The Devil's Banker (45 page)

The approximately eighty names that remained on the list were a diverse group: governors, senators, civic leaders, academicians, sports stars, actors, and big-money “friends of the President.” All had already been nominally cleared. Their names had been run through the National Crime Information Center and come back clean. Not a felon, crook, or convict among them. In theory, Fitzgerald’s brief was completed. To the best of his knowledge, there was no one on the guest list who might wish to physically harm the President. But the commander-in-chief had asked him to do a little extra digging. He didn’t want any Johnny Chungs sneaking on the guest list, snake-oil salesmen eager to get their two minutes with the President. “Buckskin,” the Secret Service’s designation for the President of the United States, did not sell coffee klatches in the Oval Office to finance his reelection, or seats to a state dinner. If there was dirt, it was Mike Fitzgerald’s job to find it. Already, Fitzgerald had had to scratch a prominent Arab-American actor who, unbeknownst to Hollywood, not to mention his wife, was keeping an underage party boy on the side.

Fitzgerald skimmed over the last few names. One in particular caught his suspicious eye. Picking up the phone, he called Blake Godsey, who’d done the actual case-by-case grunt work. “Charisse, Claire M.,” he said. “What the hell’s a Frenchie doing attached to Owen Glendenning?”

“She’s his girlfriend,” answered Godsey. “Whatdya think, Fitz?”

“What happened to
Mrs. Glendenning
?”

“Divorce. Pretty acrimonious, from what I gather. This is Glen’s first public soirée with his new squeeze.”

“What’s her story?”

“Mid-level bureaucrat at the WHO. Works out of Geneva. A real do-gooder. In charge of the Drug Action Program. Don’t worry, Fitz. I checked her out. Nothing recorded against. Oh, yeah, one thing . . . she’s sick. Cancer.”

“Cancer?” Fitzgerald rocked in his chair, watching the fan turn slowly above his head. He’d made his bones as a homicide detective working out of the Ninth Precinct in Boston. Suspicion was as much a part of him as the lingering limp from a childhood bout of polio. “How bad?”

“That I can’t tell you. Admiral Glendenning made a point of informing me that she’s taking chemotherapy.” Godsey read off the drugs. “Didn’t want any embarrassing moments. I think he was present when Mrs. Hersh had her . . . um, you know,
her thing.
”

“Yeah, I know.” Fitzgerald would never forget Mrs. Hersh’s “thing.”

Mrs. Hersh was, in fact, Mrs. Sidney M. Hersh, wife of the chairman of Hersh Industries, and the single largest contributor to the Republican party. Three months earlier, the Hershes had been the President’s guests at a state dinner given in honor of the Israeli prime minister. Mrs. Hersh was being treated for cancer, too—Stage III non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, as it turned out—but Mr. Hersh had forgotten to inform the Secret Service of her illness. Passing through the doorway to the Blue Room, where predinner cocktails were being served, the radioactive isotopes present in the drugs in her bloodstream set off one of several Geiger counters that were hidden in key locations around the White House. The alarm was hellacious. Bells clanging, lights flashing, agents beating it like hell to her location. Naturally, one of the younger guys got a little overzealous and took down Mrs. Hersh, all five-foot-nothing, ninety-one pounds of her, like she was a tackling dummy for the Ohio State football team. Worse, her wig came off in the fall. When she stood up, the first thing she saw in the mirror was her bald scalp and about fifty guests staring at her in horror. Not only was she a suspected nuclear terrorist, she was a bald nuclear terrorist. That was that. Good-bye, Mr. and Mrs. Hersh. Good-bye to all future donations to the Republican party.

“Get her oncologist’s number,” said Fitzgerald. “Call him up and verify. Otherwise, she’s good to go. Who’s handling the door tomorrow?”

“Cappelletti and Malloy.”

“I’ll have a word with them to make certain we don’t unnecessarily embarrass Miss Charisse.”

“You bet, Fitz.”

But Mike Fitzgerald made a mental note to greet Miss Charisse personally. He had a motto that had gotten him through ’Nam, homicide, and for the last twenty-some-odd years, the Secret Service.
Take nothing for granted.

“Let’s move on, then,” he said, dreaming of French fries and mustard and a glass of sour mash. “What do we know about this L.A. lawyer, Amir something-or-other? Looks like he’s been consorting with some pretty flaky types. . . .”

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!”

Chapter 57

It was thirty-seven years ago to the day that Admiral Owen Glendenning had led the action that resulted in his being awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Standing in the bedroom of his modest home in McLean, Virginia, he held the framed award, and in the day’s dying light, read the citation, trying to reconcile the amoral, duplicitous man he had become with the guileless warrior he had been.

“For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving as a SEAL team leader during action against enemy aggressor (Viet Cong) forces. Acting in response to reliable intelligence, Lt. (jg.) Glendenning led his SEAL team on a mission to capture important members of the enemy’s area political cadre known to be located on an island in the bay of Nha Trang. In order to surprise the enemy, he and his team scaled a 350-foot sheer cliff to place themselves above the ledge on which the enemy was located. Splitting his team into two elements and coordinating both, Lt. (jg.) Glendenning led his men in the treacherous downward descent to the enemy’s camp. As they neared the end of their descent, intense enemy fire was directed at them, and Lt. (jg.) Glendenning received massive injuries from a grenade that exploded at his feet and threw him backward onto the jagged rocks. Although bleeding profusely and suffering debilitating pain, he displayed outstanding courage and presence of mind in immediately directing his element’s fire into the heart of the enemy camp. Utilizing his radio, Lt. (jg.) Glendenning called in the second element’s fire support, which caught the confused Viet Cong in a devastating crossfire. After successfully suppressing the enemy’s fire, and although immobilized by his multiple wounds, he continued to maintain calm, superlative control as he ordered his team to secure and defend an extraction site. Lt. (jg.) Glendenning resolutely directed his men, despite his near unconscious state, until he was eventually evacuated by helicopter. The havoc brought to the enemy by this successful mission cannot be overestimated. The enemy soldiers who were captured provided critical intelligence to the allied effort. Lt. (jg.) Glendenning’s courageous and inspiring leadership, valiant fighting spirit, and tenacious devotion to duty in the face of almost overwhelming opposition sustain and enhance the finest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service.”