‘Are you okay, John?’ asked Elaine.
‘Just a headache,’ said Maplethorpe. ‘Stress brings it on.’
‘Why London?’ asked Elaine.
‘She doesn’t feel safe in Belfast, but doesn’t want to appear to be running away with her tail between her legs. So, they’ll spend a few weeks in London. If we don’t catch the killer, they’ll go back to Boston.’
‘And in the meantime the cops are bodyguarding them?’
‘It’s been made clear that if anything happens to the Kinsellas, heads will roll.’ Maplethorpe grinned. ‘Just hope it doesn’t happen before I leave – wouldn’t want them to have an excuse to slash my pension.’ He gestured at Shepherd with his knife. ‘How are you settling in, Jamie?’
‘Fine,’ said Shepherd.
‘We should have another game of pool.’
‘I’ll look forward to it.’
Richard Yokely stretched out his legs and waved at Karl Traynor on the large plasma screen. The other man was sitting at a desk in the Washington secure room sipping from a mug. ‘They let you have coffee in there, Karl?’ he asked jealously.
‘Sure. Can’t function without a caffeine injection, you know that.’
‘They won’t let me have it in here,’ said Yokely.
‘Ah, well, rules are rules,’ said Traynor. He pushed his spectacles up his nose. ‘Are you ready?’
‘I am.’
‘Two weeks ago Hassan Salih received a payment of a quarter of a million dollars from an account at the Mashreq Bank in Dubai. It belongs to one Muhammad Aslam. The money was transferred to an account at the DBS Bank in Singapore in the name of Majid Jasim, which was one of the names you gave me. Yesterday a further two million dollars were transferred by the same route.’
‘Do you know who Muhammad Aslam is?’
‘Sadly not. He’s not on our watch list and he’s not on the list of Specially Designated Nationals. All we get from the SWIFT download are names, account numbers and amounts. We can follow the money, but we’re not in a position as yet to get the personal details of the account holders. We can apply through the Financial Action Task Force, but it takes time.’
Yokely made a note of the name on his pad.
‘Now, large deposits were made into Muhammad Aslam’s account in Dubai shortly before he made the two transfers to Singapore. Four hundred thousand dollars went in two days before he sent the quarter of a million to Singapore, and two and a half million the day before the two million was sent to the Majid Jasim account. Both transfers came from the Gulf International Bank in Riyadh, a personal account belonging to one Othman bin Mahmuud al-Ahmed.’
‘Ah,’ said Yokely.
‘You know the name?’ asked Traynor.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Yokely. ‘He’s a very important man, is Othman. A very big wheel.’
‘We know of him, of course. He’s a fixer for several of the Saudi princes so we have to give him clearances from time to time. The way I read it is that the money is coming from Othman and that Muhammad Aslam is acting as a middle man, taking his commission before he passes the funds on.’ Traynor glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got a Treasury meeting in fifteen minutes. Is there anything else you need from me?’
‘How much is in the Dubai account at the moment?’ asked Yokely.
‘There’s the six hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ difference between what went in and what went to Singapore, plus a few hundred thousand that was already there. So, just short of a million bucks. If you want I can talk to the Office of Foreign Assets Control and get the account frozen. And I could have Aslam put on the SDN list. It might be a bit harder going against Othman as he has political connections here in Washington.’
The list of Specially Designated Nationals was one of the big guns in the OFAC armoury. Once on the list, a person’s assets were blocked and all Americans prohibited from dealing with them. Anyone on the list became a virtual pariah, their travel options were limited and any businesses they were connected to withered and died. ‘For the moment we’ll just give them enough rope to hang themselves,’ said Yokely. ‘If we start freezing assets they’ll know that we know. But keep a watching brief, please, Karl, and update me on any further transfers. What happened to the money in the Singapore account?’
‘It’s not been touched. At the moment there’s a little over five million US dollars in it. I’ve had a look at transactions over the past five years. From time to time money is paid in from mainly Middle Eastern accounts, then transferred to Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands. Various names to those accounts, but most of them are the aliases you gave me.’
‘Thanks, Karl. Do me another favour, will you? Run a worldwide search for those aliases and pin down every account he has. At some point in the future we’ll freeze them. And check for withdrawals over the past month. I’m pretty sure Salih is in London, but it’d be helpful to have confirmation.’
‘What about my HobNobs?’
‘I FedExed them yesterday,’ said Yokely.
Traynor flashed him a thumbs-up and the screen went blank. Yokely sat back in his chair and linked his fingers behind his head. ‘So, Othman bin Mahmuud al-Ahmed, you want me dead, do you?’ he whispered. ‘Well, you’ve thrown the dice. Let’s see how they land.’
Shepherd was using a pair of shears to hack away at the hedge in the back garden when his mobile phone beeped. He looked at the screen. It was a text message from a number he didn’t recognise. ‘KELLY’S CELLAR. 6 P. M.’ He frowned. Only the people he’d met in Belfast and Charlotte Button had his number. Mentally he ran through the phone numbers he knew, but there was no match. He called it back, but the phone had been switched off. There was an outside chance that the message had been sent to the wrong number, but Shepherd doubted it. It was just after three o’clock now so he had plenty of time. He finished the hedge, then went upstairs to shower and change.
He drove into the city centre and parked in a multi-storey close to Royal Avenue, then spent ten minutes walking round the shops in Royal Avenue, the City Hall behind him, checking reflections in shop windows. Kelly’s Cellar was down Bank Street to his left, but he carried on walking. A group of Hari Krishna devotees were jumping up and down, banging drums, clashing cymbals and chanting, watched by a group of Goth teenagers with black hair, pale faces and pierced noses. He went into a Virgin Megastore and wandered among the rows of CDs and DVDs for fifteen minutes until he was sure he wasn’t being followed, then left and headed back to the bar.
The Goths were still staring at the Hari Krishna group as Shepherd walked by. One of the girls had a safety- pin through her ear and a silver ring in one nostril. Shepherd realised self-mutilation wasn’t something that he found the least bit attractive. He wondered what he’d do if Liam ever decided to dress in black with white makeup, mascara and assorted body piercings or started to bang a drum and chant. His boy was only ten, but time flew and he wasn’t looking forward to the rebellious teenage years.
Kelly’s Cellar was a traditional two-storey black and white pub with a slate roof. It would perhaps have been more at home on a windswept moor, surrounded by bleating sheep, but now it was hemmed in by a branch of Tesco and a red-brick shopping centre. He took a last glance over his shoulder and pushed open the black wooden door. There was a long bar to his right and a line of wooden tables at which old men in thick coats were drinking pints of Guinness, newspapers open at the sports pages. Four women with pinched faces and cheap clothes were cackling together like witches and drinking halves of bitter.
Shepherd scanned the faces as he went to the bar but there was no one he recognised. A red-haired man in a stained T-shirt and jeans asked what he wanted to drink and he ordered a Jameson’s and ice. ‘Can I buy you a drink, you Brit bastard?’ said a man behind him, in a poor imitation of a Northern Irish accent.
Shepherd spun around. His eyes widened. Richard Yokely was the last person he’d expected to see in a Belfast pub. The American grinned but Shepherd held up a hand to silence him. He got out his mobile phone, took off the back and removed the battery.
‘Someone listening in, are they?’ said Yokely.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ said Shepherd. ‘Since when has Belfast been your turf?’ He put the phone and the battery back into his pocket.
‘I’m a quarter Irish, didn’t I tell you?’ said Yokely, clapping Shepherd on the back. ‘Well, two-eighths, actually. A great-grandmother on my mother’s side was from Donegal and a great-grandfather on my father’s was from
