Of course, it was a secret to me what they were doing during those meetings, but judging by the troubled faces of the consulate staff working under cover, things were not going that well for them.
In my opinion, just one analyst from our department sitting on the information streams would easily outdo all these ‘paladins’.
The nerves of espionage were almost ringing in Zurich and sometimes I even thought I could hear it ringing!
The octopus was moving its tentacles, groping about in the darkness of the Swiss night in search of victims, but I was ok. Everything being done here and in other corners of the world, was done first of all for the benefit of my country and its citizens, and so ‘he saw that it was good’.
But I probably shouldn’t slander these guys. Outside work they were quite friendly, even though wearily arrogant as if it was 1982 and they had only just returned from the Soviet Union from some top-secret assignment, where they had to escape the clutches of the terrible and insidious KGB.
A couple of times during the fortnight I spent in Zurich, we went for beers in an authentic German beer house called the Elephant, which overlooked Lake Zürich. From their conversation, I realised that the main problem for the local residency was recruiting people in some way connected to the Swiss banking communities.
Zurich is one of the banking capitals of the world. Major offices for almost all the large banks, of which there are more than a hundred, are located there, and it looks like half of the town’s population works in them. Zurich, at least during the day, is a town of business suits and strict hairstyles. Of course, it’s a little bit boring, but at least everything’s calm. Yes, there is a kind of nightlife – I saw a few night clubs with quite unusual names: Abart Music Club, Alte Börse or Basilica. But not a lot.
Two days before my departure I visited one of these clubs, perhaps the most unusual one. It was in response to a request from one of my Zurich colleagues, Stephen Mallers, an economic adviser to the council.
I guess he was the one I got closest to – we used to chat, sit in the Elephant, bantered about other paladins. And so Steve asked me to go to a night club called Adagio to have some beers, relax and keep an eye on a certain German, Herr Hagen, he’d be talking to.
We had been sitting in my hotel room and I was tinkering with his tablet – there were some issues with the wi-fi module – when Steve began to talk about a favour.
‘Josh, help me out. You’ve seen James Bond movies, haven’t you? How about you make yourself a super agent!’ he began to laugh but his eyes remained serious. ‘Actually we don’t have enough people. The task in itself is nothing, a trifle, you won’t need any special training for it. You just need to go to a club, stay there, listen to the music – some good groups perform there – and at the same time look who he’s talking to, what he orders, how he acts. And then just tell me everything – and that’s it.’
“And that’s it?’
“Of course. Did you think you had to film him on a camera installed in a button, or prick him on a bridge with a poisonous umbrella? Ha-ha, Josh, our work is not like a movie!’
‘But I hope he’s a world terrorist. An emissary of Al-Qaeda, no less?’
‘Of course,’ Steve reassured me. ‘He’s a major banking exec – a top dog at Deutsche Bank.’
‘And does he finance international terrorism?’
‘Something of the kind, yes. Well, you agree? I’ll give you seven hundred euros – you can spend it all in Adagio.
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Excellent,’ Steve rejoiced. ‘I knew I could rely on you. So one wolf won’t gnaw off a tail of another wolf, we are doing the same job!’
To be honest, I wanted to refuse – I just couldn’t be bothered to go anywhere. But after his phrase about the same job I felt I just couldn’t refuse.
By the evening, it was raining in Zurich – heavy clouds the color of hardened steel drifted over the snow-white peaks and crawled down onto the town’s roofs, like slugs creeping down grape leaves. The clouds brought with them the cold breath of ice, fog and darkness. The light of the street lamps blurred into orange splashes, and passers-by pulled their heads into their shoulders and raised their collars, and the raindrops streamed down the windows of my taxi. My mood was rapidly getting worse. I was tired after a day of work and the prospect of going to bed at who knows what time was looming ahead.
And I was also very nervous. After all, it’s not very often I have to be a secret agent and conduct surveillance on someone. Of course, I’m slightly exaggerating – there was not supposed to be any real surveillance, but still I felt severely uncomfortable.
Adagio, contrary to my expectations, turned out to be a decent place, finished in the style of a medieval castle with solid furniture, a ceiling painted in the Baroque style, a huge fireplace with a pile of logs, a bar with forged hooks and a quite intelligent clientele.
I chose a high stool by the bar to one side. Steve had said it was the best place to watch the entrance. I sat half-turned and ordered a double martini with vodka and ice.
I’m not the biggest admirer of this drink and have a generally negative attitude towards alcohol.
First of all, I don’t like being drunk, when you don’t belong to yourself anymore. It’s like the feelings drugs awake, but that’s acid in the brain experiencing the influence of a complex chemical compound, when in the case of alcohol you’re controlled by the waste product of billions of yeast fungi. To be controlled by fungus is quite humiliating, to say the least.
Secondly, I simply didn’t like the taste of alcohol drinks. Vodka, rum, tequila, cognac –just a burning, nauseating poison. After champagne, I get a headache almost straight away, probably because of the carbon dioxide. Beer is bitter, while dry wines are too sour for my taste. I guess the only alcohol drink I can consume and, of course, in small portions only, is martini with a little vodka. ‘Shaken, but not stirred’, yes…
I watched people entering the club. A motley crowd was gathering, from bank clerks in black suits to some complete etoiles in retro outfits. People were talking, laughing, drinking, and some guests were moving freely across the space. No one paid me any attention and I gradually relaxed.
Herr Hagen came in after about half an hour. By that time, there were quite a lot of people in the club, because some Austrian group I’d never heard of called Camo & Krooked was performing. They played in the fashionable drum’n’base style and it was strange to hear African-Australian rhythms in the medieval interior. Camo & Krooked and their energetic frontman were obviously popular with locals – the crowd was jumping as soon as they started.
Herr Hagen was tall and dark-haired, no older than thirty. He came alone but very soon two beauties in flowery dresses were draped at his table and even from my seat it was easy to see how carnivorous Herr Hagen’s look was becoming as he gazed into revealing décolletés.
Judging by the number of beer glasses and plates with sausages and fried potatoes, my ward clearly didn’t have any inclination for temperance. If someone asked me my opinion about him, I would’ve said that he is a typical representative of the target group which swallows the contents of entertainment internet portals where there are articles about new cars, photographs of beauties in negligees, and anecdotes and forums with private chat rooms for virtual sex.
People grazing portals like that usually sit in an office for five days a week and because their job is so boring, they use every spare second to entertain themselves. If the internet was taken from them, they would spend more time in cafés, rest rooms, smoking rooms – in a word, anywhere they could socialise with their own kind without leaving work for long.
The golden time for fellows like this is the weekend. It begins on Friday after lunch and ends on Sunday evening. On Monday morning our hero, clean-shaven and clean-shirted, will arrive at his office with only dark shadows under his eyes and the light tremor of his fingers to betray his tempestuous weekend.