SIXTY SEVEN.
True to form, Marcus
Dumond sat in his corner cubicle oblivious to the storm that was
raging around him. The Bull Pen at the CIA's Counterterrorism
Center was a labyrinth of five-foot-tall plastic and fabric
dividers. Partly out of necessity, and partly out of humor, the
aisles that cut through the area had been given names such as Abu
Nidal Way and Osama Bin Lane. Dumond had been the chief planner and
street namer of the ever expanding Bull Pen, and he had
intentionally located himself on a dead street with limited
access.
While his MP3 player
cranked out the tunes, Dumond worked the keys of his computer with
blazing efficiency, toggling back and forth between three screens,
closing windows, opening new ones and shrinking or enlarging
others. He was on to something. He wasn't sure what quite yet, but
he was definitely on to something. Following Rapp's lead, he'd
focused on recent transactions made by Omar's main assistant. The
hardest nut to crack wasn't hacking into the secure networks of the
institutions in question-that was easy. The real issue lay in the
enormity of Omar's wealth. He used literally hundreds of banks to
handle his vast fortune. That said, however, Dumond didn't waste
his time surfing through the Prince's transactions that were
handled by Chase or the Deutsche Bank. In fact he immediately
discarded all banks in the United States, England, Japan, Canada
and Germany and focused on those nations known for their financial
privacy laws.
Dumond had only to
read the file on Devon LeClair once to know where to focus his
attention. If given his choice, an anal retentive snob like LeClair
would bank with only one group of people. The ever efficient Swiss
were the perfect match. They thought of everything.
They conducted
themselves with a respectful, professional flair that properly
schooled men like LeClair demanded.
Trying to run
searches based on Omar's name or those of his various holding
companies had proven to be too cumbersome. Dumond hid two
strategies he wanted to employ before he called in the money guys
from Treasury and the FBI to pore over the accounts with a
magnifying glass. He'd seen the men and women do it before, chasing
down every check, wire transfer and charge to its final
destination. It could easily take fifty agents six months to run a
thorough examination of Omar's finances, and even then they might
miss something.
They had to do things
the proper way, both politically and legally.
Even if they knew the
tricks that Dumond employed, they would be too afraid to use them.
The twenty-eight-year-old hacker from MIT could get results much
quicker. None of the information he gathered would be admissible in
a court of law, but Dumond had worked enough with Rapp in the past
to know that he preferred to settle things in a less public
forum.
Dumond had keyed in
on three banks, two headquartered in Zurich and a third in Geneva.
Each bank was among Switzerland's oldest and most austere, and
LeClair was authorized access to each one. At first Dumond focused
his attention on the larger transactions, five to ten million
dollars. He came up blank, so he started over again looking for
money that had been shuffled between the three banks he was
focusing on. This also proved to be a dead end.
As a last resort he
went through each account for the past month looking for smaller
transactions from various banks on various days that all may have
ended up in a single account. He paid special attention to the name
of the banks the money was being transferred to. He was looking for
an accumulation of funds in one account that would get him to the
proper threshold.
Dumond was focusing
on blocks of money and transaction dates.
In his mind he was
trying to piece together a down payment followed by a later payment
for successful completion of contract. He couldn't find anything
that was approaching five million dollars or even half of that
number. Suddenly an amount and a bank caught his eye: $500,000 had
been wired from one of the banks in Zurich on Monday to a financial
institution on the island of Martinique in the French West
Indies.
He swore he'd already
seen the same transaction. He began looking back through the
transactions and sure enough, two weeks earlier LeClair had wired
the same amount from another account to the same account in
Martinique.
As Dumond looked at
the name on the account in Martinique he couldn't help but think
there was something familiar about it. His fingers remained poised
just above the keyboard and his head began to tilt to one side. It
was coming to him. The name was not that common.
Like his own it was
French, which would fit with the French West Indies, but there was
some reason why it seemed familiar to him. Dumond pulled his arms
back and crossed them in frustration. He had just seen the name
somewhere and it was driving him nuts that he couldn't remember. He
was about to give up and have the computer run a search when it hit
him.
Dumond closed out one
of his screens. His fingers flew across the keys in search of this
morning's on-line edition of The New York Times. The home page
popped up on his center screen and he scanned the sidebar for the
story he was looking for. After a brief moment he found it and
opened the article. In the first paragraph of the article Dumond
hit upon the name he was looking for: Peter Joussard. He looked
back and forth from one screen to the other, from the on-line
edition of The New York Times to the balance of a bank account in
the Caribbean containing one million dollars. Dumond attempted to
calculate the odds that it was coincidence and quickly decided it
wasn't, it couldn't be.
Yanking off his
headphones he grabbed the handset of his phone and dialed Rapp's
mobile number.