“Reinhardt Peter Hoffmann.”
With a movement of his hand, Gabriel instructed Ingrid to proceed.
“Peter Hoffmann hires a crew of highly professional operatives to kidnap his old friend Alice Winter during her Ibizan holiday in order to extort five hundred million dollars from her husband, who happened to be his client. He pays off the kidnappers with a portion of the ransom, not to mention the Cypriot banker, and buries the rest of the money offshore.”
“Where’s Alice?”
“Under this scenario, Alice is quite dead.”
“Who killed her?”
“The highly professional operatives.”
“Why would they do a thing like that?”
“They must have had a slip-up while she was in captivity. Or maybe that’s just the way they roll.”
It was entirely plausible, thought Gabriel. And it would explain Peter Hoffmann’s presence on Ibiza and Alice’s continued absence. There was, however, one flaw in Ingrid’s premise.
“But why would Peter Hoffmann give away nearly three million pounds of his hard-earned loot?”
“The donations,” admitted Ingrid, “are harder to explain.”
30
Zollikon
On the website of Bank Josef Bänzinger & Co., Gabriel found a number for Peter Hoffmann’s mobile phone. He attacked the device with the hacking malware Proteus at eight o’clock that evening and by midnight was reviewing the banker’s emails, text messages, browsing history, photographs, geolocation data, and telephone metadata. There was nothing in the material to suggest that Hoffmann had been in contact with the Secret Sharer silent donor service. Nor was there any reference to the anonymous shell companies Regency Holdings, Trident Resources, Pavilion Capital, or RPH Investments. He had been in frequent contact of late—phone calls and text messages—with his client Edward Knight, but it had been six months since his last text exchange with his friend and Cambridge classmate Alice Winter. Hoffmann was in London at the time, at Bänzinger’s office in Fleet Street. He met Alice for drinks that evening at the Connaught. The geolocation data indicated that Hoffmann had stayed for ninety minutes.
The rest of the phone’s GPS data portrayed an orderly life befitting a gnome of Zurich. He arrived at his office no later than nine o’clock each morning and departed at the stroke of half past six. He dwelled along the shore of the Zürichsee in the toney Gold Coast suburbof Küsnacht with his wife, Ursula, and their two young daughters. Geolocation dots crisscrossing the lake in all directions, as well as numerous photos, suggested he owned a rather decent sailboat. Other data indicated he was a skilled climber. One photo showed him standing triumphantly atop the Lagginhorn, a four-thousand-meter peak in the Pennine Alps.
There was no suitable lodging to be found in exclusive Küsnacht, but Ingrid acquired a spacious three-bedroom holiday rental a kilometer up the road in the suburb of Zollikon. They settled into the apartment at six the following evening after an arduous day of travel and were sharing a bottle of Swiss white wine on the terrace when Peter Hoffmann sped past the building in his black Audi A8 sedan. He was on the phone at the time, talking to a client in America. He terminated the call as he turned through the gate of his lakeside villa, but the phone was acting as a transmitter when he greeted his wife. She asked him, indifferently, about his day. He informed her it had been uneventful save for a minor scrape with another senior executive. “Not Konrad again?” she asked, and Hoffmann replied, “Who else?”
They saw the same black Audi sedan at half past eight the following morning, but this time it was headed in the opposite direction. Ingrid and Peel followed the car up the lakeshore in a rented Mitsubishi SUV and spent the remainder of the morning window-shopping along the Bahnhofstrasse. Gabriel, for his part, passed the morning monitoring the audio and video feeds from Peter Hoffmann’s compromised phone. Together they sat through a succession of meetings, each duller than the last. Gabriel lunched alone at the apartment, but Hoffmann dined with a female colleague at Restaurant Lumière, one of central Zurich’s better French eateries. He didn’t seem to notice the young British policeman and beautiful professional thief sitting at a nearby table.
The policeman and the thief followed the banker and his colleague back to Bänzinger HQ, then drove back to Zollikon. They couldn’t bear the thought of spending the afternoon in the apartment, so Gabriel rented a Chris-Craft Bowrider and they did their eavesdropping while cruising the Zürichsee. At seven o’clock they were approximately two hundred meters due west of Peter Hoffmann’s villa. He arrived there at seven fifteen, a few minutes behind schedule, and exchanged the same bland pleasantries with his wife. Then, drink in hand, he crossed his green lawn and walked to the end of his dock. And there he stood, still as a statue, watching the sun dipping behind the mountains on the opposite shore of the lake.
“What do you suppose he’s thinking about?” asked Peel.
“Money,” answered Ingrid, who was reclining at the vessel’s prow.
“And what money is that?” asked Gabriel.
“The rather large fortune he has hidden in the Cayman Islands and Belize.”
“There’s nothing on his phone to indicate that the money is his,” replied Gabriel. “Or that it was the ransom payment.”
“Which would suggest,” said Ingrid pedantically, “that he uses burner phones to conduct his illicit dealings.” She smiled, then added, “Most criminals do.”
“For the moment, at least, he looks like just another Zurich moneyman.”
“I rest my case.”
The Zurich moneyman was now holding something to his ear. Gabriel checked his laptop. Hoffmann’s usual phone was powered on but inactive, no incoming or outgoing call. Furthermore its current position was approximately twenty meters from the shore of the lake, which would place it inside the villa.
“It appears,” said Peel, “as though Herr Hoffmann has a burner.”
“Who do you suppose he’s talking to?” asked Gabriel.
