The Zero Hour

by Joseph Finder

  But Malcolm Dyson had always been a get-under-the-hood-and-fix-it kind of guy. He knew how the fuel systems and the drive trains of all his cars worked.

  He knew, too, the machinery of capitalism, knew how incredibly fragile it was, knew the precise location of its soft underbelly. He worked a long day in his library at Arcadia, and then pressed a button on his desk that pulsed an infrared beam at the Louis XIV armoire in a niche to his right. A panel slid open with a mechanical whir and the television came on: CNN, the top of the hour, the world news.

  The announcer, a handsome young man with immaculately parted dark hair and sincere dark eyes, said good evening and read the lead story off his TelePrompTer.

  “A computer virus has paralyzed the operations of America’s second-largest bank,” he said. “A spokesman at Manhattan Bank said that bank officials had no idea how the virus infected the bank’s computer system, but they believe it was the result of a deliberate attack by computer ‘hackers,’ or ‘phreakers.’”

  A graphic appeared next to the announcer’s head, a photograph of the sleek world-famous Manhattan Bank Building. He said, “Whatever the source, Manhattan Bank chairman Warren Elkind announced that the multinational bank was forced to close its doors at eleven o’clock Eastern Standard Time this morning, perhaps forever.”

  Dyson shifted slightly in his wheelchair.

  “The bank’s computers went haywire this morning, with all terminals freezing up. It was later discovered that a malfunction in the bank’s electronic payments system caused the withdrawal of all of Manhattan Bank’s assets, estimated at over two hundred billion dollars globally, and transferred as-yet-undetermined, enormous sums of money to banks around the world—estimated at over four hundred and thirty billion dollars, far more than the assets in the bank’s possession.

  “The consequences for the American economy are, according to the Federal Reserve chairman, incalculable. We have two reports now, from Washington, where the White House is said to be ‘gravely concerned’ as this disaster unfolds, but first from New York City, where an estimated three million small investors and bank depositors have had their entire life savings wiped out.”

  Then there was videotape footage of desperate crowds storming Manhattan Bank branch offices in Bedford-Stuyvesant and the Bronx. Dyson took a cigar from the humidor on his desk and snipped its end with intense concentration, muttering, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, folks.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY

  Warren Elkind’s inner office was chaos. His desk phone rang nonstop; young men and women rushed in and out with messages. It was crisis mode. His bank was crashing and burning. Sarah stood at his office door, still.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Elkind shouted to her across the room. “This fucking computer virus, or whatever the hell it is, has emptied the bank’s coffers, down to the last penny, and now they’re telling me they’re never going to unwind this mess—”

  “So now you want to talk.”

  “Christ! All right, I want everyone out of here. Everyone!”

  When the office was cleared out, Sarah came closer. “When you called me, you mentioned Malcolm Dyson. You think he’s behind this?”

  “How the hell do I know? I’m saying it’s a possibility.”

  “There’s nothing in your FBI file about Malcolm Dyson.”

  “It’s sealed, for God’s sake!”

  “What’s sealed?”

  “The scumbag probably blames me. He was indicted in the biggest insider-trading scandal ever to hit Wall Street, which is why he went fugitive, but he probably blames me. Thinks he’d still be a U.S. citizen, free and clear and living in Westchester, if I hadn’t turned him in.”

  Sarah said, coming still closer: “Did you turn him in?”

  “It wasn’t exactly that way,” Elkind said.

  “You were the witness that turned him in,” Sarah said. “You were the only one who knew. You made the case.”

  “He needed the bank’s help in financing an immense stock buyout, and he offered to cut me in. I refused. I’m a banker, not a kamikaze pilot.”

  “You turned him in to the SEC,” Sarah prompted.

  “Not quite so simple.”

  “Nothing ever is.”

  “After the SEC got on to him, he invited me to lunch at the Harvard Club. He wanted to make sure we ‘got our stories straight’—i.e., that I’d lie for him. By then I’d agreed to cooperate with the SEC. The SEC investigator wired me. He wanted to tape a tiny microphone and battery pack to my undershirt, but I wasn’t wearing any, and they didn’t want to tape it to my skin. So the guy offered me his undershirt to wear! I told him, look, I don’t wear polyester blends. But I wore the guy’s undershirt anyway. They found an empty supply closet next to the dining room and sat there while I broadcast to the tape recorder. I was terrified Dyson would find out.”

  “I guess he eventually did. He didn’t threaten you or anything?”

  “No. The one time I was convinced he’d go ballistic, and go after me, was when he was almost killed by the feds, in a botched shootout. I didn’t go out in public for weeks, let me tell you.”

  “When was that?”

  “The date, you mean?”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll never forget it. It was the day of my wife’s birthday—we were at ‘21’ celebrating, and they brought a phone to the table. It was one of my clients in Europe. He told me Malcolm Dyson had been fired on by U.S. marshals in an ambush in Monaco, that his wife and daughter had been killed, and that he’d been wounded. That he’d probably be paralyzed for life. I remember thinking, shit, I wish they’d gotten him too. When you strike at a king, you must kill him, as the saying goes. This was going to be one guy out for revenge. That was June twenty-sixth.”

  “That’s tomorrow.”

  June 26 was also the day when, according to the second telephone intercept, the final payment was scheduled to be made to a Panamanian bank.

  “Excuse me,” Sarah said. “I’ve got to get going.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

  “I want you to contact the Justice Department,” Sarah told Vigiani, “and get a list of all known employees, colleagues, associates, and friends of Malcolm Dyson, who might be located in Switzerland. Then get in touch with NSA and have them pull up voice samples of any of those people they have in their archives. And have them try to do a voice match with the two voices in the intercepted phone conversation.”

  There was a knock on the door to Sarah’s office. Roth pushed it open, saw that Sarah was meeting with Vigiani, but barreled ahead anyway: “Listen, Sarah, I got a call—”

  “Roth,” Sarah said curtly, “I’m in a meeting.”

  “Yeah, well, you might want to listen to this. We just got a call on the twenty-four-hour line from the police in Mount Kisco, New York. Responding to that NCIC lookout we put out.”

  Sarah looked up. “Yes?”

  “A couple of hours ago they got a theft report from an excavation company out there. One thousand pounds of C-4 plastic explosive was stolen from its warehouse last night.”

  Sarah stared. “How much?”

  “A thousand pounds.”

  “Holy shit,” she said.

  * * *

  “So what you’re telling me,” Assistant Director Joseph Walsh sputtered, “is that you don’t know crap.”

  “No, sir,” the FBI explosives analyst replied, coughing nervously into a loose fist. “I’m telling you we can only ascertain broad generalities.”

  Walsh was intimidating enough in manner. He did not need to plant his burly six-foot-seven-inch frame next to the diminutive explosives expert, towering over him, as he was doing now. Sarah and Harry Whitman, the chief of the Joint Terrorist Task Force, watched the interplay with grim fascination.

  “Jesus Christ,” Walsh thundered. “We have the fucking fusing mechanism. We know a thousand pounds of C-4 has been stolen. What else do you want? A blueprint and a wiring diagram? A guided fucking tour?”

/>   But the explosives expert, a small and precise man named Cameron Crowley with a graying crew cut and a pinched pink face, was not put off quite so easily. He had done excellent work after the World Trade Center bomb and Oklahoma City, and everyone in Walsh’s office knew it. On reputation alone he could coast. “Let me tell you exactly what we do know,” he said, “and what we don’t know. We know a thousand pounds of C-4 may—I repeat, may—be part of this bomb. We don’t know if the theft of this plastic is a coincidence, or whether it was done by, uh, Baumann.”

  “Fair enough,” Sarah put in to encourage the man.

  “But assuming Baumann stole it, we don’t know if he’s planning one bomb or a series of bombs. We don’t know if he’s planning to use all of the thousand pounds in one bomb. That’s a hell of a lot of explosive power.”

  “What’s a ‘hell of a lot’?” asked Walsh, as he pivoted to return to his desk.

  The expert sighed with frustration. “Well, don’t forget, it only took one pound of plastic to bring down Pan Am 103. Four hundred grams, actually. A thousand pounds can certainly do a lot more damage than was done in TRADEBOM. That wasn’t even dynamite—it was a witches’ brew of ammonium nitrate and all sorts of other stuff—but it blew out a six-story hole in the tower. It had an explosive force equivalent to over a thousand pounds of TNT.”

  He explained that on the table of relative destructiveness as an air-blast explosive, TNT is 1.0, ammonium nitrate is .42, dynamite can be anywhere from .6 to .9, and C-4, Semtex, and British PE-4 all have a value of 1.3 or 1.35. “So,” he concluded, “weight for weight, C-4 is about a third more powerful than TNT.”

  “Can it bring down a building?” Walsh asked impatiently.

  “Yes. Some buildings yes, some no. Not a huge building like the World Trade Center.” He knew there had been four studies done on the engineering aspects of the World Trade Center complex, which determined based on vibration analysis that the World Trade Center buildings could not be knocked down by any bomb short of a nuke. “In any case, it depends on a whole lot of factors.”

  “Such as?” Whitman prompted.

  “Location of the bomb, for one thing. Is it going to be placed outside or inside the building? Most bombs are placed outside buildings so that the damage will be visible, easily seen and photographed, for maximum psychological impact.”

  “If it’s placed inside the building…?” Sarah asked.

  “The rule of thumb is that a bomb confined inside a building will do five times more damage than one placed outside. Then again, look what happened in Oklahoma City.”

  “You’re still not telling us anything!” Walsh shouted.

  Sarah could see Cameron Crowley compress his lips to contain his irritation. “Blast analysis is a complicated business,” he said quietly. “The geometry of the charge has some effect on the peak pressure of the shock wave that emanates from the explosive. The shock waves always move at a ninety-degree angle to the surface of the explosives. We don’t know if the charge is going to be shaped, or spherical, or what. Is there any way for the explosive to vent and thus be diffused? Also, we don’t know what building it’s going to be placed into. Different substances have different abilities to withstand the shock front. Glass generally yields between one and three p.s.i. when hit with a front-on load. A typical masonry wall—a good, well-made brick wall—will break at eight to twelve p.s.i. And if there’s steel reinforcing, well, steel has a modulus of elasticity, called Young’s modulus—”

  “Goddammit,” Walsh said. He was not a thick or ignorant man, far from it, but he was famously impatient with scientific bluster that served in his opinion to muffle practicalities. “What you’re saying is that a thousand pounds of C-4, if placed intelligently inside a reasonably sized Manhattan office building, can do a fuck of a lot of damage.”

  “Yes, sir,” Crowley said. “A fuck of a lot.”

  The intercom on the AD’s desk buzzed. Walsh lumbered over to it, hit the switch, and said: “Dammit, Marlene, I said hold all calls.”

  “Sorry, sir, but it’s urgent, for Agent Cahill.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Cahill?”

  Sarah strode to the phone. “Yes? Alex, I’m in a—Uh huh … I don’t understand, what do you mean he called it in himself?… All right.”

  She hung up and turned to the three FBI men, who had been watching her throughout the conversation.

  “That was Alex Pappas. Roth got a call from NYPD Homicide. They located a body in a drainage tunnel under the streets in the Wall Street area. The victim seems to be the guy who planted the computer virus in the Manhattan Bank.”

  “Baumann?” Whitman gasped.

  “Some guy Baumann hired, a computer-hacker type.”

  Walsh sat bolt upright. “How do you know this?”

  “Seems the victim had had a call put in to 911 after his death.”

  “The hell you talking about, Agent Cahill?” Walsh thundered.

  “It’s complicated. Seems this computer guy was afraid he’d be knocked off. Had some tape recorder call 911 with a report of his own homicide. I didn’t quite follow. The point is—”

  “Is this for real?” Whitman said.

  “Apparently so. An emergency-medical team and some guys from the fire department went down in the tunnels and found a body. Homicide and some of our people are on their way over to the victim’s apartment right now.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

  Ken Alton examined the computer equipment at Leo Krasner’s apartment with the admiration of a fellow hacker. He whistled. The guy had a nice Macintosh Duo with a docking station for a removable Powerbook, a couple of enormous Apple color screens, an IBM with a Pentium processor, and a SPARC-20 Unix-based workstation, all networked together. There was also a new 1,200-d.p.i. color PostScript printer and a Xerox color scanner.

  Jesus, there was even an alpha-test prototype from the Hewlett-Packard/Intel/Sun consortium, the HPIS-35. This was a scientific workstation containing a network of five high-performance RISC processors in the SPARC/Pentium family, plus three gallium-arsenide multiprocessors from HP Labs.

  Very cool.

  He tried to access the HPIS-35 and the SPARC-20, but a password was necessary—of course. He said, “Shit,” got to his feet, and lumbered around the apartment.

  “What?” Roth asked.

  Ken ignored him. He wandered around, thinking.

  In the bedroom, on the nightstand, Ken found a palm-top computer. And he knew he had the problem solved.

  The palm-top could be connected to the workstation by means of a spread-spectrum link. In other words, the guy could use his palm-top in the bedroom to do stuff on the workstation in the living room. And of course there was a protocol built into it that accessed the workstation by giving the password. This was for easy access.

  Even geniuses got lazy once in a while, Ken knew.

  Quickly he listed the files on each machine. Some of the documents looked potentially interesting, but then, on the SPARC, he came across a couple of intriguing files, intriguing because they each had a JPEG extension. JPEG was a standardized image-compression mechanism, so named for the committee that wrote the standard, the Joint Photographic Experts Group. Each file with a JPEG extension was around 39K in size, just about the right size for a good-quality black-and-white photograph, but probably not big enough for color.

  Ah, Ken thought. Hence the scanner. All you do is run a photo through the scanner, which stores the image in either color or in a gray-scale. A black-and-white photo is broken down into particles, or pixels, each of which is assigned a gray-scale value between 1 and 256. The JPEG program takes this big hunk of data and identifies the redundancies in it and then compresses it. So you end up with a computer file, a binary file, a bunch of ones and zeroes. The compression certainly isn’t perfect—it’s “lossy,” as the techies call it—but it has the advantage of making extremely small files if you use the default quality setting.

  Ken didn’t know exactly how JPEG worked
—you heard buzz phrases like discrete cosine transforms, chrominance subsampling, and coefficient quantization—but he knew how to use it. That was all that counted.

  Well, he mused, if he’s storing images, he’s got to have a display program on here, something that will grab the image and convert it, an interactive image-manipulation and display program.

  He typed “xv brit.jpeg &” and hit enter. This was the command for a common display program.

  “Whaddaya got there?” Roth asked, standing over Ken’s shoulder.

  “We’ll see…” Ken said.

  In a few seconds the screen was filled with a high-resolution photographic image of a man, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, ruggedly handsome man of around forty. Though the picture seemed to have been taken with a long lens in some kind of public place, a restaurant or something, the man’s face was perfectly clear.

  “Is that the dead guy?” Roth asked.

  “No,” Ken said. “Leo Krasner’s tape-recorded message to 911 said he had a picture of the man who had hired him. This has got to be one of the pictures in question.”

  “Who is—?”

  “I think it’s Baumann.”

  With a few more keystrokes, he converted the JPEG file to PostScript, a format for printing images, and sent it over to the printer.

  “Hey!” Roth shouted to the others. “I think we have our guy.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

  As supervisor of the Information Processing Division of the Greenwich Trust Bank, Walter Grimmer, fifty-two, was in charge of the bank’s Moore Street facility, located just off Water Street in lower Manhattan—in the same anonymous building that housed the super-secret Network.

  Grimmer had been with the bank for sixteen years, after twelve years at Chemical Bank. He didn’t particularly like his job, didn’t like his colleagues. In fact, when you came right down to it, though he was a CPA, he didn’t even enjoy accounting. Never had. He loved his wife and his two daughters and enjoyed puttering around their house in Teaneck, New Jersey. But he had already begun counting down the months until retirement.