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Tracking Center at Langley. There, FaceIt, a sophisticated and rapidly evolving biometric software program manufactured by the Identix Corporation, would pick out all visible faces, digitally enhance them, and compare each on the basis of fifty-three distinct characteristics with an FBI database containing photographs and artists’ composites of several thousand known and suspected terrorists.
    “We getting this on tape?”
    “Not tape,” Keck said testily. “On disk.”
    “I don’t care if it’s super-eight film, as long as it records.” Chapel slipped on a communications headset. “You there, Mr. Babtiste?” he asked, pulling the slim microphone close to his mouth.
    “Ch’uis la.” Babtiste had accepted a temporary position as a hotel doorman. He stood downstairs at the hotel portico clad in one of the Ritz’s trademark blue topcoats, greeting arriving guests with a tip of his cap and the flash of his dazzling smile. “I’m making some decent tips. If our man does not show till afternoon, I’m paying for dinner at Maxim’s for nous tous .”
    “If he doesn’t show, I’ll hold you to it,” said Chapel, but even as he permitted himself a smile, a new voice barked in his ear. It was Halsey, and the strident edge to his voice made him shiver. “Adam, we’ve intercepted a second communication. It was a little garbled, but we’re betting it was Omar sending the code to his correspondent on your side. The number dialed had a Paris area code. Looks like this thing is going down now. Your team in place?”
    “Affirmative,” Chapel answered, rolling on the balls of his feet.
    “Good. We’ll be watching with you.”
     
     
    Hawala.
    Two years ago, Adam Chapel had never even heard the word, let alone known that it constituted an underground banking network that transferred more than fifty billion dollars a year around the world. The Chinese had called it “Fei Qian,” or “flying money,” but, in fact, the money never went anywhere. Today, a broker in New York asks his counterpart in Delhi to deliver five hundred dollars. Tomorrow, it would be the other way around. If, and when, accounts between the two needed balancing, some gold might change hands. But no one kept any papers. No chits, no receipts, no nothing. In the event of a dispute, hawaladars consulted human “memorizers,” trained and kept on staff to mediate.
    Hawala, however, was far more than a simple means of sending cash from one person to another. It was also a convenient mechanism to evade taxes and duties. Vendors provided importers with lower prices on their invoices and got the difference via hawala . In the late sixties, the first large hawala networks emerged to circumvent official restrictions on gold imports in Southeast Asia. Once the gold smugglers had perfected the system, it wasn’t long before other criminals followed suit: drug traffickers, money launderers, and more recently, terrorists.
    “Bachelor number one, come on down,” said Carmine Santini from his position at yet another fashion boutique. “Male, twenty-five to thirty-five, approaching Royal. Navy blazer, tan slacks, and oh, look at that shirt. Could be Italian. Definitely Mediterranean. Enjoys dinner, dancing, and moonlight walks on the beach. Got him, Kreskin? Signor Romeo with his nose to the window.”
    Santini the joker. Always ready with a name for everyone. Chapel had earned the nickname “Kreskin” (after the famous mentalist) when five minutes after sitting down with a slippery Lebanese businessman to discuss his company’s balance sheet, he’d figured out the guy was scraping ten percent off his pretax profits and sending the cash to the bad guys. Chapel had explained that it was an accounting issue entirely, the man listing the cash as a charitable donation but not taking the write-off. Three hundred grand a year was too much to forget about. But there was more to it than that. The truth was that a balance sheet was like a glimpse into a