The Zero Hour (47 page)

“FDIC, actually,” Baumann said, hoping the guard wouldn’t ask how he’d gotten into the basement. “Something wrong?”

“You’re going to have to move those on out of here,” the guard said. “Can’t stay down here. Fire department regulations.”

Baumann looked at the guard curiously. “Gosh,” he said. “I thought my boss cleared this with the building manager—a Mr. Talliaferro, right?”

“That’s the guy, but he didn’t tell me anything about leaving any boxes.”

Baumann suddenly heard a clanging sound from not far away in the basement, and he wondered whether the guard heard it too. He shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Man, this whole day’s been like this,” he said. “You want me to get my boss to call this guy Talliaferro? I mean, these’ll be gone first thing in the morning.” He watched the guard keenly, wondering whether he could hear the clanging, calculating whether he could kill the man right here, in a busy office building in the middle of the day, whether it was worth the risk.

The guard hesitated, looked at his watch. It was clear he didn’t want to wait around for someone to call someone else who’d then call him and say, yeah, it’s okay.

“All right, forget it,” the guard said. “’Long as they’re gone first thing tomorrow morning, like you say.”

The clanging grew louder, more insistent. It had to be the boy, whom he’d locked in a supply closet.

“Oh, they will be,” Baumann said with a groan. “I can’t do my job without ’em. They’ll be gone. I promise.”

“Hmm,” the guard said, nodding, as he turned away. He paused. “You hear something?”

“I don’t think so.”

“There. Banging.”

Baumann pretended to listen. “Sounds like the old water pipes knocking.”

“Over there,” the guard said, pointing.

The clanging was rhythmic, insistent. A regular tattoo. Clearly made by a human being.

Baumann drew closer to where the guard was standing, as if trying to listen at the same spot. “I still think…” he started to say as he reached over with both powerful hands and broke the man’s neck, and then he finished the sentence ruminatively: “… it’s the old pipes knocking.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

“Sarah—” Pappas said, holding a phone up in the air.

“What is it?”

“It’s Jared.”

“Oh, thank God,” Sarah said, and pressed the flashing extension button. “Jared!”

His voice was small and distant-sounding. “Mom?”

“Honey, are you all right?”

“I’m scared, Mom.” He was on the verge of tears. “Brian was supposed to take me home, but he took me somewhere else—”

“But you’re okay, aren’t you? He hasn’t hurt you, has he?”

“No. Well, he put this thing in my mouth, but I got it out.”

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know. He locked me in a closet. In the basement of some building. Kind of like a big glass-and-cement building. Looked like a bank, sort of. I’ve been banging on the pipes to try to get someone’s attention.” His voice rose in pitch. “Mom, I’m scared of him.”

“Of course you are. He’s a scary person, but we’ll come get you. Honey, now tell me as much as you can about where you are, what you saw when you—”

“I think I hear voices—”

And the call was disconnected.

*   *   *

After twenty minutes of concentrated work, checking and rechecking all fittings and connections, Baumann was finished. The bomb was now armed, which meant that the entire basement area was off-limits. Anyone passing within twenty-five feet—a guard, a janitor, anyone—would set off the bomb, which would destroy the building, with Baumann still in it. To protect himself until he got out, he had jammed shut the external locks of all doors to the basement. They could be opened from the inside, but not the outside. After he was gone, if a bomb squad somehow managed to force a door open—well, that would be unfortunate for them.

Baumann was excited and nervous, as he was whenever he did a job, although he had never before done something of this magnitude.

He glanced at his watch. The helicopter was probably on its way to take him, and his hostage, from the roof of the building directly to Teterboro Airport, a few miles from the city. That way, there was no chance of an arrest at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport.

The helicopter pilot might not come through—Baumann trusted no one, and had considered that possibility—but it was unlikely. He had offered the pilot so much money it was impossible to imagine that he wouldn’t be there. Moreover, there were probably a dozen appropriate pilots who would have gladly taken his assignment, but this one seemed the most likely to keep the bargain, the most motivated.

*   *   *

“Did he hang up?” Pappas asked.

“I don’t
know
,” Sarah said. “The line went dead. He said, ‘I think I hear voices,’ and the line went dead.”

“Either he discovered Jared, or Jared hung up so he wouldn’t be overheard. We’d better hope it’s the latter. And we’d better hope he calls again. It’s our only hope.”

“Alex, Jared doesn’t know where he
is
. He just knows he’s locked in a room in the basement of some kind of bank building, and that could be a thousand places.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Pappas said. “Next time he calls, we’ll run a trace.”

“It’s a cellular phone, Alex!”

“Boy, you’re so upset you’re not thinking clearly.”

“I can barely think. We can trace it, can’t we?”

When a couple of criminals kidnapped an Exxon executive a few years ago, she suddenly recalled, they’d used a cellular phone to call in their ransom demands, mistakenly thinking cellular phones can’t be traced. That had been their undoing.

“But only if Jared calls again,” Pappas said.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

There are only four places in Manhattan where a helicopter is permitted to land, four officially designated heliports. One is at West Thirtieth Street and Twelfth Avenue, by the West Side Highway; another is on East Thirty-fourth Street; still another on East Sixtieth Street.

The fourth is the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, located at Pier Six on the East River. Some people call it by its old name, the Wall Street Heliport; helicopter pilots just call it Downtown. It is run by the Port Authority of the City of New York and has twelve parking spaces for choppers.

Since space in the city is so prohibitively expensive, most of the helicopter charter companies that do business in Manhattan are located in New Jersey. One of the smaller charter companies, based at Allaire Airport in Farmingdale, New Jersey, fifty-five miles to the southwest of New York City, was Executive Class Aircraft Charters, certificated by the FAA as an air-taxi operator. Of Executive’s six full-time pilots, Dan Hammond was, at fifty-one, the oldest. Flying was a young man’s game, and there were hardly any helicopter pilots older than fifty-five. Most of them were in their late twenties or thirties. It wasn’t a matter of burnout, but of the medical exam you had to take every year to qualify. The longer you lived, the more likely you were to fail the medical, for one reason or another. And once you flunked the medical, they wouldn’t let you fly.

Dan Hammond’s ugly little secret was that his hearing was going. They hadn’t caught it on last year’s exam, but his doctor had told him he’d never pass this time. His ears had done yeoman work for fifty-one years, and now, after a quarter-century of rock concerts (the Stones, the Dead) and flying in noisy old Hueys in Vietnam, the Bell 205, and then thousands of short hops in the Jet Rangers, they were signing over and out.

It didn’t make much difference to Executive if Hammond was forced to resign. There were dozens of low-time, upstart, rookie pilots, with the bare minimum of a thousand flight hours in a turbine helicopter, waiting in the wings to take his place. So what if the low-time kids didn’t know how to fly the ASTAR, the jewel of Executive’s fleet? A hundred hours of flying time and they could do it too.

It was time to leave, anyway. The economy was lousy, which had really hit the helicopter charter companies hard. Executive Class Aircraft Charters was on the verge of bankruptcy.

It was awful good timing when some crazy rich guy called yesterday to charter the American Euro-Copter AS350B ASTAR, formerly known as the Aerospatiale ASTAR 350B. So what if his request had been peculiar, even illegal?

The rich guy wanted to be picked up in the Wall Street area, but not at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport. No, the guy was either too lazy or too self-important to get in his limo and drive a couple of blocks to Downtown.

He wanted to be picked up at a rooftop heliport—on the roof of his building. He was trying to impress some friends.

Hammond had told the guy that you just couldn’t do that anymore, not since the city ordinances changed after that horrible accident on top of the Pan Am Building when a chopper broke up landing and pieces went everywhere and even people on the street were killed. Anything outside of the four Manhattan heliports was controlled airspace. You violated that and the FAA would serve your balls for canapés.

“But what would the penalty be, really?” the rich guy wanted to know.

“A fine and suspension or revocation of my airman’s certificate,” Hammond had replied.

“Tell the FAA you had to make an emergency landing,” the rich man said.

“Emergency landing?”

“Say you were having difficulty with your controls. Say there was a flock of birds in front of you. Then they won’t revoke your airman’s certificate.”

“They’ll still fine me.”

“I’ll pay it.”

“I might lose my job,” Hammond said, though the prospect of that didn’t exactly sicken him.

“I’ll make it worth your while,” the rich man said.

Hammond had accepted the offer. All you really needed to land safely was an area one hundred feet by one hundred feet that was clear of power lines.

The rich guy had made a down payment of five thousand bucks, with the rest payable upon arrival at Teterboro Airport.

A hundred thousand bucks would be enough for Hammond and his wife to make the down payment on the bed-and-breakfast in Lenox, Massachusetts, they’d been eyeing for years.

A hundred thou would spring Dan Hammond from a job that he was about to lose anyway.

It was not a tough decision to make.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

The man from FBI Technical Services arrived twenty minutes later with a steel case of equipment. He unpacked a notebook computer and hooked it to a high-frequency ICOM receiver, an IC-R7100 with a specially designed antenna that filtered out all signals except those in the 800-to-900-megahertz range. Most cellular telephones broadcast in the 870-megahertz range.

Whenever a cellular phone broadcasts its signal, there really are two transmissions being emitted. There is the one you hear—the voice—and there is the carrier signal, which broadcasts at 4.5 MHz above the primary signal. The carrier signal gives a listening receiver the phone’s identification number, the frequency it is transmitting on, and the “cell,” or area, in which the caller is located.

All the technician had to do now was to wait for Jared to call again. Once the call came in, he would monitor the signal 4.5 MHz above the frequency of the call, thereby zeroing in on the cellular identification number.

That number would next be programmed into the linked computer, which was equipped with special law-enforcement software and had been preprogrammed with all existing cellular frequencies, provided by the FCC.

Cellular telephone calls constantly jump frequencies as the caller moves between cells, so the cellular phone tells the receiving cell—by means of the carrier frequency signal—when to do the “hand-off,” when to switch frequencies, and to which one, depending on which cell is strongest.

Knowing which cellular identification number to look for, the computer can tune the receiver, ever scanning, ever running its search program. That way it can quickly identify which cell the call is being made from.

With Jared inside a building—i.e., stationary—the task would probably be easier. That meant he was located within one “cell,” presumably somewhere in Manhattan.

If, that is, he called again.

Seven minutes after the technician arrived at Operation MINOTAUR’s headquarters, he did.

Sarah picked up the phone and heard Jared whisper: “Mom—”

“Jared, oh, thank God. You’re all right?”

“Yeah.” He said it with a trace of his usual petulance, which made Sarah smile with relief.

“Now, Jared, listen carefully. Don’t hang up, whatever you do. What does the building look like?”

“It’s—it’s a
building
, Mom, a modern building, I don’t know!”

“What’s the name of the bank?”

“It’s only on the first floor—”

“
Which bank
?”

“I think it’s Greenwich something—”

“Greenwich Trust! Jared, can you get out of there?”

“The room’s locked. It’s like totally dark in here.”

“Where is he? Jared, what’s he doing right now?”

“He’s—” Jared lowered his voice to a whisper that was almost inaudible. “He’s coming toward me. I can hear him right outside the door.”

Sarah’s heart drummed in her chest like a hummingbird’s. “Oh, God, Jared. Be careful.”

The technician, hunched at the receiver next to Sarah, said, “Getting there. Keep him on longer.”

She heard a voice in the background, a man’s voice, shouting something, and then she heard the phone clatter to the ground, and then there was Jared’s voice, a faint cry. “Help me!”

“Five more seconds!”
the technician shouted.

But the phone was dead.

Panicked, Sarah turned around, saw Pappas watching wide-eyed, saw the technician hunched over the receiver.

“You didn’t—” she said, afraid to ask whether he had traced the call.

“Not yet,” he admitted.

“Oh, Jesus!”

“No, wait,” the technician said.

“But the line’s disconnected!”

“That’s all right,” he said. “The phone’s still on.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whether the phone’s in use or not,” the tech said, his eyes not leaving the computer screen, “still transmits … eight seven two point oh six megahertz…”