The Zero Hour (40 page)

A direct terrorist strike on the Network’s Water Street facility would trigger worldwide havoc. It would so seriously disrupt the U.S. stock market, Eurodollar payments, and virtually all foreign exchange and foreign trade payments that the world payments system would collapse at once.

The destruction of the Network would topple the business world and plunge America and the world into a massive depression. The U.S. economy would be obliterated, and with it that of the world. America’s reign as a global power would be ended, as the country and much of the world returned to an economic Dark Ages.

It is only a matter of luck—or maybe ignorance of how the capitalist world works—that no terrorist has so far targeted the Network.

But if we could locate a masterful, experienced professional terrorist with a strong motivation—financial or otherwise—to accomplish the task, it is my strong belief that no more effective revenge could ever be wrought on the United States.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

Now there was a name, the alias Baumann had used to enter the United States. In some ways it was a major victory; in some ways it was dust.

“He may never use it again,” Roth said.

Sarah nodded. “If so, the lead’s useless.”

“Why would he use the name again, anyway? If he checks into a hotel, he does it under some fake name.”

“Credit cards?”

“Does he have this guy Moffatt’s credit cards too?”

“I don’t know.”

“And if he does?”

“Bing, we get him,” Sarah said. “Pops up right away, and he’s nabbed.”

“He’s not stupid. He’s not going to use stolen credit cards. Anyway, the scummiest little dirtbag knows you gotta test out the card first—you know, drive into a self-serve gas station and try the card on one of those credit card thingos there, and if it’s rejected, you know it’s no good. Real easy.”

“He may have to rent a car or a van.”

“Right,” Roth said. “But he’ll need a driver’s license to do that.”

“He’s got Thomas Moffatt’s driver’s license.”

“Well, there you go. So what are you suggesting?”

“This is a specific terrorist threat on U.S. soil. It’s a full-field investigation. That means we can task a hell of a lot of manpower if we want. This monster has already killed two FBI agents.”

“You’re not talking about sending a hundred guys around to every car- and truck-rental place in New York City, are you?”

“And neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut.”

“You gotta be kidding.”

“Hey, don’t forget, we caught the World Trade Center bombers through Mohammed Salameh’s driver’s license, which he used to rent the van.”

“Well, you’re the boss,” Roth said dubiously.

“I don’t mean to be a killjoy,” Christine Vigiani said, the standard gambit of every killjoy, “but the only reason everyone seems so sure Baumann used Thomas Moffatt’s passport is the timing. Pretty slender evidence.”

“Whoever used the stolen Moffatt passport entered the country twelve days ago,” Pappas argued, “which is eight days after he broke out of Pollsmoor prison. The fit is too good. Plus all the other factors—”

“Chris,” Sarah said, “there’s no point in talking any further. We have a team on it in D.C. already, so we’ll have our answer soon.”

*   *   *

In fact, at that very moment, there were several FBI teams in Washington searching for Baumann.

One of the flight attendants had been located, at her apartment near Dupont Circle, and had actually laughed when the FBI agent asked her if she remembered the passenger in seat 17-C. The customs agent who had processed Baumann/Moffatt’s entry was similarly incredulous. “You gotta be kidding,” he said. “You know how many
hundreds
of people I processed that day?” FBI street agents were unable to turn up any cab drivers at Dulles who remembered taking a fare that resembled the sketch of Baumann’s face.

Another FBI team was poring over the flight manifest that United Airlines had just faxed over. They were fortunate to be dealing with an American carrier, because foreign ones tended to be recalcitrant. Some airlines would not turn over their flight manifests without a criminal subpoena—difficult to get, because Baumann was not being sought in a criminal matter. Or they’d request a “national security letter,” a classified document that must adhere to the attorney general’s stringent guidelines on foreign counterintelligence.

Thank God for American multinational conglomerates. In a few minutes, the FBI team knew Baumann had purchased his tickets in London, with cash, an open return. They were also able to study the I-94 form that all arriving passengers are required to fill out. The address Baumann had given was false, as they expected it to be—no such street existed in the town of Buffalo, New York.

More important, they now knew which seat Baumann had sat in, which meant they knew the name of the passenger who sat next to him. Baumann had sat on the aisle, but on his right had sat a woman named Hilda Guinzburg. An FBI team visited Mrs. Guinzburg, a feisty seventy-four-year-old, at her Reston, Virginia, home and showed her a copy of Thomas Allen Moffatt’s passport photograph from the State Department archives.

Mrs. Guinzburg shook her head. This was definitely not the man she had sat next to on her flight from London, she insisted. This confirmed that Moffatt’s passport photograph had been doctored and used by someone else.

And the I-94 form was then sent to the FBI’s ID section to test for latent fingerprints.

*   *   *

After changing out of his filthy clothes and showering, Leo Krasner went for a walk.

When he reached the burnished silver Manhattan Bank building, he strolled into the atrium as casually as he could and took the elevator to the twenty-third floor. The employee cafeteria was on this floor, so there was no security.

He found a bulletin board and posted a notice, then posted the identical notice on a board in an employee lounge. He posted several other copies on other bulletin boards on the floor.

Then he returned to his apartment and went to work.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

This is New York, where no one knows his neighbors, Baumann reflected as he turned the last key in Sarah Cahill’s triple-locked door.

He was out of breath and soaking wet. It was half past noon, but the sky was dark, and torrential rain was coming down with a Biblical vengeance. He wore a raincoat, the sort of tan belted topcoat just about every man in the city was wearing right now, although he had bought his in Paris from Charvet.

He had heard that when it rains in Manhattan the city comes to a halt and it becomes impossible to get a taxi, and it was true. It had taken him a long while to find a cab, which had then become stuck in the midday rush-hour traffic, exacerbated by the weather.

Sarah would not be home for hours, and Jared was still at the YMCA. True, there might have been problems if Sarah’s neighbors were home during the day (which they were not) or if one of them chanced to see him entering her apartment and mentioned it to her.

But this is New York. Strangers exhibit certain predictable behavior. Like women and their handbags. When a woman does not know you, she clutches her handbag as if it contained her life’s savings, though in fact rarely does it hold anything besides lipstick, compact, keys, grocery receipts, dry-cleaning slips, a scrawled note, and keys.

When a woman feels she knows you better, she will relax that grip. It is a mark of intimacy almost animalistic in nature. In your apartment, preparatory to lovemaking, she will go to the bathroom and, depending on what she needs, may leave her purse on the coffee table in front of you. Sarah had gone to use the phone on her second visit to his apartment. This told Baumann that despite her tough demeanor, she was a trusting person.

The phone was in the kitchen, out of sight of the living room: Baumann had made sure the only telephone was in the kitchen. She had talked to the babysitter for four or five minutes.

That had been enough time, really much more than enough time. There are tools for this sort of thing; the most simple-minded burglar can do it. There is a long flat plastic box, hinged lengthwise, perhaps five inches long and two inches wide and an inch thick. Inside the box is a wax softer than beeswax, a layer on the top and the bottom.

He placed Sarah’s key into the box and squeezed it tight until he had an exact impression of her key—actually, three keys. He had anticipated that he might have trouble getting the keys off the ring, so he was prepared. He used a box that was notched at one end.

Later, he used a very soft, very-low-melting-point metal that in the profession is called Rose metal. It is an alloy of lead and zinc. Its melting point is lower than that of the wax mold. He poured the metal carefully into the mold. This gave him a very weak metal key, which is good only as a template.

From a hardware store he got the right key blank. In a vise he positioned the Rose metal template atop the blank. He used a Number Four Swiss-Cut file, the lockpicker’s friend, and cut his own key.

Now he quickly turned the keys in the locks and entered the apartment.

This was his fifth time searching Sarah’s apartment. She was scrupulous and left no files lying around, no personal notebooks with notes on the investigation, no computer disks. She was making this difficult … but not impossible. He now knew where she worked—the top-secret location of Operation MINOTAUR. He knew the phone number of the task force’s headquarters. Soon he would know more. At any moment she might let down her guard, begin to talk about her work, pillow talk, worried confidences. It was possible. At the very least, his proximity to her afforded him possibilities of access he’d never have dreamed of.

Yes, there were hazards. There was an element of risk for the hunted to befriend the hunter, spend so much time with her, make love to her. But it was not a great risk, because he knew there were no photographs of him. Apart from a very generic and useless physical description—which could have described 20 percent of the males in New York City—the task force had no idea what he looked like. The South African secret service had no photographs of him on file, and the prison’s photographs had been destroyed. It was a certainty that the FBI had put together an Identi-Kit, but it would do them no good. Whatever the South Africans had feebly attempted to put together would bear no resemblance to the way he looked now, not in a million years.

They might know his true eye color, but that was easily taken care of. Changing the color of one’s eyes can be as simple as using standard, generally available colored contact lenses, but this is not a disguise for professionals. A careful observer can always tell you are wearing corneal contact lenses, which can raise nettlesome questions. Baumann had had special lenses custom-designed for him by an optometrist in Amsterdam. They were prosthetic scleral soft lenses, which cover the entire eye, not just the iris, and can be comfortably worn for twelve hours. The color tones were natural, the lenses large, with iris flecks (which standard contact lenses do not have). The most suspicious observer would not have known that his eyes were blue, not a gentle brown.

Naturally, if she became suspicious, she would have to be killed at once, just as he had killed Perry Taylor and Russell Ullman. But why in the world would she suspect she was sleeping with the enemy? She wouldn’t.

It was all a game, an exhilarating game. A dance with the devil.

As he combed the apartment, in all the likely hiding places and the not-so-likely ones, among Jared’s belongings, he could hear faint traffic noises from the street, a car alarm, a siren.

And then, at last, there was something.

A notepad. A blank notepad on her bedside table. The top sheet was blank, but it bore the imprint of a scrawl that had been made on the leaf above it. He rubbed lightly against the indentation with a soft lead pencil, and the scrawl appeared, white script against black.

Thomas Allen Moffatt.

They had one of his aliases. How in the world had they gotten it? So they likely knew he had used the stolen Thomas Moffatt passport to enter the country.

He exhaled very slowly. A near miss. He had reserved a van for tomorrow in Moffatt’s name.

Well, that would have to change.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

“A nuclear weapon,” Pappas said, “is not what I’m worried about.”

“Why not?” Sarah asked.

“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean a nuke wouldn’t be terrifying. But the physics of an A-bomb are easy; it’s the actualization that’s tough. It’s far too impractical, too difficult to construct.”

“But if our terrorist has the resources and the ability—?”

“The plain fact is, a nuke would destroy much of the city, and that’s not what the intel intercept seems to be hinting at. They’re talking about a
targeted
attack on a
bank
, not on the entire city.”

Sarah nodded. “Makes sense. We can’t rule anything out, but in some ways a giant conventional bomb is scarier, because it’s much harder to detect.
Much
harder.”

“Right.”

“So what are my options?” she asked.

“Obviously you can’t order a bomb sweep of the entire city. But you can order sweeps of every Manhattan Bank branch office. That’s certainly feasible. We have the personnel for that right here in the New York office.”

“NYPD Bomb Squad?”

“They only get called in when you have a bomb ticking right in front of you. Otherwise they don’t move. They’re good, but you’ve got to have a bomb.”

“And if we
do
have a bomb?”

“Then it’s your call,” Pappas said. “But you’re not only going to have an emergency on your hands, you’re also going to have an ugly turf battle. The NYPD Bomb Squad is one of the oldest and most experienced in the country, but they’re experienced mostly with relatively low-tech stuff, homemade bombs and the like. Then you’ll have ATF, which has the responsibility for all crimes involving explosives. They have the bomb capability, and they’re going to want to play. And then there’s the Army, which is responsible for bomb disposal over the entire continental landmass of the United States, other than in the sea or on the bases of other military services. They’re going to want in, and they’re going to argue—quite rightly—that they’re substantially better equipped than the NYPD.”