The Merchant of Secrets Read Online Free

the
distance. The view from the train evoked my memory of the pictures of mountains
on the wrapping of Swiss chocolate bars for sale at our small town bakery back
home. The train rolled along for hours chugging along rhythmically until it
eventually stopped at the border town of Lugano , a
small paradise next to the Italian border   where my new school was located and where I would be spending the next two years of
my life.  As the train gradually slowed to a halt, a nice businessman   many years my senior pointed to two Swiss men on the
train and informed me  that they were anti-American and were making jokes
about Americans all the way from Zurich. He tenderly advised me to stay clear
of them at the train station and not to trust them if they tried to give me
directions. I thanked him and rushed out of the train, astonished to find
people who disliked me, just for being an American.  
     
    The next morning,  I came across an apartment walled
in glass on one side, with a killer view of the mountains in the distance and
the lake down below, and decided right on the spot that I had found my new
home. I jumped at the chance to rent it with an Iranian girl  
I’d   befriended at my new school.  Our limited transportation
came in the form of   rented Italian scooters,
 upon which we flew around the hillsides at the best speed a scooter can
manage- flying isn’t a mere turn of phrase, we actually were airborne on more
than one occasion-  zipping  through the narrow streets  that
meandered through the neighborhoods surrounding Lake Lugano ,
past fountains of bubbling water, and  pots of bright flowers bursting
from their confinement. Stone and stucco villas lined the narrow roads, with
ornate courtyards gently protected behind sculpted iron gates. The landscape
was so beautiful that made people dream.
     
    As darkness fell, the romantics gathered at a clustering
of bistros in the center of the town on the edge of lake Lugano , echoing laughter and light conversation in
symphonic measures, through the narrow streets. Couples flirted back and forth
the way Italians do; elevating the pursuit of love to an art form in a theatre
seemingly made just for them, with silent moonlit waters and mountains as a
backdrop.  Random performers would play a guitar and sing, friends would laugh and tease each other in a communal reverie lasting well
past midnight. The region had been a vacation area for wealthy Germans long
before the rest of the world descended, and it existed for pleasure not work.
It was impossible  to be unhappy.
     
     
    The rich history of the area was marred with scandal
during WWII when the Italian dictator, Mussolini, was rumored to have had
suitcases full of cash brought by boat from northern Italy to be secretly deposited
in numbered Swiss banks accounts just over the Italian-Swiss border. The lore
of the missing fortunes of Italy, still buried in a Swiss vault was still being
told in the cafes decades later. 
     
    After graduation I returned to the U.S.A., setting out to
work as the Langley representative for a major political party and followed
that with a position at a company within the intelligence community. My
colleagues and I were assigned to a station in Senegal for 2 years to monitor
the rising tensions between the north and the south because the country was
politically divided between the comparably richer south which provides timber
revenues to the country, and the arid, comparatively poorer north. The
divisions between north and south threatened to erupt in civil war. As one of
America’s best allies in the Muslim world it would have been against our
national interest to let our ally fall apart.
     
    In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001 the
first goal was to shut down the flow of money going to Al-Qaeda in order to
prevent their organization from having the capacity to finance another large
scale attack against the U.S..  Acts of
terrorism, as a result of that effort, were