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which it had been withdrawn earlier that day.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