The Zurich Conspiracy Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2005 by Bernadette Calonego

  English translation copyright © 2012 by Gerald Chapple

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  The Zurich Conspiracy was first published in 2005 by Bloomsbury Verlag GmbH as Nutze deine Feinde. Translated from German by Gerald Chapple.

  First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2012.

  Published by AmazonCrossing

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 978-1-61109-093-2

  ISBN-10: 1611090938

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011917249

  For Christa

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  (Swiss News Agency) Aug. 2. The criminal investigation of two top executives of the bankrupt corporation Swixan AG has been called off. Guido Seiler, the chief investigator, stated Wednesday at a Zurich press conference that it could not be verified that suspicious material or intentional actions by Swixan’s top management might have caused the company’s collapse.

  The three-year investigation of CEO Beat Thüring and CFO Karl Westek began after Zurich media reported their allegedly dubious transactions. The accounts claimed that Thüring and Westek deposited tens of millions of francs in the Bahamas with the aid of Urs Feller-Stähli, a corporate lawyer. Meanwhile hundreds of people at Swixan lost their pensions and all shareholders their investments.

  Seiler also indicated that the criminal investigation of Henry Salzinger, CEO of the Zurich accounting firm Färber Brothers & Co., has also been called off. Investigators were unable to prove any illegal activities on the part of Swixan or Färber executives.

  The streetcar stops so abruptly that it knocks Josefa Rehmer against the bar on the seat in front of her and then sideways, her briefcase dropping to the floor. The rapid-fire ringing of the streetcar’s shrill bell sounds in her ears as she tries to grab something to hold on to. Her left temple hits a hard object covered in rough cloth. Leaning against the person next to her, who is hanging on to the straps and swinging back and forth like a gymnast on rings, she feels a piercing pain in her temple. The gymnast pulls himself up to his full height and smoothes out his black suit under his unbuttoned sheepskin coat. Josefa senses his eyes on her. But when she smiles an apology at him, he quickly looks away. The young man is apparently as embarrassed by their unintentional body contact as she is.

  The streetcar had been gaining speed after leaving its last stop when something on the tracks forced it to brake sharply. The lead car is now stopped on Zurich’s tony Bahnhofstrasse, having sustained some sort of damage. The automatic doors open and dazed passengers push their way out. Josefa grabs the briefcase she’s dropped and steps onto the sidewalk. The icy January air stings her face.

  A group of curious spectators on the other side of the street is surrounding a Mercedes coupe, its fender crushed like an Easter egg. A stylishly dressed man, hands on hips, stands helplessly beside it.

  But Josefa doesn’t have a moment to spare. She rushes ahead, impatiently forcing her way through the crowd, her breastbone suddenly throbbing. It must have hit the bar harder than she thought. She quickly touches her forehead, which feels wet, and notices a red stain on her fingers. Still on the run, she takes a little mirror out of her purse, flips it open, and stops for a second to hold it up at an angle. Nothing. She must have dabbed the blood off with her finger. But she can see something behind her. The man in the sheepskin coat is standing before a shop window, only a few steps away. Once again she feels that throbbing pain in her head. That guy must have had something damn hard in his pocket, she thinks to herself. Josefa stuffs the mirror away and hurries on. Time’s running out. Even before the collision, the streetcar was late, abnormal in a city legendary for its punctuality. If Josefa’s fast enough, she can still make it to Paradeplatz in time. But after this unpleasant incident she’ll get there distraught and sweaty in spite of the cold.

  Bahnhofstrasse suddenly seems to go on forever, with far too many people in front of the palatial banks and upscale stores. An alpenhorn blower has set himself up on Paradeplatz, an earthy character with a full beard and an Edelweiss wreath on his green felt hat. Rushing past, she can decipher just two words painted on his cardboard sign: “Silence” and “Reflect.” The alpenhorn drowns out the squeals of the streetcars and other traffic noise from nearby streets. A cyclist attempts to cross the tracks, skids, and falls. What a crazy day! Josefa thinks, glancing back to see if he’s hurt, before catching a glimpse of the man in the sheepskin coat disappearing behind a pillar in the doorway to a private bank.

  Josefa finally spots the hotel but before entering takes the precaution of wiping her temple with a tissue; it’s streaked pink. Just across the street she notices a poster on a department store wall summoning all Swiss soldiers to the annual obligatory weapons drill.

  Josefa pushes through the revolving door to the elegant hotel lobby with its blue-and-gold carpet. The concierge gives her a casual once-over before turning his attention back to his phone call. Josefa glances quickly at her watch: already five minutes late. Never good for a first meeting. A young woman finally appears behind the counter and turns toward her with the tight-assed charm of a German newscaster.

  “The Dessag Cor
poration must have left a message for me,” Josefa says. The receptionist raises a quizzical eyebrow.

  “What company, please?”

  “Dessag. D-E-S-S-A-G,” Josefa repeats. This will be the first meeting in this hotel as the Hotel Baur au Lac is closed for renovations.

  “Dessag? And a message for whom, please?”

  Josefa’s getting edgy. Hasn’t the staff been informed? Or maybe the people I’m supposed to meet are at the wrong hotel?

  “Dessag,” repeats the concierge who has hung up the phone. “Yes, we do indeed have a message from them. You are requested to go to room 398.”

  Josefa hesitates. “Three ninety-eight? Isn’t that just a normal hotel room?”

  Meetings do not usually take place in hotel rooms. Josefa looks at the concierge with a twinge of embarrassment, recalling tales of high-class prostitutes who see well-heeled clients in grand hotels. For a brief moment she imagines the person he may be thinking she is: a slim woman, midthirties, in a bright-blue mohair coat with a matching Fabric Frontline silk scarf, a briefcase in her hand. Her graying hair is upswept (she had a few gray strands by the tender age of twenty—her mother’s legacy). Apart from pale lipstick and very thin eyeliner, she has no makeup on. Fortunately, she also inherited her Italian mother’s dark eyes and heavy eyelashes. Her finely toned skin doesn’t need any cosmetic enhancement.

  Josefa sucks in her breath. “I have been told a small conference room was reserved,” she says in a firm voice.

  The concierge nods an excuse. “All our conference rooms are taken, I’m afraid. But room 398 is a large suite with all necessary office infrastructure, rest assured.” He picks up a thick document and hits the stapler with a sweeping gesture.

  There’s a bang in Josefa’s ears. She winces. And it’s then she realizes: It was a gun that rammed her temple! A revolver or a pistol. That must’ve been it. She goes weak in the knees. Is she still being followed?

  “Would there be anything else?” the concierge asks.

  “The elevator, please,” Josefa says.

  “Over there and immediately on your left.”

  Josefa waits impatiently for the elevator. A cluster of tourists is standing next to her, loaded down with bags of loot from the expensive designer shops between Paradeplatz and Storchenplatz. Josefa, pull yourself together. Everything’s going to be OK. How easily she’s frightened! She’s all nerves. Probably the fault of the poster advertising the military drill. That must’ve stimulated her imagination. The world is still perfectly normal, she tells herself, trying to calm down, take this hotel, for example, or these tourists now floating up with me in the elevator.

  The fourth-floor corridor is deserted. An inviting, illuminated button at room 398 says, “PLEASE PRESS.” But Josefa knocks instead, several times, hard. She waits. Gleaming letters appear, “PLEASE ENTER.” She pushes down on the door handle.

  The vestibule is dark, but there is light in the adjoining suite. Even standing some distance away, she can see that the curtains are drawn. Should something have tipped her off? Should she have been more cautious after the past few months? She’s shifting her briefcase from one hand to the other in indecision when a figure appears in the doorway.

  Josefa freezes. “You?” she gasps. She has no desire to see the man who’s now raising his hand a little. Not now and not ever.

  “I’ve been wanting us to have a little chat for a long time,” she hears him say in a slurred, hoarse voice. At that moment a noise makes her spin around. A man has pushed open the door to the room. He’s wearing a sheepskin coat over a black suit. And in his pocket is a sharp-edged metal object.

  The party tent was perched like a sparkling spaceship on a black lake, not one filled with water, of course, but an outspread carpet. Francis Bourdin had the idea of covering the meadow with a platform of boards and laying down carpeting. And when Bourdin, the head of the Loyn Corporation, had an idea, it was Josefa Rehmer’s job to make it happen. She thought she’d pulled it off brilliantly once again.

  The tent was huge. Josefa had dug up one that could accommodate two hundred people at small round tables. Almost all the guests were already seated under gilded crystal chandeliers. The white tables were set with black plates on top of gold ones, resplendent with vases of white tulips, and the chairs were also black and gold. The combination of black, white, and gold was another wish of Bourdin’s, another of his visions, and Josefa did everything possible to make his ideas a reality.

  She was fired up. She wondered if anyone could tell just by looking at her how proud she was of her achievement. Loyn had invited its best customers and business contacts to a spectacular show featuring eighty of the most beautiful Arabian stallions in the world. It was one of the biggest events that Josefa had ever organized for her company. Bourdin had insisted that the party would be in St. Moritz at the end of June, in spite of Josefa’s fears that the weather might not cooperate. But now she was pleased to see that the warm, early summer air that had descended over the Engadine had soaked up the last drops of moisture from the meadow. The sun’s fiery trail was only just disappearing behind the defiant chain of the Alps.

  This sponsored event had reached its climax an hour ago with the glamorous parade of horses, and now the VIPs were waiting in the tent for hors d’oeuvres, champagne and exclusive wines already flowing. The ladies were flashing quite a bit of bare skin, expensive jewelry, and perfect teeth. Josefa, in a lime-green outfit at the tent entrance, was inspecting the space inside. A name tag identified her as the “Manager Event Marketing.”

  Suddenly she had the feeling she was being watched. She turned around as inconspicuously as possible. A thickset, broad-shouldered man was standing about fifty feet away, smoking a cigar. Their eyes met. Josefa did a quick mental rundown of the guest list. Of course: Thüring, Beat Thüring, the once much-celebrated CEO of Swixan, before the company went broke and Thüring had a great fall—a well-cushioned one, as Josefa clearly remembered. Thüring had siphoned off lots of money—many, many millions, in fact—beforehand. She’d read it in the papers. This made him persona non grata in the Zurich economic establishment, at least for a while. Why Thüring was back on Loyn’s VIP list puzzled Josefa. But that was none of her business; as the organizer, she had no choice but to be friendly, cigar smoke and all.

  “You’ve already found your seat in the tent, am I right, Herr Thüring?” she asked helpfully.

  Beat Thüring moved his cigar away from her. There was something Mediterranean about him; he looked more like a bon vivant than a financial shark. Josefa could easily imagine how his charm had seduced all those people he later victimized.

  Thüring turned the corners of his mouth into an ironic smile.

  “Today I can enjoy all these beautiful things at the same time—the Engadine Alps, a good cigar, and a wonderful hostess.”

  “And a superb meal as well,” Josefa replied without batting an eyelash. “We want our guests to have fond memories of this day.”

  “I thought I’d stretch my legs a bit until the guests of honor get here.” He gave her a conspiratorial wink.

  Josefa never stopped smiling. She knew what she owed her company.

  “For me you are one of the guests of honor, Herr Thüring,” she replied, before making her escape from the smoky cigar.

  Thüring had found a sore spot.

  The table for the honored guests in the middle of the tent was not yet filled.

  Josefa scanned the room and spotted Claire Fendi, her assistant, giving final instructions to the restaurant manager. Josefa hurried over.

  “Where’s Joan Caroll? Where’s Bourdin and the rest of them?”

  Claire looked surprised.

  “Aren’t they here yet? They were just leaving the hotel twenty minutes ago. They should be here by now.”

  Bourdin was habitually late. Though he was the head of Loyn, he acted like an eccentric artist, a bohemian in the world of economics—an image he cultivated most effectively for the media. Other pe
ople were supposed to worry about the orderly course of events. Especially Josefa.

  What made her more nervous was the fact that Joan Caroll had not shown up yet, the star of Loyn’s VIP gala event. All the guests were dying to meet the woman who’d won the US Chess Championship as a sixteen-year-old girl wonder, who was a sensation as an international model, and who’d become a film actress (Josefa didn’t find her films particularly convincing, but she kept that to herself). Loyn had bought Joan Caroll for image purposes. She made a lot of money being photographed with Loyn’s luxury handbags and suitcases, and she took part in Loyn’s promotional events. Josefa thought it was a real coup for the eighty-five-year-old Swiss family business. And it was her job to get Joan Caroll from point A to point B on time. She got out her cell phone. Bourdin didn’t answer. She feared the worst.

  “Take over here,” she said to Claire. “I’m going to the hotel. Bourdin’s behaving like an idiot again.”

  Claire rolled her eyes. She knew what was up. The two women were so much in sync that words were often superfluous.

  “When should we start?” Claire asked.

  “In fifteen minutes. I should be back by then. If not, just start serving the dinner. Let the team know.”

  Josefa ran across the black carpet to the waiting company car. It took only about seven minutes to reach the hotel, where she came across Bourdin in the lobby with the PR woman for the horse show and the mayor of St. Moritz, also a woman. Josefa also spotted a few reporters in the lobby. Bourdin always played the slightly bored loner for the media (complete with far-off gaze and long, black hair, which Josefa guessed was dyed, tied in a Mozart braid). He almost always appeared in the garb of a Pakistani aristocrat, dressed in the finest Italian silk.

  Bourdin turned around angrily.

  “What are you doing here?” he shouted. “You ought to be at the tent.”

  “I’m here because everybody in the tent is waiting for the guests of honor,” Josefa said as calmly as possible. She was annoyed at herself. Why did she feel the need to justify something that was plain as day? But Josefa had long stopped expecting rational behavior from Bourdin.

  All of a sudden his voice was filled with understanding—that’s how he always delivered his biggest affronts.