Edge

Chapter 23

HOTELS ARE GOOD meeting places in our line of work. They never close and even if you aren’t registered there, nobody pays much attention if you sit quietly in the lobby in a business suit and pretend to look over your computer, like you’re waiting for a meeting.

Which was what I was doing now.

At 11:10 a.m. Claire duBois arrived at the Tysons Hyatt. She was wearing a black pantsuit but a different black one from yesterday. The pattern, I noticed. A thin burgundy sweater underneath. As she sat down I smelled jasmine. Her eyes were red. I supposed she hadn’t gotten much sleep. Her face was troubled and for a moment I thought we had a security situation on our hands. But she simply said in a ragged whisper, “I heard Billy’s signed out a secure transport for a run to a slammer in D.C. He was secret about it. I mean, I sensed he was. Inscrutable. I’m not sure exactly what that means but it seemed to apply. When I walked toward him he headed the other way.”

That was duBois’s very long way of asking a very simple question.

“First.” I gestured across the lobby, picked up my laptop and we walked to the Starbucks stand. It wasn’t my favorite coffee. But it had caffeine and that I did need. We got two cups and Claire duBois went for some food. A vegetable wrap. We returned to where we’d been sitting. I explained about Westerfield’s call, though not the Rhode Island part or the inquiry. I supposed that duBois knew about the matter, which was there for public consumption, provided you were up for a little insidious digging, as Chris Teasley had done. It wasn’t the sort of thing to bring up with your protégé and fellow workers unnecessarily.

When I told her the U.S. attorney had demanded the Kesslers and Maree go into a slammer, duBois blinked as if I’d said the District were seceding. “But he can’t do that. You’re in charge of the principals.”

I told her, “But he’s in charge of the sanctity of the nation. And of his career.” I chose not to work the word “self-righteous” into my comments. I also chose to tell her nothing more. “In any case, that’s not our priority at the moment. We need to find who’s hired Loving. Tell me what you’ve got so far.”

“I’m still checking on the email you sent, following up on the tracker situation, the police department.”

Since I’d given her the assignment only a half hour ago I wasn’t surprised or troubled there were no results yet.

“Here’s the result of the phone call traces you asked me for.” She handed me a folder. I read it fast but completely. The answer was pretty much what I’d expected.

DuBois then handed me a second file-dealing with the alleged Ponzi scam. This was filled with a lot of paperwork and documents. I glanced up and she summarized, “Clarence Brown, aka Ali Pamuk.” She shuffled through them. “Detective Kessler hadn’t gotten too far with the case.”

“He told me. He was busy.”

“And nobody in the Department or the SEC was that concerned.”

“Poor, minority victims.”

“Not much money involved. And no loudmouths to stand up for them. Like Al Sharpton. Pamuk has an office in South East but it’s a short-term lease. All the furniture’s rented. A secretary and two assistants. Neither of them’ve graduated from college. It just doesn’t smell right. You’d think that if you were an investment advisor you’d have something that wasn’t so cheesy. Now, I saw this movie. All the President’s Men.”

“It was a book too.”

“Was it? Well, in it-”

“I know the story.”

“To track down what was going on, the reporters followed the money. I was thinking about it and that’s what I did.”

“Good.”

She continued, “I know some people at Treasury and State. And this lawyer who’s involved in international banking treaties.” She seemed to know half of the under-thirty population in the District of Columbia. “Ever since the Swiss got scared, the UBS thing a few years ago, and started to chatter, it’s not quite as hard to get information. But the trail’s really complicated.” She pulled a sheet of paper out of her file and showed me an elaborate diagram in her elegant handwriting. “I managed to find somebody at Interpol in Europe and MI6 in the U.K. They were working late or early or around the clock, I don’t know. To summarize, the investors’ money goes from D.C. to Georgetown-ha, that’s funny, I just realized. The Georgetown in the Cayman Islands. Not the Georgetown where I go to Dean and DeLuca. From there the money goes to London and Marseille and Geneva and Athens. Then, guess where?”

Pamuk’s dad was Turkish so I gambled on Istanbul or Ankara.

But the real answer was a lot more interesting. “Riyadh.”

Saudi Arabia, the origin of most of the Nine-eleven hijackers. Westerfield’s terrorist connection, which I’d thought was pretty speculative, was looking more and more possible.

“A British shell corporation. And from there, it goes to more companies throughout the Middle East but-how’s this?-they’re not Middle Eastern. They’re registered in America, France, Austria, Switzerland, England, China, Japan and Singapore. They’re all shell corporations. Every one of them. They get the money and from there it disappears.”

I sipped the bitter coffee. I summarized, “So investors aren’t getting their money out because it’s being used to fund terror operations by Hezbollah, the Taliban, Hamas, al Qaeda.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

It was a clever idea, using a Ponzi scam to produce revenue for terrorists. And, if true, it was doubly effective. The money Pamuk raised would not only fund operations but would also have secondary consequences: destroying the lives of people in the West who’d invested their savings with Pamuk.

“Where are we now?”

“The Saudis aren’t being cooperative. No surprise there. State and Interpol and local FBI’re doing some digging, trying to see who specifically is getting the money.”

I guessed that Pamuk could be a front man, picked probably because he had connections with the neighborhood-and his sympathies to fundamentalism. I wondered if he’d been the one who’d hired Henry Loving or if that had been someone in the Middle East.

“Any word about when they’ll know something?” I asked.

“By tomorrow, they hope.”

They hope…

“Now, about Graham,” I said.

She grimaced. “Sorry.”

We threaten. We don’t bluff…

I shrugged. She’d learned the lesson. The question was what to do about the situation.

I finished my coffee. I said in my mentor voice, “In this line of work?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes we’ve got to do things that test us. Push us to the extreme.”

She’d gone quiet. Unusual for her. But she was looking me in the eye, nodding slightly.

“That’s what we have to do now… But it’s really above and beyond the call of duty. I can’t order you to do it.”

DuBois touched the single button closing her jacket, subconsciously, I believed. Tucked in her waistband was a pistol similar to mine, the compact Glock. I’d seen her scores. She was a good shot and I remembered the image of her at our range, eyes focused and intense, beneath the yellow-lensed glasses, her short dark hair puffed out comically around the thick ear protectors. Always getting a tight grouping in the fifty-yard targets.

She’d be thinking, possible terrorist connection, possible New Jersey syndicate connection, even a Department of Defense conspiracy of some sort. Would there be a firefight?

She cleared her throat. “Whatever you need, Corte.”

I sized her up. Her still blue eyes, taut lips, steady breathing. She was ready for what we were about to do, I decided.

“Let’s go.”