The Devil's Banker (5 page)

“Bang!” said Leclerc, pulling the trigger on an empty chamber, watching Chapel jump from the corner of his eye. “See, I am funny, too.”

“Yeah, a barrel full of monkeys.”

Chapel walked to the center of the suite where Keck had set up the video monitors on a lacquered mahogany table. One of the six-by-six-inch screens showed the façade of Royal Joailliers. The other two offered wide-angle views of the east and west halves of the square.

“So far so good,” said Keck. “Transmit A-OK. FaceIt is online. We are operational.”

A wireless relay transmitted all three video feeds to the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center at Langley. There, FaceIt, a sophisticated and rapidly evolving biometric software program manufactured by the Identix Corporation, would pick out all visible faces, digitally enhance them, and compare each on the basis of fifty-three distinct characteristics with an FBI database containing photographs and artists’ composites of several thousand known and suspected terrorists.

“We getting this on tape?”

“Not tape,” Keck said testily. “On disk.”

“I don’t care if it’s super-eight film, as long as it records.” Chapel slipped on a communications headset. “You there, Mr. Babtiste?” he asked, pulling the slim microphone close to his mouth.

“Ch’uis la.”
Babtiste had accepted a temporary position as a hotel doorman. He stood downstairs at the hotel portico clad in one of the Ritz’s trademark blue topcoats, greeting arriving guests with a tip of his cap and the flash of his dazzling smile. “I’m making some decent tips. If our man does not show till afternoon, I’m paying for dinner at Maxim’s for
nous tous
.”

“If he doesn’t show, I’ll hold you to it,” said Chapel, but even as he permitted himself a smile, a new voice barked in his ear. It was Halsey, and the strident edge to his voice made him shiver. “Adam, we’ve intercepted a second communication. It was a little garbled, but we’re betting it was Omar sending the code to his correspondent on your side. The number dialed had a Paris area code. Looks like this thing is going down now. Your team in place?”

“Affirmative,” Chapel answered, rolling on the balls of his feet.

“Good. We’ll be watching with you.”

Hawala.

Two years ago, Adam Chapel had never even heard the word, let alone known that it constituted an underground banking network that transferred more than fifty billion dollars a year around the world. The Chinese had called it
“Fei Qian,”
or “flying money,” but, in fact, the money never went anywhere. Today, a broker in New York asks his counterpart in Delhi to deliver five hundred dollars. Tomorrow, it would be the other way around. If, and when, accounts between the two needed balancing, some gold might change hands. But no one kept any papers. No chits, no receipts, no nothing. In the event of a dispute,
hawaladars
consulted human “memorizers,” trained and kept on staff to mediate.

Hawala,
however, was far more than a simple means of sending cash from one person to another. It was also a convenient mechanism to evade taxes and duties. Vendors provided importers with lower prices on their invoices and got the difference via
hawala
. In the late sixties, the first large
hawala
networks emerged to circumvent official restrictions on gold imports in Southeast Asia. Once the gold smugglers had perfected the system, it wasn’t long before other criminals followed suit: drug traffickers, money launderers, and more recently, terrorists.

“Bachelor number one, come on down,” said Carmine Santini from his position at yet another fashion boutique. “Male, twenty-five to thirty-five, approaching Royal. Navy blazer, tan slacks, and oh, look at that shirt. Could be Italian. Definitely Mediterranean. Enjoys dinner, dancing, and moonlight walks on the beach. Got him, Kreskin? Signor Romeo with his nose to the window.”

Santini the joker. Always ready with a name for everyone. Chapel had earned the nickname “Kreskin” (after the famous mentalist) when five minutes after sitting down with a slippery Lebanese businessman to discuss his company’s balance sheet, he’d figured out the guy was scraping ten percent off his pretax profits and sending the cash to the bad guys. Chapel had explained that it was an accounting issue entirely, the man listing the cash as a charitable donation but not taking the write-off. Three hundred grand a year was too much to forget about. But there was more to it than that. The truth was that a balance sheet was like a glimpse into a person’s soul. The way someone kept their books—if they padded expenses, front-loaded revenues, took advances on salary . . .
or didn’t
—told you everything you needed to know about him. Chapel was no mentalist. He was just good at finding the man inside the numbers.

“Yeah, I got him.” Chapel nudged Keck. “Let’s get up close and personal.”

The camera zoomed in and the back of the man’s head filled the monitor. Black hair cut short, a little greasy kid stuff in it to give it some pizzazz. Pink checked shirt.
Turn around,
Chapel ordered the image.
Let me get a look at you.
The head turned, but only for a second, then it was back to studying the rings in the window.

“Did he give you enough of a profile?”

“Sorry,” said Keck. “I need a full frontal shot.”

“Stay clear,” Chapel ordered Santini and Gomez. “Carmine, take a minute at Boucheron, and a minute at Facconable. Ray, ditch that line and move to twenty yards.”

“Yo, Kreskin,” said Santini. “You’re getting good at this. Pretty soon you’re going to ditch that desk and come into the field full-time with us.”

“Doubtful,” said Chapel, but for the first time the idea appealed to him.

Santini moved on to the next boutique, his eyes glued to the window in front of him. Gomez made a show of checking his watch, then shaking his head in frustration as he set off toward the jewelry store. Both had woven themselves into the human fabric of the square and were invisible to the watcher’s eye.

Leclerc had slipped the barrel of his rifle through the curtain and laid it on the windowsill. Still as a cat, he crouched, cheek pressed to the gun’s wooden stock.

“Well,” said Keck as he stared at the figure on the monitor. “Either the price of the ring’s too high or he’s having second thoughts about the girl. Come on, buddy, make up your mind. Go inside or move along.”

Romeo broke off from the window and continued down the street.

“False alarm,” said Santini.

“Patience,” said Babtiste.

“Damn,” said Chapel.

“Crusader! Crusader!”

Sarah Churchill peered in horror at the seething crowd encircling her, reading hatred and blood lust in their eyes. “Crusader” was the spiteful label slapped on any Westerner, civilian or combatant, who defiled the land of Islam. The voices grew louder and she sensed an evil animus rising among them. No longer were they just a bunch of curious onlookers. They were a force. Willful. Intent. United in unholy purpose.

“Crusader! Crusader!”

It’s medieval,
she told herself.
Any minute, they’re going to send out the Imam himself. He’s going to declare me a heretic, and they’re going to put me to the stake. Saint Joan, redux.

No,
she corrected herself,
this is Pakistan. The Hindu Kush. They do worse things to you than burn you at the stake. They stone you. They chop off your hands and legs and tar the stumps. They run bulldozers up and down your body, and if that doesn’t do the trick, they topple a stone wall onto you.
They hadn’t given her the cyanide so she wouldn’t talk. They’d given it to her to avoid this. Zionist crusaders merited the most gruesome of deaths.

Dirt fell from her fingers as she struggled to remain standing. The punch had caught her squarely on the cheek, knocking the sunglasses from her face. Blood pooled in her mouth. Her vision was a mess. She was dizzy. Either the bruising or the heat made the world dip and twirl, even as she fought to stand still.

God, the heat.

“Bit of a mess here, boys,” she spoke into her mike. “Wondering if that A-team you mentioned is due anytime soon.”

With a start, she noticed the microphone was no longer there. White noise hissed in her earpiece. A hand fell to the transmitter, got tangled in the
burqa,
then found it. She pressed the reset button, but nothing happened. Damned thing must have broken when Sayeed knocked her to the ground.

Bit of bad news, dear,
she informed herself in her aunt Gertie’s deliciously arch tones.
I’m afraid the A-team won’t be coming today. Not in five minutes or fifty. No point in kidding yourself. There’s no way an all-terrain vehicle can make it through the bazaar’s tight lanes. Bloody donkey carts have enough trouble as it is.

The A-team. “A” for absent.

She’d been quick to spot the Special Forces boys out and about. In Kabul. In Jalalabad. In Peshawar. She had wanted to chat them up, if for no other reason than to remember what it was like to speak to a man who didn’t value a donkey, or a yak, or whatever the indigenous beast of burden was around here, more than a woman.

“Crusader! Crusader!”

Look at their eyes. They’re on fire.
Sarah turned in a circle. Hot. It was so damned hot. Sod this
burqa
. She had to get the thing off. She needed some air. She needed to breathe.

Grasping the top of the garment with her left hand, she ripped off the veil and flung it to the ground.

The gun was in her hand now. The Glock 18, thirty-three rounds of nine-millimeter Parabellum ammunition, another three clips at the ready. She held it as she’d been taught, one hand for the breech, the other on the trigger.

You must stop him,
Glendenning had said, and his voice rang like a battle cry in her ear.

“In the name of the United States,” she called out, “and the government of Pakistan, I am placing you under arrest for conspiracy to commit terrorist acts.”

Abu Sayeed gestured toward the automatic weapons pointing at her, then lunged at her with the snout of his machine gun. “Under arrest? I think it’s the other way around.”

A man in a brown turban began to ululate, the terrible shriek the Pathan tribesmen utter to build up their courage. Others took it up, a war cry penetrating to the four corners of her sanity. The unearthly warbling grew louder. A siren song of death. She was no longer frightened. She was beyond that. She was defeated. Utterly, unabashedly defeated. Turning, she did a mental count of the Kalashnikovs aimed at her heart. She stopped at thirteen, which was unlucky, so she found one more to add to the collection.

“May I?” Sayeed asked, and his gentleman’s Mayfair accent stunned her as much as his rock-hard fist had moments before. Gently, he freed the gun from her hands. She did not resist. How many would she have gotten, anyway? Would she even have slain Sayeed? Half of these men were battle-hardened soldiers. The moment she’d made a move to fire, Sayeed himself, or any one of the others, would have cut her to ribbons.

Stop him.

She’d tried, damn it.

Sayeed had exchanged his rifle for a knife. A curved dagger big enough to thresh wheat. Slowly, he approached, with the Mona Lisa’s smile and a hypnotic cast to his eyes. Her hands were lead. Her feet, too. A prayer escaped her lips.

“Father, . . . into your hands I commend my spirit. . . . Forgive me my sins . . .”

And as she recited the words, her tongue found the porcelain compartment that hid the cyanide capsule. With a trained flick, she opened it. The capsule was round and dry and lolled on the center of her tongue. Positioning it neatly between her rear molars, she congratulated herself on her bravery. Expedience was more like it. Anything had to be better than being cut with that evil blade.

Sayeed was talking to her, but she didn’t hear his voice. Strangely, all was silent. She was aware only of the heat, the drafts of warm air rising from the ground, bathing her in an arid current, luring her into a soporific trance. The blade rose in a great arc. She met his eyes and saw how very young he was beneath the beard and the dirt. Beneath the hate.

She bit down on the capsule.

A great gob of blood showered her face and suddenly, Sayeed wasn’t there any longer. He was on the ground, eyes wide open, staring in indolent horror at the splinter of bone and flesh where his forearm and hand used to be. There was a scream, and she saw that the bullet that had taken off Sayeed’s hand had continued right through and very messily blown the head off a man standing a few feet behind him.

Tat tat tat.

Gunfire crackled in the air. The dry mechanical cough of a machine gun. Loud. So incredibly loud. An amplified voice was shouting in Urdu. “Disperse immediately. Leave the area or you will be arrested.”

The hood of a Dodge four-by-four broke through the circle of men, scattering them like bowling pins. Twin thirty-caliber machine guns peered over the cab and the gunner fired a burst into the air. Someone shot at the truck. Bullets ricocheted and she winced at the bent notes. The machine guns dipped and spat fire and she heard a sound very much like someone striking a hollow pumpkin with a cricket bat. A knot of men fell upon themselves, their chests savaged, cartilage and viscera gleaming like ripe fruits.

She spit the capsule onto the ground and bent double, hawking the saliva from her mouth. God save her, she hadn’t bitten all the way through.

A soldier was standing next to her. For all the world, he looked like one of the Pakistanis who’d been taunting her. The dirt, the beard, the brown skin. She flinched at his touch. Blue eyes, she noticed dreamily, and realized she must be in some kind of shock.

“Help me get him into the truck,” the soldier was saying. “We’ve got about thirty seconds before Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys here build up their courage and all hell breaks loose.”

But as far as Sarah was concerned, hell had already broken loose. A blur of men and women ran in every direction. Every few seconds, the thirty-cals fired for effect. Cordite, dust, manure, and the ever-present army of horseflies swirled together and rose in a dense yellow fog. And still the amplified voice instructing the locals to leave the area, like Dante guiding the damned.