by John Case
“What happened to your ear?”
Coming out of nowhere, so unexpectedly, the question made Burke smile. It was like a child’s question. “I was in a crash,” he said.
“What kind of crash?”
“Helicopter. There was a lot of fuel flying around.” He made a gesture with his right hand, tossing it out as if he were sowing seeds. “I got burned.”
“You must have had a good surgeon,” d’Anconia said. “You have to look twice to notice anything.”
Burke again changed the subject. “When we spoke on the phone, I think you said confidentiality was key.”
D’Anconia nodded.
“In that case,” Burke said, “a limited liability corporation is what you want. With an Isle of Man venue.”
“Isle of Man?” d’Anconia asked.
“It’s in the Irish Sea. Oldest legislature in the world. Pretty place. Very historical.”
“But it’s English, right?”
Burke tilted his head from side to side. “It’s a sovereign state, but the U.K. handles its defense and foreign affairs.”
A ripple of suspicion flickered in d’Anconia’s eyes. “I thought the idea was to form an Irish corporation. When we talked on the phone, I assumed –”
“If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do,” Burke told him. “But if it’s confidentiality that you’re after, then it’s the Isle of Man you want. Not Ireland.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Burke explained, “unlike the Irish, the Manx don’t require disclosure of a corporation’s ‘beneficial owner.’ Which is about as discreet as it gets, because people can’t disclose what they don’t know.”
D’Anconia thought about it. “What about a Panamanian corporation?”
Burke smiled. “Well, there’s always Panama. And Vanuatu! In fact, there are a couple of dozen funky venues that will happily take your money, open a bank account, whatever. But they don’t inspire confidence – and they do attract attention. On the other hand, the Isle of Man is a part of Europe. And even though it isn’t actually British, it’s British-ish. If you see what I mean.”
D’Anconia chewed it over for a moment. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
Burke picked up a pen, and leaned forward. “I’ll need a little information – and a check for thirteen hundred euros.”
“Cash all right?”
“Cash is fine.”
“And what do I get for that?”
“You get a limited liability corporation, registered on the Isle of Man, with all its firewalls intact. You get a registered agent in Dublin – that’s us – and a checking account with five hundred euros on deposit.”
D’Anconia looked pleased. “Which bank?”
“Cadogan.” He pronounced it the British way: Cuhduggin.
“Which is … where?”
“Channel Islands,” Burke explained.
“And they’re what? British?”
Burke shrugged. “Emphasis on the ‘-ish.’”
D’Anconia grinned.
“There’s a bit of paperwork to get through,” Burke said. “Certificates of shares, articles of incorporation, the nominees’ declarations –”
“Nominees?”
“Names on paper,” Burke explained. “When the corporation is formed, they act as its directors.”
“I understand, but in real life – who are they?”
No one had ever asked him that question before. “You mean, what do they do when they’re not being ‘names’?”
D’Anconia nodded.
“Well, lots of things. Being a name is a kind of sideline. It’s like a perk that comes with being Manx.” He gestured at one of the papers on his desk. “Amanda Greene, for instance. She’s actually pretty interesting. Bright woman. Lost her husband –”
D’Anconia waved him off. “I’m sure it’s a very interesting story,” he said, “but the point is, she gets paid to let you use her name?”
For a moment, Burke didn’t say anything. D’Anconia’s bluntness was a surprise, like finding an occlusion in a gemstone. “That’s right,” he said. “She acts as a director, and the corporation pays her one hundred euros for her trouble.”
“Each year?”
“No,” Burke replied. “It’s a onetime fee.”
D’Anconia nodded thoughtfully. “And how much does she know about the corporation?”
“Just its name. Which reminds me, you’re going to need one. I may not be able to get what you want, but I can try.”
D’Anconia looked thoughtful. “I was thinking … what about the Twentieth-Century Motor Company? Could you get that?”
“I can try,” Burke promised, writing the name on a Post-it. Then he paused. “You said ‘the Twentieth-Century Motor Company’?”
“Right.”
“Kind of archaic, isn’t it?”
D’Anconia shrugged.
“Well,” Burke said, “it doesn’t matter, really. Half the companies we form are generics like the Two-One-Two Corporation or ABX.”
D’Anconia thought some more. “You said there was some kind of declaration?”
“Right. The declaration says that the company is brand-new, and that the directors don’t have any claim against its assets. Nor will they, if they’re dismissed. And they always are. The package you get includes their resignations – signed, but undated.”
“What about the bank account? Can the nominees –”
Burke shook his head. “No. You’re the only signatory. Which reminds me, I’ll need your passport.”
“My passport?”
“For the bank.”
“What’s the bank got to do with it?”
“They need to know who you are,” Burke explained. “Someone walks in off the street, says he’s you … the bank has to be sure. Trust me, you want the bank to be sure.”
D’Anconia extracted a passport from his overcoat, and pushed it across the desk.
The colors were a surprise. Blue and gold. He’s Chilean? “I’ll just be a minute.” Burke crossed the room to a copying machine in the corner. The machine came to life. After a moment, a light flared. He turned to the emergency contact page, where an address in Santiago had been penciled in. The copying machine flared a second time.
“Is that it, then?” d’Anconia asked. “We’re all set?”
“Almost,” Burke replied. Returning to the desk, he handed the passport back to his client, and sat down. “Diga me, es su primer viaje a Irlanda?”
For a moment, d’Anconia didn’t move. Then he cocked his head to the side, and held Burke’s gaze for what seemed like a long time. Finally, he said, “Si, vale. Primer tiempo.”
Burke smiled. The guy’s accent was about as Spanish as a California roll. “Well,” he said, “it’s a great country.”
“So let’s do it then,” d’Anconia said. Reaching into his coat, he pulled out a leather wallet, fat with bills. Counting out thirteen one-hundred-euro notes, he laid them on the desk in a sort of fan.
Burke gathered the bills together, and put them in a lockbox in the bottom drawer. Then he wrote out a receipt, and handed it to d’Anconia. “So I can forward everything to the address in your passport? To Santiago?”
D’Anconia looked thoughtful for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m not going to be there for a while. But I’m going to need the bank details – wire-transfer codes and all – as soon as possible. I think the best thing to do would be to send it all to my hotel.”
Burke winced, and shook his head. “A hotel –”
“– is all I can give you. I’ll be in Belgrade, at the Esplanade, for a couple of weeks.”
With a sigh, Burke made a note. “The thing is, there’s going to be correspondence.”
D’Anconia frowned.
“It’s unavoidable. But I can put you on the Hold Mail list,” Burke told him. This was a roster of clients who should never be contacted by the firm. Any communications should originate with the client himself. The concern of people on the Hold M
ail list, almost universally, was the concealment of assets – from wives, creditors, and governments.
“Excellent,” d’Anconia said.
“But you’ll have to check in with us from time to time. There’s an annual tax. If it isn’t paid, the corporation will lose its standing.” Burke could see that d’Anconia wasn’t listening. Maybe he didn’t care what happened to the company. Maybe he’d use it for a single transaction, and walk away. If so, it was no skin off Burke’s nose. With a smile, he got to his feet, signaling an end to the meeting. The two men shook hands, and d’Anconia let himself out the way he’d come in.
Burke shook his head, and smiled ruefully. Moving to the window, he watched as his client left the building, shoulders hunched against the rain.
He’s either avoiding taxes, or evading them, Burke decided. Either way, it wasn’t any of his business. Let the IRS do its job, and he’d do his.
Even so, there was something about d’Anconia that bothered him, and it wasn’t his nationality. No, the thing that bothered Burke about d’Anconia was his name. It was somehow familiar, like the name of a second-or third-string celebrity.
Maybe that’s it, Burke thought. Maybe he’s an actor.
He could imagine him playing a doctor on TV – a brilliant young surgeon who, just for the fun of it, killed the occasional patient.
Eight
Baalbek, Lebanon | February 18, 2005
WILSON STOOD WITH his back to the wall, watching the ragheads dip the cans, one by one, in buckets of gasoline. He’d been in the warehouse all day, so the gas was in his clothes, in his hair, in his pores. He could taste it. Which was frustrating, because he desperately wanted a cigarette. But even if he went outside, he couldn’t just light up. If he did, he’d go off like a flare.
The other thing about going outside was his babysitters: Zero and Khalid. Around twenty years old, they wore boots and jeans and American T-shirts (“Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute!”), and carried Heckler & Koch submachine guns as casually as umbrellas. They went with him everywhere, thanks to Hakim, and it was getting on his nerves. The one guy’s English was almost nonexistent, but the other one spoke it well. The real problem was: They wanted to be his friends. They wanted to go to America! So they were constantly mugging in his direction, bobbing their heads and smiling insanely, as if to say, Death to America, but not to you, my friend! For you – falafel! For us, green cards!
He told Hakim: I don’t need a bodyguard, much less two – much less the Fukwitz twins! The Arab insisted, and maybe he was right. Beneath its veneer of Gallic and Arab civility, Lebanon was a tinderbox. Always had been, always would be. And Baalbek was just … so much kindling.
A flyblown crossroads in the Bekaa Valley, the city lay at the foot of a long, bare hill, crowned by the Sheikh Abdullah barracks. This was the fort where American hostages had been kept, chained to radiators and pipes, during the 1980s. Hakim wanted to show him the cells, but there hadn’t been time and, anyway, Hakim didn’t trust the Syrian intel people who were headquartered there. Which was too bad, because Wilson knew something about prisons, was interested in prisons – and he wondered about the cells. Had the hostages been able to see the ruins across the road? It would have made a difference – because the ruins were as spectacular as they were unexpected.
From an engineering standpoint, they were mind-boggling. There was a brochure at the hotel. It said they were the remains of a Roman sanctuary. The centerpiece was the Temple of Jupiter, a colossus assembled on a foundation so broad and deep that it contained more stone than the Great Pyramid at Giza.
It was a wreck now. Fifty columns lying in the grass, tumbled this way and that, as if a forest of stone had been felled.
To the Romans, it was “Heliopolis,” City of the Sun. The brochure said that it was here, on the trade route between Damascus and Tyre, that the apostle Paul saw the Light. You’d think there’d be a plaque or something, but there was nothing. Just a flyer on a telephone pole, advertising the summer music festival that took place each year amid the ruins. This year: Björk and Sting.
The warehouse in which Wilson stood, wishing he could smoke, was a prefab hulk with broken windows and rusting joints. Set back from the road on an acre of hardpan, it was cold inside – except where the welders worked.
There was a ton of hash in place – quality smoke, grown locally under the supervision of Hakim’s contacts in the Ministry of Defense. Even with an assembly line, getting the product ready to ship took time. Each “hand” weighed half a kilo and had to be packaged so that it would be undetectable as it moved across borders. This meant putting the product into small plastic bags, a pound at a time, then wiping down the bags with sponges soaked in gasoline.
When the bags were clean, a different set of workers would drag them on carts to the other end of the warehouse, where they would be put, one by one, in five-by-seven tins about an inch thick. The tins would then be taken to a separate room, where they’d be sponged down with gasoline, then placed in somewhat larger tins. The larger tin would then be filled with melted wax and soldered shut. After one last dip in a bucket of gas, the tins would be laid in the bottom of fifty-five-gallon drums. Then, a forklift hauled the drums to a large room at the far end of the warehouse, where each barrel was fitted with a metal plate, creating a false bottom, just above the hash. The drums were then filled with about fifty gallons of pomegranate molasses, and sealed. Finally, each drum was spray-painted with the words MELASSE DE LIBAN.
By Wilson’s reckoning, it was going to take upwards of two hundred drums to package it all. But when they were done, there wasn’t a sniffer-dog in the world who’d bark at it.
*
That night, he had dinner with Hakim. Though Wilson had been in Lebanon for nearly a week, he had yet to speak to the Arab for more than five minutes at a time. They’d come to Baalbek in separate cars, following the Bekaa Valley as it curved north, arid and blond, between opposing mountain ranges. Once in Baalbek, Wilson was left to himself (and his minders), while Hakim made arrangements about the hash.
The hashish was a recent development, and it was an unpleasant surprise. During their time in Allenwood, Bo had assured him that finding money for Wilson’s project would not be a problem – money was never a problem. At the time, Hakim’s military operations had been subsidized by a prince who occupied a high position in the Ministry of the Interior in Riyadh. In return for the prince’s financial assistance, Hakim had promised to restrict his operations to targets outside the Happy Kingdom. And so he had.
But all that changed after 9/11. The prince was killed in an automobile accident (or so the Saudis claimed), and Hakim’s money supply dried up almost overnight. By the time Wilson was released from prison, operations were being funded with cloned and stolen credit cards, bank robberies, kidnappings, and drugs.
Just as Hakim had once worked with a prince in the Saudi Ministry of the Interior, he now worked with a general in Lebanon’s Ministry of Defense.
The Bekaa Valley was quilted with fields of marijuana grown on large and modern farms. Harvested with tractors and dried in barns, the plants were hand-rubbed through sieves of cloth, creating a resinous dust that was easily compressed into blocks of hashish.
It was up to Hakim to package the product and move it – that’s where Wilson came in. He would have preferred to be given a suitcase full of cash, and sent on his way to carry out his operation. Instead, he found himself having to earn the money the hard way, plunging into a Triangle Trade of drugs and guns and diamonds.
Moral issues didn’t bother him. He was beyond that. What worried Wilson was the fact that he was putting his life in the hands of a man who hated Americans. All he really knew about Hakim was what Bo told him. And Bo was insistent that the less Wilson and Hakim knew about each other, the better it would be for both of them. Still, he’d learned a few things about his dinner companion.
According to Bo, “Aamm Hakim” was a Jordanian. An Islamist, he’d attended universities in Ira
n and the United States. In the 1980s, he’d fought with the Taliban against the Russians in Afghanistan, and with Hezbollah against the Americans in Beirut. When the Lebanese civil war wound down, he formed his own organization to carry out operations under contract to foreign intelligence agencies and others requiring deniability.
Were Hakim and his group a part of al-Qaeda? Wilson asked. Bo turned the question aside. Al-Qaeda isn’t like that, he told him. There’s a big al-Qaeda, and a little al-Qaeda. The big al-Qaeda is more of a network than an organization. It’s like the Internet, he said, a cloud of constantly changing connections, with no central command, a loose association of people with shared affinities. Some know each other, most don’t.
Does your uncle know bin-Laden? Wilson asked.
Uncomfortable with the question, Bo replied with a non sequitur: “They don’t call him bin-Laden. They call him the Contractor.”
The FBI’s “Most Wanted” website had its own version of Aamm Hakim. According to the Bureau, Wilson’s dinner companion was an Egyptian, né Hakim Abdul-Bakr Mussawi, aka Ali Hussein Musalaam, Ahmed Izz-al-Din, and half a dozen other names.
He had a degree in accounting and was “the alleged military operations chief of the Coalition of the Oppressed of the Earth.”
Wilson had clicked on the FBI link that explicated the ideology of various al-Qaeda splinter groups. The Coalition was composed of Salafi jihadists “who believe that ridding the world of modernity will result in an Islamic Revival, returning Muslim peoples worldwide to Islam’s most righteous path. While not rejecting technology as such, Salafi jihadists do reject Western (and especially U.S.) cultural hegemony. Orbiting the true believers at the center of the Coalition,” Wilson read, “is the usual assortment of mercenaries and foot soldiers.” According to the website, the Coalition was responsible for “attacks on American facilities in West Africa and the Far East.”
Wilson and Hakim sat in the dining room of the Hotel Dumas, a dilapidated relic with high ceilings and dusty chandeliers. If anything, the guest rooms were even more decrepit, with wooden beds little better than pallets. In its heyday, the place had been a destination of considerable glamour, hosting the likes of Josephine Baker and Charles de Gaulle. But that was then; now the Bekaa’s dust had taken hold. Pipes clanked. Doors creaked. Towels and rugs were threadbare.