The Zero Hour (23 page)

“This South African guy, name of Sachs, had gone to three FBI-run retraining sessions in Europe, so our people’d had a little bit of contact with him,” Whitman said. He and Sarah stood at the entrance to his office. “We checked him out with State and the Agency, to see if maybe the guy went bad. Negative. Luckily for us, this Sachs fellow’s now in the security services, so we got a line right into the heart of darkness. Had someone on the CIA team in Johannesburg make contact, real unofficial.”

“The CIA guy asked the South African cop for information on the alias Heinrich Fürst?”

Whitman nodded. “And anything else he could get. Taylor’s thinking was that if there was something rotten going on and our contact was party to it, this contact would trigger a flurry of communications. Right after our man met with this guy, we laid on the surveillance. Had the satellite cowboys monitor all signals traffic into and out of South Africa, checking the frequency of cable traffic to their embassy here.”

“And?”

“And nothing unusual went out. No frantic calls or telexes. You can’t prove a negative, but it’s a good sign the contact’s clean.”

“Maybe.”

“Next morning he came back to us with a name. Nothing on any Heinrich Fürst, but ‘Prince of Darkness,’ yes, oh my yes. ‘Everyone in the intelligence service knows who
that
is—fellow named Henrik Baumann.’ Code name, or cryptonym, is—or was—Zero, designating their most skilled agent. So we had our legat make an official request to several branches of the South African government, the attorney general, the police, blah blah blah, for all records on one Henrik Baumann. Passport applications, birth certificate, files, the works. Now we sit and wait. See if we really do have our man.”

“Are they being cooperative?” Sarah asked.

“Are you kidding? They’re frantic! They’re all alarmed that a former South African agent may be involved in terrorism. Especially a white guy left over from the old regime. They love to dump shit on the old government. Actually, I should call the Communications Center, see if anything came in.”

He picked up his desk phone and pressed a button. Sarah examined the discarded photograph of George Bush and wondered how long it had been resting on its side. Since Clinton’s inauguration?

“
I
see,” Whitman was saying to the telephone handset. “
I
see.” His eyebrows were arched.

Sarah looked up at him curiously, trying to interpret his tone.

Whitman hung up the phone and looked directly at her with a peculiar smile. “We’ve got a full set of prints—”

“Great.”

“—and a kink in the fishing line. Just over three weeks ago, our Mr. Baumann escaped from maximum-security lockup at Pollsmoor Prison. Pollsmoor police detectives discovered he was missing, found a couple of bodies, and opened an Escaping Docket to investigate an escape from lawful custody. They followed standard procedure—Form SAP-69, with the fugitive’s fingerprints, and a dossier containing court statements and other records were sent over from central records at the South African Criminal Bureau in Pretoria. But nothing turned up, not a trace of our friend. The South Africans normally don’t reach out to the international authorities in the case of an escaped prisoner, even a former member of their own security services. They’d all but given up looking for him, even put out a burn notice on the guy. Anyway, I’d say we’ve got the right man. Now let me take you to your lovely suite of offices and introduce you to the happy campers you’ll be working with.”

*   *   *

The “lovely suite of offices,” as Harry Whitman had put it, was the penthouse of a decrepit building in midtown Manhattan, on West Thirty-seventh Street near Seventh Avenue. The neighborhood was lousy, the ancient clattering elevator even less promising.

Once Sarah got off the elevator at the penthouse, however, the scenery changed dramatically.

The site, which the FBI was renting from a company that sold display fixtures to retail stores and had recently relocated to Stamford, Connecticut, had last been used by the FBI for a Chinatown drug sting operation, and so the security was already in place. Sarah entered a reception area that was walled off from the rest of the floor. A phony name was on the wall.

A receptionist sat at a desk, Whitman explained, monitoring video cameras mounted in the hallways and fire stairs and buzzing in authorized visitors through the electronically controlled inner door. A volumetric alarm system was set up in the reception area; the rest of the space was alarmed with volumetric, passive infrared, and active point-to-point infrared systems. To allow people to work through the night in various parts of the offices, the alarm system was zoned. The safes were in one room, separately alarmed.

“Secure communications links,” Whitman said as they entered what was once a showroom, now clearly the main command center. “This place cost us serious big bucks to set up, I might add, so I’m glad we’re reusing it.” He gave her a sidelong glance as if she were to blame. “Secure fax, secure computer terminal links, a line to the Watch Center at Langley, even a couple of Stus thrown in just for fun.” “Stu” is intelligence-community lingo for STU, a secure telephone unit. In a separate room, also alarmed, were two STU-III secure telephones—black lines, as they are called, for calls up to the classification of top secret.

Several people Sarah didn’t know were there, drinking coffee and reading the
Daily News
and the
New York Post.
The rest she recognized. Alex Pappas was engaged in animated, friendly conversation with Christine Vigiani from Counterterrorism in Washington. Both of them were smoking furiously. Russell Ullman from Washington was doing a crossword puzzle. Ken Alton was off by himself reading a book entitled
Schrödinger’s Cat
, which she assumed was science fiction.

“All right,” Whitman announced loudly, his hands thrust high in the air, waving for attention. “I assume everyone here has been detailed to the special working group of the Joint Terrorist Task Force. If you’re not, you know too much already and I’m going to have to have you killed.”

Polite chuckles all around. Whitman introduced himself and then everyone else to one another. Everyone in the room, Bureau or not, was wearing the FBI-regulation ID card, either clipped to a shirt or breast pocket or hanging from a metal chain around the neck. The FBI men were all wearing laminated dog tags and, so it seemed, Rockports.

Every FBI agent in the Joint Terrorist Task Force is paired with a New York City policeman. Sarah’s partner was a paunchy, moon-faced police detective lieutenant named George Roth, who had a receding hairline, deep acne pits on identical spots on each cheek, broken capillaries spread across a bulbous nose, and a strong Brooklyn accent. He barely acknowledged her. He gave her an imperceptible nod and didn’t shake her hand. He took a Breath Saver from a roll in his shirt pocket, popped it into his mouth, and lodged it against his left cheek.

Great to meet you too, Sarah thought.

Whitman sat on the edge of a desk and shoved aside an ancient-looking cup of coffee with a cigarette butt floating in it. “Okay, now, all of you were handpicked for this special group, but I’ve gotta lay down the law about secrecy right here and now. I can’t stress enough how important secrecy is. A couple of you are from out of town, so you might not know what kind of shit will go down in this city if the word gets out that a major Wall Street bank
might
get hit with a major act of terrorism in two weeks. Panic like you’ve never seen. Those of you on the job know what that means.

“If you have to reach out to other departments in the city, don’t tell ’em you’re doing work on terrorism. You’re looking for a fugitive, okay? And not a fucking word to the press, understood?”

There were nods, clearing of throats.

“When we were working on TRADEBOM, someone on the task force had a drinking buddy, a reporter for
Newsday.
Couldn’t help blabbing. So what happens?
Newsday
runs an article about one of the terrorists we were going to arrest when we were good and ready, but no, now we had to swoop in on the guy way too early. Which screwed things up really bad. Now, that leak came from the full task force, which is big. There’s only ten of you, so if there’s a leak, you better believe I’m going to track it down. If any of you have drinking buddies in the press, I’d go on the wagon till this inquiry is completed.”

The task force, he said, was code-named Operation MINOTAUR. He explained that the Minotaur was a mythological monster, ferociously strong, with the head of a bull and the body of a human. The Minotaur—he didn’t bother to explain whether this was supposed to represent the terrorist they were after—fed exclusively on human flesh. It was perhaps an overly optimistic code name, for according to Greek mythology, the Minotaur was trapped in a place (the Labyrinth, constructed by Daedalus) from which it could not escape.

“Uh, how long is this ‘special working group’ supposed to go on for?” asked Lieutenant Roth. He gave “special working group” a heavy ironic emphasis. Sarah’s heart sank at the thought of working with him.

“The director has approved a preliminary inquiry,” Whitman said. “That means it’s good for a hundred and twenty days. Theoretically, if there’s good reason, it can be renewed for another ninety days. But I’d like to get this thing wrapped up way before that.”

“Who wouldn’t?” one of the agents mumbled.

“What do you mean, ‘theoretically’?” Pappas asked.

“I mean, in our case Washington’s giving us all of two weeks.”

He was interrupted by a chorus of protests, whistles, catcalls. “You gotta be kidding,” Christine Vigiani said.

“No, I’m not kidding. Two weeks, and then the search is shut down. And we don’t even get a full-field. Now, for those of you new to the game, the main difference between a preliminary inquiry and a full-field inquiry is what you
can’t
do. No wiretap. No surveillance. No trash cover.”

“Can we ask people questions?” Roth said. “If we ask nice?”

Whitman ignored him. “Look, I know a task force of ten people is nothing. Some of you guys remember back in 1982 when they found cyanide in Tylenol, and this guy was extorting a million bucks from Johnson & Johnson. The New York office put three
hundred
agents on the search, from Criminal and Counterintelligence. I think a ten-man force is bullshit, but I guess Washington’s trying out a small, flexible task force that’s not as hamstrung by red tape and all that.” He shrugged. “I don’t make policy.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Lieutenant Roth said mordantly, “but would it be accurate to say that we don’t have jack shit on this guy? I mean, we don’t even have this guy’s
name
.”

“Not quite,” Sarah said. The others turned around to face her. She explained what they’d just received from Johannesburg.

Instead of the outburst of excitement or appreciation that she expected, there was a beat of silence, and then Agent Vigiani spoke.

“This guy escaped from prison in South Africa more than two
weeks
ago and we never heard about it?” she asked bitterly. “They didn’t send out a heads-up, didn’t alert Interpol,
nothing
? I don’t get it.”

“I doubt it was deliberate,” Sarah said. “South Africa’s been an outcast for so long that they’re not used to sharing their internal problems with the international authorities. They haven’t exactly gotten their act together.”

“Oh, well, this is quite a relief,” said Lieutenant George Roth. “Now we have a
name.
All we have to do is ask around—if we’re permitted to do that—to see if anyone happens to know a terrorist named Henrik Baumann. Makes our job
so
much easier.”

“A lead’s a lead,” Sarah said irritably.

“Your job is just about impossible,” Whitman agreed. “Yes, we have a name, and we’ll soon have prints, maybe even a photo. But we’re still searching for a needle in a haystack.”

“A needle in a haystack?” Lieutenant Roth replied. “More like trying to find a short shaft of wheat in a field that might be anywhere in Nebraska.”

“We’ll never find the guy with that attitude,” Harry Whitman said. “You’ve got to believe the guy’s out there. Each of you has to think of yourself as the fugitive. What he’s doing, what he’s planning, what he might have to buy, where he might be living. And everyone makes mistakes.”

“From what you’re telling me,” Lieutenant Roth said, “this guy doesn’t.”

Sarah spoke without looking up. “No. He’ll make a mistake. We just have to catch him at it.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

During the lunch hour on February 26, 1993, at 12:18 p.m., a bomb concealed in a rented yellow Ryder truck exploded in level B-2 of the parking garage of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. An estimated fifty thousand people were inside the 110-story skyscraper, one of the World Trade Center’s seven buildings, at the time. Tens of thousands were stranded in offices, stairwells, and elevators as a result of the explosion, including seventeen kindergartners from P.S. 95 in Brooklyn, who were trapped in an elevator. A thousand people were injured, mostly from smoke inhalation, and six were killed. One of the great symbols of New York City sustained almost a billion dollars’ worth of damage.

After a painstaking investigation, eight men were subsequently arrested, of whom four were convicted of the bombing after an extraordinary five-month trial during which 207 witnesses were called, ten thousand pages of evidence amassed. The four men, all Arab immigrants, were followers of a blind Muslim cleric in a New Jersey mosque.

This was the worst act of terrorism ever to hit the United States up till that point. The bomb, which was built by amateurs, consisted of twelve hundred pounds of explosive material and three cylinders of hydrogen gas. It cost less than four hundred dollars to make.

Terrorism experts (an enormous number of them seemed to spring up all at once) all announced that America had lost its innocence, that America’s cities had become fortresses. The security in major buildings, particularly landmarks, was enhanced. Parking garages were no longer quite so easy for just anyone to enter. Concrete stanchions were placed around public spaces so cars could not drive into them. Incoming packages were X-rayed. Visitor passes and employee identification cards were checked more rigorously.