The Devil's Banker Read Free

was filled with automobile tires. Hundreds and hundreds of brand-new tires, stacked neatly upon one another, row after row, rising thirty feet in the air. Turning, she peered across the intersection toward the mosque. It would be safer to watch from there. An A-team was inbound. She knew what that meant: bullets, and lots of them. Abu Sayeed was not the type to turn himself over to the authorities and say, “Okay, Officer. I’ll come along quietly.”
    “Emerald, this is Ranger.” A new voice sounded in her ear, calm, authoritative. Ranger. The DDO himself. The deputy director of operations. “Go on into the store. Take a look around.”
    “Go in?”
    “We wouldn’t want him to sneak out on us, would we? Not before the party starts. It’s a jewelry store,” he went on. “Have a look at a necklace. Buy whatever you like. Call it my treat. You can put it on my expense account.”
    “I don’t think they take American Express,” she answered blithely, knowing that the banter was to relax her, to deceive her about the peril of his command. And make no mistake, it was an order. He was asking her to flit by her lonesome into a shop with the biggest underworld financier on the northwest frontier and a hardened terrorist associated with a group so secret, so rife with all manner of rumor, that no one even dared whisper its name—if it even had one—because until now, no one had wanted to acknowledge its existence. One supreme evil commander was enough for the world these days.
    Across the street, a fierce-looking man was staring daggers at her. He wore a black headdress and a black dishdasha, and his beard hadn’t been cut in a decade. An Imam, she guessed. An Islamic cleric. The man refused to avert his gaze, lips trembling, eyes afire, his entire being a vessel of hate. Through the veil, she met his accusing glare, and from his obduracy, his anger, his bewildering disrespect of the superior sex, she drew the courage she herself lacked.
    “Roger last,” she said. “I think I’ll have a look at some of Bhatia’s tat.”
    “Good girl,” said Ranger. And Sarah thought that if he ever called her that again, she’d slug him in the jaw even if he was a crip. But by then it didn’t matter. She was moving, not thinking. She dodged the curtain of sparks sent up from the gunsmith’s forge. She grimaced in her private netherworld as she passed the coils of lamb intestines dangling from the butcher’s hook. Then she was inside the store, admiring Mr. Bhatia’s mediocre wares as if they were the Crown Jewels.
     
     
    The money sat in a pile on a table in Bhatia’s private office. The Indian opened each packet with a barber’s straight-edged razor, then handed the bills to an associate to count. When he was finished, he grunted. “Five hundred thousand dollars, as you claimed.”
    “The Sheikh does not lie,” said Abu Sayeed. A bountiful rain had doubled the poppy harvest. One ton of raw opium was Allah’s gift to Hijira: his benediction upon the holocaust to come.
    “It is not easy to move such a sum,” said Bhatia. “How quickly do you need it?”
    “Immediately.”
    “Today?”
    “Now.”
    Bhatia’s grave features registered concern. “Where is the money to be sent?”
    “Paris.”
    “Hmm.” Bhatia’s eyes narrowed, and he mumbled a few words to himself, shaking his head. Sayeed knew it was a ruse, the Indian figuring how large a fee he might get away with. “It can be done. However, the cost for such a transaction is two percent.”
    “One percent.”
    “Impossible! No one keeps such cash on the premises. A bank will have to be involved. There will be borrowing costs. Overnight at least. Maybe longer. It cannot be avoided. And, of course, the risk. One and a half.”
    Sayeed disliked negotiation, but in some cases, it was necessary. Five thousand dollars was a small fee to ensure swift delivery of money to Paris. Small, indeed, compared to the damage it would wreak. “One,” he repeated. He