The Zero Hour

by Joseph Finder

  And there was Warren Elkind: a prominent New York banker, the chairman of the Manhattan Bank, the second-largest bank in the country. The accompanying biographical information indicated that he was a leading fund-raiser for Israel and had been the target of numerous threats from Palestinian and Arab groups.

  * * *

  Sarah called the Ritz and asked for the security director.

  “Is there a problem?” he asked in a pleasant baritone.

  “Absolutely nothing involving the hotel,” she reassured him. “We’re looking for someone we believe stayed there four days ago. I’d like to get a list of all hotel guests from Monday night.”

  “I wish we could do that, but we’re very protective of our guests’ privacy.”

  Sarah’s tone cooled slightly. “I’m sure you’re aware of the law—”

  “Oh,” he said with a tiny snort, “I’m quite familiar with the law. Chapter one hundred forty, section twenty-seven, of the Massachusetts General Law. But there is a legal procedure that has to be followed. You’ll have to get a subpoena from Suffolk District Court and present it to our keeper of records. Only then can we release documentation.”

  “How long would that take?” she asked dully.

  “After you get the subpoena, you mean? It takes several days for us to go into our records. A two-week register check will take at least three days. And then you’ve got to make sure the scope of the subpoena is specific enough. I doubt any judge will issue a subpoena for the names of all hotel guests that stayed here on any given night.”

  Frustrated, Sarah lowered her voice and asked confidentially: “Is there any way we can speed things up a bit? I can assure you the hotel will not be involved in any way—”

  “Whenever the FBI comes here asking for the names of our guests, we’re involved, by definition. My job is to protect the security of our guests. I’m sorry. Bring me a subpoena.”

  The second call she placed was to the Four Seasons, and this time she decided to take a different tack. When she was put through to the accounting department, she said: “I’m calling on behalf of my boss, Warren Elkind, who was a guest at your hotel recently.” She spoke with the glib, slightly bored assuredness of a longtime secretary. “There’s a problem with one of the charges on his bill, and I need to go over it with you.”

  “What’s the name again?”

  Sarah gave Elkind’s name and was put on hold. Then the voice came back on. “Mr. Elkind checked out on the eighteenth. I have his statement here, ma’am. What seems to be the problem?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “I see you collect pictures,” Baumann said.

  “You know something about art, I take it?” Malcolm Dyson asked, pleased. The word “pictures,” as opposed to “paintings,” seemed to indicate that Baumann was not entirely ignorant about the art world.

  The conversation had been relocated to the main house, whose walls were crowded with paintings, mostly old masters but a few contemporaries, from the marble-tiled entrance hall to the immense Regency dining room—even, Baumann observed, in the washroom off the conservatory. A Rothko nestled between a Canaletto and a Gauguin; canvases by Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, Twombly, and Miró jostled against a Correggio and a Bronzino, a Vermeer, a Braque and a Toulouse-Lautrec. An astonishing collection, Baumann saw, but grotesquely jumbled together. A collector with a lot of money and no taste.

  Hanging above a Louis XIV gilt console table in a hallway—poorly lighted, Baumann thought, and ineptly displayed—was a Nativity by Caravaggio. In one corner of the sitting room, oddly juxtaposed, were Antonella da Messina’s Ecce Homo and a Modigliani. Only after they had moved into the library did a switch go on in Baumann’s head, and he suddenly realized what many of these paintings had in common. The Caravaggio had disappeared thirty or so years ago from the oratory of a church in Palermo, Sicily; Ecce Homo had been looted by the Nazis from the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. Much of the art in Dyson’s collection had been obtained on the black market. The stuff had been stolen.

  They sat in the library, an enormous, high-ceilinged, dimly lit chamber lined with antiquarian books and paneled in mahogany. It smelled strongly, and not unpleasantly, of fireplace smoke. Dyson had boasted that he had purchased the library in its magisterial entirety—from the books to the vaulted ceiling—from a baronial estate outside London.

  The floors were covered in antique Persian carpets, over which Dyson had navigated his wheelchair with some difficulty. He sat behind a small writing table; Lomax, taking notes on a yellow pad with a silver ballpoint pen, sat beside him. Both of them faced Baumann, who was sunk into a large, plump armchair upholstered in green-and-white-striped taffeta.

  “Just a passing familiarity,” Baumann said. “Enough to know that the Brueghel used to live in a gallery in London. And the Rubens—Baccanale, is it?—vanished from a private collection in Rome sometime in the seventies.”

  “Baccanale it is,” Dyson said. “Very good. The Brueghel’s called Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery—very special, I’ve always thought.” He sighed. “Most of the Renoirs are from Buenos Aires; the El Greco came from Saarbrücken, as I recall. The Vermeer, I’m told, came from the Gardner in Boston, but what do I know? The Dalís were picked up in Barcelona, and the Cézanne … Marty, where the hell’d the Cézanne come from?”

  “A private collection outside Detroit,” Lomax answered without looking up from his notes. “Grosse Pointe Farms, I believe.”

  Dyson extended his hands, spread them out, palms up. “Don’t get me wrong, Baumann. I don’t put on my cat-burglar togs and rip off the stuff myself. I don’t even commission the heists. They just come to me. Black-market dealers around the world must just figure me for an easy mark—man without a country and all that.”

  “But not without a checkbook,” Baumann said.

  “Right,” Dyson said. A housekeeper appeared with a tray of coffee and smoked salmon sandwiches, served them, and noiselessly vanished. “I mean, let’s face it,” Dyson went on, “I’m not exactly going to just show up at Sotheby’s Important Old Masters sale, am I? Not if I want to stay out of Leavenworth or wherever the hell it is the U.S. government wants to stash me. Anyway, stolen art’s a bargain—stuff goes for maybe seven or ten percent of the crazy prices they hold you up for at Wildenstein or Thaw or Christie’s—”

  “I assume you didn’t break me out of Pollsmoor to talk about art, Mr. Dyson,” Baumann interrupted. “You had a ‘business proposition.’”

  Dyson regarded Baumann for a long moment over his reading glasses, his eyes steely. Then his face relaxed into a smile. “I like a fellow who’s all business,” he said to his assistant.

  Dyson’s cellular phone trilled on the table in front of him. He picked it up, flipped it open, and barked: “Yes?… Good God, what time is it there?… Does Mr. Lin ever sleep?… All right.” He pushed a button to sever the connection. Looking directly at Baumann, he went on: “The Chinese are going to take over Asia, believe you me.” He shook his head. “So they say you’re the best in the world.”

  Baumann nodded curtly. “So I’ve been told. But if I were really so good, I wouldn’t have spent the last six years in jail, would I?”

  “Too modest,” Dyson said. “My sources tell me BOSS screwed up. Not you.”

  Baumann shrugged but did not reply.

  “You were instructed to take out a member of the Mossad’s assassination unit, the kidon. Someone who was getting under Pretoria’s skin. Only it turned out the guy you whacked was some big-deal case officer—what’s the term, a katsa? Do I have this right?”

  “More or less.”

  “And then there’s lots of diplomatic fallout between Tel Aviv and Pretoria. Which sort of threatened to screw up Pretoria’s A-bomb program, which relied on Israel’s cooperation. So you get locked away. Life sentence. Spare them any embarrassment. Right?”

  “Roughly.” Dyson had the basic idea right, and Baumann was uninterested in correcting the details. The salien
t fact was that this enigmatic billionaire had gone to great trouble to extract Baumann from prison, and men like this did not do such things out of humanitarian impulses.

  About two months earlier, Baumann had been visited in his cell one afternoon by a priest, who, after a few moments of aimless chatter about Baumann’s religious faith, had leaned close and whispered to the prisoner that a “friend” from the outside wanted to aid his escape. The patron, a man of great resources, would be in touch soon through confederates. Baumann would be reassigned to the auto-repair shop at once.

  Baumann had listened without comment.

  A few days later, he had been transferred to auto repairs. A young fellow from the prison commandant’s office came by a month or so after that, ostensibly to discuss a problem with his car’s ignition system, but really to let him know that things were now in place.

  “Now then,” Dyson said, opening a folder that Martin Lomax had slid before him. “I have a few questions for you.”

  Baumann merely raised his eyebrows.

  “Call it a job interview,” Dyson said. “What’s your real name, Mr. Baumann?”

  Baumann looked at Dyson blankly. “Whatever you’d like it to be. It’s been so long I really don’t remember.”

  Lomax whispered something to Dyson, who nodded and went on: “Let’s see. Born in the western Transvaal. Only son of tobacco farmers. Boers. Members of the Nationalist Party.”

  “My parents were poorly educated and hardly political,” Baumann interrupted.

  “You left the University of Pretoria. Recruited there to BOSS—what’s it called now, the Department of National Security or something, the DNS?”

  “It’s been renamed again,” Lomax said. “Now it’s the National Intelligence Service.”

  “Who the hell can keep track of this shit?” Dyson muttered. He went on, almost to himself: “Trained at the Farm as an assassin and a munitions expert. Top marks at the academy and in the field. Service loaned you out to various friendly spook services.” He glanced at the sheaf of notes. “Says here you’re single-handedly responsible for some fifteen documented terrorist incidents and probably a good many more undocumented ones around the world. Your cryptonym within the service was Zero, meaning you were top dog or something.”

  Baumann said nothing. There was a tentative knock on the library door, to which Dyson abruptly shouted: “Come!” A tall, thin man in his late forties entered, bearing a sheet of paper. His face was sallow and concave. He handed the paper to Lomax and scurried from the room. Lomax scanned the paper, then handed it over to Dyson, murmuring: “St. Petersburg.” Dyson glanced at it and scrunched it into a ball, which he tossed toward a burgundy leather trash can, missing it by a few feet.

  “In 1986, you were hired, on a freelance basis, by Muammar Qaddafi to bomb a discotheque in West Berlin. Bomb went off on April 5. Killed three American soldiers.”

  “I’m sure whoever did it,” Baumann said, “had been assured by the Libyans that no American military would be present that night. Always better to do one’s own intelligence work.”

  “If I wanted to hire an assassin, a mercenary, a soldier of fortune, they’d be lining up out the door all the way to Paris, you know,” Dyson said. “Guns for hire are cheap and plentiful. You fellows, on the other hand—rare as hen’s teeth. You must have been quite in demand.”

  “I was, yes.”

  “Says your native language is Afrikaans. But you usually speak with a British accent.”

  “A reasonable facsimile,” Baumann replied.

  “But persuasive. How the hell old were you when you did Carrero Blanco?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Luis Carrero Blanco.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t recognize the name.”

  “The hell you talking about? Luis Carrero Blanco, the president of Spain under Franco. Blown up in 1972. The Basques claimed credit, but they’d really hired some mysterious outsider. A professional assassin who got a quarter of a million dollars American for pulling it off. That wasn’t you?”

  Baumann shrugged. “I wish it had been.”

  The old man furrowed his brow and shifted in his wheelchair. He looked puzzlingly at Lomax, then back at Baumann. “If you’re trying to conceal something from me, I’d advise you to—”

  “Now I’ve got a few questions for you,” Baumann interrupted, raising his voice ever so slightly.

  Annoyance flashed in Dyson’s gray eyes. He scowled.

  “How many people were involved in the operation to extract me from Pollsmoor?”

  “That’s my business,” Dyson replied curtly.

  “I’m afraid not. It directly concerns me and my welfare from now on.”

  Dyson paused for a moment and then relented. He turned to Lomax, who said: “Two.”

  “In all? Including the phony priest and the chap in the prison commandant’s office?”

  “Just those two,” Lomax repeated with irritation. He inclined his head toward his boss for an instant, saw Dyson nod, and said quietly: “They’re both dead.”

  “Excellent,” Baumann said. “All loose ends tied?”

  “Professionally,” Lomax said.

  “Let’s just hope,” Baumann said, “that whoever did the wet work was more professional than whoever’s in charge of security here at whatever this is called … Arcadia.”

  Lomax compressed his lips into a thin line. His eyes flashed with anger, his face reddened.

  “Look, goddammit,” Dyson said, his voice choked with fury. “You should be eternally grateful—you should damn well kiss the ground I wheel on for what I did to break you out of that hellhole.”

  At this, Baumann rose slowly to his feet. He smiled wanly and turned to leave. “I do appreciate your assistance, Mr. Dyson,” he said, “but I didn’t ask for it. If I’m not satisfied that you have taken the necessary basic precautions to ensure that I am not traced, then I must refuse to have anything more to do with you.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Dyson called out.

  “Mr. Dyson, you’ve presumably brought me here because of my proficiency at the type of work you want me to do on your behalf. I suggest that we respect each other’s areas of expertise. Now, please tell me how the arrangements were made.”

  Dyson told him about how his people contacted certain officials in South Africa and paid them off. Baumann nodded. “All right. I’ll listen to what you propose. But I should warn you that I may well not accept. It all depends on the nature of the job you want done, and the amount of payment you’re prepared to offer.”

  Dyson backed up his chair by pushing at the writing table, rattling the inkwell and the Meissen urn. “Do you seriously think you have much choice?” he said. “You’re a goddam international fugitive now. And I know your whereabouts!”

  “Yes, you do,” Baumann agreed equably, looking around the room. “And the same could be said of you.”

  Dyson stared furiously at Baumann. Lomax visibly stiffened and slowly lowered a hand toward the concealed pistol Baumann had observed in the garden.

  Baumann went on as if he hadn’t seen this: “And I’m certainly familiar enough now with the security here, the weakness and the permeability. Anytime I wish, I can pay you a return visit. Or come to call at your corporate offices in Geneva or Zug. You obviously know some of the particulars of my background, so I’m sure you don’t for a moment doubt my ability to hunt you down.”

  Dyson put a restraining arm on Lomax. “All right,” he said at length. Lomax glowered. “I’m sure we’ll be able to come to some happy agreement.” His expression eased somewhat. “We Americans call it ‘getting to yes.’”

  Baumann returned to the armchair and settled into it. He crossed his legs. “I hope so,” he said. “Six years in prison can make one long for something productive to do.”

  “You understand that what I want you to do must be done in absolute secrecy,” Dyson said. “I can’t stress that enough.”

  “I have never advertised my accompl
ishments. You don’t know even one small part of the work I’ve done.”

  Dyson fixed him with a stare. “That’s the way I like it. I must not be connected to this in any way, and I intend to take measures to ensure that.”

  Baumann shrugged. “Naturally. What is it you want done?”

  * * *

  Martin Lomax, who knew every last detail of the plan his employer had been brooding about for months, returned to the library about half an hour later. He understood that Dyson wished to close the deal in private, as Dyson always did.

  When he entered, discreet as always, the two men appeared to be finishing their conversation.

  He heard Baumann speak just one word: “Impressive.”

  Dyson gave one of his odd, cold smiles. “Then you’re interested.”

  “No,” Baumann said.

  “What, is it the money?” Lomax found himself asking, a tad too anxiously.

  “The fee would certainly be a consideration. Given the risks to my life it would entail, I’d certainly be better off back at Pollsmoor. But we will discuss finances later.”

  “What the hell are you—” Dyson began.

  “You have spelled out your conditions,” Baumann said quietly. “Now, I have mine.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Crime Lab, Kowalski,” said a man’s voice.

  “Michael Kowalski? This is Special Agent Sarah Cahill in the Boston office.”

  “Yup.” He made no attempt to hide his impatience.

  “You’re an acoustic engineer, is that right?”

  Kowalski sighed. “What’s up?”

  She leaned forward in her chair. “Listen, do you guys know how to … unerase tapes?”

  The phone line was silent for a long time. She gestured hello with her chin at Ken Alton, who was getting up from his desk and heading toward the break room.

  Finally, Kowalski spoke. “Audio, video, what?”

  “Audio.”