The Zero Hour (16 page)

True, he was movie-star handsome, a brawny, virile blond with a dazzling smile. That should have captured her attention for no more than five minutes. Once you got to know Peter at all, it was obvious he was crude, domineering, a creep. Yet at the same time he could be immensely charming when he wanted to.

When he first asked her out, after they’d met on some minor FBI-police task force, she accepted quickly. He’s different from me, she told herself, but that’s all to the good. She was the overly refined one, perhaps effete, in need of an infusion of street savvy. Their sex life was incredibly exciting. She’d never felt so carried away. They’d fight, his blistering anger would surface, they’d get back together. The roller coaster went on like that for five months until her period was a few days late and a pregnancy test she bought at a drugstore confirmed her suspicion.

There was never even a discussion of abortion; she didn’t believe in it. It hadn’t happened before. She’d never had the chance to test her moral code.

But Peter wanted to get married, and although the voice of reason in her kept shrilling against it, they went to Boston City Hall and did it several days later. They moved in together, and it was as if nothing had happened. Their relationship remained tumultuous, they still fought constantly, he still knew how to reduce her to tears.

And within a few months, he began to have affairs. First it was a sister of one of his cop friends, then a secretary he’d met at a bar called Richard’s, then a whole succession of them.

At first, Sarah faulted herself. She hadn’t been much of a wife. She was career-obsessed. Sure, Peter worked long hours, but hers were worse. It hadn’t yet occurred to her that if a man works hard, he’s ambitious, but if a woman works hard, she’s negligent. After one traumatic fight, Peter promised to end the extracurricular activities. Sarah accepted his teary apologies. They would try to rebuild their marriage, for the sake of their unborn child.

At five o’clock one morning, seven months pregnant with Jared, she came home unexpectedly early, rumpled and exhausted. She’d spent the night working a wire on a case involving a precious-metals shop in Cranston, Rhode Island, that was laundering money for the Medellín cartel. She entered the apartment quietly so as not to wake Peter, who happened to be sharing their bed with a woman.

A few weeks after he’d moved out, she saw Peter arm in arm with yet another woman, coming out of a tapas place in Porter Square.

A few months after Jared’s birth, Sarah accepted an assignment to go to Germany to help investigate the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Separated from Peter for several months already, she leaped at the chance to get out of Boston with her child. The Bureau needed female interviewers who spoke German; counterterrorism she would learn. One block of training at New Agents school had been an overview of counterterrorism, so she knew the fundamentals. Before being sent to Germany she was put through a few weeks of intensive training in terrorism at Quantico. It wasn’t easy taking a three-month-old baby to a foreign country, but it was easier than staying in the same city with Peter.

The divorce became final while Sarah and Jared were still in Germany. By the terms of the custody agreement, however, Sarah had to live in the same city as Peter. So she and three-year-old Jared returned to Boston in 1991.

Peter was suddenly interested in his little boy. She and Peter were civil with each other, and occasionally did favors for each other, while at the same time disliking each other as only divorced spouses can.

Though he didn’t seem to mind being divorced from Sarah, he was pathologically jealous. Whenever she began seeing a man, he would find out about it, do whatever he could to break it up, always in the guise of protecting Jared.

She’d had a few relatively serious relationships, and each time Peter or his friends on the job would track the man down and harass or threaten him. He’d be questioned at home, stopped repeatedly for minor traffic violations, keep having traffic and parking problems. It didn’t do much to sustain the relationships.

But most of her dates never grew into anything long-term. Men didn’t want to go out with a woman who had a child, that was one thing. Also, she threw herself into her career, working ridiculous hours, so that even when she did meet someone who didn’t mind her having a child, she wasn’t available. If she started going out with the guy, she’d keep having to cancel dates because of work. More than once a guy she’d started to get close to had planned something special only to have her cancel at the last minute. And then there was Sarah’s attitude, which had hardened since the divorce. She had become self-contained, unwilling to fake vulnerability, even brassy. She had become a woman who didn’t need a man in her life, because she’d married one, and look what had happened. Who needed that again?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Shortly after the KLM flight from Paris lifted off, Baumann noticed someone seated three rows in front staring pointedly at him, with a penetrating look of recognition.

Baumann knew the face.

The man was big, a hulking figure with round shoulders. Short hair cut into bangs, deep-set eyes. A beefy, jowly face Baumann thought he had seen before … but
where
? A long time ago, in connection with something unpleasant. The business in Madrid?

No.

No; he had
not
seen this man before. Now he was certain. The man was no longer staring at him; he was staring instead at the row behind, obviously searching for someone else.

Baumann exhaled silently, relaxed his muscles, sank into his seat. The cabin was stuffy and overheated. A bead of sweat ran down one temple.

A close call. He would have to be ever vigilant. The hulking man had called to mind another man, in another place; the resemblance was uncanny. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and was momentarily in an ice-cold hotel room in Madrid on a preposterously bright, impossibly hot afternoon.

The windows of the suite at the Ritz, Madrid, had been bulletproof, he remembered. Fresh fruit and flowers were brought in every day. The sitting room was oval; everything was painted, or wallpapered, or upholstered in shades of clotted cream.

The four young Basques came into the suite uncomfortably dressed in suits and ties: merely to enter the hotel in those days you had to wear a tie. Their leader was an enormous, bulky, awkward man with short-cropped hair. They seemed awed by Baumann, although they knew him by another name. Baumann, of course, wore a disguise and did not speak. They would never see his face. The only personal habit he allowed himself was a bit of disinformation: though he was not a smoker—that habit he developed only later, in prison—he made a point of smoking Ducados, the most popular Spanish cigarette. They would not be able to determine his nationality.

They knew nothing about him, but he had come highly recommended by a middleman, which was why they were offering a quarter of a million dollars for his services. For 1973, that was a good deal of money. They had gathered their pesetas for a long time, scrimped and saved, robbed banks.

In the privacy of the hotel suite, they told their story. They were Basque separatists—freedom fighters or militants or terrorists, depending upon your politics—and they belonged to an organization called ETA. In Basque, this stood for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Nation and Freedom.

They came from Iruña and Segovia, Palencia and Cartagena. They despised the regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, which oppressed their people, forbade them to speak their own languages, had even executed Basque
priests
during the Spanish Civil War.

They wanted amnesty for the fifteen ETA members, students and workers, who had been jailed as political prisoners after the December 1970 Burgos trials. Franco was dying—he had been dying forever—and the only way to bring down his detested government was to assassinate his sole confidant, his number two, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. That was the only way to shatter the leadership’s aura of invincibility.

Carrero Blanco, they explained, was the prime minister and was believed to be Franco’s designated successor, the future of the regime. He embodied pure Francismo; he represented the post-Franco era. He was anti-Communist, anti-Semitic, ultrarightist. Because of his fiercely bushy eyebrows he was known by the nickname Ogro, the ogre.

ETA had made several bumbling attempts to eliminate both Franco and Carrero Blanco. These four young Basques had recently seen the film
The Day of the Jackal
, about a fictional plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, and were inspired to hire a professional, an outsider about whom nothing was known. In fact, they realized they had no choice if the job was to be done.

Hence, Operation Ogro.

Baumann never spoke with them—not once. He communicated with them by means of a child’s magic slate. Not once did they hear his voice. Not once were they successful in tailing him, though they tried.

Ten ETA volunteers were provided for his assistance, but all the logistical details were left to him. Baumann prepared carefully for the hit, researched thoroughly as he always did. He learned that every morning at nine o’clock, Carrero Blanco attended mass at a Jesuit church in the Barrio de Salamanca. He studied the route that Carrero Blanco’s chauffeur took, noted the license plate of his black Dodge Dart.

Baumann rented a basement apartment at 104 Calle Claudio Coello in the Barrio de Salamanca, along the route that Carrero Blanco took to church, located directly across the street from the church. The ETA volunteers dug a two-foot-high tunnel through the apartment wall to the middle of the street, twenty-one feet long, T-shaped. Dirt was carried out in plastic garbage bags; there was an enormous amount to dispose of. Digging the tunnel was brutally arduous labor. There was little oxygen to breathe, and the soil emitted a foul-smelling gas that gave them violent headaches. And there was always the fear that the stench of the gas would seep into the apartment building and alert the neighbors.

The digging took eight days. Meanwhile, an ETA contact procured, from the Hernani Powder Magazine, two hundred kilos of Goma Two explosives, in tubular lengths like Pamplona sausages. Five packages of explosives were placed in large, square milk cans a few meters apart along the transverse of the tunnel. For a long time, Baumann wrestled with the conundrum of how to ensure that the explosion would throw up a vertical, upward, force; he eventually solved the problem by sealing the tunnel up with several feet of tightly packed dirt.

The night before the assassination, Baumann dined alone on fresh baby eels and black sausage, washed down with Oruja. The next day—December 20, 1973—Carrero Blanco’s black Dodge Dart turned the corner of Diego de León on Calle Claudio Coello. There, Baumann stood on a ladder, dressed as a house painter. When the vehicle was directly over the tunnel, Baumann threw an electrical switch concealed in a paint can.

There was a muffled explosion, and the burning wreck of the car was catapulted high up into the air and over the roof of the five-story Jesuit mission and church to the second-floor terrace on the other side. At the Ogro’s funeral, Madrileños and right-wing partisans loudly sang the Falange anthem “Cara al Sol.”

When the frantic investigation was launched, Baumann fingered, through an intermediary, each of the ETA volunteers who had dug the tunnel. The ten died during the vigorous police “interrogation.” Baumann had done the job he was hired to do, and no one alive who was involved in the conspiracy had ever seen his face.

Now visitors to Madrid can find 104 Calle Claudio Coello, the building in which Baumann had rented the basement apartment, still standing and looking rather shabby. Across the street from it, at the exact site of the assassination, a stone plaque is engraved:

AQUI RINDIO SU ULTIMO SERVICIO
A LA PATRIA CON EL SACRIFICIO DE SU VIDA
VICTIMA DE UN VIL ATENTADO EL ALMIRANTE
LUIS CARRERO BLANCO

20-XII-1974

A few years after the bombing, a book was published internationally in which the four Basque leaders claimed total credit for the assassination, neglecting to mention that they had hired a professional. This fraudulent account had been suggested by Baumann. Not only did it redound to the greater glory of the Basque movement, but it deftly covered his tracks. The world didn’t have to know that the Basque ETA were bumblers. There were rumors—which persist to this day—that the CIA provided the Basques with intelligence support, to help defeat Franco. (The truth is, sophisticated intelligence was hardly needed.)

By the time Baumann had returned to Wachthuis, the headquarters of the South African security police in Pretoria, word had gotten around of his accomplishment. A story was told and retold of how H. J. van den Bergh, the six-foot-five head of the security police, reacted upon learning what one of his agents, Henrik Baumann—cryptonym Zero—had just done in Madrid. “Jesus Christ,” van den Bergh is said to have exploded. “Who the hell is this Baumann? An intelligence agent, my arse. He sounds like the bloody Prince of Darkness!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

At eight-thirty sharp the next morning, Duke Taylor arrived at his office at FBI headquarters in Washington and was startled to see both Russell Ullman and Christine Vigiani sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of his closed office door. To either side of them, rising in three towering piles, were folders, striped with various colors. The two looked weary, disheveled. The normally fresh-faced Ullman had heavy purple circles under his eyes. Vigiani’s eyes, which usually bulged with ferocious concentration, looked sewn shut.

“Jesus,” Taylor said. “You two look as if you slept in your clothes.”

“Yeah…” Vigiani began with malice.

“Your office door was locked,” Ullman interrupted, his voice hoarse. “I hope it’s okay we heaped the dossiers here.”

Taylor glanced admiringly at the three piles again and said. “Gosh, I didn’t think you’d take me
literally.
” He shook his head as he unlocked his office door. “Who wants coffee?”