The Devil's Banker (36 page)

Suddenly, police were everywhere. Swarming like bees around their queen. More arriving every moment.

Brushing himself off, Gabriel rose and crossed the street with a host of his fellow Parisians, also eager to flee the crime scene. The pen was still in his hand. Carefully, he replaced it in his breast pocket. On the opposite sidewalk, he paused to take a final look. His last image was of the girl’s blond hair swimming in a pool of her own blood. He thought that they had probably killed her.

Chapter 40

Eventually all men talked.

That was the rule and that was why all members of Hijira had sworn to take their own lives before they could be captured. George, too, had known the rule, had sworn his allegiance, and Marc Gabriel had trusted his vow. Yet, within the past twenty-four hours his son had failed him twice. How long could he be counted on to resist the police’s interrogation? Hours? Days? Was he talking even now? And what about the girl? How much did she know about Hijira?

All these thoughts raced through Marc Gabriel’s mind as he unlocked the door of his office and marched to his desk. He knew he must proceed as if nothing were wrong. It was a footrace now. The finish line was in sight: Saturday night at eight-thirty when the newly crowned King of Saudi Arabia stepped into the blue room at the White House and toasted the American President as a prelude to ushering in a new era of goodwill between the two nations. He only needed to outrun the Americans.

Gabriel logged on to his computer. There were a few last things to be done. A trail to leave behind so there would be no doubt who was responsible. He tapped in the web address for the Gemeinschaft Bank of Dresden, then entered his account number and password. The twelve million dollars Gregorio had stolen from Inteltech would prove useful. It would be seen as a last-minute payoff, the investigators would say later. The irrefutable link between the bombers and the crazed Israeli physicist.

The screen blinked, and Gabriel was surprised to see that the bank was denying him access to his account. He tried again with the same result. Something was wrong. The denial was no coincidence. Calling the bank, he requested the account officer in charge of the Holy Land Charitable Trust.

“Reinhard.”

Reinhard?
Gabriel stiffened, as if readying for the lash. Jurgen Reinhard was the bank’s chairman. What trouble could have brought him to the phone? The day was shaping up to be a monumental disaster.

“Ali al-Maktoum speaking,” said Gabriel, adopting an Arabic accent. “Chief administrative officer of the Holy Land Trust. I’m calling regarding our account. We are expecting a large transfer this afternoon. Twelve million dollars, to be precise. I would like to confirm its arrival. Then I shall ask you to make a further transfer of funds on our behalf.”

“I’m afraid that is impossible,” said Reinhard.

“Excuse me?”

“I said it is impossible. The account has been frozen by the United States government, pending an investigation into your organization’s ties to a terrorist group. I have been instructed to ask you to contact the United States Treasury Department. A Mr. Adam Chapel. I have his number here.”

Gabriel’s heart caught in his throat. “That won’t be necessary,” he said, before hanging up.

Striding to the window, he looked down the block toward the spot where his son had been arrested fifteen minutes earlier. It was clear that the police had been waiting for someone to use the ATM. Gabriel required only a minute to piece together how they’d come up with the information. Taleel. The Cité Universitaire. Azema Immobilier. The Banque de Londres et Paris. He considered how he might have done things differently but was unable to come up with an answer. One had to pay rent by bank transfer or check. These days, cash was the vehicle of the poor and the dishonest, neither of which made desirable tenants. A trail was unavoidable.

But the Holy Land Charitable Trust was a different matter. Gabriel compartmentalized his operations to prevent authorities from using monetary data to link one entity to another. The Holy Land Charitable Trust operated as a legitimate enterprise. For years, Gabriel had set aside a portion of income generated by Richemond’s portfolio for urgent pleas from those in need in Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. He’d also used funds in the account to pay salaries to directors of the trust, including a hundred thousand euros a year to Abu Sayeed (under an alias) in a Pakistani bank, and a similar sum to Gabriel’s younger sister, Noor, in a Swiss numbered account. Though Noor held a legitimate position, he could hardly expect her to survive on a bureaucrat’s salary.

Gabriel was vexed. Nothing linked Taleel to the Trust. It was impossible to mentally retrace all the deposits, payments, and transfers he had made into and out of its account. Yet, somehow they had found it. Then it came to him . . .
Rafi Boubilas.
A year earlier, Gabriel had asked him to wire the proceeds of a sale of two thousand carats of raw diamonds to the Trust’s account. Despite assurances to the contrary, the owner of Royal Joailliers had talked.

And if the Americans had the Holy Land Trust’s name, they had more. Inteltech. The Deutsche International Bank. Bank Montparnasse. Bank Menz. The web was endless.

The Americans.

Chapel.

Gabriel remained still a moment longer. His body grew rigid; his heart pounding inside his chest. Then he could stand it no more. Grabbing his chair, he spun in a wild circle and hurled it against the wall. This was too much. Taleel, Gregorio, George, and finally, the account in Dresden. His carefully constructed world was tumbling down on top of him. Twenty years of painstaking and meticulous effort. He wanted to calm himself, but calm was out of reach. He had only black emotions to console him. Hate, impatience, shame, and the will to revenge.

Yet, what had changed? he demanded. What really had changed?

The bulk of his money was situated neatly, ready to reap profits from the Dow’s imminent plunge. Men stood ready to act, awaiting only his signal and the arrival of the large sums he had promised to them in their bank accounts. They were men in high positions at the ministries of the interior, finance, and defense; at the royal barracks, and inside the palace itself. The money was not a bribe, but an interim budget to assert their legitimacy as their country’s new leaders. These were men who thought as he did; principled men who believed that power was to be treated responsibly, that wealth was no excuse for wanton behavior, and that whores, alcohol, and profligacy were the devil’s handmaidens and had no place inside the royal palace.

If he just thought clearly . . . if he separated his anxieties from the reality of the moment, he would see that everything remained as it had when he had awoken that morning.

It was a race, he reminded himself. He must simply run a little faster.

Breathing easier, Gabriel poured himself a glass of water and walked to the window. The Eiffel Tower shimmered in the morning sun. If someone could dream of building that, he could dream of retaking his country. Both were feats of engineering and the will to conquer.

His older brother’s fault was that he had acted with passion. He had let blood rule him completely. What had he hoped to accomplish by storming the Grand Mosque at Mecca and seizing the Ka’aba? All his calls for a holy government, for reform, for simple fidelity to the Prophet’s teachings as mandated by the country’s constitution were drowned out by fears that he might destroy Islam’s holiest site. He and his band of rebels had managed to hold out two weeks before royal troops had stormed the mosque and, with the help of their French advisors, overpowered them. The insurrection was over in minutes.

Bravery was to be admired, thought Gabriel, but intellect, planning, foresight were what one needed to win the day.

Inspired by his family’s legacy, he picked up his chair and took his place in front of the computer. He would no longer react. He would act. He would prove to his older brother that his family’s struggle was not in vain, that he had not frittered twenty years of his life away on some glorified pipe dream.

Adam Chapel was not the only man who knew how to follow a money trail. His colleagues both at the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center and at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network were equally adept at scenting the odor of dirty money and tracing its path back to its origin. It was simply a question of giving them something to find.

Consulting his notes, Gabriel typed in the web address of a prominent financial institution whose headquarters were located in Washington, D.C.

The game could be played both ways.

Live by the sword, Mr. Chapel. Die by the sword.

Chapter 41

“You can’t be serious,” Sarah said, darting an incredulous glance at Adam Chapel. Her cheeks had gone white with a small spear of red in their center. “This isn’t some juicy secret we can keep; not some nasty rumor that’s best kept between you and me. I went along with you last night when you thought it best that we not call Glen. You were tired; you were scared. I can live with that. But this is something else entirely.”

They were driving beside the river Limmat, penned in behind a blue-and-white city tram. The river flowed to their right, the water a pleasant milk-glass green, boundaried by centuries-old buildings that rose in perpendicular harmony from the river’s edge.

“No,” said Chapel. “It stays with us. It’s our problem. We discovered it. It’s up to us to solve it.”

The tram slowed to a halt and Sarah braked late and hard. “Our problem?” Palm open, she knocked her forehead and rolled her eyes. “ ’Cor, blimey, he’s gone batty on us. Round the bend’s our Mr. Chapel. Never did have both feet on the ground. ‘Our problem?’ Who are you to decide? May I remind you that somewhere in our cozy little European theater of operations, there may be a man in possession of a very nasty piece of equipment and he may very well intend to convey that equipment to Mr. Albert Daudin, or Claude François, or whatever the animal behind Hijira calls himself. Adam, we know now what the five hundred thousand dollars was for . . . it was for a bomb. Not for plutonium. Not for plans. Not for a trigger. For a bomb.
The bloody bomb,
for Christ’s sake.”

“I understand,” he said, stiffening in his seat. Her gale-force onslaught left him feeling like a delinquent summoned to the principal. He knew full well what Sarah was talking about, and didn’t think she was exaggerating in the least. He’d been sitting next to her when she’d called her pals on the Israeli desk at MI6 and asked them what they had on Mordecai Kahn, full-time nuclear physicist, part-time consort of international terrorists. “Oh, yes, Mordy Kahn, well, that’s an easy one,” came the reply. “Director of Israeli Nuclear Testing Laboratory, linchpin of their development efforts, one of the doers, hard science and all that. Takes the theory, sees if he can make a toy out of it. Clever chap.”

Chapel’s hands wandered up and down his leg searching for something to do, and settled for fiddling with the air-conditioning vent. He wouldn’t back down. It wasn’t even a question of whether he wanted to or not. The issues involved might be bigger than him, but in the end it was as simple as telling the truth.

“You understand and you’re still willing to keep this between us?” she demanded.

“I don’t think we have any choice. Frankly, I’d say it’s our responsibility to keep it between us.” When she didn’t answer, he went on. “We can’t let things go south on us twice. We cannot let what happened in the Cité Universitaire with Taleel happen again. You know, find the guy, localize him, get ready to make the arrest, when, bingo, Leclerc shows up with ‘le swat team’ and all hell breaks loose. Only this time when the bad guy gets nervous and detonates his bag of tricks, he doesn’t take four men with him, he takes four thousand or forty thousand, or even more, God help us.”

“You can’t make that decision.”

“I don’t have any choice in the matter. Knowing what we know . . . what’s happened in the last couple of days . . . there’s no other decision to make.”

“No, Adam—”

“Listen to me!” He exploded, bolting out of his seat, facing her. “Someone tipped off Taleel. Someone tried to have me killed. Someone wants Hijira to succeed, and that someone is very close to us. One of us, Sarah. One of Blood Money. What are they going to do when they learn we know about Kahn? Hell, they just might tell him to blow up the bomb then and there. Forget about formalities. Any target’s fine as long as there are a lot of “crusaders” around, even if crusaders are ten-year-old girls and their baby brothers who don’t even know where the Middle East is, let alone why everyone over there hates us so much.”

Sarah took a breath and inclined her head as if it were time to bring a measure of rationality to the discussion. “All well and good, Adam, but there are others better prepared to handle this kind of thing . . .
professionals
well versed at dealing with any and all eventualities. They have technology to find these devices.”

“NEST teams?” Chapel scoffed. “From what I understand, they don’t work too well,” he said.

“NEST” stood for Nuclear Emergency Search Team, and referred to teams of scientists and weapons specialists operating within the Department of Energy’s Office of Emergency Operations that were trained to evaluate nuclear threats. After 9/11, NEST teams had fanned out around Washington, D.C, and New York City in anonymous vans equipped with the latest in radiation detection machinery to seek out rogue nuclear weapons. It was a decent enough idea, except that instead of finding any bombs, the teams ended up stopping every half block when the background radiation from the closest photo lab, pharmacy, or Circuit City set off their ultrasensitive alarms. There were a million sources of radiation in any urban environment: TV sets, tobacco products, X-ray machines, smoke detectors, building materials . . . the list went on and on. After storming their umpteenth TJ Maxx, only to discover a new delivery of digital watches (still in the box) equipped with luminous, and minutely radioactive, tritium dials, they packed it in. Next time, they would wait for a credible threat before mobilizing.