The Devil's Banker

Chapter 46

“You are a member?” the woman inside the booth asked.

“Unfortunately not,” said Marc Gabriel. “But I’ve been told I may join.”

Gabriel stood inside the entry of a neatly maintained maison de ville in the third arrondissement. The third wasn’t a part of the city he favored. It was where Paris earned its keep, a sprawling, colorless array of factories, warehouses, and rail yards. Here and there, quaint residential neighborhoods somehow managed to survive like grass sprouting in the cracks of the sidewalk.

“Perhaps,” she said. “You are alone?”

“Yes.”

The woman rose from her seat and extended her head beyond the narrow transom that separated them. She was old and battle-weary, her hair dyed black, her cheeks fleshy and veined. She wore a twenty-year-old’s silk dress that showcased a mottled, generous bosom. “But, you are very handsome,” she sang, her eyes dancing over him. “Très BCBG. You prefer women? Tell me now. If you favor boys, I will be happy to suggest an alternate location.”

Gabriel warmed her cold claw in his palm, raising it to his mouth and conferring upon it a kiss. “I hope that serves as an answer.” He allowed his eyes to linger on hers. “Surely, you do not work the entire evening?”

“Monsieur is too kind,” she admitted. “Membership is one hundred euros. No smoking in the pleasure chambers. If you carry a cocktail with you-wine, champagne, whiskey-please bring a coaster. We’ve just had the furniture redone. When you’ve enjoyed yourself, please dispose of your protection in the receptacles. We are a respectable establishment.”

“Of that I have no doubt.”

The establishment in question was called “Cléopatre,” and it was a come-one, come-all sex club dressed up as an Egyptian bordello. Gabriel paid his fee and passed through a beaded curtain into a salon decorated with an abundance of crimson velvet and smoked mirrors. Framed prints of Tutankhamen, Ramses, and Cleopatra decorated the walls, along with a poster of the pyramids at Giza. A corridor to his left led to a restaurant. The dining room was largely empty. A few couples dined lugubriously at their tables as a disco beat spilled from tinny speakers. Dancing queen. Dancing queen. You are the dancing queen. He walked back into the main salon as a statuesque African woman emerged from a doorway.

“Good evening,” she said, swinging her broad hips. “I am Véronique. You are familiar with Cléopatre?”

Véronique wore a gold lamé dress and looked like she weighed a hundred sixty pounds. Standing still, she teetered on her stiletto heels.

“Not entirely,” said Gabriel.

“We have several entertainment areas. There is the boutique upstairs, where you may buy something to wear this evening. Something to excite you. A ring. A collar. The boutique is also for watching. You may admire a lady from a two-way mirror. Don’t be ashamed. Naturally, she knows you are enjoying her striptease. Maybe you would like to visit the piano bar? Anyone may play. And it is a fine place to meet a companion for the night while you enjoy a cocktail-wine, champagne, whiskey.”

“I’m interested in seeing Bilitis’s Vineyard.”

Véronique’s eyes narrowed as a sly smile entertained her lips. “An adventurous gentleman,” she said. “Follow me.”

She led the way up a flight of stairs and pointed to a door marked with a pharaoh’s headdress. “Attire is forbidden in Bilitis’s Vineyard. You may remove your clothing and place it in a locker inside. Wear the key around your ankle or your wrist, as you please. I’ll wait for you here.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

Véronique ran a hand inside Gabriel’s jacket. “Perhaps monsieur would enjoy some company in the vineyard?”

“Thank you, no.”

Véronique shrugged and moved away. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. “The vineyard is only for those who like to play. It is upstairs and to your right. Please don’t linger. It makes the other members nervous. Some are quite shy. Their performance, you understand?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“What is it with you men coming from work?” she asked in parting. “Don’t you leave your briefcases in the office?”

“It took place in November of 1979,” said Sarah Churchill. “Juhayman al-Utaybi was a young officer in the Saudi Arabian National Guard. By all accounts he was a model soldier: charismatic, bright, tough as nails. He was also a devout Muslim. He came from a family of Wahhabi clerics. The Wahhabis practice a pure form of Islam. They’re fundamentalists who follow Muhammad’s teachings to the letter. No drinking, no smoking, no caffeine, prayer five times a day, and no extramarital sex. Family comes first, and that’s that. Good clean living by any standards. Well, you know all that…”

She and Chapel were headed across town to check out the premises of Cléopatre, the chichi sex club to which Kahn had purchased a membership six months earlier. Leclerc followed on his motorcycle, trailing a handful of his Action Service brethren. It was a long shot, but long shots were all they had.

“Go on,” said Chapel.

“A hundred years ago, the Saud family made a deal with their rival Ikhwan tribes to take control of what was then simply Arabia. Basically, they said, ‘You back us in our bid to unite the various tribes into a single kingdom, and we’ll make Wahhabism the kingdom’s religion. The Ikhwans cared more about seeing a pure form of Islam practiced across the land than political power, agreed.

“Over the years, however, it became clear that the Saudi potentates-King Ibn Saud, Faisal, Fahd, and Abdullah, take your pick-didn’t give two hoots for following the tenets of the religion. Oh, they put on a good show, but when the doors were closed, and sometimes when they weren’t entirely, they liked to enjoy what you might call a Western lifestyle. Booze, women, and lots of both. This was fine as long as the behavior was limited to just the king and his retainers. Things changed when they started pumping oil big-time, and they really changed after the first oil embargo in 1973, when the price of that oil skyrocketed. The kingdom’s revenues grew tenfold in a year. The royal treasury’s coffers were overflowing with petrodollars. The king, being a good chap and very generous, spread the wealth to his sons. And to his nephews and cousins, and their sons and nephews, and so on, and so forth. Soon, there were hundreds of princes jet-setting all over Europe and America, drinking and screwing their way through billions of dollars. Talk about boys behaving badly.

“It was the era of the ugly Arab. Once in London one of Faisal’s sons, forty-fifth or something in line of succession, took over a floor of the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane for a prolonged stay. Now, the Dorchester is swank as swank is. The prince, though, well in his cups, decided the hotel did not cater to his desert lifestyle. It was too civilized. Not at all in keeping with his Bedu roots. One day, he ran amok through Hyde Park, stole a dog, brought it back to the hotel, skinned it, and cooked it on a bonfire right smack in the corridor of the tenth floor. Word got back to the kingdom, along with umpteen hundred other stories about the Saudi predilection for call girls, coke, parties, and the ‘good life.’ The Wahhabis were not amused.”

“I can understand why,” agreed Chapel.

“Among them, Juhayman al-Utaybi was not amused,” Sarah continued. “He decided he’d had enough of seeing his religion ridiculed by the very family that had sworn to uphold its principles. He was sick of watching the West’s moral laxity undermine his country. Secretly, he gathered together a group of men who thought as he did. Soldiers, students, clerics. He proposed an audacious plan. They would take control of the Grand Mosque and force the House of Saud to change their ways. And he did it. On November twentieth, Utaybi and a couple hundred of like-minded reformists took control of the Mosque. For a week or two, he sent out letters decrying the Saud family, exposing their moral corruption. His version of Paul’s letters to the Romans. ‘The rot,’ he called it. The Sauds weren’t ones to take this standing still. They summoned their Western advisers-interestingly, the French, not the Americans-and after a decent interval stormed the Mosque. Utaybi didn’t give up easily. The battle raged for days. Dozens of rebels were killed. No one knows how many soldiers died. Juhayman al-Utaybi was captured alive. He and sixty-seven of his cohorts were tried, convicted, and beheaded. ‘Chop-chop,’ the Saudis call it. Islamic justice at its finest.”

“And did the Sauds change?” Chapel asked.

“You tell me?”

“Not a lot.”

“What they did begin doing was financing a lot of radical Islamic groups to make it look like they took their promise of Wahhabism seriously. They might not practice it, but they were certainly going to preach it.”

“And so we get Hijira,” said Chapel. “I can see why Gabriel’s family would be upset. But whom do they want to get even with? The Saudis for corrupting their religion in the first place? The French for helping put down the rebellion? The Americans for exporting their cultural drivel into their country?”

Sarah answered matter-of-factly. “Why, all of them, of course.”

Mordecai Kahn picked his way among the nude bodies, lifting his feet gingerly, squinting to adjust to the amber-hued dark. He had no desire to observe these people engaged in the most intimate act, yet he couldn’t help but look at them, if only so he would not stumble. There was little joy in their pursuits. The men moved brusquely, without tenderness or passion. The women bore an expression he could best describe as “suffering for their art.” Groans came and went. Gasps. Occasionally, even something that might pass for pleasure. And always the piped-in dance music, the steady beat, the trebly vocals.

A hand clamped his leg, and he froze, horrified. The hand belonged to a recumbent woman. She was svelte and from what he could make out, attractive. Several men had gathered around her, masturbating. Her free hand aided first one, then another. Apparently, she desired one more. Kahn freed his leg and moved on without speaking.

It took some time, but he managed to find a dark recess where he could stand without peering at any active men or women. Like the others in the wandering suite of rooms they called “Bilitis’s Vineyard,” he was naked, except for the elastic wristband that held a key and a pendant engraved with the number forty-seven. One floor below in a rickety wooden locker he could pick with a paper clip, the package sat in a briefcase covered by his clothing.

He had made it. Tel Aviv to Paris. Three thousand miles in four days. He was tired, hungry, anxious, and elated, all at once. In a few minutes, he would receive the final payment, his salary for what remained of his life. It was a bargain for what lay inside the briefcase.

Kahn imagined the compact weapon. They had named it “Salome,” after the biblical dancer who had asked for the head of John the Baptist on a plate. The neat stainless steel casing hardly larger than two packs of cigarettes contained fifty grams of plutonium-239 in a fissile core. Technically, it would be called a “fusion-boosted fission weapon” utilizing an implosion design. A thin outer shell of plutonium would be driven inward by an explosive charge at a velocity of five kilometers per second. The impact of the outer shell on the center plutonium sphere would create two high-pressure shock waves, one traveling to the center of the shell, the other outward. The resulting pressure would compress the plutonium to four times its normal density. The collapse of the central sphere would crush the fusion fuel in its center. A chain reaction would ensue, resulting in a one-kiloton blast, the equivalent of ten tons of TNT. The design was hardly revolutionary. Similar bombs had been in production for thirty years. Kahn’s genius was to create an explosive compound so powerful that only thirty grams were needed to initiate the chain reaction. This, along with the huge strides made in microchip technology that had reduced the components of the firing mechanism by a scale of ten, resulted in a significant miniaturization of the weapon.

Stealing the device had not proved difficult. It was merely a question of defeating the biometric security mechanisms governing entry and exit to and from the research and development laboratory. Only a small cadre of vetted scientists was allowed inside. A fingerprint scanner confirmed each scientist’s identity. A scale recorded his weight and was calibrated to allow a variance of one pound from the time he entered to the time he left. Security was designed with a single goal: to prevent the theft of any of the devices being developed and constructed deep below the earth at the Eilbrun facility.

Kahn’s challenge was to convince the scanner and the scale that he was another man. Someone who weighed exactly 4.3 pounds more than he. That man was his friend and colleague of twenty years, Dr. Lev Meyerman. Meyerman, who stood five foot five inches to Kahn’s six foot two. Meyerman, who weighed one hundred eighty-one pounds to Kahn’s one hundred seventy-six. Eyeballing his friend’s weight was not a possibility. Kahn was a man of science and approximation reeked of luck. The task demanded he take matters into his own hands, and if it was not science that supplied the answer, it was, at least, social engineering.

For months, Kahn pressed Meyerman to diet. Each day, he accompanied him on lunchtime walks around the complex’s perimeter. Each day, he lectured him on the benefits of fruits and vegetables. Together, they monitored the shorter, huskier man’s weight as it dropped from two hundred pounds to one hundred ninety, one hundred eighty-five, and finally, to one hundred eighty-one pounds.

Beating the fingerprint scanner demanded less finesse. Kahn lifted latent prints of the man’s index finger from Meyerman’s morning bottle of Perrier. Using cyanoacrylate adhesive fumes, more commonly known as Krazy Glue, he enhanced the fingerprints and photographed them with a digital camera. Adobe PhotoShop sharpened the contrast of every ridge and whorl. When printed onto a transparent sheet, the resulting reproduction was impeccable.

Using a photosensitive circuit board he’d purchased at RadioShack in Tel Aviv and the transparency, Kahn etched the fingerprint into the copper board, effectively creating a mold.

As for the “finger,” he’d had the ingredients all along. Five gummy bears melted on a Bunsen burner provided the gelatin with which to shape the last joint of an index finger. As the “finger” cooled, he pressed its tip against the circuit board. The impression was perfect. Lifelike. The scanner, which did not measure body heat, was fooled. In the end, Kahn walked out of the laboratory with Salome inside his jacket and a nonfunctional prototype left behind in the vault.

Kilotons. Plutonium. Fissile Material.

The words scalded Kahn’s tongue. Tomorrow, he would be free of this devil’s lexicon. His duty-as an Israeli, a Zionist, and a father-fulfilled, he would fly south to Madrid, then on to Cape Town. The city housed a prominent colony of Jews: seekers, strivers, pioneers like him. He would fit in nicely. He hoped for a teaching post. High school physics would suit him, as would chemistry, or even Hebrew. It was time to give back.

A hand touched his shoulder and Kahn flinched uncomfortably. Who was it now? Another potbellied Romeo? A saggy-breasted matron seeking gratification from a skinny old Jew? Turning, he found himself looking at the man with the smiling eyes.

“Good evening, friend,” said Marc Gabriel. “You are a long way from home.”