The Devil's Banker Read Online Free PDF Page A

what to do.
    A team of hotel security waited. Quietly, they guided Gomez, Santini, and Keck to the service elevator. Babtiste followed, swinging the stainless steel case loaded with eighty pounds of A/V gear as if it were a lunch box. Leclerc took the stairs with Chapel. Entering the opulent suite, he shot the American a challenging glance. “You look nervous,” he said.
    “I am,” Chapel answered.
     
     
    Six months, Sarah had been chasing the shadow. Six months shuttling between Kabul, Kandahar, and the Khyber Pass, chasing down leads like an errant fielder. One week she was a UNICEF relief worker, the next, a clinician from Médecins Sans Frontières, and the next, an administrator for the World Bank. She spent as much time building her legends as she did working her sources.
    The first whispers had reached her at her desk in London, though by wildly different routes. A field officer had buried a mention in his report of some rumors he’d picked up at a party at the Indian consul’s in Kabul, the kind of boozy affair frequented by aid workers, diplomats, and the local gentry, in this case a few of the tamer regional warlords. Then there were the firsthand snippets delivered over a tepid lunch at Fortnum’s by a wallah from agriculture just back from a tour of the area: something vague about a new poppy farmer in the southeast taking control of the large fields near Jalalabad. With the Taliban gone, the Afghanis were hell-bent on reclaiming their place as the world’s largest suppliers of raw opium. Word was, however, that the seller wasn’t a local, but an Arab-Afghan like bin Laden, a devout Muslim from the Gulf who had fought as a Mujahadeen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There were rumors of an important sale. Several tons of product coming to market.
    Both times the word “Hijira” came up.
    “Hijira,” as in the journey from Mecca to Medinah undertaken by the Prophet Muhammad in the year A.D. 622 to escape persecution. Or more important, “Hijira,” as in the date from which the new Muslim calendar began.
    To Sarah’s seasoned ears, it could not be a coincidence.
    Marshaling her evidence, she’d marched downstairs to Peter Callan’s office and demanded an immediate posting in country. When he demurred, she blew her stack. Wasn’t CT what it was all about these days? Counterterrorism. Intelligence’s desperately needed raison d’être borne on silver wings in what everybody had to agree was the barest nick of time. When he hesitated still, she built his argument for him. Arabic speakers were in demand. Those who spoke Pashtun were particularly prized. Sarah, who’d taken a first in Oriental languages at Cambridge, trumped them all, with Urdu, French, and German under her belt as well. The question wasn’t why she should go to Afghanistan. It was why she wasn’t already there! Callan had grunted something about a budget and called Langley.
    Four days later, she was packed aboard a commercial flight to Dulles for a one month’s crash course in the culture of the American intelligence community. From there, it was on to Karachi, and by overland route to Kabul.
    Her brief was simple: Keep an ear to the ground for the bad guys. “Players,” the Yanks called them. She was to cultivate sources, debrief agents in place, and establish her own network.
    “Follow the money” was her maxim, and it led to the gold souks of Gilgit, the vaults of the Afghani central bank, and Kabul’s bustling black market for medical supplies.
    While she never found the Arab-Afghan, she did run across one Abu Mohammed Sayeed, wanted by nearly every Western intelligence agency for barbarous acts too numerous to mention, as he scurried to and fro across her radar arranging to sell his mother lode of opium.
    Follow the money, she repeated silently, staring at the gold chain in her hand. She had, and the money had led her here, to Faisan Bhatia’s jewelry store in the heart of the Smugglers’ Bazaar.
    “No,