The Devil's Banker (3 page)

The seal of the CIA highlighted against a navy blue background lit up a third screen, currently unused.

At seven
A.M.,
the Counterterrorism Command Center was fully staffed and humming. Three rows of analysts occupied the gallery of the auditorium-sized command room. All enjoyed brand-new workstations, the latest flat-panel displays, and state-of-the-art ergonomic chairs that cost twelve hundred dollars a pop. It had been a long time since the Company had enjoyed such generous funding, but with the war on terrorism running at full bore, the spigots were wide open. To his frequent visitors from Capitol Hill, Glendenning liked to joke that his op center looked like a movie set—the way Hollywood imagined the espionage community operated. Lately, though, his audience had been less enthralled. Briefings that had once been little more than secret check-writing ceremonies had lately taken an adversarial turn. Where were the results Glendenning had promised? the more daring senators demanded. A few hundred million dollars in confiscated accounts was fine and dandy, but what about the terrorists behind it? Warm bodies, not frozen assets, were the order of the day.

They’d get their terrorists, Glendenning promised silently. A little patience would be nice.

Suppressing the grunt that came with the pain of standing, he pushed himself to his feet, then took hold of his twin bamboo canes and shuffled across the back of the op center to the glassed-in enclosure that served as his office. Owen Glendenning was sixty-one years old, thin and balding. People remarked on his resemblance to Franklin Roosevelt. They said he owned the same patrician bearing, the great politician’s indomitable smile and easy charm. He knew they were lying, that his looks made people nervous. As a young SEAL lieutenant in the Vietnam War, he had been gravely wounded leading a nighttime incursion behind enemy lines to capture a suspected VC cadre. The mortar rounds that had mangled his legs had also disfigured his face. His right cheek and jaw were concave, as if someone had hit him very hard with a spading tool. The mission, however, had been a success, and for his part in it, Glendenning had been awarded the Medal of Honor. He might have looked like FDR once, but now the only things he had in common with the great man were a steely self-reliance, a hatred of sympathy, and a refusal to be patronized.

Picking up a phone, he dialed the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center (FTAT) two floors below. “Get me Halsey.”

Strictly speaking, FTAT was a Treasury operation. Treasury funded it. Treasury supervised it. But when the scope of the investigation into worldwide terrorist financing had become clear, all involved had decided to move FTAT’s operations to Langley.

There had been a time not too far back when the very idea of the CIA contacting Treasury to share information had been practically a jailable offense. There was law enforcement and there was intelligence, and never the twain shall meet. But the events of September 11, 2001, had changed all that. With the passage of the Patriot Act, communication between the United States’s varied and multiple law enforcement and intelligence agencies not only was permitted, it was encouraged. The old concept of “stovepiping,” or keeping information inside the particular agency, or, as was the case with the FBI, inside the individual department that had discovered it, was thrown out the door. Concerns about infractions of civil liberties and personal privacy were quickly dismissed. If you weren’t stepping on someone’s rights, you weren’t doing your job, Glendenning liked to say. The threat beyond the country’s borders took preeminence and was far greater than anyone could be told.

“This is Halsey,” answered a deep, gravelly voice.

“Don’t you have a home either?”

Allan Halsey, chief of the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center, gave a shallow laugh. “Not according to my wife.”

“We nabbed the call,” said Glendenning. “The money’s being moved as we speak. Come on up and we’ll run it from here.”

“How much?”

“We’re guessing five hundred grand or five million. Either way, it’s the real deal.”

“I don’t like it,” said Halsey. “Risky to move so much.”

“I couldn’t agree more. Something’s about to pop. Who’s running your team in Paris?

“Adam Chapel.”

“Don’t know him. A new guy?”

“Treasury pulled him in after the WTC.”

“Military?”

“God no,” said Halsey. “A quant jock all the way. Kid was on the fast track at Price Waterhouse. Partner at twenty-nine. National audit manager.”

“Sounds like a real killer,” said Glendenning. “Ought to have ’em quaking in their boots.”

“Come on now, Glen. He’s the new kind of soldier. You know, brains instead of brawn. Different war we’re fighting this time.”

“That’s what they tell me. In the end, though, you still have to shoot the bad guys.”

“Don’t worry about Chapel,” said Halsey, his voice quieter, more confident, as if vouchsafing a secret. “He can hold his own.”

Midmorning traffic was light as the canary yellow postal van accelerated across the Place de la Concorde. Jaw clenched, Adam Chapel leaned close to the windshield, willing the van faster.
Finally,
an anxious voice pleaded inside his head.
Finally.

The tires hit a stretch of cobblestones and Chapel jostled inside the tight cabin. Looking out the driver’s window, he was afforded a clear view up the Champs-Elysées. Rows of oaks lined the boulevard, giving way to wide sidewalks and an array of stores and restaurants. The Arc de Triomphe rose at its head. The sun broke from the clouds, and the monument to France’s fallen warriors glimmered like an ivory tower.

“How much faster can you go?” Chapel asked the hulking black man behind the steering wheel.

“This is it, my friend,” said Detective Sergeant Santos Babtiste of the French Sûreté. “Any quicker and we’ll blow the tires off. Be happy—the average speed around town these days is ten kilometers per hour. You’re better off taking the Métro, even if you are the police.”
Zee poleece.
Gingerly, he kissed two fingers of his right hand and touched them to the photographs of his children glued to the dashboard.
“Dieu nous benisse. Aujourd’hui, nous avons de la chance.”

“We’ll see about that,” answered Chapel, shifting in his seat, eyes to the fore. Luck scared him. It was work that yielded results.

Chapel was not as big as Babtiste, but like the French detective, he looked cooped up and uncomfortable in the cramped cabin. There was something about the roll of his shoulders, the striated muscles around the neck that suggested a caged restlessness, a quivering, explosive ambition. His black hair was curly and cut close to the scalp; his skin pale, an army of stubble visible beneath the hollow planes of his cheeks. He wore what he always wore, a pressed white Polo button-down, Levi’s, and a pair of handmade loafers from John Lobb of Jermyn Street. Perched on the edge of his seat, he had the haunted, lonely look of a skipper who’d been at sea too long, his whiskey brown eyes scanning the horizon, willing land into sight.

A stone’s throw away, the Obelisk passed in a blur. He was thinking the sights should stir him more. Inspire him, even. But he was too nervous to award them more than a passing glance. It was his first command as team leader and he was determined not to screw up. The sights could wait. He was busy mapping out the job at hand, rehearsing his responsibilities, and calculating the odds of nabbing his first honest-to-god terrorist.

Two weeks earlier, a pair of Treasury agents he’d trained with at Quantico had gotten the call in Lagos, Nigeria. A sale of diamonds in the old town. Cash only. High six figures. Seller was thought to be a player. It was a “wait and watch” job, just like today. Their bodies were discovered five hours after they’d failed to report back. Both had been shot in the head at close range. Someone else had been waiting and watching.

That was the first time Adam Chapel had heard the name “Hijira” mentioned.

Today, it was his turn. Somewhere between five hundred thousand and five million dollars was being transferred to Paris.
Now. At this minute.
He wondered if the transfer belonged to the same network that had killed the men in Lagos.

The jump team had hit Paris three days earlier. Like the other teams that had landed in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Rome, Milan, Madrid, and London, it had a mandate to contact the local “cop shop,” target probable points of currency entry, and if possible, set up visual and electronic surveillance on said locations. Paris’s large Arab population—more than fifty thousand French Algerians alone lived in the capital—coupled with the jump team’s limited personnel, precluded any stakeouts. It was just as well. While there were over one hundred registered money-transfer businesses, better known as
“hawalas,”
operating in the city, Royal Joailliers was not one of them.

“Con!”
roared Santos Babtiste, ramming his enormous palm into the horn, letting it ride for a while as he jerked the wheel hard to the right. An ancient Citroën Deux Chevaux flashed across the windshield and was gone. Chapel held his breath as the van braked, then lunged forward, asserting its place in the five-lane circus.

“Take it easy up there!” came a voice from the rear of the van.

“That you griping, Santini?” asked Chapel. “What’s the problem? You got a weak stomach?”

A glance over his shoulder revealed four men seated on the metal floor, knees to their chests. All guarded the same hardened expression, and they reminded him of a stick of paratroopers ready to jump into combat. Ray Gomez and Carmine Santini from Customs. Mr. Keck from the Agency. And a very small, taciturn Frenchman with a cloudy affiliation to the Sûreté named Leclerc.

Leclerc, who rubbed the slim wooden briefcase between his knees, as if he were calming a pet.

Chapel was certain he knew what was inside.

“Weak stomach?” called Santini. “You got the wrong body part, mister. It’s like getting a jackhammer up your ass back here. Someone hurry up and tell our hosts a road’s supposed to be smooth.” Frowning, he looked at Leclerc, seated next to him. “Haven’t you guys ever heard of shock absorbers? Now I know why you don’t sell any French cars in the states. No Peugeots. No Citroëns. Like getting it in the ass all day.”

Leclerc looked at him for a second, then smiled thinly and lit a cigarette. “Pussy,” he muttered through a cloud of blue smoke.

“What’d you say?” Santini demanded, then to the others: “What’d he say, the little prick?”

“Pussy,” said Keck. “You heard him.”

“Called you a pussy, Carmine,” chimed in Gomez. “How ‘bout that?”

Santini considered the remark, his back coming off the rear wall, shoulders rising like he was going to ratchet things up a notch. At six two, one-eighty, he had it over the Frenchman in height and weight. His eyes fell to the briefcase, to Leclerc’s indifferent eyes, dull as a shark’s, and he sank back. “Ah, fuck the bunch of you,” he said halfheartedly.

Leclerc lofted a perfect smoke ring across the cabin. Shaking his head, he began rubbing the wooden case again.

“How long till we’re there?” Chapel asked Babtiste.

“Two minutes. A miracle, I tell you. A sign. We’re going to get this man, you will see.”

Looking over his shoulder, Chapel asked, “What about Royal? They on our radar?”

Ray Gomez was online with TECS, the Treasury Enforcement Computer System’s database, checking for references to Royal Joailliers. “Turned up once as a possible accomplice in a money laundering case we were working against the cartels,” he said, looking up from his laptop. “No charges filed. Owner is Rafi Boubilas, Lebanese national.”

“They are dirty,” said Leclerc. He had a folksinger’s lank dark hair and the three-day stubble to go with it. “Boubilas, he runs a big coke ring in town. You know how he gets the money out? His partners in Bogotá grind up old bottles of Seven-Up, green glass, you know, then import the pieces as uncut emeralds. This man, he has many friends. He is rich. He is well connected. No one looks too closely. The invoice says five million. No problem. Boubilas, he takes all his coke cash and sends it back to his masters to pay for the phony stones.”

“Why don’t you take him down?” Chapel asked.

Leclerc made no reply. He was suddenly busy looking out the rear window, humming.

The postal van leaned hard into a left-hand turn. Buildings rose on either side of them. Shadows drenched the cabin as they advanced the length of the Rue de Castiglione. Ahead, the buildings fell away, and the road gave onto a grand square. Place Vendôme.

Another left turn. A flood of sunlight. A decreased tempo. A courtly circuit of the square. Rising like a giant roman candle in its center was the monument to the Battle of Austerlitz, smelted from the twelve hundred cannons Napoléon had captured on the field that day in Germany. Colored awnings advertised the world’s most famous luxury goods. Chanel. Repossi. Van Cleef and Arpels. And passing to their left, the blue welcome carpet of the Ritz Hotel, their destination.

Babtiste turned into an alleyway and parked the postal van outside the service entry.

Chapel threw an arm over the back of his seat, his eyes going from one member of his team to the next. He thought about telling them to keep their heads up, their eyes and ears open. What was the point? Between them they had fifty years’ experience setting up stings, going on stakeouts, taking down
narcotrafficantes
with shields out and pistols blazing. He was the new guy. They knew better than he did what to do.

A team of hotel security waited. Quietly, they guided Gomez, Santini, and Keck to the service elevator. Babtiste followed, swinging the stainless steel case loaded with eighty pounds of A/V gear as if it were a lunch box. Leclerc took the stairs with Chapel. Entering the opulent suite, he shot the American a challenging glance. “You look nervous,” he said.

“I am,” Chapel answered.

Six months, Sarah had been chasing the shadow. Six months shuttling between Kabul, Kandahar, and the Khyber Pass, chasing down leads like an errant fielder. One week she was a UNICEF relief worker, the next, a clinician from
Médecins Sans Frontières,
and the next, an administrator for the World Bank. She spent as much time building her legends as she did working her sources.