The Zero Hour (15 page)

Instead of spending his lunch hour jogging around the CIA campus, he made a phone call and then took a quick drive into Washington to meet with his boss, Duke Taylor.

Perry Taylor was around fifty, close to retirement, but you couldn’t tell it from his demeanor. He was a genuine workaholic, driven and exacting. Yet at the same time he was one of the most affable and easygoing people Willkie had ever met.

Handsome in a sort of generic, clean-cut way, Taylor was a man of medium height with short gray hair, small brown eyes, and large wire-rimmed glasses. He’d been married to his high school sweetheart for some thirty years, and the marriage was universally believed to be as close to harmonious as a marriage could be.

But what appeared to be a Norman Rockwell painting on the outside had turned into Hopper. Taylor’s closer friends and colleagues knew that he and his wife, unable to bear children, had adopted a beautiful baby girl who had died of measles at the age of five. Then they adopted a four-year-old boy who grew up to be the heartbreak of their lives, constantly in trouble with the law, hostile far beyond the normal adolescent rebelliousness, addicted to drugs, a bafflement to his amiable suburban parents. Though Taylor talked about his home life from time to time, he never brought his problems to work. Noah Willkie respected that.

Taylor was eating his typically Spartan lunch when Willkie arrived: a salad, a roll, a can of Fresca. He greeted Willkie warmly, offered him a cup of coffee, and made small talk for a while.

Willkie remembered hearing that Hoover, who was none too fond of the idea of black FBI agents, disapproved even more roundly of his people drinking coffee on the job. Once Hoover had been so enraged to see an agent drinking coffee in his office that he transferred the offending agent clear across the country.

While Willkie reported on the morning’s meeting, and then on Paul Morrison’s odd remarks outside headquarters, Taylor nodded thoughtfully. After Willkie had finished, Taylor did not speak for a long while. Willkie noticed for the first time very quiet classical music emanating from a boom-box radio on the windowsill. He looked around at the award plaques on the wall, at the dictionary stand, the FBI ceramic stein with Taylor’s name on it, a coffee mug emblazoned “Are We Having Fun Yet?”

“Well, I guess the first thing is to run the name Heinrich Fürst through the Terrorist Information Database,” Taylor mused. “Through General, too.”

“Right,” Willkie agreed, “but Paul Morrison at the CTC says he’s already done it, and you know how much better their stuff is than ours.”

“They
say
it’s better,” Taylor said, smiling. “But if we put one of our best searchers on it—Kendall or Wendy, say—maybe we’ll turn up something. Don’t forget, this is just the NSA’s
guess
at how the name is spelled, based on a transcription of a spoken conversation. There are probably hundreds of different ways of spelling, or transliterating, the same name.”

“I wouldn’t be optimistic.”

“Fair enough. No reason to be. Next, we take the profiles of every known terrorist in the world and find some way of narrowing them down, winnowing out the wrong ones.”

“I think you can eliminate the pure ideologues,” Willkie suggested. “Abu Nidal’s people. Hezbollah. PFLP. Sendero Luminoso.”

Taylor shook his head. “I don’t think it’s so easy, Noah. Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, whatever you want to call them—they may be Maoist, but they contract out to Colombian narcotics traffickers, right?”

Willkie nodded.

“These days, anyone’s for sale. Ideology sometimes doesn’t seem to matter at all. The only terrorists we can eliminate are those who are dead or locked up. And that still leaves the board wide open—what about terrorists we’ve never heard of, going out for the first time?”

“This reference to ‘the smartest one alive’ or whatever,” Willkie objected. “You don’t call a neophyte the smartest one alive. Anyway, who’d hire a neophyte, right? My guess is, it’s someone with a track record. We may not have anything on him—or her—but whoever it is has got to be experienced.”

“Good point,” Taylor conceded. He shrugged. “But that doesn’t help us any. So let’s go about this from the other direction: the target. The Manhattan Bank.”

“If that’s really
the
target. It may be
a
target. Or not a target at all.”

“Also true. But what if we run a complete search on the bank and on Elkind? See if there’ve been any threats. Check out any international operations the bank’s involved in. See if Elkind has any enemies. He may have enemies he doesn’t even know about. Call up everything we’ve got.”

“Hey, you’re talking like you expect me to help you out. I already got a full-time job. Remember? You picked me for it.”

“Oh, I don’t mean you, Willkie. We’ve got plenty of people to do stuff like that. But you can keep us plugged in, give us a heads-up if anything comes along of interest. The CIA may not consider this worthy of study, but then, they’re full of shit.” He gave a big, ebullient smile. “Thanks for coming to me with this. I have to admit I won’t exactly be crushed if we catch the asshole before CIA does.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Jared had invited a friend of his, Colin Tolman, for dinner. The two eight-year-olds sat on the living room rug, an assortment of baseball and superhero trading cards spread out around them. The radio was blasting techno-rap. Both of them wore Red Sox caps, backward. The brim of Jared’s hat had been bent into a tube shape. Jared was wearing Diesel jeans and a Phillie Blunts T-shirt. They had their Mighty Morphin Power Rangers backpacks beside them. Both had seen the movie twice and loved it. But eight-year-olds are nothing if not fickle. In a month Mighty Morphins would more than likely be gonzo, dead meat, history, as Jared liked to say.

“Awesome!” Jared shouted as she entered. “Look, Mom, I got a Frank Thomas rookie. That’s worth three-fifty
at least
!”

“Will you turn that off, or at least down?” she said. “Hi, Colin.”

“Hi, Sarah,” said Colin, a pudgy blond kid. “Sorry. Mrs. Cronin.”

“She wants to be called
Ms. Cahill
,” Jared said, lowering the volume. “Even
I’m
not supposed to call her Sarah. Mom, Colin has a whole binder full of SpiderMan and X-Men.”

“Wonderful,” Sarah said. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Colin, you collect baseball cards too?”

“Nah.” Colin smirked. “No one collects baseball cards anymore, except Jared. Everyone else mostly just collects basketball cards or superheroes.”

“I see. How was the last day of school?”

“Jared got thrown out of class,” Colin reported.

“You did? For what?”

“For laughing,” Colin went on, delighted.

“What?” Sarah said.

“Oh, yeah,” Jared said. “You made me, you jerk.”

“I didn’t make you,” Colin said, laughing. “I didn’t make you do anything,
dickwad
.”

“Hey, watch the language,” Sarah said.

“Get out of here! Tell her what
you
were doing, dickwad,” Jared said.

“Jared’s always bossing people around,” Colin explained, “like telling them to do their chores and everything. And Mrs. Irwin was asking us about what we thought about what it’s like to be old, and I said I’d love to see Jared a hundred years old in a wheelchair, drooling and everything, and still bossing people around, poking everybody with a cane.”

Sarah sighed, shook her head, didn’t know how to reply. Secretly it pleased her to think of Jared sent to the principal’s office for laughing, of all things, but she also knew that sort of thing shouldn’t be encouraged.

“Can we watch Nickelodeon?” Jared asked.

She looked at her watch. “For fifteen minutes while I get supper ready.”

“Cool,” Jared said.

“Cool,
dude
,” Colin amended. “What’s on?
Salute Your Shorts? Doug? Rug Rats
?”

“If it’s
Ren and Stimpy
, forget it,” Jared said. “I hate
Ren and Stimpy.
”

Colin gulped air and emitted a loud burp, and then Jared did the same, and both of them cracked up laughing again.

After dinner, Sarah went upstairs to kiss Jared good night. He was lying in bed, holding Huckleberry, the teddy bear, reading the biography of Satchel Paige. He rarely cuddled with his teddy bear anymore; he considered that kid’s stuff.

“Is that a kid’s version?” Sarah asked.

“Grown-up version.” He returned to reading. After a moment, he looked up and asked peevishly, “Yes?”

“I hope I’m not disturbing you, Your Excellency,” Sarah said in mock-dudgeon. “I just came up to say good night.”

“Oh. Good night.” He turned his head to one side to receive a kiss.

Sarah complied. “Didn’t you read this already?”

Jared stared at her blankly for a long time, and then said: “Yes, so?”

“Everything okay with you?”

“Yes,” he said, and turned back to the book.

“Because you’d tell me if everything weren’t okay, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.” Not looking up.

“It’s this weekend, isn’t it?” Sarah asked, suddenly realizing. Saturday was two days away, which meant he spent the day with his father.

Jared kept reading as if he hadn’t heard her.

“You’re worried about Saturday,” she persisted.

He looked up. “No,” he said, his mouth curling in sarcasm. “I’m not ‘worried’ about Saturday.”

“But you’re not looking forward to it.”

He hesitated. “No,” he said in a small voice.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” he said, still more softly.

“Do you not want Daddy to come this weekend? You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, you know.”

“I know. I don’t know. It’s okay. It’s just that…” His voice trailed off. “Why does he act the way he does?”

“Because that’s the way he is.” That meant nothing, it was unhelpful, and they both knew it. “We all have our blind spots, and Daddy—”

“Yeah, I know. That’s the way he is.” He returned to the book and added: “But I hate it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in the business of counterterrorism is deciding what to ignore and what to pursue. You are faced with a vast quantity of intelligence, but most of it is simply noise, static: pillow talk, intercepted telegrams, rumors. Ninety-nine percent of it is useless.

Yet the cost of ignoring the wrong scrap of information may be incalculable. Any intelligence professional who disregards a lead that results in an act of terrorism may be held culpable professionally, not to speak of morally, for the death of a human being—or the death of a hundred thousand.

Duke Taylor’s career had been built upon a number of talents, from his ability to get along with just about anybody, to his sharp (though often hidden) intellect, to his golf skills. Not least among his talents, however, was an instinct, the thing that separated an intelligence bureaucrat from a professional.

And his instinct told him that Noah Willkie was right, and the CIA was wrong: there was a major act of terrorism in the planning.

Shortly after his meeting with Willkie, he summoned two of his brightest lieutenants, Russell Ullman and Christine Vigiani, both of them counterterrorism analysts, and briefed them in on the NSA intercept. Ullman, a broad-shouldered, strapping Aryan from Minnesota in his early thirties, was an operational analyst. Vigiani, some years older, and an intelligence research specialist, was tiny, compact, dark-haired, introverted. Both took copious notes.

“For reasons I can’t get into, this doesn’t go beyond this room. That’s why I’m taking the unusual step of having just you guys here without the section and unit chiefs. Now, I want to make sure the boys at Fort Meade add some names to their watch list—Heinrich Fürst, this fellow Elkind. Russell, can you draft a list of all possible trip words?”

“Right,” Ullman said, “but how can we ask NSA about this if we’re not supposed to know anything about it?”

“Leave it to me, Russ. That’s what I’m here for, the diplomacy part. You people do the heavy lifting. Chris, run down whatever you can on Fürst. Have Kendall or Wendy do a complete computer search. Wendy might be better. She’s good on Germanic languages, variant spellings, what-have-you. Have our legal attachés in Germany and Austria make discreet contact, see what they can learn.”

She nodded and scrawled a note. “I’ll try,” she said dubiously, “but I’m sure it’s not his real name.”

“Well, see what you can get. Don’t forget about our own people. Maybe somebody knows something. Round up anybody who knows something about Elkind or Manhattan Bank. Field agent, transcriptionist, even the guy who washes the office cars in the Albuquerque field office.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” Vigiani asked, genuinely curious.

“Wendy, the computer whiz, can help you. There’s a hidden search parameter she can call up, with my authorization.” Taylor saw the woman’s puzzlement, and added: “She’ll explain it. Basically, anytime anyone accesses the Bureau’s databases, there’s a notation made of it here in the central files, what they were asking about, et cetera.

“Now, and this is the biggest task: I want a pile of files on my desk by tomorrow morning—all possible terrorist suspects.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ullman said.

“Put as many people as you need on this, okay? I want all the usual suspects, plus anyone else on the radar screen. Any terrorist with a track record. We’ve got to start broad.”

“Whoa,” Ullman said. “You’re basically saying, any terrorist alive.”

“Every one that fits this MO,” Duke Taylor said. “On my desk. By tomorrow morning.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Sarah’s marriage to Peter Cronin was a mystery that only deepened with time. The reason she’d done it was simple. He’d gotten her pregnant. But that begged several questions: why she decided to keep the baby; why she felt she had to marry him just because he’d knocked her up; and, the biggest question of all, why she had been attracted to him in the first place.