“Because those guys up on the Hill were just too damned busy worrying about the civil rights of pedophiles and rapists, worrying about interest rates on credit cards that the voters use to buy wide-screen digital TVs to make them feel life is good. But those home-entertainment centers don’t seem to get C-Span. Nobody knows what’s going on, and that’s just how Congress wanted to keep it. Then they have the gall to ask us: ‘Why did they attack the innocent people? Why didn’t they go after the military?’ Well, the answer is, that’s a done deal, but no one took any notice.”
He picked up his mug and looked genuinely sad, the first time I had ever seen him like that. He seemed to be lost in his own world for a while until I cut in. “So now what?”
“Now?” The mug went down. “We’ve got the money. A billion-dollar down-payment. The problem is finding a way to fight these people. They don’t have anything to defend. It’s not like the Cold War, or any war that we’ve seen before. There’s no real estate to fight over, and the notion of deterrence doesn’t apply to these guys. There’s no treaty to be negotiated, no arms control agreement that’s going to guarantee our security. The only way we can deal with them is to hit them hard and fast and take them down. You know it’s crazy — only a few months ago, they were saying a hundred million for the Navy was too much…”
He paused and reflected. I wasn’t too sure if this was all part of the performance: George might be sad, but he still had a job to do. “But, hey, you can’t unring a bell, Nick. I’m here because I want you to work for me. For us. Nick Scott would be your cover name.”
I shook my head. “The deal was one job. You agreed on that.”
“Events have taken a serious turn these last couple days, Nick.” His voice was steely, his gaze level. “Al-Qaeda has upped the ante, these guys are just programmed for trouble. I can’t tell you how unless you commit. But I can tell you, this is the front page of the threat matrix the president gets to read every day. These are scary days, Nick. Yesterday’s ran to thirty pages.” He looked down at the table and traced a figure eight with his mug. “You know what? At the moment I feel like a blind watchmaker, just throwing the components into the case and waiting to see what works.”
I didn’t look up, because I knew he was waiting, his eyes ready to ambush mine.
“I need your help, Nick.” It was a challenge, not an entreaty.
“Things are good here with Carrie.”
“Are they?” He gave an exaggerated frown. “I don’t think she took it too well. She’s like her mom.”
The asshole. Divide and rule. He’d done it on purpose. I forced myself to stay calm. “You didn’t tell her everything, did you?”
“Son, I don’t even tell God everything. I’ll leave that until I meet him face-to-face. But, right now, I see it as my duty to make sure there’s a big fucking bunch of al-Qaeda ahead of me in the line.”
He stood up and turned his back to me again as he placed the framed picture back on the dresser. Maybe he didn’t want me to see how proud he was of the way he’d delivered his lines. “The secret of combating terrorism is simple — don’t get terrorized. Keep a clear head and fight back on their terms. That’s the only way we’re going to win this war — or, at least, contain it, keep a lid on it. But we can only do that if we take the battle to them, with every means at our disposal. And that’s where you come in, Nick. I need to stop the drains getting blocked — and fast. Do you want to know more, Nick, or am I wasting my time here?”
I looked at him and took another mouthful of coffee. “I’d like to know what happened to Zeralda’s head.”
There was a bit of a smile. “It came back here and was presented to his cousin in Los Angeles on a silver platter. By all accounts it kind of freaked him out.”
“What about the greaseball who was there with him? Was he the source? Is that why no one else was to be killed?”
“Greaseball?” He managed to complete the smile. “I like it. Yes, he was and still is a source, and a good one — too good to lose just yet.” The smile faded. “Nick, have you ever heard of hawalla?”
I’d spent enough time in the Middle East to know it, and when I was a kid in London, all the Indian and Pakistani families used it to send cash back home. “Like Western Union, but without the ADSL lines, right?”
He nodded. “Okay, so what we’ve got is a centuries-old system of moving money, originally to avoid taxes and bandits along the ancient Silk Road, and nowadays to avoid the money-laundering laws. A guy in San Francisco wants to send some cash to, say, his mother in Delhi. So, he walks into one of these hawalla bankers, maybe a shopkeeper, maybe even working in the money markets in San Fran. The hawallada takes his cash and gives the guy a code word. The hawallada then faxes, calls, or e-mails his counterpart in Delhi, maybe a restaurant owner, and gives him the code word and the amount of the transfer. The guy’s mother goes into the Delhi restaurant, says the code word, and collects. And that’s it — takes less than thirty minutes to move huge sums of money anywhere in the world, and we have no track of it.
“These hawalla guys settle their debts and commissions among themselves. In Pakistan, business is huge. There’s maybe five, six billion U.S. dollars sent back there every year by migrant workers just from the Gulf states. But only one billion goes through normal banking channels. Everything else goes via hawalladas. These guys work on total trust, a handshake or a piece of paper between them. It’s been going on for centuries, must be about the second oldest profession. It even gets a mention in the New Testament.” He gave me a wry smile. “Carrie’s mother is a very religious woman. You know the tale of Ananis and Safia?”
As if. I shook my head.
“Go read it someday. These hawalla guys were hiding money that they were due to give to Peter, so they were deemed sinners. And when they were confronted with their shame they just fell down and died.” There was a pause. “That’s what you did for us, Nick: you made Zeralda fall down and die. This hawalla network has been used to funnel money to the terrorist groups in the Kashmir valley. It’s been used by the heroin trade coming out of Afghanistan, and now it’s here, in the U.S.
“This is not good, Nick. Zeralda was a hawallada, and we reckon he’d moved between four and five million dollars into this country for terrorism in the last four years. You can be sure the legit banks are doing their bit now and cracking down on laundering all around the world, but with hawalla we can’t check accounts or monitor electronic transfers.
“Well, we’ve got to close it down. Al-Qaeda is retreating and regrouping its assets in both manpower and cash. We’ve got to turn off the faucet, Nick, and we’ve got to do that before al-Qaeda moves all its funds to safe harbors. Money is the oxygen for their campaign in this country — your new country. I say again, am I wasting my time here, Nick?”
I really needed room to think. “What happened to the cousin in Los Angeles?”
“Let’s put it this way: we didn’t stand in his way when he jumped on the first plane he could get out of the States. All he left behind was a few clothes, a pair of leather motorcycle gloves, a Qur’an, and maybe sixty pages of Arabic text off the Internet. All his accounts are frozen, but we’re not after his money. We want him to go spread the news of what happened to the other half of the transaction route. He’s back in Algeria, a very scared man, and much more use to us there than he would be sitting in a penitentiary.”
The coffee was almost cold. I took another sip to buy myself some more thinking time.
“See, Nick, you were the key. The key that switched on the power of terror. Bringing back that head showed these guys that for us anything is possible as well. They’ve got to know we’re coming for them, that they shouldn’t start reading any long books, know what I mean?”