The Devil's Banker (8 page)

You are a human being,
a voice scolded him.
And a Jew. You have every right.

Two blocks ahead, two cars entered the intersection from opposite sides and collided with one another. Glass shattered. Metal twisted. The drivers flew out of the cars, arms waving, hands gesticulating angrily. Kahn narrowed his eyes. The performance had begun. They hoped to catch him quietly, with a minimum of fuss and as little notice as possible. They would not wish to explain why their policy of targeted assassination had been turned on one of their own, or what drastic circumstances had demanded it be carried out in one of the more historically sensitive areas of the city.

He would give them no choice.

The taxi was closing behind him.

It was time.

Kahn wrenched the steering wheel to the right and punched the accelerator. The ancient Fiat hurtled the curb, the back wheels spinning free for a moment, before catching the dusty aphalt and screeching in submission. He only had a block to go. Images passed in a blur. A boy on a bicycle. Workmen digging a ditch. A vendor hawking oranges from a wooden bucket.

The voices on the radio barked like rabid dogs.
Do you have him in sight? Close the distance. Requesting order to fire. Negative. Hold. We can take him on the ground. Unit Two move in. Unit Four take Al-Ashram Road south two blocks.
Confusion. Panic. Then a change of tack.
Arm missiles. Lock on to target.

The helicopter hovered behind him. In the rearview mirror, he spotted a sniper seated in the open bay, legs dangling into oblivion, his rifle raised, its stock pressed to his cheek.

Faster. He must drive faster.

He skirted Jaffa’s main square, the site of an ongoing archaeological dig. The ruins descended three levels, showcasing successive Hellenic, Roman, and Moorish buildings dating from the third century
B.C.
In 231
B.C.
the Greek king Pompus, had housed his soldiers here. Wary of an attack by land, he had tunneled three hundred feet through the limestone cliffs to the harbor below to guard his retreat.

A tour bus was parked across the street. Students dressed in clean blue and white uniforms paraded to the ruins. He sped past them, pulling into the opposing lane of traffic. At the corner, he braked hard and pulled the wheel to the left. The car skidded and came to a halt. A curio vendor’s canopy shaded the driver’s side and the hood. The helicopter was no longer in view.

Kahn grabbed the rucksack. “Fire,” he spat at the radio. “Give the order, now!”

They were too scared. Too confident of his ineptness. He cursed their indecision.

Picking up his officer’s revolver, he shoved the snout out his window and fired a volley of shots into the air. The curio vendor scuttled into his shop. Across the street, the students scattered. He thanked God for the well-practiced survival of his people.

“Fire, missile three,” said a voice on the radio.

A scarlet sizzle burnt the air as a Hellfire missile dropped from its carriage and sped toward Mordecai Kahn’s car. The missile penetrated the rear window and exploded on impact with the dashboard. The force of the detonation lifted the car ten feet in the air and engulfed the car in a billowing fireball whose core temperature exceeded three thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

The watchers surrounded the car a moment later. Several tried to approach the inferno. They wanted to confirm their kill. But the fire burned too hot, and they kept their distance.

Sailing a fisherman’s skiff across the diamond-kissed waters of the eastern Mediterranean, Mordecai Kahn watched the plume of smoke snake into the bleached sky. He prayed the missile had not damaged the excavation site. Archaeology was his first love. Before he discovered numbers. Before the numbers turned on him and made him their captive. A stiff wind filled the mainsail and the boat picked up speed. He looked at his feet, where the rucksack lay on weathered wooden slats. He unzipped a pouch and took out a bottle of water, a bag of gummy bears, and a long-billed cap. Popping a few of the gelatin candies into his mouth, he turned his eyes to the sea.

He had bought himself three hours and not a minute longer. To a man who lived by the most precise calculations, it was more than enough time.

Chapter 7

In a leafy Paris suburb, a warm wind gusted through the burned-out remains of Mohammed al-Taleel’s apartment, sending a curtain of fine dust dancing through the air. Lifting himself off a knee, Sergeant René Montbusson of the French Sûreté’s evidence recovery unit turned his nose into the breeze and breathed deeply. He was happy for the relief. Eight hours after the explosion, the crime scene still smelled of seared flesh and scattered viscera, and it sickened him. As he looked around what had been the living room, it seemed that every square inch was coated with the victims’ remains. Medical technicians had removed the larger body parts, but scraps of flesh and muscle, and Montbusson didn’t know what, hid beneath every concrete fragment and hung from the walls like tattered pennants.

The blood—it was everywhere.

Montbusson sighed. Twenty years on the force and he still wasn’t accustomed to the sights, the smells, the textures of death. Frankly, he hoped he never would be. At mass each Sunday, he thanked God for the love of his wife and his two daughters, asked forgiveness for his sins, and prayed for the strength to make it through another week on the job. Tonight, however, the work was particularly grim, and he knew that if he stayed at it much longer, he risked losing his humanity.

Five men blown up in such a small, contained space. There were no words to describe it. He kept asking himself the same question: Where was God in this place? Though he thought himself a pious man, René Montbusson could find no response.

A flutter of white at his feet caught his attention. A piece of paper, hardly larger than a few postage stamps. Kneeling, he took a pair of tweezers from his pants and bent toward it. The tweezers dropped to the ground and he saw that his gloves were too smeared with blood to hold them. After changing the translucent, polyurethane gloves, he managed to pick up the paper. One side was white, the other, at first glance, multicolored. The edges were charred, but otherwise it was in good shape.

The same couldn’t be said for the apartment. The charge had destroyed every piece of furniture in the living room, blown out the windows and curtains, and blasted a hole in the floor as well as through the drywall separating the living room and bedroom. The first persons allowed on the scene, besides medical technicians, were the structural engineers. An examination of the building proved it to be sound. As a precaution, the engineers installed eight floor-to-ceiling braces in the apartment.

The ordnance experts had come and gone hours ago. A swab of the walls subjected to a handheld ion mobility spectrometer confirmed the presence of RDX and PETN, the two principal ingredients of plastic explosives. The vapor detection device also found the presence of ethylene glycol dinitrate, a chemical marker that identified the explosive as being “Semtex,” a product of the Czech Republic. The ordnance team estimated Taleel had used about a half-kilo of the professionally manufactured, and all too easily available, plastique to blow himself to kingdom come.

Standing, Montbusson raised the paper so that the light from one of four industrial-size paint-drying lamps brought in to illuminate the crime scene caught it squarely on its face. It was a map—that much he could tell right away. He could see the horizontal lines that denoted streets, a comma of green that indicated a park, and a ribbon of red and white that probably meant a section of freeway. He had more of a problem making out the letters. Dropping a hand into his jacket pocket, the forty-five-year-old crime-scene investigator fished out his bifocals and balanced them on his nose.
“—nt St. De”
Here the paper ended. A narrow expanse of blue curled across the bottom left-hand corner of the paper. Running through its center were larger, well-spaced, letters—
“m a.”

Carefully, Montbusson retraced his steps to his collection tray and laid the paper in a plastic folder, pasting a number onto it, and cataloguing the piece in his notebook as
“Remnant: city map. America???”
On a hand-drawn site map of the apartment, he placed a dot where he had found it, along with its corresponding evidence number.

A check of his watch showed the time to be eleven o’clock. Montbusson sat down. He felt tired, older than his years. Through the window—or rather the gaping maw where the window used to be—he viewed a chain of headlights negotiating the roadblocks and moving rapidly up the street. Strobes atop the cars spun blue and white. Mercifully, the sirens were silent. No doubt it was the American FBI’s own bomb blast specialists come to the rescue. He’d been told to expect them at any moment and to show them the utmost courtesy.

Montbusson stood, brushing the dust from his jacket. To think that the Americans called the French arrogant. The FBI acted as if they were the only competent law enforcement organization in the world. Fired by a sudden, passionate desire to do his job as well as he knew how—call it what you will, pride, patriotism, or a healthy sense of competition—he set about sifting through the rubble landscape with a demon’s eye. He had found little of interest. There were no clothes in the closets, no papers in the desks, no food in the refrigerator. Either the terrorist was planning on leaving soon or he used the apartment as a safe house. The only items of any intelligence value Montbusson had salvaged were a computer whose CPU looked like it had been run over by a Mack truck, a cellular phone crunched to the width of a stick of gum, and a few fragments from a handwritten notebook.

Step by step, he walked through the apartment, carefully lifting bent and mangled pieces of furniture, moving slabs of debris. Outside, a bevy of doors opened and closed. A chorus of loud, optimistic American voices rose toward him. He supposed he’d better go and greet his counterpart. Determinedly, he fixed a welcoming expression to his face, smoothed his mustache, and pulled his shoulders back. The Americans always stood so damned straight.

That was when he glimpsed it. A triangle of silver winking at him from the floor below. Curious, he advanced toward the “seat” of the blast, the exact spot where the terrorist Taleel had been standing when he had detonated the bomb, and looked through the hole into the apartment below. Only a cursory examination had been made of it, and a blanket of white dust coated the furniture. Squinting, he saw the swatch of metal again. It looked like an old transistor radio wedged into the wall. Hurrying from the room, he descended a flight of stairs and entered the lower apartment. Crossing to the sofa, he jumped onto the cushions and lifted himself on his tiptoes. It was a video camera. A very small Sony digital number. The viewfinder was missing, the lens was cracked, and the severe heat of the explosion had warped the casing so that it bent like a banana.

“Jean Paul!” Placing his fingers in his mouth, he whistled for his assistant to join him. In a matter of minutes, the two men had pried the camera from the wall without causing the device any further damage. Montbusson turned the camera around in his hands, seeking the on switch. A toggle controlled the apparatus’s actions. Switching it to VCR, he was surprised to hear the camera power up. He put an eye to the ruined viewfinder and pressed “play.” Immediately, a mélange of colors played across the screen, and though he was unable to make anything of it, he was thrilled nonetheless.

Cradling the camera, he left the apartment, only to walk squarely into the broad chest of Frank Neff, the FBI’s legal attaché to the American Embassy.

“Hello, René. Did you find anything?” Neff asked.

Montbusson displayed the camera. “It still functions. There is a film inside.”

Neff glanced dismissively at the camera. “That’s fine and dandy,” he said. “But what about the money? The five hundred grand?”

René Montbusson looked from Neff to the cluster of pale, expectant faces behind him. He had a terrible sensation that everyone knew something except him. Something very, very important.

“What money?” he asked.

Chapter 8

A faint blue light glowed in the office of General Guy Gadbois, chief of the General Directorate for External Security. Gadbois, a barrel-chested paratrooper, forty-year veteran of Algeria, the Congo, and too many brushfires to mention, lit another cigarette and stared at the blizzard of gray and white snow swirling on the television screen a few feet away. Though the tape had finished fifteen seconds before, he couldn’t shake his eyes from it.

“Again,” he said dully, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

“Oui, mon general.”

Gadbois sighed as his assistant rewound the digital tape. Though it was two
A.M.
and well past normal working hours, three other officers of the French intelligence service were also present. Two of the men came from the Arab Department, known inside the service as the “Midi Club,” as it handled information concerning Spain, Morocco, and the erstwhile French colonies of Algeria and Tunisia, as well as the Middle East. They were here to translate and to offer opinions that Gadbois knew in advance he would disagree with.

The third man came from the operations directorate, or the DST, the crazy bastards who had bombed the
Rainbow Warrior,
Greenpeace’s protest ship, in Auckland Harbor fifteen years back. It was he who had lifted the digital film from the evidence locker at the Sûreté’s headquarters. He was short and thin, and looked like he weighed less than a fully loaded pack. But he was tough, thought Gadbois, for whom “tough” was the highest accolade. Anyone who was still on his feet after such a blast, let alone operating with his faculties intact—well, he must have a head like pig iron. If only he’d cut his hair like any self-respecting soldier.

Without preface, the dark screen came to life. Fragments of binary data flashed on the screen in colorful erratic patches. Fifteen seconds passed before the first clear image appeared.