The Zero Hour (8 page)

“I assume you didn’t break me out of Pollsmoor to talk about art, Mr. Dyson,” Baumann interrupted. “You had a ‘business proposition.’”

Dyson regarded Baumann for a long moment over his reading glasses, his eyes steely. Then his face relaxed into a smile. “I like a fellow who’s all business,” he said to his assistant.

Dyson’s cellular phone trilled on the table in front of him. He picked it up, flipped it open, and barked: “Yes?… Good God, what time is it there?… Does Mr. Lin ever sleep?… All right.” He pushed a button to sever the connection. Looking directly at Baumann, he went on: “The Chinese are going to take over Asia, believe you me.” He shook his head. “So they say you’re the best in the world.”

Baumann nodded curtly. “So I’ve been told. But if I were really so good, I wouldn’t have spent the last six years in jail, would I?”

“Too modest,” Dyson said. “My sources tell me BOSS screwed up. Not you.”

Baumann shrugged but did not reply.

“You were instructed to take out a member of the Mossad’s assassination unit, the
kidon.
Someone who was getting under Pretoria’s skin. Only it turned out the guy you whacked was some big-deal case officer—what’s the term, a
katsa?
Do I have this right?”

“More or less.”

“And then there’s lots of diplomatic fallout between Tel Aviv and Pretoria. Which sort of threatened to screw up Pretoria’s A-bomb program, which relied on Israel’s cooperation. So you get locked away. Life sentence. Spare them any embarrassment. Right?”

“Roughly.” Dyson had the basic idea right, and Baumann was uninterested in correcting the details. The salient fact was that this enigmatic billionaire had gone to great trouble to extract Baumann from prison, and men like this did not do such things out of humanitarian impulses.

About two months earlier, Baumann had been visited in his cell one afternoon by a priest, who, after a few moments of aimless chatter about Baumann’s religious faith, had leaned close and whispered to the prisoner that a “friend” from the outside wanted to aid his escape. The patron, a man of great resources, would be in touch soon through confederates. Baumann would be reassigned to the auto-repair shop at once.

Baumann had listened without comment.

A few days later, he had been transferred to auto repairs. A young fellow from the prison commandant’s office came by a month or so after that, ostensibly to discuss a problem with his car’s ignition system, but really to let him know that things were now in place.

“Now then,” Dyson said, opening a folder that Martin Lomax had slid before him. “I have a few questions for you.”

Baumann merely raised his eyebrows.

“Call it a job interview,” Dyson said. “What’s your real name, Mr. Baumann?”

Baumann looked at Dyson blankly. “Whatever you’d like it to be. It’s been so long I really don’t remember.”

Lomax whispered something to Dyson, who nodded and went on: “Let’s see. Born in the western Transvaal. Only son of tobacco farmers. Boers. Members of the Nationalist Party.”

“My parents were poorly educated and hardly political,” Baumann interrupted.

“You left the University of Pretoria. Recruited there to BOSS—what’s it called now, the Department of National Security or something, the DNS?”

“It’s been renamed again,” Lomax said. “Now it’s the National Intelligence Service.”

“Who the hell can keep track of this shit?” Dyson muttered. He went on, almost to himself: “Trained at the Farm as an assassin and a munitions expert. Top marks at the academy and in the field. Service loaned you out to various friendly spook services.” He glanced at the sheaf of notes. “Says here you’re single-handedly responsible for some fifteen documented terrorist incidents and probably a good many more undocumented ones around the world. Your cryptonym within the service was Zero, meaning you were top dog or something.”

Baumann said nothing. There was a tentative knock on the library door, to which Dyson abruptly shouted: “Come!” A tall, thin man in his late forties entered, bearing a sheet of paper. His face was sallow and concave. He handed the paper to Lomax and scurried from the room. Lomax scanned the paper, then handed it over to Dyson, murmuring: “St. Petersburg.” Dyson glanced at it and scrunched it into a ball, which he tossed toward a burgundy leather trash can, missing it by a few feet.

“In 1986, you were hired, on a freelance basis, by Muammar Qaddafi to bomb a discotheque in West Berlin. Bomb went off on April 5. Killed three American soldiers.”

“I’m sure whoever did it,” Baumann said, “had been assured by the Libyans that no American military would be present that night. Always better to do one’s own intelligence work.”

“If I wanted to hire an assassin, a mercenary, a soldier of fortune, they’d be lining up out the door all the way to Paris, you know,” Dyson said. “Guns for hire are cheap and plentiful. You fellows, on the other hand—rare as hen’s teeth. You must have been quite in demand.”

“I was, yes.”

“Says your native language is Afrikaans. But you usually speak with a British accent.”

“A reasonable facsimile,” Baumann replied.

“But persuasive. How the hell old were you when you did Carrero Blanco?”

“Hmm?”

“Luis Carrero Blanco.”

“I’m afraid I don’t recognize the name.”

“The hell you talking about? Luis Carrero Blanco, the president of Spain under Franco. Blown up in 1972. The Basques claimed credit, but they’d really hired some mysterious outsider. A professional assassin who got a quarter of a million dollars American for pulling it off. That wasn’t you?”

Baumann shrugged. “I wish it had been.”

The old man furrowed his brow and shifted in his wheelchair. He looked puzzlingly at Lomax, then back at Baumann. “If you’re trying to conceal something from me, I’d advise you to—”

“Now I’ve got a few questions for you,” Baumann interrupted, raising his voice ever so slightly.

Annoyance flashed in Dyson’s gray eyes. He scowled.

“How many people were involved in the operation to extract me from Pollsmoor?”

“That’s my business,” Dyson replied curtly.

“I’m afraid not. It directly concerns me and my welfare from now on.”

Dyson paused for a moment and then relented. He turned to Lomax, who said: “Two.”

“In all? Including the phony priest and the chap in the prison commandant’s office?”

“Just those two,” Lomax repeated with irritation. He inclined his head toward his boss for an instant, saw Dyson nod, and said quietly: “They’re both dead.”

“Excellent,” Baumann said. “All loose ends tied?”

“Professionally,” Lomax said.

“Let’s just hope,” Baumann said, “that whoever did the wet work was more professional than whoever’s in charge of security here at whatever this is called … Arcadia.”

Lomax compressed his lips into a thin line. His eyes flashed with anger, his face reddened.

“Look, goddammit,” Dyson said, his voice choked with fury. “You should be eternally grateful—you should damn well kiss the ground I wheel on for what I did to break you out of that hellhole.”

At this, Baumann rose slowly to his feet. He smiled wanly and turned to leave. “I do appreciate your assistance, Mr. Dyson,” he said, “but I didn’t ask for it. If I’m not satisfied that you have taken the necessary basic precautions to ensure that I am not traced, then I must refuse to have anything more to do with you.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Dyson called out.

“Mr. Dyson, you’ve presumably brought me here because of my proficiency at the type of work you want me to do on your behalf. I suggest that we respect each other’s areas of expertise. Now, please tell me how the arrangements were made.”

Dyson told him about how his people contacted certain officials in South Africa and paid them off. Baumann nodded. “All right. I’ll listen to what you propose. But I should warn you that I may well not accept. It all depends on the nature of the job you want done, and the amount of payment you’re prepared to offer.”

Dyson backed up his chair by pushing at the writing table, rattling the inkwell and the Meissen urn. “Do you seriously think you have much choice?” he said. “You’re a goddam international fugitive now. And I know your whereabouts!”

“Yes, you do,” Baumann agreed equably, looking around the room. “And the same could be said of you.”

Dyson stared furiously at Baumann. Lomax visibly stiffened and slowly lowered a hand toward the concealed pistol Baumann had observed in the garden.

Baumann went on as if he hadn’t seen this: “And I’m certainly familiar enough now with the security here, the weakness and the permeability. Anytime I wish, I can pay you a return visit. Or come to call at your corporate offices in Geneva or Zug. You obviously know some of the particulars of my background, so I’m sure you don’t for a moment doubt my ability to hunt you down.”

Dyson put a restraining arm on Lomax. “All right,” he said at length. Lomax glowered. “I’m sure we’ll be able to come to some happy agreement.” His expression eased somewhat. “We Americans call it ‘getting to yes.’”

Baumann returned to the armchair and settled into it. He crossed his legs. “I hope so,” he said. “Six years in prison can make one long for something productive to do.”

“You understand that what I want you to do must be done in absolute secrecy,” Dyson said. “I can’t stress that enough.”

“I have never advertised my accomplishments. You don’t know even one small part of the work I’ve done.”

Dyson fixed him with a stare. “That’s the way I like it. I must not be connected to this in any way, and I intend to take measures to ensure that.”

Baumann shrugged. “Naturally. What is it you want done?”

*   *   *

Martin Lomax, who knew every last detail of the plan his employer had been brooding about for months, returned to the library about half an hour later. He understood that Dyson wished to close the deal in private, as Dyson always did.

When he entered, discreet as always, the two men appeared to be finishing their conversation.

He heard Baumann speak just one word: “Impressive.”

Dyson gave one of his odd, cold smiles. “Then you’re interested.”

“No,” Baumann said.

“What, is it the money?” Lomax found himself asking, a tad too anxiously.

“The fee would certainly be a consideration. Given the risks to my life it would entail, I’d certainly be better off back at Pollsmoor. But we will discuss finances later.”

“What the hell are you—” Dyson began.

“You have spelled out your conditions,” Baumann said quietly. “Now, I have mine.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Crime Lab, Kowalski,” said a man’s voice.

“Michael Kowalski? This is Special Agent Sarah Cahill in the Boston office.”

“Yup.” He made no attempt to hide his impatience.

“You’re an acoustic engineer, is that right?”

Kowalski sighed. “What’s up?”

She leaned forward in her chair. “Listen, do you guys know how to … unerase tapes?”

The phone line was silent for a long time. She gestured hello with her chin at Ken Alton, who was getting up from his desk and heading toward the break room.

Finally, Kowalski spoke. “Audio, video, what?”

“Audio.”

“No.”

Sarah could hear his hand covering the phone. There were muffled voices on the other end of the line.

“Hello?” she said.

“Yeah, I’m back. Sorry, I’m raked. All right, you got an audio tape you accidentally erased over or something? Not likely we’re going to be able to bring it back for you. No way. That tape’s gone. Sorry.”

“Thanks.” Sarah glumly put down the phone and said, “Shit.”

She found Ken sitting at a table in the break room, drinking a Diet Pepsi and eating a Snickers bar. He was reading one of the William Gibson novels he constantly toted around. She sat down beside him.

“I liked the old one better,” she said.

He closed his novel, using the Snickers wrapper as a bookmark. “The old what?”

“Break room. Across the street. The rats always snarfed your brown-bag lunch if you left it out. I miss the rats.”

“Was that Technical Services you were talking to?”

“Right.”

“Warren Elkind blew you off, eh?”

“He wouldn’t even take my call—not after he heard it was about Valerie Santoro’s murder. I guess I’m really reaching now.”

“Hey, don’t take it so hard,” Ken said. “Life sucks, and then you die.” He bit his lower lip. “Technical Services is pretty good. If they can’t do something, it usually can’t be done.”

“Great,” she said bitterly.

“But not necessarily. Are you really serious about this?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, turning to look at him. Her phone rang, and she ignored it.

“Well, there’s a guy I went to MIT with. A real genius. He’s on the faculty there now, an assistant professor or something. Electronics engineer. I could give him a call if you want.”

“Yeah, I’d like that. Hey, have you ever done a full-scale search of the computerized central files?”

“Sure. Why?” The Pepsi machine hummed, then rattled.

“Warren Elkind. I want to see if his name comes up anywhere. How do I do it?”

“You make the request through Philly Willie. He sends it on to Washington, to the professional searchers at headquarters. The correlation clerks are excellent.”

“I want to find all references to Elkind. Can they do it?”

“They use software called Sybase, which is pretty good. Only question is whether they’ll let you do it. Costs a lot. What makes you think Phelan’s going to authorize it?”

“Warren Elkind is one of the most powerful bankers in America. He’s also been a target of terrorist threats. If I leave things the way they are, we have one dead prostitute and one rich banker. No connection. A big, fat goose egg. But if we can do a fully cross-referenced search, it’s possible we’ll turn up something someplace we wouldn’t have thought to look. Some investigation somewhere, some
lead
somewhere—”

“Yeah, but Phelan’s just going to tell you about how the Bureau’s file clerks cross-reference better than any file clerks in the world. If it’s not in Elkind’s file now, what makes you think a computer search is going to yield anything more?”