“It got her attention.”
“It accomplished nothing.”
Callahan was right, of course. Yet McGarvey couldn’t shake the premonition that Schlagel was somehow involved. “I assume that you’ve seen the material that we’ve come up with,” he said.
“On the contractor who walked away?” Callahan asked. “We don’t have him in any of our files, nor do I think you have any solid evidence he was involved.”
“He killed the teacher in San Francisco to use his identity to take a tour of the facility.”
“Sorry, but any defense lawyer would throw that out as circumstantial evidence. He’d be stuck with a suspicion of murder, but not an act of terrorism.”
“I agree,” McGarvey said. “But assuming the man who walked away from the tour was the pro who was hired along with the control room engineer, you’d have to admit that he’s damned good. You have no record of him, and neither does the Company. Hell, even Rencke is having a tough time finding anything.”
“Could mean he’s innocent,” Callahan suggested. He was playing devil’s advocate; disprove all the possibilities you could, until you were left with one ironclad lead.
“Innocent men leave tracks. Passports, driver’s licenses, bank accounts, things like that. But we’re all coming up with blanks. This guy simply doesn’t exist. Add his behavior at the power plant and that makes him my prime suspect.”
“I’ll give you that,” Callahan said. “We’ve certainly begun investigations on slimmer leads. But where does it lead if you can’t find him, can’t even learn who he is?”
“If he was the contractor, we at least know that he’s a pro. He’d have to be to leave absolutely no trace.”
“Interpol, MI5, MI6, BND, anybody?”
“All blanks so far.”
Callahan spread his hands. “Okay, you’re here, Mac, and you put the reverend’s name on the table. Where are you going with this? You certainly don’t think he’d be involved in the Princeton thing?”
“No, that’s a separate issue. Almost certainly Schlagel’s crazies. For an operation like Hutchinson Island a pro, like our contractor, would not come cheap. Whoever hired him had deep pockets.”
“According to your people al-Quaeda was behind educating the engineer.”
“But we think it’s possible that someone else got the engineer into contact with the contractor who then managed to get him to the States and inside the plant,” McGarvey said. “More money. A lot more.”
“And you don’t think the New al-Quaeda is that well-heeled these days?”
“We have to ask who’s got that kind of money — millions — to spend on an act of terrorism, and who has the reason for it — something to gain, something worth the money and the risk?”
Callahan sat back and shook his head. “Schlagel has the motive, and we think he probably has the means, but going after him could be dicey. He has a lot of powerful friends, including some in the White House, he has a very large and at times fanatical following, he has a media empire three times the size of Pat Robertson’s, and he has some top-notch lawyers, and I mean first-class lawyers, who’ve managed to create a wall of nearly impenetrable interlocking organizations, a lot of them supposed charities, plus at least three dozen corporations, most of them offshore.”
“So he has the means and the motive,” McGarvey said. “And a lot of guys like that think that they’re invincible, above the law, nobody’s smart enough to catch them. Makes him a suspect. And he sure came out of the chute in big hurry with his antinuclear movement.”
Callahan hesitated for just a second, and he shook his head again. “Knowing what you’re capable of doing, I’m not sure if I should tell you the rest of it.”
“We won’t catch these guys keeping shit from each other,” McGarvey said. “Those are the old days. No interagency rivalry now. Won’t do us any good.”
“It’d be nice if that were actually the truth, but nothing much has changed,” Callahan said. “Look, it’s possible that Schlagel may have some connection with Anne Marie Marinaccio and her financial group out of Dubai. We’ve had her under investigation ever since the dot-com boom days, but we couldn’t prove a thing that would hold up in a court of law. She’s damned good, and at that time she had a half-dozen senators in her pocket one way or another. When she got out of the technology stocks she wound up in real estate, mostly Florida and California, and when she walked she took several billions of dollars with her and set up in the UAE, which took her in with open arms.”
“Has she been indicted?”
“No, but we’ve classified her as a person of interest who we’d very much like to talk to. And there’s more.”
“There always is,” McGarvey said. He’d been down this path many times before, gathering information, gearing up for the opening moves. He sometimes thought of his work as an elaborate dance, in which very often one or more of the partners ended up dead.
“Marinnacio may have a connection to the United Arab Emirates International Bank of Commerce, which is almost certainly involved in the funding of a number of terrorist organizations, funneling money from dozens if not hundreds of charities around the world, including here in the States.”
“Don’t tell me that Schlagel is connected?”
“We don’t know about any ties with IBC, but he’s almost certainly done business with the Marinaccio Group.”
“Put it to a grand jury,” McGarvey said, but Callahan shook his head.
“Wouldn’t fly, Mac. We don’t have the proof.”
“Maybe I can help,” McGarvey said. “I’ve been given a free hand to take a closer look, see where this all leads.”
“For God’s sake don’t shoot the man.”
McGarvey had to smile despite himself. “Leastways not immediately. But I think there’s more coming.”
Callahan escorted him back downstairs to the lobby. “Keep me posted,” he said before they parted.
McGarvey nodded. “It’s a two-way street.”
THIRTY-SIX
McGarvey had turned off his cell phone at the FBI, and outside he switched it back on to find that Otto had sent him a message. He called back. “What do you have?”
“Page will see you anytime you want,” Otto said. “The sooner the better. He’s got something on his mind.”
“I’ll bet he does.”
“You get anything from Callahan?”
Switching off the cell phone hadn’t disabled the GPS memory, but all the sensitive areas in the J. Edgar Hoover Building were shielded from any kind of electronic transmissions. Callahan was just a guess on Rencke’s part, typical of his genius at figuring things out.
“The Bureau’s going to help.”
“That’s a comfort,” Rencke said with a touch of sarcasm.
“Looking a little closer at the Reverend Schlagel and his possible ties to the UAEIBC.”
“Yeah, Eric called a little while ago. We both got a strong tie between Schlagel and the bank, and possibly to a derivative fund’s manager setup in Dubai.”
“The Marinaccio Group.”
“Callahan give that to you?”
“Yes, he did, but he thinks it’s a stretch that Schlagel had anything to do with Hutchinson Island. Maybe his people at Princeton, but not Florida.”
“Run it by Page,” Otto said. “We’ll talk afterwards.”
Word had been left at the front gate that McGarvey was coming in, and the cabbie was given a dashboard
