The Hindu Business Line : Operation `Blood Money'

ACCOUNTANTS are usually busy with books and records, tax referencers and law tomes. Fiction has little place in bean-counters' shelves, yet a book that they may find interesting is The Devil's Banker by Christopher Reich, from Delacorte Press (www.bantamdell.com).

This is a post-9/11 story, and so it factors in terrorism in its new avatar. The hero is no doc or lawyer, nor a cop or superman, but a forensic accountant Adam Chapel.

He is a man who "trusts numbers more than people" and he teams up with an intelligence agent "to hunt down a shadowy mastermind who is moving vast sums of money from country to country, from bank to bank, leaving no tracks."

The operation, that is following the disappearing money trail, is code-named "Blood Money".

The target is no dumb one, they find. The quarry "is auditing their every move, laying a twisting trail of false clues and shocking surprises."

Chapter 1 introduces readers to hawala in Peshawar. A word that means "to change" in Arabic, and `trust' in Hindi, explains the author. The hawala broker's job is "to effect transfers of cash from one city to another". A system that thrives because of "distrust of bureaucracy and paperwork demanded by the country's less-than-solvent banks".

Chinese had called it `Fei Qian' or `flying money', a subsequent chapter would elaborate. "The money never went anywhere. No chits, no receipts, no nothing."

Electronic transfers are some of the toughest to catch, owing to sheer volume and speed of execution.

Yet there are supercomputers that tango to trap messages that bounce through satellites, looking for thousands of keywords in hundreds of languages and dialects, and agents work on `real-time intelligence'.

Comforting stuff, though in a story, if you are too worried about the safety of all the trillions of dollars on the fly.

Chapel is an MBA `four-point-oh from HBS', plus a CPA and a CFA. "In my sock I got a nifty little MPA — that's a master's degree in public accounting," reads his self-intro.

"He preferred the precision of a balanced ledger, its promise of fiscal transparency, its devotion to a world defined by generally accepted accounting principles, to the wild, terminal justice of a hollow-tipped bullet."

Yet, this is a post-Enron world, where there are all those in the world who are grading accountants along with monstrous criminals.

That accountants can help track is proved when Chapel reasons how clandestine operations based in a foreign country "had to rent an apartment, purchase a car, have a phone connected, utilities hooked up, water, gas, electricity" with each iteration demanding "proof of identification, credit history, bank accounts, deposits".

So? Simply follow the money and you would find the man — as simple as that and also as difficult.

A book that can expose you to some new tricks out there in the world of baddies.

(Books courtesy: Landmark)

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