The Zero Hour

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

Baumann switched on the lights. The basement was low-ceilinged, bare, and quite large, the size of the entire floor above it. He had, of course, been down here several days earlier to survey it, and he knew where the furnace room was, where the supply rooms were, and which part of the basement lay directly beneath the computer facility.

“Why are we here?” asked Jared.

“I told you. I have to do an errand before I take you home.”

Jared shook his head. “Mom’s in trouble or something. She said it’s something serious.” He raised his voice. “I should go home now.”

“Soon. When I’m done with my errands. And please keep your voice down.”

Backpack on his back, hands on his hips, Jared looked at Baumann defiantly. “Hey. Take me home now.”

“I told you, soon.”

“Now.” Jared’s voice echoed.

Baumann moved suddenly, quickly clapping his hand over Jared’s mouth as Jared flailed his arms, kicked, his screams muffled.

Sarah could handle a great many things, from threats to the national security to kidnappings to murder; she had acquired an ability to steel herself against fear and great tension; but nothing could shield her against this. Not her years of training, not her professional experience, not the methodical flow charts she’d been taught, the A-then-B-then-C techniques that served so well in emergencies.

But they did not work when your son has been kidnapped by a professional terrorist, and Sarah knew that was in effect what had happened, except that she had voluntarily, unthinkingly, turned her son over to the kidnapper.

She felt sick to her stomach.

Her chest tightened. The blood roared in her ears.

My God oh my God oh my God.

Everything took on a jerky, unreal quality, as if she were in some old newsreel, jumpy and badly spliced.

Years ago, when Jared was eight months old and they were living in Frankfurt while she worked Lockerbie, she was trying to go over some case files while Jared crawled around the apartment floor. There was a spiral staircase in the middle of the living room that she knew was treacherous to a crawling baby. It was steep and made of steel. She shuddered to think of what would happen if the baby ever fell down the stairs. She’d blocked off the landing with an overturned chair.

She must have been too absorbed in a file, because she suddenly heard a crash and then all was quiet. She looked up and saw what had happened. Jared had managed to wriggle beneath the chair and had plummeted down the staircase.

She felt her stomach turn cold. Everything in the world stopped. She found herself standing over the staircase, staring in shock. Her mind was operating in slow motion, but so, thank God, was the rest of the universe. Jared had fallen down half the stairs, his tiny head lodged between the railing and a riser. He was silent.

She was convinced he was dead. She had killed this beautiful little being by looking away for an instant. Her fragile little son, with the winning, gummy smile and his two brand-new teeth, that little kid who had his entire life ahead of him and depended upon her utterly to protect him, was dead.

She leaped down the staircase and grabbed the still body and could only see the back of Jared’s head. Was he dead, was he unconscious? Would he be blind, paralyzed for life? Suddenly Jared let out a great, blood-curdling scream, and she yelled with relief. She tried to pull his head out, but it was stuck. Pulling and twisting as gently as she could, she extricated his head from the gap between stair and riser and looked at his bruised red face and saw he was all right. She cuddled him to her shoulder and chanted, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

He was fine. Ten minutes later he stopped crying, and she gave him a bottle of formula.

Only then did she realize how much of a hostage a mother really was.

Now, her mind spun with thoughts as she sank into a chair, momentarily weak and dizzy.

That “Brian Lamoreaux” was the cover for a South African-trained terrorist named Henrik Baumann was grotesque, yet in some horrible way logical. What did she know about the man except that he had tried to save Jared and her in Central Park…

… in a setup, that was suddenly clear. He had arranged the mugging-probably had paid some eager teenagers to attack this little boy for the sheer fun of it and some cash besides, a good-faith payment up front and the rest afterward. Then he had “happened” to be there, and had rushed in to help them out-a clever way to meet a woman suspicious of this new city. He must have known they didn’t have his photograph, or else he would certainly have never dared to insinuate himself into her life; the risk of exposure would otherwise have been far too great. He acted the bumbling, frail intellectual, the exact opposite of his true persona, but could not disguise his naked body-his muscular, powerful torso, his broad thighs, his well-defined biceps. Why had she given so little thought to his superbly conditioned, sinewy body? Yes, men worked out these days, so why wouldn’t a Canadian architecture professor? But why hadn’t she suspected that there was something not right about this man she knew hardly at all?

She thought of the few nights they had made love-what a misnomer, what a fraudulently inappropriate phrase; no, they had had sex-and felt a shiver of revulsion and a wave of nausea.

Revulsion, not betrayal. She cared now only about Jared.

Everything moved in slow motion, stop-action photography, unreal. She was trapped in a nightmare.

After a minute, the paralyzing fear gave way to steely resolve. She ordered all members of the task force to assemble at once, then she put in a request to the Department of Energy to mobilize the Nuclear Emergency Search Team.

She had to find Jared. To find Jared was to find Baumann; to find Baumann was now a matter of pressing concern to the entire FBI, to the City of New York.

Baumann surveyed the twelve banker boxes, stacked in four piles of three each, lined up against one wall. Each box was sealed with bright antitamper tape marked FDIC EVIDENCE.

He knew that no one in the building would have touched those boxes during the few hours he’d have to leave them there. After all, he had arranged with the Greenwich Trust Bank for these boxes of FDIC “evidence” to be held in the basement for an audit tomorrow. The officer at the Greenwich Trust Bank had in turn contacted the building manager and secured his approval to leave the boxes in the basement storage area overnight. The space was often used for deliveries, so the building manager had no objections.

The boxes contained the C-4, but since plastic explosive is roughly twice as heavy as the paper that was supposed to be inside, he had only half-filled the boxes with C-4 and then placed stacks of phony bank papers on top of the explosive. The weight of each box was therefore reasonable, and in any case, sealed as they were, no one would dare open them.

It made sense, certainly, for these boxes to be stacked here, but the precise location was no accident. They were against the elevator shaft, in the core of the building. Like most buildings, this one had an extremely strong core and was cantilevered out from that. To set off the bomb here was to maximize the chance of bringing the building down and ensuring that the Network was destroyed. It was a simple matter of structural engineering.

And just a floor above were the Unisys mainframes of the Network.

From his briefcase he drew out a roll of what appeared to be white clothesline. With a commercially available pre-inked rubber stamp, he had marked it ANTI-TAMPER/DO NOT REMOVE/TAMPER DETECTION SYSTEM IN OPERATION. He looped the cord securely over and around the twelve boxes several times.

This was the DetCord, the diameter of which was two-tenths of an inch. One end of it, tied in a triple-roll knot, he fed into one of the boxes and into the C-4 explosive.

Then he drew out from his briefcase a black box with lights on its brushed aluminum lid, labeled EVIDENTIARY SECURITY SYSTEM. Although it appeared to be the security-system control box, this was in fact the fusing mechanism. One had been confiscated by the FBI, but another had arrived by separate means, as he had arranged. He connected the mechanism to the DetCord, which was connected directly to the C-4. The pager, a fall-back option, would not be necessary now.

The fusing mechanism included an omnidirectional microwave detector.

This was quite a clever device. It had been constructed to defeat the bomb-disposal people, assuming they showed up in time, which was highly unlikely.

It was a volumetric device that worked on the principle of the Doppler shift. In effect, it was a booby trap. The area around the bomb, in a radius of twenty-five feet, was now filled with microwave energy. A steady-state pattern had been established. If a human being walked through the field at anything even close to a normal pace, the waves would be reflected, and the sensor would close a circuit, detonating the bomb.

He was about to depress a button on top of the fusing mechanism when he heard a voice.

“How’re you doing?” asked a guard, a slender young black man with a shaved head and a brass stud earring in his left ear. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

“Fine,” Baumann said, smiling jovially. “How ’bout yourself?”

“All right,” the guard said. “What you got there?”

“One shitload of documents,” Baumann said.

“So, you’re with the bank?”

“FDIC, actually,” Baumann said, hoping the guard wouldn’t ask how he’d gotten into the basement. “Something wrong?”

“You’re going to have to move those on out of here,” the guard said. “Can’t stay down here. Fire department regulations.”

Baumann looked at the guard curiously. “Gosh,” he said. “I thought my boss cleared this with the building manager-a Mr. Talliaferro, right?”

“That’s the guy, but he didn’t tell me anything about leaving any boxes.”

Baumann suddenly heard a clanging sound from not far away in the basement, and he wondered whether the guard heard it too. He shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Man, this whole day’s been like this,” he said. “You want me to get my boss to call this guy Talliaferro? I mean, these’ll be gone first thing in the morning.” He watched the guard keenly, wondering whether he could hear the clanging, calculating whether he could kill the man right here, in a busy office building in the middle of the day, whether it was worth the risk.

The guard hesitated, looked at his watch. It was clear he didn’t want to wait around for someone to call someone else who’d then call him and say, yeah, it’s okay.

“All right, forget it,” the guard said. “’Long as they’re gone first thing tomorrow morning, like you say.”

The clanging grew louder, more insistent. It had to be the boy, whom he’d locked in a supply closet.

“Oh, they will be,” Baumann said with a groan. “I can’t do my job without ’em. They’ll be gone. I promise.”

“Hmm,” the guard said, nodding, as he turned away. He paused. “You hear something?”

“I don’t think so.”

“There. Banging.”

Baumann pretended to listen. “Sounds like the old water pipes knocking.”

“Over there,” the guard said, pointing.

The clanging was rhythmic, insistent. A regular tattoo. Clearly made by a human being.

Baumann drew closer to where the guard was standing, as if trying to listen at the same spot. “I still think…” he started to say as he reached over with both powerful hands and broke the man’s neck, and then he finished the sentence ruminatively: “… it’s the old pipes knocking.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

“Sarah-” Pappas said, holding a phone up in the air.

“What is it?”

“It’s Jared.”

“Oh, thank God,” Sarah said, and pressed the flashing extension button. “Jared!”

His voice was small and distant-sounding. “Mom?”

“Honey, are you all right?”

“I’m scared, Mom.” He was on the verge of tears. “Brian was supposed to take me home, but he took me somewhere else-”

“But you’re okay, aren’t you? He hasn’t hurt you, has he?”

“No. Well, he put this thing in my mouth, but I got it out.”

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know. He locked me in a closet. In the basement of some building. Kind of like a big glass-and-cement building. Looked like a bank, sort of. I’ve been banging on the pipes to try to get someone’s attention.” His voice rose in pitch. “Mom, I’m scared of him.”

“Of course you are. He’s a scary person, but we’ll come get you. Honey, now tell me as much as you can about where you are, what you saw when you-”

“I think I hear voices-”

And the call was disconnected.

After twenty minutes of concentrated work, checking and rechecking all fittings and connections, Baumann was finished. The bomb was now armed, which meant that the entire basement area was off-limits. Anyone passing within twenty-five feet-a guard, a janitor, anyone-would set off the bomb, which would destroy the building, with Baumann still in it. To protect himself until he got out, he had jammed shut the external locks of all doors to the basement. They could be opened from the inside, but not the outside. After he was gone, if a bomb squad somehow managed to force a door open-well, that would be unfortunate for them.

Baumann was excited and nervous, as he was whenever he did a job, although he had never before done something of this magnitude.

He glanced at his watch. The helicopter was probably on its way to take him, and his hostage, from the roof of the building directly to Teterboro Airport, a few miles from the city. That way, there was no chance of an arrest at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport.

The helicopter pilot might not come through-Baumann trusted no one, and had considered that possibility-but it was unlikely. He had offered the pilot so much money it was impossible to imagine that he wouldn’t be there. Moreover, there were probably a dozen appropriate pilots who would have gladly taken his assignment, but this one seemed the most likely to keep the bargain, the most motivated.

“Did he hang up?” Pappas asked.

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “The line went dead. He said, ‘I think I hear voices,’ and the line went dead.”

“Either he discovered Jared, or Jared hung up so he wouldn’t be overheard. We’d better hope it’s the latter. And we’d better hope he calls again. It’s our only hope.”

“Alex, Jared doesn’t know where he is. He just knows he’s locked in a room in the basement of some kind of bank building, and that could be a thousand places.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Pappas said. “Next time he calls, we’ll run a trace.”

“It’s a cellular phone, Alex!”

“Boy, you’re so upset you’re not thinking clearly.”

“I can barely think. We can trace it, can’t we?”

When a couple of criminals kidnapped an Exxon executive a few years ago, she suddenly recalled, they’d used a cellular phone to call in their ransom demands, mistakenly thinking cellular phones can’t be traced. That had been their undoing.

“But only if Jared calls again,” Pappas said.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

There are only four places in Manhattan where a helicopter is permitted to land, four officially designated heliports. One is at West Thirtieth Street and Twelfth Avenue, by the West Side Highway; another is on East Thirty-fourth Street; still another on East Sixtieth Street.

The fourth is the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, located at Pier Six on the East River. Some people call it by its old name, the Wall Street Heliport; helicopter pilots just call it Downtown. It is run by the Port Authority of the City of New York and has twelve parking spaces for choppers.

Since space in the city is so prohibitively expensive, most of the helicopter charter companies that do business in Manhattan are located in New Jersey. One of the smaller charter companies, based at Allaire Airport in Farmingdale, New Jersey, fifty-five miles to the southwest of New York City, was Executive Class Aircraft Charters, certificated by the FAA as an air-taxi operator. Of Executive’s six full-time pilots, Dan Hammond was, at fifty-one, the oldest. Flying was a young man’s game, and there were hardly any helicopter pilots older than fifty-five. Most of them were in their late twenties or thirties. It wasn’t a matter of burnout, but of the medical exam you had to take every year to qualify. The longer you lived, the more likely you were to fail the medical, for one reason or another. And once you flunked the medical, they wouldn’t let you fly.

Dan Hammond’s ugly little secret was that his hearing was going. They hadn’t caught it on last year’s exam, but his doctor had told him he’d never pass this time. His ears had done yeoman work for fifty-one years, and now, after a quarter-century of rock concerts (the Stones, the Dead) and flying in noisy old Hueys in Vietnam, the Bell 205, and then thousands of short hops in the Jet Rangers, they were signing over and out.

It didn’t make much difference to Executive if Hammond was forced to resign. There were dozens of low-time, upstart, rookie pilots, with the bare minimum of a thousand flight hours in a turbine helicopter, waiting in the wings to take his place. So what if the low-time kids didn’t know how to fly the ASTAR, the jewel of Executive’s fleet? A hundred hours of flying time and they could do it too.

It was time to leave, anyway. The economy was lousy, which had really hit the helicopter charter companies hard. Executive Class Aircraft Charters was on the verge of bankruptcy.

It was awful good timing when some crazy rich guy called yesterday to charter the American Euro-Copter AS350B ASTAR, formerly known as the Aerospatiale ASTAR 350B. So what if his request had been peculiar, even illegal?

The rich guy wanted to be picked up in the Wall Street area, but not at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport. No, the guy was either too lazy or too self-important to get in his limo and drive a couple of blocks to Downtown.

He wanted to be picked up at a rooftop heliport-on the roof of his building. He was trying to impress some friends.

Hammond had told the guy that you just couldn’t do that anymore, not since the city ordinances changed after that horrible accident on top of the Pan Am Building when a chopper broke up landing and pieces went everywhere and even people on the street were killed. Anything outside of the four Manhattan heliports was controlled airspace. You violated that and the FAA would serve your balls for canapés.

“But what would the penalty be, really?” the rich guy wanted to know.

“A fine and suspension or revocation of my airman’s certificate,” Hammond had replied.

“Tell the FAA you had to make an emergency landing,” the rich man said.

“Emergency landing?”

“Say you were having difficulty with your controls. Say there was a flock of birds in front of you. Then they won’t revoke your airman’s certificate.”

“They’ll still fine me.”

“I’ll pay it.”

“I might lose my job,” Hammond said, though the prospect of that didn’t exactly sicken him.

“I’ll make it worth your while,” the rich man said.

Hammond had accepted the offer. All you really needed to land safely was an area one hundred feet by one hundred feet that was clear of power lines.

The rich guy had made a down payment of five thousand bucks, with the rest payable upon arrival at Teterboro Airport.

A hundred thousand bucks would be enough for Hammond and his wife to make the down payment on the bed-and-breakfast in Lenox, Massachusetts, they’d been eyeing for years.

A hundred thou would spring Dan Hammond from a job that he was about to lose anyway.

It was not a tough decision to make.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

The man from FBI Technical Services arrived twenty minutes later with a steel case of equipment. He unpacked a notebook computer and hooked it to a high-frequency ICOM receiver, an IC-R7100 with a specially designed antenna that filtered out all signals except those in the 800-to-900-megahertz range. Most cellular telephones broadcast in the 870-megahertz range.

Whenever a cellular phone broadcasts its signal, there really are two transmissions being emitted. There is the one you hear-the voice-and there is the carrier signal, which broadcasts at 4.5 MHz above the primary signal. The carrier signal gives a listening receiver the phone’s identification number, the frequency it is transmitting on, and the “cell,” or area, in which the caller is located.

All the technician had to do now was to wait for Jared to call again. Once the call came in, he would monitor the signal 4.5 MHz above the frequency of the call, thereby zeroing in on the cellular identification number.

That number would next be programmed into the linked computer, which was equipped with special law-enforcement software and had been preprogrammed with all existing cellular frequencies, provided by the FCC.

Cellular telephone calls constantly jump frequencies as the caller moves between cells, so the cellular phone tells the receiving cell-by means of the carrier frequency signal-when to do the “hand-off,” when to switch frequencies, and to which one, depending on which cell is strongest.

Knowing which cellular identification number to look for, the computer can tune the receiver, ever scanning, ever running its search program. That way it can quickly identify which cell the call is being made from.

With Jared inside a building-i.e., stationary-the task would probably be easier. That meant he was located within one “cell,” presumably somewhere in Manhattan.

If, that is, he called again.

Seven minutes after the technician arrived at Operation MINOTAUR’s headquarters, he did.

Sarah picked up the phone and heard Jared whisper: “Mom-”

“Jared, oh, thank God. You’re all right?”

“Yeah.” He said it with a trace of his usual petulance, which made Sarah smile with relief.

“Now, Jared, listen carefully. Don’t hang up, whatever you do. What does the building look like?”

“It’s-it’s a building, Mom, a modern building, I don’t know!”

“What’s the name of the bank?”

“It’s only on the first floor-”

“Which bank?”

“I think it’s Greenwich something-”

“Greenwich Trust! Jared, can you get out of there?”

“The room’s locked. It’s like totally dark in here.”

“Where is he? Jared, what’s he doing right now?”

“He’s-” Jared lowered his voice to a whisper that was almost inaudible. “He’s coming toward me. I can hear him right outside the door.”

Sarah’s heart drummed in her chest like a hummingbird’s. “Oh, God, Jared. Be careful.”

The technician, hunched at the receiver next to Sarah, said, “Getting there. Keep him on longer.”

She heard a voice in the background, a man’s voice, shouting something, and then she heard the phone clatter to the ground, and then there was Jared’s voice, a faint cry. “Help me!”

“Five more seconds!” the technician shouted.

But the phone was dead.

Panicked, Sarah turned around, saw Pappas watching wide-eyed, saw the technician hunched over the receiver.

“You didn’t-” she said, afraid to ask whether he had traced the call.

“Not yet,” he admitted.

“Oh, Jesus!”

“No, wait,” the technician said.

“But the line’s disconnected!”

“That’s all right,” he said. “The phone’s still on.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whether the phone’s in use or not,” the tech said, his eyes not leaving the computer screen, “still transmits… eight seven two point oh six megahertz…”

“What?” Sarah said.

“Long as the phone’s turned on-whether it’s in use or not-as long as the phone is powered on, it keeps transmitting back and forth to the closest cell. That’s how you can tell the strength of the signal before you use the phone. It’s-Yes! I got it!”

The open door to the supply closet cast a bright light on Jared, who, Baumann now saw, was speaking on a cellular phone. Who would have thought it? Baumann grabbed the child and placed a gag in his mouth. Over it he pressed a short piece of duct tape.

“Let’s go, little one,” he said, more to himself than to the boy. “Time to get going.”

CHAPTER NINETY

The cellular telephone company that served Sarah’s Motorola was NYNEX Mobile, which has 560 cell sites in the northeastern United States. In Manhattan, NYNEX has between thirty and forty cell sites; it prefers not to make public the precise figure.

When a call is placed from a cellular phone, whether mounted in a car or hand-held, the signal is relayed to the closest cellular site, which is little more than an antenna connected to sensitive radio-frame equipment. There are two types of antennas: directional, which is a rectangular box measuring three feet by one foot; and omnidirectional, which is straight and cylindrical, about an inch thick.

In cities like New York, these antennas are usually mounted on the roofs of buildings, except where a building is particularly tall, in which case they are mounted on the side of a building. The brains and guts of the cellular site, however, occupy an area approximately the size of a twelve-by-six-foot room, usually in leased space within the building itself. There, large radio-frame equipment receives and processes the signals, then sends them via telephone lines to regular telephone-company switching centers.

A cell may be as large as several square miles or as small as one building. This is because of the peculiarities of how Manhattan is built. The problem is not population density but topography: the profusion of extremely tall buildings with relatively narrow streets below. This makes it difficult for radio waves to travel to street level-where most cellular phones are used.

Because of the topography, for instance, there is a cell site in Rockefeller Center that serves an area of no more than two square blocks. There is even a cell site in a large Wall Street-area building that covers only that building.

The Wall Street region presents a number of problems for NYNEX Mobile, for several reasons. There is a large density of people in the area who use cellular phones. Also, many of those people use their cellular phones inside buildings, most of which are old, solidly constructed, thick-walled-and therefore difficult for radio waves to permeate. And the area has the same topographical challenges as Midtown-very tall buildings built on very narrow streets.

NYNEX Mobile compensates for those difficulties in two ways: by mounting some of their directional antennas on the sides of buildings, pointed down at the street, to maximize reception; and by placing more antennas per square mile in the region-four in the New York stock market area alone.

There are more cellular sites in the Wall Street area than anywhere else in the city, which means that each cellular site is relatively small-an area of a few blocks, instead of a few miles. This simple fact of telecommunications life in Manhattan turned out to be the very break Sarah needed.

NYNEX Cellular Site Number 269 was an area of approximately three irregularly shaped city blocks almost at the southernmost tip of Manhattan Island, near the South Street Seaport. The omnidirectional antenna received and transmitted signals to and from all NYNEX-serviced car phones and cellular phones situated within a chunk of real estate bordered by Water Street, Broad Street, Whitehall Street, and the one-block-long Stone Street. Running parallel to Stone, and dividing the almost-but-not-quite-rectangle into three wedges, were two short streets, Bridge and Pearl. Jutting into the rectangle from the Water Street side, and ending at Pearl, was Moore Street, one block long and paved in cobblestone.

Contained within this area are the blue-glass tower of the New York Health and Racquet Club; a large, twenty-story NYNEX building; and, across Water Street, a new forty-story office-building tower adorned with art deco ornamentation and built around a sizable plaza. This is One New York Plaza; beneath it is a shopping arcade, which can be entered at the corner of Water and Broad. On Pearl Street is the immense forty-story blue-glass tower called the Broad Financial Center, headquarters of the NASDAQ Financial Exchange. Across Whitehall is a pair of black forty-story towers, One State Street Plaza and Battery Park Plaza.

A team of twenty-two uniformed cops and FBI street agents was dispatched immediately to search the area for any building that contained a sign for the Greenwich Trust Bank.

A cell site is not a precise designation: there are areas of overlap, sections of streets that may be serviced by one of two or even three different cells. It was clear, however, that the cell site that was transmitting back and forth to Sarah’s Motorola phone was Cell Site 269. Jared was stationary, located within one building, so there was no handing-off between cell sites to complicate things.

Moreover, each NYNEX cell site is configured into three “phases,” which divide the area into three segments: alpha, beta, and gamma. If the cell site is a circular pattern, as it roughly is, each phase of each antenna serves one-third of the area of that circle.

From the carrier frequency signal, the FBI tech was soon able to determine that Jared was transmitting from the gamma phase of Cell Site 269, which narrowed the search down to no larger than a one-square-block area. This meant the area around Moore Street, between Pearl and Water.

One of the search team assigned to the Wall Street area, a rookie cop named Julio Seabra, turned right up Moore Street, which was narrow and paved in cobblestone. For some reason, there were security cameras on the second-floor level of the buildings here, trained on the street. And then he saw a gleaming new twenty-story structure of glass and steel. There, at street level, was a two-foot-square brass plaque indicating the presence of an office of the Greenwich Trust Bank.

Officer Seabra stared at the sign for a few seconds before he remembered to radio the command center.

“We got the address,” Pappas shouted.

“Oh, thank God,” Sarah said. “Where?”

“Not a skyscraper or anything. Some twenty-story building right off Water Street, on Moore.”

“What’s in it?”

“A Greenwich Trust office on the street level, which is how the street cop pegged it. Not a branch office or anything, but some administrative offices-”

His desk phone rang, and he picked it up before the first ring was finished. “Yep?” He listened for a few seconds, then his eyes became round. “Christ almighty.”

He hung up the phone. “On the mezzanine level of that building, unmarked and basically invisible to the public, is a huge data-processing center called the Network, which is-”

“All right,” Sarah interrupted. “Alex, I want you and two junior people to stay here. One is to man my phone in case Jared calls again. The other stays by the STU-III in case of direct contact from CIA or anyone else. You run the show here. Roth, you I want downtown with me, directing operations, being traffic cop. Everyone else reports immediately to NYO Command Center.”

“Right.”

“Okay, I need you to establish phone contact with whoever’s in charge of the Network. If there’s any way they can do it, I want them to shut down operations immediately. Notify all member banks to halt all funds transfers. And get us a cruiser immediately.”

“You got it.”

“I want the entire block evacuated, including all surrounding buildings.”

Roth snapped, “Are you crazy? You know how many huge motherfucker office buildings are down there? There’s New York Plaza, One State Street, Battery Park, a NYNEX building, the Broad Financial Center-”

“Do it,” Sarah said. “Notify the police commissioner-we’ve got the authority-and block off the streets with pylons and sawhorses and cruisers and patrolmen, whatever they’ve got. Block off sidewalks. I want every patrolman they can get down there. No one is to enter the area. I want every building evacuated.”

“Jesus,” Roth said. “If Baumann’s in the Network building and everyone rushes out of there at once, we’ll never find the guy.”

“Roth, my son is in there.”

“Sarah.” It was Pappas. “You’re both right. We have to empty the building at once, but at the same time we have to look over everyone who leaves.”

“Impossible, Alex!” Sarah said.

“No. It’s not impossible. Remember Mecca?”

“Mecca? What are you-”

“1979. The Grand Mosque in Mecca. A textbook example of this.”

“Alex, we don’t have any time for anything complicated.”

“Sarah! It’s not complicated. We need to round up some riot-control buses, that’s all.”

He explained quickly.

“Do it,” she said. “And somebody help me find my vest.”

The police car sped down Seventh Avenue, siren wailing and turret lights flashing, turned left onto Houston, then right onto Broadway.

In the backseat, as Roth made arrangements on his cell phone, Sarah watched Broadway go by in a blur.

Oh God oh God oh God, she thought.

Jared. Oh God.

If Baumann had taken Jared hostage, how had Jared managed to make phone calls undetected?

Where was he?

She heard Roth say, “A thousand pounds of C-4. Assume, worst case, the whole load is in the bomb.” He paused to listen, but only for a moment, and then he went on: “That’s enough to bring down the entire building, depending on placement of the device. Possibly kill everyone inside. Definitely do severe damage to neighboring buildings and pedestrians.”

Sarah’s mind raced, her body racked with tension. To save Jared was to stop the incident. This she repeated like a mantra, because she could think only of her son. She knew, but would never admit, that suddenly she didn’t care about the case, didn’t care about her work, didn’t even care about the incalculable damage the bomb was about to do.

The rain had stopped, but it was still overcast, the skies a metallic gray.

Would he kill Jared?

He had murdered-both wholesale and retail, as she thought of it. Retail murders were one-on-one, wholesale the acts of terrorism he’d engineered. In some ways, retail murders were the most chilling, and he was capable of snuffing out an individual life, face to face. Would he really hesitate to kill Jared if he deemed it necessary?

Well, perhaps. He hadn’t killed Jared yet, or so she hoped. Perhaps he planned to use him as a hostage, as insurance, as a human shield. She prayed Jared was still alive.

How had she been fooled so easily? How could she, so suspicious by profession and by training, have been taken in? Why had she been so willing to see him as a warm and likable man? How could he have concealed so well the essence of who he was?

He was a master of disguise, yes, but perhaps it wasn’t so hard to devise a disguise when your face was unknown. But it was his physical awkwardness that had deflected her suspicion. Had she not wanted to see the contradiction, really?

By the time the cruiser turned off Whitehall to Water and swung the wrong way up Moore Street, an immense crowd was already gathered in front of the building. Blue and red police lights were flashing; sirens were screaming from several different directions. Policemen were stopping and re-routing traffic on Water Street back down Whitehall or Broad. The area around Moore Street was blocked off with sawhorses marked POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS. Several fire trucks came barreling down Water Street, their sirens wailing. A couple of TV vans were already there, although how they’d been alerted so quickly, Sarah had no idea. So too was the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit.

As she jumped from the car, she wondered, How could everyone have gotten here so quickly?

Then she saw the answer. The NYPD Bomb Squad had arrived and taken over the scene, as they always did. Someone had called them in, probably one of the cops on the scene. At any moment the NEST teams would arrive and then there would be a turf battle from hell. Unless she stopped it.

She looked up at the building and whispered, “Jared.”

CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

As the hour approached, Dan Hammond began to wonder whether the rich guy would really come through with the hundred grand he’d promised for flying into controlled airspace and landing on the roof of a Wall Street building.

True, the guy had showed up in person and put down five thousand bucks in cash. That was a good sign. The usual procedure was to give a credit-card guarantee on Amex or Visa, and then Executive billed you after the flight.

The company said they charged $825 per flight hour, but you never got into a helicopter for less than fourteen hundred dollars, to be honest. So five thousand bucks was a hell of a lot, but it wasn’t such a crazy amount to put down.

This is probably my last job for Executive Class Aircraft Charter, Hammond reflected. Fitting that it should be in the best chopper they had, the ASTAR.

He loved flying the ASTAR, loved the look and feel of it. It was a French-made helicopter-actually, it was produced by a French-American firm-and so it didn’t operate in quite the same way as American choppers. That made it a tough helicopter to fly.

For one thing, the ASTAR’s rotor system turned the opposite way from the American rotor system. When you were trimming it in flight, you had to put in opposite control movements for antitorque, to keep the nose straight. Instead of applying left pedal when you added power, you applied right pedal.

Once you got used to that, it was a pleasure. It was powered by a French jet engine, the Turbo Mecca, a 640-shaft-horsepower engine. It cruised at 120 knots, the fastest single there was. It was also expensive, costing over a million dollars.

But it was a beauty. The fuselage was of a unique design, sleekly built and sweeping in appearance. It was jet-black, with titanium and plum striping and a silver lightning bolt down the expanse of fuselage. Its windows were deep-tinted. Its blades were blue, its interior tan. There were even oriental rugs to make the executive passengers feel at home. It seated four passengers, and one pilot, comfortably; it was air-conditioned and equipped with a telephone and a CD player.

The ASTAR was different, too, in that it had a panoramic passenger area, a 180-degree field of view. Your basic American helicopter had club seating, whereas this was like the interior of a luxury car. The pilot and passengers occupied the same cabin space. Also, its cabin was far quieter than those in American choppers, in which you really couldn’t hold a conversation. In the ASTAR you could talk in normal tones.

Altogether, it was a spiffy helicopter, Dan Hammond thought, just the right one for his farewell flight.

CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

At McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, three Lockheed C-141 Starlifter aircraft were landing, bearing multiple cargoes of gear on pallets. There were radios and beepers and cellular phones and PBX telephone equipment; there was every tool and widget detector imaginable, from screwdrivers to Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns and Haley & Webber E182 Multi-Burst stun grenades employing high candela and decibel levels: a dazzling array of state-of-the-art weapons, surveillance devices, communications equipment, and radiation-detection equipment for locating clandestine bombs or stolen fissionable material.

Separately, over the course of several hours, more than thirty members of the NEST render-safe team had arrived on commercial flights from around the country.

“All right, I want everything from Broad to Whitehall, and from Water to Pearl, secured and blocked off,” the man in the BOMB SQUAD wind-breaker announced to the squad members milling around him.

Sarah marched up to him and flashed her credentials. “Special Agent Cahill, FBI,” she said. “I’m in charge of this operation.”

“Oh, really?” the commanding officer of the Bomb Squad said, giving her a bored glance. “Not anymore, you’re not.”

The New York City Police Department’s Bomb Squad is the largest and oldest full-time bomb unit in the country. Operating out of the Sixth Precinct, at 233 West Tenth Street, between Hudson and Bleecker, it handles some thirteen hundred calls a year to look for and disarm explosives. The squad is made up of six teams of two detectives, labeled A through F; the commanding officer is a lieutenant, and below him are four sergeants.

The Bomb Squad is part of the NYPD’s Scientific Research Division, which is a unit of the Detective Bureau. But to be precise, though squad members wear gold badges, they are not detectives but “Detective-Specialists,” which is something of a slap in the face to this all-volunteer, brave-to-the-point-of-foolhardiness group.

According to the Patrol Guide protocol, the Bomb Squad can appear on a scene only when called in by the Emergency Service Unit. They had been summoned on this occasion by ESU after one of the patrolmen searching the area realized there was a serious possibility there was a bomb in the building. The patrolman was simply doing his duty.

Until NEST’s arrival, Sarah didn’t have a card to play: the Bomb Squad was in charge. But once NEST showed up, the unit’s Rules of Engagement-the most sweeping and comprehensive of any U.S. elite force-would place it unquestionably in charge.

There was a squealing of brakes. Sarah saw with enormous relief that NEST had arrived.

A CNN reporter was doing a stand-up in front of the tumultuous crowd surrounding the Network building on Moore Street.

Pappas and Ranahan stared at the television screen.

“… a bomb in this building,” the reporter was saying, “which houses a sensitive and highly secret Wall Street computer facility. In the basement of the building, according to police sources, there is believed to be as much as one thousand pounds of C-4 plastic explosive.”

Then, footage of hordes of people evacuating neighboring buildings. Several people had been trampled in the ensuing panic. None had been killed, but several were injured.

“Police sources tell CNN that all entrances and exits to the Moore Street building have been blocked off except the main, front entrance. After a standoff between federal and local authorities, a team from the Department of Energy known as NEST, the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, has taken control of the scene.”

There was a shot of the front of the Network building. Six buses had been lined up, three on a side, forming a narrow passageway, a chute, that led directly from the building’s front doors to a courtyard across the street.

The buses looked like regular city buses except for one crucial difference. Steel plates attached to the sides of each bus had been lowered to the pavement so that no one could crawl out underneath them. In effect, the buses formed high metal walls that would keep anyone from escaping. Everyone evacuating the building had to pass between the specially modified buses to the courtyard, where everyone could be inspected or even questioned if need be.

This same method had been used in 1979, when armed Sunni fundamentalists had seized the holiest of Islamic shrines in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, with twenty thousand people trapped inside. Saudi troops had to figure out how to get the religious pilgrims out without letting the terrorists lose themselves in the escaping herd. They used riot-control buses to construct a corridor through which the pilgrims were funneled to a nearby stadium, and there questioned.

Pappas smiled to himself.

Fire department volunteers stood both inside and outside the front entrance, rushing the panicked workers through the revolving front door three at a time and into the bus corridor. Once safely in the courtyard across the street, each person was looked over by a small team of observers from MINOTAUR, led by Vigiani and Sarah.

The process did not go smoothly at all. The lobby swarmed with people, many banging against the plate-glass windows in terror.

“I’m going to die in here!” one woman kept shouting.

“Let us out!” a man yelled.

The building’s windows, like those of many office buildings in the city, could not be opened, but on the street people could hear thudding. In one office on the sixth floor a metal desk chair was hurled through the plate-glass window, scattering shards of glass over the sidewalk. A voice screamed out in terrible agony, “I can’t stand it!” and then a woman in her early twenties jumped from the jagged hole.

The impact of the pavement hurt the woman badly, broke several bones, but she survived the fall, which the police and fire department crews feared would encourage others to do the same.

The commander of the Bomb Squad, though chafing at being supplanted by NEST, picked up a bullhorn and announced: “Stay in your offices! There is no reason to panic! There is time!” But he didn’t believe what he himself was saying. Poor bastards, he thought.

For the most part, Sarah and Vigiani were able to scan the emerging workers at great speed. Baumann was a master of disguise, but from a distance of a foot or two, he would not pass by undetected.

A few men were detained-bearded men, including one with long hair who worked in computers in a law firm on the second floor-but after a few seconds of additional inspection they were cleared.

“I’m going to sue your fucking ass,” the long-haired man said.

“Good luck,” Sarah said tightly.

There was another crash, as a desk was hurled out of a twelfth-floor window. Fragments of glass hit several onlookers, drawing blood, though no one was seriously hurt.

“Anyone attempting to leave except through the front entrance will be detained,” a metallic voice thundered.

“Who the fuck cares?” a middle-aged man shouted from the lobby. “We’re all going to die!”

Sarah turned to Vigiani. “All right, now you take over. I’m going in.”

“You’re… what?” gasped Vigiani.

“Going in the building,” Sarah said, striding off.

“You’re out of your mind!” Vigiani shouted after her.

“Yeah,” Sarah said softly to herself, “but I’m the boss.”

CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

At the same time as the police and firemen were herding office workers out of the building, NEST had already begun to move equipment up a loading ramp and into the rear service entrance of the building.

They were escorted by a tight blue knot of uniformed patrolmen who made sure no one was able to escape the building as they entered. Several persons attempted to force their way past the NEST men but were grabbed by the policemen.

The first to enter was the NEST commander, Dr. Richard Payne, a tall, lanky man in his forties with a head of prematurely gray hair. Dr. Payne, who had a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, was in his regular life a special projects manager in the Advanced Technology Division of the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. In the U.S. government’s bureaucratic hierarchy he was a GS-15. He had wide experience in nuclear weapons and was considered brilliant by everyone who’d ever dealt with him.

Alongside him was his number two on this assignment, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Freddie Suarez, from the 112th Explosives Ordnance Division Detachment in Fort Ritchie, Maryland. Behind them the other members of the team pushed carts bearing enormous and impressive-looking equipment.

In normal circumstances, theirs was a fiendishly difficult job. Like all bomb squads, they were trained to find the device and circumvent any booby traps that prevented them from gaining access to it. After that came diagnostics: examining the device, determining how it worked. Then the device was rendered safe. If need be, this was preceded by damage-mitigation efforts.

But unlike any other bomb squad, they often-though not always-dealt with nuclear devices, or at the very least with extremely sophisticated improvised explosive devices.

They’d had ample time in the last few days to examine the fusing mechanism that had been intercepted at the airport. Although there was no guarantee whatsoever that the bomber would use an identical fusing mechanism, or even anything close to it, they were prepared in case he did.

Yet these were far from ideal circumstances. The rule book said you did not attempt to defuse a bomb until the entire area had been secured and evacuated. In fact, the rules said you needed a thousand feet “under cover”-but everyone knew that was impossible in Manhattan, where you’d be lucky to back people up to the next corner.

As he pointed his team toward the stairs to the basement, Dr. Payne thought grimly, At least I’m paid to risk my life. All these other people went to work this morning fully expecting to go home to their families and their pets and their houses and apartments. Alive.

“All right,” Dr. Payne told his assembled team in the crowded stairwell outside the basement of the Network building. “The locals have already sicced their dogs on the lobby of the building and found nothing.”

He didn’t have to explain to his men that when it came to sophisticated explosives, bomb-sniffing dogs are all but useless. They are fine for TNT or dynamite or other run-of-the-mill explosives. Even for C-4, if they got close enough, which meant within inches.

The NYPD Bomb Squad’s dogs had sniffed nothing, but they had not gone into the building’s basement. The doors to the basement were locked. Likely that was where the bomb was. From a structural-engineering point of view, that was the most logical place.

In fact, although the NEST men didn’t yet know it, bomb-sniffing dogs would not have discovered anything even if they had found the banker boxes and peed on them, for the C-4 that Baumann had used in the bomb emitted no odor the dogs could detect.

It was a fair assumption, based on the intel they’d been given, that a C-4 bomb was beneath the lobby, but the team’s first order of business was to make absolutely certain. If they could.

The mechanical version of a bomb-sniffing dog is a vapor detector, of which there are several types. Richard Payne had chosen an ion-mobility vapor detector, the size and shape of a medium-sized suitcase.

But they were working in the dark: if the bomb was in the basement, they had no idea where it was located in the basement, and it could be anywhere. They gathered in the stairwell beside the white-painted steel door that led to the basement. They did not try to force the door, because they assumed it was booby-trapped.

The shut door made it difficult for the vapor detector to operate well at all. Built into the machine was a vacuum pump, which would suck in air at a fair clip. But the bomb could be hundreds of feet away. Suarez held the intake nozzle to the floor, at the slight gap between door and floor. The machine was switched on. Air was drawn into the vapor detector’s lungs, trapping a sample that could be diagnosed.

After a few minutes, Lieutenant Colonel Suarez gestured for it to be switched off. If there was C-4 behind the door, it was not registering. Maybe it was too far away.

He shrugged.

Dr. Payne shrugged in reply.

There still might be C-4 there. They would have to do other tests.

It is a serious misconception that members of bomb squads like the Nuclear Emergency Search Team don’t get frightened. In a situation in which a bomb might go off at any moment, causing maiming or death, it is only human to be scared.

But there is a difference between fear-which, reined in and redirected, can fuel intense concentration-and anxiety. Anxiety, in the form of uncontrollable apprehension and distress, is the most dangerous thing a member of a bomb squad can face, far more perilous than any bomb. A bomb is logical (whether or not we understand its logic), and a person with anxiety is not.

Dr. Payne and Lieutenant Colonel Suarez and the twenty-eight other NEST members who lined the stairwell were professionals and were experienced in rendering bombs safe. Still, each one was deeply frightened. There was far too much about this bomb that was unknown.

Simply put, they did not know whether the bomb was set to detonate if anyone came near it. The fusing mechanism had been intensively examined in a Department of Energy laboratory to determine how much energy it would take to set off the detector, whether there was a sensitivity switch or a variable resistor. Dr. Payne had himself plotted the RF (radio frequency) emanation relative to the position of gain control. He knew how much motion would set the thing off. He knew that it was designed not to respond to motion beyond twenty-five feet.

But he didn’t know whether the sensor had been dialed up, extending the safe line to forty or fifty feet or more. And it was possible the sensor wasn’t even on.

He had no idea.

This much he knew for sure: his men had not set off the bomb. Wherever the safe line was, they hadn’t stepped over it.

But it might be located at the doorjamb, and they would have to assume that it was.

If there was indeed a proximity detector in force, Payne thought, most likely it affected the area on the other side of the door. Microwaves, for all practical purposes, do not go through steel.

But to be safe, they could not risk encroaching even an inch beyond where the closest man-Dr. Payne-was standing. All of their tests had to be conducted from their present positions, and no closer.

The first order of business for the team was to rule out the presence of a nuclear weapon. To do that, they had to test for radioactivity. Not knowing what was in the nuke, or even if it was a nuke at all, they had no way of knowing whether to test for alpha or beta particles, or gamma waves, or for neutron emission. Each is detected by means of a separate procedure. They could test either for whatever radioactive substance was in the bomb or for the “degradation material,” the substance the bomb material would degrade into.

Dr. Payne knew they were not close enough to test for alpha or beta emissions. That left neutrons and gamma. If their detectors “smelled” a large quantity of gamma waves and a small quantity of neutrons, they were probably dealing with uranium; if they “smelled” the opposite, it was probably plutonium.

Their tests told them that the bomb inside the steel door was not nuclear.

That was a relief, though it lasted only a few seconds.

In a darkened room on the building’s fifth floor, Baumann was working with a soldering iron and a pair of wire cutters. Jared, his arms and legs bound, wriggled on the floor a few feet away, thumping his duct-taped feet against the floor in an ineffectual attempt to summon someone, anyone. But the floor was tile over concrete, and the thumping made barely a sound, and in any case, the top floors of the building were by now evacuated. There was no one on the floor to hear him.

Baumann continued to work, his concentration undisturbed.

CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

The next order of business for the NEST men was to determine whether the microwave detector had indeed been turned on. If not, they could force open the steel door and safely approach the bomb to render it safe.

If it was…

Well, the first thing was to determine whether it was on or not. To do that, they used a device known as a microwave sniffer, which looks for emanations in the microwave wavelength, above ten gigahertz. A version of this same device is used to test kitchen microwave ovens for leaks.

A junior member of the team, an Army sergeant named Grant who was trained in explosives detection, took the microwave sniffer’s long, flexible antenna and pointed it at the steel door as Payne directed him to do.

“Dr. Payne,” he said, “we’re just not going to get anything. This door here is steel, and microwaves are pretty much blocked by steel, sir. It’s going to mask the microwave emanations.”

“That’s right,” Payne said. “But keep at it, please.”

Sergeant Grant had served in the Army long enough to know how to take orders with grace, so he continued, though with a trace of reluctance. The microwave sniffer was silent.

“You want me to sort of snake this antenna under the door?”

“No, Grant. That’s a huge risk. Bad idea.”

“Sir,” Grant said, “Like I said, this here door-” But he was interrupted by a rapid, high-pitched beeping. The sniffer had gone into alarm mode.

The antenna, which Grant had pointed at the crack between the bottom of the steel door and the concrete floor, was being bombarded by microwaves exceeding its preset threshold.

“Oh, shit-” Grant cried out.

The microwave detector was not just in force on the other side of the door. Microwaves were leaking under the door. If anyone moved even a few inches closer to the door, there was a risk the bomb would be set off.

“Freeze!” Payne shouted. “Everybody freeze!”

The beeping continued.

“All right,” Dr. Payne said in a quiet, steady voice. “The thing hasn’t exploded. That tells us something. But any further motion might set it off.”

“Jesus!” Grant whined. He was frozen in an awkward position, partially bent toward the floor, his extended right hand gripping the microwave sniffer’s antenna. It was pointed at the gap between floor and door, which was no bigger than a quarter of an inch. The antenna was approximately six inches from the floor. He shifted slightly.

“Don’t move a fucking muscle,” Payne hissed. “We’re picking up the microwaves that are coming through from under the door. The door is sealed tight against the doorframe everywhere except against the floor.”

“I can’t stay this way,” Sergeant Grant moaned.

“Goddammit,” Payne said, “don’t move a muscle or you might just kill us all.” He felt his body flood with panic.

Grant’s eyes widened. Except for the rapid beeping, the entire stairwell was silent. Thirty men were standing almost completely still. From a distance there were faint shouts, distant sirens; but here the only sound was the papery whisk of their windbreakers as the men shifted stance ever so slightly, and the mechanical beeping.

“Now, listen,” Payne said. “Everyone, look down at your feet.”

Obediently, everyone on the team did.

“Memorize that position. Keep your feet in exactly that position. Even a reflection of a body might be picked up through that gap. I don’t know why we haven’t set it off yet-maybe the sensor just switched on. But if you move your feet, you may cause it to detonate.”

“Oh, please, God,” someone said.

“If you have to move, move parallel to the door. You’re less likely to set it off that way. But if I were you, I wouldn’t move a fucking muscle.”

“I-can’t-” Grant gasped. A tiny, liquid noise came from near the sergeant’s feet, which Payne quickly realized was a trickle of urine. A long stain darkened his left pant leg. Payne, though as frightened as any man here, felt acutely embarrassed for Grant. No doubt Grant knew that this would be his last assignment with NEST.

Yet Payne could not help thinking, morbidly, that this might be his own last assignment as well.

One of the men-the one who had just said, “Oh, please, God”-was, in shrink jargon, decompensating. He was a scientist from DOE headquarters, a young man, in his early thirties, and he had begun to babble.

Payne ignored him, praying only that the young man wouldn’t move. If he did, at least he was one of the farthest from the door. Although he had broken out in a cold sweat, he knew he could not afford to divert his attention to this man, or to Sergeant Grant, who, despite his accident, at least had the self-control to remain frozen in position. Important decisions had to be made.

There is a concept you often hear among bomb-squad technicians: the bomb’s wa. A bomb’s wa is its overall state of being.

In order not to disturb a bomb’s wa, you have to understand and appreciate its wa, and Payne had not yet done that. He only knew that opening the steel door would likely disturb the wa.

Payne could feel his anal sphincter squeeze tight as his body grew increasingly tense. This was a phenomenon well known to bomb techs-“asshole-puckering,” they called it. The detector was beeping furiously, telling them that the wrong move would detonate the bomb. Yet you couldn’t see anything, couldn’t smell anything. What did the beep signify? How sensitive was the microwave field?

“Grant,” he said gently, “can you listen to me?”

“Sir,” Grant croaked.

“Grant, I want you to move that antenna upward by a few inches. Do you understand me? Slowly and steadily. Upward.”

“Yes, sir,” Grant said. With a trembling hand he inched the antenna up. As he did, it shook up and down.

“Steady, Grant.”

“Doing my best, sir.”

The beeping stopped.

Sergeant Grant had moved the antenna less than six inches up from the floor, and apparently it was now out of range of the microwave sensor. “That’s the safe line,” Payne whispered, more to himself than to the others. “The microwaves are not moving through the steel door.”

He had received his Ph.D. in nuclear physics at CalTech and was well versed in the strengths and weaknesses of the microwave sniffer. For instance, they now knew how strong the emissions were-that was on the receiver’s readout-but without opening the door to the basement they could not know how far they were from the bomb. That meant they couldn’t map the microwave field, couldn’t learn how close they could safely get to the bomb before it would detonate.

Was there a dead zone? They couldn’t even tell that. Typically, a microwave sensor employs a Doppler shift, which means that the signal creates a constant pattern of microwave energy. The sensor looks for any change in the reflected pattern of that energy. A change occurs when an object within the sensor’s field moves. If you are standing absolutely still in the field, nothing will happen.

Of course, some motion had to be tolerable: what if the air-conditioning caused a curtain near the bomb to ripple? So the detector calculated the amplitude of change over time. Any change that was strong-or long in duration-would set it off, the exact definition of “strong” or “long” having been preset in the detector.

Also, as Payne knew, you could beat a microwave sensor if you knew how. There were ways. If you approached the sensor very slowly, you might not set it off.

But if you allowed your arms to swing at your sides even slightly, you’d probably get nailed, because your arms would be moving toward and away from the sensor at a greater rate of speed, a greater rate of change, than the rest of your body.

That wasn’t even a possibility now, however. Without seeing the bomb and being able to estimate its distance from where they were standing, they certainly could not risk approaching it.

And here was the bitch of it. How could you kill a bomb when you didn’t even know where it was?

CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

Within fifteen minutes, the line of evacuees from the Network building dwindled and then stopped. Another announcement was made over the PA system, but ten minutes later no one had emerged.

None of the workers who had filed out of the building bore a remote resemblance to Baumann.

Inside the building, Sarah made her way up the stairwell. She had searched the first four floors, but no Baumann. And no Jared.

On the fifth floor, she walked silently down the empty corridor, checking office after office.

Dr. Payne made a swift calculation.

They were detecting microwave energy, but did that really mean they couldn’t move? He knew that the range of detection is always greater than the range of function-that is, they could “see” the microwave emitter, but the emitter couldn’t necessarily see them. There’s always a threshold of acceptable leakage, just as a microwave oven might leak microwaves, but people don’t necessarily get cooked standing in front of it.

Payne had examined the fusing system. He knew now how much energy it needed to set off the bomb. The more he repeated his mental calculations, the more sure he was that the amount of microwave energy leaking under the steel door was not enough, if reflected backward, to trigger the detector.

They were safe where they were. They could move.

“All right,” Dr. Payne said. “The safe line is on the other side of the door. There’s some stray microwave leakage, but we’re safe as long as we stay on this side. Everyone, back off from the door. You, Grant, and you, O’Hara”-he pointed at the DOE scientist who had lost it-“get out of here. I don’t want to see you again.”

On this side of the door, on this side of the safe line, they could move. The microwave sensor, he now realized, would detect motion on the other side of the door only.

This was good. This gave them considerably more room to maneuver.

This also meant they could remotely “look” at the bomb using a technology that remains to this day highly classified by the U.S. government. They used a device called a neutron backscatter, which emits a stream of neutrons at a very specific energy level. The stream is fired at the target, and then the backscatter measures the rate at which the neutrons come back at it-that is, the extent to which the neutrons are absorbed.

The neutron backscatter has the ability to penetrate metal liners and walls, so the steel door was not an obstacle. Using the same physical principle employed in an HED-a hydrogenous explosives detector-it looks for hydrogen. The neutron backscatter they were using was unusually powerful. Payne flipped the switch, checked the readout.

“Well, there’s explosive material there,” Dr. Payne muttered to Suarez. “A shitload of it, from what I can tell.”

“Now what do we do?” Suarez asked.

Dr. Payne did not reply; the truth was, he had no idea. He was winging it; in times like this you always had to wing it and trust your instincts.

“All right,” he said at last. “I want the generator moved out here.”

“You want to do what?” asked Suarez.

“Like I said,” Dr. Payne said. “The generator.”

“You want to do the EMP? Jesus-”

“I want to burn out its solid-state mind, and I don’t even know if that’s going to do it.”

The electromagnetic-pulse generator was powered by a huge capacitor, really a bank of capacitors that required an immense power source. As the capacitor was wheeled into place beside the steel door to the basement, Lieutenant Colonel Suarez said, “Sir, with everyone out of the building, the situation is no longer life-threatening. Textbook says we’re not supposed to risk our lives if the situation’s not life-threatening. And the building’s empty.”

“Except for the terrorist.”

“Except for the terrorist, yes, sir.”

“The terrorist, and a child. And if this building goes up, those aren’t going to be the only ones killed.”

“Sir, the textbook-”

“Fuck the textbook,” Dr. Payne said. “Get the door open.”

“Sir, we can’t,” Suarez said.

“Well, we can’t shoot through the goddam thing! We can’t aim the EMP unless the door’s open. Get the goddam door open! Now!”

“It’s locked, sir.” Suarez was doing his best to keep his cool. “We can’t use explosive breaching techniques, sir. You don’t breach the door of a magazine.”

“Dammit,” Dr. Payne said, “get out the halligan tool.” This was a standard piece of equipment used to force open doors.

“Bad idea, sir. Respectfully. Looks like the door lock has been jammed with epoxy or Krazy Glue or something. It opens outward, toward us. It has to be opened from inside. Gently. But it looks as if it can be opened from the inside.”

“If we force it…” Payne mused aloud.

“If we force it, we’re introducing a violent motion, and you don’t want to introduce energy into a bomb situation, right? If we use a halligan, we could set the thing off.”

“Shit. You’re right, Suarez. Good thinking. All right, do we have anyone already inside the building?”

“I don’t know-”

Dr. Payne picked up his walkie-talkie and, calculating that it was safe to broadcast on this frequency, called Lieutenant George Roth. “Do we have anyone already in the building?” he repeated.

Sarah turned in the empty corridor.

Suddenly there was a static squawk.

It was her walkie-talkie, coming to life.

“Cahill, Cahill, ERCP,” came a flat, mechanical voice. ERCP referred to “Emergency Response Command Post,” the label NEST was using to avoid alerting any reporters who might be listening in.

“ERCP, Cahill, go ahead.”

“There’s a back way into the basement. We need you to enter the basement and open a door for us.”

CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

Fueled by anger and determination and fear, Sarah ran down to the lobby and, in a dim corner, just as the floor plans had indicated, located the little-used basement door.

It was jammed shut from the outside, the lock plugged with the broken end of a key and some Krazy Glue. Baumann clearly didn’t want anyone to enter the basement.

The door couldn’t be forced. That might set off the bomb.

There had to be another way to get into the basement.

Desperate, she ran across the lobby. How could she get into the basement without using the doors?

She passed a maintenance closet that had been propped open by a galvanized steel bucket and wet mop. She stopped, opened the closet door all the way, and saw the pipes at the back, running vertically up and down through the building.

The answer.

They ran through a shaft, roughly two feet square, into the basement. There was space in front of the pipes, not a hell of a lot but perhaps enough.

She leaned over and peered down the shaft.

The drop to the basement floor was probably eight or nine feet. Several of the pipes made sharp right angles into a wide, dull gray, steel ventilation duct. The duct was some four feet wide. Wide enough to shield her movements from the microwave detector.

She pulled off her shoes and her jacket and squeezed into the narrow space, grabbing on to the pipes as she moved. It was a tight squeeze, but she realized quickly she could make it through.

It was like crawling through the narrow neck of a cave.

She shimmied down, holding on to the pipes, lowering herself as much as she could toward the floor of the basement. Then the pipes veered off at sharp angles in different directions. A drop of some six feet remained.

She eased herself down slowly, carefully. Shielded by the duct she dropped noiselessly to the ground.

She gasped when she almost stumbled over the body of a uniformed man, crumpled on the floor in front of her. It looked like a security guard, probably someone who had tried to stop Baumann.

She spotted a long stack of boxes roped together, on top of which sat a small black box, which flashed in the sputtering fluorescent light.

If you can see it, it can see you, Dr. Payne had said.

But from how far?

Estimating distances didn’t come naturally to her, but she had learned to do it, and she now calculated she was ninety to one hundred feet from the device.

She stopped, pressed the transmit button on her walkie-talkie. “ERCP, ERCP, Cahill,” she said. “I’m here. I see it. How much time is remaining?”

“Cahill, ERCP. We don’t know,” Payne said. “We figure that as long as the terrorist is in the building, it’s not going to blow.”

“Good.”

“Uh, Agent Cahill, I wouldn’t be so relieved if I were you. The device has got a ground-plane antenna protecting a circular area, with a possible operating range of forty to sixty feet. If you’re beyond sixty feet from it, you’re safe. Now, I want you to move forward slowly.”

“How slowly?”

“I can’t answer that. If you’re far away from it, any movement will be perceived by the sensor as much slower than if you were right up next to it.”

“Give me a rate of speed!”

“As slowly as you possibly can. Recognizing that we’re all under the gun-there’s got to be a clock ticking, but we just don’t know when zero hour is. Let’s say slower than one step per second. We estimate the sensor can ‘see’ someone walking at the rate of one step per second, so keep it slower than that.”

“Jesus, that’s slow!”

“Keep your arms against your side. No, better-keep your arms folded against your chest. Whatever you do, you must not allow your arms to swing. The microwave’s going to see a rapid fore-and-aft like a champ. You want to avoid creating a Doppler shift.”

“Meaning what?” She knew bombs, but not to this degree.

“Just… just keep your body as still as possible. Keep flat against the wall. Inch along it. A few inches a second, no faster. Now, whenever possible, keep solid objects between you and the bomb-the furnace, machinery, whatever’s down there. Anything RF-opaque. According to our examination of the device, it’s a bit above ten thousand megahertz, so bricks and dense masonry like concrete and steel will be pretty effective at blocking it.”

Sarah inched toward the main basement area, then stopped. She raised the walkie-talkie to her mouth, realizing that this was probably the last time she’d be able to use the walkie-talkie as long as she was down here: from now on, she’d have to keep her arms folded.

“There are some large objects,” she said. “A water heater. A row of something. But there are gaps between them. Huge gaps. I’m not going to be able to always keep solid objects between the bomb and me.”

“Do your best,” Payne instructed. “In the gaps, be sure to move as slowly as possible. This is a volumetric device.”

“Meaning-?”

“Forget it. You must not change the reflected patterns of the microwave. It sees rate of change. You’ve got to minimize your effect on the rate of change of the energy pattern by minimizing your body motion.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!”

“Move very slowly and steadily, Agent Cahill. And go!”

Oh, dear God, she thought. Sweet Jesus God.

Jared was in the building, had to be in the building, upstairs. She could not think that he was dead. He was alive, he had to be alive, but silenced somehow.

An FBI agent could, under some circumstances, be called upon to sacrifice his or her own life. But not the lives of their loved ones. That was not in the employment contract.

Now as she inched along the cold damp basement wall she felt a waft of ice-cold air and smelled the old familiar dirt smell of mold, a smell she associated with her childhood, and therefore found oddly reassuring.

One… two… one… two. A slow-motion side-shuffle. Her hands gripping her chest, flattening her breasts. One… two… one… two. Her legs trembled with the enormous exertion it required to keep them from jerking away from her. Brushing against the cold damp wall, one, two…

… Up to the water heater, a behemoth, floor-to-ceiling, wall of steel, blasting heat, pilot light twinkling. Easily eight or ten feet long. She reached it, recoiling from the overpowering heat, exhaled.

It bought her ten feet, she thought. Ten free feet. She slid against the wall, quickly now. She felt a prickly flush of heat, and the sweat began to run down her arms, down the inside of her arms, down her breasts, tickling her. Rivulets of sweat ran down her inner thighs. Fluorescent light flickered sickly greenish-white.

She came to the end of the heater, and there was a gap, a space of another five or six feet, before the next shelter, which she now saw was long and rectangular, a tall row of filing cabinets.

Immediately she slowed her pace, inched along. As she edged, she stared at the black box, her eyes glistening with fear, feeling as if the invisible microwaves could feel her, were invading her body, arrogant and intrusive and everywhere. Now, from this angle, she could see a tiny pinpoint of light, a ruby-red dot, on top of the black box. What was it, an indicator? Would it wink at her if it caught her moving? Would it wink in the split second before the building was incinerated, turning her and her little boy into ash? Or would there be no warning at all? Would she move a few inches per second too quickly, enraging the red-eyed monster, and never know anything?

She stared, and she thought about Jared, and she began to formulate a plan, anything to distract her, send her mind elsewhere, anywhere, while she edged along the dank wall to the file cabinets, light flickering fluorescent-green.

Another twenty-five feet to go, and then she would have to move along another wall before she reached the door.

Hugging her chest harder, her clothes soaked through.

Thinking of Jared, cowering in a room somewhere.

She glided along the wall behind the filing cabinets, mindful of the gaps between the cabinets, through which the microwaves could pass. She had to move slowly here too, just as slowly, because of the gaps. Then she came to another open space. This one seemed miles long, seemed to stretch an eternity. Inched now. A muscle twitched, something connecting hip to leg, a slight jerking motion, and she froze. Her heart knocked against her rib cage. Stood still, holding her breath. Waiting for the ruby-red light to wink at her. It didn’t. She exhaled slowly. Moved again to her left. One… two… one… two…

Could hear voices on the other side of the heavy steel door, which was coming closer inch by inch. The NEST men issuing and receiving instructions, setting up their machinery, waiting for her to ease open the door. Her walkie-talkie crackled; she ignored it.

“Cahill, Cahill, ERCP, are you there yet?”

Her arms glued to her breasts, she inched, inched, not answering. Sidled up to the next RF-opaque obstruction, which seemed to be ductwork, but this one was narrow, maybe five feet of relief, which was nothing.

She thought of Brian/Baumann. Flashed on the Identi-Kit sketch, which was a bad cartoon, looked nothing like the real thing. What did Baumann really look like? Did she know? Who was he? She inched along in the next open space, and now she felt the snugness of the corner, cold and damp and pleasantly rounded.

Negotiating this turn was not easy. She swiveled in slow motion, trying to understand the physics of the microwave sensor.

Stared at the unwinking tiny red dot.

Sidled, inch by inch by inch. Hugging herself tighter and tighter. Felt a tickle in her throat. Had to cough. Now it was all she could think about-don’t cough, coughing will cause your head to jerk. The tickle was unbearable.

She inched along; the tickle subsided.

Now the door was close enough to reach out and touch, and it took all of her willpower to keep from doing it. Must keep her arms folded. Must move slowly, inch by inch.

How far was she, how far was the door from the bomb?

Never good at estimating distance, and never was it so important. Fifty? No, more. Sixty? Maybe. Sixty was the cut-off. Within sixty feet, the sensor could read movement. A little more, perhaps. Sixty-five feet?

Hard to know.

Yes. Sixty-five feet.

Voices on the other side of the door grew louder.

Until she had reached the doorframe, sidled her body along until she stood directly in front of the door, and she slowly, slowly eased her hands down, as if caressing her breast, her abdomen, her hips, straightening them, moving them along the contours of her body agonizingly slowly, until both hands grasped the steel doorknob and she turned it, and it didn’t move, and she turned harder, and still it didn’t move, and then a twist of both hands and the knob turned. The door had been jammed so that it couldn’t be opened from the outside, yes, but inside it could be opened, thank God, and, yes, it opened out, not into the room, thank God.

“I’m there,” she said.

“Great,” she heard a voice say. “Well done. Careful, now. No big movements.”

She pushed against the door, gently but firmly.

And slowly.

Agonizingly slowly, she eased it open, inch by inch. Never had she opened a door so slowly.

– and she heard: “Goddammit, it’s going to blow!”

She shouted: “It’s okay! It’s more than sixty feet from here, I’m sure of it!”

She heard shouts, a scream, and she felt the floor come up and smack against the back of her head, as someone forced her to the ground and out of the way of the machinery.

She looked around, saw that the stairwell was empty, realized that the NEST men had moved out of the building, as per procedure.

“All right, Agent Cahill, let’s go! Move it!” came the voice of the man who had pushed her to the floor. He was wearing a bulky green suit, armored with Kevlar panels, and a helmet. “Out of the building!”

“No!” she shouted. “I’m not moving!”

“Get the fuck out of here!”

“Back off!” she shouted. “I’m staying here. My boy’s in there.”

“Move it! Out! You’re not in charge now-we are. Only Suarez can stay here, and he’s operating the machine.”

“Sorry,” Sarah said, steely. “If anything happens, I want to be here to assist. So prosecute me later. I don’t give a shit.”

She saw Lieutenant Colonel Suarez smile. “Yeah, she’s right,” he said. “I might need an assist. Let her stay.”

Suarez aimed the antenna at the bomb and fired off a super-high-powered blast of electromagnetic energy.

There was a loud crackling sound. Sarah, crouching out of the way of the EMP, felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. It felt as if the shock were running through her body.

There was a burning smell.

There, some seventy feet away, was the pile of boxes, DetCord looped around them. On top was the fusing mechanism. Its tiny ruby-red LED light was dark.

“Is that it?” Sarah asked.

“I-I think so,” Suarez said. “Uh, the sensor isn’t picking up any microwave emissions. Tom?”

The man in the green Kevlar protective suit said, “Spectrum analyzer finds no evidence of any electric flow. No current flowing through the thing.”

“Approach the device,” Suarez ordered.

The helmeted man in the protective gear lumbered through the doorway.

Sarah held her breath, found herself praying.

Suarez explained to her: “Everything about it seems to be dead, but EMP won’t defeat a mechanical fuse, so he’s got to look for himself.”

Tom approached the device, walking up to it slowly, and did not feel his foot brush against a taut, almost invisible wire. He unfolded a flat, canary-yellow screen and placed it behind the black box, then pointed a small cylindrical object at it.

Suarez explained: “Those are CB2 screens. They fluoresce when hit by X rays. He’s using a Min-X-Ray SS-100 portable fluoroscope to send X rays through the thing, so he can see an image on the screen. He knows what to look for-mostly, any deviation from the device you folks intercepted.”

“Looks clear,” Tom shouted.

“Clear,” Suarez shouted to the rest of the team members, some three hundred yards off.

Tom opened the black box and looked inside. All the solid-state electronic guts of the fusing mechanism had been fried.

The bomb was dead.

But something caught his eye, just a glint at first, and he felt his stomach go cold.

It was a large mechanical stopwatch. A big, old, round-faced stopwatch that appeared to have been modified. A sweep second hand was moving at a normal pace, but to Tom, seized with panic, it seemed to be racing.

Two wires came out of the watch, snaked out of the box into the explosives.

He whirled around, saw the simple trip wire he had set off as he approached the bomb. A low-tech kind of thing commandos used in the jungle. The kind of thing that’s not affected by electromagnetic pulses or anything fancy like that.

The second hand continued to sweep along the face of the stop watch, toward a steel pin, and when it made contact, the bomb would blow. A sixty-second stopwatch. Less than thirty seconds remained.

From behind him, Tom heard a shout: “What the hell…?”

“Back off!” Tom shouted hoarsely. “It’s not dead!”

A simple booby trap, Tom thought. It hadn’t been in the mechanism they had inspected. Of course: Baumann trusted nobody, not even whoever had made his fusing mechanism. He’d put in a backup.

Two wires.

Two wires emanated from the watch. What did that mean?

Did he dare cut the wires?

What if it were a collapsing circuit, which meant that if you cut the wires, the circuit would automatically close, and the fucking bomb would go off?

Tom felt his fingers tremble.

Cut the wires or not?

Two wires.

Less than ten seconds remained.

No. A collapsing circuit always needed three wires.

Just over five seconds before the steel second hand touched the steel pin…

He snipped the wires.

Involuntarily, he winced, braced himself.

A second… two… three.

Nothing.

He exhaled slowly, felt tears spring to his eyes.

The thing was dead. He turned around slowly, numbly, and said, too quietly: “The render-safe is complete. The thing’s dead.”

Suarez sank to the ground in involuntary expression of relief. Sarah braced herself against the doorjamb and stared at the bomb in disbelief. Tears of relief welled up in her eyes.

“The render-safe is complete,” Suarez called out. “The thing’s dead.”

And then Sarah’s walkie-talkie crackled. “Cahill, Cahill, Roth.”

“Roth, Cahill,” she replied. “Go ahead.”

“We’ve spotted your man.”

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

The area six miles in radius from the center of La Guardia Airport is officially La Guardia airspace. As Dan Hammond’s ASTAR approached the uncontrolled airspace above the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, he was contacted by La Guardia Class B service operations. Flying into a high-density air-traffic area as he was, his craft was now under strict ATC control. ATC mandates your helicopter route, at a prescribed altitude. For each flight, you’re issued a transponder code, which was in this case 3213. The transponder code tags up on the radar screen with your tail numbers, also known as registration numbers or N numbers. The tail numbers used to be painted only on the bottom of the aircraft, but now they are required to be visible from both sides. Also, because of drug-smuggling problems, the numbers are now required to be fully twelve inches high, which makes them visible from quite a distance.

Now, as he steered the chopper off into the controlled airspace just north of the helipad, he heard, “Helicopter three two one three, you’re north of your prescribed route. State your intentions.”

Hammond hit the talk switch. “I’ve-I’ve got problems-” he started to say, which was the beginning of his prepared line.

But the ATC interrupted: “Uh, helicopter three two one three, we’ve got a NOTAM posted for the area you’ve just entered.” A NOTAM is a Notice to Aviators and Mariners which declares a certain area off-limits.

A NOTAM? For what? Now, Hammond was momentarily confused. Who the hell would have expected this? What was the NOTAM all about?

He hit his talk switch again to ask.

CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

She raced up the stairwell to the twentieth floor of the building, up a narrow set of iron stairs that led up to the roof, and stepped out of the roof exit into the dank gray late-afternoon air. She gasped for breath. Behind her in the stairwell waited several police backups. Several much taller buildings loomed on two sides. Shouts and sirens and the honking of car horns rose from below.

Two shapes were silhouetted against the glare. She couldn’t see their faces, but she recognized them at once.

Jared. He was gagged and handcuffed. One heavy steel handcuff tightly encircled both of his tiny wrists. The other end of the cuff was attached to the plastic handle of a rectangular object, a box of some kind, which Sarah at once realized was a child’s plastic lunchbox. She looked again, not comprehending. Could she be seeing right?

His silken voice filled her with horror.

“Sarah,” Baumann said with repellent gentleness, “I don’t want to hurt Jared, but I will if I absolutely must. It’s up to you to see that doesn’t happen.”

“Your bomb’s dead,” she said, short of breath, gasping. “It’s pointless now for you to keep going.” She moved closer so that her walkie-talkie, locked in transmit mode, could pick up their conversation for the benefit of the listeners down below.

“No closer, please. Now, I’d rather get out of here than stay. So now you and I will make a deal.” It was strange: he was speaking in a South African accent and sounded like a different person.

“What do you want?” Sarah said, queasy with disgust at negotiating with this monster.

“In just a few minutes, I will be leaving the building. I’m taking Jared with me.”

“What do you mean, taking him with you?” She was exhausted, bone-tired, and couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Now she could see Jared’s face. His eyes were wide with fright; he appeared frozen.

“Only for the first part of my journey. Just far enough to guarantee safe passage. Traveler’s insurance. I promise you Jared will not be hurt as long as you cooperate.”

“You promise-!”

“There’s no reason for me to hurt your son. I’m quite fond of him.”

Something was gradually coming over her now, an iciness, a fusion of hatred and determination and fierce protectiveness that made her less afraid. “Take me instead,” she said, and took another step forward.

“Please, Sarah,” Baumann said. “For Jared’s sake, stay where you are. Listen carefully, please. I don’t want you or your people to make any mistakes. First I must make a phone call.” Baumann pulled from a pocket a cellular phone and punched a few numbers. He listened for a couple of seconds, then punched a few more. “There,” he said. “Thank you, Jared, for the use of your phone. Now the bomb is armed.” He put away the cell phone and held up a small object Sarah couldn’t quite make out. “This is a dead-man switch, Sarah. You know how it works, I assume. This button is connected to a small radio transmitter, and to a signal generator that produces a continuous tone. It’s transmitting that tone now. A one-milliwatt transmitter-very low-powered. Good only for line-of-sight. As long as I keep the button depressed, the signal is transmitted. But if I let go of the button, my transmitter stops sending the signal.”

“What are you saying?” she said, although she knew. Her voice shook.

“In Jared’s lunchbox is a small explosive device-half a block of C-4 connected to a blasting cap, which is connected in series with a paging device that has been modified. I’ve just called the pager, which caused the relay to close. Now there’s only one thing that’s keeping the bomb from detonating: the signal that my transmitter is generating. The normally closed relay is connected to a radio receiver-a scanner programmed for a specific frequency. As long as the receiver hears a signal-a continuously transmitted signal-it keeps the switch open, and he’s safe. But if the signal stops, or is interrupted, the relay closes, closing the circuit between battery and blasting cap, initiating the C-4. The bomb detonates. And Jared is gone. Just half a pound of C-4, no more, but quite enough to turn him into mist.” Jared’s eyes closed.

“You’re sick,” Sarah murmured. “You’re sick. He’s a child.”

“So, if anything happens to me-if, let’s say, you or any of your people are so impulsive as to shoot me-I release pressure on the switch, and the bomb blows up. If you try to jam the signal, the receiver will no longer see a clear signal, and Jared will die. If you attempt to grab Jared, you will take him out of the line of sight of my transmitter, and he will die. And don’t even think of trying the standard FBI negotiation tactic of waiting me out, because if the battery in either my transmitter or Jared’s receiver runs down, the bomb will go off.”

“And how do I know you’re telling the truth?” she asked hollowly. She knew that NEST, as well as members of her own team, were listening to this exchange over her walkie-talkie, and she was terrified that some hothead might make the mistake of trying to rush Baumann somehow.

“I suppose you don’t, do you? But do you want to take that chance?”

Sarah stared at Baumann, then at Jared, and said with a sudden passion: “How can you do this? Don’t you care for Jared, even a little?”

Baumann smiled cynically. “Don’t bother, Sarah.”

“I understand who you are, what kind of thing you are. I just thought you had some feelings for Jared. Would you really do this to Jared? I don’t believe you would.”

Baumann’s smile faded. She was right; he did feel almost tender toward the child, but such feelings were treacherous, and his escape was paramount. He knew Sarah would never allow her son to be harmed, and that was the point, after all.

“Don’t test me, Sarah,” he snapped. “Please don’t test me. Now, Jared is going to accompany me to a nearby airport. When I’m safely aboard a plane, he’ll be returned to you. Understand, Sarah, that if anyone makes an error, or is too aggressive, and Jared is killed, his blood will be on your hands.”

Sarah heard a faint noise in the distance, and she looked up. Gradually the noise grew louder, a noise she recognized. She looked up at the sky, startled at first by the whump-whump-whump noise. It was a helicopter, black and sleek, with tinted windows.

In the NEST command post, Dr. Richard Payne turned away from the walkie-talkie. “Suarez,” he barked, “get over here. I need some equipment.”

The whump-whump-whump of the helicopter rotor blades was now deafeningly loud and directly overhead.

Baumann shouted: “Are we clear? Are we in agreement?”

Sarah looked at Jared. Tears ran down his cheeks. “Yes,” she shouted back. The decision was not difficult. But could she trust him to release Jared once the helicopter landed? What choice did she really have?

The chopper blades whumped and thundered.

Baumann walked to the helicopter, clutching Jared. The fuselage of the helicopter hovered above the roof of the building, then softly landed. From below, through the racket, he could hear sirens, saw the reflection of red and blue lights against the surrounding buildings.

He jumped through the open helicopter door and shoved Jared onto the seat next to the pilot’s. With a quick, unseen motion, he clicked off the bomb inside the Power Rangers lunchbox, then switched off his transmitter.

The helicopter idled in place. Baumann barked to Dan Hammond: “You, out of the chopper. We’re not going to Teterboro.” Hammond, frightened but at the same time clearly relieved, climbed out of his seat and slipped past Baumann to the door of the helicopter, then stepped onto the roof. Baumann slid over and took the controls.

“You’re damn right we’re not,” came a voice from immediately behind him. Baumann felt the cool steel of a gun against his temple.

The voice came from Lieutenant George Roth, who emerged from a crouch from behind the high-backed front seats where he had waited unseen, concealed behind a tall red first-aid chest.

“You’re making quite a mistake,” Baumann told Roth, taking his hand off the collective. “The child is wearing a bomb.”

“I know about the bomb,” Roth said. “Otherwise I’d have nailed you already.”

Baumann smiled, but his smile was ice. He reached down and swiftly retrieved a pistol from a concealed ankle holster, leaped from the seat, and spun around to face Roth, pointing his gun at the cop. Audacity, Baumann thought, was the hallmark of a commando, not a cop. “Would you like to get out of this helicopter, or would you like to die?”

The two men eyed each other tensely. “Looks like a standoff to me,” Roth said. “I got a better idea. Better for both of us. You let the kid go. I’ll take his place. Sarah gets her kid back, and you get a hostage.”

“And if I don’t agree to that?” Baumann asked.

“Then I guess we all blow up. I don’t care. I’ve been feeling a little suicidal these days anyway.”

“And if it becomes known that a member of the New York Police Department killed a child?”

Roth shrugged. “Who’s going to know anything? You’re the guy made the bomb. Let the kid go.”

“Thanks, but no,” Baumann said. “The child is a better hostage, to be quite honest. And in any case, I’d rather not find out what you have up your sleeve.”

“Look,” Roth said. “This isn’t just some hostage we’re talking about. This is a kid I thought you liked. You don’t want this on your conscience.”

“Believe me,” Baumann said, “I don’t want to hurt a hair on the child’s head. If anything happens to him, it will be because of your carelessness.”

Roth considered his next statement for a few seconds, though it seemed an eternity. “All right,” he said. “Let me tell you what we’ve done in the last couple of minutes. You know that we’ve got a bunch of guys down there from the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, and if you know shit, you know these guys are the best in the business. While you and Sarah were talking, her walkie-talkie stayed open and broadcast to the NEST guys. So they heard everything you said. They heard your description of the bomb you set up. And so these guys have been using one of their toys called a spectrum analyzer to figure out what kind of tone you’re broadcasting, and the frequency you’re using, and all that shit. Simple thing to duplicate the tone, and then set a transmitter to broadcast that exact tone on the same frequency. Easy stuff. Amateur hour. Took those geniuses five minutes. Meanwhile, I haul ass over to the heliport, couple blocks away, and jump on the chopper. They’re bombarding the air with that exact tone, transmitted on just the right frequency. So Jared’s bomb isn’t going off. You can toss the button out the window. Go ahead. It’s not going to blow.”

“That’s very good,” Baumann said. “I could almost believe that.”

“Go ahead,” Roth said. “Try me. Toss the button out the window.”

“Do you really want to play a game like this with the life of a child?”

“Hey, wait a second,” Roth said, as if suddenly realizing something. “You don’t believe me, do you? You really don’t believe me, do you? Then let me give you some numbers, buddy. You’re broadcasting on a VHF frequency of one hundred forty-seven megahertz. The frequency of the tone is seventeen point five kilohertz, which I’m told is the same thing as seventeen thousand five hundred cycles per second.”

Baumann did not smile now. He felt a droplet of perspiration run down the side of his face as he realized that Roth was telling the truth. They had duplicated the tone. Silently, he cursed his own arrogance.

“So I guess what I’m thinking,” Roth said, “is that you just lost your leverage, know what I’m saying?”

“And if your calculations are off by the slightest bit, well…”

“You see,” Roth said, as reasonably as if he were wrapping up the sale of a used car, “we really don’t want to take that chance either, frankly. So here’s what I propose. Let Jared go. And keep me here in his stead. You’ll have your hostage, and Sarah gets her son. Everyone wins. What do you say, hmm?”

Baumann hesitated, considered his options. There was, he had to admit, little room to negotiate. The bomb had been rendered inert. Even if they didn’t know he had disengaged it, the NEST people had defeated his system. He could move more quickly with his gun than the cop, certainly, maybe even kill him-but then there was a good chance the cop would fire and wound Baumann, and that was a chance not worth taking. Why hadn’t the cop killed him already? he wondered. Was he bluffing, lying about the signal generator? Possibly-but the cop was acting far too boldly. He wouldn’t act this way if a child’s life was at stake, particularly Sarah’s child. More likely, the cop didn’t want to risk any gunfire that might somehow affect the transmitter. A smart calculation.

“All right,” Baumann said.

“Take the bomb off the kid,” Roth said.

“You can do it yourself,” Baumann said.

Baumann handed Roth a small key. “Unlock the cuffs,” he said.

Roth took the key and unlocked Jared’s handcuffs. He noticed they were the type widely used by policemen, Smith & Wesson Model 100 swing-throughs.

“Put the device on the seat next to you,” Baumann said. “Don’t worry, I’ve already disarmed it.”

Roth gingerly placed the lunchbox on the seat. He could see red marks on the outside of both of the boy’s wrists.

Jared reached up and gently pulled at the duct tape over his mouth. His eyes teared up as the tape came off. He pulled out the gag. A large red area around his mouth showed where the tape had chafed his skin.

“You okay?” Roth asked.

“I don’t know,” Jared said miserably. “I guess I’m okay, yeah.”

“Okay,” Roth said to Jared, “now you get out of here.”

On the roof of the building, Sarah, now joined by several NEST members, watched the idling helicopter.

“What the hell is Roth doing?” Sarah asked.

“We intercepted the helicopter and forced it to land,” Vigiani explained. “It was in violation of a NOTAM. It was Roth’s idea to get on board at the heliport and have it continue on to pick up Baumann.”

“God, I hope he knows what he’s doing,” Sarah said.

“I think he does,” Vigiani said.

And then Sarah saw Jared climb down the helicopter’s three small steps and run across to the roof to her and virtually leap into her arms. She squeezed him tight. He was weeping, and then she was weeping.

“Oh, Jared, honey,” she said.

The pilot limped over to the watchers. “Asshole better be careful with that chopper,” Dan Hammond said. “Expensive piece of machinery.”

“You’re lucky to be alive yourself,” Vigiani said. “And not in prison.”

“Hey,” Hammond said. “We got a deal. I cooperated. You guys better keep your half of the bargain.”

Inside the helicopter, it was just the two men now, facing each other, guns trained on each other.

“Now,” Baumann said, “since I’m getting into the pilot’s seat, you’re going to have to drop your gun first.”

Roth stared. “You kill me,” he said defiantly, “and there’s nothing going to stop the sharpshooters on the roof from dropping you. You know that.”

Baumann nodded. “Believe me, a live hostage is far more valuable to me than a dead cop. Drop the gun.”

Roth considered taking the brave shot, but knew he was outclassed, that Baumann could kill him in a split second and then take his chances with the sharpshooters. He had to trust Baumann’s survival instincts.

He lowered the gun, then dropped it to the floor of the helicopter.

“Now, empty your pockets,” Baumann ordered.

Roth did so, dropping change and rings of keys to the floor.

Lightning-fast, Baumann smashed the butt end of his pistol against Roth’s temple, just hard enough to knock him unconscious. Roth sagged to the floor of the helicopter. Baumann didn’t want to kill him or even disable him. It was better for Roth to remain a living hostage.

Baumann handcuffed Roth to the steel frame of the seat and jumped into the pilot’s seat. He inspected the controls, familiarizing himself with them. It worked differently from any helicopter he had piloted before.

He did not see Roth stir.

He did not see Roth’s eyes flutter open.

Out of Baumann’s sight, Roth opened his eyes. Slowly, he slid his left hand, the one that wasn’t handcuffed to the seat, down toward his belt, slipped his index finger inside the belt, felt around until he had located the concealed pocket in which he always kept his spare handcuff key.

It is a little-known fact that virtually all handcuffs use the same universal key. The cuffs that connected Roth’s right wrist to the seat frame-a Smith & Wesson Model 100-could be unlocked by the key to Roth’s Peerless handcuffs. Thank God Baumann hadn’t used the much rarer Smith & Wesson Model 104, the high-security model, which had its own unique key.

From this angle Roth could not see Baumann, but he knew from the sound of the engine that the helicopter was still idling atop the building. Quietly, he slipped the key into the handcuff lock. With a slight twisting motion of his wrist, he got the handcuffs open.

Then, stealthily, praying Baumann was too preoccupied to see, he slid one hand up to the seat and toggled the bomb back on.

With one smooth motion he rolled over and out of the door of the helicopter, down five feet or so, landing on the roof of the building.

Baumann looked up just in time to see Roth roll out of the helicopter door, but he did not panic. He pulled the collective and lifted the helicopter up into the air, up above the building.

Baumann understood how things worked. He knew that the FBI and the police had nothing larger than small arms, which could not shoot down a helicopter. He also knew that, according to the century-old Posse Comitatus Act, the U.S. military was prohibited from acting in a domestic law-enforcement capacity. Which meant that the military could not shoot the helicopter down from the sky.

His hostage-first Jared, then Roth-had afforded him the opportunity to take off. That was really all he needed. The helicopter lifted high into the air above lower Manhattan and headed toward a remote area of New Jersey, and Baumann was filled with pride, with a knowledge that he had just surmounted the greatest challenge of his career, that although he had made mistakes, there was still none better.

“Roth!” Sarah shouted. “What-what happened? What about the bomb?”

“Bomb?” Roth asked innocently, and shrugged. He was still a bit unsteady from toppling onto the roof. He went up to Dr. Richard Payne of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team. “Your signal generator thingamabob,” Roth said, reaching under the waistband of his blue police uniform, just below his paunch, and removing an oblong object the size of a cigarette pack. He handed it to Payne. “Thanks.”

Sarah saw the exchange of knowing glances between Roth and Dr. Payne, and didn’t understand what was going on.

But then her attention was diverted by an explosion half a mile away or so, directly over the Hudson River.

Actually, there was first a great flash of light, a bright yellow-white light that grew steadily in intensity, followed by an explosion, an orange ball of fire that gave off smoke both white and black. The helicopter, a flaming orb, pitched wildly in the air, and as it fell apart, a million pieces plummeted to the river below.

“Roth,” Sarah said, embracing him. “Normally I don’t like it when my people keep me in the dark-but I suppose I’ll have to make an exception this time. Good job.”

It had all come clear to her. NEST, listening in to the transmission over her walkie-talkie, must have provided Roth with a transmitter that would work with the bomb that Baumann had engineered. They’d handed it to Roth before he boarded the helicopter a few blocks away. Strictly speaking, she thought, Roth hadn’t done anything illegal.

Actually, that wasn’t quite true. He hadn’t actually detonated the thing himself, but he’d switched the bomb on, while the transmitter concealed in his waistband stayed on-it had been on since before Baumann had gotten into the helicopter-and as long as Roth was within a few hundred yards of the bomb it wouldn’t detonate.

Roth had been bluffing, at least in part-he hadn’t told Baumann that he had a transmitter hidden in his pants, and that that was the only tone source. As soon as the helicopter moved out of the range of the transmitter-over water, just as the NEST team had calculated, though it was a risky calculation, to be sure-the bomb had gone off. But no one would ever know, and certainly no one on the roof of the building would ever say anything, not even to each other, about what had happened. No one would ever be able to prove anything, and after all, justice had been done.

All in all, the explosion had taken less than a second.

CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

Malcolm Dyson switched off CNN and wheeled around in a fury to the bank of telephones next to his desk.

“The goddam so-called Prince of Darkness fucked it up!” he shouted to the empty study, and was surprised when someone answered.

“That he did,” said a man who was coming through the door, accompanied by two other men. Dyson looked around, bewildered. Three others were climbing in through the windows. He recognized their dark-blue windbreakers, the big yellow block letters. They were federal marshals of the United States government, he could see. He would never forget the first time he had seen these dark-blue windbreakers with the yellow lettering, on the night that his wife and daughter were killed.

“What-?” he began.

“That he did,” the man said. “He gave us an extraditable offense, Mr. Dyson. But you and your people helped us too.”

“The hell you talking about?” Dyson managed to choke out.

“See, now that we’ve got hard evidence of your role in international terrorism, the Swiss government will no longer protect you. It can’t. It’s given you up. You’re being extradited to the U.S.” The marshal cuffed Dyson and, with the others, led him away, out of the study and down the long main corridor of the mansion Malcolm Dyson called Arcadia. “A nice place you got here,” the lead marshal said, gawking. “Very nice indeed.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

The burial service was held at a bleak cemetery south of Boston, where the Cronin family had several plots. Jared didn’t cry. Neither did he cry at the funeral. He was stoic, impassive, and talked hardly at all.

Teddy Williams cried, though, and they were genuine tears, and Sarah cried as well, and her tears were genuine too. The sky was gray, the clouds drifting by like cigar smoke.

After it was over, but before the small crowd dispersed, Pappas turned to Sarah and smiled sadly.

“How you doing, boss?” he said.

“The way you’d think,” she replied.

“True you’re being promoted to headquarters?”

She nodded again.

“The big time, huh? Onward and upward.”

“I guess.”

He lowered his voice so Jared couldn’t hear. “Jared’ll get through this okay. He’s a strong kid.”

“Yeah, he’ll be okay. It’s hard for him-all the more given how, you know, ambivalent he was about his father.”

“Same for you, I expect.”

“Yeah. But less so. I didn’t like the guy, but we had a son together. The most precious thing in my life. So you can’t exactly call it a mistake that I married him. I mean, I shouldn’t have, but I did, and something wonderful came out of all that hell.”

“Your luck with men’s bound to change.”

“Maybe,” she said, and turned and walked over to Jared, took his hand. Pappas took Jared’s other hand, and together the three of them walked toward the car. “I guess anything’s possible.”