The Zero Hour (42 page)

“Peter, you’re drunk,” Sarah groaned, and hung up.

The phone rang again a few seconds later.

“You think you can take him away for the summer?” Peter shouted. “That’s not the arrangement. I get him on weekends. Yeah, you thought I wouldn’t track you down, did you?”

“Look, Peter, you’ve had too much to drink. Let’s talk in the morning, when you’re sober—”

“You think you can get away with it? I got news for you. I’m coming to visit my son.”

“Fine,” Sarah said, depleted. “So come visit.”

“He’s my little boy. I’m not going to let you take him away from me.”

And he hung up.

*   *   *

In a tiny apartment a block away, Baumann listened on the phone.

“
Fine. So come visit.
”

“
He’s my little boy. I’m not going to let you take him away from me.
”

Sarah’s ex-husband hung up, and then Sarah hung up, and then Baumann, intrigued, hung up too.

People say things over the phone they should never say, even the most suspicious people, even professionals who know what can be done with a telephone these days. The personal conversations Sarah had were sometimes useful to Baumann, but it was the business chats that had been most informative.

Baumann had heard everything Sarah Cahill had said on the telephone ever since the day after they slept together. Her ex-husband had called once. A few female friends from Boston had called, but she seemed not to have many friends. When she used the phone it was usually for work. Jared had had long, rambling, trivial conversations with a few of his buddies; Baumann never wasted his time listening.

It is not easy to tap a phone or bug an apartment. Placing the tap is easy—that isn’t the problem. The problem is the technology.

If you plant a bug in the walls of a room, or in a phone, or even in the A-66 connection panel on the floor of the apartment building, you must stay very close at hand, because most bugs broadcast on VHF, which stands for “very high frequency.” You must have an apartment nearby, or remain in a van within a few hundred yards, and that was not possible in this case. Once there was a vogue for something called the “infinity transmitter” or “harmonica bug,” but it ties up the phone line and is easy to detect and doesn’t work all that well, anyway. The CIA met with its inventor and said sorry, but no thanks.

For a while, intelligence agencies were excited about something called the laser microphone—the watchers try to bug a room by shooting a beam of light on the room’s window from the outside. The sounds in the room make the window glass vibrate, and the vibrations of the glass in turn vibrate a small glass prism attached to the outside of the window, which redirects the light beam back toward the watchers. You look at that shimmering spot with a telescope equipped with a photocell, which converts the light to an electrical signal, which is then amplified and converted back into sound.

Nature and architecture and logistics, however, tend to get in the way. Traffic sounds almost always interfere, as well as noise from TV and radio, even water moving in pipes. And you must find a vantage point directly opposite the room in question, which is not always easy to do in the city. The technology is very impressive, but except in the most ideal circumstances it works poorly.

So you spend a little money—ten thousand dollars, in fact—and you act the jealous boyfriend. You go to a private detective and say you’re convinced your girlfriend is fucking around, you’re sick of this shit. I want you to hang a wire on her, you say. I want it to come to me. Once it’s in place, you tell the detective, you’re out of the loop.

Private investigators are asked to do this kind of thing all the time. They have contacts at the telephone company’s central station, cooperative guys, guys they know they can do business with.

When you’re on the inside, it’s easily done. The cooperative guy at the phone company, who doesn’t want to know a goddam thing about it, puts in a parallel connection in the appropriate frame.

Baumann rented a tiny apartment in Sarah’s neighborhood, because the telephone there was serviced by the same central office that serviced hers. There was nothing in this tiny apartment but a telephone and a call diverter. It recorded every single conversation made on Sarah’s telephone line, and when the call terminated it dialed out to Baumann’s apartment off Sutton Place. Now it was almost as if he had an extension in Sarah’s apartment.

When she talked on the phone, he could hear everything she said.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

By the time Leo Krasner arrived at his apartment, there were several messages on his answering machine responding to the notices he had posted not half an hour earlier. By midafternoon he had received eighteen calls from secretaries and other office workers (sixteen female, two male) at the Manhattan Bank.

One by one he returned the calls.

“The term paper’s on a computer disk,” he told the first secretary, “but my computer’s busted. Thing is, I need some really good editing—you know, just go through it, correct the spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, punctuation, all that junk. Thirty pages.”

But he needed it done tomorrow, by the end of the day. It was urgent. Who else but a desperate business-school student would pay three hundred bucks for an hour’s work?

The one he finally settled on said she did not have a home computer, but would work on it tomorrow during her coffee breaks and her lunch hour. She promised to be done by the end of the business day.

They agreed to meet at the cappuccino bar in the Manhattan Bank Building atrium, first thing in the morning.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

On the way to Central Park, just before noon the next day, Jared sulked. Two new friends from the Y went to a video arcade after camp got out every day, unaccompanied by an adult, and they had invited Jared. “Look, I’m sorry, but the answer is no,” Sarah said. “I’m glad you have some new friends, but I don’t want you going out unless a grown-up is with you, or Brea, or me.”

“It’s like two blocks away from the Y,” he protested. “And it’s not like it’s just me alone. There’s three of us.”

“No. Look what happened to you in the park when I let you go off by yourself—”

“Jesus Christ,” Jared said, sounding like his father. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“Hey,” she said. “You heard me. The answer is no.”

“That’s just stupid.”

“That’s just careful,” she said as they crossed the street to the park. “I don’t want anything happening to you.”

He raised his voice. “How come you always treat me like I’m a baby?”

Brian approached, wearing a sweatshirt. He gave Sarah a peck on the cheek, patted Jared on the shoulder. “I’m ready, coach.”

“Yeah,” Jared said sullenly.

Sarah left them there and went to work, arranging to meet them at the same spot in exactly two hours.

Jared taught Brian the fundamentals of going out to catch a pass. “You start running first,” Jared said. “
Then
I throw it.”

“Okay,” Brian said as he took off. The ball came soaring toward him. He dove for it and missed. The ball spiraled into the air, while he slipped in the mud and tumbled onto his back. Jared burst out laughing, then Brian started laughing.

Both of them grass-stained and covered in mud, laughing. They sat in the grass, as Brian caught his breath. He put his arm around Jared. “You know, my parents were divorced when I was a boy, too,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I know how lousy it is. And—well, this is something I’ve never told anybody before. When I was nine—just a year older than you—my parents fought all the time. All the time. They got divorced when I was ten, but it took them years, years of fighting. And one day when I was nine years old, I got so tired of them constantly fighting that I ran away from home.”

“Really?” Jared said, rapt.

“That’s right. I just packed my favorite toys and some clothes and packed them in a bag, and then I got on a bus and rode for an hour, to the end of the line.”

“Far away?”

Baumann nodded, imagining a Canadian boyhood, enjoying the lying, which he knew was convincing. “And I spent the night in a field, and the next morning I got back on the bus and went home. By then my parents were terrified. Seemed as if the whole town was looking for me. The police sent cars around to find me.”

“What did your parents do? Were they mad?”

“Oh, very. Very angry. But for a day they were united, a team. For that one day they stopped fighting. They were worried about me. So, you know, you should try to look at things from your mom’s point of view. She worries about you, because she loves you. There’s a lot on her mind, and she’s doing some dangerous work, isn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Jared said. “I guess.”

“I mean, she told me she’s in charge of a group of people who are looking for someone. Did she ever tell you anything about her work?”

“A little bit, I guess.”

“So you know she worries a lot, right?”

Jared shrugged.

“What did she tell you?”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

Leo Krasner worked most of the night, several times cursing the goddam Englishman who had hired him to do this job.

But by dawn he had finished. The end result was a computer diskette that appeared to contain only a thirty-one-page “term paper” on market economics and monetary policy, which Krasner had plagiarized from a college introductory economics textbook and then rendered semiliterate, strewn with typos and basic grammatical errors. Of course, the only part of the disk of any interest to him, the sequence of code he had so laboriously written, was cloaked in a hidden attribute and would remain invisible to the user.

At a few minutes to nine o’clock he walked into the cappuccino bar in the Manhattan Bank building, wearing his only blazer and tie. His blue oxford-cloth button-down shirt was too small at the neck; perspiration darkened large ovals under the arms and in the middle of his chest.

*   *   *

Mary Avakian, administrative assistant to the Manhattan Bank’s senior vice president for personnel, popped the diskette into her disk drive as soon as she’d poured herself a mug of coffee (light with two sugars) and set to work on it right away.

She copied the contents of the disk to her C-drive, which meant copying it to the bank’s LAN, or local area network. She glanced at the text. Boy, this guy wasn’t kidding. What a mess! And this guy, who could barely write, was probably going to walk out of business school and start at six figures, while she slaved away for a lousy twenty-four thousand.

During her coffee breaks and lunch hour she slogged through the guy’s term paper. The spelling was so bad she couldn’t even rely on the spell-check. It took her an hour and a half, and it wasn’t exactly easy sledding. But for three hundred bucks, tax-free, she really had no right to complain. For three hundred bucks, she’d edit this guy’s work again anytime he asked.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

That evening, Sarah and Brian took Jared out to dinner at a steakhouse, where Jared was able to order a cheeseburger and fries. Brian ordered a large salad and a plate of pasta, explaining that he was a vegetarian. After dinner, the three of them were ambling toward Sarah’s apartment when they heard a voice.

“Jared.”

Sarah and Jared turned around simultaneously, recognizing the tall blond man running toward them on the street as Peter.

“Hey, little buddy, how’re you doing?”

A look of concern passed over Brian’s face, and Sarah was noticeably tense. He hung back as Peter approached Jared, arms wide. Jared looked stricken.

“Give me a hug, Jer,” Peter said, leaning down toward Jared. He was in street clothes, slacks, and a hunter-green polo shirt.

Standing stiffly, Jared kept his arms at his side and glared at his father.

“Come on, now, buddy,” Peter said, giving his son a bear hug anyway. Straightening up, he turned to Sarah and then to Brian. “So,” he said. “I hope I’m not interrupting something.”

“Not at all,” Brian said. “Just returning from dinner.” He extended his hand. “I’m Brian Lamoreaux.”

Peter smiled at him as a snake smiles at a rabbit. “Peter Cronin. So you’re Sarah’s latest.”

Brian half-smiled uncomfortably. “I should probably leave you three alone,” he said.

“No, Brian,” Sarah said. “Please.”

“I’ve got a long day tomorrow. I should really be getting home.”

“Brian,” Sarah said. “Don’t.”

Peter slipped one arm around Jared’s slender back. “How was camp, Jerry? Hey, I’ve missed you.”

Baumann lingered awkwardly in the background, shifting from one foot to the other, eyes watchful.

“So you’ve been real busy looking for your mad bomber,” Peter said to Sarah. “So busy you don’t have time for Jared, right? You’re parking him in some YMCA all day—you think I don’t know that?”

“Will you please get out of here?” Sarah said.

“No, sorry, I will not,” Peter said. “I’ve come to see Jared for a couple of days. Come on, buddy, let’s get your things, and come on with me. I’m staying at the Marriott Marquis. We’re going to see the sights of New York City that your mom is too busy with her boyfriend and her task force to show you.”

“Come on, Peter,” Sarah said.

“No, Dad, I don’t want to go,” Jared said, face flushed. “I’m having a great time here.”

“Hey, little buddy—”

“You can’t make me,” Jared said. His eyes narrowed, in unconscious imitation of his father. “You can just go on back to Boston. Just lay off.”

Peter stared at Jared, then at Sarah. A slight twist of a smile played on his lips. His face, too, began to redden. He spoke to Sarah in almost a whisper. “You’re turning him against me, is that it? You think you can do that to my son?”

“No, Dad,” Jared said. “She doesn’t even talk about you. It’s me. I’m sick and tired of you bullying me around.”

Peter continued staring, alternating between son and ex-wife. He licked his lower lip, then smiled viciously.

He started to say something, then turned slowly and began walking away.