The Zero Hour

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The largest intelligence organization in the world also happens to be the most secretive. It is the U.S. National Security Agency, or NSA-which is sometimes archly said to stand for either “No Such Agency” or “Never Say Anything.”

The NSA, which occupies a sprawling, thousand-acre compound at Fort Meade, Maryland, is in charge of America’s SIGINT, or signals intelligence. This includes communications intelligence (COMINT), radar, telemetry, laser, and nonimagery infrared intelligence. It has been described as an immense vacuum cleaner, sucking up electronic intelligence the world over and, if necessary, decrypting it.

Crudely put, the NSA has the ability, among quite a few other abilities, to eavesdrop electronically on most telephone conversations throughout the world.

Under the provisions of two laws-Executive Order 12333, Section 2.5, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Section 101/F-1-the NSA cannot target the telephone conversations of any U.S. citizen without a warrant from the attorney general of the United States, based on probable cause that the individual is an agent of a foreign power.

The operative word here is target. The law doesn’t apply to communications that the NSA’s satellites happen to pick up as they rummage through the international telecommunications network.

Not only is the law full of loopholes and clever wording, but all of the NSA’s targeting requests are approved by a top-secret rubber-stamp court. And in any case, if the NSA’s satellites intercept a phone call between London and Moscow, there’s simply no way to tell whether the caller is a United States citizen.

So, in effect, the NSA has the ability to intercept any telephone call coming into or out of the United States as well as any telex, cable, or fax anywhere in the world, by means of microwave interception. The agency is believed to sift through millions of telephone calls daily.

In order to make such a vast undertaking remotely manageable, the NSA programs its supercomputers’ scan guides with highly classified watch lists of certain “trigger words,” including word groups, names, and telephone numbers. Thus, any telephone conversation or fax, for instance, that contains a reference to “nuclear weapons” or “terrorism” or “plutonium” or “Muammar Qaddafi,” or to names of terrorist training camps or code names of certain secret weapons, may be flagged for further analysis.

Telephone calls that are encrypted or scrambled also tend to pique the NSA’s suspicion.

The same evening that Baumann agreed to work for Malcolm Dyson, a random fragment of a telephone conversation between two points in Switzerland was captured by a geosynchronous Rhyolite spy satellite, moving 22,300 miles above the earth’s surface at the exact speed of the earth’s rotation-in effect, hovering. The conversation was sent over landlines using microwave linkage, via two microwave towers located in Switzerland, in line of sight to each other.

In many areas of the world, topographical concerns-mountains, bodies of water, and the like-make it impossible for telephone conversations to travel exclusively by landlines. So an enormous volume of telephone traffic is beamed between microwave towers. Because each microwave tower sends out its transmission in the shape of a cone, some of the waves continue to travel into the ether, where they can be picked up by satellite.

The captured signal, which contained a fragment of the telephone conversation, was scooped up by a hovering NSA Rhyolite satellite and relayed to another satellite over Australia, thence to a relay site, and then to Fort Meade, where some twenty-seven acres of computers are located deep below the National Security Agency’s Headquarters/Operations Building. It is said to be the most formidable concentration of computational power in the world.

Within minutes, the signal was classified and reconstructed. Only then were a couple of interesting things learned about the captured telephone conversation.

First, the NSA analysts discovered that the signal was digital: it had been converted into a series of zeroes and ones. Digital signals have a great advantage over analog signals in that they are received with maximum clarity.

Digital signals have another advantage over analog. Once scrambled, they are secure, impenetrable, impossible to be understood by anyone outside a handful of government agencies in the most developed countries.

Then the NSA analysts discovered a second interesting thing. The captured conversation had been rendered even more secure from eavesdropping by means of a state-of-the-art digital encryption system. It is not uncommon these days for private citizens-particularly in the world of high finance-to make their most sensitive calls on sophisticated, secure telephones that digitally encrypt their voices so that they can’t be bugged, tapped, or otherwise eavesdropped on.

But the vast majority of suppliers of these secure phones (one of the biggest is Crypto A.G. of Zurich) cooperate with law enforcement by selling their encryption schemes to both the National Security Agency and the British GCHQ (the Government Communications Headquarters, in Cheltenham, England, which is the British counterpart of the NSA). So even most encrypted phone conversations can be listened to by the NSA and GCHQ. International businessmen discussing illegal schemes and drug cartels discussing transactions all tend to speak carelessly over “secure” phones, not realizing that most of them really aren’t secure at all.

But this particular digitally encrypted format was unknown to either NSA or GCHQ. And that was the third peculiar discovery.

The scrambled signal was sent immediately to the Cryptanalytic Division at NSA’s Headquarters/Operations Building. There it was run through a Cray supercomputer, which tested the signal against all known encryption schemes. But the Cray came up blank. The signal wouldn’t break. Instead of voices speaking, there was only a bewildering sequence of ones and zeroes that the computer couldn’t comprehend.

This in itself was extraordinary. The NSA’s computers are programmed with the keys to virtually every known cipher ever invented, every mechanism to encipher that has ever been used. This includes any system ever used by anyone at any time in history, anything ever written about in a technical paper, in a book, even in a novel, any cipher that’s ever been even floated as a hypothesis.

As long as the computers are fed a large enough sample of the cipher, and the encryption scheme is known to the NSA, they will crack the code. Most digital signals are broken immediately. But after minutes, then hours of churning, the computers were stumped.

The NSA abhors the existence of any encryption scheme it doesn’t know. To a cryptanalyst, an “unbreakable” encryption is like an impenetrable safe to a master safecracker, an unpickable lock to a master lockpick. It is a challenge, a taunt, a red flag.

Two cryptanalysts-cryppies, as they’re called within the Fort Meade complex-hunched before a screen and watched with mingled fascination and frustration.

“Jeez, what’s wrong with this one?” George Frechette said to his officemate, Edwin Chu. “Everything’s processing except this one string. Now what?”

Edwin Chu adjusted his round horn-rimmed glasses and peered through them for several moments at the flashing numbers on the screen. “We got us a new one.”

“What do you say we have a look at it?” George suggested. “Play with it a little?”

“Sure,” Edwin said. “Hey, I’m there.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Professor Bruce Gelman, a small, slender, balding man with a wispy beard, was an assistant professor of computer science at MIT with a national reputation in the field of electronic engineering. According to Ken Alton, he was also a legendary hacker skilled in the intricacies of telephony and one of the founders of the Thinking Machines Corporation.

He could have been in his thirties or forties; it was impossible to tell. Dressed in a woolen lumberjack shirt over a plaid flannel shirt, he did not look like a typical university professor, but then, computer types rarely did. His office was located in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in a tall, anonymous office building in Kendall Square, Cambridge.

“I thought you guys were up to speed on this stuff,” he said, sipping coffee from a giant plastic cup. “You’re telling me the FBI labs threw in the towel?”

“Basically, yes,” Sarah said.

Gelman rolled his eyes, scratched at his beard, and chuckled. “I see,” he said with exaggerated politeness, leaving no doubt what he thought of the FBI. “Of course, this technician you talked to is right: it’s not exactly easy to restore a tape that’s been erased. That’s true.”

She removed from her briefcase a black cassette sealed in a plastic evidence bag and marked with a number, took it out of the bag, and handed it to him.

He gulped some more coffee, set down the cup, and knitted his brow. “We could get lucky,” he said. “Might be an old answering machine. Or just a poorly constructed one.”

“Why would that help?”

“Maybe the tape wobbles up and down in the machine, relative to the heads. Possible the tape guides are loose, and the tape wandered up and down some.”

“That would make it easier?”

He shot his left hand out for the enormous cup of coffee, and accidentally tipped it over. “Oh, God. Yuck.” Pulling some sheets of pale-blue Kleenex from a plastic dispenser, he mopped up the muddy spill, which coursed over a stack of papers. “Yuck.”

He retrieved the enormous cup, managing to salvage half the coffee. “You see, that would leave us a stripe of recorded information above or below what’s been recorded over it.”

“And if the answering machine isn’t old, or the tape guides aren’t loose?”

“Well,” Gelman said, “tape is three-dimensional, right?” He slurped loudly from the coffee cup, then gingerly set it down. “It has a thickness to it. The front and the back surfaces of the tape are affected differently by the recording process.”

Sarah didn’t entirely understand what he was driving at, but nodded anyway.

“So you compare the front and back surfaces of the tape,” he went on, “to see if there are any traces of magnetic information on the back of the tape. Sometimes that works.”

“And if not?”

“Well, then there’s an effect called ‘print-through,’ where you find traces on one section of the tape of what’s been recorded on a section right next to it. So there are various places to look for data. I’m surprised your labs didn’t think of this.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “So we can scan the tape and reconstruct it two-dimensionally, using VCR technology.”

“Can you explain that?”

He frowned and looked down at the coffee-stained papers arrayed on the desk before him. “So, it’s like this,” Gelman said. “This is a technique I developed for a-another government agency, under contract. Oh, hell, it’s obviously the NSA. Anyways, normally an audio tape is magnetized, negative or positive, on a stripe, okay?”

Sarah nodded.

“But on a videotape, the information is laid down differently. It’s recorded on stripes put down at a transverse angle to the tape, in order to fit more information on the same length of tape.”

“Uh huh.”

“So when it comes time to play back, a VCR uses a helical-scan playback head to read that information. Meaning the tape head moves at sort of an angle across the tape, okay?”

“Okay.”

“So if you want to play back a really narrow stripe of leftover information that’s sort of on the edges of a broader band-the vertical information as well as the horizontal-you can use this VCR technology, a similar helical-scan playback device.”

He paused a moment, and Sarah nodded to encourage him to proceed.

“So the helical scan goes across the tape, transversely, moving up through the newly recorded stuff and then over the narrow band of leftover information-the stuff we’re interested in, right? So, at regular intervals, we have these little blips of the stuff we want. The rest is garbage.” Gelman spoke more and more rapidly, with growing enthusiasm. “So, then the question is, how do you sort the wheat from the chaff, you know what I mean? How do you separate out the sound you want from the sound you don’t? Well, what you do is, you write a program to differentiate it out, right?”

“Right.”

“Now, I know the distance and the time between the bits of the stripe we’re interested in-the sequence of magnetic impulses, let’s call it. I can calculate it on the basis of the rate at which the playback head is revolving. I know the periodicity. So, I tell the computer what I’m looking for and to pull out any signals of interest. Then we put sort of a digital ‘picture’ of the magnetic information onto a computer, using a specially constructed piece of equipment, a helical-scan tape playback mechanism that converts the analog signal to a digital signal. It’s the same technology as a compact-disc player or a digital audio tape, right? Really, it’s a modified digital compact cassette playback unit that can play back the recovered audio tape as if it were high-density digital tape.”

“Look,” Sarah broke in at last. “Computer stuff is obviously not my area of expertise, which is why I’m talking to you. You’re saying you may be able to unerase this tape, right?”

“That’s right.”

“How long would it take you?”

“The process might take a few hours, maybe. But to do it right, a week, probably-”

“Okay. I’d like to hire your services on a contract basis. Could you have something for me in two or three days?”

“Three days?” Gelman gasped. “I mean, theoretically, yes, but-”

“That would be great,” Sarah said. “Thanks.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Baumann awoke with a pounding headache, covered in a cold sweat. The linen bedsheet around him was soaked, as if he’d been doused with gallons of cold water. He drew back the heavy drapes to let in the strong morning sunlight. Looking down at the Avenue des Portugais, then up at the sky, he estimated that it was eight or nine o’clock. He had badly needed the sleep, but there was much to be done today.

For a few moments he sat on the edge of the bed and massaged his temples to ease the headache. His head spun with the residue of nightmares. He had dreamed he was back in the hole, that black chamber of horrors.

He had abided the floggings, the “cuts” with a cane while you were strapped, spread-eagled, to the three-legged mare, a prison physician standing dourly by. But the hole, or the “bomb,” as some called it, was the worst place in Pollsmoor, a dank horrific place it had taken all of his strength to endure without cracking. The hole was where they put you to punish you for fighting in the exercise yard, for striking a boer, for no reason at all other than that the chief warder didn’t like your face. Actually, he had spent no more than a month there in all his years at Pollsmoor. It meant solitary confinement, a bare concrete cell, a “punishment regime” of maize porridge and watery broth and more porridge.

No cigarettes, no newspapers, no letters, no visitors. No radio, no television. No contact with the outside world; no leaving the tiny, fetid, unlighted cell, whose walls began to close in on you. You lived like an animal in a cage rank with your own urine and excrement from the shallow hole in the ground into which you had to relieve yourself.

Why was he having this dream again? What did it mean? That his subconscious didn’t believe he was out of prison? That his mind understood things on a higher plane: he was still not out of prison?

He took a long, almost unbearably hot shower. Then he got into one of the hotel’s thick white cotton robes (“Hôtel Raphaël Paris” stitched in gold on the breast), settled into one of the suite’s chaises longues, and began to make telephone calls. As he spoke-his French, slightly British-accented, was impeccable-he idly combed his damp hair straight back.

He’d flown into Orly from Geneva’s Cointrin Airport, on a false passport provided by Dyson’s staff. Travel within the European Economic Community had become remarkably casual since he’d been locked away. No one gave his Swiss passport so much as a passing glance. But however Dyson’s people had procured the passport, he didn’t trust it. If it was forged, was the forgery top-notch? Was the forger an informer for the Swiss authorities? If it was a legitimate passport, what if it had been flagged as missing? If someone in the Swiss government had been paid off, how secure was that transaction?

Dyson had offered to supply a full set of the documents he’d need-passports, driver’s licenses, credit cards-but he’d politely turned down the offer. Dyson-supplied paper was a sheep’s bell: if he chose, Dyson could keep close tabs on his whereabouts.

Until he made contact with a professional forger, he needed to create a plausible identity from scratch. Things had gotten more complicated in the last five or six years. Passports were more difficult to forge; you could no longer rent a car with cash. The emergence of worldwide terrorism had spurred the airlines to impose random security checks of checked and carry-on baggage on transatlantic flights. It was a much more suspicious world. Also, he didn’t dare acquire all of his documentation in one place, from one source. He would have to travel to a number of countries in the next few days.

He had reserved suite 510 at the Raphaël, on Avenue Kléber in the 16th Arrondissement, a luxurious and discreet place. He had never stayed here before (he would never be so careless) but had heard of it from acquaintances. The suite was immense by Parisian standards, with a large sitting room, and cost a fortune, but he was spending Dyson’s money, after all, not his own. And it was important to cultivate the right sort of appearances.

He had money enough to last for a while, U.S. dollars, Swiss and French francs. The first payment from Dyson had already been transferred from a bank in Panama.

He needed clothes. All he had were the suit and shoes he’d bought off the rack at Lanvin, on Geneva’s Rue du Rhône. He would have to pick up a selection of shirts from Sulka, a few pairs of shoes from John Lobb, and a couple of conservative businessman’s suits at Cifonelli or Marcel Lassance.

All of this would have to be done in a matter of hours, for there was even more important business to conduct.

An hour later he was sitting in the spare, inelegant showroom of a microwave-communications firm on the sixth floor of a building on Boulevard de Strasbourg, in the 10th Arrondissement. The company did business with corporations, news organizations, and anyone who required the use of a satellite-linked telephone.

The company’s director, M. Gilbert Trémaud, treated Baumann with the utmost deference: the British gentleman traveled widely in the Third World and needed an Inmarsat-M- and Comsat-compatible phone.

“The most compact model I have,” Mr. Trémaud explained in fluent English, “is an MLink-5000, about one-fifth the size of most other portable satellite telephones. With battery, it weighs thirteen kilos. Eighteen inches long, fourteen inches wide, and five inches thick. It’s extremely portable, highly reliable, and glitch-free.” He brought it out of a locked display case. It looked like an aluminum briefcase.

Baumann popped the clasp. It opened like a book. “The antenna-?”

“A flat-plate array antenna,” Trémaud said. “The days of the parabolic antenna are over, thankfully. Beam-width is much broader, which means aiming accuracy is much less crucial.”

“I don’t see it,” Baumann said.

Trémaud touched the lid. “This is the antenna,” he said, and watched his visitor smile.

“Very convenient,” Baumann said.

“Yes, it is,” Trémaud agreed. “You can use it in an apartment or hotel room quite easily. Just sit it on the windowsill, flip the top open, and it’s deployed. The signal-strength meter helps you adjust the angle. The unit will compute the azimuth for you. Do you know where you’ll be using it?”

Baumann thought for a moment. “Why do you ask?”

“There are four satellites in use now. Depending upon where you are, you will transmit via any of the four. If you’re in Moscow, for example, make sure your hotel room faces west. But if you’re, say, in-”

“How quickly can I get it?”

“You can buy it today, if you wish. I have three in stock. But you cannot take it with you yet.”

“Why not?”

“These units are very strictly controlled. First, you must apply for an identification number, which will serve as your telephone number. The application takes three days at least to go through-”

“That’s impossible,” Baumann said. “I’m leaving tonight.”

“Tonight?” Trémaud exclaimed. “But there’s simply no way!”

“I’ll buy it without an identification number.”

Trémaud shrugged, spread his palms, and widened his eyes. “If I could do that, sir, I would do so gladly. But I must enter an identification number in the computer next to the serial number of each unit I sell. Otherwise the computer will not release it from inventory.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Baumann said quietly. He took an envelope from his breast pocket and began counting out thousand-franc notes. “I am in a difficult position, because I need to have this immediately. I am prepared to pay you”-he continued to count out the bills-“lavishly… for your attention to this matter. There are ways to circumvent foolish restrictions such as this, are there not?”

Trémaud watched as Baumann counted out the rest of the cash. Then he pulled the pile toward himself and counted them again. Finally he looked up at Baumann and swallowed hard. His throat was dry.

“Yes, sir,” he said with a slight nod of his head. “There are ways.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Alexander Pappas had been retired from the FBI almost a year, but he was one of the least retired retired people Sarah knew. He had been her boss when she first moved to the Boston office, before Lockerbie, and had become a good friend, then mentor. There was sort of a father-daughter thing between them, yes, but Alex Pappas felt strongly about women getting ahead in the Bureau. He seemed to have made up his mind that of all the women in the Boston office, Sarah Cahill was the one who most deserved his support. The two had become close when Sarah’s marriage was breaking up and she needed someone to talk to; Pappas became an adviser, father confessor, sounding board. Sarah sometimes felt he’d saved her sanity.

There was another kind of bond as well: both had worked major terrorism cases. In March 1977, when Pappas was assigned to the Counterterrorism Section in the Washington metropolitan field office, a religious sect calling themselves the Hanafi Muslims seized three buildings in Washington. They took 139 hostages and threatened to kill them if their demands weren’t met, chiefly vengeance against a rival sect. The FBI and the local police surrounded the buildings but had little success until Pappas managed to convince the Hanafis to surrender without violence. Which was fortunate, because as Pappas later explained it to Sarah, the Justice Department had made it clear to the FBI that force was not to be used under any circumstances.

And then, at the end of his career, he was called to New York to help investigate the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, when an explosion in the parking garage beneath one of the twin towers killed six and injured a thousand. Although he repeatedly downplayed his role in the effort whenever discussing the Trade Center matter, and rarely talked about it, Sarah knew that Pappas was far more central than he let on.

He was content to let others grab the credit. “Look,” he once explained to Sarah, “for the younger guys this was a CTM-a Career-Threatening Moment. Make or break. What the hell did I need the credit for? I was an old man about to get out of there.” Then he added, with a wicked cackle: “Now, if this had been twenty years earlier, you’d have read my goddam name all over Newsday and the Times, believe me.”

Pappas was a widower who lived in a small, comfortable house in Brookline, near Boston. Once a month or so, he’d invite Sarah and Jared over for a home-cooked dinner. He was an excellent cook. Jared loved dinners at Pappas’s house and was fond of the old man.

Pappas greeted them at the door by reaching down to give Jared a hug and-his usual joke-pretending to try to lift Jared into the air. “I can’t do it!” he wheezed. “You’re too heavy!”

“You’re not strong enough!” Jared replied delightedly. “You’re too old!”

“Right you are, young man,” he said, giving Sarah a kiss on the cheek.

He was a large man, large-boned and thick around the middle. He was sixty-seven and looked at least that, with a round, jowly face, rheumy brown eyes, a full head of silver hair, and oversized ears.

The entire house smelled wonderfully of garlic and tomatoes. “Lasagna,” he announced. He asked Jared: “You ever have Greek lasagna?”

“No,” Jared said dubiously.

He tousled Jared’s hair. “Greek lasagna is called spanakopita. I made that for you guys once, didn’t I?”

Jared shook his head.

“I didn’t? What’s wrong with me? Next time. My wife, Anastasia, made the best spanakopita you ever had.”

“I never had it,” Jared said.

“Don’t be a wiseacre. Now, come here. I’ve got something to show you.”

“I want to play with the Victrola in the basement,” Jared said, running ahead toward the basement steps.

“Later. This is more interesting, I promise you,” Pappas said. “All right? All right?” He produced a small, flat package wrapped in silver paper and handed it to Jared.

“A baseball card!” he squealed.

“No, it’s not,” Pappas said solemnly.

“Yes it is,” Jared replied, just as solemnly, carefully tearing the package open. “All right! Awesome!” He held the baseball card up for Sarah to see and explained, “It’s a Reggie Jackson rookie. This is worth, like, thirty or forty dollars.”

“Oh, God, Alex,” Sarah scolded. “You shouldn’t do that.”

Pappas beamed. “Now, if we’re going to eat anytime within the next ten hours, Jared’s going to have to help me make the salad. Come on.”

Jared stuck out his tongue but followed Pappas into the kitchen eagerly. They talked baseball. “The greatest player who ever was,” Pappas rumbled, “was the Babe.”

Jared, who was not actually helping make the salad but was instead watching Pappas slice cucumbers, replied with exasperation: “He was a big, slow white guy.”

“Excuse me?” Pappas said incredulously and put down the paring knife. “Excuse me? Babe Ruth stole seventeen bases twice in his career. And they didn’t even run much back in the twenties. In those days, there were hardly any stolen bases.”

“Who had more home runs?” Jared said.

“Sure, Aaron did, but over a much longer period of time. Babe Ruth’s career was shorter than Aaron’s, for one thing. The Babe wasn’t even a full-time hitter-for the first six years of his career, he split his time between pitching and playing outfield, Jared.”

Jared hesitated, fixed Pappas with a long stare. “The best was Willie Mays.”

“Oh, so you’re dumping Hank Aaron now.”

“Mays was one of the greatest fielders ever. And Ruth had an advantage-the ballparks in the nineteen-twenties were smaller.”

“Oh, for God’s sake-” Pappas began.

“Boys,” Sarah interrupted. “If we don’t eat, I’m going to pass out and Jared’s going to have to hitchhike home.”

Jared finished his supper quickly and disappeared downstairs to the basement to play with Pappas’s ancient Victrola. Sarah and Pappas, sitting at the table and poking at the remains of the cannolis, could hear the distant ghost strains of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.

They talked for a while about the darkroom Pappas was building in the basement, about the adult-education course he was taking in black-and-white photography. Sarah ran the details of the Valerie Santoro murder by him, mentioning the database search and the still-unclear involvement of a banker named Warren Elkind.

“I seriously doubt,” she said, “that the head of the Manhattan Bank killed Valerie.”

“Why? Rich people don’t murder?”

“Come on. There’s something more to this.”

“There always is, kid. Always is. When someone decides to become an FBI informant, he or she’s taking a chance.”

“Sure, but…”

“You know the pay’s the same whether you develop an asset or not.”

“My job is to protect the source-”

“Sarah, if you really want to protect a source, you’ll never use her information, and what good is that? Look, always go with your gut instinct. You’re suspicious about your informant’s murder, don’t leave it to the locals. See if the answering-machine tape turns up anything. Whether it’s the Mob or your banker, you’ll know soon enough. Speaking of the Mob, you still seeing that Italian guy?”

Sarah gave him a blank stare and said in mock indignation: “Is that supposed to be funny? Do all Italians belong to the Mafia?”

“Yeah, and all Greeks have souvlaki stands,” Pappas replied. “What’s his name again-Angelo?”

“Andrew,” Sarah said, “and he’s history.”

“He was a nice-looking guy.”

“Not my type.”

“Not potential father material?”

“Alex, he’d pretend Jared wasn’t even there. He couldn’t deal with the fact that I had a son.”

“You probably won’t believe me when I tell you you’ll find the right kind of guy-for you as well as for Jared. You’re the one who’s got to fall in love with him. Jared-Jared’ll come around.”

“You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

Pappas nodded. “It’ll happen. Plus, whoever you get serious about is going to have to pass Jared’s scrutiny, and he’s an excellent judge of character. Gotta be-he likes me, doesn’t he? So don’t worry so much. It’ll happen.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Within hours after Edwin Chu and George Frechette, the NSA cryptanalysts, received the encrypted fragment of telephone conversation captured by a Rhyolite spy satellite above Switzerland, Edwin Chu broke the code.

Actually, the NSA’s Cray supercomputers, using all available analytical skills, including several cryptanalytic techniques unknown outside the agency, broke it. But Edwin Chu had hovered over the computer and had done what he could to help-sort of a binary backseat driver.

The National Security Agency is always interested in new encryption schemes, so the work Chu did with the Cray late that night and into the early morning wasn’t purely to satisfy his own curiosity.

But that was a large part of it.

It wasn’t easy. In fact, had Chu been more senior and had more clout, cracking the code would have taken less than an hour, rather than eight hours. He’d wanted to use the latest generation of Cray supercomputers, but had to settle instead for an older Cray.

“I was sort of hoping this would be RC-4,” he explained to Frechette, referring to a commercially available encryption package. The only cryptographic software that NSA permitted to be exported out of the United States used algorithms of a certain length, specifically 40-bit. The best-known of these software packages were RC-2 and RC-4, tunable ciphers that were reasonably secure-except from the NSA, which has special-purpose chips designed to crack them in just a few minutes.

“Piece of cake,” he modestly announced to George Frechette, handing him a set of headphones. “There’s supposed to be this new crypto firm in Zurich that’s been making new secure voice-encryption phones and told the Agency to go fuck off.”

“Good for them,” Frechette murmured. Unknown encryption schemes paid their mortgages.

“I think this is from those guys. Company was founded by some Russian émigré, an encryption specialist, used to be in the KGB’s Eighth Directorate.” The Eighth Chief Directorate of the former KGB was responsible for the security of all Soviet cipher communications. “Guy was one of their most advanced encryption people. A real big swinging dick. Got fed up with the pathetic level of Soviet technology, and then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the money dried up. Couldn’t produce his most advanced designs. So he went capitalist.”

“Huh.”

Chu explained that the Russian had developed his own encryption algorithm some years back, while still working for the KGB. The KGB, of course, hadn’t let him publish it in a mathematical journal. When he went private, the Russian kept it closely held.

This was his error.

One of the great paradoxes of the crypto world is that the more secret you keep a piece of cryptographic software, the less secure it will be. Unless you make an algorithm widely available to hackers around the world, you’ll never become aware of the hidden flaws it may contain.

In this instance, Chu explained, the algorithm depended upon the intractability of a complicated inverse polynomial operation-which the NSA had solved two years ago. The creator likely didn’t know this, nor that the NSA had a lot of partial solutions precomputed and stored in fast memory, enabling Chu to take the complicated polynomials and reduce them to a set of simpler polynomials.

In short, it hadn’t been easy to crack, but between the NSA’s high-powered research and its vast array of the latest computers, it had been crackable.

“Luckily we got a decent hunk of the signal, enough to work on,” Edwin Chu said. “Have a listen.”

George Frechette looked up, blinking owlishly at Chu. “These guys Americans?”

“Voice One sounds American. Voice Two is foreign, like Swiss or German or Dutch or something, I can’t be sure.”

“So what do you want to do with this?”

“Get it transcribed and inputted and out of our hands, buddy. Let someone else worry about it. As for me”-he glanced at his watch-“it’s Big Mac time.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

At a hardware store near the Etoile, Baumann purchased an assortment of tools, and at the Brentano’s on Avenue de l’Opéra, he picked up two identical red-vinyl-jacketed Webster’s pocket dictionaries to use for sending encoded messages. On a brief shopping trip in the 8th Arrondissement, he bought several very good suits and shirts, off the rack but well made, along with an assortment of ties, several pairs of English shoes, an expensive leather attaché case, and a few other accessories.

Then he returned to the Raphaël. Although it was not even noon, the dark, English-style oak-paneled bar was already doing a good business. At a small table, he lingered over a café express, going through a stack of American business magazines and newspapers-Forbes, Fortune, Barron’s, and others. From time to time he looked up and watched the clientele come and go.

It was not long before he noticed a man in his late thirties, an American businessman, from the look of him. Baumann overheard him having a conversation with a man at an adjoining table who appeared to be a junior associate. The first businessman, whose neatly combed dark hair was salted with gray, was complaining to the other that the hotel had failed to deliver his Wall Street Journal to his room with breakfast this morning, though he had made a specific request.

The stroke of good fortune came when the businessman was called by his last name by a waiter, who brought a telephone to his table and plugged it into a wall jack. Once he’d finished his apparently urgent telephone call, the two Americans hastened into the lobby. There the junior associate took a seat while his friend got into the elevator.

Just before the elevator door closed, Baumann slipped into the cabin. The businessman pressed the button for the seventh floor; Baumann pressed the same button again, unnecessarily, and then smiled awkwardly at his own clumsiness. The businessman, evidently in a rush, did not return the smile.

Baumann followed the American down the corridor. The man stopped at room 712, and Baumann continued on, disappearing around a turn. From that vantage point, unseen, he watched the businessman enter the room and emerge a few seconds later, wearing a tan gabardine raincoat and carrying a collapsible umbrella, and stride quickly toward the elevator.

Baumann couldn’t be sure, of course, but given the time-a few minutes before one in the afternoon-the odds were good that the two Americans were going to a lunch meeting. This was, he knew, a Parisian tradition; such lunches could go on for two hours or more.

Baumann hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the American’s hotel-room door and, wearing latex gloves, set to work at once. Although room 712 was considerably smaller than his own suite, the basic amenities, including the safe in an armoire near the king-size bed, were, as he expected, the same.

The room safe, as in all hotel rooms Baumann had ever stayed in, was an amateurish affair, fit mainly for discouraging a larcenous maid from stealing a camera or a wallet full of cash. It was of the type commonly found in the better hotel rooms: a small, heavy, concrete-lined steel box, extremely difficult (though not impossible) to lift.

You punched in a series of numbers of your own choosing into a keypad on the front of the box; the numbers would appear in a liquid-crystal readout; and then when you hit the * key or some such, the locking mechanism would be electronically activated.

He inserted a small hex wrench into the hole in the safe’s face, then slid the plate back. That was all it took to reveal the ordinary keyed lock, which required two keys. After a minute or so of grappling with his improvised lock picks, the set of ordinary household tools he’d purchased at the hardware store a few hours earlier, the lock yielded, and the safe popped open.

As was usual with such electronic devices, the safe drew its power from batteries-in this case, two AA batteries-which powered the readout and the locking mechanism. The batteries often went dead and had to be replaced. Or the hotel guest would forget the combination he had himself set. Thus, the manual override mechanism that enabled Baumann to open the safe so easily.

It was there, of course. Whereas Europeans usually carry their vital documents on their person while traveling, Americans tend not to. Mr. Robinson-Mr. Sumner Charles Robinson, in full-had left his passport, along with a good supply of American Express traveler’s checks and a small pile of American currency.

Baumann pocketed the passport, then quickly counted the cash (two hundred and twenty dollars) and the traveler’s checks (fifteen hundred dollars). For a moment he considered taking the cash and checks, then decided against it. When Mr. Sumner C. Robinson returned late this afternoon or this evening, he might (or might not) open the safe and might (or might not) discover his passport missing. If he did, he’d realize with great relief that his cash and traveler’s checks were still there, and he’d probably think that he’d simply misplaced the passport somewhere.

It was preposterous to imagine that a thief would steal his passport and not his cash. Even after searching the room, the pockets of his clothing, and his luggage, and not finding his passport, he might not even do so much as inform the hotel management of the loss. Let alone the municipal police. Taking the cash was simply not worth it.

Martin Lomax, Malcolm Dyson’s aide-de-camp, picked up the phone and called the company’s Zug, Switzerland, office on a secure telephone to check that all the financial arrangements had been done, and that Baumann’s payment had been transferred to the bank in Panama. Lomax had called the Zug office three days in a row, because he was a thorough man, and his boss did not like the slightest detail to be overlooked.

Moreover, Dyson was highly suspicious of the intelligence capabilities of the U.S. government and had instructed Lomax never to speak of the upcoming event on anything but a secure telephone. And not just any secure telephone, because Dyson had not been born yesterday and he knew that virtually all firms that sold encrypted phones-including the famous Crypto, A.G., of Zurich-sold their encryption schemes to the NSA and GCHQ. So there was really no such thing as a truly secure phone anymore, unless you were canny about it.

But Dyson had not purchased his phones from any of these companies. A Russian émigré in Geneva had let it be known that he was in need of financing for his new, start-up venture, a secure-communications company. The Russian, an encryption specialist, had worked for the KGB in the bad old days. Dyson had provided the seed money, and the Russian’s company was launched. Its first prototype secure phone went to Dyson. And no encryption schemes were sold or given to the NSA or GCHQ. These phones were truly secure, truly unbreakable. Only on these phones would Dyson and his associates talk openly.

Baumann returned to his own room and, for the remainder of the afternoon, made notes.

Malcolm Dyson’s undertaking was indeed brilliant, but the more he thought it through, the more holes emerged. Dyson had made quite a few assumptions that might be false. Also, the billionaire lacked a fundamental working knowledge of the particulars of the site, the security precautions and vulnerabilities, and this was crucial. Dyson underestimated the risk that Baumann would be either caught or killed. But the devil, as they say, is in the details, and Baumann did not intend to overlook a detail.

By the time the bellboy knocked on his door to deliver the suits on hangers, the boxes of shoes, and the rest of the clothing he had purchased that morning, Baumann had sketched out a diagram of action-very rough, but a workable plan, he felt sure. Then he got dressed and went out for a walk.

Stopping into a tabac, he bought a carte de téléphone, the plastic card with a magnetized strip issued by France Telecom, which would allow him to place several international calls from any public phone booth. He found one in the basement of a café and, after debating this next step for a few moments, placed a call to New Haven, Connecticut. Using the address he’d copied down from the slip accompanying Sumner Robinson’s traveler’s checks, he obtained Robinson’s home number from directory assistance.

A woman’s voice answered. It was late in the evening there, and at first she seemed startled, as if awakened by the call.

“Is that Mrs. Robinson?” Baumann inquired in a plummy, grand-public-school, Sloane Ranger British accent. “Name’s Nigel Clarke, calling from Paris.” He spoke, as someone once said, as if he had the Elgin Marbles in his mouth.

The woman confirmed she was Sumner Robinson’s wife and asked immediately whether everything was all right with her husband.

“Oh, my Lord, not to worry,” Baumann went on. “The thing of it is, I found your husband’s passport, in a cab, of all places-”

He listened to her for a moment and went on, “Got your number from directory assistance. But tell your husband he shouldn’t worry-I have it here, safe and sound. Tell me what to do, how to get it to him-” He listened again.

“Quite right,” he said, “at Charles de Gaulle airport.” Baumann’s voice was jolly, though his eyes were steely-cold. He heard someone clamber down the stairs. A young woman, exhaling a cumulus cloud of cigarette smoke, saw he was using the telephone and flashed him a look of irritation. He gave her a level, gray, warning stare; she flushed, threw her cigarette to the floor, and went back up the stairs.

“Oh, not leaving Paris till the end of the week, is he? Brilliant… Right, well, the problem is that I’m getting on a plane back to London in just a few seconds, you see, and-oh, damn it all, that’s the final boarding call, I’m afraid I will have to run-but if you’ll give me an address I’ll send it off by DHL or some other overnight service the very instant I get to my house.” He pronounced it “hice.” He chuckled pleasantly while the woman burbled her gratitude for his generosity. “Heavens, no, I wouldn’t hear of it. Shouldn’t cost more than a few pounds anyway.” He pronounced it “pineds.”

He had done the right thing, he knew. True, the American businessman might not have reported his passport lost or stolen and applied to the American embassy for a replacement. Now, however, his wife would call him at the hotel, tell him that his passport had been recovered by a nice Englishman at Charles de Gaulle Airport, but not to worry, Mr. Cooke or Clarke or whatever his name was going to send the passport by express mail right away.

Sumner Robinson would wonder how his passport ended up in a cab. Perhaps he’d wonder whether he’d put it into his safe after all. In any case, he would not report the passport lost or stolen today or even tomorrow-since it would be on its way back to him in a matter of hours. The friendly Brit would certainly get around to sending it the next day: why the hell else would he have called New Haven, after all?

The passport would be valid at least three full days. Perhaps even more, though Baumann would never take the chance.

He hung up the receiver and mounted the stairs to the street level. “The phone’s all yours,” he told the young woman who had been waiting to use the phone, giving her a cordial smile and the tiniest wink.

Baumann had dinner alone at the hotel. By the time dinner was over, a large carton had been delivered to his room containing the MLink-5000. He unpacked it, read through the operating instructions, ran it through its paces. Turning the thumbscrews on the back panel, he pulled out the handset, then flipped open the unit’s top, adjusted the angle of elevation, and placed two calls.

The first was to a bank in Panama City, which confirmed that the first payment had been made by Dyson.

The second was to Dyson’s private telephone line. “The job has begun,” he told his employer curtly, and hung up.

In the last decade it has become considerably more difficult to forge an American passport. Not impossible, of course: to a skilled forger, nothing is impossible. But Baumann, familiar though he was with the rudiments, was hardly a professional forger. That he left to others.

In a day or so he’d contact a forger he knew and trusted. But in the meantime, he’d have to do his best, in the six hours until he had to arrive at Charles de Gaulle for his early-morning commuter flight to Amsterdam.

He examined Sumner Robinson’s passport closely. The days when one could just scissor out the original owner’s photograph and paste in one’s own were long gone. Now, the key page of the U.S. passport, which contained photo and identifying information, was laminated with a clear plastic oversheet, a “counterfoil,” designed as a security feature. Another security feature was the emblem of an American bald eagle, taken from the Great Seal of the United States, which grasped in its talons the arrows of war and the olive branch of peace. The eagle, which also appeared in gold ink on the front of the passport, was printed on the counterfoil in green ink, slightly overlapping the passport holder’s photograph.

Lost in concentration, Baumann sucked at his front teeth. He knew the U.S. State Department had spent a fortune on special, forge-proof passport paper manufactured by a company called Portal’s. Yet the security of the passport actually hinged on a single, cheap piece of clear plastic tape.

He called down to the hotel’s front desk, told the clerk he urgently needed an electric typewriter to prepare a contract. Would the clerk send one up to his room? Certainly, he was told, although it would take a few minutes to open the office containing the typewriters; it was closed for the evening.

A few blocks from the hotel he located a photocopy-and-printing shop that was open all night, blazing with fluorescent light. He instructed the clerk to photocopy and reduce the eagle image on the front of the passport, explaining offhandedly that he needed to put an American eagle on the front of a three-ring binder for a presentation to a major French client early in the morning. No laws against that. Then, on a Canon 500 color laser copier, the eagle was reproduced onto a sheet of clear crack-and-peel label stock in green ink. Baumann had several copies made: it was easy to make mistakes. After a brief stop at a coin-operated automated photo booth, he returned to the Raphaël.

There he meticulously removed the old counterfoil laminate from the passport, careful not to rip too much of the paper underneath. With an X-Acto knife, he removed Robinson’s photograph and replaced it with his own. Inserting the sheet of clear plastic label stock into the electric typewriter provided by the hotel, he pecked out the exact same biographical data that had appeared on Robinson’s passport and had been lifted off with the old laminate.

By three o’clock in the morning, he was satisfied with the result. Only the closest inspection would reveal that the passport had been dummied up. And departing from Paris’s busy Charles de Gaulle Airport as he was, on a crowded commuter flight, he knew the French inspectors would scarcely have time for even the most cursory of glimpses at this American businessman’s passport.

He ran a steaming-hot bath and soaked in it for a long time while he meditated. Then he dozed for about two hours, arose, dressed, and finished packing his Louis Vuitton suitcase.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Prince of Darkness had begun.

Dyson put down the telephone and felt a shiver of anticipation. He had hired the best (he hired only the best), and this savant of the terrorist netherworld would do his thing, and in precisely two weeks the deed would be done.

He pressed a button on his desk phone to summon his aide-de-camp, Martin Lomax.

Dyson & Company A.G.’s corporate headquarters building on the Rue du Rhône in Geneva was a glass cube that, during the day, reflected the buildings around it. It was a stealth office building: depending on the time of day and the angle from which you looked, the glass-walled box disappeared. At night it lit up a fierce yellow-white as Dyson’s traders worked, barking out orders halfway around the world.

Dyson’s office was on the top floor, southwest corner. It was entirely white: white leather sofas, white wall-to-wall carpet, white fabric covering the interior walls. Even his massive, irregularly shaped desktop had been hewn from an immense vein of white Carrara marble.

Only the artwork, here tastefully sparse, provided splashes of color. There was Rubens’s picture of three women, Virtue, seized from a rich man during the Second World War. A Van Dyck (Holy Family with St. Anne and an Angel) had disappeared some time ago in Italy, only to reemerge at Dyson & Company A.G. Holbein’s St. Catherine had made its way from a stash in East Germany soon after the Wall fell.

To Dyson, the acquisition of old masters on the black market was one of his greatest post-exile pleasures. It was liberation from legal convention, a way of thumbing his nose at the rest of the world, a wonderfully illicit satisfaction. Let the others buy their second-tier stuff through buying agents with catalogues raisonnés, over seafood at Wilton’s in Bury Street, London, where the dealers gathered like flies. His pictures, many of them the world’s greatest, had been plied off their stretchers and hidden in a table leg or smuggled in via diplomatic pouch.

The art market reminded Dyson of Wall Street, where the rules applied only when you weren’t a member of the club. The philanthropist Norton Simon had once admitted he owned a bronze of the god Shiva smuggled from India. In fact, most of the Asian art he bought was smuggled. Even Boston’s august Museum of Fine Arts had once been caught red-handed with a stolen Raphael that the museum director claimed he had bought in Genoa.

Embittered was not how Dyson thought of himself. He was liberated. The requirements of vengeance clarified everything.

Malcolm Dyson had been labeled quite a few things before he escaped the clutches of U.S. law enforcement after the great insider-trading scandal, but the most popular seemed to be “the largest tax evader in the nation’s history.” This was not true. He personally knew of several famous, even legendary, titans of business, household names, who had evaded far more taxes than he’d ever tried to do.

In any case, he had been indicted on no fewer than fifty-one counts of tax evasion, tax fraud, and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. All his U.S. assets were frozen. There were extensive negotiations with the SEC and the Justice Department. He was looking at several years in prison even in the best of circumstances, and that was unacceptable. Had his former friend Warren Elkind not cooperated with the Justice Department to entrap him, none of this would have happened. They’d never have had the proof necessary to indict.

While the negotiations dragged on, Dyson made a business trip to Switzerland with his wife, Alexandra. They decided not to return. The Swiss government refused all American requests to extradite him. Their logic was unimpeachable: under Swiss law, Dyson had been charged with “fiscal violations,” which were not extraditable offenses. Was it a coincidence that Dyson also happened to be the largest corporate taxpayer in Switzerland?

Shortly afterward, he went to the bureau of vital statistics in Madrid, took an oath to the Spanish king, and renounced his U.S. citizenship. Now a citizen of Spain resident in Geneva, he never traveled by commercial airliner, because he feared bounty hunters. A very rich man in his position was easy prey. They would kidnap you and then demand a billion dollars or else they’d turn you over to the U.S. government. The U.S. Marshals Service was always trying to ensnare him. He traveled only by private jet.

Now, however, he didn’t particularly care whether the bounty hunters came after him. The light had gone out of his life. They had murdered his wife and daughter, and they had put him in a wheelchair, and they would pay dearly.

Dyson sat at his immense desk in his electric wheelchair, a small bald man with liver-spotted head and liver-spotted hands and eyes of gray steel, smoking a Macanudo. The door opened, and Martin Lomax entered. Tall, thin, balding, Lomax was colorless and faithful.

Lomax sat in his customary white-upholstered chair beside the desk and drew his ballpoint pen and pad of paper like a gun from a holster.

“I want to make sure,” Dyson said methodically to his assistant, “that we are entirely out of the stock market.”

Lomax looked up, puzzled, realizing that this was a question, not an instruction. He glanced at his wristwatch to check the date. “Yes,” he said, “we are. As of three days ago, actually.”

“And the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank? No change in its policy?”

“Correct. The Fed will no longer bail out banks. Our intelligence is good on this. Washington calls it ‘banking reform’-let the large depositors go down when a bank fails. Banks are getting too fast and loose anyway. Teach ’em a lesson.”

“All right.” Dyson whirred his wheelchair to one side and peered sadly out the floor-to-ceiling window at the rain. “Because our Prince of Darkness has gone to work.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Paul O. Morrison, deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, hurtled down a narrow corridor toward a conference room where some twenty-five people had been hastily assembled. In one hand was a manila folder containing a small stack of computer printouts, in the other a half-full mug of cold black coffee that sloshed onto the gray wall-to-wall carpeting as he ran.

He entered the conference room and could immediately sense the tension. Muttering an apology for his tardiness, he set down his mug on the large, gleaming mahogany table and looked around with a worried expression.

Morrison was small and thin, with heavy black-framed glasses and a sallow complexion. Forgoing any opening statement-they knew why they were here-he launched right in: “Um, I’ve got the complete transcript here.”

He handed the pile of printouts to the director of the Counterterrorism Center, a whippet-thin, athletic-looking, squash-playing man in his mid-fifties, Hoyt Phillips (Yale ’61), who took one and passed it on. Morrison waited as the transcripts made their way around the table.

The reaction was swift yet subdued: murmurings of amazement, the occasional whisper, and then a grave silence. He waited, his stomach queasy with acid, until everyone had finished reading.

The Counterterrorism Center-the existence of which was until recently one of the CIA’s closely held secrets-was founded in 1986 to deal with the government’s embarrassing inability to handle the steadily worsening plague of international terrorism.

The idea behind the center was simple: to give the dozen or so agencies in the U.S. government concerned with terrorism-from the FBI to the State Department, from the Pentagon to the Secret Service-one centralized location into which intelligence from around the world could be funneled, and where all terrorism-fighting efforts could be coordinated.

For years the CIA had resisted the notion. It ran against the very culture of the Agency, whose gentlemen spies much preferred fighting the Soviet menace to soiling their hands with terrorists.

Also, the CIA’s leadership never much liked the idea of sharing “product” with its siblings in the intelligence community. And in order for such a center to work, it would have to allow collectors-the people in the field who gather the information-to mingle with the analysts. That simply had never been done. The CIA almost always keeps a Chinese Wall between its analysts and its operators, so as not to taint the product. The folks in the trench coats, it was always believed, should do their spying without any sense of the larger picture, or at least without any agenda or bias. Leave the political bias to the desk jockeys.

But Director of Central Intelligence William Casey did not share this concern. He ordered the establishment of an interagency “fusion center” where specially chosen representatives of the intelligence community-eighteen or nineteen intelligence officers from the NSA, the FBI, INR (the State Department’s intelligence arm), the DIA, and other agencies-are detailed full-time. Although they work at CIA headquarters, their salaries are paid on a nonreimbursable basis by their home departments.

Until the spring of 1994, the twenty-five or so staff members of the center worked in an overcrowded warren of desks and partitions on the sixth floor of the CIA headquarters’ original building. Thereafter, they were located in a more spacious, much more modern area in the new building next door. But it was hardly sleek or impressive; no one who has ever been inside CIA headquarters would call the place sleek.

Anything that happens in the world that is in any way related to terrorism will flash across the computer terminals in the center. Armed with secure communications and other secure links to the NSA and other intelligence agencies, the Counterterrorism Center’s staff are charged with ensuring cooperation among the various agencies, putting out intelligence products (while protecting sources and methods), and quelling the disputes over credit that are so rife in government bureaucracies.

Since the center is a part of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, the director of the center is always an Ops officer; the deputy director is always an analyst from the Intelligence Directorate. For all his athletic prowess, Hoyt Phillips, the director, was a classic Agency burnout case, bored with a career stymied by his own mediocrity, whiling away his time here until retirement.

Deputy Director Paul Morrison effectively ran the center, deftly managing its six sections. Rare though it is for a CIA office, the center’s organizational chart is fairly fluid. There is the Intel staff, who do what is called “target analysis” (evaluating the information collected by CIA and other agencies’ sources), a Reports staff, a Technical Attack group, an Assessment and Information group, an Ops group, and so on.

And there are all sorts of meetings, ranging from the monthly Warning and Forecast meeting, to the bimonthly Interagency Intelligence Committee, to the three-times-a-week 8:45 A.M. staff meeting. This meeting, however, had been called for seven-thirty in the morning, which was the earliest all the staff could be gathered.

It was not yet an emergency, but something close to it.

Paul Morrison had been awakened at four-thirty this morning by a watch officer at the center, who had in turn been given a heads-up by the NSA’s deputy director of the Office of Telecommunications and Computer Services, concerning a SIGINT intercept deserving immediate attention. By the time Morrison arrived at his office in the center, the complete transcripts of the intercepted telephone conversation had been placed on his desk, having been secure-faxed over from NSA.

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TOP SECRET UMBRA

FILE: TCS-1747-322

D/OTCS, DD/OTCS, D/DIRNSA

COMINT intercept decryption. Transcription text complete.

VOICE I:… Mr. Heinrich Fürst/ [First?] has accepted the sales assignment.

VOICE II: He has? Excellent. When [blank] the field office in New York? [blank segment]

VOICE II: [blank segment] target being?

VOICE I: Warren Elkind [word segment blank]… attan Bank including [blank segment]

VOICE II: Oh. Right. Uh, so he’s, he’s serious about this.

VOICE I: He hired a professional.

VOICE II: I don’t doubt that. I’ve seen the guy’s dossier. Probably the smartest [three-second silence]… uh, one alive-

VOICE I:-the stupid ones don’t live-

VOICE II:-know that. But I’m concerned-what if he turns out to be a loose cannon? I mean, he’s hardly, he’s not fully controllable.

VOICE I:-get the job done.

VOICE II: But not traceable?

VOICE I: He’ll be taken care of.

VOICE II: Right. No doubt. But we, couldn’t we still be linked? Bringing down Wall Street-well, you saw what happened with the World Trade Center thing and with Oklahoma City. They didn’t rest until they found the guys. If we’re connected in any way-

VOICE I:-not going to happen. The boss knows what he’s doing.

TOP SECRET UMBRA

“All right,” said Hoyt Phillips, clearing his throat summarily. “There may or may not be something here.”

“Are you and I reading from the same document?” a woman seated across the table from him asked in astonishment. This was Margaret O’Connor, a small, fiery, thirty-four-year-old woman with short brown hair, a face full of freckles, and a surprisingly deep voice. She was the liaison from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Phillips’s thick white eyebrows shot up. “Don’t let’s overreact, now, folks,” he cautioned. “What we’ve got here is a couple of guys talking in a roundabout way-”

“Hoyt-” He was interrupted by a handsome black man in his early forties, wearing a blue suit and horn-rimmed glasses. Noah Willkie, the center’s liaison with the FBI, had been detailed to Langley for the last seven months. “There’s no denying they’re referring to a terrorist-‘probably the smartest one alive’-who’s been hired by someone, presumably their ‘boss.’ And they’re afraid this guy might not be ‘controllable,’ meaning he’s acting as an agent on their behalf, which is why he was hired.”

“Noah,” Phillips explained patiently, “if you’re at all familiar with NSA product, you know you’re always getting static, fragments of phone calls that inevitably sound scarier than they are. For heaven’s sake, some MIT student doing his junior year abroad in Vienna places a call to a buddy of his in London and uses the phrase ‘nuke,’ as in ‘I got nuked last night’-he got tanked on lager-and suddenly that trips an alarm somewhere and we’re all yanked out of bed in the middle of the night.”

Deputy Director Morrison watched his boss in silent frustration, wondering whether Phillips was genuinely unconcerned about the intercept or was simply undermining his deputy for reasons of his own. The director had approved Morrison’s suggestion that the meeting be an hour and a quarter earlier than usual, but then maybe Phillips was just covering his ass. Did he honestly believe this intercept was meaningless? Or was he posturing?

“Uh, Hoyt,” Morrison said gently, “I think this may bear some scrutiny. The transcript discusses a ‘target,’ obviously the Manhattan Bank. They’re talking about getting a ‘job’ done in a nontraceable way. They’re concerned about being linked. They’re talking about ‘bringing down Wall Street’-”

“Meaning what, exactly?” asked the DIA liaison, Wayne Carter.

“I don’t know if that’s a figure of speech or what, frankly,” Morrison admitted. “But they’re comparing it to the Trade Center bomb and Oklahoma City.”

“Do we know who these two are?” Margaret O’Connor asked the NSA liaison, Bob Halpern.

“No, we don’t,” Halpern replied. “The signal caught the attention of some of our cryppies because of its encryption scheme-they’d never seen one like it before.”

“Well, at least we have a name here,” said a CIA Operations officer, Richard Jarvis. “The name of the terrorist, right? Heinrich Fürst? That’s a hell of a lot.”

“It’s a code name,” Morrison replied. “And it doesn’t correspond to any alias or code name in any of our databases.”

“Christ,” someone snapped in disgust.

“German,” Noah Willkie suggested. “Maybe we could check the Stasi archives.” The files of the defunct East German secret intelligence service, Stasi, had been captured after the Berlin Wall had fallen and were now in the possession of the Western services, mostly the German intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND. The documents included information on terrorists who had been supported by the East Germans.

Margaret O’Connor, from State, put a question to the group in general: “So who’s the smartest terrorist alive?”

“Carlos the Jackal,” one of the CIA analysts snickered.

“No, he’s only the sloppiest terrorist alive,” someone else replied with a snort of derision. Carlos, the terrorist of legend-real name Ilich Ramírez Sánchez-had been involved in some of the most horrific acts of terrorism in the 1970s, but despite his fearsome reputation, he was actually a lackadaisical operator overly fond of alcohol and women. He had become enormously overweight, living like a cornered animal in frightened retirement in a drab flat in Damascus. Then in August 1994 the French security service finally snatched him from the Sudan and put him in an underground cell at Le Santé prison in Paris.

“The real question,” said Jarvis, the CIA Operations officer, “is who are the most skilled terrorists we know of whose whereabouts we don’t have a fix on.”

“That’s the problem,” Morrison said quietly. “‘The most skilled terrorists we know of.’ The really good ones-the really elusive, masterful ones-we may not even have dossiers on. And in any case, how do you define ‘terrorist’? Who’s a terrorist? An IRA bomb-maker? Qaddafi? One of the Abus-Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, Abu Ibrahim? Or a country, like Syria?”

“It’s obviously an individual, a male,” O’Connor said. “Someone who’s known to be available for hire. Maybe one of the Agency computer geniuses can have DESIST come up with a list of known terrorists, profile them and all that.” DESIST was the CIA’s cumbersome computer database system that recorded summaries of all terrorist incidents.

“You’re all jumping the gun once again,” Hoyt Phillips said. “You’re all ready to commit some very expensive resources to chasing down a-a will-o’-the-wisp. We still don’t know this is for real.”

There was a long silence, at last broken by Noah Willkie from the FBI: “But do we want to take a chance on being wrong?”

“I’m afraid I have to agree with Noah,” Morrison said to his boss. “We have to proceed as if this is solid.”

Phillips gave a long, exasperated sigh. “If-if-we do, I want this thing contained right here in this room. I don’t want the White House up in arms about this. I don’t want the NSC breathing down my neck.” He shook his head. “Soon as the White House is in on this, the shit hits the fan. Then it’s amateur hour.”

“Well,” Paul Morrison said. “We in this room are the only ones outside the NSA who know about it.”

“Good,” Phillips said. “Let’s keep it that way. The contents of this intercept-and the fact of its very existence-are to stay right here in this room. Nothing, and I mean nothing, gets put on CACTIS.”

CACTIS, which stands for Community Automated Counterterrorism Intelligence System, was a secure communications network: a sophisticated e-mail document system linking the NSA, the CIA, State, the DIA, and the rest of the counterterrorism community. CACTIS had gone on-line in April 1994, replacing the old system, known as FLASHBOARD. Naturally, there is a complete “air gap” between CACTIS and the CIA’s internal database, so that the CIA’s most sensitive intelligence archives cannot be penetrated from outside the building.

Phillips went on: “I’m still not persuaded we’ve got anything solid to worry about. When I am, I’ll be more than happy to set up a working group or something. Until then, I’m not prepared to dump a lot of resources into this.” He clasped his hands together. “No further action,” he announced.

“Since when did you take over the terrorism account?” the NSA liaison, Bob Halpern, inquired acidly.

“You know exactly what I’m saying, Bob,” Phillips said. “I don’t want to be getting a call every five minutes from some chucklehead at NSC who doesn’t know an AK-47 from a popsicle stick. That means no working groups, no reports to your home agencies. Nothing. Put nothing in writing. Nothing, is that clear?” He rose. “Let’s not make a mountain out of the proverbial molehill, okay?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

An hour or so after the conclusion of the morning staff meeting at which the NSA telephone intercepts were discussed, Special Agent Noah Willkie, the FBI man assigned to the Counterterrorism Center, was standing in the enclosed courtyard between the new and old CIA buildings, smoking a Camel Light. He heard someone call his name, and was surprised to see Paul Morrison, the center’s deputy director, approaching him. Morrison did not smoke; what was he doing out here?

“Noah,” the deputy director said, “I liked your idea about the Stasi archives.”

“The Stasi-oh, right, thanks,” Willkie said fuzzily, through a mouthful of smoke.

“You seemed to read the transcript the same way I did.”

Noah Willkie furrowed his brow, as if to say, Which way is that?

“In the sense that we could be dealing with a potentially serious act of terrorism here,” Morrison hastily explained. “I also sensed you weren’t in agreement with the director about ignoring the whole thing.”

Willkie took a deep, contemplative drag, then expelled a cloud. “You know what they say: the boss may not always be right, but he’s always the boss.”

Morrison nodded and was silent for a moment. “How’s Duke Taylor doing these days? I haven’t seen him in a hell of a long time.”

Perry “Duke” Taylor was Willkie’s immediate boss at the FBI, a deputy assistant director in the Intelligence Division who was the chief of the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Section.

“Oh, Duke’s fine,” Willkie said. “Same old same old.”

“His son ever get into a college?”

“He’s doing a year at a prep school. Deerfield, I think. Then he’ll try again.”

“Hmm,” Morrison said. “If he’s got any of his father’s genes, he’ll do fine.”

“Hmm,” Willkie agreed. He took another drag and peered curiously at Morrison out of the corner of an eye.

“I bet Duke would share your take on the NSA thing,” Morrison said.

Ah, so that was it, Willkie thought. “He probably would,” Willkie said dryly, “if I showed it to him. But I heard Hoyt.”

“Then again,” Morrison said, “your primary loyalty is to the Bureau.”

“It’s complicated. I’ve also got to abide by Agency procedures.”

“Who said Hoyt represents the Agency?” Morrison said with a chuckle. “There are many different points of view here.”

Willkie furrowed his brow again, as Morrison turned to leave. “Meaning-”

“I’m just saying,” Morrison said with a cryptic half-smile, “that, well, let’s say this lead is legit, and some huge bomb really does go off. Who’s going to get lynched? CIA? I doubt it. If it’s domestic, it’s you guys, right? FBI fucks up. First it’s Waco, then the World Trade Center, then Oklahoma City, and now this. And let’s say the director of the Bureau learns that one of his agents actually knew about it in advance but didn’t say anything…” He shook his head as if unable to comprehend the enormity of the consequences. “Anyway, you’ve got to rely on your best judgment, I guess is what I’m saying.”

During the seven months that Special Agent Noah Willkie had been assigned to the Counterterrorism Center at CIA headquarters in Langley, he rarely went to his old stomping grounds, the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue between Ninth and Tenth streets in Washington. Most of his liaison work could be done by telephone and secure fax. The only reason to visit the Hoover building anymore was to use the gym in the basement, which he never did. He didn’t much miss FBI headquarters, and besides, for the time being, working at CIA-the Pickle Factory, as CIA insiders call the place-was a novel experience.

Unfortunately, little had actually happened during his seven months at the center. The work was dull, routine stuff, bureaucratic procedures and the like. But this morning’s meeting had been different. The NSA intercept intrigued him. Despite the way the center’s director, Hoyt Phillips, was downplaying it, Willkie knew something big was in the works. And that strange encounter with Paul Morrison outside the new headquarters building… what was that all about, anyway? Morrison was obviously urging him to brief Duke Taylor, but why? Was Morrison playing out some power struggle with his boss? Was he hinting that no matter what Hoyt Phillips said, CIA was secretly working the lead, in an attempt to grab credit from FBI and everybody else? Or was Morrison simply trying to use the Bureau to do the risky work, launch an investigation CIA wouldn’t?

Instead of spending his lunch hour jogging around the CIA campus, he made a phone call and then took a quick drive into Washington to meet with his boss, Duke Taylor.

Perry Taylor was around fifty, close to retirement, but you couldn’t tell it from his demeanor. He was a genuine workaholic, driven and exacting. Yet at the same time he was one of the most affable and easygoing people Willkie had ever met.

Handsome in a sort of generic, clean-cut way, Taylor was a man of medium height with short gray hair, small brown eyes, and large wire-rimmed glasses. He’d been married to his high school sweetheart for some thirty years, and the marriage was universally believed to be as close to harmonious as a marriage could be.

But what appeared to be a Norman Rockwell painting on the outside had turned into Hopper. Taylor’s closer friends and colleagues knew that he and his wife, unable to bear children, had adopted a beautiful baby girl who had died of measles at the age of five. Then they adopted a four-year-old boy who grew up to be the heartbreak of their lives, constantly in trouble with the law, hostile far beyond the normal adolescent rebelliousness, addicted to drugs, a bafflement to his amiable suburban parents. Though Taylor talked about his home life from time to time, he never brought his problems to work. Noah Willkie respected that.

Taylor was eating his typically Spartan lunch when Willkie arrived: a salad, a roll, a can of Fresca. He greeted Willkie warmly, offered him a cup of coffee, and made small talk for a while.

Willkie remembered hearing that Hoover, who was none too fond of the idea of black FBI agents, disapproved even more roundly of his people drinking coffee on the job. Once Hoover had been so enraged to see an agent drinking coffee in his office that he transferred the offending agent clear across the country.

While Willkie reported on the morning’s meeting, and then on Paul Morrison’s odd remarks outside headquarters, Taylor nodded thoughtfully. After Willkie had finished, Taylor did not speak for a long while. Willkie noticed for the first time very quiet classical music emanating from a boom-box radio on the windowsill. He looked around at the award plaques on the wall, at the dictionary stand, the FBI ceramic stein with Taylor’s name on it, a coffee mug emblazoned “Are We Having Fun Yet?”

“Well, I guess the first thing is to run the name Heinrich Fürst through the Terrorist Information Database,” Taylor mused. “Through General, too.”

“Right,” Willkie agreed, “but Paul Morrison at the CTC says he’s already done it, and you know how much better their stuff is than ours.”

“They say it’s better,” Taylor said, smiling. “But if we put one of our best searchers on it-Kendall or Wendy, say-maybe we’ll turn up something. Don’t forget, this is just the NSA’s guess at how the name is spelled, based on a transcription of a spoken conversation. There are probably hundreds of different ways of spelling, or transliterating, the same name.”

“I wouldn’t be optimistic.”

“Fair enough. No reason to be. Next, we take the profiles of every known terrorist in the world and find some way of narrowing them down, winnowing out the wrong ones.”

“I think you can eliminate the pure ideologues,” Willkie suggested. “Abu Nidal’s people. Hezbollah. PFLP. Sendero Luminoso.”

Taylor shook his head. “I don’t think it’s so easy, Noah. Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, whatever you want to call them-they may be Maoist, but they contract out to Colombian narcotics traffickers, right?”

Willkie nodded.

“These days, anyone’s for sale. Ideology sometimes doesn’t seem to matter at all. The only terrorists we can eliminate are those who are dead or locked up. And that still leaves the board wide open-what about terrorists we’ve never heard of, going out for the first time?”

“This reference to ‘the smartest one alive’ or whatever,” Willkie objected. “You don’t call a neophyte the smartest one alive. Anyway, who’d hire a neophyte, right? My guess is, it’s someone with a track record. We may not have anything on him-or her-but whoever it is has got to be experienced.”

“Good point,” Taylor conceded. He shrugged. “But that doesn’t help us any. So let’s go about this from the other direction: the target. The Manhattan Bank.”

“If that’s really the target. It may be a target. Or not a target at all.”

“Also true. But what if we run a complete search on the bank and on Elkind? See if there’ve been any threats. Check out any international operations the bank’s involved in. See if Elkind has any enemies. He may have enemies he doesn’t even know about. Call up everything we’ve got.”

“Hey, you’re talking like you expect me to help you out. I already got a full-time job. Remember? You picked me for it.”

“Oh, I don’t mean you, Willkie. We’ve got plenty of people to do stuff like that. But you can keep us plugged in, give us a heads-up if anything comes along of interest. The CIA may not consider this worthy of study, but then, they’re full of shit.” He gave a big, ebullient smile. “Thanks for coming to me with this. I have to admit I won’t exactly be crushed if we catch the asshole before CIA does.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Jared had invited a friend of his, Colin Tolman, for dinner. The two eight-year-olds sat on the living room rug, an assortment of baseball and superhero trading cards spread out around them. The radio was blasting techno-rap. Both of them wore Red Sox caps, backward. The brim of Jared’s hat had been bent into a tube shape. Jared was wearing Diesel jeans and a Phillie Blunts T-shirt. They had their Mighty Morphin Power Rangers backpacks beside them. Both had seen the movie twice and loved it. But eight-year-olds are nothing if not fickle. In a month Mighty Morphins would more than likely be gonzo, dead meat, history, as Jared liked to say.

“Awesome!” Jared shouted as she entered. “Look, Mom, I got a Frank Thomas rookie. That’s worth three-fifty at least!”

“Will you turn that off, or at least down?” she said. “Hi, Colin.”

“Hi, Sarah,” said Colin, a pudgy blond kid. “Sorry. Mrs. Cronin.”

“She wants to be called Ms. Cahill,” Jared said, lowering the volume. “Even I’m not supposed to call her Sarah. Mom, Colin has a whole binder full of SpiderMan and X-Men.”

“Wonderful,” Sarah said. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Colin, you collect baseball cards too?”

“Nah.” Colin smirked. “No one collects baseball cards anymore, except Jared. Everyone else mostly just collects basketball cards or superheroes.”

“I see. How was the last day of school?”

“Jared got thrown out of class,” Colin reported.

“You did? For what?”

“For laughing,” Colin went on, delighted.

“What?” Sarah said.

“Oh, yeah,” Jared said. “You made me, you jerk.”

“I didn’t make you,” Colin said, laughing. “I didn’t make you do anything, dickwad.”

“Hey, watch the language,” Sarah said.

“Get out of here! Tell her what you were doing, dickwad,” Jared said.

“Jared’s always bossing people around,” Colin explained, “like telling them to do their chores and everything. And Mrs. Irwin was asking us about what we thought about what it’s like to be old, and I said I’d love to see Jared a hundred years old in a wheelchair, drooling and everything, and still bossing people around, poking everybody with a cane.”

Sarah sighed, shook her head, didn’t know how to reply. Secretly it pleased her to think of Jared sent to the principal’s office for laughing, of all things, but she also knew that sort of thing shouldn’t be encouraged.

“Can we watch Nickelodeon?” Jared asked.

She looked at her watch. “For fifteen minutes while I get supper ready.”

“Cool,” Jared said.

“Cool, dude,” Colin amended. “What’s on? Salute Your Shorts? Doug? Rug Rats?”

“If it’s Ren and Stimpy, forget it,” Jared said. “I hate Ren and Stimpy.”

Colin gulped air and emitted a loud burp, and then Jared did the same, and both of them cracked up laughing again.

After dinner, Sarah went upstairs to kiss Jared good night. He was lying in bed, holding Huckleberry, the teddy bear, reading the biography of Satchel Paige. He rarely cuddled with his teddy bear anymore; he considered that kid’s stuff.

“Is that a kid’s version?” Sarah asked.

“Grown-up version.” He returned to reading. After a moment, he looked up and asked peevishly, “Yes?”

“I hope I’m not disturbing you, Your Excellency,” Sarah said in mock-dudgeon. “I just came up to say good night.”

“Oh. Good night.” He turned his head to one side to receive a kiss.

Sarah complied. “Didn’t you read this already?”

Jared stared at her blankly for a long time, and then said: “Yes, so?”

“Everything okay with you?”

“Yes,” he said, and turned back to the book.

“Because you’d tell me if everything weren’t okay, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.” Not looking up.

“It’s this weekend, isn’t it?” Sarah asked, suddenly realizing. Saturday was two days away, which meant he spent the day with his father.

Jared kept reading as if he hadn’t heard her.

“You’re worried about Saturday,” she persisted.

He looked up. “No,” he said, his mouth curling in sarcasm. “I’m not ‘worried’ about Saturday.”

“But you’re not looking forward to it.”

He hesitated. “No,” he said in a small voice.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” he said, still more softly.

“Do you not want Daddy to come this weekend? You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, you know.”

“I know. I don’t know. It’s okay. It’s just that…” His voice trailed off. “Why does he act the way he does?”

“Because that’s the way he is.” That meant nothing, it was unhelpful, and they both knew it. “We all have our blind spots, and Daddy-”

“Yeah, I know. That’s the way he is.” He returned to the book and added: “But I hate it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in the business of counterterrorism is deciding what to ignore and what to pursue. You are faced with a vast quantity of intelligence, but most of it is simply noise, static: pillow talk, intercepted telegrams, rumors. Ninety-nine percent of it is useless.

Yet the cost of ignoring the wrong scrap of information may be incalculable. Any intelligence professional who disregards a lead that results in an act of terrorism may be held culpable professionally, not to speak of morally, for the death of a human being-or the death of a hundred thousand.

Duke Taylor’s career had been built upon a number of talents, from his ability to get along with just about anybody, to his sharp (though often hidden) intellect, to his golf skills. Not least among his talents, however, was an instinct, the thing that separated an intelligence bureaucrat from a professional.

And his instinct told him that Noah Willkie was right, and the CIA was wrong: there was a major act of terrorism in the planning.

Shortly after his meeting with Willkie, he summoned two of his brightest lieutenants, Russell Ullman and Christine Vigiani, both of them counterterrorism analysts, and briefed them in on the NSA intercept. Ullman, a broad-shouldered, strapping Aryan from Minnesota in his early thirties, was an operational analyst. Vigiani, some years older, and an intelligence research specialist, was tiny, compact, dark-haired, introverted. Both took copious notes.

“For reasons I can’t get into, this doesn’t go beyond this room. That’s why I’m taking the unusual step of having just you guys here without the section and unit chiefs. Now, I want to make sure the boys at Fort Meade add some names to their watch list-Heinrich Fürst, this fellow Elkind. Russell, can you draft a list of all possible trip words?”

“Right,” Ullman said, “but how can we ask NSA about this if we’re not supposed to know anything about it?”

“Leave it to me, Russ. That’s what I’m here for, the diplomacy part. You people do the heavy lifting. Chris, run down whatever you can on Fürst. Have Kendall or Wendy do a complete computer search. Wendy might be better. She’s good on Germanic languages, variant spellings, what-have-you. Have our legal attachés in Germany and Austria make discreet contact, see what they can learn.”

She nodded and scrawled a note. “I’ll try,” she said dubiously, “but I’m sure it’s not his real name.”

“Well, see what you can get. Don’t forget about our own people. Maybe somebody knows something. Round up anybody who knows something about Elkind or Manhattan Bank. Field agent, transcriptionist, even the guy who washes the office cars in the Albuquerque field office.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” Vigiani asked, genuinely curious.

“Wendy, the computer whiz, can help you. There’s a hidden search parameter she can call up, with my authorization.” Taylor saw the woman’s puzzlement, and added: “She’ll explain it. Basically, anytime anyone accesses the Bureau’s databases, there’s a notation made of it here in the central files, what they were asking about, et cetera.

“Now, and this is the biggest task: I want a pile of files on my desk by tomorrow morning-all possible terrorist suspects.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ullman said.

“Put as many people as you need on this, okay? I want all the usual suspects, plus anyone else on the radar screen. Any terrorist with a track record. We’ve got to start broad.”

“Whoa,” Ullman said. “You’re basically saying, any terrorist alive.”

“Every one that fits this MO,” Duke Taylor said. “On my desk. By tomorrow morning.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Sarah’s marriage to Peter Cronin was a mystery that only deepened with time. The reason she’d done it was simple. He’d gotten her pregnant. But that begged several questions: why she decided to keep the baby; why she felt she had to marry him just because he’d knocked her up; and, the biggest question of all, why she had been attracted to him in the first place.

True, he was movie-star handsome, a brawny, virile blond with a dazzling smile. That should have captured her attention for no more than five minutes. Once you got to know Peter at all, it was obvious he was crude, domineering, a creep. Yet at the same time he could be immensely charming when he wanted to.

When he first asked her out, after they’d met on some minor FBI-police task force, she accepted quickly. He’s different from me, she told herself, but that’s all to the good. She was the overly refined one, perhaps effete, in need of an infusion of street savvy. Their sex life was incredibly exciting. She’d never felt so carried away. They’d fight, his blistering anger would surface, they’d get back together. The roller coaster went on like that for five months until her period was a few days late and a pregnancy test she bought at a drugstore confirmed her suspicion.

There was never even a discussion of abortion; she didn’t believe in it. It hadn’t happened before. She’d never had the chance to test her moral code.

But Peter wanted to get married, and although the voice of reason in her kept shrilling against it, they went to Boston City Hall and did it several days later. They moved in together, and it was as if nothing had happened. Their relationship remained tumultuous, they still fought constantly, he still knew how to reduce her to tears.

And within a few months, he began to have affairs. First it was a sister of one of his cop friends, then a secretary he’d met at a bar called Richard’s, then a whole succession of them.

At first, Sarah faulted herself. She hadn’t been much of a wife. She was career-obsessed. Sure, Peter worked long hours, but hers were worse. It hadn’t yet occurred to her that if a man works hard, he’s ambitious, but if a woman works hard, she’s negligent. After one traumatic fight, Peter promised to end the extracurricular activities. Sarah accepted his teary apologies. They would try to rebuild their marriage, for the sake of their unborn child.

At five o’clock one morning, seven months pregnant with Jared, she came home unexpectedly early, rumpled and exhausted. She’d spent the night working a wire on a case involving a precious-metals shop in Cranston, Rhode Island, that was laundering money for the Medellín cartel. She entered the apartment quietly so as not to wake Peter, who happened to be sharing their bed with a woman.

A few weeks after he’d moved out, she saw Peter arm in arm with yet another woman, coming out of a tapas place in Porter Square.

A few months after Jared’s birth, Sarah accepted an assignment to go to Germany to help investigate the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Separated from Peter for several months already, she leaped at the chance to get out of Boston with her child. The Bureau needed female interviewers who spoke German; counterterrorism she would learn. One block of training at New Agents school had been an overview of counterterrorism, so she knew the fundamentals. Before being sent to Germany she was put through a few weeks of intensive training in terrorism at Quantico. It wasn’t easy taking a three-month-old baby to a foreign country, but it was easier than staying in the same city with Peter.

The divorce became final while Sarah and Jared were still in Germany. By the terms of the custody agreement, however, Sarah had to live in the same city as Peter. So she and three-year-old Jared returned to Boston in 1991.

Peter was suddenly interested in his little boy. She and Peter were civil with each other, and occasionally did favors for each other, while at the same time disliking each other as only divorced spouses can.

Though he didn’t seem to mind being divorced from Sarah, he was pathologically jealous. Whenever she began seeing a man, he would find out about it, do whatever he could to break it up, always in the guise of protecting Jared.

She’d had a few relatively serious relationships, and each time Peter or his friends on the job would track the man down and harass or threaten him. He’d be questioned at home, stopped repeatedly for minor traffic violations, keep having traffic and parking problems. It didn’t do much to sustain the relationships.

But most of her dates never grew into anything long-term. Men didn’t want to go out with a woman who had a child, that was one thing. Also, she threw herself into her career, working ridiculous hours, so that even when she did meet someone who didn’t mind her having a child, she wasn’t available. If she started going out with the guy, she’d keep having to cancel dates because of work. More than once a guy she’d started to get close to had planned something special only to have her cancel at the last minute. And then there was Sarah’s attitude, which had hardened since the divorce. She had become self-contained, unwilling to fake vulnerability, even brassy. She had become a woman who didn’t need a man in her life, because she’d married one, and look what had happened. Who needed that again?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Shortly after the KLM flight from Paris lifted off, Baumann noticed someone seated three rows in front staring pointedly at him, with a penetrating look of recognition.

Baumann knew the face.

The man was big, a hulking figure with round shoulders. Short hair cut into bangs, deep-set eyes. A beefy, jowly face Baumann thought he had seen before… but where? A long time ago, in connection with something unpleasant. The business in Madrid?

No.

No; he had not seen this man before. Now he was certain. The man was no longer staring at him; he was staring instead at the row behind, obviously searching for someone else.

Baumann exhaled silently, relaxed his muscles, sank into his seat. The cabin was stuffy and overheated. A bead of sweat ran down one temple.

A close call. He would have to be ever vigilant. The hulking man had called to mind another man, in another place; the resemblance was uncanny. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and was momentarily in an ice-cold hotel room in Madrid on a preposterously bright, impossibly hot afternoon.

The windows of the suite at the Ritz, Madrid, had been bulletproof, he remembered. Fresh fruit and flowers were brought in every day. The sitting room was oval; everything was painted, or wallpapered, or upholstered in shades of clotted cream.

The four young Basques came into the suite uncomfortably dressed in suits and ties: merely to enter the hotel in those days you had to wear a tie. Their leader was an enormous, bulky, awkward man with short-cropped hair. They seemed awed by Baumann, although they knew him by another name. Baumann, of course, wore a disguise and did not speak. They would never see his face. The only personal habit he allowed himself was a bit of disinformation: though he was not a smoker-that habit he developed only later, in prison-he made a point of smoking Ducados, the most popular Spanish cigarette. They would not be able to determine his nationality.

They knew nothing about him, but he had come highly recommended by a middleman, which was why they were offering a quarter of a million dollars for his services. For 1973, that was a good deal of money. They had gathered their pesetas for a long time, scrimped and saved, robbed banks.

In the privacy of the hotel suite, they told their story. They were Basque separatists-freedom fighters or militants or terrorists, depending upon your politics-and they belonged to an organization called ETA. In Basque, this stood for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Nation and Freedom.

They came from Iruña and Segovia, Palencia and Cartagena. They despised the regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, which oppressed their people, forbade them to speak their own languages, had even executed Basque priests during the Spanish Civil War.

They wanted amnesty for the fifteen ETA members, students and workers, who had been jailed as political prisoners after the December 1970 Burgos trials. Franco was dying-he had been dying forever-and the only way to bring down his detested government was to assassinate his sole confidant, his number two, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. That was the only way to shatter the leadership’s aura of invincibility.

Carrero Blanco, they explained, was the prime minister and was believed to be Franco’s designated successor, the future of the regime. He embodied pure Francismo; he represented the post-Franco era. He was anti-Communist, anti-Semitic, ultrarightist. Because of his fiercely bushy eyebrows he was known by the nickname Ogro, the ogre.

ETA had made several bumbling attempts to eliminate both Franco and Carrero Blanco. These four young Basques had recently seen the film The Day of the Jackal, about a fictional plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, and were inspired to hire a professional, an outsider about whom nothing was known. In fact, they realized they had no choice if the job was to be done.

Hence, Operation Ogro.

Baumann never spoke with them-not once. He communicated with them by means of a child’s magic slate. Not once did they hear his voice. Not once were they successful in tailing him, though they tried.

Ten ETA volunteers were provided for his assistance, but all the logistical details were left to him. Baumann prepared carefully for the hit, researched thoroughly as he always did. He learned that every morning at nine o’clock, Carrero Blanco attended mass at a Jesuit church in the Barrio de Salamanca. He studied the route that Carrero Blanco’s chauffeur took, noted the license plate of his black Dodge Dart.

Baumann rented a basement apartment at 104 Calle Claudio Coello in the Barrio de Salamanca, along the route that Carrero Blanco took to church, located directly across the street from the church. The ETA volunteers dug a two-foot-high tunnel through the apartment wall to the middle of the street, twenty-one feet long, T-shaped. Dirt was carried out in plastic garbage bags; there was an enormous amount to dispose of. Digging the tunnel was brutally arduous labor. There was little oxygen to breathe, and the soil emitted a foul-smelling gas that gave them violent headaches. And there was always the fear that the stench of the gas would seep into the apartment building and alert the neighbors.

The digging took eight days. Meanwhile, an ETA contact procured, from the Hernani Powder Magazine, two hundred kilos of Goma Two explosives, in tubular lengths like Pamplona sausages. Five packages of explosives were placed in large, square milk cans a few meters apart along the transverse of the tunnel. For a long time, Baumann wrestled with the conundrum of how to ensure that the explosion would throw up a vertical, upward, force; he eventually solved the problem by sealing the tunnel up with several feet of tightly packed dirt.

The night before the assassination, Baumann dined alone on fresh baby eels and black sausage, washed down with Oruja. The next day-December 20, 1973-Carrero Blanco’s black Dodge Dart turned the corner of Diego de León on Calle Claudio Coello. There, Baumann stood on a ladder, dressed as a house painter. When the vehicle was directly over the tunnel, Baumann threw an electrical switch concealed in a paint can.

There was a muffled explosion, and the burning wreck of the car was catapulted high up into the air and over the roof of the five-story Jesuit mission and church to the second-floor terrace on the other side. At the Ogro’s funeral, Madrileños and right-wing partisans loudly sang the Falange anthem “Cara al Sol.”

When the frantic investigation was launched, Baumann fingered, through an intermediary, each of the ETA volunteers who had dug the tunnel. The ten died during the vigorous police “interrogation.” Baumann had done the job he was hired to do, and no one alive who was involved in the conspiracy had ever seen his face.

Now visitors to Madrid can find 104 Calle Claudio Coello, the building in which Baumann had rented the basement apartment, still standing and looking rather shabby. Across the street from it, at the exact site of the assassination, a stone plaque is engraved:

AQUI RINDIO SU ULTIMO SERVICIO

A LA PATRIA CON EL SACRIFICIO DE SU VIDA

VICTIMA DE UN VIL ATENTADO EL ALMIRANTE

LUIS CARRERO BLANCO

20-XII-1974

A few years after the bombing, a book was published internationally in which the four Basque leaders claimed total credit for the assassination, neglecting to mention that they had hired a professional. This fraudulent account had been suggested by Baumann. Not only did it redound to the greater glory of the Basque movement, but it deftly covered his tracks. The world didn’t have to know that the Basque ETA were bumblers. There were rumors-which persist to this day-that the CIA provided the Basques with intelligence support, to help defeat Franco. (The truth is, sophisticated intelligence was hardly needed.)

By the time Baumann had returned to Wachthuis, the headquarters of the South African security police in Pretoria, word had gotten around of his accomplishment. A story was told and retold of how H. J. van den Bergh, the six-foot-five head of the security police, reacted upon learning what one of his agents, Henrik Baumann-cryptonym Zero-had just done in Madrid. “Jesus Christ,” van den Bergh is said to have exploded. “Who the hell is this Baumann? An intelligence agent, my arse. He sounds like the bloody Prince of Darkness!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

At eight-thirty sharp the next morning, Duke Taylor arrived at his office at FBI headquarters in Washington and was startled to see both Russell Ullman and Christine Vigiani sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of his closed office door. To either side of them, rising in three towering piles, were folders, striped with various colors. The two looked weary, disheveled. The normally fresh-faced Ullman had heavy purple circles under his eyes. Vigiani’s eyes, which usually bulged with ferocious concentration, looked sewn shut.

“Jesus,” Taylor said. “You two look as if you slept in your clothes.”

“Yeah…” Vigiani began with malice.

“Your office door was locked,” Ullman interrupted, his voice hoarse. “I hope it’s okay we heaped the dossiers here.”

Taylor glanced admiringly at the three piles again and said. “Gosh, I didn’t think you’d take me literally.” He shook his head as he unlocked his office door. “Who wants coffee?”

When they were all seated, Ullman said: “Let’s start with the most obvious ones. Eliminating all those dead or in custody, that leaves mostly Arabs. Also, most of the better-known terrorists are fairly old by now.”

Taylor nodded encouragement.

“Ahmed Jabril, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine/General Command. Former captain in the Syrian army. Ba’athist. Hard-line Palestinian. He and his group are responsible-”

“Jabril’s a creature of Syrian intelligence,” Taylor interrupted. “Go ahead.” He was leaning back in his office chair, eyes closed. Vigiani and Ullman sat in chairs sandwiched among pillars of dossiers. As Ullman made his presentation, Vigiani pored through a stack in her lap and made notes on her clipboard.

“All right, well, Abu Nidal, of course,” Ullman went on. “Nom de guerre of Sabri al-Banna, broke with Yasir Arafat in 1974 to found the Fatah Revolutionary Council. Brutal, brilliant, the shrewdest operator there is. Estimated to have killed a thousand people, two-thirds of them Palestinians. Responsible for terrorism in more than twenty nations, including the Istanbul synagogue massacre in ’86 and attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports in ’85. Never captured. Lived for a while in Libya. He and his organization are now based in the Bekaa Valley. Do you know, there’s no picture of him available?”

Taylor shook his head. “One of that rare breed of terrorist, a true ideologue. Never hire out. Go on.”

Christine Vigiani looked up from her dossiers. “Actually, he takes money.”

“Only for someone he wants to kill anyway,” said Ullman, flashing her a look of profound irritation. “Anyway, this doesn’t smell like an Abu Nidal op. But I was intrigued by Abu Ibrahim, a.k.a Mohammed Al-Umari. Leader of the May 15 Group. Expert in the use of barometric detonators and plastic explosives. Perhaps the most technically proficient bomb maker around. Also, there’s Imad Mughniya, who masterminded the hijacking of that Kuwaiti airliner back in 1988, who’s tied to Hezbollah.”

“Problem is,” Taylor said, heaving a sigh, “none of them can plausibly pass as Germans. I’m not going to rule them out, but I wouldn’t be quick to count them in either. Chris, who are your prime suspects?”

She sat up straight, took a large swallow of coffee, widened her eyes. “Okay if I smoke?”

“I’d rather-” Ullman started.

“All right,” Taylor said. “You probably need it.”

She pulled out a pack of Marlboros and lighted one, inhaling gratefully. Russell Ullman glanced at her with snakelike distrust and shifted his chair a few symbolic inches away.

“If we’re talking Arabs,” she said, “I can’t believe he didn’t mention either Islamic Jihad or Hamas. Particularly Hamas, which has really been acting up lately. If Warren Elkind is such a big Israel supporter, this sounds like a Hamas kind of thing, given how much they hate Israel, and how they set off that car bomb outside the Israeli embassy in London in July 1994. And that bombing in Argentina that killed-”

“Because we’re not talking Arabs, we’re talking mercenary terrorists for hire, and none of those organizations has anyone that hires out,” Ullman said darkly. “Unless you know better.”

There was a poisonous silence, and then Vigiani continued: “There’s an ETA Basque terrorist who worked as muscle for the Medellín cartel, but that was some time ago. He’s believed dead, but reports vary. I’ll keep on that one.”

“That guy’s dead,” Ullman said impatiently.

Vigiani ignored him. “And at first I would have thought that among the Provos-the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army-we’d find some good possibilities, but none of them fit the profile. None are known to hire out. Though I suppose any of them could. Also, according to the most recent intelligence, some of the Protestant groups in Northern Ireland-the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force-have started using mercenaries, paid assassins, for the real serious, clinical operations. I didn’t bother with those assholes who did OKBOMB,” she said, using the Bureau’s code name for Oklahoma City. “Way too primitive. And, let’s see, there’s a South African guy, but he’s locked up for life in Pretoria or Johannesburg or something. And this may seem sort of left-field, but there’s Frank Terpil, the former CIA guy Qaddafi hired to train his special forces.”

Taylor nodded, eyes still closed.

“Well, his buddy Ed Wilson’s serving a long sentence in a federal penitentiary, but Terpil’s still at large. File says he’s been involved in assassinations in Africa and a coup attempt in Chad in 1978. He’s alive and hiding somewhere, and for all I know he may still be active.”

Taylor opened his eyes and frowned at the acoustic dropped ceiling of his office. “Maybe.”

Vigiani jotted something down on her clipboard. “And all those old East German training camps-they may be history, but some of the folks who trained there are probably still on the market. Problem is, our data on those guys is pretty skimpy.”

“You contact the Germans?” Taylor asked.

“I’m working on it,” Ullman said.

“All right,” Taylor said. “I’m inclined to take a second look at this Terpil fellow and any of the East German-trained personnel we can turn up. Tell your staff to keep digging. Chris, what did you turn up in the computer search on Warren Elkind?”

Vigiani snubbed out her cigarette in the large glass ashtray she’d taken from Taylor’s desk. A plume of acrid smoke curled. She presented a quick biographical profile of Elkind, emphasizing his charitable work on behalf of Israel. “Apart from that, there’s not much, unfortunately. We’ve got an agent in Boston who just did a complete computer search on Warren Elkind.”

“Really?” Taylor said with interest. “What’s he assigned to?”

“OC, I believe. And it’s a she.”

“What’s her name?”

“Cahill, I think. Sarah Cahill.”

“I know the name. Big in Lockerbie. Counterterrorism expert. Wonder why she’s looking into Elkind. Hmm. I want to talk to her. Get her in here. Meantime, why don’t you two go home and get some sleep?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Early the next morning, after Peter had arrived to take Jared for the day, Sarah drove in to work. Saturdays at the office had become ritual since Peter’s weekend visits had begun. Anyway, she had a lot of work to catch up on, and she wanted to search for anything she could find on Valerie’s killer.

It turned out not to be necessary.

When she arrived at work, there was a voice-mail message from Teddy Williams. She listened, and immediately took a drive over to the Homicide Squad.

“What have you got?” Sarah asked him.

“Blowback,” Teddy said. This was the sometimes invisible spray of a victim’s blood found on the shooter’s clothing.

“On what?”

“A sport coat we found in the giant closet belonging to a guy named Sweet Bobby Higgins.”

Sarah leaned against the wall, eyes closed. She felt queasy. “Sweet-?”

“Sweet Bobby Higgins lives in a big house in Maiden with no less than four wives. They refer to each other as wives-in-law. I think three of them are sisters. Each of them has his made-up crest tattooed below her navel.”

“Sort of like you’d brand cattle. Who is he?”

“Sort of an on-again, off-again boyfriend of your friend Valerie’s madam. An enforcer.”

“I doubt it.”

“Valerie was cheating on her, and the madam knew it.”

“Maybe she knew it, but I doubt she’d have some pimp whack Val. You got a tip?”

“We were there on a routine search warrant, based on the madam’s phone records. Your ex-husband saw it first. A white-and-gold jacket, looked like the sleeves were soiled. Peter looked closer, saw tiny drops, like elongated tears or commas, maybe a sixteenth of an inch long. Sweet Bobby didn’t see any blood. When we found it, he looked like he was getting ready to flex.”

“You did a PGM test?” She was referring to a phosphoglucomutase enzyme test.

“Precise match with Val’s blood. And if you’re thinking it’s a plant, he doesn’t have an alibi. Hinky as hell.”

“Does he deny the jacket is his?”

Ted laughed raucously. “Not with a straight face. That’s the ugliest jacket I’ve ever seen.”

“Ballistics?”

“Sweet Bobby’s got a Glock. Matches the 9mm rounds used on Valerie Santoro.”

“You think that clinches it? What did Ballistics tell you?”

Defensively: “They got a match.”

She shook her head. “Glocks aren’t bored. So it’s a lot more difficult to make a definitive ballistic match. But you want to say Sweet Bobby did it, go ahead. That’s your business. I really don’t give a shit, and as far as I’m concerned, the more pimps you lock up the better.”

“Degrading to women, is that it?”

“They’re just scumbags. You’d better hope he doesn’t have a lawyer slick enough to pick up on the Glock thing, or else the case’ll be dismissed without prejudice. You still don’t have a witness, do you?”

“This is a guy with priors.”

“And if you guys don’t get your clearance rate up, you’ll both be transferred to Auto Theft. No need to get defensive on me, Ted. I really don’t care. Congratulations, okay?”

Late in the afternoon, driving home through the streets of Cambridge, Sarah passed a large grassy field and saw Peter and Jared. Wearing muddy jeans and T-shirts, they were throwing a football. It had just started raining. Peter was making large, sweeping gestures; Jared looked small and awkward. He gave his mother an enthusiastic wave when he saw her get out of the car.

Peter turned, gave a perfunctory thumbs-up.

“You’re early,” he shouted.

“Mind if I watch for a couple minutes?”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Jared called out. “Dad’s just showing me how to run pass patterns.”

Peter now pointed, making jabbing motions. “A square-out,” he called to Jared. “Go straight five yards, and then cut right five yards. All right?”

“Straight and then right?” Jared asked. His voice was high, reedy.

“Go!” Peter shouted suddenly, and Jared began running. Peter hesitated, then threw the football, and Jared caught it. Sarah smiled.

“No!” Peter yelled. “I said a square-out, didn’t I? You’re supposed to cut on a dime. You’re running a square-out like a fly pattern!”

“I don’t even remember what a fly pattern is,” Jared said.

“You run straight out, fast as you can, and I throw it over your head. A square-out, you cut right. Get it?”

Jared ran back toward his father. As he ran, he shouted defiantly: “Yeah, but I caught it!”

“Jerry, buddy, you’re not catching the ball right either. You’re just using your hands. Don’t just use your hands. Bring it into your chest. Get your body in front of it.”

“I don’t want to get hit.”

“Don’t be a pussy,” Peter said. “You can’t be afraid of the ball. Don’t be a pussy. Try it again, let’s go!”

Jared began running, then pivoted to the right, slipping a little in the mud.

“Now when you get it, tuck the ball into your chest,” Peter shouted, tossing the football. It soared in a perfect arc. He shouted: “Tuck the ball into your chest. Tuck-”

Jared stepped aside, and the football slipped through his hands and thunked hollowly into the grass. Vaulting after it, Jared lost his balance and slammed to the ground.

“Jesus,” Peter said with disgust. “The ball’s not going to hurt you. Get your body in front of the ball! Don’t be afraid of it!”

“I did-”

“Get both hands around the ball!”

Frustrated, Jared got to his feet and ran back toward Peter.

“Look, Jerry,” Peter said in a softer voice. “You gotta bring it into your body. All right, we’re going to do a button hook.”

“A button hook?” Jared repeated wearily.

“A button hook. You get out there, run ten yards, and turn around. The ball will be there. You get it?”

“I get it,” Jared said. His voice was sullen; he hung his head. Sarah wondered whether her presence was embarrassing him, decided it was, and that she should leave.

“All right, let’s go!” Peter shouted as Jared scrambled ahead. As he ran, his pace accelerated. Peter threw the ball hard and fast, a bullet. Just as Jared stopped and turned, the football hit him in the stomach. Sarah heard a whoof of expelled air. Jared buckled over, sank clumsily to the ground.

“Jared!” Sarah shouted.

Peter laughed raucously. “Man,” he said. “Buddy boy. You really screwed the pooch there, didn’t you.” He turned toward Sarah. “Wind knocked out of him. He’ll be fine.”

Jared struggled to his feet, his face red. There were tears running down his face. “Jesus, Dad,” he cried. “What’d you go and do that for?”

“You think I did something?” Peter said, and laughed again. “I told you, you gotta tuck it into your chest, kid. You looked like a clown out there. You want to learn this or not?”

“No!” Jared screamed. “Jesus, Dad! I hate this!” He limped away toward Sarah.

“Peter!” Sarah said. She began to run toward Jared, but the heel of her left shoe caught in a tangle of weeds. She tripped and landed with her knees in the mud.

When she got up, Jared was there, throwing his arms around her. “I hate him,” he sobbed against her blouse, muffled. “He’s such an asshole, Mom. I hate him.”

She hugged him. “You did so well out there, honey.”

“I hate him.” His voice grew louder. “I hate him. I don’t want him to come around anymore.” Peter approached, his face set in a grim expression, his jaw tight.

“Look, Jerry,” he said. “I don’t want you to be afraid of the ball. You do it right, the ball’s not going to hurt you.”

“You get the hell out of here!” Sarah exploded, her heart racing. She grabbed Jared so tightly he yelped in pain.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Peter said. “Look what you’re doing to him.”

“Get the hell out,” Sarah said.

“You’re a goddam asshole!” Jared shouted at his father. “I don’t want to play football with you again. You’re an asshole!”

“Jerry,” Peter coaxed.

“Screw you, Dad!” Jared said in a quavering voice. He whirled around and stomped away.

“Jared,” Sarah called out.

“I’m going home, Mom,” he said, and she hung back.

A few minutes later, Sarah and Peter stood on the edge of the field in the drizzle. His blond hair was tousled, his gray Champion sweatshirt smudged with mud. In his faded jeans, he looked as slender and trim as ever. He had never looked as attractive, and she had never hated him more.

“I talked to Teddy,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I heard about Sweet Bobby whatever-his-name-is.”

“What, you surprised we made the whore’s killer so fast?”

“No. I just don’t think you got the right one.”

“Jesus, Sarah, we got blood on the guy’s clothes, what more do you-”

“You’ve got evidence enough to lock him up. I just don’t think he’s the killer.”

Peter shook his head and smiled. “Whatever. Mind if I use your shower? Get changed? Jared and I are going out to dinner. Hilltop Steak House.”

“I don’t think Jared is up to going out.”

“I got him till tonight, remember.”

“It’s Jared’s choice, Peter,” she said. “And I don’t think he wants to go out to the Hilltop with you tonight. I’m sorry.”

“The kid’s got to learn to stand on his own,” he said gently.

“For God’s sake, Peter, he’s eight years old. He’s a child!”

“He’s a boy, Sarah. Kid’s got a lot of potential. He just needs a little discipline, is all.” He seemed almost to be pleading. “You know, Joey Gamache was a lightweight, but he became a world champ. You want to knock down Floyd Patterson or Marvin Hagler or Mike Tyson, you got to learn to take your lumps. You’re raising him to be soft. Jerry needs a father.”

“You aren’t a father, you’re a sparring partner,” Sarah said, her voice quiet and malevolent. “Rocket shots to the rib. Jab to the jaw. You’re goddam abusive, is what you are, and I’m not going to permit it. I’m not going to let you treat my son this way anymore.”

“‘My son,’” Peter echoed with dark irony, chuckling.

They were both silent for a moment. The argument hung heavy in the air between them.

“Look, just make it easier on all of us,” Sarah said. “Go home. Jared doesn’t want to go out to dinner with you tonight.”

“Kid needs a father,” Peter said quietly.

“Yeah,” Sarah agreed. “It’s just not clear you’re the one.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

At a few minutes after four o’clock in the afternoon, the office mail courier, a chubby middle-aged black man, dropped a small yellow bubble-pack envelope, about four inches wide by five inches long, into Sarah’s in basket. “Just came in,” he said. “Rush.”

“Thanks, Sammy,” she said. The label bore the return address of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

She tore open the envelope, removed the tape, and put it in a tape player.

The voices were indistinct, forlorn, distant conversations in a wind tunnel. Even played on the most high-fidelity tape deck Sarah could wangle from Audio Services, the acoustic quality of the tape recording was woefully bad. But once you got used to it, you could make out the words.

Will Phelan-brow furrowed, intently concentrating, stroking his mustache absently with his pinkie-sat at the conference table beside Ken, who leaned way back in his chair, arms folded across his ample belly, eyes closed.

Sarah provided the narration. “This one,” she said, “is just a routine dunning call.” A man’s voice identified himself as being “from Card Services” and left an 800 number. Then a beep, then the synthesized female voice of the answering machine’s day/time stamp announced: “Monday, four-twelve P.M.”

“All right,” Sarah said. “Listen.”

Another man’s voice. If the first voice sounded lost in an electronic maelstrom, this one was even more distant, bobbing on crashing waves of static.

“Mistress? It’s Warren.” A surge of crackly static, then: “… the Four Seasons at eight o’clock tonight. Room 722. I’ve been hard for days thinking about you. Had to jerk off in the lavatory on the plane. Probably against some FAA law. I’m going to have to be punished.”

Phelan arched his eyebrows and turned to look at Ken, who seemed on the verge of exploding with laughter.

A beep. The day/time voice stamp announced: “Monday, five-twenty P.M.”

Phelan cleared his throat and rumbled: “All right, you got-”

“Wait,” Sarah interrupted. “One more.”

A rush of static, hollow and metallic. The next voice was male, high-pitched, British-accented. The connection was distant; every few seconds it broke up.

“Valerie, it’s Simon. Good evening.” Slow, deliberate, phlegmatic. “Your friend is staying in Room 722 at the Four Seasons Hotel. You are looking for a small, round, flat object that looks like a compact disk you might play on your stereo…”

A break, then: “… gold-colored. It may or may not be in a square sleeve. It will almost certainly be in his briefcase.” A long rush of static. “A van will be parked down the street from the hotel this evening. You will take the disk to the van, hand it over, and wait for it to be copied. Then you will return the disk to the hotel’s front desk. You will tell them you found it. When you return home, you will be visited by a friend around midnight, who will give you the rest of what we’ve agreed upon. Goodbye.”

A beep, then the mechanical voice: “Monday, six oh five P.M.”

Sarah clicked the tape off, looked at the two men.

A long beat of silence.

Phelan said: “Is this admissible?”

“Easily,” said Ken. “Bruce Gelman’s got credentials up the wazoo.”

“This some kind of CD-ROM they’re talking about?” Phelan asked.

Sarah said, “Probably. The situation we have here-the five-thousand-dollar payoff in bills cut in half, the theft of a computer disk-this isn’t a run-of-the-mill pimp-killing-a-prostitute thing. This is a fairly elaborate setup, I’d guess.”

Phelan nodded contemplatively. “By whom and for what?”

“My theory is that Warren Elkind was set up to be robbed by Valerie. That Elkind had something, or has access to something-something computer-related-that’s worth a lot to some people with a lot of resources.” Sarah ejected the cassette tape from the machine and idly turned it over several times.

Phelan sighed long and soulfully. “There’s something there,” he admitted. “But not enough to go on. What’d you turn up from the computer search?”

She explained that the interagency computer search for any mention of Elkind’s name had yielded exactly 123 references. The information had come over the teletype, instead of by letter, because Phelan, fortunately, had marked the search “immediate” rather than routine. Most of the references were garbage-“overhears,” as they’re called in the intelligence community. Some CIA flunky in Jakarta heard Warren Elkind’s name mentioned in connection with a major banking arrangement with the Indonesian government. Someone in U.S. military intelligence in Tel Aviv had heard a rumor (false, it turned out) that Elkind had once accepted a bribe from an Israeli minister. Someone else had heard that Elkind had bribed a member of the Israeli government. A lot of junk.

The telephone on a table against the wall rang. Ken got up to answer it.

“I’m inclined to leave Elkind out of this,” Phelan said.

“For you, Sarah,” Ken said.

Sarah took the phone. “Yes?”

“Agent Cahill, this is Duke Taylor, at headquarters.”

“Yes?” she said, her heart hammering. It had to be something serious.

“How fast can you get your bags packed and get on a plane to Washington?” Taylor asked. “I need to see you immediately.”