The Zero Hour (7 page)

Though for the last several years she’d been working Organized Crime in Boston, her main interest was in counterterrorism, where she’d developed something of a reputation within the Bureau while working the Lockerbie case.

A Pan Am jumbo had exploded in the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, at 7:03 p.m., resulting in the death of 270 people. The FBI launched SCOTBOMB, the largest international terrorist investigation ever, conducting fourteen thousand interviews in fifty countries.

Sarah was a single mother—Peter had moved out by then—living in Heidelberg, Germany, with a sick infant. Jared, then four months old, had developed a bad case of bronchiolitis. Neither baby nor mother got any sleep. The first several weeks in Heidelberg Sarah spent in a state of complete sleep deprivation. It was a trying, exhausting time, but it was where she had made her bones within the Bureau.

She’d been assigned to interview the friends and families of U.S. soldiers who’d been stationed at the base at Heidelberg to see whether any might have been targets. The days were long; they usually weren’t done until nine at night. The Army provided a command post and a secretary for dictating reports.

Each investigator was assigned one victim. You had to follow up all connections to that victim, all friends, even casual contacts. In the process, you couldn’t help digging up dirt. One victim had been cheating on his wife, another was in financial trouble, another was using drugs. Were any of these problems connected to the bombing?

Sarah became a sponge, soaking up information, rumors, overhears. It soon became apparent that the answer was not in Heidelberg.

The important forensic work was going on elsewhere. Sarah began to hear details through Bureau channels. The bomb had consisted of a plastic explosive and a timing device concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette recorder, which had been placed in a Samsonite suitcase. The suitcase was traced to Air Malta flight KM-180, from Malta to Frankfurt, then transferred as unaccompanied luggage to Pan Am 103A from Frankfurt to Heathrow. There it was transferred to container AVE-4041 on Pan Am 103.

Then she learned that a fragment of a green circuit board, part of the timing device, had been identified.

Sarah asked and received permission to do some digging into the matter of timing devices—who used what, what had been used where. This was pure scut work, and it wasn’t her “ticket,” as they say in the Bureau, but she had gotten reluctant approval to search.

All the intelligence on timing devices was on-line at the Bureau. There was a match. The circuit board was similar to one used in an attempted coup in Togo in 1986. It was also similar to one seized at the Senegal airport in 1988.

That was her contribution, and although it turned out to be crucial, at the time she had no idea where it would lead.

But the timer was eventually traced to a Swiss company, Meister et Bollier Limited, Telecommunications. In 1985, it turned out, twenty of these timers were sold to Libyan intelligence.

And the case was cracked. Her file reflected a “contribution above and beyond.”

But when her Heidelberg tour was done, she found that there were very few Counterterrorism slots in the United States open and none in Boston, which she still considered home—and where, by the terms of her custody agreement with Peter, she had to live. So she’d requested a transfer to Organized Crime, and there she’d been ever since.

*   *   *

She called a few informants, worked a few leads. For almost two hours she filled out forms, wrote up a few 302s, or interview reports, did the paperwork that takes up most of an FBI agent’s work, got caught up. She called the airport and talked to a member of an FBI surveillance team on a case that was all but wrapped up.

Then a thought occurred to her, and she picked up the phone. Fortunately, Ted answered the phone; Peter was out of the squad room.

“Can you pull Val’s phone records, or should I?” she asked.

“Already did.”

“You’re kidding me. You got a subpoena that fast?”

“I’ve got a friend at New England Telephone Security.”

Sarah shook her head, half in disgust and half in admiration. “I see.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you feebees always play by the rules,” Ted replied. “Phone company’s impossible to deal with through channels anymore, you know that.”

“So what’d you find?”

“According to her local phone records, at three forty-four in the afternoon of the day she was killed, she received a three-minute call.”

“So?”

“So she wasn’t at home at the time. Between three and quarter after four, she was at a salon on Newbury Street called Diva. Take a look at her appointment book. Both her hair stylist, a guy named Gordon Lascalza, and her manicurist, Deborah something, placed her there then.”

“You’ve never heard of answering machines?” Sarah said.

“Oh, there’s messages on her answering machine, all right,” Ted replied. “Three messages. One from the owner of the Stardust Escort Service, a Nanci Wynter. Her madam. And two from creditors—Citibank Visa and Saks. Apparently she didn’t like paying her bills, or she was short of funds, or both.”

“And?”

“None of them remotely approached two minutes. Also, they were received between five o’clock and six-thirty. They also match up with her phone records.”

“So you’re saying that Val came home after her haircut and manicure,” Sarah said, “played her answering machine, and rewound, right?”

“Exactly,” Ted said.

“And whoever called her at three forty-four that afternoon and left a long message—we don’t have that message, because it was recorded over by later messages.”

“Right.”

“But you know who placed the call, right? From the phone records?”

Teddy hesitated. He was not a good liar. “According to the phone records, that three-minute phone call Valerie Santoro got on the day she was killed came from a cellular phone, a car phone. Registered to a limousine-rental agency. The limo company has twenty-some cellular phones in its name, probably all installed in the cars it rents out.”

She nodded, sensed he was holding back. “Did you already talk to the limo company, or should I?”

An even longer pause. “Uh, I did already.”

“And?”

“All right, the phone call came from a limo rented for two days by a guy named Warren Elkind, from New York City.”

She hesitated. “Know anything about the guy?”

“Nothing.”

“Do me a favor. Forget to mention to Peter you told me about this guy, huh?” There was a long silence. “Hello?”

“Yeah, I’m here. All right. Understood,” Teddy said reluctantly.

“Thanks, Teddy. I owe you. Oh, and one more thing.”

“Now what?”

“Can I have the tape?”

“The what?”

“The tape from Valerie’s answering machine.”

“You asking me to get it transcribed? Or copied?

“I want the original.”

“Shit, Sarah, why are you doing this? It’s in the evidence locker already—”

“Because we have jurisdiction. She’s one of our informants.”

“It’s not going to do you any good, Sarah—I already told you what’s on it.”

“Can I borrow it for a little while anyway?”

He sighed. “I’m hanging up before you ask me for anything else.”

“Ms. Cahill? Excuse me.” Hector, the database trainee, approached her awkwardly. He was holding a long sheet of computer paper and smiling bashfully. His face looked like that of a child who’d accomplished something for which he knew he’d be praised.

“We got six hits,” the trainee said.

Sarah perused the computer printout. The six names had little in common. One was a United States senator whose name had come up in a bribery investigation. Another was a professor at Harvard Law School who specialized in defending celebrities; he was probably being watched for no other reason than that someone high in the Bureau disliked him. A third was a well-known construction executive tied to the Mob; then there were two lowlifes who’d done time for drug trafficking.

And there was Warren Elkind: a prominent New York banker, the chairman of the Manhattan Bank, the second-largest bank in the country. The accompanying biographical information indicated that he was a leading fund-raiser for Israel and had been the target of numerous threats from Palestinian and Arab groups.

*   *   *

Sarah called the Ritz and asked for the security director.

“Is there a problem?” he asked in a pleasant baritone.

“Absolutely nothing involving the hotel,” she reassured him. “We’re looking for someone we believe stayed there four days ago. I’d like to get a list of all hotel guests from Monday night.”

“I wish we could do that, but we’re very protective of our guests’ privacy.”

Sarah’s tone cooled slightly. “I’m sure you’re aware of the law—”

“Oh,” he said with a tiny snort, “I’m quite familiar with the law. Chapter one hundred forty, section twenty-seven, of the Massachusetts General Law. But there
is
a legal procedure that has to be followed. You’ll have to get a subpoena from Suffolk District Court and present it to our keeper of records. Only then can we release documentation.”

“How long would that take?” she asked dully.

“After you get the subpoena, you mean? It takes several days for us to go into our records. A two-week register check will take at least three days. And then you’ve got to make sure the scope of the subpoena is specific enough. I doubt any judge will issue a subpoena for the names of
all
hotel guests that stayed here on any given night.”

Frustrated, Sarah lowered her voice and asked confidentially: “Is there any way we can speed things up a bit? I can assure you the hotel will not be involved in any way—”

“Whenever the FBI comes here asking for the names of our guests, we’re involved, by definition. My job is to protect the security of our guests. I’m sorry. Bring me a subpoena.”

The second call she placed was to the Four Seasons, and this time she decided to take a different tack. When she was put through to the accounting department, she said: “I’m calling on behalf of my boss, Warren Elkind, who was a guest at your hotel recently.” She spoke with the glib, slightly bored assuredness of a longtime secretary. “There’s a problem with one of the charges on his bill, and I need to go over it with you.”

“What’s the name again?”

Sarah gave Elkind’s name and was put on hold. Then the voice came back on. “Mr. Elkind checked out on the eighteenth. I have his statement here, ma’am. What seems to be the problem?”

CHAPTER TEN

“I see you collect pictures,” Baumann said.

“You know something about art, I take it?” Malcolm Dyson asked, pleased. The word “pictures,” as opposed to “paintings,” seemed to indicate that Baumann was not entirely ignorant about the art world.

The conversation had been relocated to the main house, whose walls were crowded with paintings, mostly old masters but a few contemporaries, from the marble-tiled entrance hall to the immense Regency dining room—even, Baumann observed, in the washroom off the conservatory. A Rothko nestled between a Canaletto and a Gauguin; canvases by Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, Twombly, and Miró jostled against a Correggio and a Bronzino, a Vermeer, a Braque and a Toulouse-Lautrec. An astonishing collection, Baumann saw, but grotesquely jumbled together. A collector with a lot of money and no taste.

Hanging above a Louis XIV gilt console table in a hallway—poorly lighted, Baumann thought, and ineptly displayed—was a
Nativity
by Caravaggio. In one corner of the sitting room, oddly juxtaposed, were Antonella da Messina’s
Ecce Homo
and a Modigliani. Only after they had moved into the library did a switch go on in Baumann’s head, and he suddenly realized what many of these paintings had in common. The Caravaggio had disappeared thirty or so years ago from the oratory of a church in Palermo, Sicily;
Ecce Homo
had been looted by the Nazis from the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. Much of the art in Dyson’s collection had been obtained on the black market. The stuff had been stolen.

They sat in the library, an enormous, high-ceilinged, dimly lit chamber lined with antiquarian books and paneled in mahogany. It smelled strongly, and not unpleasantly, of fireplace smoke. Dyson had boasted that he had purchased the library in its magisterial entirety—from the books to the vaulted ceiling—from a baronial estate outside London.

The floors were covered in antique Persian carpets, over which Dyson had navigated his wheelchair with some difficulty. He sat behind a small writing table; Lomax, taking notes on a yellow pad with a silver ballpoint pen, sat beside him. Both of them faced Baumann, who was sunk into a large, plump armchair upholstered in green-and-white-striped taffeta.

“Just a passing familiarity,” Baumann said. “Enough to know that the Brueghel used to live in a gallery in London. And the Rubens—
Baccanale
, is it?—vanished from a private collection in Rome sometime in the seventies.”

“
Baccanale
it is,” Dyson said. “Very good. The Brueghel’s called
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
—very special, I’ve always thought.” He sighed. “Most of the Renoirs are from Buenos Aires; the El Greco came from Saarbrücken, as I recall. The Vermeer, I’m told, came from the Gardner in Boston, but what do I know? The Dalís were picked up in Barcelona, and the Cézanne … Marty, where the hell’d the Cézanne come from?”

“A private collection outside Detroit,” Lomax answered without looking up from his notes. “Grosse Pointe Farms, I believe.”

Dyson extended his hands, spread them out, palms up. “Don’t get me wrong, Baumann. I don’t put on my cat-burglar togs and rip off the stuff myself. I don’t even commission the heists. They just come to me. Black-market dealers around the world must just figure me for an easy mark—man without a country and all that.”

“But not without a checkbook,” Baumann said.

“Right,” Dyson said. A housekeeper appeared with a tray of coffee and smoked salmon sandwiches, served them, and noiselessly vanished. “I mean, let’s face it,” Dyson went on, “I’m not exactly going to just show up at Sotheby’s Important Old Masters sale, am I? Not if I want to stay out of Leavenworth or wherever the hell it is the U.S. government wants to stash me. Anyway, stolen art’s a bargain—stuff goes for maybe seven or ten percent of the crazy prices they hold you up for at Wildenstein or Thaw or Christie’s—”