“Between you and me,” Yossi went on. “Find this guy, get our material back, and make him disappear. There’s a place you might check. Something we found on Kahn’s credit card. A hundred euros to an establishment called Cleopatre in Paris. We sent one of our boys over to have a look. It’s a sex club. Open only at night. Some kind of porn thing. Ever heard of it?”
“No.”
“Probably nothing. He had strange charges from all over Europe. Prague, Berlin, Madrid. Setting up his escape. Still, you might want to check it out.”
Coming from Yossi that was an order to get the hell over there.
“Maybe,” she said. There was only so much honestly between spies and she’d used up her quotient.
Chapel waited until George Gabriel had regained his composure to continue. “Your father’s name is?”
“Omar al-Utaybi. He calls himself Marc Gabriel. He’s an investor. His company’s called Richemond Holdings.”
For the moment, Chapel wasn’t interested in Gabriel’s legitimate undertakings. “What about Hijira?”
George Gabriel showed no surprise that Chapel knew the name. “It’s crazy,” he said. “I mean, the whole thing.”
“What’s the whole thing?”
“Nothing.” George Gabriel wiped at his eyes and took a few deep breaths. A stubborn stillness had settled over him. Chapel could feel the resistance building. Gabriel had been caught out once, but that was that. His breakdown had shamed him and now he was intent on proving that he was made of tougher stuff. “I’m a terrible son.”
“I’d say you’re a good man.” Chapel put his elbows on the table and craned his neck forward. “What exactly is your dad planning?”
George Gabriel crossed his arms over his chest and laughed to himself. “You’re good. You’re very good. You made me feel sorry for you, as if you and I might have something in common. You are clever. I’ll give that to you.”
“Listen, George… I can call you George?”
“Better than Hakim.”
“George, look… four of my friends died Monday afternoon. Good guys. Fathers-”
“Taleel was very brave,” George cut in, chin raised pridefully. “He gave his life for my father.”
“He was a-” Chapel harnessed his anger at the last minute. Emotion was their tool. “A lot more people are going to give their lives for your father whether they want to or not,” he explained as calmly as he could. “I know that much about your father’s plan. You couldn’t kill Dr. Bac. You couldn’t kill me. You know what’s right and wrong. Keeping quiet is no different from pulling a trigger. If your father succeeds in killing more people… I don’t care how many-one, ten, a thousand… you are as responsible as he is. If that comes to pass-if you sit here without raising a finger to stop it, I can promise that you are going to spend the rest of your life in a room a lot less comfortable than the one we’re in now. The rest of your life, George.”
George Gabriel squirmed, the boy in him now visible, protesting such callous treatment. “I didn’t do anything.”
“But you know,” Chapel said painfully. “You’re part of it.” He pointed at the door. “The French bastard out there is pretty sure you’ve been to a camp in the Middle East, and I don’t mean a math camp. Dr. Bac, she said you knew your way around a knife. You’re not a regular kid, George. Just the fact that you went to that camp could land you in jail for twenty years. This isn’t about your father anymore. It’s about you. You’ve got to make choices to help yourself. And don’t go shaking your head like that. Don’t ask me for time to think about it. You and me both know that Hijira is happening now.”
Gabriel stared sullenly at the floor.
“Does the name Mordecai Kahn mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“A teacher. A scientist from Israel?”
“No.”
“You’re sure? Maybe a professor.”
“A professor? No.”
Chapel bit back his disappointment. “What can you tell me, then?”
“Get real,” said Gabriel. “He kept everything secret. He told me what I needed to know, and that was all.”
“You’re his son. He shared his dreams with you. I don’t believe he kept it quiet.”
“All I know is that you were getting too close. That’s why I had to kill you.”
“Why you? He has other men.”
“Does he? Then you know more than I do.”
“Bullshit!”
“I am his son,” Gabriel shouted back. “It was a test. I failed it.”
“What’s your father planning?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me!”
“I don’t know.”
Chapel reddened. Somehow he managed to guard his calm. “You’d better know or you’re going to jail for the rest of your life. You may never leave this building again except for a ride to and from the courthouse for what I promise you will be a very short trial. Look around you. This is your life. You ‘get real.’ Let’s try it again. What is he planning?”
“We’re going home.”
“Where’s home?”
“The desert. Saudi Arabia. Where do you think? We’re Utaybis.”
“And that’s his plan? To go home. I don’t buy it. What’s his plan?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me!” Chapel slammed his fist on the table.
“Don’t you see?” asked Gabriel, angry tears staining his cheeks. “To get even! The plan is to get even!”
Chapter 44
Once in a while, even Bobby Freedman got tired. It wasn’t something he liked to admit. Freedman was a former Marine, a four-year team leader of Force Recon, who’d seen action in Panama and the secret war in Guatemala. He prided himself on his disdain for sleep, his ability to go hour after hour doing quality work while keeping his wits about him. But thirty-six hours at a desk was pushing the envelope.
Looking out the window of his third-floor office at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Freedman admired the sun as it crept over the horizon and lit the rolling hills of northern Virginia. It was his second sunrise of the shift. Since Adam Chapel had called from Paris with the information about the Holy Land Charitable Trust, Freedman had only left his chair to shit, shower, and shave. The only thing keeping him going was the knowledge that Chapel was doing the same thing on his end.
Chapel. The man was a maniac.
Rubbing the fatigue from his eyes, Freedman turned back to the monitor. He was “walking out” the accounts to whom the Holy Land Charitable Trust had sent money over the last twenty-four months. “Walking out” simply meant feeding the numbers into the witches’ cauldron-his pet name for the family of databases he regularly queried-and following each and every lead to its bitter end. He’d presorted the accounts by monetary value, investigating those that had received the most money first. In total, the Holy Land Charitable Trust had sent seven million dollars to fifty-six different accounts. So far, Freedman had looked at twelve of them.
Cracking the mini-fridge tucked beneath his desk, he retrieved an ice-cold diet Coke and guzzled half of it in a go. “Gentlemen, start your engines,” he said aloud, before burping monstrously. “Bring on lucky thirteen.”
Freedman placed his ruler beneath the next account number on his list and banged the numbers into his computer. A quick jaunt through the Currency and Banking Retrieval System identified the account as belonging to the Beirut National Bank and nothing else. Beirut meant terrorism, drugs, and mayhem. On to NADDIS, the Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System, and a reference to a joint FBI-Treasury CT investigation. But it was left to TECS, the Treasury Department’s proprietary database, to spit out the name of the account holder as Yassir Ibrahim a financial capo who specialized in raising funds for several well-known Pakistani madrasas-Islamic schools that advertised a virulently anti-Western curriculum.