The Zero Hour (48 page)

“What?” Sarah said.

“Long as the phone’s turned on—whether it’s in use or not—as long as the phone is powered on, it keeps transmitting back and forth to the closest cell. That’s how you can tell the strength of the signal before you use the phone. It’s—Yes! I got it!”

*   *   *

The open door to the supply closet cast a bright light on Jared, who, Baumann now saw, was speaking on a cellular phone. Who would have thought it? Baumann grabbed the child and placed a gag in his mouth. Over it he pressed a short piece of duct tape.

“Let’s go, little one,” he said, more to himself than to the boy. “Time to get going.”

CHAPTER NINETY

The cellular telephone company that served Sarah’s Motorola was NYNEX Mobile, which has 560 cell sites in the northeastern United States. In Manhattan, NYNEX has between thirty and forty cell sites; it prefers not to make public the precise figure.

When a call is placed from a cellular phone, whether mounted in a car or hand-held, the signal is relayed to the closest cellular site, which is little more than an antenna connected to sensitive radio-frame equipment. There are two types of antennas: directional, which is a rectangular box measuring three feet by one foot; and omnidirectional, which is straight and cylindrical, about an inch thick.

In cities like New York, these antennas are usually mounted on the roofs of buildings, except where a building is particularly tall, in which case they are mounted on the side of a building. The brains and guts of the cellular site, however, occupy an area approximately the size of a twelve-by-six-foot room, usually in leased space within the building itself. There, large radio-frame equipment receives and processes the signals, then sends them via telephone lines to regular telephone-company switching centers.

A cell may be as large as several square miles or as small as one building. This is because of the peculiarities of how Manhattan is built. The problem is not population density but topography: the profusion of extremely tall buildings with relatively narrow streets below. This makes it difficult for radio waves to travel to street level—where most cellular phones are used.

Because of the topography, for instance, there is a cell site in Rockefeller Center that serves an area of no more than two square blocks. There is even a cell site in a large Wall Street–area building that covers only that building.

The Wall Street region presents a number of problems for NYNEX Mobile, for several reasons. There is a large density of people in the area who use cellular phones. Also, many of those people use their cellular phones inside buildings, most of which are old, solidly constructed, thick-walled—and therefore difficult for radio waves to permeate. And the area has the same topographical challenges as Midtown—very tall buildings built on very narrow streets.

NYNEX Mobile compensates for those difficulties in two ways: by mounting some of their directional antennas on the sides of buildings, pointed down at the street, to maximize reception; and by placing more antennas per square mile in the region—four in the New York stock market area alone.

There are more cellular sites in the Wall Street area than anywhere else in the city, which means that each cellular site is relatively small—an area of a few blocks, instead of a few miles. This simple fact of telecommunications life in Manhattan turned out to be the very break Sarah needed.

NYNEX Cellular Site Number 269 was an area of approximately three irregularly shaped city blocks almost at the southernmost tip of Manhattan Island, near the South Street Seaport. The omnidirectional antenna received and transmitted signals to and from all NYNEX-serviced car phones and cellular phones situated within a chunk of real estate bordered by Water Street, Broad Street, Whitehall Street, and the one-block-long Stone Street. Running parallel to Stone, and dividing the almost-but-not-quite-rectangle into three wedges, were two short streets, Bridge and Pearl. Jutting into the rectangle from the Water Street side, and ending at Pearl, was Moore Street, one block long and paved in cobblestone.

Contained within this area are the blue-glass tower of the New York Health and Racquet Club; a large, twenty-story NYNEX building; and, across Water Street, a new forty-story office-building tower adorned with art deco ornamentation and built around a sizable plaza. This is One New York Plaza; beneath it is a shopping arcade, which can be entered at the corner of Water and Broad. On Pearl Street is the immense forty-story blue-glass tower called the Broad Financial Center, headquarters of the NASDAQ Financial Exchange. Across Whitehall is a pair of black forty-story towers, One State Street Plaza and Battery Park Plaza.

A team of twenty-two uniformed cops and FBI street agents was dispatched immediately to search the area for any building that contained a sign for the Greenwich Trust Bank.

A cell site is not a precise designation: there are areas of overlap, sections of streets that may be serviced by one of two or even three different cells. It was clear, however, that the cell site that was transmitting back and forth to Sarah’s Motorola phone was Cell Site 269. Jared was stationary, located within one building, so there was no handing-off between cell sites to complicate things.

Moreover, each NYNEX cell site is configured into three “phases,” which divide the area into three segments: alpha, beta, and gamma. If the cell site is a circular pattern, as it roughly is, each phase of each antenna serves one-third of the area of that circle.

From the carrier frequency signal, the FBI tech was soon able to determine that Jared was transmitting from the gamma phase of Cell Site 269, which narrowed the search down to no larger than a one-square-block area. This meant the area around Moore Street, between Pearl and Water.

One of the search team assigned to the Wall Street area, a rookie cop named Julio Seabra, turned right up Moore Street, which was narrow and paved in cobblestone. For some reason, there were security cameras on the second-floor level of the buildings here, trained on the street. And then he saw a gleaming new twenty-story structure of glass and steel. There, at street level, was a two-foot-square brass plaque indicating the presence of an office of the Greenwich Trust Bank.

Officer Seabra stared at the sign for a few seconds before he remembered to radio the command center.

*   *   *

“We got the address,” Pappas shouted.

“Oh, thank God,” Sarah said. “Where?”

“Not a skyscraper or anything. Some twenty-story building right off Water Street, on Moore.”

“What’s in it?”

“A Greenwich Trust office on the street level, which is how the street cop pegged it. Not a branch office or anything, but some administrative offices—”

His desk phone rang, and he picked it up before the first ring was finished. “Yep?” He listened for a few seconds, then his eyes became round. “Christ almighty.”

He hung up the phone. “On the mezzanine level of that building, unmarked and basically invisible to the public, is a huge data-processing center called the Network, which is—”

“All right,” Sarah interrupted. “Alex, I want you and two junior people to stay here. One is to man my phone in case Jared calls again. The other stays by the STU-III in case of direct contact from CIA or anyone else. You run the show here. Roth, you I want downtown with me, directing operations, being traffic cop. Everyone else reports immediately to NYO Command Center.”

“Right.”

“Okay, I need you to establish phone contact with whoever’s in charge of the Network. If there’s any way they can do it, I want them to shut down operations immediately. Notify all member banks to halt all funds transfers. And get us a cruiser immediately.”

“You got it.”

“I want the entire block evacuated, including all surrounding buildings.”

Roth snapped, “Are you crazy? You know how many huge motherfucker office buildings are down there? There’s New York Plaza, One State Street, Battery Park, a NYNEX building, the Broad Financial Center—”

“Do it,” Sarah said. “Notify the police commissioner—we’ve got the authority—and block off the streets with pylons and sawhorses and cruisers and patrolmen, whatever they’ve got. Block off sidewalks. I want every patrolman they can get down there. No one is to enter the area. I want every building evacuated.”

“Jesus,” Roth said. “If Baumann’s in the Network building and everyone rushes out of there at once, we’ll never find the guy.”

“Roth, my son is in there.”

“Sarah.” It was Pappas. “You’re both right. We have to empty the building at once, but at the same time we have to look over everyone who leaves.”

“Impossible, Alex!” Sarah said.

“No. It’s not impossible. Remember Mecca?”

“Mecca? What are you—”

“1979. The Grand Mosque in Mecca. A textbook example of this.”

“Alex, we don’t have any time for anything complicated.”

“Sarah! It’s not complicated. We need to round up some riot-control buses, that’s all.”

He explained quickly.

“
Do it
,” she said. “And somebody help me find my vest.”

*   *   *

The police car sped down Seventh Avenue, siren wailing and turret lights flashing, turned left onto Houston, then right onto Broadway.

In the backseat, as Roth made arrangements on his cell phone, Sarah watched Broadway go by in a blur.

Oh God oh God oh God,
she thought.

Jared. Oh God.

If Baumann had taken Jared hostage, how had Jared managed to make phone calls undetected?

Where was he?

She heard Roth say, “A thousand pounds of C-4. Assume, worst case, the whole load is in the bomb.” He paused to listen, but only for a moment, and then he went on: “That’s enough to bring down the entire building, depending on placement of the device. Possibly kill everyone inside. Definitely do severe damage to neighboring buildings and pedestrians.”

Sarah’s mind raced, her body racked with tension. To save Jared was to stop the incident. This she repeated like a mantra, because she could think only of her son. She knew, but would never admit, that suddenly she didn’t care about the case, didn’t care about her work, didn’t even care about the incalculable damage the bomb was about to do.

The rain had stopped, but it was still overcast, the skies a metallic gray.

Would he kill Jared?

He had murdered—both wholesale and retail, as she thought of it. Retail murders were one-on-one, wholesale the acts of terrorism he’d engineered. In some ways, retail murders were the most chilling, and he was capable of snuffing out an individual life, face to face. Would he really hesitate to kill Jared if he deemed it necessary?

Well, perhaps. He hadn’t killed Jared yet, or so she hoped. Perhaps he planned to use him as a hostage, as insurance, as a human shield. She prayed Jared was still alive.

How had she been fooled so easily? How could she, so suspicious by profession and by training, have been taken in? Why had she been so willing to see him as a warm and likable man? How could he have concealed so well the essence of who he was?

He was a master of disguise, yes, but perhaps it wasn’t so hard to devise a disguise when your face was unknown. But it was his physical awkwardness that had deflected her suspicion. Had she not
wanted
to see the contradiction, really?

By the time the cruiser turned off Whitehall to Water and swung the wrong way up Moore Street, an immense crowd was already gathered in front of the building. Blue and red police lights were flashing; sirens were screaming from several different directions. Policemen were stopping and re-routing traffic on Water Street back down Whitehall or Broad. The area around Moore Street was blocked off with sawhorses marked
POLICE LINE
—
DO NOT CROSS
. Several fire trucks came barreling down Water Street, their sirens wailing. A couple of TV vans were already there, although how they’d been alerted so quickly, Sarah had no idea. So too was the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit.

As she jumped from the car, she wondered, How could everyone have gotten here so quickly?

Then she saw the answer. The NYPD Bomb Squad had arrived and taken over the scene, as they always did. Someone had called them in, probably one of the cops on the scene. At any moment the NEST teams would arrive and then there would be a turf battle from hell. Unless she stopped it.

She looked up at the building and whispered, “Jared.”

CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

As the hour approached, Dan Hammond began to wonder whether the rich guy would really come through with the hundred grand he’d promised for flying into controlled airspace and landing on the roof of a Wall Street building.

True, the guy had showed up in person and put down five thousand bucks in cash. That was a good sign. The usual procedure was to give a credit-card guarantee on Amex or Visa, and then Executive billed you after the flight.

The company said they charged $825 per flight hour, but you never got into a helicopter for less than fourteen hundred dollars, to be honest. So five thousand bucks was a hell of a lot, but it wasn’t such a crazy amount to put down.

This is probably my last job for Executive Class Aircraft Charter, Hammond reflected. Fitting that it should be in the best chopper they had, the ASTAR.

He loved flying the ASTAR, loved the look and feel of it. It was a French-made helicopter—actually, it was produced by a French-American firm—and so it didn’t operate in quite the same way as American choppers. That made it a tough helicopter to fly.

For one thing, the ASTAR’s rotor system turned the opposite way from the American rotor system. When you were trimming it in flight, you had to put in opposite control movements for antitorque, to keep the nose straight. Instead of applying left pedal when you added power, you applied right pedal.

Once you got used to that, it was a pleasure. It was powered by a French jet engine, the Turbo Mecca, a 640-shaft-horsepower engine. It cruised at 120 knots, the fastest single there was. It was also expensive, costing over a million dollars.