The Devil's Banker (15 page)

“We had some big wins up front: a few major league money-transfer agents and
hawalas;
some charities ostensibly set up to send money to the Middle East for schools, food, medical care. All told, we froze around a hundred million in assets in those first eighteen months.”

“A hundred million’s not bad.”

“It is and it isn’t. People always talk about how it only cost the hijackers five hundred thousand dollars to mount the operation that resulted in nine-eleven. That might be true, but it takes millions to finance the system that bred those guys. The schools, the camps, the propaganda machines they’ve got turning twenty-four hours a day. Some of the bigger
madrasas
need a hundred grand a year to keep their doors open. And there are hundreds of those schools in Pakistan alone.”

“Expensive to brainwash an entire generation, isn’t it?”

“What gets me is that when we get inside these organizations and look at their books, we see that a lot of the money—and I’m talking five, ten million dollars—was going to medical supplies, relief funds, to building a hospital here and there. Legitimate works. But the rest was going to the Hamas regional security office or to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade to buy TNT for suicide bombers or AK-47s for the next generation of
jihadis.
You have no choice but to freeze it all.”

She was looking at him strangely, her head cocked, eyes scrunched up, a determined set to her lips. She was the cat who’d cornered the mouse and was deciding whether to eat it.

“What?” he asked.

“Why, Mr. Chapel, it sounds like you have a conscience.”

“So? That against the law these days?”

“It is in this profession.”

The car was fitted out for undercover work, equipped with a two-way radio, a Heckler and Koch “street sweeper” twenty-gauge racked beneath Adam’s seat, and a dashboard siren hidden inside the glove compartment. Sarah drove confidently, with attention and foresight, as if driving were her job and she was determined to be good at it. She barely took her eyes from the road, and Chapel used her bouts of sustained concentration as an excuse to take a good look at her. In the harsh sunlight, lines of wear spread from her eyes and her mouth, hinting at an inner tension. She was wound tight. Her cool and confident act didn’t fool him a bit. He could see it in the way she sat, too—back barely touching the seat, jaw jutting a half inch too far forward, eyes nailed in front of her. When she’d spoken at the embassy, her voice wasn’t just crisp, it was near military in its inflection. Even in the car, her hand movements belonged to a general delivering a briefing to his commanders. But a while ago, she’d asked him what he did for fun, and when he said train for marathons, she’d burst out laughing. With a supple hand, she’d freed her ponytail and stared at him, for the first time really looking at him, and her eyes had come alive with mischief and merriment and all the qualities she was not allowed to exhibit as an officer of British intelligence.

Only now did he realize that her manner was designed to camouflage what she’d learned to be a professional liability. She was a natural beauty, and she knew, as Chapel had seen firsthand in the business world, that beauty was not equated with smarts, savvy, or any of the positive traits she needed to get ahead in her profession. More than anything, she was competitive, and her diligently veiled ambition frightened him.

“And you?” he asked. “How’d you get him? I mean Sayeed. Or am I allowed to ask?”

Sarah considered his request. “A bit like how you get your bad guys, I suppose. Looked at where the money was going. Problem is, though, in Afghanistan there isn’t any banking system, I mean not like how we know it. It’s still nineteenth century over there—paper ledgers, doing sums on an abacus, the whole works. Audit trails may not lie, but what if there’s no trail to begin with. So you ask questions. You rely on people, even if they are deceitful and untruthful. When you’ve got to find someone in a hurry, I’d take a live source anytime.”

Chapel knew a lecture when he heard it. “And who was yours?”

“Who wasn’t?” she replied, like he’d asked a dumb question. “Information’s the national currency over there. No one’s got any money, but everyone’s got just the story you want to hear. In this case, we came across some reliable information that a lot of field workers were heading to Jalalabad to help harvest poppies for a foreigner, an Arab-Afghan like bin Laden. When ninety-nine percent of the population is destitute, someone who’s throwing money around like confetti sticks out like a sore thumb. Then we got lucky. We learned about a Pakistani banker, a former big shot with BCCI, in from South America, who was heading to the same area. He couldn’t pass through town without letting his old buddies know that he was up to something big. He insulted a lot of Al Qaeda fighters, calling them ill-focused. I heard that he used the word ‘scattershot’ twice, and called their attacks pointless.”

“How did you know he was hooked into Hijira?”

“We tracked him to Sayeed’s village in Jalalabad. No coincidences, Mr. Chapel. Not in this game.”

“Did you pull him in?”

Sarah shook her head and he could see the muscles working in her jaw, a tightening around the eyes. “We lost him at night,” she said with palpable disgust. “Place is like a sieve.”

Bringing the car to a halt at a red light, she thudded a hand against the steering wheel. “Anyway, that’s where we stand. Hijira’s about money. About focus. Of course, we’ve learned something new. They won’t let themselves be captured alive.” She looked at him, and when she spoke, her voice had dropped a note and was stripped clean of artifice. “Tell me, Mr. Chapel, what are they planning that they’d rather die than tell us?”

Chapter 16

It was a king’s fortune. Two hundred seventy-one million four hundred fifty-nine thousand dollars and three cents. He had sold his last share of stock, covered his last call, closed out his last option. For the first time in two decades his portfolios stood empty. The three screens on his desk broadcasting real-time account information blinked like a barren New Age triptych. For a few minutes anyway, the sum total of twenty years’ obsessive effort rested in his cash account. Every last cent.

Marc Gabriel stared at the numbers, feeling nothing: not contentment, not pride, not avarice. Long ago, he’d acquired the professional trader’s ice-cold objectivity. If anything, he relished the coming challenge, and the warrior’s daring flared in his eyes. Money was the ultimate weapon. Everything had been a prelude to this moment.

Two hundred seventy million dollars.

He could have used it to buy a yacht in Antibes, a two-hundred-foot Suncruiser with a helicopter deck aft and a crew of ten. He could have purchased a
finca
in Ibiza, a chalet in Zermatt, and an estate near Chenonceau, and had enough left over for lavish parties, the finest clothing, a lifetime of waste. Gabriel wanted none of it. He owned something far more valuable already. A cause.

Pushing aside his
pain baignat,
he slipped his earpiece into place and murmured to himself, “Two seventy. Let’s see what we can do with it.”

“Gruezi,
Heini,” he said to his banker in Zurich, his Swiss-German dialect nearly perfect. “New strategy. Don’t be shocked and don’t ask why. Richemond is going short big-time. Got a pencil? Short ten thousand IBM, ten thousand 3M, ten thousand Merck, ten thousand Microsoft . . .” he went on, listing the industrial stalwarts of the United States before traveling round the globe to visit his doomsday doctrine on Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Hong Kong. In every country he picked only the most heavily traded issues. He shorted consumer goods, electronics, drugs, and paper products; financials, insurance, entertainment, and lodging. He avoided only one sector: defense.

When he finished with Zurich, he called Madrid, and did it again. And when he was finished with Madrid, he called Dublin, Frankfurt, Mexico City, and Johannesburg.

“We’re shorting this market,” he said, over and over again, but when pressed, offered no explanation for his pessimistic view, other than to say that prices were “overvalued.”

To “go short” meant to sell a stock you didn’t own in hopes its share price would decrease and you could buy it back at a lower level. The idea was to sell at a hundred, wait for bad news to drive the price down, then buy it back at fifty, giving yourself a fifty-dollar gain. Shorting was just buying and selling in reverse.

It wasn’t quite that simple. Officially, you had to borrow the stock. If the stock’s price increased—if it “moved against you”—you could be forced to buy it back from the true owner at the higher price. (But only if he wanted to sell it then and there, and if there were no other shares for sale that could be substituted.) Dividends were also your responsibility and were debited to your account. These were technicalities, however. What mattered in the end was that, even if you didn’t officially own the stock, you got to keep the proceeds of the sale.

Mostly, you needed three things to short a stock. Balls, good credit, and information. It was up to the trader to supply the first. Brokerage houses were generous in extending the second. Financial firms were as greedy as any other for-profit business in the Western world, and they liked to give their customers ample rope with which to hang themselves. A good client like Marc Gabriel with his Richemond Holdings was allowed to sell a hundred dollars of stock for every twenty-five dollars he kept in his account. A margin ratio of twenty-five percent. As for information, Gabriel didn’t have any nasty secrets about any one particular company hidden up his sleeve. No news about a pending lawsuit, a deal gone sour, or a failed technology. He was privy to a more violent brand of information. News that would adversely impact every stock in every market around the world.

An hour after he’d begun, the screens buzzed with life and showed his accounts to be valued at just over one billion dollars.

Nine zeroes.

Gabriel steepled his fingers thoughtfully.

He had begun in 1980, a twenty-one-year-old neophyte out of the London School of Economics with a degree in finance, a convert’s zeal, and a kitty of four million dollars, equal parts his father’s pension and donations from like-minded friends. He almost lost it all several times, and the recollection of those early white-knuckle trades, the endless weekends with open, unhedged positions, the sleepless nights with bankruptcy looming overhead, was enough to bring on a nervous sweat.

Then came the nineties, a ten-year bull run in the West and the destruction of the Nikkei in the East. He bet big with Soros against the pound, and rode the back of the Japanese market all the way down on its suicide leap from 36,000 to a quarter that level. Meanwhile, he’d bought IBM at 50 and sold at a split-adjusted 200.

The boom in Internet stocks was the capper, and to his pious eye, all the indication he needed that God was on his side. Yahoo, Netscape, Inktomi, and Akamai. He rode them up, up, up. If his analyst’s eye told him the stocks were overvalued, his trader’s logic steadied him. “The trend is your friend” was the rule of the day, and he followed it as devoutly as he did his religion. He also knew the meaning of a “stop/loss,” and when to use it.

Along the way there were other deals, ventures into businesses legitimate and otherwise. Inteltech in Paraguay. Gropius Gems in Nigeria. The Allen Victor Metal company in Kazakhstan. He had vowed never to tamper with his capital, and the steady revenues generated by ongoing concerns were necessary for other more interesting sidelines.

Finished with the calls, Gabriel walked to the kitchenette and poured coffee into a chipped porcelain cup. As he sipped the strong desert brew, he lit a cigarette and stared at the blinking screens, at the scuffed briefcase sitting next to the desk, and at the rest of his abandoned office. Drawers yawned from the polished teak filing cabinets. Gilt-framed oils stared down from paneled walls. Most were still-lifes, sterile depictions of fruit, fowl, and fish purposely chosen to reveal nothing of his tastes or background. They would stay. He hated them, anyway. Photographs of smiling children, a lovely blond wife, and a pair of Yorkshire terriers adorned the credenza and a visitors’ coffee table. They would stay, too. The subjects were complete strangers. He didn’t know one of them. Except the dogs.

Setting down his coffee, he walked to the printer next to his desk and snatched a sheaf of paper. The top page showed the layout of a building. He skipped past the first floor, the second floor—ah, here it was—he slipped the page showing the third floor on top, and took a seat. Running a nail across the page, he quickly located the burn unit. Consulting his notes from an earlier conversation, he jotted down a few names, then added the most crucial information: Room 310. 10
A.M.

He shook his head, a little bewildered at the speed of events.

It was all moving so fast now.

The phone had rung at four-thirty that morning. Gabriel had been awake, showered and dressed in business attire, seated in his private study at his home in the leafy, upmarket quartier of Neuilly. He was listening to the BBC World Service broadcast news of the death of one Abu Sayeed, a high-level member of Hijira, a heretofore unknown Islamic extremist group. He was wondering who had tipped off the Americans.

“Yes,” he answered.

“I shall be arriving in Paris, the day after tomorrow. Sometime in the afternoon. Do you have the cash?”

Gabriel winced at the hard Israeli accent. “Of course. Do you have the package?”

“I do.”

Gabriel swallowed. The world had begun to spin on a new axis. “Do you need a place to stay while you’re here? I can arrange something.”

“I’m quite capable myself, thank you.”

“Shall we set a time to get together?”

“That would be impractical.”

A baby’s cry broke the morning still. Gabriel turned his head toward the noise. It would be Fayez, his seventh son, just a few weeks old. Suddenly, he wanted very badly to sit with his wife in the darkness and watch as she nursed the boy.