Tom Clancy - Command Authority

He saw immediately that much of it was in the form of notes in David Penright’s own handwriting, and other documents—these all related to Penright’s death—were in the handwriting of Nick Eastling and members of his team.

Of all the documents present, the dot-matrix printout of internal bank account transfers at Ritzmann Privatbankiers was the most curious to Jack. At first blush it wasn’t much to look at. Just columns of numbered accounts next to other columns of numbered accounts alongside a column that showed, as far as Jack could determine, values represented in Swiss francs.

Paper-clipped to the file was an English translation of the few words on the pages.

There was nothing about the printout that seemed obviously crucial to the case. If the KGB or other Russians were using RPB to hold money, the transfers into the bank to the suspected Russian account would be damn important, as would any transfers out of the bank to other banks around the world. These sorts of transactions could help SIS and CIA follow the money trail.

But internal account transfers did not seem terribly useful to Ryan. He knew enough about banking to know that many account holders had multiple accounts and routinely moved their money around within the bank. Some accounts might be tied to an investment portfolio or another account might be used for payables at the account holder’s place of business.

This sheaf of papers seemed to Ryan to be more clerical in nature.

Another problem with the printout was that it was indecipherable to him, because although Penright had given him the list of clients of the banks, the client list was not tied to the numbered accounts themselves.

No, there was no reason to find this printout interesting in the least, except for the fact that, as far as anyone could determine, a bank executive had hand-delivered these internal documents to a British spy on the night the British spy was killed, and the bank executive himself was killed two days later.

That alone made this long, folded dot-matrix printout worthy of further investigation.

Ryan began looking at the dates for the transactions listed. The printout was 122 pages long, and from what Ryan could tell, it seemed to contain all in-house transfers for the past thirty days.

Now he thought back. Tobias Gabler had been killed five days earlier. Ryan ran a finger quickly down the date column, flipped through page after page, and finally found the date of Gabler’s death.

He started looking at the numbered accounts, and the in-house transfers, and he searched for multiple transfers leaving the same account. There were dozens of cases of this, so soon he began looking at high-value transfers, or cases where the same account had made many transfers into a single second account.

He used a legal pad to calculate how much had been moved out of each account. It was slow, laborious, and boring, but after an hour and a half he began to focus on two particular numbered accounts. Beginning on the day before the death of Tobias Gabler and continuing for three days, there had been several large transfers out of account number 62775.001 and into account number 48235.003.

It took two more hours to finish his work. All in all, since the day before the death of Tobias Gabler, there had been 704 in-house transfers of funds. Twelve of them came from 62775.001, and the total of all twelve transfers was 461 million Swiss francs. Jack checked the exchange rate in a financial newspaper he found on the desk; then he pulled his calculator closer, and keyed in some numbers.

The amount of the transfer was $204 million. Penright had told him the account being investigated by the suspected KGB men contained exactly that amount. Looking over the 704 transactions, Jack saw that no other account had moved a tenth of the money around as had account 62775.001.

Jack felt certain this was the account in question and all its money had been moved out of it and into another account in the same bank. Jack had no way of knowing if this was simply a poor attempt to hide the funds from the first account, or if it represented some sort of payment to another entity who had an account at RPB.

But whatever was going on here, Jack knew it was important, and knew he needed to find out who owned numbered account 48235.003, the receiver of the $204 million.

Jack put the dot-matrix printout to the side and spent the next hour reading everything else available about Morningstar and the Penright death investigation. There was lots and lots of mundane data: meeting places and times for Marcus Wetzel and David Penright, protocols established for setting up a dead drop, makes and models of vehicles seen in the area. Jack did not learn much from any of this.

But he did discover something interesting. In a meeting three days before the death of Tobias Gabler, Penright had pressured Marcus Wetzel to try to get more information about the account holder of the two hundred million. To do this, it appeared from the documentation, Morningstar had spoken directly to Tobias Gabler at a meeting between the two of them in a park near Lake Zug.

Jack wondered if that conversation set in motion the death of all three men. It seemed possible that once Gabler knew Wetzel was fishing around for information about the account, he might have gone to the Russians directly to warn them a bank executive was asking questions.

Then, it was conceivable to Ryan, the Russians might have decided to move their money to safety and to kill both Wetzel, the man asking the questions, and Gabler, the man in possession of the answers. And then, it was a stretch, but it was possible, the Russians killed the British agent managing the operation against them.

Ryan rubbed exhaustion from his eyes.

Just after nine p.m., Jack called Sir Basil at his home in Belgravia, London. “I don’t know what I found, but at least I have a place for us to start.”

“Where?”

“First things first. Thank you for letting me take a look at the files.”

“Of course.”

Jack explained that he’d worked through the in-house transfers, and he was near certain that the money Morningstar had flagged as suspicious had all been moved into another account.

Jack said, “We need to dig into the new numbered account. If we can find out who owns this, we can continue to monitor these funds.”

Charleston said, “As usual, Jack, you have done impressive work. But I am afraid what you are asking for cannot just be ordered up. Getting information on the new account would involve finding a new inside man at this particular bank. A bloody rare thing, indeed. I’m afraid Morningstar was a one-off.”

“We have to go to the bank. Either SIS or Langley. We can pressure them.”

“Pressuring a Swiss bank will not succeed without going through the Swiss legal system, and even if we did receive permission to get information on the account it would take months. Whoever controls that account can move the money out in days, if not hours.

“I’m sorry, Jack. We had an inside man, we lost him, and now we have lost the access he provided us.”

Jack knew Basil was correct. Morningstar had worked as an asset only because he had come willingly to the British. Any attempts to pressure RPB for information on the accounts would take a lot longer to bear fruit than it would take the Russians to move their money from the bank.

Ryan’s work of the past several hours had been, if not a waste of time, certainly nothing that would create actionable intelligence anytime in the near future.

Dejected, Ryan told Charleston he would fly back to the UK the next day, and he wished him a good evening. Then he gathered up all the files and left the little office.

The SIS courier named Mr. Miles had been waiting in the cafeteria the entire time Jack had worked, and now he went through every page of every document, checking the physical files with a printout he had with him. Then he put them back in his case, handcuffed it to his wrist, bid Jack good evening, and headed out to his car.