“Sounds a bit steep to me.”
“I chose the number, not him.”
“And Sentry Global?”
“Another ten million,” said Alice. “But it included a Swiss passport.”
“Which left you a mere four hundred and sixty-five million dollars.”
“Four hundred and sixty, actually. This chalet cost me a pretty penny.”
“And then there was the nearly three million pounds you donated anonymously to charity,” said Gabriel. “Including the one million pounds you gave to the international relief organization where your friend Phoebe Chadwick works.”
“Is that how you found me?”
“That’s how I found Peter,” said Gabriel. “And Peter led me to you.”
“He warned me not to give Phoebe that money, but I thought we’d covered our tracks with the other contributions.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I wanted to make amends for what happened between us.”
“Perhaps you should have done that before she left Ibiza.”
“I couldn’t. Myrealaccomplices and I wanted her off the island before my disappearance.”
“Sophie Maxwell and Ella Burns?”
She nodded.
“A solicitor who works for the Magic Circle law firm that represents your husband’s company,” Gabriel pointed out. “And an executive at the British bank where he gets his financing.”
“You’re wrong about that, I’m afraid. HSBC stopped doing business with Edward years ago.”
“In that case, where has he been getting his money?”
“In Moscow, Mr. Allon. Where else?”
33
Lauterbrunnen
The trouble began in the dreary winter of 2009, when the recklessness of Wall Street’s investment banks plunged Britain’s economy into the worst recession since World War II. Hardest hit was the property market, with the average British home losing twenty percent of its value, almost overnight. The declines in the commercial real estate sector were even more severe. One closely watched index plunged a catastrophic forty-six percent.
Edward Knight weathered the storm with only minor losses, or so he claimed. In truth the Knight Group was hemorrhaging cash. Twelve months into the crisis, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. A sale of existing assets was not an option, for there were no buyers and prices were at rock bottom. Knight asked his man at HSBC for an additional line of credit and a restructuring of his current debt, and was denied both. Having nowhere else to turn he sought a private solution to his problems. He found one in the form of a billionaire Russian oligarch living grandly in London.
“Which one?” asked Gabriel.
“Dmitri Savin.”
“The name rings a distant bell.”
“Made a mountain of money in Russian chemicals,” said Alice.“Fertilizers, if I’m not mistaken. Poor Dmitri found himself at the wrong end of sanctions after Russia invaded Ukraine and was forced to return to Moscow, leaving a couple billion in frozen assets behind in the West, including his enormous mansion in Prince of Wales Terrace. It has since fallen into a state of disrepair, much to the dismay of Dmitri’s former neighbors.”
“An art collector, isn’t he?”
“Aren’t they all? Bloody Russians,” she murmured.
