“Uniforms, but supposed to be some of New York’s finest, whatever that means. They’re already there, watching. What do you think about this Libyan timer?”
“Ed Wilson sold a bunch of timers to the Libyans, but who knows where they all ended up. By now, those timers have gone through a bunch of hands.”
She nodded. “Arab hands.”
“Odds are, yes.”
“But I don’t believe the Libyans are behind this thing.”
“Why not?”
“The Libyans and the Iranians have a whole catalog of suicide bombers who can’t wait to die for the greater glory of Allah. They don’t need to hire him.”
“He’s the best.”
“They don’t need the best.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know what Baumann is up to.”
“That’s not my point. You hire the best to make sure you don’t get caught, that the incident isn’t traced back to you. The Libyans usually don’t care if it is or not. If it is traced back to them, it makes them more formidable. They like that.”
Pappas was silent, waiting for her to continue, and when she didn’t, he said: “You might have a point.”
* * *
At the same time, a DHL delivery truck was pulling up to Mail Boxes Etc. at 2840 Broadway, between 110th and 111th streets, next door to Columbia Bagels and not far from Columbia University. It was a legitimate DHL truck, making the first overnight deliveries of the day. Double-parked in front of the Mail Boxes store, the driver took out three express packages.
Two new employees were working the counter that morning at Mail Boxes Etc. One was a dark-haired man in his twenties, busy shelving boxes. The other, a pretty young blond woman, appeared to be a trainee working with a more experienced, though younger, woman. The blonde’s hair was long and full, and it nicely concealed the tiny earphone she was wearing.
On Broadway, in front of the storefront, idled a yellow taxi, its roof light indicating it was out of service. The driver, a pudgy and balding man in a cheap-looking leather jacket and a frayed denim shirt, was examining the Daily Racing Form. Since he was far from the precinct in which he had once worked, he doubted any passerby would recognize him as Lieutenant George Roth of the New York Police Department.
The yellow cab—a real New York City cab that had been seized by the FBI in a drug raid—was the mobile command post. From there, Roth could communicate by radio with the two policemen inside who had been detailed to the working group on temporary assignment.
The eight members of the surveillance team had been fully briefed and outfitted with appropriate disguises and communications equipment. Wireless microphones were worn inside shirts or sweaters; earphones were concealed under wigs, baseball caps, or hats.
On the bustling stretch of Broadway in front of the storefront, an FBI agent in a spandex jogging suit was trying to change the right rear tire on his silver Corvette, another seized vehicle. A young Hispanic-looking man sat behind the wheel of a parked pizza delivery van. A hobbled old homeless woman pushed a grocery cart full of aluminum cans.
Another agent kept a lookout from the third-floor window of the office building across the street. Another, in a Con Ed uniform and hard hat, seemed to be inspecting a faulty electrical meter in an alley about thirty feet from the Mail Boxes storefront.
In the movies and on television, a telephone call can be traced in a matter of seconds. The reality, unfortunately, is far less impressive. A trap-and-trace, as it’s called, can take five, ten, even fifteen minutes or longer, and quite often several separate attempts.
It is true that a service known as Caller ID is available in many areas of the United States, which allows you to learn the number of an incoming call even before the phone rings. But this service works only in telephone exchanges that use the fully computerized technology called SS7, for System Signaling Group 7.
And many telephone exchanges remain antiquated, particularly in larger cities. NYNEX, the company that services Manhattan as well as much of New York State and New England, has been one of the slowest Baby Bells to update its technology.
Another problem with Caller ID is that it doesn’t work on trunking systems, PBX systems, which are used in office buildings. Also, any subscriber can have the Automatic Number Identification (ANI) signal blocked, rendering Caller ID useless.
So the only reliable way to trace a number remains the old-fashioned trap-and-trace method, which can only be done by the telephone company, in its offices. The manager of Mail Boxes Etc., and his district manager, happily complied with the FBI’s request to ask NYNEX to order a trap-and-trace for this particular store.
All that remained now was for Henrik Baumann—if indeed he was the recipient—to place a call and ask whether an express package had been received for a Mr. James Oakley. Even if Baumann called from a public pay phone, they might be fortunate enough to discover his location in time.
At 11:14 A.M., the call came.
The pretty young blond policewoman answered the phone and said perkily, “Your name, please?”
She signaled with her index finger. “Let me check, Mr. Oakley.” She punched the hold button.
Her partner was already on another line to NYNEX telephone security, activating the trap-and-trace. As he held the handset to his ear, he said to the woman, “Keep him holding as long as you think you can.”
“Right,” she said. “But he said he was in a hurry, so I don’t know how long he’ll hold.”
“Sure, he’s in a hurry,” the man said. “He’s no idiot.” Into the phone he said, “All right, good. Yeah, we will.”
Ten seconds went by, then twenty.
“I’m going to have to pick up again and say something,” the blond woman said, “or he’ll get suspicious and we’ll lose him.”
“We got Manhattan,” her partner announced. “Midtown. Let’s go, man, let’s go. Speed this thing up.”
“Matt—”
“Yeah, yeah. Pick it up, tell him—think of something, for God’s sake. Give us more time!”
She punched the hold button again to release it. “Mr. Oakley, we do have something here for you, and I’m trying to locate it. Was that an envelope or a box? It makes a difference, because we store them in different … Oh, shit. He hung up.” She put down the handset. “We lost him.”
* * *
Baumann, standing at a midtown pay phone, hung up the phone and quickly walked away. For reasons of safety, he did not like to stay on the phone for longer than twenty seconds. He did not know whether telephone-tracing technology had changed at all since he’d been in prison, but he did not want to find out. He knew that his package had arrived, which was the main thing. Even if they traced the call, by the time they got to this pay phone, he’d be long gone.
Perhaps he was being overly cautious. After all, it was highly unlikely that any law-enforcement authorities would have found out about this mail drop. But such instincts had kept him alive throughout a hazardous career.
It was out of this same overcautiousness that he donned a disguise—a long, shaggy brown wig, a natural-looking beard, a prosthetic paunch, a loose baggy white sweatshirt—and took a cab uptown to the Mail Boxes Etc. site, outside of which he did some preliminary surveillance. He found no reason to be suspicious, though if they were good, they would hardly be obvious.
He entered the small facility. The only other person there was a young man standing at the counter, listening to music on Walkman headphones and filling out some kind of long form, which looked like an application for employment.
“Can I help you?” the young woman behind the counter asked.
“Not yet, thanks,” Baumann answered, absorbed in a display of folding mailing cartons of various sizes. Then he turned back casually to the clerk and asked: “So where’s Donna?”
“Donna?” the woman echoed dubiously.
“The woman who normally works the day shift here,” Baumann said. He had come here twice before, each time in very different
disguises, and had learned that a woman named Donna always worked days. “You know. Blond. Long hair.”
“Oh, her. Sorry, I’m new. She’s off for the day—went to the beach, I think. Why, you a friend?”
Baumann’s instincts told him to leave at once. Both people behind the counter, he now realized, were new. He didn’t like this at all. He also did not like the fact that the job applicant was wearing a Walkman. It made him suspicious. Headphones could be used to communicate with a command post. Then again, they could be entirely innocent. But his instincts told him not to take any chances.
“Yeah,” he said. “Tell Donna that Billy said hi.” He glanced at his watch as if late for an appointment, and walked out the door.
Halfway down the block he noticed that the young man wearing the Walkman had left a few seconds after he had and was heading in his direction.
He didn’t like this either.
* * *
A few paces behind, Russell Ullman, who had been standing at the counter pretending to fill out a form for over an hour, spoke into his transmitter: “I don’t know if this is our guy or not, but I’m going to follow him awhile, make sure.”
“Got it,” the voice in his headphones said. “Come on back soon as you’re sure it’s not our man.”
“Okay,” Ullman said.
* * *
Baumann suddenly darted across the street in the middle of the block, weaving between the moving cars, and walked along the other side of the block. As he rounded the next corner, he saw in the reflection in a plate-glass window that the young man was still behind him.
He was being followed.
Why? The only explanation was that somehow the fusing mechanism had been intercepted on its way from Belgium. True, there were many points at which it could have been intercepted, but …
Had Charreyron, the Belgian explosives expert, talked?
Unlikely, Baumann decided. If he had, he probably would have given up each of the addresses to which Baumann had requested the fusing mechanisms be sent. And since Baumann had already received one of them without incident, that seemed to rule out Charreyron as a leak.
No; the DHL package simply must have been intercepted. Such things happened, which was why he had had duplicate fusing mechanisms sent. In the real world, things went wrong; one made fall-back plans.
As he plunged into a crowd of tourists emerging from a bus, hoping thereby to lose the tail, he caught another glimpse of the follower in a mirrored storefront. The man appeared to be alone. Why, Baumann wondered, were there no others?
* * *
In his headphones, Ullman heard: “It’s probably just some hinky guy. Lot of weirdos use private mail-box services to get sicko videos and child pornography, or whatever. You get his face? We didn’t.”
“No,” Ullman said, “but I will.” A woman passing by saw him talking to himself and veered away with alarm.
* * *
Baumann attempted several classic maneuvers to lose the tail, but the follower was too good. Obviously he was professionally trained, and talented as well. He didn’t recognize the young man’s face, but that meant nothing. Although he’d conducted some surveillance of the Operation MINOTAUR headquarters building, he’d not been able to identify any of the task force members. Also, Sarah never emerged from the building talking with anyone.
Baumann passed a small, dingy Chinese restaurant, stopped short, and entered its dimly lit interior. It took a few seconds before his eyes became accustomed to the dark. He sat down at one of the Formica tables. He was the only one in the restaurant. In effect, he was daring the tail to follow him in and reveal himself.
* * *
Ullman saw the fat man in the white sweatshirt turn abruptly into the Chinese restaurant. In front of the restaurant, he hesitated. It was obvious the man was trying to lose him.
Well, there was no choice.
He opened the restaurant door and stepped into the dark air-conditioned interior. He looked around. It was empty. In the rear of the restaurant, a Chinese man sat behind a counter punching numbers into a calculator. Ullman spoke into his transmitter, giving his location. Then he approached the Chinese man and said, “You see someone come in here?”
The man gazed warily at Ullman, then pointed toward the rear of the restaurant. Ullman saw a rest room, raced to it, flung open the door, and stepped in.
A sink, a toilet; no stall, no window, no place to hide. And no one here.
He quickly turned back to the corridor, looked left and right, saw the kitchen. This was the only place the sweatshirted man could have gone.
He pushed open the swinging double doors to the small kitchen, surprising a couple of elderly Chinese men doing prep work, cutting up vegetables. Without explanation, he walked in, looked around, saw no one else. Then he saw the delivery door and ran toward it, ignoring shouts of protest from the kitchen workers.
The door gave onto a narrow alley, where he was assaulted by the stench of rotten food garbage. He looked around and saw nothing. The man in the sweatshirt must have escaped through this door and run down the alley.
Shit.
He’d gotten away. Ullman stepped carefully down a slimy set of three iron stairs into the alley, past bulging black plastic trash bags.
“I think I lost him,” Ullman said into his Walkman.
“All right,” the voice replied. “We’ll send a couple of guys down where you are to see if we can nab him.”
Ullman glanced around, then moved quietly over toward the blue metal Dumpster, which overflowed with more disgusting food garbage, and as he glanced behind it, he felt something grab his throat. He lost his footing as he was yanked behind the Dumpster. He felt something squeeze his trachea with an excruciatingly painful force. He reached for his pistol, but before he could do so, something slammed into his right eye.
Everything went red. He doubled over in pain and gasped. For a moment he could not speak. He wondered whether his eye had burst. Somehow he realized that the object that had just smashed into his eyeball was the barrel of a handgun. With his one good eye he found himself looking into a man’s ice-blue eyes.
“Who are you?” the man whispered.
“FBI,” Ullman croaked. “Baumann—”
“Man, you got the wrong guy,” Baumann said as he crushed the young blond man’s trachea with one hand, killing him instantly.
The FBI man had been agile and strong, but also clearly inexperienced. And he had seen Baumann’s face—disguised, yes, but that was still too great a risk. Baumann removed the dead man’s wallet and found the FBI ID card, which identified him as Special Agent Russell Ullman. He pocketed the card and murmured to himself, “You got the wrong guy.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The plastic explosive Composition C-4, so beloved by terrorists, usually comes in rectangular blocks an inch high, two inches wide, and eleven inches long. Each block, wrapped in clear or green plastic, weighs one and a quarter pounds. Its color is pure white.
C-4’s compactness makes it appealing to the U.S. military, and of course to terrorists. For terrorists, one of its most useful attributes is that it doesn’t have an odor: it is therefore quite difficult to detect. It is not, however, impossible to detect.
What is unknown outside exclusive intelligence and law-enforcement circles is that certain types of C-4 are much more readily detectable than others. For obvious reasons, counterterrorists prefer that terrorists and potential terrorists know as little as possible about these various types of C-4.
Having served in South African intelligence, however, Baumann knew quite a lot about explosives. He knew that the active ingredient in C-4 is the compound cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, which is entirely odorless. In fact, it is the impurities in most plastic explosives that are sniffed out by trained dogs or mechanical sensors.
He knew, too, the well-concealed fact that all C-4 in America is made in one of seven manufacturing plants. Six of the manufacturers use either nitroglycerine or the compound EGDN
in the manufacture of dynamite, which contaminates the C-4 made at the same time. This contaminant makes most C-4 detectable.
Only one company in America makes a pure, “uncontaminated” C-4. Baumann knew which one it was.
He also had a reasonably good plan to get some.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
As a technology procurement specialist in the Network Administration Department of the Manhattan Bank, Rick DeVore handled a lot of telephone solicitations. That was his job; he did it without complaining and was always friendly but firm. The truth was, in the computer business, a lot of selling took place over the phone, so you couldn’t refuse to take calls. But if you stayed on the phone too long, you’d never get anything done. So Rick DeVore was quick to screen out the jokers, those selling junk, stuff he had no interest in.
The vendor on the phone this morning, however, seemed to know what he was talking about.
“Hi, I’m Bob Purcell from Metrodyne Systems in Honolulu,” the voice on the phone said.
“How’re you doing?” Rick said neutrally, not encouraging, but not discouraging either. Metrodyne was one of the hottest software companies these days, located in the hottest new city for software companies, Honolulu. They wrote add-ons for Novell networks.
“Good, thanks. Listen, I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I was calling to let you know about the availability of a new security NLM that allows for run-time encryption of files regardless of format or network.”
“Uh huh,” DeVore said, doodling on his pink “While You Were Out” telephone message pad. He flashed on a mental image of himself and Deb last night and wondered if it was true that men think about sex every five minutes.
The Metrodyne vendor went on, with increasing enthusiasm: “Every time you save a file it’s automatically encrypted on your Novell network, and every time you open the file it’s decrypted. It’s really great. Just like the way a file is compressed and decompressed automatically, without the user even being aware of it. I think every Novell user should have it. I was wondering if you’d have some time for me to come by and talk to you about—”
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