“It might have made a small difference to the woman who spent eight months in jail accused of killing her.”
“Not my problem. Neither is this. I inquired into it as a favor to you and got what you wanted. I don’t see what’s your beef, tell you the truth. She was connected into witness protection, okay. That’s what you asked. Then somebody else apparently killed her. So?”
“So maybe the killer was who she was being protected against.”
“It was determined that wasn’t the case.”
Glitsky presses the skin at his temples, runs his finger over the scar through his lips. “It was determined . . .”
“That’s what they told me.” Schuyler doesn’t move a muscle. His hands are clasped on the table in front of him. He may know Glitsky somewhat as an individual, but this is not a personal conversation on any level. It is bureau business.
“So what was the protection about?”
“That’s ‘need to know.’ ” Then, softening somewhat. “So I don’t know.”
“Any way to find out?”
A shrug.
“And what about now, when it appears she’s alive?”
“That I did ask. Seems she fooled us, too.”
“So she’s really gone?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“Why would she do that? Shake your protection if it was working?”
Schuyler shakes his head. “No idea.”
Glitsky wills himself to speak calmly. “Let me ask you this, Bill. Your personal opinion. Would somebody in the bureau have helped her with this?”
“With what?”
“Getting away.”
After a minute, he nods. “It’s barely possible, I suppose, but not if it involved killing Hanover and another citizen and then torching the house.”
“But you do agree that it must have been her?”
“It’s possible. I don’t have an opinion. Officially, she’s still dead.”
“She’s not dead. There’s no body.”
“Okay, you’ve only known that for a week. Before that, she’d been dead for ten months. In the system, she’s still dead.”
This isn’t Glitsky’s war. Besides, dead or missing, the official call doesn’t matter to him. “Do you know who her connection was?”
A flare goes off in Schuyler’s eyes. He does a favor for Glitsky and the guy wants to go around him, higher up? “Negative,” he says. “And they wouldn’t tell me if I asked.”
“Need to know again?”
“That’s how we do it.” Schuyler, truly pissed off now, starts to slide out of the booth.
Glitsky reaches out a hand, touches his arm, stops him. “She’s alive, Bill. I intend to find her, but I need something to work with. I need to know who she is.”
“Put in a request.” He gets out of the booth. “If anybody wants to talk, they’ll call you.”
Glitsky came to believe that the only realistic possibility of tracing Missy D’Amiens had to be through the very large sum of money she’d stolen. She wouldn’t want to carry it around in cash. She would have to put it somewhere, if only for safekeeping. So on the day after his meeting with Schuyler, he had made some inquiries with the local branch of the Department of Homeland Security and had finally been put in contact with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN. He didn’t hold out much hope that the financial search would yield any results, since he’d already learned that Missy’s Social Security number was inactive due to her apparent death. But he had nothing else to pursue.
As a law enforcement officer, Glitsky had the authority to initiate what they called a Section 314(a) request, under that numbered provision of the Patriot Act. At the same time, he petitioned the attorney general of the United States, indicating that the person he was investigating in the Witness Protection Program had been charged, according to 18 U.S.C. Section 3521 et seq., with “an offense that is punishable by more than one year in prison or that is a crime of violence.”
The 314(a) request, originally intended to monitor the financial dealings of suspected terrorist groups, had in fact become primarily a tool to identify money laundering. There was, Glitsky knew, a host of problems with this approach—privacy issues, First Amendment questions, the basic problem of government interference with the lives of private citizens—but they were not his problems. Not now. And beyond that, the approach seemed somewhat backward. But to his astonishment his research turned up the fact that banks and most other financial institutions—even in post-9/11 America—didn’t try very hard to verify the identity of their customers.
In California and several other western states, banks hire a private company to validate addresses and maintain databases on driver’s license information, for example. But these verifications only concern themselves with whether the information is properly formatted. That dates of birth are made up of a month, a day and a year, for example. Or that residence addresses are not, in fact, business addresses. Or that there are nine digits in the SSN, broken in the right places—although inactive SSNs due to death are flagged.
Most unbelievably to Glitsky, banks did not even have to try to verify whether a given Social Security number matched a name. Instead, they would open an account with a valid SSN or business tax ID number and accept an accompanying driver’s license or other form of ID. If the driver’s license had your picture on it, with the name Joe Smith, and it seemed like a valid license, then the bank would take your SSN and list the account under Joe Smith. There was no system in place to identify fraudulent or fictitious names by comparing them to SSNs, or for tying all of this various identification information together.
The 314(a) procedure is straightforward, simple, low-tech. Every two weeks the government compiles a hardcopy list, usually with between fifty and two hundred names, of the government and law enforcement requests and sends it by fax or e-mail to every financial institution in the country. Each one of these institutions, within two more weeks, then must provide information on whether it maintains or has maintained accounts for, or engaged in transactions with, any individual, entity or organization listed in the request. If a match is found, the bank must notify FinCEN with a “Subject Information Form.”
And when Glitsky had gotten that form forwarded to him as the requesting party, submitted to FinCEN by Putah Creek Community Bank in Davis, California, he had gone to District Attorney Clarence Jackman in great secrecy. Only Jackman, the judge who’d signed the warrant and Glitsky’s wife knew that he had obtained a search warrant for the records referenced in the report.
32
Downtown Davis was arranged in a grid with lettered streets running north/south and numbered ones east/ west, and Glitsky had no trouble finding the Putah Creek Community Bank at Third and C. It was a small corner building, about half the size of Glitsky’s BofA branch in San Francisco. He drove by it, continued on to Fifth and turned right. About a mile farther on, outside the downtown section, he navigated an unexpected roundabout and pulled into the parking lot of a low-rise building that looked new. As an armed on-duty officer from another jurisdiction, he needed to check in with the local police not only as a courtesy, but to try to avoid any of those complicated misunderstandings that sometimes cropped up when dark-skinned men carrying concealed weapons encounter uniformed patrolmen. Glitsky didn’t expect anybody to hold a parade in his honor, but it couldn’t hurt to have the locals know that he was in town. He knew that he might also need to make arrangements for support and logistics.
The chief, Matt Wessin, came out and greeted him in the lobby. Ten or more years Glitsky’s junior, Wessin exuded health, competence and vigor. The shape of his body indicated that he worked out for a couple of hours every day. His hair bore not a streak of gray either on top or in the clipped military mustache. The face itself was as smooth and unlined as a boy’s. But he was every inch a professional cop, first talking privately to Glitsky about the situation in his office, then bringing him into a small conferen
ce room to brief a small team of detectives and a couple of patrolmen who he assigned to temporary detail.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. There were two women in the room, a lieutenant and a sergeant. He made the introductions, then continued. “By now, you’ve all had a chance to look over the fax pages that Deputy Chief Glitsky sent down yesterday. He’s got some more show-and-tell today, mostly a couple more pictures of the woman he’s hoping to locate here in town, although she may already be gone. As these pages indicate, it appears that she’s closed up her post office box. She may also have simply abandoned her safe-deposit box, which is down at Putah Creek Community Bank, but the upshot is that her address, if any, is a mystery. I’m going to pass these new pictures around and invite you all to look at them and then review for a minute who we’re actually talking about. This isn’t something we hear every day, I know, but in this case, I’d take it to heart. She should be considered armed and extremely dangerous.
“She got the deposit box under the name Monica Breque, although she has previous aliases, which include Michelle, or Missy, D’Amiens. If you’ll open the files in front of you, you’ll see . . .”
It’s two and a half weeks ago, just after lunch on a Monday afternoon.
Glitsky made his 314(a) request more than three weeks ago and hasn’t gotten any response yet. An hour ago, Zachary was cleared for a month without the need for more testing, and the dour and cautious Dr. Trueblood even allowed himself what looked like a genuine and even optimistic smile.
Glitsky gets back to his office at the Hall of Justice in the early afternoon. He greets Melissa, spends a minute giving her the good news about Zachary, then turns left out of the reception area, passes through the small conference room adjacent to it and into the short hallway that leads to his office, where he stops.
His door is closed.
When he left for the doctor’s appointment three hours ago, he’d left it open. He almost goes back to ask Melissa if she’d locked up for him while he was gone, but then realizes that it’s probably nothing. Maybe some cleaning staff, somebody leaving a note, not an issue.
So he opens the door.
Inside, on one of the upholstered chairs in front of Glitsky’s desk, in a relaxed posture, slumped even, with his legs crossed, is a man he’s never seen before. He’s wearing a business suit and looks over at Glitsky’s entrance. “You might want to get the door,” he says.
Glitsky doesn’t move. “Who are you?”
“A friend of Bill Schuyler’s.” There’s no threat in the soft-spoken voice. He points. “You mind? The door?”
Never taking his eyes off him, Glitsky complies. The man returns the gaze for a second, then stands up. He is probably in his forties, tall, slim and pale, half bald with a well-trimmed tonsure of blond hair. He’s already got his wallet in his hand and opens it up, flashes some kind of official-looking identification. “Scott Thomas,” he says. “You’ve been making inquiries about Missy D’Amiens. Do you really believe she’s still alive?”
“I do. I don’t think there’s any doubt of it. Are you FBI?”
A small, tidy, almost prim chuckle. “No, I’m sorry. CIA.”
Glitsky takes a beat. “I understood she was in witness protection.”
“She was. We put her in it, farmed it out to the bureau.” Another ironic smile. “The company isn’t allowed to operate domestically.”
“All right,” Glitsky says. “How can I help you?”
“Maybe we should sit down.”
“I’m okay on my feet.”
Thomas’s mouth gives a little twitch. The man clearly isn’t used to being gainsaid. His orders, even his suggestions, get followed. His eyes, the pupils as black as a snake’s, show nothing resembling emotion. “It might take a minute,” he says in a pleasant tone. “We’ll be more comfortable.” He sits again, back in the easy chair, and waits until Glitsky finally gives up, crosses behind his desk and lowers himself into his chair.
“I want to tell you a story,” Thomas says.
In the next hour, Glitsky hears about a young woman, born Monique Souliez in 1966 in Algiers. The sixth child and youngest daughter of a very successful French-trained surgeon, she, too, was schooled in France. Linguistically talented, she traveled widely during her vacation—within Europe over several summers, Singapore another, San Francisco, Sydney, Rio. But she came from a well-established and very closely knit family, and when her formal education was completed in 1989, she returned to Algeria, where she took a job in junior management at the local branch of the Banque National de Paris and soon fell in love with a young doctor, Philippe Rouget.
In 1991, she and Philippe got married in a highly visible society wedding. This was also the year in which a party of some moderate but mostly radical Islamists called the Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS, won a round of parliamentary elections for the first time. This victory prompted Algeria’s ruling party, the National Liberation Front (FLN) to outlaw the FIS, and this in turn led to the first violent confrontations between the FLN and the FIS, confrontations that within a year had grown into a full-scale civil war.
Monique and Philippe were not particularly political. True, they both came from the upper classes and socialized almost exclusively within that circle. But mostly they kept to themselves and to the strong Souliez extended family of doctors, engineers, professional people and their educated, sophisticated, well-traveled relatives. The young couple themselves were contented newlyweds doing work that they felt was important and that would go on regardless of who was in power. After Monique became pregnant, their personal world became even more insular, even as the civil war escalated throughout the country and all around them.
Idealistic and unaffiliated with any of the warring factions, Philippe volunteered when he could at both emergency rooms and makeshift clinics that treated both sides. Sometimes these weren’t clinics at all, but calls in the night, wounded and dying young men at their doors.
The slaughter, meanwhile, continued unabated until the government finally took the conflict to another level. Anyone suspected of FIS sympathies would simply disappear amid rumors of mass graves and torture. The government issued weapons to previously noncombatant civilians, and this led to a further breakdown in order, with neighbors killing neighbors, with armed bands of simple thieves creating further confusion and havoc. On the rebel side, a splinter organization that called itself the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, began a campaign of horrific retaliatory massacre, sometimes wiping out entire villages, killing tens of thousands of civilians. Favoring techniques such as assassinations,car bombings, and kidnapping—and then slitting their victims’ throat—they brought a new definition of terror to the conflict.
Philippe and Monique considered leaving the country, of course. They had a baby, Jean-Paul, to protect now. The rest of the family would understand. But the rest of the family wasn’t fleeing. This was their home. They and their civilized counterparts in similar predicaments believed it their duty to stay. And Philippe and Monique came to feel the same way. They would be the only hope for the country when the fighting stopped, as they believed it eventually would.
But it didn’t stop in time for Philippe and Jean-Paul.
Pounding on their door in the middle of the night, a twenty-man squadron of government security forces broke into their home. Informants had told authorities that they’d seen Philippe working on the GIA wounded. He was, therefore, with the GIA. They dragged him from the house, knocking Monique unconscious with rifle butts in the street as she screamed and fought and tried to get them to stop. When she came to, Philippe was gone, the door to her house was open and nearly everything in it was destroyed. Jean-Paul’s broken body lay in a corner of his bedroom with his dismantled toys and slashed stuffed animals littering the floor around him.
Here Glitsky holds up a hand. “I get the picture.” He pauses, explains. “I’m not in a good place to hear stories about dead babies right now.”
Thomas, jarred out of his narra
tive, narrows his obsidian eyes in impatience or even anger. Then he checks himself.Glitsky suddenly gets the impression that he knows about Zachary. It’s unnerving.
“Sure,” Thomas says. “No problem.”
He gathers himself, picks up where he left off.
After the government thugs killed her husband and her son, Monique became transformed both by her need for vengeance and by her passionate hatred for the government, and particularly its so-called security units. Within a month of the twin tragedies she’d endured, she went underground and joined one of the revolutionary brigades.
At this time, the rebels still lacked a strong organizational structure or even a cohesive political platform. They were united in seeking to overthrow the current administration and replace it with an Islamic state, but there was no central command, or even a consensus on what type of Islamic structure the country would eventually embrace if they were victorious. The typical cell consisted of a loosely confederated group of between ten and twenty-five individuals. Most of these were Islamic, of course, but many Christians and even some Europeans were drawn to the cause in the way Monique had been—by the government’s brutality or by simple hatred of individuals in power. Many, too, joined the rebels because they hated France, which supported the FLN and its military-dominated regime.
The details of Monique’s next couple of years were sketchy, but it was clear that she had become affiliated with one of the cells. She may or may not have actually participated in many raids and ambushes—the accounts varieed—but she certainly became comfortable with a variety of weapons and took part in planning and funding operations, especially against security details such as those that had killed her family.
But as the government’s ongoing campaign continued to decimate the rebels’ numbers, the individual cells were forced to congeal into more cohesive and ever more secretive units. The GIA, effectively beaten as an army, had to abandon the pitched street battles that had marked the civil war stage of the conflict, although they continued to assassinate, to bomb and to kidnap. The government, for its part, waged what began as a successful torture campaign against captured prisoners who were suspected of GIA affiliation. Increasingly marginalized, the rebels countered with an effective tool to guarantee the silence of its captured operatives. If a captive talked, his or her entire family would be killed. Not just husbands and wives and children, but fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grand-mothers, uncles, aunts and cousins, to the third degree.
The Motive Page 42