The Merchant of Secrets (11 page)

In Chicago, after reaching the hotel I checked-in using a
fake name and paid for the room in cash. Then I called Colin to describe the
positioning of the security cameras. “They’ve got three on the far wall and two
more by the door. You’d better come in through the side entrance where there is
only one. And wear a hat.”

On the hotel room floor, I scanned both sides of the
corridor before unlocking the door, to make sure I wasn’t being followed.

While waiting for Colin to walk down the street from his
meeting I showered and slipped into some new lingerie that I bought for the
evening. I was angry at myself for allowing the extra pounds to creep onto my
hips during the last few weeks, and hoped he wouldn’t notice how fat I was
getting. Then I popped the cork on a bottle of Champagne.

“Hey beautiful,” Colin said as he burst into the hotel
room flinging his arms wide open. He was wearing jeans, an oxford shirt and a
blue sweater, without a tie.  He snatched a glass of champagne, turned it
upside down drinking it all at once. He laid the empty glass on the
bedtable
, turned and grabbed me passionately, pulling me
onto the bed. “I’ve just got few minutes then I have to get back.”

 “What?”

“Yea, I’ve got to get back, I can’t stay here tonight,”
he replied.

“ I’ve
just driven, I don’t know…
600 miles, to spend a couple of nights with you in Chicago and you’re not even
staying here? Colin!”

“Hey look, I can’t help it,” he said, shrugging.
“Everyone from the meeting is staying at the hotel down the street. If I came
strolling in tomorrow morning from another hotel, don’t you think they’d notice
and ask questions? Oh come on, please don’t sulk. Let’s try to have a good
time.”

Colin’s easy logic was getting a little creepy. The wild
mood swings from day to day, and the way he led me all the way to Chicago for
nothing overwhelmed me with an anxiety about something that innately was wrong
about the relationship but not out in the open yet. It seemed like there were
two
Colins
, and I was a ball being kicked back and
forth between them.

“I wouldn’t have come all this way if you had told me,” I
said.

“Well let’s spend what time we have,” he said looking
down at my face with his big, blue, doe eyes. “Then I’ll go back to my hotel.”

I turned my back to him, facing the wall.

“I’m sorry, but it’s an important meeting. The rebel
factions in Libya are desperate and crying out for help and NATO is sending in
aircraft. Mass demonstrations are everywhere in the streets.” He was excited
about
Gaddafy’s
demise although the battle for
Tripoli was still months away.  “The C.I.A. is slipping guys quietly into
the midst of the confusion to gather intelligence. What can I do? Tell them I
can’t come to this critical meeting because my girlfriend’s waiting for me at a
hotel down the street?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course you have to go,” I
replied, “but if you can’t carve out a few hours a day that don’t belong to the
government then your life’s going off of a deep-end.  We can’t have even
one whole night together without your work interfering, the government owns you
twenty-four hours a day!”

He grabbed the glass from the bedside table, walked over
to the bottle sitting on the desk and poured himself another glass, and emptied
that one down his throat, too.

“Well there’s no point in me staying here while you’re at
a meeting.  I’m going back to Virginia tomorrow,” I said, in no mood to
discuss business anymore.  

The next morning I woke up in an empty bed and knew that
something was wrong, but suppressed the messages from a
 
nagging
conscience. I went into the shower with a stream of hot water
flowing over my head and shoulders to relax me. As the water
flowed
my back, complex set of emotions was running through my mind. I was occupying a
small compartment in Colin’s life. Not fully there, just when he had the time,
in bits and pieces.  

I stuffed the lingerie back into my bag and called the
driver to take me back to Virginia.

CHAPTER 15 

At the new temporary office within the IRS building I was
issued a badge which I clipped to my pants.  Bailey greeted me downstairs
like nothing had happened. We rode the elevator upstairs as
 
we
had done a few weeks earlier but this time I was allowed to enter
through the same door as Bailey. We poured ourselves some bad coffee into
Styrofoam cups and walked to the grey cubicle that was to be my temporary
office for the remainder of the project.
Mulally
had sent over a new laptop which was waiting when I arrived.
 

She investigated payments for
Qureshi’s
apartments in Turkey and Spain which, as it turned out, were both
bought  with
bank  wires from the same mysterious
company in Kabul, Afghanistan. Then she made some calls to the South East Asia
desk at the State Department to request a profile of the company and was told
that the company didn’t exist. At that point Bailey’s part of the investigation
had hit a wall. We closed her office door and called Keisha and
Mulally
.

“Hi Caroline,”
Mulally
greeted
me in a cheerful tone, “sorry to hear that Todd put you through the ringer,
how’re you doing?” 

 “I’m just fine sir,” I replied.

“Glad to hear it,” he replied. “Don’t pay any attention
to Todd, your clearance is still active and I want you to stay on this project.
Okay?”

It was more than okay. It was great!

“Sir, did you read that psychological evaluation?” I
asked cautiously.

 “Oh, Todd runs a smear campaign on everyone who
crosses his path. He pays this same psychologist to write the same report on
anyone who’s on his enemy list so he can try to strip them of their security
clearance. Don’t take it too seriously.”

I did take it seriously.

“Caroline, Jones has been a controversial figure for over
a decade. He had a reputation for running his unit in Afghanistan like a
mobster with a readiness to kill any who betrayed him. The problems arising
with the armed military contractors like Jones went largely undetected until
some catalyst sent the details spilling over into the press and then the story
broke. The press painted a picture of him as a very controlling and highly paid
government contractor who ordered his men to commit acts brutality for his own
profit or pleasure, causing most of the local population of the small town in
Kandahar to flee in fear of him,” he explained.  “Even in a war zone, Jones
stood out as a person lacking any trace of moral checks and balances. I
understand  the
corrosive effect that someone like
Jones has on those around him, including Todd.”  

 “Then why isn’t he in prison?” I asked.

 “He had an influential circle of friends,”
Mulally
said. “After he was arrested, he was released
quickly with the weak explanation that he had been ‘sufficiently disciplined.’
That meant that someone was covering for him.”

“There are political overtones everywhere, aren’t there?”

“Yep,”
Mulally
replied.

“Was that one of Jones’ guys following me?”

“I think so.”

Bailey jumped in with a change of topic. “Sir, we need
some surveillance on a P.O. Box in Afghanistan.  Adnan
Qureshi’s
homes in Madrid and Istanbul were paid for with a wire transfer sent from a
company in Kabul but the State Department says the company doesn’t exist; it’s
just a shadow organization with a P.O. Box.  We can’t determine where the
money is originating. If we had some identification of who is picking up mail
from the P.O. Box for this shadow company maybe we could see who owns the bank
account, and determine who is paying
Qureshi’s
bills.”

“Okay, that shouldn’t be difficult. I’ll put in the
request today. So what kind of operation do you think company runs? Is it part of
the Afghan drug trade?”

 “We’re drawing a blank, sir,” she said.

“Okay, just keep on it” he said and hung up. He had a
meeting to attend on Pakistan.  The CIA had a strong presence in Kabul and
would be able to piece together who owned the mailbox by identifying who picked
up the mail.

Bailey and Keisha picked a code name for me.  It was
“cloud sheriff’ making reference to my job watching over a national security
network to detect harmful vectors attacking U.S. targets.  Bailey was
“Queen B.” and Keisha kept her longtime nickname
of  “
Boots.”
We agreed that I would be Project Manager along with Keisha, of course subject
to approval from above.  We decided to name the project “Hades’ Drone”
with reference to the Greek god of death and Jones’ company that manufactures
drones.  

The IRS was given primary jurisdiction over the case as
it pertained to illegal wire transfers. Anything else came under the
jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security.  Any funds recovered
from the operation would be split equally between the IRS and the Defense
Department.

C.I.A. agents on the ground in Afghanistan were loaned to
our project to keep an eye on the target but at first the information that came
back was fragmented. Eventually they informed
Mulally
that unidentified couriers arrived each day
peddling a bicycle to pick- up mail from the P.O. Box and carried it to a house
in the center of Kabul. Combing through our office connections to enquire if
anyone knew about the house, we came up empty; there was no record of who owned
the house. But Keisha had connections with the troops in Kabul and told us that
the house where the couriers were delivering the mail belonged to one of
Qureshi’s
brothers.
Qureshi
was
from a large family with 5 brothers and a sister, but they were a poor family
by western standards and wouldn’t
themselves
have had
the money to buy their brother properties in Spain and Turkey. Most likely,
they were being used to collect money on behalf of their brother and to send it
to him.

 
Mulally
ordered
surveillance on the mechanic’s vehicle at the car dealership in McLean, and on
Qureshi’s
too, tracking his movements to Sara’s house and
to the club, and to the car dealership and few other places. Agents had
installed satellite receivers underneath the frame of the vehicles so that a
team of our own guys at the office could
monitor  Joe
and
Qureshi’s
movements 24 hours a day. 
Checking his past travel records, “Joe” they found, had made a trip to Beijing
departing out of Dulles airport and we strongly suspected that the contents of
Qureshi’s
gym bags went with him.

That’s where the trail ended. It was our job to pick up the
pieces and to close the loop.

Keisha came over to our office at the I.R.S. building
later that week to conference with us about Kabul.  The U.S. had been at
war in Afghanistan for ten years and the military had a lot of experience to
share about a major city in one of the most violent countries in the world.
 The popularity of Americans and the cooperation with our armed forces on
joint training missions varied from province to province but overall it was a
tense alliance. We had in the past used Pakistan to broker discussions with
Kabul but U.S. relations with Pakistan were now a low point and their
assistance could no longer be relied upon.  

Bailey showed Keisha and me a data dump of all incoming
wire transactions into
Qureshi’s
brother’s account in
Kabul.  It was a significant amount data to be sorted so we spent the next
couple of days entering and re-entering the “special attributes” i.e. the
search terms, into the program. The program didn’t like what we were doing, and
punished us with error messages over, and over, and over again. Finally on a
Saturday afternoon we found what we were looking for, incoming wire transfers
to the Kabul bank from an obscure bank in Shanghai, corresponding to the day
that “Joe” arrived in China. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. On paper we
outlined the trail.  David Jones from PFG gives classified information to
Qureshi
in a gym bag at the club, who then drives to the
dealership and hands it off to Joe, who passed without notice through the
airport when he flew to Beijing. When the contents of the gym bag were
received, cash was wired to Kabul.

Bailey decided to take a second detailed look at the
Kabul bank account, and saw again the wires which paid for the apartments in
Turkey and Spain but she also found something else. Wires were going to a bank
in Abu Dhabi.

We set up a breakfast conference with
Mulally
and
Flumm
at a
restaurant at Tyson’s Corner, Virginia.

“Good morning,” I said to
Mulally
and
Flumm
as they
walked into the room. It was a private dining room where we could have a
conversation without being overheard, except by the one server who stood
against the wall waiting to attend to our needs. The table was covered in white
tablecloth, with a silver tray overflowing with breakfast pastries, and
miniature jars of jam. A silver coffee pot was waiting with cups and saucers.  
Mulally
smiled back at me, “Good to see you Caroline” he
said, “and you too Bailey” he added, nodding in her direction.