Blood Trust (49 page)

It was the private sector that gave him the most fits, primarily Safe Banking Systems, a small Long Island company with proprietary software that was incredibly efficient at weeding out international banking transactions like the ones that provided the lifeblood of the Syrian’s organization. God forbid the Feds should start using Safe Banking’s software—he and the Syrian would have to fold their tents and find some other sucker nation through which to siphon illicit transactions.

Popping a bite of eggs Benny into his mouth, he pressed a key on his laptop and the last of the incriminating data on Middle Bay’s servers was deleted. Next, he remotely ran a program Caroline had created that electronically shredded the deleted files, scrambled them, then overwrote the data again and again until there was, literally, nothing left. Finally, returning to the files from the last five years, he satisfied himself that it was as if the accounts he had opened and used had never existed. There was no gap, no scrap of data, not even a single kilobyte out of place. Satisfied at last, he closed all his programs, put the laptop in sleep mode, and slipped it into its case. He snagged the waitress and ordered fresh coffee, then settled himself to finish his breakfast.

His mind was hardly relaxed, however. He was haunted by the possibility that Billy Warren, having discovered the Gemini Holdings accounts, might have hit upon their significance. If he had, Pawnhill thought, surely he’d be smart enough to make electronic copies of the files. And he wouldn’t keep them in his office at Middle Bay. The cops, and then Warren’s family, had all been sifting through his apartment. Nothing had been found, which was a tremendous relief, because with all the activity, Pawnhill had been unable to send a team in to do his own snooping.

He hated loose ends. He also feared them. It was loose ends that invariably tripped you up. He couldn’t afford to be tripped up. He couldn’t afford to allow the Syrian’s dealings to be exposed.

Ever since the Syrian had started preparations for the assassination of President Edward Carson, Pawnhill had been making contingency plans for the day when they might need to pull up stakes and disappear off the American intelligence radar. When the Syrian had seen which way the last U.S. election was going, he had vowed to have the incoming president killed. The last thing he wanted was a moderate president in power. The previous incumbent, surrounded by his bunkered neocons, had exported American aggression into the Islamic world with such a high degree of religious zealousness that his administration had done much of the Syrian’s work for him. He had never had so many recruits clamoring to strap on packets of C4 and blow themselves up in the name of Islam. “A hated America is a weakened America” was a mantra the Syrian often used in his speeches to the new inductees.

It had been a dark day when Edward Carson had been killed in a car accident in Moscow. A random event for which the Syrian’s people could not credibly claim authorship without coming into conflict with the Russian government. So, though the Syrian got what he wanted, he didn’t get it in the way he wanted. There could be no propaganda value attached to President Carson’s death, no righteous revenge that could be claimed, and so a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity had slipped through his fingers. Not one to dwell on missed chances, the Syrian had set his sights on other ways of bringing misfortune and disaster to the United States. He had sifted through many schemes, finally selecting one that had a particular appeal to him.

Pawnhill had received an MBA in international accounting from a major American university and then had gained an advanced international finance degree from Oxford. It was at Oxford that he had met the Syrian. Both had been using different names. They had had a brief but intense weeklong affair, after which they had amused themselves by exchanging girlfriends, much as, long ago, kids traded baseball cards.

Through a series of Gemini Holdings’ subsidiaries set up by Caro, Pawnhill had begun to buy up residential mortgages, package them, and sell them to brokerages and other banks, with the promise of ultrahigh yields. The Syrian had directed Pawnhill to accomplish this utilizing the accounts he had set up in Middle Bay Bancorp. The banks and brokerages, in turn, sold these collateralized debt obligations to their clients.

It was astonishing to Pawnhill how quickly these CDOs got snapped up. Everyone involved was so busy making obscene amounts of money that virtually none of the institutions bothered to look inside the CDOs to see that many of the individual mortgages had been obtained from first-time homeowners without even a down payment or a check on whether they would be able to afford the balloon payments five years down the road. The few that did bother to look told their clients that they were buying a basket of mortgages so that if one or two failed it wouldn’t matter. The problem was, when the reckoning came, all the mortgages failed.

By that time, the Syrian and Pawnhill had long since banked their profits, laundering them through the accounts at Middle Bay, and moving them so many times, through Caroline’s maze of offshore accounts and shell companies in various quarters of the world, that they were untraceable.

Even Pawnhill had had no idea of the scope of the calamity the CDO frenzy would cause. In the aftermath, when the American financial system was on the brink of collapse, when the knives had come out and culprits were being hunted, it had been Pawnhill’s job to keep Gemini Holdings and its now nonexistent subsidiaries from being discovered by Safe Banking Systems, a task far more difficult than dealing with the inept probing of the federal authorities. This was where Pawnhill had earned his money. He’d kept the Syrian off the PEP lists and he’d provided Gemini with an impregnable safe harbor. He was just beginning to accept the Syrian’s congratulations on a job well done when he’d become aware of Annika Dementieva.

She was the joker in the deck, an element he could not have accounted for because he had known nothing about her toxic relationship with Xhafa. The partnership had troubled him from the first—adding another personality to the mix was always a risk, and especially one as volatile as Xhafa’s—but the Syrian had brushed aside his objections.
“I need this man,”
the Syrian had told him.
“His ambition has made him into the visible one, the leader of a new international organization. And he’s perfect because his terrorists are also revolutionaries fighting for the freedom of Albanians inside Macedonia. It’s a beautiful setup. He’s seen as a hero to others outside Islam, which makes him invaluable. And, if anything should go wrong, he’ll take the heat, while you and I melt away into the shadows.”

Pawnhill was certain that Dementieva had become aware of the Syrian’s activities through her investigation of Arian Xhafa. But it was only in the last week that he had come upon an ambiguous and seemingly innocuous bit of data. Following it had proved immensely difficult and it had taken him three days to crack. What he discovered had floored him. In some way he could not fathom, Dementieva and Henry Holt Carson were communicating with one another. Curious enough, but what had put the fear of God in him was that the substance of their communication was Middle Bay Bancorp. This intel was so new that he’d not yet had a chance to bring it to the Syrian’s attention. He knew he needed to do so as quickly as possible, but he also knew his boss wouldn’t take it well at all. Therefore, he needed a piece of good news to offset the bad.

He thought for a time while he sipped his coffee, which was black and strong, the way he liked it. The recovery of a copy of the account data from Billy Warren would both appease and please the Syrian. Pawnhill’s discovery of Carson and Dementieva discussing Middle Bay was an extraordinary stroke of luck. But just the fact that they were discussing Middle Bay at all had set off deep-level warning bells inside his head. Though he had long ago used a number of tried-and-true methods to put M. Bob Evrette in his hip pocket, there were always forces outside the bank he might have to contend with one day. For this and many other reasons he had aggressively pursued the forensic accounting assignment with InterPublic. He had done business with them before—another one of his fail-safe measures should he have felt the need to move accounts to a larger bank.

When the waitress passed by, he asked for a slice of devil’s food cake. It was now possible to take a step back and see the InterPublic buyout of Middle Bay in a different light. The possibility that Carson suspected both the existence of the accounts and their connection with the Syrian and Arian Xhafa sent chills down his spine. By nature, Pawnhill was not prone to panic, but this development had disaster written all over it. This was why he had attacked Middle Bay’s books with such thoroughness, wiping clean not only the accounts themselves, but any electronic footprint their deletion might leave behind.

Pawnhill finished his cake. Asking for the check, he threw some bills down on the table, leaving his customary large tip, and went out. It was late morning, humid, the clouds yellowish with the threat of a storm coming up from the south. He walked for a couple of blocks until he spotted a cruising taxi and took it to within three blocks of Billy Warren’s apartment. After the crime scene investigators were done with it, Billy’s father had slept there for a couple of nights, further impeding Pawnhill’s access. But now the people Pawnhill had surveilling the building reported that the father was gone. The apartment was empty; it hadn’t been visited in more than forty-eight hours.

Time, Pawnhill thought, to go in.

*   *   *

W
HEN THE
Syrian didn’t hear from Baltasar at the appointed time, he spent a fruitless thirty seconds trying to raise him on his sat phone. Then, with a grim expression, he went to where Caro sat hunched over her computer and whispered in her ear.

Her fleeting startled expression was quickly replaced by one of resignation. All her work was either on her laptop or on remote servers in Holland. Nothing was ever saved on the desktop here. Still, she shut it down, removed the hard drive, and destroyed it. Then she packed up her laptop. The Syrian had gone to talk to Xhafa. She unlocked the drawer, removed
The Little Curiosity Shop,
and lovingly nestled it into the case beside the laptop.

As she was walking to where her shoes sat beside the front door, Taroq appeared.

He eyed her laptop case. She hardly left the compound, and never at night. “Where are you going?”

“The Syrian and I have a meeting outside the compound.”

“At this hour?” Taroq frowned. “I was told nothing about a meeting.”

Her expression hardened. She had no time for Taroq’s jealousy. “You’re told what you need to know, nothing more.”

He stood looking at her for a moment. He was hurt, of course, but something had stirred his inner alarm. The Syrian was exceedingly deliberate in all his appointments and meetings. The word “spontaneous” did not exist in the Syrian’s world, therefore anything that smacked of it was suspect.

She was spared further discourse on the subject as the Syrian returned and joined her at the door.

“Taroq, we’ll be gone for several hours,” he said without a hint that anything might be wrong. “In the interim, keep Xhafa here.”

Taroq blinked. “Here?”

The Syrian offered an encouraging smile. “He’ll be safer inside the compound.”

They took the big black Lincoln Navigator that had been imported as a gift by one of the entities he supplied. He had many cars; he’d paid for none of them.

“You didn’t want to take Taroq or a driver with us?” Caroline asked.

“In this situation,” he said tersely, “it’s best to travel light, the better to ensure that we arrive at our destination.”

He drove very fast and with the lights off. He knew these back roads well.

“What’s happened?” she asked.

“The enemy has arrived.” He made a sweeping turn, then stepped heavily on the accelerator. “The enemy is coming.”

She sat cradling her laptop case as if it were an infant. She supposed she should feel concerned, but, as usual, she felt nothing at all. “And just where is our destination?”

The Syrian stared straight ahead and smiled.

*   *   *

P
AWNHILL MADE
three circuits of Billy Warren’s building without seeing anything out of the ordinary. Via his Bluetooth earpiece, he was in constant cell contact with his surveillance team, who reported no police activity anywhere in the vicinity. It appeared as if the neighborhood had returned to the sleepy state it had been in before Warren’s torture-murder caused a media frenzy. Since no photos of the crime scene had been leaked, even the tabloids, both print and online, had moved on to fresh fodder. And in America in this day and age there were more than enough scandals in Hollywood and inside the Beltway to feed even their insatiable appetites.

Pawnhill set a slim attaché case on the ground and opened it. The case was considerably smaller inside than out, but there was still room for a number of items, including a one-inch-thick laptop, a small zipped leather case, and latex gloves, hood, and booties. These he put on, then he took out the leather case, and snapped the lid shut.

He possessed an aptitude for vocations other than finance. These had been taught to him by the Syrian during the crazy time they’d enjoyed at Oxford. Unzipping the leather case, he selected several professional picks from a set. In no time, he was through the rear door. Warren’s apartment was on the third floor. Pawnhill took the stairs; since childhood he’d had a fear of being trapped in an elevator. The same could be said for revolving doors.