Circle Around the Sun

by M. D. Johnson

  “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “Not in the slightest, Hallah my dear. I’ve wanted to do that for decades.”

  “Have you talked with Mum?”

  “Hallah, I rarely talk with your mother unless it’s business. I believe she knows a few scores were settled. She’ll be briefed when she returns to Maryland.”

  “So what happens now?” Haley asked her father.

  “We wait and see what happens to Ansari. As for your brother, I don’t think there will be any charges filed. They’ll be too busy trying to cover up the actions of one of their own. They won’t want to make a big deal out of it.”

  “Wait a minute. My brother was beaten to a bloody pulp. He might not be able to work again. He’s a physician, for heaven’s sake.”

  “You brother was in a war zone because that’s where he wanted to be, Hallah. That’s all there is to it. He’ll be adequately compensated for his efforts on behalf of his country.”

  “That’s all there is. One nice neat little package. Mason is out of harm’s way. That’s it. Over and done with?”

  “That’s the way it works, Hallah.” Idris Farrukh played with his orange joice eyeing her closely “The game goes on and on. We win some. They win some.”

  Atiya Shah was murdered by this sadistic bastard. What about that?”

  “Casualty of war, my dear. What can I say?”

  “Daddy dearest, your war hasn’t even begun. Thanks for the drink. I have to get over to see Mason. Breakfast tomorrow, perhaps?” And with that, she was gone.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-SEVEN

  She arrived at the Ansaris’ apartment a few minutes later. Mason was sleeping peacefully. Her parents were having their usual nightcap of Scotch.

  “Explain all this to me Hallah.”

  “Oh shit. You called me Hallah. I’m getting grounded?”

  “Tell me everything. I want an explanation,” her mother commanded.

  Harrison and the Ansaris sat down on the couch, waiting for the explosion.

  “Mother, I will not lie to you. When I heard Mason was in trouble, I contacted the Ansaris in case there were people they could get me in touch with in Herat, and then I called Yassir Shallal.”

  “You did what?” Her mother asked incredulously.

  “I contacted Shallal, as he was the only British spy I knew personally.”

  “You don’t know Yassir Shallal. You’ve heard of him, and perhaps met him twice.”

  “Oh Mother, wake up! I know who he is. I can look in the mirror and see that. Get a life, for chrissake!”

  “It had nothing to do with him,” her mother said, backing off.

  “Mother! It had everything to do with him. He was the only person who could get Mason out.”

  “Why did he get involved?’

  “Because I asked him to.”

  “What right did you have involving him, Haley?”

  “Mason is my brother, in case you forgot, and I didn’t want you in there taking a risk. If de Crecy had seen you he’d have used you for bait for Shallal or Dad.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “You haven’t told them, have you?” Haley asked Harrison.

  “Haven’t told me what?” Emily looked from her daughter to her husband, then at the Ansaris.

  “They have Ghulam. That’s why they took Mason in the first place. They knew he was in touch with Ghulam and ultimately with bin Laden.”

  Humera Ansari screamed.

  “I told Tony Shallal that he owed me this much, Mother. And he does.”

  “No, Haley, you led Tony Shallal and his cohort to Ghulam Ansari, the biggest fish in their dirty little pond.”

  “That’s completely out of line, Mother. My brother was being held hostage, tied up and suspended from the ceiling while they beat him with knotted ropes. If Shallal hadn’t got there he would have been back in for round two until he told them where Ghulam was.”

  “He didn’t know where Ghulam was, Haley.”

  “Mother, they had photographs of him and Ghulam with bin Laden. I saw them. Shallal destroyed them. I was there. I helped him.”

  “Haley, Haley what have you done? No...I don’t want to know any more.”

  “Mother, if it wasn’t for Tony Shallal, your stupid son would be in a death camp in Cuba, OK? Shallal did what had to be done. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Tony Shallal always has method to his madness, Haley. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

  “Wrong, Mother. I do know. I’m from the same bloody gene pool. We didn’t need a reason. It’s a family affair.”

  “The person who needs help now is Ghulam Ansari.”

  “No, Mother, he doesn’t. There is someone there with him who will help him when he has to. A friend of his named Mustafa Jalil.”

  “Why am I not surprised,” sighed Emily glibly. She turned to Madam Ansari who was by now sobbing relentlessly.

  “Poor woman. She lost her son and now she knows he is alive, and he might die anyway.”

  “Christ, Mother, you’re just a well of compassion. Give the woman some sympathy.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” Emily said, going over to the couch and placing her arm around the older woman.

  “Can we get any further information, Harry?” Emily asked her husband.

  “I dinna think so. I could, I suppose, ring Dana. She’s still over there filing complaints. If Ansari could be taken into American custody, I’d feel better, but I don’t have that much pull.”

  “She’s a human rights Attorney. Couldn’t she go in there with Human Rights Watch or something like that and just check out whether he’s still alive and if he is still in custody?”

  “Where’s Sinead?”

  “She’s back in Annapolis, or should be by now. There’s work for her since the assault on Tora Bora. They think there were some Taliban big shots killed and she has to do reconstruction of remains. She is working for the task force, after all.”

  “So are you, as I recall, or have you recused yourself?”

  “Look Haley, there’s no doubt which side I’m on. I’ve been fighting against the Taliban’s gendercide on women for years. Long before it was bloody fashionable.”

  “Mother, please. I don’t want to argue with you. We are on the same side, you know. I love Mason too. Tony Shallal owes me. He’s my father.”

  “He didn’t do a damn thing for you, Haley. Not once in all those years and he had to have known. Good grief, you look so like him.”

  “Mother,” she said, putting her arm around both of her parents, “I didn’t say he was my dad, did I?” and she started to cry.

  Dana Johnson when contacted reported that Ghulam Ansari had indeed been interrogated and released into American custody for further questioning. He was, she had been informed, being transferred from the jail at Bagram Air Base to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

  “May Allah be merciful,” his mother said softly.

  Mustafa Jalil was working for the British and would remain at the Air Base as a translator. He would keep in touch with Dana, who, her work completed, was leaving for Baltimore Washington International later that day.

  “I think it’s time to go home,” Emily said, leaving the room to pack her suitcase.

  Mason Desai remained with his paternal grandparents for several weeks and made a commitment to return to Afghanistan once the new Karsai regime took over permanently. Until then he would, when his health was restored, journey to Pakistan and work in the settlement camps on the border. As a physician, he would be allowed greater freedom. He learned that Atiya Shah had deeded her property to the clinic and that his mother was the designated trustee. It was fortunate that he now had a comfortable and spacious place to live, as he was later joined by Safiya Muhammad, the young intern from Annapolis. Like his grandparents, the Ansaris, he kept a very low profile but made several trips into Afghanistan. He did not gather intelligence information for either the allies or the insurgents and was never conta
cted by members of the bin Laden entourage. Like many other physicians he would listen intently to the conversations of incoming wounded, each of whom had a story to add to what was already known of Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind who had transcended the physical and was now firmly entrenched in the myths and legends of a broken people.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-EIGHT

  Emily Byron Cowan returned to Annapolis and by the third week of December was firmly ensconced in the arduous task of tracing the monies supporting bin Laden and his organization al-Qaeda. The ISIS Project was still committed to the task of stopping the flow of money and assisting in the tracking down of all companies, residents and citizens involved wittingly or unwittingly in fund raising and procurement for terrorist backed organizations. The task force was now exchanging information with the CIA, the FBI Financial Crimes Division, FBI Counter-terrorism, the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division, United States and British Customs, the United States Postal Service, the Office of Foreign Asset and Control, the United States Secret Service, the Department of Justice as well as Interpol and lastly, MI6. The objective now was to focus on the vast array of resources at the financial end of all terrorist organizations, but particularly that of al-Qaeda. Unofficially still known as The ISIS Project, it remained located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but due to the combined efforts of all those involved the time invested was now reduced to that similar to an normal executive work day, with sufficient days off to keep the families of the core group content.

  What was now being reiterated by the ‘feebies’ on a daily basis was that terrorism was a global problem and the United States, by virtue of 9/11 must accept and deal with her own vulnerability. Emily still maintained that the American position was arrogant and appeared to proclaim, “Now that we’ve been hit, terrorism is an issue!” That virtually every country in Europe and most of the third world had in one way or another endured terrorist attack and were now rather used to it despite such attacks going unnoticed for the most part in the United States never ceased to amaze her and she always spoke her mind. As a result, she was not high on the popularity ratings among her federal colleagues. She was convinced that frequently forgotten was the necessary collaboration with intelligence services worldwide to retrieve financial records. They had to, she knew, utilize electronic surveillance of foreign and third country nationals overseas to effect seizure of evidence and its examination. The use of Letters Interrogatory, Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties and other forms of overseas judicial cooperation was necessary to glean information from foreign banks, but such assistance was often slow and required excellent coordination and cooperation from all agencies involved. The United States intelligence community, like their transatlantic cousins MI6 and MI5, was always in a state of non-cooperation unless absolutely forced. The whole question of mutual collaboration struck Emily as rather cantankerous and horribly male, reminding her of an international espionage pissing contest.

  Even though she chaired the committee, she found it close to impossible to keep the boys club in order. They were not interested in any level of cooperation with foreign countries, they were more interested in being the first agency to bring in bin Laden with a ring through his nose. She had mentioned several times, and had the meeting minutes duly note, that bringing in bin Laden was secondary, crushing al-Qaeda was their sole mission. She attempted to convince the feds that it was the only way to dismantle, disorganize and destroy terrorist groups.

  Bin Laden dead would be a major mistake! Bin Laden alive and on the run, humiliated, with empty coffers was an interesting proposition. Somewhere outside of the money flow they already knew about was a cash camel, tracing the money, identifying its source, finding links between those involved, locating, seizing and freezing the assets was the only thing left to do. America however had much to lose; in Emily’s opinion, there were standards that had to be followed. Americans of all ethnic groups were guaranteed freedom of choice. If an American wished to finance any religious group, it should be legally possible to do so. But if the group was in itself linked to any pro-terrorist organization, much in the same manner that RICO and other racketeering laws linked innocent bystanders to organized crime, and if any “good” money wound up in “bad” hands, innocent and well-intentioned people could lose their credibility, their livelihood and face heavy fines or imprisonment. Even worse, most of the people targeted for surveillance were of Arab ancestry. It was thus racial profiling at its worst. The feds, it would appear, never learned anything; the sixties, when terrorism began to get glamorous was the classic learning module. Terrorism had been successful because of the “mix and match” techniques. History told us that terrorists would lend out assassins and strategists to different organizations. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant women were specifically recruited for use in terrorist interchanges for the PLO. The majority of them having no criminal records, it was impossible at the time to track them. Similarly, German, Irish and Italian groups had recruited women of Asian or African origin for their missions because no one suspected them. There was certainly progress being made in the discovery, everyone agreed that there were high risk areas in the financial services sector. Terrorist groups relied heavily on wire transfers because they leave little paper trail and were fast transactions making “trace” almost impossible. By the time law enforcement agencies at a local level got involved, the trail was cold. A well organized group could multitask and transact hundreds of thousands of dollars daily in different locations offering wire transfers without being caught. Despite the federal government attempting to modify existing wire transfer rules with the potential of enabling law enforcement to obtain complete information at any stage of the transfer, subpoenas were still necessary.

  From a banking standpoint, Emily’s task force reported there was tremendous vulnerability, remarkably akin to organized crime and money laundering. Many United States banks dealt openly with high-risk foreign counterparts. Frequently, they were “cut-outs” with no physical presence in any foreign country or offshore banks with limited transaction licenses, even worse were the murkier banks with weak regulatory control beckoning criminal presence because that was precisely how they made their profit. Tracing such fund transfers was almost impossible.

  It was Emily’s private opinion that the most vulnerable sector of financial services were Money Service Businesses which were, for the most part, non-banks. Thus the ISIS Project led somewhat of an unauthorized investigation into MSBs. They learned that often such non-banks were employed by money laundering criminals and it was easy to exploit this environment because of inadequate regulation. Such businesses required little if any registration, there were no cash reporting requirements for threshold transactions and no way for such businesses to file Suspicious Activity Reports. FinCEN was hardly ever provided with ownership, location or operational details on such businesses.

  It was a few days before New Year that Emily’s ‘piece de resistance’ dawned on her. A discovery so bloody obvious, in her words, she needed a royal boot up the arse for not realizing it sooner. During her absence a month or so earlier, she had neglected to pay her credit card bills. On her return, she had written two checks to the company which held both her Visa and MasterCard account. The checks had been mailed in separate envelopes and covered all current charges in their entirety. For whatever reason, both payments had been erroneously applied to one account, making the other account one month overdue. She had received several phone calls listing a West Coast telephone number on her caller ID. Of course they left no message. The forth call Harrison took inadvertently, and was asked whether he could pay the outstanding amount via bank transfer. He replied laughingly that this was his wife’s account, thus her responsibility and a few minutes later he jokingly chastised Emily, who was just getting out of the shower. Harrison commented that the fellow sounded as though he was straight out of Bollywood.

  “Bloody bigot,” Emily retaliated. When another call came through two hours l
ater, Emily answered herself and was told quite rudely that her payment was overdue and she must pay it immediately by giving the caller her bank account number for them to deduct the required amount. Emily noted that the heavily-accented person on the other end was, as Harrison had indicated, Indian, Pakistani or possibly Afghan. She asked, although she could see the roll over California number on her caller ID, where the person was located. The response was, “Pakistan.”

  “You are clearly out of your mind,” she told the caller, adding that she would not under any circumstances divulge personal, banking or logistical information to anyone in a foreign country over the telephone.

  The caller responded, “It is of no consequence to me. We have all the information we need anyway!” leaving Emily dumbfounded and angry.

  Within minutes she contacted the credit card company’s toll free number and asked whether they outsourced this type of customer service. She was told that they, and many other financial institutions used overseas labor, as it was cost effective. “Surely, during these very troubled times, when we are so vulnerable as a nation, it is not possible that your company would contract such sensitive information to a country whose borders are riddled with terrorist supporters?” Emily asked. The response was short and to the point, “You can email a complaint or send a letter to Customer Service at the address located on your bill.” Emily thanked her and hung up.

  The following morning the task force was presented with a report from Emily indicating that terrorist cells have long used traditional fraudulent schemes to finance their activities, through credit card fraud, identity theft and credit card maxing schemes based on the ease with which one can assume the identity of another person. The report further stated that generally having stolen someone else’s identity, one could open bank accounts, obtain additional credit cards, and even purchase property. The Internet, she maintained, had also made it possible to remain virtually anonymous while opening bank accounts, thereby obtaining credit cards on-line using an another identity. Emily pulled herself up from her chair, stared the Financial Crimes Chief full in the eye and calmly stated, “Thousands of credit card owners are, as this report is being read, giving out sensitive financial information over the phone to foreign nationals under the auspices of well-known financial institutions, who are outsourcing labor to India and Pakistan. Both, I might add, are known targets and harborers of terrorist cells. When we are faced with the greatest national crisis of our time, I ask, why is this the case? We are, learned colleagues, in the throes of attempting to destroy large-scale terrorist supporting, money laundering operations, when right under our noses our identities are potentially being mutilated by intimidating credit collection agents with dubious connections located on foreign shores and often in unfriendly territories. It’s all perfectly legal. Who gave big business the authority to sell us out? We are continually being advised that our counter-terrorism process is the largest, most complex and critical investigation the world has ever known, yet we give away our citizens banking and credit information without consent or conscience! If such activity isn’t being nurtured by al-Qaeda, how long will it take them to catch on?”