The Zero Hour

by Joseph Finder

  “You hired an amateur,” the forger said disapprovingly.

  Baumann nodded.

  “This was crudely done.” He shook his head. “If you used this and were not caught—well, you were lucky. You must not use this again.”

  Baumann took the insult to his craftsmanship in stride. “That’s why I’m here,” he said. “I have no doubt you will do a superior job. But how can you ensure that a stolen passport will not be reported as missing or stolen, and placed on the look-out list on the computers at all American ports of entry? The only way I can think of is to take a passport that belongs to someone who never uses it, and therefore wouldn’t notice its absence.”

  “Exactly, Mr. Lerner. The network at my disposal has the names and addresses of Americans living abroad, in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and other places. Americans who have passports but rarely if ever travel.”

  “Good,” Baumann said.

  The two men negotiated a price—a stiff one, as it turned out, because of the number of personnel, including a small ring of petty break-and-enter specialists, who’d require a cut.

  As he was about to leave, Baumann added, as if in afterthought: “Oh, and while your people are at it, have them get me an assortment of credit cards. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and whatnot.”

  “Credit cards?” Van den Vondel replied dubiously. “Passports that are seldom used are one thing. But credit cards—they’re almost always noticed missing. They’d be canceled immediately.”

  “Quite right,” Baumann said. “But that makes no difference to me.” He extended his hand; the forger gave a moist, oily squeeze. “Until tomorrow night, then.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Once Baumann concluded his business with the forger, he took a taxi to Schiphol Airport, rented a Mercedes at an all-night car-rental agency, and set out toward the Belgian border. He was bone-tired and in need of a good night’s sleep, but there was, to be fair, a certain logic to his middle-of-the-night journey. The distance between Amsterdam and Liège, Belgium, is 120 miles, a drive of only a few hours. In the hours after midnight, the roads were empty and the drive went quickly. Motoring was far less time-consuming than flying to Brussels, then driving to Liège. And Baumann wanted to arrive in the early morning.

  There was a black-market armaments dealer who for years had lived and conducted his trade in a village just south of Liège, Baumann had ascertained after a few calls to underground armaments shippers at the Port of Antwerp. Baumann’s sources indicated that this dealer, a man named Charreyron, could do the job Baumann needed done.

  Historically, Belgium has always been Europe’s most notorious, most active arms manufacturer and dealer. It exports 90 percent of the weapons it produces. And the capital of the Belgian arms industry since the Middle Ages has been Liège, at the junction of the Meuse and the Ourthe rivers: the heart of the Belgian steel industry and Europe’s third-largest inland port.

  In 1889, the Belgian government decided its army needed a reliable single source for the Mauser Model 1888 military rifle, and founded at Liège the Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre. Ten years later, Fabrique Nationale, or FN, began making Browning pistols, which it makes to this day, along with machine guns and rifles. (It was FN rifles that Fidel Castro first used upon seizing power in Cuba.) As a result of this industry, a number of small-arms dealers have grown up around Liège in the last half-century, some of them dealing quite profitably outside the law.

  By four o’clock in the morning Baumann had reached Liège. The sky was pitch-black; dawn was still a few hours away. He was exhausted, badly in need of a few hours’ rest, and he considered what to do next.

  He could drive into the Place Saint-Lambert and fortify himself with a cup of strong black coffee, perhaps read a few newspapers. Or park somewhere quiet and doze until he was awakened by first light.

  But he decided not to trouble with driving into the city, and instead continued on southwest. As he drove through the darkness, he found himself growing increasingly contemplative. The gloomy landscape reminded him of the western Transvaal of his childhood.

  The small town in which Baumann had been born was settled in the early nineteenth century by Voortrekkers. Very quickly it became a plak-kie-dorp, a shantytown. When Baumann was a child, the town was made up of Dutch farmhouses and rondavels with thatched roofs. His parents’ farmhouse was situated hard by the Magaliesberg Mountains, forty kilometers outside Pretoria, surrounded by broodboom and bread trees.

  He taught himself to hunt in the bushveld nearby, which teemed with wildebeest and springbok, the perfect game. For all of his childhood, and even into his adolescence, he kept to himself, preferring solitude to the company of other children, who bored him. When he wasn’t hunting or hiking or collecting rock and plant specimens in the bushveld, he was reading. He had no brothers or sisters: in the years after his birth, his Boer parents tried repeatedly to conceive, but miscarriage followed miscarriage until it became clear his mother was unable to bear another child.

  His father, a tobacco farmer who’d sold his farm to the Magaliesberg Tobacco Corporation, the cooperative that owned most of the tobacco farms in the region, was a gloomy, silent man who died of a heart attack when Baumann was six. Baumann’s memories of his father were few. His mother supported the two of them by taking in sewing.

  She worried constantly about her only son, whom she didn’t understand. He was unlike the other children in town, unlike the sons of her neighbors and few friends. She was concerned he had been damaged by the untimely death of his father, had turned inward from the lack of brothers or sisters, had been rendered permanently sullen by his solitary existence. And she despaired of a solution.

  The more she urged him to do things the other children did—play games, even get into trouble—the more he kept to himself. Yet he caused her no grief. He excelled in school, made his bed, tidied up his room, read, and hunted. After a while she gave up trying to push her son in a direction he clearly didn’t want to go.

  Mother and son rarely spoke. During the long, furiously hot December afternoons and evenings—the South African summer—the two of them sat silently in the kitchen. She sewed; he read. They lived in separate universes.

  One afternoon in his twelfth year, unknown to his mother, Baumann went hunting for springbok in the bushveld and came upon a drunken Tswana, a local black tribesman. (Baumann had learned to distinguish among the tribes who lived nearby, the Tswanas or Ndebeles or Zulus.) The drunk, a young man perhaps ten years older than Baumann, began taunting the white boy, and Baumann without a moment’s hesitation aimed his hunting rifle and squeezed off a single shot.

  The Tswana died instantly.

  The victim’s blood, even his brain matter, splattered Baumann’s face and hands and muslin shirt. Baumann burned the bloodied shirt, bathed himself in a stream, and went home shirtless, leaving the crumpled body where it had fallen.

  When he returned home, his mother could see he hadn’t caught any game and didn’t even ask what had happened to his shirt. She’d given up asking questions only to receive monosyllabic replies. He read quietly, and she sewed.

  But that evening he was unable to concentrate on his reading, for the killing had thrilled him more deeply than anything had ever thrilled him before. It had scared him, yes, but it had also given him a warm and satisfying sense of control, of mastery, of power over the insolent black man. To Baumann, this was not a racial issue, because he thought little about Coloureds and Blacks. It was the ability to end a human life that intoxicated him—all the more when, after a few weeks, he realized he had gotten away with it, with no consequences whatsoever.

  Nothing happened. There was no investigation, no mention in the local newspaper, nothing.

  He had gotten away with it. It was like hunting a wildebeest, only a hundred times more exciting, more real.

  And it had been so simple. Baumann solemnly swore to himself that he wouldn’t kill another human being again, because he was afraid
that if he continued, he wouldn’t be able to stop.

  It was then that a complete and stunning transformation overcame the young Baumann. His personality changed almost overnight. He turned outward, became lively and outgoing. He was witty, winning, suddenly popular. He began to play sports, to go out. He made lots of friends. Within a few years he took a great interest in girls.

  His mother was baffled, but delighted. She attributed this miraculous change in her son to some mysterious effect of the hormonal surges of puberty. Whatever had clicked inside her son, she was grateful for it.

  Only rarely did she pause to observe that her son’s newfound demeanor seemed hollow at its center. There was something dead in his eyes, something false in his joviality, something fundamentally false. With her, his closest (and only) living relative, he was polite, proper, even a touch formal. Between them there was, she sometimes felt, a dead space, a coldness.

  She died when he was in his late twenties, already an accomplished operative for BOSS, the South African secret police. He made the funeral arrangements with an appropriate measure of grief, which he also displayed at her funeral. The small handful of friends and neighbors from their hometown who attended the service took note of how deeply distraught the young Baumann was, the poor thing, who’d lost his father so early and now his mother, and such a good and polite young man, too.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Deputy Assistant Director Duke Taylor escorted Sarah Cahill into his office and introduced her to Russell Ullman and Christine Vigiani, who got to their feet and welcomed her with grudging hospitality. They’d have been happier to meet a boa constrictor.

  The air-conditioning was particularly strong here on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building. Why, Sarah wondered, did the directors of both CIA and FBI have seventh-floor offices? Did old J. Edgar himself say, “If that’s the way the Pickle Factory does it, me too?”

  Sarah assessed them quickly. Ullman was big and towheaded, a corn-fed version of Peter. Vigiani looked smart as a whip and was probably trouble. Taylor she liked instantly, liked his serenity, his self-deprecating humor.

  Settling into his high-backed leather desk chair, with a huge FBI seal behind him, Taylor said, “So, you were in Germany on the Lockerbie thing.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You got a lot of raves. Apparently you helped break the case.”

  With a glint in her eye, she said: “You think if I cracked Lockerbie I’d be sitting here?”

  “Where would you be?”

  She shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “But you know well enough that it took us twenty-one months to find the timing device, and that was what cracked the case. If it hadn’t been for you, we’d probably have cracked it—but it would have taken even longer. The Bureau owes you a major debt.”

  “I’ll happily take a pay raise.”

  “File says you showed strong leadership. You ran a squad in Heidelberg. Obviously you also like to speak your mind.”

  “When I think it’s important. My superiors in Heidelberg got a little annoyed when I insisted there might be more to the case than a couple of Libyans.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like maybe Syria working with Iran. It’s just a theory. A few months before Pan Am 103 went down, a couple of guys from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command were arrested in Germany with barometric detonators. Who sponsors them? Syria. But because the Bush administration saw Syria as crucial to the Middle East peace process, they wanted to leave Syria alone. Then we needed Syria to take our side in the Gulf War, so they were definitely off the hook.”

  “Interesting,” Taylor said. “No comment.”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  He smiled. “I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long in the Bureau.”

  “I have a reputation for getting stuff done. I get cut a lot of slack.”

  “Do you have a theory on the World Trade Center bombing too? Some people don’t think we’ve completely solved that one either.”

  “You don’t really want to know.”

  “Try me.”

  “Well, we never really pursued the international angle adequately. It’s like Lockerbie—we just don’t want to know, because what do you do if you find out? Everyone seems to be happy pinning the blame on some incompetent followers of some blind sheik. But if you look at the evidence closely, you’ll see that one of members of the gang was an Iraqi sleeper agent. I think he was the control. I think Saddam Hussein was behind the Trade Center thing.”

  “Did they call you in on OKBOMB?”

  “No. By then I was in Boston. I wish they had.”

  “If I’d been in charge then, I would have. Do you miss being in Counterterrorism?”

  Sarah paused. “So that’s where this is leading. Yeah, I miss it a lot. But I have personal reasons to be where I am.”

  “I’ve read your file; I know about your custody situation. I understand about the sacrifices you sometimes have to make for family.”

  “Is this a job interview?”

  “Sort of. You think we’re tough enough on terrorists?”

  “‘We’ being the FBI or the United States?”

  “The United States.”

  “You can’t be serious. Of course not. We talk tough, but that’s about it. Remember how, during the Gulf War, the Pentagon wanted to target the terrorist training camps in the Iraqi countryside, strike them, but the White House said no? Didn’t want to piss off the Syrians, ’cause we needed them in the coalition against Saddam Hussein. That’s really tough, huh? And remember when the president of Pakistan, Zia, was killed along with the American ambassador in a plane crash and State wouldn’t allow any of our agents into Pakistan to investigate? Pretty damned tough, huh? We’ve got more than two dozen executive agencies and departments that monitor and respond to terrorism, and we couldn’t stop the Gang That Couldn’t Bomb Straight at the World Trade Center.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re sloppy. The blind sheik behind the World Trade Center incident was on our watch list of suspected terrorists, but he twice got visas to enter the country because his name was spelled wrong on the application, right?”

  “You think if we were tougher, things like Oklahoma City wouldn’t happen?”

  She paused. “I don’t know. You can’t stop maniacs.”

  Taylor leaned back in his chair, folded his arms. “All right. We noticed that you’ve been doing some deep background investigation into a New York banker named Warren Elkind. That seems a little outside your jurisdiction, unless there’s an OC connection I don’t know about.”

  Sarah looked at him penetratingly. So that was it. “A prostitute who happened to be one of my key informants—helped me wrap up a couple of important cases—was killed. A call girl, actually, not a prostitute—in her line of work they make certain distinctions. Anyway, the Boston police have cleared the case, but I’m skeptical, to be honest. It appears that the call girl was hired to steal something—a CD-ROM disk, I believe—from this Elkind guy.”

  “What’s the connection between Elkind and this prostitute?” Russell Ullman asked.

  “A preexisting relationship. She did bondage-and-discipline sessions with him whenever he was in Boston. She was his ‘top,’ or dominatrix. His mistress. Someone who knew she worked for Elkind must have hired her.”

  “What was on the CD-ROM?” asked Vigiani.

  “I don’t know. Bank records, I’d guess. Obviously something pretty valuable.”

  “But how do you know the call girl was hired to do this?” Vigiani persisted. “You haven’t talked to Elkind, have you?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “Not yet. He wouldn’t take my call, actually. The reason I know is that I have it on tape.”

  “Really?” Taylor said, hunching forward. “Phone cover on the prostitute?”

  “Her answering-machine tape.” She explained how the tape was unerased.

  “FBI Crime Labs,” Tay
lor said with a proud smile. “Best in the world.”

  Sarah cleared her throat. “Actually, I had to go outside the Bureau. MIT. We don’t have the technology.”

  “You have a transcript?” Taylor asked.

  “Better than that,” Sarah said. “I have the tape right here. I had a hunch you’d want to hear it.”

  After Sarah played the tape twice, on an old Panasonic that Ullman had rounded up from a nearby desk, Taylor said: “Now we’ve got a transcript we’d like you to take a look at.” He handed Sarah a transcript of the NSA intercept; the three were silent as she scanned it.

  Sarah read with puzzlement. When she got to Warren Elkind’s name she looked up, then resumed reading. Once she finished, she asked, “Who’s speaking here?”

  “We don’t know,” said Taylor.

  “Where was the conversation picked up?”

  “Switzerland.”

  She exhaled slowly, looked around at the others. “The ‘target,’ as they put it, is either Warren Elkind or Manhattan Bank, or both. Elkind is not just one of the most powerful bankers in the world, but he’s also a major fund-raiser for Israel. A lot of Palestinians would probably love to see him roast in hell.”

  Vigiani shrugged, as if to say, This is news to you?

  Sarah continued, “And this Heinrich Fürst, however it’s spelled, who’s ‘accepted the sales assignment’—what have you turned up on him?”

  “Nothing,” Taylor said.

  “Big fat goose egg,” said Ullman. “Under every variant spelling, every homophone, anything remotely close. Nothing.”

  “Fürst…” Sarah said aloud. “You know, I do have an idea.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Taylor said dubiously. “We’ll take anything.”

  “Well, I spent a lot of time, when I was in Germany working SCOTBOMB, looking into timing devices for bombs. I talked to one colonel at DIA—an old guy, who died a couple of years ago—about an attempted coup in Togo in 1986. This DIA guy mentioned, really in passing, the name of someone thought to be involved in the Togo affair. He was a mercenary terrorist who went by the alias Fürst. One of many aliases this mere used.”