The Zero Hour Read online

  With a loud metallic clatter, the blue-painted steel doors, which led to the vehicle trap and the courtyard outside, began to lift. The car’s ignition was switched on; the engine was revved exactly three times—signifying that all was according to plan—and the car began to move forward.

  There, a minute or two went by, during which time the guards in the vehicle trap carefully inspected the car to make sure no prisoner was hiding in it. Baumann was thoroughly familiar with how they inspected vehicles, and he knew he would not be caught. The trunk was opened. Baumann could see a tiny sliver of light appear suddenly at a gap where the panel met the trunk’s floor.

  He inhaled slowly, noiselessly. His heart hammered; his body tensed. Then the trunk was slammed and the car moved forward.

  Out of the vehicle trap. Into the courtyard.

  Baumann could taste the exhaust fumes and hoped he would not have to remain here much longer. A moment later, the car again came to a halt. He knew they had arrived at the prison gates, where another cursory inspection would be done. Then the car moved on again, soon accelerating as it merged with the main road to Cape Town.

  Clever though he was, Baumann knew he could not have orchestrated his escape without the help of the powerful man in Switzerland who for some reason had taken a keen interest in his liberty.

  The car’s driver, a young man named van Loon, was an accountant in the office of the prison commandant as well as a friend of the chaplain’s. The young accountant had volunteered to pick up the chaplain, who was arriving on a Trek Airways flight from Johannesburg to D. F. Malan Airport in Cape Town, in the chaplain’s own newly repaired car.

  By prior arrangement with Baumann, however, van Loon would find it necessary to make a brief stop at a petrol station along the way for refueling and a cup of coffee. There, in a secluded rest stop out of sight of passersby, Baumann would get out.

  The plan had worked perfectly.

  He was free, but his elation was dampened somewhat by the unpleasantness with the warder in the auto shop. It was unfortunate he had had to kill the simple fellow.

  He had rather liked Keevy.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Several hours earlier, at eight o’clock on a rainy evening in Boston, a young blond woman strode brusquely across the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel and toward the bank of elevators.

  The set of her pretty face was all business, her eyebrows arched, her lips slightly pursed. She wore the uniform of an affluent businesswoman: a navy-blue double-breasted Adrienne Vittadini suit with padded shoulders, an Hermès scarf, an off-white silk blouse, a simple strand of pearls and matching mabe pearl earrings, black Ferragamo pumps, and, under one arm, a slim cordovan Gucci portfolio. In the other hand—somewhat incongruously—she grasped a large black leather bag.

  To the casual observer, the woman might have been a high-powered attorney or an executive returning from a dinner with clients. But a more thorough inspection would have revealed tiny details that punctured the illusion. Perhaps it was her too obviously dyed, shoulder-length ash-blond hair. Perhaps her restless blue eyes, which betrayed a discomfort with the hotel’s modern glass-and-marble opulence.

  Whatever it was that didn’t fit, the concierge glanced up at her, back down to the petty-cash-disbursement sheet before him, then back again to the beautiful blond woman for the briefest instant. Then he inclined his head slightly to one side and caught the eye of one of the hotel’s security people, a woman who sat in a large comfortable armchair feigning to read The Boston Globe.

  Security arched her eyebrows a fraction to signal that she, too, was suspicious—or at least amused—then smiled and gave the tiniest shrug, invisible to anyone but the concierge, which said, Let her go, we can’t be entirely sure.

  The Four Seasons did all it could to discourage call girls, but in uncertain cases such as this, it was far better to err on the permissive side rather than risk offending a legitimate hotel guest.

  The blond woman entered a waiting elevator and got out on the seventh floor. When she reached room 722, she let herself in with a key.

  * * *

  About twenty minutes later, a well-dressed man in his mid-fifties unlocked the same door. Although he was not an especially handsome man—he had a high, speckled forehead, beaky nose, large pouches under his eyes, fleshy jowls—there was about him the patina of prosperity.

  His face and hands were deeply tanned, as if he often sailed the waters off St. Bart’s, which he did. His hair was silver and neatly combed. His navy blazer was well tailored and expensive, his tie from Ermenegildo Zegna, his tasseled loafers polished to a high sheen.

  Entering the room tentatively, he glanced around, but the only evidence of the woman was the clothes hanging neatly in the closet. The bathroom door was closed. He tingled with enormous anticipation.

  In the exact center of the king-size bed an envelope had been placed. He reached across the bed and retrieved it. On its front was his name in large, loopy script. The note inside contained a simple set of instructions, which he read and immediately began to follow.

  With trembling, clumsy fingers, he placed his briefcase on a desk and started undressing, dropping his jacket and then his pants in crumpled heaps on the gray carpet beside the bed. Fumblingly, he unbuttoned his shirt and then slipped off his monogrammed silk boxer shorts. He stumbled twice trying to remove his socks. Momentarily alarmed, he looked up to make sure the drapes were drawn. They were. She had, of course, taken care of every detail.

  As he knelt in the corner of the room, naked, he felt his half-swollen member throb fully, almost painfully, to life, arching away from his body, proud and distended and flushed.

  He heard the bathroom door open.

  When the woman emerged, he did not turn to look: he had been ordered not to do so. In her black patent-leather boots with heels, the blond woman was just under six feet tall. Her body was covered entirely in a skin-tight black cat suit of four-way-stretch PVC, a wet-looking material made of a plastic substance bonded to Lycra. Her black gloves went to her elbows; the mask over her eyes was of thin black leather.

  Silently, with fluid movements, she approached him from behind and placed a blindfold on him, the soft sheepskin against his eyes, the supple leather on the outside, its closure made of elastic. It looked like an oversize pair of goggles.

  As she fastened the blindfold, she touched him gently, caressed him, wordlessly reassured. She placed a gloved hand under each arm, lifted him to his feet, and guided him over to the bed, where he knelt again, his engorged phallus compressed tightly between his abdomen and the side of the bed.

  Next, she placed handcuffs on his wrists and clicked them shut. For the first time, she spoke. “It’s time for your hood,” she said in a husky contralto.

  He inhaled deeply and quaveringly. His shoulders hunched with anticipation. He could sense her towering over him, could smell her leather gloves and boots.

  She removed his blindfold, and now he was able to look at her. “Yes, mistress,” he said in a soft, childlike whisper.

  The hood was made of leather, too, form-fitting and lined with rubber. It had no holes for eyes or mouth, only nose holes for breathing. His eyes widened in fear as he took in the severity of this piece of apparatus. She slipped it over his head, heavy and cold and stifling, and he trembled with mixed terror and excitement.

  She pulled the hood’s collar tight, adjusted it, pulled the zipper down at the back, and fastened the zipper’s tag end to the collar with a loud click.

  The man was now overwhelmed with delicious fear. An icy, sickening terror lodged itself in the pit of his stomach. He wanted to vomit, but was afraid to do so, for it would suffocate him.

  He felt his breath catch somewhere deep in his throat, just above the lungs. He gulped, gasped for air, forgetting for an instant that in this hood the only way he could breathe was through his nose, and he panicked.

  He whimpered, trying to scream, but unable to.

  “You’ve been bad,” he heard
her admonish him. “I like looking at you, but you’ve been a bad boy.”

  Control your breathing! he told himself. Regular, rhythmic! Through the nose—breathe! But the panic was too powerful; it overwhelmed his feeble efforts to take control of his body. He gulped for air, but his mouth tasted only the rubber, now warm and damp. Rivulets of perspiration ran down his face in the darkness, and trickled, hot and salty, into his gasping mouth. Even when he somehow managed to compel himself to breathe through his nose, snorting in stingy, leather-smelling nosefuls of air, he knew he remained on the very precipice of losing control entirely.

  Yet at the same time—such a peculiar, wonderful blend of the deepest terror and the most extraordinary tingling arousal!—he could feel his penis throb with excitement, as if it were about to explode.

  And then—and then!—he felt the sting of her leather riding crop on the backs of his thighs, teasing and painful. And—my God!—even a sting on the head of his very penis!

  “I’m going to keep you on my leash,” he heard from very far away. “You certainly haven’t behaved properly, not at all.”

  He whimpered again, then moaned, and he realized he was gyrating his pelvis to some imagined rhythm, waving his butt at her, a coy offering.

  “I’m going to flog the skin from your back,” she said, and he knew she meant what she was saying, and he could barely contain himself.

  The woman could see that he was on the verge of climax. And she hadn’t even yet applied the device that was sold in medical supply houses as the Wartenberg Neurological Stimulator. From her black bag she withdrew a medical instrument that resembled a pinwheel at the end of a scalpel handle. Radiating out from the small-diameter pinwheel were dozens of sharp pins. She ran the instrument lightly across his legs and up to his chest.

  His moans now came in waves, plaintively; he sounded to her very much like a woman nearing orgasm.

  With her left hand she lightly grasped his testicles and caressed them; with the other hand, she ran the pinwheel over the backs of his legs, the backs of his knees. She moved her left hand up to the shaft of his penis and began slowly to pump, knowing it would not take much time at all. He was already throbbing, rocking back and forth, moaning. Now she ran the pinwheel up the crack of his ass, up the center of his spine, all the while masturbating him vigorously, and even before the pinwheel reached the sensitive skin at the back of the neck, he started to come, spasming and bucking, moaning, moaning.

  “Now,” she said, as he collapsed onto the bed, “I’m going to your wallet to take what I deserve.” So blissed out was he that he didn’t even hear what she said, but it made no difference; he had utterly ceded control.

  The blond woman got to her feet and briskly walked over to the desk where he had left his briefcase. She popped it open—he hadn’t locked it, rarely did—removed the glinting gold disk, and dropped it into her black leather toy bag, where it disappeared among the whips and crops and restraints.

  She looked over at the bed and saw that he had not moved: he was still slumped over the side of the bed, still breathing hard and deep, the sweat pouring off his chest and his back in glistening streams, darkening the pale-green bedspread beneath him. The dark, damp border around him reminded the woman of the snow angels she and her sisters used to make years ago by lying prone in the new-fallen New Hampshire snow and waving their hands and feet. Then another, very different association: the even, wet border around the man also looked a little like the crude white paint tracings you sometimes see around dead bodies at crime scenes.

  Quickly, she bent over and retrieved his wallet from the seat pocket of his pants, withdrew four fifty-dollar bills, and slipped them into her portfolio.

  She returned to her spent client and caressed him. A submissive must always be brought back to earth slowly and gently. “Turn around and kneel in front of me,” she ordered with quiet authority. He did so, and she unlocked his handcuffs. Then she unzipped the leather hood, tugging at it with great effort until it began to slide off.

  His silver hair stood up in crazed, sweaty clumps, and his face was deep crimson. He blinked slowly, his pupils adjusting to the light, his eyes coming slowly into focus.

  She patted his hair flat. “What a good boy you’ve been,” she said. “Have you had a good time?”

  His only reply was a faint, weak smile.

  “Now I’ve got to run. Call me next time you’re in town.” She ran her fingers lovingly across his cheek, over his lips. “What a good boy you’ve been.”

  * * *

  Down the block from the Four Seasons, a gleaming black van was parked. The blond woman tapped on the mirrored, opaque passenger’s side window, which was then lowered a few inches.

  She removed the golden disk from her leather bag and placed it in the outstretched palm.

  She hadn’t even seen anyone’s face.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The flashing turret lights atop the cruisers pulsed blue and white along most of the block of Marlborough Street. Five patrol cars were double-parked on the narrow street, roiling the rush-hour traffic all the way to Massachusetts Avenue and infuriating the already short-tempered Boston drivers.

  A dozen or so residents of this normally staid Back Bay neighborhood (although “neighborhood” wasn’t an accurate description of these connected rows of nineteenth-century town houses whose inhabitants did everything they could to avoid one another) leaned out of their bay windows and gawked like children at a schoolyard fistfight. Very un–Back Bay.

  But the presence of all these police cruisers, unusual in this proper stretch of Marlborough Street, promised that something fairly exciting might actually be going on here. Sarah Cahill double-parked her aged Honda Civic and walked toward the building, in front of which stood a beefy young uniformed patrolman holding a clipboard. She was wearing jeans, running shoes, and a Wesleyan sweatshirt—hardly professional attire, but after all, she had been in the middle of making dinner for herself and her eight-year-old son, Jared. Spaghetti sauce: her hands reeked of garlic, which was too bad, because she’d be shaking a lot of hands. Well, she thought, screw ’em if they don’t like garlic.

  The responding officer, the guy with the clipboard, couldn’t have been out of his twenties. He was crew-cut and pudgy and awkward and was joking with another cop, who was laughing uproariously and had traces of doughnut sugar on his face.

  Sobering momentarily, the crew-cut officer said, “You live here, ma’am?”

  “I’m Sarah Cahill,” she replied impatiently. “Special Agent Cahill, FBI.” She flashed her badge.

  The patrolman hesitated. “Sorry, ma’am. You’re not on my admit list here.”

  “Check with Officer Cronin,” she said.

  “Oh, you’re—” He gave a crooked smile, and his eyes seemed to light up. He looked her up and down with unconcealed interest. “Right. He did mention you’d be here.”

  She signed her name and returned the clipboard to him. She smiled back and pushed ahead through the front door, her smile disappearing at once. From behind she could hear a whispered comment, then loud laughter. The crew-cut cop remarked loudly in his foghorn voice: “I always thought Cronin was an asshole.” More laughter.

  Sarah got into the elevator and punched the button for the third floor, overcome by irritation. What the hell was that supposed to mean—a jibe at Peter Cronin for having had the bad taste to marry an FBI agent? Or for having had the bad taste to divorce her? Which hindbrain instincts were these two chuckleheads responding to, raunchy sexuality or hatred of the feds?

  She shook her head. The elevator, a musty, old-fashioned Otis with an accordion gate inside that shut automatically, provoked a moment of claustrophobia. The grimy mirror inside reflected her image duskily. She quickly took out her new M.A.C. coral lipstick (a shade called Inca) and reapplied it, then, with her fingers, combed her glossy auburn hair.

  She was thirty-six, with a sharp nose, wavy shoulder-length hair, and large, luminescent, cocoa-brown eyes, her best
feature. She was not, however, looking her best at this moment. She looked a wreck, in fact; she wished she’d taken the time to change into a suit, or any outfit, for that matter, that would garner some respect from the hostile audience she was about to face. The Bureau, finicky about the way its agents dressed, would not look kindly on her attire. Well, screw the Bureau too.

  The elevator door opened, and she took a deep breath.

  The door to 3C was open. In front of it stood a uniformed officer she didn’t know. She identified herself and was admitted to the apartment, which was crawling with homicide detectives, photographers, patrolmen, medical examiners, an assistant district attorney, and all the other usual guests at a murder scene. Crime scenes are supposed to be orderly and methodical, but, for all the police department’s lists and rules and procedures, they’re inevitably chaotic and frenzied.

  Sarah elbowed her way through the jostling crowd (someone was smoking, though that was strictly verboten) and was halted by someone she didn’t recognize, a homicide detective from the look of him. He stood before her, blocking her entry, an immense monolith. Fifties, a hard drinker, balding; tall, muscular, spiteful.

  “Hey!” he boomed. “Who the hell are you?” Before she could reply, the detective went on: “Anyone who’s not on the list I’m going to issue a fucking summons, you understand? Plus, I’m going to start asking you all for reports.”

  She sighed, contained her exasperation. She produced her leather-encased FBI badge, and was about to speak when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  “Sarah.”

  Peter Cronin, her ex-husband, told the other detective: “Sarah Cahill, from the FBI’s Boston office. Sarah, this is my new boss, Captain Francis Herlihy. Frank, you okayed this, remember?”

  “Right,” Herlihy conceded sullenly. He looked at her for a moment as if she’d said something rude, then pivoted toward a gaggle of non-uniformed men. “Corrigan! Welch! I need some evidence bags. I want that Hennessey’s bottle and the drinking glasses in the sink.”