The Zero Hour (12 page)

“Good for them,” Frechette murmured. Unknown encryption schemes paid their mortgages.

“I think this is from those guys. Company was founded by some Russian émigré, an encryption specialist, used to be in the KGB’s Eighth Directorate.” The Eighth Chief Directorate of the former KGB was responsible for the security of all Soviet cipher communications. “Guy was one of their most advanced encryption people. A real big swinging dick. Got fed up with the pathetic level of Soviet technology, and then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the money dried up. Couldn’t produce his most advanced designs. So he went capitalist.”

“Huh.”

Chu explained that the Russian had developed his own encryption algorithm some years back, while still working for the KGB. The KGB, of course, hadn’t let him publish it in a mathematical journal. When he went private, the Russian kept it closely held.

This was his error.

One of the great paradoxes of the crypto world is that the more secret you keep a piece of cryptographic software, the less secure it will be. Unless you make an algorithm widely available to hackers around the world, you’ll never become aware of the hidden flaws it may contain.

In this instance, Chu explained, the algorithm depended upon the intractability of a complicated inverse polynomial operation—which the NSA had solved two years ago. The creator likely didn’t know this, nor that the NSA had a lot of partial solutions precomputed and stored in fast memory, enabling Chu to take the complicated polynomials and reduce them to a set of simpler polynomials.

In short, it hadn’t been easy to crack, but between the NSA’s high-powered research and its vast array of the latest computers, it had been crackable.

“Luckily we got a decent hunk of the signal, enough to work on,” Edwin Chu said. “Have a listen.”

George Frechette looked up, blinking owlishly at Chu. “These guys Americans?”

“Voice One sounds American. Voice Two is foreign, like Swiss or German or Dutch or something, I can’t be sure.”

“So what do you want to do with this?”

“Get it transcribed and inputted and out of our hands, buddy. Let someone else worry about it. As for me”—he glanced at his watch—“it’s Big Mac time.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

At a hardware store near the Etoile, Baumann purchased an assortment of tools, and at the Brentano’s on Avenue de l’Opéra, he picked up two identical red-vinyl-jacketed Webster’s pocket dictionaries to use for sending encoded messages. On a brief shopping trip in the 8th Arrondissement, he bought several very good suits and shirts, off the rack but well made, along with an assortment of ties, several pairs of English shoes, an expensive leather attaché case, and a few other accessories.

Then he returned to the Raphaël. Although it was not even noon, the dark, English-style oak-paneled bar was already doing a good business. At a small table, he lingered over a
café express
, going through a stack of American business magazines and newspapers—
Forbes, Fortune, Barron’s
, and others. From time to time he looked up and watched the clientele come and go.

It was not long before he noticed a man in his late thirties, an American businessman, from the look of him. Baumann overheard him having a conversation with a man at an adjoining table who appeared to be a junior associate. The first businessman, whose neatly combed dark hair was salted with gray, was complaining to the other that the hotel had failed to deliver his
Wall Street Journal
to his room with breakfast this morning, though he had made a specific request.

The stroke of good fortune came when the businessman was called by his last name by a waiter, who brought a telephone to his table and plugged it into a wall jack. Once he’d finished his apparently urgent telephone call, the two Americans hastened into the lobby. There the junior associate took a seat while his friend got into the elevator.

Just before the elevator door closed, Baumann slipped into the cabin. The businessman pressed the button for the seventh floor; Baumann pressed the same button again, unnecessarily, and then smiled awkwardly at his own clumsiness. The businessman, evidently in a rush, did not return the smile.

Baumann followed the American down the corridor. The man stopped at room 712, and Baumann continued on, disappearing around a turn. From that vantage point, unseen, he watched the businessman enter the room and emerge a few seconds later, wearing a tan gabardine raincoat and carrying a collapsible umbrella, and stride quickly toward the elevator.

Baumann couldn’t be sure, of course, but given the time—a few minutes before one in the afternoon—the odds were good that the two Americans were going to a lunch meeting. This was, he knew, a Parisian tradition; such lunches could go on for two hours or more.

*   *   *

Baumann hung the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the American’s hotel-room door and, wearing latex gloves, set to work at once. Although room 712 was considerably smaller than his own suite, the basic amenities, including the safe in an armoire near the king-size bed, were, as he expected, the same.

The room safe, as in all hotel rooms Baumann had ever stayed in, was an amateurish affair, fit mainly for discouraging a larcenous maid from stealing a camera or a wallet full of cash. It was of the type commonly found in the better hotel rooms: a small, heavy, concrete-lined steel box, extremely difficult (though not impossible) to lift.

You punched in a series of numbers of your own choosing into a keypad on the front of the box; the numbers would appear in a liquid-crystal readout; and then when you hit the * key or some such, the locking mechanism would be electronically activated.

He inserted a small hex wrench into the hole in the safe’s face, then slid the plate back. That was all it took to reveal the ordinary keyed lock, which required two keys. After a minute or so of grappling with his improvised lock picks, the set of ordinary household tools he’d purchased at the hardware store a few hours earlier, the lock yielded, and the safe popped open.

As was usual with such electronic devices, the safe drew its power from batteries—in this case, two AA batteries—which powered the readout and the locking mechanism. The batteries often went dead and had to be replaced. Or the hotel guest would forget the combination he had himself set. Thus, the manual override mechanism that enabled Baumann to open the safe so easily.

It was there, of course. Whereas Europeans usually carry their vital documents on their person while traveling, Americans tend not to. Mr. Robinson—Mr. Sumner Charles Robinson, in full—had left his passport, along with a good supply of American Express traveler’s checks and a small pile of American currency.

Baumann pocketed the passport, then quickly counted the cash (two hundred and twenty dollars) and the traveler’s checks (fifteen hundred dollars). For a moment he considered taking the cash and checks, then decided against it. When Mr. Sumner C. Robinson returned late this afternoon or this evening, he might (or might not) open the safe and might (or might not) discover his passport missing. If he did, he’d realize with great relief that his cash and traveler’s checks were still there, and he’d probably think that he’d simply misplaced the passport somewhere.

It was preposterous to imagine that a thief would steal his passport and not his cash. Even after searching the room, the pockets of his clothing, and his luggage, and not finding his passport, he might not even do so much as inform the hotel management of the loss. Let alone the municipal police. Taking the cash was simply not worth it.

*   *   *

Martin Lomax, Malcolm Dyson’s aide-de-camp, picked up the phone and called the company’s Zug, Switzerland, office on a secure telephone to check that all the financial arrangements had been done, and that Baumann’s payment had been transferred to the bank in Panama. Lomax had called the Zug office three days in a row, because he was a thorough man, and his boss did not like the slightest detail to be overlooked.

Moreover, Dyson was highly suspicious of the intelligence capabilities of the U.S. government and had instructed Lomax never to speak of the upcoming event on anything but a secure telephone. And not just any secure telephone, because Dyson had not been born yesterday and he knew that virtually all firms that sold encrypted phones—including the famous Crypto, A.G., of Zurich—sold their encryption schemes to the NSA and GCHQ. So there was really no such thing as a truly secure phone anymore, unless you were canny about it.

But Dyson had not purchased his phones from any of these companies. A Russian émigré in Geneva had let it be known that he was in need of financing for his new, start-up venture, a secure-communications company. The Russian, an encryption specialist, had worked for the KGB in the bad old days. Dyson had provided the seed money, and the Russian’s company was launched. Its first prototype secure phone went to Dyson. And no encryption schemes were sold or given to the NSA or GCHQ. These phones were truly secure, truly unbreakable. Only on these phones would Dyson and his associates talk openly.

*   *   *

Baumann returned to his own room and, for the remainder of the afternoon, made notes.

Malcolm Dyson’s undertaking was indeed brilliant, but the more he thought it through, the more holes emerged. Dyson had made quite a few assumptions that might be false. Also, the billionaire lacked a fundamental working knowledge of the particulars of the site, the security precautions and vulnerabilities, and this was crucial. Dyson underestimated the risk that Baumann would be either caught or killed. But the devil, as they say, is in the details, and Baumann did not intend to overlook a detail.

By the time the bellboy knocked on his door to deliver the suits on hangers, the boxes of shoes, and the rest of the clothing he had purchased that morning, Baumann had sketched out a diagram of action—very rough, but a workable plan, he felt sure. Then he got dressed and went out for a walk.

Stopping into a
tabac
, he bought a
carte de téléphone
, the plastic card with a magnetized strip issued by France Telecom, which would allow him to place several international calls from any public phone booth. He found one in the basement of a café and, after debating this next step for a few moments, placed a call to New Haven, Connecticut. Using the address he’d copied down from the slip accompanying Sumner Robinson’s traveler’s checks, he obtained Robinson’s home number from directory assistance.

A woman’s voice answered. It was late in the evening there, and at first she seemed startled, as if awakened by the call.

“Is that Mrs. Robinson?” Baumann inquired in a plummy, grand-public-school, Sloane Ranger British accent. “Name’s Nigel Clarke, calling from Paris.” He spoke, as someone once said, as if he had the Elgin Marbles in his mouth.

The woman confirmed she was Sumner Robinson’s wife and asked immediately whether everything was all right with her husband.

“Oh, my Lord, not to worry,” Baumann went on. “The thing of it is, I found your husband’s passport, in a
cab
, of all places—”

He listened to her for a moment and went on, “Got your number from directory assistance. But tell your husband he shouldn’t worry—I have it here, safe and sound. Tell me what to do, how to get it to him—” He listened again.

“Quite right,” he said, “at Charles de Gaulle airport.” Baumann’s voice was jolly, though his eyes were steely-cold. He heard someone clamber down the stairs. A young woman, exhaling a cumulus cloud of cigarette smoke, saw he was using the telephone and flashed him a look of irritation. He gave her a level, gray, warning stare; she flushed, threw her cigarette to the floor, and went back up the stairs.

“Oh, not leaving Paris till the end of the week, is he? Brilliant.… Right, well, the problem is that I’m getting on a plane back to London in just a few
seconds
, you see, and—oh, damn it all, that’s the final boarding call, I’m afraid I
will
have to run—but if you’ll give me an address I’ll send it off by DHL or some other overnight service the very
instant
I get to my house.” He pronounced it “hice.” He chuckled pleasantly while the woman burbled her gratitude for his generosity. “Heavens, no, I wouldn’t
hear
of it. Shouldn’t cost more than a few pounds anyway.” He pronounced it “pineds.”

He had done the right thing, he knew. True, the American businessman might not have reported his passport lost or stolen and applied to the American embassy for a replacement. Now, however, his wife would call him at the hotel, tell him that his passport had been recovered by a nice Englishman at Charles de Gaulle Airport, but not to worry, Mr. Cooke or Clarke or whatever his name was going to send the passport by express mail right away.

Sumner Robinson would wonder how his passport ended up in a cab. Perhaps he’d wonder whether he’d put it into his safe after all. In any case, he would not report the passport lost or stolen today or even tomorrow—since it would be on its way back to him in a matter of hours. The friendly Brit would certainly get around to sending it the next day: why the hell else would he have called New Haven, after all?

The passport would be valid at least three full days. Perhaps even more, though Baumann would never take the chance.

He hung up the receiver and mounted the stairs to the street level. “The phone’s all yours,” he told the young woman who had been waiting to use the phone, giving her a cordial smile and the tiniest wink.

*   *   *

Baumann had dinner alone at the hotel. By the time dinner was over, a large carton had been delivered to his room containing the MLink-5000. He unpacked it, read through the operating instructions, ran it through its paces. Turning the thumbscrews on the back panel, he pulled out the handset, then flipped open the unit’s top, adjusted the angle of elevation, and placed two calls.

The first was to a bank in Panama City, which confirmed that the first payment had been made by Dyson.

The second was to Dyson’s private telephone line. “The job has begun,” he told his employer curtly, and hung up.