Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [218]
“No problem at all, Fräulein,” Herr Hasselmann said. “How can I be of service?”
“I would like to open an account. I have a number of private bonds that I’d like to convert.”
Irene Nesser placed her portfolio on the desk in front of him.
Herr Hasselmann examined the contents, hastily at first, and then more slowly. He raised an eyebrow and smiled politely.
She opened five numbered accounts, which she could access via the Internet and which were owned by an apparently anonymous post-office-box company in Gibraltar. A broker had set them up for her for 50,000 kronor of the money she had borrowed from Blomkvist. She cashed in fifty of the bonds and deposited the money in the accounts. Each bond was worth the equivalent of one million kronor.
Her business at the Bank Dorffmann also took more time than expected, so now she was even more behind on her schedule. She had no chance to take care of her final transactions before the banks closed for the day. So Irene Nesser returned to the Matterhorn Hotel, where she spent an hour hanging around to establish her presence. But she had a headache and went to bed early. She bought some aspirin at the front desk and ordered a wake-up call for 8:00 a.m. Then she went back to her room.
It was close to 5:00 p.m., and all the banks in Europe were closed for business. But the banks in North and South America were open. She booted up her PowerBook and uplinked to the Net through her mobile. She spent an hour emptying the numbered accounts she had opened at Bank Dorffmann earlier in the day.
She divided the money up into small amounts and used it to pay invoices for a large number of fictional companies around the world. When she was done, the money had strangely enough been transferred back to the Bank of Kroenenfeld in the Cayman Islands, but this time to an entirely different account than the one from which it had been withdrawn earlier that day.
Irene Nesser considered this first stage to be secure and almost impossible to trace. She made one payment from the account: the sum of nearly one million kronor was deposited into an account linked to a credit card that she had in her wallet. The account was owned by Wasp Enterprises, registered in Gibraltar.
Several minutes later a girl with blonde page-boy hair left the Matterhorn by a door into the hotel bar. Monica Sholes walked to the Zimmertal Hotel, nodded politely to the desk clerk, and took the lift up to her room.
There she took her time putting on Monica Sholes’ combat uniform, touching up her make-up, and applying an extra layer of skin cream to the tattoo before she went down to the hotel restaurant and had an insanely delicious fish dinner. She ordered a bottle of vintage wine that she had never heard of before though it cost 1,200 kronor, drank one glass, and nonchalantly left the rest before she went into the hotel bar. She left absurd tips, which certainly made the staff notice her.
She spent quite a while allowing herself to be picked up by a drunk young Italian with an aristocratic name which she did not bother to remember. They shared two bottles of champagne, of which she drank almost one glass.
Around 11:00 her intoxicated suitor leaned forward and boldly squeezed her breast. She moved his hand down to the table, feeling pleased. He did not seem to have noticed that he was squeezing soft latex. At times they were so loud that they caused a certain amount of irritation among the other guests. Just before midnight, when Monica Sholes noticed that a hall porter was keeping a stern eye on them, she helped her Italian boyfriend up to his room.
When he went to the bathroom, she poured one last glass of wine. She opened a folded piece of paper and spiked the wine with a crushed Rohypnol sleeping tablet. He passed out in a miserable heap on the bed within