The Genoa Rendezvous

The Genoa Rendezvous

charles back

Published by charles back, 2022.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

THE GENOA RENDEZVOUS

First edition. November 12, 2022.

Copyright © 2022 charles back.

Written by charles back.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

The Genoa Rendezvous

1

More thriller novels by CHARLES BACK

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Breakwater Bay

The Diamond Sunrise

Outlander Run

Red Storm Horizon

The Game Change

Ebbtide Crossing 

The Miscreant Focus

ONE

Incoming junk mail arrives in copious quantities on my laptop every day and this morning was no different. The sender list increases unabated, strangers all, and they’re starting to annoy me. I was sitting at my desk earlier and going through the inbox when another one arrived, unsolicited and seemingly unimportant. I was about to hit the delete key, but I glanced at the by-line instead and then re-read it. I tried to comprehend the veiled threat it implied, and what the toxic body of text was supposed to mean.            

I was halfway through a cup of hot coffee when the message shuffled to the top of the list. It was twenty minutes before the hum of peak hour traffic intruded from the highway a kilometre north of my home in Hillarys, both early and both unsettling.    

It was still dark outside when I first skimmed the text and the sender’s name wasn’t familiar. Their identity was of no real significance either, but the short sentence that followed struck a disturbing chord deep down inside me as I sat staring at the screen wondering what the implications could be.            

‘It’s time to balance the books now Coltrane,’ it read acrimoniously in a clear statement of aggression. By the omission of my first name and at least some status in referring to me as Mister, this guy appeared to have a bone to pick with me. The message was filled with a violent overtone, and it caught me by surprise, given that to my recollection I hadn’t upset anyone to that point in the recent past, not to the extent of wanting to balance the books anyway.     

My work has involved me in security investigations with the police as an ASIO field officer for six years and the only incident that concluded with ongoing malice that I could recall occurred more than a year previously. The perpetrator in that incident was still serving time. Field work can be a murky area sometimes because of the nature of the security game, but nothing else specifically came to mind. Back then I always operated within the job description and usually within the law if it served the purpose of the case.    

The email was a strongly worded threat and specifically addressed to me, Daniel Coltrane. Initially I tried to ignore it as nothing more than an annoyance generated by some crackpot with too much time on his hands, but the message’s arrival was disturbing, and the uncomfortable feeling persisted into the late morning. I was aware that anonymous e-mails arrive randomly on people’s computers across the country countless thousands of times every day, so what made this one so different? Well specifically, it was a personal threat and to me that always makes a difference. It’s a big ask to expect me to roll over for the scum sending anonymous e-mails of this type. When I meet them face to face, as I may in the not-too-distant future, a whole new febrile experience in victim threat response will materialise high up on their pain scale.    

Coltrane’s the name by the way, Dan Coltrane ex ASIO Security Officer DSD (Defence Signals Department) Melbourne. I’m thirty-eight years old a little over one eighty-four centimetres tall, around six feet in the old scale and a senior member of the Federal Government Finance and Expenditure Investigations section. I still hold my ASIO investigator status, but more in more of a consultant capacity these days.    

My new position has recently been pumped up to address the burgeoning volume of financial bank fraud that’s been increasingly biting into government coffers and public banking investment for the past twelve months. The job description involves scouring all of the security systems used by Australian Government departments and identify those that need tightening up.      

From what I’ve been able to dig up so far that will mean most of them. The overwhelming majority of suspect cases involve sizeable amounts of finance, in particular the banking system and medical accounts. Coming in a close second in the fraud stakes is the superannuation industry and insurance broking, all large finance generating concerns that need immediate attention. The new wave of ‘Banksters’ as they’ve been colloquially referred to on some television news broadcasts is as hungry as a school of Amazonian Piranha, and their voracity is about the same. The extent to which these people, usually middle-aged males, have been able to purloin finance from the public purse is still a ballpark dollar figure in the tens of millions, but it’s significant and increasing.     

I don’t often let my ire rise against the behaviour of petty criminals or even those higher up the scale, bad guys go with the territory, but illegal procurement of public funding has become a growth industry. Added to that the personal threats made against public officers are a whole new ball game, and it’s definitely a no-go area. I intend to find out who the heavyweights are in the organisations that work in tandem with crooked government bureaucrats and I’m going to come down on them with a paralysing and irresistible force, it’s called the law.       

The recent leaking of the Paradise Papers is a case in point. Our initial success in the investigation is due largely to the efforts of Denise Gray, a competent female agent who’s been working with me on this case. Denise is a class act, and catching these corporate criminals is only half of the workload. Getting them into court and convicted is a difficult problem yet to be solved, but we’re working on it late into most nights.                      

The e-mail that arrived on my laptop at home was designed to unsettle me obviously, and I’m still going over some of my recent work to see who a contender in the revenge stakes might be. My past rate of success in prosecuting some of these people in serious cases is impressive, but it’s been a hard-won record.

TWO

Originally, I hail from Liverpool England, and I arrived in Australia what now seems like a lifetime ago. Our small, impoverished family of three settled in the suburbs of Sydney New South Wales. The world was still recovering from years of economic difficulty after the Second World War and immigrant families were moving out of the devastation of Europe to find a new life in Australia, halfway across the world. 

With my two parents I arrived in Sydney, and we settled in a working-class outer city suburb to make a new beginning in this wonderful country with sunshine. That in itself was a totally new concept for three immigrants newly arrived from England in November.             

My early years were as predictable as any other school age male during the puberty blues, repetitive boring and seemingly pointless. My upbringing was regimented by my father, an ex Royal Marine who believed in saturating my life with deadlines and standards akin to a diet of tough love and tougher discipline. It was a soul-destroying regime at the time, but it helped me to develop a thick layer of defensive strategies in both my physical and mental make-up.     

During those adolescent years, everything was going according to nature’s grand plan until my life’s purpose changed dramatically and without warning. I had just turned thirteen when I first met Jim Kennealy at school. My modest intellectual interests were not scientific or mathematical, but they leaned towards an unusual problem-solving interest. It was a natural ability that was about to shape the next two decades of my life.    

The illogical workings of my brain’s right lobe enabled me to look outside the square and solve strategic problems intrinsic to an inquisitive mind and the long played and noble game of chess. With creative Art interests somewhere involved, my natural enquiry then spilled into the unlikely, but related world of algebraic equations and their application to cryptography and code structure analysis.    

Art, Chess, Algebra and Cryptography, an unlikely formula for my life’s skill set in many ways, but they formed the foundation of my employment opportunities for the most productive years of my working life. Jim Kennealy was my longtime friend who lived ten minutes trot along the bush path that rimmed the clifftops around our home in Como, a bush-land Sydney suburb on the Woranora River. Jim introduced me to chess one afternoon on the way home from school soon after we met, and the moment he opened the small travel board he carried everywhere with him I was totally intrigued.   

From the outset, the level of game planning and chess piece interaction provoked my interest. When combined, the concepts shared by Chess and Algebra lent themselves to my fundamental understanding of geometrical algorithms as the foundation of sophisticated financial and military encryption systems that were broadcast each night on short wave radio frequencies.   

Fundamentally I was able to decipher many of the complicated high security corporate business codes before I’d turned fifteen and had completed my high school education. As a young boy I engaged myself in decryption late into the evening on most school days without interference from my parents, while tucked away in my bedroom. In my secluded little world, with my Stromberg Carlson radio chirping Morse code traffic softly in the background, I sifted the medium frequency airways late into the night.        

I was engaging in an early form of hacking, but during those years computer hacking and code breaking in a commercial sense was still a long way off. As an official illegal activity for civilians in Australia, it would take a few more years before hacking would generally apply to sophisticated computer programme break-ins. In the years to follow and in an ever-changing world, the definition of hacking expanded to involvement in almost all illicit intelligence gathering activities, both commercial and government.   

During my early teens computers were still in the developmental stages and relatively unsophisticated.

Most messages were encrypted and transmitted over MF or HF radio frequencies for the military and sent by Morse code. With the aid of up-market encryption systems they were transmitted via teleprinter lines by the larger business interests in rapidly increasing volumes. Classified information between large corporations became more frequent as companies expanded, and the computer world developed exponentially a few years after that.    

The information contained in all of these messages was of no real interest to me, but I was fascinated by the encryption systems they used, and I could read Morse code without difficulty having been a member of the Boy Scouts for a year.   

I never divulged to anyone the contents of anything I was able to decrypt. Sometimes the information included detailed ship positions or the affairs of business tycoons. Even as a young man I could see that businesses were transferring substantial amounts of money overseas to foreign companies which I did not understand. In hindsight it was likely to be for tax evasion purposes which also became a growth industry.  

Although that appeared to be against the law and unfair to the working-class people, these issues never really concerned me at the time. While barely in my teens, what I was interested in besides a healthy awareness of the opposite sex, was the structure of codes which were in the embryonic stages of transfer to sophisticated computer systems. Then suddenly all that was in the past and I engaged the mysteries of life with my peers, all of us totally unaware of what the future would hold.  

THREE

Art can get into your blood, remember what happened to van Gogh... so be careful. It was written on the back of a ‘Sunflowers’ postcard I bought in a secondhand shop years ago. As it happened, van Gogh’s problems were blood related according to modern medicine. The man was ingesting lead from the paint he used, and it was in mind decaying amounts.      My interest in fine Art and the recent discovery of famous painting forgeries came about almost by accident. I was browsing the information contained in one case on our files and happened on an intriguing story that took place in Perth Western Australia two decades previously. It involved a well-known and valuable van Gogh work entitled ‘Irises’ another flower study by the Dutch genius, but unlike ‘Sunflowers’ it was owned for a short time by a colourful business identity in Western Australia.

The painting was completed in 1889 while van Gogh resided in the St Paul-de-Mausole asylum for the insane where he died the next year from a gunshot wound to the stomach. Contrary to popular belief van Gogh did not shoot himself, the perpetrator was a mentally deficient teen aged boy whose father owned the revolver and lived in a near-by village. At Van Gogh’s request the youth was never charged or brought to trial and Vincent died soon after. He said his time had come.       

In 2019 a farmer ploughing a field in the now defunct St Paul-de-Mausole asylum fields found an old, rusted revolver a few metres from where Van Gogh had been shot. As an important historical artifact, the weapon was subsequently verified as the murder weapon and auctioned in 2020. It fetched a price in excess of $650,000 U.S. That’s all history now and Vincent lies beneath a cold stone slab in the Saint Remy graveyard next to his brother Theo.

A current investigation into the Australian bank finance anomalies revealed a connection to another file of priority, also an Art case. It involved Wolfgang Beltracchi, a German national, and an Art forger of considerable talent around the late sixties. His deception of Art enthusiast’s world-wide lasted until just prior to the turn of the century when his ingenious ruse came to grief. Beltracchi was renowned for his undetectable forgeries of famous paintings that were much in demand and sold regularly as original works in respectable auction houses world-wide.

Considerable amounts of finance were required to purchase these paintings on the black market in Europe as well, and negotiations could only be entered into if and when the paintings were available. The works of Vincent van Gogh were one of Beltracchi’s favourite subjects because of their impressive colours, and he completed more than twenty forgeries of the famous images without detection.

Beltracchi was the most gifted art forger ever born, and information in the file I was perusing caught my attention because of the man’s unusual talents. He stimulated my need to find out how he managed to create close to perfect painting forgeries, and how I could procure the names of those investors who had purchased the finished works.

Many of his forgeries adorned the mansions of the rich and powerful around the world, and they were owned by families who still believed their recently acquired artworks were the priceless originals painted by long dead masters. The same gullibility was rife in Perth where the owners of Irises by Vincent van Gogh and a van Dyke self-portrait suffered in silence, much to the mirth of their societal counterparts.         

The West, as Perth’s growing population referred to their hometown state a decade ago when I first arrived, is a descriptive term that still amuses me. The city has developed exponentially during the previous ten years largely due to the discovery of rich deposits of high-grade iron ore, and a raft of other valuable minerals.

Now it’s central to the nation’s business hub while still geographically one of the most isolated cities in the world and situated on the far side of the Australian mainland.  

During the eighties and nineties Perth was not just in the west, it was the Wild West. A list of colourful entrepreneurs won and lost fortunes on the stock market and in the fine Art market they lost their money in copious quantities as regularly as the setting of the Westerly sun.            

It was only later in my work on the budget for Public   

Medical services that I discovered that the amount designated had blown out four-fold during the previous financial year. The money, in excess off four billion dollars per annum had been used for services that were rendered well outside the designated portfolio description         

From the very outset it was evident to me that the medical section receipt supervisor, Colin McFarlane was involved in the bogus log of claims being made. He was in a position of authority and was paid handsomely for his lack of due diligence and lax investigative procedures. 

McFarlane was involved at the first executive level, and I paid close attention to his accounting practices for some months before making my report to the chief of finance investigation. The whole network of bank fraud and access to government coffers was technically outside of my official job portfolio, but the decryption of coded computer messages was vital to the case and that was where my specialist skills came into the investigative equation.    

It may have been that McFarlane got wind of my activities somehow, and with help from his backers decided to warn me off, initially with this email that was still sitting in front of me on my laptop, and later with physical coercion

The investigative project started with a scan of McFarlane’s computer files without his or any other government supervisor’s knowledge, except for one-man, Senior Supervisor Robert Clarkson. He’s the security section CEO, a reliable and conscientious investigator who’d given his services for six years as the senior section controller.  

A new career path suddenly developed, and within a few short months I was working alongside Clarkson as a finance analyst, a position that would take me into the field as a mid-level government field operative within the coming months. Eventually I became a senior specialist located in a small but elite investigative team in Perth, far to the west of the main business hubs. My periodical travel interstate takes me to the big smoke, primarily Sydney and that’s where the investigation is currently being conducted.

Chains and teams depend on link strength and team proficiency, or so I was taught. There’s always a weak link in crime syndicates and it’s usually, but not always a dissident minion in the lower levels of the team. The weak link in our government department was mid-level, and influential in McFarlane, and it was amongst his affairs that my investigation began.    

McFarlane was a physically dominant supervisor when overseeing staff, and he was a man whose tactics were well thought out and effective in his immediate sphere of influence. His social and overbearing work-place behaviour also spilled out into his supervisory position at the office like septic swill. It wasn’t bullying in an overt sense because he was too careful to have those career threatening accusations leveled at him. Women were intimidated by his physical size and unquestioned authority, but he always stayed on the right side of the line. McFarlane had built his reputation with complete authority over the hiring and firing of staff during most of the previous decade. Nothing short of total compliance with his work-place demands were tolerated and anything less met with the threat of dismissal.         

With total control of the office intact, McFarlane was accountable to only one man inside his workplace environment, the Deputy Finance Commissioner Alan Cortisone MBA.

FOUR

Twenty more minutes passed, and my laptop blinked again. The corresponding chime announced the arrival of a second email that joined the short inbox list, but it was the junk message that had registered an hour previously that still held my attention. The second message was related to the first in the accusatory subject matter designed to amplify the effect on a victim’s threat response.   

Psychologically as a survival mechanism the response is usually significant on the fear scale. This message also emphasised the previous text which in addition to the psychological effect was implying an element of physical threat, but this time they’d got it all wrong.         

‘Coltrane, your time is up.’ The words leapt at me from the screen again like an attacking viper. It eventually occurred to me that if my time was up why would I be warned in time to do something about it, and who could be the originator of the message? That would be part of their ploy obviously, a rehearsed attack manoeuvre designed to disturb the thought patterns of the intended victim, who was at this moment me, Daniel Coltrane esq.

Four days later the physical side of the threat started to materialise. During the early hours of the following Tuesday morning a large brick was thrown through my bedroom window, a river stone to be precise. I wasn’t injured physically, but glass fragments shattered across my bed and the stone hit my foot and bounced against the opposite wall before landing noisily on the floor.   

The perpetrator’s intended result was totally and completely successful. I was shaken by the early morning shattering of glass that jolted me from my sleep like a sharp punch to the midriff. In a world where violence is reported hourly on television and radio news broadcasts, reports of an attack of this nature doesn’t sound like much, but the consequences can be severe and long lasting for someone living alone.    

I hadn’t been injured, but my survival instincts had been alerted and the flight or fight response was stimulated to the point of me sleeping with one eye open during the next few weeks. I’d done a lot of investigative police work during the past ten years and in retrospect I probably caused a few sleepless nights among thieves and lawbreakers myself.

I mentally sifted through the recent past looking for something that I was involved in that might have offended these people, but my recollection of any misdemeanor was elusive. Apart from the McFarlane case I hadn’t been involved with anyone in any personal dealings of note that I could recall. Our investigation had made inroads into to a large monetary investment in high end art purchases by bank executives evading taxation, but there hadn’t to this point been any connection with McFarlane or employees in his department.    

I reasoned that to reply to this unwarranted email would indicate a certain amount of concern on my part, and that might be exactly what they anticipated. Despite the prolonged reasoning processes my initial reluctance to an answer was wavering. At nine o’clock a few days later, I sat at my laptop undecided on the nature of the reply I would make but determined to put the incident to rest before noon. It was unnecessary and a time-wasting exercise to validate a threat made by a total stranger, but this episode needed to be put to rest.   

Although she had not been directly employed in the department for some time, I had a suspicion that Denise Gray was also involved in this web somewhere because of her sudden departure some months earlier.   

She was a social cold case who left the Government offices where I worked more than six months ago. There was no official discussion of her resignation, but female office detectives created several possibilities concerning her sudden disappearance, all speculative and all unable to come up with a positive conclusion.    

At the time Miss Gray was an investigative analyst who worked in our section, but she was later deployed to computer data recognition and interpretation. Her special decryption skills were different but similar to my own, and together we were for a short period a formidable analytical team.   

She left the section some months later and her job responsibilities were transferred to computer systems surveillance. Miss Gray was investigating newly introduced computer technology and the latest inroads being made into artificial intelligence which was being used by large corporations including banks. It had been developed for the encryption of overseas transfers and their classified payment protocols.   

I met Miss Gray not long before she left the department. She was amicable to friendly conversation in the staff room, but there was a reluctance to talk about her newly appointed position or any private work she was involved in. When I enquired about her work she hesitated before delivering a well-rehearsed cover- story with muted interest during the coffee break. It was plausible enough in the short term, but on closer scrutiny her work activity rendition wasn’t overly convincing when being related to a trained security investigator.   

‘It’s interesting in some of the business practice investigations Mister Coltrane, but as you know office work can be repetitive and time consuming. No-matter what you complete in the first hour there is very little change in the volume of work still to be done. Have you made any headway with those matched pair accounts you were working on,’ she replied, skillfully diverting the attention from my question?’       

‘It’s been almost a year now. The accounting system has changed quite a lot during the last six months or so,’ I said ‘There are a lot more security issues to be observed too, but I guess that’s to be expected when dealing with the general public and their personal information. How are you finding the work in security?’ I asked her with genuine professional interest. I was beginning to like this woman who was of European decent, Italian maybe, or East German with the dark hair and eyes. She was obviously intelligent and attractive in a quiet and physically understated way. 

‘Humming along,’ she replied non-committed,’ and I detected in her words a further reluctance to continue with the conversation. Although I was already privy to her job activities, I silently commended her adherence to security protocols that protected the classified work area from unwarranted scrutiny.

Denise Gray was employed in her new position for less than six months when she resigned unexpectedly amid a mixed bag of conjecture. Most of the surface evidence surrounded her inclusion in a particularly sensitive case. It involved a high-level banker, a large chunk of government finance and another famous painting by the Dutch portrait artist Anthony van Dyke that had surfaced in Perth. Staff creativity was rife again for nearly three weeks after Miss Gray left the security department under a cloud of intrigue.          

When no additional information concerning her departure came to light, interest in the incident quickly diminished and her name didn’t come to my attention again until today, nearly a year later. She was making her appearance as a support force officer employed in a new security push towards corporate crime investigation. Colin McFarlane, the financial section supervisor was only a small fish in a very big pond where sharks circled endlessly in pursuit of acquirable cash, but he was an important link into classified information about the accounts under investigation.   

McFarlane’s financial indiscretions were initially small amounts, but as time passed his passion for gambling pushed him into some serious debt. During this period his pilfering of government funds for himself steadily increased and his activities started to concern his accomplices. To the men at the top he was becoming a liability.

During the next two months I planned a low-profile high priority approach to the investigation through workplace channels and the creation of a fictitious investor identity in the banking system. I had gone over McFarlane’s head to inform