The Devil's Banker by Christopher Reich

him?”
    “Adam, do as I—”
    “Did we?”
    “No,” admitted Halsey. “No prisoners were apprehended.”
    Chapel choked back his frustration. It wasn’t good enough. Not after busting his hump to get inside the Islamic alternative remittance network. Not after sniffing the shorts of every halfway questionable charity in the United States. “Disrupt and dismantle” were the task force’s watchwords. So far, they’d arrested a dozen moneymen and frozen over a hundred million dollars in questionable assets. It was good work to be sure, but as yet they had no proof they’d impeded the functioning of an active terrorist cell. Finally they had a certified player in their sights, one caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and they wanted to take him down before they could put a finger on his associates or clamp down on his cell.
    “Follow the money, Mr. Halsey. That’s the rule. Stop him now and we got nothing. One more smart-ass who won’t talk.”
    “A bird in the hand, Adam. With the proper inducements, I’m sure Mr. Taleel will be most cooperative.”
    “Arrest him and we’ve got no idea what he’s up to. Intel says he’s set to pick up five hundred G’s or more. Something’s got to be hot to risk that kind of transfer. Let me follow him. We’ll tag and mark him. He’s ours.”
    “You need three cars and five or six guys on the street not to spook him. You telling me you can follow him in a city of six million people? All he has to do is take off his jacket and he’s gone. I won’t tell Glen Glendenning we’ve lost a major player.”
    “Arrest him now,” said Leclerc, in his gravedigger’s voice. “I promise you I’ll find out everything you need to know.”
    Chapel glared at him. “We don’t do things that way.”
    Leclerc glared back. “Ah, you will, mon ami .”
    “What’s he doing with the money?” Chapel demanded of Halsey. “Tell me that and I’ll arrest him. It’s like nine-eleven. You think if we stopped Atta the day before the attack, he would have told us what was going to happen? You think they would have canceled their plans? He’d have told us to go to hell and we’d have had no choice but to respect his rights, get him a lawyer, and wait until the goddamn towers went down to get after him. I say we wait. I say we see who Taleel’s delivering the money to. We can’t stop short on this.”
    Suddenly the suite was too small. The ornate furnishings pressed in on him like a bad migraine. You could toss a football across the salon, but you couldn’t go two feet without bumping into some Louis XV chair, a froufrou sofa, or an antique oak secretary. Every nook had a Chinese vase. Every shelf, an ormolu clock. Every wall, a rustic oil painting. A chandelier hung in the entry and another dangled over the dining room table. And all of it—the couches, the carpets, the ashtrays, and artwork—was color coordinated in a sea of navy blue and ivory, with just a touch of maroon to remind you that the French still loved their royalty, even if they had led them to the chopping block in a tumbrel cart.
    “Mr. Chapel?” It was a new voice that he recognized as Owen Glendenning’s. “Are you telling me that you can hang on to Taleel in all that mess?”
    “Yes, sir, I can.”
    “Those are pretty big words for your first time out.”
    “I’ve got some good guys with me.”
    “They trust you to run this?”
    Chapel looked at Keck, who was listening to every word of their exchange. Keck raised a thumb and nodded his head. “You da man, Mr. C.”
    “Yes, sir,” replied Chapel. “I believe they do.”
    “All right, then. We lost one player today. Don’t lose another. Ghosts don’t make a habit of turning up in the same place twice.”
    “Yes, sir.” And then Chapel was doing five things at once. “Ditch the coat and bring round the van,” he ordered Santos Babtiste. “And call in a second tail car.”
    “Get to the service entrance, PDQ,” he commanded Ray Gomez.