The Zero Hour

by Joseph Finder

  In the meantime, Baumann had plenty of time to do what he needed to do. He returned to the Jefferson and placed a call to the auto dealership whose name—Brautigan Motors—was on Perry Taylor’s license-plate bracket.

  “Yes,” he said when the service department came on the line. “I feel like such an idiot.” He laughed. “This is Perry Taylor, and I bought a car from you guys, a ’94 Olds, and I just went and locked my keys in the car.”

  From his brief conversation with Perry Taylor the night before, Baumann had learned the eccentricities of the FBI man’s voice—a resonant baritone, a slight Southern accent, a careful enunciation. The imitation would fool anyone except a good friend; fortunately, the young man in the service department did not seem to know Taylor.

  “Sorry to hear that, sir. I assume you don’t have a spare set—?”

  “I’m embarrassed to say it, but my wife has the spare, and she’s in Miami Beach visiting the in-laws. Pretty swift of me, huh?”

  “Mr. Taylor, I’m going to have to ask you for your VIN number, which is located on the car or in your paperwork. Do you think you can find that for me?”

  “No problem, I got that.”

  “Great,” the young man said. “Otherwise we would have a problem.” Baumann gave him the VIN number. “Okay, now hold on a moment while I pull your file.”

  When he returned to the phone a few minutes later, the serviceman said, “I’m going to give you a number now, Mr. Taylor.” He spoke as if Mr. Taylor were a simpleton, which was probably a fair assumption given the circumstances. He gave Baumann the number. “You bring that number—it’s your key code, okay?—to any locksmith, and they can make you a new one. All right?”

  “All right, great,” Baumann said. “Thanks so much.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  The next afternoon, unfortunately, Perry Taylor drove home from work without stopping. Baumann placed a call to the auto dealership, asked for Kevin, the young man who had helped him, and thanked him for his help. It would not do at all to have Kevin call Taylor to make sure everything turned out all right.

  The next morning, Taylor made his regular delicatessen stop, but that was too short a time to do anything.

  That evening after work, Taylor made a stop at a Giant Foods supermarket a few miles from his home, part of a strip mall containing a People’s Drug, a Crown Books, and a variety of smaller shops.

  Baumann pulled into the lot just in time to see Taylor get out of the car.

  The opportunity had come.

  Taylor locked his briefcase in the trunk of the car. Baumann waited for him to enter the store before he went up to the Oldsmobile.

  He had left the car alarm off again. Baumann nonchalantly inserted the trunk key in the lock and popped it open. Taylor kept his trunk immaculate—no debris, no old newspapers or rags or dog-eared magazines. There was only an unopened can of tennis balls and the gray Samsonite briefcase. He lifted it out, shut the trunk, and returned to his own, rented car.

  Although the briefcase had a locking mechanism beneath its handle, three numbered dials, Taylor had not locked it, and why would he? It was safe in his trunk.

  In one of the pockets there was a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic, Model 1006, which took 10mm rounds. There was also a datebook and a thick sheaf of file folders. As he went through the datebook and the files, wearing latex gloves, Baumann began to sweat. He turned the car on to get the air-conditioning going, but it did a feeble job. The car had to be in drive for the air-conditioning to really kick in.

  Taylor was not holding a shopping list, so it was possible that he was only making a quick stop, in which case Baumann had to get through these files in a matter of minutes and return the briefcase to the trunk. Taylor must not know anyone had been in his car. Fortunately, Taylor had parked his Olds in a remote corner of the lot, where there was little foot traffic.

  There were a lot of documents, many of them marked “Confidential” or “Secret,” but that was meaningless. No one paid any attention to any document that wasn’t marked at least “Top Secret.” Baumann knew that in the U.S. government there are three levels of secrecy: confidential, secret, and top secret. Top secret is the highest level of secrecy; despite what is commonly believed, there is none higher.

  But there do exist more than thirty subsets of classification, known as compartments. A person in the government may be granted access to one or more compartments, yet not for others.

  Then Baumann found a document that was of interest, one he hadn’t expected to find. Hadn’t hoped to find, in fact.

  It was a sheet of green paper marked AIRTEL.

  Baumann knew enough about the workings of the FBI to realize that there were three categories of communications sent between headquarters and field offices. A routine communication was called a Letter and was printed on white paper. One level of urgency up from Letter was an Airtel, printed on green paper. At least, at headquarters it was green; the field offices got blue copies. In the old days, an Airtel was sent by airmail, although that distinction had long since become meaningless. Now Airtels (also known as “greenies”) were either faxed or sent by courier. The highest level of urgency was a Teletype, on manila paper, which was once sent by Teletype and now faxed or couriered. The only operative difference between the two was the heading.

  This particular Airtel was addressed to ADIC NY, the assistant director of the FBI in charge of the New York office. It was from Perry Taylor, and it listed members of a special working group of the Joint Terrorist Task Force, code-named Operation MINOTAUR, along with their affiliations. Five of them were FBI: two from headquarters, two from the Boston office, and one recently retired from the Boston office.

  Baumann understood at once that these were the names of the FBI agents who had been assigned to investigate an “alleged,” “impending” act of terrorism in New York City. It was Baumann they were after.

  He had the names of his hunters.

  He did not want to take the time to bring the papers to a photocopy shop, so he copied down the names and identifying information and replaced the papers neatly in the briefcase. Then he got out of his car, opened the trunk of Taylor’s Olds, replaced the briefcase, and shut the trunk. He quickly leaned over to retrieve the transmitter from the rear bumper—it was too risky to leave it there any longer. He felt along the underside of the bumper until his fingers slid up against the magnetized transmitter and closed around it, and then he heard someone speak very close to him.

  “Freeze,” the voice said. “FBI.”

  Baumann whirled around and saw Perry Taylor standing just a few feet away, and he could not suppress a smile. He had been sloppy, or perhaps he had underestimated Taylor. Taylor must have seen someone standing next to his car, must have left the supermarket by some unseen exit. He had no shopping bags.

  This was a very bad situation indeed, and Baumann’s head spun. He did not want to kill Perry Taylor; that had not been his intention at all. Baumann gave an abashed smile, laughed awkwardly. He spoke in a Southern accent, which by now felt natural. “Of all the places to drop a contact lens,” he said.

  He could see Taylor hesitate. “Where’d you drop it?” Taylor asked skeptically. Had he seen Baumann open the trunk?

  No one was walking by, no one even close. No one could see them. “Right … right here, somewhere, it’s got to be,” Baumann said, shaking his head. “Man, it’s one of those days.”

  “I know what you mean,” Taylor said. “Here, let me help you.”

  Of course: Taylor didn’t have a gun with him. His gun was locked in his trunk. Taylor moved closer, pretending to help Baumann look for the lost contact lens, but really—Baumann was sure of it—to grab Baumann, catch him off base, perhaps attempt to disarm him.

  “Thanks,” Baumann said, and waited for Taylor to come closer, and when Taylor did, Baumann’s right hand shot toward Taylor’s throat, as quick as the dart of a snake’s tongue, and got hold of the FBI man’s trachea and squeezed, and Perry Taylo
r sank to the ground dead, looking very much like a middle-aged man overcome by the sweltering heat of a Washington summer evening.

  Part 4

  FINGERPRINTS

  Under fragrant bait there is certain

  to be a hooked fish.

  —Sun-tzu, The Art of War

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Police around the world still use the old Henry system of fingerprint classification, which groups fingerprints by their various features, their loops, arches, whorls, and ridges.

  It is a fairly baroque system. A loop may be ulnar or radial; a central pocket loop may be plain or tented. Whorls come in four types: plain, center-loop, double-loop, or accidental. Additionally, a whorl can be an inside tracing, an outside tracing, or a “meet” tracing. Then there are ridges. Every fingerprint has a unique pattern of ridges, enclosures, ending ridges, and bifurcations, places where the ridge lines end or split in two. To make a positive identification, one must have eight or more points of identification, also called Galton’s details, after the nineteenth-century English scientist Sir Francis Galton. Under the Henry classification system, unfortunately, comparisons have to be done manually, in a print-by-print search, which can take weeks or even months.

  But since 1986 a different, computerized method of sorting and storing prints has been in use in the United States. It is called the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, and it uses high-speed optical scanners to analyze prints, digitalize them, and store them in computerized form. The position of minutiae are counted on a 512-pixel-per-inch scale and converted into a series of numbers, which can easily be compared with others. Loops and whorls are effectively turned into bytes and bits. Using AFIS, the FBI and major police forces around the nation have the remarkable ability to compare fingerprints at the rate of nine thousand a minute.

  The FBI’s Identification Division has the fingerprints of some twenty-four million convicted criminals on line, in addition to the print file cards of forty million other Americans, including federal employees and military veterans. And very recently, the FBI’s AFIS has been electronically connected to AFIS machines at state capitals and major cities around the country. This network, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), which is housed in a new site in Clarksburg, West Virginia, ties the local police booking station to the FBI in a paperless transmission system that will soon eliminate the old-fashioned fingerprint cards entirely.

  * * *

  The task force had been hastily assembled by beeper. Even Ken Alton, awakened from slumber, straggled in clutching a take-out cup of coffee. Sarah passed out copies of Henrik Baumann’s “ten-print,” his ten fingerprints compiled on a file card by the South Africans. On this form, each print was carefully rolled onto its own block. On the lower portion of the card were the “slap prints,” the four fingers of each hand slapped down at once.

  “You may not have any use for the prints,” she announced, “but it’s there in case you do. Those numbers there beneath each print are the Henry numbers, which the South Africans still use. Stone-age technology, but we’re not in a position to complain. The Identification Division is already working on these, blowing them up, tracing the ridges, and converting them to the AFIS system.”

  “What, no lip prints?” asked Lieutenant Roth dryly.

  There were a few chuckles, some louder than others, as if this were an inside joke.

  “Sorry?” Sarah said, mystified.

  “It’s a running joke,” explained Wayne Kim from NYPD Forensics, shaking his head. “There’ve been a couple of papers in the Journal of Forensic Science on using lip prints for personal identification. They look at labial wrinkles and grooves, bifurcated, trifurcated, reticulate, stuff like that.”

  “I see,” she said. “Now, a couple of things about these prints you may or may not know, since I know you’re not all fingerprint jocks. Until we get the AFIS classifications, you can fax these ten-prints or receive latents by fax, but make sure to use not just the high-resolution fax, but the secure high-resolution fax, okay? And be careful, because even the high-res fax can introduce false minutiae. If you get a set of latents you think might be from our guy, I’d rather courier them down to Washington than mess around with the fax.”

  “Sarah,” Ken said groggily, “what’s the deal on reliability of AFIS matches?”

  “Okay, the machine classifies the quality of the prints A or B. C is a reject. It doesn’t give you a definite yes-or-no, this-is-it kind of thing. It’ll give you a list of the top contenders in descending order by PCN number. A so-called perfect score is nineteen thousand, nine hundred ninety-eight. But remember, we’re in the law-enforcement business, not the intelligence business, so everything we do has to stand up in court. And legally, even after the computer spits out the winner, ID’s still going to have to chart it by hand, or rather by eye.”

  Ken nodded.

  “We going to put this out on the NCIC?” asked Mark McLaughlin of the NYPD, who had sandy blond hair and a face dense with freckles.

  Sarah shook her head. “NCIC uses a different system, a simple numerical classification the Bureau came up with in order to be able to store prints on computer. It’s based on a line count of ridges between the delta and the core—you know, ‘center loop, outside tracing,’ or ‘radial loop with a four count,’ like that. It’s actually a pretty crude system, useful for pointing the way and that’s all. AFIS and IAFIS are really a hell of a lot more useful.”

  “And Albany, too, since we’re assuming the guy’s right here,” Lieutenant Roth said. “The Division of Criminal Justice, Fingerprints Section. So if he’s arrested and printed anywhere in the state, we’ve got him. I say it’s worth the time to send prints on to every state to search for a match, and retain them if they’re willing to. New York will, but a lot of states won’t.”

  “So what do you want us to do with prints if we get any?” asked one of the street agents, Dennis Stewart, whose specialty was organized crime.

  “We’ve got some basic equipment set up here,” she replied. “A RAMCAM, the little fingerprint reader that makes a thermal picture of the print, and the CRIMCON, which is hooked up to a video monitor. Lieutenant Roth is the man to see if you have a print—he’ll be in charge of all that.”

  Later, as the group dispersed, Pappas approached her and spoke quietly. “Listen, Sarah, with all this sophisticated technology, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that all the fancy computers in the world aren’t going to make up for some good solid shoeleather.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m just afraid that the clock’s ticking and we’re being sidetracked by all these toys.”

  “Alex, we ignore the new technology at our own peril.”

  “You remember when the Reagan administration spent seventeen million bucks on a computer system they called TRAP/TARGIT that was supposed to predict terrorist incidents based on early signals? It was a complete bust. Never worked. A huge joke. I’m just wondering whether we shouldn’t be doing some more basic, old-fashioned brainstorming. What are you doing tonight?”

  “I’m picking up Jared from camp. Between six and seven at Penn Station.”

  “You two doing something, going out for dinner?”

  “I didn’t have any plans. I thought I’d see what Jared’s up for.”

  “Maybe I could come by later, when Jared’s asleep. No, I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you ask Jared when he gets in if he feels like having dinner with you and me at a nice Greek place I discovered on First Avenue. You and I can talk, and Jared can put in his two cents. But I don’t want to horn in on your little reunion—”

  “Oh, he always loves seeing you, Alex. But I don’t know about Greek. You know how discriminating he is about food.”

  “McDonald’s it is. The one at the intersection of Seventy-first, Broadway, and Amsterdam.”

  * * *

  Alex Pappas devoured his Big Mac and fries with as much gusto as he did mo
ussaka or spanakopita. A good portion of his fries, of course, went directly to Jared, who ate ravenously, as if he’d just come not from summer camp but a Soviet hard-labor camp.

  In the two weeks since she’d last seen him, Jared seemed to have grown taller and more slender, more a young man than a pudgy little boy. Sarah could at times see him as an adult, a breathtakingly, head-turningly handsome man. And in the next instant he was again the kid in tie-dyed shorts with scuffed knees letting out a fake belch, telling them about all the games he’d learned at camp. “I can’t wait to play in Central Park,” he said.

  Sarah shook her head. “Not without supervision, you’re not.”

  “Oh, God, I don’t need supervision.”

  “You’re not playing in Central Park unless I’m there, Jared. ‘Stranger danger,’ remember?”

  Jared pouted. “I’m not a baby, Mom.”

  “Central Park can be a dangerous place for kids. That’s the rule. Only with supervision. Now, I’m going to be really, really busy during the days, and I don’t want you staying in the apartment all day and watching TV, so I got you into the summer program at the YMCA near Lincoln Center. It’s on West Sixty-third Street, not too far from here. Sort of a neat building. That’s where you’ll spend your days.”

  “YMCA?” Jared said. “I don’t want to swim.”

  “It’s not just swimming, it’s arts and crafts and basketball and other games. You’ll have a great time.”

  “Oh, God,” Jared wailed.

  “Believe me,” Pappas said to him, “when you get to be as old as me, you’d give anything to be able to spend your days at a day camp. Anything!”