The Devil's Banker (18 page)

“Then you’re a fool.”

The words stung more than a slap across the face. “I’ll prove you wrong.”

Sarah hid her disbelief poorly. Playing toss with the car keys, she shot him a loser’s glance. “What odds are you offering?”

“Odds?” He nodded toward the sea of traffic a block away. “ ‘Bout the same that you can find a way around this mess and get us to the Finance Ministry in, say, an hour.”

“Address?”

“Twenty-three bis rue de l’Université.”

She chewed her lip. “You’re on.”

Chapter 19

The trip took them fifty-seven minutes.

Sarah drove with furious concentration, her lips issuing a string of silent commands. Twice they barreled down one-way streets. Once they mounted the sidewalk to go around a stalled Citroën, scattering pigeons but no pedestrians. No fewer than six times did she disobey a red light. Chapel refused to protest, and for her part, Sarah was too absorbed to explain. Time was not the only matter being contested.

“Call Leclerc,” she’d said as they crossed the Pont-Neuf. “He’s got to have found someone who knows Taleel by now. Between the FBI and the Sûreté, they’ve a hundred bodies canvassing the neighborhood.”

“I’m sure we’d be the first to know,” said Chapel, surprised at her anger.

“Why are you fighting me?” Sarah snapped. “Don’t you want to put the finger on Taleel’s friends? Or does it have to be your way? By the numbers?” She tossed him the cell phone. “Just call him.”

She’d put her hair up into a bun, mumbling something about her neck being bloody hot. Her cheeks glowed with a dark warmth, but her eyes were cold and impossibly alert. At some point, a veil had descended around her, and Chapel felt as if part of her had left the car. He’d known her barely half a day, but a few minutes was all he’d needed to feel the power of her presence. When she was there, she was
there.
A force that would make any compass spin.

“Damn,” muttered Sarah. “There’s got to be someone who knew him.”

Chapel called Leclerc, who said they hadn’t found a soul who knew Taleel as more than a passing acquaintance. Chapel then relayed the information about Taleel’s propensity to withdraw money from ATMs in the sixteenth and seventeenth arrondissements, and Leclerc promised to have men at the addresses by midnight.

They arrived with a squeal of brakes, a wrench of the wheel, and a thud of the tires as the car breached the curb. The brass plaque at the foot of the broad limestone stairs read “Ministère de l’Économie, du Finance, et de l’Industrie.” A slim, earnest man in a pinstripe suit paced back and forth on the pavement. A chaotic wind played with his hair, but he kept his hands in his pockets, wrinkling his nose to keep his wire-rimmed spectacles in place. Seeing Chapel climb from the car, he dashed a few steps in his direction. “Hello, Adam. I read about the bombing in the paper. Thank God you are all right.”

“I have. Many times,” said Chapel, shaking the man’s hand. “This is Miss Churchill. She’s with our team. Sarah, may I present Giles Bonnard. Giles runs the shop over here.”

The shop in question was Tracfin, short for
Traitement du renseignement et action contre les circuits financiers clandestins,
or in English, Treatment of information and action against clandestine financial flows. Tracfin was not technically speaking a law enforcement entity, but an FIU, or financial intelligence unit. Its mission was to combat money laundering as a tool for drug traffickers, organized crime, and of late, terrorist organizations. To do so, it worked with the nation’s varied financial institutions—banks, brokerage houses, money transmitters, to name a few—seeing to it they enforced the country’s stringent money laundering regulations while gathering as much information as the law allowed them about their customers’ banking habits.

“I believe we’ve met.” Sarah extended a hand. “How are things, Giles?”

“Busier than ever.” Bonnard was unable to hide his curiosity. “Have you been working with the Americans long?”

“A temporary assignment.” Sarah captioned her answer with a forceful glance.
Shut up, Giles,
it said.
You’ve been indiscreet before. Don’t make the same mistake twice.
And again, Chapel got the feeling that there was nowhere he could go that Sarah hadn’t been before. He knew better than to ask what they’d worked on in the past. But why hadn’t she at least mentioned that she knew Bonnard, or that she’d worked with Tracfin before?

Because she’s a spy,
Chapel told himself.
She keeps secrets.
There was more, though he didn’t care to admit it.
Because she doesn’t trust you.

“So, Adam,” Giles Bonnard said as they passed through the black double doors that led into the ministry. “How can we help?”

“The terrorist who killed our guys had an account at the Banque de Londres et Paris. We looked at his records, but didn’t find much.”

Bonnard’s eyes widened, impressed. “BLP, they show you the records already? Usually, you need one warrant to make them talk to you, another to get inside the door, and the police at your side to make sure they don’t have any second thoughts.”

“Wasn’t as hard as that,” said Chapel. “They weren’t too keen on being known as the terrorists’ bank of choice. We need your platform,” he added, patting Bonnard on the back. “I’m finally giving you the chance to prove that your database is everything you say it is.”

“That’s why we are here. Our offices are upstairs. I will show you the way.”

In the best of all possible worlds, Chapel would only have to plug Taleel’s alias of Bertrand Roux, Roux’s address in the Cité Universitaire, his driver’s license, or phone number, into Tracfin’s database to see if the same information had been listed by an account holder at any French bank or its subsidiary, in France or abroad. France, however, being a democracy, held an individual’s rights inviolate, and his privacy equally so. The idea of a central database accessed by software that would allow Chapel to query the country’s four thousand some–odd financial institutions was considered anathema and roundly denounced.

What he could look for was an account bearing Taleel’s alias, or given personal information, that had been written up as part of a suspicious activity report, known in the trade as an “SAR,” or a cash transaction report, a “CTR.” Whenever one moved large sums of money from one account to another, sooner or later, no matter how exacting his precautions, he would attract attention. If Mohammed al-Taleel had ever erred in this country, a record of his blunder would be in Tracfin’s database.

As they zigged and zagged through the corridors, Chapel saw that Bonnard’s pace had adopted its own urgency, and it pleased him. The fluorescent lights were terrible, half of them stuttering, the other half burnt out. Doors with drizzled glass panes slammed shut and rattled. The henna carpet was worn through in so many places that he wasn’t sure which had come first, the carpet or the black-and-white checked tile beneath it. Chapel spotted a crack in the tiles, and another indeterminate flooring beneath it. The building was like a ruin. Dig down and you’d find the remnants of civilizations gone before.

To his right, he spied a large room crowded with carrels and PCs. Several men sat at the terminals, absorbed in their work. He guessed they were French officers come to the capital to plumb Tracfin’s database in the hopes of gathering evidence of wrongdoing against suspected criminals, much as he wished to do against Taleel. Chapel had one advantage over these men. He did not have to build a case. He simply had to find a name.

After another left turn, Bonnard leaned his shoulder into a doorway and waited as Chapel and Sarah passed him to enter his private office.

“We do it from here, okay?” Bonnard said, his urgency momentarily absent as he removed his jacket, dusted the shoulders, then hung it inside his closet. Chore completed, he slid behind his desk, and motioned for Chapel and Sarah to pull up chairs on either side of him. A few keystrokes later, he had logged on to his computer. “Give me what you have.”

Sarah recited the name, “Bertrand Roux,” then began to give his address, only to be halted by Bonnard’s outstretched palm. “One piece of information at a time. First we start with his name. We wait for results, then we proceed to the next item. Roux, Bertrand,” he repeated, then hit the send key. “He is French?”

“We assume so,” said Sarah.

Opening a drawer, Bonnard pulled out a packet of Disque Bleus and offered them around. “It takes a few minutes,” he explained, lighting his cigarette after Chapel and Sarah had declined. “The
Central des Donnees
was updated in ninety-seven using technology we bought on the cheap a few years earlier. They keep enlarging the memory, but the CPU stays the same.”

The specter of money laundering as a tool for organized crime had first demanded international attention in the late 1970s. With Colombian and Peruvian cocaine flooding the American and European marketplace,
narcotrafficantes
and their soldiers had to struggle, operationally and
physically,
to discover a means to dispose of the ton upon ton of Yankee greenback, French franc, German mark, and Spanish peseta their lucrative trade generated. In Miami and Marseilles, it was not uncommon to see certain olive-skinned gentlemen arrive at a bank’s staff entrance and unload duffel bag after duffel bag of cash for immediate deposit into their accounts. On the documents they filed to open their accounts, they listed their profession as “entrepreneur,” “gambler,” or “gentleman.”

The first legislation to combat such flagrant laundering required a bank’s customers to fill out a “cash transaction report” for every deposit or withdrawal over the sum of ten thousand dollars. The cocaine cowboys quickly found an easy way around the mechanism. “Smurfing,” or what was currently referred to as “structuring,” involved sending a few loyal soldiers to a legion of banks, each man depositing the sum of nine thousand nine hundred dollars. Flying low under the radar, so to speak.

Subsequent legislation placed the onus on the bank to know its customers. Efforts were made to train bank tellers to be on the lookout for activities that might tip them off to a client’s criminal activities. More effective enforcement tools were constantly being invented. In instances where a rash of illegal activity was noted in a specific neighborhood, law enforcement agents were able to issue geographic transmitting orders, or GTOs, lowering the reporting requirements in that area to amounts as low as seven hundred dollars.

But Chapel had learned that drug traffickers and career criminals were easy targets. You knew who they were. You knew what they did, and when they did it. Mostly, you knew that sooner or later they had to use financial institutions to get at their dough.

A terrorist was much harder to find. The reason was simple: They moved their money
before
they committed the crime. Until then, they were invisible.

“Nothing on Bertrand Roux,” said Bonnard, after what felt like an eternity but was only two minutes.

Sarah read aloud Roux’s address, his driver’s license, and his phone number. Each time, the response came back negative.

“Reverse the phone number,” said Chapel. “Read it off backward.”

“Pardon?” said Bonnard.

“It’s an easy trick. Guys do it all the time when they need to put down a fake number. Humor me.”

Sarah had lowered her eyes and a grim smile had taken control of her lips. He could read her mind as if it were his own.
The numbers won’t lead us where we need to be. We need bodies. Warm bodies.
At that moment, Chapel felt a shiver of dislike rattle his spine. He wasn’t certain what bothered him most. Her cool disdain. Her detached pessimism. Or just the way she was able to divorce herself from the events, while he hung on every word.

“Eh, voilà!”
shouted Giles Bonnard.

Chapel rocketed from his seat, but Sarah had beaten him to Bonnard’s side. “You’re bloody well kidding,” she said.

“I am not. Let’s see here.” Bonnard pointed to the screen. “A suspicious activity report filed June sixteenth of last year at the St.-Germain-des-Près branch of the Bank Montparnasse. The account belongs to Mr. Albert Daudin. The telephone number listed on our documents is the same you gave me. I read you the teller’s words. ‘Between nine and nine-thirty on the morning of Thursday, June sixteenth, Mr. Daudin entered the bank three separate times. The first time he was a customer at my window and withdrew four thousand five hundred euros. The second time, I did not see him. Later, I learned from Geneviève Droz, my colleague, that he had withdrawn also four thousand euros. The third time, he came to Yvette’s window (Yvette Pressy works next to me) and he withdrew again four thousand euros. When I spoke with my colleagues, we learned he had always used the same account.’ That is all.”

“What’s the threshold for reporting requirements in France?” Chapel asked.

“Five thousand euros,” Bonnard answered. “Clearly your man did not want to attract any attention.”

“Do we know what the balance of the account was?”

Bonnard searched the screen. “Doesn’t say. You’ll have to speak with the bank.”

Chapel scratched his chin. He knew he should be pleased, but the actions didn’t mesh with the discipline Taleel had shown before. Only an amateur would risk going into the same branch three times in a half hour. Bank Montparnasse had offices all over town. All Taleel had to do was jump a taxi ten blocks and he would have been safe. “June sixteenth,” he said. “What was going on then? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Last year? June?” Bonnard shook his head with disgust. “Of course you don’t remember. You don’t live in Paris. Me, I remember. I live outside of the city. I don’t have a car. It was impossible to get home. I had to sleep at the office three nights in a row.”

“What do you mean you couldn’t get home?” Sarah asked, but as Bonnard began to explain, a light went on behind her eyes and she began to murmur, “Yes, yes, yes.”

“A transportation workers’ strike,” Bonnard was saying. “The entire city was shut down. No Métro. No bus. That day the taxi drivers joined their brothers in solidarity. You have never seen such traffic. Your friend, Mr. Daudin, or Mr. Roux, or Mr. Taleel, whatever he called himself, he was in a hurry, and he was too lazy to walk. Case closed. Hold on while I check the name Daudin, maybe we find him somewhere else.” Bonnard typed in the name, then sat back, hands locked behind his head.