Free The Devil's Banker by Christopher Reich Page B

the American FBI’s own bomb blast specialists come to the rescue. He’d been told to expect them at any moment and to show them the utmost courtesy.
    Montbusson stood, brushing the dust from his jacket. To think that the Americans called the French arrogant. The FBI acted as if they were the only competent law enforcement organization in the world. Fired by a sudden, passionate desire to do his job as well as he knew how—call it what you will, pride, patriotism, or a healthy sense of competition—he set about sifting through the rubble landscape with a demon’s eye. He had found little of interest. There were no clothes in the closets, no papers in the desks, no food in the refrigerator. Either the terrorist was planning on leaving soon or he used the apartment as a safe house. The only items of any intelligence value Montbusson had salvaged were a computer whose CPU looked like it had been run over by a Mack truck, a cellular phone crunched to the width of a stick of gum, and a few fragments from a handwritten notebook.
    Step by step, he walked through the apartment, carefully lifting bent and mangled pieces of furniture, moving slabs of debris. Outside, a bevy of doors opened and closed. A chorus of loud, optimistic American voices rose toward him. He supposed he’d better go and greet his counterpart. Determinedly, he fixed a welcoming expression to his face, smoothed his mustache, and pulled his shoulders back. The Americans always stood so damned straight.
    That was when he glimpsed it. A triangle of silver winking at him from the floor below. Curious, he advanced toward the “seat” of the blast, the exact spot where the terrorist Taleel had been standing when he had detonated the bomb, and looked through the hole into the apartment below. Only a cursory examination had been made of it, and a blanket of white dust coated the furniture. Squinting, he saw the swatch of metal again. It looked like an old transistor radio wedged into the wall. Hurrying from the room, he descended a flight of stairs and entered the lower apartment. Crossing to the sofa, he jumped onto the cushions and lifted himself on his tiptoes. It was a video camera. A very small Sony digital number. The viewfinder was missing, the lens was cracked, and the severe heat of the explosion had warped the casing so that it bent like a banana.
    “Jean Paul!” Placing his fingers in his mouth, he whistled for his assistant to join him. In a matter of minutes, the two men had pried the camera from the wall without causing the device any further damage. Montbusson turned the camera around in his hands, seeking the on switch. A toggle controlled the apparatus’s actions. Switching it to VCR, he was surprised to hear the camera power up. He put an eye to the ruined viewfinder and pressed “play.” Immediately, a mélange of colors played across the screen, and though he was unable to make anything of it, he was thrilled nonetheless.
    Cradling the camera, he left the apartment, only to walk squarely into the broad chest of Frank Neff, the FBI’s legal attaché to the American Embassy.
    “Hello, René. Did you find anything?” Neff asked.
    Montbusson displayed the camera. “It still functions. There is a film inside.”
    Neff glanced dismissively at the camera. “That’s fine and dandy,” he said. “But what about the money? The five hundred grand?”
    René Montbusson looked from Neff to the cluster of pale, expectant faces behind him. He had a terrible sensation that everyone knew something except him. Something very, very important.
    “What money?” he asked.

 
    Chapter 8
    A faint blue light glowed in the office of General Guy Gadbois, chief of the General Directorate for External Security. Gadbois, a barrel-chested paratrooper, forty-year veteran of Algeria, the Congo, and too many brushfires to mention, lit another cigarette and stared at the blizzard of gray and white snow swirling on the television screen a few feet away. Though the