The Devil's Banker (30 page)

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.”

Chapter 33

“What time is the flight leaving?” Claire Charisse demanded for the second time. She held the phone to her breast, and motioned with her free hand in an emphatic manner for her assistant to hurry up.

“Two, I think,” he answered, flinching as if she were going to hit him. He was a shy, lumbering Liberian whose first name was Samuel and last name was unpronounceable. She hadn’t meant to scare him, but it was either that or swear, and Samuel was a born-again Christian.

“I don’t want your opinion,” she railed. “I want a simple fact. Look up the schedule and tell me what time the flight is supposed to take off. Global Trans can’t have too many cargo flights leaving Geneva for Angola on a Friday afternoon.”

Lips pursed in desperation, Samuel flitted through the flight company’s brochure. They’d sent it along with the reams of documentation the World Health Organization was required to fill out when shipping medical supplies across borders. “It is here, Madame Charisse. I am sure.”

“Look it up on the Net, damn it!”

Samuel froze as if he’d been slapped, and Claire was sorry that she’d lost her cool. It wasn’t like her, but then again these were hardly ordinary times.

“Two forty-five,” came the proud reply, thirty seconds after he’d sat down and punched in Global Trans’s web address.

“That’s better.” Claire exhumed the phone from the folds of her crimson pashmina wrap and placed it to her ear. She was petite and fine-boned, with skin the color of porcelain and raven black hair that fell in perfectly orchestrated layers to her shoulders. She had a temper and knew how to use it when necessary. She also had charm by the loads and knew how to use that, too. Both were requisite skills for her job.

“Hugo,” she purred into the phone, twirling a lock of hair with her finger. “We’ve got loads of time. If you could manage to have the cartons at the Global Trans desk at Cointrin by one, that would be perfect. Really, I don’t know how to thank you enough. Or Novartipham. You’re both wonderful. You’re saving lives and that’s the point of this, isn’t it?”

Claire hung up. Spreading her arms wide enough to embrace the entire world, she turned to face Samuel and the trio of secretaries huddled in the anteroom. “Mr. Hugo Luytens of Novartipham has generously donated two thousand doses of Coartem to today’s emergency flight. Who says the Swiss don’t care about anybody else but themselves? Three cheers for Helvetia and here’s to eradicating the last vestiges of malaria!”

Samuel applauded enthusiastically. The secretaries less so. Coartem was the newest and most effective antimalarial ever to combat the illness. Known as an ACT, an artemisinin-based combination therapy, the drug had recently been added to the WHO’s essential medicines list. It worked by localizing and killing the malaria parasite rapidly, allowing the patient a prompt and side effect–free recovery. With any luck, the drug would go a long way to saving the lives of the eight hundred thousand children who died of malaria each year in sub-Saharan Africa.

Claire bowed from the waist, doing her Sarah Bernhardt bit. “Isn’t getting any easier, is it, dears?” She coughed loudly and pretended not to see the concerned faces staring back. Opening a desk drawer, she snatched a cigarette and lit it. “Every girl deserves a reward,” she offered.

But Samuel wasn’t buying. “Claire, you are not to smoke,” he said, plucking the cigarette from her mouth with his long, tapered fingers. “Even you have to follow doctor’s orders.”

“Oh, damn you.” Claire Charisse caught herself. “Sorry, Sammy—
blast
you,” she said with the same mock despair. “I hate it when you’re right.” Instead, she handed her chipped coffee mug to him, the one her boyfriend had given her with the picture of the United States Capitol Building decaled on the side. “Another cup, if you please. They’ve yet to prove that caffeine keeps your white count down.”

Claire patted Samuel on the back and retreated to her office, where she collapsed into her chair. The workload was enough to bow the shoulders of a coolie. Somewhere lost in the riot of memos, files, and Post-its was a plaque bearing her name and title: “Director, Drug Action Program.” It was her job to keep in close contact with aid agencies in developing countries around the world and do what was necessary to see that they were able to maintain sufficient stores of what the WHO defined as essential drugs and medicines. Today that meant responding to a malaria outbreak in Angola and pestering her contacts at the major pharmaceutical companies to come up with the thousands of doses of the drugs needed to combat it.