The Devil's Banker

Chapter 2

It was the most god-awful frightening place she had ever been. Some parts of Jakarta came close. Jakarta with its garish slums, oppressive pollution, and packs of teenage muggers giggling with hostile intent. Macao had a few dark corners where you didn’t dare venture. And everyone knew about Rio, the gorgeous bad boys on motorbikes, streaking past with their razors at the ready. But here-the unremitting heat, the hostile stares, and worst of all, the burqa draped over her head and shoulders, baking her like a Christmas goose-this topped it all.

Her name was Sarah Churchill, operational designation: “Emerald,” and through her black gauze veil, she watched the target advance across the intersection. She could see that he was in distress, trying not to limp, compensating by standing too straight and puffing out his chest. Two days she’d been tracking him, up and down the mountain passes, a distance of sixty miles. She was hurting, too, but she’d be damned if she’d show it. Her feet were raw and blistered in their leather sandals; her legs fatigued beyond measure. A little while ago, her lower lip had cracked and she could feel a trickle of blood, salty and strangely reassuring, on her tongue.

A trio of Indian women clad in red and orange saris scurried across her path, and she mimicked their gait. The “second-class shuffle,” she called it-head bent, shoulders hunched, eyes fixed to the ground like a dog that’s been beaten too much.

Drawing in her shoulders, Sarah made herself shrink beneath the full-length garment. Her horizons seemed to dwindle before her and she bridled at her training. Blend in with your environment: the first rule of tradecraft taught at Fort Monckton, where all good little English boys and girls go to learn to be spies. Ever the prize pupil, she kept her back hunched and continued to hug the inside of the street.

She was too tall. That was the problem. You didn’t see many Pakistani women who stood five feet nine inches in bare-stockinged feet. Her height came from her father, a six-foot-four-inch Welshman. Her hair, a raven’s black and cut to her shoulders, was her mother’s gift, as were her sierra brown eyes. Her attitude, though, was all her own, and not subject to amendment or revision. She was determined, outspoken, and possessed a dangerous temper she could not quite control. Five years ago at IONEC, the Intelligence Officer’s New Entrant’s Course, she’d set the women’s mark for the fifty-mile hike, but when at her graduation ceremony her instructors called her their toughest recruit, she’d broken down and cried like a baby.

Her earpiece crackled with static. “Primary still visual?”

“He’s gone into the store,” she whispered. “Bhatia’s Gold and Precious Jewelry.” She spelled the name slowly, enunciating each letter just as the matron had taught her at Roedean. “It’s the bloody hawala, all right. Time to call in the reinforcements.”

“Give us a GPS read.”

“Coming up.” She found the global positioning device on her belt and hit the locate/transmit button. Within a second, the stationary satellites that comprised the Central Intelligence Agency’s proprietary GPS had established her exact latitude and longitude to within six inches of where she actually stood, and her altitude above sea level to within four. She’d been transmitting her location every hundred meters since she’d entered the bazaar. Taken together, the coordinates constituted a route marker for the cavalry, or in more dire circumstances, a path to get her the hell out of Dodge.

“Emerald, you are mapped. An A-team is moving in to clean up. ETA is twelve minutes.”

“Twelve minutes? He could be out the back and halfway back to Pesh by then. Damn it, tell them to hurry.”

The Smugglers’ Bazaar encompassed an area as big as the City of London, with half again as many alleys, roads, and lanes. Few of the roads were marked, if they even possessed a name. There were certainly no addresses. It had sprung up as an informal “gray market” trading in goods stolen across the Afghani border. Carts had given way to shacks, and now most of the stores were housed in sturdy concrete bungalows. A patchwork of dubious signs advertised the wares. Marks and Spencer. Maytag. Pringle of Scotland. Sony. And her absolute favorite: Sacks Fifth Avenue. Though wholly within Pakistan’s borders, the bazaar was treated as its own autonomous region. Crime was rampant. Thieves, pickpockets, and worse roamed freely, practicing their trade on the weak and unsuspecting. It was up to the victim to catch the criminal. Once he did, the punishment was up to him, too. If there was any rule at all, it was the harsh custom of the Pathan tribesmen who made it their home.

“Maintain visual,” snapped the voice.

“How’s the picture?” she asked. “Getting what you need?”

“Reception’s a little fuzzy. Keep still for a second. I need to reset the color balance.”

Sarah held still, staring out at the bustling street. Seven thousand miles away a technician was deciding whether the picture was too red or too green. The Sony microdigital camera embedded in her sunglasses was a gift from the boys in Langley. She liked to think of it as a “welcome to our side of the pond” present given upon her secondment from MI6. The Yanks always had the neater toys. The camera’s images ran to a transmitter in her belt that relayed both audio and visual signals to a spot station nearby. The spot station, in turn, sent the signals on to Langley. The boys at Langley had also given her a machine pistol, three spare clips of ammo, and a tab of cyanide tucked inside a neat little compartment where her wisdom tooth used to be.

“Give us a slow scan left to right.”

Sarah turned her head as directed, the camera capturing the same exotic imagery as her eyes: the mosque and its beautifully carved doors, the merchant stringing fresh offal in his front window, the gunsmith tooling a rifle barrel on the sidewalk, and finally, Bhatia’s Gold and Precious Jewelry, where she could make out a tall, lean figure standing at the far counter. Abu Mohammed Sayeed. “Omar,” for operational purposes.

But they couldn’t get the smell. The acrid whiff of long-tended fires; the spiced scent of lamb on a spit; the eye-watering odor of men who toiled and sweated in the one-hundred-degree heat and had not bathed in weeks.

“Close enough?” she asked. “Or would you gents like me to stick my head inside the store and say hello?”

“Negative. Just give us a walk-by. Nice and brisk. We can slow down the pictures on this side.”

Sarah crossed the street, dodging a howling Vespa, doing her best to keep to a walk. She was sure that somewhere in the Koran there was a hadith banning “righteous women” from running, just as the holy lessons banned them from everything else, except catering to the whims and desires of “righteous man folk.”

Stepping onto the raised walkway, she continued past the jewelry store, letting her gaze fall on the array of gold chains in the window. The doorway gaped beside her. Two guards with AK’s stood at attention inside. Surveillance cameras stared down from the corners. A portly Indian was talking to Sayeed. There were no other customers.

“Confirmed. Omar on premises,” came the voice in her earpiece. “Looks like he’s got some muscle in there. Keep it moving.”

For a quarter second longer she watched, then continued her promenade. At that very moment, however, there was a flurry of movement inside the store, and she stopped. It was a clumsy, jerky halt, a dead giveaway. And there she stood for one second… two-a perfect silhouette frozen in the doorway.

“He’s going in the back,” Sarah whispered. “I mean, the two are going together. So is one of the guards. Where are the bully boys?” she asked, desperation crowding inside her.

“ETA nine minutes. Do not jeopardize your cover. Proceed to the Tikram Mosque and continue surveillance from there.”

“Nine min-” Her rigid training cut short her protest. In her mind, however, she howled with frustration.

At the end of the walkway, Sarah stepped off the curb and stopped. The courtyard to her right was filled with automobile tires. Hundreds and hundreds of brand-new tires, stacked neatly upon one another, row after row, rising thirty feet in the air. Turning, she peered across the intersection toward the mosque. It would be safer to watch from there. An A-team was inbound. She knew what that meant: bullets, and lots of them. Abu Sayeed was not the type to turn himself over to the authorities and say, “Okay, Officer. I’ll come along quietly.”

“Emerald, this is Ranger.” A new voice sounded in her ear, calm, authoritative. Ranger. The DDO himself. The deputy director of operations. “Go on into the store. Take a look around.”

“Go in?”

“We wouldn’t want him to sneak out on us, would we? Not before the party starts. It’s a jewelry store,” he went on. “Have a look at a necklace. Buy whatever you like. Call it my treat. You can put it on my expense account.”

“I don’t think they take American Express,” she answered blithely, knowing that the banter was to relax her, to deceive her about the peril of his command. And make no mistake, it was an order. He was asking her to flit by her lonesome into a shop with the biggest underworld financier on the northwest frontier and a hardened terrorist associated with a group so secret, so rife with all manner of rumor, that no one even dared whisper its name-if it even had one-because until now, no one had wanted to acknowledge its existence. One supreme evil commander was enough for the world these days.

Across the street, a fierce-looking man was staring daggers at her. He wore a black headdress and a black dishdasha, and his beard hadn’t been cut in a decade. An Imam, she guessed. An Islamic cleric. The man refused to avert his gaze, lips trembling, eyes afire, his entire being a vessel of hate. Through the veil, she met his accusing glare, and from his obduracy, his anger, his bewildering disrespect of the superior sex, she drew the courage she herself lacked.

“Roger last,” she said. “I think I’ll have a look at some of Bhatia’s tat.”

“Good girl,” said Ranger. And Sarah thought that if he ever called her that again, she’d slug him in the jaw even if he was a crip. But by then it didn’t matter. She was moving, not thinking. She dodged the curtain of sparks sent up from the gunsmith’s forge. She grimaced in her private netherworld as she passed the coils of lamb intestines dangling from the butcher’s hook. Then she was inside the store, admiring Mr. Bhatia’s mediocre wares as if they were the Crown Jewels.

The money sat in a pile on a table in Bhatia’s private office. The Indian opened each packet with a barber’s straight-edged razor, then handed the bills to an associate to count. When he was finished, he grunted. “Five hundred thousand dollars, as you claimed.”

“The Sheikh does not lie,” said Abu Sayeed. A bountiful rain had doubled the poppy harvest. One ton of raw opium was Allah’s gift to Hijira: his benediction upon the holocaust to come.

“It is not easy to move such a sum,” said Bhatia. “How quickly do you need it?”

“Immediately.”

“Today?”

“Now.”

Bhatia’s grave features registered concern. “Where is the money to be sent?”

“Paris.”

“Hmm.” Bhatia’s eyes narrowed, and he mumbled a few words to himself, shaking his head. Sayeed knew it was a ruse, the Indian figuring how large a fee he might get away with. “It can be done. However, the cost for such a transaction is two percent.”

“One percent.”

“Impossible! No one keeps such cash on the premises. A bank will have to be involved. There will be borrowing costs. Overnight at least. Maybe longer. It cannot be avoided. And, of course, the risk. One and a half.”

Sayeed disliked negotiation, but in some cases, it was necessary. Five thousand dollars was a small fee to ensure swift delivery of money to Paris. Small, indeed, compared to the damage it would wreak. “One,” he repeated. He had his orders. “The Sheikh will show his appreciation.”

“How?”

Abu Mohammed Sayeed clamped his hand over the Indian’s, allowing his eyes to deliver the threat.

Four hundred seventy miles above the Indian Ocean, an Intruder Geosynchronous SIGINT (signals intelligence) satellite, tasked by the National Reconnaissance Agency to monitor mobile communications in the Pakistan-Northern India-Afghanistan triangle, responded to an emergency override command. In the freezing infinity of space, guidance boosters fired for a half second. Rectangular electromagnetic phased array panels minutely altered their attitude. In an instant, the satellite’s field of surveillance, or “footprint,” shifted forty miles to the north and twenty-two miles to the east, and centered on code name Emerald’s last relayed GPS coordinates.

Several minutes later, the satellite intercepted an open-air cellular transmission based in Peshawar with a respondent in Paris. Along with two thousand three hundred and twenty-nine other calls it had concurrently captured, the satellite’s transponders relayed the signal to a ground-based listening station at Diego Garcia, maintained by the U.S. Air Force’s 20th space satellite group. In real time, the listening station directed the signals to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, where the conversation was analyzed by a team of parallel-linked IBM supercomputers for any of a thousand “keywords” in one hundred languages and dialects. In.025 of a second, the supercomputer determined the call was of “strategic or military” value, coded it “urgent,” and forwarded a digital copy of the conversation to an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The analyst, realizing he was in possession of “real-time intelligence,” or information of an immediate strategic concern, phoned the deputy director of operations and requested a crash meeting.

“Sixth floor. CTCC,” said Admiral Owen Glendenning. “Get up here on the double and bring me a copy of the call.”

“So,” trumpeted Faisan Bhatia, reentering the office after a fifteen-minute absence. “Everything is arranged. The money can be picked up at Royal Joailliers. It is located at the Place Vendôme in Paris. Do you wish their address?”

“Of course.” Abu Sayeed smiled secretly. The Sheikh had informed him that Bhatia would use Royal Joailliers. Royal called itself an “haute joaillier,” meaning that nothing in its satin-lined showcases sold for less than ten thousand dollars. The cartels were their best clients-Colombians, Mexicans, Russians-and it was their practice to keep unconscionable sums of cash on the premises. When Sayeed had written down the address, Bhatia inquired if he would like to provide him with the recipient’s name.

“That is not necessary,” said Sayeed.

“Very well. The recipient must use a password to identify himself. In this case, a dollar bill will do nicely.” Bhatia slid a worn U.S. banknote across the table. “You will take it with you. As soon as possible, I advise you to transmit the serial numbers on the lower left-hand side of the bill to the recipient. When he presents himself to Royal Joailliers, he must give them the identical numbers in sequence. Only then will he be given the money. There can be no mistakes. It is agreed?”

Sayeed knew the rules of hawala well. The Sheikh had made use of the informal banking system for years to funnel funds to his operatives. “It is agreed,” he said.

“May I offer the use of my telephone?”

“I have my own.”

“Very good, then. You will join me for something to eat. If I may say, you look rather done in.” Bhatia clapped his hands, barking an order to an unseen consort. A moment later, his wife entered carrying a tray with two porcelain cups and a china teapot. A younger woman followed, bearing a goat’s head upon a silver platter. In the cloying, ninety-degree heat, flies swarmed the tray, attacking the staring, gelatinous eyes.

“Please,” said Bhatia, extending a hand toward the Pakistani delicacy.

But Sayeed was not interested in food. Glancing at the monitor that broadcast the interior of Bhatia’s showroom, he watched as a woman clad in a full-length burqa examined a tray of jewelry. She had been there the entire time he had been with Bhatia. The picture grew fuzzy as if losing reception, then snapped back into focus. A tinge of unease soured his stomach. The clock read 4:45. It would be 12:45 in Paris. He wanted to leave. He wanted to make the call. His brother would be waiting.

Abruptly, he stood. “The monitor,” he said, lifting his finger toward the screen. “It is a closed-circuit system?”

“No,” answered Bhatia proudly. “Wireless. New from Japan.”

Sayeed stalked from the office without another word.