The Devil's Banker (6 page)

A spooked donkey trotted past, teeth bared and braying, dragging a pullcart stacked high with DVDs and videocassettes.

Sayeed writhed on the ground, eyes nailed to his ruined limb. He screamed in irregular spurts, a vain and tortured caterwaul that, frankly, pissed her off. “Where did you send the money?” she asked, kneeling beside him. “Why are you doing this?”

“My hand,” Sayeed was shouting. “Where’s my hand?”

“Get me a tourniquet,” she ordered the soldier.

On the ground next to him were a packet of Tic Tacs that she suspected held amphetamines rather than breath mints, a dollar bill, and a cell phone.
Get the phone,
she told herself. As she reached for it, a pair of soldiers frog-marched Bhatia out of his store. “Can’t find the money,” one was saying, apparently to Sarah. “It’s nowhere.”

Sarah looked up. The guards lay dead near the entry, as did the salesman who’d so badly wanted her to buy a chain. “It doesn’t mat—” she began to respond.

It was then that Sayeed moved. Drawing his legs to his chest, he kicked her in the stomach, sending her sprawling into the dirt.

“Hey!” shouted the American soldier, simultaneously shouldering his weapon and lowering it to Sayeed’s chest.

“No,” Sarah said weakly. “We’ve got to talk to him.”

But it was already too late. Sayeed had found his thresher’s knife. In a single whipsaw motion, he buried the blade into the outstretched tendons of his neck and slashed his throat.

“No!” she screamed, as blood fountained from his neck and his head collapsed onto the ground.

Only when they had cleared the bazaar and she was staring at the Karakoram’s blue-gray dreamscape far in the distance did she realize she had forgotten the cellular phone. Momentarily, she rose in her seat and thought of ordering the driver back, but she knew it was too late. Even if a second incursion were to be tolerated, the phone was already gone.

Finders keepers.

Chapter 5

“Romeo’s back.”

Santini’s hushed voice sent a current through Chapel. In an instant he was at the window, binoculars to his eyes. The same well-dressed man they’d observed thirty minutes earlier dawdling in front of Royal Joaillier’s sparkling store windows had returned. At first, Chapel was convinced that he’d stroll right past. He walked purposefully, one hand in his trousers, the other smoothing his hair. Just a guy coming back from a coffee break, he’d decided. A stockbroker stoking up his courage to make another hundred cold calls or a sales clerk taking five to iron the wrinkles from his smile.

Then Romeo stopped, and Chapel’s heart stopped with him. Directly in front of the entry to Royal Joailliers, Romeo did a little stutter step. For a long second he turned, which left him facing the jump team’s third-floor suite. Time stood still.

“Tell me you got the head shot,” said Chapel sotto voce.

“I got it,” said Leclerc from his assassin’s post at the window.

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Got it.” Keck froze a close-up of Romeo and transmitted the still image to Langley for identification.

A dozen people had lit up their radar since they’d taken up their positions. Most had been women stopping to take a snapshot glance at the five-carat diamond rings, time enough for a wish, a glimpse of another life, before the less glittering pressures of the real world called. There’d been an older man with a dog who’d played with entering the store, and a young couple who seemed to be daring each other to take the plunge, but not a one had actually gone inside.

Staring at the screen, Chapel silently urged the man to enter.

An instant later, Romeo threw open the door to Royal Joailliers and disappeared from view.

“He’s in,” said Chapel. If he’d expected to feel relieved, he was mistaken. His stomach tightened and his heartbeat kicked up a notch. “Ray, did you get a look?”

“Went right by me,” said Gomez. “I’m guessing Lebanese, but he could be from anywhere in the Gulf. He’s no gutter rat, either. Wearing an eighteen-karat Rolex Daytona and his fingernails look like they’ve been spit-shined by a Marine.” Gomez was an Aramco orphan, the son of an oil executive who’d grown up in the cloistered compounds that foreign oil companies maintain inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He was wiry, dark, and scruffy, and he spoke Farsi like a native. “He’s our guy,” confirmed Gomez. “He’s got the eyes, man. Burning a hole in everything around him. Listen, I’m outta here. Romeo gave me the full once-over. I’m charred.”

“All right, then. Come in, but nice and slow.”

“Adam, we’ve got a FaceIt confirm on your man.” It was Allan Halsey, and his voice was taut. “Checks out as Mohammed al-Taleel, native of Saudi Arabia, naturalized an American citizen in 1993. Mr. Taleel is wanted in connection with a 1996 London car bombing, the Khobar Towers case, and the murder of two Russian nuclear physicists in Damascus in ’97. Funny thing, though: Our records indicate that he drowned in a ferry accident crossing Lake Victoria in Kenya in 1999.”

“Then it must be his ghost that just walked in that store.”

“He’s our man. Take him down.”

Chapel stared at the storefront, at the throngs of tourists crowding the sidewalks. “Not yet,” he protested. “Let’s see where he takes the dough.”

“No chance,” said Halsey. “We can’t risk his getting away. We’re enforcement. We’re paid to arrest the bad guys. You’ve got a major player trapped inside a store two hundred yards away. I said take him down.”

Chapel bridled at the order. He thought of Khobar Towers, where a truck bomb had killed nineteen American servicemen stationed in Saudi Arabia and wounded several hundred others. He didn’t want Taleel to escape his just rewards. Add to that the London attack and the slaying of the Russians. Taleel was a nasty piece of work, all right.

“Do we have any word from Glendenning?”

“He’s shut down the operation on the other side. Now, do as I say.”

“Did we get him?”

“Adam, do as I—”

“Did we?”

“No,” admitted Halsey. “No prisoners were apprehended.”

Chapel choked back his frustration. It wasn’t good enough. Not after busting his hump to get inside the Islamic alternative remittance network. Not after sniffing the shorts of every halfway questionable charity in the United States. “Disrupt and dismantle” were the task force’s watchwords. So far, they’d arrested a dozen moneymen and frozen over a hundred million dollars in questionable assets. It was good work to be sure, but as yet they had no proof they’d impeded the functioning of an active terrorist cell. Finally they had a certified player in their sights, one caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and they wanted to take him down before they could put a finger on his associates or clamp down on his cell.

“Follow the money, Mr. Halsey. That’s the rule. Stop him now and we got nothing. One more smart-ass who won’t talk.”

“A bird in the hand, Adam. With the proper inducements, I’m sure Mr. Taleel will be most cooperative.”

“Arrest him and we’ve got no idea what he’s up to. Intel says he’s set to pick up five hundred G’s or more. Something’s got to be hot to risk that kind of transfer. Let me follow him. We’ll tag and mark him. He’s ours.”

“You need three cars and five or six guys on the street not to spook him. You telling me you can follow him in a city of six million people? All he has to do is take off his jacket and he’s gone. I won’t tell Glen Glendenning we’ve lost a major player.”

“Arrest him now,” said Leclerc, in his gravedigger’s voice. “I promise you I’ll find out everything you need to know.”

Chapel glared at him. “We don’t do things that way.”

Leclerc glared back. “Ah, you will,
mon ami
.”

“What’s he doing with the money?” Chapel demanded of Halsey. “Tell me that and I’ll arrest him. It’s like nine-eleven. You think if we stopped Atta the day before the attack, he would have told us what was going to happen? You think they would have canceled their plans? He’d have told us to go to hell and we’d have had no choice but to respect his rights, get him a lawyer, and wait until the goddamn towers went down to get after him. I say we wait. I say we see who Taleel’s delivering the money to. We can’t stop short on this.”

Suddenly the suite was too small. The ornate furnishings pressed in on him like a bad migraine. You could toss a football across the salon, but you couldn’t go two feet without bumping into some Louis XV chair, a froufrou sofa, or an antique oak secretary. Every nook had a Chinese vase. Every shelf, an ormolu clock. Every wall, a rustic oil painting. A chandelier hung in the entry and another dangled over the dining room table. And all of it—the couches, the carpets, the ashtrays, and artwork—was color coordinated in a sea of navy blue and ivory, with just a touch of maroon to remind you that the French still loved their royalty, even if they had led them to the chopping block in a tumbrel cart.

“Mr. Chapel?” It was a new voice that he recognized as Owen Glendenning’s. “Are you telling me that you can hang on to Taleel in all that mess?”

“Yes, sir, I can.”

“Those are pretty big words for your first time out.”

“I’ve got some good guys with me.”

“They trust you to run this?”

Chapel looked at Keck, who was listening to every word of their exchange. Keck raised a thumb and nodded his head. “You da man, Mr. C.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Chapel. “I believe they do.”

“All right, then. We lost one player today. Don’t lose another. Ghosts don’t make a habit of turning up in the same place twice.”

“Yes, sir.” And then Chapel was doing five things at once. “Ditch the coat and bring round the van,” he ordered Santos Babtiste. “And call in a second tail car.”

“Get to the service entrance, PDQ,” he commanded Ray Gomez. “Carmine, circle the other way. Calmly, now. Calmly.”

“Go, Kreskin,” cheered Carmine Santini.

“Keck, put your system on automatic pilot. You’ll ride in the second car. Be ready to hit the street at my mark.”

“And you,” Chapel said very quietly to Mr. Leclerc of the Sûreté, first name unknown. “Where I come from we like our prisoners alive, so please put away that peashooter and get on your feet.”

But the last word belonged to Keck. Keck with the spiky blond hair and elfin stature. “Hey, dude,” he said as they filed out of the hotel suite. “Three words.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Don’t fuck up.”

Mohammed Al-Taleel, aka Romeo, emerged through the tinted glass doors of Royal Joailliers fifteen minutes later. In his hand, he carried a scuffed leather briefcase, the tried companion of attorneys and academics around the world. He left the square along the same path as he had entered it, walking with the same brisk gait that Chapel had remarked on earlier. One more man about town in the world’s most cosmopolitan city.

“All right, Carmine, move in. Put a smear on Romeo. One chance, my man. Do not mess up. Tag him.”

“Tagging” referred to the act of depositing a trace of tritium on a subject’s person. Though invisible to the naked eye, the mildly radioactive substance could be tracked by a sensitive Geiger counter at distances up to five hundred yards.

Santini closed in on Taleel. As he passed, he nudged him ever so slightly, a shoulder glancing against the back, nothing more. Taleel never felt the applicator brush his trousers.
Bingo,
thought Chapel,
you’re ours.

From the Place Vendôme, Taleel walked up the Rue de la Paix, turning left on Rue Daunou and passing Harry’s Bar, one of Ernest Hemingway’s favorite haunts when he’d lived in Paris in the 1920s. Keck followed at twenty yards, with Leclerc shadowing him ten yards farther back on the opposite side of the street.

By the time they reached the Madeleine, the sidewalks pulsed with a vibrant, swarming humanity. Chapel decided that blue blazers and tan slacks were a kind of French national uniform. From his position in the passenger seat of the postal van, he counted seven men wearing a similar outfit crossing the intersection at the Boulevard des Capucines. A small metallic box similar to a Magellan GPS rested on his lap. The backlit display showed a map of Paris. The blinking red dot above the Madeleine Métro station represented Mohammed al-Taleel.

“He’s hitting the Métro,” said Santos Babtiste.
“Merde.”

“Ligne douze. Mairie d’Issy,”
said Leclerc, already underground.

“Keck, pull back,” Chapel ordered. “Leclerc, it’s your turn to play shadow.”

“D’acc,”
replied the Frenchman.

“I’m going in,” said Chapel, flinging the tracking device onto the seat.

Crossing the street, he hit the stairs to the Métro at a run. The underground was crowded and hot. White tiled tunnels led in four directions. It was a labyrinthine steam bath. The sign for Ligne 12 pointed to the right. Not stopping to buy a ticket, he jumped the turnstiles and dashed down the corridor toward the platform. At least, he’d picked up one worthwhile skill growing up in Brooklyn. Hustling down another flight of stairs, he rounded a corner to find the platform deserted and the door to the train closing.

“Damn it,” he muttered under his breath, even as he rushed toward the train. As if by a miracle, the doors wheezed open and he slid into the car. At the next doorway, Leclerc retrieved a foot from the entry. Taleel sat ten feet away, paying the briefcase between his legs no concern.

A pro,
thought Chapel, as he took a spot toward the rear that positioned Taleel in his line of sight.

Concorde. Assemblée Nationale. Solférino.

The stations passed in turn. Chapel swayed with the train’s rhythmic swagger.
Don’t look at him,
he repeated over and over, reciting the lines from his training manual.
Live your cover. You’re a tourist from New York. You know better than to stare.

As new passengers came and went, the cars grew neither more nor less crowded. More than once, he felt Taleel’s eyes sweep over him. When the train pulled into the station at Sèvres-Babylon, Taleel stood and walked to the door. Chapel stood, too, taking up position inches behind the man. He smelled the Saudi’s cologne and noticed that he’d recently had a haircut. And, yes, Gomez was right: Taleel’s fingernails were shined to perfection.