The Zero Hour (13 page)

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In the last decade it has become considerably more difficult to forge an American passport. Not impossible, of course: to a skilled forger, nothing is impossible. But Baumann, familiar though he was with the rudiments, was hardly a professional forger. That he left to others.

In a day or so he’d contact a forger he knew and trusted. But in the meantime, he’d have to do his best, in the six hours until he had to arrive at Charles de Gaulle for his early-morning commuter flight to Amsterdam.

He examined Sumner Robinson’s passport closely. The days when one could just scissor out the original owner’s photograph and paste in one’s own were long gone. Now, the key page of the U.S. passport, which contained photo and identifying information, was laminated with a clear plastic oversheet, a “counterfoil,” designed as a security feature. Another security feature was the emblem of an American bald eagle, taken from the Great Seal of the United States, which grasped in its talons the arrows of war and the olive branch of peace. The eagle, which also appeared in gold ink on the front of the passport, was printed on the counterfoil in green ink, slightly overlapping the passport holder’s photograph.

Lost in concentration, Baumann sucked at his front teeth. He knew the U.S. State Department had spent a fortune on special, forge-proof passport paper manufactured by a company called Portal’s. Yet the security of the passport actually hinged on a single, cheap piece of clear plastic tape.

He called down to the hotel’s front desk, told the clerk he urgently needed an electric typewriter to prepare a contract. Would the clerk send one up to his room? Certainly, he was told, although it would take a few minutes to open the office containing the typewriters; it was closed for the evening.

A few blocks from the hotel he located a photocopy-and-printing shop that was open all night, blazing with fluorescent light. He instructed the clerk to photocopy and reduce the eagle image on the front of the passport, explaining offhandedly that he needed to put an American eagle on the front of a three-ring binder for a presentation to a major French client early in the morning. No laws against
that.
Then, on a Canon 500 color laser copier, the eagle was reproduced onto a sheet of clear crack-and-peel label stock in green ink. Baumann had several copies made: it was easy to make mistakes. After a brief stop at a coin-operated automated photo booth, he returned to the Raphaël.

There he meticulously removed the old counterfoil laminate from the passport, careful not to rip too much of the paper underneath. With an X-Acto knife, he removed Robinson’s photograph and replaced it with his own. Inserting the sheet of clear plastic label stock into the electric typewriter provided by the hotel, he pecked out the exact same biographical data that had appeared on Robinson’s passport and had been lifted off with the old laminate.

By three o’clock in the morning, he was satisfied with the result. Only the closest inspection would reveal that the passport had been dummied up. And departing from Paris’s busy Charles de Gaulle Airport as he was, on a crowded commuter flight, he knew the French inspectors would scarcely have time for even the most cursory of glimpses at this American businessman’s passport.

He ran a steaming-hot bath and soaked in it for a long time while he meditated. Then he dozed for about two hours, arose, dressed, and finished packing his Louis Vuitton suitcase.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Prince of Darkness had begun.

Dyson put down the telephone and felt a shiver of anticipation. He had hired the best (he hired only the best), and this savant of the terrorist netherworld would do his thing, and in precisely two weeks the deed would be done.

He pressed a button on his desk phone to summon his aide-de-camp, Martin Lomax.

Dyson & Company A.G.’s corporate headquarters building on the Rue du Rhône in Geneva was a glass cube that, during the day, reflected the buildings around it. It was a stealth office building: depending on the time of day and the angle from which you looked, the glass-walled box disappeared. At night it lit up a fierce yellow-white as Dyson’s traders worked, barking out orders halfway around the world.

Dyson’s office was on the top floor, southwest corner. It was entirely white: white leather sofas, white wall-to-wall carpet, white fabric covering the interior walls. Even his massive, irregularly shaped desktop had been hewn from an immense vein of white Carrara marble.

Only the artwork, here tastefully sparse, provided splashes of color. There was Rubens’s picture of three women,
Virtue
, seized from a rich man during the Second World War. A Van Dyck
(Holy Family with St. Anne and an Angel)
had disappeared some time ago in Italy, only to reemerge at Dyson & Company A.G. Holbein’s
St. Catherine
had made its way from a stash in East Germany soon after the Wall fell.

To Dyson, the acquisition of old masters on the black market was one of his greatest post-exile pleasures. It was liberation from legal convention, a way of thumbing his nose at the rest of the world, a wonderfully illicit satisfaction. Let the others buy their second-tier stuff through buying agents with
catalogues raisonnés
, over seafood at Wilton’s in Bury Street, London, where the dealers gathered like flies. His pictures, many of them the world’s greatest, had been plied off their stretchers and hidden in a table leg or smuggled in via diplomatic pouch.

The art market reminded Dyson of Wall Street, where the rules applied only when you weren’t a member of the club. The philanthropist Norton Simon had once admitted he owned a bronze of the god Shiva smuggled from India. In fact, most of the Asian art he bought was smuggled. Even Boston’s august Museum of Fine Arts had once been caught red-handed with a stolen Raphael that the museum director claimed he had bought in Genoa.

Embittered was not how Dyson thought of himself. He was liberated. The requirements of vengeance clarified everything.

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Malcolm Dyson had been labeled quite a few things before he escaped the clutches of U.S. law enforcement after the great insider-trading scandal, but the most popular seemed to be “the largest tax evader in the nation’s history.” This was not true. He personally knew of several famous, even legendary, titans of business, household names, who had evaded far more taxes than he’d ever tried to do.

In any case, he had been indicted on no fewer than fifty-one counts of tax evasion, tax fraud, and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. All his U.S. assets were frozen. There were extensive negotiations with the SEC and the Justice Department. He was looking at several years in prison even in the best of circumstances, and that was unacceptable. Had his former friend Warren Elkind not cooperated with the Justice Department to entrap him, none of this would have happened. They’d never have had the proof necessary to indict.

While the negotiations dragged on, Dyson made a business trip to Switzerland with his wife, Alexandra. They decided not to return. The Swiss government refused all American requests to extradite him. Their logic was unimpeachable: under Swiss law, Dyson had been charged with “fiscal violations,” which were not extraditable offenses. Was it a coincidence that Dyson also happened to be the largest corporate taxpayer in Switzerland?

Shortly afterward, he went to the bureau of vital statistics in Madrid, took an oath to the Spanish king, and renounced his U.S. citizenship. Now a citizen of Spain resident in Geneva, he never traveled by commercial airliner, because he feared bounty hunters. A very rich man in his position was easy prey. They would kidnap you and then demand a billion dollars or else they’d turn you over to the U.S. government. The U.S. Marshals Service was always trying to ensnare him. He traveled only by private jet.

Now, however, he didn’t particularly care whether the bounty hunters came after him. The light had gone out of his life. They had murdered his wife and daughter, and they had put him in a wheelchair, and they would pay dearly.

Dyson sat at his immense desk in his electric wheelchair, a small bald man with liver-spotted head and liver-spotted hands and eyes of gray steel, smoking a Macanudo. The door opened, and Martin Lomax entered. Tall, thin, balding, Lomax was colorless and faithful.

Lomax sat in his customary white-upholstered chair beside the desk and drew his ballpoint pen and pad of paper like a gun from a holster.

“I want to make sure,” Dyson said methodically to his assistant, “that we are entirely out of the stock market.”

Lomax looked up, puzzled, realizing that this was a question, not an instruction. He glanced at his wristwatch to check the date. “Yes,” he said, “we are. As of three days ago, actually.”

“And the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank? No change in its policy?”

“Correct. The Fed will no longer bail out banks. Our intelligence is good on this. Washington calls it ‘banking reform’—let the large depositors go down when a bank fails. Banks are getting too fast and loose anyway. Teach ’em a lesson.”

“All right.” Dyson whirred his wheelchair to one side and peered sadly out the floor-to-ceiling window at the rain. “Because our Prince of Darkness has gone to work.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Paul O. Morrison, deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, hurtled down a narrow corridor toward a conference room where some twenty-five people had been hastily assembled. In one hand was a manila folder containing a small stack of computer printouts, in the other a half-full mug of cold black coffee that sloshed onto the gray wall-to-wall carpeting as he ran.

He entered the conference room and could immediately sense the tension. Muttering an apology for his tardiness, he set down his mug on the large, gleaming mahogany table and looked around with a worried expression.

Morrison was small and thin, with heavy black-framed glasses and a sallow complexion. Forgoing any opening statement—they knew why they were here—he launched right in: “Um, I’ve got the complete transcript here.”

He handed the pile of printouts to the director of the Counterterrorism Center, a whippet-thin, athletic-looking, squash-playing man in his mid-fifties, Hoyt Phillips (Yale ’61), who took one and passed it on. Morrison waited as the transcripts made their way around the table.

The reaction was swift yet subdued: murmurings of amazement, the occasional whisper, and then a grave silence. He waited, his stomach queasy with acid, until everyone had finished reading.

The Counterterrorism Center—the existence of which was until recently one of the CIA’s closely held secrets—was founded in 1986 to deal with the government’s embarrassing inability to handle the steadily worsening plague of international terrorism.

The idea behind the center was simple: to give the dozen or so agencies in the U.S. government concerned with terrorism—from the FBI to the State Department, from the Pentagon to the Secret Service—one centralized location into which intelligence from around the world could be funneled, and where all terrorism-fighting efforts could be coordinated.

For years the CIA had resisted the notion. It ran against the very culture of the Agency, whose gentlemen spies much preferred fighting the Soviet menace to soiling their hands with terrorists.

Also, the CIA’s leadership never much liked the idea of sharing “product” with its siblings in the intelligence community. And in order for such a center to work, it would have to allow collectors—the people in the field who gather the information—to mingle with the analysts. That simply had never been done. The CIA almost always keeps a Chinese Wall between its analysts and its operators, so as not to taint the product. The folks in the trench coats, it was always believed, should do their spying without any sense of the larger picture, or at least without any agenda or bias. Leave the political bias to the desk jockeys.

But Director of Central Intelligence William Casey did not share this concern. He ordered the establishment of an interagency “fusion center” where specially chosen representatives of the intelligence community—eighteen or nineteen intelligence officers from the NSA, the FBI, INR (the State Department’s intelligence arm), the DIA, and other agencies—are detailed full-time. Although they work at CIA headquarters, their salaries are paid on a nonreimbursable basis by their home departments.

Until the spring of 1994, the twenty-five or so staff members of the center worked in an overcrowded warren of desks and partitions on the sixth floor of the CIA headquarters’ original building. Thereafter, they were located in a more spacious, much more modern area in the new building next door. But it was hardly sleek or impressive; no one who has ever been inside CIA headquarters would call the place sleek.

Anything that happens in the world that is in any way related to terrorism will flash across the computer terminals in the center. Armed with secure communications and other secure links to the NSA and other intelligence agencies, the Counterterrorism Center’s staff are charged with ensuring cooperation among the various agencies, putting out intelligence products (while protecting sources and methods), and quelling the disputes over credit that are so rife in government bureaucracies.

Since the center is a part of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, the director of the center is always an Ops officer; the deputy director is always an analyst from the Intelligence Directorate. For all his athletic prowess, Hoyt Phillips, the director, was a classic Agency burnout case, bored with a career stymied by his own mediocrity, whiling away his time here until retirement.

Deputy Director Paul Morrison effectively ran the center, deftly managing its six sections. Rare though it is for a CIA office, the center’s organizational chart is fairly fluid. There is the Intel staff, who do what is called “target analysis” (evaluating the information collected by CIA and other agencies’ sources), a Reports staff, a Technical Attack group, an Assessment and Information group, an Ops group, and so on.

And there are all sorts of meetings, ranging from the monthly Warning and Forecast meeting, to the bimonthly Interagency Intelligence Committee, to the three-times-a-week 8:45
A.M.
staff meeting. This meeting, however, had been called for seven-thirty in the morning, which was the earliest all the staff could be gathered.