America: the world’s policeman.
Mordecai Kahn allowed himself a rare smile, a raspy, mean-spirited laugh.
There was no way the Americans could be allowed to know. Not about this.
The Unit would be in charge. They always got the messy stuff: the operations that were either too politically sensitive or too difficult to execute for anybody else. Their official name was Unit 269 of the Sayeret Matkal, or the general reconnaissance staff. They’d made their name at Entebbe and in Beirut. Their history was colored with the blood of their adversaries, rarely their own.
By now, they’d questioned his wife, searched his offices at school and the lab, grilled his coworkers, his secretaries, his teaching assistants. They’d braced the base security officer, Colonel Ephraim Bar-Gera, with a view toward how a theft of this magnitude could occur. There’d be no general’s stars for Ephraim. They’d checked and double-checked their sensors. They’d changed the codes. They’d convinced themselves it would never happen again.
But Kahn was by nature a cautious man, if not made paranoid by his work. He had no intention of being caught, or in fact, ever heard from again. He had taken care to modify his appearance. His skin was darker by three shades. His hair was dyed an inoffensive brown and his beard shaved off altogether. He wore a businessman’s natty suit and had even remembered to snip the stitching holding his jacket pockets closed. He was nothing if not detail-oriented. He liked the horn-rimmed glasses best: Alain Mikli of Paris, slim, stylish, sophisticated. Either they took ten years off his age or they made him look like a queer clerk, he wasn’t sure which. He was only sure that he looked nothing like Dr. Mordecai Kahn, of late distinguished professor of Physics at David Ben-Gurion University, director of Quantum Research at Ha’aretz National Laboratories, and consultant to certain unnamed divisions in the Israeli Defense Force, too secret to mention, if, in fact, they even existed. The camouflage was complete down to the lifts in his Bruno Magli loafers.
While part of his mind occupied itself with the chore of driving, another spent its time constructing his pursuer’s investigation. His altered appearance would only go so far to shield him. The men seeking him out were determined and crafty. He did not know all their secrets.
He was certain that by now they had found the abandoned skiff and tracked his presence aboard the ferry to Cyprus. They would have had a harder time figuring which boat he’d taken from Larnaca, but through persistence, and maybe a break here and there, they would have learned that he’d boarded the tramp steamer Eleni bound for Athens. The locus of possible destinations multiplied at each point. And from Athens where? By train to Berlin? Budapest? By bus to Sofia? Another ferry to Crete or Italy? At each spot, the possibilities multiplied, the matrices grew more complex.
They knew only that with the package he could not fly.
The infinite array of his choices comforted him. If he kept to plan, if he followed the groundwork he had meticulously laid these last six months, he would be invisible. They would not catch him. The numbers did not permit it. Europe was too large a place, and the Unit too poorly staffed.
Yet, even as he drove, he could not rid his mind of the suspicion that somewhere or someplace during his rigorous preparation, he’d slipped up. He’d left a clue. It was a fear that kept him checking the rearview mirror when he should be looking ahead, the fear that had kept him awake all the night on the rough transit to Athens, the fear that even now, traveling at 100 kilometers an hour on a sunny summer day, laid a track of goose bumps along his arms.
He would be safe once he reached Vienna. It was a twenty-hour drive through the underbelly of Europe-Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia. Across isolated roads and deserted countryside.
Until then he was alone.
He was vulnerable.
He was a target.
Chapter 18
It had been years since Adam Chapel had sat in one of the plush conference rooms where bankers and accountants met their moneyed customers, but with the rush of familiarity it provoked in him, the recognition of the de rigueur symbols of wealth and privilege, it might have been a day. Velvet drapes framed the windows; the lace inner curtains remained drawn, allowing daylight to enter, while rendering the heart-stopping view over the city a blur. A subdued, but nonetheless magnificent, Persian rug covered a shopworn carpet. Prints of gentlemen riding to hounds decorated the walls. The only furniture was an antique mahogany conference table with clawed feet and the four Louis XV chairs surrounding it. Looking around, he remembered the pride he’d felt meeting with his clients. It was a child’s excitement of dining at the grown-ups’ table, the worker’s pride at gaining admittance into an elite club.
The door opened and a female executive entered, carrying a single accordion file. Petite, tight-lipped, wan brown hair pulled into a severe bun, she marched to Adam and Sarah, offering each a single, deliberate shake of the hand. “Good day. My name is Marie-Josée Puidoux. I am the bank’s compliance officer. I have with me all the bank’s records for the account in question. Naturally, we at BLP deplore terrorism and violence in all forms. We had no idea that Mr. Roux, as he called himself, was anything but a customer in good standing.”
The bank had expressed no qualms about turning over the private banking records of one of its clients without the proper court documents. The man was dead. He was a terrorist. Most important, in return for the bank’s immediate and unconstrained cooperation, the French government had promised absolute silence about their dealings with the man.
“Naturally,” said Chapel. “We’re appreciative of your assistance. I’m sure it won’t take long.”
Madame Puidoux set the file on the table. “If there’s anything else?”
“One thing,” he said. “We recently came into possession of Mr. Roux’s driver’s license number. Would it be possible to run a search of your bank accounts to see if any list that, or Roux’s address or phone number, on the opening documents?”
“Of course,” the bank executive answered. “If you’ll provide me with the number, I’ll see that it is taken care of right away.”
With a curt smile, she withdrew from the room.
Chapel began to stretch his arm across the table, then thinking better of it, sank back into his chair. “Sarah, could you?”
Grasping the file, she untied the clasp, and removed a sheaf of papers the width of her thumb from inside. “Not a lot for two years,” she commented, passing the papers to her right.
“We don’t need a lot. We only need a mistake.”
The statements were in reverse chronological order, the most recent ones on top. Chapel threw his gaze around the room, drawing breath like a sprinter settling in the blocks. He had the same anxiety, too. The butterflies in his stomach. The quivering tension in his legs. This was the beginning. How they proceeded, the entire course of the investigation, would be determined by what they found in Taleel’s account.
“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?”