The Zero Hour (21 page)

Back in the 1960s, Baumann later learned, this Hercule had built bombs for the legendary mercenary leader Mike O’Hore, the South African leader of the Fifth Commando, nicknamed the Wild Geese. Baumann had always considered O’Hore, whose exploits were world-famous, something of a slacker, a slob whose greatest skill was getting himself good press. But his bomb makers were always the best.

When it became necessary for Baumann to disappear from Angola, he had arranged an “accident” outside the capital city, Luanda, in which it appeared that he had been ambushed and killed. All the other mercs, including, no doubt, Hercule—who knew Baumann only under another name—had always believed that he was dead, one of the many casualties of war.

Bomb-disposal experts are a strange breed. They do their harrowing work in odd corners of the world, traveling to where the work is, often on contract for various governments. Many of them were brought in to clear land mines in Cambodia in the 1970s; in Angola, most of the land mines were cleared by Germans, although a few Belgians were brought in as well. After the Gulf War, the Kuwaiti government contracted with Royal Ordnance for an enormous number of bomb-disposal specialists to clear the leftover munitions. Their work is so stressful that many of them—those who escape unharmed—retire as soon as they can find good work elsewhere. Baumann now learned that this Hercule/Charreyron had left this hazardous line of work in the early eighties, when he was hired by the small Belgian firm Carabine Automatique of Liège.

“My God, it’s great to see you,” Charreyron at last exclaimed. “This is—this is just amazing! Please, sit.”

“And you too,” Baumann said, sinking into a chair.

“Yes,” Charreyron said, as he sat behind his desk. “How marvelous it is to see you again!” He was brave, genial, and clearly terrified. “But I don’t understand. You—well, the report of your death was some sort of disinformation, is that right?”

Baumann nodded, seemingly pleased to be sharing this secret with his old comrade in arms.

“I take it Rhys-Davies is a cover name, then?”

“Exactly,” Baumann said. He confided to the Belgian a fabricated, though plausible, story of his defection from South Africa to Australia and eventually to England, his hush-hush security work on behalf of a London-based sheik. “Now, this client of mine has asked me to undertake a highly sensitive project,” he went on, and explained the fusing mechanism that he needed to have built.

“But really, I haven’t done that sort of work for a few years now,” Charreyron protested mildly.

“I suspect it’s like riding a bicycle,” Baumann said. “You never forget. And the technology has changed little if at all in the last few years.”

“Yes, but…” His voice trailed off as he listened to Baumann, taking notes all the while.

“The relay,” Baumann said, “must be attached to a pocket pager. When the pager receives a signal, it will cause the relay to close, which will close the circuit between battery and detonator.”

“Won’t you need some means of disabling it?”

“Yes, but I want to set the electronic timer to go off automatically if it’s not disabled.”

Charreyron, his composure returned, simply shrugged nonchalantly.

“One more thing,” Baumann said. “There must also be a microwave sensor built into the mechanism that will set off the bomb if anyone approaches.”

Charreyron nodded again, arching his brows in mild surprise.

“I will need three of them,” Baumann said. “One for testing purposes, and the other two to be sent, separately.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Now, as to price.”

“Yes,” the Belgian said. He did some rapid calculations and then announced a large sum in Belgian francs.

Baumann arched his eyebrows in surprise. Fusing mechanisms of such complexity generally went for about ten thousand dollars apiece, and he did not like to be cheated.

“You see,” Charreyron explained, “the difficulty lies in acquiring the pagers. You will need three of them, and they must be purchased in the United States. You know how complicated that is—with every pager comes a telephone number and a detailed registration. They must be bought clandestinely. And since I certainly don’t want the serial number plate on the pager to be traced through the paging company back to me, I’ll have to purchase several and do some alterations.”

“But for an old friend…?” Baumann said jovially. Haggling over prices was common in this line of work; the Belgian would expect it.

“I can go as low as fifteen thousand each. But less than that, and it’s simply not worth the risk. I will have to go to New York myself to get them, so I have to figure in the cost of travel. And you are asking me to do all this in such a short period of time—”

“All right then,” Baumann said. “Forty-five thousand U.S. it is. No, let’s make it an even fifty thousand U.S.”

The two men shook hands. For the first time, Charreyron appeared relaxed. Baumann counted out twenty-five thousand dollars and placed them on the desk. “The other half when I return in a week. Is there a vacant warehouse on the outskirts of town where we can do a test?”

“Certainly,” Charreyron said. “But I think we have a little more business to transact.”

“Oh?”

“For an additional fifty thousand U.S., I can assure you that nothing of our past acquaintance will become known.”

“Fifty thousand?” Baumann asked, as if seriously considering it.

“And then”—Charreyron clapped his hands together—“the past is gone, just like that.”

“I see,” Baumann said. “Please understand something. I have many police contacts who stand to benefit handsomely by giving me any information of possible interest to me. Rumors, reports of my presence here, that sort of thing. I am paying you well, with a generous bonus to come. But I don’t want to learn that the slightest detail of our talk, or of my past history, has left this office. Not a single detail. You can imagine the consequences for you and your family.”

The color drained from Charreyron’s face. “I’m a professional,” he said, retreating hastily. “I would never betray a confidence.”

“Excellent. Because you know me, and you know that I would stop at nothing.”

Charreyron shook his head violently. “I would never say a word,” he said desperately. “Please. Forget what I said about the fifty thousand. It was a foolish mistake.”

“Don’t worry,” Baumann said pleasantly. “It’s forgotten. We all make mistakes. But please don’t make the mistake of underestimating me.”

“Please,” Charreyron whispered. In his days as a bomb-disposal expert, he had constantly faced the possibility of losing a limb, even his life. But nothing terrified him so much as this phlegmatic, ruthless South African, who had suddenly appeared in his office after ten years—a man who, Charreyron had no doubt whatsoever, would indeed stop at nothing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

A few days after Baumann’s first visit to Charreyron, in southwest Belgium, he returned to inspect the fusing mechanisms.

In the intervening time, he had combined a little business with a great deal of relaxation. On his first night back in Amsterdam, he met again with “Bones” Van den Vondel, who provided him with the three sets of stolen documentation he had requested—two American, one British—and a small bundle of credit cards. Bones made it abundantly clear he was happy to do business with Mr. Sidney Lerner, and happier still to have the opportunity to do an ongoing business with the Mossad, should it require any other assistance from an outsider.

Several mornings he slept late. He saw movies, enjoyed expensive restaurants. Several afternoons he spent studying maps of New York City. He took in a few topless bars around Rembrandtsplein and, in the red-light district, bought himself an hour of pleasure with a young prostitute. One night he went to a popular nightclub called Odeon, where he picked up a comely young woman and took her back to his hotel. She was about as randy as he was; they spent most of the night having sex, until each collapsed in happy exhaustion. In the morning, she wanted to stay, or at least to see him again that evening. He was tempted—during his years in Pollsmoor he had almost forgotten how pleasurable sex could be—but knew it was a bad idea to become too familiar to anyone here. He told her he had, regrettably, to catch a return flight that afternoon.

Amsterdam, like New York and San Francisco, is world-renowned as a gathering place for computer enthusiasts, or “hackers.” Although Baumann had been in prison too long to be conversant in the latest technology, he knew where to find someone who was. He contacted a member of the Amsterdam-based Dutch organization Hacktic, which publishes a magazine for computer hackers, and arranged a meeting. He described the sort of person he was looking for: a hacker based in New York, without a criminal past.

“No,” he was told, “you are looking for a
cracker
—not a hacker. A hacker makes it his mission to understand, shall we say, undocumented technology, so that the government doesn’t enslave us, and to make the world a better place. A cracker has the same skills but uses them, so to speak, to break into your house, often for mercenary purposes.”

“All right, then, a cracker,” Baumann said.

“I have a name for you,” his contact said. “But he will only take on your project, whatever it is, if he finds it of interest—and enormously lucrative.”

“Oh, that he will,” said Baumann. “He will find it both.”

On his second-to-last morning in Amsterdam, he purchased a small device at a large electronics supply house for one thousand guilders, which was then equivalent to six hundred dollars. It was an “ATM Junior,” used by banks to encode magnetic strips on bank and credit cards. With this device he recoded the magnetic strips on each stolen credit card.

When a credit card is used at a retail establishment, it is usually swiped through a transponder, which reads the CVC number at the head of the magnetic stripe and immediately sends it over a telephone line to the credit card company’s central data-processing facility. The computers there check whether the card in question is expired, overextended, or stolen. If it is not, the computers send back an approval code within a second or two. (American Express uses two-digit approval codes, while Visa and MasterCard use four- or five-digit ones.)

Baumann had little doubt that most if not all of these credit cards had already been reported as stolen. If they hadn’t yet, it was simply a matter of time.

But he had circumvented that process. Each credit card now had an approval code of the appropriate number of digits encoded in its magnetic stripe. Whenever a merchant swiped one of these cards through the transponder, the approval code would instantly appear on the transponder’s readout. The machine would read the code—not send it out.

It was highly unlikely the merchant would wonder why the telephone hadn’t dialed, why several seconds hadn’t elapsed before the approval code came in. And if that happened, why, Baumann would remark that the magnetic stripe on the back of the card must have worn out. Too bad. And that would be the end of that. An excellent chance of success, with virtually no risk.

In his remaining time, Baumann ordered several sets of letterhead stationery for several notional, amorphous firms—an import-export company, a law firm, a storage facility.

And he reserved a seat on a Sabena flight from Brussels to London under a false name for which he had no documentation, knowing that, so long as he traveled within the European Commonwealth, he would not be required to show a passport. Then he booked a coach seat from London to New York under the name of one of his newly acquired American passports, that of a businessman and entrepreneur named Thomas Allen Moffatt.

*   *   *

Etienne Charreyron had arranged to use a deserted horse barn on the outskirts of Huy that belonged to a business associate who was in Brussels for the entire month. The associate had recently liquidated all of his family’s livestock at auction.

The barn still smelled strongly of horse manure and damp hay and machine oil. The lighting was barely adequate. In the dim, dank interior, Charreyron opened a battered leather suitcase and gingerly removed three black plastic utility boxes the size of shoeboxes. The lid of each was a plate of brushed aluminum, and on this plate were three tiny bulbs, light-emitting diodes.

“This light tells you that the pocket pager is on and functioning,” Charreyron explained to Baumann. “This one tells you that the battery is emitting power. And this one indicates that the timer is functioning.”

Charreyron slid the aluminum plate off one of the fusing mechanisms. “I’ve set up two separate systems on opposite sides, for redundancy. Two nine-volt batteries, two sets of two screw posts each to connect to the blasting caps. Two timers, two pager-receivers set to the same frequency, two relays. Even two ferrite bars for antennae.” He looked up. “It will beat the bomb-disposal people. Doubles the chances of the thing working, hmm?”

“And one microwave sensor.”

“That’s all there’s room for, and certainly all you’ll need.”

“Shall we test one of them?”

“Yes, of course.” Charreyron lifted one of the black boxes.

“Actually,” Baumann said, grabbing another, “let’s try this one.”

Charreyron smiled slyly, seeming to enjoy the sport. “Whatever you like.”

He brought the box over to an empty fifty-five-gallon steel drum at the far end of the barn and put it on a narrow wooden plank that had been placed across the open top of the barrel. He attached two blasting caps to it, then walked to the other side of the barn.

“First test,” the Belgian said, “is for radio control.”

He took a small cellular phone from his breast pocket, opened it, and dialed a number. As soon as he had done so, he looked at his watch. Baumann did the same.

The two men waited in silence.

Forty-five seconds later the barn echoed with the sound of a gunshot. The blasting caps that dangled from the fusing mechanism had detonated, giving off fragments that were contained by the steel barrel.

“A long delay,” Baumann observed.

“It varies.”

“Yes.” The detonator that set off the blasting caps had been armed by a circuit that closed when the built-in pager received a signal sent by satellite. Depending on how much satellite traffic there was at any given moment, the page signal could be received in a few seconds or a few minutes. “What about the microwave sensor?”