The Devil's Banker (17 page)

“Okay,” he said, selecting the uppermost page. “Here we go. July of this year. Beginning account balance: one thousand five hundred euros—about the equivalent value in U.S. dollars. Cash deposit via ATM on the first of July of five thousand euros. Next day he writes the check to Azema for fifteen hundred.” He dragged a nail down the page. “Check clears on the eighth. What else? ATM, ATM, ATM. Withdraw seven hundred euros. Again seven hundred.” His eyes ran up and down the summary. “Looks like every five days Mr. Taleel helps himself to seven hundred euros. Probably his daily limit. A total of five withdrawals for three thousand five hundred euros. Ending balance, Miss Churchill?”

“Fifteen hundred euros.”

“Like clockwork.” Chapel raised his eyes to hers. “Pros. No messing around. Next month, please.” He read from the top again. “June. Beginning balance: fifteen hundred euros. Cash deposit via ATM on the first of the month of five thousand euros—” Here he stopped. “Sarah, ask Mrs. Puidoux for a map of the city and a list of all the bank’s ATMs. And see if it’s possible to find out what time Taleel made the withdrawals.”

Sarah stepped from the room as Chapel recommenced his examination of the statements. Each month’s statement read the same as the last. The initial cash deposit, the single check written on the account, the five cash withdrawals, each for seven hundred euros. The guy was a machine.

“She’ll bring up a map in a few minutes,” Sarah said when she returned. “We’re to write down each ATM’s unit number and she’ll provide us with its address. She’s getting on to records about the time of his withdrawals, but she doubts they’ll have anything farther back than a year. Anything new?”

“Nada. Here, take these.” Chapel handed her a dozen statements. “Let me know if you see anything out of the ordinary. God forbid our man actually wrote two checks in one month, or better yet, received a wire transfer from somewhere.”

“He’s good, isn’t he?” It was a lament.

“Never steps into a branch. Lives on cash. Entirely self-contained. The trail begins and ends with the account. What did Ricard say? He’s perfect.”

“The invisible client.”

Chapel’s eyes flared, and as if challenged, he spun to face her. “No one is invisible.”

Thirty minutes later they’d finished running through Taleel’s statements. In twenty-four months, he’d varied from practice exactly twice. In March of the preceding year, instead of waiting five days between cash withdrawals, he’d hurried up and taken out the thirty-five hundred over five consecutive days at the beginning of the month. Sarah suggested he’d gone out of town and a surrogate was making the withdrawals for him. Neither of them, however, was ready to hazard a guess as to what the money was for. Carefully, Chapel noted the ATM codes for the March withdrawals.

The second exception was more recent. A month earlier he’d made two withdrawals for a thousand euros each.

If there was to be a surprise, he had hoped to find it on Taleel’s initial account statement. If the opening deposit had been made via wire transfer, it would allow Chapel to see where the money had come from. A glimpse behind the curtain. From there he could establish a trail from bank to bank—a golden thread, as it were. Again, he was disappointed. The opening deposit was made via an over-the-counter money order, an anonymous instrument that paid the bearer. Worse, it was bank policy to discard hard copy records of checks after two years. The physical evidence of the money order had been destroyed thirty days earlier.

“Pretty paltry living allowance,” he scoffed as he gathered up the statements and slid them into the file. “Five grand a month minus fifteen hundred for rent. Thirty-five hundred bucks in the big city doesn’t take you far. It’s hardly enough to keep your clothes cleaned and pressed.” Earlier in the week, he’d discovered that the cost for dry-cleaning a suit ran to twenty dollars. Shirts cost three dollars a pop, and slacks five. “It certainly isn’t enough for hundred-dollar manicures. No, sir. I don’t buy it. Not at all enough do-re-mi for Mr. Eighteen-Karat Rolex Daytona.”

Yet, he wasn’t half so disappointed as his tone indicated. He hadn’t expected Taleel to leave a clue behind. His quarry was better than that. In a strange fashion, he was pleased by Taleel’s discipline. It was important that his friends hadn’t been killed by a dime-store Charlie with his shoes untied. At the same time, he was beginning to get a feel for him, for his organization. Often, you learned more about somebody by what they
didn’t do
.

“It’s not his spending money,” declared Sarah. “I’d wager that the withdrawals represent his operational expenses. The funding he receives to keep the cell running. He’s following a schedule, making his meets, handing over their allowance.”

Cells, operatives, meets.
The words belonged to Sarah’s lexicon, not Chapel’s. “Maybe,” he said. “From my end, it doesn’t really matter. It all spells out the same conclusion. He’s got to have access to more money. That means he’s got to have other accounts in the city.”

The map lay sprawled across the table, an army of red, green, and blue dots indicating the locations of the ATMs Taleel had frequented. The green dots showed where Taleel deposited his monthly allowance. The blue dots where he made his withdrawals. And the red dots, of which there were only five, where he withdrew the money in the one aberrant month of March, a year earlier. While the blue dots (withdrawals) were scattered over the entire Parisian cityscape, the green dots (deposits) were bunched much more closely together—twenty within the sixteenth and seventeenth arrondissements, the area just north and west of the Arc de Triomphe; the remaining four near the Cité Universitaire, far to the west.

The five red dots showing where Taleel, or as Sarah suspected, his surrogate, had used the ATM were clumped more closely again, all of them within a ten-block radius inside the sixteenth arrondissement. One of the machines had been used not only to make deposits, but on three occasions prior to that March, to make withdrawals.

To Chapel’s eye, it was a homing beacon.

There was a last piece of information to map. With a nail, Chapel flicked the top off a black felt-tipped pen and colored a dot at the corner of Rue Saint-Paul and Boulevard Victor Hugo, the Neuilly branch of the BLP—smack dab in the middle of that same ten-block radius in the sixteenth arrondissement—where on June 29, two years earlier, Mohammed al-Taleel, aka Bertrand Roux, had opened his account. Leaning over the table, Chapel drew a circle around all the dots in the sixteenth.

“Whoever was paying Taleel either lives or works somewhere inside that circle,” he said. “And whoever that person is, he’s the same guy who made the deposits a year ago March.”

“Why put cash into an account if you’re only going to take it out a few days later?” Sarah had left her chair and taken up position directly next to Chapel, so that their bodies touched and he could smell her scent. No perfume, she wasn’t the type, but he couldn’t mistake the tart sniff of French milled soap and the hint of vanilla that drifted from her hair. Or miss the faint scar tracing the periphery of her eye. She’d lost some battles, too.

“Don’t know yet,” he said. “But there’s a reason, you can count on it.”

Laying a hand on his shoulder for balance, she bent closer to the map. Her sleeveless-T draped loosely from her chest, allowing him a glance at one full, perfect breast. He tried to look away, but he hadn’t slept with a woman in a year. His eyes lingered, and he was unable to suppress the electric sexual current that warmed his body.

“Neuilly. That’s where he lives, huh?” said Sarah. “It’s a nice part of town. One of the ritziest, actually. Can’t you just see it? Taleel picks up his allowance. It’s burning a hole in his pocket, so he deposits his loot as quickly as he can. One month he walks north eight blocks. The next, east. Then, west. He thinks he’s being a clever boots. You need time and a bird’s-eye view to discern the pattern.” Standing straight, she sighed with frustration. “Now all we have to do is find every family of Middle Eastern extraction in Neuilly, bring them in for a quick once-over. Even if it were legal, it wouldn’t be feasible.”

As Sarah finished her words, the door quietly opened. Entering the client room with a martial stride, Madame Puidoux handed Chapel a single paper. “I’m afraid we show no accounts with the details you’d provided. However, we were able to come up with the times Mr. Roux used the ATMs. Only for a year, but I hope you will agree that it is better than nothing. Go ahead. Look.” She waited, her shoulders pinned back, her chin held at attention, not so much a victorious smile etched on her face as an arrogant smirk, which in France probably qualified as the same thing.

Scanning the paper, he was pleased to find a listing of the exact times that Taleel had visited the automatic teller machines during the preceding twelve months. A pattern was immediately discernible.

“He made his deposits in the afternoons between and five and six,” said Chapel. “And his withdrawals in the morning between seven and eight. Both are peak traffic periods. People mostly use ATMs on their way to work and on their way home. Looks like Taleel had a nine-to-five job.”

Again, however, Taleel’s record was imperfect. Chapel pointed to the notation citing a withdrawal of a thousand euros at two
A.M.
on the thirteenth of June of that year. “Madame Puidoux, can you tell me where this ATM is located?”

“La Goutte d’Or. Near Montmartre.”

“And this one?” The second of the thousand euro withdrawals.

“Also in La Goutte d’Or.”

Chapel knew the name vaguely as a haven for money-transmitting businesses. “
Hawala
heaven,” Babtiste had called it.

“Hardly the kind of place I’d want to be caught at two in the morning,” commented Sarah. “It’s a working-class area, mostly West Africans and Arabs. A lot of garment shops, jewelry stores. Head there at noon, it’s like walking around downtown Lagos.”

Chapel massaged his temple. “Lagos,” he said. “Two of our guys were killed there in June. It was a diamond buy. We still have no idea what exactly happened.”

“We know this: The orders came from here.”

“So this is where they’re based,” he said.

“It appears so.”

“No coincidences?”

“No coincidences, Adam. Not in this game.” She was staring at him and her gaze was forceful and inquiring. Was she challenging him? Appraising him? For a crazy moment, he thought she was seducing him, but then he knew it was himself, his own weakness.

Thanks were given. Documents collected. A few minutes later, he and Sarah were standing on the curb, surveying the parking lot that was Paris traffic at rush hour. They walked to the end of the street. In both directions, cars lolled in endless rows, bumper-to-bumper, engines conjoined in a miserable rumble, exhaust rising in the narrow urban canyons and forming a mustard-tinted cloud.

“It’s like they saw us coming a mile away and covered their tracks,” said Sarah when they’d reached their car.

“What did you expect to find? A neon sign pointing the way to his accounts?”

“Call me an optimist, but I wouldn’t have minded one nine-digit account number at a bona fide banking institution on any one of seven continents. At least we’d have a trail to follow.”

But instead of being put off, Chapel found himself seized by a prickly anticipation. He was basking in the glow of unfettered access to a suspect’s banking records. He could forget the rigamarole of subpoenas and writs, the constant wrangling with magistrates and judges. He could kiss the dreaded MLAT good-bye—the Mutual Lateral Assistance Treaty used to request information from a friendly government under which responses never, ever came back in less than ten days, and in most cases three times that long. Not only had the French government promised their cooperation, they were delivering.

“We know Taleel was making weekly payments to someone,” he said, “most probably the other members of his cell. We have a map of the ATMs he was using. You said there were between six and eight principal members of Hijira.”

“Of which two are dead.”

“Maybe so, but someone picked up the money from Royal Joailliers. I’m betting it was the person who was sharing Taleel’s apartment. Damn it, Sarah, someone was watching TV before he came in. Tell Leclerc to have his boys set up round-the-clock surveillance on the ATMs inside that circle and to put a man here at the bank. If anyone tries to access those accounts, we’ll know in real time. We can take him down.”

“Do you really think so? They’re smarter than that. Smart enough to figure out that your jump team was on to them. If they can outwit you, they certainly aren’t going to access a compromised account. That would be tantamount to turning themselves in.”

“Look,” he went on. “They’re here, Sarah. They’re operating in this city. We can hazard a guess that their paymaster’s holed up somewhere in Neuilly, and that the guy’s a wee bit complacent.”

“He sure as hell isn’t going to be complacent anymore. Not after losing two of his lieutenants and learning that the CIA had practically crawled up his posterior and infiltrated his organization. No, Adam, he will not be the least bit complacent.”

“Even so,” Chapel went on. “Taleel had to have opened more than one account in Paris. Ask me, I’d say he was working at least ten accounts at ten different banks. Maybe more. There’s no way he had ten aliases, ten different addresses, and ten driver’s licenses. I’ve never seen it. We’ve got the guy’s address, his driver’s license, his home phone. Somewhere he’s left behind his mark.”

“He knew better than that.”

“I’m betting otherwise.”

“And then?” Sarah threw her arms up, exasperated. “All this information about his moving money from place will take us only so far without someone to tell us why he’s doing it. We need flesh and blood, Adam. Someone to lean on. The numbers are fine for establishing a pattern of behavior, maybe even to construct a predictive model. But we’re past that. We’re into the endgame. They’ve made the tape. They’re not planning any longer. They’re doing.”

“People lie,” said Chapel. “They deceive, they mislead. I’d take numbers any day.”