The Zero Hour

by Joseph Finder

  “That’s very good,” Baumann said. “I could almost believe that.”

  “Go ahead,” Roth said. “Try me. Toss the button out the window.”

  “Do you really want to play a game like this with the life of a child?”

  “Hey, wait a second,” Roth said, as if suddenly realizing something. “You don’t believe me, do you? You really don’t believe me, do you? Then let me give you some numbers, buddy. You’re broadcasting on a VHF frequency of one hundred forty-seven megahertz. The frequency of the tone is seventeen point five kilohertz, which I’m told is the same thing as seventeen thousand five hundred cycles per second.”

  Baumann did not smile now. He felt a droplet of perspiration run down the side of his face as he realized that Roth was telling the truth. They had duplicated the tone. Silently, he cursed his own arrogance.

  “So I guess what I’m thinking,” Roth said, “is that you just lost your leverage, know what I’m saying?”

  “And if your calculations are off by the slightest bit, well…”

  “You see,” Roth said, as reasonably as if he were wrapping up the sale of a used car, “we really don’t want to take that chance either, frankly. So here’s what I propose. Let Jared go. And keep me here in his stead. You’ll have your hostage, and Sarah gets her son. Everyone wins. What do you say, hmm?”

  Baumann hesitated, considered his options. There was, he had to admit, little room to negotiate. The bomb had been rendered inert. Even if they didn’t know he had disengaged it, the NEST people had defeated his system. He could move more quickly with his gun than the cop, certainly, maybe even kill him—but then there was a good chance the cop would fire and wound Baumann, and that was a chance not worth taking. Why hadn’t the cop killed him already? he wondered. Was he bluffing, lying about the signal generator? Possibly—but the cop was acting far too boldly. He wouldn’t act this way if a child’s life was at stake, particularly Sarah’s child. More likely, the cop didn’t want to risk any gunfire that might somehow affect the transmitter. A smart calculation.

  “All right,” Baumann said.

  “Take the bomb off the kid,” Roth said.

  “You can do it yourself,” Baumann said.

  Baumann handed Roth a small key. “Unlock the cuffs,” he said.

  Roth took the key and unlocked Jared’s handcuffs. He noticed they were the type widely used by policemen, Smith & Wesson Model 100 swing-throughs.

  “Put the device on the seat next to you,” Baumann said. “Don’t worry, I’ve already disarmed it.”

  Roth gingerly placed the lunchbox on the seat. He could see red marks on the outside of both of the boy’s wrists.

  Jared reached up and gently pulled at the duct tape over his mouth. His eyes teared up as the tape came off. He pulled out the gag. A large red area around his mouth showed where the tape had chafed his skin.

  “You okay?” Roth asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jared said miserably. “I guess I’m okay, yeah.”

  “Okay,” Roth said to Jared, “now you get out of here.”

  * * *

  On the roof of the building, Sarah, now joined by several NEST members, watched the idling helicopter.

  “What the hell is Roth doing?” Sarah asked.

  “We intercepted the helicopter and forced it to land,” Vigiani explained. “It was in violation of a NOTAM. It was Roth’s idea to get on board at the heliport and have it continue on to pick up Baumann.”

  “God, I hope he knows what he’s doing,” Sarah said.

  “I think he does,” Vigiani said.

  And then Sarah saw Jared climb down the helicopter’s three small steps and run across to the roof to her and virtually leap into her arms. She squeezed him tight. He was weeping, and then she was weeping.

  “Oh, Jared, honey,” she said.

  The pilot limped over to the watchers. “Asshole better be careful with that chopper,” Dan Hammond said. “Expensive piece of machinery.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive yourself,” Vigiani said. “And not in prison.”

  “Hey,” Hammond said. “We got a deal. I cooperated. You guys better keep your half of the bargain.”

  * * *

  Inside the helicopter, it was just the two men now, facing each other, guns trained on each other.

  “Now,” Baumann said, “since I’m getting into the pilot’s seat, you’re going to have to drop your gun first.”

  Roth stared. “You kill me,” he said defiantly, “and there’s nothing going to stop the sharpshooters on the roof from dropping you. You know that.”

  Baumann nodded. “Believe me, a live hostage is far more valuable to me than a dead cop. Drop the gun.”

  Roth considered taking the brave shot, but knew he was outclassed, that Baumann could kill him in a split second and then take his chances with the sharpshooters. He had to trust Baumann’s survival instincts.

  He lowered the gun, then dropped it to the floor of the helicopter.

  “Now, empty your pockets,” Baumann ordered.

  Roth did so, dropping change and rings of keys to the floor.

  Lightning-fast, Baumann smashed the butt end of his pistol against Roth’s temple, just hard enough to knock him unconscious. Roth sagged to the floor of the helicopter. Baumann didn’t want to kill him or even disable him. It was better for Roth to remain a living hostage.

  Baumann handcuffed Roth to the steel frame of the seat and jumped into the pilot’s seat. He inspected the controls, familiarizing himself with them. It worked differently from any helicopter he had piloted before.

  He did not see Roth stir.

  He did not see Roth’s eyes flutter open.

  Out of Baumann’s sight, Roth opened his eyes. Slowly, he slid his left hand, the one that wasn’t handcuffed to the seat, down toward his belt, slipped his index finger inside the belt, felt around until he had located the concealed pocket in which he always kept his spare handcuff key.

  It is a little-known fact that virtually all handcuffs use the same universal key. The cuffs that connected Roth’s right wrist to the seat frame—a Smith & Wesson Model 100—could be unlocked by the key to Roth’s Peerless handcuffs. Thank God Baumann hadn’t used the much rarer Smith & Wesson Model 104, the high-security model, which had its own unique key.

  From this angle Roth could not see Baumann, but he knew from the sound of the engine that the helicopter was still idling atop the building. Quietly, he slipped the key into the handcuff lock. With a slight twisting motion of his wrist, he got the handcuffs open.

  Then, stealthily, praying Baumann was too preoccupied to see, he slid one hand up to the seat and toggled the bomb back on.

  With one smooth motion he rolled over and out of the door of the helicopter, down five feet or so, landing on the roof of the building.

  Baumann looked up just in time to see Roth roll out of the helicopter door, but he did not panic. He pulled the collective and lifted the helicopter up into the air, up above the building.

  Baumann understood how things worked. He knew that the FBI and the police had nothing larger than small arms, which could not shoot down a helicopter. He also knew that, according to the century-old Posse Comitatus Act, the U.S. military was prohibited from acting in a domestic law-enforcement capacity. Which meant that the military could not shoot the helicopter down from the sky.

  His hostage—first Jared, then Roth—had afforded him the opportunity to take off. That was really all he needed. The helicopter lifted high into the air above lower Manhattan and headed toward a remote area of New Jersey, and Baumann was filled with pride, with a knowledge that he had just surmounted the greatest challenge of his career, that although he had made mistakes, there was still none better.

  * * *

  “Roth!” Sarah shouted. “What—what happened? What about the bomb?”

  “Bomb?” Roth asked innocently, and shrugged. He was still a bit unsteady from toppling onto the roof. He went up to Dr. Richard Payne of the Nuclear
Emergency Search Team. “Your signal generator thingamabob,” Roth said, reaching under the waistband of his blue police uniform, just below his paunch, and removing an oblong object the size of a cigarette pack. He handed it to Payne. “Thanks.”

  Sarah saw the exchange of knowing glances between Roth and Dr. Payne, and didn’t understand what was going on.

  But then her attention was diverted by an explosion half a mile away or so, directly over the Hudson River.

  Actually, there was first a great flash of light, a bright yellow-white light that grew steadily in intensity, followed by an explosion, an orange ball of fire that gave off smoke both white and black. The helicopter, a flaming orb, pitched wildly in the air, and as it fell apart, a million pieces plummeted to the river below.

  “Roth,” Sarah said, embracing him. “Normally I don’t like it when my people keep me in the dark—but I suppose I’ll have to make an exception this time. Good job.”

  It had all come clear to her. NEST, listening in to the transmission over her walkie-talkie, must have provided Roth with a transmitter that would work with the bomb that Baumann had engineered. They’d handed it to Roth before he boarded the helicopter a few blocks away. Strictly speaking, she thought, Roth hadn’t done anything illegal.

  Actually, that wasn’t quite true. He hadn’t actually detonated the thing himself, but he’d switched the bomb on, while the transmitter concealed in his waistband stayed on—it had been on since before Baumann had gotten into the helicopter—and as long as Roth was within a few hundred yards of the bomb it wouldn’t detonate.

  Roth had been bluffing, at least in part—he hadn’t told Baumann that he had a transmitter hidden in his pants, and that that was the only tone source. As soon as the helicopter moved out of the range of the transmitter—over water, just as the NEST team had calculated, though it was a risky calculation, to be sure—the bomb had gone off. But no one would ever know, and certainly no one on the roof of the building would ever say anything, not even to each other, about what had happened. No one would ever be able to prove anything, and after all, justice had been done.

  All in all, the explosion had taken less than a second.

  CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

  Malcolm Dyson switched off CNN and wheeled around in a fury to the bank of telephones next to his desk.

  “The goddam so-called Prince of Darkness fucked it up!” he shouted to the empty study, and was surprised when someone answered.

  “That he did,” said a man who was coming through the door, accompanied by two other men. Dyson looked around, bewildered. Three others were climbing in through the windows. He recognized their dark-blue windbreakers, the big yellow block letters. They were federal marshals of the United States government, he could see. He would never forget the first time he had seen these dark-blue windbreakers with the yellow lettering, on the night that his wife and daughter were killed.

  “What—?” he began.

  “That he did,” the man said. “He gave us an extraditable offense, Mr. Dyson. But you and your people helped us too.”

  “The hell you talking about?” Dyson managed to choke out.

  “See, now that we’ve got hard evidence of your role in international terrorism, the Swiss government will no longer protect you. It can’t. It’s given you up. You’re being extradited to the U.S.” The marshal cuffed Dyson and, with the others, led him away, out of the study and down the long main corridor of the mansion Malcolm Dyson called Arcadia. “A nice place you got here,” the lead marshal said, gawking. “Very nice indeed.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

  The burial service was held at a bleak cemetery south of Boston, where the Cronin family had several plots. Jared didn’t cry. Neither did he cry at the funeral. He was stoic, impassive, and talked hardly at all.

  Teddy Williams cried, though, and they were genuine tears, and Sarah cried as well, and her tears were genuine too. The sky was gray, the clouds drifting by like cigar smoke.

  After it was over, but before the small crowd dispersed, Pappas turned to Sarah and smiled sadly.

  “How you doing, boss?” he said.

  “The way you’d think,” she replied.

  “True you’re being promoted to headquarters?”

  She nodded again.

  “The big time, huh? Onward and upward.”

  “I guess.”

  He lowered his voice so Jared couldn’t hear. “Jared’ll get through this okay. He’s a strong kid.”

  “Yeah, he’ll be okay. It’s hard for him—all the more given how, you know, ambivalent he was about his father.”

  “Same for you, I expect.”

  “Yeah. But less so. I didn’t like the guy, but we had a son together. The most precious thing in my life. So you can’t exactly call it a mistake that I married him. I mean, I shouldn’t have, but I did, and something wonderful came out of all that hell.”

  “Your luck with men’s bound to change.”

  “Maybe,” she said, and turned and walked over to Jared, took his hand. Pappas took Jared’s other hand, and together the three of them walked toward the car. “I guess anything’s possible.”

  CODA

  Sweet Bobby Higgins was tried and eventually found innocent of the murder of Valerie Santoro.

  Malcolm Dyson was imprisoned in the United States and died of a heart attack in prison.

  The Manhattan Bank was declared insolvent, its stock worthless. The Federal Reserve Bank negotiated a deal with Citicorp to buy what remained of the Manhattan Bank’s assets. Warren Elkind committed suicide two days later.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Network does exist, though under a different name and at another location in New York City. Some of the details, particularly those having to do with security, have been fictionalized or deliberately obscured.

  But the vulnerability remains real. In 1992 a New York Times correspondent wrote of the real-world equivalent of the Network: “Were the flow to stop unexpectedly, financial empires would teeter and governments tremble.… If something were to go seriously awry in the nearly perfect world of electronic money, the whole system could come to a wrenching halt in the twinkling of a gigabyte.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m grateful to the extraordinary number of people who helped in the research of this novel.

  In the Federal Bureau of Investigation—officially and unofficially, active and retired—quite a few counterterrorism experts gave generously of their time and expertise, particularly Robert J. Heibel, of Mercyhurst College, Special Agent (retired) Gray Morgan, Special Agent Deborah L. Stafford, retired Deputy Assistant Director Harry “Skip” Brandon, Peter Crooks, Hank Flynn, and James M. Fox, former head of the FBI’s New York office. They aren’t to blame, of course, for whatever factual liberties I’ve taken.

  Just as accommodating was the Central Intelligence Agency, both officially and unofficially, but I can publicly mention only Vince Cannistraro, former head of CIA’s counterterrorism operations and analysis, and a formidable terrorism expert. Other experts in terrorism who helped were: Neil C. Livingstone, David E. Long, and Mark D. W. Edington. (A few people on the dark side of the terrorism industry were very helpful, but probably wouldn’t take kindly to being thanked by name.) I also thank my colleagues in the Association of Former Intelligence Officers and Elizabeth Bancroft of the National Intelligence Book Center.

  In law-enforcement and police work: Curt Wood, commander of the Fugitive Apprehension Unit of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Correction; Beverly Deignan of MCI Cedar Junction at Walpole; former New York City Police Commissioner Robert J. McGuire; James R. Sutton; Lieutenant Colonel Neal Moss of the South African National Police; Paul McSweeney of Professional Management Specialists, Inc.; and, in the Boston police, Frank Williams, Bobby Silva, and most of all, Sergeant-Detective Bruce A. Holloway.

  I received some crucial cyberassistance from Eric Wiseman, Simson Garfinkel, Bob Frankston, Tom Knight of the MIT Artificial Intelligence La
boratory, Marc Donner, Dan Geer, David Churbuck, Donn B. Parker, Peter Wayner, and my good friend Bruce Donald. In surveillance and satellite technology, I was helped by H. Keith Melton and Glenn Whidden; in forgery, Frank W. Abagnale; in medicine and forensics, Dr. Stanton Kessler of the Boston Medical Examiner’s Office, and my brother, Dr. Jonathan Finder.

  For initiating me into the mysteries of the eight-year-old in the 1990s, I’m grateful to Tom McMillan and Christopher Beam. Thanks as well to Bobby Baror, Amram Ducovny, and two close friends: Rick Weissbourd; and Joe Teig, actor and cartographer.

  I’m grateful as well for the early enthusiasm of my agent, Henry Morrison; Danny Baror of Baror International; Deborah Schindler; Caron K at Twentieth-Century Fox; and above all, Richard Green and Howie Sanders of the United Talent Agency, who lit the fuse.

  The manuscript benefitted enormously from the astute editorial assistance of my brother, Henry Finder; from my chief technical expert, Jack McGeorge of the Public Safety Group, who knows almost everything; and from the superb editing of Henry Ferris at William Morrow.

  Thanks, finally, to my wife, Michele, who was there from the start with love and support, and to our daughter, Emma, for elucidating to us the Meaning of Life.

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles

  by Joseph Finder

  High Crimes

  Vanished

  Power Play

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  Praise for New York Times bestselling author Joseph Finder and his novels

  THE ZERO HOUR

  “Thrilling.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Breathlessly exciting.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “A labyrinth of suspense … brilliant … a master storyteller.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “A thinking person’s thriller with bite.”