not necessarily.” Garrison clapped a hand on Lamont’s shoulder, starting them both onto the crosswalk. “We did get one thing. The Bank of Reykjavik, unknown to any of its employees, gave us the physical address that Windward Actuarial’s incorporation certificate was mailed to. Dollars to doughnuts it’s an accommodation address; there’s no phone, fax, or anything else listed. It is a space of some sort, though, in a small office building in Bridgetown, Barbados, which might be something. At worst, Corky, you’ll have had a trip to the tropics courtesy of Uncle Sam.”