Bech idly scratched his cheek. The whole thing smelled, and the bank seemed to have been very casual in not checking Bakowski’s credentials properly. If this was ‘funny’ money – the receipts from drug trafficking or mafia activity in the old Soviet bloc – investigation would get them nowhere. The Belarus authorities weren’t going to cooperate in an investigation of the sort of activity that half their own government was probably involved in, nor were the Kazaks nor the Azerbaijanis.
But this felt different, Bech thought. Why had this Bakowski character started to show up at the bank in person instead of continuing to transfer money electronically? For a man with a false identity he was taking a big risk. How could he be sure that the bank was not on to him? He must know that at the very least the CCTV cameras would have photographed him as he withdrew the money. Perhaps he was relying on traditional Swiss banking secrecy. If so, he was out of date. He must need clean cash for some purpose. It must be for paying someone, and it wasn’t his window cleaner. An intelligence operation of some kind perhaps, brooded Bech.
This wouldn’t have bothered him very much if he could have been sure that whatever he’d stumbled on was being carried out somewhere else, but that seemed unlikely – after all, the cash was being withdrawn in Geneva.
The next step, Bech decided as he looked out of the window and saw members of his staff starting to arrive for work, was to find out who this Bakowski really was. The bank had supplied a very blurred CCTV photograph – their camera looked as though it could do with some attention – but he needed something better.
‘Monsieur Bech?’
He looked up with annoyance, since people knew he didn’t like to be disturbed this early. It was the night duty officer, Henri Leplan.
‘What is it?’
‘Forgive the interruption but I thought you should know. There’s been an accident.’
The man paused, ill at ease. Bech prompted him, ‘What kind of accident?’
‘A car ran off the road last night, not far from Lausanne. It was being driven by Dieter Steinmetz.’
‘Is he all right?’ Steinmetz was a good officer, thoroughly reliable, very experienced.
Leplan shook his head. ‘He’s dead, I’m afraid. There was a long drop off the side of the road, and the car rolled over several times.’
‘Good Lord. Was anyone with him?’
‘No. And it doesn’t look as if another car was involved.’
‘There were no witnesses?’
‘None. A local farmer discovered Steinmetz’s car. There’s no way of knowing how long after the accident. We’ve sent a team to assist the police, but right now we think Dieter somehow lost control of the vehicle.’
‘Has his family been notified?’
Leplan nodded. ‘We’ve managed to contact his wife. She’s in Basle seeing her mother. She says Dieter had taken their daughter to the airport and should have gone straight home.’
‘I thought he lived in Geneva.’
‘He did.’
‘So what was he doing near Lausanne?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out. Madame Steinmetz says she can’t understand it.’
Bech raised a suggestive eyebrow. ‘Maybe he’d planned a rendezvous while his wife was away.’
Leplan stiffened and shook his head. ‘I’ve known Dieter for years, sir. You couldn’t find a more devoted husband. We even used to tease him about it. There has to be another reason why he was up there.’
Chapter 6
That year spring had come early. Even before Easter the lilacs on campus were showing their first blush and at home Liz Carlyle’s mother said the bluebells were already out in the woods. Liz, just turned twenty-one, was in her last year at Bristol University and preparing for her Finals. When she looked ahead, she wondered what she was going to do with her life.
She was half-frightened, half-excited. So much seemed to be happening in the outside world. The Berlin Wall had come down a few years earlier, and now the Soviet Union – once an impermeable bloc – had suddenly fragmented. The glacier of the Cold War, which as Liz grew up had seemed permanent, was melting away: Democratic movements had sprung up in the states of the Soviet Union, and new governments had taken over in the Warsaw Pact countries after free elections; censorship was lifted, private enterprise encouraged – all measures which formerly would have brought in the tanks from Moscow.
As a History student, Liz had learned enough to realise that it was too early to tell if the promise of perestroika would be fulfilled and a new, safer world would emerge; or if instead all the changes would bring fresh dangers. Either way, she watched the fast-moving events and waited impatiently to get her degree and a job that would enable her to be part of it. She was working hard; she wanted to do well because she knew that a good degree would open more doors than a poor one – though she hadn’t as yet worked out which door to knock on. One thing she knew for certain was that she didn’t want to stay on at university. Academic research held no interest for her. She wanted to be involved on the front line of something that was happening – something relevant to the changes in the world.
For the short thesis that formed part of her degree, she had chosen to write about the significance of the break-up of the Soviet Union. Her tutor, Dr Callaghan, had invited her to the postgraduate seminars on twentieth-century European history that he held every week. She had found some of the topics pretty obscure, but she was flattered to be included, and one week the guest speaker had seemed particularly relevant to her thesis.
Dr Callaghan had introduced the serious, dark-haired young man at the end of the table as Alexander Sorsky, a visitor from Moscow State University where he was a lecturer in political theory. Sorsky looked little older than the postgraduate students, in his turtleneck pullover and jeans. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes the colour of maize, and spoke in excellent, accented English. He had high cheekbones and a prominent forehead, and though he wasn’t exactly handsome, his large, dark eyes made for an attractive, even exotic appearance.
‘I would like to speak of my own experiences during the recent upheavals in my country,’ he began. Then, talking without notes, he described how he had watched with mounting excitement as the new wave of freedom swept across the countries of the Warsaw Pact, moving inexorably towards the epicentre of the empire that had once contained them. He said that for months he had felt like a child waking up on his birthday morning.
At his own university in Moscow there were student protests against the Communist regime. They had been timid ones at first, then buoyed by events in East Germany and Czechoslovakia they had grown bolder; there was even a series of ‘teach-ins’ – inspired, Sorsky noted proudly, by those held in American universities during the Vietnam War. People started to speak out for the first time in their lives.
The guest speaker brilliantly conveyed the excitement of those days, and the uncertainty – no one knew when the Party might crack down on this new dissident movement, or if the military would intervene. It was only when the Republics of the Soviet Union broke away that it became clear there would be no counter-revolution. At one ‘teach-in’, in fact, a KGB officer had appeared in the lecture room and taken a seat. Out of habit everyone grew nervous in his presence, and the discussion – usually lively – was muted and restrained. But then the KGB man politely raised his hand and asked to speak. He rose, looking slightly nervous, and announced that he was not there in any official capacity. He came simply as a citizen, one who wanted to acknowledge that the time for change had come, and could not be denied. His listeners had applauded him, and to their astonishment the KGB man had burst into tears. To Sorsky this seemed the ultimate symbol of the Communist state’s demise.