AT THE END OF APRIL, Finn told me we were to travel to Liechtenstein. He said we should go by separate routes, as we usually did, but I thought that now it seemed like we were two parents who travel separately so that their children aren’t left orphaned.
I flew to Zurich and Finn to Munich. We were to meet at the Café Sacher in Vaduz, Liechtenstein’s capital, at 4.20 p.m. on 4 May. Failing that, our fall-back plan was to return at staggered hours over the next three days. I don’t know why Finn made these complex arrangements, he never had before, but I should have guessed that he knew he was getting close to danger. I never saw him making a call, doing anything that concerned the Plan, but I guess he was setting up what was to be the final act, out of my sight.
We met at the time appointed in the Café Sacher, an ancient building which sagged over a cobbled street off the main square in Vaduz.
Finn had rented a car and after we’d had coffee and some pastries he’d bought at another café–which irritated the proprietor–we walked down the hill to a car park, the closest a car could approach the square. It was a beautiful day though, as Finn said later, there was still a hint in the Alpine evenings of the winter just passed. There’d been a huge snowfall in the middle of April.
We drove out of the city in the last warmth of a bright, clear afternoon and headed up into the mountains that bordered Germany. It was a beautiful drive. The fair-skinned cattle were cropping the early grass on the Alpine pastures where they would remain until the September transhumance, the ancient tradition which brought them down to the lower slopes. We saw few people, hikers mainly, and one or two farmers in the distance. When we passed two seriously equipped hikers, Finn looked at them in astonishment.
‘Whatever happened to stopping for a drink?’ he said, and gesticulated at the hoses connected up to their mouths from their backpack water bottles.
After driving for more than an hour we were very high up and there were fewer barns and even fewer farmhouses. The road we were taking had now become a dirt track and still we climbed until, in the lee of a ridge, we saw a very old wooden barn, with a wooden house attached to it, made in the days when animals and humans lived together.
Finn had talked for most of the way. He explained that we were on the last lap that would connect the money that came into the Exodi accounts with its destination, and thus the Plan would be laid out for a child to see, let alone Adrian and the Service. He called Exodi’s purpose, the funds paid from Russia and their destination, the in and out trays. As we approached the last few miles towards the distant farmhouse, he began to tell me why we were here.
‘Pablo is a very bad Italian,’ Finn said as he drove, in his usual obtuse way, not explaining who Pablo was. ‘In the early seventies he smuggled dope in a yacht he’d stolen. His regular route was up from Morocco to Holland. He made himself a lot of money and lost most of it gambling and drinking and whoring. But he learned some skills that have been invaluable to us…’ by which I assumed he meant the Service ‘…and, no doubt, to anyone else who paid him the right money. Pablo is a Venetian merchant of secrets. When he was finally arrested by the Dutch police, they made a deal with him and he happily turned in his old drug-running comrades to save his own skin. Then the Dutch appointed him their police drug expert. He was a good choice. Pablo was dealing drugs from the sixties and was the first person I ever met who owned a mobile phone. I remember it. It was the size of a radio set.
‘So Pablo was living in Holland, under arrest within its borders, until he’d served his time as their drug expert. The last time I visited him at the end of the nineties, he was testing all the drugs that came into police possession, to check their quality in order for the correct prosecutions to be made. The Dutch had also let him cultivate his own marijuana in greenhouses in the east of the country–legally and for medical purposes only.
‘I remember Pablo’s kitchen in Nijmegen, something his police employers never saw. It was full of jars of every kind of drug, and every quality of every kind of drug, that he’d skimmed off the top of the smuggled goods the police had seized.
‘But then in 2000 Pablo changed. He’d run his term of being legally confined to Holland and he came to Liechtenstein. His knowledge of how and who to bribe in national police forces turned out to be even more useful than his knowledge of drugs. Somehow he infiltrated his way into Liechtenstein’s financial authority and he is one of the few outsiders who dines regularly with a member of the committee. Pablo’s the reason we’re here.’
‘He doesn’t sound very reliable,’ I said.
‘He’s completely unreliable,’ Finn laughed. ‘And that’s why he’s so reliable. If you shout down the stairs to Pablo “Where are you?” and he says, “The kitchen”, you can be sure he’s in the bathroom.’
‘So why is he so important to us, to where we’re going?’ I asked. ‘Why are you trusting him?’
‘Oh, I’m not trusting him,’ Finn said. ‘He’s told me he won’t say a word until I’m out of the country, that’s all. I believe that. But I know that what he’s given me is so important he must be desperate to pass on to someone else my interest in it. So we’ll go straight into Germany after this.’
‘Why would Pablo give you anything?’ I asked.
‘OK, not given, exactly, of course not, no. He’s the great Venetian merchant. We’ve exchanged what each of us wants with the other. I’ve given him some very valuable knowledge. It would get me thrown in jail if they knew in London I’d done it. No, Pablo never gives anything away. He’ll already be selling my information now, I should think. It’s taken me a long time to set this up,’ Finn added.
I didn’t ask him what state secret he’d sold to Pablo in return for whatever information brought us here.
‘So we’ve come to meet Pablo, have we? Up here?’ I said.
‘No. The man we’re meeting is part of the information Pablo’s given me,’ he replied. ‘According to Pablo, the man we’re seeing has hard information that links the KGB and the Russian mafia with their agents in the West. This is where we will find how Exodi works.’
‘From a farmer in a barn in the Alps?’ I asked doubtfully.
‘That’s right.’ Finn grinned.
Finally, we came around a wide sweep of track near the top of a grassy mountain which brought us up to the wooden barn and the house we’d seen a while earlier. The track ended here. It was as remote a place as you could find in Western Europe.
Finn and I got out of the car. There was an old Toyota truck in front of the barn house and a small tractor parked on a grass slope that had animal dung on a rickety wagon behind it. From the open doors of the barn section of the building, we could hear the sound of a welding torch.
When we walked up to the entrance we saw a man with his back to us, wearing pale trousers, covered in grease and motor oil, and a blue shirt. He was crouched over a piece of red-painted metal on to which he was welding another, similarly shapeless piece of red metal. When the torch stopped and Finn shouted, the man turned, but his face was obscured by a plastic visor. When he lifted the visor I saw he was a man in his late fifties with a face so brown and lined that he looked like part of the old carvings on the barn’s wooden walls.
He stood still. Then he walked unhurriedly away from the workbench, seemingly unsurprised to have visitors-or maybe unsurprised by anything at all. He came towards the barn entrance, slotting the welding torch on to a metal trolley that held the gas bottle. When he stood in front of us, he slipped the visor off completely. I saw he had a big face; he was a big man, but completely quiet in himself.
‘Missed the road?’ he said, in thick, placeless German.
‘No. We came to see you,’ Finn said in English and I translated.
‘Oh yes?’
‘It’s a lonely spot up here,’ Finn said.
‘Maybe you want to rent it,’ the man answered in a mocking voice.
‘I want to know who rents it,’ Finn said. ‘We’re passing through to the lakes on the other side.’
This, I knew later, was the phrase which identified Finn to the farmer.
On hearing the words, the man stiffened and his air of quiet self-sufficiency deserted him. He walked past us, a little closer to Finn than was normal, like a big dog that wants its presence felt among potential rivals.
He said nothing and Finn and I followed him. He threw the visor on to a table by the door of the house and opened the door on a latch. He left it open and we followed behind him.
The light was dim inside- the place had been built against the winter- and we could barely see after the sunshine outside. When my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I saw on another wooden table which looked about a thousand years old, a rifle that was halfway through being cleaned, a hurricane lamp, likewise, and a few empty bottles of beer. The single large room was otherwise sparse. There was no kitchen, or any obvious room at all which could be described as such by an estate agent. There was no electricity. The place was bare but for half a dozen chairs in various states of repair, an old sofa on which a huge wolfhound was lying, and some artfully placed oil lamps.
‘You have the money?’ the man asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Bring it.’
Finn left the room and walked to the car. I saw him open the boot and bring out a black plastic briefcase which shone unnaturally in the dying rays of the sunset. As Finn walked back, the man disappeared through a door and by the time Finn was in the gloomy long room, the man was coming back through the door again carrying some beers in the crook of his arm. He snapped the tops off with a Swiss army knife and put them on the table. The beers were very cool, and came, perhaps, from a deep cellar.
Finn put the briefcase on the table and picked up one of the bottles. The man sat down, without asking us to join him. He opened the case and I could see from the angle at which I was standing, that it was full of bundles of cash. The man counted each row of bundles out in front of us and put them back in the case before counting the next row. When he’d finished, he snapped the lid of the case shut and picked up a beer and sat with his elbows on the table, sipping from the neck of the bottle.
‘Sit down,’ he said at last, and gave a low whistle. The wolfhound which had apparently been sleeping came immediately over to the table and sat on the floor beside him. Finn and I pulled up the chairs most likely to survive our weight and sat opposite him.
‘So. Who’s this Pablo?’ the man asked, and I translated for Finn. ‘How does he know of me?’
‘I don’t know how he knows you. He’s a cheat and a liar,’ Finn said. ‘That’s why the British employ him,’ he added.
‘The British?’
‘And others,’ Finn said. ‘Anyone who’ll pay him enough, in fact.’
‘How does he know about this place?’
‘I don’t know. He makes it his business to collect valuable information, that’s all I know.’
‘Maybe my father spoke to him once,’ the man said vaguely.
He pushed the briefcase to the centre of the table, as if he hadn’t yet decided whether to take the money or not, but Finn didn’t react. He just said, ‘I’ve told Pablo that if any accident happens to you, he’ll be dead in days.’
I looked at Finn in astonishment and saw that he was serious. It made me scared. But the man also saw he was serious and made the decision that Finn wanted.
‘I’ll show you something, then,’ he said.
He got up and walked through the door where he’d gone to get the beers. He was gone a long time, as if what he was bringing was buried very deep somewhere. Outside the sunset was now turning into a dull glow. I saw stars through the open door and a chill air was creeping into the house.
When he returned he was carrying an old leather knapsack of the kind one of his ancestors might have worn while sitting out on the mountain, guarding his flocks against wolves. He sat down and undid the one buckle that still worked and withdrew a waterproof plastic folder; from inside that he took out a buff A4 reinforced envelope for photographs.
He put five photographs on to the table, looked at them keenly, then pushed them across the table to Finn. He got up and fetched a bottle of some home-made mountain liqueur with what looked like a sprig of rosemary inside the bottle. It was dark now and he shut the door. He lit a fire already laid in a rough brick fireplace in the corner of the room.
Finn looked at the pictures. Three were faded and were older than the other two, which looked very recent; different paper, sharp and with a glossy look to them as if they’d recently been developed.
The farmer poured three shots of the liqueur and raised his glass.
‘To what are we drinking?’ he said.
Finn and I raised our glasses.
‘Let’s drink to your father,’ Finn said.
The farmer levelled his eyes at Finn.
‘It’s a good toast,’ he said finally, and we drank. Then the man began to speak.
‘In the spring of 1989,’ he began, ‘my father was working this farm. I wasn’t here back then. I was working in Switzerland. An intermediary, who my father later discovered was acting for one of the men in the pictures, came to him and requested that he rent this house for a weekend in that June. In return for the rent of the farmhouse here, he offered my father a hundred thousand dollars and also a week in the Canary Islands for him and his wife, which they were to take over the period of the weekend when the farmhouse was rented. My own mother died many years ago and this was his second wife,’ the man explained.
‘My father accepted the deal and the money was paid into an account set up for him in Vaduz. The two of them were given air tickets and a room was booked at the most expensive hotel on an island called Hierra. Very remote, even by the standards there. But my father didn’t go. Instead, he called me. I was working at the time on a dairy farm belonging to a distant relative over the border in Switzerland. I hadn’t been up here for many years at the time. I didn’t like his wife.
‘I met my father in Vaduz and he asked me to go with his wife on this holiday instead of him. We had the same first names and it would be easy for me to simply substitute myself for him. I didn’t want to. The idea of spending a week with his woman was repugnant to me. He offered to buy me a new car and I accepted. I was broke. So I went to Hierra and had a horrible time, drinking too much and trying to get away from her. We had to share a room to make it look right on the bill that the intermediary was paying. It wasn’t an enjoyable week.
‘And my father stayed behind in Liechtenstein. He told nobody but me and his wife. He kept it a secret. He hid out in an old shepherd’s hut a few miles over the mountain from here. He came up here in the early evenings of the weekend these men rented the place and stayed in the cover of the trees over there.’ He waved vaguely in the direction of the door. ‘There was a lot of security, he told me later, and that was as close as he could get. And he brought a camera with him. These are the pictures he took.’
The farmer separated the three older pictures and turned them round to face Finn.
‘The man on the far right you know. Most of the newspaper-reading public knows him.’
Finn and I bent over the first picture and looked at a tall, grey-haired figure. I recognised him immediately: a very senior, long-serving German politician from the political elite. Then I looked at the third figure from the right and recognised a KGB general, the SVR’s central Asian boss, who liaises with the Uzbeks and their drug cartels. In between these two was a man I didn’t know. Nor did I recognise the others. But Finn seemed to know everyone in the picture.
‘Quite an interesting weekend,’ Finn said.
‘These three pictures were taken in 1989,’ the farmer repeated. ‘And these I took earlier this year, when there was a second meeting here, between the same men.’
The two recent photographs were indeed the same group, shiny in the newness of the pictures.
‘They rented the farm up here for another weekend, fifteen years after they first took it. Maybe they’ve had other meetings, I’m sure they have, elsewhere. But this is what I have.’
He poured another shot of liqueur for each of us and raised his glass.
‘These are the kind of people who run our countries,’ he said. ‘To freedom from such men.’ Finn and I echoed the toast.
‘I don’t know why my father took the original pictures,’ the man mused quietly. ‘It was completely out of character. But I knew I had to do the same this year when they came back after all this time and, if only in memory of my father, I did.’
We left the farmer with the case of money and drove back down the track until we reached the road. Then Finn turned left, towards Germany, and we drove in silence for a while. I had the pictures on my lap, inside the stiff photograph envelope, inside the waterproof bag.
‘I wonder what he’ll do with all that money,’ Finn said, breaking the silence briefly. I guessed at how much of it there was from watching the farmer count the bundles and I was stunned by the cost.
‘He’ll probably hoard it up somewhere like all the mountain men,’ he continued. ‘The Troll, for example. I bet he turns out to be a multimillionaire when he dies.’
Once we were over the border and in Germany, Finn began to talk quietly about the men in the pictures.
‘There’s the German politician. He’s someone who might even become chancellor of Germany. And of course you know the KGB general, Anna. Then there’s a citizen of the former East Germany, a man called Dietz, who’s now a billionaire from his supermarket chains. And next to him to the left is a Swede called Bengsten. He’s an arms manufacturer. The old guy on the far right is an ex-Nazi, former SS. His name’s Reiter. He’s in his early eighties now and still running his business with the same efficiency as he ran his SS unit in 1945. He owns, lock, stock and barrel, the third-largest trucking company in Europe. But Reiter isn’t his real name, of course. He’s one of the brothers of Otto Roth. And finally, the last figure in the picture is Otto Roth himself.’