“I’ll be damned.”
“Anything new with Sali?” Wills asked, bringing things back to reality.
“There’s some little stuff. You know, fifty thousand here, eighty thousand there—pounds, not dollars. Into accounts I don’t know much about. He goes through anywhere from two to eight thousand pounds a week in what he probably considers petty cash.”
“Where does that cash originate?” Wills asked.
“Not entirely clear, Tony. I figure he skims some off his family account, maybe two percent that he can write off as expenses. Not quite enough to alert his father that’s he stealing from Mom and Pop. I wonder how they’d react to that?” Jack speculated.
“They wouldn’t cut his hand off, but they could do something worse—cut his money off. You see this guy working for a living?”
“You mean real work?” Jack had himself a brief laugh. “Somehow I don’t see that happening. He’s been on the gravy train too long to like driving spikes into the ties. I’ve been to London a lot. Hard to figure how a working stiff survives there.”
Wills began humming. “‘How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they seen Paree?”‘
Jack flushed. “Look, Tony, yeah, I know I grew up rich, but Dad always made sure I had a summer job. I even worked construction for two months. Made life hard for Mike Brennan and his pals. But Dad wanted me to know what it was like to do real work. I hated it at first, but, looking back, it was probably a good thing, I guess. Mr. Sali here has never done that. I mean, I could survive in a real-world entry-level job if I had to. It’d be a lot harder adjustment for this guy.”
“Okay, how much unexplained money, total?”
“Maybe two hundred thousand pounds—three hundred thousand bucks, call it. But I haven’t really pinned it down yet, and it’s not all that much money.”
“How much longer to narrow it down?”
“At this rate? Hell, maybe a week if I’m lucky. This is like tracking a single car during New York rush hour, y’know?”
“Keep it up. Isn’t supposed to be easy, or fun.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” It was something he’d picked up from the Marines at the White House. They’d even said that to him once in a while, until his father had noticed and put an immediate end to it. Jack turned back to his computer. He kept his real notes on a pad of white lined paper, just because it was easier for him that way, then transferred them to a separate computer file every afternoon. As he wrote, he noted that Tony was leaving their little room for a trip upstairs.
“THIS KID’S got the eye,” Wills told Rick Bell on the top floor.
“Oh?” It was a little early for any results from the rookie, regardless who his father was, Bell thought.
“I put him on a young Saudi living in London, name of Uda bin Sali—money changer for his family’s interests. The Brits have a loose tail on him because he called somebody they found interesting once.”
“And?”
“And Junior has found a couple of hundred thousand pounds that can’t be accounted for.”
“How solid is that?” Bell asked.
“We’ll have to put a regular on it, but, you know . . . this kid’s got the right sort of nose.”
“Dave Cunningham, maybe?” A forensic accountant, he’d joined The Campus out of the Department of Justice, Organized Crime Division. Pushing sixty, Dave had a legendary nose for numbers. The trading department at The Campus mainly used him for “conventional” duties. He could have done very well on Wall Street, but he’d just loved bagging bad guys for a living. At The Campus, he could pursue that avocation well past government retirement rules.
“Dave’d be my pick,” Tony agreed.
“Okay, let’s cross-load Jack’s computer files to Dave and see what he turns over.”
“Works for me, Rick. You see the take-report from NSA yesterday?”
“Yeah. Got my attention,” Bell answered, looking up. Three days before, message traffic from sources that the government intelligence services found interesting had dropped by seventeen percent and two particularly interesting sources had almost completely stopped. When radio traffic in a military unit did that, it often meant a stand-down prior to real operations. The sort of thing that made signals-intelligence people nervous. The majority of the time, it meant nothing at all, just random chance in operation, but it had developed into something real often enough that the signal-spooks frequently went into a tizzy about it.
“Any ideas?” Wills asked.
Bell shook his head. “I stopped being superstitious about ten years ago.”
Clearly, Tony Wills had not: “Rick, we’re due. We’ve been due for a long time.”
“I know what you’re saying, but we can’t run this place on that sort of stuff.”
“Rick, this is like sitting at a ball game—dugout seats, maybe, but you still can’t go on the field when you want.”
“To do what, kill the umpire?” Bell asked.
“No, just the guy planning to throw a beanball.”
“Patience, Tony, patience.”
“Son of a bitch of a virtue to acquire, isn’t it?” Wills had never quite learned it, despite all his experience.
“Think you have it bad? What about Gerry?”
“Yeah, Rick, I know” He stood. “Later, man.”
THEY’D SEEN not another human being, not a car, not a helicopter. Clearly, there was nothing of value out here. No oil, no gold, not even copper. Nothing worth guarding or protecting. The walk had just been enough to be healthy. Some scrubby bushes, even some stunted trees. A few tire tracks, but none of them recent. This part of America might as well have been Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter, the Rub’ al-Khali, where even a hardy desert camel would have found it grim going.
But clearly the walk was over. As they crested a small rise, they saw five more vehicles sitting all alone, with men standing by them talking among themselves.
“Ah,” Ricardo said, “they are early, too. Excellent.” He could dump these morose foreigners and get on with his business. He stopped and let his clients catch up.
“This is our destination?” Mustafa asked, with hope in his voice. It had been an easy walk, far easier than he’d expected.
“My friends there will take you to Las Cruces. There you can make your travel plans for the future.”
“And you?” Mustafa asked.
“I go home to my family,” Ricardo answered. Wasn’t that simple enough? Maybe this guy didn’t have a family?
The remaining walk took only ten minutes. Ricardo got in the lead SUV after shaking hands with his party. They were friendly enough, albeit in a guarded fashion. It could have been harder to get them here, but illegal-immigrant traffic was far thicker in Arizona and California, and that was where the U.S. Border Patrol had most of its personnel. The gringos tended to grease the squeaky wheel—like everyone else in the world, perhaps, but still it was not terribly farsighted of them. Sooner or later, they’d realize that there was cross-border traffic here, too. Just not the dramatic sort. Then he might have to find a new way to make a living. He’d done well the past seven years, however—enough to set up a little business and raise his children into a more legitimate line of work.
He watched his party board their transport and motor off. He also headed in the general direction of Las Cruces, then turned south on I-10 toward El Paso. He’d long since stopped wondering what his clients planned to do in America. Probably not tending gardens or doing construction work, he judged, but he’d been paid ten thousand dollars in American cash. So, they were important to someone . . . but not to him.
CHAPTER 10
DESTINATIONS
FOR MUSTAFA and his friends, the ride to Las Cruces was a surprisingly welcome break, and though they didn’t show it, there was obvious excitement now. They were in America. Here were the people they proposed to kill. The mission was now somehow closer to fulfillment, not by a mere handful of kilometers, but by a magical, invisible line. They were in the home of the Great Satan. Here were the people who had rained death upon their homeland, and upon the Faithful throughout the Muslim world, the people who so fawningly supported Israel.
At Deming, they turned east for Las Cruces. Sixty-two miles—a hundred kilometers—to their next intermediate stop, along I-10. There were billboards advertising road hotels and places to eat, tourist attractions of types routine and inconceivable, and more rolling land, and horizons which seemed far even as the car ate up the distances at a steady seventy miles per hour.
Their driver, as before, looked Mexican, and said nothing. Probably another mercenary. Nobody said anything, the driver because he didn’t care, his passengers because their English was accented, and the driver might take note of it. This way he’d only remember that he’d picked up some people on a dirt road in southern New Mexico and driven them someplace else.