The Zero Hour

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Police around the world still use the old Henry system of fingerprint classification, which groups fingerprints by their various features, their loops, arches, whorls, and ridges.

It is a fairly baroque system. A loop may be ulnar or radial; a central pocket loop may be plain or tented. Whorls come in four types: plain, center-loop, double-loop, or accidental. Additionally, a whorl can be an inside tracing, an outside tracing, or a “meet” tracing. Then there are ridges. Every fingerprint has a unique pattern of ridges, enclosures, ending ridges, and bifurcations, places where the ridge lines end or split in two. To make a positive identification, one must have eight or more points of identification, also called Galton’s details, after the nineteenth-century English scientist Sir Francis Galton. Under the Henry classification system, unfortunately, comparisons have to be done manually, in a print-by-print search, which can take weeks or even months.

But since 1986 a different, computerized method of sorting and storing prints has been in use in the United States. It is called the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, and it uses high-speed optical scanners to analyze prints, digitalize them, and store them in computerized form. The position of minutiae are counted on a 512-pixel-per-inch scale and converted into a series of numbers, which can easily be compared with others. Loops and whorls are effectively turned into bytes and bits. Using AFIS, the FBI and major police forces around the nation have the remarkable ability to compare fingerprints at the rate of nine thousand a minute.

The FBI’s Identification Division has the fingerprints of some twenty-four million convicted criminals on line, in addition to the print file cards of forty million other Americans, including federal employees and military veterans. And very recently, the FBI’s AFIS has been electronically connected to AFIS machines at state capitals and major cities around the country. This network, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), which is housed in a new site in Clarksburg, West Virginia, ties the local police booking station to the FBI in a paperless transmission system that will soon eliminate the old-fashioned fingerprint cards entirely.

The task force had been hastily assembled by beeper. Even Ken Alton, awakened from slumber, straggled in clutching a take-out cup of coffee. Sarah passed out copies of Henrik Baumann’s “ten-print,” his ten fingerprints compiled on a file card by the South Africans. On this form, each print was carefully rolled onto its own block. On the lower portion of the card were the “slap prints,” the four fingers of each hand slapped down at once.

“You may not have any use for the prints,” she announced, “but it’s there in case you do. Those numbers there beneath each print are the Henry numbers, which the South Africans still use. Stone-age technology, but we’re not in a position to complain. The Identification Division is already working on these, blowing them up, tracing the ridges, and converting them to the AFIS system.”

“What, no lip prints?” asked Lieutenant Roth dryly.

There were a few chuckles, some louder than others, as if this were an inside joke.

“Sorry?” Sarah said, mystified.

“It’s a running joke,” explained Wayne Kim from NYPD Forensics, shaking his head. “There’ve been a couple of papers in the Journal of Forensic Science on using lip prints for personal identification. They look at labial wrinkles and grooves, bifurcated, trifurcated, reticulate, stuff like that.”

“I see,” she said. “Now, a couple of things about these prints you may or may not know, since I know you’re not all fingerprint jocks. Until we get the AFIS classifications, you can fax these ten-prints or receive latents by fax, but make sure to use not just the high-resolution fax, but the secure high-resolution fax, okay? And be careful, because even the high-res fax can introduce false minutiae. If you get a set of latents you think might be from our guy, I’d rather courier them down to Washington than mess around with the fax.”

“Sarah,” Ken said groggily, “what’s the deal on reliability of AFIS matches?”

“Okay, the machine classifies the quality of the prints A or B. C is a reject. It doesn’t give you a definite yes-or-no, this-is-it kind of thing. It’ll give you a list of the top contenders in descending order by PCN number. A so-called perfect score is nineteen thousand, nine hundred ninety-eight. But remember, we’re in the law-enforcement business, not the intelligence business, so everything we do has to stand up in court. And legally, even after the computer spits out the winner, ID’s still going to have to chart it by hand, or rather by eye.”

Ken nodded.

“We going to put this out on the NCIC?” asked Mark McLaughlin of the NYPD, who had sandy blond hair and a face dense with freckles.

Sarah shook her head. “NCIC uses a different system, a simple numerical classification the Bureau came up with in order to be able to store prints on computer. It’s based on a line count of ridges between the delta and the core-you know, ‘center loop, outside tracing,’ or ‘radial loop with a four count,’ like that. It’s actually a pretty crude system, useful for pointing the way and that’s all. AFIS and IAFIS are really a hell of a lot more useful.”

“And Albany, too, since we’re assuming the guy’s right here,” Lieutenant Roth said. “The Division of Criminal Justice, Fingerprints Section. So if he’s arrested and printed anywhere in the state, we’ve got him. I say it’s worth the time to send prints on to every state to search for a match, and retain them if they’re willing to. New York will, but a lot of states won’t.”

“So what do you want us to do with prints if we get any?” asked one of the street agents, Dennis Stewart, whose specialty was organized crime.

“We’ve got some basic equipment set up here,” she replied. “A RAMCAM, the little fingerprint reader that makes a thermal picture of the print, and the CRIMCON, which is hooked up to a video monitor. Lieutenant Roth is the man to see if you have a print-he’ll be in charge of all that.”

Later, as the group dispersed, Pappas approached her and spoke quietly. “Listen, Sarah, with all this sophisticated technology, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that all the fancy computers in the world aren’t going to make up for some good solid shoeleather.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m just afraid that the clock’s ticking and we’re being sidetracked by all these toys.”

“Alex, we ignore the new technology at our own peril.”

“You remember when the Reagan administration spent seventeen million bucks on a computer system they called TRAP/TARGIT that was supposed to predict terrorist incidents based on early signals? It was a complete bust. Never worked. A huge joke. I’m just wondering whether we shouldn’t be doing some more basic, old-fashioned brainstorming. What are you doing tonight?”

“I’m picking up Jared from camp. Between six and seven at Penn Station.”

“You two doing something, going out for dinner?”

“I didn’t have any plans. I thought I’d see what Jared’s up for.”

“Maybe I could come by later, when Jared’s asleep. No, I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you ask Jared when he gets in if he feels like having dinner with you and me at a nice Greek place I discovered on First Avenue. You and I can talk, and Jared can put in his two cents. But I don’t want to horn in on your little reunion-”

“Oh, he always loves seeing you, Alex. But I don’t know about Greek. You know how discriminating he is about food.”

“McDonald’s it is. The one at the intersection of Seventy-first, Broadway, and Amsterdam.”

Alex Pappas devoured his Big Mac and fries with as much gusto as he did moussaka or spanakopita. A good portion of his fries, of course, went directly to Jared, who ate ravenously, as if he’d just come not from summer camp but a Soviet hard-labor camp.

In the two weeks since she’d last seen him, Jared seemed to have grown taller and more slender, more a young man than a pudgy little boy. Sarah could at times see him as an adult, a breathtakingly, head-turningly handsome man. And in the next instant he was again the kid in tie-dyed shorts with scuffed knees letting out a fake belch, telling them about all the games he’d learned at camp. “I can’t wait to play in Central Park,” he said.

Sarah shook her head. “Not without supervision, you’re not.”

“Oh, God, I don’t need supervision.”

“You’re not playing in Central Park unless I’m there, Jared. ‘Stranger danger,’ remember?”

Jared pouted. “I’m not a baby, Mom.”

“Central Park can be a dangerous place for kids. That’s the rule. Only with supervision. Now, I’m going to be really, really busy during the days, and I don’t want you staying in the apartment all day and watching TV, so I got you into the summer program at the YMCA near Lincoln Center. It’s on West Sixty-third Street, not too far from here. Sort of a neat building. That’s where you’ll spend your days.”

“YMCA?” Jared said. “I don’t want to swim.”

“It’s not just swimming, it’s arts and crafts and basketball and other games. You’ll have a great time.”

“Oh, God,” Jared wailed.

“Believe me,” Pappas said to him, “when you get to be as old as me, you’d give anything to be able to spend your days at a day camp. Anything!”

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

“If Baumann is indeed in New York City,” Pappas said after Jared had gone to sleep, “he has to have entered within the last month, since his escape from Pollsmoor.”

Sarah nodded. “That narrows the time frame, but we don’t know if he entered legally or illegally. He’s a pro, so he might have sneaked in without a trace. Which makes finding him just about impossible.”

“You can’t think that way. You have to think in terms of probabilities. Yes, people can and do enter the U.S. illegally by walking across the border from Canada-so you have the Canadians search their entry records.”

“And if he came in by way of Mexico? We’re screwed if we have to depend on the Mexicans to help us out.”

“Think probabilities. Mexico’s used far less often for illegal entries in cases like this.”

“But what do we ask the Canadians to search for? They’re only going to be able to help if he flew in on his own passport, under his true name. Which isn’t likely.”

“Granted, but it’s still worth a try.”

“And if he flew into the U.S. directly-whatever passport he used-there are lots of international airports. The guy has his choice. Wouldn’t he choose some little, Podunk place like-oh, I don’t know, isn’t there an international airport in Great Falls, Montana, with just one INS inspector?”

“Not at all,” Pappas said. “One inspector means much closer scrutiny, which he wants to avoid. Much better to enter the country at a large, crowded airport that’s got six hundred people waiting to get through Customs and Immigration. All those people, and just one poor, overworked customs inspector for the teeming hordes. That’s what I’d do-JFK or Dulles or Miami, something big like that.”

“Great,” she said bitterly. “So we’re looking for a guy who entered the U.S. sometime in the last month. Under any name whatsoever. Just… a guy. That really narrows it, doesn’t it?”

Pappas shrugged.

“And as if that weren’t bad enough, I’m supposed to have people search entry records in every port of entry in the U.S. Why the hell aren’t they all together in one place, in some kind of centralized data bank?”

“Because they aren’t. Someday they will be, but for now all the searching has got to be done by hand. Could I trouble you for another cup of instant?”

“Sure.” Sarah got up, went to the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil. As she waited, she mentally listed the airports in the United States and Canada. Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington (both National and Dulles), LAX… The list went on and on, and she began to lose track. And what if Baumann hadn’t entered the country by air? It was maddening, hopeless.

She returned to the living room and put down a mug of instant coffee and one of Earl Grey tea. “Let’s say he hasn’t arrived in New York yet, hasn’t even arrived in the country. In that case, we should contact Interpol and have them put out an International Red Notice.” A Red Notice is an international lookout for a fugitive based on an outstanding arrest warrant for the purpose of extradition, sort of an all-points bulletin issued by Interpol’s General Secretariat to the border lookout systems of all member countries. “Result, we’ll get nothing and just end up alerting Baumann.”

“Nothing necessarily wrong with that. Maybe that’ll scare him, make him call it off.”

“Not likely.”

“No,” Pappas conceded. “Not likely.”

“I suppose we could blanket the city with a description. Damn, I wish we could find a photo! But even if we could, the word would be out about our existence, and the city’ll go crazy.”

“Not if we do it through the New York office and say we’re on the trail of some guy who’s wanted for some brutal crime in Europe or something.”

She nodded. “All right, let’s focus on the passport issue. Say for the sake of argument he entered the U.S. directly, but not on his own passport. What are the search options there?”

“Quite a few,” Pappas said. “Can I smoke?”

“I’d rather you didn’t, not with Jared so close by.”

“You’re no fun.” He sighed, stretched his legs, took another sip of coffee. “We went through this drill in TRADEBOM,” he said. “When we searched the apartments of some of the suspects, we found Nicaraguan passports-real, legitimate Nicaraguan passports.”

“How’d they get them?”

“Who knows? Some corrupt Nicaraguan official sold blanks to the Sandinistas, who sold them, or gave them, to ideological soulmates. This stuff happens all the time, all over the world.”

She thought for a moment. “So, what, we have our foreign legats talk to all their counterparts and local liaison?”

Pappas nodded.

She went on, “Ask every country we have dealings with to check whether a passport was issued to this guy. Maybe even ask them to do a complete records check, if they’re so inclined.”

“But without a photo, we’ll get squat. And not every country will comply. They’d be more likely to help out if they believe our guy forged one of their passports. But a lot of countries won’t give us the time of day.”

“Seems pointless.”

“That’s right. The thing we have going for us is, it’s not likely-probabilities, again-that he’d use a foreign passport.”

“Why not, if it’s so easy to get one?”

“Because that entails going through both customs and immigration in most U.S. airports and having officials take a nice, hard look, and who needs all that? Certainly not our Prince of Darkness.”

In her peripheral vision she saw that Jared was standing before them in his Lion King pajamas, squinting, hair mussed from sleep. “Could you guys keep it down?” he said grumpily.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Sarah said.

“Sorry,” Pappas said. “We’ll be quieter. Hey, buddy, do you mind if I smoke in here?”

“No, Alex, it’s okay. You can.”

Sarah got up, gave Pappas a black look, and kissed Jared on the forehead. She took him back to bed. When she returned, they resumed in much lower tones.

“Okay, so he’s got to get his hands on a U.S. passport,” she said. “How does he do that?”

Pappas exhaled delicately out of one side of his mouth, ostentatiously keeping the smoke away from Jared’s direction. “A number of ways. There’s the classic method of going to a cemetery, copying down the name of someone who died in infancy who’s also around your age, getting his birth certificate, then applying for a passport. Easier said than done; it’s awfully labor-intensive, and more and more often birth and death records are collated, so you can’t pull a fast one. No, he’d have to steal one or acquire a forged one.”

“It’s not so easy to forge a U.S. passport anymore.”

“No, it isn’t. Though admittedly not impossible if you hire someone really skilled. But that’s a limited pool of talent.”

“And if he does hire someone good?”

“If it’s a top-flight forgery, we’re not going to catch it anyway.”

“Oh, come on, Alex, isn’t there a computer network linking all border entry points? Called something like IBIS, for Inter-Interagency Border Inspection System? Correct?”

“Correct, but-”

“As I recall from New Agents training, we used to post watch lists and photographs of fugitives at border entry points, and the customs agent would consult his lookout lists either alphabetically or by passport number.”

Pappas nodded and fished out another cigarette from the pack.

“But now we’ve got automatic document readers at most major ports, right? They optically scan the coded information at the bottom of the passport, and they’re programmed to look for variances and patterns to make sure a passport is valid. So if our guy flashes a forged passport, isn’t he going to be caught instantly?”

“If it’s a lousy forgery, sure. But not if it’s any good. You’re dreaming if you think the system is set up to catch fakes. It’s not.”

“But if the number of a fake passport doesn’t match existing passport numbers, won’t it be flagged?”

“Wrong. More techno-lust. Little-known fact: the system doesn’t notice passport numbers that don’t exist.”

“Jesus Christ. But surely lost or stolen passports are logged onto the system. Otherwise, what the hell is it good for?”

“Yes, lost or stolen passports are entered into the computer, so if someone tries to use one, a ‘red flag’ goes up-an alert message or whatever it is. That’s how we caught those terrorists who stole all those U.S. passports a couple of years back.”

He was referring to a recent incident, which the FBI has never made public, in which a terrorist group seized fifteen hundred valid U.S. passports. But the FBI had each of the passports flagged on the INS computer system and thereby caught any terrorist who tried to use one.

“Which means,” Sarah said, “Baumann’s not going to use a stolen passport.”

“Well, no, not necessarily. There’s always a delay between the moment he, or someone else, steals a passport and the moment it goes onto the on-line lookout list. Maybe the guy he lifted it from doesn’t notice for a couple of days. Or maybe the lady whose job it is to enter passport data into IBIS took the week off to visit Disney World with her kids.”

“So he can use a stolen passport.”

“Correct.”

“Shit. All right, I’ve got it. We do a cross-check.”

“Hmm?”

“Okay, so we know the automated, optically scanning document readers at all ports of entry store all information on who’s entered the country, at what time, on what day and on what flight and where, right?”

“Right.”

“That’s all on an immense database at State. And we cross-check that list against a list of all passports reported lost or stolen within the last month. So in effect, what we’re coming up with is a list of all lost or stolen passports that’ve been used since they were reported lost or stolen.”

Pappas chuckled. “More of your beloved technology.”

“Of course, it won’t work if the passport Baumann used to get into the country was never reported. But say it was. Then we’ve got a list of all illegal entries, and we filter out that list, and we’ve got him.”

“Can’t be done,” Pappas said flatly. “These are two separate, discrete databases. Sad, but true. We’re not set up to do something like that. Sounds good in theory, but you’d have to check a list of thousands of stolen or lost passports against millions of people who’ve come into the U.S. recently-and do it by hand. It would take forever. Tedious, mind-numbing, and frankly impossible.”

“That’s why God invented computers.”

“Listen, Sarah. For as long as I’ve been in the Bureau, that’s never been done. Never. There’s a reason for that.”

“Yeah. They didn’t have Ken Alton, computer wizard. I’ll give him a call. He’s probably just booted up his computer for the night.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, kid. And don’t forget, even if you somehow find out what passport he used, he’s already in the country.”

“Shame on you, Alex. Then we’ve got us a trail.”

“Hardly a trail.”

“Oh, come on,” Sarah upbraided him. “Then we’ve got us a damn good start.”

“If we’re lucky.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes you’ve got to count on a little luck. Think positive.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

In a great city like New York, Henrik Baumann was in his element. He disappeared easily into crowds, his appearance always changing; he made his arrangements, established his contacts, bought what he needed in absolute anonymity.

In the beginning he took a one-bedroom suite on the forty-first floor of the New York Hilton, in what they called the Executive Tower. There were less expensive rooms, and nicer hotels, but it was height he was after most of all.

He set up the MLink-5000 satellite telephone on the sill of an east-facing window and opened its lid to aim the flat-plate array antenna, checked the signal-strength meter, and readjusted the angle of elevation. Rather than use the handset, he plugged into the phone’s modular port a small fax machine he had purchased on Forty-seventh Street. On a table nearby he placed the cheap electronic typewriter he had bought at the same place, and several preprinted invoice forms.

For the first time he felt anxiety. The situation had changed.

He’d never intended to kill the FBI executive in charge of finding him, but the fellow had made it unavoidable. Baumann had done what he could to make the death look like a random act of violence. He had stolen Taylor’s wallet and with a silencer-equipped pistol had fired two bullets into Taylor’s head and throat. He had also removed from the briefcase the Airtel that listed members of the top-secret task force, but he took nothing else. Those investigating Taylor’s death would, he hoped, think that Taylor’s killer had not even gone into the trunk of the car. Even if they did suspect Baumann, they wouldn’t know that he had found the list of task force members.

In any case, the FBI had learned enough of his undertaking to form an investigative body to look into it. This was serious. There was now a possibility that the mission would be blown, that he would be caught. And for the first time he wondered whether he should go through with it.

He had already received a good chunk of Dyson’s money, and he knew he could disappear now if he had to and never be found. But he had never aborted a mission before, except on orders from above; men behind desks tended to be cautious, even fearful, by nature. He felt as if his work had barely begun. And he prided himself on his dexterity and cunning, his talent at remaining elusive.

The truth was, despite all the danger he felt sure he could forge ahead and not be caught. He had been hired to do a job-the largest, most ambitious undertaking of his lifetime-and he was going to do it. He knew he was the best at what he did; pride would not let him give up now.

So he turned his attention to where the leak might have come from. There were loose ends-there were always loose ends, you could not work in a vacuum-but he thought it unlikely the leak had come from his end. True, the bomb-disposal expert in Liège was aware of a small part of his operation, the nature and operation of the bomb. But he knew very little-and certainly not enough to have been the FBI’s source.

No, the leak had to have come from Malcolm Dyson’s team. The question was whether someone of Dyson’s associates had been bent, or their security had been compromised.

Assuming the first possibility-that one of Dyson’s people had talked-then the operation was as good as over. Godammit to hell, that was exactly why Baumann didn’t trust groups! If this was correct, then Baumann would know soon enough. He would proceed as planned, but with even greater caution, and prepare to abort the mission if need be.

But what if the leak had not been human but mechanical, technical? A tapped fax or phone call, a bug in Dyson’s offices? The Russians, the British, and the Americans all had the facilities to listen in on telephone conversations by means of satellites. But Dyson and his people would never talk on open lines; Baumann had specifically instructed them on this point. Yet what if Dyson’s people had spoken openly over amateur equipment, encrypting telephones bought on the commercial market?

This was possible.

It was utterly inconceivable that his one, brief satellite communication with Dyson had been the source of the leak, since he had said only a few words and had not been at all explicit. Yes, the CIA and the NSA and GCHQ had the ability to use a spectrum analyzer to pick up this SATCOM’s characteristic signal. But why would anyone be so motivated?

Baumann had learned through bitter experience how dangerous it was to communicate by even “secure” communications, and he tried to keep doing it to a minimum. When the Libyans had hired him to bomb the La Belle disco in West Berlin in 1986, they had been foolish enough to send a “secure” message from Tripoli to East Berlin predicting a “joyous event” to take place at a club in Berlin. The Americans had intercepted the message and had frantically tried to close down clubs in Berlin, but didn’t know which one was to be hit. The operation was almost blown, and Baumann was furious. Since then, the Libyans communicate only through couriers, human-to-human contact, the only safe way.

To use the SATCOM again was a risk, but a small one. Still, he would have to take extra precautions now. This would be his last telephone call to Dyson, unless there was a great emergency.

Hence the secure fax machine.

Baumann placed a secure call to the bank in Panama City, which confirmed that the second 3.3 million had been wired to his Liechtenstein account. Excellent; exactly one week remained until the strike date. Dyson had not been tardy with the money. Then again, 3.3 million dollars here and there was pocket change to Malcolm Dyson.

He then called the Liechtenstein bank and purchased slightly less than 6.6 million U.S. dollars’ worth of gold bullion. He lost a few thousand dollars in the transaction, but it would be worth it in the long run.

Then he wrote out a message, which began: LEAK YOUR END. AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE PARTIALLY KNOWLEDGEABLE. THOROUGHLY SWEEP HOME, OFFICES, COMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT, CHECK PERSONNEL. DON’T USE TELEPHONE. I WILL BE OUT OF CONTACT. He ended it: HEREBY ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT SECOND PAYMENT.

Using the red-plastic-bound Webster’s pocket dictionary he’d bought in Paris, a twin of which Dyson had, he encrypted the message by means of a simple substitution cipher and typed it out on one of the preprinted forms. The text appeared to be an authentic-looking invoice requesting prices on a list of things-item #101.15, item #13.03, and on and on. Dyson alone knew this referred to page 101 in the dictionary, fifteen major words down on the page, etc. This simple cipher was almost unbreakable.

Baumann had set a five-minute window for Dyson to fax a similarly encoded reply. He ordered a room-service lunch, took a brief nap, and once again set up the MLink-5000.

Precisely as the five-minute window began, his SATCOM blinked to indicate an incoming signal, then the fax machine warbled and out came Dyson’s reply.

He read it, and then, in the glass ashtray, burned it and all the other pieces of paper he had used. He flushed the ashes down the toilet, then went out for a stroll.

Christine Vigiani had been tasked to be liaison with the National Security Agency. In reality, this meant one thing only: find out whatever she could about the intercepted telephone conversation, and urge them to get more. Sarah had arranged to have her cleared at a high enough level to read the NSA telephone intercept.

Not only is the NSA notoriously secretive, but it is disinclined to share with rival agencies more than it absolutely must about its sources and methods. Vigiani was having a hell of a time finding anyone at NSA who knew what he was talking about and had the authority, or the willingness, to talk.

Finally, an NSA analyst named Lindsay called Vigiani on the STU-III secure phone. He was cordial and seemed familiar with the satellite intercept in question.

“The first thing we need to know,” Vigiani said, “is whether you captured the telephone numbers of the caller or the recipient along with the conversation.”

“No.”

“You didn’t? You’re sure of that.”

“Right. The answer is no, we did not.”

“Neither one. Neither sender nor receiver.”

“Correct.”

“Why not?”

Lindsay paused. “How to answer that,” he sighed. “What we got was a snatch of conversation in midstream, so to speak. A few minutes from somewhere in the middle of the phone call.”

“But the satellite intercept-” Vigiani said, not sure of what she was saying.

Lindsay sensed her ignorance and responded in simple language: “It’s actually rare to get the phone number that’s being called,” he said. “Pure happenstance. We’d have to have locked on to the call from the very first second, so we could hear the dialing or the touch tones being punched.”

“It’s really that crude?”

“It’s what the technology allows.”

“Well, what we’d like is for you to have your satellites search for this same encryption scheme again. We figure that whoever made this call will continue to use this encrypted phone, and so now that we know the key, we can just pick up anything in the ether with that configuration, or whatever.”

“Doesn’t work that way,” Lindsay said. “Our satellites can’t tell any particular encryption scheme is being used until the signal is down-linked and examined.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Am I talking to the National Security Agency?”

Lindsay’s response was cold silence.

“All right,” Vigiani said, “what do you know about this intercept?”

“We know a number of things. We know it was a digital signal, to start with, which is helpful, because there aren’t that many digital phone signals out there in the ether yet. Soon, that’s all there will be. But not yet.”

“What else?”

“And we know which microwave relay station the signal was captured from, its exact location. It’s the Geneva North microwave relay, numbered Alpha 3021, located on a mountain north of Geneva. If our caller uses this phone again, the signal will likely be transmitted using the same relay. We can target that station.”

“Okay…”

“Also, each microwave relay station uses a known, fixed set of frequencies. We can tell our receiving station to listen in on these frequencies, scan them. Of course, we’ll ask the British, GCHQ, to monitor the same frequencies and process them. If we’re really lucky, we’ll record another signal that won’t decrypt.”

“Fine,” Vigiani said, “but this time get the phone number, okay?”

“Okay, right,” the NSA man said dryly. “You got it. Whatever you want.”

Vigiani got up from her desk and walked toward Sarah’s office. There, gathered around Sarah in a knot, were most of the task force members watching Sarah speak on the phone. Everyone, including Sarah, looked stricken.

“What?” she said to Ullman. “What is it?”

“It’s Duke,” he said without even turning to her.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Straining to keep a semblance of order and calm, Sarah stood before the MINOTAUR task force. “Whatever our private suspicions,” she said, “we can’t rule out the possibility that Perry Taylor died in a-well, I hesitate to use the word ‘routine,’ but there it is-a routine holdup. At least that’s the way it looks to both the Bureau’s Crime Labs and Washington Police Homicide.”

“In a parking lot in broad daylight?” asked George Roth.

“It was early evening,” she said.

“But the sun was out,” Roth persisted.

“Okay, right, but his car was parked in a fairly remote area of the lot.”

Pappas shook his head, but Sarah couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“Look,” Roth said, “Baumann wants us to think Taylor was held up. Does anyone here seriously think that’s what happened? I don’t know Taylor. You feebees, tell me: was he a drug user?”

“Of course not,” Vigiani said. “Obviously Baumann did this. Which means he’s in the U.S.”

Russell Ullman, to whom Perry Taylor had been something of a father figure, had been silent for most of the meeting. His eyes were rimmed in red. Now he spoke, his voice weak. “Has Crime Labs looked into the MO of the murders at Pollsmoor Prison to establish a correlation?”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “But there’s nothing.”

“How so?” Pappas asked.

“Taylor appears to have died from bullet wounds in the throat and forehead at fairly close range.”

“What do you think?” Vigiani exploded. “Baumann’s going to leave a signature-a billboard saying, ‘Here I am’? Come on!”

“All right,” Sarah said calmly. “You all may be right.”

Roth asked: “Any similarity between Taylor’s death and the death of your call-girl friend back in Boston?”

Sarah shook her head. “Ballistics tells me no.”

“If Duke was killed by Henrik Baumann,” said Pappas, “that tells us he’s not unwilling to kill a major FBI official, with all the heat that brings down. The question then is, what would his motive be? Nothing appears to have been stolen from Taylor or his car, except a wallet.”

“Baumann might have wanted the ID cards,” Ullman said. “Or he might have wanted to make it look like a mugging.”

“The motive,” Vigiani said, “was to try to paralyze the hunt for him. And if he’d kill Duke Taylor, he’d certainly kill any of us in an instant.”

On Jared’s third day in New York, on a Sunday afternoon, he insisted on going to the park to play. Sarah had worked all day Saturday, and had planned to work all day Sunday too, but at the last moment she relented. It was important for her to spend some family time with Jared. And she could do some work while he played. So they went to Strawberry Fields at West Seventy-second Street, and she read files while he batted a softball around by himself. It would have been a sad sight, this solitary kid in a brand-new leather jacket (a gift from Peter), tossing a ball up into the air and batting it, then running after it and starting all over again, were it not for the fact that he was so clearly enjoying himself.

In short order he had befriended another boy of roughly the same age who took turns pitching to him and then being pitched to. Relieved that he had met someone, Sarah returned to reading Bureau intelligence files on terrorist attempts within the United States.

The truth was, she was discovering, the Bureau’s record on catching terrorists was spotty. In 1986, she read, a domestic group called the El Rukin organization tried to buy an antitank weapon from an FBI undercover agent, intending to pull off some terrorist act in the United States in exchange for money from the Libyan government. A couple of years later, the FBI arrested four members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who were trying to buy a heat-seeking antiaircraft missile in Florida.

Fine, but what about all the black-market weapons sales that the Bureau didn’t catch? Barely months after the TRADEBOM investigation, which Alex Pappas was justly so proud of, a ring of Sudanese terrorists was arrested in New York, and members of the Abu Nidal organization were apprehended in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Missouri.

Pappas talked of probabilities, but what were the odds, really, that the special working group would catch this terrorist-and without a photograph?

People liked to joke about the World Trade Center terrorists, with their rinky-dink operation, returning to Ryder Truck Rental to get their five-hundred-dollar security deposit back, but Sarah didn’t find it amusing. Sure, the World Trade Center bombers were jokers, clowns, amateurs, but look what they had accomplished. And imagine what a top-notch, professional terrorist like Henrik Baumann could do.

The Bureau had come close to cracking the Oklahoma City case, but so much of it was luck. One of the investigators had found a twisted scrap of truck axle with a legible vehicle identification number on it, and he fed that number into Rapid Start, one of the Bureau’s many databases, and then we were off. That was good, basic scut work-but the Bureau had also lucked out when it was discovered that a nearby ATM video camera had captured an image of the rental truck that contained the bomb. And then a cop happened to stop a guy for speeding, a guy who happened to be driving without a license. How many lucky breaks could MINOTAUR really count on?

Perry Taylor’s death had changed everything. None of them really believed he’d been killed in a routine mugging. It was as if Baumann were in the next room now. They could hear his footsteps, his breathing, his approach. He was no longer an abstraction, a code name. He was here.

Lost in her thoughts, Sarah didn’t notice at first that Jared had disappeared.

She looked around, then rose slowly to get a better vantage point. She slipped the files into her shoulder bag. Jared was gone.

She was not yet nervous. Jared was impulsive, prone to run off without thinking, and now he had an accomplice.

She called his name. Several people turned around to look at her.

She called his name again, louder.

“Dammit, Jared,” she said. “Where the hell are you?”

She tightened her fists in anger and frustration, walked aimlessly around the landscaped field, yelled for him.

No answer.

She told herself not to overreact, not to be overprotective. Any moment he’d pop up behind her, laughing at the prank he’d pulled off, and she’d deliver a stern lecture about not fooling around that way in a strange city.

And after she’d circled the field and realized he really wasn’t there, that he probably wasn’t playing a trick, her heart began thudding.

She followed the path near where he and his new friend had been playing, toward the northeast part of the field, which dropped off suddenly into a densely wooded area, and when she heard his cries she began to run.

Three rough-looking late-adolescent boys had circled Jared and were jabbing at him. One of them was grabbing his new leather jacket. Another was wielding a baseball bat. Jared’s face was flushed, his eyes wide with fear.

“Hey!” she called out. “Back off! Leave him alone!”

They turned to look at her, and then two of them approached her.

“Mommy!” Jared cried out.

“Mommy!” mimicked one of them, with dreadlocks and a wispy adolescent goatee.

“Fuck you, bitch,” the other said, waving the bat.

Sarah knew the basics of hand combat, but the truth was she had never had to defend herself physically, not once in her career outside of the FBI Academy, not once when she didn’t have a gun, and right now her gun was in the office suite on West Thirty-seventh Street.

And then she felt a numbing blow to her abdomen, at precisely the same time that Jared let out a terrified scream, and she felt her purse being yanked from her shoulder. One of the young men had swung at her with the bat. With a great fury she lunged at the two attackers, while her son was slammed to the ground by the other, who yanked off his leather jacket. Jared let out a terrible scream.

She hit one of them in the jaw. He barely flinched, grabbed her waist, kneed her in the solar plexus, while the other approached, brandishing a bat. She screamed for help, but barely a sound escaped her throat. “Just leave him alone,” she finally shouted, trying to regain her balance, but they kept coming at her, grabbing her neck, kicking at her abdomen. She screamed again.

“Back off!” said a male voice to her right. “You let her go!” She caught a glimpse of a slender bespectacled man in jeans and a dark-blue T-shirt, walking stiffly toward them. He lunged at the assailants. One of the kids, who had been menacing Jared, turned to fend off this newcomer; the one with the bat swung at him and cracked into his hip, hard.

The man doubled up in pain. His glasses skittered to the ground a few feet away, one lens popped out of the bent frame.

And then, as quickly as they had appeared, the three young men disappeared, tearing off at top speed. Jared was in a heap on the ground, sobbing. Blood was pouring down his forehead, sheeting down. She rushed to him, threw her arms around him.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “My God. Are you all right? Are you all right?”

“Hurt,” came his small, muffled voice.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, feeling his blood-sticky scalp for the source of the gushing blood. He’d been wounded in the head. She squeezed him tight, feeling his body rise and fall rhythmically with his sobs. He winced when she touched a spot, a large gash. She looked up, saw the man in the blue T-shirt getting awkwardly to his feet.

“Is he okay?” the man asked. He had soft brown eyes, a tousled head of salt-and-pepper hair. He clutched his hip, bent down to retrieve his glasses, which looked damaged beyond repair. “Looks like he got hit bad.”

“I-I don’t know,” Sarah said.

The man came closer, knelt down, touched Jared’s head. Jared let out a yowl of pain. “It looks bad,” the man said. “We’ve got to get him to a hospital. Is there one nearby?”

“I have no idea,” Sarah said, now terrified as the realization struck her that Jared might in fact have been seriously hurt. “Oh, God. There’s got to be one.”

“Can you pick him up? If you can’t, I can. He shouldn’t walk.”

“No,” Sarah said quickly. She didn’t want the stranger to touch Jared, though he was a nice-seeming man, maybe around forty, quite good-looking, and seemed gentle. “I’ll carry him,” she said.

“I’ll get a cab.”

The man ran ahead of them and flagged down a cab, which came screeching to a halt. He opened the back door, then came running back toward Sarah, who was struggling to carry Jared, and helped them into the cab.

“Get us to the nearest emergency room,” the man ordered the driver.

In the cab, the man introduced himself. His name was Brian Lamoreaux, and he was an architect, a writer, and a professor of architecture and town planning at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Things were moving so quickly that she forgot even to thank the stranger for coming along to help them.

When the cab stopped, Sarah allowed him to pick up Jared and escort them into the St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital ER. Jared’s bleeding was still profuse, but it seemed to be slowing. Although he had stopped crying, he seemed dazed.

“I think he’s probably okay,” Brian assured her. “The scalp always bleeds a lot. He probably got cut when he was shoved to the ground.”

Brian dealt with the triage nurses while Sarah comforted Jared, and Jared was seen quickly. The examining physician asked if his tetanus shots were up to date. It took Sarah a moment to remember that Jared had had a DPT shot at the age of four or five.

The doctor wanted to take Jared away to suture his scalp, but Brian insisted that Sarah be allowed to accompany her son, and they reluctantly agreed.

As they wheeled Jared, Sarah noticed for the first time that Brian was limping slightly. She wondered whether the limp was from the blow with the bat. Jared, who was looking over at Brian, wasn’t burdened with tact, and for the first time he spoke.

“Did you get hurt trying to help us?” Jared asked.

“Hardly at all,” Brian Lamoreaux said. “Hip’s bruised a bit, but I’ll be fine.”

“But you’re limping,” Jared persisted.

“I’ve had this limp for a long time,” he replied. “Let’s worry about you.”

“How’d you get it?” Jared asked.

“Jared!” Sarah exclaimed.

“No, it’s okay,” Brian said. “I was in an accident once. Years ago.”

“Wow,” Jared said, satisfied.

The surgeon clipped the hair around the scalp wound and numbed the area with a syringe of something, chatting with Jared the whole time to distract him. Then, a few minutes later when the numbness had set in, he began suturing the scalp. Sarah held his hand; Brian sat in a chair nearby.

“Okay,” the surgeon said to Sarah when the procedure was done, “he’s going to be fine. He must have fallen against something on the ground, a piece of metal or broken glass or something, and got a fairly nasty laceration. What we call a ‘scalp lac.’ The scalp is richly vascular and bleeds like hell. Fortunately, scalp lacs are easy to suture.”

“Shouldn’t you check for concussion?” Sarah asked.

“No reason to,” the doctor said. “He didn’t lose consciousness at all, did he?”

She shook her head.

“Then no.”

“What about infection?”

“I cleaned the wound with Betadine, then used lidocaine with epinephrine, then dabbed on some bacitracin. He’s had his tetanus shots, so he should be okay there. I wouldn’t worry about it. Just don’t wash the hair for three days. Don’t get the wound wet. Watch for signs of infection, like redness or pus. In a week the sutures can come out. If you have a pediatrician in town he can take them out, or come on back here. He’ll be fine.”

They sat for a while, the three of them, near a vending machine in the ER waiting area. Brian told Sarah he was working on a biography of a Canadian architect Sarah had never heard of. He was here because some of the architect’s papers were in New York. Sarah said she was with the FBI, but was vague about what exactly she did, and he, apparently sensing her discomfort, didn’t pursue it.

Abruptly, Jared asked, with his eight-year-old’s straightforwardness: “Are you married?”

Sarah felt acutely uncomfortable. Was her son turning into a pander for his mother?

“I was,” Brian said.

“Jared knows all about divorce,” Sarah said quickly, mussing Jared’s hair. “Doesn’t he?”

“My wife died three years ago,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. She watched Brian as he talked to Jared. On closer inspection, she saw that he was prematurely gray; his face was youthful, although there were deep furrows around his mouth that looked like smile lines.

“How?” Jared asked.

“Jared!” Sarah said, shocked.

“No, it’s a natural thing to ask. She was sick for a long time, Jared.”

“What’d she have, cancer?”

“Come on, now, Jared!” Sarah said.

“Yes,” Brian said. “In fact, she had breast cancer.”

“Oh,” Jared said, somewhere between sad and bored.

“She was young,” Sarah said.

“It happens. It’s a horrible thing.” He paused. “You’re divorced?”

“Yeah,” she said, and quickly said, “You’re great with kids-do you have a son?”

“Clare wanted to have a kid before she got sick. We both did. Before I got my Ph.D. and went into academia, I worked for the Canadian Government Children’s Bureau as a counselor. I worked with a lot of kids Jared’s age. He’s a terrific little guy.”

“I think so, but I’m biased.”

“So, you’re alone here? I mean, you and your son?”

Sarah hesitated. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

“Me, too. It’s a tough city to be lonely in.”

“I said alone, not lonely. Anyway, it’s a better place to be alone in than, say, Jackson, Mississippi.”

“Listen, I hope this isn’t too… forward, but I’ve got a couple of tickets to a performance of Beethoven’s late quartets at Carnegie Hall, day after tomorrow.” He reddened as he talked. “I got them for me and a colleague of mine, but-”

“But she can’t make it,” Sarah interrupted, “and you hate to waste a ticket, right?”

“He, actually. He decided to leave the city early and return to Canada. I don’t know if this is your kind of thing, or whatever-”

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “I love chamber music, and the late quartets are among my favorites, but I’m just not a reliable companion these days. I’m in New York on some very pressing business, and my pager’s always going off, and I often have to go in to work at odd times of day or night.”

“That’s all right,” Brian said.

“I don’t think so,” she said. She was drawn to Brian, but instinctively distrustful of any stranger in the city. “Thanks anyway. And-listen, thank you so much for your help.”

“Can I take your number anyway?”

She hesitated, thought it over. “All right,” she said, and gave it to him.

“So can I call you sometime?”

She shrugged, smiled. “Sure.”

“I will. Jared, you’re going to be fine. Just don’t wash your hair for a couple of days. You heard the doctor.”

“Yeah, I can deal with that,” Jared said.

“I thought so. Take care.” He shook Sarah’s hand. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The encrypted message Baumann had faxed by SATCOM emerged with a beep from one of Malcolm Dyson’s personal fax machines in his inner office. From the rest room, where, wheelchair-bound, he found the simple act of relieving himself a veritable Bataan death march, he heard the fax and wheeled out to get it.

Faxes that came through these lines were for his eyes only; mostly they contained political intelligence of a highly confidential nature that could affect a major deal, or they spelled out details of blatantly illegal transactions he preferred his staff not to know too much about.

Recently the Dyson corporate jet had been flying to Moscow quite a bit, and to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, where Dyson’s minions were hacking through some Byzantine dealings in grain and sugar, Siberian oil, and copper refined in Kazakhstan. Most of these undertakings were extremely sensitive, involving massive bribes to politicians. Had one of them soured?

But this one, sender unspecified, was a meaningless jumble of words. He stared at it mystified for a few seconds until he realized that it was the substitution cipher he had worked out with Baumann.

He buzzed for Lomax and had him do the cryptographic heavy lifting. Lomax took the fax and the pocket dictionary to his office and returned half an hour later with the message in clear.

Dyson donned his reading glasses and studied the translation. “The hell’s this supposed to mean?” he asked his aide. “‘Leak your end’ and ‘American intelligence partially knowledgeable’?”

Lomax answered with another question. “If there’s a leak, how does he know it’s from our end?”

“‘Leak,’” Dyson said with a scowl. “How serious a leak? He doesn’t say he’s abandoning the operation; it can’t be that serious.”

“I don’t know.”

“The fuck is ‘partially knowledgeable,’ anyway?”

“Don’t know.”

“I’ve told exactly two people,” Dyson said. “You and Kinzel.” Johann Kinzel ran the Zug, Switzerland, office of Dyson & Company, and was one of Dyson’s few confidants.

“You’ve hardly told Kinzel a thing,” Martin Lomax reminded him. “The roughest outline, really.”

“You two’ve talked about this, though, I’m sure.”

“Of course,” Lomax said. “He’s made all the banking arrangements. But all of our conversations have been on the secure phone.”

Dyson gave his underling a scorching stare. “On the Russian’s phones, I assume.”

“Of course.”

Dyson shook his head. “Those phones are secure-the only ones I want you or Kinzel to use. What the hell does he mean? This office is swept every other day. Arcadia gets a good going-over every Monday. And we can’t even raise the guy, can we? This is exactly how I didn’t want it.”

“At least we know he’s in New York.”

“Cold comfort. One week remaining, and we don’t even know what he’s done.”

“The main thing is that you not be connected in any way.”

“What about the hired gun who took care of the whore in Boston?”

“Died in an unfortunate car accident near his native Coventry, England.”

Dyson gave one of his enigmatic smiles and reached for a Macanudo, whose end he snipped as meticulously as a surgeon. He lighted it with a gold lighter and turned toward the window. Martin Lomax stood in silence, knowing better than to interrupt one of his boss’s reveries, which were more and more frequent of late.

Dyson found himself recalling the incident once again, for what seemed the millionth time. It had not made any of the newspapers, which indicated to Dyson that the U.S. government and its allies had pulled in a lot of chits. It had been a botch, all round, and the less known publicly the better.

Dyson had always feared the bounty hunters, but he had not counted on a bounty hunter working on contract for the U.S. government, a higher level of bounty hunter with the best intelligence.

Washington had obviously given up. All legal channels had been exhausted. The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs had passed on to State its request to extradite. State had sent it to the Swiss embassy. No dice. The Alien Fugitive Division of Interpol’s U.S. National Central Bureau had been enlisted, to no effect.

Then someone at Justice, clearly frustrated beyond rational thinking, had come up with the idea: Screw the federal marshals. Send a contract employee to Monaco, where Dyson and his wife went twice a month. Grab the fucker. Just go in there and grab him and bring him back to the States, back to justice and Justice. Sort out the niceties later.

The attempted grab happened on a dark pathway near the casino. Two armed bounty hunters, actually. Taking on two of Dyson’s personal bodyguards.

A full moon, a bright crystalline night sky. The twenty-sixth of June. Malcolm and Alexandra Dyson had just come from a night of baccarat, accompanied by their thirty-one-year-old daughter, Pandora, a delicately beautiful woman, their only child, visiting from Paris.

The ringing of Pandora’s delighted laughter, the clove notes of Alexandra’s perfume.

A scuff on the pavement, a rustling.

Dimly glimpsed out of the corner of an eye: a silhouette, a darting figure.

Dyson, always watching, always suspicious, felt his stomach constrict before his mind knew anything.

The sudden intrusion of a raspy male voice: “Freeze.”

Bertrand, Dyson’s senior bodyguard, drew his pistol first, and the bounty hunters swiftly returned fire.

A sudden explosion, a series of rapid pops, the flashes of orange fire, the acrid smell of cordite. A woman’s scream, which was really the terrified scream of two women. The flash of moonlight reflected in Pandora’s earrings, a cough.

Bertrand saved Dyson’s life, though not his legs, and died in the process. Both Dyson’s wife and daughter were killed instantly. Dyson, paralyzed from the waist down, squirmed over to his dying wife and child and threw his arms around them both, half protecting, half embracing.

Malcolm and Alexandra Dyson’s marriage had long cooled, but she had given birth to Pandora, and Pandora was Malcolm Dyson’s whole world, the center of his life. He loved his daughter as much as any father had ever loved a daughter. He was obsessed with his Pandora; he could not talk about her without lighting up, without a smile or a glow.

Malcolm Dyson was a paraplegic now who carried his anger around in his motorized chair. Once he had lived for fortune; now he lived for revenge. I’ll never walk again, he had once thundered at Lomax, but with Pandora gone, why in the world would I ever want to?

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Early Monday morning, Sarah arrived at headquarters, walking stiffly from the previous day’s attack. She had placed Band-Aids over the cuts on her neck and the side of her face. There was a large bruise on her right cheek that had turned blue, another one on her forearm, and a particularly nasty one under her rib cage.

“What the hell happened to you?” Pappas asked.

She recounted the incident, assured Pappas that Jared was fine.

“Eight-year-old boys,” Pappas said, “are a unique species. They’re easily frightened and just as easily soothed. Plus, their wounds somehow seem to heal almost overnight-it’s one of their chief physical properties.”

Christine Vigiani approached, waited for Pappas to finish talking. In one hand was a curling sheet of slick fax paper; in the other was a cigarette, pluming smoke.

She said: “We got a photo.”

Sarah whirled around. “Thank God. How?”

“I’ve been putting out intelligence feelers to all friendly contacts, as you asked me to do. I was sort of dubious, I’ll admit it. But then all of a sudden, Mossad finally came through.” The Mossad is world-renowned for its extensive photographic archives, some of which are stored on CD-ROM.

Sarah took the fax. “What is this?” she asked.

“An enlargement of a video image taken from a moving car in Johannesburg-a group of BOSS officers exiting a restaurant.”

“This came over the high-res fax?” Sarah asked, plainly crestfallen. “This is it?”

“It’s all they had, and since it comes from a single video frame-”

“Is this supposed to be a face? It looks more like a smudged thumbprint!” It was totally useless.

Vigiani took a drag from her cigarette, narrowed her eyes in silence.

“I’m sorry, Chris,” Sarah said. “Nice try anyway, but this isn’t going to do us any good.”

When the group had assembled for the morning meeting, Sarah announced: “A few hundred copies of a South African computer Identi-Kit drawing of our good Prince are available up front, along with a spec sheet. Flash them around, or leave a copy if you think there’s a chance he might come into an establishment. We’ve got to check as many hotels as we can, which means we’ll have to call in some reinforcements from the PD and the Bureau. Remember, we’re looking for a fugitive implicated in a murder. That’s the public line.”

“That’s what he is,” mumbled one of the cops.

“Do you know how many hotels there are in the city?” asked another one of the cops, a tall, thin, sandy-haired fellow named Ranahan.

“No,” said Roth, holding a commuter’s mug of coffee. He turned around to stare directly at him. “Exactly how many hotels are there in the city? I’d be interested to learn the number.”

Ranahan coughed nervously. “How the hell do I know? A shitload.”

Roth nodded meaningfully. “‘A shitload.’ I see. Is that privileged information, or can I leak that to the press?”

“Baumann is known to travel first-class,” Sarah interrupted, “and to prefer first-class accommodations, so we should make sure to check all the top hotels, but also the bottom rung, the flophouses and boardinghouses. Those are the best places to ensure anonymity, better than the middle-level ones.”

“I’ll do the Plaza and the Carlyle,” Ranahan volunteered. “George, there’s a bunch of crack hotels in Harlem got your name on them.”

“Keep the search to Manhattan proper,” Sarah instructed. “White male, forties. Blue eyes, black hair, medium build, no known identifying marks. Bearded, but may be clean-shaven or have a mustache. Probably has a South African accent.”

“What the hell does that sound like?” asked Special Agent Walter Latimer from the New York office.

“No one knows what a South African accent sounds like,” said Ullman. “They might think it’s an English accent, or Australian or Dutch or even German.”

“Right,” Sarah said. “Now, let’s bear in mind that he can’t exist in a vacuum, in isolation. What does he have to do in order to live in the city and make his preparations?”

“Does he have any known accomplices?” asked Vigiani. “Any major act requires some assistants or contacts. He’s not going to just fly in, plant a bomb, and fly out. It doesn’t work that way.”

“He may want to open a bank account,” Vigiani’s police partner said. “Or rent a car or a truck or a van.”

“Like maybe from Ryder Truck Rental in Jersey City,” suggested Lieutenant Roth, a reference to the place where the Trade Center conspirators rented their van.

“He’s a stranger in a strange land,” Sarah said. “That’s why he may call upon old contacts, friends or accomplices or contacts from the South African service or from past jobs. Chris, I’d like you to stay here and work the phones and the fax, see what you can turn up from friendly intelligence services in the way of known contacts. You didn’t turn up anything on the domestic right-wing extremist groups, did you?”

Vigiani shook her head slowly.

“Didn’t think so. Ken, what about the video frame Christine got from Mossad-any luck there?”

“I’ve been trying a bunch of times to enhance the photo using some not-bad photo-enhancement software. Some our own, some commercial ‘paintbrush’ stuff, but it’s hopeless. There’s no face there. I don’t think the Mossad guys even had a lens on their camera.”

“Thanks for trying,” Sarah said. “Have you turned up any of our man’s known relatives, associates, contacts, whatever?”

“Zero,” Ken replied.

“Great,” said one of the cops mordantly. “The guy has no friends.”

“Yeah, well, if your name was the Prince of Darkness,” said Roth, “you wouldn’t exactly be popular either. ‘Hey, hon, I’ve invited the Prince of Darkness over for dinner tonight. There enough lasagna to go around?’”

Sarah smiled politely, and a few cops chuckled appreciatively.

“One of the wizards at ID,” Ken went on, “translated his ten-prints into a couple of different formats, NCIC and AFIS, in addition to the Henry system, and secure-faxed them to the French, the Italians, the Spanish, the Germans, the Israelis, and the Brits, for starters. A couple of the antiterrorist strike forces were really helpful. The Spanish GEO, the Grupo Especial de Operaciones-Special Operations Group, their antiterrorist group. The French GIGN, the Groupement d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, France’s crack antiterrorist unit. And the German GSG-9. They’re all operational, but they all have direct lines to intelligence.”

“And?” Sarah prompted.

“And we scored a couple interesting hits.”

Several heads turned in his direction.

“In 1985 and ’86 there was a string of fifteen bombings in Paris. Thirteen people were killed, more than two hundred wounded.”

“Iranian, wasn’t it?” Pappas said.

“I don’t know-terrorism isn’t my forte. But I do know that a Tunisian-born Frenchman was arrested and put on trial as the mastermind behind the campaign. He wanted to keep France from sending arms to Iraq during its war with Iran. Well, a big juicy latent thumbprint was found, clear as day, on a piece of duct tape used on one of the packages. The print was never ID’d-it didn’t come from the Tunisian guy.”

“Baumann,” one of the cops said.

“The way it looks,” Ken said. “Our guy gets around, or at least he’s not discriminating about who he works for. And the Spaniards, the GEO, had a fairly good partial from his index finger, taken from the fuel line of a car back in 1973. Apparently our man was wearing latex surgical gloves, but when the latex in the glove is stretched tightly enough, the print comes through.”

“What was the incident?” Pappas asked sharply.

“The assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco, the prime minister of Spain.”

“Jesus, that was the Basques,” Pappas said. “The Basque separatist movement ETA. You know, there was a rumor that they brought in an outsider. Baumann… is that possible?”

“Well, they scored a hit on the prints,” Ken said, “so I guess so.”

“The guy’s not a ghost,” Ullman said. “He does exist.”

“Ken,” Sarah said, “call up whatever you can on those events. I want names, contacts, anything. Have you been in touch with TRAC?” TRAC was the Terrorist Research and Analytical Center at Bureau headquarters in Washington.

“Oh, sure,” Ken said. “I also reached out to INS, to see if they had any matches for the prints. My thinking was, maybe he applied for a U.S. visa under a false name. The answer was no, of course. He’s way too careful a dude.”

“Well, nice try, anyway,” Sarah said. “And what about our cross-check?”

“A primo idea, oh esteemed leader.” He explained to the others Sarah’s idea. “But State is hamstrung by the Privacy Act, which protects passport information so ferociously that you can’t just lump it all together in one nice, handy package.”

Pappas gave Sarah a significant look. Sarah felt uncomfortable. “I like that,” she said. “With all our personal rights to privacy, what about the right not to be blown up in a subway or a skyscraper or something?”

Ken went on: “Ask State a simple question like ‘Can you tell if someone got into the country using a stolen passport?’ and you get a load of bullshit. Like, ‘Oh, we don’t depend on the passport number for enforcement,’ and ‘Oh, there’s lots of security features to prevent fraud, it could never happen.’ Junk like that. But here’s what they don’t want to tell you: they do have a lookout system for lost or stolen passports, so it pops up on the screen at all major ports of entry. It’s called the Consular Lookout and Support System. But it’s not real-time or anywhere close. It’s weeks and weeks behind the time. So you steal a passport from a guy in London-I mean, right out from under his nose, so he sees you doing it-and you can use that passport to get into the U.S., assuming you look enough like the photo on the stolen passport. Because it’s weeks by the time the London embassy sends-I mean, sends by snail-mail-the report of a lost or stolen passport to the U.S. and it’s entered into the system.”

“Can’t you get a list of all passports reported stolen or lost in the last several months?” Sarah asked.

“That’s the other thing. They don’t have a way to do that, to collect the names and passport numbers in one file.”

“You’re kidding me,” Sarah said.

“Unfortunately not. The U.S. State Department issues four million passports a year. And if you look at the figures for passports reported lost or stolen in 1992, for example, there were thirteen thousand, one hundred and one passports reported lost, and fourteen thousand, six hundred and ninety-two reported stolen. Of course, a lot of people who’ve actually lost their passport report it as stolen to save face, seem less clumsy. Yet State can’t do a cross-check for you on stolen passports that were used after they were reported stolen!”

Lieutenant Roth remarked, “Let’s hear it for the feds.”

“So now what?” Sarah asked.

“So just because they can’t do it doesn’t mean I can’t.”

Sarah smiled wanly.

“Through the Bureau’s link, I tapped into the Consular Lookout and Support System to see what passport numbers have been flagged as lost or stolen. Then simultaneously I went into the INS database that lists everyone who’s entered the country by any port of entry.”

“And if there’s a match,” Vigiani said excitedly, “you’ve got yourself a list of everyone who used a stolen or lost passport to get into the country in the last couple of months.”

“Right,” Ken concluded.

“And?” Sarah said.

“Well, I’m running the cross-check now, and I’ll fill you in as soon as you let me go back to my toys.”

“You did all this over the weekend?” asked one of the cops, a black man named Leon Hoskin, with more contempt than awe.

“Computers never sleep,” Ken explained offhandedly. “Some of these passport numbers will be automatic rule-outs, I suspect. Plus, I can eliminate females, older folks, nonwhites.”

“Don’t,” Sarah said. “Be careful about what you eliminate. A pro like Baumann can look older or younger than he is, can dress like a nun or a wheelchair-bound middle-aged man, for all I know. Don’t be too hasty to rule any of them out.”

For some reason she flashed on an image of Jared curled fetus-like on the ground in Central Park, then saw the wispy goatee of her mugger.

She felt a surge of anger and of protectiveness, and thought of how little progress they’d made, really, since she’d arrived here, how much further there was to go before there was even the remotest chance of stopping the Prince of Darkness.

CHAPTER FIFTY

Warren Elkind, chairman and chief executive officer of the Manhattan Bank, had been under intensive FBI surveillance since Operation MINOTAUR had begun its work. Elkind had been unreceptive to repeated FBI inquiries, and therefore Sarah had ordered the surveillance, knowing in time they would find his weak spot.

There were several leading private bondage-and-discipline sex clubs in New York City, and considering his relationship with Valerie Santoro, the odds were great that Elkind frequented at least one of them. He did not, however, turn up at the two best-known ones, Pandora’s Box and the Nutcracker.

At around four o’clock the next afternoon, Elkind left his office in the Manhattan Bancorp Building and began walking north up Lexington. His tails followed him to an office building on East Fifty-sixth Street between First and Second avenues, which was just a few blocks away.

Repeated calls to his office at the same time elicited the information that he was “out of the office,” and then that he had “left for the day.” As soon as surveillance had determined that Elkind’s destination, on the thirteenth floor of the building, was the private and very exclusive Brimstone Club, Sarah’s beeper went off.

She was there within twenty minutes, which, given the traffic, was impressive time.

The elevator took her straight to the thirteenth floor and opened on a small, dark, eucalyptus-scented waiting area with comfortable-looking couches around a black shag rug. On the wall were vast blowups of artistically grainy photographs of women posing provocatively in black leather. Behind a glass window, sitting at a counter, was a fierce-looking middle-aged woman with obviously dyed blond hair, an enormous bosom, and heavy purple eyeshadow. She glanced warily at Sarah and said, “Can I help you?”

Sarah had dressed casually in jeans and a button-down polo shirt rolled up at the sleeves. She looked like an attractive young woman who was perhaps a graduate student, perhaps a professional on a day off. Hard to read, yes, but certainly not someone to beware of.

She had thought long and hard about her approach here, too. Flashing her credentials wouldn’t get her beyond the waiting area, if they wanted to play hardball. If she bluffed her way in, she risked alerting him. Yet she had to get in somehow.

“A friend of mine suggested I check out working here, learn the trade,” she said offhandedly.

“Uh huh,” the blond receptionist said. “And who’s that?”

“I’d rather not say, okay? A friend. I’m sort of into the idea of dominance.”

She looked at Sarah neutrally yet appraisingly. “You have experience?”

“Some. I’ve played a little, with a lover. Done the clubs, the Nutcracker, you know. Now I’m sort of looking to do it professionally.”

“You married?”

“No. My ex-husband’s idea of dominance and submission was more mental than physical, if you know what I’m saying.”

The receptionist gave a short laugh. “What toys are you familiar with?”

“Well… single-tail whips. Floggers. Some knifeplay, electrical play. CBT.” CBT was the argot for cock-and-ball torture.

“We don’t allow the knife,” the receptionist said. “No blood sports.”

“I want a tour,” Sarah said.

“I think one of the rooms is booked,” said the receptionist.

“That’s okay. Everything else, though.”

The receptionist shrugged.

Another woman, this one with jet-black hair, gave the tour. She was stout and even more buxom than the receptionist, dressed entirely in black stretch fabric, and had a hooked nose. She introduced herself as Eva and gave an introductory spiel.

The Brimstone Club was one of New York’s most exclusive houses of D &S, or dominance and submission. Its clientele, she explained, included some of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful men and women. They ranged from corporate lawyers to music executives, from Wall Street tycoons to world-famous academics. No one from the lower or even middle echelons of society. A number of prominent public figures, a few extremely well known, came here regularly.

“Most of our members are men,” Eva explained, “mostly submissives, though not all. Largely heterosexual, but not entirely. We have a staff of fourteen, including two men and twelve exalted mistresses.”

Eva led Sarah down a low-ceilinged, acoustically tiled corridor. “We charge two hundred fifty dollars an hour, two-hour minimum. No sex or drugs allowed, and we’re strict about that.”

“So to speak.”

She smiled. “So to speak. No intercourse or oral sex. No blood sports. Absolutely no hand releases. That’s the law.”

“How much of that five hundred do I get?”

“Forty percent of the hourly fee,” Eva said.

“How many clients a day can I reasonably expect?”

“Look,” Eva said, “there’s always a surplus of mistresses.”

“So how much time am I going to sit, waiting for someone who doesn’t have a favorite?”

“If you’re good, you can do maybe a thousand a day for the house, which means four hundred for yourself.”

“You guys have an arrangement with any of the kinky clothing stores in the city? Any employee discounts or whatever? That stuff’s expensive.”

“Oh, sure. No nice clothes, no clients, simple as that. Yeah, we’ve got arrangements.” She opened a door marked REST ROOM. A man in a maid’s uniform was on his knees, furtively cleaning the tiled floor with a toothbrush and a pail of Lysol. Sarah noticed he was wearing a wedding band.

“That’s not clean enough, Matilda,” she barked. “Do it again!” She closed the door. “Anyway, that’s the rest room. Unisex. His real name is Matthew. Matilda, when he’s in the role. He’s a sissy slave.”

“Good help is hard to find, isn’t it?” Sarah said.

“Not here. All right, now, there are five dungeons, all fully equipped.” She pulled open a heavy steel door labeled DUNGEON TWO. Except that its walls were painted black, it could have been a doctor’s examination room. Its equipment, however, would not have been found in most hospitals. There was a rotating wooden bondage table, a stretch rack, a cross outfitted with leather manacles. Against one wall was a long rack of whips and crops and other equipment Sarah didn’t recognize. Against another wall was a black leather gym horse.

“That’s Two. They’re all pretty similar, with minor variations-suspension equipment, a pin chair, that sort of thing.”

“Can I see the others?”

“Dungeon Three is in use, but I can show you the others if you want. Believe me, it’s all pretty much the same thing.”

“Forget it, that’s all right.”

“Our dominas typically wear leather, patent leather, latex, PVC, or English riding attire. We perform bondage, spanking, flagellation, and humiliation, all mild to severe. Puppy training, infantilism, genital chastisement, nipple torment, foot worship. All the usual.”

When they had returned to the waiting room and Sarah had been handed a three-page form to fill out, she asked to use the rest room.

“Sure,” Eva said, “go ahead. You remember where it is?”

“Yeah.”

“If you want Matilda out of there, just order him out. He’d love it.”

Unescorted, she followed the corridor to the rest room, passed by it, and found the steel door marked Dungeon Three, the one that was occupied. This had to be where she’d find him. She swung it open.

A beautiful redheaded woman in black PVC stretch pants, bra, gloves, and thigh-high black patent-leather boots with long spike heels was wielding a crop on a naked middle-aged man wearing only a black leather hood.

She turned toward the open door and said huffily, “Excuse me.”

“Excuse me,” Sarah said. “Mr. Elkind?”

A muffled, confused voice emerged from the hood: “Yes, mistress?”

“Mr. Elkind, it’s Special Agent Sarah Cahill. I’m awfully sorry to disturb you, but I thought we might have a little talk.”

The corporate headquarters of the Manhattan Bank were housed in a spectacular modernistic building designed by Cesar Pelli and located on Fifty-second Street near Lexington, very close to the headquarters of its leading competitor, Citicorp.

The executive offices were on the twenty-seventh floor, where Warren Elkind’s suite of offices occupied a large corner of the floor, the area of a small law firm. The floors were covered with Persian carpets; antiques of burled walnut and fruitwood lined the corridors.

In his thousand-dollar navy-blue double-breasted suit with a gold tie, hair combed back, and seated behind his mammoth, bare desk, Warren Elkind once again exuded gravity. Sarah found it hard to reconcile this mandarin with the sweaty, paunchy figure she’d seen wearing nothing but a leather hood just half an hour ago.

Warren Elkind was the chairman of the second-largest commercial bank in the country. An Amherst graduate, he had been married to a wealthy New York socialite for twenty-some years and had four children. He was a director of PepsiCo, Occidental Petroleum, and Fidelity Investments, and a member of a number of exclusive clubs, from the Cosmos in Washington to the Bohemian Grove in San Francisco. A well-connected guy.

But rarely did he appear in the public eye. Here and there he gave a speech about bank regulation. Once in a while he and his wife appeared in the society pages of the Times at some benefit or other.

“Now,” he said, “my lawyer will have a field day.”

“So will the press,” Sarah said. “And your shareholders. And the thousands upon thousands of employees of the Manhattan Bank.”

“Are you aware this is blackmail?”

“Yes,” Sarah admitted blithely.

“And that I could get you fired for it?”

“Only if you could prove it,” she responded. “But if I go down, I’ll take you with me.”

“What the hell do you want?”

“I thought you’d never ask. Mr. Elkind, we have some very good information that either you or your bank, or both, are being targeted by terrorists. And we’ve been trying to tell you this for over two weeks.”

“Who?”

“We don’t know.”

He nodded slowly. “Probably the loons who did Oklahoma City. Those right-wing militia groups are convinced that the major banks are in some giant conspiracy with the Israelis and the Russians and the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.”

“I think whoever’s behind it is considerably more sophisticated than any militia group. In any case, we need your cooperation. A few weeks ago you saw a call girl in Boston named Valerie Santoro, who was murdered later that same night.”

Elkind stared levelly at her for several moments. His nostril hairs were white. His hands were perfectly manicured. “I don’t know who or what you’re talking about.”

“Mr. Elkind, I understand your situation. You’re a married man with four children, you’re the chairman of a major bank, you have a reputation to protect. I understand why you’d rather not admit you know Valerie Santoro. But the potential consequences here are serious. You should know I can make sure your name is kept confidential, that any connection to Ms. Santoro-”

“You understand English, don’t you? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“You should also know that a call was placed from a limousine rented in your name to a telephone number in the name of Valerie Santoro. We have records. That’s point one. Point two, your name was discovered in Valerie Santoro’s Rolodex. Now, perhaps we can talk for a few minutes.”

Elkind looked at her for a long while as if deciding which way to play it. At last he spoke. “Listen to me, Special Agent Cahill,” he said with quiet sarcasm. “I don’t know any Valerie Santorini or whatever the hell her name is. You say a call to some woman was placed from my limo? What the hell makes you think I know anything about that? What the hell makes you so sure I made this call? How the hell do I know who had access to the limousine?”

“Mr. Elkind-”

“And you say my name is in some girl’s Rolodex. So what?” He leaned over his desk, rustled through a pile of mail, and triumphantly waved a large junk-mail envelope. “I’m delighted and honored that some call girl in Boston put me in her Rolodex. And apparently I’ve also won ten million dollars from the Publishers Clearing House, Special Agent Cahill.”

“Please, Mr. Elkind-”

“Ms. Cahill, in my position, you’re a target for all sorts of schemers and loonies. These type of people prey on rich men like me all the time. They go through the Forbes Four Hundred, they buy addresses from these computer data services. I don’t even know this woman, and I resent your wasting my time with this bullshit. If you’re going to accuse me of the murder of some girl I don’t even know, go right ahead. But you’d better have an ironclad case. And you’ll be laughed out of a job. I’ll see to it.”

Sarah felt her face flush with anger. She studied the repeating floral pattern on the rust-colored carpet. “Is that a threat?”

“That’s a prediction. I’m not without friends and allies. Don’t fuck with me.” He stood up.

“Sit down, please,” she said. She took out a cassette tape recorder and hit the play button.

After she played the phone conversation between Elkind and Valerie, she said: “This, as well as your documented membership in the Brimstone Club, can become public knowledge through artfully placed leaks. Which means the end of your reign at Manhattan Bank. The humiliation will be too profound. Your board of directors will demand your immediate resignation.”

“My private life is my own affair.”

“Not for someone in your position of prominence.”

“There’s no difference between what you people are doing now and the way you went after Charlie Chaplin. You don’t find it repulsive?”

“Oh, sometimes I do,” Sarah admitted. “But this kind of gamesmanship is something I’ll bet you’re quite familiar with.”

“That’s Machiavellian-”

“Right-since the end justifies it. Everyone’s always in favor of privacy unless we’re invading the ‘privacy’ of terrorists or assassins-then they’re all in favor of our ‘intelligence.’ I’d have thought that the threat of a terrorist attack on your own bank would have persuaded you to cooperate long ago, but I guess not. Now the choice is yours: tell me everything, or lose your career, maybe even your family.”

Sarah called to mind the society-page photographs she had seen of Warren Elkind’s socialite wife, Evangeline Danner Elkind, at one benefit or another, duly recorded in Town & Country and the Times. She was an anorexic blonde, once beautiful but now the taut-skinned victim of one too many face-lifts. She was what Tom Wolfe called a “social X ray.” She and her husband had four children, one at Choate, one at Exeter, one at Vassar, one doing drugs and living off Dad’s money in Miami.

Obviously Evangeline Elkind knew nothing of her husband’s proclivities, and the threat of public exposure was potent. Sarah was disgusted with herself, though outwardly she seemed calculating and cool.

Of course, it was far from a sure thing that to own up to his regular liaisons with Valerie would destroy his marriage and family. Marriages and families sometimes had unexpected artesian sources of resiliency. But his career as America’s most powerful banker, or even second- or third-most-powerful banker, would assuredly be ruined.

She went on, “Valerie Santoro was hired to steal a CD-ROM from your briefcase-”

“Nothing was stolen from my briefcase!”

“No. She ‘borrowed’ it for a while, then returned it to the front desk at the Four Seasons.”

He stared at Sarah again, and this time she was sure she could see the blood drain from his face. “What are you-”

“A CD-ROM. Did you ‘misplace’ it while you were at the hotel?”

“Oh, Jesus God. Oh, Jesus God.” Elkind’s face seemed to cave in.

“What happened to it?”

“The disk-I thought it fell out of my suitcase. I mean, it was meaningless to anyone else-no one would know what was on it. Then when it turned up, I knew it had just fallen out somewhere. The front desk said it had been found in a trash container-”

“What was on it?”

“Every year we get one of those CD-ROMs that’s got an entire year’s worth of authentication codes on it, a different computer ‘key’ for each day. They’re used to send money around the world by computer, encoded digitally. That’s why I was in Boston, for one of those bank security meetings. Once a year the heads of the bank, or their designated proxies, meet and exchange computer keys.”

“Someone who had that cryptographic key-”

“-could get into our computers and falsify transactions and steal billions of dollars. Can’t even think about it.”

“But if the bank is suddenly missing an enormous sum of money, wouldn’t the Federal Reserve just bail you out?”

“Christ, no. All these banking reforms. The Fed talks about ‘moral hazard’-that we’re not strict enough with depositors. The truth is, only eight percent of Manhattan Bank’s assets are secure-in government bonds, triple-A-rated securities-basically liquid.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it would only take a loss of about a hundred million dollars to make us insolvent. Now, will you just tell me what you want me to do, please?”

“I want to see your director of security,” Sarah said. “Right now.”

The Manhattan Bank’s director of security was a formidable, very tall woman in her late forties named Rosabeth Chapman. She was ex-Bureau, which gave Sarah the notion that they’d have common ground on which to schmooze.

Rosabeth Chapman, however, was not a schmoozer. She had the charm of a meter maid. She had a firm, intimidating way of speaking, a perfect pale-blond bouffant hairdo, precise pink lipstick. She spoke in a contralto, and her three male associates listened in respectful silence. Warren Elkind seemed to have a fondness for dominant women.

“You’re asking us to activate a crisis-management approach. You want us to come up with a ‘game plan,’ as you call it. Yet you have absolutely no evidence of an impending attack on Manhattan Bank, whether the headquarters building or any of our branches.”

“That’s not quite accurate,” Sarah said. “We have an intercepted telephone conversation-”

“Which is meaningless. It’s talk; it’s a hollow threat.”

“Threats are more than we usually get in this business-” Sarah began.

“Are you aware how many threats are made against this bank?”

“What the hell else do you want?” Sarah finally burst out. “You want a ticking bomb? You want the whole building brought down? You want a signed statement from the terrorists notarized by a notary public-‘Oh, and make sure that little seal-punch thing hasn’t expired’?”

Rosabeth Chapman shouted back: “You want to send a bomb squad around to search our headquarters and all the branches, is that it? You want to announce publicly that someday soon, we don’t know when, Manhattan Bank is going to be struck by a terrorist? Do you have any idea what that will do to the bank’s business?”

“All right,” Sarah said. “Let’s agree on this much. You’ll send plainclothes teams around to inspect for bombs on a regular basis. The public won’t have a clue. You beef up your security here and at all branches. Make sure Elkind’s personal security is doubled or tripled. And for Christ’s sake, change the bank’s access codes immediately. Will you at least do that much?”

Rosabeth Chapman glowered. After a long pause, she said primly, “Yes. That much we can do.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Ken Alton emptied his Diet Pepsi and slammed it down on his desk with a hollow aluminum thock. “Hot damn,” he said. “So Elkind talked. Let’s hear it for compromising situations.”

“Let’s not dwell on that,” Sarah said queasily, pulling up a chair next to his desk. She looked around at the wall of blue computer screens and keyboards and CPUs and cables that surrounded him. “I’d rather not think about it. He says the disk had an entire year’s worth of computer passwords on it, a different one for each day. He said someone who had access to it could conceivably steal billions of dollars from the bank. This sound right to you?”

“Shit, yeah.”

“How?”

Ken sighed the sigh of the expert who dreads the ordeal of having to explain in layman’s language. “All right. Cash-good old-fashioned cash, the stuff we use to buy a cup of coffee or tip the waiter, that funny paper-that’s disappearing, okay? Fast becoming history. Today, five out of every six dollars in the economy isn’t cash but-vapor. Streams of zeroes and ones zipping around through cyberspace. A trillion dollars a day now ricochet around the world by computer. A trillion-can you get your mind around that?”

Sarah shook her head slowly, lost in thought.

“I mean, okay, you can argue that cash is an abstract concept, right? It’s just a colored piece of paper printed up in some government printing press somewhere. Checks, too-what are they but fancy IOU notes? Okay, but the really big sums of money-the really cosmically huge amounts-they always move by computer. In the old days, when a bank wanted to send a million bucks, they sent a messenger out with a piece of paper, a cashier’s check. Now it’s almost always done by wire transfer-electronic funds transfer, to use the proper name. Man, I remember when the Bank of New York had some sort of software glitch, back in ’85, and the Federal Reserve had to lend them twenty-three billion dollars overnight to bail them out.”

“But what about theft?”

“Right, I was getting to that. This whole system makes it so goddam easy. Only shmucks go into banks with guns and ski masks on and try to steal the, what, maybe ten thousand bucks the average bank has on hand. That’s pathetic. In 1988, some people in Chicago almost got away with stealing seventy million dollars from a bank, using electronic funds transfer.”

“But they didn’t get away with it.”

“Yeah, but they were morons. Thing is, you rarely hear about the successful heists, because the banks don’t want people to know how vulnerable they are. But around 1982 or 1983, this guy went into a bank in the U.S., I forget where, and did a little ‘social engineering’-”

“Meaning?”

“Oh, that’s computer hacker talk for using people to help you pull off some computer caper. The guy pretended to be from the Federal Reserve Bank doing something security-related, and he managed to transfer ten point two million dollars to an account in Switzerland, where he converted it to diamonds-and got away with it.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. And then there was this case in 1989, when a con man from Malaysia co-opted two employees of the Swiss Bank Corporation in Zurich in a huge scam, where they wired twenty million dollars to the New York branch of an Australian bank. The order was forged, but no one knew that. So the twenty million was zapped over to Australia, where it was drawn down quickly to a bunch of different accounts, and it just disappeared into the ether, leaving no trace. By the time Swiss Bank Corporation discovered what had happened, the money was pretty much all gone.”

“So if someone had the computer passwords-?”

“Are you kidding, Sarah? Christ, someone clever could steal all of a bank’s money, make it go belly up inside of a day. I think I should take a look at the Manhattan Bank’s computers, don’t you?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

If you were a drug smuggler seeking to get, say, a few thousand kilos of cocaine into the United States, you would probably resort to one of the time-honored methods devised by the drug cartels. You might conceal the goods in hollowed-out bars of aluminum stacked high in the cargo of a Venezuelan ship entering the Port of Newark. Or you might move the cocaine by truck across the Mexican border, buried in a shipment of roofing material.

If you were careful, and your shipping documents were in order, the odds would be in your favor.

But if instead you were smuggling in relatively small quantities of contraband, whether drugs or explosives or weapons-grade plutonium, there is another, far safer way.

You would simply use an international express package delivery service such as DHL or Federal Express or Airborne. Millions of packages enter the United States every day, roughly a hundred thousand sent by overnight express, and they are hardly ever subject to inspection.

“Express consignment operators,” as the U.S. government formally designates international express courier services, are strictly controlled by the lengthy list of rules set out in Volume 19 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Part 128. They must demonstrate to the satisfaction of the U.S. Customs Service that their shipping facilities are secure, and that everyone who works for them has been subjected to a thorough background security check.

John F. Kennedy International Airport in Idlewild, New York, is the single customs entry point, the funnel through which all express packages from Europe must pass. In order to speed up the customs procedures, most of the express consignment shippers transmit a manifest in advance, by computer, to enable U.S. Customs to clear the planeload of packages in advance. After all, the U.S. Customs Service cannot possibly inspect even one of every thousand packages that pass through JFK.

Etienne Charreyron, the bomb-disposal expert in Lièges, Belgium, whom Baumann had hired to construct the fusing systems, sent two parcels on two separate days through DHL in Brussels. Each package contained a custom-designed fusing system, concealed in the hollow body of a Sony CFD-30 CD/radio/cassette player.

Charreyron knew the basic route of packages sent by DHL. He knew that Brussels was DHL’s European hub. He knew that a package sent from the DHL office in Brussels was sent via one of DHL’s private 727 jets, in which it was stuffed into one of six or seven large containers, or “cans,” as they’re called in shipping terminology. Each can might contain one to two thousand packages.

He knew that the packages containing the fusing mechanisms would arrive at one or two o’clock in the morning at JFK Airport, go through customs, and be loaded on a DHL jet to Cincinnati, DHL’s U.S. hub, by nine in the morning. By the next day they would be in the hands of the man who had ordered them. In all, the transit time would be two business days.

Charreyron had done his homework, and he had chosen a good, low-risk way to send the detonators. But he had not figured on Senior Inspector Edna Mae Johnson.

Johnson had worked for the U. S. Customs Service for thirty-six years. A stout black woman of ferocious intelligence and unwavering attention, she was known by friends and admirers as Eagle Eye, and by many who got in her way by less admiring nicknames, most of them unprintable. Her husband of forty-odd years had learned the hard way not to bother trying to pull one over on Edna Mae.

So had the licensed customs brokers who dealt with her each night when the express consignments came in. They all knew that when Inspector Johnson was on duty, nothing would ever be allowed to slide by. Everything would go strictly according to Hoyle. With a fine-tooth comb-no, with a goddam microscope!-she went through the manifests, the airbills, and the commercial invoices (the official U.S. Customs form, actually called a Customs Entry, which listed a package’s contents, value, and use), looking for any discrepancies.

A few of the customs brokers swore that finding a discrepancy gave Edna Mae an orgasm. If she found one, you could bank on the fact that she would make things right, even if it meant holding an entire planeload.

Two words everyone in the courier business most feared were “break bulk”: this meant to make the shipping company open a container and spend three hours or so sorting through the two thousand packages for that one miserable little letter envelope whose paperwork was fouled up. Inspector Johnson certainly did not hesitate to break bulk. There were those who suspected she rather enjoyed it. When a customs broker groaned, she’d snap, “Well, I sure as hell didn’t make the mistake. And you call yourself a business!”

So if you were in the express consignment business and Edna Mae Johnson was on for the night, you made extra sure to do things right. You made sure that the things they always wanted to inspect by hand-animal products, drugs, vitamins, foodstuffs-were put in a separate container, so you didn’t delay thousands of other packages.

And you made sure that the declared value on the airbill matched the declared value on the Customs Entry. And you made sure that no single shipment exceeded 550 pounds, that no single piece exceeded 124 pounds, that the total of the length, width, and height of a piece didn’t exceed 118 inches.

If you didn’t, Edna Mae Johnson most certainly would.

Actually all the paperwork on the DHL express consignment that night was perfectly in order. Inspector Johnson reviewed the manifest-she always worked from hard copy, because she was convinced that mistakes were made when the computer screen was used-and found nothing to object to.

As she continued processing the paperwork, she returned to her computer terminal and called up the consolidated Customs Entry. She saw a message flash on her computer screen: INTENSIVE.

The automated system was programmed to assign, completely at random, the designation “Intensive” every once in a while to an express consignment. “Intensive” meant that a hold was placed on the plane’s cargo while a physical inspection was done.

She looked up at the customs broker and said, “Well, Charles, this is not your night. This shipment’s going to hold.”

“Oh, God,” the customs broker moaned.

“Come on now, you’d better get to work and notify DHL. They’ve got some offloading to do.”

Six large cans were removed from the DHL jet and transferred to a customs holding area. There, DHL employees were instructed to break bulk. A team of dogs was brought in to sniff the parcels. No explosives were found, but one DHL package sent from Florence, Italy, was discovered to contain seven large white truffles, packed in perfumed soap chips in a desperate attempt to conceal the truffles’ pungent fungal aroma.

Inspector Johnson picked out a few dozen parcels and had them put through the mobile X-ray van. Several of them she instructed DHL employees to slit open. She did a visual inspection, satisfied herself that the contents were as described on the airbill, and had DHL employees reseal them with bright-yellow tape that informed the recipients that the parcels had been opened by U.S. Customs.

One of the parcels she put through the X-ray machine was, according to its airbill and its Customs Entry, a CD/radio/cassette player. Although the X ray showed that the piece of equipment inside likely was, in fact, a CD/radio/cassette player, Edna Mae Johnson didn’t like its weight.

It was heavier than it should be. She was always looking for drugs, and Lord knows these drug dealers were always thinking of new ways to smuggle drugs. She had DHL cut the package open, and she took the matte-black Sony CFD-30 apart. As she did, she admired its sleek shape and thought how much her grandson Scott would like something like this. She wondered what it cost.

She took a screwdriver and carefully pulled off the bottom plate. Inside, instead of the normal guts, she found a black box with little lights on top of it. It was something electronic, and definitely something that didn’t belong there.

“The hell-?” she said aloud.

The entire parcel was immediately sent over to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms for inspection.

There, the dummy CD-and-cassette player was found to house a black plastic shoebox-sized utility box with a metal lid. The shoebox contained a microwave sensor as well as some peculiar fittings and brackets and wires and screw posts.

In one place, a battery was clearly meant to fit. And then there were those damned screw posts, which were meant to be attached to something. One of the ATF agents realized that if a blasting cap was attached to the screw posts…

No, it couldn’t be, could it?

Inside the dummy shell of the Sony CD player was an ingeniously constructed fusing mechanism for an extremely sophisticated bomb.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

At six in the morning, as Sarah was lying in bed trying to rouse herself, the phone rang.

Forty-five minutes later, she entered the conference room belonging to the assistant director of the FBI in charge of the New York office, a burly, six-foot-seven-inch, white-haired Irishman named Joseph Walsh. Seated next to him, and the only face she recognized, was Harry Whitman, the chief of the Joint Terrorist Task Force. She felt her stomach flip over when she was introduced to the two she didn’t know, both in shirtsleeves: an overweight black man named Alfonse Mitchell, who was the first deputy commissioner of the NYPD; and the chief of detectives of the NYPD, a small, wiry man named Thomas McSweeney. This was a high-powered gathering, and it had to be serious.

In the middle of the table was a telephone speaker and a small, furiously percolating Bunn-O-Matic coffeemaker. She poured herself a cup of coffee, smiled at Whitman, and sat down.

“First things first,” said Assistant Director Walsh, addressing Sarah directly. “I don’t know if you’ll take this as good news or bad news, but your investigation has been upgraded to a full-field.”

Sarah nodded, betraying no emotion, certainly not the fear she felt. A full-field? A full-field investigation had to be authorized at the top, by the attorney general, through the FBI director. In order to authorize a full-field, there had to be a prima facie case. Why all of a sudden? What had changed?

He went on: “A component to a serious bomb has been found by United States Customs in a DHL shipment. Herb, can you take over?”

“Sure,” came a voice over the squawk box. It belonged to Herbert Massie, chief of the Technical Section of the FBI’s vaunted Laboratory Division. “Thanks to some thorough work by U.S. Customs at JFK, and some good luck thrown in, an ordinary-looking portable CD player was intercepted on its way from Brussels to Manhattan-actually, to a Mail Boxes Etc. location near Columbia University.” The rustling of paper could be heard. “Inside it was what turned out to be a pretty fancy fusing mechanism.”

“That’s part of a bomb, Sarah,” explained Alfonse Mitchell, the first deputy police commissioner.

Sarah mentally ran through several sharp responses, but merely nodded politely.

Over the speaker, Herb Massie’s voice resumed: “I believe Agent Cahill worked Lockerbie, so she probably knows her bombs. Customs handed it over to ATF, who gave it to us. Well, actually, I had to do some shouting, but our techs got it pretty damned fast.” In nonterrorism cases, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms would normally be the investigating agency. In this case, however, the fusing mechanism was analyzed by Massie’s section of the Crime Labs.

“When did the package come into JFK?” Sarah asked.

“Night before last.”

“So it’s supposed to have arrived at its destination by now.”

“That’s right,” Massie replied. “Inside the shell of the CD player was a box measuring, let’s see, nine point five inches long, five inches wide, and four point five inches high. It’s got some interesting stuff inside. There’s a pocket pager-receiver rigged to the relay.”

“Radio-controlled,” Sarah said. “Go ahead.”

“There’s also an electronic timer, which presumably goes off no matter what, unless it’s deliberately stopped. “And here’s the fiendish thing-it’s got a microwave sensor rigged up in such a way that if anyone comes within twenty-five feet of the bomb, it’ll go off. Talk about belt and suspenders.”

“Agent Massie,” interrupted the chief of detectives, “what have you people concluded about the sort of bomb that this… this fusing mechanism thing gets hooked up to?”

“A number of things. We know it’s probably not meant to go off in an airplane.”

“How do you know that?” asked FBI Assistant Director Walsh.

“It has no barometric capability or impact sensitivity. That means it can’t be set off by a plane’s reaching a certain air pressure, or landing. Also, since that pager inside is meant to receive a radio signal to set off the bomb, we know it’s command-detonated.”

Assistant FBI Director Walsh put in: “If the bomb’s supposed to be detonated by means of a pager, doesn’t that limit where the bomb could go? I mean, the radio signal can’t travel everywhere, can it?”

Sarah nodded; that was a good point.

“Yes,” Massie said. “We can be fairly certain that the bomb is not-was not-meant to go in a tunnel or a subway.”

“Or an underground parking garage,” Harry Whitman said, ever mindful of the World Trade Center bomb.

“Right,” came Massie’s voice. “All of those places are too shielded to allow the signal to reach the pager, at least reliably. You know how it is if you try to use your cellular phone in a parking garage, right?”

Thomas McSweeney, the chief of detectives, leaned forward and interrupted: “Can I go back to this microwave sensor thing? I guess what I’m saying is, why twenty-five feet? Doesn’t that tell us something about where the bomb’s supposed to be placed? If the bomb’s on a street or any place where there’s a crowd, the microwave would go off, right? So it’s got to be placed somewhere where there aren’t a lot of people.”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “Or else at night, in a deserted building.”

“Could be,” Massie said.

“There’s another thing,” Sarah said, looking around at the men, and pouring herself a second cup of coffee. “Probably the most important thing. The bomb’s meant to go off no matter what, right? A timer, a microwave sensor, a radio-activated pager-one way or another, the bomb was designed to explode.”

“So?” said Alfonse Mitchell.

“So now we know a lot about the intentions of the terrorist or terrorists,” Sarah said. “Since there’s really no way to shut it off, we know this isn’t meant to be an extortion or blackmail attempt. That explains why we haven’t received any demands, either by phone or by letter. They don’t want anything from us! Unlike the normal terrorist-if there is such a thing-these guys don’t want the United States to release prisoners or pull out of a war or some such thing. They want to cause destruction no matter what.”

“That’s right,” came Massie’s voice after a moment’s hesitation. The tension in the room was electric.

“Uh, Ms. Cahill,” said Alfonse Mitchell of the NYPD, “you’re overlooking the most important thing of all. There isn’t going to be any destruction. We have the goddam fusing mechanism! Without it, our terrorists don’t have a bomb, now do they?”

“Oh, that’s good,” Sarah snapped. “Would you like my group to start packing now, or can we have a couple of days to sort of wind down?”

“Sarah,” Harry Whitman warned.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah apologized. “That’s just a ridiculous, even dangerous, comment to make. How do we know there aren’t a dozen fusing mechanisms just like this one, that have already been sent into the country and have already been picked up? Or, if this really is the one and only, how do we know that my terrorist can’t just pick up the phone and order another one? Have it sent in another way?”

“Right,” said Assistant FBI Director Walsh. “We can’t rule out that possibility.”

Alfonse Mitchell sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee in smoldering silence.

“Agent Massie,” Sarah said, “from what I know about how pagers work, you can’t just buy a pager, you have to lease the telephone service at the same time, isn’t that right?”

“Well, yes and no,” Massie said. “You can buy a pager anywhere. But if you want it to work, you need to lease the service.”

“Well, that’s our lead,” Sarah said, looking around the table with a smile. “We trace the pager to the paging service, and find out who signed on for the service. Even assuming they gave a false name, they have to give so much information when they sign up for a pager that we’ll be able to trace-”

“No,” Massie said. “Not that simple.”

Alfonse Mitchell smiled behind his coffee cup.

“Why not?” asked Sarah.

“First of all, the serial number plate has been removed from the pager. The designer of this thing seems to be fairly slick.”

“But aren’t there other ways-” Sarah began.

“You buy a pager from a paging company,” Harry Whitman said, “and you lease the service, right? Then you buy another pager-just the pager, no service-from a second source. Now, each pager is programmed to respond to a digital code sequence. So all you do is you study the first pager, and alter the second one, so that it responds to the same digital code sequence as the first one-”

“You’re losing us, here,” interrupted Assistant Director Walsh.

“I get it,” Sarah said. “The pager in the fusing mechanism works like the one that came with the leased service, but if we were to try to trace it, we couldn’t. Very clever.”

“You got it,” said Herbert Massie. “But I’ve been trying to get to the main attraction, here. Listen up. Our techs have a theory as to who’s behind all this.”

“Who?” Sarah asked.

“Libya.”

“Jesus!” exploded Harry Whitman.

“How do you know?” asked Assistant Director Walsh.

“All right,” Massie said. “Someone in the lab is getting the day off. The timer is one of the ones Ed Wilson sold Libya back in 1976.”

Sarah and some of the other FBI people present knew what Herbert Massie was talking about, but none of the police could possibly have been expected to know. Indeed, the story of Libya and its business dealings with the rogue CIA agent Edwin Wilson has been written about-but not entirely.

It is a matter of public record that Edwin Wilson-a CIA officer who went “off the reservation,” as they say in the intelligence business-and an associate sold Muammar Qaddafi twenty tons of Semtex plastic explosive, which later turned up in numerous terrorist attacks around the world. It is also a matter of public record that Wilson sold the Libyan government three thousand electronic explosives timers.

What is not publicly known is where and how Wilson got them. He got them from the very source that custom-makes them for the CIA. Wilson placed the order for these three thousand timers with a man who lives outside of Washington, D.C., a renowned inventor with over six hundred patents to his name, who has for years constructed high-tech gadgets for the U.S. intelligence community. This man, who once built satellites for the Air Force at Edwards Air Force Base, is widely considered a genius.

This inventor knew that Edwin Wilson was an employee of the CIA-but not that Wilson was acting on his own behalf, not for the Agency. He should have been alerted by the fact that Wilson paid for the timers in cash, and not by purchase order. Wilson had cleverly duped him.

The gadgeteer designed and built three thousand timers, encased in black plastic, measuring three inches square by approximately half an inch high. On the outside of the timer was an LED and an on/off switch. The timer went from zero to 150 hours, in one-hour increments. As recently as 1988, these timers have repeatedly turned up in bombs set by Arab terrorists.

“So you think Henrik Baumann has been hired by the Libyans?” asked Sarah.

“It’s possible. Looks that way,” Herbert Massie said.

“Bravo,” said Harry Whitman.

“Well done,” Sarah said. “All right, now, I want that fusing mechanism put back together, boxed up, and delivered to that Mail Boxes Etc. site today.”

“What the hell-?” said Chief of Detectives McSweeney.

“Sarah,” said Whitman, “you’re out of your mind.”

“No,” she said. “I want a surveillance team put on the site. At some point someone has to show up to claim the package. Let me remind you, we don’t know it’s Baumann, by the way. We assume it is.”

“Agent Cahill,” Massie’s voice came, high and strained, “we’re far from finished examining it.”

“If we hold off any longer, Baumann’s bound to get suspicious, and he won’t show up. It’s got to arrive today-one day late is okay, but no more. Also, I want a trap-and-trace on the Mail Boxes phone line, in case Baumann-or whoever it is-calls about the package. If I were in his place, I would.”

“You didn’t hear me, did you?” Massie said. “I said, we’re not done. We’re not packing this up yet.”

Deputy Commissioner Alfonse Mitchell glowered at Sarah and shook his head slowly.

“Okay,” Sarah said, backing down. “Get a duplicate of the tape player if you can, box that up in the exact same packaging, and get it over to Mail Boxes today, using a regular DHL truck, with their other stuff. Oh, and one more thing. Customs usually uses yellow tape to seal packages it’s opened, saying ‘Opened by U.S. Customs’ or something like that. Make sure there’s no yellow tape on it. I want it to look like everything went fine with it.” She looked around the table once again. “We’re going to catch the bastard,” she said.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

In the next days, Baumann worked almost nonstop, renting not one but two furnished apartments in different parts of the city, under different aliases assumed by entirely different personas. He paid cash; let the real estate agents think what they wanted. Greed would always prevail; the Realtors would keep their silence. On a bleak, foul-smelling street not far from the Fulton Fish Market he took a short-term rental on a tiny street-level warehouse space barely big enough to park a compact car in.

He contacted the computer whiz (the “cracker,” as he’d been taught to say), but the cracker, to his credit, insisted on meeting in person. Baumann knew only that the man was in his late twenties, was pompous to the point of megalomania, and worked only sporadically, but for fantastic sums of money. Most important, he came highly recommended by the intermediary in Amsterdam, who called him a man of rare skill, “ultra-slick, a serious wizard.”

The cracker’s name was Leo Krasner. He did work for businessmen who didn’t like their credit ratings and wanted them repaired; for private investigators; for news reporters. He would work for any organization that interested him, except the government.

Krasner’s fame had spread in the underworld of computer crackers early in 1991. It is a matter of record that during the Persian Gulf War of that year, the Cable News Network hired a number of computer hackers, crackers, and phreakers to circumvent the U.S. government’s onerous press restrictions. These computer wizards were paid to intercept transmissions to and from military satellites and decrypt them. Krasner was heavily relied upon by CNN and other television networks, as well as by investors who wanted to know what was going on.

Baumann arranged to meet Krasner in a brightly lit but shabby little restaurant on the far West Side whose smeared plate-glass windows looked out onto the verminous street.

Leo Krasner was short, not much over five feet, and enormously obese. His doughy face was framed by immense porkchop sideburns. His unwashed hair spilled over his collar. He wore tinted aviator-frame glasses.

Baumann introduced himself, using an American alias and legend. Krasner offered a damp, pudgy hand to shake. After a minute or so of chitchat that was clearly going nowhere, Baumann came right to the point and told him what he wanted.

Krasner, who had been cupping his mouth in his small, round fist, looked up at Baumann slowly and gave a cryptic half-smile. A man sat down at a nearby table, set down a gym bag, and began to read a crummy paperback of Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. “This is some very high-profile shit,” Krasner said. “It’s going to bring down an enormous amount of heat. I may not be able to work for a very, very long time.”

“Perhaps yes, perhaps no.”

“I assume you’re talking some very, very big bucks.”

“A six-figure payment for a few days’ work,” Baumann said.

“Six-figure?” Krasner snorted. “Go find a high school kid. You gotta be kidding.”

“Do you want to suggest a fee? You’re the subcontractor, after all. Give me a bid.”

“My bid is a million dollars, take it or leave it.”

“I don’t have anywhere near that kind of money,” Baumann said.

“Then what kind of serious offer will you make?”

“If I really scrape and borrow and beg, I can come up with half that. But it will take enormous effort to scrape together.”

“In gold. Currency’s going to take a serious beating after this goes down.”

“Done. Are you at all familiar with the systems used by the Manhattan Bank?”

“Sure, I know the Manhattan Bank. A little background work, a little calling around, and I’m all set.” He extended his moist hand to shake. “No problem.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Over coffee half an hour later, Pappas said: “They were right, Sarah. Had you given up that fusing device, you’d not only have lost an incredibly valuable mass of information, but you’d have risked losing a crucial piece of evidence.”

“The idea wasn’t to throw the thing away,” Sarah said, exasperated because she knew Pappas was right. “It was to keep everything intact so as not to alert Baumann, and…” Her voice faded. “All right, I was wrong. I’ll admit it.”

Pappas nodded once. “Ah, well. To err is human, to forgive is not Bureau policy. Water under the bridge. Mail Boxes opens in, what, fifteen minutes or so? Hours are nine to seven, weekdays. You got a team in place?”

“Uniforms, but supposed to be some of New York’s finest, whatever that means. They’re already there, watching. What do you think about this Libyan timer?”

“Ed Wilson sold a bunch of timers to the Libyans, but who knows where they all ended up. By now, those timers have gone through a bunch of hands.”

She nodded. “Arab hands.”

“Odds are, yes.”

“But I don’t believe the Libyans are behind this thing.”

“Why not?”

“The Libyans and the Iranians have a whole catalog of suicide bombers who can’t wait to die for the greater glory of Allah. They don’t need to hire him.”

“He’s the best.”

“They don’t need the best.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know what Baumann is up to.”

“That’s not my point. You hire the best to make sure you don’t get caught, that the incident isn’t traced back to you. The Libyans usually don’t care if it is or not. If it is traced back to them, it makes them more formidable. They like that.”

Pappas was silent, waiting for her to continue, and when she didn’t, he said: “You might have a point.”

At the same time, a DHL delivery truck was pulling up to Mail Boxes Etc. at 2840 Broadway, between 110th and 111th streets, next door to Columbia Bagels and not far from Columbia University. It was a legitimate DHL truck, making the first overnight deliveries of the day. Double-parked in front of the Mail Boxes store, the driver took out three express packages.

Two new employees were working the counter that morning at Mail Boxes Etc. One was a dark-haired man in his twenties, busy shelving boxes. The other, a pretty young blond woman, appeared to be a trainee working with a more experienced, though younger, woman. The blonde’s hair was long and full, and it nicely concealed the tiny earphone she was wearing.

On Broadway, in front of the storefront, idled a yellow taxi, its roof light indicating it was out of service. The driver, a pudgy and balding man in a cheap-looking leather jacket and a frayed denim shirt, was examining the Daily Racing Form. Since he was far from the precinct in which he had once worked, he doubted any passerby would recognize him as Lieutenant George Roth of the New York Police Department.

The yellow cab-a real New York City cab that had been seized by the FBI in a drug raid-was the mobile command post. From there, Roth could communicate by radio with the two policemen inside who had been detailed to the working group on temporary assignment.

The eight members of the surveillance team had been fully briefed and outfitted with appropriate disguises and communications equipment. Wireless microphones were worn inside shirts or sweaters; earphones were concealed under wigs, baseball caps, or hats.

On the bustling stretch of Broadway in front of the storefront, an FBI agent in a spandex jogging suit was trying to change the right rear tire on his silver Corvette, another seized vehicle. A young Hispanic-looking man sat behind the wheel of a parked pizza delivery van. A hobbled old homeless woman pushed a grocery cart full of aluminum cans.

Another agent kept a lookout from the third-floor window of the office building across the street. Another, in a Con Ed uniform and hard hat, seemed to be inspecting a faulty electrical meter in an alley about thirty feet from the Mail Boxes storefront.

In the movies and on television, a telephone call can be traced in a matter of seconds. The reality, unfortunately, is far less impressive. A trap-and-trace, as it’s called, can take five, ten, even fifteen minutes or longer, and quite often several separate attempts.

It is true that a service known as Caller ID is available in many areas of the United States, which allows you to learn the number of an incoming call even before the phone rings. But this service works only in telephone exchanges that use the fully computerized technology called SS7, for System Signaling Group 7.

And many telephone exchanges remain antiquated, particularly in larger cities. NYNEX, the company that services Manhattan as well as much of New York State and New England, has been one of the slowest Baby Bells to update its technology.

Another problem with Caller ID is that it doesn’t work on trunking systems, PBX systems, which are used in office buildings. Also, any subscriber can have the Automatic Number Identification (ANI) signal blocked, rendering Caller ID useless.

So the only reliable way to trace a number remains the old-fashioned trap-and-trace method, which can only be done by the telephone company, in its offices. The manager of Mail Boxes Etc., and his district manager, happily complied with the FBI’s request to ask NYNEX to order a trap-and-trace for this particular store.

All that remained now was for Henrik Baumann-if indeed he was the recipient-to place a call and ask whether an express package had been received for a Mr. James Oakley. Even if Baumann called from a public pay phone, they might be fortunate enough to discover his location in time.

At 11:14 A.M., the call came.

The pretty young blond policewoman answered the phone and said perkily, “Your name, please?”

She signaled with her index finger. “Let me check, Mr. Oakley.” She punched the hold button.

Her partner was already on another line to NYNEX telephone security, activating the trap-and-trace. As he held the handset to his ear, he said to the woman, “Keep him holding as long as you think you can.”

“Right,” she said. “But he said he was in a hurry, so I don’t know how long he’ll hold.”

“Sure, he’s in a hurry,” the man said. “He’s no idiot.” Into the phone he said, “All right, good. Yeah, we will.”

Ten seconds went by, then twenty.

“I’m going to have to pick up again and say something,” the blond woman said, “or he’ll get suspicious and we’ll lose him.”

“We got Manhattan,” her partner announced. “Midtown. Let’s go, man, let’s go. Speed this thing up.”

“Matt-”

“Yeah, yeah. Pick it up, tell him-think of something, for God’s sake. Give us more time!”

She punched the hold button again to release it. “Mr. Oakley, we do have something here for you, and I’m trying to locate it. Was that an envelope or a box? It makes a difference, because we store them in different… Oh, shit. He hung up.” She put down the handset. “We lost him.”

Baumann, standing at a midtown pay phone, hung up the phone and quickly walked away. For reasons of safety, he did not like to stay on the phone for longer than twenty seconds. He did not know whether telephone-tracing technology had changed at all since he’d been in prison, but he did not want to find out. He knew that his package had arrived, which was the main thing. Even if they traced the call, by the time they got to this pay phone, he’d be long gone.

Perhaps he was being overly cautious. After all, it was highly unlikely that any law-enforcement authorities would have found out about this mail drop. But such instincts had kept him alive throughout a hazardous career.

It was out of this same overcautiousness that he donned a disguise-a long, shaggy brown wig, a natural-looking beard, a prosthetic paunch, a loose baggy white sweatshirt-and took a cab uptown to the Mail Boxes Etc. site, outside of which he did some preliminary surveillance. He found no reason to be suspicious, though if they were good, they would hardly be obvious.

He entered the small facility. The only other person there was a young man standing at the counter, listening to music on Walkman headphones and filling out some kind of long form, which looked like an application for employment.

“Can I help you?” the young woman behind the counter asked.

“Not yet, thanks,” Baumann answered, absorbed in a display of folding mailing cartons of various sizes. Then he turned back casually to the clerk and asked: “So where’s Donna?”

“Donna?” the woman echoed dubiously.

“The woman who normally works the day shift here,” Baumann said. He had come here twice before, each time in very different disguises, and had learned that a woman named Donna always worked days. “You know. Blond. Long hair.”

“Oh, her. Sorry, I’m new. She’s off for the day-went to the beach, I think. Why, you a friend?”

Baumann’s instincts told him to leave at once. Both people behind the counter, he now realized, were new. He didn’t like this at all. He also did not like the fact that the job applicant was wearing a Walkman. It made him suspicious. Headphones could be used to communicate with a command post. Then again, they could be entirely innocent. But his instincts told him not to take any chances.

“Yeah,” he said. “Tell Donna that Billy said hi.” He glanced at his watch as if late for an appointment, and walked out the door.

Halfway down the block he noticed that the young man wearing the Walkman had left a few seconds after he had and was heading in his direction.

He didn’t like this either.

A few paces behind, Russell Ullman, who had been standing at the counter pretending to fill out a form for over an hour, spoke into his transmitter: “I don’t know if this is our guy or not, but I’m going to follow him awhile, make sure.”

“Got it,” the voice in his headphones said. “Come on back soon as you’re sure it’s not our man.”

“Okay,” Ullman said.

Baumann suddenly darted across the street in the middle of the block, weaving between the moving cars, and walked along the other side of the block. As he rounded the next corner, he saw in the reflection in a plate-glass window that the young man was still behind him.

He was being followed.

Why? The only explanation was that somehow the fusing mechanism had been intercepted on its way from Belgium. True, there were many points at which it could have been intercepted, but…

Had Charreyron, the Belgian explosives expert, talked?

Unlikely, Baumann decided. If he had, he probably would have given up each of the addresses to which Baumann had requested the fusing mechanisms be sent. And since Baumann had already received one of them without incident, that seemed to rule out Charreyron as a leak.

No; the DHL package simply must have been intercepted. Such things happened, which was why he had had duplicate fusing mechanisms sent. In the real world, things went wrong; one made fall-back plans.

As he plunged into a crowd of tourists emerging from a bus, hoping thereby to lose the tail, he caught another glimpse of the follower in a mirrored storefront. The man appeared to be alone. Why, Baumann wondered, were there no others?

In his headphones, Ullman heard: “It’s probably just some hinky guy. Lot of weirdos use private mail-box services to get sicko videos and child pornography, or whatever. You get his face? We didn’t.”

“No,” Ullman said, “but I will.” A woman passing by saw him talking to himself and veered away with alarm.

Baumann attempted several classic maneuvers to lose the tail, but the follower was too good. Obviously he was professionally trained, and talented as well. He didn’t recognize the young man’s face, but that meant nothing. Although he’d conducted some surveillance of the Operation MINOTAUR headquarters building, he’d not been able to identify any of the task force members. Also, Sarah never emerged from the building talking with anyone.

Baumann passed a small, dingy Chinese restaurant, stopped short, and entered its dimly lit interior. It took a few seconds before his eyes became accustomed to the dark. He sat down at one of the Formica tables. He was the only one in the restaurant. In effect, he was daring the tail to follow him in and reveal himself.

Ullman saw the fat man in the white sweatshirt turn abruptly into the Chinese restaurant. In front of the restaurant, he hesitated. It was obvious the man was trying to lose him.

Well, there was no choice.

He opened the restaurant door and stepped into the dark air-conditioned interior. He looked around. It was empty. In the rear of the restaurant, a Chinese man sat behind a counter punching numbers into a calculator. Ullman spoke into his transmitter, giving his location. Then he approached the Chinese man and said, “You see someone come in here?”

The man gazed warily at Ullman, then pointed toward the rear of the restaurant. Ullman saw a rest room, raced to it, flung open the door, and stepped in.

A sink, a toilet; no stall, no window, no place to hide. And no one here.

He quickly turned back to the corridor, looked left and right, saw the kitchen. This was the only place the sweatshirted man could have gone.

He pushed open the swinging double doors to the small kitchen, surprising a couple of elderly Chinese men doing prep work, cutting up vegetables. Without explanation, he walked in, looked around, saw no one else. Then he saw the delivery door and ran toward it, ignoring shouts of protest from the kitchen workers.

The door gave onto a narrow alley, where he was assaulted by the stench of rotten food garbage. He looked around and saw nothing. The man in the sweatshirt must have escaped through this door and run down the alley.

Shit.

He’d gotten away. Ullman stepped carefully down a slimy set of three iron stairs into the alley, past bulging black plastic trash bags.

“I think I lost him,” Ullman said into his Walkman.

“All right,” the voice replied. “We’ll send a couple of guys down where you are to see if we can nab him.”

Ullman glanced around, then moved quietly over toward the blue metal Dumpster, which overflowed with more disgusting food garbage, and as he glanced behind it, he felt something grab his throat. He lost his footing as he was yanked behind the Dumpster. He felt something squeeze his trachea with an excruciatingly painful force. He reached for his pistol, but before he could do so, something slammed into his right eye.

Everything went red. He doubled over in pain and gasped. For a moment he could not speak. He wondered whether his eye had burst. Somehow he realized that the object that had just smashed into his eyeball was the barrel of a handgun. With his one good eye he found himself looking into a man’s ice-blue eyes.

“Who are you?” the man whispered.

“FBI,” Ullman croaked. “Baumann-”

“Man, you got the wrong guy,” Baumann said as he crushed the young blond man’s trachea with one hand, killing him instantly.

The FBI man had been agile and strong, but also clearly inexperienced. And he had seen Baumann’s face-disguised, yes, but that was still too great a risk. Baumann removed the dead man’s wallet and found the FBI ID card, which identified him as Special Agent Russell Ullman. He pocketed the card and murmured to himself, “You got the wrong guy.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

The plastic explosive Composition C-4, so beloved by terrorists, usually comes in rectangular blocks an inch high, two inches wide, and eleven inches long. Each block, wrapped in clear or green plastic, weighs one and a quarter pounds. Its color is pure white.

C-4’s compactness makes it appealing to the U.S. military, and of course to terrorists. For terrorists, one of its most useful attributes is that it doesn’t have an odor: it is therefore quite difficult to detect. It is not, however, impossible to detect.

What is unknown outside exclusive intelligence and law-enforcement circles is that certain types of C-4 are much more readily detectable than others. For obvious reasons, counterterrorists prefer that terrorists and potential terrorists know as little as possible about these various types of C-4.

Having served in South African intelligence, however, Baumann knew quite a lot about explosives. He knew that the active ingredient in C-4 is the compound cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, which is entirely odorless. In fact, it is the impurities in most plastic explosives that are sniffed out by trained dogs or mechanical sensors.

He knew, too, the well-concealed fact that all C-4 in America is made in one of seven manufacturing plants. Six of the manufacturers use either nitroglycerine or the compound EGDN in the manufacture of dynamite, which contaminates the C-4 made at the same time. This contaminant makes most C-4 detectable.

Only one company in America makes a pure, “uncontaminated” C-4. Baumann knew which one it was.

He also had a reasonably good plan to get some.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

As a technology procurement specialist in the Network Administration Department of the Manhattan Bank, Rick DeVore handled a lot of telephone solicitations. That was his job; he did it without complaining and was always friendly but firm. The truth was, in the computer business, a lot of selling took place over the phone, so you couldn’t refuse to take calls. But if you stayed on the phone too long, you’d never get anything done. So Rick DeVore was quick to screen out the jokers, those selling junk, stuff he had no interest in.

The vendor on the phone this morning, however, seemed to know what he was talking about.

“Hi, I’m Bob Purcell from Metrodyne Systems in Honolulu,” the voice on the phone said.

“How’re you doing?” Rick said neutrally, not encouraging, but not discouraging either. Metrodyne was one of the hottest software companies these days, located in the hottest new city for software companies, Honolulu. They wrote add-ons for Novell networks.

“Good, thanks. Listen, I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I was calling to let you know about the availability of a new security NLM that allows for run-time encryption of files regardless of format or network.”

“Uh huh,” DeVore said, doodling on his pink “While You Were Out” telephone message pad. He flashed on a mental image of himself and Deb last night and wondered if it was true that men think about sex every five minutes.

The Metrodyne vendor went on, with increasing enthusiasm: “Every time you save a file it’s automatically encrypted on your Novell network, and every time you open the file it’s decrypted. It’s really great. Just like the way a file is compressed and decompressed automatically, without the user even being aware of it. I think every Novell user should have it. I was wondering if you’d have some time for me to come by and talk to you about-”

“Gee, that sounds cool,” DeVore said sincerely, “but you know, we don’t use Novell anymore. We just switched to NT Advanced Server.” This was Microsoft’s networking software. “Sorry.”

“Oh, no, that’s great,” said the salesman. “We’ve got a version that runs on NT too-we really want to address the variety of the marketplace. Do you mind if I ask, what are you currently using for security?”

“Well, I-”

“I mean, are you relying on what comes out of the box for security? Because we’ve engineered our product to make up for the weaknesses in NT’s security. As you know, NT doesn’t even do encryption, you’ve got to encrypt everything separately. But ours does across-the-board encryption-”

“Listen,” Rick DeVore said, shifting into terminate-call mode, “I’ve pretty much said all I can responsibly tell you. Sorry. I’m really not at liberty to talk about this stuff. But if you’d like to send me a demo of your product I’d be happy to take a look at it. Okay?”

When he’d taken a mailing address and a contact name, Leo Krasner hung up the phone and turned to his SPARC-20 workstation.

He’d learned all he had to about what software the bank used.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

The Technical Services analyst, on the secure direct line to the Hoover Building, sounded as young as an adolescent. His high-pitched voice actually cracked several times as he spoke.

“Agent Cahill, I’m Ted Grabowski,” he said tentatively. “I’ve been assigned to work on the piece of equipment, the fusing mechanism.”

“Mmm-hmm?” she said distractedly.

“Remember you asked me to check out whether there was any kind of signature on this here-”

“I certainly do remember.” Identifying tool marks is one of the FBI’s forensic strengths, and though it often requires painstaking effort, it is the most reliable “fingerprint” a bomb can provide. It is also admissible in court.

“All right, well, it’s sort of confusing,” Grabowski said. “Not really a coherent signature.”

“The soldering?”

“The soldering joints are neat, maybe too neat. But it’s the knots that got me.”

“How so?”

“They’re Western Union splices. Really nice work.”

“Refresh my memory.”

“They first used the Western Union splice with telegraph wire, in the old days, because those wires were subject to a lot of pulling, and you had to have a knot that could withstand a good yank. You sort of take the bare ends of two lengths of wire, set them down in opposition to each other, twist them, then raise the ends and twist them again, at a ninety-degree angle. Sort of forms a triangle, and you wrap some tape around it-”

“So what does this tell you?”

He paused. “It tells me-this is only speculation, ma’am-but it tells me the guy who made this was trained at Indian Head.”

Indian Head was the Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal School at Indian Head, Maryland, where all U.S. military bomb experts-“explosive ordnance disposal specialists,” as they’re called in military and intelligence circles-are trained. Although the CIA does have the facilities to train its own bomb experts, most of its people are trained at Indian Head as well.

“You’re telling me this was made by an American?”

“No, ma’am, I’m not. You may not know this, but the Naval EOD trains some foreigners, too. One section at Indian Head is the course on improvised explosive devices-I know, because I took it. I’m just saying that whoever made this neat little fusing mechanism, it sure as hell wasn’t a Libyan.”

Christine Vigiani, smoking furiously, stood at the threshold to Sarah’s office until Sarah looked up.

“Yes, Chris?”

Vigiani coughed, cleared her throat. “Came up with something you might want to take a look at.”

“Oh?”

“I mean, it was really just a matter of putting two and two together. Our guy did Carrero Blanco, right? Hired by the Basques?”

“Okay…?”

“So I got onto CACTIS and cross-referenced the Carrero Blanco murder, trying to find any other connections.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “So come to find out, CIA has some excellent sources that say whoever it was who was hired by the Basques was hired soon afterward by the IRA.”

Sarah sat up, her attention riveted.

“So I got in touch with Scotland Yard Special Operations. And there’s solid evidence that our man also did the assassination of the British ambassador to Northern Ireland in the mid-seventies-you remember that?”

Sarah, of course, remembered it well. On July 21, 1976, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the British ambassador to Ireland, was killed when a land mine detonated in a culvert under the road on which he was driving, in the countryside near Dublin. Ewart-Biggs had been ambassador for a mere three weeks.

The assassination was the work of the IRA’s Provisional Wing. But it has long remained a matter of much speculation who actually carried out the bombing. British Intelligence later learned that it was a paid professional hit-that it was not done by the IRA.

But by now it is a matter of certainty within intelligence circles, based on forensic and intelligence data, that Ewart-Biggs was killed by the same mysterious person who killed Carrero Blanco in Madrid. The name has never been made public.

“This Baumann,” said Vigiani fuzzily through a lungful of smoke, “is one mean motherfucker, if you’ll pardon my French.”

“Agent Cahill?” the Technical Services analyst said over the secure link a little more than an hour later. “Your question about the timer?”

“Yes?”

“Well, I think you may be on to something, ma’am. I looked at it real close, and a couple other guys here looked at it, and we all pretty much agreed it’s almost identical to the timers that Edwin Wilson sold Libya in 1976.”

“‘Almost identical’?”

“It’s built just like those timers, ma’am, but it’s not one of them. You know the black plastic box that houses the timer? Well, I ran the plastic through a melting-point test, and I found it melts at three hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit, so now I can say for certain it’s not the same timer.”

“You’re sure.”

“Positive. We’ve got several of the Wilson timers, as you call them, and they’re all made from a nylon resin, which melts at five hundred and two degrees Fahrenheit. But the one we got here, that’s an acetel resin. This one’s different.”

“So it’s a fake? You think someone made a fake timer that looked just like the Libyan one to make the bomb look like it was done by the Libyans?”

“That’s what I’m saying, ma’am. There’s no other reason why someone would construct a duplicate timer except to fool the counterterrorist folks like you. Someone’s trying to snow us.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

AAAA Construction and Excavation was an eyesore on the outskirts of the otherwise lovely Westchester County town of Mount Kisco, New York. It was nothing more than a small brick structure surrounded by trailers, set in a field of rubble, surrounded by alarmed barbed-wire fencing.

Four A, as its seven employees called it, advertised construction and specialty blasting in the Manhattan Yellow Pages, in a small red-outlined box that featured a line drawing of a crane with dirt cascading from its shovel. It was the first listing under “excavation” in the Yellow Pages, thanks to all those A’s.

Its demoralized and underpaid employees thought a better emblem would have been a dollar bill with wings on it, to symbolize the fact that Four A had been losing money steadily for the last four years, ever since David Nickelsen, Jr., had taken over the family business after his father, the company’s founder, suffered a stroke.

But AAAA Construction and Excavation suited Henrik Baumann’s purposes just fine. He’d gone through the Yellow Pages listings of construction companies and rejected any that didn’t have the licenses-from ATF and the local municipality-to use or store explosives.

That still left quite a few candidates. But of those, only a few fit the desired profile: small, privately held, and in sufficiently bad financial shape not to immediately turn away an English guy who was calling to discuss some private business regarding C-4.

Fortunately, David Nickelsen, Jr., was not overburdened with scruples. Baumann knew it would not be difficult to find someone in this line of work who’d do business with him. Nickelsen listened to the proposition of the well-dressed man who identified himself as John McGuinness from Bristol, England, and agreed to do business. Whether it was Mr. McGuinness’s polite manners or his offer of fifty thousand dollars in cash that persuaded him, David Nickelsen, Jr., gladly accepted.

The Englishman explained that he represented a foreign buyer-he would not say more-who was having difficulty obtaining an export license for a major construction job in Kuwait. This buyer needed a five-hundred-foot roll of DetCord, several M6 Special Engineer Electrical Blasting Caps, and one thousand pounds of C-4, U.S. military designation Charge Demolition Block M-112.

But not just any Charge Demolition Block M-112. For technical reasons too complicated to go into, it had to have a specific manufacturer’s code.

What Baumann did not bother explaining was that the numbers he gave the corrupt construction-company owner referred to a certain manufacturer and lot. He had found these codes in a list of government contracts published in a journal called the Commerce Business Daily.

David Nickelsen, Jr., had looked at him as if he were out of his mind. Your guys want plastic explosives or not? Yes or no? What’s the deal here?

Baumann informed Nickelsen that the exact lot he wanted was being offered for sale, dirt cheap and right now, at a national auction conducted by a government agency called the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service (DRMS), in Battle Creek, Michigan. DRMS is an arm of the Defense Logistics Agency, which is in turn part of the Department of Defense. Each month, DRMS offers surplus explosives, from government warehouses, for sale at drastically reduced prices. Anyone who has the proper explosives license can bid.

“All right,” Nickelsen said, “I can buy this stuff today if you want.”

“I do,” Baumann said.

“Then what? How the hell’m I supposed to cover the fact that I made an illegal sale?”

“You don’t. You have the C-4 shipped to you, and you store it in your certified magazine. You turn off the power in the electrified security fence-a lapse you will blame on one of your expendable employees. You let me know when it’s there, and you receive the money. The following morning, you find the lock on your magazine cut. You are horrified, and you report the theft. And that is the end of it. You’ll never see or hear from me again. And one last thing-the guys I work for are really intent on their privacy. One goddam word of this gets out-one bloody word-and your two little boys will be without a father. Simple as that. All clear?”

CHAPTER SIXTY

At the same time, Ken Alton was sitting at his work station, deep in concentration, surrounded by large blue-screened monitors, several keyboards, an impossible-looking tangle of wires, and heaps of empty Diet Pepsi cans.

“I’ve been in touch with the computer people over at Manhattan Bank,” he said, “sort of familiarizing myself with the system. It’s pretty secure, for a bank. But I’m thinking of going over there and getting my hands dirty, doing some hands-on work, checking things out.”

Sarah nodded. “Great. Any luck on the passport search?”

“We’re getting there.”

“How close?”

“I’m winnowing. I’m down to forty-some names-we could hand-check them, but it would be a hell of a lot faster for me to narrow down to a name or two.”

“What are the forty?”

“The intersection of two databases: every U.S. citizen who’s entered the country since the beginning of the year, and all U.S. passports reported lost or stolen.”

“Can I see the list?”

“It won’t do you any good, but sure, if you want. Hard copy?”

“Please.”

He tapped a few keys, and his laser printer hummed to life. “Done. But it’s just a list of names, with Social Security and passport numbers, ranked in order of probability.”

“Probability of each candidate being our guy?”

“You got it.”

“Based on what?”

“Several different fields, or factors. Stuff like height, age, sex. To start, we know Baumann’s five foot eleven.”

“The passport people don’t check height, Ken.”

“Right, but if someone’s very short-four foot eight, in one case-it’s not likely to be Baumann, unless he had his legs sawed off. On the other hand, I’m not eliminating anyone taller, because it’s easy for someone to look taller with lifts or special shoes, okay?”

“What about age? We’ve already agreed that he could look a lot older if he wanted to, with the right makeup.”

“Granted, but he’s not going to look eight years old, right? So there are some passport ages that probably couldn’t be him. Anyone younger than twenty-five gets demoted in the probability ranking automatically. And there’s itinerary.”

“Hmm?”

“I’m proceeding on the assumption that Baumann didn’t first depart the U.S. before he entered. In other words, he most likely acquired the passport abroad and used it to enter the country. Anyone who, let’s say, entered the U.S. last week but left the country a week or two earlier isn’t likely to be our terrorist. So he gets pushed down the list.”

“Okay, good.”

“Plus, I’ve gotten data from most, though not all, of the airlines these forty-three flew in on. Manifests, airline travel logs, flight logs. Those databases tell us a lot. For instance, did the passenger buy a ticket with cash? Odds are very high our guy did. If he didn’t-down to the bottom of the pile he goes. Not out, but down.”

“Makes sense.”

“Oh, and we can eliminate anyone who entered the country before the date of Baumann’s escape from prison.” He retrieved a sheet from the printer, handed it to her. “So, what you’re looking at is a work in progress. Not all the databases have been worked in. Another day or two, I should have it narrowed down to one name.”

Lieutenant George Roth had just about given up searching the alley behind the Chinese restaurant, and he radioed in to report his lack of success. Then, as he turned back toward Broadway, something in a trash heap in a large blue Dumpster behind the restaurant attracted his attention. He moved closer to the refuse, holding his breath, and saw that his first impression had been right-it was a black leather shoe. He pulled at it, and realized that it was attached to a leg.

A few minutes later, the special working group assembled for an end-of-the-day full staff meeting, minus the two involved with the Mail Boxes Etc. operation, George Roth and Russell Ullman.

Sarah opened by briefing them in on the Mail Boxes watch. “Apparently someone called to ask about the package,” she said, “but hung up before we could get a fix on his location.”

“You think he got suspicious?” Pappas asked.

“Possibly. Could be he was just being careful.”

“He might not ever come in to get the package,” Pappas went on. “If it really is Baumann, he might not need it-he might have other fusing mechanisms. Baumann’s probably quite thorough.”

“True,” Sarah said. “In any case, they’ll page me if anyone shows up to claim the package.” She went on to detail the other operations that were in gear.

A full-field investigation, which Operation MINOTAUR had become, is extremely resource-intensive; it allowed them to use every weapon they had. These included clandestine microphones and video, direction finders on cars, trash covers, wiretap surveillance. Technically, a full-field was good for one year, but it was renewable-some full-fields, like the FBI’s war against the Communist Party of the United States, had gone on for forty years. The problem was, of course, that they didn’t have a year, even a month.

She related what Technical Services had discovered about the fusing mechanism. But the latest information, which she’d received a few minutes ago from the youthful-voiced Ted Grabowski, was the real story. “Once it was clear that the Libyan timer was a fake, a counterfeit, the techies began to look more closely,” she said. “They did a microscopic examination, looking for tool marks. Remember the attempt to assassinate President Bush in Kuwait a couple of years ago?”

“Sure,” Pappas said. “We found explosives, DetCord, and fusing mechanisms, and determined that the folks behind it were-who else?-the Iraqis. So what’s the connection?”

“Well, the exact same pair of wirecutters that were used to make the Kuwait bomb were used to cut the wires in this fusing mechanism.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Pappas said.

“Hold on,” Vigiani said. “You’re saying the Iraqis made this thing?”

“No,” Sarah replied. “The Iraqis didn’t make the Kuwait bomb either-they farmed it out. It was a pretty fancy piece of handiwork, probably beyond the capabilities of the Iraqis.”

“Sarah,” Vigiani said, “I think I’m above my pay grade here. Can you explain it in simple terms?”

“Okay,” Sarah said. “Baumann hired someone to construct a detonator and ship it in. Whoever he hired also did the Kuwait bomb. And was trained at the Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal School-by us. So if we can find out who built the Kuwaiti fusing mechanism…”

“I’m intrigued by this counterfeit Libyan timer,” Pappas said. “This attempt to lay a false trail. Why would someone do that?”

“To conceal their own involvement, lead us astray?” suggested Vigiani.

“Or else,” Pappas said, “to pin it on the Libyans for some strategic reason. Either way, this is not normal terrorist behavior. This is the work of someone who wants no credit, no blame, no extortion. In short, Baumann has been hired by someone who simply wants to destroy some part of New York City, presumably the Manhattan Bank, without making a statement.”

“Well,” said Vigiani, “he sure as hell isn’t going to do it without his fuse thing. And he still hasn’t shown up to claim it, or has he?”

“Not yet, as far as I know,” Sarah replied. “He may still. Not likely, I admit.”

“Sarah,” Pappas said, “what else does this fellow need to build a bomb?”

“An explosive, obviously… Why, what are you getting at?”

“Well, terrorists love plastic explosives, Semtex and C-4 and the like, right? Which is very difficult to get on the open market. So he’s either shipping it in somehow-”

“Yes,” Sarah interrupted. “Or getting it here.” She saw where he was going. “Yes, that could be a way.”

“What, steal it?” Vigiani asked.

“Possibly, yes,” Sarah said.

“So we put out a threat advisory?”

“Too public,” Sarah said.

“Real sanitized,” Vigiani said.

“Still throws up too many questions. We’ll ask ATF to inform us of any thefts of C-4, dynamite, or other explosives, please report immediately, blah blah blah. And give our twenty-four-hour number. Without revealing why we’re so interested. Concentrate especially on military bases.”

Vigiani shrugged. “Worth a try, I suppose.” She looked up as Ranahan and Roth entered the room. “Hey, any luck?”

The expression on the two men’s faces told the assembled that it wasn’t good news.

“What happened?” Sarah asked.

“It’s Ullman,” Roth said, ashen-faced.

“What do you-what about Ullman?” Sarah said, although she now knew.

“Dead,” Ranahan said thickly.

“Oh, my God,” exploded Vigiani.

Ranahan continued: “He followed a guy for a couple of blocks, then vanished without a trace in an alley behind a restaurant. When we stopped hearing his voice, we sent out some guys to track him down.”

“I found him,” Roth said. “Dumpster behind the restaurant. Under a pile of, I don’t know, food shit.” He sank into a chair. There was a stunned silence.

“Baumann?” asked Pappas.

“His MO, anyway,” Roth said. “Same as the Pollsmoor killings. Done with bare hands, except for a blunt object used to smash in the eyeball.”

“Russell must have been on to him,” Vigiani said in a hoarse whisper.

“Maybe,” Sarah said. “But Baumann’s obviously on to us.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

The doorbell chimed, and Sarah buzzed Brian Lamoreaux in. He was wearing a nubby brown jacket over a striped band-collar shirt and looked terrific. He smelled very faintly of bay rum cologne. He was wearing an Armani-type pair of glasses with a tortoiseshell inlay that made him look almost sexy.

“New glasses,” she said by way of greeting.

“They’re old, actually,” Brian said. “I’m glad you could come with me tonight.”

“I can’t work all the time,” she said, although in truth she wished she were back at MINOTAUR headquarters. Still, if she continued working the way she had been, she feared she’d go out of her mind.

From behind his back he drew a small bouquet of lilies, some of which were already wilted. “How nice,” she said. “Thank you. But let me warn you again, if my beeper goes off while the music’s playing, I’ll have to leave you in the lurch.”

“Understood. I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself.”

Softly playing in the background was the E-flat adagio movement of the Haydn G minor piano trio, which was not helping much to calm Sarah down. This was their second time going out, and for some reason she was still nervous. She’d turned him down at the hospital, but accepted when he called later in the day to check on Jared. The next night they’d met for a drink at a Cuban café on Columbus Avenue, and she’d decided maybe there was something there.

Jared approached shyly. Behind him hovered his babysitter, a Marymount Manhattan College student named Brea, who said hi and didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands.

“So, Brian,” Jared said, “do you build buildings?”

“No, I just write about them,” Brian admitted.

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. “You like baseball?”

“The truth is, I don’t follow baseball. I don’t know anything about it. But funny you should mention baseball.” He produced a small plastic-wrapped card and handed it to Jared. “Look what I found in the rubbish.”

Jared looked at the object, and his eyes widened. “No way!” he exulted. “You didn’t find this in the trash! Oh, my God, it’s a Satchel Paige!”

“Isn’t that nice of Brian!” Sarah said.

“It’s awesome,” Jared said. “It’s a 1953 Topps!” He turned to Sarah and explained: “There’s hardly any Satchel Paiges around-they didn’t make Negro League cards.”

Sarah said, “I hope it didn’t cost too much.”

“You know, Satchel Paige didn’t even know how old he was,” Jared said. “There aren’t any official stats on him. He’d, like, pitch three games a day, day after day, and then he’d go down to South America and pitch down there… This is so excellent.”

The phone rang. Sarah felt an adrenaline jolt and turned to answer it, but Jared got to it first.

“Oh, hi,” he said without enthusiasm, and Sarah instantly knew who was calling. “Yeah, I’m okay,” he went on in a sullen monotone. “Everything’s fine. Mom, it’s Dad.”

“Can you tell him I’ll call him tomorrow from work?”

“Mommy’s going out on a date,” Jared said into the phone. As Jared hung up the phone, Sarah caught his eye and gave him a look. He stared back at her brazenly, as if to say, I know what I’m doing.

“Now this is an apartment building,” Sarah said as they strolled past the Dakota, at Central Park West and Seventy-second Street. She was distraught and frightened by Ullman’s death, barely able to think about anything other than her work now, and yet trying to mask it with a blithe air. “You know anything about this one?”

“The Dakota? Sure do,” Brian said. “Well, it was really the first great luxury apartment house. Built in the 1880s by a guy named Edward Clark, the president of the Singer sewing machine company. People called it Clark’s Folly, because it was ridiculously far from the center of town.”

“Hmm.”

“In fact, I believe it was named the Dakota for the Dakota Territory, because it was so far away.”

“Who was the architect?” she asked without interest. What am I doing? she asked herself. Trying to keep the conversation going so I don’t have to think about the nightmares?

“Henry J. Hardenbergh,” he said. “One of the great architects of the time. And… I seem to recall something about how Clark bought the adjoining land and had a couple dozen row houses built on it. Then he put this immense power plant in the basement of the Dakota to supply electricity not just for the Dakota, but for all the neighboring row houses. That’s some serious urban planning.”

“Isn’t this where John Lennon was killed?”

“That’s right… Sarah, no offense, but I have a feeling you’re not terribly interested in an architectural tour right now. Something wrong?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Is it Jared?”

“Oh, no, Jared’s doing fine.”

“That was your ex who called, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. I don’t know how the hell he tracked me down, but he’s a resourceful guy. And it’s not like I’m in the Federal Witness Protection Program or anything. I just… mostly, I guess I wish he’d leave us alone.”

“He isn’t the jealous type, is he?”

“Oh, he is. He’s also the violent type.”

Brian stepped to the curb to hail a cab. “Great,” he said. “I could barely handle prepubescent thugs. I doubt I could stand up to a jealous cop.”

There was a break after the A Minor Quartet. Brian whispered, “Boy, that slow movement isn’t easy to listen to.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think it’s the most difficult passage in all Beethoven. Someone once compared this piece to a man who’s trying to see how slowly he can ride a bicycle without falling.”

Sarah laughed gently. The longer she watched him, particularly when he was animated by enthusiasm for whatever he was talking about, the more appealing she found him. The difference between him and Peter was so enormous it wasn’t even funny. How could the same woman be attracted to such entirely different men? In the park the other day, she had pitied him, felt a sort of contempt for him, bumbling and ineffectual as he was. Yet he had been wonderful, attentive, caring, when he took them to the emergency room.

After the Grosse Fuge, the concert ended with the C-sharp minor Quartet, which Sarah considered one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. “Amazing, isn’t it?” Brian said, taking her hand. “The adagio is one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.”

Sarah squeezed his hand and nodded.

They took a cab to his apartment, just off Sutton Place. She had promised herself she wouldn’t end up at his place or in a hotel room, but she felt comfortable with him, and Brea, the babysitter from Marymount Manhattan College, had said she didn’t mind if it was a late night.

His apartment was small but elegantly furnished, with a lot of books, mostly on architecture, and beautiful, comfortable furniture. She went into his kitchen and made a phone call to check on the babysitter, then returned and sank into a wonderfully overstuffed couch while he got some brandy.

“I like it,” she said, indicating the whole apartment.

“Oh, it’s not mine,” he said. “I think I mentioned this colleague of mine from Edmonton-he and his wife are here on sabbatical, but they’re spending the summer in residence at Taliesen, the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Wisconsin. They’re only too happy to have me take over the rent for a few weeks.”

“Well, you’ve seen the way I furnished my apartment,” Sarah said. “Milk crates and moving boxes, right? It must be nice to be living in a place so finished.”

He poured out two snifters of brandy and handed one to her. “Look, Sarah, we hardly know each other, so this may be way too aggressive, but let me just say this.” He sat down on the couch beside her, at what seemed the perfect remove, neither menacingly close nor exaggeratedly far away. “I pick up vibes that you don’t want to talk about whatever it is you do, whether you really work for the FBI or not. If that’s the way you want it, that’s fine. But I don’t want you to think I’m not interested, okay?”

Sarah couldn’t help smiling appreciatively. “Okay.”

“So let’s talk about the weather or something.”

“Well,” she said, “do you mind if I ask you something personal?”

“Me? I’m an open book.”

“Your limp. You’ve had it for a while, right? Did you get hit by a car or something?”

“A couple of weeks after my wife’s death, I got really high and drove into a telephone pole. Next thing I knew, I was in the hospital, and a couple of policemen came to visit me, and they told me that they hadn’t found any skidmarks at the accident scene.”

“Meaning what?”

“I didn’t try to stop. I just drove into the telephone pole at sixty miles an hour.”

“Trying to kill yourself.”

“I don’t remember it, but yeah, that’s what they were saying.”

“You loved her.”

“Yes, I did. She was a wonderful, wonderful person.” He hesitated a moment, a catch in his throat. “But that was a different part of my life, and this is no time to talk about all that, all right?”

“All right.”

He got up to put some music on. For a few minutes he rummaged through a large collection of CDs.

She watched him as he stood. He had a wonderful, lithe body, broad shoulders, a narrow waist. It was not the body of a man who sat around, an academic or an architect; he obviously worked out.

“This is a wonderful Armagnac,” Sarah said.

“Thanks. I thought you’d like it.”

“I love Armagnac.”

“Good. So do I. Do you like jazz vocals?”

“Of course. What have you got?”

“Let me surprise you.”

He returned to the sofa and sat closer, watching her as the music came on, simple but highly syncopated jazz piano.

“Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald!” Sarah said. “One of the all-time great albums.”

“You’ve got good taste in music,” Brian said, and leaned over and kissed her lips. He held her face in both hands as if admiring an objet d’art. Sarah closed her eyes and parted her lips and tasted his tongue.

Oh, God, Sarah thought, let me just be right here, in the moment.

She put her hands on his back, against his shoulder blades, then ran them down to the firm, shirt-covered flesh of his lower back. She slipped her fingertips underneath his belt and rested them there, enjoying the warmth, the velvety feel of the swell of his buttocks.

His tongue moved slowly into her mouth, exploring the inside of her mouth, and he held her face even tighter.

“Sarah,” he groaned.

Be in the moment, she chanted to herself. In the moment.

She felt her thoughts at last beginning to lift momentarily away from the inordinate tensions of her daily work, the deaths, the fear and uncertainty. She felt almost light-headed, and she was grateful.

His hands slid smoothly down her neck, over her shoulders, then came around to cup her breasts from the sides, gently. She felt enveloped by the warmth, felt aroused.

I can’t believe this is happening, she thought. Can’t believe this is happening. I don’t know the man, don’t know anything about him, don’t-

He unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse, nuzzled warmly against her bare skin, then licked and kissed his way to her nipples.

“Mmmph,” she groaned.

A new song began: “How Long Has This Been Going On?” Ella’s voice, though past its peak, was husky yet agile. She belted out the lyrics, stumbled over one line, sang, One more once and that makes tw-thrice!

She slipped her fingers underneath the band of his jockey shorts, felt the silky smoothness of his skin. At the same time, he reached around to finish unbuttoning her blouse, then unfasten her bra, and she felt her nipples grow hard. He undid her skirt and let it fall to the floor, then unbuckled his belt and let his pants drop. She saw his erection tenting the white cotton of his undershorts, and she slowly slid them down.

Slowly, agonizingly slowly, his head moved downward, planting a trail of scorchingly hot kisses on her belly, the wisps of hair beneath her navel, and-

“Brian-” she said, a vain attempt to gain control.

Down there, his tongue fluttering like a butterfly, or a hummingbird, his head moving back and forth, then up and down, his tongue alternately rigid and probing, then soft and wet and oscillating. He kissed, sucked gently at her labia, hummed a few notes along with the song, sucked a little harder, hummed again, and then enveloped her clitoris and the hood around it with a luscious, feather-soft kiss. She rocked back and forth, undulating her hips as the teasing little tickle of pleasure built into a sharp-edged wave and grew stronger and larger and she heard something so far away, something-

– a mechanical noise, of the ordinary world, not of the world of pleasure into which she was floating-

– her pager. She groaned. Her pager had gone off.

Brian grunted his annoyance. “Not now,” he said.

“I’m-I’m sorry-I have to…” She rolled over, took her cellular phone out of her purse. Naked, she took it into the bathroom, shut the door, clicked on the ventilation fan to muffle her voice.

“Yes, Ken,” she said. “I really hope this is important.”

“Sorry to bother you,” Ken Alton said. “But yeah, I think it is. I got it.”

“Got… what?”

“The passport. The passport Baumann used to enter the U.S. The name is Thomas Allen Moffatt.”

Sarah disconnected, folded up the phone, and returned to the bedroom. Brian was lying on his back, a crooked half-smile on his face. “Everything all right?” he murmured.

“Everything’s fine,” she said. “Good news.”

“Good,” Henrik Baumann said. “We can all use good news. Now, where were we?”