For the rest of the world, the new message meant that the time frame had accelerated, and that the area in which the attack would take place had been narrowed.
…praise be to Allah and His foot soldiers. Give thanks to His prophet, Mohammed, and His soldiers of the jihad. Mighty are His works, and blessed be His name. After a perilous but courageous voyage, the soldiers are in place, even in the lair of the Great Satan, within the very walls of her house. The weapons of Allah are positioned, and the means of delivery has been secured, praise be His name. Within days the great terror will strike within the serpent’s house. Within days, one of her great cities, a city full of abomination and wickedness, will be destroyed. The great and holy jihad will be taken to the underbelly of the Great Satan. A great and holy day for Islam is at hand. All warriors on the path of Mohammed — peace be upon you. Reach for the sword, and strike down the Great Satan in her moment of weakness…
For everyone watching, there was one unanswered question. There were now four messages. Would there be a fifth? The only one who was truly hoping for another was Mahari. He was already a millionaire. A fifth message, and the accompanying fifth case of cash, would make him fabulously wealthy. He hoped there would be a hundred more.
Yousseff loved to tell the tale of how Ba’al and Izzy became Canadian citizens. Legal Canadian citizens. Perfectly, legally, legitimately Canadian. There were, in fact, many Afghani and Pakistani people on Yousseff’s payroll who were either already legal immigrants or in the process of becoming so. This had happened because of a problem that started the way most of Yousseff’s problems started. He had too much unlaundered money lying around.
The issue had developed for Yousseff in the early ’80s. Leon, his Canadian contact, insisted on paying with an occasional suitcase of Canadian cash. While the money was definitely more colorful, it was also more difficult to launder or use. Canadian dollars went nowhere in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The money could be taken every now and then to the Caribbean, to some bank or other in the Caymans, but that was risky, and the banking charges were inordinately high. At that time, the Canadian and American governments had been catching on to what was happening with the banks in the Caymans, and had started pressuring the Caribbean governments to provide the names and sources of the cash that was deposited in their banks. For that reason, it was an option that Yousseff had avoided unless he had no other choice.
Over the years, the Canadian money had started to accumulate. Yousseff kept it stashed in a mini-warehouse rental establishment in an industrial suburb of Vancouver, but all that ever happened with it was that he required more space to keep the growing collection of suitcases. He rented first one unit, then two. At three he bought his own warehouse, for which he was able to pay a small down payment in cash. All the monthly mortgage payments were paid in cash. But it was getting awkward. He desperately needed a way to launder his Canadian dollars.
By this time in his life, Yousseff had learned the three fundamentals of laundering drug money. First came placement — namely, moving the funds away from any direct association with the drug enterprise. Then came layering, or disguising the trail to foil any pursuit. The final phase was integration — making the money available again, with its occupational and geographic origins hidden from view.
It was the first and third steps, the placement, and then the integration, that were most difficult. He had solved the problem brilliantly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the USA. The Karachi Drydock and Engineering Company, the Karachi Star Line, the real estate and commercial ventures, and the submersible firm in California were all running so well that he hardly needed to intervene in their operation. Dollars were introduced into these companies in a thousand clever ways, always leading to apparently legitimate deposits. When the submersible business became too successful for comfort, Kumar had opened a corner store and service station business. Now Yousseff owned, through Kumar’s companies, 50 different gas station/corner stores in southern California. It was easy to introduce illicit cash into the daily deposits of such a company. The key employees were recent immigrants from either Afghanistan or northern Pakistan, and business was well under control.
Yousseff’s problem in British Columbia was that he knew no one other than Leon, who was far too unreliable and unpredictable for a serious business relationship. He needed Pashtun tribesmen, loyal to him, involved in businesses in British Columbia. One fateful day in the early ’80s, Yousseff walked into the Canadian Embassy in Islamabad with a simple question.
“How does one become a Canadian citizen?” he had asked. In the course of discussing that particular question, Yousseff found out about the “Investor Exception” that was part of the Canadian immigration policy. To his astonishment, if you could demonstrate a net worth of greater than $800,00 °Canadian, and were prepared to put $400,000 in Canadian banking institutions for five years, you were basically in. All you had to do was put the money into an investment account and forego the interest. It was an absolute Godsend, and meshed perfectly with Yousseff’s business strategy. In no time at all, he had convinced the Embassy that two individuals, Ba’al and Izzy, were indeed wealthy people, sophisticated real estate investors, and entrepreneurs, and yes, of course they would put up the money. Of course they would establish businesses in British Columbia that would employ many Canadians and pay many, many taxes. It took less than two years. Now Ba’al and Izzy were Canadian citizens, and the placement problem of the laundering cycle had been solved.
Taking a page from Kumar’s playbook, Ba’al and Izzy promptly started purchasing corner store/gas stations across the province and merging them to create a new company. These stores, especially those located at busy intersections, typically had high revenue and low profit margins. A typical stop at such a station might put $60 or $70 of revenue into company coffers. People would pay $50 or $60 for gas, then a little more for a drink, or a burger, or a carwash, or just a basic candy bar. Cigarettes? Even better, since most customers paid for those in cash. Many of their corner shops had a revenue in excess of $1 million a month. Much of the business was cash based.
Their mission became a relatively easy matter of folding illicit dollars in with regular business revenues, and making enriched daily deposits. They decided on a new name for the small but rapidly growing chain — instead of 7/11, they called the chain 24/7. The business grew rapidly, and branches sprung up outside of Vancouver, and in Kamloops, Prince George, Kelowna, and even Nelson. At the turn of the millennium they moved into Alberta, putting corner store/gas stations in Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, and Red Deer. A store had just been purchased in Saskatchewan. Each store was managed by a Pashtun businessman in the process of becoming a “Canadian investor,” pursuant to Canadian immigration policy.
Yousseff watched it all grow with delight, and was entertaining the vision of drawing Kumar’s stores northward, and Ba’al and Izzy’s southward, to meet somewhere in central Oregon. Maybe they could even put the stores in Mexico, so that they were selling merchandise through a chain of stores along the entire western edge of the continent. He had created the perfect laundry machine. And it was making him even more money, with absolutely no effort on his part.
“What the hell is it?” Ethan and his colleagues were asking themselves, as they stood around the finished product. The new device was sitting on a lift in the center of their shop floor. Halfway through its construction, someone had started to call it “the Ark” because of the way it was shaped, and the name had stuck. It had a base containing multiple layers of stainless steel, titanium, and molybdenum alloys. The base was elliptical, measuring 20 feet along the “x” axis and five along the “y.” The same layered alloys made up the “walls” of the Ark, which were approximately six feet in height at each end, decreasing to two feet in height at the center. The base and walls were uniform in their thickness. Kumar had said that there must be no deviation from the blueprints. With the multiple layers of metals, the base thickness was approximately a quarter of an inch. It looked like an incredibly large saddle, made entirely of metal. The interior of the container was even more complex.