The Zero Hour

by Joseph Finder

  A cell may be as large as several square miles or as small as one building. This is because of the peculiarities of how Manhattan is built. The problem is not population density but topography: the profusion of extremely tall buildings with relatively narrow streets below. This makes it difficult for radio waves to travel to street level—where most cellular phones are used.

  Because of the topography, for instance, there is a cell site in Rockefeller Center that serves an area of no more than two square blocks. There is even a cell site in a large Wall Street–area building that covers only that building.

  The Wall Street region presents a number of problems for NYNEX Mobile, for several reasons. There is a large density of people in the area who use cellular phones. Also, many of those people use their cellular phones inside buildings, most of which are old, solidly constructed, thick-walled—and therefore difficult for radio waves to permeate. And the area has the same topographical challenges as Midtown—very tall buildings built on very narrow streets.

  NYNEX Mobile compensates for those difficulties in two ways: by mounting some of their directional antennas on the sides of buildings, pointed down at the street, to maximize reception; and by placing more antennas per square mile in the region—four in the New York stock market area alone.

  There are more cellular sites in the Wall Street area than anywhere else in the city, which means that each cellular site is relatively small—an area of a few blocks, instead of a few miles. This simple fact of telecommunications life in Manhattan turned out to be the very break Sarah needed.

  NYNEX Cellular Site Number 269 was an area of approximately three irregularly shaped city blocks almost at the southernmost tip of Manhattan Island, near the South Street Seaport. The omnidirectional antenna received and transmitted signals to and from all NYNEX-serviced car phones and cellular phones situated within a chunk of real estate bordered by Water Street, Broad Street, Whitehall Street, and the one-block-long Stone Street. Running parallel to Stone, and dividing the almost-but-not-quite-rectangle into three wedges, were two short streets, Bridge and Pearl. Jutting into the rectangle from the Water Street side, and ending at Pearl, was Moore Street, one block long and paved in cobblestone.

  Contained within this area are the blue-glass tower of the New York Health and Racquet Club; a large, twenty-story NYNEX building; and, across Water Street, a new forty-story office-building tower adorned with art deco ornamentation and built around a sizable plaza. This is One New York Plaza; beneath it is a shopping arcade, which can be entered at the corner of Water and Broad. On Pearl Street is the immense forty-story blue-glass tower called the Broad Financial Center, headquarters of the NASDAQ Financial Exchange. Across Whitehall is a pair of black forty-story towers, One State Street Plaza and Battery Park Plaza.

  A team of twenty-two uniformed cops and FBI street agents was dispatched immediately to search the area for any building that contained a sign for the Greenwich Trust Bank.

  A cell site is not a precise designation: there are areas of overlap, sections of streets that may be serviced by one of two or even three different cells. It was clear, however, that the cell site that was transmitting back and forth to Sarah’s Motorola phone was Cell Site 269. Jared was stationary, located within one building, so there was no handing-off between cell sites to complicate things.

  Moreover, each NYNEX cell site is configured into three “phases,” which divide the area into three segments: alpha, beta, and gamma. If the cell site is a circular pattern, as it roughly is, each phase of each antenna serves one-third of the area of that circle.

  From the carrier frequency signal, the FBI tech was soon able to determine that Jared was transmitting from the gamma phase of Cell Site 269, which narrowed the search down to no larger than a one-square-block area. This meant the area around Moore Street, between Pearl and Water.

  One of the search team assigned to the Wall Street area, a rookie cop named Julio Seabra, turned right up Moore Street, which was narrow and paved in cobblestone. For some reason, there were security cameras on the second-floor level of the buildings here, trained on the street. And then he saw a gleaming new twenty-story structure of glass and steel. There, at street level, was a two-foot-square brass plaque indicating the presence of an office of the Greenwich Trust Bank.

  Officer Seabra stared at the sign for a few seconds before he remembered to radio the command center.

  * * *

  “We got the address,” Pappas shouted.

  “Oh, thank God,” Sarah said. “Where?”

  “Not a skyscraper or anything. Some twenty-story building right off Water Street, on Moore.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “A Greenwich Trust office on the street level, which is how the street cop pegged it. Not a branch office or anything, but some administrative offices—”

  His desk phone rang, and he picked it up before the first ring was finished. “Yep?” He listened for a few seconds, then his eyes became round. “Christ almighty.”

  He hung up the phone. “On the mezzanine level of that building, unmarked and basically invisible to the public, is a huge data-processing center called the Network, which is—”

  “All right,” Sarah interrupted. “Alex, I want you and two junior people to stay here. One is to man my phone in case Jared calls again. The other stays by the STU-III in case of direct contact from CIA or anyone else. You run the show here. Roth, you I want downtown with me, directing operations, being traffic cop. Everyone else reports immediately to NYO Command Center.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, I need you to establish phone contact with whoever’s in charge of the Network. If there’s any way they can do it, I want them to shut down operations immediately. Notify all member banks to halt all funds transfers. And get us a cruiser immediately.”

  “You got it.”

  “I want the entire block evacuated, including all surrounding buildings.”

  Roth snapped, “Are you crazy? You know how many huge motherfucker office buildings are down there? There’s New York Plaza, One State Street, Battery Park, a NYNEX building, the Broad Financial Center—”

  “Do it,” Sarah said. “Notify the police commissioner—we’ve got the authority—and block off the streets with pylons and sawhorses and cruisers and patrolmen, whatever they’ve got. Block off sidewalks. I want every patrolman they can get down there. No one is to enter the area. I want every building evacuated.”

  “Jesus,” Roth said. “If Baumann’s in the Network building and everyone rushes out of there at once, we’ll never find the guy.”

  “Roth, my son is in there.”

  “Sarah.” It was Pappas. “You’re both right. We have to empty the building at once, but at the same time we have to look over everyone who leaves.”

  “Impossible, Alex!” Sarah said.

  “No. It’s not impossible. Remember Mecca?”

  “Mecca? What are you—”

  “1979. The Grand Mosque in Mecca. A textbook example of this.”

  “Alex, we don’t have any time for anything complicated.”

  “Sarah! It’s not complicated. We need to round up some riot-control buses, that’s all.”

  He explained quickly.

  “Do it,” she said. “And somebody help me find my vest.”

  * * *

  The police car sped down Seventh Avenue, siren wailing and turret lights flashing, turned left onto Houston, then right onto Broadway.

  In the backseat, as Roth made arrangements on his cell phone, Sarah watched Broadway go by in a blur.

  Oh God oh God oh God, she thought.

  Jared. Oh God.

  If Baumann had taken Jared hostage, how had Jared managed to make phone calls undetected?

  Where was he?

  She heard Roth say, “A thousand pounds of C-4. Assume, worst case, the whole load is in the bomb.” He paused to listen, but only for a moment, and then he went on: “That’s enough to bring down the entire building, dependin
g on placement of the device. Possibly kill everyone inside. Definitely do severe damage to neighboring buildings and pedestrians.”

  Sarah’s mind raced, her body racked with tension. To save Jared was to stop the incident. This she repeated like a mantra, because she could think only of her son. She knew, but would never admit, that suddenly she didn’t care about the case, didn’t care about her work, didn’t even care about the incalculable damage the bomb was about to do.

  The rain had stopped, but it was still overcast, the skies a metallic gray.

  Would he kill Jared?

  He had murdered—both wholesale and retail, as she thought of it. Retail murders were one-on-one, wholesale the acts of terrorism he’d engineered. In some ways, retail murders were the most chilling, and he was capable of snuffing out an individual life, face to face. Would he really hesitate to kill Jared if he deemed it necessary?

  Well, perhaps. He hadn’t killed Jared yet, or so she hoped. Perhaps he planned to use him as a hostage, as insurance, as a human shield. She prayed Jared was still alive.

  How had she been fooled so easily? How could she, so suspicious by profession and by training, have been taken in? Why had she been so willing to see him as a warm and likable man? How could he have concealed so well the essence of who he was?

  He was a master of disguise, yes, but perhaps it wasn’t so hard to devise a disguise when your face was unknown. But it was his physical awkwardness that had deflected her suspicion. Had she not wanted to see the contradiction, really?

  By the time the cruiser turned off Whitehall to Water and swung the wrong way up Moore Street, an immense crowd was already gathered in front of the building. Blue and red police lights were flashing; sirens were screaming from several different directions. Policemen were stopping and re-routing traffic on Water Street back down Whitehall or Broad. The area around Moore Street was blocked off with sawhorses marked POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS. Several fire trucks came barreling down Water Street, their sirens wailing. A couple of TV vans were already there, although how they’d been alerted so quickly, Sarah had no idea. So too was the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit.

  As she jumped from the car, she wondered, How could everyone have gotten here so quickly?

  Then she saw the answer. The NYPD Bomb Squad had arrived and taken over the scene, as they always did. Someone had called them in, probably one of the cops on the scene. At any moment the NEST teams would arrive and then there would be a turf battle from hell. Unless she stopped it.

  She looked up at the building and whispered, “Jared.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

  As the hour approached, Dan Hammond began to wonder whether the rich guy would really come through with the hundred grand he’d promised for flying into controlled airspace and landing on the roof of a Wall Street building.

  True, the guy had showed up in person and put down five thousand bucks in cash. That was a good sign. The usual procedure was to give a credit-card guarantee on Amex or Visa, and then Executive billed you after the flight.

  The company said they charged $825 per flight hour, but you never got into a helicopter for less than fourteen hundred dollars, to be honest. So five thousand bucks was a hell of a lot, but it wasn’t such a crazy amount to put down.

  This is probably my last job for Executive Class Aircraft Charter, Hammond reflected. Fitting that it should be in the best chopper they had, the ASTAR.

  He loved flying the ASTAR, loved the look and feel of it. It was a French-made helicopter—actually, it was produced by a French-American firm—and so it didn’t operate in quite the same way as American choppers. That made it a tough helicopter to fly.

  For one thing, the ASTAR’s rotor system turned the opposite way from the American rotor system. When you were trimming it in flight, you had to put in opposite control movements for antitorque, to keep the nose straight. Instead of applying left pedal when you added power, you applied right pedal.

  Once you got used to that, it was a pleasure. It was powered by a French jet engine, the Turbo Mecca, a 640-shaft-horsepower engine. It cruised at 120 knots, the fastest single there was. It was also expensive, costing over a million dollars.

  But it was a beauty. The fuselage was of a unique design, sleekly built and sweeping in appearance. It was jet-black, with titanium and plum striping and a silver lightning bolt down the expanse of fuselage. Its windows were deep-tinted. Its blades were blue, its interior tan. There were even oriental rugs to make the executive passengers feel at home. It seated four passengers, and one pilot, comfortably; it was air-conditioned and equipped with a telephone and a CD player.

  The ASTAR was different, too, in that it had a panoramic passenger area, a 180-degree field of view. Your basic American helicopter had club seating, whereas this was like the interior of a luxury car. The pilot and passengers occupied the same cabin space. Also, its cabin was far quieter than those in American choppers, in which you really couldn’t hold a conversation. In the ASTAR you could talk in normal tones.

  Altogether, it was a spiffy helicopter, Dan Hammond thought, just the right one for his farewell flight.

  CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

  At McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, three Lockheed C-141 Starlifter aircraft were landing, bearing multiple cargoes of gear on pallets. There were radios and beepers and cellular phones and PBX telephone equipment; there was every tool and widget detector imaginable, from screwdrivers to Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns and Haley & Webber E182 Multi-Burst stun grenades employing high candela and decibel levels: a dazzling array of state-of-the-art weapons, surveillance devices, communications equipment, and radiation-detection equipment for locating clandestine bombs or stolen fissionable material.

  Separately, over the course of several hours, more than thirty members of the NEST render-safe team had arrived on commercial flights from around the country.

  * * *

  “All right, I want everything from Broad to Whitehall, and from Water to Pearl, secured and blocked off,” the man in the BOMB SQUAD wind-breaker announced to the squad members milling around him.

  Sarah marched up to him and flashed her credentials. “Special Agent Cahill, FBI,” she said. “I’m in charge of this operation.”

  “Oh, really?” the commanding officer of the Bomb Squad said, giving her a bored glance. “Not anymore, you’re not.”

  The New York City Police Department’s Bomb Squad is the largest and oldest full-time bomb unit in the country. Operating out of the Sixth Precinct, at 233 West Tenth Street, between Hudson and Bleecker, it handles some thirteen hundred calls a year to look for and disarm explosives. The squad is made up of six teams of two detectives, labeled A through F; the commanding officer is a lieutenant, and below him are four sergeants.

  The Bomb Squad is part of the NYPD’s Scientific Research Division, which is a unit of the Detective Bureau. But to be precise, though squad members wear gold badges, they are not detectives but “Detective-Specialists,” which is something of a slap in the face to this all-volunteer, brave-to-the-point-of-foolhardiness group.

  According to the Patrol Guide protocol, the Bomb Squad can appear on a scene only when called in by the Emergency Service Unit. They had been summoned on this occasion by ESU after one of the patrolmen searching the area realized there was a serious possibility there was a bomb in the building. The patrolman was simply doing his duty.

  Until NEST’s arrival, Sarah didn’t have a card to play: the Bomb Squad was in charge. But once NEST showed up, the unit’s Rules of Engagement—the most sweeping and comprehensive of any U.S. elite force—would place it unquestionably in charge.

  There was a squealing of brakes. Sarah saw with enormous relief that NEST had arrived.

  * * *

  A CNN reporter was doing a stand-up in front of the tumultuous crowd surrounding the Network building on Moore Street.

  Pappas and Ranahan stared at the television screen.

  “… a bomb in this building,” the reporter was s
aying, “which houses a sensitive and highly secret Wall Street computer facility. In the basement of the building, according to police sources, there is believed to be as much as one thousand pounds of C-4 plastic explosive.”

  Then, footage of hordes of people evacuating neighboring buildings. Several people had been trampled in the ensuing panic. None had been killed, but several were injured.

  “Police sources tell CNN that all entrances and exits to the Moore Street building have been blocked off except the main, front entrance. After a standoff between federal and local authorities, a team from the Department of Energy known as NEST, the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, has taken control of the scene.”

  There was a shot of the front of the Network building. Six buses had been lined up, three on a side, forming a narrow passageway, a chute, that led directly from the building’s front doors to a courtyard across the street.

  The buses looked like regular city buses except for one crucial difference. Steel plates attached to the sides of each bus had been lowered to the pavement so that no one could crawl out underneath them. In effect, the buses formed high metal walls that would keep anyone from escaping. Everyone evacuating the building had to pass between the specially modified buses to the courtyard, where everyone could be inspected or even questioned if need be.

  This same method had been used in 1979, when armed Sunni fundamentalists had seized the holiest of Islamic shrines in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, with twenty thousand people trapped inside. Saudi troops had to figure out how to get the religious pilgrims out without letting the terrorists lose themselves in the escaping herd. They used riot-control buses to construct a corridor through which the pilgrims were funneled to a nearby stadium, and there questioned.