30 Zollikon
Zollikon
On the website of Bank Josef B?nzinger & 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 B?nzinger’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 suburb of 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 B?nzinger 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.
“The possibilities,” replied Ingrid, “are endless.”
The subsequent three days were spent in the pursuit of Peter Hoffmann’s second mobile phone. Not the device itself, at least
not initially, but merely a number that Gabriel could enter into the hacking malware Proteus. They searched for it in the
only source they had—the digital debris of his public-facing device. They isolated seventy-eight possible candidates and dialed
each of the numbers from a prepaid device they purchased from a shop in Zurich Hauptbahnhof. Twenty-two of the phones were
answered by women, thirty-eight by men other than Peter Hoffmann, and three by young girls. The remaining phones repeatedly
went straight to voicemail. Gabriel fed the numbers into Proteus and in short order determined that none of the devices were
in the possession of a banker from Zurich.
It was at this point, on the Thursday morning of that week, that Gabriel reached the unsettling conclusion they had no choice
but to illicitly acquire the phone itself. He ruled out breaking into the Hoffmann villa in Küsnacht. It was undoubtedly protected
by a high-quality security system, and finding the device would be akin to searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
The only alternative, he submitted, was to remove the device from the owner’s pocket.
“We would need a professional pickpocket,” said Peel.
“We have one,” replied Gabriel.
He was the first to acknowledge, though, that the plan was not perfect—far from it, in fact.
The target only set foot outside the insular world of his bank at lunchtime, which meant the theft would have to occur on the Bahnhofstrasse or an adjacent street.
Moreover there was no guarantee the target would be carrying his second phone when he left the office—or that the thief would necessarily be able to discern one device from the other.
It was quite possible, he admitted, that she might steal the wrong phone.
“Which would leave us in the dark,” said Peel.
“Until he gets a new phone,” answered Gabriel.
They had seen enough of Peter Hoffmann to know that he was right-handed and carried his phone in the left breast pocket of
his suit jacket. It followed, therefore, that he would carry a second device in the opposite pocket, the right. It was, Ingrid
explained, the easier of the two pockets for her to pick, for she was right-handed as well. Her preferred method involved
pleating the pocket lining to make the valuable easier to obtain. She demonstrated the technique on Peel during a rehearsal
in the apartment in Zollikon. He admitted, much to his dismay, that he had felt neither the elusive touch of her hand nor
the phone leaving his pocket.
He steadfastly refused, however, to serve as Ingrid’s accomplice, only her chauffeur. They left the apartment at eleven thirty
and made the short drive up the lakeshore to the Bahnhofstrasse. Ingrid did a bit of shopping, and at twelve forty-five, bags
in hand, she was admiring the silver and gold trinkets displayed in the window of the luxury jewelry boutique located on the
ground floor of B?nzinger HQ. Peter Hoffmann stepped from the door of the building two minutes later, bound for a business
lunch at Restaurant Kronenhalle, his phone to his ear. Ingrid chose that instant to conclude her examination of the jewelry
and, as misfortune would have it, a minor collision occurred. Peter Hofffmann, like Timothy Peel before him, never felt the
touch of her hand. The breast pocket it probed was empty.
“Forgive me,” she said in German. “I’m hopelessly clumsy.”
“The pleasure was mine,” said Peter Hoffmann with a smile, and walked away.
Which left them one final bite at the apple before the weekend. Because the target had got a good look at the thief, she would
have to make a drastic change to her appearance. The second collision occurred at 1:07 p.m. Friday outside a popular Zurich restaurant specializing in the cuisine of Tuscany. The other party to the incident was a
small, strikingly handsome man in his mid-thirties, or so it appeared to the target. Once again he failed to notice the hand
that slipped inside his suit jacket. This time, however, it discovered a mobile phone resting on the bottom of the right breast
pocket.
Polite apologies were exchanged, and the two went their separate ways. Within minutes, though, each would make a startling
discovery. The banker discovered that his mobile phone was missing. The thief, much to her dismay, realized that it was the
banker’s primary device.
Leaving his office that evening, he walked to a nearby Apple store and, with a British detective looking on from a safe distance,
purchased a replacement phone for the one that was now lying on the bottom of the Zürichsee. By the time he arrived home in
Küsnacht, the hacking malware Proteus had seized control of the phone’s operating system, and the device was acting as an
audio and video transmitter. He passed a quiet evening with his wife and children, and early the following morning loaded
a quantity of climbing gear into the trunk of his Audi sedan. It was a few minutes after seven o’clock when he sped past a
small apartment house in the neighboring suburb of Zollikon. A rented Mitsubishi SUV eased from the curb and followed after
him.