“Damn,” muttered Sarah. “There’s got to be someone who knew him.”
Chapel called Leclerc, who said they hadn’t found a soul who knew Taleel as more than a passing acquaintance. Chapel then relayed the information about Taleel’s propensity to withdraw money from ATMs in the sixteenth and seventeenth arrondissements, and Leclerc promised to have men at the addresses by midnight.
They arrived with a squeal of brakes, a wrench of the wheel, and a thud of the tires as the car breached the curb. The brass plaque at the foot of the broad limestone stairs read “Ministère de l’Économie, du Finance, et de l’Industrie.” A slim, earnest man in a pinstripe suit paced back and forth on the pavement. A chaotic wind played with his hair, but he kept his hands in his pockets, wrinkling his nose to keep his wire-rimmed spectacles in place. Seeing Chapel climb from the car, he dashed a few steps in his direction. “Hello, Adam. I read about the bombing in the paper. Thank God you are all right.”
“I have. Many times,” said Chapel, shaking the man’s hand. “This is Miss Churchill. She’s with our team. Sarah, may I present Giles Bonnard. Giles runs the shop over here.”
The shop in question was Tracfin, short for Traitement du renseignement et action contre les circuits financiers clandestins, or in English, Treatment of information and action against clandestine financial flows. Tracfin was not technically speaking a law enforcement entity, but an FIU, or financial intelligence unit. Its mission was to combat money laundering as a tool for drug traffickers, organized crime, and of late, terrorist organizations. To do so, it worked with the nation’s varied financial institutions-banks, brokerage houses, money transmitters, to name a few-seeing to it they enforced the country’s stringent money laundering regulations while gathering as much information as the law allowed them about their customers’ banking habits.
“I believe we’ve met.” Sarah extended a hand. “How are things, Giles?”
“Busier than ever.” Bonnard was unable to hide his curiosity. “Have you been working with the Americans long?”
“A temporary assignment.” Sarah captioned her answer with a forceful glance. Shut up, Giles, it said. You’ve been indiscreet before. Don’t make the same mistake twice. And again, Chapel got the feeling that there was nowhere he could go that Sarah hadn’t been before. He knew better than to ask what they’d worked on in the past. But why hadn’t she at least mentioned that she knew Bonnard, or that she’d worked with Tracfin before?
Because she’s a spy, Chapel told himself. She keeps secrets. There was more, though he didn’t care to admit it. Because she doesn’t trust you.
“So, Adam,” Giles Bonnard said as they passed through the black double doors that led into the ministry. “How can we help?”
“The terrorist who killed our guys had an account at the Banque de Londres et Paris. We looked at his records, but didn’t find much.”
Bonnard’s eyes widened, impressed. “BLP, they show you the records already? Usually, you need one warrant to make them talk to you, another to get inside the door, and the police at your side to make sure they don’t have any second thoughts.”
“Wasn’t as hard as that,” said Chapel. “They weren’t too keen on being known as the terrorists’ bank of choice. We need your platform,” he added, patting Bonnard on the back. “I’m finally giving you the chance to prove that your database is everything you say it is.”
“That’s why we are here. Our offices are upstairs. I will show you the way.”
In the best of all possible worlds, Chapel would only have to plug Taleel’s alias of Bertrand Roux, Roux’s address in the Cité Universitaire, his driver’s license, or phone number, into Tracfin’s database to see if the same information had been listed by an account holder at any French bank or its subsidiary, in France or abroad. France, however, being a democracy, held an individual’s rights inviolate, and his privacy equally so. The idea of a central database accessed by software that would allow Chapel to query the country’s four thousand some-odd financial institutions was considered anathema and roundly denounced.
What he could look for was an account bearing Taleel’s alias, or given personal information, that had been written up as part of a suspicious activity report, known in the trade as an “SAR,” or a cash transaction report, a “CTR.” Whenever one moved large sums of money from one account to another, sooner or later, no matter how exacting his precautions, he would attract attention. If Mohammed al-Taleel had ever erred in this country, a record of his blunder would be in Tracfin’s database.
As they zigged and zagged through the corridors, Chapel saw that Bonnard’s pace had adopted its own urgency, and it pleased him. The fluorescent lights were terrible, half of them stuttering, the other half burnt out. Doors with drizzled glass panes slammed shut and rattled. The henna carpet was worn through in so many places that he wasn’t sure which had come first, the carpet or the black-and-white checked tile beneath it. Chapel spotted a crack in the tiles, and another indeterminate flooring beneath it. The building was like a ruin. Dig down and you’d find the remnants of civilizations gone before.
To his right, he spied a large room crowded with carrels and PCs. Several men sat at the terminals, absorbed in their work. He guessed they were French officers come to the capital to plumb Tracfin’s database in the hopes of gathering evidence of wrongdoing against suspected criminals, much as he wished to do against Taleel. Chapel had one advantage over these men. He did not have to build a case. He simply had to find a name.
After another left turn, Bonnard leaned his shoulder into a doorway and waited as Chapel and Sarah passed him to enter his private office.
“We do it from here, okay?” Bonnard said, his urgency momentarily absent as he removed his jacket, dusted the shoulders, then hung it inside his closet. Chore completed, he slid behind his desk, and motioned for Chapel and Sarah to pull up chairs on either side of him. A few keystrokes later, he had logged on to his computer. “Give me what you have.”
Sarah recited the name, “Bertrand Roux,” then began to give his address, only to be halted by Bonnard’s outstretched palm. “One piece of information at a time. First we start with his name. We wait for results, then we proceed to the next item. Roux, Bertrand,” he repeated, then hit the send key. “He is French?”
“We assume so,” said Sarah.
Opening a drawer, Bonnard pulled out a packet of Disque Bleus and offered them around. “It takes a few minutes,” he explained, lighting his cigarette after Chapel and Sarah had declined. “The Central des Donnees was updated in ninety-seven using technology we bought on the cheap a few years earlier. They keep enlarging the memory, but the CPU stays the same.”
The specter of money laundering as a tool for organized crime had first demanded international attention in the late 1970s. With Colombian and Peruvian cocaine flooding the American and European marketplace, narcotrafficantes and their soldiers had to struggle, operationally and physically, to discover a means to dispose of the ton upon ton of Yankee greenback, French franc, German mark, and Spanish peseta their lucrative trade generated. In Miami and Marseilles, it was not uncommon to see certain olive-skinned gentlemen arrive at a bank’s staff entrance and unload duffel bag after duffel bag of cash for immediate deposit into their accounts. On the documents they filed to open their accounts, they listed their profession as “entrepreneur,” “gambler,” or “gentleman.”