The Zero Hour

by Joseph Finder

  The present owner and occupant of this enormous estate, another sort of Napoleon entirely, was a man named Malcolm Dyson, an American expatriate financier, a billionaire, about whom the world knew very little.

  In the last few months, however, Baumann had steadily put together a sketchy portrait of the legendary, reclusive Malcolm Dyson. The confines of Pollsmoor Prison had given him unlimited time for his research, and the prison library had yielded a small amount of public-record information. But the best network of resources by far had been the prison’s inmates, the petty crooks, the smugglers, the shady dealers.

  The American newspapers had christened Malcolm Dyson the “fugitive financier,” a phrase now fastened to his name like a Homeric epithet. He had made a fortune on Wall Street, in bonds and commodities and by playing the stock market brilliantly. In the mid-1980s, Malcolm Dyson was one of Wall Street’s most glittering tycoons.

  Then, in 1987, he had been arrested for insider trading, and his vast corporate empire had come tumbling down. All of his U.S. assets had been confiscated.

  After his trial, and before he was slated to be sent off to prison, he fled to Switzerland, which has no extradition treaty with the United States. He and his late wife had lived in Switzerland ever since, rebuilding his empire from the ground up. Now, at seventy-two, Dyson was one of the richest men in the world, controlling assets estimated at several hundred billion dollars. Yet he could never return to the United States, nor travel to any country from which he might be extradited, or he would promptly be thrown in prison for the rest of his life. So he remained a prisoner of sorts, but in the most lavishly gilded of cages.

  He lived in a Swiss Xanadu, a restored thirteenth-century castle he called Arcadia. More significantly, however, Malcolm Dyson had become a major trader in commodities and the world currency markets. He was widely rumored to have come close to cornering the world’s supply of gold and platinum and to have major holdings in gem diamonds and strategic minerals such as titanium, platinum, and zirconium, which were vital in the defense and space industries. Dyson’s corporate empire, which was sometimes called “the Octopus,” had in the last few years outgrown the other leading diamond and precious-metals firms that made up the cartel whose offices were located in Charterhouse Street in London, just off High Holborn and Farringdon Road. His holdings were by now larger than those of the other precious-metals behemoths, including De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., the Anglo American Corporation, Charter Consolidated, the Mineral and Resources Corporation, and Consolidated Gold Fields Ltd. He was enormously wealthy, but beyond that he was an enigma.

  The limousine came to a stop at a tall hedge, into which was carved a topiary gate. Standing in front of the gate was a tall man in his late thirties, with a high forehead and receding hairline, wearing rimless spectacles. He wore a dark-gray sack suit. He was clearly an American.

  He approached the limousine and opened the door. “Welcome,” the man said. “I’m Martin Lomax.” He shook hands and ushered Baumann into the dim labyrinth of an English hedge maze. The path wended maddeningly through acute angles and around cul-de-sacs. Baumann permitted himself a smile at Dyson’s affectation. He wondered what other sort of eccentricities Malcolm Dyson would entertain.

  Then the tall hedges gave way to an open area of immaculate jade-green lawn, bordered by brightly colored flowers—lavender, nepeta, agapanthus, daylilies, roses, honeysuckle, euphorbia—in wild and lush profusion.

  Lomax led Baumann through this meticulously tended garden and through another opening in the winding hedge, then stopped. There were faint sounds of gurgling, plashing water. Baumann’s curiosity was piqued. He took a few steps forward and entered the verdant, shaded stillness of another garden. At the exact center of this garden was a swimming pool, an irregular oval of smooth rocks that looked almost natural.

  In a wheelchair nearby, next to an ancient, crumbling sundial, sat Malcolm Dyson, speaking on a cellular telephone. He was a small, rumpled man, almost rotund. His head was round and almost completely bald. There were dark liver spots at his temples and on the backs of his gnarled hands. He was wearing a loose, open-necked white muslin shirt that resembled a tunic. His legs were covered by a plaid wool blanket; his shoes were comfortable Italian leather loafers.

  Whoever Dyson was speaking with was obviously making him angry. He concluded the conversation abruptly by flipping the phone closed. Then he looked straight across the garden at Baumann and gave a warm, engaging smile.

  “So at last I meet the famous Prince of Darkness,” Dyson said. His voice was high, throaty, adenoidal. Only his eyes, steely gray, did not smile.

  There was a high mechanical whine as Dyson urged his electric wheelchair closer to Baumann, but it was only a symbolic gesture; he stopped after a few feet.

  Baumann approached, and Dyson extended a round, speckled hand. “Mr. Baumann,” he announced with a chuckle and a dip of his head. “I assume you know who I am.”

  Baumann shook his hand and nodded. “Certainly, Mr. Dyson,” he said. “I do know a bit about you.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “I’ve recently had some spare time to do a little research.”

  Dyson chortled, as if to share Baumann’s joke, but Baumann was not smiling. “Do you know why you’re here?” Dyson asked.

  “No,” Baumann admitted. “I know that I’m not sitting in Cell Block Nineteen in Pollsmoor Prison. And I know that you made the arrangements for my jailbreak. But to be entirely honest, I have no idea why.”

  “Ah,” Dyson said, arching his brows as if the matter hadn’t before occurred to him. “Right. Well, I hoped we might have a little talk, you and I. I have sort of a business proposition for you.”

  “Yes,” Baumann said mildly, and then gave one of his brilliant smiles. “I didn’t think it would take you long to get around to that.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Early the next morning, Sarah arrived at the FBI Boston field office and took the photocopies of Valerie Santoro’s handwritten Rolodex cards to the counter where the computer searches were done. A young Latino clerk-trainee named Hector took the sheets and squinted at Sarah amiably. “You want these run through NCIC?”

  The FBI’s computerized National Crime Information Center database is used by police whenever they stop a motorist, to check for stolen vehicles, cash, and guns, as well as fugitives, missing children, and missing adults. It would also tell her which of Val’s clients had criminal records or warrants outstanding.

  “Right,” she replied. “And Intelligence and Criminal. And of course FOIMS. See if we get a hit.” FOIMS, the Field Office Information Management System, was the FBI’s main database.

  The Boston office of the FBI occupies four floors of an enormous curved modern building called One Center Plaza. Sarah’s cubicle was located on the building’s fifth floor, where the Organized Crime and drug squads shared space. The vast expanse of floor was covered in tan wall-to-wall carpeting. Long blue partitions separated small office areas known as pods, two or three desks equipped with telephones, walkie-talkie radios, and, on some desks but not all, computer terminals. The younger agents tended to be computer-literate, unlike their older colleagues, who left the computer-search headaches to the folks in Indices, at the other end of the floor. Next to her desk was a paper shredder.

  Apart from the usual equipment, Sarah’s desk held her Sig-Sauer pistol in its holster in a small green canvas bag (a pistol was standard issue in both drugs and OC), her pager, and a few personalizing touches: a framed photograph of her parents sitting on the couch at home in Bellingham, Washington, and a framed snapshot of Jared in his hockey uniform, holding a stick, smiling broadly, displaying his two large front teeth.

  The atmosphere was quiet, yet bustling. It could have been any private corporation in the country. The FBI had moved here a few years ago from the John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building across the street, where the whole Boston office had been crowded onto one big open floor, noisy and boisterous an
d gregarious, and you could hear what everyone else was doing at every moment.

  She returned to her desk, gazed for a moment out at the Suffolk County Courthouse, leafed through the photocopies of Val’s appointment book that Peter had had made.

  The entries were brief and unrevealing. Val did not record the names of her clients, just times and places. On the night she was murdered, she’d had two appointments, one at eight o’clock at the Four Seasons, the other at eleven o’clock at the Ritz. It wasn’t out of the question that one of these two “clients” had followed her home after an assignation and murdered her. The possibility couldn’t be ruled out.

  Had Valerie Santoro been murdered because someone had discovered she was an FBI informant? If so, was it one of her clients? Valerie’s information had helped Sarah make two major OC cases; quite likely she’d been the victim of an organized-crime hit.

  Sarah was one of a handful of women in the Boston office, and for some reason she hadn’t become friends with any of the others. Her closest work friend was her partner and podmate, an immense grizzly bear of a man named Kenneth Alton, who was speaking on the telephone. He waved at her as he sat down. A computer junkie who’d gone to MIT, Ken had long hair, hippie wire-rimmed glasses, and a great protuberant belly. He probably weighed over three hundred pounds and was always on a diet, always sipping Ultra Slimfast milk shakes. He wasn’t exactly what the public expected to see in an FBI agent, and he’d never make management. But he was valued for his extraordinary computer skills, and so his idiosyncrasies were tolerated. J. Edgar was probably spinning in his grave.

  Sarah had been with the FBI for almost ten years. Her father had been a cop who hated being a cop and had urged his only child to avoid law enforcement if it were the last job on earth. Naturally, she went into law enforcement and married a cop, in that order.

  Though for the last several years she’d been working Organized Crime in Boston, her main interest was in counterterrorism, where she’d developed something of a reputation within the Bureau while working the Lockerbie case.

  A Pan Am jumbo had exploded in the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, at 7:03 p.m., resulting in the death of 270 people. The FBI launched SCOTBOMB, the largest international terrorist investigation ever, conducting fourteen thousand interviews in fifty countries.

  Sarah was a single mother—Peter had moved out by then—living in Heidelberg, Germany, with a sick infant. Jared, then four months old, had developed a bad case of bronchiolitis. Neither baby nor mother got any sleep. The first several weeks in Heidelberg Sarah spent in a state of complete sleep deprivation. It was a trying, exhausting time, but it was where she had made her bones within the Bureau.

  She’d been assigned to interview the friends and families of U.S. soldiers who’d been stationed at the base at Heidelberg to see whether any might have been targets. The days were long; they usually weren’t done until nine at night. The Army provided a command post and a secretary for dictating reports.

  Each investigator was assigned one victim. You had to follow up all connections to that victim, all friends, even casual contacts. In the process, you couldn’t help digging up dirt. One victim had been cheating on his wife, another was in financial trouble, another was using drugs. Were any of these problems connected to the bombing?

  Sarah became a sponge, soaking up information, rumors, overhears. It soon became apparent that the answer was not in Heidelberg.

  The important forensic work was going on elsewhere. Sarah began to hear details through Bureau channels. The bomb had consisted of a plastic explosive and a timing device concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette recorder, which had been placed in a Samsonite suitcase. The suitcase was traced to Air Malta flight KM-180, from Malta to Frankfurt, then transferred as unaccompanied luggage to Pan Am 103A from Frankfurt to Heathrow. There it was transferred to container AVE-4041 on Pan Am 103.

  Then she learned that a fragment of a green circuit board, part of the timing device, had been identified.

  Sarah asked and received permission to do some digging into the matter of timing devices—who used what, what had been used where. This was pure scut work, and it wasn’t her “ticket,” as they say in the Bureau, but she had gotten reluctant approval to search.

  All the intelligence on timing devices was on-line at the Bureau. There was a match. The circuit board was similar to one used in an attempted coup in Togo in 1986. It was also similar to one seized at the Senegal airport in 1988.

  That was her contribution, and although it turned out to be crucial, at the time she had no idea where it would lead.

  But the timer was eventually traced to a Swiss company, Meister et Bollier Limited, Telecommunications. In 1985, it turned out, twenty of these timers were sold to Libyan intelligence.

  And the case was cracked. Her file reflected a “contribution above and beyond.”

  But when her Heidelberg tour was done, she found that there were very few Counterterrorism slots in the United States open and none in Boston, which she still considered home—and where, by the terms of her custody agreement with Peter, she had to live. So she’d requested a transfer to Organized Crime, and there she’d been ever since.

  * * *

  She called a few informants, worked a few leads. For almost two hours she filled out forms, wrote up a few 302s, or interview reports, did the paperwork that takes up most of an FBI agent’s work, got caught up. She called the airport and talked to a member of an FBI surveillance team on a case that was all but wrapped up.

  Then a thought occurred to her, and she picked up the phone. Fortunately, Ted answered the phone; Peter was out of the squad room.

  “Can you pull Val’s phone records, or should I?” she asked.

  “Already did.”

  “You’re kidding me. You got a subpoena that fast?”

  “I’ve got a friend at New England Telephone Security.”

  Sarah shook her head, half in disgust and half in admiration. “I see.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me you feebees always play by the rules,” Ted replied. “Phone company’s impossible to deal with through channels anymore, you know that.”

  “So what’d you find?”

  “According to her local phone records, at three forty-four in the afternoon of the day she was killed, she received a three-minute call.”

  “So?”

  “So she wasn’t at home at the time. Between three and quarter after four, she was at a salon on Newbury Street called Diva. Take a look at her appointment book. Both her hair stylist, a guy named Gordon Lascalza, and her manicurist, Deborah something, placed her there then.”

  “You’ve never heard of answering machines?” Sarah said.

  “Oh, there’s messages on her answering machine, all right,” Ted replied. “Three messages. One from the owner of the Stardust Escort Service, a Nanci Wynter. Her madam. And two from creditors—Citibank Visa and Saks. Apparently she didn’t like paying her bills, or she was short of funds, or both.”

  “And?”

  “None of them remotely approached two minutes. Also, they were received between five o’clock and six-thirty. They also match up with her phone records.”

  “So you’re saying that Val came home after her haircut and manicure,” Sarah said, “played her answering machine, and rewound, right?”

  “Exactly,” Ted said.

  “And whoever called her at three forty-four that afternoon and left a long message—we don’t have that message, because it was recorded over by later messages.”

  “Right.”

  “But you know who placed the call, right? From the phone records?”

  Teddy hesitated. He was not a good liar. “According to the phone records, that three-minute phone call Valerie Santoro got on the day she was killed came from a cellular phone, a car phone. Registered to a limousine-rental agency. The limo company has twenty-some cellular phones in its name, probably all installed in the cars it rents out.”

  She nodded, se
nsed he was holding back. “Did you already talk to the limo company, or should I?”

  An even longer pause. “Uh, I did already.”

  “And?”

  “All right, the phone call came from a limo rented for two days by a guy named Warren Elkind, from New York City.”

  She hesitated. “Know anything about the guy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do me a favor. Forget to mention to Peter you told me about this guy, huh?” There was a long silence. “Hello?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. All right. Understood,” Teddy said reluctantly.

  “Thanks, Teddy. I owe you. Oh, and one more thing.”

  “Now what?”

  “Can I have the tape?”

  “The what?”

  “The tape from Valerie’s answering machine.”

  “You asking me to get it transcribed? Or copied?

  “I want the original.”

  “Shit, Sarah, why are you doing this? It’s in the evidence locker already—”

  “Because we have jurisdiction. She’s one of our informants.”

  “It’s not going to do you any good, Sarah—I already told you what’s on it.”

  “Can I borrow it for a little while anyway?”

  He sighed. “I’m hanging up before you ask me for anything else.”

  “Ms. Cahill? Excuse me.” Hector, the database trainee, approached her awkwardly. He was holding a long sheet of computer paper and smiling bashfully. His face looked like that of a child who’d accomplished something for which he knew he’d be praised.

  “We got six hits,” the trainee said.

  Sarah perused the computer printout. The six names had little in common. One was a United States senator whose name had come up in a bribery investigation. Another was a professor at Harvard Law School who specialized in defending celebrities; he was probably being watched for no other reason than that someone high in the Bureau disliked him. A third was a well-known construction executive tied to the Mob; then there were two lowlifes who’d done time for drug trafficking.