The Devil's Banker Read Online Free PDF

no,” she remonstrated the clerk. “The quality of the links is terrible. Look: this is not solid gold. It is electroplated.”
    “Yes. Twenty microns.”
    “Ten at most,” she countered. “I can scratch it off with my fingernail.”
    She’d been in the store for twenty minutes, and her every sensor was telling her to get the hell out. One of the surveillance cameras was pointed directly at her, and she could imagine Sayeed in the back room, glancing up at the monitor and asking, “Is she still there? That’s a bit long, isn’t it?”
    She dropped the chain on the counter and pretended to spot a bracelet that captured her fancy.
    “There’s been a delay,” said a voice in her ear. “A traffic jam.” It was Ranger and he no longer sounded so calm and authoritative. “The A-team will be there in five minutes. If Omar comes out, you need to stop him. Once he’s in the bazaar, he’s got the advantage. We need him penned in.”
    Stop him? The reply choked deep in her throat. Damn it! She knew they wouldn’t make it in time.
    “Are you with me?” asked Ranger. “Just nod.”
    So, it had come to this, thought Sarah. With all their satellites and uplinks and GPS, it had come back to the same old thing. Put your body in front of the bullet.
    She would do it. She never considered saying no. Not with a daddy who’d gone ashore with 2 Para at Goose Green in the Falklands and a brother who’d done thirty missions over Baghdad. The Churchills were bred to fight. And they had the coat of arms and the professional soldier’s proud penury to prove it.
    She just hadn’t thought it would be hers to do alone.
    Swallowing, she found her throat dry as a chalkboard. It was the heat, she told herself.
    She nodded.
    “I’d like to see the red one.” To her surprise, Sarah realized that she was asking the salesman a second time to see the bracelet and that he wasn’t responding. She heard a rustle behind her, the creak of a door opening, hushed voices. The salesman’s eyes were pinned to the men emerging from the back room. Against her every instinct, she turned so that Langley could see what she was seeing, so that they would know that their vaunted A-team, their bare-chested macho superstars, were too late, and that Omar was going to get away unless she tackled him right then and there.
    Sayeed was talking on a cell phone, his words rushed, urgent. She caught a string of numbers, a pause, saw his mouth widen to utter an arrogant laugh. As he slid past her, she caught his ripe scent.
    Stop him, Glendenning had said.
    Sarah took a step back. The collision was stilted and orchestrated. Sayeed grunted and spun, immediately on the defensive. And even as she turned to apologize, and the futility of her cause overcame her, she knew that, at least for a moment, she’d accomplished what she’d been told, and that her father, the general himself, would be proud.
     
     
    Abu Sayeed lifted his arm to brush away the woman, his eyes drawn into a distasteful grimace. Until she had backed into him like a clumsy ox, he thought he’d been wrong to suspect her. Her burqa was immaculate. Her posture at once respectful, yet with the right amount of pride. She revealed no part of herself. She was a righteous woman, not a street whore eager to prey on a man with a little money in his pocket.
    Abu Sayeed believed in the law of Hijaab, or “concealment.” He believed that women had no place in public. They belonged at home, caring for children, tending to their household. Only in this way could their dignity be upheld, their purity protected. Should they have to venture out, they must cover their figure in deference to the Prophet. The smallest piece of exposed flesh was as provocative as a woman’s pudenda.
    Now he knew it was a sham. Her adherence to Hijaab, a lie; a ploy to rid an unsuspecting male of a few dollars. It was common enough practice. You could barely pass a diamond merchant without spotting the women waiting outside like