by Heidi Blake
The odd thing was that Temarii’s lawyer, Géraldine Lesieur, had been paid through a separate company called JCB Consulting, which had also creamed off a cut of Bin Hammam’s funds. There was no clue in the files as to what role this shadowy company had played, but something about those initials rang a bell deep in the recesses of Calvert’s memory. He pulled up his Google search page and tapped in the company name. Then, he let out a small yelp.
Blake spun round: ‘Christ! What is it?’
‘Sorry! But . . . Wow! This is spooky.’ Her colleague’s face was pale in the harsh light. Blake began to cross the room towards him, concerned.
‘Hey, are you okay? What have you found?’ Calvert had turned back to his computer and was peering closely at his screen. She rested her hands on the top of his chair back and leaned in to look at what had rattled him.
‘Jean Charles Brisard,’ he replied, pointing at an image of a blond, elfin-featured man with pale-blue eyes gazing coolly out of his Google search results. ‘That’s the private detective who was hired to spy on me years ago, after we did the “World Cup votes for sale” story.’
‘Huh. Looks like butter wouldn’t melt,’ said Blake. ‘What about him?’
‘No, he was nasty,’ said Calvert. ‘He came up with a whole smear campaign.’ He had pulled up an invoice on screen and was pointing to the name JCB Consulting.
‘This is his company,’ he said, seeing Blake’s eyes widen. ‘He was working for Mohamed bin Hammam all along.’
Jean Charles Brisard had first come to Calvert’s attention three years before in 2011 when he had been exposed as the private detective who ran ‘Project Airtime’, an attempt to discredit members of the Insight team following their undercover investigation into the World Cup race. The Frenchman was a private investigator of some renown: he had been given the National Order of Merit by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 for his work on the financing of terrorist networks. He now ran his JCB Consulting security and intelligence company from an office in the Swiss town of Préverenges on the shores of Lake Geneva and, in the weeks after The Sunday Times broke its undercover story, Brisard had been hired on Temarii’s behalf to try to dig up some dirt that could be used to smear the journalists and restore his reputation.
Brisard had uncovered their home addresses, family information, foreign travel records, and details of previous investigative work, including other identities they had adopted for old undercover operations. ‘He tracked down where I lived; researched my family; and tried to draw some sinister conclusion from a planning application my builder had made for an extension to my loft,’ Calvert explained indignantly to Blake. ‘And he managed to blag my hotel bill from the trip to Auckland when I met Temarii.’
Brisard was a formidable operator, but this time he had been unaccountably clumsy, and had somehow allowed his error-strewn Project Airtime report to fall into the hands of a freelance journalist who was friendly with the Insight team. The 24-page dossier which had been shown to Calvert was a strange muddle of inaccuracies and distortions. Dates, addresses and a supposed company directorship were wrong. Calvert had been accused of using a false name in official correspondence, based on a planning application which had actually been submitted and signed not by him but by the family’s builder. The report also falsely suggested that Parliament had previously accused him of withholding evidence from an official inquiry. In fact, the unfounded allegation had come from the lawyer of a disgraced peer who had been exposed by Insight for fiddling his expenses. In short, Project Airtime had been a shambles.
The Sunday Times had published a story in June 2011 revealing that Brisard had been employed to do his grubby work by Temarii and his lawyer, and pointing out all the errors in his report. Lesieur rejoined that the investigator’s efforts had demonstrated the newspaper had ‘tried to manipulate FIFA’s procedures with incomplete information’. This was based on Brisard’s pièce de résistance – a detailed analysis of a 17-page transcript of the undercover meeting with Temarii in which he counted ‘153 errors or omissions, including significant changes in the meaning of several sentences’ and cited this as evidence that the newspaper had tried to mislead FIFA. That charge had clearly struck a chord with Claudio Sulser, who ran FIFA’s ethics committee. When he formally suspended Temarii, Sulser pandered to the furious executive committee members by telling the world’s press that The Sunday Times had twisted the facts. ‘What I cannot tolerate is the fact that they changed the sentences,’ he fumed.
Blake knew this was one of Calvert’s bugbears. The newspaper used an outside agency to produce transcripts of its undercover tapes, which were always in a messy state when they came into the office. But all the quotes that appeared in the newspaper would be checked over and again so that they were 100 per cent accurate. FIFA had wanted the transcripts and tapes the day after publication, so Calvert had sent an accompanying letter explaining that ‘in cases where we have provided transcripts, they are for your guidance only as they are working transcripts. This means they may have words or phrases that are slightly wrong. The quotes used in the newspaper, however, are entirely accurate as they are checked many times over.’ In any case, FIFA had the tapes, so there was no doubt about what had been said in the meetings. But Brisard had been clutching at straws, and he was happy to use anything he could find to cast doubt on the story which had brought Temarii into disgrace.
All that had since dissolved into the soft fog of distant memory, until now. The discovery that Mohamed bin Hammam had been Brisard’s true paymaster was chilling. Calvert and Blake had almost come to feel they knew ‘Big Mo’ or ‘Bin Bung’, as they affectionately called him. They had no doubt that his activities in the lead up to the World Cup vote were nefarious, but they could see he was driven by genuine patriotism and passion for football and somehow couldn’t help but feel his heart was in the right place, even if his ethics weren’t. This strange discovery, intersecting his world unexpectedly with their own, suddenly threw a new, disturbing light on the man they had spent the past months studying. The irony of the situation was not lost on them. But Brisard had been in the business of smearing the Insight journalists for cash, rather than pursuing the truth. And if Bin Hammam had hired a man like that to spy on Calvert before, it suddenly seemed all the more likely that the same thing could happen again.
‘This is weird,’ said Blake, pulling her baggy hoody tighter and wrapping her arms around herself. ‘It’s sort of given me the creeps. Shall we get out of here?’
‘Yes, let’s call it a night,’ said Calvert.
The reporters shut down their machines, scooped up the day’s empty coffee mugs and made their way down the narrow attic stairs. They dumped the washing up by the sink in the small downstairs kitchen, swept the latest ready-meal wrappers into the brimming bin, shut off all the lights and set the alarm. Then they pulled up their hoods, crept down the back fire escape and slipped off into the dark. The leaves whispered faintly in the soft breeze behind the high garden walls on either side of the back alley as they hurried towards the car park where Blake left her battered VW Polo. As they rounded the corner into the usually deserted lot, they spotted two sparkling sports cars parked side by side in the far corner.
‘Ooh, I think that’s a Lamborghini,’ said Calvert. Abruptly, the headlights flashed on, catching the journalists momentarily in their beam. The car shot out of the bay and screeched towards the exit, cornering fast into the road and speeding off into the night.
‘Woah! What was all that?’ said Blake. ‘Get in the car, quick.’ They jogged towards the Polo and jumped in, locking the doors and pulling on their seatbelts as Blake switched on the ignition and began reversing out of the space. Calvert was peering out of the window.
‘I think there’s someone in the other car,’ he said. She looked over. Sure enough, there was a figure at the wheel, sitting still in the pitch darkness without any inner lights on. The clock on Blake’s dashboard read 3am. Was he looking their way? She hit the accelerator.
&
nbsp; Once they were out on the road heading back towards their hotel, Blake slowed to a regular speed and relaxed back into the driver’s seat. Her heart was beating fast.
‘What was that about? What was he doing just sitting there in the dark at three am? Why did that other car shoot off like that?’
‘I don’t know, is the honest answer,’ said Calvert. ‘Could have been a drug deal I guess, but a pretty high level one with cars like that.’
‘Ahh, yes. A drug deal makes sense.’ She blew out her cheeks. ‘God, I’m really jumpy. I think I need sleep.’
‘What you need is a drink,’ said Calvert. Blake chuckled.
‘How well you know me.’ Then her eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror and flared. A black car was speeding up behind them, its headlights on full beam. Blake’s mother was forever fretting that she was going to get ‘bumped off’ one of these days, if she kept writing stories antagonising rich and powerful people. When told not to be silly, she had a habit of cocking her head with a knowing look and saying things like: ‘Car crashes do happen late at night with no witnesses, you know.’ Suddenly those words were flashing through Blake’s deliriously tired mind as she watched the gleaming black Mercedes racing up at the rear. Now it was hard on her tailgate, veering from side to side.
‘What’s this guy doing, trying to run us off the road?’ Her voice had come out at a strangely squeaky pitch. Calvert glanced over and rolled his eyes.
‘Heids, you’re doing eighteen miles an hour and hugging both lanes. You’re right – you do need sleep.’
Ten minutes later, the Polo rolled into the hotel car park. The journalists stumbled sleepily through the lobby, waved at the all-night barman who had come to know them well, and headed downstairs to their rooms looking out over the gardens. Blake flipped the lights off and threw herself onto the bed fully clothed. She lay there in the dark with her eyes closed, the image of Jean Charles Brisard’s blue-eyed stare floating in her mind, beginning to sink into a half-dreaming haze of names, faces and imagined places far away.
The phone let out a shrill ring. Blake jolted upright, staring at the handset. It was 3.30am. Who was calling at this hour? She picked up tentatively.
‘Hello?’
‘Madam, this is Sam from the bar upstairs. I’ve taken the liberty of preparing you two gin martinis. You both looked like you could use a drink.’ Blake rubbed her eyes, and smiled.
‘Are they dirty?’
‘Yes madam, with olives.’
‘We’ll be right up.’ She knew Calvert would never say no to a dirty martini, whatever the hour.
The pair headed back upstairs and spent an hour sipping their deliciously briny drinks, wondering what was going to happen when their story finally broke. After all these months in hiding, there were just two weeks to go until they would have to let the genie out of the bottle and reveal the extraordinary secrets they had found in the attic. How would the world react?
Sixteen
A Fine Lesson in Machiavellian Expertise
In the last few days of 2010, Zurich was in an excited state of expectancy. Europe’s wealthiest city was preparing to surpass itself by proffering the most comfortingly expensive luxuries that a plastic expense card could buy. The champagne crates were piled high, the fridges were bursting with truffles and foie gras, and the great chefs were dreaming up irresistible epicurean feasts to entice, delight and financially deplete their customers. Every decent hotel room was already taken, every taxi was making itself available, and the red light district along Langstrasse was expecting business to be brisk. The ‘FIFA family’ was coming to town in numbers that had not been seen for many years. There would be heads of state, prime ministers, billionaires, actors, models, fixers, public relations teams, football officials, journalists, TV crews and pundits, and an abundance of current and former players. This was a towering event which the world would be watching: the ballot to host not one but two World Cups.
The Qatar 2022 bid had booked early for the momentous event. Six months before, Mohamed bin Hammam’s uncomplaining assistant Najeeb Chirakal had been ordered to find three presidential suites, six executive suites and 54 deluxe rooms for the whole fortnight before the ballot. They were to be put up in the best hotels: the Baur au Lac, the Dolder Grand and the Savoy. The bill Chirakal passed on to Hassan Al-Thawadi for the entire stay was $960,000, including $150,000 for limousines.
Bin Hammam had flown in to join them in the Baur au Lac on the Monday, three days ahead of the vote, and was accompanied by his two right-hand men, Mohammed Meshadi and Amadou Diallo. There were butterflies in his stomach. This would be his moment of crowning glory or snivelling shame. Bin Hammam had paid the cash, done the maths and prayed that it would be the former.
If previously he had been a closet supporter of his country’s bid by force of necessity, he was now well and truly out and proud. Indeed, Sheikh Mohammed, the young royal chairman of Qatar 2022, had eulogised about the pivotal role he had played in the campaign in an interview a month before. ‘When it comes to executive committee members, we don’t really get involved in what happens inside the committee, because FIFA is very strict,’ he said. ‘But outside the executive committee and within the bid itself, Mohamed bin Hammam has been a very good mentor to us. He’s been very helpful in advising us how to go about with our messaging and can have the biggest impact. He’s always been advising us and always been by our side. He’s definitely our biggest asset in the bid.’
Bin Hammam was now taking up the cudgels on behalf of Qatar like never before. Stung by a whispering campaign against his country’s bid in the wake of the collusion scandal and FIFA’s withering technical assessment, he kicked the week off by issuing an open letter on his website rallying the ‘sons, colleagues and friends of the Qatar bid’ to take no heed of the naysayers: ‘I did warn you that your noble cause to host the World Cup 2022 will face some unethical resistance . . . You should expect more of this hidden war against your bid.’
As usual, the British media were daring to rain on FIFA’s parade. The news story dominating the airwaves came from a BBC Panorama documentary by the irrepressible journalist Andrew Jennings. It was aired with impudent timing on the Monday evening before the vote and its ripples would continue to be felt throughout the week. With his unkempt white hair and Cumbria-casuals dress sense, Jennings may not have looked like FIFA’s most ferocious adversary, but the men who ran world football’s governing body loathed and feared him. They tried to ban him from their media events but he cocked a snook at them every time – once even unbuttoning his shirt during a press conference to reveal a t-shirt saying ‘FUCK FIFA’.
Jennings had a wicked sense of humour, but he also happened to be a first-class journalist who was born to stick his microphone in the faces of the rich and powerful, keeping a straight face while asking the most excruciatingly pointed questions. It was Jennings who had picked apart FIFA’s ISL scandal layer by layer and, after years of patience, his contacts had finally come good with a piece of paper which showed exactly who had taken the bungs. His programme revealed that three of the voters – Ricardo Teixeira, Nicolas Leoz and Issa Hayatou31 – had received kickbacks in the nineties from ISL and a fourth, Jack Warner, was involved in attempting to sell World Cup tickets to touts. The FIFA executive committee were incandescent.
They were still fuming when they gathered together in their boardroom at FIFA headquarters on Wednesday morning, the eve of the vote. Sepp Blatter knew how to placate them. The South African World Cup had been a tremendous success financially and as a result they were to receive a $200,000 bonus on top of their $100,000-a-year salary. But the money meant nothing to Bin Hammam and his mood darkened as two guests were ushered before the executive committee.
The first was Andre Pruis, the South African police chief, who was there to deliver his terrorism assessment on the bids. His report was, of course, damning of Qatar’s security plans and Bin Hammam sat with an implacably serious face as the police chief singled out
the Gulf state as the highest risk of all the bidders. Were any of his colleagues taking any notice? The faces around the room looked bored. He hoped they would ignore the warning.
Next up was Harold Mayne-Nicholls, the man who had been funded by FIFA to travel the world assessing the bids with his technical team to produce the definitive account of the strengths and weaknesses of the bids. He was proud of the thoroughness and independence of his work, and expected the executive committee to give his report some sober consideration before they made up their minds. But he was to leave disillusioned. The Chilean spoke for half an hour, but he felt as though he might as well have been talking to the wall when he singled out Qatar as the worst bid. The executive committee sat in silence and Mayne-Nicholls formed the impression that many of them had not even bothered to read his report.
Towards the end of his presentation, he grew tired of listening to the sound of his own voice and asked the Exco if they had any questions. The room froze, before one voice gently enquired about the hospitality Mayne-Nicholls had enjoyed on his tour of the bidding countries. ‘Did they all treat you well?’ That was the only thing the Exco wanted to know. The technical inspector packed up his files and left the room, wondering what his months of work had all been for. He was now convinced that the Exco’s decision would not be based on which country was best equipped to hold a World Cup. They clearly had other agendas.
