around the corner from the apartment building ready to cover the extraction.
Everyone is bored stiff and hungry for something more exciting than lunch meat and yogurt. Mac has reconnoitered a café that looks to be reasonably safe; so, they take a small risk and walk in pairs and at separate times to get something to eat. The traditional Bulgarian grill— Skara-tatarsko kufte — shishcheta [shish kabobs], karnache [sausage with spices]— sarma from the main entrée menu, and dessert baklava are excellent and sits well on their empty stomachs. The food buoys them up. They are ready for action when they leave the café at midnight. It is a long and boring three-hour wait before they can go into action.
Mac and Ivory make one last scouting trip at two-thirty and report back to the team that everything is still quiet. Another woman has come and gone between midnight and one thirty, but Mazurkiewicz is presumably sound asleep when Mac and Ivory leave the vicinity of the apartment building. Everything looks to be safe.
“Okay,” Sybil orders, “one at a time. See you in the backyard.” The men and women carry fairly heavy backpacks. One male and one female agent and McGee are selected to be sentries for the team. The rest—Sybil, Mac, Ed, and Ivory, along with three covert ops agents—make their way through the shadowy streets and pick their way into the areas of larger pieces of trash in the backyard of the seedy apartment building.
The team determines two escape routes and silently sets up three ambush sites. Sybil checks everything four times before she is satisfied. They work even as the security guards make their rounds, stopping only when the guards get too close. Sybil and her CIA team, McGee and Ivory, are ready.
Chapter Twelve
C aitlin and her two assistants, and David Harger and his senior technical assistant, put in ten-hour days gathering anything and everything ever written or photographed by or about Anne Marcus. It is largely an exercise in tedium, but the occasional nugget pops out of the sluice. Taken in aggregate, the nuggets are becoming a growing gold bar of useful information. Caitlin looks in the New York Times archives and finds nothing until she decides—on a whim—to go through a couple of decades of the social column. In 2011, there is a large picture of the executive staff of the Global Investment Bank at a fund-raising gala for charity. That is not in and of itself remarkable, but—as the saying goes—the devil is in the details. The name of the charity rings a bell for Caitlin. It is Universal Islamic Assistance Foundation. Receiving an enthusiastic hug is Usama ibn al Bakr, the foundation’s president. The woman hugging him is Anne Marcus. It is a very clear color photograph. The reporter commented on Mrs. Marcus’s perfect choice of an evening gown by Vera Wong for the occasion, and the magnificence of her diamond jewelry. Mrs. Marcus is quoted in the article describing al Bakr, as “my dear friend.”
The only other photograph shows the executives of the Global Investment Bank’s internal banking investment group and their wives at a retreat at the Four Seasons Hotel on Nevis Island in the Caribbean, the most successful off-shore banking system in the Caribbean—more secure for American investors seeking anonymity from the IRS, the FBI, private creditors, and divorce attorney forensic accountants than the Cayman Islands. It cannot be a coincidence that Usama ibn al Bakr is standing next to Anne Marcus in an apparent tête-à-tête.
David and his forensic accountants bring up several nuggets of their own. They produce four receipts signed by Mrs. Marcus at the Four Seasons, and—also not a likely coincidence—they find four receipts at the same hotel for ibn Bakr. Although not related directly to ibn Bakr or to the bank, there are multiple hotel receipts from around the world that appear to indicate that attractive Mrs. Marcus does a considerable amount of traveling without
Everyone is bored stiff and hungry for something more exciting than lunch meat and yogurt. Mac has reconnoitered a café that looks to be reasonably safe; so, they take a small risk and walk in pairs and at separate times to get something to eat. The traditional Bulgarian grill— Skara-tatarsko kufte — shishcheta [shish kabobs], karnache [sausage with spices]— sarma from the main entrée menu, and dessert baklava are excellent and sits well on their empty stomachs. The food buoys them up. They are ready for action when they leave the café at midnight. It is a long and boring three-hour wait before they can go into action.
Mac and Ivory make one last scouting trip at two-thirty and report back to the team that everything is still quiet. Another woman has come and gone between midnight and one thirty, but Mazurkiewicz is presumably sound asleep when Mac and Ivory leave the vicinity of the apartment building. Everything looks to be safe.
“Okay,” Sybil orders, “one at a time. See you in the backyard.” The men and women carry fairly heavy backpacks. One male and one female agent and McGee are selected to be sentries for the team. The rest—Sybil, Mac, Ed, and Ivory, along with three covert ops agents—make their way through the shadowy streets and pick their way into the areas of larger pieces of trash in the backyard of the seedy apartment building.
The team determines two escape routes and silently sets up three ambush sites. Sybil checks everything four times before she is satisfied. They work even as the security guards make their rounds, stopping only when the guards get too close. Sybil and her CIA team, McGee and Ivory, are ready.
Chapter Twelve
C aitlin and her two assistants, and David Harger and his senior technical assistant, put in ten-hour days gathering anything and everything ever written or photographed by or about Anne Marcus. It is largely an exercise in tedium, but the occasional nugget pops out of the sluice. Taken in aggregate, the nuggets are becoming a growing gold bar of useful information. Caitlin looks in the New York Times archives and finds nothing until she decides—on a whim—to go through a couple of decades of the social column. In 2011, there is a large picture of the executive staff of the Global Investment Bank at a fund-raising gala for charity. That is not in and of itself remarkable, but—as the saying goes—the devil is in the details. The name of the charity rings a bell for Caitlin. It is Universal Islamic Assistance Foundation. Receiving an enthusiastic hug is Usama ibn al Bakr, the foundation’s president. The woman hugging him is Anne Marcus. It is a very clear color photograph. The reporter commented on Mrs. Marcus’s perfect choice of an evening gown by Vera Wong for the occasion, and the magnificence of her diamond jewelry. Mrs. Marcus is quoted in the article describing al Bakr, as “my dear friend.”
The only other photograph shows the executives of the Global Investment Bank’s internal banking investment group and their wives at a retreat at the Four Seasons Hotel on Nevis Island in the Caribbean, the most successful off-shore banking system in the Caribbean—more secure for American investors seeking anonymity from the IRS, the FBI, private creditors, and divorce attorney forensic accountants than the Cayman Islands. It cannot be a coincidence that Usama ibn al Bakr is standing next to Anne Marcus in an apparent tête-à-tête.
David and his forensic accountants bring up several nuggets of their own. They produce four receipts signed by Mrs. Marcus at the Four Seasons, and—also not a likely coincidence—they find four receipts at the same hotel for ibn Bakr. Although not related directly to ibn Bakr or to the bank, there are multiple hotel receipts from around the world that appear to indicate that attractive Mrs. Marcus does a considerable amount of traveling without
Similar Books
