The Zero Hour

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

At four-thirty in the morning, the narrow alley off the side street in the Wall Street area of lower Manhattan was dark and deserted. Opaque steam rose from a manhole cover. A discarded yellow wrapper from a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder drifted along the wet asphalt like tumbleweed.

Two figures appeared at one end of the alley, one tall and lean, the other small and portly. Both were clad in heavy pants and boots, long-sleeved overshirts, and welder’s gloves.

On their backs were mountaineering backpacks and air tanks connected to mouthpieces that dangled at their sides. They approached the steaming manhole. The taller one, who was carrying a four-foot crowbar, inserted the sharp end of the crowbar between the manhole cover and casing, then pushed downward with all his body weight.

“You see why I couldn’t do this myself,” Leo Krasner said.

Baumann did not answer. He kept pushing at the fulcrum until a low, rusty moan began to sound, then a higher-pitched squeak, and then the manhole cover began slowly to lift.

“Go,” he said.

Krasner trundled over to the opening, turned his portly body around, and began clambering down the rungs of the steel ladder built into the side of the manhole. Baumann followed, sliding the manhole cover back with great exertion. Finally the ornamented iron cover was back in place. They were underground within one minute and thirty seconds.

First Krasner, then Baumann dropped from the end of the ladder into the still water below. Two splashes disturbed the silence. The smell was rank, overpowering. Krasner heaved; Baumann bit his lower lip.

They reached around for the silicone mouthpieces, pulled them up, and bit into the nubs that held them in place. Baumann switched on Krasner’s air tank, then Krasner did the same for him. With loud hisses, they began inhaling the tanked air. Krasner took several deep, grateful breaths.

Despite the stench, they were standing not in sewage but in a few inches of runoff water from storm drains, which ran through miles of tunnels beneath the streets of New York. The oval concrete tube was seven feet or so high and about five feet wide, and it seemed to go on forever. These drainage tunnels served a dual function: along the top and the upper sides of the tunnel ran many cables for power and telecommunication links.

“We can leave the crowbar here or take it with us,” Leo said.

“Take it,” said Baumann. “Let’s move quickly.”

There was a splash, and a rat the size of a small dog ran by.

“Shit!” exclaimed Leo with a shudder.

Baumann pulled a caver’s headlamp from his backpack and put it on. He checked the reading on his compass and zeroed his pedometer, then waited patiently for Leo to do the same. He did, and consulted a map that had been compiled by a group of crackers he knew who liked to do nefarious deeds in the city.

For almost a quarter of a mile they slogged through the tunnels, guided through the maze by their compasses, pedometers, and the surprisingly detailed map of the underground tunnels. A more direct route would have meant entering via a manhole on a much more visible major street, which was out of the question.

They came to a juncture between two tunnels whose curved walls were covered with a profusion of large oblong boxes connected to thick wire casings. Each removed his mouthpiece, then switched off the other’s air tank. The air here was much better.

This was, Leo explained, one of the many central switching areas in which repairmen from NYNEX could access telephone lines. To Baumann’s untrained eye, it appeared to be a forest of wires in maddening disarray.

“Each one is labeled with a tag,” Krasner said, panting. “Series of numbers and letters. By customer account number. Fear not, I know the one we want.”

Two, then three rats scurried by underfoot. One of them stopped to sniff something in the cloudy gray water, then moved on.

After a few minutes of searching, Leo located the right cable.

“Coax,” he announced. “Just like they told me.”

“Hmm?”

“It’s coaxial cable-copper wire. Hell of a lot easier to splice.”

“What if it had been fiber-optic cable?”

Krasner shook his head in disbelief at Baumann’s ignorance. “I brought every tool we’d need, whether it was copper or fiber.” With a pair of wire cutters he snipped the copper line and proceeded to strip it. “Problem with fiber is, they could tell if there’s a tap on the line. The coefficient of the material you use to connect the two cut ends of the fiber will always change the characteristics of the light pulse. So it’s going to be obvious to a monitor that there’s a new material conducting the light pulse. It would be detected instantly, soon as they’re on line.”

He fed both ends of the copper wire into a square “breakout box,” which was, he explained, made by a company named Black Box. This was a tap, a sophisticated, undetectable, high-impedance parallel tap for computers, often used for diagnostic purposes.

Then Krasner carefully removed from his backpack an NEC UltraLite Versa notebook computer no bigger than a hardcover book. He connected the breakout box to the serial port in the notebook computer.

“This baby’s modified so it’s got a gigabyte of storage capacity,” he said. He set the computer down on a small shelf that jutted out from the wall. “All right, it’s ten after six o’clock. We can’t do anything till nine A.M., and all we really need to capture is maybe an hour’s worth of traffic. In the meantime, I’m going to take a nap. The Manhattan Bank doesn’t open for business for another, oh, three hours.”

While Leo Krasner slept, Baumann sat next to him, thinking. He thought about his time in prison, about his childhood, about a woman at university with whom he had had a long and ardent relationship. He thought, too, about Sarah Cahill and the game of deception he was playing with her. If she had been distrustful of “Brian,” she was quickly becoming less so. Already he had successfully invaded her life, and soon, very soon, there would be many more opportunities to do so.

Then Leo Krasner’s Casio alarm watch finally beeped, jolting him awake. “Whoa,” Krasner said through a yawn. His breath was fermented, noxious. “All right now, we should have some action in just about three minutes. Let’s boot ’er up.”

A little over an hour later, he had a sizable amount of captured traffic outgoing from Manhattan Bank, all stored on his computer. “We got a shitload of information here,” he said. “Pattern of transaction, transaction length, destination code. Everything. Now it’s a simple matter to mimic the transactions and get inside.” He pulled the connector out of the computer’s serial port. “I’m going to leave the breakout box here.”

“Won’t it be detected?”

“Nah. The fuck you want, you want me to yank this thing off right now and interrupt the line? Then we’d really be screwed.”

“No,” Baumann said patiently. “The breakout box can’t be removed until after transmissions have stopped, which means after banking hours. And yes, I most certainly want it removed. I can’t risk having a piece of evidence here for longer than a day.”

“You want to repair the patch, you do it,” Krasner said.

“I’d be glad to do it, if I could be certain of my ability to do it perfectly. But I can’t. So we both must return here. Tonight?”

Krasner scowled. “Hey, man, I happen to have a life.”

“I don’t think you have much of a choice,” Baumann explained. “Your payment depends upon satisfactory completion of all aspects of the job.”

The cracker was silent, sullen, for a moment. “Tonight I’ll be analyzing the traffic and writing code. I don’t have time to slog around the sewers tonight. It can wait.”

“All right,” Baumann said. “It will wait.”

“Hey, and speaking of analyzing the traffic, I can’t do shit without the key. You got it with you? If you forgot to bring it-”

“No,” Baumann said, “I didn’t forget.” He handed the cracker a shiny gold disk, the CD-ROM Dyson had given him. It had been stolen-Dyson did not say how he had arranged this-from a high-ranking officer of the bank. “Here’s the key,” he said.

“How new is this? Passwords still valid?”

“I’m sure the passwords have been changed by now, but that’s insignificant. The cryptographic software is unchanged, and it’s all here.”

“Fine,” Krasner said. “No problem.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

Malcolm Dyson switched off CNN and pressed the button to close the sliding panel on the armoire. He had been watching a business report on the computer industry and could think about nothing except the plan.

The soft underbelly of capitalism, he knew, was the computer. And not just the computer in general, the computer as an abstract concept, but one specific collection of computers, in one specific building in lower Manhattan.

Its location is kept secret, yet when you know the right people, you can find out. Bankers and money men occasionally talk about the Network over drinks late at night, speculating about what might happen if… and, with a shudder, dismiss the thought.

Great catastrophes can happen at any moment, but we don’t think about them. Most of us don’t give much thought to the possibility of a gigantic meteor colliding with our planet and extinguishing all life. With the end of the Cold War we less and less often think about what might happen if an all-out nuclear war were to erupt.

The destruction of the Network is every banker’s nightmare. It would plunge America into a second Great Depression that would make the 1930s seem like a time of prosperity. This possibility is, fortunately, kept hidden from the ordinary citizen.

It is, however, very real.

Dyson had come up with the idea, originally, and Martin Lomax had provided the spadework, which he had presented to his boss six months ago-almost six months after Dyson was paralyzed and his wife and daughter were killed.

The report Lomax had written now lay in a concealed drawer in the desk in Dyson’s library. Dyson had read it countless times since then. It gave him strength, got him through the days, diverted his pain, both physical and psychic. It began:

FROM: R. MARTIN LOMAX

TO: MALCOLM DYSON

First, a brief history.

In the years immediately after the California Gold Rush of 1848, the American banking system became increasingly chaotic. Banks would send payments to other banks by dispatching porters with bags of gold coins. Errors and confusion were rampant. In 1853, the fifty-two major banks in New York established the New York Settlement Association in the basement of 14 Wall Street to provide some coordination in the exchange of payments. On its very first day, the Association cleared 22.6 million dollars.

By 1968, this antiquated system began to break down. It was virtually impossible to get anything done. The era of teletype technology in the 1950s gave way to that of the computer in the 1960s. By 1970 the advent of the computer allowed the Association to be replaced by the Network, shorthand for the National Electronic Transfer Facility.

The Network began with one computer connected to a telephone. The newfangled system was at first distrusted by the world’s banks, but confidence began to grow. Banks began to accept wire payments. Gradually, every major bank in the world sought to join the Network.

Today, over a trillion dollars moves through the Network each day-90 percent of the dollars used anywhere on earth. Since virtually all Eurodollar and foreign exchange trading is conducted in dollars, and the world’s flow of money is centered in New York, the Network, and its Unisys A-15J dual processor, has become the very nerve center of the world’s financial system.

How fragile is the Network?

A brief case history will illustrate. At the close of business on June 26, 1974, German banking authorities closed the Bankhaus Herstatt in Cologne, a major player in foreign exchange trading. At the end of the German banking day it was still noon in New York, where banks suddenly found themselves out hundreds of millions of dollars. By the next day, the world banking system had gone into shock. Only quick action by Walter Wriston of Citicorp averted a global crash. As president of the Network at the time, he ordered the Network to stay open through the weekend until all payments were worked out. Any bank that refused to honor payment orders was thrown out of the Network.

A direct terrorist strike on the Network’s Water Street facility would trigger worldwide havoc. It would so seriously disrupt the U.S. stock market, Eurodollar payments, and virtually all foreign exchange and foreign trade payments that the world payments system would collapse at once.

The destruction of the Network would topple the business world and plunge America and the world into a massive depression. The U.S. economy would be obliterated, and with it that of the world. America’s reign as a global power would be ended, as the country and much of the world returned to an economic Dark Ages.

It is only a matter of luck-or maybe ignorance of how the capitalist world works-that no terrorist has so far targeted the Network.

But if we could locate a masterful, experienced professional terrorist with a strong motivation-financial or otherwise-to accomplish the task, it is my strong belief that no more effective revenge could ever be wrought on the United States.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

Now there was a name, the alias Baumann had used to enter the United States. In some ways it was a major victory; in some ways it was dust.

“He may never use it again,” Roth said.

Sarah nodded. “If so, the lead’s useless.”

“Why would he use the name again, anyway? If he checks into a hotel, he does it under some fake name.”

“Credit cards?”

“Does he have this guy Moffatt’s credit cards too?”

“I don’t know.”

“And if he does?”

“Bing, we get him,” Sarah said. “Pops up right away, and he’s nabbed.”

“He’s not stupid. He’s not going to use stolen credit cards. Anyway, the scummiest little dirtbag knows you gotta test out the card first-you know, drive into a self-serve gas station and try the card on one of those credit card thingos there, and if it’s rejected, you know it’s no good. Real easy.”

“He may have to rent a car or a van.”

“Right,” Roth said. “But he’ll need a driver’s license to do that.”

“He’s got Thomas Moffatt’s driver’s license.”

“Well, there you go. So what are you suggesting?”

“This is a specific terrorist threat on U.S. soil. It’s a full-field investigation. That means we can task a hell of a lot of manpower if we want. This monster has already killed two FBI agents.”

“You’re not talking about sending a hundred guys around to every car- and truck-rental place in New York City, are you?”

“And neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut.”

“You gotta be kidding.”

“Hey, don’t forget, we caught the World Trade Center bombers through Mohammed Salameh’s driver’s license, which he used to rent the van.”

“Well, you’re the boss,” Roth said dubiously.

“I don’t mean to be a killjoy,” Christine Vigiani said, the standard gambit of every killjoy, “but the only reason everyone seems so sure Baumann used Thomas Moffatt’s passport is the timing. Pretty slender evidence.”

“Whoever used the stolen Moffatt passport entered the country twelve days ago,” Pappas argued, “which is eight days after he broke out of Pollsmoor prison. The fit is too good. Plus all the other factors-”

“Chris,” Sarah said, “there’s no point in talking any further. We have a team on it in D.C. already, so we’ll have our answer soon.”

In fact, at that very moment, there were several FBI teams in Washington searching for Baumann.

One of the flight attendants had been located, at her apartment near Dupont Circle, and had actually laughed when the FBI agent asked her if she remembered the passenger in seat 17-C. The customs agent who had processed Baumann/Moffatt’s entry was similarly incredulous. “You gotta be kidding,” he said. “You know how many hundreds of people I processed that day?” FBI street agents were unable to turn up any cab drivers at Dulles who remembered taking a fare that resembled the sketch of Baumann’s face.

Another FBI team was poring over the flight manifest that United Airlines had just faxed over. They were fortunate to be dealing with an American carrier, because foreign ones tended to be recalcitrant. Some airlines would not turn over their flight manifests without a criminal subpoena-difficult to get, because Baumann was not being sought in a criminal matter. Or they’d request a “national security letter,” a classified document that must adhere to the attorney general’s stringent guidelines on foreign counterintelligence.

Thank God for American multinational conglomerates. In a few minutes, the FBI team knew Baumann had purchased his tickets in London, with cash, an open return. They were also able to study the I-94 form that all arriving passengers are required to fill out. The address Baumann had given was false, as they expected it to be-no such street existed in the town of Buffalo, New York.

More important, they now knew which seat Baumann had sat in, which meant they knew the name of the passenger who sat next to him. Baumann had sat on the aisle, but on his right had sat a woman named Hilda Guinzburg. An FBI team visited Mrs. Guinzburg, a feisty seventy-four-year-old, at her Reston, Virginia, home and showed her a copy of Thomas Allen Moffatt’s passport photograph from the State Department archives.

Mrs. Guinzburg shook her head. This was definitely not the man she had sat next to on her flight from London, she insisted. This confirmed that Moffatt’s passport photograph had been doctored and used by someone else.

And the I-94 form was then sent to the FBI’s ID section to test for latent fingerprints.

After changing out of his filthy clothes and showering, Leo Krasner went for a walk.

When he reached the burnished silver Manhattan Bank building, he strolled into the atrium as casually as he could and took the elevator to the twenty-third floor. The employee cafeteria was on this floor, so there was no security.

He found a bulletin board and posted a notice, then posted the identical notice on a board in an employee lounge. He posted several other copies on other bulletin boards on the floor.

Then he returned to his apartment and went to work.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

This is New York, where no one knows his neighbors, Baumann reflected as he turned the last key in Sarah Cahill’s triple-locked door.

He was out of breath and soaking wet. It was half past noon, but the sky was dark, and torrential rain was coming down with a Biblical vengeance. He wore a raincoat, the sort of tan belted topcoat just about every man in the city was wearing right now, although he had bought his in Paris from Charvet.

He had heard that when it rains in Manhattan the city comes to a halt and it becomes impossible to get a taxi, and it was true. It had taken him a long while to find a cab, which had then become stuck in the midday rush-hour traffic, exacerbated by the weather.

Sarah would not be home for hours, and Jared was still at the YMCA. True, there might have been problems if Sarah’s neighbors were home during the day (which they were not) or if one of them chanced to see him entering her apartment and mentioned it to her.

But this is New York. Strangers exhibit certain predictable behavior. Like women and their handbags. When a woman does not know you, she clutches her handbag as if it contained her life’s savings, though in fact rarely does it hold anything besides lipstick, compact, keys, grocery receipts, dry-cleaning slips, a scrawled note, and keys.

When a woman feels she knows you better, she will relax that grip. It is a mark of intimacy almost animalistic in nature. In your apartment, preparatory to lovemaking, she will go to the bathroom and, depending on what she needs, may leave her purse on the coffee table in front of you. Sarah had gone to use the phone on her second visit to his apartment. This told Baumann that despite her tough demeanor, she was a trusting person.

The phone was in the kitchen, out of sight of the living room: Baumann had made sure the only telephone was in the kitchen. She had talked to the babysitter for four or five minutes.

That had been enough time, really much more than enough time. There are tools for this sort of thing; the most simple-minded burglar can do it. There is a long flat plastic box, hinged lengthwise, perhaps five inches long and two inches wide and an inch thick. Inside the box is a wax softer than beeswax, a layer on the top and the bottom.

He placed Sarah’s key into the box and squeezed it tight until he had an exact impression of her key-actually, three keys. He had anticipated that he might have trouble getting the keys off the ring, so he was prepared. He used a box that was notched at one end.

Later, he used a very soft, very-low-melting-point metal that in the profession is called Rose metal. It is an alloy of lead and zinc. Its melting point is lower than that of the wax mold. He poured the metal carefully into the mold. This gave him a very weak metal key, which is good only as a template.

From a hardware store he got the right key blank. In a vise he positioned the Rose metal template atop the blank. He used a Number Four Swiss-Cut file, the lockpicker’s friend, and cut his own key.

Now he quickly turned the keys in the locks and entered the apartment.

This was his fifth time searching Sarah’s apartment. She was scrupulous and left no files lying around, no personal notebooks with notes on the investigation, no computer disks. She was making this difficult… but not impossible. He now knew where she worked-the top-secret location of Operation MINOTAUR. He knew the phone number of the task force’s headquarters. Soon he would know more. At any moment she might let down her guard, begin to talk about her work, pillow talk, worried confidences. It was possible. At the very least, his proximity to her afforded him possibilities of access he’d never have dreamed of.

Yes, there were hazards. There was an element of risk for the hunted to befriend the hunter, spend so much time with her, make love to her. But it was not a great risk, because he knew there were no photographs of him. Apart from a very generic and useless physical description-which could have described 20 percent of the males in New York City-the task force had no idea what he looked like. The South African secret service had no photographs of him on file, and the prison’s photographs had been destroyed. It was a certainty that the FBI had put together an Identi-Kit, but it would do them no good. Whatever the South Africans had feebly attempted to put together would bear no resemblance to the way he looked now, not in a million years.

They might know his true eye color, but that was easily taken care of. Changing the color of one’s eyes can be as simple as using standard, generally available colored contact lenses, but this is not a disguise for professionals. A careful observer can always tell you are wearing corneal contact lenses, which can raise nettlesome questions. Baumann had had special lenses custom-designed for him by an optometrist in Amsterdam. They were prosthetic scleral soft lenses, which cover the entire eye, not just the iris, and can be comfortably worn for twelve hours. The color tones were natural, the lenses large, with iris flecks (which standard contact lenses do not have). The most suspicious observer would not have known that his eyes were blue, not a gentle brown.

Naturally, if she became suspicious, she would have to be killed at once, just as he had killed Perry Taylor and Russell Ullman. But why in the world would she suspect she was sleeping with the enemy? She wouldn’t.

It was all a game, an exhilarating game. A dance with the devil.

As he combed the apartment, in all the likely hiding places and the not-so-likely ones, among Jared’s belongings, he could hear faint traffic noises from the street, a car alarm, a siren.

And then, at last, there was something.

A notepad. A blank notepad on her bedside table. The top sheet was blank, but it bore the imprint of a scrawl that had been made on the leaf above it. He rubbed lightly against the indentation with a soft lead pencil, and the scrawl appeared, white script against black.

Thomas Allen Moffatt.

They had one of his aliases. How in the world had they gotten it? So they likely knew he had used the stolen Thomas Moffatt passport to enter the country.

He exhaled very slowly. A near miss. He had reserved a van for tomorrow in Moffatt’s name.

Well, that would have to change.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

“A nuclear weapon,” Pappas said, “is not what I’m worried about.”

“Why not?” Sarah asked.

“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean a nuke wouldn’t be terrifying. But the physics of an A-bomb are easy; it’s the actualization that’s tough. It’s far too impractical, too difficult to construct.”

“But if our terrorist has the resources and the ability-?”

“The plain fact is, a nuke would destroy much of the city, and that’s not what the intel intercept seems to be hinting at. They’re talking about a targeted attack on a bank, not on the entire city.”

Sarah nodded. “Makes sense. We can’t rule anything out, but in some ways a giant conventional bomb is scarier, because it’s much harder to detect. Much harder.”

“Right.”

“So what are my options?” she asked.

“Obviously you can’t order a bomb sweep of the entire city. But you can order sweeps of every Manhattan Bank branch office. That’s certainly feasible. We have the personnel for that right here in the New York office.”

“NYPD Bomb Squad?”

“They only get called in when you have a bomb ticking right in front of you. Otherwise they don’t move. They’re good, but you’ve got to have a bomb.”

“And if we do have a bomb?”

“Then it’s your call,” Pappas said. “But you’re not only going to have an emergency on your hands, you’re also going to have an ugly turf battle. The NYPD Bomb Squad is one of the oldest and most experienced in the country, but they’re experienced mostly with relatively low-tech stuff, homemade bombs and the like. Then you’ll have ATF, which has the responsibility for all crimes involving explosives. They have the bomb capability, and they’re going to want to play. And then there’s the Army, which is responsible for bomb disposal over the entire continental landmass of the United States, other than in the sea or on the bases of other military services. They’re going to want in, and they’re going to argue-quite rightly-that they’re substantially better equipped than the NYPD.”

“And there’s NEST,” Sarah said.

“Right,” Pappas said. “And ever since Harvey’s Casino, they’re going to want to play too.”

NEST is an acronym for the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, the best bomb squad in the United States by far and, naturally, the most secretive. It is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, but is actually managed by a private contractor. Charged with searching for and rendering safe all suspected nuclear explosives, NEST is based in Las Vegas, Nevada (the Nevada nuclear weapons test site is ninety miles away). A portion of its equipment is also located at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and its East Coast facilities are based in Germantown, Maryland.

The incident involving Harvey’s Casino in State Line, Nevada, near Lake Tahoe, will not soon be forgotten by those in NEST. In 1981, a man who owed the casino a gambling debt of a quarter of a million dollars decided to liquidate his debt in the best way he could think of. He placed a complex, though not sophisticated, bomb in the casino, consisting of a thousand pounds of dynamite, and made an extortion demand: forgive the debt, or the place would blow up. Either way, he figured, he couldn’t lose.

The bomb, which had six different fusing systems, sat there ticking for three days while everyone argued about whose responsibility it was. No one was avoiding responsibility; on the contrary, quite a few different parties wanted to take charge of defusing the bomb.

There was the city-which really meant two guys from the fire department who’d gone through a rudimentary three-week training program at hazardous devices school. They had the backing of the politicos. Then there was the Army, which announced that it had the legal responsibility for the bomb. NEST showed up, did a careful study, and declared, this is one complex bomb; why don’t you let us handle it? But the city told both NEST and the Army to take off; its two firemen would take care of the bomb.

Both NEST and the Army were faced with a dilemma: if the city handled the bomb and anything went wrong, they’d both be held responsible, legally and morally. So they came to a decision. Throw us out of town, they declared-in writing. Otherwise, we’ll move in and attempt to render it safe.

The city did as they asked and told the Army and NEST to leave town by sunset.

The explosion that resulted caused some twelve million dollars’ worth of damage and left a huge gaping hole in Harvey’s Casino. The firemen who had insisted on rendering the bomb safe unfortunately did not have much of a grasp of elementary physics. Never again would NEST give up control to the locals without a fight.

“Okay,” Sarah said. “I’m going to hold out the possibility it’s a nuke.”

“What?” exploded Pappas. “There’s no goddam reason to believe it’s a nuke, and if you want to scare half-”

“I know, I know,” Sarah said. “But it’s the only way DOE will be willing to call in NEST, and we’re going to need the resources of the best. And when we need them, we’re going to need them fast.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

Dressed in a European suit, Baumann fit right into the throngs of Wall Street businessmen swarming to work this morning. He might have been a cosmopolitan banker, an Anglophilic bond salesman.

He stood on Water Street and gazed casually across the street at the ordinary-looking office building. Hundreds of thousands of people passed by this building, people whose livelihoods depended upon Wall Street and who probably never gave the building even so much as a passing glance.

On the street level were administrative offices of a small bank called Greenwich Trust. On the upper floors were various other offices. The building’s lobby was green Wall-Street-office-building marble. There was absolutely nothing distinctive about the building.

Except for what was on the mezzanine level, behind unmarked doors accessed by a card-key system.

There, well protected and hidden from the world by the anonymity of its setting, was the Network, the nerve center of the world financial community. By now, Baumann knew quite a bit about what was behind those walls and doors. He knew there were two Unisys A-15J mainframes and optical disk pads for read-write media storage. In case of fire, Halon suppressants would instantly be released into the room. In case of power outages or surges, the machines would run on current that emanated from storage batteries fed by the city’s power grid. The batteries would sustain operations until diesel-powered generators could be switched on.

There was electrical backup and telecommunications backup, and the dual processors provided computer redundancy. There were twenty-two electronic authentication boxes made by the British firm Racal-Guardata to screen all incoming messages for code flaws before permitting them on the mainframes. By algorithmic means, checking for both number and spacing of characters, the authenticators would defeat interdiction.

The builders of the Network had done extensive risk analysis. Even in constructing the facility they had used union labor only up to a point, then brought in their own technicians to do the sensitive internal wiring. Regular maintenance was done by their own internal technicians too.

But when you came right down to it, it was early-1980s technology, really, with only the most rudimentary security precautions taken. It was nothing short of a scandal how the planet’s entire financial system could be brought down by one act of destruction visited upon this ordinary-looking office building in lower Manhattan.

After the World Trade Center bomb, there was talk about how badly damaged America’s financial structure had almost been. That was nonsense. The World Trade Center bomb had killed a handful of people and closed some businesses for a while. That was nothing compared to what was about to happen here, across the street.

A trillion dollars moved electronically through one floor of this office building each day-more than the entire money supply of the United States. Immense fortunes moved through here and around the world at the speed of lightning. What, after all, is a treasury bill these days but an item on a computer tape? The fragile structure of the planet’s finance depended upon the function of this room full of mainframes. It teetered on the confidence that this system would function.

Interrupt the flow-or worse, destroy the machinery and wipe out the backup records-and governments would shake, vast corporations would be wiped out. The global financial system would screech to a halt. Corporations around the world would run out of money, would be unable to pay for goods, would have to halt production, would be unable to write paychecks to their employees. How astonishing it was, Baumann mused, that we allowed our technology to outpace our ability to use it!

This was the genius of Malcolm Dyson’s plan of vengeance. He had targeted his revenge both selectively and broadly. A banker named Warren Elkind, the head of the second-largest bank in the country, had turned Dyson in for insider trading, and would now pay for his perfidy. A computer virus would invade the Manhattan Bank and cause all of the bank’s assets to be transferred out around the world. Not only would the Manhattan Bank be shut down, but it would be plundered of all its assets. It would be broke.

I don’t want Warren Elkind killed, Dyson had said. I want him to suffer a living death. I want his livelihood to be destroyed, the bank into which he’s poured his life to come toppling down.

Dyson knew that the failure even of such an immense bank would not seriously weaken the U.S. economy. That blow would come a day later, when the Network was brought down just before the end of the business day. Then the entire economy of the United States, which had sent agents to kill Dyson’s wife and daughter, would be dealt a paralyzing blow, from which it would not recover for years.

It was, really, a clever plan, Baumann reflected. Why had no one thought of it before?

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

Saturday morning, and Sarah took Jared to the St. Luke’s-Roosevelt emergency room to have his stitches removed. By late morning they were back at home. Sarah was about to call Brea, the babysitter, and return to the MINOTAUR headquarters, when Brian called.

“You’re home,” he said, surprised. “I was wondering if you and Jared might want to take a walk around the city.”

“A walk?”

“I want to show you two my favorite place in New York.”

“Let me make a few calls,” Sarah said, “and see how much time I can spare this afternoon. But I should warn you-”

“I know, I know. The beeper.”

He met them in front of their apartment building and took them downtown on the subway at West Seventy-second and Broadway.

“Where are you from?” Jared asked Baumann on the ride downtown.

“Canada.”

“But where?”

“A town called Edmonton.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s in Alberta. It’s the capital.”

“Is that a state?”

“Well, we call it a province. It’s five times the size of New York State.”

“Edmonton,” Jared mused. His eyes suddenly widened. “That’s where the Edmonton Oilers are from!”

“Right.”

“You ever meet Wayne Gretzky?”

“Never met him.”

“Oh,” Jared said, disappointed.

Sarah watched the two of them sitting next to one another, noticing that Jared had started to become relaxed around Brian, that there was a chemistry there.

Baumann said, “You know, basketball was invented by a Canadian, a hundred years ago. The first basket was a bushel basket used for peaches.”

“Uh huh,” Jared said, unimpressed by Canada and its legacy. “Can you throw a pass?”

“As in American football?” Baumann asked.

“Yep.”

“No, I can’t. Sorry, I can’t play football with you. I’m a klutz. Do you like football?”

Jared hesitated. “Not really.”

“What do you like?”

“Tennis. Softball.”

“You play ball with your dad?”

“Yeah. You play ball?”

“Not so well, Jared. But I can show you buildings. Maybe you can show me how to throw a pass someday.”

As they walked to the Woolworth Building, Baumann said, more to Jared than to Sarah, “This was once the tallest building in the world.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jared objected. “What about the Empire State Building?”

“That wasn’t built yet. This building was completed in 1913. Only the Eiffel Tower was taller, but that doesn’t count.”

“Do planes ever crash into the tall buildings?”

“Once in a while,” Baumann said. “A plane once crashed into the Empire State Building. And I know that once a helicopter trying to land on the roof of the Pan Am building broke apart, killing a lot of people.”

“A helicopter! Helicopters can land on the Pan Am building?”

“No more. They used to, but since that horrible accident, helicopters can only land in officially designated heliports.”

He brought them up to the main entrance on Broadway, with its ornately carved depressed arch, and pointed out the apex of the arch, the figure of an owl.

“That’s supposed to symbolize wisdom and industry and night,” Baumann said. He had always been an architecture buff; his time in Pollsmoor had given him ample time to read architectural histories. As a cover it was natural.

“How come those are empty?” Jared asked, pointing at two long niches flanking the portal.

“Excellent question. A well-known American sculptor was supposed to carve a statue of Frank W. Woolworth for one of those spaces, but for some reason it never got done.”

“Who was supposed to be in the other one?”

“They say Napoleon, but no one knows for sure.”

In the lobby, Baumann pointed out a plaster bracket near the ceiling, which he called a corbel. Jared could see only that it was a figure of a man with a mustache holding his knees, coins in both hands.

“Who’s that, do you think?” Baumann asked.

“Some old guy,” Jared said. “I don’t know. Weird-looking.”

“It is sort of weird-looking, you’re right. That’s old Mr. Woolworth,” Baumann said, “paying for his building with nickels and dimes. Because he paid all cash for the building. Mr. Woolworth’s office was modeled on Napoleon’s palace, with walls of green marble from Italy and gilded Corinthian capitals.” Jared didn’t know what Corinthian capitals were, but it sounded impressive.

“Where do you want to eat supper? McDonald’s?”

“Definitely,” Jared said.

“What do you know about the Manhattan Bank Building?” Sarah said suddenly.

Baumann was suddenly very alert. He turned to her casually, shrugged. “What do I know? I know it’s second-rate. Why do you ask?”

“Isn’t it designed by some famous architect?”

“Pelli, but not good Pelli. Now, you want to see good Pelli, take a look at the World Financial Center in Battery Park City. Look at the four towers-how, as the buildings rise, the proportion of windows to granite increases until the top is all reflecting glass. You can see the clouds float by in the tops of the towers. It’s amazing. Why are you so interested in the Manhattan Bank Building?”

“Just curious.”

“Hmm.” Baumann nodded contemplatively. “Say, listen,” he suddenly exclaimed, putting a hand on Jared’s shoulder. “I’ve got an idea. Jared, do you think you could teach me how to throw a pass?”

“Me? Sure,” Jared said. “When?”

“How about tomorrow afternoon?”

“I think Mom’s working.”

“Well, Sarah, maybe I could borrow Jared for the afternoon, while you’re at work. We could go to the park, just Jared and me. What do you say?”

“I guess that would be all right,” she said without conviction.

“Yeah!” Jared exclaimed. “Thanks, Mom!”

“Okay,” she said. “But you promise me you’ll be careful? I don’t want anything to happen to your head.”

“Come on, don’t worry so much,” Jared said.

“Okay,” she said. “Just be careful.”

Late at night, the phone rang. Startled out of a restless, anxious dream, Sarah picked it up,

“You fucking some guy?”

“Who is-”

“You fucking some guy? Right in front of my son?”

“Peter, you’re drunk,” Sarah groaned, and hung up.

The phone rang again a few seconds later.

“You think you can take him away for the summer?” Peter shouted. “That’s not the arrangement. I get him on weekends. Yeah, you thought I wouldn’t track you down, did you?”

“Look, Peter, you’ve had too much to drink. Let’s talk in the morning, when you’re sober-”

“You think you can get away with it? I got news for you. I’m coming to visit my son.”

“Fine,” Sarah said, depleted. “So come visit.”

“He’s my little boy. I’m not going to let you take him away from me.”

And he hung up.

In a tiny apartment a block away, Baumann listened on the phone.

“Fine. So come visit.”

“He’s my little boy. I’m not going to let you take him away from me.”

Sarah’s ex-husband hung up, and then Sarah hung up, and then Baumann, intrigued, hung up too.

People say things over the phone they should never say, even the most suspicious people, even professionals who know what can be done with a telephone these days. The personal conversations Sarah had were sometimes useful to Baumann, but it was the business chats that had been most informative.

Baumann had heard everything Sarah Cahill had said on the telephone ever since the day after they slept together. Her ex-husband had called once. A few female friends from Boston had called, but she seemed not to have many friends. When she used the phone it was usually for work. Jared had had long, rambling, trivial conversations with a few of his buddies; Baumann never wasted his time listening.

It is not easy to tap a phone or bug an apartment. Placing the tap is easy-that isn’t the problem. The problem is the technology.

If you plant a bug in the walls of a room, or in a phone, or even in the A-66 connection panel on the floor of the apartment building, you must stay very close at hand, because most bugs broadcast on VHF, which stands for “very high frequency.” You must have an apartment nearby, or remain in a van within a few hundred yards, and that was not possible in this case. Once there was a vogue for something called the “infinity transmitter” or “harmonica bug,” but it ties up the phone line and is easy to detect and doesn’t work all that well, anyway. The CIA met with its inventor and said sorry, but no thanks.

For a while, intelligence agencies were excited about something called the laser microphone-the watchers try to bug a room by shooting a beam of light on the room’s window from the outside. The sounds in the room make the window glass vibrate, and the vibrations of the glass in turn vibrate a small glass prism attached to the outside of the window, which redirects the light beam back toward the watchers. You look at that shimmering spot with a telescope equipped with a photocell, which converts the light to an electrical signal, which is then amplified and converted back into sound.

Nature and architecture and logistics, however, tend to get in the way. Traffic sounds almost always interfere, as well as noise from TV and radio, even water moving in pipes. And you must find a vantage point directly opposite the room in question, which is not always easy to do in the city. The technology is very impressive, but except in the most ideal circumstances it works poorly.

So you spend a little money-ten thousand dollars, in fact-and you act the jealous boyfriend. You go to a private detective and say you’re convinced your girlfriend is fucking around, you’re sick of this shit. I want you to hang a wire on her, you say. I want it to come to me. Once it’s in place, you tell the detective, you’re out of the loop.

Private investigators are asked to do this kind of thing all the time. They have contacts at the telephone company’s central station, cooperative guys, guys they know they can do business with.

When you’re on the inside, it’s easily done. The cooperative guy at the phone company, who doesn’t want to know a goddam thing about it, puts in a parallel connection in the appropriate frame.

Baumann rented a tiny apartment in Sarah’s neighborhood, because the telephone there was serviced by the same central office that serviced hers. There was nothing in this tiny apartment but a telephone and a call diverter. It recorded every single conversation made on Sarah’s telephone line, and when the call terminated it dialed out to Baumann’s apartment off Sutton Place. Now it was almost as if he had an extension in Sarah’s apartment.

When she talked on the phone, he could hear everything she said.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

By the time Leo Krasner arrived at his apartment, there were several messages on his answering machine responding to the notices he had posted not half an hour earlier. By midafternoon he had received eighteen calls from secretaries and other office workers (sixteen female, two male) at the Manhattan Bank.

One by one he returned the calls.

“The term paper’s on a computer disk,” he told the first secretary, “but my computer’s busted. Thing is, I need some really good editing-you know, just go through it, correct the spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, punctuation, all that junk. Thirty pages.”

But he needed it done tomorrow, by the end of the day. It was urgent. Who else but a desperate business-school student would pay three hundred bucks for an hour’s work?

The one he finally settled on said she did not have a home computer, but would work on it tomorrow during her coffee breaks and her lunch hour. She promised to be done by the end of the business day.

They agreed to meet at the cappuccino bar in the Manhattan Bank Building atrium, first thing in the morning.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

On the way to Central Park, just before noon the next day, Jared sulked. Two new friends from the Y went to a video arcade after camp got out every day, unaccompanied by an adult, and they had invited Jared. “Look, I’m sorry, but the answer is no,” Sarah said. “I’m glad you have some new friends, but I don’t want you going out unless a grown-up is with you, or Brea, or me.”

“It’s like two blocks away from the Y,” he protested. “And it’s not like it’s just me alone. There’s three of us.”

“No. Look what happened to you in the park when I let you go off by yourself-”

“Jesus Christ,” Jared said, sounding like his father. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“Hey,” she said. “You heard me. The answer is no.”

“That’s just stupid.”

“That’s just careful,” she said as they crossed the street to the park. “I don’t want anything happening to you.”

He raised his voice. “How come you always treat me like I’m a baby?”

Brian approached, wearing a sweatshirt. He gave Sarah a peck on the cheek, patted Jared on the shoulder. “I’m ready, coach.”

“Yeah,” Jared said sullenly.

Sarah left them there and went to work, arranging to meet them at the same spot in exactly two hours.

Jared taught Brian the fundamentals of going out to catch a pass. “You start running first,” Jared said. “Then I throw it.”

“Okay,” Brian said as he took off. The ball came soaring toward him. He dove for it and missed. The ball spiraled into the air, while he slipped in the mud and tumbled onto his back. Jared burst out laughing, then Brian started laughing.

Both of them grass-stained and covered in mud, laughing. They sat in the grass, as Brian caught his breath. He put his arm around Jared. “You know, my parents were divorced when I was a boy, too,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I know how lousy it is. And-well, this is something I’ve never told anybody before. When I was nine-just a year older than you-my parents fought all the time. All the time. They got divorced when I was ten, but it took them years, years of fighting. And one day when I was nine years old, I got so tired of them constantly fighting that I ran away from home.”

“Really?” Jared said, rapt.

“That’s right. I just packed my favorite toys and some clothes and packed them in a bag, and then I got on a bus and rode for an hour, to the end of the line.”

“Far away?”

Baumann nodded, imagining a Canadian boyhood, enjoying the lying, which he knew was convincing. “And I spent the night in a field, and the next morning I got back on the bus and went home. By then my parents were terrified. Seemed as if the whole town was looking for me. The police sent cars around to find me.”

“What did your parents do? Were they mad?”

“Oh, very. Very angry. But for a day they were united, a team. For that one day they stopped fighting. They were worried about me. So, you know, you should try to look at things from your mom’s point of view. She worries about you, because she loves you. There’s a lot on her mind, and she’s doing some dangerous work, isn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Jared said. “I guess.”

“I mean, she told me she’s in charge of a group of people who are looking for someone. Did she ever tell you anything about her work?”

“A little bit, I guess.”

“So you know she worries a lot, right?”

Jared shrugged.

“What did she tell you?”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

Leo Krasner worked most of the night, several times cursing the goddam Englishman who had hired him to do this job.

But by dawn he had finished. The end result was a computer diskette that appeared to contain only a thirty-one-page “term paper” on market economics and monetary policy, which Krasner had plagiarized from a college introductory economics textbook and then rendered semiliterate, strewn with typos and basic grammatical errors. Of course, the only part of the disk of any interest to him, the sequence of code he had so laboriously written, was cloaked in a hidden attribute and would remain invisible to the user.

At a few minutes to nine o’clock he walked into the cappuccino bar in the Manhattan Bank building, wearing his only blazer and tie. His blue oxford-cloth button-down shirt was too small at the neck; perspiration darkened large ovals under the arms and in the middle of his chest.

Mary Avakian, administrative assistant to the Manhattan Bank’s senior vice president for personnel, popped the diskette into her disk drive as soon as she’d poured herself a mug of coffee (light with two sugars) and set to work on it right away.

She copied the contents of the disk to her C-drive, which meant copying it to the bank’s LAN, or local area network. She glanced at the text. Boy, this guy wasn’t kidding. What a mess! And this guy, who could barely write, was probably going to walk out of business school and start at six figures, while she slaved away for a lousy twenty-four thousand.

During her coffee breaks and lunch hour she slogged through the guy’s term paper. The spelling was so bad she couldn’t even rely on the spell-check. It took her an hour and a half, and it wasn’t exactly easy sledding. But for three hundred bucks, tax-free, she really had no right to complain. For three hundred bucks, she’d edit this guy’s work again anytime he asked.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

That evening, Sarah and Brian took Jared out to dinner at a steakhouse, where Jared was able to order a cheeseburger and fries. Brian ordered a large salad and a plate of pasta, explaining that he was a vegetarian. After dinner, the three of them were ambling toward Sarah’s apartment when they heard a voice.

“Jared.”

Sarah and Jared turned around simultaneously, recognizing the tall blond man running toward them on the street as Peter.

“Hey, little buddy, how’re you doing?”

A look of concern passed over Brian’s face, and Sarah was noticeably tense. He hung back as Peter approached Jared, arms wide. Jared looked stricken.

“Give me a hug, Jer,” Peter said, leaning down toward Jared. He was in street clothes, slacks, and a hunter-green polo shirt.

Standing stiffly, Jared kept his arms at his side and glared at his father.

“Come on, now, buddy,” Peter said, giving his son a bear hug anyway. Straightening up, he turned to Sarah and then to Brian. “So,” he said. “I hope I’m not interrupting something.”

“Not at all,” Brian said. “Just returning from dinner.” He extended his hand. “I’m Brian Lamoreaux.”

Peter smiled at him as a snake smiles at a rabbit. “Peter Cronin. So you’re Sarah’s latest.”

Brian half-smiled uncomfortably. “I should probably leave you three alone,” he said.

“No, Brian,” Sarah said. “Please.”

“I’ve got a long day tomorrow. I should really be getting home.”

“Brian,” Sarah said. “Don’t.”

Peter slipped one arm around Jared’s slender back. “How was camp, Jerry? Hey, I’ve missed you.”

Baumann lingered awkwardly in the background, shifting from one foot to the other, eyes watchful.

“So you’ve been real busy looking for your mad bomber,” Peter said to Sarah. “So busy you don’t have time for Jared, right? You’re parking him in some YMCA all day-you think I don’t know that?”

“Will you please get out of here?” Sarah said.

“No, sorry, I will not,” Peter said. “I’ve come to see Jared for a couple of days. Come on, buddy, let’s get your things, and come on with me. I’m staying at the Marriott Marquis. We’re going to see the sights of New York City that your mom is too busy with her boyfriend and her task force to show you.”

“Come on, Peter,” Sarah said.

“No, Dad, I don’t want to go,” Jared said, face flushed. “I’m having a great time here.”

“Hey, little buddy-”

“You can’t make me,” Jared said. His eyes narrowed, in unconscious imitation of his father. “You can just go on back to Boston. Just lay off.”

Peter stared at Jared, then at Sarah. A slight twist of a smile played on his lips. His face, too, began to redden. He spoke to Sarah in almost a whisper. “You’re turning him against me, is that it? You think you can do that to my son?”

“No, Dad,” Jared said. “She doesn’t even talk about you. It’s me. I’m sick and tired of you bullying me around.”

Peter continued staring, alternating between son and ex-wife. He licked his lower lip, then smiled viciously.

He started to say something, then turned slowly and began walking away.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

Shortly after midnight Baumann left Sarah’s apartment. The street was empty, chilly, lit by soft oblique early-morning sunlight. As he walked, he became aware of someone following him.

He turned around and saw Sarah’s ex-husband, Peter Cronin.

“Oh, hello,” he said.

Cronin held his face a few inches from Baumann’s. He shoved Baumann into the mouth of a narrow alley a few feet away and began moving closer, his breath hot against Baumann’s face. He placed a large hand on Baumann’s shoulder and flattened him against the brick wall. Baumann looked around: there was no one in sight. They were alone. No one was passing by.

“Let me be really clear with you, Brian. I’m a cop. I got resources you wouldn’t believe. I’m going to look into your past, find out all about you. You wouldn’t believe the shit I can find out about you, you asshole. The shit I can do to you. I can get you deported, motherfucker.”

“All right, enough,” Baumann said quietly.

“Enough, motherfucker? Enough? I got news for you, fucker. I did a little checking on you, big guy. There’s no record of any ‘Brian Lamoreaux’ entering the country. Either you’re here illegally or you aren’t who you say you are.”

“Oh, is that right?” Baumann said phlegmatically.

“That’s right, buddy. I’m going to turn your whole life inside out, you little shithead. I’m going to make your life a living nightmare, and then I’m going to-”

There was a loud snap, the unmistakable sound of bone cracking, and now Peter’s head was turned around almost 180 degrees. He seemed to have turned to look at the opposite wall; but, his spinal column having been severed, his head was grotesquely out of position. His eyes glared angrily, his mouth gaping in midsentence, frozen in death.

Baumann eased the body to the ground, then took out an alcohol wipe from his pocket and cleaned the prints from Peter Cronin’s neck and face, and in a matter of seconds he was out of the alley and on his way.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

At two o’clock in the morning, Henrik Baumann and Leo Krasner were slogging through the tunnels beneath the Wall Street area of New York City. Though burdened as before with backpacks and air tanks, they moved more quickly this time, finding their destination without pedometer, compass, or map.

They arrived at the central switching area and removed their breathing apparatus. Krasner, angry at having to do this menial task, took out his tools in silence.

Then he turned around and, short of breath, fixed Baumann with a menacing glare. “Before I do jack shit, you listen to me.”

Baumann’s stomach tightened.

“I’m not as stupid as you seem to think,” Leo said. “This whole ridiculous idea of making me go back down here in this fucking cesspool and fix the splice-let’s just say I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We both know you could have left the box here and no one would ever have detected it. Just coming back down here again is a bigger risk than leaving the breakout box on the line. So why would you want to take a chance like that?”

Baumann furrowed his brow. “I don’t want-”

“No, I’m not done, dude. If you have some idea about wasting me down here, you can forget about it. I taped our first meeting. If I’m not home in a couple of hours, a phone call is going to be made.”

“What is this?” Baumann said darkly. At their first meeting, Baumann had carried a small, concealed near-field detector that would have detected a running tape recorder. He was sure Krasner was bluffing.

“It’s my life insurance policy,” the cracker said. “I’ve dealt with assholes like you before. I know the sort of shit you guys sometimes try.”

“This is a business deal,” Baumann said quietly, almost sadly. “I certainly have no intention of killing you. Why should I? We are both professionals. You do the work I’ve asked you to do, you get paid-rather generously, yes?-and then we never see each other again. For me to do anything else would be insane.”

Krasner stared at him for a few seconds longer, then turned back to the wires. “Just as long as we’re totally clear on that,” he said, as he removed the breakout box and respliced the copper cable on which Manhattan Bank’s encrypted financial transactions traveled.

When he had finished his work, he turned around and smiled at Baumann. “And that, dude-”

Baumann reached out his hands with lightning speed and swiveled the computer wizard’s head until the vertebrae cracked audibly. The mouth was open in a half-smile, half-grimace; the eyes stared dully. The large body sagged.

It required considerable effort, but Baumann was strong. He hoisted the dead body and carried it to a blind end of the tunnel, where he deposited it in a crumpled heap. With alcohol wipes, he removed any fingerprints from Krasner’s face and neck.

In this section of the tunnel, there was a good chance that the body would remain undiscovered for weeks, if not longer, and by then it would make no difference anyway.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

Early the next morning, Christine Vigiani was informed that there was a call for her on the STU-III secure phone. She went into the secure communications area, lighting a cigarette as she walked, and picked it up. “Vigiani,” she said.

“This is Larry Lindsay at NSA.”

Vigiani was silent for a beat too long, so he went on, “Your liaison, remember?”

“Oh, right. What’s up?”

“Let’s go secure,” he said. “This is sensitive.”

Vigiani called Sarah’s apartment. Sarah answered on the first ring.

“Hope I’m not waking you,” Vigiani said.

“Nope, I’m just having my coffee. What’s up?”

“I think I have your deadline.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The deadline. The day the attack’s going to take place. I think I have the date.”

“Oh?”

“GCHQ picked up another piece of an encrypted phone conversation from the same microwave relay station the last intercept came from.”

Sarah sat up straight.

“They were targeting Geneva North microwave relay station, listening on a number of specified frequencies, when they came across a signal that wouldn’t decrypt. They pulled it down and put it through the Cray. And lo and behold, it turns out to be the exact same encryption scheme as the first one.”

“What’s in the conversation? More about Baumann?”

“No, it was some guy-the same guy as in the last intercept-calling a banker in Panama, authorizing a payment. He was very detailed about it. He wanted to make sure one-third of ‘the money’ had been paid out at the beginning, and then another third last week, and then the final payment three days from now. June 26. He said a major ‘incident’ was going to take place in the United States on June 26, and only once that ‘incident’ took place was the money to be released. He wasn’t more specific than that.”

“Three days from now…” Sarah mused aloud. “You’re right. That’s the target date. That’s when the bomb’s going off.”

She hung up and turned to Jared. “I want you to take my cellular phone. Put it in your backpack.”

“Wow,” Jared said.

“This is no game, Jared. You are not to use it. Don’t show it around, don’t play games with it, you hear me? It’s only if I have to reach you.”

“What are you going to use?”

“We have other cell phones at work I can use.”

“Cool,” Jared said.

In the very small, unfurnished apartment a block away, Baumann put down the phone, pursed his lips, shook his head slowly.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

When Leo Krasner bragged to Baumann that he’d “taped” their first meeting, he hadn’t been bluffing. But he hadn’t been so foolhardy as to conceal a tape recorder on his person, because he knew there were devices that could detect such things-portable, hand-held bias-oscillator detectors or metal detectors, that sort of thing.

No, he had done something far more effective.

After Baumann had first called, Krasner had insisted they meet at a brightly lit restaurant, not in some dingy pub. He had enlisted the help of a friend, a fellow hacker and cracker, who showed up at the restaurant with a gym bag.

The gym bag, set down on a table near where Baumann and Krasner were meeting, had black nylon mesh at either end to provide ventilation for sweaty gym clothes. But the mesh served another purpose as well. A video camera could clandestinely film through it quite well-and did.

While the video camera ran, Krasner’s friend read a book. He sat for a good long while, and then left.

Thus Krasner had a clear videotape of his meeting with Baumann, whose name he of course didn’t know, from which he had chosen several excellent still frames of the man who had hired him. Using his Xerox color scanner for maximum resolution, he had scanned the clearest black-and-white image into one of his computers.

The man could track him down, could find his apartment, could find the video and the stack of black-and-white glossies. But only someone a good deal more computer-adept than that guy would realize that his photo was hidden in a silicon chip.

Neither was Leo Krasner lying about a phone call being made if he did not return to his apartment by a certain time. Using the same simple technology employed in burglar alarms that automatically telephone the police when they’re tripped, he connected an autodialer to a timer and an answering machine on which one outgoing message had been recorded.

At exactly nine o’clock in the morning following Krasner’s last trip through the underground tunnels, the autodialer called 911 and played the message.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

At nine in the morning exactly, a call was answered by one of the sixty-three 911 operators at work in one large room at One Police Plaza. “New York Police 911,” she said into her headset. “Your call is being recorded.”

She was met by silence, and was about to disconnect when she heard the whine of a tape recorder, and then a male voice began to speak.

“My name is Leo Krasner,” the voice said hesitantly, “and I want to report myself missing. This is not a joke. Um…” There was a rustling of paper in the background. “Please listen carefully. It is possible I have been abducted, but it’s… um, even more likely I’ve been murdered. If I have been, there is a very good chance my body can be found in a tunnel whose precise location I will now describe…”

As the tape-recorded voice of Leo Krasner continued speaking, the 911 operator grew less and less skeptical. It was too sober-sounding to be a prank. She typed the information-name, address, the possible location of the man’s body-into her computer terminal, forwarding it to the appropriate police dispatcher, who sat in the adjacent room.

Calls that come into 911 are “stacked” on the computer screen in order of priority, from a full Priority One on down to a Ten, a complaint about a barking dog or loud music in the middle of the day-which could wait or simply be ignored.

Although this was not an emergency situation, the call was treated as Priority Three, as are all “found bodies,” to which an ambulance was required to respond.

An ambulance, the fire department, the NYPD Emergency Service Unit, and a two-man car were all sent to investigate.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

“Can I help you?”

The receptionist for the Information Management Group at the Manhattan Bank greeted the large, unkempt man before her as if he’d wandered in off the street reeking of Night Train.

“Special Agent Ken Alton, FBI.”

The receptionist stared at the leather-encased badge, then back at Ken, as if unable to reconcile the two. “What can I do for you, Agent… Alton?”

“I need to talk to your boss,” Ken said.

“May I ask what this is in reference to?”

“Yeah. It’s in reference to this visit. Can you please get him?”

“Do you have an appointment-?”

“Right now,” Ken said.

With a grimace, the receptionist lifted her telephone handset and buzzed her boss.

Ken Alton had all but taken over the workstation belonging to the Information Management Group administrator, who stood by anxiously, watching. “I told you,” the administrator said, “we’ve run an exhaustive series of diagnostic tests, and our systems seem to be secure. No break-ins.”

“Do you have anything to drink?” Ken asked as he scrolled down a directory on the screen.

“Coffee?”

“I’d prefer Coke or Pepsi. Diet. Now, I need to know if you’ve seen any unusual transfers of funds in the last couple of days. Unusually large amounts, or anything unaccounted for, or… Hold on a sec. Just one second.”

“Yes?”

“Take a look at this executable file. This is in, like, a million places.”

The network administrator, a slight black man with graying hair so closely cropped it almost looked shaved, bent to look where Ken was pointing. “I’d have to get the manual,” he said.

“All right,” Ken said. “I want to take a copy of this file off the machine, put it on a nonconnected machine. Break it down into assembly language and see what it would be doing if it ran. Or maybe run it, and see what happens.”

“What do you think it is?”

“Don’t know. You tell me if this EXE should be here.”

“Okay.”

Twenty minutes later, Ken looked up at the network administrator with alarm and said, “Holy shit, man! This is a fucking virus! If this thing ever runs-”

“What? What is it?”

“-Your whole system would be fucked. You got a serious problem here. Shut down all users.”

“What are you saying?” the administrator gasped.

“You heard me. Shut down the system.”

“Are you out of your mind? I can’t do that. This is the busiest day of the week! It’s a peak day for network traffic-”

“Go, man!”

“If I shut down the system, the entire bank grinds to a halt!” the man shouted at Ken, folding his arms. “Files can’t be accessed, transactions can’t be processed, every single branch office-”

“Will you just goddam do it?” Ken bellowed. “Send out a message to all users-”

“Look, you can’t just shut down the whole goddam bank like that! You think-”

“Oh, God. Oh, Jesus God. Forget it.”

“What are you-?”

Ken pointed at his monitor. He thrummed the keys, but the screen remained frozen. He ran a finger along the row of keys, then pressed his entire hand onto the keyboard, but nothing appeared on the screen. “It’s too late.” Ken said, his voice shaking. “Shit! I don’t know if it was timed to go off now, or it got activated by my taking a look at it.”

The network administrator turned to a monitor at the adjoining workstation and banged at the keys, but it too was frozen. Shouts began to rise from the adjoining desks, until the entire computer center was chaos. People were running down aisles; the place had gone mad.

“Frank!” someone shouted, running toward the administrator. “We got a freeze-up!”

“What the hell is going on?” the man thundered to the enormous room.

Ken replied, his voice now almost inaudible: “You got yourselves a virus that’s taking over the whole system, the whole bank. A serious, fucking, monster virus.”

Racing for a taxi, Ken Alton nearly stumbled twice on his way out of the Manhattan Bank Building’s atrium. It was raining with such force the rain seemed to be coming up from the steaming pavement. It was morning, but the sky was dark with storm clouds.

He didn’t have an umbrella, of course, and his clothes were totally soaked through. A cab slowed down for him. Then a middle-aged woman darted in front of him and flung herself into the cab’s backseat. He called her a colorful name, but the slamming of the door kept her from hearing him.

Several stolen cabs later-damned New Yorkers get aggressive when it gets wet, he thought-he sat cocooned in the stifling warmth of a taxi hurtling toward Thirty-seventh Street. He leaned back and tried to gather his thoughts.

A virus. A goddam polymorphic computer virus. But what kind of virus was it? What was its intent? A practical joke-to gum up the works for a day or so? Or something more sinister-to wipe out all records of the second-largest bank in the country?

The idea of a computer virus-a piece of software that reproduces itself endlessly, spreading from computer to computer, copying itself ad infinitum-was relatively recent. There was the Internet Worm in 1988, the Columbus Day virus in 1989, the Michelangelo virus in 1992.

But how had it gotten in? A virus can be planted by any number of means. Someone inside the bank could have done it, or someone from the outside who had somehow gained access to the bank’s computer facilities. Or an outside phone link. Or an infected diskette. There was a famous story, famous at least among computer types, about a guy who rented a plush office space in London, pretending to be a software company. He persuaded a major PC magazine in Europe to attach a free diskette to copies of the magazine. The diskette contained an AIDS questionnaire as a public service: you popped it into your computer, and the program asked you a series of dopey questions and then gave you an AIDS “risk assessment.”

But it also did something else to your computer. It sent a virus burrowing its way into your machine that, after a certain number of reboots, hid all your files and flashed a bill. The bill directed the by now panicked users to send a sum of money to a post office box in Panama in exchange for a code that would unlock their files. The extortion scheme would have worked had some very smart hackers not broken the code and solved the virus.

Ken knew several people who were far more expert in the subject than he. As soon as he got to headquarters, he would have to figure out a way to send this virus on to his friends without infecting their systems, so they could examine it.

But this goddam cab was taking fucking forever. He took out his cellular phone, and he punched out Sarah’s number.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

Most people fly on jets blissfully unaware of what keeps them aloft. So too do princes of capitalism wheel and deal in vast, inconceivable sums of money, ignorant of how their money travels magically from New York to Hong Kong in seconds. As long as the machinery works, that’s all that counts.

But Malcolm Dyson had always been a get-under-the-hood-and-fix-it kind of guy. He knew how the fuel systems and the drive trains of all his cars worked.

He knew, too, the machinery of capitalism, knew how incredibly fragile it was, knew the precise location of its soft underbelly. He worked a long day in his library at Arcadia, and then pressed a button on his desk that pulsed an infrared beam at the Louis XIV armoire in a niche to his right. A panel slid open with a mechanical whir and the television came on: CNN, the top of the hour, the world news.

The announcer, a handsome young man with immaculately parted dark hair and sincere dark eyes, said good evening and read the lead story off his TelePrompTer.

“A computer virus has paralyzed the operations of America’s second-largest bank,” he said. “A spokesman at Manhattan Bank said that bank officials had no idea how the virus infected the bank’s computer system, but they believe it was the result of a deliberate attack by computer ‘hackers,’ or ‘phreakers.’”

A graphic appeared next to the announcer’s head, a photograph of the sleek world-famous Manhattan Bank Building. He said, “Whatever the source, Manhattan Bank chairman Warren Elkind announced that the multinational bank was forced to close its doors at eleven o’clock Eastern Standard Time this morning, perhaps forever.”

Dyson shifted slightly in his wheelchair.

“The bank’s computers went haywire this morning, with all terminals freezing up. It was later discovered that a malfunction in the bank’s electronic payments system caused the withdrawal of all of Manhattan Bank’s assets, estimated at over two hundred billion dollars globally, and transferred as-yet-undetermined, enormous sums of money to banks around the world-estimated at over four hundred and thirty billion dollars, far more than the assets in the bank’s possession.

“The consequences for the American economy are, according to the Federal Reserve chairman, incalculable. We have two reports now, from Washington, where the White House is said to be ‘gravely concerned’ as this disaster unfolds, but first from New York City, where an estimated three million small investors and bank depositors have had their entire life savings wiped out.”

Then there was videotape footage of desperate crowds storming Manhattan Bank branch offices in Bedford-Stuyvesant and the Bronx. Dyson took a cigar from the humidor on his desk and snipped its end with intense concentration, muttering, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, folks.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY

Warren Elkind’s inner office was chaos. His desk phone rang nonstop; young men and women rushed in and out with messages. It was crisis mode. His bank was crashing and burning. Sarah stood at his office door, still.

“Where the hell have you been?” Elkind shouted to her across the room. “This fucking computer virus, or whatever the hell it is, has emptied the bank’s coffers, down to the last penny, and now they’re telling me they’re never going to unwind this mess-”

“So now you want to talk.”

“Christ! All right, I want everyone out of here. Everyone!”

When the office was cleared out, Sarah came closer. “When you called me, you mentioned Malcolm Dyson. You think he’s behind this?”

“How the hell do I know? I’m saying it’s a possibility.”

“There’s nothing in your FBI file about Malcolm Dyson.”

“It’s sealed, for God’s sake!”

“What’s sealed?”

“The scumbag probably blames me. He was indicted in the biggest insider-trading scandal ever to hit Wall Street, which is why he went fugitive, but he probably blames me. Thinks he’d still be a U.S. citizen, free and clear and living in Westchester, if I hadn’t turned him in.”

Sarah said, coming still closer: “Did you turn him in?”

“It wasn’t exactly that way,” Elkind said.

“You were the witness that turned him in,” Sarah said. “You were the only one who knew. You made the case.”

“He needed the bank’s help in financing an immense stock buyout, and he offered to cut me in. I refused. I’m a banker, not a kamikaze pilot.”

“You turned him in to the SEC,” Sarah prompted.

“Not quite so simple.”

“Nothing ever is.”

“After the SEC got on to him, he invited me to lunch at the Harvard Club. He wanted to make sure we ‘got our stories straight’-i.e., that I’d lie for him. By then I’d agreed to cooperate with the SEC. The SEC investigator wired me. He wanted to tape a tiny microphone and battery pack to my undershirt, but I wasn’t wearing any, and they didn’t want to tape it to my skin. So the guy offered me his undershirt to wear! I told him, look, I don’t wear polyester blends. But I wore the guy’s undershirt anyway. They found an empty supply closet next to the dining room and sat there while I broadcast to the tape recorder. I was terrified Dyson would find out.”

“I guess he eventually did. He didn’t threaten you or anything?”

“No. The one time I was convinced he’d go ballistic, and go after me, was when he was almost killed by the feds, in a botched shootout. I didn’t go out in public for weeks, let me tell you.”

“When was that?”

“The date, you mean?”

“Right.”

“I’ll never forget it. It was the day of my wife’s birthday-we were at ‘21’ celebrating, and they brought a phone to the table. It was one of my clients in Europe. He told me Malcolm Dyson had been fired on by U.S. marshals in an ambush in Monaco, that his wife and daughter had been killed, and that he’d been wounded. That he’d probably be paralyzed for life. I remember thinking, shit, I wish they’d gotten him too. When you strike at a king, you must kill him, as the saying goes. This was going to be one guy out for revenge. That was June twenty-sixth.”

“That’s tomorrow.”

June 26 was also the day when, according to the second telephone intercept, the final payment was scheduled to be made to a Panamanian bank.

“Excuse me,” Sarah said. “I’ve got to get going.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

“I want you to contact the Justice Department,” Sarah told Vigiani, “and get a list of all known employees, colleagues, associates, and friends of Malcolm Dyson, who might be located in Switzerland. Then get in touch with NSA and have them pull up voice samples of any of those people they have in their archives. And have them try to do a voice match with the two voices in the intercepted phone conversation.”

There was a knock on the door to Sarah’s office. Roth pushed it open, saw that Sarah was meeting with Vigiani, but barreled ahead anyway: “Listen, Sarah, I got a call-”

“Roth,” Sarah said curtly, “I’m in a meeting.”

“Yeah, well, you might want to listen to this. We just got a call on the twenty-four-hour line from the police in Mount Kisco, New York. Responding to that NCIC lookout we put out.”

Sarah looked up. “Yes?”

“A couple of hours ago they got a theft report from an excavation company out there. One thousand pounds of C-4 plastic explosive was stolen from its warehouse last night.”

Sarah stared. “How much?”

“A thousand pounds.”

“Holy shit,” she said.

“So what you’re telling me,” Assistant Director Joseph Walsh sputtered, “is that you don’t know crap.”

“No, sir,” the FBI explosives analyst replied, coughing nervously into a loose fist. “I’m telling you we can only ascertain broad generalities.”

Walsh was intimidating enough in manner. He did not need to plant his burly six-foot-seven-inch frame next to the diminutive explosives expert, towering over him, as he was doing now. Sarah and Harry Whitman, the chief of the Joint Terrorist Task Force, watched the interplay with grim fascination.

“Jesus Christ,” Walsh thundered. “We have the fucking fusing mechanism. We know a thousand pounds of C-4 has been stolen. What else do you want? A blueprint and a wiring diagram? A guided fucking tour?”

But the explosives expert, a small and precise man named Cameron Crowley with a graying crew cut and a pinched pink face, was not put off quite so easily. He had done excellent work after the World Trade Center bomb and Oklahoma City, and everyone in Walsh’s office knew it. On reputation alone he could coast. “Let me tell you exactly what we do know,” he said, “and what we don’t know. We know a thousand pounds of C-4 may-I repeat, may-be part of this bomb. We don’t know if the theft of this plastic is a coincidence, or whether it was done by, uh, Baumann.”

“Fair enough,” Sarah put in to encourage the man.

“But assuming Baumann stole it, we don’t know if he’s planning one bomb or a series of bombs. We don’t know if he’s planning to use all of the thousand pounds in one bomb. That’s a hell of a lot of explosive power.”

“What’s a ‘hell of a lot’?” asked Walsh, as he pivoted to return to his desk.

The expert sighed with frustration. “Well, don’t forget, it only took one pound of plastic to bring down Pan Am 103. Four hundred grams, actually. A thousand pounds can certainly do a lot more damage than was done in TRADEBOM. That wasn’t even dynamite-it was a witches’ brew of ammonium nitrate and all sorts of other stuff-but it blew out a six-story hole in the tower. It had an explosive force equivalent to over a thousand pounds of TNT.”

He explained that on the table of relative destructiveness as an air-blast explosive, TNT is 1.0, ammonium nitrate is.42, dynamite can be anywhere from.6 to.9, and C-4, Semtex, and British PE-4 all have a value of 1.3 or 1.35. “So,” he concluded, “weight for weight, C-4 is about a third more powerful than TNT.”

“Can it bring down a building?” Walsh asked impatiently.

“Yes. Some buildings yes, some no. Not a huge building like the World Trade Center.” He knew there had been four studies done on the engineering aspects of the World Trade Center complex, which determined based on vibration analysis that the World Trade Center buildings could not be knocked down by any bomb short of a nuke. “In any case, it depends on a whole lot of factors.”

“Such as?” Whitman prompted.

“Location of the bomb, for one thing. Is it going to be placed outside or inside the building? Most bombs are placed outside buildings so that the damage will be visible, easily seen and photographed, for maximum psychological impact.”

“If it’s placed inside the building…?” Sarah asked.

“The rule of thumb is that a bomb confined inside a building will do five times more damage than one placed outside. Then again, look what happened in Oklahoma City.”

“You’re still not telling us anything!” Walsh shouted.

Sarah could see Cameron Crowley compress his lips to contain his irritation. “Blast analysis is a complicated business,” he said quietly. “The geometry of the charge has some effect on the peak pressure of the shock wave that emanates from the explosive. The shock waves always move at a ninety-degree angle to the surface of the explosives. We don’t know if the charge is going to be shaped, or spherical, or what. Is there any way for the explosive to vent and thus be diffused? Also, we don’t know what building it’s going to be placed into. Different substances have different abilities to withstand the shock front. Glass generally yields between one and three p.s.i. when hit with a front-on load. A typical masonry wall-a good, well-made brick wall-will break at eight to twelve p.s.i. And if there’s steel reinforcing, well, steel has a modulus of elasticity, called Young’s modulus-”

“Goddammit,” Walsh said. He was not a thick or ignorant man, far from it, but he was famously impatient with scientific bluster that served in his opinion to muffle practicalities. “What you’re saying is that a thousand pounds of C-4, if placed intelligently inside a reasonably sized Manhattan office building, can do a fuck of a lot of damage.”

“Yes, sir,” Crowley said. “A fuck of a lot.”

The intercom on the AD’s desk buzzed. Walsh lumbered over to it, hit the switch, and said: “Dammit, Marlene, I said hold all calls.”

“Sorry, sir, but it’s urgent, for Agent Cahill.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake. Cahill?”

Sarah strode to the phone. “Yes? Alex, I’m in a-Uh huh… I don’t understand, what do you mean he called it in himself?… All right.”

She hung up and turned to the three FBI men, who had been watching her throughout the conversation.

“That was Alex Pappas. Roth got a call from NYPD Homicide. They located a body in a drainage tunnel under the streets in the Wall Street area. The victim seems to be the guy who planted the computer virus in the Manhattan Bank.”

“Baumann?” Whitman gasped.

“Some guy Baumann hired, a computer-hacker type.”

Walsh sat bolt upright. “How do you know this?”

“Seems the victim had had a call put in to 911 after his death.”

“The hell you talking about, Agent Cahill?” Walsh thundered.

“It’s complicated. Seems this computer guy was afraid he’d be knocked off. Had some tape recorder call 911 with a report of his own homicide. I didn’t quite follow. The point is-”

“Is this for real?” Whitman said.

“Apparently so. An emergency-medical team and some guys from the fire department went down in the tunnels and found a body. Homicide and some of our people are on their way over to the victim’s apartment right now.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

Ken Alton examined the computer equipment at Leo Krasner’s apartment with the admiration of a fellow hacker. He whistled. The guy had a nice Macintosh Duo with a docking station for a removable Powerbook, a couple of enormous Apple color screens, an IBM with a Pentium processor, and a SPARC-20 Unix-based workstation, all networked together. There was also a new 1,200-d.p.i. color PostScript printer and a Xerox color scanner.

Jesus, there was even an alpha-test prototype from the Hewlett-Packard/Intel/Sun consortium, the HPIS-35. This was a scientific workstation containing a network of five high-performance RISC processors in the SPARC/Pentium family, plus three gallium-arsenide multiprocessors from HP Labs.

Very cool.

He tried to access the HPIS-35 and the SPARC-20, but a password was necessary-of course. He said, “Shit,” got to his feet, and lumbered around the apartment.

“What?” Roth asked.

Ken ignored him. He wandered around, thinking.

In the bedroom, on the nightstand, Ken found a palm-top computer. And he knew he had the problem solved.

The palm-top could be connected to the workstation by means of a spread-spectrum link. In other words, the guy could use his palm-top in the bedroom to do stuff on the workstation in the living room. And of course there was a protocol built into it that accessed the workstation by giving the password. This was for easy access.

Even geniuses got lazy once in a while, Ken knew.

Quickly he listed the files on each machine. Some of the documents looked potentially interesting, but then, on the SPARC, he came across a couple of intriguing files, intriguing because they each had a JPEG extension. JPEG was a standardized image-compression mechanism, so named for the committee that wrote the standard, the Joint Photographic Experts Group. Each file with a JPEG extension was around 39K in size, just about the right size for a good-quality black-and-white photograph, but probably not big enough for color.

Ah, Ken thought. Hence the scanner. All you do is run a photo through the scanner, which stores the image in either color or in a gray-scale. A black-and-white photo is broken down into particles, or pixels, each of which is assigned a gray-scale value between 1 and 256. The JPEG program takes this big hunk of data and identifies the redundancies in it and then compresses it. So you end up with a computer file, a binary file, a bunch of ones and zeroes. The compression certainly isn’t perfect-it’s “lossy,” as the techies call it-but it has the advantage of making extremely small files if you use the default quality setting.

Ken didn’t know exactly how JPEG worked-you heard buzz phrases like discrete cosine transforms, chrominance subsampling, and coefficient quantization-but he knew how to use it. That was all that counted.

Well, he mused, if he’s storing images, he’s got to have a display program on here, something that will grab the image and convert it, an interactive image-manipulation and display program.

He typed “xv brit.jpeg &” and hit enter. This was the command for a common display program.

“Whaddaya got there?” Roth asked, standing over Ken’s shoulder.

“We’ll see…” Ken said.

In a few seconds the screen was filled with a high-resolution photographic image of a man, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, ruggedly handsome man of around forty. Though the picture seemed to have been taken with a long lens in some kind of public place, a restaurant or something, the man’s face was perfectly clear.

“Is that the dead guy?” Roth asked.

“No,” Ken said. “Leo Krasner’s tape-recorded message to 911 said he had a picture of the man who had hired him. This has got to be one of the pictures in question.”

“Who is-?”

“I think it’s Baumann.”

With a few more keystrokes, he converted the JPEG file to PostScript, a format for printing images, and sent it over to the printer.

“Hey!” Roth shouted to the others. “I think we have our guy.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

As supervisor of the Information Processing Division of the Greenwich Trust Bank, Walter Grimmer, fifty-two, was in charge of the bank’s Moore Street facility, located just off Water Street in lower Manhattan-in the same anonymous building that housed the super-secret Network.

Grimmer had been with the bank for sixteen years, after twelve years at Chemical Bank. He didn’t particularly like his job, didn’t like his colleagues. In fact, when you came right down to it, though he was a CPA, he didn’t even enjoy accounting. Never had. He loved his wife and his two daughters and enjoyed puttering around their house in Teaneck, New Jersey. But he had already begun counting down the months until retirement.

There were many more of them.

And it was days like today that made him think seriously about early retirement. The day had started with a call from a new assistant to the bank’s chief financial officer, letting him know about an imminent visit from the FDIC. Great. How could you top that? Maybe at his next checkup the doctor would find a polyp.

Oh, the FDIC, the goddam FDIC. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was the bane of Grimmer’s existence.

The FDIC supervised all state-chartered banks, which meant banks that weren’t members of the Federal Reserve, weren’t national, didn’t have the initials “N.A.” in their legal title. They rated these banks for soundness, on a scale from one to five, one being the best. This was called a Uniform Bank Rating, the CAMEL rating. “CAMEL” was an acronym derived from a jumble of factors: capital, asset quality, management, earnings, and liquidity.

Depending on the bank’s CAMEL rating, which was always kept secret from the bank, the FDIC inspected the bank either annually or every eighteen months. The eighteen-month cycle was for banks rated one or two. Banks rated three or less, or which had assets of over $250 million, were inspected annually.

Walter Grimmer didn’t know for sure, but he suspected that Greenwich Trust rated a middling three. Which meant that every year, a team of eight to twelve FDIC examiners barged in and took over the place for as much as six weeks. They reviewed the bank’s loan portfolio, the adequacy of its capital in relation to the risk of its portfolio, the stability of its earnings, its liquidity. Then they brought the whole happy adventure to a rousing finale with a wrap-up meeting with the bank’s president and executive committee.

Loads of fun. And Walter Grimmer, lucky Walter Grimmer, had the honor and privilege of serving as the bank’s liaison to the FDIC.

The guy who’d called this morning, the assistant to the chief financial officer, had phoned to let Grimmer know that for some damn reason the FDIC had to come back for an additional examination, as if once a year weren’t enough. Computer runs had been ordered. Something like a dozen boxes of documentation for the FDIC were going to be shipped in late this afternoon, and Grimmer was supposed to sign for them.

Did it have something to do with the collapse of the Manhattan Bank?

Was that why the FDIC was making a surprise visit?

“Where the heck am I going to put a dozen boxes?” Grimmer had wailed. “I don’t have room here for a dozen boxes!”

“I know,” the assistant said sympathetically. “The delivery service will bring them right down to the basement of the building and leave them there until FDIC shows up tomorrow. Just overnight. Then it’s their problem.”

“The basement? We can’t leave them there!”

“Mr. Grimmer, we’ve already cleared it with the building manager. Just make sure you’re there to sign for them, okay?”

The deliveryman from Metro-Quik Courier Service groaned as he pulled his delivery truck up to the modern-looking building on Moore Street, in the Wall Street area. The damned street was paved with cobblestones, which really did a number on the truck’s suspension. It was a narrow, one-way street that ran from Pearl Street to Water Street. He’d had no problem picking up the boxes at the storage facility in Tribeca, but he’d gotten lost several times trying to find the downtown facility of the Greenwich Trust Bank.

At least the boxes were filled with paper, not floor tiles or something. He loaded the twelve sealed boxes, each sealed with bright-yellow tape marked FDIC EVIDENCE, onto a dolly and moved them into the basement of the building.

“Sign right here, please,” he told Walter Grimmer as he handed him a clipboard.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

Vigiani burst into Sarah’s office without knocking. “We got a match.”

“A match?”

“I mean, the NSA did. That phone intercept. We got the names to attach to the voices now.”

“Let’s hear.”

“A guy named Martin Lomax, who’s apparently a close associate of Malcolm Dyson’s, and someone named Johann Kinzel, who’s Dyson’s money man.”

“Great work. I think we just locked this up. We’ve got a prosecutable case now. Bravo.”

Pappas knocked on the door and said, “Sarah, we need to talk.”

She knew Pappas’s face well, knew it was serious. “What is it?”

“There’s been another murder,” he said. “There was a body found in an alley in your neighborhood. The report just came in.”

“Whose?”

“Sarah,” Pappas said, putting his arm around her, “it’s Peter.”

Hunched over the toilet, vomiting.

Bitter tears burning her nostrils. She wanted to call Jared, wanted to go get him now, didn’t know what to do. There was a right time, a right way, to tell an eight-year-old something so wrenching.

Then she remembered she had given him her cellular phone this morning to keep in his backpack, in case she needed to reach him. In case of emergency.

But no. She couldn’t call him. It had to be done in person.

It would be harder because of Jared’s anger toward his father. The wounds were already open; the pain would be unbearable.

She needed to go for a walk.

Roth called headquarters, asked for Sarah. Pappas answered. “She’s not here,” he said. “I don’t know where she is. I just gave her the bad news about her ex-husband. She left about fifteen minutes ago.”

“I’ll try her at home,” Roth said. “If you see her, tell her we got our guy.”

“What do you-”

“I mean, we got a picture-a photo of Baumann.”

“What are you talking about?”

But Roth hung up, and then dialed Sarah’s apartment. He got the machine, calculated she might be on the way home, maybe to get her kid, so he left a message.

In a coffee shop across the street from headquarters, Sarah sat, red-eyed, dazed.

Peter was dead.

How could it possibly be a coincidence? What if Baumann had meant to get her, and had got to Peter instead-Peter, who was in town and might well have tried to go to her apartment…

Jared. Was Jared next?

She had to get back to work immediately, today of all days, but somebody had to get Jared out of YMCA day camp. Pappas couldn’t do it. She needed him at headquarters.

At a pay phone on the street, she called Brea, the babysitter, then hung up before the phone began to ring. Brea was at her parents’ house in Albany, upstate. The fall-back sitter, Catherine, was in classes all day.

Then she dialed Brian’s number.

In the small, unfurnished apartment, Baumann listened to the message Lieutenant George Roth was leaving on Sarah’s answering machine.

Leo Krasner hadn’t been bluffing. A phone call would be made, he said. He had a photograph, he said.

Frozen, Baumann sat with his mind racing. Tomorrow was the 26th, the anniversary of the day on which U.S. federal marshals had killed Malcolm Dyson’s wife and daughter, the day Dyson wanted it all to happen.

But now they had a photograph.

They had his face.

Sarah would recognize the face. He hadn’t counted on that.

Well, the bomb was already in place. Waiting until tomorrow meant the entire mission might be sabotaged.

He could not take that chance. He would have to move things up. Dyson would certainly understand.

He would have to move now.

Then suddenly another phone rang. This call was being forwarded from his display apartment, the one where he took Sarah. Baumann could tell by the ring.

It was Sarah.

“Brian, please,” she said, her voice verging on the hysterical. “I need to ask you a favor.”

Roth slammed down the phone in Leo Krasner’s apartment.

“Shit,” he said. “Where the hell is Sarah?” Then he said loudly, to the apartment in general, “You think this guy maybe has a fax around here somewhere?”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

Outside the YMCA on West Sixty-third Street, Henrik Baumann stood, dressed in a blue polo shirt and chinos and sunglasses.

Jared emerged, looking disoriented. He smiled when he saw Baumann, came up to him and gave him a high-five.

Baumann flagged a cab. They got in, and he directed the driver to head toward Wall Street.

“Where are we going?” Jared asked.

“Your mom wanted us to go for a little outing.”

“But the camp director said you were going to take me home because my mom couldn’t get off from work.”

Baumann shook his head absently.

“The director said Mom wanted you to take me right home,” Jared said, puzzled, “’cause something important was going on.”

“We’re going on a little outing,” Baumann said quietly.

It was a few minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon, still the lunch hour, so the streets bustled despite the weather. Although he was moving the operation up by an entire day, the timing was still good, because it was the middle of the day, when the Network operated at maximum capacity.

When the cab reached Moore Street, it pulled up before the new twenty-story building that housed the Network’s computer facilities. Baumann got out with Jared.

“What’s this, Brian?” Jared asked. “Where are we?”

“It’s a surprise,” Baumann said.

He took Jared around to the rear of the building and found the yellow-painted emergency-exit door he’d identified earlier.

He pulled out the key he had made a few days before, unlocked the door, and entered, taking the service stairs to the basement.

“Sarah,” Vigiani said as Sarah entered headquarters. “There’s a fax coming in for you. Slow as shit.”

“Who’s it from?”

“Roth. Says he’s got a photograph of Baumann.”

Her heart suddenly hammering, Sarah went over to the fax machine. Now she saw why it was coming through so maddeningly slowly. It was a photograph. The bottom was coming out first, a thick white border, and then a dark area, millimeter by millimeter. This could take forever.

She stood over the fax. The suspense was unbearable. In two minutes, the photograph had come through almost completely.

She looked at the face, felt her insides twist.

She looked again. She felt vertiginous, about to lose consciousness. The face seemed to rush toward her like a speeding train, like some special effect in a movie. She gasped.

Brian.