BANK CAPER NUMBERED ACCOUNT By Christopher Reich Delacorte 483pp $24.95 These are tough times for Swiss bankers. Their ranks are being thinned by mergers and restructurings. Their august institutions are under fire for their handling of Nazi gold and Jewish assets. And prosecutors in the U.S. and elsewhere are pushing them to spill the beans on corrupt politicians, tax cheats, and money-launderers shielded by the banks' vows of financial secrecy. If you think there's a thriller to be found in these themes, you're right. Crooked Swiss bankers, of course, have long been fodder for potboilers by Paul Erdman, a former banking executive who spent time in the Basel lockup himself during a commodities-trading probe. Now, Erdman has some spirited competition from Christopher Reich, another former Swiss banker with a penchant for telling tales out of school. Numbered Account is a fast-paced story of the adventures of Nicholas Alexander Neumann, a Swiss banker's son and an ex-U.S. Marine with a grisly past as a CIA-sanctioned hit man. Ditching a fast-track Wall Street career at Morgan Stanley, he returns to Zurich to work for his father's bank and to try to ferret out the cause of his dad's mysterious death years before. Neumann eventually finds the answer, but not before he meets a slew of slimy personalities, including a Kazakh general peddling a purloined Russian nuclear device, a crazed Middle Eastern drug merchant and warlord, a squad of crooked bankers who launder his illicit billions, and a wily corporate raider bent on taking over their bank and turning it into a high-powered trading machine. The book is hardly as polished as a John Le Carre novel, which it somewhat resembles in its dark, brooding mood. For one thing, its characters tend toward the wooden--hero Neumann has all the depth of RoboCop, and Mideast villain Ali Mevlevi is an implausible collage of every cinematic terrorist cliche you can imagine. Still, Numbered Account is hard to put down. Reich, a former Union Bank of Switzerland private banker and mergers-and-acquisitions maven, knows the workings of the industry and its capital inside out--and it shows. Reich's fictitious United Swiss Bank is in many ways the spitting image of his former employer. (That's even more true now that UBS and Swiss Bank Corp. are merging to become United Bank of Switzerland.) His raider, Klaus Konig, is a thinly disguised portrait of Martin Ebner, the hard-driving Zurich fund manager whose incessant campaign for improved shareholder value helped chase UBS into the arms of SBC in December. And Reich nicely captures the look and feel of Zurich, from the posh jewelers and imposing banks along the Bahnhofstrasse to its twisting 15th century alleyways. Numbered Account comes to a standard bloody end, with the bad guys getting their due and Neumann limping off in triumph. But one can't help feeling that there are more tales of Swiss high crimes and lowlife to be told. With all the embarrassing news about the Swiss these days, it shouldn't be too hard to dream up a sequel. BY WILLIAM GLASGALL RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ``Numbered Account'' Return to top of story

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