The Devil's Banker

Chapter 41

“You can’t be serious,” Sarah said, darting an incredulous glance at Adam Chapel. Her cheeks had gone white with a small spear of red in their center. “This isn’t some juicy secret we can keep; not some nasty rumor that’s best kept between you and me. I went along with you last night when you thought it best that we not call Glen. You were tired; you were scared. I can live with that. But this is something else entirely.”

They were driving beside the river Limmat, penned in behind a blue-and-white city tram. The river flowed to their right, the water a pleasant milk-glass green, boundaried by centuries-old buildings that rose in perpendicular harmony from the river’s edge.

“No,” said Chapel. “It stays with us. It’s our problem. We discovered it. It’s up to us to solve it.”

The tram slowed to a halt and Sarah braked late and hard. “Our problem?” Palm open, she knocked her forehead and rolled her eyes. “ ’Cor, blimey, he’s gone batty on us. Round the bend’s our Mr. Chapel. Never did have both feet on the ground. ‘Our problem?’ Who are you to decide? May I remind you that somewhere in our cozy little European theater of operations, there may be a man in possession of a very nasty piece of equipment and he may very well intend to convey that equipment to Mr. Albert Daudin, or Claude François, or whatever the animal behind Hijira calls himself. Adam, we know now what the five hundred thousand dollars was for… it was for a bomb. Not for plutonium. Not for plans. Not for a trigger. For a bomb. The bloody bomb, for Christ’s sake.”

“I understand,” he said, stiffening in his seat. Her gale-force onslaught left him feeling like a delinquent summoned to the principal. He knew full well what Sarah was talking about, and didn’t think she was exaggerating in the least. He’d been sitting next to her when she’d called her pals on the Israeli desk at MI6 and asked them what they had on Mordecai Kahn, full-time nuclear physicist, part-time consort of international terrorists. “Oh, yes, Mordy Kahn, well, that’s an easy one,” came the reply. “Director of Israeli Nuclear Testing Laboratory, linchpin of their development efforts, one of the doers, hard science and all that. Takes the theory, sees if he can make a toy out of it. Clever chap.”

Chapel’s hands wandered up and down his leg searching for something to do, and settled for fiddling with the air-conditioning vent. He wouldn’t back down. It wasn’t even a question of whether he wanted to or not. The issues involved might be bigger than him, but in the end it was as simple as telling the truth.

“You understand and you’re still willing to keep this between us?” she demanded.

“I don’t think we have any choice. Frankly, I’d say it’s our responsibility to keep it between us.” When she didn’t answer, he went on. “We can’t let things go south on us twice. We cannot let what happened in the Cité Universitaire with Taleel happen again. You know, find the guy, localize him, get ready to make the arrest, when, bingo, Leclerc shows up with ‘le swat team’ and all hell breaks loose. Only this time when the bad guy gets nervous and detonates his bag of tricks, he doesn’t take four men with him, he takes four thousand or forty thousand, or even more, God help us.”

“You can’t make that decision.”

“I don’t have any choice in the matter. Knowing what we know… what’s happened in the last couple of days… there’s no other decision to make.”

“No, Adam-”

“Listen to me!” He exploded, bolting out of his seat, facing her. “Someone tipped off Taleel. Someone tried to have me killed. Someone wants Hijira to succeed, and that someone is very close to us. One of us, Sarah. One of Blood Money. What are they going to do when they learn we know about Kahn? Hell, they just might tell him to blow up the bomb then and there. Forget about formalities. Any target’s fine as long as there are a lot of “crusaders” around, even if crusaders are ten-year-old girls and their baby brothers who don’t even know where the Middle East is, let alone why everyone over there hates us so much.”

Sarah took a breath and inclined her head as if it were time to bring a measure of rationality to the discussion. “All well and good, Adam, but there are others better prepared to handle this kind of thing… professionals well versed at dealing with any and all eventualities. They have technology to find these devices.”

“NEST teams?” Chapel scoffed. “From what I understand, they don’t work too well,” he said.

“NEST” stood for Nuclear Emergency Search Team, and referred to teams of scientists and weapons specialists operating within the Department of Energy’s Office of Emergency Operations that were trained to evaluate nuclear threats. After 9/11, NEST teams had fanned out around Washington, D.C, and New York City in anonymous vans equipped with the latest in radiation detection machinery to seek out rogue nuclear weapons. It was a decent enough idea, except that instead of finding any bombs, the teams ended up stopping every half block when the background radiation from the closest photo lab, pharmacy, or Circuit City set off their ultrasensitive alarms. There were a million sources of radiation in any urban environment: TV sets, tobacco products, X-ray machines, smoke detectors, building materials… the list went on and on. After storming their umpteenth TJ Maxx, only to discover a new delivery of digital watches (still in the box) equipped with luminous, and minutely radioactive, tritium dials, they packed it in. Next time, they would wait for a credible threat before mobilizing.

“It’s not for us to decide that. We will alert Glen. We will tell him our suspicions about Kahn and ask him to keep it as quiet as possible for the time being. Kahn’s gone walkabout, we’ll say. Yossi as much as admitted it.”

“And Glen will call Gadbois, and the word will be all over Europe in ten minutes.”

“It’s time we bring in the big guns. We’re Laurel and Hardy.”

“We’ve gotten this far.”

“And that’s as far as we’re going to get. You’re right, Adam. Your numbers are wonderful things. I’ll admit that it’s amazing the information you can get out of a set of figures. I’m a convert. Hallelujah and all that. Count me among your adoring faithful. But there is a time to call it quits.”

Chapel looked away, infuriated by her patronizing tone. Miss Churchill, the doyenne of the secret world, talking down to him as if he were some kind of well-educated rube, a circus act, massaging him with her belief in his theory of numbers. Turning his head, he caught her anxious glance and knew there was something else.

“You’re afraid,” he said.

“Damn right, I’m afraid.”

“No, I don’t mean afraid of the bomb. You’re afraid of the responsibility. You can’t stand it that the buck has stopped, and it’s pointing at you and me.”

“It’s too damn big, Adam,” she blurted. “I’m a spy. Great title, but it’s still just a job. Point me toward the bad guys, I’ll go. Tell me look and listen, I’m your gal. Tell me to shoot, you’re getting on tougher ground. But I draw the line at taking personal responsibility for a hundred thousand innocent lives. No, thank you. That’s the general’s job.”

The general. Sarah’s all-knowing father, R.I.P.

“The general’s dead.”

“Kahn could be headed anywhere,” she protested. “Madrid, Tripoli, Helsinki, the South Pole… who knows?”

“Oh, I think we know where he’s headed. You said it yourself at the embassy. There’s a reason the money was sent to Paris. Now we know what it is. It’s a payoff. Daudin or François, or whatever he calls himself, doesn’t like to stray far from the city. I’m thinking he’s got a business there, something that requires him to stay close to home. In Paris, he’s invisible. Part of the city’s fabric. On foreign turf, he sticks out. This guy’s got a serious comfort factor. He’s got his boys around him, his safe houses, his bank accounts spread around the city. Hundred to one, if Mordecai Kahn does have a bomb-if, in fact, he’s selling it to Hijira for three million dollars-the deal is going down in Paris. You can bet on it.”

Sarah was nodding. He’d won her over, yet he still needed to explain himself. Skimming a hand along the back of her head, he said, “I don’t want this gig any more than you do. You know what I want? I want to go back to my desk in Virginia, put my feet up, crack open a can of diet Coke, and get lost in my computer. I want my numbers. My sterile, safe numbers.”

The tram turned off the Limmat Quai at Centralplatz. Sarah floored the rental Mercedes, taking it around the large tram stop, through a series of tight streets, following the blue placards that showed the way to the Flughafen. They left the river and entered a tunnel.

“And so?” she asked. “Where now?”

“Find Mr. Claude François and we find Kahn,” he said.

“That simple?”

Chapel shrugged his shoulders. It wasn’t simple at all, but there it was. “Who do you trust?”

Sarah extended her hand and he took it. “I trust you,” she said, squeezing it tightly.

They left the car in the Terminal A parking lot with the keys tucked beneath the visor. At the ticket counter, they purchased three seats on the twelve o’clock flight to Paris. One for Chapel. One for Sarah. And one for the three boxes of files they’d taken from the Deutsche International Bank.

Once through passport control, they walked the length of the terminal to their gate and bought coffee and a pair of sausages. “Can’t visit Switzerland without trying the bratwurst,” said Chapel, taking a seat on a leather banquette.

“What about the chocolate?”

“I’ll get a bar to bring to Glen. A peace offering.”

“Sugar?” Sarah asked.

“No, I take it black.”

“Suit yourself.” She opened three bags of Equal and dumped them into her paper cup.

“Nasty,” commented Chapel, grimacing.

“Terrible sweet tooth. Don’t even get me started on toffee.”

“Bangers and mash?”

“Adore them.”

“Steak and kidney pie.”

“Lovely.”

“Fish and chips?”

“Yumm.”

“The Spice Girls?”

“Make me gag, but Robbie Williams is a cutie.”

“You are England’s rose.”

“I take that as a compliment, sir.”

A minute passed as the two ate in silence. Their flight was called and they traded looks to say, let everyone else get on board first. Chapel felt that something had grown between them, something more than just a night together. It was a pleasant sensation. They watched the last stragglers disappear into the jetway.

“Shall we, Miss Churchill?”

“By all means, Mr. Chapel.”

She stood, hefting the overnight bag onto her shoulder. Taking a step, she pressed her body against him and pecked him on the lips. “So how do we find him?”

“I’ve got to sit down with all this info, run the account numbers and the beneficiaries, through our database. Somewhere in here, we’ll find a hint, a trail to follow. We’ll start at the beginning. Daudin, or François back then, opened that account twenty years ago. He listed his date of birth as 1961. I’ll wager he was a damn sight less cautious back then than he is now. There’s a learning curve for terrorism, too.”

“What’s your guess? Who is he?”

“François? He’s a money man. A banker. A broker. Maybe a trader of some kind. Someone who knows the ins and outs of international finance. He’s got to be a pro, the way he juggles those accounts.”

Sarah walked toward the gate. “Takes one to know one, eh?”

“Something like-” Chapel’s cell phone chirped. “Hello.”

“Allo, mon ami,” said Leclerc. “And where might I ask are you?”

Chapel stopped in his tracks. “On the way to Paris.”

“I hope so. There’s someone here I think you’ll greatly enjoy meeting.”

“Who’s that?”

“Right now, I’m calling him Charles François. Ring a bell? You two know each other already. I understand you bumped into him at the hospital the other day.”

It couldn’t be, he thought. Not so quickly. “How?”

“Poor guy needed some cash. We nabbed him at the ATM in Neuilly. The one with three dots on it. Blue, black, and red. Felicitations.” The map. Leclerc was talking about the map of the BLP’s ATM locations.

“Where are you?”

“La Sante.”

La Sante. France’s most notorious maximum security prison.

“Leclerc, do not lay a hand on him.” He exchanged the strident tone for one of dead earnestness. “Please.”

“It’s too late for that. This is my town. We do things my way.”

“We’ll be there in two hours.”