She’d worked on a Russian case a few years ago, in which Fane had also been involved. He knew about that, especially as it had ended disastrously for him. She didn’t want to remind him of it.
As though he was reading her thoughts he said, ‘I don’t mean the oligarch. I was wondering about other cases.’
‘I helped uncover a British scientist who was selling secrets to the Russians a few years ago. I had to give evidence in court. He got ten years.’
‘What about earlier on in your career? Weren’t you in counter-espionage in your first years here?’
What on earth is this about? thought Liz. But she knew Geoffrey Fane too well to try to hurry him. He would tell her in his own good time.
‘Yes. In my first three years. Then I moved to counter-terrorism,’ she replied.
‘You didn’t deal with an approach from any Russian intelligence officer? Or run anyone here who’d been recruited?’
‘No. I was far too junior. I didn’t do agent running until I went to counter-terrorism.’
‘Hmm,’ said Fane. Then he went on, ‘Some people thought the end of the Cold War would mean the end of espionage. How naïve. Motives change, allegiances change, but spying goes on…’ Liz listened impatiently as Geoffrey droned on, expounding his familiar theme about the perennial need for intelligence work. I don’t know why he’s telling me all this, she thought. I agree with him. Perhaps sensing her impatience, he said suddenly, ‘Anyway, this chap Sorsky says he wants to speak to you. In fact, he won’t talk to anyone else.’
‘I don’t know anyone called Sorsky. Are you sure he really meant me?’
‘He’s reported to have said “Lees Carlisle”. There is only one Lees in either Service, and the only other Carlyle, Rex, has been our man in Uruguay for the last sixteen years. And in any case, Sorsky clearly indicated his Lees Carlisle was a woman. So yes, I rather think he does mean you.’
‘But how’s he got my name?’
‘I was hoping you could answer that. You must have met him somewhere.’
Liz racked her brains, but nothing emerged. Fane was looking at her sceptically, but she could only shrug. ‘What can you tell me about him?’
‘We don’t know anything more than that he’s suspected SVR, under commercial cover at the Trade Delegation in Geneva. As far as our records go, he’s never served here, though you’ll want to do your own Look Up.’ Fane reached down for his briefcase. ‘I have a photograph. Not a very good one but perhaps it will jog your memory.’ He handed over the group shot from the Geneva Mug Book. ‘We could improve this, of course, but have a look at it and see if it means anything.’
She stared at the small group of men, standing on the steps of a large institutional-looking building, and in particular at the figure that had been arrowed. A man a little older than she was, wearing a dark suit and looking sombre.
‘Mean anything?’ asked Fane. His tone was light but he was staring keenly at her.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
But she kept looking at the photograph, and in particular the eyes. They were dark and unusually large. There was something familiar in the gaze, something she had seen before.
Fane started to say something, but she shook her head for silence. Memories were stirring, a confused collection of them slowly starting to take form in her mind. It had been a long time ago – a world away. But where? She’d joined the Service straight after university and had come to London. Apart from a posting in Belfast, she hadn’t lived anywhere else for longer than a month or two. Surely she couldn’t have met him at home, when she’d been visiting her parents in Wiltshire. But she had the feeling she had been young when she met him. Could it have been before she joined the Service?
Chapter 5
Otto Bech liked to come into the office on Bern’s Papiermühlerstrasse very early. He got up at five each morning, walked the dog along the shoreline of the Wohlensee, ate a healthy bowl of muesli, kissed his still-dozing wife goodbye, then sat reading the paper in the back of his Audi saloon as his driver took him to work. Bech’s office was on an upper floor of a small complex of modern buildings known as the Egg Boxes, from the dimpled indentations in the external concrete along the line of the windows. The name reminded him of when he was a boy growing up on his father’s farm in the foothills of the mountains outside Geneva.
Bech thought that coming in at the crack of dawn set a good example to his staff; it showed that their boss worked longer hours than anyone else and if they wanted to get on they must work hard too. But the real reason he was usually at his desk at 6.30 was that it was quiet; no one else was around except the security guard and the night duty officer. He had peace and time to think.
Thinking, planning, analysing situations was what he did best. Not that he was bad at management – the staff of the FSI found him approachable and fair for the most part; and he had led them effectively through the disruption when this new intelligence service had been created by merging the two existing agencies.
It helped that Bech hadn’t come originally from either of them; he was an ex-policeman, though that had not been a recommendation in the eyes of most of those he now led. But he wasn’t an ordinary cop. He had run the National Fraud Squad, working for over two decades in the labyrinthine world of hidden bank accounts and anonymous tax shelters. Bech knew his way through his country’s arcane rules and banking practices, and in twenty years he had learned when to keep his eyes shut and when to investigate. But things were starting to change now, he reflected, looking out of the window across the Mingerstrasse at the parkland beyond. Terrorism had seen to that. Swiss banking laws had toughened, and there was unprecedented cooperation with foreign authorities, tracking down and freezing suspect bank deposits. It was difficult work; money could be moved at the click of a mouse, and keeping pace took foresight and speed.
This morning Bech was examining an interesting case. He was used to watching strange transfers of funds in and out of his country, but the movements recorded in this file seemed especially baffling. Twelve months ago an account had been opened in Switzerland’s second largest bank by a foreign national, and a significant deposit was moved into it from another Swiss bank. Checked in a random audit, the money had been traced back to a holding fund in one of the ex-Soviet Republics, Belarus. The bank had put an audit tag on the account, which meant that each deposit (and they came in monthly from various reputable European banks) was traced to its origins, which turned out to be other former Soviet Republics: one month Azerbaijan; the next Kazakhstan, and so on until eventually six or seven seemed to be involved, and the total sum in the account was over 5 million Swiss francs.
There the money had sat, drawing the negligible interest on offer during the worldwide recession. Then it started to be moved, initially in a series of transfers to the branch of a French bank in the city of Lyons. Then withdrawals from the Geneva account started to be made by a man who came into the Head Office and showed credentials proving him to be the same individual who had originally opened the account. He had made four withdrawals, each for 100,000 Swiss francs, before Bech’s officers had been alerted under money-laundering regulations. The identity details of the man, passed over by the bank, showed him to be one Nikolai Bakowski.
There was just one problem: when Bech’s officers attempted to trace Bakowski, they found that he didn’t seem to exist. At the Geneva address he had given, no one had heard of him; the mobile phone number had been terminated, and Swiss Immigration had no record of anyone entering the country under that name. All of which suggested that the Polish passport he had shown at the bank was false, and that it had been used only to create the account.