The Devil's Banker

Chapter 3

Admiral Owen Glendenning sat at the rear of the Counterterrorism Command Center on the sixth floor of the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, digesting the latest information. It was too soon to hope, but he had no intention of ignoring the first flush of optimism that reddened the back of his neck and had him tapping his cane on the floor.

“Keep on him a little longer, girl, and we’re there,” he said to himself. “Just a little longer.”

Projected onto a ten-foot screen, a live feed from Pakistan broadcast Sarah Churchill’s point of view as she examined a selection of gold chains. She raised her head, and Glendenning came face-to-face with a frantic jewelry salesman blabbing the usual nonsense about high quality and best price. A simultaneous English translation ran across the bottom of the screen.

A second screen broadcast the footprint of the Central Intelligence Agency’s spy satellites on a political map of the globe. A shaded area indicated each satellite’s footprint. Some shadows remained stationary; others crept across the map with the turning of the earth.

The seal of the CIA highlighted against a navy blue background lit up a third screen, currently unused.

At seven A.M., the Counterterrorism Command Center was fully staffed and humming. Three rows of analysts occupied the gallery of the auditorium-sized command room. All enjoyed brand-new workstations, the latest flat-panel displays, and state-of-the-art ergonomic chairs that cost twelve hundred dollars a pop. It had been a long time since the Company had enjoyed such generous funding, but with the war on terrorism running at full bore, the spigots were wide open. To his frequent visitors from Capitol Hill, Glendenning liked to joke that his op center looked like a movie set-the way Hollywood imagined the espionage community operated. Lately, though, his audience had been less enthralled. Briefings that had once been little more than secret check-writing ceremonies had lately taken an adversarial turn. Where were the results Glendenning had promised? the more daring senators demanded. A few hundred million dollars in confiscated accounts was fine and dandy, but what about the terrorists behind it? Warm bodies, not frozen assets, were the order of the day.

They’d get their terrorists, Glendenning promised silently. A little patience would be nice.

Suppressing the grunt that came with the pain of standing, he pushed himself to his feet, then took hold of his twin bamboo canes and shuffled across the back of the op center to the glassed-in enclosure that served as his office. Owen Glendenning was sixty-one years old, thin and balding. People remarked on his resemblance to Franklin Roosevelt. They said he owned the same patrician bearing, the great politician’s indomitable smile and easy charm. He knew they were lying, that his looks made people nervous. As a young SEAL lieutenant in the Vietnam War, he had been gravely wounded leading a nighttime incursion behind enemy lines to capture a suspected VC cadre. The mortar rounds that had mangled his legs had also disfigured his face. His right cheek and jaw were concave, as if someone had hit him very hard with a spading tool. The mission, however, had been a success, and for his part in it, Glendenning had been awarded the Medal of Honor. He might have looked like FDR once, but now the only things he had in common with the great man were a steely self-reliance, a hatred of sympathy, and a refusal to be patronized.

Picking up a phone, he dialed the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center (FTAT) two floors below. “Get me Halsey.”

Strictly speaking, FTAT was a Treasury operation. Treasury funded it. Treasury supervised it. But when the scope of the investigation into worldwide terrorist financing had become clear, all involved had decided to move FTAT’s operations to Langley.

There had been a time not too far back when the very idea of the CIA contacting Treasury to share information had been practically a jailable offense. There was law enforcement and there was intelligence, and never the twain shall meet. But the events of September 11, 2001, had changed all that. With the passage of the Patriot Act, communication between the United States’s varied and multiple law enforcement and intelligence agencies not only was permitted, it was encouraged. The old concept of “stovepiping,” or keeping information inside the particular agency, or, as was the case with the FBI, inside the individual department that had discovered it, was thrown out the door. Concerns about infractions of civil liberties and personal privacy were quickly dismissed. If you weren’t stepping on someone’s rights, you weren’t doing your job, Glendenning liked to say. The threat beyond the country’s borders took preeminence and was far greater than anyone could be told.

“This is Halsey,” answered a deep, gravelly voice.

“Don’t you have a home either?”

Allan Halsey, chief of the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center, gave a shallow laugh. “Not according to my wife.”

“We nabbed the call,” said Glendenning. “The money’s being moved as we speak. Come on up and we’ll run it from here.”

“How much?”

“We’re guessing five hundred grand or five million. Either way, it’s the real deal.”

“I don’t like it,” said Halsey. “Risky to move so much.”

“I couldn’t agree more. Something’s about to pop. Who’s running your team in Paris?

“Adam Chapel.”

“Don’t know him. A new guy?”

“Treasury pulled him in after the WTC.”

“Military?”

“God no,” said Halsey. “A quant jock all the way. Kid was on the fast track at Price Waterhouse. Partner at twenty-nine. National audit manager.”

“Sounds like a real killer,” said Glendenning. “Ought to have ’em quaking in their boots.”

“Come on now, Glen. He’s the new kind of soldier. You know, brains instead of brawn. Different war we’re fighting this time.”

“That’s what they tell me. In the end, though, you still have to shoot the bad guys.”

“Don’t worry about Chapel,” said Halsey, his voice quieter, more confident, as if vouchsafing a secret. “He can hold his own.”

Midmorning traffic was light as the canary yellow postal van accelerated across the Place de la Concorde. Jaw clenched, Adam Chapel leaned close to the windshield, willing the van faster. Finally, an anxious voice pleaded inside his head. Finally.

The tires hit a stretch of cobblestones and Chapel jostled inside the tight cabin. Looking out the driver’s window, he was afforded a clear view up the Champs-Elysées. Rows of oaks lined the boulevard, giving way to wide sidewalks and an array of stores and restaurants. The Arc de Triomphe rose at its head. The sun broke from the clouds, and the monument to France’s fallen warriors glimmered like an ivory tower.

“How much faster can you go?” Chapel asked the hulking black man behind the steering wheel.

“This is it, my friend,” said Detective Sergeant Santos Babtiste of the French Sûreté. “Any quicker and we’ll blow the tires off. Be happy-the average speed around town these days is ten kilometers per hour. You’re better off taking the Métro, even if you are the police.” Zee poleece. Gingerly, he kissed two fingers of his right hand and touched them to the photographs of his children glued to the dashboard. “Dieu nous benisse. Aujourd’hui, nous avons de la chance.”

“We’ll see about that,” answered Chapel, shifting in his seat, eyes to the fore. Luck scared him. It was work that yielded results.

Chapel was not as big as Babtiste, but like the French detective, he looked cooped up and uncomfortable in the cramped cabin. There was something about the roll of his shoulders, the striated muscles around the neck that suggested a caged restlessness, a quivering, explosive ambition. His black hair was curly and cut close to the scalp; his skin pale, an army of stubble visible beneath the hollow planes of his cheeks. He wore what he always wore, a pressed white Polo button-down, Levi’s, and a pair of handmade loafers from John Lobb of Jermyn Street. Perched on the edge of his seat, he had the haunted, lonely look of a skipper who’d been at sea too long, his whiskey brown eyes scanning the horizon, willing land into sight.

A stone’s throw away, the Obelisk passed in a blur. He was thinking the sights should stir him more. Inspire him, even. But he was too nervous to award them more than a passing glance. It was his first command as team leader and he was determined not to screw up. The sights could wait. He was busy mapping out the job at hand, rehearsing his responsibilities, and calculating the odds of nabbing his first honest-to-god terrorist.

Two weeks earlier, a pair of Treasury agents he’d trained with at Quantico had gotten the call in Lagos, Nigeria. A sale of diamonds in the old town. Cash only. High six figures. Seller was thought to be a player. It was a “wait and watch” job, just like today. Their bodies were discovered five hours after they’d failed to report back. Both had been shot in the head at close range. Someone else had been waiting and watching.

That was the first time Adam Chapel had heard the name “Hijira” mentioned.

Today, it was his turn. Somewhere between five hundred thousand and five million dollars was being transferred to Paris. Now. At this minute. He wondered if the transfer belonged to the same network that had killed the men in Lagos.

The jump team had hit Paris three days earlier. Like the other teams that had landed in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Rome, Milan, Madrid, and London, it had a mandate to contact the local “cop shop,” target probable points of currency entry, and if possible, set up visual and electronic surveillance on said locations. Paris’s large Arab population-more than fifty thousand French Algerians alone lived in the capital-coupled with the jump team’s limited personnel, precluded any stakeouts. It was just as well. While there were over one hundred registered money-transfer businesses, better known as “hawalas,” operating in the city, Royal Joailliers was not one of them.

“Con!” roared Santos Babtiste, ramming his enormous palm into the horn, letting it ride for a while as he jerked the wheel hard to the right. An ancient Citroën Deux Chevaux flashed across the windshield and was gone. Chapel held his breath as the van braked, then lunged forward, asserting its place in the five-lane circus.

“Take it easy up there!” came a voice from the rear of the van.

“That you griping, Santini?” asked Chapel. “What’s the problem? You got a weak stomach?”

A glance over his shoulder revealed four men seated on the metal floor, knees to their chests. All guarded the same hardened expression, and they reminded him of a stick of paratroopers ready to jump into combat. Ray Gomez and Carmine Santini from Customs. Mr. Keck from the Agency. And a very small, taciturn Frenchman with a cloudy affiliation to the Sûreté named Leclerc.

Leclerc, who rubbed the slim wooden briefcase between his knees, as if he were calming a pet.

Chapel was certain he knew what was inside.

“Weak stomach?” called Santini. “You got the wrong body part, mister. It’s like getting a jackhammer up your ass back here. Someone hurry up and tell our hosts a road’s supposed to be smooth.” Frowning, he looked at Leclerc, seated next to him. “Haven’t you guys ever heard of shock absorbers? Now I know why you don’t sell any French cars in the states. No Peugeots. No Citroëns. Like getting it in the ass all day.”

Leclerc looked at him for a second, then smiled thinly and lit a cigarette. “Pussy,” he muttered through a cloud of blue smoke.

“What’d you say?” Santini demanded, then to the others: “What’d he say, the little prick?”

“Pussy,” said Keck. “You heard him.”

“Called you a pussy, Carmine,” chimed in Gomez. “How ‘bout that?”

Santini considered the remark, his back coming off the rear wall, shoulders rising like he was going to ratchet things up a notch. At six two, one-eighty, he had it over the Frenchman in height and weight. His eyes fell to the briefcase, to Leclerc’s indifferent eyes, dull as a shark’s, and he sank back. “Ah, fuck the bunch of you,” he said halfheartedly.

Leclerc lofted a perfect smoke ring across the cabin. Shaking his head, he began rubbing the wooden case again.

“How long till we’re there?” Chapel asked Babtiste.

“Two minutes. A miracle, I tell you. A sign. We’re going to get this man, you will see.”

Looking over his shoulder, Chapel asked, “What about Royal? They on our radar?”

Ray Gomez was online with TECS, the Treasury Enforcement Computer System’s database, checking for references to Royal Joailliers. “Turned up once as a possible accomplice in a money laundering case we were working against the cartels,” he said, looking up from his laptop. “No charges filed. Owner is Rafi Boubilas, Lebanese national.”

“They are dirty,” said Leclerc. He had a folksinger’s lank dark hair and the three-day stubble to go with it. “Boubilas, he runs a big coke ring in town. You know how he gets the money out? His partners in Bogotá grind up old bottles of Seven-Up, green glass, you know, then import the pieces as uncut emeralds. This man, he has many friends. He is rich. He is well connected. No one looks too closely. The invoice says five million. No problem. Boubilas, he takes all his coke cash and sends it back to his masters to pay for the phony stones.”

“Why don’t you take him down?” Chapel asked.

Leclerc made no reply. He was suddenly busy looking out the rear window, humming.

The postal van leaned hard into a left-hand turn. Buildings rose on either side of them. Shadows drenched the cabin as they advanced the length of the Rue de Castiglione. Ahead, the buildings fell away, and the road gave onto a grand square. Place Vendôme.

Another left turn. A flood of sunlight. A decreased tempo. A courtly circuit of the square. Rising like a giant roman candle in its center was the monument to the Battle of Austerlitz, smelted from the twelve hundred cannons Napoléon had captured on the field that day in Germany. Colored awnings advertised the world’s most famous luxury goods. Chanel. Repossi. Van Cleef and Arpels. And passing to their left, the blue welcome carpet of the Ritz Hotel, their destination.

Babtiste turned into an alleyway and parked the postal van outside the service entry.

Chapel threw an arm over the back of his seat, his eyes going from one member of his team to the next. He thought about telling them to keep their heads up, their eyes and ears open. What was the point? Between them they had fifty years’ experience setting up stings, going on stakeouts, taking down narcotrafficantes with shields out and pistols blazing. He was the new guy. They knew better than he did what to do.

A team of hotel security waited. Quietly, they guided Gomez, Santini, and Keck to the service elevator. Babtiste followed, swinging the stainless steel case loaded with eighty pounds of A/V gear as if it were a lunch box. Leclerc took the stairs with Chapel. Entering the opulent suite, he shot the American a challenging glance. “You look nervous,” he said.

“I am,” Chapel answered.

Six months, Sarah had been chasing the shadow. Six months shuttling between Kabul, Kandahar, and the Khyber Pass, chasing down leads like an errant fielder. One week she was a UNICEF relief worker, the next, a clinician from Médecins Sans Frontières, and the next, an administrator for the World Bank. She spent as much time building her legends as she did working her sources.

The first whispers had reached her at her desk in London, though by wildly different routes. A field officer had buried a mention in his report of some rumors he’d picked up at a party at the Indian consul’s in Kabul, the kind of boozy affair frequented by aid workers, diplomats, and the local gentry, in this case a few of the tamer regional warlords. Then there were the firsthand snippets delivered over a tepid lunch at Fortnum’s by a wallah from agriculture just back from a tour of the area: something vague about a new poppy farmer in the southeast taking control of the large fields near Jalalabad. With the Taliban gone, the Afghanis were hell-bent on reclaiming their place as the world’s largest suppliers of raw opium. Word was, however, that the seller wasn’t a local, but an Arab-Afghan like bin Laden, a devout Muslim from the Gulf who had fought as a Mujahadeen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There were rumors of an important sale. Several tons of product coming to market.

Both times the word “Hijira” came up.

“Hijira,” as in the journey from Mecca to Medinah undertaken by the Prophet Muhammad in the year A.D. 622 to escape persecution. Or more important, “Hijira,” as in the date from which the new Muslim calendar began.

To Sarah’s seasoned ears, it could not be a coincidence.

Marshaling her evidence, she’d marched downstairs to Peter Callan’s office and demanded an immediate posting in country. When he demurred, she blew her stack. Wasn’t CT what it was all about these days? Counterterrorism. Intelligence’s desperately needed raison d’être borne on silver wings in what everybody had to agree was the barest nick of time. When he hesitated still, she built his argument for him. Arabic speakers were in demand. Those who spoke Pashtun were particularly prized. Sarah, who’d taken a first in Oriental languages at Cambridge, trumped them all, with Urdu, French, and German under her belt as well. The question wasn’t why she should go to Afghanistan. It was why she wasn’t already there! Callan had grunted something about a budget and called Langley.

Four days later, she was packed aboard a commercial flight to Dulles for a one month’s crash course in the culture of the American intelligence community. From there, it was on to Karachi, and by overland route to Kabul.

Her brief was simple: Keep an ear to the ground for the bad guys. “Players,” the Yanks called them. She was to cultivate sources, debrief agents in place, and establish her own network.

“Follow the money” was her maxim, and it led to the gold souks of Gilgit, the vaults of the Afghani central bank, and Kabul’s bustling black market for medical supplies.

While she never found the Arab-Afghan, she did run across one Abu Mohammed Sayeed, wanted by nearly every Western intelligence agency for barbarous acts too numerous to mention, as he scurried to and fro across her radar arranging to sell his mother lode of opium.

Follow the money, she repeated silently, staring at the gold chain in her hand. She had, and the money had led her here, to Faisan Bhatia’s jewelry store in the heart of the Smugglers’ Bazaar.

“No, no,” she remonstrated the clerk. “The quality of the links is terrible. Look: this is not solid gold. It is electroplated.”

“Yes. Twenty microns.”

“Ten at most,” she countered. “I can scratch it off with my fingernail.”

She’d been in the store for twenty minutes, and her every sensor was telling her to get the hell out. One of the surveillance cameras was pointed directly at her, and she could imagine Sayeed in the back room, glancing up at the monitor and asking, “Is she still there? That’s a bit long, isn’t it?”

She dropped the chain on the counter and pretended to spot a bracelet that captured her fancy.

“There’s been a delay,” said a voice in her ear. “A traffic jam.” It was Ranger and he no longer sounded so calm and authoritative. “The A-team will be there in five minutes. If Omar comes out, you need to stop him. Once he’s in the bazaar, he’s got the advantage. We need him penned in.”

Stop him? The reply choked deep in her throat. Damn it! She knew they wouldn’t make it in time.

“Are you with me?” asked Ranger. “Just nod.”

So, it had come to this, thought Sarah. With all their satellites and uplinks and GPS, it had come back to the same old thing. Put your body in front of the bullet.

She would do it. She never considered saying no. Not with a daddy who’d gone ashore with 2 Para at Goose Green in the Falklands and a brother who’d done thirty missions over Baghdad. The Churchills were bred to fight. And they had the coat of arms and the professional soldier’s proud penury to prove it.

She just hadn’t thought it would be hers to do alone.

Swallowing, she found her throat dry as a chalkboard. It was the heat, she told herself.

She nodded.

“I’d like to see the red one.” To her surprise, Sarah realized that she was asking the salesman a second time to see the bracelet and that he wasn’t responding. She heard a rustle behind her, the creak of a door opening, hushed voices. The salesman’s eyes were pinned to the men emerging from the back room. Against her every instinct, she turned so that Langley could see what she was seeing, so that they would know that their vaunted A-team, their bare-chested macho superstars, were too late, and that Omar was going to get away unless she tackled him right then and there.

Sayeed was talking on a cell phone, his words rushed, urgent. She caught a string of numbers, a pause, saw his mouth widen to utter an arrogant laugh. As he slid past her, she caught his ripe scent.

Stop him, Glendenning had said.

Sarah took a step back. The collision was stilted and orchestrated. Sayeed grunted and spun, immediately on the defensive. And even as she turned to apologize, and the futility of her cause overcame her, she knew that, at least for a moment, she’d accomplished what she’d been told, and that her father, the general himself, would be proud.

Abu Sayeed lifted his arm to brush away the woman, his eyes drawn into a distasteful grimace. Until she had backed into him like a clumsy ox, he thought he’d been wrong to suspect her. Her burqa was immaculate. Her posture at once respectful, yet with the right amount of pride. She revealed no part of herself. She was a righteous woman, not a street whore eager to prey on a man with a little money in his pocket.

Abu Sayeed believed in the law of Hijaab, or “concealment.” He believed that women had no place in public. They belonged at home, caring for children, tending to their household. Only in this way could their dignity be upheld, their purity protected. Should they have to venture out, they must cover their figure in deference to the Prophet. The smallest piece of exposed flesh was as provocative as a woman’s pudenda.

Now he knew it was a sham. Her adherence to Hijaab, a lie; a ploy to rid an unsuspecting male of a few dollars. It was common enough practice. You could barely pass a diamond merchant without spotting the women waiting outside like jackals. After all, if a man had a few hundred dollars to spend on a precious stone, he might be willing to part with a good deal less to sate his baser desires. He’d been mistaken. The cloudy reception on Bhatia’s TV was from her pager, no doubt. They all carried them, anxious to meet their customers’ beck and call. Carrion birds, they were. Vultures. And laden with as many diseases.

Still, Sayeed was unable to look away. The sun shone through the window, silhouetting her breasts. He imagined that beneath the full-length garment she possessed an exquisite form. He was tempted to take her to his safe house and have his way with her, but the current of lust was swept aside by waves of self-righteousness. Years of education demanded to be heard. He was talking before he knew it, speaking as if the Prophet himself commanded his tongue.

“Harlot,” he said. “Do you think every man is corruptible? Do you think you tempt me even for a moment? You are a disgrace to Islam and to the Prophet. Do you not follow the holy teachings?”

The woman did not respond.

“Speak when you are addressed!” he bellowed.

“Excuse me,” came the voice, timid and repentant. “I did not mean to run into you. It was an accident. I did not realize I was of offense.”

“Of course you did. How else can your actions be taken? Why else have you been waiting so long in the store? Do you think I do not know what you wish of me?”

Sayeed grasped the woman’s arm and pulled her along with him. “Stay on the street, where you belong. Or better yet, inside your house of ill-repute.”

Her upper arm was muscular. She was strong. He had known women like this, in the camps, and in America.

He pushed her through the doorway and into the street.

“Away,” she cried, struggling. “You have no right.”

“I am a man. I have every right.”

He heard her exhale, and then she was upon him, striking him with the ferocity of a wildcat. A fist swung at his face. Stepping away, he deflected the blow, keeping a grip on her arm.

“A fighter, eh? Is that where you built your muscles? Hitting men and stealing their wealth when they are weak and sated?”

A dozen men had stopped to gawk at the struggle. Quickly, a circle formed around Sayeed and the woman. Voices offered all manner of advice, a precious few even calling for Sayeed to let her go.

“Away,” she yelled repeatedly, the fear of retribution pinching her voice. “Let me go. I shall call the police.”

“Call them,” he seconded. “Be my guest. Here, the Lord God is judge. We require no other authority.”

He tried to swing her around and get her arm locked behind her, but suddenly she slid inside his reach. His jaw rocked. His mouth filled with a warm, salty fluid that he knew was blood. It surprised him, nonetheless. She had hit him. The whore had hit him. Clenching his fist, he swung at the veiled face, holding back nothing. A cry escaped as she collapsed to a knee.

A cheer erupted from the crowd. The spectators closed in, fifty of them at least, more rushing in every second. Their voices were raucous and hungry, the confrontation awakening an ancient taste for savagery.

Sayeed lifted the woman to her feet. Dust coated her burqa. Rivets of blood dotted the ground beneath her, some black, some violently red. Yet, as she rose, he felt something hard and angular rub against him. Something that felt very much like a gun.

“Who are you?” he asked, raising his machine gun to port arms, pulling the firing pin, and slipping a finger inside the trigger guard.

“I know who she is,” came a cracked and rusted voice. “I have seen her watching.”

Sayeed spun to face an old man, dressed entirely in black, emerging from the ring of spectators. “;Yes, Imam,” he addressed the mullah. “Tell me. Tell us all.”

The Islamic cleric raised a gnarled finger, his voice shrill with the fury of a thousand years. “A crusader!”