“I miss you, dear.”
Glendenning sighed, needing her. “I miss you, too. How are you feeling?”
“Not so badly. We started the second round of therapy on Monday. I haven’t thrown up yet, so I suppose that is good.”
“And the pain?”
“I will see Dr. Ben-Ami later this week. He has promised me a miracle.”
“Three days,” he whispered. It was the countdown until he could hold her in his arms.
“Yes, my dear. Three days.”
“Have you chosen a dress? Remember, nothing too sexy. We don’t want to shock our esteemed guests.”
“Anything above the ankle shocks them. They are savages.”
“Now, Claire,” he admonished kindly, even as a part of him agreed with her.
“Really, it’s true. The way they treat women is insupportable… it isn’t fair.”
“They’re to be the president’s guests, so we must treat them with all due respect.”
“I should come topless. How typically French, they will say.” She laughed deliciously at her own humor. “Do you think they would let me in?”
Imagining her naked form, he repressed a decidedly ungentlemanly response. “You’d cause a diplomatic stir, to say the least.”
“It would teach them a thing or two.”
“Yes, my dear, it would.”
“I’m sorry you couldn’t stop over.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke, and the silence burst with the accumulated joys and frustrations of a long-distance relationship.
“Three days, my love,” said Owen Glendenning. “Be strong.”
“Toujours. À bientôt, mon amour.”
Chapter 27
The digital clock read 8:45 when Adam Chapel and Sarah Churchill finished examining the account records of Albert Daudin, aka Mohammed al-Taleel, at the Bank Montparnasse.
“Two steps forward, one step back,” said Chapel as he pushed his chair away from the table.
“What do you mean?” asked Sarah. “You wanted a lead, you’ve got it. I thought you’d be ecstatic. It’s the triumph you wanted. Paper over people. You even have me convinced. Bravo, Adam. You were right.”
“Germany.” He spoke the word with unabashed disgust. “The money was wired in from Germany.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“You’ve got no idea.” He shook his head, recalling the woes of a dozen previous investigations: the requests for information, the promises of cooperation, the neglected messages, the nasty missives that followed, the institutionalized lying. “America’s most closemouthed ally. We don’t talk to them and they don’t talk to us. Bilateral relations at their finest.”
“Come now, they’re not as bad as that. I’ve worked with the Bundespolizei several times.”
“Things have changed.”
Rubbing his forehead, he stared at the pile of account statements spread across the chrome and glass table. While the account had not proved to be the gold seam he’d hoped, it pointed an unequivocal finger in the right direction and brought them one step closer to Taleel’s paymaster.
On the first of every month, a numbered account at the Frankfurt Branch of Deutsche International Bank, a world-class financial behemoth with assets in excess of three hundred billion dollars, wired Mr. Daudin the sum of one hundred thousand euros and no cents. The statements went back three years without an aberration. Always the first. Always one hundred thousand euros.
As with Taleel’s account at the BLP, the money in the Montparnasse account was withdrawn primarily by ATM, according to a set schedule. The maximum daily limit was higher, however, set at two thousand euros. Until two days earlier, the balance of the account had stood at a healthy seventy-nine thousand and five hundred euros. Today it wobbled at an anemic five hundred. The remaining balance had been wired back to the Deutsche International Bank. Hijira was closing up shop. Endgame, just as Sarah had said.
Sitting on top of the stack were the original documents filled out to open the account. Two items had piqued Chapel’s curiosity. Daudin’s nationality, listed as Belgian, birthplace Bruges, passport number included; and his date of birth, the thirteenth of March, 1962. Taleel, though, had been twenty-nine and looked it. He could never have passed for a forty-year-old. The conclusion was inescapable. Taleel and Daudin were different people. Hijira had more than one operative in Paris. Was Daudin the man who had left the television on in Taleel’s apartment? Was he the man who had, in fact, retrieved the cash from Royal Joailliers? The questions fired a new urgency in Chapel. Immediately, he had phoned Marie-Josée Puidoux at the BLP to ask if Roux, too, was Belgian, and if he had indicated his date of birth.
“We need to get Halsey on the line,” he said to Sarah.
“Don’t be silly. Call Giles Bonnard’s opposite number in Berlin.”
“Germany’s not an Egmont country. They don’t maintain a financial intelligence unit. They’re real touchy about letting anyone look over their shoulders.”
In the early 1990s, despite the creation of many national FIUs, or financial intelligence units, it was clear that the specter of money laundering was growing in scope and sophistication. Criminals relied increasingly on cross-border transfers to spirit their booty from one corner of the globe to another. Too often, a single country working alone to isolate a criminal found itself unable to surmount the obstacles limiting the exchange of information between foreign law enforcement agencies. In 1995, leaders of the FIUs of five countries met at the Egmont-Arenberg Palace in Brussels to systematize the exchange of information between them-or, to put it in vulgar terms, to do away with bureaucratic bullshit that let criminals use the law against them.
Chapel dialed the chief of the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center from a landline. Waiting for an answer, he met Sarah’s eye and held it, daring her to reveal her true thoughts, her real emotions. She had dressed formally in a tailored navy suit and cream-colored silk top. Her hair fell loosely about her face, and she’d made a point of leaving it ruffled, a little wild. She might be a fashion editor who’d been pushing herself too hard or a socialite washed-out after a night out on the town.
Every glance awakened his frustrations with the slippery course their relations had taken. He wasn’t sure who she was, or what he was supposed to expect from her, or how, even, he was supposed to treat her. Was she a colleague, a rival, a would-be lover, or just a spy doing her job?
“Adam, this you?” It was Halsey, and his voice was pained with exhaustion.
“Sorry to wake you, sir. We’ve come onto something that might need your soft touch.”
“The sledgehammer is ready. What is it?”
“We’ve moved up the ladder a rung. We’ve identified a second player operating in Paris. He opened an account at the Bank Montparnasse under the name Albert Daudin. It looks like Taleel was sharing the alias to draw funds from the account.”
“Daudin. I’ll check out the name. What else can I do?”
“This guy Daudin was getting his money from an account at the Deutsche International Bank. A hundred grand a month’s worth. We’ve got the account number, the dates of the transfers, all that stuff. I’d like you to grease the wheels, see if you can convince our friends in Berlin to have a quiet word with DIB.”
As Chapel spoke, the door to the room opened and Leclerc slipped inside, no hello, no nod, no nothing. Taking a chair opposite them, he kicked one of his boots onto the table and shook loose a cigarette. Chapel turned toward the wall, putting a hand to his ear, though the connection was as clear as if Halsey were next door.