The Devil's Banker

Chapter 49

Mordecai Kahn sat on the bench in the changing room, staring at the scuffed leather satchel between his legs as a profound relief poured over him. There. It was done. For the first time in his life, he’d acted. He’d formed his opinions and given them weight. Most men begged to have a chance to affect the course of history. Offered that chance, he had taken it. He had made his mark. Kahn slipped on his shoes, then dropped a hand to the satchel. Carefully, he sprang the lock and looked inside. Packets of one hundred dollar bills winked at him.

Strangely, he felt no elation at seeing the money. True, it would make things easier. If it cheapened his motives, he could live with that, too. The Sayeret would never give up until they had found and punished him. In the spy’s game, he was a marked man. Three million dollars would keep him ahead of the pack for a while. Months? Years? He didn’t care to guess.

Selecting a packet of bills, he slapped it against his knee, then fanned the currency against his thumb, just like in the movies. He would buy himself an extravagant meal. He would check into a five-star hotel, have a long bath, purchase some new clothes, and set out for a night on the town. It was only eleven-thirty. In Paris, the night was still young.

“Bonsoir, Dr. Kahn.”

Turning his head, Kahn looked at the slight, sallow face of the man man who had called his name, and he knew he would never have any of it.

“Bienvenue à Paris.”

Leclerc drew his pistol and stepped inside the changing room. “Did you have a nice trip?” he asked.

Kahn said nothing. Dropping his hand to his lap, he simply sighed.

Leclerc was looking at the satchel. To his mind, it was the same satchel that Taleel had carried halfway across town on his martyr’s last mission. It was the satchel that had killed Santos Babtiste and the Americans. It was the satchel that should have killed him.

“Stand up,” he said.

Kahn stood.

Leclerc took a step back. He wanted to get out of there. It was a bomb. He knew it. Just like he’d known the other satchel was a bomb. He wasn’t a coward. It was not fear that had prevented him from rushing like a hero into Taleel’s apartment. It was instinct. Survival. Something had told him that Taleel possessed a bomb. It was nature’s private warning that he had no business entering a confined space with a suicidal maniac. And this satchel held a bomb, too.

“Move away from the bag.”

“You don’t want some?” Kahn asked, as if astonished. He raised the packet of one hundred dollar bills, fluttering the notes.

“I said move away.”

“You’re too late, actually. It’s the other thing you want. I’m afraid he’s gone.”

The door opened behind Leclerc. It was Sarah Churchill. “Get back,” he warned her. “Clear the building.”

“What is it?”

“Clear the building!” He swallowed and fought to keep from blinking. He sounded scared. He had to watch that. He nodded, and her head disappeared.

Leclerc envisioned himself inside the gloomy hallway at the Cité Universitaire. He had always disliked small spaces. A premonition, he knew. He had wanted to follow Babtiste. He had ordered himself to chase after Chapel and the others, but his legs had refused the command. He’d stood there nailed to the ground, wondering which idiot had called the police. It was probably Gadbois, despite his protests to the contrary. Gadbois and his distrust of the Americans. “Wheels within wheels,” he liked to say. There was always something Leclerc didn’t know.

“Come on, then,” he barked, liking the sound of his voice this time. “Move away. Don’t make me ask you again.”

Kahn buried his head in his hands. “All this money,” he pleaded. “Please. We can come to an agreement. I’ll help you find him. I will. It’s yours-all of it. Take it, please.”

Leclerc advanced a step, then another, his heart beating wildly. A voice told him to turn around, to get out, to grab Sarah and Chapel, and flee the building as quickly as possible. It was Taleel’s satchel. A small space. Remember the premonition. No, he answered. He wouldn’t run again. This was his stand. It was his arrest to make. Rising on his tiptoes, he glanced into the satchel. He relaxed. It was just money, after all.

“Okay,” he said, his voice regaining its natural pique. “Just keep your hands where I can see them.”

But something in Leclerc’s voice had sparked hope in Kahn. The Israeli physicist dropped his hands into the satchel. “We can come to an agreement,” he cried. “Here-”

And he lifted two of the slim green packets and thrust them toward Leclerc.

Chapel ran back through the corridors and down the stairs. Gabriel was in the building. Chapel had to alert Sarah, to warn Leclerc. Kahn might be here as well. His mind was a mess, his powers of logic and rational thought as frayed as a cut rope. Hitting the ground floor, he glanced to his right and left. Four men whom he didn’t know but who looked somehow familiar were marching toward him. All wore blue suits and white shirts.

“Mr. Chapel,” one said. It was Neff, the FBI legal attaché. The starched-collar bureaucrat who’d ferried him from the hospital to the meeting with Owen Glendenning. “Mr. Chapel, we’d like you to give us your weapon, please.”

Chapel looked to his right hand and realized he’d been waving the gun like an idiot. “He’s here,” he said feverishly, lowering the gun to his side. “Gabriel is here. I mean Utaybi. Upstairs. I saw him for a moment, then he moved away. Tell the Action Service to block the exits. He’s here!”

Neff had his gun out, too, a snub-nosed thirty-eight police special, and he was aiming it at Chapel. “Lay the gun on the floor.”

“Are you listening to me?” Chapel exclaimed. “Gabriel is in the building. Now!”

“Drop-your-weapon!” Neff shouted so loudly, so sternly, that Chapel did as he was told. The Beretta landed on the floor with a thud, and a second later, Neff and his three thugs were all over him, pinning his arms behind his back, cuffing his hands, and shoving him toward the exit.

“What’s going on?” Chapel protested, asking one man, then the next, getting no answer from any of them. He’d never been cuffed in his life. He was too shocked to fight. He was certain this was a foolish mistake and that given an opportunity, he could explain his way out of it-whatever “it” was. “He’s here,” Chapel repeated. “Are you guys deaf? The man we’ve been looking for is inside that building. I spotted him on the second floor less than a minute ago.”

Neff led him outside into the warm night air past a picket of Action Service men. A convoy of black Fords was parked in the middle of the road. Wooden trestles had been erected at both ends of the street. Uniformed police cordoned off the sidewalks.

“Neff,” Chapel began, then remembering his first name, used that. Lesson number one of the Dale Carnegie course he’d been asked to take after joining Price Waterhouse, and his interpersonal skills been found wanting. “Frank, hold on a second.”

They’d reached the sidewalk and Neff shoved Chapel against the car. “No, you hold on, you piece of shit. ‘What’s going on?’ Is that what you want to know, Chapel? Why don’t you tell me, bin Lad-”

Before Neff could finish, a tremendous explosion rocked the night. A violent clap of thunder boxed Chapel’s ears. A flash of orange blinded his corneas as a gust of heat singed his cheeks. Fragments of mortar, wood, and glass pummeled the car and rained down on the street. A quarter of a second later, the blast hit him, a wave that lifted him off his feet and tossed him bodily over the hood of the car and onto the street. He was unconscious for a second, maybe two. When he came to, he saw a black curtain of smoke seething from the building.

And there was Neff, sitting up on the ground next to him, stunned, picking shards of glass out of his bloodied cotton shirt and calmly flicking them away.

The last man had been brought out of the building ten minutes earlier. Sitting upright on a gurney, covered head to foot in ash, he resembled a shrouded mummy with an oxygen mask clasped to his mouth. Chapel heard a paramedic say that he’d been found at the rear of the building beneath a collapsed spar. A chef on his midnight break.

One of the firemen started back up the steps to continue the rescue effort. A colleague coming the other way shook his head, and together they returned to the sidewalk, taking up position a few feet from where Adam Chapel sat, cuffed in the backseat of a Ford.

“You can’t stop yet,” Chapel implored them silently. “If you found the chef, you’ll find her, too. Go on, now! Keep looking!”

For the past two hours, the living and the dead had been escorted past his window. Chapel had searched the faces of the survivors, checked the clothing of the dead, hoping for a sign of her.

The blast had eviscerated the second story of the building and ignited a fire that had rapidly engulfed the upper floors. Within minutes the building was a raging inferno. All the survivors had been pulled from the ground floor, or the east side of the second floor. Everyone else had perished. Smoke. Fire. The blast itself. They hadn’t stood a chance.

At three-thirty, Frank Neff slid into the front seat of the car. He was wearing a fireman’s stained canvas jacket, and he wiped the dust from his eyes with a damp towel. “Nice work,” he said, directing his comments over his shoulder. “Seventeen dead. Thirty-three injured, most of ’em with burns that’ll never heal properly. Five are critical, not expected to make it. If you want to cheer, go ahead. Tell me, Chapel, was it worth it?”

Chapel ignored the question. Denials, explanations, apologies: nothing concerned him except her. “Sarah,” he said. “Have they found her?”

Neff threw an arm over the center rest and stared at Chapel. “No luck, bud. She didn’t make it out.”