The Zero Hour (29 page)

To use the
SATCOM
again was a risk, but a small one. Still, he would have to take extra precautions now. This would be his last telephone call to Dyson, unless there was a great emergency.

Hence the secure fax machine.

Baumann placed a secure call to the bank in Panama City, which confirmed that the second 3.3 million had been wired to his Liechtenstein account. Excellent; exactly one week remained until the strike date. Dyson had not been tardy with the money. Then again, 3.3 million dollars here and there was pocket change to Malcolm Dyson.

He then called the Liechtenstein bank and purchased slightly less than 6.6 million U.S. dollars’ worth of gold bullion. He lost a few thousand dollars in the transaction, but it would be worth it in the long run.

Then he wrote out a message, which began:
LEAK YOUR END. AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE PARTIALLY KNOWLEDGEABLE. THOROUGHLY SWEEP HOME
,
OFFICES
,
COMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT
,
CHECK PERSONNEL. DON
’
T USE TELEPHONE. I WILL BE OUT OF CONTACT
. He ended it:
HEREBY ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT SECOND PAYMENT
.

Using the red-plastic-bound Webster’s pocket dictionary he’d bought in Paris, a twin of which Dyson had, he encrypted the message by means of a simple substitution cipher and typed it out on one of the preprinted forms. The text appeared to be an authentic-looking invoice requesting prices on a list of things—item #101.15, item #13.03, and on and on. Dyson alone knew this referred to page 101 in the dictionary, fifteen major words down on the page, etc. This simple cipher was almost unbreakable.

Baumann had set a five-minute window for Dyson to fax a similarly encoded reply. He ordered a room-service lunch, took a brief nap, and once again set up the MLink-5000.

Precisely as the five-minute window began, his
SATCOM
blinked to indicate an incoming signal, then the fax machine warbled and out came Dyson’s reply.

He read it, and then, in the glass ashtray, burned it and all the other pieces of paper he had used. He flushed the ashes down the toilet, then went out for a stroll.

*   *   *

Christine Vigiani had been tasked to be liaison with the National Security Agency. In reality, this meant one thing only: find out whatever she could about the intercepted telephone conversation, and urge them to get more. Sarah had arranged to have her cleared at a high enough level to read the NSA telephone intercept.

Not only is the NSA notoriously secretive, but it is disinclined to share with rival agencies more than it absolutely must about its sources and methods. Vigiani was having a hell of a time finding anyone at NSA who knew what he was talking about and had the authority, or the willingness, to talk.

Finally, an NSA analyst named Lindsay called Vigiani on the STU-III secure phone. He was cordial and seemed familiar with the satellite intercept in question.

“The first thing we need to know,” Vigiani said, “is whether you captured the telephone numbers of the caller or the recipient along with the conversation.”

“No.”

“You didn’t? You’re sure of that.”

“Right. The answer is no, we did not.”

“Neither one. Neither sender nor receiver.”

“Correct.”

“Why not?”

Lindsay paused. “How to answer that,” he sighed. “What we got was a snatch of conversation in midstream, so to speak. A few minutes from somewhere in the middle of the phone call.”

“But the satellite intercept—” Vigiani said, not sure of what she was saying.

Lindsay sensed her ignorance and responded in simple language: “It’s actually rare to get the phone number that’s being called,” he said. “Pure happenstance. We’d have to have locked on to the call from the very first second, so we could hear the dialing or the touch tones being punched.”

“It’s really that crude?”

“It’s what the technology allows.”

“Well, what we’d like is for you to have your satellites search for this same encryption scheme again. We figure that whoever made this call will continue to use this encrypted phone, and so now that we know the key, we can just pick up anything in the ether with that configuration, or whatever.”

“Doesn’t work that way,” Lindsay said. “Our satellites can’t tell any particular encryption scheme is being used until the signal is down-linked and examined.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Am I talking to the National Security Agency?”

Lindsay’s response was cold silence.

“All right,” Vigiani said, “what
do
you know about this intercept?”

“We know a number of things. We know it was a digital signal, to start with, which is helpful, because there aren’t that many digital phone signals out there in the ether yet. Soon, that’s all there will be. But not yet.”

“What else?”

“And we know which microwave relay station the signal was captured from, its exact location. It’s the Geneva North microwave relay, numbered Alpha 3021, located on a mountain north of Geneva. If our caller uses this phone again, the signal will likely be transmitted using the same relay. We can target that station.”

“Okay…”

“Also, each microwave relay station uses a known, fixed set of frequencies. We can tell our receiving station to listen in on these frequencies, scan them. Of course, we’ll ask the British, GCHQ, to monitor the same frequencies and process them. If we’re really lucky, we’ll record another signal that won’t decrypt.”

“Fine,” Vigiani said, “but this time get the phone number, okay?”

“Okay, right,” the NSA man said dryly. “You got it. Whatever you want.”

Vigiani got up from her desk and walked toward Sarah’s office. There, gathered around Sarah in a knot, were most of the task force members watching Sarah speak on the phone. Everyone, including Sarah, looked stricken.

“What?” she said to Ullman. “What is it?”

“It’s Duke,” he said without even turning to her.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Straining to keep a semblance of order and calm, Sarah stood before the MINOTAUR task force. “Whatever our private suspicions,” she said, “we can’t rule out the possibility that Perry Taylor died in a—well, I hesitate to use the word ‘routine,’ but there it is—a routine holdup. At least that’s the way it looks to both the Bureau’s Crime Labs and Washington Police Homicide.”

“In a parking lot in broad daylight?” asked George Roth.

“It was early evening,” she said.

“But the sun was out,” Roth persisted.

“Okay, right, but his car was parked in a fairly remote area of the lot.”

Pappas shook his head, but Sarah couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“Look,” Roth said, “Baumann wants us to think Taylor was held up. Does anyone here seriously think that’s what happened? I don’t know Taylor. You feebees, tell me: was he a drug user?”

“Of course not,” Vigiani said. “Obviously Baumann did this. Which means he’s in the U.S.”

Russell Ullman, to whom Perry Taylor had been something of a father figure, had been silent for most of the meeting. His eyes were rimmed in red. Now he spoke, his voice weak. “Has Crime Labs looked into the MO of the murders at Pollsmoor Prison to establish a correlation?”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “But there’s nothing.”

“How so?” Pappas asked.

“Taylor appears to have died from bullet wounds in the throat and forehead at fairly close range.”

“What do you think?” Vigiani exploded. “Baumann’s going to leave a signature—a billboard saying, ‘Here I am’? Come
on
!”

“All right,” Sarah said calmly. “You all may be right.”

Roth asked: “Any similarity between Taylor’s death and the death of your call-girl friend back in Boston?”

Sarah shook her head. “Ballistics tells me no.”

“If Duke was killed by Henrik Baumann,” said Pappas, “that tells us he’s not unwilling to kill a major FBI official, with all the heat that brings down. The question then is, what would his motive be? Nothing appears to have been stolen from Taylor or his car, except a wallet.”

“Baumann might have wanted the ID cards,” Ullman said. “Or he might have wanted to make it look like a mugging.”

“The motive,” Vigiani said, “was to try to paralyze the hunt for him. And if he’d kill Duke Taylor, he’d certainly kill any of us in an instant.”

*   *   *

On Jared’s third day in New York, on a Sunday afternoon, he insisted on going to the park to play. Sarah had worked all day Saturday, and had planned to work all day Sunday too, but at the last moment she relented. It was important for her to spend some family time with Jared. And she could do some work while he played. So they went to Strawberry Fields at West Seventy-second Street, and she read files while he batted a softball around by himself. It would have been a sad sight, this solitary kid in a brand-new leather jacket (a gift from Peter), tossing a ball up into the air and batting it, then running after it and starting all over again, were it not for the fact that he was so clearly enjoying himself.

In short order he had befriended another boy of roughly the same age who took turns pitching to him and then being pitched to. Relieved that he had met someone, Sarah returned to reading Bureau intelligence files on terrorist attempts within the United States.

The truth was, she was discovering, the Bureau’s record on catching terrorists was spotty. In 1986, she read, a domestic group called the El Rukin organization tried to buy an antitank weapon from an FBI undercover agent, intending to pull off some terrorist act in the United States in exchange for money from the Libyan government. A couple of years later, the FBI arrested four members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who were trying to buy a heat-seeking antiaircraft missile in Florida.

Fine, but what about all the black-market weapons sales that the Bureau
didn’t
catch? Barely months after the TRADEBOM investigation, which Alex Pappas was justly so proud of, a ring of Sudanese terrorists was arrested in New York, and members of the Abu Nidal organization were apprehended in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Missouri.

Pappas talked of probabilities, but what were the odds, really, that the special working group would catch this terrorist—and without a photograph?

People liked to joke about the World Trade Center terrorists, with their rinky-dink operation, returning to Ryder Truck Rental to get their five-hundred-dollar security deposit back, but Sarah didn’t find it amusing. Sure, the World Trade Center bombers were jokers, clowns, amateurs, but look what they had accomplished. And imagine what a top-notch, professional terrorist like Henrik Baumann could do.

The Bureau had come close to cracking the Oklahoma City case, but so much of it was luck. One of the investigators had found a twisted scrap of truck axle with a legible vehicle identification number on it, and he fed that number into Rapid Start, one of the Bureau’s many databases, and then we were off. That was good, basic scut work—but the Bureau had also lucked out when it was discovered that a nearby ATM video camera had captured an image of the rental truck that contained the bomb. And then a cop happened to stop a guy for speeding, a guy who happened to be driving without a license. How many lucky breaks could MINOTAUR really count on?

Perry Taylor’s death had changed everything. None of them really believed he’d been killed in a routine mugging. It was as if Baumann were in the next room now. They could hear his footsteps, his breathing, his approach. He was no longer an abstraction, a code name. He was
here
.

Lost in her thoughts, Sarah didn’t notice at first that Jared had disappeared.

She looked around, then rose slowly to get a better vantage point. She slipped the files into her shoulder bag. Jared was gone.

She was not yet nervous. Jared was impulsive, prone to run off without thinking, and now he had an accomplice.

She called his name. Several people turned around to look at her.

She called his name again, louder.

“Dammit, Jared,” she said. “Where the hell are you?”

She tightened her fists in anger and frustration, walked aimlessly around the landscaped field, yelled for him.

No answer.

She told herself not to overreact, not to be overprotective. Any moment he’d pop up behind her, laughing at the prank he’d pulled off, and she’d deliver a stern lecture about not fooling around that way in a strange city.

And after she’d circled the field and realized he really wasn’t there, that he probably wasn’t playing a trick, her heart began thudding.

She followed the path near where he and his new friend had been playing, toward the northeast part of the field, which dropped off suddenly into a densely wooded area, and when she heard his cries she began to run.

Three rough-looking late-adolescent boys had circled Jared and were jabbing at him. One of them was grabbing his new leather jacket. Another was wielding a baseball bat. Jared’s face was flushed, his eyes wide with fear.

“Hey!” she called out. “Back off! Leave him alone!”

They turned to look at her, and then two of them approached her.

“Mommy!” Jared cried out.

“Mommy!” mimicked one of them, with dreadlocks and a wispy adolescent goatee.

“Fuck you, bitch,” the other said, waving the bat.

Sarah knew the basics of hand combat, but the truth was she had never had to defend herself physically, not once in her career outside of the FBI Academy, not once when she didn’t have a gun, and right now her gun was in the office suite on West Thirty-seventh Street.

And then she felt a numbing blow to her abdomen, at precisely the same time that Jared let out a terrified scream, and she felt her purse being yanked from her shoulder. One of the young men had swung at her with the bat. With a great fury she lunged at the two attackers, while her son was slammed to the ground by the other, who yanked off his leather jacket. Jared let out a terrible scream.

She hit one of them in the jaw. He barely flinched, grabbed her waist, kneed her in the solar plexus, while the other approached, brandishing a bat. She screamed for help, but barely a sound escaped her throat. “Just leave him alone,” she finally shouted, trying to regain her balance, but they kept coming at her, grabbing her neck, kicking at her abdomen. She screamed again.