The Zero Hour

by Joseph Finder

  “I don’t even remember what a fly pattern is,” Jared said.

  “You run straight out, fast as you can, and I throw it over your head. A square-out, you cut right. Get it?”

  Jared ran back toward his father. As he ran, he shouted defiantly: “Yeah, but I caught it!”

  “Jerry, buddy, you’re not catching the ball right either. You’re just using your hands. Don’t just use your hands. Bring it into your chest. Get your body in front of it.”

  “I don’t want to get hit.”

  “Don’t be a pussy,” Peter said. “You can’t be afraid of the ball. Don’t be a pussy. Try it again, let’s go!”

  Jared began running, then pivoted to the right, slipping a little in the mud.

  “Now when you get it, tuck the ball into your chest,” Peter shouted, tossing the football. It soared in a perfect arc. He shouted: “Tuck the ball into your chest. Tuck—”

  Jared stepped aside, and the football slipped through his hands and thunked hollowly into the grass. Vaulting after it, Jared lost his balance and slammed to the ground.

  “Jesus,” Peter said with disgust. “The ball’s not going to hurt you. Get your body in front of the ball! Don’t be afraid of it!”

  “I did—”

  “Get both hands around the ball!”

  Frustrated, Jared got to his feet and ran back toward Peter.

  “Look, Jerry,” Peter said in a softer voice. “You gotta bring it into your body. All right, we’re going to do a button hook.”

  “A button hook?” Jared repeated wearily.

  “A button hook. You get out there, run ten yards, and turn around. The ball will be there. You get it?”

  “I get it,” Jared said. His voice was sullen; he hung his head. Sarah wondered whether her presence was embarrassing him, decided it was, and that she should leave.

  “All right, let’s go!” Peter shouted as Jared scrambled ahead. As he ran, his pace accelerated. Peter threw the ball hard and fast, a bullet. Just as Jared stopped and turned, the football hit him in the stomach. Sarah heard a whoof of expelled air. Jared buckled over, sank clumsily to the ground.

  “Jared!” Sarah shouted.

  Peter laughed raucously. “Man,” he said. “Buddy boy. You really screwed the pooch there, didn’t you.” He turned toward Sarah. “Wind knocked out of him. He’ll be fine.”

  Jared struggled to his feet, his face red. There were tears running down his face. “Jesus, Dad,” he cried. “What’d you go and do that for?”

  “You think I did something?” Peter said, and laughed again. “I told you, you gotta tuck it into your chest, kid. You looked like a clown out there. You want to learn this or not?”

  “No!” Jared screamed. “Jesus, Dad! I hate this!” He limped away toward Sarah.

  “Peter!” Sarah said. She began to run toward Jared, but the heel of her left shoe caught in a tangle of weeds. She tripped and landed with her knees in the mud.

  When she got up, Jared was there, throwing his arms around her. “I hate him,” he sobbed against her blouse, muffled. “He’s such an asshole, Mom. I hate him.”

  She hugged him. “You did so well out there, honey.”

  “I hate him.” His voice grew louder. “I hate him. I don’t want him to come around anymore.” Peter approached, his face set in a grim expression, his jaw tight.

  “Look, Jerry,” he said. “I don’t want you to be afraid of the ball. You do it right, the ball’s not going to hurt you.”

  “You get the hell out of here!” Sarah exploded, her heart racing. She grabbed Jared so tightly he yelped in pain.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Peter said. “Look what you’re doing to him.”

  “Get the hell out,” Sarah said.

  “You’re a goddam asshole!” Jared shouted at his father. “I don’t want to play football with you again. You’re an asshole!”

  “Jerry,” Peter coaxed.

  “Screw you, Dad!” Jared said in a quavering voice. He whirled around and stomped away.

  “Jared,” Sarah called out.

  “I’m going home, Mom,” he said, and she hung back.

  A few minutes later, Sarah and Peter stood on the edge of the field in the drizzle. His blond hair was tousled, his gray Champion sweatshirt smudged with mud. In his faded jeans, he looked as slender and trim as ever. He had never looked as attractive, and she had never hated him more.

  “I talked to Teddy,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I heard about Sweet Bobby whatever-his-name-is.”

  “What, you surprised we made the whore’s killer so fast?”

  “No. I just don’t think you got the right one.”

  “Jesus, Sarah, we got blood on the guy’s clothes, what more do you—”

  “You’ve got evidence enough to lock him up. I just don’t think he’s the killer.”

  Peter shook his head and smiled. “Whatever. Mind if I use your shower? Get changed? Jared and I are going out to dinner. Hilltop Steak House.”

  “I don’t think Jared is up to going out.”

  “I got him till tonight, remember.”

  “It’s Jared’s choice, Peter,” she said. “And I don’t think he wants to go out to the Hilltop with you tonight. I’m sorry.”

  “The kid’s got to learn to stand on his own,” he said gently.

  “For God’s sake, Peter, he’s eight years old. He’s a child!”

  “He’s a boy, Sarah. Kid’s got a lot of potential. He just needs a little discipline, is all.” He seemed almost to be pleading. “You know, Joey Gamache was a lightweight, but he became a world champ. You want to knock down Floyd Patterson or Marvin Hagler or Mike Tyson, you got to learn to take your lumps. You’re raising him to be soft. Jerry needs a father.”

  “You aren’t a father, you’re a sparring partner,” Sarah said, her voice quiet and malevolent. “Rocket shots to the rib. Jab to the jaw. You’re goddam abusive, is what you are, and I’m not going to permit it. I’m not going to let you treat my son this way anymore.”

  “‘My son,’” Peter echoed with dark irony, chuckling.

  They were both silent for a moment. The argument hung heavy in the air between them.

  “Look, just make it easier on all of us,” Sarah said. “Go home. Jared doesn’t want to go out to dinner with you tonight.”

  “Kid needs a father,” Peter said quietly.

  “Yeah,” Sarah agreed. “It’s just not clear you’re the one.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  At a few minutes after four o’clock in the afternoon, the office mail courier, a chubby middle-aged black man, dropped a small yellow bubble-pack envelope, about four inches wide by five inches long, into Sarah’s in basket. “Just came in,” he said. “Rush.”

  “Thanks, Sammy,” she said. The label bore the return address of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

  She tore open the envelope, removed the tape, and put it in a tape player.

  The voices were indistinct, forlorn, distant conversations in a wind tunnel. Even played on the most high-fidelity tape deck Sarah could wangle from Audio Services, the acoustic quality of the tape recording was woefully bad. But once you got used to it, you could make out the words.

  Will Phelan—brow furrowed, intently concentrating, stroking his mustache absently with his pinkie—sat at the conference table beside Ken, who leaned way back in his chair, arms folded across his ample belly, eyes closed.

  Sarah provided the narration. “This one,” she said, “is just a routine dunning call.” A man’s voice identified himself as being “from Card Services” and left an 800 number. Then a beep, then the synthesized female voice of the answering machine’s day/time stamp announced: “Monday, four-twelve P.M.”

  “All right,” Sarah said. “Listen.”

  Another man’s voice. If the first voice sounded lost in an electronic maelstrom, this one was even more distant, bobbing on crashing waves of static.

  “Mistress? It’s Warr
en.” A surge of crackly static, then: “… the Four Seasons at eight o’clock tonight. Room 722. I’ve been hard for days thinking about you. Had to jerk off in the lavatory on the plane. Probably against some FAA law. I’m going to have to be punished.”

  Phelan arched his eyebrows and turned to look at Ken, who seemed on the verge of exploding with laughter.

  A beep. The day/time voice stamp announced: “Monday, five-twenty P.M.”

  Phelan cleared his throat and rumbled: “All right, you got—”

  “Wait,” Sarah interrupted. “One more.”

  A rush of static, hollow and metallic. The next voice was male, high-pitched, British-accented. The connection was distant; every few seconds it broke up.

  “Valerie, it’s Simon. Good evening.” Slow, deliberate, phlegmatic. “Your friend is staying in Room 722 at the Four Seasons Hotel. You are looking for a small, round, flat object that looks like a compact disk you might play on your stereo…”

  A break, then: “… gold-colored. It may or may not be in a square sleeve. It will almost certainly be in his briefcase.” A long rush of static. “A van will be parked down the street from the hotel this evening. You will take the disk to the van, hand it over, and wait for it to be copied. Then you will return the disk to the hotel’s front desk. You will tell them you found it. When you return home, you will be visited by a friend around midnight, who will give you the rest of what we’ve agreed upon. Goodbye.”

  A beep, then the mechanical voice: “Monday, six oh five P.M.”

  Sarah clicked the tape off, looked at the two men.

  A long beat of silence.

  Phelan said: “Is this admissible?”

  “Easily,” said Ken. “Bruce Gelman’s got credentials up the wazoo.”

  “This some kind of CD-ROM they’re talking about?” Phelan asked.

  Sarah said, “Probably. The situation we have here—the five-thousand-dollar payoff in bills cut in half, the theft of a computer disk—this isn’t a run-of-the-mill pimp-killing-a-prostitute thing. This is a fairly elaborate setup, I’d guess.”

  Phelan nodded contemplatively. “By whom and for what?”

  “My theory is that Warren Elkind was set up to be robbed by Valerie. That Elkind had something, or has access to something—something computer-related—that’s worth a lot to some people with a lot of resources.” Sarah ejected the cassette tape from the machine and idly turned it over several times.

  Phelan sighed long and soulfully. “There’s something there,” he admitted. “But not enough to go on. What’d you turn up from the computer search?”

  She explained that the interagency computer search for any mention of Elkind’s name had yielded exactly 123 references. The information had come over the teletype, instead of by letter, because Phelan, fortunately, had marked the search “immediate” rather than routine. Most of the references were garbage—“overhears,” as they’re called in the intelligence community. Some CIA flunky in Jakarta heard Warren Elkind’s name mentioned in connection with a major banking arrangement with the Indonesian government. Someone in U.S. military intelligence in Tel Aviv had heard a rumor (false, it turned out) that Elkind had once accepted a bribe from an Israeli minister. Someone else had heard that Elkind had bribed a member of the Israeli government. A lot of junk.

  The telephone on a table against the wall rang. Ken got up to answer it.

  “I’m inclined to leave Elkind out of this,” Phelan said.

  “For you, Sarah,” Ken said.

  Sarah took the phone. “Yes?”

  “Agent Cahill, this is Duke Taylor, at headquarters.”

  “Yes?” she said, her heart hammering. It had to be something serious.

  “How fast can you get your bags packed and get on a plane to Washington?” Taylor asked. “I need to see you immediately.”

  Part 3

  KEYS

  Be extremely subtle, even to the point

  of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious,

  even to the point of soundlessness.

  Thereby you can be the director

  of the opponent’s fate.

  —Sun-tzu, The Art of War

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Goedenavond, Mijnheer,” the portly little man in the corner booth said as he half rose to greet Baumann at the Hoppe, a well-known bruine krogen, or “brown café.” This was a type of pub peculiar to Amsterdam, so named for its tobacco-smoke-stained walls and ceilings. A loud and crowded place, poorly lit, it was located on Spui, in the middle of Amsterdam’s university section.

  “Good evening,” Baumann replied, assessing the man, whose name was Jan Willem Van den Vondel, but—presumably because of his girth—was universally known by the nickname Bones.

  Bones was a “mere,” an ex-mercenary who had worked in the Middle East and Africa under a bewildering variety of aliases. He had once been one of the dreaded affreux, the “frightful ones,” the white freelance soldiers who helped keep dictators in power throughout Africa and Asia. In the sixties and seventies, he had worked in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire), in Angola in the days when it was owned by the Portuguese, in white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in Yemen under the old monarchy, and in Iran under the Shah. In 1977 he had helped lead an unsuccessful effort to oust the Marxist government of Benin, a small country in West Africa. A year later he had been instrumental in aiding Ahmed Abdallah to seize the presidency of the Comoros Islands, an archipelago off the southeastern coast of Africa. A decade later, several of his employees, working as guards for President Abdallah, had assassinated the very man they had put into office.

  Van den Vondel was loathsome in appearance, lacking in personal hygiene and malodorous. He had cauliflower ears as well as bad teeth, presumably stained by chewing tobacco, a wad of which bulged in his cheek.

  Yet Bones had become one of the best forgers in the business. He had agreed to meet Baumann, a man he did not know, only because Baumann had been vouched for by a mutual friend, an ex-mercenary now residing in Marseilles whom Baumann had hired to do a nasty job in Ostend some ten years earlier. This Frenchman, who’d worked under Bones in the Belgian Congo, knew Baumann only as a wealthy American named Sidney Lerner—a cover Baumann had gone to a great deal of trouble to establish.

  “Sidney Lerner” was one of the Mossad’s many thousands of sayanim, volunteers who help out the Israeli intelligence service out of a sense of loyalty to Israel. A sayan (Hebrew for “assistant”) must be 100 percent Jewish, but not an Israeli citizen; in fact, sayanim are always diaspora Jews, though they may have relatives in Israel. In the United States alone there are some fifty thousand sayanim. A doctor sayan, for instance, will treat a Mossad agent’s bullet wound without reporting it to the authorities. A sayan can refuse an assignment—they often do—but can be relied upon not to turn a Mossad agent in.

  As Baumann had expected, the forger had asked this mutual friend why on earth Sidney Lerner couldn’t get his false papers from his katsa, his Mossad case officer. There were reasons, the mercenary said darkly. Are you interested or not? Bones was interested.

  Baumann got right to the point. “I need three complete sets of documents.”

  The forger’s eyes narrowed. “Belgian?”

  “American and British.”

  “Passports, driver’s licenses, et cetera?”

  Baumann nodded, and took a sip of beer.

  “But Mr. Lerner,” Van den Vondel said, “it’s much cheaper to get them in New York or London.”

  “Speed is of greater importance to me than expense,” Baumann explained.

  The forger flashed a big, feral gray smile. This was music to his cauliflower ears. “Tell me, please, Mr. Lerner, exactly what sort of schedule are you on?”

  “I need them by tomorrow evening.”

  Van den Vondel burst out laughing, as if this were the most riotously amusing joke he’d ever heard. “Oh, my,” he exclaimed helplessly between guffaws. “Oh, my. And I need to be the king of England.”

>   Baumann got to his feet. “I’m sorry we’re unable to do business,” he said.

  The forger’s laughing fit immediately ceased. “Mr Lerner, what you ask is absolutely unrealistic,” he said quickly. “Impossible. You will find this no matter who you talk to. Unless you have the misfortune of hooking up with some small-time fraud who does the shoddiest work that will have the American or the British authorities on your ass in seconds. I am a craftsman, Mr. Lerner. The work I do is absolutely top-notch, of the highest quality.” With another feral smile, he added: “Better, I may say, than the real thing.”

  Baumann sat down again. “Then how much time do you require?”

  “It depends upon what you want exactly. The British documents are no problem whatsoever. The American ones, on the other hand—well, this can be a major challenge.”

  “So I understand.”

  “In April of 1993,” Bones explained, “the U.S. government began issuing new passports marked with what is called a kinegram, which looks like a hologram, if you know what that is.”

  Baumann nodded impatiently, closing his eyes.

  “It’s part of the laminate on the identity page. When you hold it up to the light, it changes between two different images. We still have not devised a satisfactory method to copy that, although in a short time I have no doubt we will. Fortunately, the older-style American passports are still valid and in use. Those are much easier to reproduce. Though still quite difficult. To forge a new passport requires access to the paper, or better still, to the actual passport books that the government uses. It also requires the proper equipment, which is strictly controlled, difficult to obtain, and extremely expensive—”

  “And time-consuming, I imagine.”

  “Very much so. Because of your time constraints, forgery is out. The only possibility is to acquire a valid passport and alter it.”

  “I’m familiar with how it’s done,” Baumann said, smiling thinly. He produced Sumner Robinson’s passport, opened it to the identity page, and showed it to the forger, covering the name with his thumb.