Executive Power

Chapter Sixty-Six
True to form, Marcus Dumond sat in his corner cubicle oblivious to the storm that was raging around him. The Bull Pen at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center was a labyrinth of five-foot-tall plastic and fabric dividers. Partly out of necessity, and partly out of humor, the aisles that cut through the area had been given names such as Abu Nidal Way and Osama Bin Lane. Dumond had been the chief planner and street namer of the ever expanding Bull Pen, and he had intentionally located himself on a dead street with limited access.

While his MP3 player cranked out the tunes, Dumond worked the keys of his computer with blazing efficiency, toggling back and forth between three screens, closing windows, opening new ones and shrinking or enlarging others. He was on to something. He wasn't sure what quite yet, but he was definitely on to something. Following Rapp's lead, he'd focused on recent transactions made by Omar's main assistant. The hardest nut to crack wasn't hacking into the secure networks of the institutions in question-that was easy. The real issue lay in the enormity of Omar's wealth. He used literally hundreds of banks to handle his vast fortune. That said, however, Dumond didn't waste his time surfing through the Prince's transactions that were handled by Chase or the Deutsche Bank. In fact he immediately discarded all banks in the United States, England, Japan, Canada and Germany and focused on those nations known for their financial privacy laws.

Dumond had only to read the file on Devon LeClair once to know where to focus his attention. If given his choice, an anal retentive snob like LeClair would bank with only one group of people. The ever efficient Swiss were the perfect match. They thought of everything.

They conducted themselves with a respectful, professional flair that properly schooled men like LeClair demanded.

Trying to run searches based on Omar's name or those of his various holding companies had proven to be too cumbersome. Dumond hid two strategies he wanted to employ before he called in the money guys from Treasury and the FBI to pore over the accounts with a magnifying glass. He'd seen the men and women do it before, chasing down every check, wire transfer and charge to its final destination. It could easily take fifty agents six months to run a thorough examination of Omar's finances, and even then they might miss something.

They had to do things the proper way, both politically and legally.

Even if they knew the tricks that Dumond employed, they would be too afraid to use them. The twenty-eight-year-old hacker from MIT could get results much quicker. None of the information he gathered would be admissible in a court of law, but Dumond had worked enough with Rapp in the past to know that he preferred to settle things in a less public forum.

Dumond had keyed in on three banks, two headquartered in Zurich and a third in Geneva. Each bank was among Switzerland's oldest and most austere, and LeClair was authorized access to each one. At first Dumond focused his attention on the larger transactions, five to ten million dollars. He came up blank, so he started over again looking for money that had been shuffled between the three banks he was focusing on. This also proved to be a dead end.

As a last resort he went through each account for the past month looking for smaller transactions from various banks on various days that all may have ended up in a single account. He paid special attention to the name of the banks the money was being transferred to. He was looking for an accumulation of funds in one account that would get him to the proper threshold.

Dumond was focusing on blocks of money and transaction dates.

In his mind he was trying to piece together a down payment followed by a later payment for successful completion of contract. He couldn't find anything that was approaching five million dollars or even half of that number. Suddenly an amount and a bank caught his eye: $500,000 had been wired from one of the banks in Zurich on Monday to a financial institution on the island of Martinique in the French West Indies.

He swore he'd already seen the same transaction. He began looking back through the transactions and sure enough, two weeks earlier LeClair had wired the same amount from another account to the same account in Martinique.

As Dumond looked at the name on the account in Martinique he couldn't help but think there was something familiar about it. His fingers remained poised just above the keyboard and his head began to tilt to one side. It was coming to him. The name was not that common.

Like his own it was French, which would fit with the French West Indies, but there was some reason why it seemed familiar to him. Dumond pulled his arms back and crossed them in frustration. He had just seen the name somewhere and it was driving him nuts that he couldn't remember. He was about to give up and have the computer run a search when it hit him.

Dumond closed out one of his screens. His fingers flew across the keys in search of this morning's on-line edition of The New York Times. The home page popped up on his center screen and he scanned the sidebar for the story he was looking for. After a brief moment he found it and opened the article. In the first paragraph of the article Dumond hit upon the name he was looking for: Peter Joussard. He looked back and forth from one screen to the other, from the on-line edition of The New York Times to the balance of a bank account in the Caribbean containing one million dollars. Dumond attempted to calculate the odds that it was coincidence and quickly decided it wasn't, it couldn't be.

Yanking off his headphones he grabbed the handset of his phone and dialed Rapp's mobile number.