The Devil's Banker (16 page)

“I will contact you in forty-eight hours,” said the caller. “If you do not hear from me, presume I’ve been taken. I am not a brave man. I will talk. I do not know your true name, but you may wish to take precautions.”

“Good luck,” said Gabriel, hanging up.

The professor was on his way.

It was five o’clock. Gabriel had one last item to take care of. He sat at his desk, a commander of one. His eyes fell to his notepad. The name “Gregorio” was circled crazily, reflecting his own frustration. He picked up the phone and dialed the ten-digit number. A cheerful, Spanish-speaking woman answered. “Inteltech,
buenos días.
”

“
Buenos días,
Gloria,” said Gabriel, his own Spanish very good, but not fluent. “I would like to speak to Señor Gregorio, if you would be so kind.”

“Señor Gregorio is not in—”

“Gloria,” Gabriel cut in, steel in his voice. “Pass me to Señor Gregorio. Immediately.”

“Sí, Jefe.”

The faint hum of Latin Muzak tickled his ear and he wondered why no one thought of broadcasting something uplifting instead of this insipid fare. A minute passed, and to his horror he discovered he was humming the tune. Disgusted, he bit his lip. It was insidious. The rot was everywhere. Even in a backwater like Ciudad del Este.

“Gregorio speaking.”

Marc Gabriel hunched forward and spoke. “Ah, I’m happy to have caught you, Pedro. There’s been a small misunderstanding.”

“Hello, Marc. A misunderstanding? What in heaven’s name are you talking about?”

“I am talking about the sum of twelve million dollars. The sum that you had promised to wire to our partner’s account last week. I’m certain it’s an oversight.”

With annual revenues of nearly seventy million dollars, Inteltech was a leader in the sales and distribution of over-the-counter software to the rapidly growing markets of Southeast Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe. Last year, the company had shipped more than one million copies of Microsoft Office, Lotus Development, and Corel WordPerfect. It was a lovely business. Gross margins of eighty percent. No marketing costs. No advertising expenses. After the cost of goods sold, the largest below-the-line item constituted “official gratuities,” which Gabriel knew better as bribes to government officials. Every last copy Inteltech sold was a pirated, or “bootleg,” edition reproduced with the company’s proprietary counterfeiting technology. Richemond’s ninety percent stake in the company accounted for one of the holdings’ largest investments.

“An oversight on the bank’s behalf,” said Gregorio. “I can tell you I was on the phone screaming bloody murder. It’s terrible here. You have no idea. They have a completely different conception of time.”

“I can imagine,” said Gabriel agreeably, as he toyed with his letter opener. It was Gregorio who was the problem, however. Gregorio, who had an excuse for every occasion. Gregorio, who’d honed his lying skills as an executive at BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the Pakistani financial institution whose spectacular flameout in the early nineties had earned it the moniker the “Bank of Crooks and Criminals Indicted.”

Gabriel continued. “Be that as it may, your primary responsibility is to see that our funds are transferred as directed.”

“Apologies,
Jefe.
I will call the bank immediately and see that it is carried out as soon as possible.”

“Not as soon as possible,” said Gabriel, pressing the point of the opener into his leg. “Now. This very instant. We no longer have use for this enterprise. Our energies are required at home. Your travel documents are in order?”

Again, Gregorio said yes.

“Very good. Go in peace.”

As Gabriel hung up, he could not ignore his lingering suspicions. “Señor Gregorio” could not be trusted. He’d been too long in the jungle, too long away from his people. The rot had consumed him.

Gabriel stood, adjusting his cuffs, tightening the knot of his tie, counting the days until he could be rid of the constricting clothing. The twelve million dollars was necessary, a crucial component to the lie. It must come from South America. It took him only a few moments to decide.

The professor was due in forty-eight hours.

There was time.

Before going home, he booked a flight for that evening to Buenos Aires with onward connections to Foz do Iguaçú, returning the next day, then reserved a motorbike, something nimble to negotiate the knotted traffic.

As he walked along the Rue Kleber, passing from the shade of one elm to the next, he carried the briefcase casually, letting it bang against his leg. A stiff wind had come up, and women were fighting to keep their dresses down and their hair in place. He checked the sky. Dark clouds were on the march from the north. Almost unconsciously, he checked over his shoulder. He saw nothing. It was Sayeed who was bothering him. Had he talked before dying? When had his death actually taken place? Facts were still sketchy. Gabriel had too few people on the ground, and news reports were unreliable.

He whistled a tune to distract himself. It took him a moment to recognize it as the same unpleasant ditty he’d heard while on hold to Gregorio. He stopped. Fishing in his jacket, he found his sunglasses and put them on. Hidden behind the mirrored lenses, no one could see the worry in his eyes.

Chapter 17

To be alone was to stand out.

To be alone was to be vulnerable.

To be alone was to be a target.

He had left Athens an hour ago. The bustling, chaotic city lay behind him like the memory of a warm bed. The coast highway had narrowed to two lanes. He followed its undulant, graceful curves halfway up a steep mountainside. Whitewashed villages crouched among copses of pine and thistle to his left. The endless expanse of the Aegean spread to his right. The water was coursing with activity, ferries, tugs, and fishing boats scratching white trails across the azure surface. The bigger vessels, the cruise liners packed with sun-starved tourists, the supertankers that belonged to the scions of Onassis and Niarchos, the mile-long cargo ships loaded with the East’s bounty of cars, televisions, stereos, and computers, had docked at Piraeus. He was patrolling the old Greece, the territory of the partisans, the hills of Pan and Apollo, and the invasion route of the Huns.

For the moment, he saw no other cars on the highway. His rearview yawned empty. The road ahead beckoned, an untrammeled pathway to a glorious future. At the wheel of his sparkling gold BMW 750iL, he was just another transnational tourist trawling Europe’s unmatched highways. He drove the speed limit—no slower, no faster—though the muscular automobile begged to be given its reins, like a racehorse on an early morning run.

By now, the efforts to track him would have gathered a critical mass. He was sure they’d worked up a good story, something urgent, but hardly an emergency. Something along the lines of a Palestinian spy who’d escaped with some marginally important data about troop strength on the West Bank. They’d confine their inquiries to the local level. They liked to work quietly and would not wish to attract undue attention. If they contacted the state police, if the whole affair went federal, it would be only a matter of hours until the Americans started asking questions.

America:
the world’s policeman.

Mordecai Kahn allowed himself a rare smile, a raspy, mean-spirited laugh.

There was no way the Americans could be allowed to know. Not about this.

The Unit would be in charge. They always got the messy stuff: the operations that were either too politically sensitive or too difficult to execute for anybody else. Their official name was Unit 269 of the Sayeret Matkal, or the general reconnaissance staff. They’d made their name at Entebbe and in Beirut. Their history was colored with the blood of their adversaries, rarely their own.

By now, they’d questioned his wife, searched his offices at school and the lab, grilled his coworkers, his secretaries, his teaching assistants. They’d braced the base security officer, Colonel Ephraim Bar-Gera, with a view toward how a theft of this magnitude could occur. There’d be no general’s stars for Ephraim. They’d checked and double-checked their sensors. They’d changed the codes. They’d convinced themselves it would never happen again.

But Kahn was by nature a cautious man, if not made paranoid by his work. He had no intention of being caught, or in fact, ever heard from again. He had taken care to modify his appearance. His skin was darker by three shades. His hair was dyed an inoffensive brown and his beard shaved off altogether. He wore a businessman’s natty suit and had even remembered to snip the stitching holding his jacket pockets closed. He was nothing if not detail-oriented. He liked the horn-rimmed glasses best: Alain Mikli of Paris, slim, stylish, sophisticated. Either they took ten years off his age or they made him look like a queer clerk, he wasn’t sure which. He was only sure that he looked nothing like Dr. Mordecai Kahn, of late distinguished professor of Physics at David Ben-Gurion University, director of Quantum Research at Ha’aretz National Laboratories, and consultant to certain unnamed divisions in the Israeli Defense Force, too secret to mention, if, in fact, they even existed. The camouflage was complete down to the lifts in his Bruno Magli loafers.

While part of his mind occupied itself with the chore of driving, another spent its time constructing his pursuer’s investigation. His altered appearance would only go so far to shield him. The men seeking him out were determined and crafty. He did not know all their secrets.

He was certain that by now they had found the abandoned skiff and tracked his presence aboard the ferry to Cyprus. They would have had a harder time figuring which boat he’d taken from Larnaca, but through persistence, and maybe a break here and there, they would have learned that he’d boarded the tramp steamer
Eleni
bound for Athens. The locus of possible destinations multiplied at each point. And from Athens where? By train to Berlin? Budapest? By bus to Sofia? Another ferry to Crete or Italy? At each spot, the possibilities multiplied, the matrices grew more complex.

They knew only that with the package he could not fly.

The infinite array of his choices comforted him. If he kept to plan, if he followed the groundwork he had meticulously laid these last six months, he would be invisible. They would not catch him. The numbers did not permit it. Europe was too large a place, and the Unit too poorly staffed.

Yet, even as he drove, he could not rid his mind of the suspicion that somewhere or someplace during his rigorous preparation, he’d slipped up. He’d left a clue. It was a fear that kept him checking the rearview mirror when he should be looking ahead, the fear that had kept him awake all the night on the rough transit to Athens, the fear that even now, traveling at 100 kilometers an hour on a sunny summer day, laid a track of goose bumps along his arms.

He would be safe once he reached Vienna. It was a twenty-hour drive through the underbelly of Europe—Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia. Across isolated roads and deserted countryside.

Until then he was alone.

He was vulnerable.

He was a target.

Chapter 18

It had been years since Adam Chapel had sat in one of the plush conference rooms where bankers and accountants met their moneyed customers, but with the rush of familiarity it provoked in him, the recognition of the de rigueur symbols of wealth and privilege, it might have been a day. Velvet drapes framed the windows; the lace inner curtains remained drawn, allowing daylight to enter, while rendering the heart-stopping view over the city a blur. A subdued, but nonetheless magnificent, Persian rug covered a shopworn carpet. Prints of gentlemen riding to hounds decorated the walls. The only furniture was an antique mahogany conference table with clawed feet and the four Louis XV chairs surrounding it. Looking around, he remembered the pride he’d felt meeting with his clients. It was a child’s excitement of dining at the grown-ups’ table, the worker’s pride at gaining admittance into an elite club.

The door opened and a female executive entered, carrying a single accordion file. Petite, tight-lipped, wan brown hair pulled into a severe bun, she marched to Adam and Sarah, offering each a single, deliberate shake of the hand. “Good day. My name is Marie-Josée Puidoux. I am the bank’s compliance officer. I have with me all the bank’s records for the account in question. Naturally, we at BLP deplore terrorism and violence in all forms. We had no idea that Mr. Roux, as he called himself, was anything but a customer in good standing.”

The bank had expressed no qualms about turning over the private banking records of one of its clients without the proper court documents. The man was dead. He was a terrorist. Most important, in return for the bank’s immediate and unconstrained cooperation, the French government had promised absolute silence about their dealings with the man.

“Naturally,” said Chapel. “We’re appreciative of your assistance. I’m sure it won’t take long.”

Madame Puidoux set the file on the table. “If there’s anything else?”

“One thing,” he said. “We recently came into possession of Mr. Roux’s driver’s license number. Would it be possible to run a search of your bank accounts to see if any list that, or Roux’s address or phone number, on the opening documents?”

“Of course,” the bank executive answered. “If you’ll provide me with the number, I’ll see that it is taken care of right away.”

With a curt smile, she withdrew from the room.

Chapel began to stretch his arm across the table, then thinking better of it, sank back into his chair. “Sarah, could you?”

Grasping the file, she untied the clasp, and removed a sheaf of papers the width of her thumb from inside. “Not a lot for two years,” she commented, passing the papers to her right.

“We don’t need a lot. We only need a mistake.”

The statements were in reverse chronological order, the most recent ones on top. Chapel threw his gaze around the room, drawing breath like a sprinter settling in the blocks. He had the same anxiety, too. The butterflies in his stomach. The quivering tension in his legs. This was the beginning. How they proceeded, the entire course of the investigation, would be determined by what they found in Taleel’s account.