“So you’re the money man?” she asked, without taking her eyes from the road.
“Is that what Admiral Glendenning told you?”
“You don’t call him ‘Glen,’ like everybody else? An American who prefers formality? I don’t know if I should believe you.” She laughed sarcastically, then said, “You’re an accountant, is that right?”
“That’s right. I was at Price Waterhouse.”
“Long time?”
“Six years.”
“How far did you climb?”
Chapel looked at her out of the corner of his eye, not liking the questions, the feeling that she was checking for any inadequacies. “Partner.”
“Impossible!” she cried, and her surprise almost made the years of misplaced effort worthwhile. “You must have worked yourself to the bone. I know, you see. My oldest brother works in the City for one of the snootier investment banks. He’s a partner, too, from what I understand. I haven’t heard from him in ages, except for his dreadful Christmas cards. Sends them unsigned. It’s his wife I feel sorry for: three children and no daddy, to speak of. She makes do with the paycheck, I suppose. He makes loads of money. Practically prints it, I hear. Then again, you can’t cuddle with a pound note, can you? Oh, well, we all choose our sacrifices. Still, I am impressed, Mr. Chapel. And now you’ve gone and traded one eighteen-hour-a-day job for another. Pity about the cut in pay.”
“No pity at all, actually,” said Chapel. “Money-”
“Next thing, you’ll have me believe you’re a patriot.”
When did that become a four-letter word? “And you?”
“Me? Oh, I do it for the travel ops. You know: Voyage to faraway places, meet exotic people, and-”
“And kill them.” Chapel finished it for her, remembering the old bumper sticker that had popped up after the Vietnam War.
“Actually, I just talk to them, try to get them to see things our way, turn them to our side. I like to think I’m a sane advocate of my country’s foreign policy.”
“And a patriot?”
Sarah took a moment to answer. “Once in a while,” she said slowly, deliberately, as if he’d seen a side of her she didn’t like. “And how are things going at FTAT? That’s who you’re with, right? Foreign Terrorist something-or-other?”
“It’s a mouthful,” said Chapel.
“Well,” she said, after a second. “Go on, then.”
“We had some big wins up front: a few major league money-transfer agents and hawalas; some charities ostensibly set up to send money to the Middle East for schools, food, medical care. All told, we froze around a hundred million in assets in those first eighteen months.”
“A hundred million’s not bad.”
“It is and it isn’t. People always talk about how it only cost the hijackers five hundred thousand dollars to mount the operation that resulted in nine-eleven. That might be true, but it takes millions to finance the system that bred those guys. The schools, the camps, the propaganda machines they’ve got turning twenty-four hours a day. Some of the bigger madrasas need a hundred grand a year to keep their doors open. And there are hundreds of those schools in Pakistan alone.”
“Expensive to brainwash an entire generation, isn’t it?”
“What gets me is that when we get inside these organizations and look at their books, we see that a lot of the money-and I’m talking five, ten million dollars-was going to medical supplies, relief funds, to building a hospital here and there. Legitimate works. But the rest was going to the Hamas regional security office or to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade to buy TNT for suicide bombers or AK-47s for the next generation of jihadis. You have no choice but to freeze it all.”
She was looking at him strangely, her head cocked, eyes scrunched up, a determined set to her lips. She was the cat who’d cornered the mouse and was deciding whether to eat it.
“What?” he asked.
“Why, Mr. Chapel, it sounds like you have a conscience.”
“So? That against the law these days?”
“It is in this profession.”
The car was fitted out for undercover work, equipped with a two-way radio, a Heckler and Koch “street sweeper” twenty-gauge racked beneath Adam’s seat, and a dashboard siren hidden inside the glove compartment. Sarah drove confidently, with attention and foresight, as if driving were her job and she was determined to be good at it. She barely took her eyes from the road, and Chapel used her bouts of sustained concentration as an excuse to take a good look at her. In the harsh sunlight, lines of wear spread from her eyes and her mouth, hinting at an inner tension. She was wound tight. Her cool and confident act didn’t fool him a bit. He could see it in the way she sat, too-back barely touching the seat, jaw jutting a half inch too far forward, eyes nailed in front of her. When she’d spoken at the embassy, her voice wasn’t just crisp, it was near military in its inflection. Even in the car, her hand movements belonged to a general delivering a briefing to his commanders. But a while ago, she’d asked him what he did for fun, and when he said train for marathons, she’d burst out laughing. With a supple hand, she’d freed her ponytail and stared at him, for the first time really looking at him, and her eyes had come alive with mischief and merriment and all the qualities she was not allowed to exhibit as an officer of British intelligence.
Only now did he realize that her manner was designed to camouflage what she’d learned to be a professional liability. She was a natural beauty, and she knew, as Chapel had seen firsthand in the business world, that beauty was not equated with smarts, savvy, or any of the positive traits she needed to get ahead in her profession. More than anything, she was competitive, and her diligently veiled ambition frightened him.
“And you?” he asked. “How’d you get him? I mean Sayeed. Or am I allowed to ask?”
Sarah considered his request. “A bit like how you get your bad guys, I suppose. Looked at where the money was going. Problem is, though, in Afghanistan there isn’t any banking system, I mean not like how we know it. It’s still nineteenth century over there-paper ledgers, doing sums on an abacus, the whole works. Audit trails may not lie, but what if there’s no trail to begin with. So you ask questions. You rely on people, even if they are deceitful and untruthful. When you’ve got to find someone in a hurry, I’d take a live source anytime.”
Chapel knew a lecture when he heard it. “And who was yours?”
“Who wasn’t?” she replied, like he’d asked a dumb question. “Information’s the national currency over there. No one’s got any money, but everyone’s got just the story you want to hear. In this case, we came across some reliable information that a lot of field workers were heading to Jalalabad to help harvest poppies for a foreigner, an Arab-Afghan like bin Laden. When ninety-nine percent of the population is destitute, someone who’s throwing money around like confetti sticks out like a sore thumb. Then we got lucky. We learned about a Pakistani banker, a former big shot with BCCI, in from South America, who was heading to the same area. He couldn’t pass through town without letting his old buddies know that he was up to something big. He insulted a lot of Al Qaeda fighters, calling them ill-focused. I heard that he used the word ‘scattershot’ twice, and called their attacks pointless.”
“How did you know he was hooked into Hijira?”
“We tracked him to Sayeed’s village in Jalalabad. No coincidences, Mr. Chapel. Not in this game.”
“Did you pull him in?”
Sarah shook her head and he could see the muscles working in her jaw, a tightening around the eyes. “We lost him at night,” she said with palpable disgust. “Place is like a sieve.”
Bringing the car to a halt at a red light, she thudded a hand against the steering wheel. “Anyway, that’s where we stand. Hijira’s about money. About focus. Of course, we’ve learned something new. They won’t let themselves be captured alive.” She looked at him, and when she spoke, her voice had dropped a note and was stripped clean of artifice. “Tell me, Mr. Chapel, what are they planning that they’d rather die than tell us?”