Solid Oak

by William F Lovejoy

Since he was out and about, Malone drove over to the Venice Gourmet on Bridgeway and filled a few shopping bags with edibles. He also filled two bags with eggs, sausage, Earl Grey tea, a couple ribeye steaks, cereal, bread, milk, and a lot of mint cookies and ordered them delivered to Emma Blaylock, a friend whose Social Security check didn’t go very far.

  Usually, he utilized the online Safeway store for his own shopping and had his groceries delivered, but this seemed like a celebratory day. Number One, he wasn’t dead, and Number Two, Bobbi had joined forces with him. He felt good about both events, but he didn’t know how to properly thank Bobbi for Number One.

  So he drove over to Nancy Ann Flowers, also on Bridgeway, and bought two dozen red roses. Bought two vases also since he had none in inventory. The lady arranged them for him with some other greenery.

  It was after 1:00 by the time he got back to the house. He carried groceries inside to the kitchen and noted that the stereo receiver was turned on. It was classical music, probably KOSC out of San Francisco.

  Kind of nice, coming home to an occupied house.

  He brought in the second round of sacks to find Bobbi checking what was in the first round.

  “You bought out the store?” she asked.

  “Just part of it.”

  “My God, you could buy a car with what these filets cost.”

  “Not a very good car. But it’s world class meat.”

  He dropped sacks on the counter and went back out to the truck. The two vases were on the floor of the back seat, propped in place by the first aid kits, so they wouldn’t tip over. He took the first aid kits in.

  “Well, that was smart,” she said. “Given that you seem accident prone. Is that it?”

  “One more trip.”

  He brought the roses in and kicked the door shut behind him.

  “What?”

  “One for the table and one for your desk.”

  “Oh, damn, Oak. No one’s bought me flowers in years. They’re beautiful!”

  She took one vase and held it close to smell the aroma.

  “Thank you, again, Bobbi.”

  “You don’t have to thank me over and over, Oak. I’ve thought about it, and I’d do it again.”

  She went up on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. A thorn from one of the roses caught him on the other cheek.

  He didn’t mention it.

  “I’ve got news,” she said.

  “Good news?”

  “The bad news is, while I finally found Dinmore’s checking and savings accounts and got a little history, it’s not going to tell us much. Some unexplained deposits, but I don’t know where they come from and I can’t trace them back. And Lorna is not going to be pleased about the balances.”

  “What’s the good?”

  “We were trying to follow the wrong money.”

  *

  Abdul Wahhab had many contacts all over the Middle East, and it only required three hours to learn the name of the man he sought and to track him down in Doha. He was careful to note the names of the people who assisted him for he would later remunerate them with cash. That practice kept them in the category of reliable sources of information.

  Wahhab engaged in the import-export business as a middleman rather than a manufacturer or retailer. Primarily, he imported cash and exported whatever the client desired. He was an expedient and enlightened man with a flair for utilizing technology where he could.

  He had ample time to pick up the money in U.S. one hundred dollar bills at the bank in Riyadh and place it in his briefcase. He went to his own bank and deposited half of it, and then he caught a Gulf Air flight from Saudi Arabia to Doha.

  In the capital city of Qatar, he made the airport his office while he placed phone calls. By 3:00 in the afternoon, he had secured a meeting place, and he hired a taxi to take him to the open air café on Al Bayan Street. The magnificent skyline of the city loomed high to the east. The architecture was ultra modern, skillfully designed and executed. Doha was a very clean and desirable city, he thought.

  Wahhab was dressed in a long white shirt and loose pants, as were most of the men he saw on the street. He wore the loose headdress called gutra. A number of men working at offices in the area were dressed in long-sleeved white dress shirts and ties. Most of the women were in the traditional fashion of a black dress with their hair covered by the black shayla.

  As intended, he arrived first and took a table by himself. He ordered coffee and placed his blue handkerchief on the table top. It was the signal identifying himself to the man he was to meet.

  Twenty minutes later, a man in his mid-twenties with a full black beard and dark, shifting eyes approached the table. Wahhab looked up at him and held his eyes, stopped the shifting.

  “I am Bijad,” the man said in Arabic.

  “Come, sit. I am Abdul.” He signaled the waiter for a second cup and more coffee.

  The man pulled out the opposite chair and sat, but he was uneasy, looking around for the armed men he expected Wahhab to have with him. He was dressed similarly to Wahhab and therefore to most of the population of the city. It would be difficult to single him out if he was to be a target.

  “You may relax, Bijab. I am alone, and as I explained on the telephone, I am very interested in your cause and wish to know more.”

  “You also have money.”

  “I may have. It depends. Tell me about your goals.”

  After the coffee was poured, he listened to a twenty-minute diatribe that began in stuttered monosyllables and steadily increased in fervor until it became almost a rant. The Emir had lost sense of the newly developing world. He was tenaciously grasping a history that had long since lost its importance and meaning, and the Emir must be forced to adapt to democratic ways. Bijab was a believer.

  Wahhab was not. He didn’t believe a word of what the man said. He knew from three other sources that Bijab was a passionate follower of the tenets of Al Qaeda. That organization was pretty much mired in the 14th Century or earlier. Sharia law or nothing. With the loss of its leadership in Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda’s aggression against non-believers was frequently born at lower and independent levels of the movement. That would include an independent Bijab, a man seeking a return to the middle ages, but with a cell phone in hand.

  Abdul Wahhab thought that Bijab, with a twenty-five year old uneducated mind, was convinced that the misdirection of a fight for democracy would serve the eventual purpose of anarchy and therefore jihad.

  Let Bijab believe what he believed or expound on his cover story. Wahhab did not care as long as it also served his own purpose.

  Wahhab said, “I represent a group of people who have sympathy for your movement and wish to support it.”

  “They should know that I am the leader,” Bijab said. “It is I who will determine the direction we must follow.”

  “Very well,” Wahhab said as he stood up. “We wish you well.”

  “Wait! Wait! You are going to give me money. The movement is very expensive.”

  “You should know that a great leader accepts advice when it is pertinent.”

  The man searched Wahhab’s face, and then finally said, “Yes, I understand that. This group has advice?”

  Wahhab settled back into his chair. “Despite all our beliefs, money rules the world.”

  “That is not necessarily. . . .”

  “And the Jews own all the banks,” Wahhab finished.

  Now, Wahhab saw interest in Bijab’s eyes. He had to read the eyes because the beard disguised most of his face.

  “The Commercial Bank of Qatar, for example. If one wanted to make a real statement about the evils supported by the Emir, that bank should disappear.”

  After a full minute of consideration, Bijab caught on. “I see that. But what. . . .”

  “A suicide bomber would make such a statement,” he said. Al Qaeda operated under one tenet that said civilian deaths were acceptable to the cause.

  “Yes, that is true.”

  �
��My group is prepared to offer you $25,000 US. . . .”

  Bijab’s eyes closed. No doubt he was dreaming about a million dollars. “That is hardly enough.”

  “Immediately, then another $25,000 after the event.”

  That cut Wahhab’s commission to $150,000 but it was acceptable.

  *

  David Wainwright Dixon’s office on the second floor was extremely comfortable in soft turquoise leather and burled ash casework. It was so because Lani had decorated it. Dark emerald wool carpet hugged the floor. One wall of bookshelves was crammed with tomes covering economics, history, philosophy, and sociology. The paintings hung on the burlap covered walls didn’t mean much, but the colors were complementary and they had been expensive.

  Behind his desk was a credenza made from a library table cut in half lengthwise, and on the wall above the credenza was a nice grouping of his diplomas, certificates, and photographs of David with his academic and political friends. On the desk was a teak pipe holder because David was allowed to smoke a pipe in this room. Lani had had a separate softly purring ventilation system installed in this office to extract most of the god-awful smell of his cherry tobacco.

  David was perfectly anal. Everything in his room had a place, from the ashtray and pen and pencil holder on his desktop to the magazines staggered carefully on the coffee table in front of the sofa. The New York Times, not yet read, was centered on the dark red leather blotter. His desk chair was always left aligned snugly against the center of the desk.

  On the credenza behind the desk were two computer workstations separated by a multifunction printer, fax machine, copier, and scanner. One computer was online and the other computer stood alone. That was the one he used to write essays and position papers that required confidentiality until they were ready for release or publication. He frequently shared his work in progress with his peers for comment before composing the final drafts. That process meant that the final product very often carried the expertise of many intelligent men and women. Often, the title carried the names of several different co-authors.

  It was Wednesday and so David was on the golf course with three colleagues.

  Lani passed around the desk, pulled out the chair, sat in it, and spun around to the stand alone computer. She pressed the button and waited while it fired up.

  When the screen came to life and asked for a password, she keyed in “LANI2.” David wasn’t very complex when it came to passwords, and she had figured it out in three tries. The online computer was “LANI3.”

  She called up the word processing program and checked the listing. Since the last time she had checked, she found he was working on a currently forty-page long position paper on Mali. That would be interesting, she thought, so she sent it to the printer.

  As soon as it printed out, she shut down the machine, got up and returned the chair to its proper position. From a bottom drawer of the desk, she counted out forty pages of blank paper and added them to the feed tray of the printer to replace those she had used.

  It wouldn’t do to forward these pages on David’s fax machine because he always checked its usage. He was also perfectly paranoid about his secrets. If he would only work on the other machine, she could just use e-mail. Still, it didn’t take much longer this way.

  Lani climbed the stairs to her office suite and used the fax machine there to send the Mali paper to May.

  *

  The doorbell rang just before 5:00 and Malone went to answer it. Through the stained glass, he saw the outlines of Andy and Abby.

  He unlocked and pulled the door open.

  “Hey, ladies!”

  Abby was wearing her new dress.

  “Guess what the UPS man had for us today,” Andrea said.

  “I hope it fits.”

  “Both of them fit just fine.”

  “Come on in,” he said.

  They stepped into the foyer as Bobbi rose from her position at the desk and came to the doorway. “What fit?” she asked.

  “Look at my new dress,” Abby ordered.

  “Ah! That’s very pretty.”

  “Oak does this all the time, Bobbi. Sends us things without a card or note, and we have to figure out that it came from New York, and he was just in New York.”

  Malone had been planning to broil the filets, but he adapted and said, “I’m going to order pizzas.”

  While he did, the others moved to the sofa and sat. From the kitchen phone, he watched Bobbi and Andy sizing each other up, making small talk, wondering about relationships, no doubt. Andrea was younger at about thirty, slim with dark brown hair cut short.

  He completed his order and went to sit in one of the chairs flanking the sofa.

  “Have you known Oak for long?” Galway asked.

  “Since he moved in here. Of course, he’s gone a lot.”

  “Andy’s husband was a lieutenant in the army,” Malone told Bobbi. “He didn’t make it back from Afghanistan.”

  “Ah, damn, I’m sorry.” She hesitated, and then said, “Same situation here.”

  “Come on, Abby,” Malone said.

  He led her back to the dining table, found the chess set in a kitchen cabinet, and set it up. He and Abby had played often, and they renewed their rivalry while the women talked. Abby was getting better, taking more time to think out her moves, and they finished two games before the pizza arrived. They were even up on the score, and Abby was happy enough with that to broadcast the results.

  It only took forty minutes to devour two large pizzas with accompanying Pepsi, and then his neighbors departed amid a flurry of thanks.

  He locked the front door.

  “Well,” Bobbi said, “I’d been thinking she was your paramour.”

  “My paramours are in short supply. She’s more a neighbor.”

  “You’re kind of an old softy, aren’t you?”

  “I am getting older by the minute.”

  “I think she’d like to be your paramour. Hint of jealousy there.”

  “Nah.”

  “Trust me. Women know these things.”

  He was sure they did, but he didn’t want to get bogged down in it. Hell, he gave things to others — the eighty-six year old Emma Blaylock who lived near the marina, an eight year old girl with autism, a young couple who had been in an auto accident. Others.

  “Don’t want to talk about it?” Galway asked.

  “Nothing to talk about.”

  She grinned at him. “Back to work.”

  They returned to the office, Bobbi at the desk, and Oak in the big chair with his feet up on the ottoman and his laptop in his lap. After all that pizza, he could go right to sleep.

  “What did you learn?”

  “I’m more interested in your research,” Oak said.

  “You first.”

  “Okay. Conrad Sherry doesn’t live in the U.S., at least by that name.”

  “Could it be an alias?”

  “It could, except a Conrad Sherry graduated from high school in Texarkana. Played really mean football on a consistently winning team. Joined the Army right after graduation according to the newspaper. And that’s the last mention I found. Naturally, I couldn’t get into Army records.”

  “And Jim Mears?”

  “Not much more than we already knew. There is kind of a strange thing though. You’d think a guy who knew he was going to be taking over the family dealership would have majored in business. Mears got his degree in finance. Then he received a master’s degree from the University of Phoenix with a concentration in global management.”

  “And that means something to you?” Bobbi asked.

  “I’m still mulling it over. Be nice if we had a look at his stock portfolio.”

  Galway gave him a grimace. “We’ll see. But next, I’ll tell you about the money.”

  “Please do.”

  “Earlier, you wanted to know more about the Institute for International Stability, so I started with it. I pulled down ten years of annual reports. They appear to be very
well done and include the reports of annual audits by outside auditors. Everything on the up and up.”

  Malone was prepared to be disappointed. He was hoping she’d found something.

  “I told you before that they donate a lot of money to what appear to be worthy causes around the world. I guess we’re supposed to assume that those donations encourage the receiving organizations to assist in the mission, to help reduce tensions and confrontation between certain groups.”

  “It’s a theory,” Oak agreed.

  “These reports and audits are designed for internal consumption by the members of the organization, that is, within the United States. But the donations are made outside the U.S. and I got to wondering about the recipients.”

  “So you. . . .”

  “So I started a spreadsheet and listed, by year, all of the charities identified in the Institute’s annual reports, along with the amounts donated.”

  “And then. . . .”

  “And then I went looking for reports or audits produced by those charities, and there are hundreds of them. Like the Sadr City Advice Center in Iraq. In Pakistan, there’s probably a thousand charitable organizations ranging from the Aga Khan Foundation to the Green Earth Network to the Heifer Project International. . . .”

  “Heifer Project?”

  “I’m just reporting, Oak. In Kuwait, there’s the Islam Presentation Committee. In Afghanistan, there’s the Women of Hope Project and Turquoise Mountain. There are dozens of others identified in the Institute donations listings. Now, when I went searching online, I came up with mixed results. Some of these organizations apparently don’t report at all, or at least not report online. Some provide vague annual or quarterly reports. But quite a few do identify their major donors. Where I found that information, I plugged it into another column on my spreadsheet.”

  Bobbi was getting to the point, now, and Malone could tell she was excited about it.

  “This is going to be good, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “This isn’t something the average person would pick up on, I think. But there is a consistent pattern,” she said. “If the Institute reported a donation of $750,000 to one organization in its annual report for 2006, the same year’s report from the recipient reported income of $375,000 from the Institute. An Institute donation of 1.2 million to another organization shows up in the organization’s books as a $600,000 receipt. So far, I’ve identified eighty-four similar transactions. The recipient organizations are receiving half of what is reported in the Institute’s books.”