They took care to periodically lock a school child’s bicycle to a post along the executive’s predictable commute route. After a while, the careful security sweep along the route simply noted it as an expected, unremarkable part of the environment. Then the attackers hid the bomb in a knapsack hung on the back of the bike.
The explosively formed projectile was triggered by an infrared detection beam that counted past the lead security car, which in response to threats had been added to the detail a week earlier. The charge calculation took into account the armor placement on the hardened Mercedes sedan and successfully penetrated just below the thickest protective belt, perfectly breaching the rear passenger compartment. The blast threw the car off course, starting a fire that would eventually consume the vehicle. Not that it mattered.
The terrorists knew their target. They calculated the timing to a hair. Their patient, thorough intelligence knew all about the escort vehicles and the Mercedes’s armor. Alfred Herrhausen, then the Chief Executive of Deutsche Bank A.G., died on the scene from blast and fragmentation wounds created by a bomb exquisitely tailored just for him.
It didn’t matter whether the bomb belonged to the last active terror cell of the Red Army Faction striking against a hated symbol of capitalism or to the East German Stasi trying to delay national reunification or to some other attacker. The shockwaves that Herrhausen’s death sent not just throughout Germany, but through the banking industry in general, were severe. Banks had long known that everybody wanted what they held—but a sophisticated bomb attack using infrared trigger beams and explosively formed penetrators and backed by painstaking research was beyond their ken. Rather suddenly, the traditional answer to filling banking security leadership roles with retired cops didn’t seem like quite enough. The 1989 attack that killed Herrhausen had another victim. The old school of financial services security died that day too. Its death just took a little while longer to register.
Bankers have money and brains, and can apply both in their own self-interest when appropriately motivated. The best bankers learn to make their decisions ahead of any curve. So it was that, upon learning that the chairman of one of the largest banks had been killed despite the strongest precautions then in existence, the boards of the top investment banks considered alternatives in security. Shortly afterward, their recruiters received new orders.
Options weren’t deep, but only a few years before, the British Special Air Service, or SAS, commandos had made the professional acquaintance of some uninvited Iranian guests during a “dinner party” at the Iranian Embassy in London. Not long thereafter, the SAS led the recapture of the Falkland Islands. Soon after that, Special Operations units were getting publicity in Operations Urgent Fury, Just Cause and a little dustup called Desert Storm.
The time seemed right to do a little poaching, banker style.
They didn’t know just how well it was going to pay off.