The Zero Hour

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“Goedenavond, Mijnheer,” the portly little man in the corner booth said as he half rose to greet Baumann at the Hoppe, a well-known bruine krogen, or “brown café.” This was a type of pub peculiar to Amsterdam, so named for its tobacco-smoke-stained walls and ceilings. A loud and crowded place, poorly lit, it was located on Spui, in the middle of Amsterdam’s university section.

“Good evening,” Baumann replied, assessing the man, whose name was Jan Willem Van den Vondel, but-presumably because of his girth-was universally known by the nickname Bones.

Bones was a “mere,” an ex-mercenary who had worked in the Middle East and Africa under a bewildering variety of aliases. He had once been one of the dreaded affreux, the “frightful ones,” the white freelance soldiers who helped keep dictators in power throughout Africa and Asia. In the sixties and seventies, he had worked in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire), in Angola in the days when it was owned by the Portuguese, in white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in Yemen under the old monarchy, and in Iran under the Shah. In 1977 he had helped lead an unsuccessful effort to oust the Marxist government of Benin, a small country in West Africa. A year later he had been instrumental in aiding Ahmed Abdallah to seize the presidency of the Comoros Islands, an archipelago off the southeastern coast of Africa. A decade later, several of his employees, working as guards for President Abdallah, had assassinated the very man they had put into office.

Van den Vondel was loathsome in appearance, lacking in personal hygiene and malodorous. He had cauliflower ears as well as bad teeth, presumably stained by chewing tobacco, a wad of which bulged in his cheek.

Yet Bones had become one of the best forgers in the business. He had agreed to meet Baumann, a man he did not know, only because Baumann had been vouched for by a mutual friend, an ex-mercenary now residing in Marseilles whom Baumann had hired to do a nasty job in Ostend some ten years earlier. This Frenchman, who’d worked under Bones in the Belgian Congo, knew Baumann only as a wealthy American named Sidney Lerner-a cover Baumann had gone to a great deal of trouble to establish.

“Sidney Lerner” was one of the Mossad’s many thousands of sayanim, volunteers who help out the Israeli intelligence service out of a sense of loyalty to Israel. A sayan (Hebrew for “assistant”) must be 100 percent Jewish, but not an Israeli citizen; in fact, sayanim are always diaspora Jews, though they may have relatives in Israel. In the United States alone there are some fifty thousand sayanim. A doctor sayan, for instance, will treat a Mossad agent’s bullet wound without reporting it to the authorities. A sayan can refuse an assignment-they often do-but can be relied upon not to turn a Mossad agent in.

As Baumann had expected, the forger had asked this mutual friend why on earth Sidney Lerner couldn’t get his false papers from his katsa, his Mossad case officer. There were reasons, the mercenary said darkly. Are you interested or not? Bones was interested.

Baumann got right to the point. “I need three complete sets of documents.”

The forger’s eyes narrowed. “Belgian?”

“American and British.”

“Passports, driver’s licenses, et cetera?”

Baumann nodded, and took a sip of beer.

“But Mr. Lerner,” Van den Vondel said, “it’s much cheaper to get them in New York or London.”

“Speed is of greater importance to me than expense,” Baumann explained.

The forger flashed a big, feral gray smile. This was music to his cauliflower ears. “Tell me, please, Mr. Lerner, exactly what sort of schedule are you on?”

“I need them by tomorrow evening.”

Van den Vondel burst out laughing, as if this were the most riotously amusing joke he’d ever heard. “Oh, my,” he exclaimed helplessly between guffaws. “Oh, my. And I need to be the king of England.”

Baumann got to his feet. “I’m sorry we’re unable to do business,” he said.

The forger’s laughing fit immediately ceased. “Mr Lerner, what you ask is absolutely unrealistic,” he said quickly. “Impossible. You will find this no matter who you talk to. Unless you have the misfortune of hooking up with some small-time fraud who does the shoddiest work that will have the American or the British authorities on your ass in seconds. I am a craftsman, Mr. Lerner. The work I do is absolutely top-notch, of the highest quality.” With another feral smile, he added: “Better, I may say, than the real thing.”

Baumann sat down again. “Then how much time do you require?”

“It depends upon what you want exactly. The British documents are no problem whatsoever. The American ones, on the other hand-well, this can be a major challenge.”

“So I understand.”

“In April of 1993,” Bones explained, “the U.S. government began issuing new passports marked with what is called a kinegram, which looks like a hologram, if you know what that is.”

Baumann nodded impatiently, closing his eyes.

“It’s part of the laminate on the identity page. When you hold it up to the light, it changes between two different images. We still have not devised a satisfactory method to copy that, although in a short time I have no doubt we will. Fortunately, the older-style American passports are still valid and in use. Those are much easier to reproduce. Though still quite difficult. To forge a new passport requires access to the paper, or better still, to the actual passport books that the government uses. It also requires the proper equipment, which is strictly controlled, difficult to obtain, and extremely expensive-”

“And time-consuming, I imagine.”

“Very much so. Because of your time constraints, forgery is out. The only possibility is to acquire a valid passport and alter it.”

“I’m familiar with how it’s done,” Baumann said, smiling thinly. He produced Sumner Robinson’s passport, opened it to the identity page, and showed it to the forger, covering the name with his thumb.

“You hired an amateur,” the forger said disapprovingly.

Baumann nodded.

“This was crudely done.” He shook his head. “If you used this and were not caught-well, you were lucky. You must not use this again.”

Baumann took the insult to his craftsmanship in stride. “That’s why I’m here,” he said. “I have no doubt you will do a superior job. But how can you ensure that a stolen passport will not be reported as missing or stolen, and placed on the look-out list on the computers at all American ports of entry? The only way I can think of is to take a passport that belongs to someone who never uses it, and therefore wouldn’t notice its absence.”

“Exactly, Mr. Lerner. The network at my disposal has the names and addresses of Americans living abroad, in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and other places. Americans who have passports but rarely if ever travel.”

“Good,” Baumann said.

The two men negotiated a price-a stiff one, as it turned out, because of the number of personnel, including a small ring of petty break-and-enter specialists, who’d require a cut.

As he was about to leave, Baumann added, as if in afterthought: “Oh, and while your people are at it, have them get me an assortment of credit cards. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and whatnot.”

“Credit cards?” Van den Vondel replied dubiously. “Passports that are seldom used are one thing. But credit cards-they’re almost always noticed missing. They’d be canceled immediately.”

“Quite right,” Baumann said. “But that makes no difference to me.” He extended his hand; the forger gave a moist, oily squeeze. “Until tomorrow night, then.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

Once Baumann concluded his business with the forger, he took a taxi to Schiphol Airport, rented a Mercedes at an all-night car-rental agency, and set out toward the Belgian border. He was bone-tired and in need of a good night’s sleep, but there was, to be fair, a certain logic to his middle-of-the-night journey. The distance between Amsterdam and Liège, Belgium, is 120 miles, a drive of only a few hours. In the hours after midnight, the roads were empty and the drive went quickly. Motoring was far less time-consuming than flying to Brussels, then driving to Liège. And Baumann wanted to arrive in the early morning.

There was a black-market armaments dealer who for years had lived and conducted his trade in a village just south of Liège, Baumann had ascertained after a few calls to underground armaments shippers at the Port of Antwerp. Baumann’s sources indicated that this dealer, a man named Charreyron, could do the job Baumann needed done.

Historically, Belgium has always been Europe’s most notorious, most active arms manufacturer and dealer. It exports 90 percent of the weapons it produces. And the capital of the Belgian arms industry since the Middle Ages has been Liège, at the junction of the Meuse and the Ourthe rivers: the heart of the Belgian steel industry and Europe’s third-largest inland port.

In 1889, the Belgian government decided its army needed a reliable single source for the Mauser Model 1888 military rifle, and founded at Liège the Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre. Ten years later, Fabrique Nationale, or FN, began making Browning pistols, which it makes to this day, along with machine guns and rifles. (It was FN rifles that Fidel Castro first used upon seizing power in Cuba.) As a result of this industry, a number of small-arms dealers have grown up around Liège in the last half-century, some of them dealing quite profitably outside the law.

By four o’clock in the morning Baumann had reached Liège. The sky was pitch-black; dawn was still a few hours away. He was exhausted, badly in need of a few hours’ rest, and he considered what to do next.

He could drive into the Place Saint-Lambert and fortify himself with a cup of strong black coffee, perhaps read a few newspapers. Or park somewhere quiet and doze until he was awakened by first light.

But he decided not to trouble with driving into the city, and instead continued on southwest. As he drove through the darkness, he found himself growing increasingly contemplative. The gloomy landscape reminded him of the western Transvaal of his childhood.

The small town in which Baumann had been born was settled in the early nineteenth century by Voortrekkers. Very quickly it became a plak-kie-dorp, a shantytown. When Baumann was a child, the town was made up of Dutch farmhouses and rondavels with thatched roofs. His parents’ farmhouse was situated hard by the Magaliesberg Mountains, forty kilometers outside Pretoria, surrounded by broodboom and bread trees.

He taught himself to hunt in the bushveld nearby, which teemed with wildebeest and springbok, the perfect game. For all of his childhood, and even into his adolescence, he kept to himself, preferring solitude to the company of other children, who bored him. When he wasn’t hunting or hiking or collecting rock and plant specimens in the bushveld, he was reading. He had no brothers or sisters: in the years after his birth, his Boer parents tried repeatedly to conceive, but miscarriage followed miscarriage until it became clear his mother was unable to bear another child.

His father, a tobacco farmer who’d sold his farm to the Magaliesberg Tobacco Corporation, the cooperative that owned most of the tobacco farms in the region, was a gloomy, silent man who died of a heart attack when Baumann was six. Baumann’s memories of his father were few. His mother supported the two of them by taking in sewing.

She worried constantly about her only son, whom she didn’t understand. He was unlike the other children in town, unlike the sons of her neighbors and few friends. She was concerned he had been damaged by the untimely death of his father, had turned inward from the lack of brothers or sisters, had been rendered permanently sullen by his solitary existence. And she despaired of a solution.

The more she urged him to do things the other children did-play games, even get into trouble-the more he kept to himself. Yet he caused her no grief. He excelled in school, made his bed, tidied up his room, read, and hunted. After a while she gave up trying to push her son in a direction he clearly didn’t want to go.

Mother and son rarely spoke. During the long, furiously hot December afternoons and evenings-the South African summer-the two of them sat silently in the kitchen. She sewed; he read. They lived in separate universes.

One afternoon in his twelfth year, unknown to his mother, Baumann went hunting for springbok in the bushveld and came upon a drunken Tswana, a local black tribesman. (Baumann had learned to distinguish among the tribes who lived nearby, the Tswanas or Ndebeles or Zulus.) The drunk, a young man perhaps ten years older than Baumann, began taunting the white boy, and Baumann without a moment’s hesitation aimed his hunting rifle and squeezed off a single shot.

The Tswana died instantly.

The victim’s blood, even his brain matter, splattered Baumann’s face and hands and muslin shirt. Baumann burned the bloodied shirt, bathed himself in a stream, and went home shirtless, leaving the crumpled body where it had fallen.

When he returned home, his mother could see he hadn’t caught any game and didn’t even ask what had happened to his shirt. She’d given up asking questions only to receive monosyllabic replies. He read quietly, and she sewed.

But that evening he was unable to concentrate on his reading, for the killing had thrilled him more deeply than anything had ever thrilled him before. It had scared him, yes, but it had also given him a warm and satisfying sense of control, of mastery, of power over the insolent black man. To Baumann, this was not a racial issue, because he thought little about Coloureds and Blacks. It was the ability to end a human life that intoxicated him-all the more when, after a few weeks, he realized he had gotten away with it, with no consequences whatsoever.

Nothing happened. There was no investigation, no mention in the local newspaper, nothing.

He had gotten away with it. It was like hunting a wildebeest, only a hundred times more exciting, more real.

And it had been so simple. Baumann solemnly swore to himself that he wouldn’t kill another human being again, because he was afraid that if he continued, he wouldn’t be able to stop.

It was then that a complete and stunning transformation overcame the young Baumann. His personality changed almost overnight. He turned outward, became lively and outgoing. He was witty, winning, suddenly popular. He began to play sports, to go out. He made lots of friends. Within a few years he took a great interest in girls.

His mother was baffled, but delighted. She attributed this miraculous change in her son to some mysterious effect of the hormonal surges of puberty. Whatever had clicked inside her son, she was grateful for it.

Only rarely did she pause to observe that her son’s newfound demeanor seemed hollow at its center. There was something dead in his eyes, something false in his joviality, something fundamentally false. With her, his closest (and only) living relative, he was polite, proper, even a touch formal. Between them there was, she sometimes felt, a dead space, a coldness.

She died when he was in his late twenties, already an accomplished operative for BOSS, the South African secret police. He made the funeral arrangements with an appropriate measure of grief, which he also displayed at her funeral. The small handful of friends and neighbors from their hometown who attended the service took note of how deeply distraught the young Baumann was, the poor thing, who’d lost his father so early and now his mother, and such a good and polite young man, too.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Deputy Assistant Director Duke Taylor escorted Sarah Cahill into his office and introduced her to Russell Ullman and Christine Vigiani, who got to their feet and welcomed her with grudging hospitality. They’d have been happier to meet a boa constrictor.

The air-conditioning was particularly strong here on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building. Why, Sarah wondered, did the directors of both CIA and FBI have seventh-floor offices? Did old J. Edgar himself say, “If that’s the way the Pickle Factory does it, me too?”

Sarah assessed them quickly. Ullman was big and towheaded, a corn-fed version of Peter. Vigiani looked smart as a whip and was probably trouble. Taylor she liked instantly, liked his serenity, his self-deprecating humor.

Settling into his high-backed leather desk chair, with a huge FBI seal behind him, Taylor said, “So, you were in Germany on the Lockerbie thing.”

“That’s right.”

“You got a lot of raves. Apparently you helped break the case.”

With a glint in her eye, she said: “You think if I cracked Lockerbie I’d be sitting here?”

“Where would you be?”

She shrugged. “Who knows?”

“But you know well enough that it took us twenty-one months to find the timing device, and that was what cracked the case. If it hadn’t been for you, we’d probably have cracked it-but it would have taken even longer. The Bureau owes you a major debt.”

“I’ll happily take a pay raise.”

“File says you showed strong leadership. You ran a squad in Heidelberg. Obviously you also like to speak your mind.”

“When I think it’s important. My superiors in Heidelberg got a little annoyed when I insisted there might be more to the case than a couple of Libyans.”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe Syria working with Iran. It’s just a theory. A few months before Pan Am 103 went down, a couple of guys from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command were arrested in Germany with barometric detonators. Who sponsors them? Syria. But because the Bush administration saw Syria as crucial to the Middle East peace process, they wanted to leave Syria alone. Then we needed Syria to take our side in the Gulf War, so they were definitely off the hook.”

“Interesting,” Taylor said. “No comment.”

“That sounds familiar.”

He smiled. “I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long in the Bureau.”

“I have a reputation for getting stuff done. I get cut a lot of slack.”

“Do you have a theory on the World Trade Center bombing too? Some people don’t think we’ve completely solved that one either.”

“You don’t really want to know.”

“Try me.”

“Well, we never really pursued the international angle adequately. It’s like Lockerbie-we just don’t want to know, because what do you do if you find out? Everyone seems to be happy pinning the blame on some incompetent followers of some blind sheik. But if you look at the evidence closely, you’ll see that one of members of the gang was an Iraqi sleeper agent. I think he was the control. I think Saddam Hussein was behind the Trade Center thing.”

“Did they call you in on OKBOMB?”

“No. By then I was in Boston. I wish they had.”

“If I’d been in charge then, I would have. Do you miss being in Counterterrorism?”

Sarah paused. “So that’s where this is leading. Yeah, I miss it a lot. But I have personal reasons to be where I am.”

“I’ve read your file; I know about your custody situation. I understand about the sacrifices you sometimes have to make for family.”

“Is this a job interview?”

“Sort of. You think we’re tough enough on terrorists?”

“‘We’ being the FBI or the United States?”

“The United States.”

“You can’t be serious. Of course not. We talk tough, but that’s about it. Remember how, during the Gulf War, the Pentagon wanted to target the terrorist training camps in the Iraqi countryside, strike them, but the White House said no? Didn’t want to piss off the Syrians, ’cause we needed them in the coalition against Saddam Hussein. That’s really tough, huh? And remember when the president of Pakistan, Zia, was killed along with the American ambassador in a plane crash and State wouldn’t allow any of our agents into Pakistan to investigate? Pretty damned tough, huh? We’ve got more than two dozen executive agencies and departments that monitor and respond to terrorism, and we couldn’t stop the Gang That Couldn’t Bomb Straight at the World Trade Center.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re sloppy. The blind sheik behind the World Trade Center incident was on our watch list of suspected terrorists, but he twice got visas to enter the country because his name was spelled wrong on the application, right?”

“You think if we were tougher, things like Oklahoma City wouldn’t happen?”

She paused. “I don’t know. You can’t stop maniacs.”

Taylor leaned back in his chair, folded his arms. “All right. We noticed that you’ve been doing some deep background investigation into a New York banker named Warren Elkind. That seems a little outside your jurisdiction, unless there’s an OC connection I don’t know about.”

Sarah looked at him penetratingly. So that was it. “A prostitute who happened to be one of my key informants-helped me wrap up a couple of important cases-was killed. A call girl, actually, not a prostitute-in her line of work they make certain distinctions. Anyway, the Boston police have cleared the case, but I’m skeptical, to be honest. It appears that the call girl was hired to steal something-a CD-ROM disk, I believe-from this Elkind guy.”

“What’s the connection between Elkind and this prostitute?” Russell Ullman asked.

“A preexisting relationship. She did bondage-and-discipline sessions with him whenever he was in Boston. She was his ‘top,’ or dominatrix. His mistress. Someone who knew she worked for Elkind must have hired her.”

“What was on the CD-ROM?” asked Vigiani.

“I don’t know. Bank records, I’d guess. Obviously something pretty valuable.”

“But how do you know the call girl was hired to do this?” Vigiani persisted. “You haven’t talked to Elkind, have you?”

“No,” Sarah said. “Not yet. He wouldn’t take my call, actually. The reason I know is that I have it on tape.”

“Really?” Taylor said, hunching forward. “Phone cover on the prostitute?”

“Her answering-machine tape.” She explained how the tape was unerased.

“FBI Crime Labs,” Taylor said with a proud smile. “Best in the world.”

Sarah cleared her throat. “Actually, I had to go outside the Bureau. MIT. We don’t have the technology.”

“You have a transcript?” Taylor asked.

“Better than that,” Sarah said. “I have the tape right here. I had a hunch you’d want to hear it.”

After Sarah played the tape twice, on an old Panasonic that Ullman had rounded up from a nearby desk, Taylor said: “Now we’ve got a transcript we’d like you to take a look at.” He handed Sarah a transcript of the NSA intercept; the three were silent as she scanned it.

Sarah read with puzzlement. When she got to Warren Elkind’s name she looked up, then resumed reading. Once she finished, she asked, “Who’s speaking here?”

“We don’t know,” said Taylor.

“Where was the conversation picked up?”

“Switzerland.”

She exhaled slowly, looked around at the others. “The ‘target,’ as they put it, is either Warren Elkind or Manhattan Bank, or both. Elkind is not just one of the most powerful bankers in the world, but he’s also a major fund-raiser for Israel. A lot of Palestinians would probably love to see him roast in hell.”

Vigiani shrugged, as if to say, This is news to you?

Sarah continued, “And this Heinrich Fürst, however it’s spelled, who’s ‘accepted the sales assignment’-what have you turned up on him?”

“Nothing,” Taylor said.

“Big fat goose egg,” said Ullman. “Under every variant spelling, every homophone, anything remotely close. Nothing.”

“Fürst…” Sarah said aloud. “You know, I do have an idea.”

“Let’s hear it,” Taylor said dubiously. “We’ll take anything.”

“Well, I spent a lot of time, when I was in Germany working SCOTBOMB, looking into timing devices for bombs. I talked to one colonel at DIA-an old guy, who died a couple of years ago-about an attempted coup in Togo in 1986. This DIA guy mentioned, really in passing, the name of someone thought to be involved in the Togo affair. He was a mercenary terrorist who went by the alias Fürst. One of many aliases this mere used.”

Taylor, who’d been massaging his eyes, suddenly looked at her.

Vigiani said sharply: “Heinrich Fürst?”

“Just ‘Fürst’ or ‘Herr Fürst.’”

“German?” Ullman said.

“No,” Sarah said. “I mean, the alias was, obviously, but not the mere.”

“Did you get a true name on the mere?” Taylor asked.

“No. Just that, and a nickname, sort of a nom de guerre.”

“Which was?”

“Well, the guy was good, really good, and apparently as amoral as they come. Brilliant, ruthless, every adjective you can come up with-top-notch in his field. A white South African-rumored to have once worked for BOSS, the old South African secret intelligence service. And some of his admirers called him ‘Prince of Darkness.’”

“Loves kids, dogs, Mozart, and walks on the beach,” said Vigiani dryly.

Sarah went on: “Well, my German’s pretty rusty by now, but doesn’t Fürst mean-”

Ullman interrupted: “Fürst-Prince-oh, Jesus. Fürst der Finsternis. Translates as ‘Prince of Darkness.’”

“Right,” Sarah said. “Just a possibility.”

Taylor gave a lopsided grin. “Nice. I think I’m beginning to understand why all the raves in your file. You’ve got a mind for this stuff.”

“Thanks. I did, once.”

“You still do. Now, if it’s true that our good Prince is really a South African, we should reach out to Pretoria. See what they have on anyone with this alias.”

“I’d-I’d be careful about that,” Sarah said.

“Oh, come on.” Vigiani scowled. “The new South African government is as cooperative as can be. If you think the guy used to work for BOSS, that’s where the answer will be. Pretoria.”

“Wait a second,” Taylor said. “What’s your thinking, Sarah? That it might get back to him?”

“I think we’ve got to consider the possibility-however remote-that certain white South Africans might be the ones hiring Herr Fürst.”

“White South Africans are out of power,” Vigiani said irritably.

Sarah gave Agent Vigiani a blank look. “I don’t think it’s quite that simple,” she said calmly. “Who do you think mainly staffs the South African intelligence service? White South Africans. Anglos and Afrikaners. And they’re not happy about how the rug was pulled out from under them.”

Vigiani continued to scowl. Sarah noticed that Duke Taylor’s brow was furrowed, so she elaborated: “Say we contact the South African service and ask about a terrorist who calls himself Heinrich Fürst. And some group within that service is in fact running this agent for some nefarious purpose of its own. Suddenly you’ve set off all kinds of alarms.”

Taylor grunted. “So if we’re not going the official route to Pretoria, that rules out both State Department channels and our new legat.” The FBI had sixteen legal attachés, or legats, in American embassies around the world, which exchange information with foreign police and intelligence agencies. For years the FBI did not have a legat in Pretoria, because of the sanctions applied by the U.S. government. Only recently, since the election of Nelson Mandela as president, had the FBI opened an office there. “We need to reach out and touch some people. Some trusted, private source.”

“Do we have a paid asset over there?” Sarah asked.

“Not that I know of. I’ll ask around, but I don’t think so. At least, not a paid asset high enough in the government.”

“Someone with whom the Bureau or the Agency or the government has a relationship, someone reliable?”

“We’ll have to shake the bushes. But the first step is to set up an elite, completely secret task force, Sarah, and I’d like you to be on it.”

“Where? In New York?”

“Right here,” Taylor said.

“I’ve got a little boy, remember?” Sarah said.

“He’s portable. Anyway, it’s summer. He’s not in school now, is he?”

“No,” Sarah said. “But I’d really rather not.”

Taylor regarded her for a moment in puzzled silence. In the old days-during the Hoover era-it was unheard of for an agent to refuse an assignment. In the old days, you’d be told, “You want your paycheck, it’ll be in Washington in thirty days.” They’d have said, “We didn’t issue you a son. You want him, bring him.”

“Agent Cahill,” Taylor said icily, “if our intelligence is accurate, we’re looking at a major act of terrorism that’s going to take place in New York City in a matter of weeks. You want to tell me what the heck you’re working on that’s more important, more urgent, than that?”

Surprised by his sudden intensity, Sarah sat up straight. She leaned forward and said, returning intensity for intensity: “You’re asking me to disrupt my life, pack up my boy, and move out of Boston for what could be weeks or months. Okay, fair enough. But to work here? In Washington? Why don’t we set up shop in Altoona?”

“Excuse me?” Taylor said incredulously.

Agents Ullman and Vigiani watched the exchange with fascination, spectators at a bullfight.

“If the terrorism is to occur in New York, we’ve got to be in New York. You want to do a search, that takes massive shoeleather. That means working closely with the NYPD. It’s crazy to be in D.C.”

“Sarah, all the resources are here, the computers, the secure links-”

“For God’s sake, I had secure links with the Bureau when I was in Jackson, Mississippi, just out of New Agents school. You mean to tell me you can’t do that in New York City? I don’t believe it.”

“Then you’re talking about running a secret Ops center out of 26 Federal Plaza,” Taylor said. 26 Federal Plaza was the headquarters of the New York office of the FBI.

“Why not take out a full-page ad in The New York Times?” Sarah said.

“Excuse me?”

“If you want to keep it secret, forget about 26 Federal Plaza. We’ve got to find another location in the city.”

“I take it from your use of ‘we’ that you accept.”

“With a couple of conditions.”

Vigiani shook her head in disgust. Ullman studied his notes.

“Such as?”

“We’re off-site, for one.”

“That’s incredibly expensive.”

“Look, we’re going to need a lot of phone lines, some secure phones. NYO isn’t going to have the facilities anyway.”

“All right. I’m sure the New York office has something available. What else?”

“I’d like to bring a couple of people with me. A friend of mine on the OC squad, Ken Alton. He’s a computer whiz, and we may need his skills.”

“Done,” Taylor said. “And?”

“Alexander Pappas.”

“Alex Pappas?” Taylor said. “I thought he retired a couple of years ago.”

“Last year, actually.”

“What would he think about going back on the job?”

“I could twist his arm,” Sarah said, “but I think he’d secretly jump at the chance. They called him in on TRADEBOM.” This was the Bureau designation for the World Trade Center bombing.

“Well, it’s highly unusual, but I suppose it can be arranged. All right. So you’re on?”

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “I’m on.”

“Good. Now, how about leading it?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The components of a sophisticated bomb are not difficult to obtain. Quite the opposite: the fuse components, wires, and fittings can easily be purchased at any electronics supply shop. Explosives and blasting caps are available at most construction sites.

But the fusing mechanism-the device that fires the bomb at a specified time or under specified conditions-is a far trickier thing. Often it is constructed uniquely for each bomb. It must function under set circumstances with a high degree of reliability. In fact, it takes a good deal of skill to construct a reliable fusing mechanism. For this reason, most terrorists or operatives would no sooner think of assembling their own fusing mechanisms than building their own automobiles. You can’t be expert at everything.

Baumann arrived in the small industrial city of Huy, in a manufacturing belt southwest of Liège, by sunrise as he’d planned. The proprietor of a stationery store directed him to the modern brick multistoried building that housed Carabine Automatique of Liège (CAL), a small manufacturer of assault rifles and related components that had long since relocated to Huy, but had kept its name. Although he had no interest in assault rifles, he had made an appointment to see the marketing director, Etienne Charreyron.

It had been easy to arrange the meeting. Posing over the telephone as a British subject named Anthony Rhys-Davies, Baumann had explained that he was a munitions salesman for Royal Ordnance, the vast British arms manufacturer that makes virtually all the small arms for the British military. He was, he explained, a military-history buff on holiday, making a tour of famous Belgian battlefields. But he was mixing business with pleasure and thought he’d stop by to meet Mr. Charreyron and discuss the possibilities of doing business with Royal Ordnance. It would not look at all strange for a businessman on vacation to be dressed in casual attire.

Mr. Charreyron, of course, was happy to arrange a meeting at any time convenient for the British salesman. The possibilities were irresistible. Charreyron’s secretary was expecting Mr. Rhys-Davies and greeted him cordially, taking his overcoat and offering him coffee or tea before showing him into Charreyron’s cramped office.

Baumann went to shake Charreyron’s hand and momentarily started. It was bound to happen, in the small and insular world in which he operated. He and Etienne Cherreyron had known each other years before, though under different names. This was potentially a disaster. Baumann’s head spun.

Etienne Charreyron reacted as if he’d seen a ghastly apparition. “What-you-I thought you were dead!” he gasped.

Baumann, who had quickly gained an outward semblance of composure, smiled. “Sometimes I feel that way, but I’m very much alive.”

“But you-Luanda-Christ Almighty-!”

For the next ten seconds or so, Charreyron did little more than babble and stare in horror and incomprehension. His secretary stood in the doorway, uncertain what to do, until he dismissed her with a wave of his pudgy hand.

Ten years earlier, Charreyron and Baumann had served together in Angola. A former Portuguese colony, Angola had since 1976 been racked by civil war, with the Cuban-supported, Marxist MPLA battling the pro-Western UNITA forces, aided by South Africa.

Baumann’s employers had sent him there to help orchestrate a covert campaign of terrorism. There he had met a bomb-disposal specialist who went by the nom de guerre Hercule, a mere who had once worked for the Belgian police.

Back in the 1960s, Baumann later learned, this Hercule had built bombs for the legendary mercenary leader Mike O’Hore, the South African leader of the Fifth Commando, nicknamed the Wild Geese. Baumann had always considered O’Hore, whose exploits were world-famous, something of a slacker, a slob whose greatest skill was getting himself good press. But his bomb makers were always the best.

When it became necessary for Baumann to disappear from Angola, he had arranged an “accident” outside the capital city, Luanda, in which it appeared that he had been ambushed and killed. All the other mercs, including, no doubt, Hercule-who knew Baumann only under another name-had always believed that he was dead, one of the many casualties of war.

Bomb-disposal experts are a strange breed. They do their harrowing work in odd corners of the world, traveling to where the work is, often on contract for various governments. Many of them were brought in to clear land mines in Cambodia in the 1970s; in Angola, most of the land mines were cleared by Germans, although a few Belgians were brought in as well. After the Gulf War, the Kuwaiti government contracted with Royal Ordnance for an enormous number of bomb-disposal specialists to clear the leftover munitions. Their work is so stressful that many of them-those who escape unharmed-retire as soon as they can find good work elsewhere. Baumann now learned that this Hercule/Charreyron had left this hazardous line of work in the early eighties, when he was hired by the small Belgian firm Carabine Automatique of Liège.

“My God, it’s great to see you,” Charreyron at last exclaimed. “This is-this is just amazing! Please, sit.”

“And you too,” Baumann said, sinking into a chair.

“Yes,” Charreyron said, as he sat behind his desk. “How marvelous it is to see you again!” He was brave, genial, and clearly terrified. “But I don’t understand. You-well, the report of your death was some sort of disinformation, is that right?”

Baumann nodded, seemingly pleased to be sharing this secret with his old comrade in arms.

“I take it Rhys-Davies is a cover name, then?”

“Exactly,” Baumann said. He confided to the Belgian a fabricated, though plausible, story of his defection from South Africa to Australia and eventually to England, his hush-hush security work on behalf of a London-based sheik. “Now, this client of mine has asked me to undertake a highly sensitive project,” he went on, and explained the fusing mechanism that he needed to have built.

“But really, I haven’t done that sort of work for a few years now,” Charreyron protested mildly.

“I suspect it’s like riding a bicycle,” Baumann said. “You never forget. And the technology has changed little if at all in the last few years.”

“Yes, but…” His voice trailed off as he listened to Baumann, taking notes all the while.

“The relay,” Baumann said, “must be attached to a pocket pager. When the pager receives a signal, it will cause the relay to close, which will close the circuit between battery and detonator.”

“Won’t you need some means of disabling it?”

“Yes, but I want to set the electronic timer to go off automatically if it’s not disabled.”

Charreyron, his composure returned, simply shrugged nonchalantly.

“One more thing,” Baumann said. “There must also be a microwave sensor built into the mechanism that will set off the bomb if anyone approaches.”

Charreyron nodded again, arching his brows in mild surprise.

“I will need three of them,” Baumann said. “One for testing purposes, and the other two to be sent, separately.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Now, as to price.”

“Yes,” the Belgian said. He did some rapid calculations and then announced a large sum in Belgian francs.

Baumann arched his eyebrows in surprise. Fusing mechanisms of such complexity generally went for about ten thousand dollars apiece, and he did not like to be cheated.

“You see,” Charreyron explained, “the difficulty lies in acquiring the pagers. You will need three of them, and they must be purchased in the United States. You know how complicated that is-with every pager comes a telephone number and a detailed registration. They must be bought clandestinely. And since I certainly don’t want the serial number plate on the pager to be traced through the paging company back to me, I’ll have to purchase several and do some alterations.”

“But for an old friend…?” Baumann said jovially. Haggling over prices was common in this line of work; the Belgian would expect it.

“I can go as low as fifteen thousand each. But less than that, and it’s simply not worth the risk. I will have to go to New York myself to get them, so I have to figure in the cost of travel. And you are asking me to do all this in such a short period of time-”

“All right then,” Baumann said. “Forty-five thousand U.S. it is. No, let’s make it an even fifty thousand U.S.”

The two men shook hands. For the first time, Charreyron appeared relaxed. Baumann counted out twenty-five thousand dollars and placed them on the desk. “The other half when I return in a week. Is there a vacant warehouse on the outskirts of town where we can do a test?”

“Certainly,” Charreyron said. “But I think we have a little more business to transact.”

“Oh?”

“For an additional fifty thousand U.S., I can assure you that nothing of our past acquaintance will become known.”

“Fifty thousand?” Baumann asked, as if seriously considering it.

“And then”-Charreyron clapped his hands together-“the past is gone, just like that.”

“I see,” Baumann said. “Please understand something. I have many police contacts who stand to benefit handsomely by giving me any information of possible interest to me. Rumors, reports of my presence here, that sort of thing. I am paying you well, with a generous bonus to come. But I don’t want to learn that the slightest detail of our talk, or of my past history, has left this office. Not a single detail. You can imagine the consequences for you and your family.”

The color drained from Charreyron’s face. “I’m a professional,” he said, retreating hastily. “I would never betray a confidence.”

“Excellent. Because you know me, and you know that I would stop at nothing.”

Charreyron shook his head violently. “I would never say a word,” he said desperately. “Please. Forget what I said about the fifty thousand. It was a foolish mistake.”

“Don’t worry,” Baumann said pleasantly. “It’s forgotten. We all make mistakes. But please don’t make the mistake of underestimating me.”

“Please,” Charreyron whispered. In his days as a bomb-disposal expert, he had constantly faced the possibility of losing a limb, even his life. But nothing terrified him so much as this phlegmatic, ruthless South African, who had suddenly appeared in his office after ten years-a man who, Charreyron had no doubt whatsoever, would indeed stop at nothing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

A few days after Baumann’s first visit to Charreyron, in southwest Belgium, he returned to inspect the fusing mechanisms.

In the intervening time, he had combined a little business with a great deal of relaxation. On his first night back in Amsterdam, he met again with “Bones” Van den Vondel, who provided him with the three sets of stolen documentation he had requested-two American, one British-and a small bundle of credit cards. Bones made it abundantly clear he was happy to do business with Mr. Sidney Lerner, and happier still to have the opportunity to do an ongoing business with the Mossad, should it require any other assistance from an outsider.

Several mornings he slept late. He saw movies, enjoyed expensive restaurants. Several afternoons he spent studying maps of New York City. He took in a few topless bars around Rembrandtsplein and, in the red-light district, bought himself an hour of pleasure with a young prostitute. One night he went to a popular nightclub called Odeon, where he picked up a comely young woman and took her back to his hotel. She was about as randy as he was; they spent most of the night having sex, until each collapsed in happy exhaustion. In the morning, she wanted to stay, or at least to see him again that evening. He was tempted-during his years in Pollsmoor he had almost forgotten how pleasurable sex could be-but knew it was a bad idea to become too familiar to anyone here. He told her he had, regrettably, to catch a return flight that afternoon.

Amsterdam, like New York and San Francisco, is world-renowned as a gathering place for computer enthusiasts, or “hackers.” Although Baumann had been in prison too long to be conversant in the latest technology, he knew where to find someone who was. He contacted a member of the Amsterdam-based Dutch organization Hacktic, which publishes a magazine for computer hackers, and arranged a meeting. He described the sort of person he was looking for: a hacker based in New York, without a criminal past.

“No,” he was told, “you are looking for a cracker-not a hacker. A hacker makes it his mission to understand, shall we say, undocumented technology, so that the government doesn’t enslave us, and to make the world a better place. A cracker has the same skills but uses them, so to speak, to break into your house, often for mercenary purposes.”

“All right, then, a cracker,” Baumann said.

“I have a name for you,” his contact said. “But he will only take on your project, whatever it is, if he finds it of interest-and enormously lucrative.”

“Oh, that he will,” said Baumann. “He will find it both.”

On his second-to-last morning in Amsterdam, he purchased a small device at a large electronics supply house for one thousand guilders, which was then equivalent to six hundred dollars. It was an “ATM Junior,” used by banks to encode magnetic strips on bank and credit cards. With this device he recoded the magnetic strips on each stolen credit card.

When a credit card is used at a retail establishment, it is usually swiped through a transponder, which reads the CVC number at the head of the magnetic stripe and immediately sends it over a telephone line to the credit card company’s central data-processing facility. The computers there check whether the card in question is expired, overextended, or stolen. If it is not, the computers send back an approval code within a second or two. (American Express uses two-digit approval codes, while Visa and MasterCard use four- or five-digit ones.)

Baumann had little doubt that most if not all of these credit cards had already been reported as stolen. If they hadn’t yet, it was simply a matter of time.

But he had circumvented that process. Each credit card now had an approval code of the appropriate number of digits encoded in its magnetic stripe. Whenever a merchant swiped one of these cards through the transponder, the approval code would instantly appear on the transponder’s readout. The machine would read the code-not send it out.

It was highly unlikely the merchant would wonder why the telephone hadn’t dialed, why several seconds hadn’t elapsed before the approval code came in. And if that happened, why, Baumann would remark that the magnetic stripe on the back of the card must have worn out. Too bad. And that would be the end of that. An excellent chance of success, with virtually no risk.

In his remaining time, Baumann ordered several sets of letterhead stationery for several notional, amorphous firms-an import-export company, a law firm, a storage facility.

And he reserved a seat on a Sabena flight from Brussels to London under a false name for which he had no documentation, knowing that, so long as he traveled within the European Commonwealth, he would not be required to show a passport. Then he booked a coach seat from London to New York under the name of one of his newly acquired American passports, that of a businessman and entrepreneur named Thomas Allen Moffatt.

Etienne Charreyron had arranged to use a deserted horse barn on the outskirts of Huy that belonged to a business associate who was in Brussels for the entire month. The associate had recently liquidated all of his family’s livestock at auction.

The barn still smelled strongly of horse manure and damp hay and machine oil. The lighting was barely adequate. In the dim, dank interior, Charreyron opened a battered leather suitcase and gingerly removed three black plastic utility boxes the size of shoeboxes. The lid of each was a plate of brushed aluminum, and on this plate were three tiny bulbs, light-emitting diodes.

“This light tells you that the pocket pager is on and functioning,” Charreyron explained to Baumann. “This one tells you that the battery is emitting power. And this one indicates that the timer is functioning.”

Charreyron slid the aluminum plate off one of the fusing mechanisms. “I’ve set up two separate systems on opposite sides, for redundancy. Two nine-volt batteries, two sets of two screw posts each to connect to the blasting caps. Two timers, two pager-receivers set to the same frequency, two relays. Even two ferrite bars for antennae.” He looked up. “It will beat the bomb-disposal people. Doubles the chances of the thing working, hmm?”

“And one microwave sensor.”

“That’s all there’s room for, and certainly all you’ll need.”

“Shall we test one of them?”

“Yes, of course.” Charreyron lifted one of the black boxes.

“Actually,” Baumann said, grabbing another, “let’s try this one.”

Charreyron smiled slyly, seeming to enjoy the sport. “Whatever you like.”

He brought the box over to an empty fifty-five-gallon steel drum at the far end of the barn and put it on a narrow wooden plank that had been placed across the open top of the barrel. He attached two blasting caps to it, then walked to the other side of the barn.

“First test,” the Belgian said, “is for radio control.”

He took a small cellular phone from his breast pocket, opened it, and dialed a number. As soon as he had done so, he looked at his watch. Baumann did the same.

The two men waited in silence.

Forty-five seconds later the barn echoed with the sound of a gunshot. The blasting caps that dangled from the fusing mechanism had detonated, giving off fragments that were contained by the steel barrel.

“A long delay,” Baumann observed.

“It varies.”

“Yes.” The detonator that set off the blasting caps had been armed by a circuit that closed when the built-in pager received a signal sent by satellite. Depending on how much satellite traffic there was at any given moment, the page signal could be received in a few seconds or a few minutes. “What about the microwave sensor?”

“Certainly.” Charreyron walked across the barn to the steel barrel and attached a fresh set of blasting caps to the fusing mechanism. He rearmed it and pushed a button to activate a time-delay switch.

“As soon as the timer runs down, the microwave sensor is armed. You can set the time delay for as short as ten seconds.”

“And as long as-?”

“Seventy-two hours. But if you need a longer delay, I can easily replace it.”

“No, that’ll do.”

“Good. I’ve set this for ten seconds. And now, the microwave-yes.” From across the dim expanse, Baumann could see a red light wink on. “It’s armed now. Would you like to…?”

“Distance?”

“Twenty-five feet, but that too can be adjusted.”

Baumann walked slowly toward the steel drum, then stopped approximately thirty feet from it. Then he approached step by step, until he was startled by the loud explosion of the blasting caps.

“Very precise,” he said.

“It’s top-quality,” Charreyron said, permitting himself a proud smile.

“You do good work. But what about the signature, as we discussed?”

“That took me quite some time to research. But I came up with a rather convincing Libyan signature.”

Most explosive devices leave “signatures” that permit an investigator to determine who originated them. They might be how the knots are tied, how connections are soldered, how wires are cut.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army, for instance, makes its bomb fuses in lots of a hundred or so. A number of PIRA technicians get together in a warehouse or barn and work without stop for a few days, making identical fuses, which are then parceled out. This has been confirmed both by intelligence and by inspecting the fusing mechanisms of unexploded PIRA bombs: one can tell from the identical, if minuscule, markings that every wire has been cut with the same pair of wirecutters. Some terrorist groups leave a signature unintentionally, out of sloppiness, because they have always constructed a bomb in a certain way. Some, however, do so deliberately, as a subtle way to claim credit.

“Now, as for shipping,” the Belgian said. “You’re certainly welcome to take them with you, but I assume you don’t want to take that risk.”

Baumann gave a small snort of derision.

“I didn’t think so. The entire assembly can be broken down into its components, which all clip rather neatly into place. I’ll go over it with you. That makes it easy to ship.”

“But you won’t ship them from Liège.”

“That would not be discreet,” Charreyron said, “given what Liège is known for. No, I will send them from Brussels. Concealed, let’s say, in some harmless electronic thing like a radio. Overnight express, if you like. You simply give me an address.”

“Fine.”

“And-uh-there’s the matter of payment. The pagers cost a bit more than I calculated.”

Baumann removed an envelope of bills and counted out the amount Charreyron asked for. It was a reasonable sum-about 30 percent more than his original estimate. The Belgian was not trying to pull a fast one.

“Excellent,” Charreyron said, as he pocketed the money.

“Well, then,” Baumann said heartily, “please give my best to your lovely wife, Marie. Isn’t she a curator at the Curtius Museum?”

Charreyron stared dully.

“And little Berthe-six years old and a student at the école normale, is that right? You must be proud.”

“What the hell are you hinting at?”

“Just this, my friend. I know the address of your apartment on Rue Saint-Gilles. I know where your daughter is at this very moment, where your wife is. Remember what I said: if the slightest detail of our dealings is made known to anyone, the consequences for you and your family will be unimaginable. I will stop at nothing.”

“Oh, please, not another word,” said the Belgian, ashen-faced. “That is understood.”

As they strolled out of the barn and into the blindingly bright afternoon daylight, Baumann considered whether to kill the man. There was a mild, cool breeze and the pleasant smell of newly mown grass.

Life is a series of gambles, Baumann reflected. Charreyron would not benefit in any way from turning in a South African mercenary whose name he didn’t even know, and would certainly not wish to let the authorities know of his own past involvement in Luanda. And the threat to his family’s well-being would be persuasive.

No, Charreyron would live. Baumann shook his hand cordially, got into his rented car, and drove off. Doing business with someone he knew from another life was an enormous risk-but so too had been his escape from Pollsmoor. He could not proceed with this undertaking until he knew for certain whether his whereabouts remained unknown.

There were ways to find out. He had been driving through the Meuse Valley, along the Sambre River, which meets the Meuse River at Namur. This stretch of the road was breathtakingly beautiful, with high cliffs and canals, farmhouses and the ruins of ancient brick buildings. After he’d passed through Andenne, and before he’d reached Namur, he pulled off the road and drove around until he located a long stretch of woods, a line of trees beside a clearing. There he switched off the engine.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Of the fifty-six FBI field offices and four hundred resident agencies throughout the United States and Puerto Rico, the New York office is generally considered both the best assignment and the worst. From the ABSCAM convictions against members of Congress for taking bribes, to the siege against the five major Mafia families, to the bombing of the World Trade Center, New York has always had the sexiest cases.

New York is the largest of the field offices, with some twelve hundred agents. It occupies eight floors of the Jacob J. Javits Federal Building, at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan. Unlike all the other field offices, New York is headed not by a special agent in charge but by an assistant FBI director, because it is both bigger and more important than the others.

Sarah had always found the Javits building gloomy. Tall and plain, with a facing of black stone alternating with sandstone, it is set in the middle of a forlorn cement “park” studded with concrete planters holding marigolds, ferns, and petunias-some landscape designer’s valiant attempt to make the setting cheery. Pigeons skitter across the broad granite ledges around a reflecting pool.

On her first morning, she arrived before eight, already perspiring from the heat. The one-bedroom furnished apartment she was subletting was on West Seventy-first Street near Columbus Avenue, very close to the subway stop, a Gray’s Papaya, several decent pizza places, and a Greek coffee shop. For the first couple of days, she had lived on nothing but Greek salads and slices of pizza. What else could you ask for?

Daylight, perhaps? Somehow, by some ingenious stroke of architecture, all of the apartment windows gave onto shadowed air shafts. It was always midnight in her small bedroom, in the cheaply furnished living/dining room, dark enough to grow mushrooms.

For the first time in years, Sarah was living alone. It was disorienting, at times lonely, but not entirely unpleasant. She’d stayed up late the night before, reading in the tub and drinking wine. She played a recording of the Beethoven late quartets she’d picked up at Tower Records and listened to it until it began to sound like Philip Glass.

Jared was away at camp in upstate New York. For months he’d demanded to go to summer sleep-over camp, and she had kept refusing. The money was too tight these days, she’d explained; he could go to day camp near Boston.

But with the sudden transfer to New York, and the wrench that threw into her son’s life, she had to scrape together the money. The new assignment brought with it an increase in salary, which made paying for camp feasible. Anyway, it was certainly better for him to spend a couple of weeks in camp (though he’d wanted a month) than to live in New York City, not a place for eight-year-old boys, she thought.

The lobby of 26 Federal Plaza was cavernous, with high marble walls, several long elevator banks, cash machines. She felt small. She presented her credentials at the reception desk, and was directed to Counterterrorism, in a corner of the twenty-third floor.

A very tall, thin, good-looking man of forty introduced himself as Harry Whitman, the chief of the Joint Terrorist Task Force. He wore a khaki summer-weight suit with a standard-issue white shirt and, the one grace note, a bright turquoise tie.

“So, you’re Sarah Cahill,” he said. “Welcome.”

“Thanks.”

His office was sparsely decorated with a small, autographed photo of Hoover-not a good sign, Sarah mused-and, for some reason, a large official photo of George Bush in a fake-gilt frame, propped on its side against the side of his desk. Bush had been out of office for years. Definitely not a good sign.

“You and the rest of the special task force will be located off-site,” he said. “I’ll introduce you to the others in a couple of minutes, and explain how the joint task force operates. You’re in charge of a code-name operation. But first things first. I guess Perry Taylor in D.C. liked you, but he likes you even more now.”

“Why?”

“Thanks to your suggestion, Perry shook the bushes in South Africa for a lead on your terrorist.”

“And?”

“We’ve got a name. By tomorrow morning we should have a face.”

She felt her heart start to thud. “A name…?”

“His name is Henrik Baumann.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Baumann hiked around the perimeter of the clearing, satisfied no one was around, that no one could come upon him unexpectedly. From the truck he pulled out the MLink-5000, the satellite telephone that resembled a metal briefcase. He placed it on the roof of the car and unfolded it. The top, which flipped open like a book, was the flat-plate antenna. It was much less conspicuous than the older models whose antennas were large dishes.

Since the transmitter’s beam width was much broader than that of the older models, aiming accuracy was much less crucial. As he adjusted the angle of elevation, he studied the little boxes on the LCD readout that indicated signal strength. When he had maximum signal strength, he turned the thumbscrews on the back panel and removed the handset.

Then he placed a telephone call.

From his years in South African intelligence, he knew the workings of the government of South Africa. He knew that any search for his whereabouts would move in one of two directions. It would either be instigated by South Africa and reach outward, or it would be instigated by another country and be directed toward South Africa.

The first direction-a request coming from South Africa and going to security and law-enforcement services around the world-was by far the more likely. A former member of BOSS had broken out of prison, had likely left the country: the South Africans would request help.

Less likely, but far more worrisome, was the second possibility-that some law-enforcement or intelligence agency had learned something about him and had turned to South Africa for help. This would most certainly indicate a leak in Dyson’s coterie.

When governments deal with other governments, they almost always go through established channels. An official request to the South African government for information on one Henrik Baumann might come through diplomatic or intelligence channels; it might be sent to the attorney general, or directly to the South African police. But no matter where it was pointed, it would be funneled to one place. All prisoner records, including court statements, photographs, and the standard fingerprint record, S.A.P. 69, are stored in the centralized records of the South African Criminal Bureau in Pretoria. The Criminal Bureau, however, was a large bureaucracy. A request for records might be handled by any of a dozen or more people.

But a far smaller staff was employed at the Department of Customs and Excise, Baumann knew, processing and handling passport applications. Any thorough search for information on him would include a request for his original passport application. Years ago, there was just one person, a stout Afrikaner whose name Baumann had long since forgotten, who handled requests for copies of these applications.

The clerk in charge was no doubt a different person by now. But there probably was still just one clerk in charge.

By his second call, he had reached the customs clerk in charge of passport application requests, a pleasant-voiced woman.

“This is Gordon Day from Interpol in Lyons. I’m following up on a request…”

“Sorry,” the clerk said politely when Baumann had stated his business. “We’re not supposed to deal directly with outside agencies-”

“Right,” he said, the jolly British civil servant, “but you see, the thing of it is, the request has already been made, and I need to know whether the documents have been sent, is all, because there seems to be some foul-up on our end here, at headquarters.”

“I haven’t gotten any request from Interpol concerning a passport of that number,” she said.

“Are you quite sure?” Baumann insisted.

“Yes, Mr. Day, I’m quite sure, but if you send me a fax with-”

“Is there another agency the request might have ended up at?”

“Not that I know of, sir.”

“Oh, dear. Well, is it possible that our request was filed with another country’s, like the French, maybe, or-”

“No, sir. The only request for that application I’ve received came from the American FBI.”

“Ah,” Baumann said triumphantly. “That makes sense. They put in the request to us, as well. Was the requesting officer a Mr… Mr… I must have it here somewhere…”

“Taylor, sir, from Counterterrorism?”

“Taylor! Right. Well, that certainly clears that up. Thanks so much for your help.”

“Yes, sir, my pleasure.”

Counterterrorism. The FBI. The Americans were on to him. A change in plan was most definitely necessary.

He would not fly to New York. No, that would not do at all. That would be a mistake.

He would fly to Washington.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Twenty years ago or so, Harry Whitman explained, an agent in the Criminal Division had attended the FBI Academy with a South African policeman. The FBI National Academy runs an intensive fifteen-week program at Quantico, Virginia, to train midlevel police officials in the latest investigative techniques. Out of the one hundred law-enforcement officials in each class, fifteen or twenty are foreign.

“This South African guy, name of Sachs, had gone to three FBI-run retraining sessions in Europe, so our people’d had a little bit of contact with him,” Whitman said. He and Sarah stood at the entrance to his office. “We checked him out with State and the Agency, to see if maybe the guy went bad. Negative. Luckily for us, this Sachs fellow’s now in the security services, so we got a line right into the heart of darkness. Had someone on the CIA team in Johannesburg make contact, real unofficial.”

“The CIA guy asked the South African cop for information on the alias Heinrich Fürst?”

Whitman nodded. “And anything else he could get. Taylor’s thinking was that if there was something rotten going on and our contact was party to it, this contact would trigger a flurry of communications. Right after our man met with this guy, we laid on the surveillance. Had the satellite cowboys monitor all signals traffic into and out of South Africa, checking the frequency of cable traffic to their embassy here.”

“And?”

“And nothing unusual went out. No frantic calls or telexes. You can’t prove a negative, but it’s a good sign the contact’s clean.”

“Maybe.”

“Next morning he came back to us with a name. Nothing on any Heinrich Fürst, but ‘Prince of Darkness,’ yes, oh my yes. ‘Everyone in the intelligence service knows who that is-fellow named Henrik Baumann.’ Code name, or cryptonym, is-or was-Zero, designating their most skilled agent. So we had our legat make an official request to several branches of the South African government, the attorney general, the police, blah blah blah, for all records on one Henrik Baumann. Passport applications, birth certificate, files, the works. Now we sit and wait. See if we really do have our man.”

“Are they being cooperative?” Sarah asked.

“Are you kidding? They’re frantic! They’re all alarmed that a former South African agent may be involved in terrorism. Especially a white guy left over from the old regime. They love to dump shit on the old government. Actually, I should call the Communications Center, see if anything came in.”

He picked up his desk phone and pressed a button. Sarah examined the discarded photograph of George Bush and wondered how long it had been resting on its side. Since Clinton’s inauguration?

“I see,” Whitman was saying to the telephone handset. “I see.” His eyebrows were arched.

Sarah looked up at him curiously, trying to interpret his tone.

Whitman hung up the phone and looked directly at her with a peculiar smile. “We’ve got a full set of prints-”

“Great.”

“-and a kink in the fishing line. Just over three weeks ago, our Mr. Baumann escaped from maximum-security lockup at Pollsmoor Prison. Pollsmoor police detectives discovered he was missing, found a couple of bodies, and opened an Escaping Docket to investigate an escape from lawful custody. They followed standard procedure-Form SAP-69, with the fugitive’s fingerprints, and a dossier containing court statements and other records were sent over from central records at the South African Criminal Bureau in Pretoria. But nothing turned up, not a trace of our friend. The South Africans normally don’t reach out to the international authorities in the case of an escaped prisoner, even a former member of their own security services. They’d all but given up looking for him, even put out a burn notice on the guy. Anyway, I’d say we’ve got the right man. Now let me take you to your lovely suite of offices and introduce you to the happy campers you’ll be working with.”

The “lovely suite of offices,” as Harry Whitman had put it, was the penthouse of a decrepit building in midtown Manhattan, on West Thirty-seventh Street near Seventh Avenue. The neighborhood was lousy, the ancient clattering elevator even less promising.

Once Sarah got off the elevator at the penthouse, however, the scenery changed dramatically.

The site, which the FBI was renting from a company that sold display fixtures to retail stores and had recently relocated to Stamford, Connecticut, had last been used by the FBI for a Chinatown drug sting operation, and so the security was already in place. Sarah entered a reception area that was walled off from the rest of the floor. A phony name was on the wall.

A receptionist sat at a desk, Whitman explained, monitoring video cameras mounted in the hallways and fire stairs and buzzing in authorized visitors through the electronically controlled inner door. A volumetric alarm system was set up in the reception area; the rest of the space was alarmed with volumetric, passive infrared, and active point-to-point infrared systems. To allow people to work through the night in various parts of the offices, the alarm system was zoned. The safes were in one room, separately alarmed.

“Secure communications links,” Whitman said as they entered what was once a showroom, now clearly the main command center. “This place cost us serious big bucks to set up, I might add, so I’m glad we’re reusing it.” He gave her a sidelong glance as if she were to blame. “Secure fax, secure computer terminal links, a line to the Watch Center at Langley, even a couple of Stus thrown in just for fun.” “Stu” is intelligence-community lingo for STU, a secure telephone unit. In a separate room, also alarmed, were two STU-III secure telephones-black lines, as they are called, for calls up to the classification of top secret.

Several people Sarah didn’t know were there, drinking coffee and reading the Daily News and the New York Post. The rest she recognized. Alex Pappas was engaged in animated, friendly conversation with Christine Vigiani from Counterterrorism in Washington. Both of them were smoking furiously. Russell Ullman from Washington was doing a crossword puzzle. Ken Alton was off by himself reading a book entitled Schrödinger’s Cat, which she assumed was science fiction.

“All right,” Whitman announced loudly, his hands thrust high in the air, waving for attention. “I assume everyone here has been detailed to the special working group of the Joint Terrorist Task Force. If you’re not, you know too much already and I’m going to have to have you killed.”

Polite chuckles all around. Whitman introduced himself and then everyone else to one another. Everyone in the room, Bureau or not, was wearing the FBI-regulation ID card, either clipped to a shirt or breast pocket or hanging from a metal chain around the neck. The FBI men were all wearing laminated dog tags and, so it seemed, Rockports.

Every FBI agent in the Joint Terrorist Task Force is paired with a New York City policeman. Sarah’s partner was a paunchy, moon-faced police detective lieutenant named George Roth, who had a receding hairline, deep acne pits on identical spots on each cheek, broken capillaries spread across a bulbous nose, and a strong Brooklyn accent. He barely acknowledged her. He gave her an imperceptible nod and didn’t shake her hand. He took a Breath Saver from a roll in his shirt pocket, popped it into his mouth, and lodged it against his left cheek.

Great to meet you too, Sarah thought.

Whitman sat on the edge of a desk and shoved aside an ancient-looking cup of coffee with a cigarette butt floating in it. “Okay, now, all of you were handpicked for this special group, but I’ve gotta lay down the law about secrecy right here and now. I can’t stress enough how important secrecy is. A couple of you are from out of town, so you might not know what kind of shit will go down in this city if the word gets out that a major Wall Street bank might get hit with a major act of terrorism in two weeks. Panic like you’ve never seen. Those of you on the job know what that means.

“If you have to reach out to other departments in the city, don’t tell ’em you’re doing work on terrorism. You’re looking for a fugitive, okay? And not a fucking word to the press, understood?”

There were nods, clearing of throats.

“When we were working on TRADEBOM, someone on the task force had a drinking buddy, a reporter for Newsday. Couldn’t help blabbing. So what happens? Newsday runs an article about one of the terrorists we were going to arrest when we were good and ready, but no, now we had to swoop in on the guy way too early. Which screwed things up really bad. Now, that leak came from the full task force, which is big. There’s only ten of you, so if there’s a leak, you better believe I’m going to track it down. If any of you have drinking buddies in the press, I’d go on the wagon till this inquiry is completed.”

The task force, he said, was code-named Operation MINOTAUR. He explained that the Minotaur was a mythological monster, ferociously strong, with the head of a bull and the body of a human. The Minotaur-he didn’t bother to explain whether this was supposed to represent the terrorist they were after-fed exclusively on human flesh. It was perhaps an overly optimistic code name, for according to Greek mythology, the Minotaur was trapped in a place (the Labyrinth, constructed by Daedalus) from which it could not escape.

“Uh, how long is this ‘special working group’ supposed to go on for?” asked Lieutenant Roth. He gave “special working group” a heavy ironic emphasis. Sarah’s heart sank at the thought of working with him.

“The director has approved a preliminary inquiry,” Whitman said. “That means it’s good for a hundred and twenty days. Theoretically, if there’s good reason, it can be renewed for another ninety days. But I’d like to get this thing wrapped up way before that.”

“Who wouldn’t?” one of the agents mumbled.

“What do you mean, ‘theoretically’?” Pappas asked.

“I mean, in our case Washington’s giving us all of two weeks.”

He was interrupted by a chorus of protests, whistles, catcalls. “You gotta be kidding,” Christine Vigiani said.

“No, I’m not kidding. Two weeks, and then the search is shut down. And we don’t even get a full-field. Now, for those of you new to the game, the main difference between a preliminary inquiry and a full-field inquiry is what you can’t do. No wiretap. No surveillance. No trash cover.”

“Can we ask people questions?” Roth said. “If we ask nice?”

Whitman ignored him. “Look, I know a task force of ten people is nothing. Some of you guys remember back in 1982 when they found cyanide in Tylenol, and this guy was extorting a million bucks from Johnson & Johnson. The New York office put three hundred agents on the search, from Criminal and Counterintelligence. I think a ten-man force is bullshit, but I guess Washington’s trying out a small, flexible task force that’s not as hamstrung by red tape and all that.” He shrugged. “I don’t make policy.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Lieutenant Roth said mordantly, “but would it be accurate to say that we don’t have jack shit on this guy? I mean, we don’t even have this guy’s name.”

“Not quite,” Sarah said. The others turned around to face her. She explained what they’d just received from Johannesburg.

Instead of the outburst of excitement or appreciation that she expected, there was a beat of silence, and then Agent Vigiani spoke.

“This guy escaped from prison in South Africa more than two weeks ago and we never heard about it?” she asked bitterly. “They didn’t send out a heads-up, didn’t alert Interpol, nothing? I don’t get it.”

“I doubt it was deliberate,” Sarah said. “South Africa’s been an outcast for so long that they’re not used to sharing their internal problems with the international authorities. They haven’t exactly gotten their act together.”

“Oh, well, this is quite a relief,” said Lieutenant George Roth. “Now we have a name. All we have to do is ask around-if we’re permitted to do that-to see if anyone happens to know a terrorist named Henrik Baumann. Makes our job so much easier.”

“A lead’s a lead,” Sarah said irritably.

“Your job is just about impossible,” Whitman agreed. “Yes, we have a name, and we’ll soon have prints, maybe even a photo. But we’re still searching for a needle in a haystack.”

“A needle in a haystack?” Lieutenant Roth replied. “More like trying to find a short shaft of wheat in a field that might be anywhere in Nebraska.”

“We’ll never find the guy with that attitude,” Harry Whitman said. “You’ve got to believe the guy’s out there. Each of you has to think of yourself as the fugitive. What he’s doing, what he’s planning, what he might have to buy, where he might be living. And everyone makes mistakes.”

“From what you’re telling me,” Lieutenant Roth said, “this guy doesn’t.”

Sarah spoke without looking up. “No. He’ll make a mistake. We just have to catch him at it.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

During the lunch hour on February 26, 1993, at 12:18 p.m., a bomb concealed in a rented yellow Ryder truck exploded in level B-2 of the parking garage of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. An estimated fifty thousand people were inside the 110-story skyscraper, one of the World Trade Center’s seven buildings, at the time. Tens of thousands were stranded in offices, stairwells, and elevators as a result of the explosion, including seventeen kindergartners from P.S. 95 in Brooklyn, who were trapped in an elevator. A thousand people were injured, mostly from smoke inhalation, and six were killed. One of the great symbols of New York City sustained almost a billion dollars’ worth of damage.

After a painstaking investigation, eight men were subsequently arrested, of whom four were convicted of the bombing after an extraordinary five-month trial during which 207 witnesses were called, ten thousand pages of evidence amassed. The four men, all Arab immigrants, were followers of a blind Muslim cleric in a New Jersey mosque.

This was the worst act of terrorism ever to hit the United States up till that point. The bomb, which was built by amateurs, consisted of twelve hundred pounds of explosive material and three cylinders of hydrogen gas. It cost less than four hundred dollars to make.

Terrorism experts (an enormous number of them seemed to spring up all at once) all announced that America had lost its innocence, that America’s cities had become fortresses. The security in major buildings, particularly landmarks, was enhanced. Parking garages were no longer quite so easy for just anyone to enter. Concrete stanchions were placed around public spaces so cars could not drive into them. Incoming packages were X-rayed. Visitor passes and employee identification cards were checked more rigorously.

Unfortunately, that heightened vigilance lasted for only a few months. Although the new security cameras and the concrete stanchions remained in place, the shock of the World Trade Center bombing gradually faded, and people returned to life as usual.

The terrorism experts declared that America had finally joined the ranks of Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, where terrorism is a regular occurrence. Actually, the United States had seen terrorism before.

There had been a few isolated incidents: in Chicago in 1886, a bomb exploded in a crowd of policemen; in 1920, a bomb went off on Wall Street. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a wave of leftist-radical bombings, but they were sparse, mostly done by the Weather Underground faction of the Students for a Democratic Society and other members of the “white left,” who’d launched a campaign of urban terrorism hoping to spark a revolution. In a famous 1970 incident, leftist radicals had blown up the University of Wisconsin Army Research Center with a crude bomb made of diesel fuel and fertilizer. But the Weathermen dissolved in 1976 as a result of internal squabbling and by 1980 had more or less ceased to exist.

During the 1970s, the world was swept by terrorism, but the continental United States was mostly left alone, with the exception of a series of attacks, from the mid-seventies to the early eighties, by the Puerto Rican independence group FALN. Most of the Puerto Rican attacks, however, were limited to Puerto Rico. In 1980, in fact, more Americans were killed by lightning than by terrorism-and that was, worldwide, a big year for terrorism.

From time to time in recent years, America has gone through terrorism scares-in 1983, when a U.S. warship accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger plane, and in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War. But very little ever materialized. Of the five terrorist incidents on U.S. soil in 1991, none was associated with the Middle East. Four took place in Puerto Rico; the only one that happened in the continental United States was an attack on the Internal Revenue Service Center in Fresno, California, on April Fools’ Day by a group calling itself Up the IRS, Inc.

In fact, in the thirty-four terrorist incidents recorded in the United States and Puerto Rico between 1987 and 1991, not a single person was killed or even injured.

So while the bombing of the World Trade Center certainly jarred America into the realization that terrorism could actually happen here, that realization faded all too quickly. By the end of 1994, America returned to its normal state of blissful unconcern.

And then, on April 19, 1995, came the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the worst domestic terrorist incident in U.S. history. Like TRADEBOM, the bomb was loaded onto a yellow Ryder rental truck. This one consisted of a ton of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer. It killed 167 people.

Fortunately, by the early 1980s the Federal Bureau of Investigation had begun to take terrorism seriously and had set up six Joint Terrorist Task Forces around the country. The largest was in New York City. It operated out of 26 Federal Plaza and was commanded jointly by the FBI and the New York City Police Department. And for more than a decade-until the Trade Center bomb-it went without an international incident, a “major special,” as such significant attacks are called.

The composition of the Joint Terrorist Task Force is always precisely 50 percent FBI agents and 50 percent New York City police detectives. Under the Memorandum of Understanding that established the task force, the FBI is the lead agency. The police members are sworn in as federal marshals to enable them to handle federal violations. A lieutenant oversees the policemen; an FBI supervisor oversees the agents.

It is a choice assignment for cops, and the task force members selected are always the cream of the detective corps. They tend to be senior detectives; the FBI members tend to be younger. They always work in teams of two and are further divided into squads-one that deals with Muslim fundamentalists, for instance, one for domestic terrorism, one for other international groups like the Sikhs or the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

The Joint Terrorism Task Force numbered no more than six cops and six agents in 1985. During the Gulf War the commitment increased to about a hundred agents and a hundred detectives. By 1994-after the Trade Center bomb-it had shrunk to thirty agents and thirty detectives. There was even talk at One Police Plaza and 26 Federal Plaza about disbanding the force entirely.

After all, TRADEBOM was an isolated event, was it not? And what were the odds, when you came right down to it, of such a thing ever happening again?

But then came Oklahoma City, and then it seemed that America would never be safe from terrorism again.

At three-thirty in the afternoon, Baumann arrived at Dulles International Airport, outside of Washington. An hour and a half later, he carried his baggage through the terminal’s Eero Saarinen-designed interior and got a cab to Washington. In his leather carry-on satchel, in several neat bundles, were Thomas Cook traveler’s checks in various denominations totaling several hundred thousand dollars, payable to a fictitious corporation. Baumann knew that the Central Intelligence Agency uses unsigned Thomas Cook traveler’s checks to pay its contract agents (often diverted from funds earmarked for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations). That way, there’s no paper trail. Had the customs inspector opened his satchel and discovered the checks-which did not happen-there would have been no problem: such checks are nonnegotiable currency and cannot be taxed by U.S. Customs.

Baumann stayed at the Jefferson, because he had heard it was a comfortable and elegant hotel, and because it happened to have a room available for a harried businessman who’d just missed his plane.

It was too late in the day, by the time he arrived at the hotel, to make any calls, so he ordered a cheeseburger from room service, took a steaming-hot bath, and slept off his exhaustion. In the morning, refreshed and prosperous-looking in one of his businessman’s suits, he devoured a large room-service breakfast, read The Washington Post, and set off for a walk.

When you call the FBI’s general number, you do not hear the periodic beeping that signifies you are being recorded. But Baumann assumed the FBI did record all incoming calls, legally or not. The real problem, though, was not whether his voice might be taped. Had he called the FBI from his hotel room, a record would be made at the Bureau of the number from which he called. That would not do at all.

So he found a pay phone in the atrium of an office building from which he could call without too much background noise.

“I’d like to speak to Agent Taylor in Counterterrorism, please,” he said. Someone named Taylor, from Bureau headquarters, was the authorizing official on the request to the South African Department of Customs for a copy of his passport application. That didn’t mean Taylor was the investigator, just that he was the responsible authority. And it was a very good start.

“Mr. Taylor’s office,” came a friendly woman’s voice.

“Yes, I’m looking for Agent Frank Taylor, please,” he said.

“I’m sorry, this is Perry Taylor’s office-”

“But this is Counterterrorism, right?”

“Yes, it is, sir, but there’s no Frank Taylor-”

“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry, this must be the right Agent Taylor. I’m Paul Tannen from the Baltimore Sun, and I’m copyediting and fact-checking a piece on the battle against terrorism. The reporter mentions-well, it’s got to be Agent Perry Taylor, and quite favorably, I should say, but you know how lazy journalists are these days, what with computers and everything.”

The woman’s voice brightened. “Yes, sir, that’s sure the truth.”

“I mean, you got spell-checks and word-processing programs and all that stuff. Good golly, a newspaperman doesn’t even have to write anymore.”

She laughed pleasantly, a high, musical, laugh. “Did you want to talk to Agent Taylor?”

“Golly, I can’t be bothering him with proofreading queries, no ma’am, but thanks anyway. Well, thanks a lot, and-oh, right, one more thing. Our reporter talked to Agent Taylor at home. I assume he did, anyway. He lives in Washington, right?”

“Alexandria, actually.”

Baumann gave a big, exasperated sigh. “You see what I mean?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

“As the case agent on the original investigation that led to all of us being here,” Whitman said, “Ms. Cahill will be lead investigator, in charge of day-to-day operations.”

Sarah cleared her throat and launched into a summary of the information they had so far and read aloud from a paraphrased summary of the NSA intel intercepts. Annoyingly enough, she explained, she couldn’t give copies of the actual intercepts to them, since none of them had been cleared, though she was working on getting at least one of them cleared to act as liaison with NSA from now on. She didn’t explain-no reason for them to know-that CIA and FBI were now at each other’s throats over the leak of the NSA intercept to the FBI. But the two agencies were always skirmishing, and it would blow over. She explained about the CD-ROM that had been stolen from Warren Elkind and copied, and then returned to him.

“Has anyone talked to this Elkind guy?” asked Lieutenant George Roth, who then popped a breath mint into his mouth.

“Not yet,” Sarah said. “The New York office sent a couple of agents to talk to him. They briefed him about the threat, but he seemed fairly unconcerned, said he gets threats all the time. Which is true-his security people are always handling one threat or another. But he won’t talk, won’t submit to questioning. His attorney was with him, wouldn’t let him answer anything.”

“Prick,” said Roth. “We should just let the fuckers bomb the bank, or zap Elkind, or whatever they want to do. Serve him right.”

“It’s his right not to talk to us,” Sarah said.

Pappas said, “We should try again. Maybe you should try talking to him.”

“I’m working on it,” Sarah said. “In my own way. He’ll talk, I promise you. One of the main things we want to find out is what was on the CD-ROM in question. Ken, why would a terrorist want a CD-ROM?”

“The possibilities are endless,” Ken said. “My guess is that the CD contains something that would allow the bad guys to penetrate the bank’s security. Passwords, keys, that sort of thing.”

“How easy is it to copy a CD-ROM? Is it tough?”

“Oh, God, no way. Shit, it’s practically like photocopying the thing. For a couple thousand bucks you can get a CD-ROM player that has a writable CD-ROM drive in it. Pinnacle Microsystems makes one; so does Sony.”

“All right. Russell, have you reached the Israelis, and are they being helpful?”

“Yes to the first, no to the second,” Ullman replied. “The Mossad is one tight-lipped bunch. They wouldn’t confirm that Elkind is one of their, what you call, sayans. Wouldn’t even say if anyone in Mossad had ever been in touch with the guy. Off the record they confirm they know about Elkind’s kinky side, mostly because he’s a big contributor to Israel and all that, and they like to be informed. They say they don’t know anything about terrorism and any connection to Elkind, but they might just be playing it close to the vest.”

“Anything from flight records?” Sarah asked.

“Nothing from any of the major carriers, or even the minor ones,” Christine Vigiani said. “But I wouldn’t expect to find anything unless he’s traveling under his real name or a known alias, and he wouldn’t do that if he’s got any smarts.”

“Sarah,” Pappas put in, “we might want to contact every intelligence service we have ties to-the British SIS, both MI6 and MI5, the French SDECE, the Spanish, the Germans. The Russians may well have something in their archives from Soviet times.”

“Good idea,” Sarah said. “You want to coordinate that? Request any records of Henrik Baumann under his true name, any known aliases, the names of any friends or relatives or associates. Any name we can trawl up. This guy has a record of doing tricks in the terrorist business for years, so he has to have left some trail.”

Pappas nodded and jotted down a note. “I should warn you, we may have to apply some serious pressure. Counterterrorism is like motherhood and apple pie-everyone says they’re for it, everyone says they’ll help, until it comes to the crunch. But I’ll put out the word worldwide.”

There was a hoarse bark of laughter, and Lieutenant Roth said: “I like this. This investigation is so top-secret we can’t tell a soul, except for a few thousand people around the world, from Madrid to Newfoundland. That’s really keeping the lid on.”

“Look-” Pappas began with exasperation.

Sarah turned to the cop slowly with a vacant expression. “Lieutenant Roth, either you’re with us or you’re out of here. It’s as simple as that. If you want to leave, please do so now.”

She folded her arms and stared.

A crooked half-smile slowly appeared on one side of Roth’s mouth. He nodded, almost a bow. “My apologies,” he said.

“Accepted. Now, Ken, we’ve already done a complete database search of Bureau records, but since this is your specialty, maybe you could go over it again and do it right.”

“I’ll try,” Ken said, “but I really don’t know squat about the terrorism indices.”

“You’ll figure it out in no time. Most of the good stuff is at CIA, which maintains the principal government terrorism database. It’s divided into two parts-the interagency one, and another one that’s parochial to CIA, containing operational information, sources and methods, and so on. Also I need someone-Christine?-to check out any connections between our terrorist and the right-wing maniacs who did OKBOMB.”

“I doubt there’s anything,” Vigiani said. “This is clearly international-”

“I agree with you. But just run a check, okay? Rule it out.”

“Sarah, what about Elkind?” Pappas said. “He’s still the best lead we’ve got. If he can be persuaded his bank is being targeted, he’s got to be a little more receptive.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said with a heavy sigh. “He should be, shouldn’t he?” Unless he’s holding something back, she thought.

Perry Taylor’s telephone number and address were listed in the Washington metropolitan telephone book, in Alexandria.

Baumann rented a car, a black Ford Mustang, from Hertz, using one of the false U.S. driver’s licenses, this one belonging to a Connecticut driver named Carl Fournier. Then he made the short drive to Alexandria and located 3425 Potomac Drive, a contemporary brick ranch fronted in weathered shingles.

Passing by at moderate speed, he saw that the front lawn was an immaculate bottle-green carpet, a veritable putting green. The only car in the recently blacktopped driveway was a hunter-green Jeep Grand Cherokee, Limited Edition, of recent vintage. The family car.

He returned to Washington and spent the day making various purchases at an electronics shop, a pet shop, and a sporting-goods store. He rose early the next morning and was in Alexandria by about five o’clock.

It was still dark, the sky streaked faintly with pink traces of the rising sun. A second car was now in the driveway, next to the Jeep: a metallic-blue late-model Oldsmobile. No lights were on in the house yet.

Baumann did not slow the car as he passed. The neighborhood was upper-middle-class, and a car that slowed or stopped would be noticed. Neighbors here, like neighbors everywhere, could be counted on not to mind their own business. They eavesdropped on domestic quarrels, noticed new cars, watched yard work (approvingly or not). The houses were set far apart; property lines were neatly marked by tall picket fences or short split-log ones, but there was little privacy. There would always be an early riser next door or across the broad suburban street, peering out as he or she arose.

He parked the car a few blocks away in the mostly deserted lot of a Mobil station and walked back to Perry Taylor’s house. He was wearing a sporty cardigan sweater, a pair of Dockers khaki pants, new white Nikes. He belonged.

In one hand was a bright-red dog’s leash, which jingled as he walked; in the other was an aluminum device the pet shop called a “Pooper-Scooper,” used to clean up after your dog. He whistled low as he approached the house, softly calling: “Tiger! Come on, boy! Come on back, Tiger!”

As he walked up Taylor’s driveway, he saw with relief that the house was still dark. He continued to call out quietly, looking back and forth across the immaculate lawn for his errant pet. Finally he came up behind the Oldsmobile and quickly knelt down.

If Taylor or a neighbor chanced to catch him there, in this position, he had a ready excuse. Still, his heart thudded rapidly. Taylor was an FBI man involved in counterterrorism and had to be cautious.

In a few seconds, he slipped a tiny, rectangular object, a flat metal box no bigger than an inch a side, under the rear bumper of the Olds. The powerful magnet locked on instantly.

“Where are you, Tiger, old boy?” he called out in a stage whisper as he got to his feet.

There was some information he wanted to get from this car, but it would require him to switch on his Maglite. The pencil flashlight’s beam was small but powerful, not worth the risk.

A light went on in a second-story window next door. Baumann casually strolled down the driveway, shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head in resignation, for the sake of the neighbor who, he assumed, was watching him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

The finest houses in all of Amsterdam are located on the Herengracht canal, in a long row of facades built in varying stunning styles and known as the Golden Bend.

One of the grandest of the houses, built in Louis XIV style, with a double staircase running through its magnificent entrance and frescoed ceilings, belonged to an American man in his early forties who had married an extremely wealthy Dutch woman and ran her family’s banking concern.

Early in the morning, the telephone rang in the man’s enormous, light-filled master bedroom, waking both the American and his beautiful blond wife. The man picked up the handset, listened, said a few words, and then hung up.

He began weeping.

“What is it?” his wife asked.

“It’s Jason,” he replied. “He’s dying.”

The man had been estranged from his younger brother, who lived in Chula Vista, California, for some five years. Five years earlier, the younger brother had announced that he was gay, news that had torn this conservative Republican family apart.

In the ensuing battle, the two brothers had fought, and years of simmering resentments and rivalries had boiled over. They had not spoken since.

Now came the news that Jason, Thomas’s only sibling, had an advanced, full-blown case of AIDS. According to his physicians, he might live for another week, no more.

Although Thomas was an American citizen, he had not left the country in more than two years, for a brief, unavoidable meeting in London. He despised traveling, and until this morning had intended never to leave Amsterdam again.

He got up and went downstairs, drank a cup of koffie verkeerd (coffee with hot milk) prepared by their housekeeper, and booked the earliest possible flight to San Diego for him and his wife. Then he went to the marble-topped bureau in his study, where he kept all of his important papers, to get his passport.

It was not there.

This was odd, because he had seen it there just two or three days ago, when he had to make a photocopy of his birth certificate. He searched the drawer again, then pulled the drawer out and looked in the space behind it to see whether it might have somehow slid out of the drawer.

But it was not there.

The cleaning lady who came in every other day had just neatened up his study a few days ago, but she would certainly never move it. Thomas doubted she’d ever opened this drawer.

By late morning, Thomas and his wife and the housekeeper had searched the house high and low, but to no avail. The passport was missing.

“Just call the embassy and tell them it’s lost,” his wife said impatiently. “You can get a replacement right away. We can’t look anymore if we’re going to catch the afternoon flight, Thomas.”

He called the American consulate, on Museumplein, and reported his passport missing. After the typical runaround, he was told to come in and fill out some papers.

“Let me have your name again, sir,” the woman on the other end of the line said.

He responded with great annoyance, because he had given this dull-witted woman his name no fewer than three times. He had even spelled it out, as if to an idiot.

“Moffatt,” he said. “Thomas Allen Moffatt.”

CHAPTER FORTY

The Mobil lot was too exposed, so Baumann found a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts, which was open, casting a sulfurous fluorescent light on the cars parked in the small lot in front. He parked and went inside for a cup of coffee. The server was a small young woman with frosted blond hair. She handed him a large cup, black, and a plain doughnut, and cheerily wished him a good morning. From the vending machine at the entrance he bought an early edition of the Post.

In the car, he draped the newspaper over the steering wheel and perused it as he sipped his coffee. From under the front passenger’s seat he slid the receiver, plugged it into the cigar lighter, and adjusted the antenna. Any passerby would think he was studying the paper, though he was actually examining the LCD readout. A flashing red dot told him that the “bumper beeper,” or Hound Dog, he had placed on the Oldsmobile’s bumper was transmitting a signal, and that the car hadn’t moved.

The device emitted an RF signal. Some Hound Dogs trailed a black wire antenna almost a foot long, but not this. Not on the car of an FBI man. This particular solid-state model had a stubby antenna that wouldn’t easily be detected.

The scope, beside him on the front seat, told him where the transmitter was and where he was relative to it. This would enable him to tail the FBI man without being detected. Even deputy assistant directors had once gone through training and knew to look for certain signs of surveillance.

There was a risk that the FBI did regular RF sweeps on Taylor’s car, in which case the Hound Dog would be discovered; but they would not do them daily. In any case, he would have to move quickly.

By his second cup of coffee, at 7:50 A.M., the flashing red dot began to move.

He followed the FBI man from as much as half a mile behind. Only once did he come close enough to see Taylor. This was at a large intersection just outside the District. Taylor was in the right lane, near the entrance to a shopping center. Baumann entered the shopping center’s lot and drove within line of sight.

With his Nikon 7 × 50 binoculars he was able to scrutinize Perry Taylor; because Baumann’s rental car had tinted windows, Taylor could not see Baumann, even if he happened to look. Taylor looked to be in his late forties, perhaps fifty, of medium build. His gray hair was neatly cut, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses. He wore an olive poplin suit with a white shirt and a gold-striped tie: the consummate government bureaucrat.

An ID badge was attached to the breast pocket of Taylor’s suit jacket by means of an alligator clip, which told Baumann that Perry usually kept his jacket on during the day. Whenever an FBI employee was in FBI space he was required to wear his ID badge.

Baumann let the metallic-blue Oldsmobile get a good distance ahead, and he followed carefully. Since he didn’t know the streets of Washington, he made a few wrong turns and was stymied by a one-way street, but that was inevitable.

When the flashing red dot came to a stop once again, Baumann pulled up several car lengths away, and could see that Taylor had pulled into a small parking lot off a commercial stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue. Baumann double-parked half a block up the street and watched through the binoculars.

Perry Taylor got out of the car, placed a coin in the parking meter, and entered a delicatessen that advertised breakfast specials and takeout meals. Was he having breakfast? If so, this was a golden opportunity.

With some trepidation, Baumann left his car double-parked, strolled past the metallic-blue Oldsmobile, and quickly made a few mental notes.

One, there was an FBI parking garage pass on the dashboard. No surprise here; all employees who worked at FBI headquarters had the right to park in its garage. Unfortunately, the garage was well guarded and difficult to enter.

Two, if Taylor had set the car alarm, there was no visible sign of it. Likely he had not.

And three, there was a briefcase on the front seat, a gray Samsonite. This was most interesting, but how to get to it? It was possible, though not likely, that Taylor had left the car unlocked. Baumann passed by the car again, pretending to be looking for a street number, and with his glove-clad hands tried the driver’s-side door. It was locked.

Then he noticed a small plate screwed onto the dash where it met the windscreen. Yes, of course. Engraved on the plate was the VIN, the vehicle identification number. Baumann drew close and copied down the long series of numbers and letters, and just then he saw Taylor emerge from the delicatessen, carrying a white paper bag-his breakfast? his lunch? Baumann kept walking toward the rented Mustang and got back into the car. He took note of the name of the auto dealership where Taylor had probably purchased the car: it was emblazoned on the bracket that held the license plate. Then Baumann pulled into traffic and proceeded down the street and out of sight.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Sarah and Pappas were not the first to arrive at Operation MINOTAUR’s headquarters. By seven-fifteen, everyone had arrived except Ken Alton, who’d been at work into the early morning, rigging up in record time a local-area network, or LAN. Since each member of the task force had a computer terminal, this would allow everyone to gain access to files and records in the most efficient way possible. Ken had explained to Sarah that he wasn’t particularly concerned about what he called interior defense, because every task force member had been thoroughly screened and vetted. Had there been more time, he would set up an adequate perimeter defense, with a “firewall” security system. But Ken was a perfectionist in everything except his grooming, and Sarah told him to leave things as they were. No time for anything elaborate.

The group broke up into teams and dispersed for the day, all of them equipped with a beeper in case Sarah needed to reach them suddenly. She and Lieutenant Roth moved to the office she had claimed as her own. Probably it had once belonged to the display company’s president. For all the high-tech security that had been set up on the floor, many of the offices had been left untouched. A ratty abandoned desk-and-chair set dwarfed the room, with its breathtaking view of the city. From up here it looked clean and galvanized and full of promise. The desk’s surface was wood-grain Formica, patched at one corner with mismatched wood-grain contact paper. The high-backed chair was upholstered in mustard-yellow vinyl, with white cotton tufts sprouting through gaping holes in the seat. No wonder the furnishings had been left behind. The only official-looking thing in the room was the FBI-approved safe, a four-drawer Mosler combination safe, concrete-and-steel, good for material up to top secret.

“So, Lieutenant Roth, my sources tell me you’re one of the best cops on the force, you were considered a genius when you were on the Fugitive Squad, you tracked down twelve fugitives in a year and half, you’re great at passports and credit cards, and you’ve got some sort of unbelievable gift at finding people, some kind of sixth sense. I hope my sources are right.”

Roth popped a Breath Saver. “They exaggerate,” he said. “I’ll do my best, all I can say.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

“Okay,” he said, as Sarah prepared to take notes. “There’s an organization that might help called APPLE, for the Area Police Private Security Liaison program. I guess the S is silent. The members are the security directors of nine hundred buildings and companies in the city. Mostly they’re involved with break-ins and domestic crime. They spend their time thinking about public toilets and loading docks and service entrances, but since the World Trade Center they’ve gotten pretty concerned about terrorism. The program coordinator is a buddy of mine. I’ll give him a call.”

“But if the Manhattan Bank is the target,” Sarah said, “why bother with nine hundred other companies?”

“On the assumption that the Manhattan Bank might be one of a series of targets. Probably I’m wrong, but I figure it’s safer to rule things out instead of being surprised down the line.”

“What are you going to ask them?”

“If they’ve received any threats or noticed any suspicious behavior. This is New York City. Threats and suspicious behavior are a way of life, so the answer will be yes, and we’ll have to screen. I mean, we got the resources, right, so why not squander them?”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Sarah said.

“Plus, I was thinking we should just go down the list of major landmark buildings and locations and keep them on our radar screens.”

“Like the Empire State Building and the Trade Center towers?”

“And Rockefeller Center, Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the New York Stock Exchange.”

“The Statue of Liberty?”

“Hey, a bunch of Croatian nationalists planted a bomb there fifteen, twenty years ago. The thing went off. Fair amount of damage, luckily no injuries. The big lady’s managed by the National Park Service, and they use electronic scanning equipment on visitor’s packages.”

She nodded, leaned back in the mustard-yellow chair. It gave a squeak of protest. There was a deferential knock at the door, and Russell Ullman entered, bearing a large manila envelope. “It’s in,” he said.

“What’s in?” Sarah asked.

“The prints.”

“The prints of your Prince,” Roth said. “I told you someday your prints would come.”

“We’re on the home stretch,” Ullman said. He could barely contain his excitement. “We got him now.”

Lieutenant Roth rubbed a large, fleshy hand over his face. “Oh, is that right?” he asked, affecting the deepest boredom. “Kid, the race hasn’t even started.”

Sarah snatched the envelope from Ullman and tore it open. Roth was right. They hadn’t even started.

It was a complete set of fingerprints, carefully done.

“Where’s the photo?” she asked.

“They couldn’t turn one up,” Ullman said.

“What? What do you mean, they couldn’t ‘turn one up’? They couldn’t find a photograph of the guy?”

“The South Africans say they’re unable to turn up any photo of Baumann. In cases like his-deep-cover agents-the old secret service used to keep only one photograph, in its locked central personnel files. Reasons of security. But that one photograph appears to be missing-stolen, pilfered, something.”

“Try the prison, Russell,” Sarah snapped. “You didn’t think of that?”

“No, I did,” Ullman replied. “Pollsmoor photographs all incoming prisoners, like every other prison, and stores them in two different places, but both photos of Baumann have disappeared sometime in the last few weeks.”

“Bullshit!” Sarah exploded.

“No, really,” Ullman protested. “They did a thorough search, but the file photos have been stolen.”

“How can that be?”

“Look,” Ullman said, “for years the South African government did everything it could to keep this guy’s face a secret. The way CIA does with its deep-cover agents. Maybe there were three extant photographs of him in all the government files. So if our guy had enough pull, or some powerful friends in the right places, it was no big deal to make those photos disappear. The South Africans protected his anonymity so well and for so long that now-when they want a picture-they can’t get their hands on one.”

“Looks like your terrorist,” Roth interjected, “has some powerful friends.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Perry Taylor arrived at the FBI headquarters at 8:20 A.M. and pulled into the main employee entrance in the middle of the Tenth Street side of the building. This meant he would be in his office by 8:30 A.M. He was a punctual man, which was good for Baumann, because it meant he was also a man of regular habits, a most useful vulnerability.

Unfortunately, Taylor’s car did not leave the FBI building the entire day. The red dot remained fixed and flashing: the Hound Dog hadn’t been discovered, it was still transmitting, and the car hadn’t been moved.

Baumann spent a few hours walking the streets around FBI headquarters. He bought a pair of cheap sunglasses and a Washington, D.C., T-shirt, and played the tourist. For lunch he got a hot dog from a stand at Tenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

He noticed that the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to the FBI garage was shut, the gates drawn, presumably for security reasons. The World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings had made the FBI understandably nervous. He saw that groups of tourists could gain access to the building by taking a guided tour. For no particular reason, except that he had time to kill, he took a tour at midmorning, which began in front of a display of America’s Ten Most Wanted criminals and ended with a film about handguns.

The rest of the day he kept watch on the various employee entrances and exits to see whether Taylor emerged. He did not. Many FBI employees went out for lunch to the food malls nearby, and there was said to be a large and adequate cafeteria within the complex, but Taylor probably ate his lunch at his desk, from the white bag he had taken out of the delicatessen.

By four o’clock in the afternoon, Baumann had returned to his parked car and prepared for Taylor to leave the building. The red dot did not begin to move until 6:45 P.M. Baumann waited until Taylor was a good distance away before he began to follow. Taylor appeared to be taking the same route home he’d taken to work.

Baumann drove with a sense of discouragement. This could go on for days, and he would learn nothing unless he got into Taylor’s office or home. Taylor was indeed going home, Baumann saw, but to be sure, he followed the Olds as far as he could prudently do so.

Getting into Taylor’s home would not be a problem, although there was no reason to believe he would find anything there. Careful FBI men like Taylor did not keep a set of files at their homes. Getting into Taylor’s office was possible, though perilous to the point of being foolhardy. Obviously he or someone who worked with or for him had been delving into Baumann’s past. That meant he might recognize Baumann in person.

But even assuming Baumann entered the office wearing a persuasive disguise, what could he expect to find there, really, without being left alone-a highly unlikely possibility?

Baumann suspected that the gray Samsonite briefcase would contain Taylor’s FBI building pass, a personnel list, or any of a hundred things. If Taylor were to stop somewhere on the way to or from work, Baumann would have an opportunity.

There was no keyless entry system on the driver’s door, which was too bad, because that would have made it easy to get into the car. All Baumann would have had to do was to watch through the binoculars as Taylor keyed in the code.

If Taylor were to leave his briefcase on the front seat again, Baumann could just slip in a slim jim and have the car open in a matter of seconds, without anyone noticing.

If Taylor locked the briefcase in the trunk, that was a different situation. There were simple, brute-force methods. You could use a dent-puller to pop the trunk lock out, then open the trunk with a screwdriver. But no matter how carefully you did it, the damage would be immediately visible. Taylor would know someone had gotten into his trunk, and he would be immediately suspicious. Such a move would blow everything.

The smash-and-grab had to be ruled out.

Baumann returned to the Jefferson, made some notes, went out for a brief walk. From a pay phone he hadn’t used before he called Perry Taylor’s number. If Mrs. Taylor answered, he would ask for him, say he was an old friend, make it clear he was not a salesman of any kind… But Taylor answered the phone himself.

“Hello,” he said.

“Perry Taylor?” Baumann asked pleasantly.

“Speaking. Who’s this?

“Mr. Taylor, according to our records, you don’t subscribe to Time magazine, and we’d like to offer-”

“Sorry,” Taylor said brusquely, “but we’re not interested. Good night.”

Baumann read for a while, an architectural history of New York City, and went to sleep early.

In the morning, Baumann followed the same routine, picking up Perry Taylor’s signal from a half-mile away and following him at a distance. Once again, Taylor stopped at the delicatessen on Pennsylvania Avenue to buy what Baumann assumed was his lunch. He drove into the FBI garage by the same entrance on Tenth Street, and again did not leave the building until his workday was done.

In the meantime, Baumann had plenty of time to do what he needed to do. He returned to the Jefferson and placed a call to the auto dealership whose name-Brautigan Motors-was on Perry Taylor’s license-plate bracket.

“Yes,” he said when the service department came on the line. “I feel like such an idiot.” He laughed. “This is Perry Taylor, and I bought a car from you guys, a ’94 Olds, and I just went and locked my keys in the car.”

From his brief conversation with Perry Taylor the night before, Baumann had learned the eccentricities of the FBI man’s voice-a resonant baritone, a slight Southern accent, a careful enunciation. The imitation would fool anyone except a good friend; fortunately, the young man in the service department did not seem to know Taylor.

“Sorry to hear that, sir. I assume you don’t have a spare set-?”

“I’m embarrassed to say it, but my wife has the spare, and she’s in Miami Beach visiting the in-laws. Pretty swift of me, huh?”

“Mr. Taylor, I’m going to have to ask you for your VIN number, which is located on the car or in your paperwork. Do you think you can find that for me?”

“No problem, I got that.”

“Great,” the young man said. “Otherwise we would have a problem.” Baumann gave him the VIN number. “Okay, now hold on a moment while I pull your file.”

When he returned to the phone a few minutes later, the serviceman said, “I’m going to give you a number now, Mr. Taylor.” He spoke as if Mr. Taylor were a simpleton, which was probably a fair assumption given the circumstances. He gave Baumann the number. “You bring that number-it’s your key code, okay?-to any locksmith, and they can make you a new one. All right?”

“All right, great,” Baumann said. “Thanks so much.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The next afternoon, unfortunately, Perry Taylor drove home from work without stopping. Baumann placed a call to the auto dealership, asked for Kevin, the young man who had helped him, and thanked him for his help. It would not do at all to have Kevin call Taylor to make sure everything turned out all right.

The next morning, Taylor made his regular delicatessen stop, but that was too short a time to do anything.

That evening after work, Taylor made a stop at a Giant Foods supermarket a few miles from his home, part of a strip mall containing a People’s Drug, a Crown Books, and a variety of smaller shops.

Baumann pulled into the lot just in time to see Taylor get out of the car.

The opportunity had come.

Taylor locked his briefcase in the trunk of the car. Baumann waited for him to enter the store before he went up to the Oldsmobile.

He had left the car alarm off again. Baumann nonchalantly inserted the trunk key in the lock and popped it open. Taylor kept his trunk immaculate-no debris, no old newspapers or rags or dog-eared magazines. There was only an unopened can of tennis balls and the gray Samsonite briefcase. He lifted it out, shut the trunk, and returned to his own, rented car.

Although the briefcase had a locking mechanism beneath its handle, three numbered dials, Taylor had not locked it, and why would he? It was safe in his trunk.

In one of the pockets there was a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic, Model 1006, which took 10mm rounds. There was also a datebook and a thick sheaf of file folders. As he went through the datebook and the files, wearing latex gloves, Baumann began to sweat. He turned the car on to get the air-conditioning going, but it did a feeble job. The car had to be in drive for the air-conditioning to really kick in.

Taylor was not holding a shopping list, so it was possible that he was only making a quick stop, in which case Baumann had to get through these files in a matter of minutes and return the briefcase to the trunk. Taylor must not know anyone had been in his car. Fortunately, Taylor had parked his Olds in a remote corner of the lot, where there was little foot traffic.

There were a lot of documents, many of them marked “Confidential” or “Secret,” but that was meaningless. No one paid any attention to any document that wasn’t marked at least “Top Secret.” Baumann knew that in the U.S. government there are three levels of secrecy: confidential, secret, and top secret. Top secret is the highest level of secrecy; despite what is commonly believed, there is none higher.

But there do exist more than thirty subsets of classification, known as compartments. A person in the government may be granted access to one or more compartments, yet not for others.

Then Baumann found a document that was of interest, one he hadn’t expected to find. Hadn’t hoped to find, in fact.

It was a sheet of green paper marked AIRTEL.

Baumann knew enough about the workings of the FBI to realize that there were three categories of communications sent between headquarters and field offices. A routine communication was called a Letter and was printed on white paper. One level of urgency up from Letter was an Airtel, printed on green paper. At least, at headquarters it was green; the field offices got blue copies. In the old days, an Airtel was sent by airmail, although that distinction had long since become meaningless. Now Airtels (also known as “greenies”) were either faxed or sent by courier. The highest level of urgency was a Teletype, on manila paper, which was once sent by Teletype and now faxed or couriered. The only operative difference between the two was the heading.

This particular Airtel was addressed to ADIC NY, the assistant director of the FBI in charge of the New York office. It was from Perry Taylor, and it listed members of a special working group of the Joint Terrorist Task Force, code-named Operation MINOTAUR, along with their affiliations. Five of them were FBI: two from headquarters, two from the Boston office, and one recently retired from the Boston office.

Baumann understood at once that these were the names of the FBI agents who had been assigned to investigate an “alleged,” “impending” act of terrorism in New York City. It was Baumann they were after.

He had the names of his hunters.

He did not want to take the time to bring the papers to a photocopy shop, so he copied down the names and identifying information and replaced the papers neatly in the briefcase. Then he got out of his car, opened the trunk of Taylor’s Olds, replaced the briefcase, and shut the trunk. He quickly leaned over to retrieve the transmitter from the rear bumper-it was too risky to leave it there any longer. He felt along the underside of the bumper until his fingers slid up against the magnetized transmitter and closed around it, and then he heard someone speak very close to him.

“Freeze,” the voice said. “FBI.”

Baumann whirled around and saw Perry Taylor standing just a few feet away, and he could not suppress a smile. He had been sloppy, or perhaps he had underestimated Taylor. Taylor must have seen someone standing next to his car, must have left the supermarket by some unseen exit. He had no shopping bags.

This was a very bad situation indeed, and Baumann’s head spun. He did not want to kill Perry Taylor; that had not been his intention at all. Baumann gave an abashed smile, laughed awkwardly. He spoke in a Southern accent, which by now felt natural. “Of all the places to drop a contact lens,” he said.

He could see Taylor hesitate. “Where’d you drop it?” Taylor asked skeptically. Had he seen Baumann open the trunk?

No one was walking by, no one even close. No one could see them. “Right… right here, somewhere, it’s got to be,” Baumann said, shaking his head. “Man, it’s one of those days.”

“I know what you mean,” Taylor said. “Here, let me help you.”

Of course: Taylor didn’t have a gun with him. His gun was locked in his trunk. Taylor moved closer, pretending to help Baumann look for the lost contact lens, but really-Baumann was sure of it-to grab Baumann, catch him off base, perhaps attempt to disarm him.

“Thanks,” Baumann said, and waited for Taylor to come closer, and when Taylor did, Baumann’s right hand shot toward Taylor’s throat, as quick as the dart of a snake’s tongue, and got hold of the FBI man’s trachea and squeezed, and Perry Taylor sank to the ground dead, looking very much like a middle-aged man overcome by the sweltering heat of a Washington summer evening.