Stephen Leather - Breakout

Having passed though the airlock, he was escorted to the lifts by the chairman’s mini-skirted blonde PA. They took the lift to the top floor and she led him past a cavernous room with dozens of employees staring at monitors and computer screens, and a glass-fronted conference room, before reaching the chairman’s office. It occupied a corner suite with wall-to-ceiling windows giving magnificent views over the city and Lake Geneva.

The chairman, a large and serious-looking middle-aged Swiss man in an immaculate Savile Row suit, greeted him in almost accentless English, and after shaking his hand and sending his PA off to bring coffee, he gave Harper an appraising look. ‘Mr Harper, so how can I help you today? The letter of introduction from our London office is rather short on detail.’

Harper smiled. ‘I hope you’ll be able to help me trace a colleague and friend of mine, who has done some specialist work for you in Latin America. And by the way,’ he gestured to the bank of CCTV monitors on the wall, ‘I didn’t realise that security would be such an issue here in Switzerland.’

The chairman laughed. ‘As I’m sure you know, it isn’t really. If you so much as snatch a purse in this country, you will probably find yourself locked up before you’ve had time to count the money. No, this is all for the benefit of our visiting clients. When they arrive here, it is usually because they are nervous and in need of reassurance about the safety of themselves, their families and employees-’ He paused and permitted himself another smile. ‘Not forgetting their wealth, of course. So we want them to understand that all the money they have will not keep them safe unless they make use of our expertise. The subliminal message we hope that our clients will take away is that we are leaders in our field and we can keep them safe, not just in the First World but in the Third World too. And if the unthinkable happens and they are actually kidnapped, we have the expertise, skill and experience to secure their prompt release. So this colleague, what was his name again?’

‘Pete Davies. He went by the name Scouse.’

The chairman buzzed for his PA on the intercom. ‘Could you bring me our file on a contractor called Mr Pete Davies please?’

She brought the file through and after studying it for a few moments, he nodded. ‘Well, it seems your friend Mr Davies was recruited via our London office and initially employed by us to act as a courier of a large sum in US dollars from here to Bogotá in Colombia. We have him listed as Peter Davies. That was successfully accomplished and he carried out - let me see - four, no, five more courier assignments for us, first to Colombia and latterly to Bolivia, which has become the new focus of cocaine trafficking and kidnap and ransom. They grow a huge amount of coca leaves in the Chapare and Benir regions and Bolivian drug lords have long been supplying raw cocaine base to the Colombian cartels, particularly Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel before they imploded. When a coca grower, Evo Morales, became President, one of his first actions was to kick the DEA out of the country, and even though he was eventually deposed, the Bolivian cocaine trade has boomed ever since. The Colombians are no longer such big players - Medellin is a tourist town these days - but the Mexican cartels and their allies have replaced them and Bolivia is now the main transhipment point for cocaine from Peru, Colombia and Bolivia itself. There are scores of drug gangs operating in La Paz, Cochabamba and particularly, Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the east of the country. Cocaine is carried by planes taking off from primitive strips deep in the jungle, or boats using tributaries of the Amazon like the Chapare river, or human pack mules following narrow tracks through the rainforest into the Mato Grosso and Rondonia in Brazil. The cocaine is then shipped from Brazil to every part of the world: North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.’

‘And Scouse?’ Harper said, trying to drag the chairman back to the point.

The chairman again consulted the file. ‘In between his assignments as a courier, he was also apparently employed on some lower grade work by one of our representatives out there, but I don’t have the details of it, I’m afraid.’

Harper gave a slow shake of his head. ‘I must confess I’m having a bit of difficulty getting my head around the fact that you use people like my friend Mr Davies to courier large amounts of cash, alone and unescorted, to some of the most high-risk areas of the world. Why, in this day and age, can’t it be done electronically?’

‘With the exception of South America, that is exactly what we try to do. We invite the parties involved to Switzerland, and the transaction often simply involves the transfer of the ransom payment from one numbered account to another. For obvious reasons, that is our much-preferred method. We even managed to move the Somalian pirates online. But in South America, cash is still king. There tend to be so many different interested and involved partners in a kidnapping, with a complete lack of trust between them, that it would be impossible for the payment to be anything other than cash. As for the couriers being alone and unescorted, as you put it, they are as closely monitored as possible from leaving here to arriving at the distribution point, usually Bogotá in Colombia or La Paz in Bolivia. The system seems to work, we have only ever lost one shipment or courier in transit.’ He fixed Harper with his gaze. ‘The one your friend Mr Davies was carrying when he disappeared.’

‘And what was his last job?

‘A delivery of a ransom payment to Bolivia. He was to take the money to La Paz. As well as the cartels, there are still a few renegade guerrilla groups there, like exiles from FARC in Colombia, who see kidnapping as an easier way to make a living than fighting the government or trafficking cocaine, though most of them do that too.’

‘And was the payment delivered?’

‘We don’t know. According to the airline, he arrived at La Paz but the kidnappers said they never received the money, which may or may not have been true, but in the end we paid out another ransom; it was a fairly modest payment by normal standards.’

‘And what about Scouse?’

‘We never heard from him. To be honest, we don’t know what happened to him. He simply vanished.’

‘So he could have been killed or kidnapped himself?’

‘The latter is not likely, because no ransom demand has been received. As to the former…’ He spread his hands. ‘Who knows? I’m sorry we can’t offer you more definite information.’

‘Well I hope to discover what happened to him and the money,’ Harper said, ‘and it would help me if you could run me through the courier system you use.’

The chairman nodded. ‘First, we do regular dummy runs to test that the system is working as it should, and second, we do not let the courier wander where he wishes. He is required to follow a fixed route and timetable, which we monitor as closely as we can, and we always have a tiny locator beacon concealed in the wall of the case containing the money, operating on a frequency that we can monitor from our control room here. As an important commercial bank, we have some influence here in Switzerland, so we have the co-operation of the customs and immigration authorities at Geneva airport, easing the courier’s path through security here. From here he takes a SWISS flight to Madrid, connecting with one of the South American airlines’ overnight flights either to Bogotá, if the payment is to be made in Colombia, or via Santiago or Lima to La Paz, if the kidnapping case is in Bolivia. Similar arrangements to Switzerland are in place with customs and immigration in those countries.’ He gave a bleak smile. ‘The courier’s arrival is expected and he will be briefed as to which immigration desk and customs desk to use. Once he is on the ground-side of Arrivals, he will be met and escorted to his hotel where he will be debriefed and the contents of the suitcase checked before the operation moves onto its next phase. The courier transports the cash but he does not become involved in the negotiations or hand over the cash to the kidnappers himself. We use go-betweens to deal with them, maintaining a degree of separation between us and the criminals.’