Seven Grams of Lead (23 page)

“I wouldn’t be too smart if I passed up the one
with the top-rated advisers,” Kammeyer said—or, rather, Penélope Piera said. Wendy Kammeyer knew that 99 percent of Belmonte’s clients were his clients because they wanted no noses but their own in their accounts.

Opening the account required the digital equivalent of paperwork, which Kammeyer filled out on a tablet computer provided by Belmonte. As soon as she finished, he looked it over along with her passport. Under European Union pressure, Andorran banks had recently agreed to inspect prospective clients’ passports. A glance was the extent of their inspections, however. Belmonte only looked at Kammeyer’s passport a second time so as to avoid staring when she plucked six stuffed letter-size envelopes from the pockets inside her parka.

She withdrew a total of €160,000 in €100 notes from the envelopes. She was stacking the bills on Belmonte’s desk when his secretary hurriedly delivered coffee on a silver tray along with a selection of sweeteners and a perfunctory cookie, then bid him
bonne soirée.

Excellent, thought Kammeyer. The late hour of the appointment was the key to her plan. She let the coffee sit until certain she and Belmonte were alone; then she took a sip and reacted as if it contained vinegar.

“I asked for skim milk,” she said. “I beg your pardon, but dairy fat and my skin are archenemies.”

“I am terribly sorry,
senyora
,” Belmonte said, his
focus elsewhere, probably on trying to get a handle on how she could have misinterpreted
café crème.
“My assistant must have made an error. Would you allow me to run to the pantry?”

Kammeyer lit up. “You don’t know what that would mean to me.”

The moment he left, she shot a hand to her left eye and pinched out the contact lens. When his hasty steps faded down the marble corridor, she rounded his desk and placed the lens over the uppermost USB drive on his computer tower. The lens launched a six-legged spiderlike robot one-fiftieth the size of the head of a pin. Originally intended for the targeted delivery of medication, the nanobot had been adapted by Langley’s “toy makers” to deploy spyware. The nanobot might now invisibly penetrate the Banca Privada d’Andorra system, capturing the BIC of the institution that had wired funds to the account of gun-for-hire Ronny Brackman. The spyware would infiltrate the system at that institution when Penélope Piera decided to wire €10,000 there tomorrow.

The nanobot needed about thirty seconds to do its job. Success and the blue iris overlay on the lens would temporarily turn green. Kammeyer watched from a squat behind the desk, lest any passersby see her from the hall. Failure was a 1-in-25 proposition, a function of the inability of the lens to gain recognition by the USB port.

After twenty-five seconds, the inner circle of the
lens was red like a bull’s-eye. Make that 1 in 25
in ideal conditions at a Langley lab,
Kammeyer thought.

She wasted no time replacing the dud with the contact lens from her right eye. Twenty seconds later, she extracted the lens from the USB port. This time the inner circle glowed a green as lovely as any she’d ever seen, just as Belmonte returned, a fresh mug of coffee in one hand, a plastic container of
llet desnatada
—skim milk—in the other, and understandable circumspection in his eyes.

“I lost a contact lens,” Kammeyer said. Rising, she opened her hand to display the lens. “But don’t worry, I found it.”

The next day at noon, Lamont met Garrison at Giorgio’s on Chambers Street. The place had the look of a run-down cafeteria, but busy FBI agents came here and stood on line for fifteen minutes because the pizza was the best in the city. The CIA man had called Lamont and said he had good news and that, to celebrate, he was going to take a holiday from his low-cholesterol diet. Enjoying a pepperoni slice now, Garrison talked sports, leaving Lamont to wonder whether the “Eagles’ shitty offense” was code for troubles encountered in penetrating the Andorran bank.

As soon as they were back on the sidewalk, wading into the thick lunch-hour pedestrian traffic on
Chambers, Garrison said, “Good news and bad news. The good is the eighty grand to the liquidator came out of a numbered account at the Bank of Reykjavik, where, according to our ‘research,’ the account holder is a corporation called Windward Actuarial.” Garrison halted as the sign on the far side of Broadway turned to the red hand—
DON
’
T WALK
. “The bad news is, we have no idea who Windward Actuarial is.”

“Doesn’t incorporation require listing a verifiable human owner?” Lamont asked.

“It did, past tense. Now you can get anonymous bearer share corporations in three places—Belize, Nevis, and Guatemala. Because those governments are eager for the business, they don’t ask for any ownership information and don’t keep any kind of public registry or database, except for a list of the physical mailing addresses they send the certificate to.”

The street sign clicked to an icon of a man walking. Pedestrians shot across Broadway, but disappointment held Lamont in place. “So after all that, the Bank of Reykjavik is of no use to us, even if it wanted to be?” he asked.

“Not necessarily.” Garrison clapped a hand on Lamont’s shoulder, starting them both onto the crosswalk. “We did get one thing. The Bank of Reykjavik, unknown to any of its employees, gave us the physical address that Windward Actuarial’s incorporation certificate was mailed to. Dollars to doughnuts it’s
an accommodation address; there’s no phone, fax, or anything else listed. It is a space of some sort, though, in a small office building in Bridgetown, Barbados, which might be something. At worst, Corky, you’ll have had a trip to the tropics courtesy of Uncle Sam.”

Paris is a
good town to spot a tail. Capitalize on the plethora of channels—the quiet one-way streets, the narrow bridges, the maze of Métro corridors—and your surveillant has little choice but to fall in step behind you. So Canning told himself as he slid on eyeglasses designed specifically for the occasion. His light disguise also included an absurdly expensive charcoal virgin-wool business suit just like those worn by the bankers comprising much of the male population in Paris’s affluent and old-line sixteenth arrondissement. He smiled at the notion that, if this morning’s meeting went as he expected, he would never again need to give consideration to the price of a suit—or the price of anything.

Heaving open a wrought-iron door, he stepped
out of the century-old apartment building whose fourth floor served as a safe house. A buttery dawn made the rue de Passy evoke an Impressionist painting, although the rumbling of early traffic could be heard. The street itself was quiet and still; a fluttering moth would have stood out against the contiguous limestone façades. Canning didn’t put it past surveillants to deploy drones smaller than a gnat, for which reason he’d placed sensors among the lilies in the fourth-floor window box. Should the devices pick up transmissions in the 900 MHz to 2.52 GHz range, his cell phone would vibrate three times.

The phone remained still. Effectively a green light.

To be on the safe side, he planned to duck into several buildings and underground passages en route to the meeting. Also he would change clothes, twice. Turning onto rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, he sensed nothing amiss. No one else was out. As he rounded the corner onto boulevard Raspail, the delicious aroma of
pains aux raisins
surrounded him. Within the little
boulangerie,
preparations were under way as usual.

He hurried down a stairwell, then toward the Métro station via a humid ceramic tunnel that amplified his footfalls. With a pair of midpoint exits and a three-pronged fork at the far end, the tunnel was a textbook surveillance detection route. It, too, was deserted. Until two men followed Canning down the stairs, one about five seconds before the other, both in charcoal suits just like his. Probably both early-bird
bankers. At least one could be a spook, though. It was difficult to tell, but not impossible; even the best surveillants could be manipulated into revealing their cards.

At the end of the tunnel, Canning turned onto a sparsely populated platform just as a Porte de Clignancourt–bound 4 train hissed to a stop. No one disembarked. As both banker types followed him aboard the third of five cars, the doors snapped shut and the metro launched into a dark tunnel. There were three other passengers: another suit, a nurse, and a party girl for whom it was still last night. Canning took mental pictures of each; he would recognize them if they reappeared along his route this morning. The Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur—France’s FBI—would put multiple tails on him, as many as fifty, if they had any idea what he was up to. And CIA surveillance would have no “reruns.” Langley would think nothing of dispatching a team of 100.

A few minutes later, the metro rolled into the Saint-Germain-des-Prés station. Canning rose slowly, giving a surveillant ample time to get up too. Stepping out of the car and onto the platform, he regarded the mirrored film glued inside his tortoiseshell frames, providing a rear view. He searched for as little as a passenger muttering to himself—i.e., into a hidden microphone. No lips moved. No fingers tapped at keys or dug in their pockets for phones. No one, for all intents and purposes, did anything.

He transferred to the line terminating at Gare
d’Austerlitz, one of the city’s six major railroad stations. There he climbed up to the street, walking against traffic on the pedestrian lane of the pont d’Austerlitz, a bridge over the Seine supported by a series of five stone arches. Halfway across, he halted abruptly, as if taken with the view, the river transformed to a mosaic by the early morning sun. This was a timing stop, to see if anyone’s pace altered along with his. Again, he saw nothing—or, as he thought of nothing in this case: an idyllic view.

It was a five-minute walk to the meeting place, the Gare de Lyon, northern terminus of the Marseille railway. Canning spent an hour, taking turns at random, observing who reacted and who didn’t, finding nothing out of the ordinary. Finally a one-way street brought the Gare de Lyon’s celebrated clock tower into view. Canning chose not to enter the train station through the front doors where the crush of early commuters might obscure a dozen tails. Instead he clambered down the stairs to the adjoining Métro stop before riding an escalator up and into the station’s palatial beaux arts lobby. Any remotely competent team would post someone at a secondary entrance like this. Canning’s countersurveillance was impeded for a moment by shafts of sunlight from the latticed ceiling. He was forced to squint. Bad luck.

But he’d taken bad luck into his planning. He climbed aboard a TGV. The high-speed train thrummed its readiness to cover the 250 miles to
Lyon in less than two hours. Canning strolled down the narrow aisle, passing thirty-three seated teenage girls, all in kelly green tracksuits. Nine heads turned. Another time he’d be glad he still had it. Now he was just glad no one was in the aisle behind him.

At the other end of the car, he took the stairs back down to the platform and made his way to a brasserie at the back of the lobby. His eye went past the crowd to a high-backed booth in the far corner that offered the advantage of a view of the entire place. A heavyset middle-aged man in a three-piece camel hair suit sat there, dissecting a big breakfast. His chin was a small island in a sea of tan flesh, but he had kind blue eyes and a pleasant smile. In the latest French fashion, his dark hair, short on the sides, rose on top—with the help of a lot of mousse—into a peak.
La Gazzetta dello Sport,
the popular daily printed on distinctive pink paper, was spread across the table, signifying that his own countersurveillance jibed with Canning’s.

Canning proceeded to the counter, ordering a
café au lait
and a croissant from one of the four workers, all of whom had appeared in recent recon photos. With his
petit déjeuner
in hand, he passed two occupied tables, stopping at one of several that were empty. He and the man in the booth struck up a pre-scripted conversation, in French, about last night’s rugby match.

Cheerfully introducing himself as Laurent, the man said, “Why don’t you join me?”

Canning took inventory of the crowd. The nearest patron, a businessman three tables away, was out of earshot given the general clamor of the station.

Soon after Canning lowered himself onto the bench opposite Laurent, their conversation shifted from sports to current events. Then Laurent said, “So what’s too good to be true?”

Like his hair and blue irises, the name Laurent was fake. Canning knew his tablemate was in fact Izzat Ibrahim al-Hawrani, once a high-ranking officer in Iraq’s Republican Guard. By way of response, Canning asked, “What if someone offered to sell you an E-bomb capable of frying Washington and the vicinity?”

“I suppose I would be curious if he really had such a device.” Al-Hawrani nibbled at a brioche. Canning had anticipated an expression of elation from the man who now led the National Council of Resistance of Iraq, an assembly of deposed Ba’athist Party members exiled to France in 2003. With the billions of dollars smuggled out of Baghdad, the council underwrote al-Qaeda spin-off Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn—the Organization of the Jihadi Base in Mesopotamia—which waged an Iraqi insurgent brand of jihad. The organization’s relentless attacks on security forces in Iraq attracted a steady flow of volunteers, yet in Sisyphean fashion, failed to advance the cause.

“Say the guy used some office supplies from his
day job for his own purposes,” Canning said. “Over the course of a few months, he collected all the pertinent details and had the device assembled by a physicist—a cutout who subsequently took a long vacation. Then he left the weapon for you—plug and play—close to the heart of Washington.”

“That’s a good story.” The Iraqi’s features didn’t budge. “I would have to take it with a few grains of salt.”

“The guy would expect that. So the ante would be low, just to cover his operating expenses. The ante gets you a remote detonator. If the device doesn’t work to your satisfaction, you go home having lost nothing.”