A walkie-talkie near him crackled. "In place," said a crisp voice.

"Entendu," replied Captain Henri L'Hunold, commander of the DIR. "Await my signal."

Stepping into the document storage room, Jean-Jacques Pillonel took up his tale where he had left off in the car ten minutes earlier.

"As I said, it is part of our job as fiduciaries to keep a permanent record of our customers' accounts. This means keeping copies of the bank confirmations showing all monies that flow into and out of them: every deposit, every wire transfer, every cash withdrawal."

"But you're not a bank yourself?" asked Cate.

"Good Lord, no. But as their accountants we require the confirmations to perform the audits of our customers' accounts. We scan them immediately and transfer them to hard drive. Every month, we download the new confirmations onto our customers' private CDs."

The three were snaking through aisles of chest-high filing cabinets colored a wan yellow. Pillonel was their leader, and he moved like an automaton through the metallic maze, drawing first one CD, then another, his destinations memorized long ago.

"What was Kirov's game?" Gavallan asked. "Didn't he want to pay the tax man his due?"

"Forget the tax man," said Cate. "Kirov didn't even plan on giving the money to Novastar. As far as he was concerned, Novastar's revenues were his, and he made sure they didn't turn up anywhere on the company's ledgers."

"It's a bit more complicated than that," cautioned Pillonel. "Once Kirov won the auction for Novastar, he transferred the company's headquarters from Moscow to Geneva. Moscow was too parochial, he said; an international airline needed an international presence. He asked me to set up a holding company for his forty-nine percent stake in the airline. We were happy to oblige. The company is called Futura. It is domiciled in Lausanne."

"Is Kirov the sole shareholder?" Cate demanded.

"No. There is a second man. His name is Dashamirov. Aslan Dashamirov. You know him?"

Gavallan and Cate said they didn't.

"He is trouble, this man." Pillonel offered a secret smile. "He is Chechen. Not so polished as Mr. Kirov. From the bandit country. Anyway, at the same time as we opened Futura for Mr. Kirov, he asked us to set up a second company, this one offshore in the Dutch Antilles- Curaçao, I believe. That company is named Andara. Now of course we all know why he did this, but I was surprised at his audacity. First, he instructs all of Novastar's foreign offices to transfer their revenues to Futura, instead of to the company's old accounts in Moscow. This means all the money Novastar earns from sales of plane tickets made in Los Angeles or Rio or Hong Kong come to Switzerland."

"I have a feeling we're getting to the good part," said Gavallan, giving Cate a fateful glance.

"If you mean the part that concerns Mercury, you are right," said Pillonel. "From Futura, Kirov would transfer the money into Mercury's accounts here in Geneva. But only at certain times during the year, and just briefly- one day in, the next day out. He timed it so that Mercury's quarterly bank statements showed the effect of the transfer. Usually, the inflows increased Mercury's revenues by around thirty percent."

"Thirty percent? Not kidding around, was he." It was Gavallan's policy to involve himself in the due diligence being done on Black Jet's larger deals, and he remembered poring over Mercury's banking statements, corroborating the balance held at the bank with the sum shown on Mercury's books. In one day, out the next. Clever, but you could only get away with it with the complicity of your accountant.

Then again, fifteen million francs bought a lot of complicity.

Cate said, "So once Mercury booked the funds as revenues, they wired the money back to Futura?"

"Only about ten percent, actually. The rest was always transferred to Andara, the company in Curaçao, for the personal benefit of Mr. Kirov and Mr. Dashamirov."

"That explains why Baranov and the Russian government are so pissed off," Cate said. "The revenues from the foreign rep offices never made it to Moscow. The government privatized Novastar to increase its profitability and bring it up to Western business standards. They expected the fifty-one percent they retained to earn them a decent chunk of hard currency."

Pillonel had completed his rounds of the filing cabinets and was heading toward the back wall, where a long desk divided by partitions into carrels offered a dozen personal computers and printers for everyday use. Next to the desk stood a row of IBM mainframes, their blinking red and green pinlights the only indication they were in service. Sitting down at a carrel, he selected a CD and slipped it into the PC's disc drive. "It's all here. See for yourself."

Gavallan watched from behind Pillonel's shoulder as copies of Novastar's transfers to Futura flashed onto the screen. Two hundred thousand dollars from New York. Three million French francs from Paris. Four hundred thousand deutsche marks from Frankfurt. All the money headed for Switzerland. Pillonel flipped through the transfers, taking the three of them on a paper trail across the globe. Shanghai, Mexico City, Toronto, Chicago, Paris again. Around the world in eighty seconds.

"Like I say, it's all here." Suddenly, Pillonel laughed, a high-pitched, hysterical whinny. "I don't know who is going to be madder- the Swiss because I break the secrecy law, or Kirov because I violated his trust."

Oh, I can tell you the answer to that one, buddy, declaimed Gavallan silently: Kirov by a long shot.

Pillonel switched discs, and a new set of transfers scrolled onto the screen. "Here are the transfers you are most interested in, Jett: the funds injected into Mercury." The amounts were larger, the transfers less frequent. It would be an easy task to back out the amounts Kirov had transferred into Mercury's accounts and arrive at a true reckoning of Mercury's revenues, and thus its market value.

Pillonel switched discs again, and the screen was filled with transfer after transfer out of Mercury and into Andara, Kirov's private strongbox. The sums were staggering. Ten million dollars. Thirty-two million. Six million.

It's the gold seam, thought Gavallan. A hard copy trail showing Konstantin Kirov's meticulously executed efforts to divert Novastar's revenues to his personal account. A how-to manual on stealing from Mother Russia. He found Cate's hand and gave it a squeeze. "I don't suppose Mr. Kirov will be too keen for Baranov to get his hands on these."

"Forget Baranov," said Pillonel acidly. "He's powerless. Kirov will flee the country if any charges are filed against him. He'll set up shop in Marbella with the other Russian expats. They've got a whole little community down there. Like I said, forget Baranov… he's a paper tiger. You want to hurt Kirov, I show you something that hurts him."

Pillonel slipped the third compact disc into the e-drive. Once again, the screen was filled with scanned copies of bank transfers. Gavallan leaned closer. It took his middle-aged eyes a few seconds before he could read the names and numbers on the screen. He recognized the account number of Andara, the Curaçao holding company, but the beneficiary was an anonymous numbered account at the Banque Prive de Geneve et Lausanne.

"Isn't that your brother's bank?" Gavallan asked. Pierre Pillonel was Jean-Jacques's fraternal twin. One had chosen banking, the other accounting. What more could a Swiss mother desire?

"Yes. Pierre is managing partner for two years now."

Cate put a finger to the screen. "And to whom may I ask does account number 667.984Z belong?"

"Who do you think?" Pillonel scalded her with a reproving glance. "Mr. Kirov, he trusted no one- not even his partner, Mr. Dashamirov. After the Chechen left our meeting, Kirov asked me to open a private account for him here in Switzerland. This man is not content simply to steal from the Russian government- he wants to steal from his partner, too. If I were Kirov, I wouldn't be afraid of the prosecutor general, Mr. Baranov. Baranov can only put him in jail. Me, I am afraid of Mr. Dashamirov. Mr. Dashamirov catches Kirov stealing, he will kill him."