“This is Michel Bézy. He has no direct connection with Unetat, but we believe he is Alain Peyron’s attorney and his most important business adviser. He has an extraordinary family background. His father was a prominent French businessman in Algeria who worked closely with French intelligence. The father was killed by Algerian terrorists in the 1950s, when Bézy was studying in Paris. His mother was from one of the leading families of Corsica. He was also educated in the United States, at Stanford. When he returned home, he joined French intelligence, where he spent the next fifteen years. He was a leading member of Maurice Costa’s old network. He’s the link between the old world of corruption and the new. He left the government a few years ago and began doing personal legal work for Peyron. He is the bagman, not to put too fine a point on it—the fixer. He has been very active the last few years in Asia and spends much of his time out there.”

“I went to Stanford,” I said. I wanted him to know that I shared that biographical detail with the mysterious Mr. Bézy, but he reacted defensively.

“Big deal. I went to Penn State. Can we continue?”

The next page of the briefing book displayed another photograph. It showed a younger man, in his late thirties. He was thin, sandy-haired, wearing a blue-striped shirt and a fine linen suit. He looked like an MTV version of Peyron.

“This is Jean-Luc Gaspard. He is one of Bézy’s point men. He studied computer science at Berkeley—notice a pattern here?—and then spent six years working for Apple. We think during that time he may really have been a French NOC. He quit Apple in 1989, around the time the FBI was expelling a bunch of French agents who were working in American companies.

“Now Gaspard runs a company called New Asia Development Corp., which has an office in Hong Kong and one near here, in Bethesda. It’s supposedly a venture-capital firm that funds high-tech projects in Asia, but we think—scratch that, we know—it’s an important part of Unetat’s infrastructure for paying bribes in China. We can document the link through information New Asia has submitted to banks in the United States to obtain trade financing and secure leases. Those documents show that New Asia has received tens of millions of dollars in loans from an offshore bank controlled by Peyron, called Banque des Marins.

“Gaspard’s m.o. is to invest in the businesses of prominent Chinese who the French want to befriend. Occasionally they’re real businesses; mostly they’re shell companies, and Gaspard’s ‘investments’ are really payoffs.