The Zero Hour Read online

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Alexander Pappas had been retired from the FBI almost a year, but he was one of the least retired retired people Sarah knew. He had been her boss when she first moved to the Boston office, before Lockerbie, and had become a good friend, then mentor. There was sort of a father-daughter thing between them, yes, but Alex Pappas felt strongly about women getting ahead in the Bureau. He seemed to have made up his mind that of all the women in the Boston office, Sarah Cahill was the one who most deserved his support. The two had become close when Sarah’s marriage was breaking up and she needed someone to talk to; Pappas became an adviser, father confessor, sounding board. Sarah sometimes felt he’d saved her sanity.

  There was another kind of bond as well: both had worked major terrorism cases. In March 1977, when Pappas was assigned to the Counterterrorism Section in the Washington metropolitan field office, a religious sect calling themselves the Hanafi Muslims seized three buildings in Washington. They took 139 hostages and threatened to kill them if their demands weren’t met, chiefly vengeance against a rival sect. The FBI and the local police surrounded the buildings but had little success until Pappas managed to convince the Hanafis to surrender without violence. Which was fortunate, because as Pappas later explained it to Sarah, the Justice Department had made it clear to the FBI that force was not to be used under any circumstances.

  And then, at the end of his career, he was called to New York to help investigate the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, when an explosion in the parking garage beneath one of the twin towers killed six and injured a thousand. Although he repeatedly downplayed his role in the effort whenever discussing the Trade Center matter, and rarely talked about it, Sarah knew that Pappas was far more central than he let on.

  He was content to let others grab the credit. “Look,” he once explained to Sarah, “for the younger guys this was a CTM—a Career-Threatening Moment. Make or break. What the hell did I need the credit for? I was an old man about to get out of there.” Then he added, with a wicked cackle: “Now, if this had been twenty years earlier, you’d have read my goddam name all over Newsday and the Times, believe me.”

  Pappas was a widower who lived in a small, comfortable house in Brookline, near Boston. Once a month or so, he’d invite Sarah and Jared over for a home-cooked dinner. He was an excellent cook. Jared loved dinners at Pappas’s house and was fond of the old man.

  Pappas greeted them at the door by reaching down to give Jared a hug and—his usual joke—pretending to try to lift Jared into the air. “I can’t do it!” he wheezed. “You’re too heavy!”

  “You’re not strong enough!” Jared replied delightedly. “You’re too old!”

  “Right you are, young man,” he said, giving Sarah a kiss on the cheek.

  He was a large man, large-boned and thick around the middle. He was sixty-seven and looked at least that, with a round, jowly face, rheumy brown eyes, a full head of silver hair, and oversized ears.

  The entire house smelled wonderfully of garlic and tomatoes. “Lasagna,” he announced. He asked Jared: “You ever have Greek lasagna?”

  “No,” Jared said dubiously.

  He tousled Jared’s hair. “Greek lasagna is called spanakopita. I made that for you guys once, didn’t I?”

  Jared shook his head.

  “I didn’t? What’s wrong with me? Next time. My wife, Anastasia, made the best spanakopita you ever had.”

  “I never had it,” Jared said.

  “Don’t be a wiseacre. Now, come here. I’ve got something to show you.”

  “I want to play with the Victrola in the basement,” Jared said, running ahead toward the basement steps.

  “Later. This is more interesting, I promise you,” Pappas said. “All right? All right?” He produced a small, flat package wrapped in silver paper and handed it to Jared.

  “A baseball card!” he squealed.

  “No, it’s not,” Pappas said solemnly.

  “Yes it is,” Jared replied, just as solemnly, carefully tearing the package open. “All right! Awesome!” He held the baseball card up for Sarah to see and explained, “It’s a Reggie Jackson rookie. This is worth, like, thirty or forty dollars.”

  “Oh, God, Alex,” Sarah scolded. “You shouldn’t do that.”

  Pappas beamed. “Now, if we’re going to eat anytime within the next ten hours, Jared’s going to have to help me make the salad. Come on.”

  Jared stuck out his tongue but followed Pappas into the kitchen eagerly. They talked baseball. “The greatest player who ever was,” Pappas rumbled, “was the Babe.”

  Jared, who was not actually helping make the salad but was instead watching Pappas slice cucumbers, replied with exasperation: “He was a big, slow white guy.”

  “Excuse me?” Pappas said incredulously and put down the paring knife. “Excuse me? Babe Ruth stole seventeen bases twice in his career. And they didn’t even run much back in the twenties. In those days, there were hardly any stolen bases.”

  “Who had more home runs?” Jared said.

  “Sure, Aaron did, but over a much longer period of time. Babe Ruth’s career was shorter than Aaron’s, for one thing. The Babe wasn’t even a full-time hitter—for the first six years of his career, he split his time between pitching and playing outfield, Jared.”

  Jared hesitated, fixed Pappas with a long stare. “The best was Willie Mays.”

  “Oh, so you’re dumping Hank Aaron now.”

  “Mays was one of the greatest fielders ever. And Ruth had an advantage—the ballparks in the nineteen-twenties were smaller.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake—” Pappas began.

  “Boys,” Sarah interrupted. “If we don’t eat, I’m going to pass out and Jared’s going to have to hitchhike home.”

  Jared finished his supper quickly and disappeared downstairs to the basement to play with Pappas’s ancient Victrola. Sarah and Pappas, sitting at the table and poking at the remains of the cannolis, could hear the distant ghost strains of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.

  They talked for a while about the darkroom Pappas was building in the basement, about the adult-education course he was taking in black-and-white photography. Sarah ran the details of the Valerie Santoro murder by him, mentioning the database search and the still-unclear involvement of a banker named Warren Elkind.

  “I seriously doubt,” she said, “that the head of the Manhattan Bank killed Valerie.”

  “Why? Rich people don’t murder?”

  “Come on. There’s something more to this.”

  “There always is, kid. Always is. When someone decides to become an FBI informant, he or she’s taking a chance.”

  “Sure, but…”

  “You know the pay’s the same whether you develop an asset or not.”

  “My job is to protect the source—”

  “Sarah, if you really want to protect a source, you’ll never use her information, and what good is that? Look, always go with your gut instinct. You’re suspicious about your informant’s murder, don’t leave it to the locals. See if the answering-machine tape turns up anything. Whether it’s the Mob or your banker, you’ll know soon enough. Speaking of the Mob, you still seeing that Italian guy?”

  Sarah gave him a blank stare and said in mock indignation: “Is that supposed to be funny? Do all Italians belong to the Mafia?”

  “Yeah, and all Greeks have souvlaki stands,” Pappas replied. “What’s his name again—Angelo?”

  “Andrew,” Sarah said, “and he’s history.”

  “He was a nice-looking guy.”

  “Not my type.”

  “Not potential father material?”

  “Alex, he’d pretend Jared wasn’t even there. He couldn’t deal with the fact that I had a son.”

  “You probably won’t believe me when I tell you you’ll find the right kind of guy—for you as well as for Jared. You’re the one who’s got to fall in love with him. Jared—Jared’ll come around.”

 
“You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

  Pappas nodded. “It’ll happen. Plus, whoever you get serious about is going to have to pass Jared’s scrutiny, and he’s an excellent judge of character. Gotta be—he likes me, doesn’t he? So don’t worry so much. It’ll happen.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Within hours after Edwin Chu and George Frechette, the NSA cryptanalysts, received the encrypted fragment of telephone conversation captured by a Rhyolite spy satellite above Switzerland, Edwin Chu broke the code.

  Actually, the NSA’s Cray supercomputers, using all available analytical skills, including several cryptanalytic techniques unknown outside the agency, broke it. But Edwin Chu had hovered over the computer and had done what he could to help—sort of a binary backseat driver.

  The National Security Agency is always interested in new encryption schemes, so the work Chu did with the Cray late that night and into the early morning wasn’t purely to satisfy his own curiosity.

  But that was a large part of it.

  It wasn’t easy. In fact, had Chu been more senior and had more clout, cracking the code would have taken less than an hour, rather than eight hours. He’d wanted to use the latest generation of Cray supercomputers, but had to settle instead for an older Cray.

  “I was sort of hoping this would be RC-4,” he explained to Frechette, referring to a commercially available encryption package. The only cryptographic software that NSA permitted to be exported out of the United States used algorithms of a certain length, specifically 40-bit. The best-known of these software packages were RC-2 and RC-4, tunable ciphers that were reasonably secure—except from the NSA, which has special-purpose chips designed to crack them in just a few minutes.

  “Piece of cake,” he modestly announced to George Frechette, handing him a set of headphones. “There’s supposed to be this new crypto firm in Zurich that’s been making new secure voice-encryption phones and told the Agency to go fuck off.”

  “Good for them,” Frechette murmured. Unknown encryption schemes paid their mortgages.

  “I think this is from those guys. Company was founded by some Russian émigré, an encryption specialist, used to be in the KGB’s Eighth Directorate.” The Eighth Chief Directorate of the former KGB was responsible for the security of all Soviet cipher communications. “Guy was one of their most advanced encryption people. A real big swinging dick. Got fed up with the pathetic level of Soviet technology, and then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the money dried up. Couldn’t produce his most advanced designs. So he went capitalist.”

  “Huh.”

  Chu explained that the Russian had developed his own encryption algorithm some years back, while still working for the KGB. The KGB, of course, hadn’t let him publish it in a mathematical journal. When he went private, the Russian kept it closely held.

  This was his error.

  One of the great paradoxes of the crypto world is that the more secret you keep a piece of cryptographic software, the less secure it will be. Unless you make an algorithm widely available to hackers around the world, you’ll never become aware of the hidden flaws it may contain.

  In this instance, Chu explained, the algorithm depended upon the intractability of a complicated inverse polynomial operation—which the NSA had solved two years ago. The creator likely didn’t know this, nor that the NSA had a lot of partial solutions precomputed and stored in fast memory, enabling Chu to take the complicated polynomials and reduce them to a set of simpler polynomials.

  In short, it hadn’t been easy to crack, but between the NSA’s high-powered research and its vast array of the latest computers, it had been crackable.

  “Luckily we got a decent hunk of the signal, enough to work on,” Edwin Chu said. “Have a listen.”

  George Frechette looked up, blinking owlishly at Chu. “These guys Americans?”

  “Voice One sounds American. Voice Two is foreign, like Swiss or German or Dutch or something, I can’t be sure.”

  “So what do you want to do with this?”

  “Get it transcribed and inputted and out of our hands, buddy. Let someone else worry about it. As for me”—he glanced at his watch—“it’s Big Mac time.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  At a hardware store near the Etoile, Baumann purchased an assortment of tools, and at the Brentano’s on Avenue de l’Opéra, he picked up two identical red-vinyl-jacketed Webster’s pocket dictionaries to use for sending encoded messages. On a brief shopping trip in the 8th Arrondissement, he bought several very good suits and shirts, off the rack but well made, along with an assortment of ties, several pairs of English shoes, an expensive leather attaché case, and a few other accessories.

  Then he returned to the Raphaël. Although it was not even noon, the dark, English-style oak-paneled bar was already doing a good business. At a small table, he lingered over a café express, going through a stack of American business magazines and newspapers—Forbes, Fortune, Barron’s, and others. From time to time he looked up and watched the clientele come and go.

  It was not long before he noticed a man in his late thirties, an American businessman, from the look of him. Baumann overheard him having a conversation with a man at an adjoining table who appeared to be a junior associate. The first businessman, whose neatly combed dark hair was salted with gray, was complaining to the other that the hotel had failed to deliver his Wall Street Journal to his room with breakfast this morning, though he had made a specific request.

  The stroke of good fortune came when the businessman was called by his last name by a waiter, who brought a telephone to his table and plugged it into a wall jack. Once he’d finished his apparently urgent telephone call, the two Americans hastened into the lobby. There the junior associate took a seat while his friend got into the elevator.

  Just before the elevator door closed, Baumann slipped into the cabin. The businessman pressed the button for the seventh floor; Baumann pressed the same button again, unnecessarily, and then smiled awkwardly at his own clumsiness. The businessman, evidently in a rush, did not return the smile.

  Baumann followed the American down the corridor. The man stopped at room 712, and Baumann continued on, disappearing around a turn. From that vantage point, unseen, he watched the businessman enter the room and emerge a few seconds later, wearing a tan gabardine raincoat and carrying a collapsible umbrella, and stride quickly toward the elevator.

  Baumann couldn’t be sure, of course, but given the time—a few minutes before one in the afternoon—the odds were good that the two Americans were going to a lunch meeting. This was, he knew, a Parisian tradition; such lunches could go on for two hours or more.

  * * *

  Baumann hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the American’s hotel-room door and, wearing latex gloves, set to work at once. Although room 712 was considerably smaller than his own suite, the basic amenities, including the safe in an armoire near the king-size bed, were, as he expected, the same.

  The room safe, as in all hotel rooms Baumann had ever stayed in, was an amateurish affair, fit mainly for discouraging a larcenous maid from stealing a camera or a wallet full of cash. It was of the type commonly found in the better hotel rooms: a small, heavy, concrete-lined steel box, extremely difficult (though not impossible) to lift.

  You punched in a series of numbers of your own choosing into a keypad on the front of the box; the numbers would appear in a liquid-crystal readout; and then when you hit the * key or some such, the locking mechanism would be electronically activated.

  He inserted a small hex wrench into the hole in the safe’s face, then slid the plate back. That was all it took to reveal the ordinary keyed lock, which required two keys. After a minute or so of grappling with his improvised lock picks, the set of ordinary household tools he’d purchased at the hardware store a few hours earlier, the lock yielded, and the safe popped open.

  As was usual with such electronic devices, the safe drew its power from batteries—in this case, two AA batteries—which power
ed the readout and the locking mechanism. The batteries often went dead and had to be replaced. Or the hotel guest would forget the combination he had himself set. Thus, the manual override mechanism that enabled Baumann to open the safe so easily.

  It was there, of course. Whereas Europeans usually carry their vital documents on their person while traveling, Americans tend not to. Mr. Robinson—Mr. Sumner Charles Robinson, in full—had left his passport, along with a good supply of American Express traveler’s checks and a small pile of American currency.

  Baumann pocketed the passport, then quickly counted the cash (two hundred and twenty dollars) and the traveler’s checks (fifteen hundred dollars). For a moment he considered taking the cash and checks, then decided against it. When Mr. Sumner C. Robinson returned late this afternoon or this evening, he might (or might not) open the safe and might (or might not) discover his passport missing. If he did, he’d realize with great relief that his cash and traveler’s checks were still there, and he’d probably think that he’d simply misplaced the passport somewhere.

  It was preposterous to imagine that a thief would steal his passport and not his cash. Even after searching the room, the pockets of his clothing, and his luggage, and not finding his passport, he might not even do so much as inform the hotel management of the loss. Let alone the municipal police. Taking the cash was simply not worth it.

  * * *

  Martin Lomax, Malcolm Dyson’s aide-de-camp, picked up the phone and called the company’s Zug, Switzerland, office on a secure telephone to check that all the financial arrangements had been done, and that Baumann’s payment had been transferred to the bank in Panama. Lomax had called the Zug office three days in a row, because he was a thorough man, and his boss did not like the slightest detail to be overlooked.

  Moreover, Dyson was highly suspicious of the intelligence capabilities of the U.S. government and had instructed Lomax never to speak of the upcoming event on anything but a secure telephone. And not just any secure telephone, because Dyson had not been born yesterday and he knew that virtually all firms that sold encrypted phones—including the famous Crypto, A.G., of Zurich—sold their encryption schemes to the NSA and GCHQ. So there was really no such thing as a truly secure phone anymore, unless you were canny about it.