The Devil's Banker (35 page)

“Not at all,” said Maurice Ben-Ami, gesturing toward an empty examining room. “I’m happy to help. I spoke with Hugo Luytens at Novartipham. He says you’re making some real progress at the WHO. It’s the least I could do, to see you.”

Claire put down her purse and took a seat on the raised bench, nervously adjusting her skirt beneath her legs.

“These are the latest?” he asked, accepting the manila envelope from her. He threw the X rays on the light box as if he were dealing cards. “Let’s have a look, shall we?”

Sixty, sallow, with twenty-pound bags of coal under his eyes and a miner’s fractured posture, Maurice Ben-Ami looked as if he hadn’t left his offices in a year. His specialty was oncology, the branch of medicine concerned with the study and treatment of tumors. Staring at the X rays, he saw three knotty masses attaching themselves to the elbow joint.

“Hmm,” he grunted. “I had no idea the case was so advanced. Hugo didn’t mention anything—”

“Hugo doesn’t know. Our relationship is strictly professional. I strong-arm him into sending my patients drugs. He gets me doctors’ appointments.”

“What I mean is that you look too healthy.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“So you’re familiar with the prognosis?”

“Intimately.”

“And how are you feeling?” he asked, sitting down on a rolling stool.

“Not great, or else I wouldn’t be here.” Claire touched her elbow and winced.

“There, there.” Ben-Ami took her arm in his hands and gingerly worked the joint, his practiced fingers probing the afflicted area. “You’ve started your second round of treatment?”

“Tuesday.”

“No nausea?”

Claire flashed him her survivor’s grin. “Nothing a cigarette won’t cure.”

The strong, capable hands slid up the arm, massaging the biceps, the triceps. “Your hair is staying with you.”

She lifted the three-thousand-dollar wig off her head. Clusters of brittle, gray-white hair clung to her scalp. “Fooled you, didn’t I?” she asked, before repositioning the hairpiece. Ben-Ami smiled briefly, as if smiles were rationed. “Loss of appetite?”

“I was never a big eater.”

Finished with his examination, Maurice Ben-Ami frowned. “Strange. Usually, I can get some feel of the growths. Your arms feel strong. No deterioration in the muscle. The tumors seem to have shrunk.” He bent Claire’s arm to her shoulder and she stifled a moan. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she said, wiping at a tear. When she allowed her eyes to meet his, she appeared ashamed of her low tolerance for pain.

“One of the brave ones, eh? Good for you. It’s important to put up a good fight. So many people, after a cancer metastasizes—when they have bone mets like you—they give in to the pain. They give up. It’s a mistake. Our will to live is the strongest weapon we possess.”

Sighing, Ben-Ami rose from the stool and lumbered to the cupboard. He returned with two vials of clear liquid. “This might do the trick. Metastron. The newest stuff we’ve got.”

“Will it help the pain?”

“Takes a few days to kick in, but I think you’ll be happy. A third of my patients tell me they don’t feel a thing. Of course, it’s only palliative. It treats the pain, not the tumor, but it will add significantly to the quality of your life. Your appetite will come back. You’ll be able to enjoy your wine. I always like Fendant this time of year, or maybe an Aigle Les Murailles.” He raised a finger in admonishment. “But no more than a glass at dinner. Cut the cigarettes, too. They knock out your immune system.”

“And movement?”

“Your range of motion will improve. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t play tennis. Best of all, you should be able to sleep through the night.”

“Sounds wonderful,” said Claire.

Swabbing her arm, Ben-Ami opened a vial and dosed a syringe. It wasn’t a small syringe, the stuff of flu shots and tetanus vaccines. It was a large metal syringe, the needle a good three inches long, with the diameter of a ballpoint pen tip.

“You can expect some discomfort,” he said. “It’s necessary to administer the drug slowly.”

Claire winced as the needle entered her skin.

“This will only take a minute or two.”

“How does it work?” She already knew, but she needed him to talk,
anything
to distract her from the needle working its way into her muscle.

“Metastron? It tricks the bones into thinking it’s calcium and gets sucked up into the tumor. The active agent is strontium. The radioactive isotopes bind with the tumor and lessen the friction against the bone. Hence less pain.”

“Strontium?” A look of horror passed across her face. “Goodness, will I glow in the dark?”

“You’re thinking of strontium ninety, which is a by-product of nuclear fission—the stuff we get comes from spent fuel rods, nuclear reactors, that kind of thing. Metastron uses strontium eighty-nine chloride. It’s a different molecule.”

“But it
is
radioactive?”

“Mildly. All you need to worry about is that in five days most of your pain should have dissipated.”

Claire was more concerned about the shorter term. “How long will it stay in my system?”

“The half-life of the active radioisotope is fifty-one days. You’ll pass the debris by urination. The best part of it is that there are no side effects. You’re getting your life back.” Ben-Ami removed the syringe and pressed a cotton ball to her arm. “Dr. Rosenblum told me that you’ll be traveling soon.”

“Yes, this weekend. I’m flying to the States.”

“I’d like to schedule some X rays. We can do them now, in fact. In the next office.”

“I’m afraid I can’t this afternoon.”

“Tomorrow, then?” It was almost an order. “I’ll clear some time in the morning. Say, nine o’clock? I’m hoping to have some good news for you.”

“Can we say after the weekend? Monday morning?”

“Certainly. Anyhow, in the meantime, you may need this.” Ben-Ami scribbled a note on his drug pad. As to be expected, it was illegible.

“Thank you,” said Claire Charisse, rising from the bench. “It’s a great relief.”

Chapter 39

Leclerc sipped his coffee in the back-office operations center of the Banque de Londres et Paris. “How many men have we got on the street?”

“Twenty-six,” answered Dominique Maison, chunky, ill-shaven, a twenty-year veteran of the Sûreté.

“What happened to the other four?”

“Reassigned. There was a double murder in the Bois last night.” Maison shrugged by way of apology. “We need them to take statements.”

“We need them to watch these ATMs,” retorted Leclerc. “These guys are on the run. Anytime, they might hit a machine for cash.”

He didn’t believe it for a second. It had taken them all of two days to run through their leads. Rafi Boubilas’s information about the Holy Land Charitable Trust hadn’t yielded what Leclerc had hoped. He couldn’t care less if the account had been frozen. He needed names. People to roust. Men to seek out and interrogate. In his mind, he played the digital videotape incessantly, including the section that Gadbois and Glendenning ordered to have edited out on the grounds that it would provoke too much worry and inhibit the investigators’ proper functioning. The audio track had remained intact for a good fifteen seconds after the digital images had deteriorated. “You will drown in a flood tide of blood,” the man in the red-checked
khaffiyeh
and mirrored sunglasses had said. “Bodies will crowd the streets. Chaos will reign.”

As for Dupuy, the vaunted computer guru hadn’t been able to pull anything more than a few pages of gobbledygook off Taleel’s hard drive, though he was begging for more time to take apart an encrypted E-mail file he’d only just discovered. For all Chapel’s faith in bank accounts, he hadn’t come up with a damned thing that brought them a step closer to finding Santos Babtiste’s killer and learning what in the world Hijira had up their sleeve.

Frustrated, Leclerc shook loose a cigarette from a crushed pack of Gauloises. “All right, then, at least let’s make sure our guys are in the right place.”

The map indicating the location of the most frequently used cash machines sat on a table in the center of the room. Lighting the cigarette, Leclerc moved his finger from point to point, inquiring whether the police had stationed a man at each spot. “We need more men in the sixteenth arrondissement. Mr. Chapel is convinced it’s their base.”

“Chapel? The American? He’s not even a real cop,” Maison snickered, and Leclerc cuffed him on the ear. “Shut up,” he said. “He’s tougher than you, and a lot more fit. Just tell me who we have.”

Maison tapped a finger on the map. “Sergeant de Castille is here and Officer Perez a few blocks away.”

“What about here?” asked Leclerc, laying a finger at the corner of Boulevard Victor Hugo and Rue Saint-Paul: the Neuilly branch of the BLP.

“No one.”

“No one? Well, get someone over there in a hurry.”

A buzzer sounded and Leclerc said, “What the hell is that?”

All heads turned toward a technician seated at a console of small video screens.

“It’s your man,” said the bank’s director of technical services, eyes glued to the wall of glass screens. Most were dark. A few broadcast a line or two of text in fluorescent green letters.
Installation 212: down for repairs. Installation 9: cash needed.
“Someone is accessing the restricted account. Installation number fifty-seven.”

“Where?” asked Leclerc, rushing to the console. “Show me where!”

“Our branch on Rue Saint-Paul.” The technician hit a button and one of the video screens bloomed. “There’s your man,” he said, patching into the ATM’s software, taking a look at just what “their man” was up to. “Withdrawing seven hundred euros. Transaction complete. Uh, no, trying to get more cash. Sorry, pal, seven hundred’s the max for the account.” He adjusted a knob and the security camera zoomed in, showing not a man, but an attractive woman with fawn-colored hair pulled into a ponytail and wearing Ray-Bans. “I didn’t know you were looking for a girl.”

“We weren’t.” Leclerc picked up a two-way radio and contacted Sergeant de Castille, who was three blocks away, ordering him to move his ass as quickly as possible to Rue Saint-Paul and to instigate surveillance on a blond woman dressed in a navy T-shirt and a short white skirt. “I don’t know how tall she is,” he added, “but she’s got one helluva figure.”

A new voice squawked from Leclerc’s radio. “Captain, this is Michel Martin. I’m off shift, but I’m only a block away. Let me take a look.”

“Do it,” said Leclerc. “And both of you keep your eyes open for a tall male she may be traveling with. Young guy, buzz cut, strong. Be careful.”

“You want us to take them down?”

Leclerc ran the palm of his hand over his cheek. It would take him at least fifteen minutes to get to Neuilly, maybe more. Surveillance hadn’t turned out well last time they’d tried. He had little choice. “If she’s with the man, take them down. Otherwise just follow her. And okay, you are authorized to use deadly force—but
les gars,
only if necessary.”

Marc Gabriel crossed the street, dodging the scattered traffic to take up position on the sidewalk twenty meters behind his son. No longer was he a father. He was a soldier, a warrior carrying out the Prophet’s orders. There was no other way. He was not the only one looking for his son. The chances were simply too great that if captured, George would talk. And while George did not know the details of Hijira, he knew the fundamentals, the names of the bigger players. Perhaps most important, he knew that it was set to happen this weekend.

Gabriel quickened his step. A hand delved into his pants pocket and came out with a gold Mont Blanc fountain pen. With his nail, he flicked off the cap, dropping it back in the pocket. Then he cupped the pen in his hand so that the nib rested in his curled palm. It would be unwise to nick himself. Instead of India ink, the pen contained a concentrated dose of ricin, a deadly poison for which there was no antidote. How ironic, Gabriel thought. He’d always meant the pen for himself. He had no intention of falling into unfriendly hands.

Gabriel lengthened his stride. He stared at his son’s garments. The baggy pants, the shirt with the black man’s face, the American cap, were all taboo in their household and served to fuel his rage. There would be no time for words. No need. His son was a traitor and he knew a traitor’s fate. The jab would have to be quick. George had a mongoose’s reflex. The neck would be best. The soft flesh just below the jaw.

Ricin acted instantly. Within a half second, the nerves became paralyzed. The heart stopped beating a moment later. George would be dead before he hit the ground.

Ten meters separated them.

He heard George laugh, and the laugh galvanized him. If he had harbored any doubt about his intentions, or his ability to carry them out, the laugh quashed them. Nothing could be so amusing as to warrant such a carefree chuckle—not when you’d let down your father; when you had broken a promise to your family; when you’d betrayed your destiny.

Marc Gabriel slid the pen forward in his hand so that the nib protruded and glinted in the sun like a warrior’s blade. Fixing his jaw, he took a breath. His left hand rose before him like the arm of another man, a stranger, reaching toward his son’s shoulder. He brought the pen up and felt his body tensing, readying itself to deliver the killing jab.

“Hakim.”
He whispered his son’s true name.

The boy stopped on a dime.

“Stop! Police! Do not move!”

Before Gabriel could lunge, he was knocked to the ground. A pair of plainclothes policemen swept past, tackling his son to the pavement. A third man hit the girl at the knees, swiping her legs from beneath her. She yelped, and Gabriel saw her eyes stretched in fright an instant before her skull struck the sidewalk. A fourth man fought his way in, a canister of pepper spray in hand, and as George struggled, the policeman aimed it at his eyes and fired a blast.

“You are under arrest! Do not struggle! Keep still!”

A siren wailed. Horns blared. Tires squealed.

Scuttling backward on his hands and knees, Gabriel waited for the bite of the cuffs, the icy fire of the pepper spray. Incredibly, they ignored him. All eyes were on George. The police pulled the radios from their belts, talking feverishly to headquarters. Several ran into the street to wave down the approaching squad cars. No one had the least idea who Gabriel was.