Free Liberation Day by Andy McNab Page B

on the dresser. Maybe he didn’t want me to see how proud he was of the way he’d delivered his lines. “The secret of combating terrorism is simple—don’t get terrorized. Keep a clear head and fight back on their terms. That’s the only way we’re going to win this war—or, at least, contain it, keep a lid on it. But we can only do that if we take the battle to them, with every means at our disposal. And that’s where you come in, Nick. I need to stop the drains getting blocked—and fast. Do you want to know more, Nick, or am I wasting my time here?”
    I looked at him and took another mouthful of coffee. “I’d like to know what happened to Zeralda’s head.”
    There was a bit of a smile. “It came back here and was presented to his cousin in Los Angeles on a silver platter. By all accounts it kind of freaked him out.”
    “What about the greaseball who was there with him? Was he the source? Is that why no one else was to be killed?”
    “Greaseball?” He managed to complete the smile. “I like it. Yes, he was and still is a source, and a good one—too good to lose just yet.” The smile faded. “Nick, have you ever heard of hawalla ?”
    I’d spent enough time in the Middle East to know it, and when I was a kid in London, all the Indian and Pakistani families used it to send cash back home. “Like Western Union, but without the ADSL lines, right?”
    He nodded. “Okay, so what we’ve got is a centuries-old system of moving money, originally to avoid taxes and bandits along the ancient Silk Road, and nowadays to avoid the money-laundering laws. A guy in San Francisco wants to send some cash to, say, his mother in Delhi. So, he walks into one of these hawalla bankers, maybe a shopkeeper, maybe even working in the money markets in San Fran. The hawallada takes his cash and gives the guy a code word. The hawallada then faxes, calls, or e-mails his counterpart in Delhi, maybe a restaurant owner, and gives him the code word and the amount of the transfer. The guy’s mother goes into the Delhi restaurant, says the code word, and collects. And that’s it—takes less than thirty minutes to move huge sums of money anywhere in the world, and we have no track of it.
    “These hawalla guys settle their debts and commissions among themselves. In Pakistan, business is huge. There’s maybe five, six billion U.S. dollars sent back there every year by migrant workers just from the Gulf states. But only one billion goes through normal banking channels. Everything else goes via hawalladas . These guys work on total trust, a handshake or a piece of paper between them. It’s been going on for centuries, must be about the second oldest profession. It even gets a mention in the New Testament.” He gave me a wry smile. “Carrie’s mother is a very religious woman. You know the tale of Ananis and Safia?”
    As if. I shook my head.
    “Go read it someday. These hawalla guys were hiding money that they were due to give to Peter, so they were deemed sinners. And when they were confronted with their shame they just fell down and died.” There was a pause. “That’s what you did for us, Nick: you made Zeralda fall down and die. This hawalla network has been used to funnel money to the terrorist groups in the Kashmir valley. It’s been used by the heroin trade coming out of Afghanistan, and now it’s here, in the U.S.
    “This is not good, Nick. Zeralda was a hawallada, and we reckon he’d moved between four and five million dollars into this country for terrorism in the last four years. You can be sure the legit banks are doing their bit now and cracking down on laundering all around the world, but with hawalla we can’t check accounts or monitor electronic transfers.
    “Well, we’ve got to close it down. Al-Qaeda is retreating and regrouping its assets in both manpower and cash. We’ve got to turn off the faucet, Nick, and we’ve got to do that before al-Qaeda moves all its funds to safe harbors. Money is the