“Of course,” said Chapel, but something in his tone angered the older man.
“You see, Mr. Chapel, one must either ask no questions or ask many,” Menz argued. “There is no in-between. Willful ignorance is no longer tolerated.”
“What prompted you to contact us?” asked Sarah, touching Menz’s arm. “And may I say, we’re ever so grateful.”
“It was later,” said Menz, calmer now, “when we noticed the sums were coming from a dubious account. I can only say that this Claude François had raised some questions in the past. We bankers do talk. And, of course, there was the beneficiary: an Israeli scientist receiving money from a questionable account in Berlin. Why? For what reason? What services might he have performed? I was too frightened even to imagine. So I called you.”
So this was the new Switzerland, thought Chapel. The Swiss financial industry had undergone a sea change in the last six years. From impenetrable bastion of bank secrecy to an engaged, active, and cooperative partner in the international combat against money laundering and terrorist finance. Several factors had been responsible for the shift. First, the country had decided it was uncomfortable with its image as a partner of crooks and criminals. Second, many other countries had stepped up to challenge Switzerland as a fortress of secrecy. Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, and a slew of stamp-sized republics in the South Pacific all promised to guard a client’s secrecy against any and all intrusions. No longer did bank secrecy offer the Swiss banks a marketing advantage, a leg up on their opponents, as it were. It was this that decided the matter. Bank secrecy simply didn’t pay anymore. It might even be costing the Swiss money.
“Has Dr. Kahn withdrawn any money from the account?” Chapel asked.
“Seventy-seven thousand dollars wired to a BMW dealership in Vienna. That’s all. Not a dime more.”
“And would you happen to have an address for him?”
“Naturally. I have all the particulars here.”
At his beckoning, Dr. Senn passed copies of the documents to Chapel and Sarah. Kahn’s address was listed as Jabotinsky Street in Tel Aviv. His profession as “professor/research.” There was a home and work telephone. He’d named his wife as a beneficiary of the account. It all looked on the up-and-up. Except that a banker with forty years’ experience had sniffed that something was wrong and had decided that a Jewish physicist wearing cheap clothing, a digital watch, who was in need of a shower and acting nervously could only be receiving large sums for illicit acts. Well then, as Menz might have said. That was the way the system was supposed to work. Why did it feel to Chapel like such a miracle that for once it had?
“May I ask you both one question?”
“Of course,” said Chapel.
Otto Menz came out of his chair an inch and leaned on his forearms. “What has Kahn given them in exchange for the money?”
Sarah stood by the lake watching a majestic paddle-wheel steamer approach the dock. A freshening breeze raised a small chop. Swans and ducks bobbed on the surface. In the distance, like hovering ghosts, the outline of the Glarner Alps was visible.
“Hello, Yossi,” she said, into her cell phone. “It’s Meg from London.”
“Hello, Meg from London.”
“Need your help a bit. Got a sec?”
“Always a sec for Meg from London,” said Yossi, who was from Jerusalem, a mover and shaker in the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.
“I’ve run across one of your own in a little deal we’re following. Mordecai Kahn. A physicist. Name ring a bell?”
“Kahn, you say. Not off the top of my head, but let me check.”
“Sure thing.”
Sarah looked at Chapel, who was on his own phone, booking them return flights to Paris. He was making things complicated. He loved her and she knew it. She’d encouraged it. And what about her? She had only to catch his eye to feel his longing. He was staring at her now. Something in his brown eyes stretched her loyalties in three different directions. She wrote it off to her sentimental side. A needy man always provoked her weaker emotions. But love? She dismissed it out of hand.
“Hey, Meg…”
“Yes?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Too bad,” she said, knowing better than to feel disappointed. “Thanks for checking. I owe you.”
“Traffic goes both ways,” he said. “Just in case I get something, where will you be?”
“Just in case?” Sarah hesitated a minute. Where would she be? Why, she’d be at the other end of her cell phone, that’s where. Yossi knew that.
“Yeah, you know,” he said. “If we need to get in touch with you.”
Oh, God, thought Sarah. It can’t be. It can’t have come to this. The intent of Kahn’s payments was unmistakable. You only pay a nuclear physicist two million dollars for one thing these days and it wasn’t to build a better mousetrap.
“Paris,” she said. “Hôtel Splendide. I’ll even let you buy me a drink this time.”
But Yossi didn’t respond, not with a laugh or even a good-bye. Without another word, the line went dead.
Chapter 37
Marc Gabriel made his way through the arrival hall at Charles-de-Gaulle Airport, a hand in his jacket checking for his passport. He walked briskly, a man with somewhere to go. A man who would let nothing delay him. The boy had failed. Measures had to be taken. It was difficult to separate a father’s disappointment from a commander’s anger. Sidestepping, dodging, brushing past the relentless sea of tourists, he arrived at immigration control. He smiled perfunctorily for the passport officer, his fingers drumming the counter, itching to reclaim his documents.
“Welcome home, Mr. François.”
“Thank you,” he replied, already past the booth, making a beeline for the taxi stand.
It had been a long flight from Buenos Aires. The movies and meals had done little to pass the time. Alone with his thoughts, he’d played out every possible scenario. George had been arrested. George had been killed. But in the end, he was left with only one possibility: George had failed. He was trying to flee. Measures had to be taken.
Outside, he raised his hand and whistled sharply. A silver Citroën docked at the curb. Gabriel climbed into the backseat. “Rue Clemenceau.”
“Address?”
“Near the corner of Avenue Marseilles. I’ll show you when we get there. And there’s an extra twenty euros in it for you if you get me there inside an hour.”
Gabriel stared out the window, eyes glazed, unfocused. It could only be a lack of moral conviction, he told himself, trying to account for what had gone wrong. The rot had corroded his son’s values. He himself was to blame. He had kept the family in Paris too long. So many years among the infidel, it was inevitable.
Islam was based on virtue; the word itself meant “submission.” It was not a religion, not simply a set of beliefs, but an entire way of life. The Koran did not simply govern one’s daily conduct, it extended to all aspects of society. To law and trade, war and peace, education and family. Sharia governed all.
By providing a sanctuary inside his home that valued these beliefs, he had hoped to mitigate the rot, but it had turned out to be too much. The temptations were constant and pervasive-the pounding amoral music, the lewd films, the relentless emphasis on sex, sex, sex. It was a form of intellectual colonization. Like syphilis, it entered the brain, eating away at it slowly, maddeningly, piece by piece, lobe by lobe, until there was nothing left but a hollowed-out rotten husk. There was no such thing as selective Westernization. You took all of it or none of it.
When the West had separated the realm of God from the realm of society, it had put itself on a collision course with Islam. It was a war, and either one side or the other would prevail. He’d felt certain that George knew all of this, that he believed it to the marrow of his bones. Yet, he’d been wrong.