The Zero Hour

by Joseph Finder

  “Right,” Willkie agreed, “but Paul Morrison at the CTC says he’s already done it, and you know how much better their stuff is than ours.”

  “They say it’s better,” Taylor said, smiling. “But if we put one of our best searchers on it—Kendall or Wendy, say—maybe we’ll turn up something. Don’t forget, this is just the NSA’s guess at how the name is spelled, based on a transcription of a spoken conversation. There are probably hundreds of different ways of spelling, or transliterating, the same name.”

  “I wouldn’t be optimistic.”

  “Fair enough. No reason to be. Next, we take the profiles of every known terrorist in the world and find some way of narrowing them down, winnowing out the wrong ones.”

  “I think you can eliminate the pure ideologues,” Willkie suggested. “Abu Nidal’s people. Hezbollah. PFLP. Sendero Luminoso.”

  Taylor shook his head. “I don’t think it’s so easy, Noah. Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, whatever you want to call them—they may be Maoist, but they contract out to Colombian narcotics traffickers, right?”

  Willkie nodded.

  “These days, anyone’s for sale. Ideology sometimes doesn’t seem to matter at all. The only terrorists we can eliminate are those who are dead or locked up. And that still leaves the board wide open—what about terrorists we’ve never heard of, going out for the first time?”

  “This reference to ‘the smartest one alive’ or whatever,” Willkie objected. “You don’t call a neophyte the smartest one alive. Anyway, who’d hire a neophyte, right? My guess is, it’s someone with a track record. We may not have anything on him—or her—but whoever it is has got to be experienced.”

  “Good point,” Taylor conceded. He shrugged. “But that doesn’t help us any. So let’s go about this from the other direction: the target. The Manhattan Bank.”

  “If that’s really the target. It may be a target. Or not a target at all.”

  “Also true. But what if we run a complete search on the bank and on Elkind? See if there’ve been any threats. Check out any international operations the bank’s involved in. See if Elkind has any enemies. He may have enemies he doesn’t even know about. Call up everything we’ve got.”

  “Hey, you’re talking like you expect me to help you out. I already got a full-time job. Remember? You picked me for it.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean you, Willkie. We’ve got plenty of people to do stuff like that. But you can keep us plugged in, give us a heads-up if anything comes along of interest. The CIA may not consider this worthy of study, but then, they’re full of shit.” He gave a big, ebullient smile. “Thanks for coming to me with this. I have to admit I won’t exactly be crushed if we catch the asshole before CIA does.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Jared had invited a friend of his, Colin Tolman, for dinner. The two eight-year-olds sat on the living room rug, an assortment of baseball and superhero trading cards spread out around them. The radio was blasting techno-rap. Both of them wore Red Sox caps, backward. The brim of Jared’s hat had been bent into a tube shape. Jared was wearing Diesel jeans and a Phillie Blunts T-shirt. They had their Mighty Morphin Power Rangers backpacks beside them. Both had seen the movie twice and loved it. But eight-year-olds are nothing if not fickle. In a month Mighty Morphins would more than likely be gonzo, dead meat, history, as Jared liked to say.

  “Awesome!” Jared shouted as she entered. “Look, Mom, I got a Frank Thomas rookie. That’s worth three-fifty at least!”

  “Will you turn that off, or at least down?” she said. “Hi, Colin.”

  “Hi, Sarah,” said Colin, a pudgy blond kid. “Sorry. Mrs. Cronin.”

  “She wants to be called Ms. Cahill,” Jared said, lowering the volume. “Even I’m not supposed to call her Sarah. Mom, Colin has a whole binder full of SpiderMan and X-Men.”

  “Wonderful,” Sarah said. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Colin, you collect baseball cards too?”

  “Nah.” Colin smirked. “No one collects baseball cards anymore, except Jared. Everyone else mostly just collects basketball cards or superheroes.”

  “I see. How was the last day of school?”

  “Jared got thrown out of class,” Colin reported.

  “You did? For what?”

  “For laughing,” Colin went on, delighted.

  “What?” Sarah said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Jared said. “You made me, you jerk.”

  “I didn’t make you,” Colin said, laughing. “I didn’t make you do anything, dickwad.”

  “Hey, watch the language,” Sarah said.

  “Get out of here! Tell her what you were doing, dickwad,” Jared said.

  “Jared’s always bossing people around,” Colin explained, “like telling them to do their chores and everything. And Mrs. Irwin was asking us about what we thought about what it’s like to be old, and I said I’d love to see Jared a hundred years old in a wheelchair, drooling and everything, and still bossing people around, poking everybody with a cane.”

  Sarah sighed, shook her head, didn’t know how to reply. Secretly it pleased her to think of Jared sent to the principal’s office for laughing, of all things, but she also knew that sort of thing shouldn’t be encouraged.

  “Can we watch Nickelodeon?” Jared asked.

  She looked at her watch. “For fifteen minutes while I get supper ready.”

  “Cool,” Jared said.

  “Cool, dude,” Colin amended. “What’s on? Salute Your Shorts? Doug? Rug Rats?”

  “If it’s Ren and Stimpy, forget it,” Jared said. “I hate Ren and Stimpy.”

  Colin gulped air and emitted a loud burp, and then Jared did the same, and both of them cracked up laughing again.

  After dinner, Sarah went upstairs to kiss Jared good night. He was lying in bed, holding Huckleberry, the teddy bear, reading the biography of Satchel Paige. He rarely cuddled with his teddy bear anymore; he considered that kid’s stuff.

  “Is that a kid’s version?” Sarah asked.

  “Grown-up version.” He returned to reading. After a moment, he looked up and asked peevishly, “Yes?”

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you, Your Excellency,” Sarah said in mock-dudgeon. “I just came up to say good night.”

  “Oh. Good night.” He turned his head to one side to receive a kiss.

  Sarah complied. “Didn’t you read this already?”

  Jared stared at her blankly for a long time, and then said: “Yes, so?”

  “Everything okay with you?”

  “Yes,” he said, and turned back to the book.

  “Because you’d tell me if everything weren’t okay, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.” Not looking up.

  “It’s this weekend, isn’t it?” Sarah asked, suddenly realizing. Saturday was two days away, which meant he spent the day with his father.

  Jared kept reading as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “You’re worried about Saturday,” she persisted.

  He looked up. “No,” he said, his mouth curling in sarcasm. “I’m not ‘worried’ about Saturday.”

  “But you’re not looking forward to it.”

  He hesitated. “No,” he said in a small voice.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Not really,” he said, still more softly.

  “Do you not want Daddy to come this weekend? You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, you know.”

  “I know. I don’t know. It’s okay. It’s just that…” His voice trailed off. “Why does he act the way he does?”

  “Because that’s the way he is.” That meant nothing, it was unhelpful, and they both knew it. “We all have our blind spots, and Daddy—”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s the way he is.” He returned to the book and added: “But I hate it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Perhaps the greatest difficulty in the business of counterterrorism is deciding what to ignore and what to pursue. You are faced with a vast qua
ntity of intelligence, but most of it is simply noise, static: pillow talk, intercepted telegrams, rumors. Ninety-nine percent of it is useless.

  Yet the cost of ignoring the wrong scrap of information may be incalculable. Any intelligence professional who disregards a lead that results in an act of terrorism may be held culpable professionally, not to speak of morally, for the death of a human being—or the death of a hundred thousand.

  Duke Taylor’s career had been built upon a number of talents, from his ability to get along with just about anybody, to his sharp (though often hidden) intellect, to his golf skills. Not least among his talents, however, was an instinct, the thing that separated an intelligence bureaucrat from a professional.

  And his instinct told him that Noah Willkie was right, and the CIA was wrong: there was a major act of terrorism in the planning.

  Shortly after his meeting with Willkie, he summoned two of his brightest lieutenants, Russell Ullman and Christine Vigiani, both of them counterterrorism analysts, and briefed them in on the NSA intercept. Ullman, a broad-shouldered, strapping Aryan from Minnesota in his early thirties, was an operational analyst. Vigiani, some years older, and an intelligence research specialist, was tiny, compact, dark-haired, introverted. Both took copious notes.

  “For reasons I can’t get into, this doesn’t go beyond this room. That’s why I’m taking the unusual step of having just you guys here without the section and unit chiefs. Now, I want to make sure the boys at Fort Meade add some names to their watch list—Heinrich Fürst, this fellow Elkind. Russell, can you draft a list of all possible trip words?”

  “Right,” Ullman said, “but how can we ask NSA about this if we’re not supposed to know anything about it?”

  “Leave it to me, Russ. That’s what I’m here for, the diplomacy part. You people do the heavy lifting. Chris, run down whatever you can on Fürst. Have Kendall or Wendy do a complete computer search. Wendy might be better. She’s good on Germanic languages, variant spellings, what-have-you. Have our legal attachés in Germany and Austria make discreet contact, see what they can learn.”

  She nodded and scrawled a note. “I’ll try,” she said dubiously, “but I’m sure it’s not his real name.”

  “Well, see what you can get. Don’t forget about our own people. Maybe somebody knows something. Round up anybody who knows something about Elkind or Manhattan Bank. Field agent, transcriptionist, even the guy who washes the office cars in the Albuquerque field office.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?” Vigiani asked, genuinely curious.

  “Wendy, the computer whiz, can help you. There’s a hidden search parameter she can call up, with my authorization.” Taylor saw the woman’s puzzlement, and added: “She’ll explain it. Basically, anytime anyone accesses the Bureau’s databases, there’s a notation made of it here in the central files, what they were asking about, et cetera.

  “Now, and this is the biggest task: I want a pile of files on my desk by tomorrow morning—all possible terrorist suspects.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Ullman said.

  “Put as many people as you need on this, okay? I want all the usual suspects, plus anyone else on the radar screen. Any terrorist with a track record. We’ve got to start broad.”

  “Whoa,” Ullman said. “You’re basically saying, any terrorist alive.”

  “Every one that fits this MO,” Duke Taylor said. “On my desk. By tomorrow morning.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Sarah’s marriage to Peter Cronin was a mystery that only deepened with time. The reason she’d done it was simple. He’d gotten her pregnant. But that begged several questions: why she decided to keep the baby; why she felt she had to marry him just because he’d knocked her up; and, the biggest question of all, why she had been attracted to him in the first place.

  True, he was movie-star handsome, a brawny, virile blond with a dazzling smile. That should have captured her attention for no more than five minutes. Once you got to know Peter at all, it was obvious he was crude, domineering, a creep. Yet at the same time he could be immensely charming when he wanted to.

  When he first asked her out, after they’d met on some minor FBI-police task force, she accepted quickly. He’s different from me, she told herself, but that’s all to the good. She was the overly refined one, perhaps effete, in need of an infusion of street savvy. Their sex life was incredibly exciting. She’d never felt so carried away. They’d fight, his blistering anger would surface, they’d get back together. The roller coaster went on like that for five months until her period was a few days late and a pregnancy test she bought at a drugstore confirmed her suspicion.

  There was never even a discussion of abortion; she didn’t believe in it. It hadn’t happened before. She’d never had the chance to test her moral code.

  But Peter wanted to get married, and although the voice of reason in her kept shrilling against it, they went to Boston City Hall and did it several days later. They moved in together, and it was as if nothing had happened. Their relationship remained tumultuous, they still fought constantly, he still knew how to reduce her to tears.

  And within a few months, he began to have affairs. First it was a sister of one of his cop friends, then a secretary he’d met at a bar called Richard’s, then a whole succession of them.

  At first, Sarah faulted herself. She hadn’t been much of a wife. She was career-obsessed. Sure, Peter worked long hours, but hers were worse. It hadn’t yet occurred to her that if a man works hard, he’s ambitious, but if a woman works hard, she’s negligent. After one traumatic fight, Peter promised to end the extracurricular activities. Sarah accepted his teary apologies. They would try to rebuild their marriage, for the sake of their unborn child.

  At five o’clock one morning, seven months pregnant with Jared, she came home unexpectedly early, rumpled and exhausted. She’d spent the night working a wire on a case involving a precious-metals shop in Cranston, Rhode Island, that was laundering money for the Medellín cartel. She entered the apartment quietly so as not to wake Peter, who happened to be sharing their bed with a woman.

  A few weeks after he’d moved out, she saw Peter arm in arm with yet another woman, coming out of a tapas place in Porter Square.

  A few months after Jared’s birth, Sarah accepted an assignment to go to Germany to help investigate the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Separated from Peter for several months already, she leaped at the chance to get out of Boston with her child. The Bureau needed female interviewers who spoke German; counterterrorism she would learn. One block of training at New Agents school had been an overview of counterterrorism, so she knew the fundamentals. Before being sent to Germany she was put through a few weeks of intensive training in terrorism at Quantico. It wasn’t easy taking a three-month-old baby to a foreign country, but it was easier than staying in the same city with Peter.

  The divorce became final while Sarah and Jared were still in Germany. By the terms of the custody agreement, however, Sarah had to live in the same city as Peter. So she and three-year-old Jared returned to Boston in 1991.

  Peter was suddenly interested in his little boy. She and Peter were civil with each other, and occasionally did favors for each other, while at the same time disliking each other as only divorced spouses can.

  Though he didn’t seem to mind being divorced from Sarah, he was pathologically jealous. Whenever she began seeing a man, he would find out about it, do whatever he could to break it up, always in the guise of protecting Jared.

  She’d had a few relatively serious relationships, and each time Peter or his friends on the job would track the man down and harass or threaten him. He’d be questioned at home, stopped repeatedly for minor traffic violations, keep having traffic and parking problems. It didn’t do much to sustain the relationships.

  But most of her dates never grew into anything long-term. Men didn’t want to go out with a woman who had a child, that was one thing. Also, she threw herself
into her career, working ridiculous hours, so that even when she did meet someone who didn’t mind her having a child, she wasn’t available. If she started going out with the guy, she’d keep having to cancel dates because of work. More than once a guy she’d started to get close to had planned something special only to have her cancel at the last minute. And then there was Sarah’s attitude, which had hardened since the divorce. She had become self-contained, unwilling to fake vulnerability, even brassy. She had become a woman who didn’t need a man in her life, because she’d married one, and look what had happened. Who needed that again?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Shortly after the KLM flight from Paris lifted off, Baumann noticed someone seated three rows in front staring pointedly at him, with a penetrating look of recognition.

  Baumann knew the face.

  The man was big, a hulking figure with round shoulders. Short hair cut into bangs, deep-set eyes. A beefy, jowly face Baumann thought he had seen before … but where? A long time ago, in connection with something unpleasant. The business in Madrid?

  No.

  No; he had not seen this man before. Now he was certain. The man was no longer staring at him; he was staring instead at the row behind, obviously searching for someone else.

  Baumann exhaled silently, relaxed his muscles, sank into his seat. The cabin was stuffy and overheated. A bead of sweat ran down one temple.

  A close call. He would have to be ever vigilant. The hulking man had called to mind another man, in another place; the resemblance was uncanny. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and was momentarily in an ice-cold hotel room in Madrid on a preposterously bright, impossibly hot afternoon.

  The windows of the suite at the Ritz, Madrid, had been bulletproof, he remembered. Fresh fruit and flowers were brought in every day. The sitting room was oval; everything was painted, or wallpapered, or upholstered in shades of clotted cream.