The Atlas Maneuver

Book 18: Cotton Malone

by Steve Berry

Genres: Action & Adventure; International Crime & Mystery; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

From celebrated New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry comes the latest Cotton Malone adventure, in which Cotton unravels a mystery from World War II involving a legendary lost treasure, worth billions, known as Yamashita’s Gold.

1945. In the waning months of World War II, Japan hid vast quantities of gold and other stolen valuables in boobytrapped underground caches all across the Philippines. By 1947 some of that loot was recovered, not by treasure hunters, but by the United States government, which told no one about the find. Instead, those assets were stamped classified, shipped to Europe, and secretly assimilated into something called the Black Eagle Trust.

Present day. Retired Justice Department operative, Cotton Malone, is in Switzerland doing a favor for a friend. But what was supposed to be a simple operation turns violent and Cotton is thrust into a war between the world’s oldest bank and the CIA, a battle that directly involves the Black Eagle Trust. He quickly discovers that everything hinges on a woman from his past, who suddenly reappears harboring a host of explosive secrets centering around bitcoin. The cryptocurrency is being quietly weaponized, readied for an assault on the world’s financial systems, a calculated move that will have devastating consequences. Cotton has no choice. He has to act. But at what cost?

From the stolid banking halls of Luxembourg, to the secret vaults of Switzerland, and finally up into the treacherous mountains of southern Morocco, Cotton Malone is stymied at every turn.  Each move he makes seems wrong, and nothing works, until he finally comes face-to-face with the Atlas Maneuver.

Release date: February 20, 2024

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

BASEL, SWITZERLAND

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3

9:40 A.M.

COTTON MALONE COULD NOT DECIDE IF THE THREAT WAS REAL OR imaginary. He’d been sent to assess the situation, keep an eye on the target, and intervene. But only if necessary.

Did this qualify?

The streets of Basel were busy. Not surprising given this city of two hundred thousand had been a commercial hub and cultural center since the Renaissance. Six hundred years ago it was one of Europe’s great cities. Location helped. Strategically placed where Switzerland, France, and Germany converged, downtown was divided by the Rhine River into two distinct sections. One from the past, the other rooted in today. Its old town filled two hills that rose against the river’s southern bank. A place full of ivy-clad, half-timber houses reminiscent of a long-ago medieval town, the cobbled paths a mix of pedestrian-only and light-traffic streets.

He stood, bathed in sunshine, beside one of the more congested traffic routes and enjoyed a bag of roasted chestnuts purchased from a nearby vendor. His target was inside a small boutique, on the other side of the street, about two hundred feet away, where she’d been for the past thirty minutes. Windows of fashionable stores drew a continuous stream of patrons. Lots of cafés, shops, jewelers, designer clothing, and, his personal favorite, antique-book stores. Plenty of them too. Each reminiscent of his own bookshop back in Copenhagen. He’d owned it now for several years, the store modest in size, tastefully appointed, and well stocked. He catered not only to bibliophiles, but also to the countless tourists who visited Copenhagen. He’d netted a profit every year, though he spent more time away from the shop than he liked. He was also the current secretary of the Danish Antiquarian Booksellers Association, a first for him as he was not much of a joiner.

But what the hell?

He loved books. They loved books.

People moved steadily in every direction, his brain attentive to the slightest detail that had signaled trouble in his former profession. No one stared or lingered too long. Nothing at all out of sync, except for one car. A dark-colored Saab. Parked thirty yards away among other vehicles nestled to the curb. All of the others were empty. But not the Saab. It contained two people, whose forms he could make out through the lightly tinted windshield. The driver and another in the back seat. None of which, in and of itself, should spark any suspicion in most people.

But he wasn’t most people.

He was a trained intelligence officer who’d worked a dozen years for the Magellan Billet, a covert investigative unit of the United States Justice Department. He’d been one of the first people recruited by his old friend Stephanie Nelle, who both created and continued to run the unit. She’d recently found some trouble with the new American president, Warner Fox, but all that had been resolved and now she was back in command. And though he’d been retired from the Billet for a while now, he continued to work freelance for Stephanie whenever she managed to entice him away from his bookshop. He liked that he was still needed, so he rarely refused her. Sure, there’d come a day when she would ask less frequently and he would become only a bookseller. But thankfully, for now, he still had his uses, though he wasn’t here for Stephanie. This favor was for another friend whom he’d encountered a few months back in Germany.

Derrick Koger.

Recently promoted European station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency. Who’d piqued his curiosity with an amazing tale of lost treasure.

Billions in plundered gold.

General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who’d commanded the final defense of the Philippine Islands, along with supervising the secretion of that loot, surrendered to the Allies in September 1945, then was quickly tried and convicted of war crimes in December 1945. Two months later Yamashita was hanged.

Why so fast?

Simple.

The Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA, had learned about 175 buried vaults. Yamashita flatly refused to cooperate with locating them and the last thing the Americans wanted was him still alive, able to tell the world about the gold.

So they hung him.

Once that loose end had been eliminated, and the island of Luzon militarily secured, the OSS moved in and managed to retrieve several of the larger caches, tons of unaccounted-for precious metals, all shipped off to repositories in forty-two countries across the world. All done with the full knowledge and blessing of both General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry Truman.

Why was it taken?

Three reasons.

First, if the recovery of such a huge mass of stolen gold had become known, thousands of people would have come forward to claim it, many of them fraudulently, and governments would have been bogged down for decades resolving ownership.

Second, the sheer volume of the gold, if dumped back on the open market, would have devalued the price. At the time most countries linked their currencies to the U.S. dollar, and the dollar was tied to gold, so an unexpected plummet in value would have caused a worldwide financial disaster.

And finally, once Hitler and Japan had been defeated, the greatest threat to world security now came from the Soviet Union. Communism had to be stopped. At all costs. And hundreds of millions of dollars in secret wealth could certainly be channeled into that purpose.

So, slowly, over time, the retrieved gold and silver were consolidated to one location under the control of what came to be known as the Black Eagle Trust. Where was it centralized? The Bank of St. George in Luxembourg. And there that wealth had sat since 1949, safe behind a wall of secrecy that had only, according to Koger, fallen in the past few months.

Fascinating stuff.

The car with the two occupants cranked to life.

Cotton’s attention shifted from the vehicle to the boutique.

His target had appeared, stepping from the front doorway and turning onto the busy sidewalk. Had the car cranking been just coincidence?

Doubtful.

He’d only seen one photo of Kelly Austin, who was employed by the Bank of St. George. Her job? He had no idea. All he’d been told was to look after her and intervene only if absolutely required. Koger had been emphatic on that last detail. Which was why he’d positioned himself across the street, among people walking here and there, oblivious to anything around them outside of their own concerns.

Kelly Austin walked away from the Saab, which swung from its parking place and crept forward in the street. No cars were behind it, but one was ahead. The one in front accelerated and headed off past Cotton. The Saab, though, never changed speed.

No question. This was a threat.

Austin kept walking his way, on the other side of the street. No head turns. No looking around. No hesitation. Just one step after another with a shopping bag dangling from one hand, a purse slung over her other shoulder.

Oblivious.

He tossed the chestnuts into the waste can beside him and stepped from the curb, zigzagging against the lanes of traffic to the pedestrian bay at the center. There, at the first break in the cars, he crossed, fifty feet ahead of Austin. People passed by, heading in the opposite direction. The Saab kept coming, moving a little faster, now nearly parallel with Austin.

The rear window descended.

A gun barrel came into view.

No time existed to get closer to Austin. Too far away. So he reached back beneath his jacket and found the Beretta. Magellan Billet issue. Which he’d been allowed to retain after retiring out early. The appearance of the weapon sent a panic through some of the pedestrians. No way to keep the gun out of view.

He told himself to focus.

In his mind the all-pervasive background noise common to cities around the world ground to a halt. Silence dominated his thoughts and his eyes assumed command of the rest of his senses. He leveled the gun and fired two shots into the open rear window. The Saab immediately accelerated, tires grabbing the pavement as the car squealed past. The danger from return fire seemed great. So he sent another bullet into the open window.

People scattered. Many hit the ground.

The Saab raced away.

He focused on the license plate and etched the letters and numbers into his eidetic memory. The car came to the next intersection, then disappeared around the corner. He quickly stuffed the gun back under his jacket and looked around.

His lungs inflated in short, quick breaths.

Kelly Austin was nowhere to be seen.

LAKE BAIKAL, SIBERIA

4:40 P.M.

KYRA LHOTA PRESSED THE THROTTLE FORWARD AND POWERED THE boat across the water. The lake’s statistics were mind boggling. Formed from an ancient rift valley thirty million years ago. The world’s oldest reservoir. Containing one-fifth of the planet’s fresh water. Three hundred rivers fed into it, but only one drained out. Seven hundred kilometers long and up to eighty wide, its deepest point dropping fifteen hundred meters down.

On maps it was a crescent-shaped arc in southern Siberia, part of Russia’s great empty quarter near the Mongolian border. Two thousand kilometers of shoreline stretched in every direction and thirty islands dotted the crystalline surface, all of it a haven for the rich and poor. The latter huddled in villages and towns that hugged the pebbly-beached shores. The former occupied the forested high ground inside expensive dachas, the real estate remote and desired, commanding the highest price per square meter in Russia.

Summer was fading, autumn always short-lived, a long winter not that far away. This was also the stormy season and soon the freezes would come, transforming the lake into one continuous block of thick blue ice solid enough for trucks, cars, and railroads to move across.

But not today.

The surface remained wet and frothy.

Kyra marveled at the overwhelming sight of water and sky, both deep and saturated, each slightly different in hue, the blue colors blanketing everything with a mystical sense of calm and order. A stiff north breeze chopped the surface, which had little effect on the thrust from the triple outboards against the fiberglass hull. She’d rented the speedboat at a marina on the southern shore, one that catered to high rollers who loved to use Lake Baikal as their personal playground. Hers was a little over ten meters long and came with enough power to send the boat streaking across the surface at nearly fifty knots.

She stood at the center console, the wheel tight in her hands, and spotted another long narrow muscle boat about half a kilometer away. She yanked back on the throttle and brought her engines to neutral, then switched them off. Their roar faded until the only sound was the distant hum of the other boat. She grabbed her backpack, found the smoke grenades, and pulled two pins. They ignited, sending a dark plume up into the late-afternoon sky. From everything she’d read about the occupant of the other boat he should react to the sign of a fire. Part of his egotistical gallantry.

But the other vessel kept going.

She added a third grenade that generated more smoke.

The other boat turned and sped her way.

Finally. As predicted.

She prepared herself, unzipping her leather jacket and allowing it to hang open, revealing her tight toned body. More of her intel pegged the target as a rich narcissistic playboy who’d managed to make billions off copper mining with dabbles into agriculture, construction, and telecommunications. In Russia that success meant this oligarch had political connections, ones that surely reached deep into the Kremlin.

Which advised her to proceed with caution and make no mistakes.

The other boat approached and slowed, pressing against its wake and easing up alongside. The lone occupant matched the photograph she’d been sent of Samvel Yerevan. Medium height. Coils of coal-black hair atop a muscular frame. An Armenian who’d relocated to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. There, he’d become enormously rich then reconnected with his Armenian homeland, buying a seat in the national parliament for his brother, eventually elevating him to prime minister. Net worth? In the five-to-eight-billion-euro range. A few international magazines labeled him the richest ethnic Armenian in the world. A title he reportedly cherished. He lived outside of Moscow in a palatial estate. Married, with five children. But that did not stop him from enjoying a variety of mistresses.

Women were his weakness.

And she’d dressed for the part.

A black neoprene bodysuit showed off her petite body’s every curve, her blond hair tied back into a cute ponytail.

“Are you having trouble?” Yerevan called out in Russian.

She raised her arms in confusion and kept to his language. “The motors started to smoke, then died. Can you take look?”

He nodded and began to ease the powerboat closer, tossing over mooring lines, which she attached to hull cleats. She made sure to position herself between him and the grenades, which were still spewing out smoke, obscuring the engines from view. Yerevan was an avowed thrill seeker. He owned fast boats, cars, and planes, along with a huge dacha not far away that overlooked the lake. No doubt he was heading there before she’d interrupted the journey. The intel she possessed had informed her that he spent a lot of time in Siberia, as some of his mines were located nearby.

She’d learned that the easiest way to entice someone was to keep things normal. Nothing odd or questionable. Just the expected, which provided her with the advantage of being one step ahead. She was good at her job, which was why her services commanded such a high price. The client that had contracted for these possessed some of the deepest pockets imaginable, so she’d seized the opportunity and altered her fee from a flat rate to a commission.

And not in dollars or euros.

Bitcoin would be her payment.

One percent of the amount she recovered.

And if the intel was right, that would mean around seventeen million euros for this day’s work. There’d been some pushback on her terms, which she’d expected, but she reminded the client that the victim possessed connections not only to the Kremlin but also to the Russian mob. There could well be retaliation, so part of her task was to make sure she left nothing that could lead anyone anywhere. And that added protection the client had been willing to pay for.

Yerevan finished securing his boat and powering down his outboards. He then hopped up on the gunwales and was about to step over onto her boat when she leaped up and joined him. She noticed his nose, broken long ago and never set properly, which added a touch of hardness to his face that some women might find attractive.

She used her index finger to signal for him to come closer.

Which he did.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him hard. He did not seem the least bit surprised or intimidated, and pressed his lips into hers, willing to accept whatever this stranger might offer.

She pivoted and swung them both around, then pushed off with her legs and propelled them over the side and into the freezing water. She was ready, having worn neoprene to insulate her pale skin.

He was not.

Her arms were already wrapped around his neck and, during the plunge over, she swung herself around so that her spine hit the water first, her hands and arms changing to a vise grip on his throat. They submerged and she kicked, keeping them under. He struggled, trying to free himself, but weightlessness evened the score and gave him no leverage.

She tightened her hold.

His hands tried to break her grip, but she clamped even harder. The water temperature was well under twenty degrees Celsius, which would quickly affect Yerevan, who wore only a bathing suit and light jacket over a bare chest. She kicked and popped her head up above the surface and grabbed another breath, not allowing Yerevan the same luxury. Back down they went and she could feel his grip on her arms lessen, his body going limp, and finally no movement at all. To be sure she kept the hold in place a few more seconds, then released and kicked to the surface.

Yerevan was not moving.

She checked for a pulse.

Nothing.

Good. One more thing.

She found the gold chain that she’d seen before the attack, the one Yerevan wore night and day, and yanked it free of his neck, her grip tight on the small steel cylinder that dangled from the loop.

She then swam away from the body, which floated facedown. Back at the two boats she climbed aboard hers. The smoke grenades had played themselves out. A quick glance around in every direction revealed no one else in sight. They were toward the lake’s center, kilometers from the nearest shore, with dusk rapidly approaching.

She’d timed her move well.

She untied Yerevan’s boat and allowed it to drift away. The assumption would be he went for a swim and drowned, the cold water erasing any evidence of strangulation. A tragic accident. For which no one was to blame.

She took a moment and gathered herself.

Only the gurgling of the water beneath the hulls disturbed the silence.

Part one done.

She powered up her engines.

Now for part two.

LUXEMBOURG CITY

GRAND DUCHY OF LUXEMBOURG

10:00 A.M.

CATHERINE GLEDHILL ENJOYED THE FIRST THURSDAY OF EACH MONTH. She was in her twenty-sixth year of employment with the Bank of St. George, one of the oldest financial institutions in the world. It had started in Italy and first received deposits and made loans nearly a hundred years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. By the 17th century it was heavily involved in the maritime trade, financing kings, queens, and emperors along with such concerns as the Dutch East India Company. Unlike most of its competitors it withstood the centuries, possessing a sense of greatness and destiny, weathering financial panics, wars, and revolutions. After Napoleon invaded Italy he suppressed independent banks, which led to its closure in 1805. But not its eradication. The bank moved west from Genoa to Luxembourg and, after Waterloo, restarted its business, becoming one of many private financial institutions the duchy harbored.

There were no shareholders or regulators. A special Luxembourg law allowed the bank to freely communicate internationally, like an embassy, and it was exempt from local taxation. The institution was capitalized, in perpetuity, with private equity. Its customers were few and special, all by invitation only. Some individuals. Most corporations and institutional investors. A smattering of governments. Royalty. Even other banks. Nothing retail, though, like checking or savings accounts. Everything was done at the wholesale level, providing services such as asset management, the buying and selling of foreign exchanges or precious metals, and selective loans and credit extensions, most to finance ultra-high-risk projects, which all accrued an above-market return on investment. Its business model was a delicate balance of risk and reward for clients who could afford to play, and pay, for those high-stakes games. They had one long-standing customer, though, which they’d spent the past seventy-five years quietly satisfying.

The Central Intelligence Agency.

But all that was about to end.

“Are we prepared to begin?” she asked the six others, each settled comfortably in a black leather chair around the long oval of a glass-topped conference table.

They each bore the title of consul. One for every continent, with the South American desk also handling Antarctica but, as of yet, no investment opportunities had materialized there. Each was highly successful with varying degrees of international finance experience. Two counts, one French, the other Spanish, heavy with inherited fortunes. Three others were former heads of competing financial institutions who retired early to take the positions. Another the retired creator of a European hedge fund known for high risk and equally high returns. She was the seventh member, the first consul, chosen by the others, not representing any particular territory but instead acting as board chairman and chief operating officer. They all resided in Luxembourg, a requirement for membership, but most retained dual citizenship.

Nothing about the bank’s operations was ever publicly discussed. It worked in total secrecy behind closed doors. She was the third generation of her family to serve. Her grandfather had been first consul too. But her father made it only to North American chair, understandable given his propensity for alcohol, which eventually killed him.

“I call the September meeting to order.”

She sat upright in the leather chair, her graying blond hair coiled tightly in a bun to the back of her head. She wore a gray silk blouse and charcoal skirt that clung to her thin frame. Both Chanel. No jewelry, save for a small pendant. A gift from her grandfather. St. George atop a horse. Fitting.

And symbolic.

The room around her reflected the solemnity of the gathering. Mahogany paneling with the matted patina that wood acquired after decades of polishing. Thick ornate draperies. Tasteful antiques. The only touches of modernity came from the glass conference table and a monitor that constantly scanned for electronic devices. She’d always liked the feeling of accomplishment the room oozed, the walls decorated with framed photographs. No captions or titles. Only successes that they all knew. The current batch included an offshore North Sea oil platform. A natural gas facility in Ghana. Italian textile mills. A British motion picture studio. And a German automobile plant. Three times a year the photographs were changed to display the most current of their investments.

They moved through the eight-point agenda, dealing with various scenarios from around the globe, some showing promise, a few not so much. Rarely did the bank become entangled in a failure, given its rigorous underwriting requirements. Sure, they took risks. But never foolishly. The main check and balance on recklessness was the fact that the seven around the table were compensated solely on the bank’s overall performance. So any losses would, quite literally, come out of their own pockets. It took a little less than an hour to deal with the agenda. The monthly meetings never lasted long. She closed the leather portfolio in front of her, the Cross of St. George embossed into its cover, foiled in red.

“I now need to update everyone on what’s currently happening,” she said. “Everything internally is secure.”

And it was.

The bank controlled, at last count, 4,556,298.67523984 bitcoin, procured over the past decade by a variety of means. Some legal, most not so much. Unknown to the world the bank was by far the largest possessor of bitcoin on the planet, now owning about twenty-three percent of the entire total. Those coins existed anonymously within the cyberworld inside 4,312 separate electronic wallets, each protected by a twenty-four-digit access code.

A private key.

The keys were encrypted and changed every few days on a random schedule to ensure the highest level of security. No paper record of the 4,312 keys existed. All of them dwelled inside a special server, not connected to the internet, that stored them behind a complex computer code designed to thwart any intrusion. Hence the label air gap. Only five people could access the server. She was one of those. Three more were currently inside the bank, at work. The last was Kelly Austin. But she had left yesterday for a previously scheduled holiday in Switzerland.

“And Samvel Yerevan?” one of them asked.

“That is being handled, too. As we speak.”

Another task that also involved private keys.

At its heart bitcoin was nothing more than ones and zeros amid a computer program that generated mathematical challenges, requiring some of the fastest and most powerful computers in the world to solve. But if solved by people who cleverly called themselves miners, that same computer program sent a reward in the form of bitcoin. At present, that success was achieved, and 3.125 bitcoin were issued, every ten minutes. Four hundred and fifty a day. Was the whole thing strange? Odd? Not really. Little different from the other miners who once scoured the earth, or panned a stream, in search of gold. Both actions generated wealth. One traditionally, the other through something new and different.

But nonetheless valuable.

Gold was heavy, bulky, and difficult to transport. Bitcoin dwelled in the cyberworld, easily stored and capable of moving around the globe at the speed of light. At present, twenty million or so coins existed within over three hundred million online wallets, each accessible only through that owner’s unique twenty-four-digit alphanumeric private key. Have the private key, and you have that person’s bitcoin. The current value of the bank’s holdings? A little under 220,000,000,000 euros, all safe and secure.

But Samvel Yerevan’s bitcoin?

For him, those were in dire jeopardy.

Over the years the bank had acquired bitcoin through covert mining, front-running purchases, and trading. But stealing had, of late, become the fastest and easiest way. It was actually quite easy, provided the person doing the stealing was bold, competent, and knowledgeable. Which perfectly described Kyra Lhota.

“We should be able to transfer Yerevan’s wallets to us by the end of the day,” she told the other consuls.

Nods signaled all was good.

And she agreed.

On to other matters.

“The event in Morocco will happen, as planned,” she told them. “Everything is being prepared. So we all fly there tomorrow. I look forward to seeing each of you there. I’m also anticipating some good news later this evening from Mexico, and will alert you once that happens.”

“And the CIA?” one of the consuls asked.

That was the wild card in all that was about to happen.

“Surely they know that our relationship is at an end. But I have a plan to make that point absolutely clear.”

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND

10:40 A.M.

CASSIOPEIA VITT WALKED DOWN THE CORRIDOR. THE WALLS AROUND her were stainless steel and shiny to the consistency of a mirror, the floor a polished gray terrazzo. Every ten meters windows of double-thick glass provided a view into dimly lit refrigerated rooms. The underground facility had first been built in the 1970s with stone walls a meter thick, surrounded by heavy support pillars to protect against earthquakes. It had served as a repository for Swiss banks, the perfect place to safely store large amounts of gold bullion. But that business ended years back. Now the whole thing had been converted into something unique, one of only a handful of such places in the world.

A wine vault.

Dedicated to aficionados worldwide who wanted a safe and secure place to store their precious bottles. Her research, done before coming, told her that, at present, there were forty-one thousand bottles, with room for fifty thousand more. Wealthy collectors, bankers, diplomats, and corporate executives made up the bulk of the clientele. Some owned as many as two thousand bottles. The fee? A mere quarter of a Swiss franc per bottle, per month. Quite a bargain considering the underground space came with zero temperature variations, controlled lighting, little to no vibration, and a constant humidity.

She kept walking.

She’d never been much of a wine fanatic, despite living in southern France among world-famous vineyards. True, she enjoyed a glass now and then, but never would she sink tens of thousands of euros into something to drink.

Not her idea of an investment.

But to be honest, business was not her forte.

Her parents had left her sole ownership of one of Europe’s largest corporations. Terra. Her Spanish grandfather started the business in the 1920s, when he began to import coal, minerals, precious metals, gems, and gold from all over the world. Her father grew the company even more and today that output was used in everything from high-end electronics to parts for planes and missiles. Demand never seemed to cease. He also hired the right people to run things, a practice she’d continued after his death. Which allowed her time to focus on her rebuilding project, which was progressing. The idea was to erect a French castle, from the ground up, using only 13th-century materials, tools, and techniques. Daunting, for sure, especially for a passion project, but she was about a quarter of the way complete, though a few setbacks of late had definitely cost time and money.

She’d been working at the construction site three days ago when the call came from Cotton. He’d been asked to help out an old acquaintance, Derrick Koger, with something in Basel, Switzerland. Simultaneously a repository in Geneva needed to be visited. Time was of the essence. Why? That had not been explained. Which was not unusual when favors like these were requested. Little information seemed the norm. But when Cotton asked if she was in or out her decision was never in doubt.

If you’re in, I’m in.

Truth be told, she’d do pretty much whatever he asked.

The intel she’d been provided indicated that the wine was actually a front for another vault, one left over from the facility’s former days, one that should contain a staggering amount of bullion. Part of Yamashita’s gold, unearthed in the Philippines after World War II and secretly brought to Europe, eventually consolidated and managed in what came to be known as the Black Eagle Trust. The ownership of the wine vault itself was connected through a series of shell companies to the Bank of St. George in Luxembourg