The Devil's Banker

Chapter 32

The fields of France passed beneath them, a patchwork quilt of golds and greens. They were flying east. The sun hovered overhead. The shadow of the MD-80 aircraft defined a bullet piercing rivers and valleys and plains of summer wheat. They had a row to themselves. Chapel took the window, Sarah the aisle. Since takeoff, they’d been huddled over the center seat, whispering like thieves in fear of their lives.

“He knew I’d be there,” said Chapel. “He was waiting.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“He slugged me in the shoulder, Sarah. He knew where I was burned. How much more sure do I need to be? Think about it. They had me pegged to be at the hospital at ten o’clock. They knew the time of the appointment. They knew I was going to see Dr. Bac. Christ, Sarah, they even knew what I looked like. He’d seen a picture of me. Where in the hell did he get that? It’s not like I’m on the cover of People.”

But Sarah persisted in her stubbornness. “Why did he run, then? Why didn’t he kill Dr. Bac? If he’d waited another minute, he’d have had you all to himself.”

“I don’t know. Maybe something spooked him. He was young. Twenty or twenty-one. I could smell the fear on him. Maybe he just couldn’t do it. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter why.”

Sarah took a moment to answer. The determined furrows that cradled her eyes relaxed. “I suppose not.”

“They’re inside, Sarah. Hijira’s penetrated Blood Money.”

“Who?” she asked angrily, frustrated by their predicament. “Give me a name.

But neither of them was willing to hazard a guess.

An honor guard awaited them at Berlin Tegel Airport.

A covey of the local Bundespolizei, smart in their short-sleeved summer uniforms and wan green caps, lined the gate area. In its midst stood a chubby American who introduced himself as Lane, the FBI’s legal attaché to Berlin. He presented the formal writ requesting Germany to turn over all information pertaining to Deutsche International Bank account 222.818E to Adam Chapel, designated representative of the U.S. Treasury Department, then escorted the pair through passport control, past baggage claim, to a waiting black Mercedes 600. A blond driver nodded courteously as he slammed the door after them. Lane climbed in the front seat. “The courthouse is in the new Federal Square near the Potsdamerplatz,” he explained. “Hermann here is with the local cop shop. He informs me that he’ll have us there in seventeen minutes.”

The Mercedes left the curb like the shuttle from the launchpad. Sinking into the seat, Chapel hoped the German government’s accommodation might extend past prompt limousine service.

The German capital was a city of the living, a vibrant metropolis on an unending construction binge. Cranes chopped the skyline into hundreds of vertical slabs. Any building that hadn’t been newly constructed in the last two years had at least been renovated, repainted, sandblasted, or steam-cleaned.

Abruptly, the cityscape ended. A sparse forest combed with trails and dotted with ice-cream vendors pressed in on them. The Tiergarten was Berlin’s answer to Central Park, or to be historically correct, its antecedent by three hundred years. The car barreled down the Avenue of Third of June. The Siegesaule passed in a blur, Apollo’s chariot perched high on the victory column. Ahead stood the Brandenburg Gate. They slowed as they passed around it. Chapel glimpsed the Hotel Adlon, stomping ground of the Third Reich’s rich and famous, restored to its five-star glory. Another burst of acceleration delivered them onto the Unter den Linden, once Berlin’s most fashionable walking street, where Goebbels had ordered its famed oaks chopped down to make way for winged swastikas perched on stone columns.

The federal courthouse stared out over the Alexanderplatz. It was a large government building, one of Schinkel’s neoclassical masterpieces, complete with the imposing Doric columns, the monumental plinth, and the esplanade copied from the Parthenon. Lane led them inside. An elevator took them to the second floor. The floor was radiantly polished, hewn from Italian Carrara marble. The snap of their heels sounded every ambitious attorney’s charge. Lane opened an unmarked door and held it for Chapel and Sarah to pass by.

“He’s a piece of work, this guy,” Lane said. “Good luck.”

Without another word, he motioned them across the antechamber and into the judge’s chambers proper.

“Hans Schumacher told me all about the tape,” complained Judge Manfred Wiesel as he shut off the DVD. “He didn’t say it was this bad, though.”

“I’m glad you were able to see the threat,” Chapel said, buoyed. “It’s clear he’s talking about-”

“The threat?” Wiesel cut in. “Good lord, no, I wasn’t talking about the threat. I was talking about the quality of the recording. It’s worse even than my rabid colleague described.”

Wiesel was the presiding federal magistrate, and as such the point man for official intergovernmental legal requests. His chambers were straight out of Faust, an oppressive symphony of polished wood, dark velvet curtains, and lead-framed windows. “Let me see the motion,” he said, all but snapping his fingers.

Chapel handed over the papers. “I’m happy to report that the government has decided to freeze the Holy Land Charitable Trust’s accounts.”

“Have they?” Freeing a pair of bifocals from a tangle of wiry red hair, Wiesel turned his attention to the writ. He was fifty, a thin, dissipated man with an irritating sniffle. Finished reading the writ, he grunted. “This is it?”

“Yes,” said Chapel.

“All of it?”

Again, Chapel nodded.

Wiesel shook his head as if not only distressed but disappointed. “It is my job to determine the legitimacy of your demands with regard to German law,” he said. “I am not a clairvoyant, nor am I an oracle. The court demands facts, and facts alone.” He thrust the papers at Chapel and rustled them. “You tell me the man on that tape is making a threat. Personally, I think he is merely ranting. It might as well be an editorial broadcast on Al-Jazeera. While I can imagine that the tape might scare certain parties, I do not see it as a threat and I most certainly do not see what it has to do with the Holy Land Trust. Facts. Give me facts!”

Sarah stepped closer to Manfred Wiesel, offering him a schoolgirl’s demure glance. The Agency’s thumbnail sketch stated unequivocally that he was a womanizer. His court record favored female prosecutors over male nearly three to one. “If you examine account records from the Bank Montparnasse, you’ll see that the Holy Land Trust received money from the same account at the Deutsche International Bank that funded Albert Daudin. ‘Daudin’ was an alias used by Mohammed al-Taleel, the terrorist who took the life of one French and three American law enforcement officers two days ago.”

“How can you be sure Daudin and Taleel are the same person?”

Chapel wasn’t, but he had no intention of voicing his belief that Taleel and a second man-a man still on the loose-had both used the Daudin alias. What was important was that Wiesel be convinced that Taleel and Daudin were one and the same.

“Daudin listed the same phone number on his account as another of Taleel’s aliases, ‘Bertrand Roux,’ ” she explained. “Both accounts demonstrate remarkable similarities in the timing of deposits and withdrawals. It was in Taleel’s apartment that we found the videocassette.”

“Correct me if I am wrong, fräulein, but it says here that the digital tape was found embedded in the wall of the apartment downstairs.”

“By the force of the blast,” said Chapel, and Sarah shot him a killing glance.

“So you say.”

Chapel rose on his toes. “Your Honor-”

Again Wiesel cut him off. “There are no ‘Your Honors’ here. This is a court of the common man. ‘Mister’ will do just fine.”

“Judge,” Chapel began again, his effort at politeness costing him dearly. “The apartment directly below Mohammed al-Taleel’s is occupied by two female theology students, both French citizens, currently in Spain on their summer holiday making a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.”

“Could Daudin be Taleel’s roommate?” persisted Wiesel. “Is it not common for roommates to share a phone?”

Sarah waved Chapel down. “Taleel had no roommate. Even so, if Daudin were a roommate, he would still be a material witness to the crime,” she argued persuasively. “If nothing else, we would have every right to detain and question him. Given the nature of the crime and what we know about how terrorists operate, we’d look at him as a coconspirator.”

“Yes, but to what crime?”

It was too much. The purposeful obfuscation, the stubborn refusal to see the facts for what they were. “The murder of four damned good men, that’s what,” shouted Chapel as he threw up his hands. “Being party to a plan to commit an act of terror on American soil. Just what the hell do you think we’re talking about?”

“Supposition. Supposition,” Wiesel shouted back. His pale face flushed red, but his eyes were pleading, not angry. “I ask for facts, and you give me theories. I am not a fool. I can connect the dots as well as the next man. I know the picture you are trying to paint. Do you honestly believe that I am averse to your efforts?”

“No,” said Chapel.

“But you cannot march into my chambers and on the basis of such scant and threadbare evidence demand that I order the Deutsche International Bank to open its doors to you and reveal the private financial history of one of its clients. This is Germany! We have a history of government intrusion into the private sphere. And I am not just talking about the Third Reich. You are too young to remember the seventies, but I am not. I was there. I lived them. Before Al Qaeda, and this group Hijira there was the Red Army Faction, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Brigadi Rossi. They bombed department stores. They robbed banks. They kidnapped industrialists and bankers, demanded ransoms, then shot them dead before they were paid, just to show they could. As terrorists they succeeded in one thing only-in terrifying the populace.

“The government mobilized its resources to catch them. Its goal was to establish a predictive model to help them outsmart and outguess the terrorists. To do so, they began this thing called ‘profiling’ that is so popular today. A man named Horst Herold was the mastermind. He asked companies to open their databases to him. He searched travel agency records, heating bills, phone bills, gasoline purchases. He set up cameras on the Autobahns to record license plates and entered every traffic ticket issued in the entire country into his all-seeing computer. He wanted to know how the terrorists traveled, where they stayed, what brand of car they preferred to steal-it was a four-door BMW, if you want to know-all to establish a ‘movement picture.’ It worked to a point. Horst Herold locked up the ringleaders. But people were uneasy. Herold knew too much about us, and I mean all of us. Citizens were being turned into gläsernen Menschen, glass people, into whom the State could look and learn all their secrets. The whole thing stank of the Nazis. Of the Gestapo. This was too much power in the hands of the State.”

Wiesel paused, circling his desk and settling into his chair. He drew a breath and fixed his eyes on Chapel and Sarah. His calm returned and with it his belligerent tone. “I won’t allow those days to come back again. We will have no more gläsernen Menschen. If you want me to show you the records, give me a concrete reason. Show me a crime has been committed.”

Chapel took a chair and set a copy of the writ on the desk. He felt frustrated, thwarted by the principles he was striving to uphold. What did privacy matter when lives were at stake? Why did an exception threaten the rule? If you were innocent, you had nothing to worry about anyway. Doggedly, he raced through the papers. Wiesel wanted a crime, fine. If lending financial succor to a bona fide terrorist wasn’t good enough, Chapel would find him another. He turned page after page, growing increasingly impatient. Suddenly, his eye tripped over a word and he went back a page. He read one paragraph, then another, and he realized the answer had been staring at him the entire time. “Software piracy,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Wiesel sat chin in hand, eyes burning into him, and Chapel realized the judge had been rooting for him to succeed.

“The Trust’s name first came to our attention in connection with an investigation into a Paraguayan company called Inteltech suspected of illegally copying, manufacturing, and distributing computer software. The company’s records showed that they were funneling profits to the Trust’s account.”

“Paraguay, the United States… when am I going to hear Germany’s name in all of this?”

“At the time, the case was brought to our attention by Microsoft. But a cocomplainant was SAP, who I believe is Germany’s largest software provider.”

Wiesel nodded reluctantly.

“By helping pirate copies of SAP’s software,” Chapel continued. “The Holy Land Charitable Trust is committing a crime against a German company. In essence, it’s stealing bread from the mouths of German workers. Piracy is a felonious offense, isn’t it?”

“Most certainly.”

“Well, then. Tell Deutsche International Bank to show me which of their clients is doing business with the Holy Land Trust.”

“Hand me the papers.”

Chapel sifted through the pile and selected the relevant pages.

Wiesel examined them thoroughly. Drawing a pen from his robes, he executed a flamboyant signature on the writ and handed it to his assistant. “Done,” he said. “Theft of intellectual property is a crime we do not tolerate in this country.”