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“Of course not,” I said. “You’re not a fool.” “So let me get the records, for Chrissake!” “What’s to stop you giving me phony ones or another client’s? No, we’ll go and look at the computer together.” He shook his head, panicking. “Impossible, nobody’s allowed in the back office—the staff will realize.” It was true except for one thing. “Why do you think I chose one o’clock, the Friday of a holiday weekend,” I said. “Everybody’s at lunch.” I picked up my bag, followed him out of the conference room, and watched as he used an encrypted ID card to unlock a door into the inner offices. We sat at a terminal; he used a fingerprint scanner to open the system and keyed in the digits of an account number. There they were—pages of Christos Nikolaides’s supposedly secret bank records, linked to a matrix of other family accounts. Within minutes we were printing them all out. I stared at the pages for a long time—the ledgers of so much corruption and death. The family were billionaires—or close enough not to matter—but the records also proved beyond doubt that Christos was the Russians’ paymaster. More than that, just as I’d hoped, the documents also pried open the rest of the enterprise. Regular transfers into other accounts at the bank revealed the names of six of our people whom I would never have imagined were traitors. Two of them were FBI agents involved in counterespionage and the other four were career diplomats at US embassies in Europe—including a woman I had once slept with—and for what they had done there was usually only one tariff. In a corner of my heart I hoped they would get good lawyers and manage to plea-bargain it down to life imprisonment. Don’t believe what they tell you—it’s a terrible thing to hold another person’s life in the palm of your hand. So it was with less satisfaction than I had anticipated that I put the material in my briefcase and turned to Bucher. I told him that in two hours I would call the head of Hong Kong Telecom and have the technicians reassigned. I stood up and, under the circumstances, decided against offering him my hand. Without a word I walked out, leaving him alone—vomit smearing his suit, one hand trembling,
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