Dark Zone

64

As demanding as they were, his responsibilities as head of Desk Three were only part of William Rubens’ job at the National Security Agency, and there was always a stack of paperwork waiting for him in his office. So when Marie Telach told him she wanted to update him in person on what Tommy Karr had found, he asked her to come up to his office. The few minutes he saved meant he could finish reviewing a half-dozen briefs, and by staying here he could initial a small stack of papers. Telach always looked a bit out of sorts when she came upstairs, blinking her eyes like a gopher pulled from her hole.

“Circumstantially at least, it looks bad for Ponclare,” she told him when she arrived, detailing the money trail they had fleshed out from Karr’s information. The chemist Vefoures had been paid from a bank account in Austria that seemed to belong to the French DST Paris security head, Ponclare. That fit with the story that Karr had been told by Vefoures’ friend LaFoote, that Vefoures had been brought back by the government for a secret project. The source of the money wasn’t clear — it came from an Algerian bank whose owner could not, for the time being at least, be traced.

But was it really Ponclare’s? The account had been set up only a few days before the first payment to Vefoures and had only been used to pay him. A preliminary search of the phone records showed that Ponclare had not called the bank from his office or the home number listed on the account. And there were no large transfers from any of Ponclare’s accounts, nor any sudden transfer in for that matter.

“Perhaps he is extremely prudent,” said Rubens.

“Or maybe it was set up to make it seem like a legitimate project to the chemist, and point suspicion at Ponclare if discovered,” said Telach.

Rubens turned to the computer at the side of his desk and punched the keyboard, bringing Ponclare’s resume up in front of him. The man had worked for the French security service for three decades and had, at least according to his superiors, done a decent job. But he had no flashy results; he was clearly more bureaucrat than artist.

Ponclare had served briefly in Africa, where his service overlapped with LaFoote’s. His job there seemed primarily to facilitate budget cutting; besides LaFoote, several dozen officers and foreign agents were let go during Ponclare’s short tenure and no one replaced.

“Is there any connection with the car thief?” Rubens asked.

“Mussa Duoar? Not that we can see.”

“Do they have accounts at the same banks?”

“No,” replied Telach.

“The transfer from Morocco?”

“Duoar doesn’t use any bank there.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Neither there nor Algeria.”

“What about Ponclare’s father?”

“No. Duoar was just a child when Ponclare Senior went back to France. Duoar’s father was active in the resistance movement against the French,” she told him, “but he died after the country gained its independence.”

“How?”

Telach shrugged. “Murky circumstances. Officially, an accident. Unofficially, it may have been something else. He was in police custody shortly before he died. We’d have to do quite a lot more checking to clarify what happened, and even then, I don’t know that we’d get a true answer. Do you think it’s relevant?”

Probably not, Rubens thought. He was grasping for connections, trying to see the whole pattern. “All right. The CD-ROMs that Tommy sent back last night?”

“Formula for a very potent bomb. Different ways of constructing large bombs and shaping them. Some of them are rather large — two hundred pounds, three hundred pounds. Various formulas the experts are analyzing.”

“Has Johnny Bib’s team examined the hard drive that Dean and Lia got from the library yet?”

“The drive just arrived. It’ll take a while.”

Rubens got up and began pacing, trying to ward off his fatigue; he hadn’t slept now in quite some time.

The information about the account transfers added little, if anything, to what they already had — unless Ponclare had some theory on why he was used.

Someone would have to ask him about it. In person, to catch his reaction.

There was a chance that Ponclare was involved with the terrorists. Rubens couldn’t disregard that. He needed someone he could trust to put this to him, perhaps catch him off-guard with it. And it had to be done directly, without going through channels.

The French, of course, would raise a stink. So would he, if the situation were reversed.

“Where’s Tommy?” Rubens asked Telach.

“On a train back to Paris,” she said. “He should be there in about twenty minutes.”

Twenty minutes — and then another twenty or thirty in traffic to get over to the DST headquarters.

Karr wasn’t the best person for this job — he was clearly prejudiced.

Dean was the man he wanted. He trusted his judgment.

“Send Mr. Dean over. Tell him to go to Ponclare and talk to him personally. Tell him what we’ve found. Dean can offer to have the information faxed to him as he’s speaking. We’re looking for a reason he would be used — someone he’s wronged, revenge, something like that. Tell Mr. Dean that I’m going to be very interested in his personal assessment of Ponclare’s reaction. Have Lia go with him.”

Rubens paused.

“Yes, it is a long shot, Marie,” he added. “But we have to fill in the blanks somehow.”