The Zero Hour (34 page)

As she continued processing the paperwork, she returned to her computer terminal and called up the consolidated Customs Entry. She saw a message flash on her computer screen:
INTENSIVE
.

The automated system was programmed to assign, completely at random, the designation “Intensive” every once in a while to an express consignment. “Intensive” meant that a hold was placed on the plane’s cargo while a physical inspection was done.

She looked up at the customs broker and said, “Well, Charles, this is not your night. This shipment’s going to hold.”

“Oh, God,” the customs broker moaned.

“Come on now, you’d better get to work and notify DHL. They’ve got some offloading to do.”

Six large cans were removed from the DHL jet and transferred to a customs holding area. There, DHL employees were instructed to break bulk. A team of dogs was brought in to sniff the parcels. No explosives were found, but one DHL package sent from Florence, Italy, was discovered to contain seven large white truffles, packed in perfumed soap chips in a desperate attempt to conceal the truffles’ pungent fungal aroma.

Inspector Johnson picked out a few dozen parcels and had them put through the mobile X-ray van. Several of them she instructed DHL employees to slit open. She did a visual inspection, satisfied herself that the contents were as described on the airbill, and had DHL employees reseal them with bright-yellow tape that informed the recipients that the parcels had been opened by U.S. Customs.

One of the parcels she put through the X-ray machine was, according to its airbill and its Customs Entry, a CD/radio/cassette player. Although the X ray showed that the piece of equipment inside likely
was
, in fact, a CD/radio/cassette player, Edna Mae Johnson didn’t like its weight.

It was heavier than it should be. She was always looking for drugs, and Lord knows these drug dealers were always thinking of new ways to smuggle drugs. She had DHL cut the package open, and she took the matte-black Sony CFD-30 apart. As she did, she admired its sleek shape and thought how much her grandson Scott would like something like this. She wondered what it cost.

She took a screwdriver and carefully pulled off the bottom plate. Inside, instead of the normal guts, she found a black box with little lights on top of it. It was something electronic, and definitely something that didn’t belong there.

“The hell—?” she said aloud.

*   *   *

The entire parcel was immediately sent over to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms for inspection.

There, the dummy CD-and-cassette player was found to house a black plastic shoebox-sized utility box with a metal lid. The shoebox contained a microwave sensor as well as some peculiar fittings and brackets and wires and screw posts.

In one place, a battery was clearly meant to fit. And then there were those damned screw posts, which were meant to be attached to something. One of the ATF agents realized that if a blasting cap was attached to the screw posts …

No, it couldn’t be, could it?

Inside the dummy shell of the Sony CD player was an ingeniously constructed fusing mechanism for an extremely sophisticated bomb.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

At six in the morning, as Sarah was lying in bed trying to rouse herself, the phone rang.

Forty-five minutes later, she entered the conference room belonging to the assistant director of the FBI in charge of the New York office, a burly, six-foot-seven-inch, white-haired Irishman named Joseph Walsh. Seated next to him, and the only face she recognized, was Harry Whitman, the chief of the Joint Terrorist Task Force. She felt her stomach flip over when she was introduced to the two she didn’t know, both in shirtsleeves: an overweight black man named Alfonse Mitchell, who was the first deputy commissioner of the NYPD; and the chief of detectives of the NYPD, a small, wiry man named Thomas McSweeney. This was a high-powered gathering, and it had to be serious.

In the middle of the table was a telephone speaker and a small, furiously percolating Bunn-O-Matic coffeemaker. She poured herself a cup of coffee, smiled at Whitman, and sat down.

“First things first,” said Assistant Director Walsh, addressing Sarah directly. “I don’t know if you’ll take this as good news or bad news, but your investigation has been upgraded to a full-field.”

Sarah nodded, betraying no emotion, certainly not the fear she felt. A full-field? A full-field investigation had to be authorized at the top, by the attorney general, through the FBI director. In order to authorize a full-field, there had to be a prima facie case. Why all of a sudden? What had changed?

He went on: “A component to a serious bomb has been found by United States Customs in a DHL shipment. Herb, can you take over?”

“Sure,” came a voice over the squawk box. It belonged to Herbert Massie, chief of the Technical Section of the FBI’s vaunted Laboratory Division. “Thanks to some thorough work by U.S. Customs at JFK, and some good luck thrown in, an ordinary-looking portable CD player was intercepted on its way from Brussels to Manhattan—actually, to a Mail Boxes Etc. location near Columbia University.” The rustling of paper could be heard. “Inside it was what turned out to be a pretty fancy fusing mechanism.”

“That’s part of a bomb, Sarah,” explained Alfonse Mitchell, the first deputy police commissioner.

Sarah mentally ran through several sharp responses, but merely nodded politely.

Over the speaker, Herb Massie’s voice resumed: “I believe Agent Cahill worked Lockerbie, so she probably knows her bombs. Customs handed it over to ATF, who gave it to us. Well, actually, I had to do some shouting, but our techs got it pretty damned fast.” In nonterrorism cases, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms would normally be the investigating agency. In this case, however, the fusing mechanism was analyzed by Massie’s section of the Crime Labs.

“When did the package come into JFK?” Sarah asked.

“Night before last.”

“So it’s supposed to have arrived at its destination by now.”

“That’s right,” Massie replied. “Inside the shell of the CD player was a box measuring, let’s see, nine point five inches long, five inches wide, and four point five inches high. It’s got some interesting stuff inside. There’s a pocket pager-receiver rigged to the relay.”

“Radio-controlled,” Sarah said. “Go ahead.”

“There’s also an electronic timer, which presumably goes off no matter what, unless it’s deliberately stopped. “And here’s the fiendish thing—it’s got a microwave sensor rigged up in such a way that if anyone comes within twenty-five feet of the bomb, it’ll go off. Talk about belt and suspenders.”

“Agent Massie,” interrupted the chief of detectives, “what have you people concluded about the sort of bomb that this … this fusing mechanism thing gets hooked up to?”

“A number of things. We know it’s probably not meant to go off in an airplane.”

“How do you know that?” asked FBI Assistant Director Walsh.

“It has no barometric capability or impact sensitivity. That means it can’t be set off by a plane’s reaching a certain air pressure, or landing. Also, since that pager inside is meant to receive a radio signal to set off the bomb, we know it’s command-detonated.”

Assistant FBI Director Walsh put in: “If the bomb’s supposed to be detonated by means of a pager, doesn’t that limit where the bomb could go? I mean, the radio signal can’t travel everywhere, can it?”

Sarah nodded; that was a good point.

“Yes,” Massie said. “We can be fairly certain that the bomb is not—
was
not—meant to go in a tunnel or a subway.”

“Or an underground parking garage,” Harry Whitman said, ever mindful of the World Trade Center bomb.

“Right,” came Massie’s voice. “All of those places are too shielded to allow the signal to reach the pager, at least reliably. You know how it is if you try to use your cellular phone in a parking garage, right?”

Thomas McSweeney, the chief of detectives, leaned forward and interrupted: “Can I go back to this microwave sensor thing? I guess what I’m saying is, why twenty-five feet? Doesn’t that tell us something about where the bomb’s supposed to be placed? If the bomb’s on a street or any place where there’s a crowd, the microwave would go off, right? So it’s got to be placed somewhere where there aren’t a lot of people.”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “Or else at night, in a deserted building.”

“Could be,” Massie said.

“There’s another thing,” Sarah said, looking around at the men, and pouring herself a second cup of coffee. “Probably the most important thing. The bomb’s meant to go off no matter what, right? A timer, a microwave sensor, a radio-activated pager—one way or another, the bomb was designed to explode.”

“So?” said Alfonse Mitchell.

“So now we know a lot about the
intentions
of the terrorist or terrorists,” Sarah said. “Since there’s really no way to shut it off, we know this isn’t meant to be an extortion or blackmail attempt. That explains why we haven’t received any demands, either by phone or by letter.
They don’t want anything from us!
Unlike the normal terrorist—if there is such a thing—these guys don’t want the United States to release prisoners or pull out of a war or some such thing.
They want to cause destruction no matter what
.”

“That’s right,” came Massie’s voice after a moment’s hesitation. The tension in the room was electric.

“Uh, Ms. Cahill,” said Alfonse Mitchell of the NYPD, “you’re overlooking the most important thing of all. There isn’t going to be any destruction.
We have the goddam fusing mechanism!
Without it, our terrorists don’t have a bomb, now do they?”

“Oh, that’s good,” Sarah snapped. “Would you like my group to start packing now, or can we have a couple of days to sort of wind down?”

“Sarah,” Harry Whitman warned.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah apologized. “That’s just a ridiculous, even dangerous, comment to make. How do we know there aren’t a dozen fusing mechanisms just like this one, that have already been sent into the country and have already been picked up? Or, if this really is the one and only, how do we know that my terrorist can’t just pick up the phone and order another one? Have it sent in another way?”

“Right,” said Assistant FBI Director Walsh. “We can’t rule out that possibility.”

Alfonse Mitchell sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee in smoldering silence.

“Agent Massie,” Sarah said, “from what I know about how pagers work, you can’t just buy a pager, you have to lease the telephone service at the same time, isn’t that right?”

“Well, yes and no,” Massie said. “You can buy a pager anywhere. But if you want it to
work
, you need to lease the service.”

“Well, that’s our lead,” Sarah said, looking around the table with a smile. “We trace the pager to the paging service, and find out who signed on for the service. Even assuming they gave a false name, they have to give so much information when they sign up for a pager that we’ll be able to trace—”

“No,” Massie said. “Not that simple.”

Alfonse Mitchell smiled behind his coffee cup.

“Why not?” asked Sarah.

“First of all, the serial number plate has been removed from the pager. The designer of this thing seems to be fairly slick.”

“But aren’t there other ways—” Sarah began.

“You buy a pager from a paging company,” Harry Whitman said, “and you lease the service, right? Then you buy another pager—just the pager, no service—from a second source. Now, each pager is programmed to respond to a digital code sequence. So all you do is you study the first pager, and alter the second one, so that it responds to the same digital code sequence as the first one—”

“You’re losing us, here,” interrupted Assistant Director Walsh.

“I get it,” Sarah said. “The pager in the fusing mechanism works like the one that came with the leased service, but if we were to try to trace it, we couldn’t. Very clever.”

“You got it,” said Herbert Massie. “But I’ve been trying to get to the main attraction, here. Listen up. Our techs have a theory as to who’s behind all this.”

“Who?” Sarah asked.

“Libya.”

“Jesus!” exploded Harry Whitman.

“How do you know?” asked Assistant Director Walsh.

“All right,” Massie said. “Someone in the lab is getting the day off. The timer is one of the ones Ed Wilson sold Libya back in 1976.”

Sarah and some of the other FBI people present knew what Herbert Massie was talking about, but none of the police could possibly have been expected to know. Indeed, the story of Libya and its business dealings with the rogue CIA agent Edwin Wilson has been written about—but not entirely.

It is a matter of public record that Edwin Wilson—a CIA officer who went “off the reservation,” as they say in the intelligence business—and an associate sold Muammar Qaddafi twenty tons of Semtex plastic explosive, which later turned up in numerous terrorist attacks around the world. It is also a matter of public record that Wilson sold the Libyan government three thousand electronic explosives timers.

What is not publicly known is where and how Wilson got them. He got them from the very source that custom-makes them for the CIA. Wilson placed the order for these three thousand timers with a man who lives outside of Washington, D.C., a renowned inventor with over six hundred patents to his name, who has for years constructed high-tech gadgets for the U.S. intelligence community. This man, who once built satellites for the Air Force at Edwards Air Force Base, is widely considered a genius.

This inventor knew that Edwin Wilson was an employee of the CIA—but not that Wilson was acting on his own behalf, not for the Agency. He should have been alerted by the fact that Wilson paid for the timers in cash, and not by purchase order. Wilson had cleverly duped him.

The gadgeteer designed and built three thousand timers, encased in black plastic, measuring three inches square by approximately half an inch high. On the outside of the timer was an LED and an on/off switch. The timer went from zero to 150 hours, in one-hour increments. As recently as 1988, these timers have repeatedly turned up in bombs set by Arab terrorists.