The Zero Hour (43 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

Shortly after midnight Baumann left Sarah’s apartment. The street was empty, chilly, lit by soft oblique early-morning sunlight. As he walked, he became aware of someone following him.

He turned around and saw Sarah’s ex-husband, Peter Cronin.

“Oh, hello,” he said.

Cronin held his face a few inches from Baumann’s. He shoved Baumann into the mouth of a narrow alley a few feet away and began moving closer, his breath hot against Baumann’s face. He placed a large hand on Baumann’s shoulder and flattened him against the brick wall. Baumann looked around: there was no one in sight. They were alone. No one was passing by.

“Let me be really clear with you, Brian. I’m a cop. I got resources you wouldn’t believe. I’m going to look into your past, find out all about you. You wouldn’t
believe
the shit I can find out about you, you asshole. The shit I can do to you. I can get you
deported
, motherfucker.”

“All right, enough,” Baumann said quietly.

“
Enough
, motherfucker?
Enough?
I got news for you, fucker. I did a little checking on you, big guy. There’s no record of any ‘Brian Lamoreaux’ entering the country. Either you’re here illegally or you aren’t who you say you are.”

“Oh, is that right?” Baumann said phlegmatically.

“That’s right, buddy. I’m going to turn your whole life inside out, you little shithead. I’m going to make your life a living nightmare, and then I’m going to—”

There was a loud snap, the unmistakable sound of bone cracking, and now Peter’s head was turned around almost 180 degrees. He seemed to have turned to look at the opposite wall; but, his spinal column having been severed, his head was grotesquely out of position. His eyes glared angrily, his mouth gaping in midsentence, frozen in death.

Baumann eased the body to the ground, then took out an alcohol wipe from his pocket and cleaned the prints from Peter Cronin’s neck and face, and in a matter of seconds he was out of the alley and on his way.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

At two o’clock in the morning, Henrik Baumann and Leo Krasner were slogging through the tunnels beneath the Wall Street area of New York City. Though burdened as before with backpacks and air tanks, they moved more quickly this time, finding their destination without pedometer, compass, or map.

They arrived at the central switching area and removed their breathing apparatus. Krasner, angry at having to do this menial task, took out his tools in silence.

Then he turned around and, short of breath, fixed Baumann with a menacing glare. “Before I do jack shit, you listen to me.”

Baumann’s stomach tightened.

“I’m not as stupid as you seem to think,” Leo said. “This whole ridiculous idea of making me go back down here in this fucking cesspool and fix the splice—let’s just say I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We both know you could have left the box here and no one would ever have detected it. Just coming back down here again is a bigger risk than leaving the breakout box on the line. So why would you want to take a chance like that?”

Baumann furrowed his brow. “I don’t want—”

“No, I’m not done, dude. If you have some idea about wasting me down here, you can forget about it. I taped our first meeting. If I’m not home in a couple of hours, a phone call is going to be made.”

“What is this?” Baumann said darkly. At their first meeting, Baumann had carried a small, concealed near-field detector that would have detected a running tape recorder. He was sure Krasner was bluffing.

“It’s my life insurance policy,” the cracker said. “I’ve dealt with assholes like you before. I know the sort of shit you guys sometimes try.”

“This is a business deal,” Baumann said quietly, almost sadly. “I certainly have no intention of killing you. Why should I? We are both professionals. You do the work I’ve asked you to do, you get paid—rather generously, yes?—and then we never see each other again. For me to do anything else would be insane.”

Krasner stared at him for a few seconds longer, then turned back to the wires. “Just as long as we’re totally clear on that,” he said, as he removed the breakout box and respliced the copper cable on which Manhattan Bank’s encrypted financial transactions traveled.

When he had finished his work, he turned around and smiled at Baumann. “And that, dude—”

Baumann reached out his hands with lightning speed and swiveled the computer wizard’s head until the vertebrae cracked audibly. The mouth was open in a half-smile, half-grimace; the eyes stared dully. The large body sagged.

It required considerable effort, but Baumann was strong. He hoisted the dead body and carried it to a blind end of the tunnel, where he deposited it in a crumpled heap. With alcohol wipes, he removed any fingerprints from Krasner’s face and neck.

In this section of the tunnel, there was a good chance that the body would remain undiscovered for weeks, if not longer, and by then it would make no difference anyway.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

Early the next morning, Christine Vigiani was informed that there was a call for her on the STU-III secure phone. She went into the secure communications area, lighting a cigarette as she walked, and picked it up. “Vigiani,” she said.

“This is Larry Lindsay at NSA.”

Vigiani was silent for a beat too long, so he went on, “Your liaison, remember?”

“Oh, right. What’s up?”

“Let’s go secure,” he said. “This is sensitive.”

*   *   *

Vigiani called Sarah’s apartment. Sarah answered on the first ring.

“Hope I’m not waking you,” Vigiani said.

“Nope, I’m just having my coffee. What’s up?”

“I think I have your deadline.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The deadline. The day the attack’s going to take place. I think I have the date.”

“Oh?”

“GCHQ picked up another piece of an encrypted phone conversation from the same microwave relay station the last intercept came from.”

Sarah sat up straight.

“They were targeting Geneva North microwave relay station, listening on a number of specified frequencies, when they came across a signal that wouldn’t decrypt. They pulled it down and put it through the Cray. And lo and behold, it turns out to be the exact same encryption scheme as the first one.”

“What’s in the conversation? More about Baumann?”

“No, it was some guy—the same guy as in the last intercept—calling a banker in Panama, authorizing a payment. He was very detailed about it. He wanted to make sure one-third of ‘the money’ had been paid out at the beginning, and then another third last week, and then the
final payment
three days from now. June 26. He said a major ‘incident’ was going to take place in the United States on June 26, and only once that ‘incident’ took place was the money to be released. He wasn’t more specific than that.”

“Three days from now…” Sarah mused aloud. “You’re right. That’s the target date. That’s when the bomb’s going off.”

She hung up and turned to Jared. “I want you to take my cellular phone. Put it in your backpack.”

“Wow,” Jared said.

“This is no game, Jared. You are not to use it. Don’t show it around, don’t play games with it, you hear me? It’s only if I have to reach you.”

“What are you going to use?”

“We have other cell phones at work I can use.”

“Cool,” Jared said.

*   *   *

In the very small, unfurnished apartment a block away, Baumann put down the phone, pursed his lips, shook his head slowly.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

When Leo Krasner bragged to Baumann that he’d “taped” their first meeting, he hadn’t been bluffing. But he hadn’t been so foolhardy as to conceal a tape recorder on his person, because he knew there were devices that could detect such things—portable, hand-held bias-oscillator detectors or metal detectors, that sort of thing.

No, he had done something far more effective.

After Baumann had first called, Krasner had insisted they meet at a brightly lit restaurant, not in some dingy pub. He had enlisted the help of a friend, a fellow hacker and cracker, who showed up at the restaurant with a gym bag.

The gym bag, set down on a table near where Baumann and Krasner were meeting, had black nylon mesh at either end to provide ventilation for sweaty gym clothes. But the mesh served another purpose as well. A video camera could clandestinely film through it quite well—and did.

While the video camera ran, Krasner’s friend read a book. He sat for a good long while, and then left.

Thus Krasner had a clear videotape of his meeting with Baumann, whose name he of course didn’t know, from which he had chosen several excellent still frames of the man who had hired him. Using his Xerox color scanner for maximum resolution, he had scanned the clearest black-and-white image into one of his computers.

The man could track him down, could find his apartment, could find the video and the stack of black-and-white glossies. But only someone a good deal more computer-adept than that guy would realize that his photo was hidden in a silicon chip.

Neither was Leo Krasner lying about a phone call being made if he did not return to his apartment by a certain time. Using the same simple technology employed in burglar alarms that automatically telephone the police when they’re tripped, he connected an autodialer to a timer and an answering machine on which one outgoing message had been recorded.

At exactly nine o’clock in the morning following Krasner’s last trip through the underground tunnels, the autodialer called 911 and played the message.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

At nine in the morning exactly, a call was answered by one of the sixty-three 911 operators at work in one large room at One Police Plaza. “New York Police 911,” she said into her headset. “Your call is being recorded.”

She was met by silence, and was about to disconnect when she heard the whine of a tape recorder, and then a male voice began to speak.

“My name is Leo Krasner,” the voice said hesitantly, “and I want to report myself missing. This is not a joke. Um…” There was a rustling of paper in the background. “Please listen carefully. It is possible I have been abducted, but it’s … um, even more likely I’ve been murdered. If I have been, there is a very good chance my body can be found in a tunnel whose precise location I will now describe.…”

As the tape-recorded voice of Leo Krasner continued speaking, the 911 operator grew less and less skeptical. It was too sober-sounding to be a prank. She typed the information—name, address, the possible location of the man’s body—into her computer terminal, forwarding it to the appropriate police dispatcher, who sat in the adjacent room.

Calls that come into 911 are “stacked” on the computer screen in order of priority, from a full Priority One on down to a Ten, a complaint about a barking dog or loud music in the middle of the day—which could wait or simply be ignored.

Although this was not an emergency situation, the call was treated as Priority Three, as are all “found bodies,” to which an ambulance was required to respond.

An ambulance, the fire department, the NYPD Emergency Service Unit, and a two-man car were all sent to investigate.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

“Can I help you?”

The receptionist for the Information Management Group at the Manhattan Bank greeted the large, unkempt man before her as if he’d wandered in off the street reeking of Night Train.

“Special Agent Ken Alton, FBI.”

The receptionist stared at the leather-encased badge, then back at Ken, as if unable to reconcile the two. “What can I do for you, Agent … Alton?”

“I need to talk to your boss,” Ken said.

“May I ask what this is in reference to?”

“Yeah. It’s in reference to this visit. Can you please get him?”

“Do you have an appointment—?”

“Right
now
,” Ken said.

With a grimace, the receptionist lifted her telephone handset and buzzed her boss.

*   *   *

Ken Alton had all but taken over the workstation belonging to the Information Management Group administrator, who stood by anxiously, watching. “I told you,” the administrator said, “we’ve run an exhaustive series of diagnostic tests, and our systems seem to be secure. No break-ins.”

“Do you have anything to drink?” Ken asked as he scrolled down a directory on the screen.

“Coffee?”

“I’d prefer Coke or Pepsi. Diet. Now, I need to know if you’ve seen any unusual transfers of funds in the last couple of days. Unusually large amounts, or anything unaccounted for, or … Hold on a sec. Just one second.”

“Yes?”

“Take a look at this executable file. This is in, like, a million places.”

The network administrator, a slight black man with graying hair so closely cropped it almost looked shaved, bent to look where Ken was pointing. “I’d have to get the manual,” he said.

“All right,” Ken said. “I want to take a copy of this file off the machine, put it on a nonconnected machine. Break it down into assembly language and see what it would be doing if it ran. Or maybe run it, and see what happens.”

“What do you think it is?”

“Don’t know. You tell me if this EXE should be here.”

“Okay.”

Twenty minutes later, Ken looked up at the network administrator with alarm and said, “Holy shit, man! This is a fucking virus! If this thing ever runs—”

“What? What is it?”

“—Your whole system would be fucked. You got a serious problem here. Shut down all users.”

“
What
are you saying?” the administrator gasped.

“You heard me. Shut down the system.”

“Are you out of your
mind
? I can’t do that. This is the busiest day of the week! It’s a peak day for network traffic—”

“Go, man!”

“If I shut down the system, the entire bank grinds to a halt!” the man shouted at Ken, folding his arms. “Files can’t be accessed, transactions can’t be processed, every single branch office—”