When a woman feels she knows you better, she will relax that grip. It is a mark of intimacy almost animalistic in nature. In your apartment, preparatory to lovemaking, she will go to the bathroom and, depending on what she needs, may leave her purse on the coffee table in front of you. Sarah had gone to use the phone on her second visit to his apartment. This told Baumann that despite her tough demeanor, she was a trusting person.
The phone was in the kitchen, out of sight of the living room: Baumann had made sure the only telephone was in the kitchen. She had talked to the babysitter for four or five minutes.
That had been enough time, really much more than enough time. There are tools for this sort of thing; the most simple-minded burglar can do it. There is a long flat plastic box, hinged lengthwise, perhaps five inches long and two inches wide and an inch thick. Inside the box is a wax softer than beeswax, a layer on the top and the bottom.
He placed Sarah’s key into the box and squeezed it tight until he had an exact impression of her key—actually, three keys. He had anticipated that he might have trouble getting the keys off the ring, so he was prepared. He used a box that was notched at one end.
Later, he used a very soft, very-low-melting-point metal that in the profession is called Rose metal. It is an alloy of lead and zinc. Its melting point is lower than that of the wax mold. He poured the metal carefully into the mold. This gave him a very weak metal key, which is good only as a template.
From a hardware store he got the right key blank. In a vise he positioned the Rose metal template atop the blank. He used a Number Four Swiss-Cut file, the lockpicker’s friend, and cut his own key.
Now he quickly turned the keys in the locks and entered the apartment.
This was his fifth time searching Sarah’s apartment. She was scrupulous and left no files lying around, no personal notebooks with notes on the investigation, no computer disks. She was making this difficult … but not impossible. He now knew where she worked—the top-secret location of Operation MINOTAUR. He knew the phone number of the task force’s headquarters. Soon he would know more. At any moment she might let down her guard, begin to talk about her work, pillow talk, worried confidences. It was possible. At the very least, his proximity to her afforded him possibilities of access he’d never have dreamed of.
Yes, there were hazards. There was an element of risk for the hunted to befriend the hunter, spend so much time with her, make love to her. But it was not a great risk, because he knew there were no photographs of him. Apart from a very generic and useless physical description—which could have described 20 percent of the males in New York City—the task force had no idea what he looked like. The South African secret service had no photographs of him on file, and the prison’s photographs had been destroyed. It was a certainty that the FBI had put together an Identi-Kit, but it would do them no good. Whatever the South Africans had feebly attempted to put together would bear no resemblance to the way he looked now, not in a million years.
They might know his true eye color, but that was easily taken care of. Changing the color of one’s eyes can be as simple as using standard, generally available colored contact lenses, but this is not a disguise for professionals. A careful observer can always tell you are wearing corneal contact lenses, which can raise nettlesome questions. Baumann had had special lenses custom-designed for him by an optometrist in Amsterdam. They were prosthetic scleral soft lenses, which cover the entire eye, not just the iris, and can be comfortably worn for twelve hours. The color tones were natural, the lenses large, with iris flecks (which standard contact lenses do not have). The most suspicious observer would not have known that his eyes were blue, not a gentle brown.
Naturally, if she became suspicious, she would have to be killed at once, just as he had killed Perry Taylor and Russell Ullman. But why in the world would she suspect she was sleeping with the enemy? She wouldn’t.
It was all a game, an exhilarating game. A dance with the devil.
As he combed the apartment, in all the likely hiding places and the not-so-likely ones, among Jared’s belongings, he could hear faint traffic noises from the street, a car alarm, a siren.
And then, at last, there was something.
A notepad. A blank notepad on her bedside table. The top sheet was blank, but it bore the imprint of a scrawl that had been made on the leaf above it. He rubbed lightly against the indentation with a soft lead pencil, and the scrawl appeared, white script against black.
Thomas Allen Moffatt.
They had one of his aliases. How in the world had they gotten it? So they likely knew he had used the stolen Thomas Moffatt passport to enter the country.
He exhaled very slowly. A near miss. He had reserved a van for tomorrow in Moffatt’s name.
Well, that would have to change.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
“A nuclear weapon,” Pappas said, “is not what I’m worried about.”
“Why not?” Sarah asked.
“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean a nuke wouldn’t be terrifying. But the physics of an A-bomb are easy; it’s the actualization that’s tough. It’s far too impractical, too difficult to construct.”
“But if our terrorist has the resources and the ability—?”
“The plain fact is, a nuke would destroy much of the city, and that’s not what the intel intercept seems to be hinting at. They’re talking about a targeted attack on a bank, not on the entire city.”
Sarah nodded. “Makes sense. We can’t rule anything out, but in some ways a giant conventional bomb is scarier, because it’s much harder to detect. Much harder.”
“Right.”
“So what are my options?” she asked.
“Obviously you can’t order a bomb sweep of the entire city. But you can order sweeps of every Manhattan Bank branch office. That’s certainly feasible. We have the personnel for that right here in the New York office.”
“NYPD Bomb Squad?”
“They only get called in when you have a bomb ticking right in front of you. Otherwise they don’t move. They’re good, but you’ve got to have a bomb.”
“And if we do have a bomb?”
“Then it’s your call,” Pappas said. “But you’re not only going to have an emergency on your hands, you’re also going to have an ugly turf battle. The NYPD Bomb Squad is one of the oldest and most experienced in the country, but they’re experienced mostly with relatively low-tech stuff, homemade bombs and the like. Then you’ll have ATF, which has the responsibility for all crimes involving explosives. They have the bomb capability, and they’re going to want to play. And then there’s the Army, which is responsible for bomb disposal over the entire continental landmass of the United States, other than in the sea or on the bases of other military services. They’re going to want in, and they’re going to argue—quite rightly—that they’re substantially better equipped than the NYPD.”
“And there’s NEST,” Sarah said.
“Right,” Pappas said. “And ever since Harvey’s Casino, they’re going to want to play too.”
NEST is an acronym for the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, the best bomb squad in the United States by far and, naturally, the most secretive. It is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, but is actually managed by a private contractor. Charged with searching for and rendering safe all suspected nuclear explosives, NEST is based in Las Vegas, Nevada (the Nevada nuclear weapons test site is ninety miles away). A portion of its equipment is also located at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and its East Coast facilities are based in Germantown, Maryland.
The incident involving Harvey’s Casino in State Line, Nevada, near Lake Tahoe, will not soon be forgotten by those in NEST. In 1981, a man who owed the casino a gambling debt of a quarter of a million dollars decided to liquidate his debt in the best way he could think of. He placed a complex, though not sophisticated, bomb in the casino, consisting of a thousand pounds of dynamite, and made an extortion demand: forgive the debt, or the place would blow up. E
ither way, he figured, he couldn’t lose.
The bomb, which had six different fusing systems, sat there ticking for three days while everyone argued about whose responsibility it was. No one was avoiding responsibility; on the contrary, quite a few different parties wanted to take charge of defusing the bomb.
There was the city—which really meant two guys from the fire department who’d gone through a rudimentary three-week training program at hazardous devices school. They had the backing of the politicos. Then there was the Army, which announced that it had the legal responsibility for the bomb. NEST showed up, did a careful study, and declared, this is one complex bomb; why don’t you let us handle it? But the city told both NEST and the Army to take off; its two firemen would take care of the bomb.
Both NEST and the Army were faced with a dilemma: if the city handled the bomb and anything went wrong, they’d both be held responsible, legally and morally. So they came to a decision. Throw us out of town, they declared—in writing. Otherwise, we’ll move in and attempt to render it safe.
The city did as they asked and told the Army and NEST to leave town by sunset.
The explosion that resulted caused some twelve million dollars’ worth of damage and left a huge gaping hole in Harvey’s Casino. The firemen who had insisted on rendering the bomb safe unfortunately did not have much of a grasp of elementary physics. Never again would NEST give up control to the locals without a fight.
“Okay,” Sarah said. “I’m going to hold out the possibility it’s a nuke.”
“What?” exploded Pappas. “There’s no goddam reason to believe it’s a nuke, and if you want to scare half—”
“I know, I know,” Sarah said. “But it’s the only way DOE will be willing to call in NEST, and we’re going to need the resources of the best. And when we need them, we’re going to need them fast.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Dressed in a European suit, Baumann fit right into the throngs of Wall Street businessmen swarming to work this morning. He might have been a cosmopolitan banker, an Anglophilic bond salesman.
He stood on Water Street and gazed casually across the street at the ordinary-looking office building. Hundreds of thousands of people passed by this building, people whose livelihoods depended upon Wall Street and who probably never gave the building even so much as a passing glance.
On the street level were administrative offices of a small bank called Greenwich Trust. On the upper floors were various other offices. The building’s lobby was green Wall-Street-office-building marble. There was absolutely nothing distinctive about the building.
Except for what was on the mezzanine level, behind unmarked doors accessed by a card-key system.
There, well protected and hidden from the world by the anonymity of its setting, was the Network, the nerve center of the world financial community. By now, Baumann knew quite a bit about what was behind those walls and doors. He knew there were two Unisys A-15J mainframes and optical disk pads for read-write media storage. In case of fire, Halon suppressants would instantly be released into the room. In case of power outages or surges, the machines would run on current that emanated from storage batteries fed by the city’s power grid. The batteries would sustain operations until diesel-powered generators could be switched on.
There was electrical backup and telecommunications backup, and the dual processors provided computer redundancy. There were twenty-two electronic authentication boxes made by the British firm Racal-Guardata to screen all incoming messages for code flaws before permitting them on the mainframes. By algorithmic means, checking for both number and spacing of characters, the authenticators would defeat interdiction.
The builders of the Network had done extensive risk analysis. Even in constructing the facility they had used union labor only up to a point, then brought in their own technicians to do the sensitive internal wiring. Regular maintenance was done by their own internal technicians too.
But when you came right down to it, it was early-1980s technology, really, with only the most rudimentary security precautions taken. It was nothing short of a scandal how the planet’s entire financial system could be brought down by one act of destruction visited upon this ordinary-looking office building in lower Manhattan.
After the World Trade Center bomb, there was talk about how badly damaged America’s financial structure had almost been. That was nonsense. The World Trade Center bomb had killed a handful of people and closed some businesses for a while. That was nothing compared to what was about to happen here, across the street.
A trillion dollars moved electronically through one floor of this office building each day—more than the entire money supply of the United States. Immense fortunes moved through here and around the world at the speed of lightning. What, after all, is a treasury bill these days but an item on a computer tape? The fragile structure of the planet’s finance depended upon the function of this room full of mainframes. It teetered on the confidence that this system would function.
Interrupt the flow—or worse, destroy the machinery and wipe out the backup records—and governments would shake, vast corporations would be wiped out. The global financial system would screech to a halt. Corporations around the world would run out of money, would be unable to pay for goods, would have to halt production, would be unable to write paychecks to their employees. How astonishing it was, Baumann mused, that we allowed our technology to outpace our ability to use it!
This was the genius of Malcolm Dyson’s plan of vengeance. He had targeted his revenge both selectively and broadly. A banker named Warren Elkind, the head of the second-largest bank in the country, had turned Dyson in for insider trading, and would now pay for his perfidy. A computer virus would invade the Manhattan Bank and cause all of the bank’s assets to be transferred out around the world. Not only would the Manhattan Bank be shut down, but it would be plundered of all its assets. It would be broke.
I don’t want Warren Elkind killed, Dyson had said. I want him to suffer a living death. I want his livelihood to be destroyed, the bank into which he’s poured his life to come toppling down.
Dyson knew that the failure even of such an immense bank would not seriously weaken the U.S. economy. That blow would come a day later, when the Network was brought down just before the end of the business day. Then the entire economy of the United States, which had sent agents to kill Dyson’s wife and daughter, would be dealt a paralyzing blow, from which it would not recover for years.
It was, really, a clever plan, Baumann reflected. Why had no one thought of it before?
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Saturday morning, and Sarah took Jared to the St. Luke’s–Roosevelt emergency room to have his stitches removed. By late morning they were back at home. Sarah was about to call Brea, the babysitter, and return to the MINOTAUR headquarters, when Brian called.
“You’re home,” he said, surprised. “I was wondering if you and Jared might want to take a walk around the city.”
“A walk?”
“I want to show you two my favorite place in New York.”
“Let me make a few calls,” Sarah said, “and see how much time I can spare this afternoon. But I should warn you—”
“I know, I know. The beeper.”
He met them in front of their apartment building and took them downtown on the subway at West Seventy-second and Broadway.
“Where are you from?” Jared asked Baumann on the ride downtown.
“Canada.”
“But where?”
“A town called Edmonton.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s in Alberta. It’s the capital.”
“Is that a state?”
“Well, we call it a province. It’s five times the size of New York State.”
“Edmonton,” Jared mused. His eyes suddenly widened. “That’s where the Edmonton Oilers are from!”
“Right.”
“You ever meet Wayne Gretzky?”
“Never m
et him.”
“Oh,” Jared said, disappointed.
Sarah watched the two of them sitting next to one another, noticing that Jared had started to become relaxed around Brian, that there was a chemistry there.
Baumann said, “You know, basketball was invented by a Canadian, a hundred years ago. The first basket was a bushel basket used for peaches.”
“Uh huh,” Jared said, unimpressed by Canada and its legacy. “Can you throw a pass?”
“As in American football?” Baumann asked.
“Yep.”
“No, I can’t. Sorry, I can’t play football with you. I’m a klutz. Do you like football?”
Jared hesitated. “Not really.”
“What do you like?”
“Tennis. Softball.”
“You play ball with your dad?”
“Yeah. You play ball?”
“Not so well, Jared. But I can show you buildings. Maybe you can show me how to throw a pass someday.”
As they walked to the Woolworth Building, Baumann said, more to Jared than to Sarah, “This was once the tallest building in the world.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jared objected. “What about the Empire State Building?”
“That wasn’t built yet. This building was completed in 1913. Only the Eiffel Tower was taller, but that doesn’t count.”
“Do planes ever crash into the tall buildings?”
“Once in a while,” Baumann said. “A plane once crashed into the Empire State Building. And I know that once a helicopter trying to land on the roof of the Pan Am building broke apart, killing a lot of people.”
“A helicopter! Helicopters can land on the Pan Am building?”
“No more. They used to, but since that horrible accident, helicopters can only land in officially designated heliports.”
He brought them up to the main entrance on Broadway, with its ornately carved depressed arch, and pointed out the apex of the arch, the figure of an owl.
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