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.
The sudden intrusion of a raspy male voice: “Freeze.”
Bertrand, Dyson’s senior bodyguard, drew his pistol first, and the bounty hunters swiftly returned fire.
A sudden explosion, a series of rapid pops, the flashes of orange fire, the acrid smell of cordite. A woman’s scream, which was really the terrified scream of two women. The flash of moonlight reflected in Pandora’s earrings, a cough.
Bertrand saved Dyson’s life, though not his legs, and died in the process. Both Dyson’s wife and daughter were killed instantly. Dyson, paralyzed from the waist down, squirmed over to his dying wife and child and threw his arms around them both, half protecting, half embracing.
Malcolm and Alexandra Dyson’s marriage had long cooled, but she had given birth to Pandora, and Pandora was Malcolm Dyson’s whole world, the center of his life. He loved his daughter as much as any father had ever loved a daughter. He was obsessed with his Pandora; he could not talk about her without lighting up, without a smile or a glow.
Malcolm Dyson was a paraplegic now who carried his anger around in his motorized chair. Once he had lived for fortune; now he lived for revenge. I’ll never walk again, he had once thundered at Lomax, but with Pandora gone, why in the world would I ever want to?
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Early Monday morning, Sarah arrived at headquarters, walking stiffly from the previous day’s attack. She had placed Band-Aids over the cuts on her neck and the side of her face. There was a large bruise on her right cheek that had turned blue, another one on her forearm, and a particularly nasty one under her rib cage.
“What the hell happened to you?” Pappas asked.
She recounted the incident, assured Pappas that Jared was fine.
“Eight-year-old boys,” Pappas said, “are a unique species. They’re easily frightened and just as easily soothed. Plus, their wounds somehow seem to heal almost overnight—it’s one of their chief physical properties.”
Christine Vigiani approached, waited for Pappas to finish talking. In one hand was a curling sheet of slick fax paper; in the other was a cigarette, pluming smoke.
She said: “We got a photo.”
Sarah whirled around. “Thank God. How?”
“I’ve been putting out intelligence feelers to all friendly contacts, as you asked me to do. I was sort of dubious, I’ll admit it. But then all of a sudden, Mossad finally came through.” The Mossad is world-renowned for its extensive photographic archives, some of which are stored on CD-ROM.
Sarah took the fax. “What is this?” she asked.
“An enlargement of a video image taken from a moving car in Johannesburg—a group of BOSS officers exiting a restaurant.”
“This came over the high-res fax?” Sarah asked, plainly crestfallen. “This is it?”
“It’s all they had, and since it comes from a single video frame—”
“Is this supposed to be a face? It looks more like a smudged thumbprint!” It was totally useless.
Vigiani took a drag from her cigarette, narrowed her eyes in silence.
“I’m sorry, Chris,” Sarah said. “Nice try anyway, but this isn’t going to do us any good.”
When the group had assembled for the morning meeting, Sarah announced: “A few hundred copies of a South African computer Identi-Kit drawing of our good Prince are available up front, along with a spec sheet. Flash them around, or leave a copy if you think there’s a chance he might come into an establishment. We’ve got to check as many hotels as we can, which means we’ll have to call in some reinforcements from the PD and the Bureau. Remember, we’re looking for a fugitive implicated in a murder. That’s the public line.”
“That’s what he is,” mumbled one of the cops.
“Do you know how many hotels there are in the city?” asked another one of the cops, a tall, thin, sandy-haired fellow named Ranahan.
“No,” said Roth, holding a commuter’s mug of coffee. He turned around to stare directly at him. “Exactly how many hotels are there in the city? I’d be interested to learn the number.”
Ranahan coughed nervously. “How the hell do I know? A shitload.”
Roth nodded meaningfully. “‘A shitload.’ I see. Is that privileged information, or can I leak that to the press?”
“Baumann is known to travel first-class,” Sarah interrupted, “and to prefer first-class accommodations, so we should make sure to check all the top hotels, but also the bottom rung, the flophouses and boardinghouses. Those are the best places to ensure anonymity, better than the middle-level ones.”
“I’ll do the Plaza and the Carlyle,” Ranahan volunteered. “George, there’s a bunch of crack hotels in Harlem got your name on them.”
“Keep the search to Manhattan proper,” Sarah instructed. “White male, forties. Blue eyes, black hair, medium build, no known identifying marks. Bearded, but may be clean-shaven or have a mustache. Probably has a South African accent.”
“What the hell does that sound like?” asked Special Agent Walter Latimer from the New York office.
“No one knows what a South African accent sounds like,” said Ullman. “They might think it’s an English accent, or Australian or Dutch or even German.”
“Right,” Sarah said. “Now, let’s bear in mind that he can’t exist in a vacuum, in isolation. What does he have to do in order to live in the city and make his preparations?”
“Does he have any known accomplices?” asked Vigiani. “Any major act requires some assistants or contacts. He’s not going to just fly in, plant a bomb, and fly out. It doesn’t work that way.”
“He may want to open a bank account,” Vigiani’s police partner said. “Or rent a car or a truck or a van.”
“Like maybe from Ryder Truck Rental in Jersey City,” suggested Lieutenant Roth, a reference to the place where the Trade Center conspirators rented their van.
“He’s a stranger in a strange land,” Sarah said. “That’s why he may call upon old contacts, friends or accomplices or contacts from the South African service or from past jobs. Chris, I’d like you to stay here and work the phones and the fax, see what you can turn up from friendly intelligence services in the way of known contacts. You didn’t turn up anything on the domestic right-wing extremist groups, did you?”
Vigiani shook her head slowly.
“Didn’t think so. Ken, what about the video frame Christine got from Mossad—any luck there?”
“I’ve been trying a bunch of times to enhance the photo using some not-bad photo-enhancement software. Some our own, some commercial ‘paintbrush’ stuff, but it’s hopeless. There’s no face there. I don’t think the Mossad guys even had a lens on their camera.”
“Thanks for trying,” Sarah said. “Have you turned up any of our man’s known relatives, associates, contacts, whatever?”
“Zero,” Ken replied.
“Great,” said one of the cops mordantly. “The guy has no friends.”
“Yeah, well, if your name was the Prince of Darkness,” said Roth, “you wouldn’t exactly be popular either. ‘Hey, hon, I’ve invited the Prince of Darkness over for dinner tonight. There enough lasagna to go around?’”
Sarah smiled politely, and a few cops chuckled appreci
atively.
“One of the wizards at ID,” Ken went on, “translated his ten-prints into a couple of different formats, NCIC and AFIS, in addition to the Henry system, and secure-faxed them to the French, the Italians, the Spanish, the Germans, the Israelis, and the Brits, for starters. A couple of the antiterrorist strike forces were really helpful. The Spanish GEO, the Grupo Especial de Operaciones—Special Operations Group, their antiterrorist group. The French GIGN, the Groupement d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, France’s crack antiterrorist unit. And the German GSG-9. They’re all operational, but they all have direct lines to intelligence.”
“And?” Sarah prompted.
“And we scored a couple interesting hits.”
Several heads turned in his direction.
“In 1985 and ’86 there was a string of fifteen bombings in Paris. Thirteen people were killed, more than two hundred wounded.”
“Iranian, wasn’t it?” Pappas said.
“I don’t know—terrorism isn’t my forte. But I do know that a Tunisian-born Frenchman was arrested and put on trial as the mastermind behind the campaign. He wanted to keep France from sending arms to Iraq during its war with Iran. Well, a big juicy latent thumbprint was found, clear as day, on a piece of duct tape used on one of the packages. The print was never ID’d—it didn’t come from the Tunisian guy.”
“Baumann,” one of the cops said.
“The way it looks,” Ken said. “Our guy gets around, or at least he’s not discriminating about who he works for. And the Spaniards, the GEO, had a fairly good partial from his index finger, taken from the fuel line of a car back in 1973. Apparently our man was wearing latex surgical gloves, but when the latex in the glove is stretched tightly enough, the print comes through.”
“What was the incident?” Pappas asked sharply.
“The assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco, the prime minister of Spain.”
“Jesus, that was the Basques,” Pappas said. “The Basque separatist movement ETA. You know, there was a rumor that they brought in an outsider. Baumann … is that possible?”
The Zero Hour Page 24