Agent Fitzpatrick was one of two agents, in addition to Tyra Baylor, who remained in Vancouver after the botched courthouse attack. His assignment was to take out Kumar and Turbee. He knew Turbee was on the fortysecond floor of the Wall Centre. He thought that Kumar was in the same suite. He was not aware that Zak and Richard had taken Kumar into the courthouse lockup.
At 2:00 a.m. Fitzpatrick, equipped with a Beretta and various other weapons of personal combat, entered the main foyer of the Wall Centre and took one of the east tower elevators to the forty-second floor. He knocked on the door of room 4201. He felt the tingle of adrenalin surge through his system. He pulled out his gun and knocked on the door again. “Room service,” he said.
The mouse whizzed past George’s ear and clattered on the floor behind him, knocking the battery cover off and sending the battery skittering in 360s across the wood-paneled floor.
“Whoa, Turb, I’ve never seen you do that before. What’s up little buddy?”
“I’m completely stuck, George. I think I know who owns fifty-one percent of the Afghanistan Development Corporation, and it’s suspicious. But this Erbium166 company is thoroughly hidden away. I don’t think there’s a digital record at all.”
“Not at all?”
“Yes, George. Paper and pen are becoming the new high-tech form of encryption. You don’t use computers at all. You go back to the 1950s. You write things down. You use ink. Honest to god ink. And you don’t put it on a hard drive or in the cloud or on a flash drive. You put it in a desk. In a drawer, lock it up with an old-fashioned key. You avoid digital snoops by avoiding digital. That’s what I think happened here.”
“How far did you get?”
“Well, Erbium166 is a company incorporated in Afghanistan, and it’s owned by another company in Pakistan. Both countries have modeled their corporate system after the English model. After all, it was the English who took things over for a while, in the nineteenth century, until they were thoroughly beaten and tossed out. But in the meantime, a lot of British law was adopted, and it hung around. Erbium166 is owned by Erbium166—Pakistan— Ltd., which is owned by a numbered company that’s headquartered with a large law firm in Karachi. There is absolutely no trace of anything owned by or owning the numbered company, other than a lawyer at the law firm.”
“Are you sure, Turb?”
“George, I’m accessing the TTIC computers from here. They have access to pretty much every database on the planet. If it exists, TTIC can find it.”
“So if TTIC can’t find it—”
Turbee finished George’s sentence: “It does not exist. At least not digitally.”
“But,” George added, “we know it must exist because it owns a company that owns a company that owns forty-nine percent of most of the natural resources of Afghanistan. There is no way that some lawyer in Karachi owns it.”
“The syllogism works, George. You are right. It must exist because of the wealth it owns. But TTIC can’t find anything about it. That means that while it does not exist digitally, it must exist. And the only way I can think of is the nineteenth century way.”
Turbee was silent for a few minutes, listening to the distant sound of traffic, and the occasional siren coming from the direction of St. Paul’s two blocks away. He poured himself a cup of lukewarm coffee and looked disconsolately at his computer screen.
“What about the fifty-one percent chunk?” asked George.
“Kumar told us that Yousseff owns it, but probably indirectly, through trusts and offshore holding companies.”
“Who is supposed to own it? On paper?”
“The press releases state that it’s owned by the government, by the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. But when you look a little closer, it’s actually owned by the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Ltd. This is a limited company. It’s owned by a series of numbered companies that are owned by various trusts that are directed by various other numbered companies in countries famous for laundering and hiding drug money, or money stolen by despots. You know, the usual places—the Bahamas, Guatemala, Luxembourg, Kazakhstan, St. Maarten, Martinique, those places. But at least that’s trackable and I’m working on it. One of the things that helps us is that ultimately the trail has to lead back to Yousseff. But George, there’s something else.”
“What?”
“I think I’m being followed.”
“Followed how?”
“I think someone is tracking me, George. There’s nothing specific that I can point to. Every now and then I get weird interruptions in my searches, stuff that you wouldn’t spot if you didn’t know the system intimately. You know what I mean. You and I designed most of the programming. You kind of get a feel—”
There was a sharp rap on the door. “Room service,” came the voice from the other side.
“Did you order anything, Turbee?”
“I might have. I think I ordered some root beer and a bunch of chocolate bars a couple of hours ago, but then I might not have, or I might have.
George, you know I don’t keep track of such things. I don’t know.”
60
The haste of the assignment had resulted in faulty intelligence. The trial had to be stopped in any way possible, as rapidly as possible. If defense counsel were to be deleted from the equation, the trial would be delayed until new lawyers could be brought into the picture. That would be enough for the Yousseff-did-not-do-this cabal to regroup. Tyra was ready for two people, Dana and Chris, either of whom she could have killed with her bare hands. But no one had told her about an 185-pound Saint Bernard who was fanatically devoted to—in fact, made it his mission to protect—the two people
