The Zero Hour (36 page)

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

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

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

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

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

He didn’t like this either.

*   *   *

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

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

“Okay,” Ullman said.

*   *   *

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

He was being followed.

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

Had Charreyron, the Belgian explosives expert, talked?

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

*   *   *

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

Well, there was no choice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shit.

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

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

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

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

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

“Who are you?” the man whispered.

“FBI,” Ullman croaked. “Baumann—”

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

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

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

He also had a reasonably good plan to get some.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, I—”

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

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

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

“Mmm-hmm?” she said distractedly.

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

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

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

“The soldering?”

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

“How so?”

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

“Refresh my memory.”

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

“So what does this tell you?”

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

“Yes, Chris?”

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

“Oh?”