Spoils of War, page 23
‘Much of the success of my practice has come from connections I have built up in the Middle East, especially in Iraq. My involvement there began in the nineteen sixties. The Iraq Petroleum Company, which belonged to Western interests, was to be nationalized, and I helped to negotiate terms of compensation for the European partners in the consortium. The job took up a good deal of my time for almost ten years. That was also a period of political instability, a succession of military coups and dictatorships. In the course of my visits to Baghdad, some highly placed Iraqis began asking me to handle private business for them. Banks and major industries were also being taken over by the State, and large personal fortunes would be lost unless ways could be found of investing them abroad.
‘This was not work that I welcomed but I found it difficult to refuse. You know the Middle East; you understand the importance of doing favours for the right people, and how impatient and demanding they can be. My reputation apparently spread; I became known as what you call in English a “fixer”. Naturally, the whole thing was a political minefield. I tried to be careful who I dealt with but, frankly, it wasn’t always possible to be certain of their standing.’
Zunckel flicked the handkerchief like a duster over his features. ‘I will not go into details. Enough to say that I was able to settle most of these people’s affairs satisfactorily. The nationalization of the oil industry was completed in the early seventies, and after that I had less occasion to go to Baghdad and fewer requests for help. The political situation had also settled down. More people had access to foreign currency, and those with the right connections had channels through which to invest it.
‘Then began the Iran-Iraq war. There was a point, around the mid-eighties, when Iraq looked in danger of losing it. I was approached once again by people who wanted favours. This time it was not only industrialists and bankers, but others who feared for the future –’
‘People like these?’ Jack held out the list of six names culled from the Kroll report.
‘Those among others,’ Zunckel admitted grudgingly.
‘Who are they? I mean, who are they really, behind their pseudonyms?’
‘Mr Rushton, as far as I am concerned they are who they say they are. I had only limited contact with them, and since the Gulf War I have had none at all. Now I’ve been as candid as possible with you –’
‘But not candid enough, I think,’ Jack said harshly. ‘It’s taken me about twenty-four hours to establish that one of these names, Mohamed Ghani, is an alias. Are you saying you haven’t worked that out for yourself over four or five years? It’s a false identity almost certainly used by a member of the Iraqi secret police. It was also used for a time by Colonel Jalloul.’
‘I cannot explain that,’ Zunckel said, mustering his dignity. ‘All I can say is that I have met Ghani and Jalloul, and they are two separate people.’
‘Dr Zunckel, you’ve invested twenty-six million dollars on behalf of these six men without caring much who they are or where their money came from. But soon your banking authorities here are going to start caring. Actually none of that concerns me, but I have to remind you that Dr Hamadi is paying both of us to represent him. I want to be sure there’s no conflict between his interests and those of these others.’
‘How could there be? They are quite separate interests.’
‘But connected through you. Hamadi had been given the name of Jalloul, and because of your reputation as a fixer he came to you asking to be put in touch with him. How do you explain Jalloul’s using the alias of your other client, Ghani? And how is it that the bank account you opened for Jalloul hasn’t been touched?’
‘That, I assure you, is news to me. It’s also his business, not mine.’
‘You say you met Jalloul only once, in Jordan when the documents were signed. Who had found him for you? Was it Ghani?’
Zunckel was busy with his handkerchief again, and his face was redder than before. He sighed heavily and said: ‘Ghani was merely returning a small favour to me, acting as yet another intermediary. If he had some private connection with Jalloul, I know nothing about it.’
Jack hunched forward in his chair. ‘I think you’d better tell me more about Ghani, Doctor. It strikes me that whoever he really is, he may hold the key to the whereabouts of the colonel.’
‘There is almost nothing to tell,’ Zunckel protested. ‘I have heard nothing from him or any of the others for six or seven months.’
‘Dr Zunckel, I want you to give me access to all your records on Ghani and Jalloul and these other five Iraqis. The alternative is for me to report what I know to Dr Hamadi and tell him that you’re refusing to co-operate. I have no idea what he’ll choose to do about that, but I do know that I wouldn’t like to have an enemy with his resources. He told me you were too rich to be corruptible, but I rather imagine he could buy and sell you and all your other clients with the change in his pocket. On the other hand, if I can tell him you are co-operating, I needn’t go into any details. The choice is yours.’
The lawyer shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He gave Jack a resentful look and then glanced again at the list of names. ‘Do you understand that these people could be dangerous?’
‘I certainly do.’
‘Wait here a moment.’
Zunckel stood up and waddled out of the room. Jack rose as well, to get away from the fire, and strolled to the window. It overlooked a garden ablaze with cherry blossom. The offices of the finanzamwalt had turned out to be some distance from the financial centre, occupying a substantial grey-brick villa just off Bellerivestrasse on the east shore of the lake. The woman who had met him at the door had seemed rather apprehensive; he took her to be Zunckel’s secretary and guessed that it was she who had committed the indiscretion of replying too incautiously to the query from the bank.
The room into which she had shown him was one set aside for receiving visitors, another variation on the theme of the club lounge, with a floor of black-and-white marble squares, a leather sofa and armchairs, and a table on which newspapers in half a dozen languages were spread out. Jack turned away from the window and scanned the news pages of the Financial Times. It was an early edition and probably it wouldn’t have bothered much anyway with the shooting and kidnapping in Cricklewood, but there was plenty about the plight of the Kurds in their homeland. The Turkish army had taken measures to halt the flood of refugees trying to cross into the country; up to two million of them were now said to have fled into the mountains. In Iraq, more of the atrocities carried out by the secret police were being uncovered. In other circumstances the implications of these events might have seemed a million miles from this cosy room; Jack had a sense now that they had drawn uncomfortably close.
When Zunckel returned he was followed by his secretary carrying a heap of box files. She set them down nervously before hurrying out of the room. Zunckel loosened some papers from their bindings in one of the boxes and handed them grudgingly to Jack.
‘Here are details that Ghani provided when he first became my client. A copy of his passport is attached.’
The top sheet was a printed form in German, headed Verwaltung von Wertschriften. It was a standard authorization, apparently, allowing Zunckel to manage funds on behalf of a client. The details, such as they were, had been completed in a European hand: the surname Ghani, the given name Mohamed, and a post office box address in Baghdad. A signature was scrawled at the bottom and the form was dated 9 May 1986.
The second sheet was more revealing. It was a photocopy of two pages of an Iraqi passport, the headings printed in English and French as well as Arabic. The name, Mohamed Ghani, was given in its romanized form, his date of birth was recorded as 6 February 1941, and his height as one metre eighty. His occupation and place of birth were written in Arabic.
On the opposite page was a photograph. A man of chunky build wearing a jacket and tie. A wide, jowly face scowling at the camera. Dark hair and moustache, unsmiling eyes with heavy bags beneath them, making their owner look older than his stated age of forty-five. He had the aggrieved look of an insomniac, and he certainly wasn’t Jalloul.
‘How did you meet Ghani?’ Jack asked.
‘Through other clients in Baghdad. Friends of friends: as usual, I was under an obligation to help. He was introduced to me as a businessman with funds he wanted to invest abroad.’
‘What business was he supposed to be in? And where did his money come from?’
Zunckel gave a helpless shrug. ‘Some things, in places like Iraq, it is better not to know. And Ghani did not encourage me to ask. He told me never to contact him directly, and the only address I had for him was that box number.’
‘What else have you got on him?’
‘Only details of his investments.’
The lawyer surrendered the file to Jack, who skimmed quickly through it. There were receipts and advice notes, securities and deposit statements, all more or less confirming the picture he had built up at the Handelsbank Bauer. For just over four years a steady trickle of funds had been reaching Zunckel for investment in Ghani’s proxy accounts. Nice round figures, a hundred thousand dollars here, fifty thousand dollars there. And always in dollars, the currency used in the sale of Iraq’s only export worth mentioning, oil. The payments had stopped at the end of last July, just before the invasion of Kuwait.
The other files contained similar sets of records for Zunckel’s five other Iraqi clients. Their authorization forms were all dated later than Ghani’s, and Zunckel explained that they had been introduced and vouched for by Ghani himself. More favours being repaid, no doubt, more flies gathering at the honey pot. For Colonel Jalloul there was virtually no paperwork at all, not even a copy of his passport, since he had elected to manage his account at the bank himself.
‘I’m going to want copies of those passport pages,’ Jack said. ‘And blow-ups of the photographs, if you can manage it.’
‘Mr Rushton –’ Zunckel began to object again, but Jack cut him short.
‘Just for my own reference. Nothing you’ve told me or shown me needs to jeopardize your relationship with your clients. Just think how happy Dr Hamadi is going to be when I tell him what a help you’ve been.’
Resignedly Dr Zunckel sent for his secretary and gave her the papers to copy. Looking weary, he went back to his chair by the fire. Jack sat down opposite.
‘So you have no idea what’s happened to any of these people since the Gulf War, and you’re sitting on twenty-six million dollars’ worth of their assets. Isn’t it strange that not even one or two of them should have turned up? Just to see how their investments were doing?’ Zunckel shrugged again and Jack said: ‘All right, you can’t tell me what you don’t know. There are just a few small details I need to be clear on. If this Ghani is so elusive, how did you reach him to get in touch with Jalloul?’
‘We had an arrangement in case of anything urgent. He had given me a phone number in Baghdad at which I could leave messages, day or night. I phoned and he called back within a couple of hours. I explained what was required, and two days later Jalloul himself phoned me.’
‘Is that number in Baghdad still working?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘You mean you haven’t tried it? Then it’s not strictly true to say you’ve lost all contact with Ghani, is it? Why didn’t you try to reach him when Hamadi told you about his difficulty?’
‘Because I was sure that Ghani wouldn’t be willing to help.’
‘Why?’
Zunckel hesitated. ‘Another circumstance had intervened. It really is of no relevance.’
‘Perhaps you’d better tell me all the same, Doctor.’
‘Look, it was nothing. It was a foolish notion . . .’ Zunckel was trying to work up his indignation again but the fight had gone out of him. He dropped his hands into his lap. ‘That phone call in the middle of August wasn’t the last conversation I had with Ghani. He called me again, later that month, I think, looking for some assistance that I refused to give. He became annoyed. The discussion ended on a somewhat unfriendly note.’
Jack waited. Zunckel went on: ‘He wanted my advice on the sale of some gold bullion. Quite a lot of it, I gather. I told him I had no expertise in such matters, and I wasn’t willing to recommend him to anyone else who might help. I didn’t even want to hear the details, but he insisted on giving an explanation of sorts.’ With an odd lack of irony the lawyer added: ‘It didn’t sound like the kind of thing that anyone reputable would want to touch.’
22
Entering his room at the Meilenhof Hotel, the first thing Jack saw was a note on the hotel stationery that had been left at the foot of the bed. Written in the rounded, legible hand that was characteristic of Americans, it said:
Gone to drool at the windows of the shops on the Bahnhofstrasse. I’ve found some maps that may lead us to Ms Schuster, and I’ve rented a car that we can pick up whenever we want.
See you soon.
Love,
Dale.
His bag was standing on a luggage bench and he went to unpack it. He was still preoccupied by his conversation with Zunckel, and it was only when he opened the wardrobe that he realized there was something oddly lived-in about the room.
Dale’s clothes were hung in the wardrobe and stacked on the shelves beside it. Her small suitcase was tucked in beneath them. When he looked around he saw the boots she had travelled in discarded at the foot of the wide bed. She had arranged for them to have a double room.
This commitment touched him with a mixture of longing and guilt. There was more involved here than those sexual fantasies of his, there was a suggestion of a faith in him that he didn’t think he’d earned. Although more eager than ever to see her again, he was conscious of an immediate need to be alone and gather his thoughts. It was five-thirty Swiss time, making it seven-thirty in Kuwait, so he called Dr Hamadi at home. The tycoon himself answered, his tone light but peremptory: ‘Hamadi.’
Jack wasted no time on pleasantries. He sketched in as briefly as possible the progress he had made so far, leaving out names and details, and then said: ‘There’s something that I need to have checked urgently at your end, Doctor. Have you got a fax machine at home?’
‘The Iraqis stole it. It hasn’t been replaced yet.’
‘In your office, then? I’d like you to ask Major Al-Shaheb to take a look at some photographs and documents and see if he can make some quick IDs.’
‘Yes, the one in the office seems to be working. Send them there and I’ll have them collected at once and call you back.’ Hamadi paused. ‘It sounds as if you’re on to something positive. Are you any nearer to tracing our friend?’
‘I might be,’ Jack said noncommittally. He told Hamadi the number of the hotel and wrote down the fax number the doctor gave him. Then he left the room and went down to the lobby. He had not been strictly truthful in telling Zunckel he wanted the Iraqis’ IDs purely for his own purposes. But then, he reflected, neither had the lawyer been particularly honest with him.
The Meilenhof Hotel catered mainly to a business clientele. There was an office across from the reception desk that provided secretarial and travel services, and he handed over the papers to be faxed. With the copying machines in Zunckel’s office his assistant had managed to blow up the passport photographs to postcard size, and although they were rather fuzzy they should serve their purpose provided they were reproduced with reasonable clarity at the other end.
The hotel fax machine signalled that the number in Kuwait was receiving. The transmission lasted five minutes, and when it was over he took the documents back and returned to his room. There was nothing to do now but wait.
Dale came back at six o’clock. When he made a silent gesture around the room she said: ‘I thought it might save you some money. I hope you don’t think I was presumptuous.’
There was still an awkwardness about their new intimacy. ‘Of course you were,’ he said lightly. ‘But you presumed correctly.’
Among the glittering shops on the Bahnhofstrasse she had made only one purchase, a tiny gift-wrapped package that she handed to him with a smile. It contained a pair of silver cufflinks that she’d had engraved with his initials.
He kissed her. ‘Thank you. But why?’
‘Just to celebrate our arrival. I hope you like them. I realize I don’t know anything about your tastes.’
‘Enough to know that these are perfect. And extravagant. And unnecessary. But appreciated.’
Jack got down to practicalities. He explained that he couldn’t leave the hotel until Hamadi had called him back, so they went down to the bar for a drink and reserved a table in the restaurant for dinner. Against a background of cocktail Muzak and the conversations of foreign businessmen he told her everything he had learned that afternoon from the doctors Buchmann and Zunckel. He ended by repeating what the lawyer had said about the last phone call he’d received from the client who called himself Mohamed Ghani.
‘Ghani spoke in vague terms about being a member of a syndicate that owned a quantity of gold bullion. He claimed they’d been planning to ship it out of Iraq to be sold, but had been prevented when the United Nations sanctions were imposed. Trying to make it sound as legitimate as possible, Zunckel said.
‘Ghani wanted advice on how this little difficulty could be circumvented. What red tape would be involved in moving the gold between countries, proving ownership and so on. What he seemed to be hinting at was that Zunckel might come up with some way of laundering the stuff, just as he’d laundered Ghani’s money: in effect, putting it on the official market by disguising its origins. Well, Zunckel’s been involved in a few dodgy transactions in his time, but he knew better than to touch this one. He fobbed Ghani off with excuses and apparently made him angry, but he did ask the question that anyone in his position would: how much gold was involved? Millions of dollars’ worth, Ghani said.’
