The Zero Hour (30 page)

“Back off!” said a male voice to her right. “You let her go!” She caught a glimpse of a slender bespectacled man in jeans and a dark-blue T-shirt, walking stiffly toward them. He lunged at the assailants. One of the kids, who had been menacing Jared, turned to fend off this newcomer; the one with the bat swung at him and cracked into his hip, hard.

The man doubled up in pain. His glasses skittered to the ground a few feet away, one lens popped out of the bent frame.

And then, as quickly as they had appeared, the three young men disappeared, tearing off at top speed. Jared was in a heap on the ground, sobbing. Blood was pouring down his forehead, sheeting down. She rushed to him, threw her arms around him.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “My God. Are you all right? Are you all right?”

“Hurt,” came his small, muffled voice.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, feeling his blood-sticky scalp for the source of the gushing blood. He’d been wounded in the head. She squeezed him tight, feeling his body rise and fall rhythmically with his sobs. He winced when she touched a spot, a large gash. She looked up, saw the man in the blue T-shirt getting awkwardly to his feet.

“Is he okay?” the man asked. He had soft brown eyes, a tousled head of salt-and-pepper hair. He clutched his hip, bent down to retrieve his glasses, which looked damaged beyond repair. “Looks like he got hit bad.”

“I—I don’t know,” Sarah said.

The man came closer, knelt down, touched Jared’s head. Jared let out a yowl of pain. “It looks bad,” the man said. “We’ve got to get him to a hospital. Is there one nearby?”

“I have no idea,” Sarah said, now terrified as the realization struck her that Jared might in fact have been seriously hurt. “Oh, God. There’s got to be one.”

“Can you pick him up? If you can’t, I can. He shouldn’t walk.”

“No,” Sarah said quickly. She didn’t want the stranger to touch Jared, though he was a nice-seeming man, maybe around forty, quite good-looking, and seemed gentle. “I’ll carry him,” she said.

“I’ll get a cab.”

The man ran ahead of them and flagged down a cab, which came screeching to a halt. He opened the back door, then came running back toward Sarah, who was struggling to carry Jared, and helped them into the cab.

“Get us to the nearest emergency room,” the man ordered the driver.

In the cab, the man introduced himself. His name was Brian Lamoreaux, and he was an architect, a writer, and a professor of architecture and town planning at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Things were moving so quickly that she forgot even to thank the stranger for coming along to help them.

When the cab stopped, Sarah allowed him to pick up Jared and escort them into the St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital ER. Jared’s bleeding was still profuse, but it seemed to be slowing. Although he had stopped crying, he seemed dazed.

“I think he’s probably okay,” Brian assured her. “The scalp always bleeds a lot. He probably got cut when he was shoved to the ground.”

Brian dealt with the triage nurses while Sarah comforted Jared, and Jared was seen quickly. The examining physician asked if his tetanus shots were up to date. It took Sarah a moment to remember that Jared had had a DPT shot at the age of four or five.

The doctor wanted to take Jared away to suture his scalp, but Brian insisted that Sarah be allowed to accompany her son, and they reluctantly agreed.

As they wheeled Jared, Sarah noticed for the first time that Brian was limping slightly. She wondered whether the limp was from the blow with the bat. Jared, who was looking over at Brian, wasn’t burdened with tact, and for the first time he spoke.

“Did you get hurt trying to help us?” Jared asked.

“Hardly at all,” Brian Lamoreaux said. “Hip’s bruised a bit, but I’ll be fine.”

“But you’re limping,” Jared persisted.

“I’ve had this limp for a long time,” he replied. “Let’s worry about you.”

“How’d you get it?” Jared asked.

“Jared!” Sarah exclaimed.

“No, it’s okay,” Brian said. “I was in an accident once. Years ago.”

“Wow,” Jared said, satisfied.

The surgeon clipped the hair around the scalp wound and numbed the area with a syringe of something, chatting with Jared the whole time to distract him. Then, a few minutes later when the numbness had set in, he began suturing the scalp. Sarah held his hand; Brian sat in a chair nearby.

“Okay,” the surgeon said to Sarah when the procedure was done, “he’s going to be fine. He must have fallen against something on the ground, a piece of metal or broken glass or something, and got a fairly nasty laceration. What we call a ‘scalp lac.’ The scalp is richly vascular and bleeds like hell. Fortunately, scalp lacs are easy to suture.”

“Shouldn’t you check for concussion?” Sarah asked.

“No reason to,” the doctor said. “He didn’t lose consciousness at all, did he?”

She shook her head.

“Then no.”

“What about infection?”

“I cleaned the wound with Betadine, then used lidocaine with epinephrine, then dabbed on some bacitracin. He’s had his tetanus shots, so he should be okay there. I wouldn’t worry about it. Just don’t wash the hair for three days. Don’t get the wound wet. Watch for signs of infection, like redness or pus. In a week the sutures can come out. If you have a pediatrician in town he can take them out, or come on back here. He’ll be fine.”

They sat for a while, the three of them, near a vending machine in the ER waiting area. Brian told Sarah he was working on a biography of a Canadian architect Sarah had never heard of. He was here because some of the architect’s papers were in New York. Sarah said she was with the FBI, but was vague about what exactly she did, and he, apparently sensing her discomfort, didn’t pursue it.

Abruptly, Jared asked, with his eight-year-old’s straightforwardness: “Are you married?”

Sarah felt acutely uncomfortable. Was her son turning into a pander for his mother?

“I was,” Brian said.

“Jared knows all about divorce,” Sarah said quickly, mussing Jared’s hair. “Doesn’t he?”

“My wife died three years ago,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. She watched Brian as he talked to Jared. On closer inspection, she saw that he was prematurely gray; his face was youthful, although there were deep furrows around his mouth that looked like smile lines.

“How?” Jared asked.

“Jared!” Sarah said, shocked.

“No, it’s a natural thing to ask. She was sick for a long time, Jared.”

“What’d she have, cancer?”

“Come on, now, Jared!” Sarah said.

“Yes,” Brian said. “In fact, she had breast cancer.”

“Oh,” Jared said, somewhere between sad and bored.

“She was young,” Sarah said.

“It happens. It’s a horrible thing.” He paused. “You’re divorced?”

“Yeah,” she said, and quickly said, “You’re great with kids—do you have a son?”

“Clare wanted to have a kid before she got sick. We both did. Before I got my Ph.D. and went into academia, I worked for the Canadian Government Children’s Bureau as a counselor. I worked with a lot of kids Jared’s age. He’s a terrific little guy.”

“I think so, but I’m biased.”

“So, you’re alone here? I mean, you and your son?”

Sarah hesitated. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

“Me, too. It’s a tough city to be lonely in.”

“I said alone, not lonely. Anyway, it’s a better place to be alone in than, say, Jackson, Mississippi.”

“Listen, I hope this isn’t too … forward, but I’ve got a couple of tickets to a performance of Beethoven’s late quartets at Carnegie Hall, day after tomorrow.” He reddened as he talked. “I got them for me and a colleague of mine, but—”

“But she can’t make it,” Sarah interrupted, “and you hate to waste a ticket, right?”

“
He
, actually. He decided to leave the city early and return to Canada. I don’t know if this is your kind of thing, or whatever—”

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “I love chamber music, and the late quartets are among my favorites, but I’m just not a reliable companion these days. I’m in New York on some very pressing business, and my pager’s always going off, and I often have to go in to work at odd times of day or night.”

“That’s all right,” Brian said.

“I don’t think so,” she said. She was drawn to Brian, but instinctively distrustful of any stranger in the city. “Thanks anyway. And—listen, thank you so much for your help.”

“Can I take your number anyway?”

She hesitated, thought it over. “All right,” she said, and gave it to him.

“So can I call you sometime?”

She shrugged, smiled. “Sure.”

“I will. Jared, you’re going to be fine. Just don’t wash your hair for a couple of days. You heard the doctor.”

“Yeah, I can deal with that,” Jared said.

“I thought so. Take care.” He shook Sarah’s hand. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The encrypted message Baumann had faxed by
SATCOM
emerged with a beep from one of Malcolm Dyson’s personal fax machines in his inner office. From the rest room, where, wheelchair-bound, he found the simple act of relieving himself a veritable Bataan death march, he heard the fax and wheeled out to get it.

Faxes that came through these lines were for his eyes only; mostly they contained political intelligence of a highly confidential nature that could affect a major deal, or they spelled out details of blatantly illegal transactions he preferred his staff not to know too much about.

Recently the Dyson corporate jet had been flying to Moscow quite a bit, and to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, where Dyson’s minions were hacking through some Byzantine dealings in grain and sugar, Siberian oil, and copper refined in Kazakhstan. Most of these undertakings were extremely sensitive, involving massive bribes to politicians. Had one of them soured?

But this one, sender unspecified, was a meaningless jumble of words. He stared at it mystified for a few seconds until he realized that it was the substitution cipher he had worked out with Baumann.

He buzzed for Lomax and had him do the cryptographic heavy lifting. Lomax took the fax and the pocket dictionary to his office and returned half an hour later with the message in clear.

Dyson donned his reading glasses and studied the translation. “The hell’s this supposed to mean?” he asked his aide. “‘Leak your end’ and ‘American intelligence partially knowledgeable’?”

Lomax answered with another question. “If there’s a leak, how does he know it’s from our end?”

“‘Leak,’” Dyson said with a scowl. “How serious a leak? He doesn’t say he’s abandoning the operation; it can’t be that serious.”

“I don’t know.”

“The fuck is ‘partially knowledgeable,’ anyway?”

“Don’t know.”

“I’ve told exactly two people,” Dyson said. “You and Kinzel.” Johann Kinzel ran the Zug, Switzerland, office of Dyson & Company, and was one of Dyson’s few confidants.

“You’ve hardly told Kinzel a thing,” Martin Lomax reminded him. “The roughest outline, really.”

“You two’ve talked about this, though, I’m sure.”

“Of course,” Lomax said. “He’s made all the banking arrangements. But all of our conversations have been on the secure phone.”

Dyson gave his underling a scorching stare. “On the Russian’s phones, I assume.”

“Of course.”

Dyson shook his head. “Those phones are secure—the only ones I want you or Kinzel to use. What the hell does he mean? This office is swept every other day. Arcadia gets a good going-over every Monday. And we can’t even raise the guy, can we? This is exactly how I didn’t want it.”

“At least we know he’s in New York.”

“Cold comfort. One week remaining, and we don’t even know what he’s done.”

“The main thing is that you not be connected in any way.”

“What about the hired gun who took care of the whore in Boston?”

“Died in an unfortunate car accident near his native Coventry, England.”

Dyson gave one of his enigmatic smiles and reached for a Macanudo, whose end he snipped as meticulously as a surgeon. He lighted it with a gold lighter and turned toward the window. Martin Lomax stood in silence, knowing better than to interrupt one of his boss’s reveries, which were more and more frequent of late.

*   *   *

Dyson found himself recalling the incident once again, for what seemed the millionth time. It had not made any of the newspapers, which indicated to Dyson that the U.S. government and its allies had pulled in a lot of chits. It had been a botch, all round, and the less known publicly the better.

Dyson had always feared the bounty hunters, but he had not counted on a bounty hunter working on contract for the U.S. government, a higher level of bounty hunter with the best intelligence.

Washington had obviously given up. All legal channels had been exhausted. The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs had passed on to State its request to extradite. State had sent it to the Swiss embassy. No dice. The Alien Fugitive Division of Interpol’s U.S. National Central Bureau had been enlisted, to no effect.

Then someone at Justice, clearly frustrated beyond rational thinking, had come up with the idea: Screw the federal marshals. Send a contract employee to Monaco, where Dyson and his wife went twice a month. Grab the fucker. Just go in there and grab him and bring him back to the States, back to justice and Justice. Sort out the niceties later.

The attempted grab happened on a dark pathway near the casino. Two armed bounty hunters, actually. Taking on two of Dyson’s personal bodyguards.

A full moon, a bright crystalline night sky. The twenty-sixth of June. Malcolm and Alexandra Dyson had just come from a night of baccarat, accompanied by their thirty-one-year-old daughter, Pandora, a delicately beautiful woman, their only child, visiting from Paris.

The ringing of Pandora’s delighted laughter, the clove notes of Alexandra’s perfume.

A scuff on the pavement, a rustling.

Dimly glimpsed out of the corner of an eye: a silhouette, a darting figure.

Dyson, always watching, always suspicious, felt his stomach constrict before his mind knew anything.