Gray Fox was puzzled. His voice on the secure line from TOSA headquarters to the Tracker’s operations room in the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square revealed it.
“Tracker, are you up to speed on the traffic between the helper in London and his pal in Marka?”
“Absolutely. Why?”
“The stuff he has been passing to the Preacher. He picked that up from a half-assed lawyer at a Belgravia dinner party.”
The Tracker thought over his reply. There is a subtle difference between lying and being what a former British cabinet secretary once described as “economical with the truth.”
“That’s what Dardari seems to be saying.”
“What do the Brits think?”
“They think,” said the Tracker quite truthfully, “that the bastard is sitting in his London town house, passing scuttlebutt to his friend in the south. By the by, are my requests still getting a no-no from upstairs?”
He wanted to get the subject away from the issue of Mustafa Dardari, messaging out of London, when he was staring at the rain in Caithness with three former commandos for company.
“Absolutely, Tracker. No missiles because of Agent Opal and no beach assaults. And no heli-borne attacks from our compound in Mogadishu. One shoulder-fired rocket into a hovering helicopter full of Delta boys and we have another Somali catastrophe. You’ll have to find another way.”
“Yes, boss,” said the Tracker as he put the phone down.
• • •
The Preacher was right about the uselessness of his Kismayo computer for secret transmissions, but he did not realize that his ally in London, his boyhood friend and secret supporter, had also been unmasked, and his encrypted messages, shielded inside the vegetable price code, had also been broken. So he broke security again and sent Dardari a request from Marka. It was intercepted and deciphered.
• • •
Colonel Jackson?”
“Yes, Ariel.”
“There’s some very weird stuff going between Marka and London.”
“You should know, Ariel. You’re sending it in Dardari’s name.”
“Yeah, but Marka has just replied. He is asking his friend to lend him a million dollars.”
He should have foreseen it. Certainly the budget could stand it. That sum was just a fraction of a single missile. But why waste tax dollars?
“Does he say how he wants it to be sent?”
“Something called Dahabshiil.”
Tracker nodded, alone in his London office. He knew about it. Cunning and safe and almost untraceable. Based on the centuries-old figure of the hundi man.
Terrorism costs money, a lot of money. Behind the bomb-planting dupes, often no more than children, are the controllers, usually mature men who have no intention of dying. Somewhere behind them are the ring chieftans, and behind them are the financiers, often leading lives of apparent respectability.
For antiterrorist agencies, the money sources for terrorism have proved a fertile field for tracing the paper trail from operating account back to its source. For money movement leaves a paper trail. But the hundi man does not. In the Middle East, the system goes back many centuries.
It started because back then moving wealth through a landscape teeming with bandits was too dangerous without a small army. So the hundi man takes the money in country A and authorizes his cousin to disburse the same amount, minus commission, to the beneficiary in country B. No money moved across borders, just coded phone call or e-mail.
Dahabshiil was founded in Burco, Somalia, in 1970, presently headquartered in Dubai. In Somali, it just means “gold smelter,” and mainl
y remits money earned by the hundreds of thousands of Somalis working abroad back to their families in the homeland. Many of the Somali diaspora are in Britain, accounting for a flourishing office in London.
“Could you break into Dardari’s banking system?” asked the Tracker.
“I don’t see why not, Colonel. Can you give me a day?”