The Devil's Banker

Chapter 56

It always came back to the money, thought Chapel. If Hijira was running a cell out of the United States, it had to finance and support their clandestine operations. They had to rent an apartment, purchase a car, have a phone connected, utilities hooked up, water, gas, electricity. Each iteration demanded proof of identification, credit history, bank accounts, deposits. Gabriel had been planning his act of revenge for twenty years. He would not set up an operation on American soil without having a man on the ground. And so, inevitably, he had left a trail.

Follow the money and you find the man. It was as simple, and as difficult, as that.

Chapel swiped his credit card through the cellular pay phone next to the aft lavatory and dialed the private extension of a certain senior analyst at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The phone rang five times before a tired voice answered.

“Freedman.”

“Bobby, this is Adam. Listen up for a second and don’t say a word. This whole thing is a setup. Marc Gabriel, the man we were looking for in Paris, hacked into the Hunts mainframe and took control of their system. He fudged my account. Get last month’s tapes from Oglethorpe. Look at the bal-”

“Already got ’em,” Freedman cut in. “You? Hijira? It stank from the get-go. Man, you don’t have time to be involved in anything like that. You’re here twenty-four seven. I already called Glen and told him that I found proof that the system had been hacked.”

“You did what?” Chapel grimaced.

“I was the one who gave him the original information. I’m sorry, Adam. I was stunned, too. I know I should have waited, done some double-checking, but the heat of the moment, man. You know how it is.”

Yes, Chapel answered silently, he knew how it was.

“He’s on his way over to collect the stuff now,” Freedman was saying. “I figured I got you into the trouble, I had better get you out of it.”

“Admiral Glendenning is coming there?”

“Yeah. He was excited about the news. Just for the record, he told me he never bought into the fact that you were a mole, either. You’re lucky to have a guy like him going to bat for you.”

“Tell him you were wrong.”

“Tell him I was what?”

“Tell him you were wrong, Bobby. Tell him that I’m guilty.”

“What are you saying? I never make mistakes. That’s what set me off in the first place. I saw that-”

“Shut up, Bobby!”

A flight attendant eyed Chapel warily and motioned for him to keep it down. He was scaring the other passengers. Turning to face the rear hatch, he said, “When is the admiral due there?”

“Now. Actually, he’s five minutes late. What’s going on, Adam? What’s the big deal?”

Chapel weighed how much he might tell Freedman.

“It wasn’t Leclerc who called the police Monday and blew your surveillance on Taleel,” Sarah had whispered to him in the confines of Mortier Caserne. “Not General Gadbois, either.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. It was the same man who delayed the A-team from getting to me in the Smugglers’ Bazaar. The same man who ordered Frank Neff to arrest you. The same man who told Gadbois to keep you locked up until Monday. The same man who thinks I’m dead.”

Hours later, Chapel bridled at the suggestion. Her suspicions were too circumstantial… too crazy. “I need a favor,” he said, “and if Admiral Glendenning’s coming your way, I need it quick.”

“Hey, Adam, you’re freaking me out a little.”

“Just go with me, Bobby. Are you at your terminal?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Log on to INS.”

A moment passed. “I’m there.”

Chapel read off the passport number Gabriel had used under the name of Claude François to open the account at the Deutsche International Bank, and more recently, to fly to Paraguay, and asked that he check if François had entered the United States anytime in the past five years.

“Five years?” moaned Freedman. “You know how many people come into the States in one year? The INS’s system isn’t up to singling out a passport number. Give me something else, a date, a flight number, an address he’s staying at in the States. I need at least two identifiers or else we’re going to be here all day.”

Chapel closed his eyes. The joys of Boolean logic. “June last year.” The words came automatically. He’d never been quite able to get his mind around the series of urgent withdrawals made by Taleel from the Bank Montparnasse that were the subject of the suspicious activity reports he’d discovered at Tracfin. What had prompted Taleel to so flagrantly break with procedure? The defection from normal conduct was all the more glaring now that he knew what kind of man Gabriel was and the degree of discipline he demanded from his ranks. “Scratch François. Look under the name Albert Daudin.” He read off the passport number from his notes.

“Nothing.”

“Okay, then. Log on to Customs. Check under the CMIRs.” CMIR stood for Currency and Monetary Instrument Reports. Any visitors traveling to the United States were obliged to inform U.S. Customs if they were carrying more than ten thousand dollars in currency. Gabriel was a finance man. He was meticulous. He was exacting. He would know that declaring cash on arrival to the States did not sound any alarms or precipitate any actions. The information was filed in a bin to be entered into the Customs database at some future time, and most probably to be ignored. On the other hand, were Gabriel or any member of Hijira to be caught bringing in a large sum of cash, he would be arrested and his name, photograph, and (false) identity would be forever known to U.S. law enforcement.

“Again, nothing,” said Freedman.

Frustrated, Chapel sighed. Without some record of Gabriel’s entry into the United States, he had nowhere else to look. Chapel studied the information on his notepad: Gabriel’s passport numbers, his addresses, phone numbers, all of them false. Flipping the pages back and forth, he locked on two pairs of numbers. It was only then that he noticed that Claude François and Albert Daudin possessed sequentially numbered Belgian passports.

Belgian passports had long been a favorite of smugglers and terrorists due to the ease with which they could be stolen. In Belgium, the issuance of passports was not the domain of any single federal agency, as was the case in nearly every Western country, but the responsibility of over five hundred local mairies, or municipalities. As such, blank passports were often kept in less-than-secure locations: filing cabinets, wall safes, even simple desk drawers. On more than one occasion, thieves had simply helped themselves to a portable safe, choosing to crack it and take the contents at their leisure. Worse still was the laxity (until 9/11) with which authorities reported the thefts.

If Gabriel had two Belgian passports, why not more?

Chapel read off a third passport number to Freedman, raising the final digit from a seven to an eight. Amid the pitter-patter of Freedman working the keyboard, Chapel heard him murmur, “Here’s the big kahuna, now.”

Chapel jumped at the words. “Who? Is Glen there?”

“Just pulled into the lot. Analysts get to look at asphalt all day. You big shots get the Galleria. I gotta run in a sec-” Without warning, Freedman’s voice dropped an octave. “Oh, man… whoa, got it! Two years ago. June twenty-first. Mr. Gerard Moreau, arriving passenger, Geneva to JFK, declared cash amount forty thousand dollars.”

“Where’d he stay?”

“Hotel Richemond, New York.”

“It’s a fake,” said Chapel. “That’s the name of his investment company. He knew we wouldn’t check. What does he list as his home address?”

Freedman recited Taleel’s address in the Cité Universitaire. “So where do we go from here?”

“Run the name through the CBRS. Check for SARs and CTRs. Let’s see if Moreau’s got an account.”

“That’s a negative,” said Freedman after an agonizing silence.

“Try the IRS. That much cash must be burning a hole in his pants. See if there are any eighty-three-hundreds filled out in his name.” Merchants were required to fill out a Form 8300 for cash purchases totaling more than ten thousand dollars. Another tool in the fight against money laundering.

“Just a sec…” Chapel heard Freedman speaking on another line. “Yes, sir. I’ll be right over.” Then to Chapel: “It’s Glen. He’s at the entrance. I’ve got to sign him in.”

“Don’t go.”

“Adam, I’m not keeping the deputy director of operations of the Central Intelligence Agency waiting… oh, wow, look at this-you are the maestro, Chapel. Amazing!”

“What is it?”

“Moreau put down twenty-two thousand dollars at a BMW dealership in Falls Church, Virginia.”

“Who’s the registered owner of the car? If the dealership filed an eighty-three-hundred, they had to list a vehicle identification number.”

“Let me check, um, hold on…” Freedman’s voice developed an eerie whine. “No, no, this can’t be. What is this, some kind of joke?”

“Tell me, Bobby.”

“Gabriel’s some kind of wiz if he can do this.”

“What is it?”

“The car is registered to 3303 Chain Bridge Road. It belongs to Owen Glendenning.”

“Get out of the building, Bobby. Now!”