The Zero Hour (33 page)

Obviously Evangeline Elkind knew nothing of her husband’s proclivities, and the threat of public exposure was potent. Sarah was disgusted with herself, though outwardly she seemed calculating and cool.

Of course, it was far from a sure thing that to own up to his regular liaisons with Valerie would destroy his marriage and family. Marriages and families sometimes had unexpected artesian sources of resiliency. But his career as America’s most powerful banker, or even second- or third-most-powerful banker, would assuredly be ruined.

She went on, “Valerie Santoro was hired to steal a CD-ROM from your briefcase—”

“Nothing was stolen from my briefcase!”

“No. She ‘borrowed’ it for a while, then returned it to the front desk at the Four Seasons.”

He stared at Sarah again, and this time she was sure she could see the blood drain from his face. “What are you—”

“A CD-ROM. Did you ‘misplace’ it while you were at the hotel?”

“Oh, Jesus God. Oh, Jesus God.” Elkind’s face seemed to cave in.

“What happened to it?”

“The disk—I thought it fell out of my suitcase. I mean, it was meaningless to anyone else—no one would know what was on it. Then when it turned up, I knew it had just fallen out somewhere. The front desk said it had been found in a trash container—”

“What was on it?”

“Every year we get one of those CD-ROMs that’s got an entire year’s worth of authentication codes on it, a different computer ‘key’ for each day. They’re used to send money around the world by computer, encoded digitally. That’s why I was in Boston, for one of those bank security meetings. Once a year the heads of the bank, or their designated proxies, meet and exchange computer keys.”

“Someone who had that cryptographic key—”

“—could get into our computers and falsify transactions and steal billions of dollars. Can’t even think about it.”

“But if the bank is suddenly missing an enormous sum of money, wouldn’t the Federal Reserve just bail you out?”

“Christ, no. All these banking reforms. The Fed talks about ‘moral hazard’—that we’re not strict enough with depositors. The truth is, only eight percent of Manhattan Bank’s assets are secure—in government bonds, triple-A-rated securities—basically liquid.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it would only take a loss of about a hundred million dollars to make us insolvent. Now, will you just tell me what you want me to do, please?”

“I want to see your director of security,” Sarah said. “Right now.”

*   *   *

The Manhattan Bank’s director of security was a formidable, very tall woman in her late forties named Rosabeth Chapman. She was ex-Bureau, which gave Sarah the notion that they’d have common ground on which to schmooze.

Rosabeth Chapman, however, was not a schmoozer. She had the charm of a meter maid. She had a firm, intimidating way of speaking, a perfect pale-blond bouffant hairdo, precise pink lipstick. She spoke in a contralto, and her three male associates listened in respectful silence. Warren Elkind seemed to have a fondness for dominant women.

“You’re asking us to activate a crisis-management approach. You want us to come up with a ‘game plan,’ as you call it. Yet you have absolutely no evidence of an impending attack on Manhattan Bank, whether the headquarters building or any of our branches.”

“That’s not quite accurate,” Sarah said. “We have an intercepted telephone conversation—”

“Which is meaningless. It’s talk; it’s a hollow threat.”

“Threats are more than we usually get in this business—” Sarah began.

“Are you aware how many threats are made against this bank?”

“What the hell else do you want?” Sarah finally burst out. “You want a ticking bomb? You want the whole building brought down? You want a signed statement from the terrorists notarized by a
notary public
—‘Oh, and make sure that little seal-punch thing hasn’t
expired
’?”

Rosabeth Chapman shouted back: “You want to send a bomb squad around to search our headquarters and all the branches, is that it? You want to announce publicly that
someday soon
, we don’t know when, Manhattan Bank is going to be struck by a terrorist? Do you have any idea what that will do to the bank’s business?”

“All right,” Sarah said. “Let’s agree on this much. You’ll send plainclothes teams around to inspect for bombs on a regular basis. The public won’t have a clue. You beef up your security here and at all branches. Make sure Elkind’s personal security is doubled or tripled. And for Christ’s sake, change the bank’s access codes
immediately.
Will you at least do that much?”

Rosabeth Chapman glowered. After a long pause, she said primly, “Yes. That much we can do.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Ken Alton emptied his Diet Pepsi and slammed it down on his desk with a hollow aluminum
thock.
“Hot damn,” he said. “So Elkind talked. Let’s hear it for compromising situations.”

“Let’s not dwell on that,” Sarah said queasily, pulling up a chair next to his desk. She looked around at the wall of blue computer screens and keyboards and CPUs and cables that surrounded him. “I’d rather not think about it. He says the disk had an entire year’s worth of computer passwords on it, a different one for each day. He said someone who had access to it could conceivably steal billions of dollars from the bank. This sound right to you?”

“Shit, yeah.”

“How?”

Ken sighed the sigh of the expert who dreads the ordeal of having to explain in layman’s language. “All right. Cash—good old-fashioned cash, the stuff we use to buy a cup of coffee or tip the waiter, that funny paper—that’s disappearing, okay? Fast becoming history. Today, five out of every six dollars in the economy isn’t cash but—
vapor.
Streams of zeroes and ones zipping around through cyberspace. A
trillion
dollars a day now ricochet around the world by computer. A
trillion
—can you get your mind around that?”

Sarah shook her head slowly, lost in thought.

“I mean, okay, you can argue that cash is an abstract concept, right? It’s just a colored piece of paper printed up in some government printing press somewhere. Checks, too—what are they but fancy IOU notes? Okay, but the really big sums of money—the really cosmically huge amounts—they always move by computer. In the old days, when a bank wanted to send a million bucks, they sent a messenger out with a piece of paper, a cashier’s check. Now it’s almost always done by wire transfer—electronic funds transfer, to use the proper name. Man, I remember when the Bank of New York had some sort of software glitch, back in ’85, and the Federal Reserve had to lend them twenty-three
billion
dollars overnight to bail them out.”

“But what about theft?”

“Right, I was getting to that. This whole system makes it so goddam easy. Only shmucks go into banks with guns and ski masks on and try to steal the, what, maybe ten thousand bucks the average bank has on hand. That’s pathetic. In 1988, some people in Chicago almost got away with stealing seventy million dollars from a bank, using electronic funds transfer.”

“But they didn’t get away with it.”

“Yeah, but they were morons. Thing is, you rarely hear about the
successful
heists, because the banks don’t want people to know how vulnerable they are. But around 1982 or 1983, this guy went into a bank in the U.S., I forget where, and did a little ‘social engineering’—”

“Meaning?”

“Oh, that’s computer hacker talk for using people to help you pull off some computer caper. The guy pretended to be from the Federal Reserve Bank doing something security-related, and he managed to transfer ten point two million dollars to an account in Switzerland, where he converted it to diamonds—and got away with it.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. And then there was this case in 1989, when a con man from Malaysia co-opted two employees of the Swiss Bank Corporation in Zurich in a huge scam, where they wired twenty million dollars to the New York branch of an Australian bank. The order was forged, but no one knew that. So the twenty million was zapped over to Australia, where it was drawn down quickly to a bunch of different accounts, and it just disappeared into the ether, leaving no trace. By the time Swiss Bank Corporation discovered what had happened, the money was pretty much all gone.”

“So if someone had the computer passwords—?”

“Are you kidding, Sarah? Christ, someone clever could steal all of a bank’s money, make it go belly up inside of a day. I think I should take a look at the Manhattan Bank’s computers, don’t you?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

If you were a drug smuggler seeking to get, say, a few thousand kilos of cocaine into the United States, you would probably resort to one of the time-honored methods devised by the drug cartels. You might conceal the goods in hollowed-out bars of aluminum stacked high in the cargo of a Venezuelan ship entering the Port of Newark. Or you might move the cocaine by truck across the Mexican border, buried in a shipment of roofing material.

If you were careful, and your shipping documents were in order, the odds would be in your favor.

But if instead you were smuggling in relatively small quantities of contraband, whether drugs or explosives or weapons-grade plutonium, there is another, far safer way.

You would simply use an international express package delivery service such as DHL or Federal Express or Airborne. Millions of packages enter the United States every day, roughly a hundred thousand sent by overnight express, and they are hardly ever subject to inspection.

“Express consignment operators,” as the U.S. government formally designates international express courier services, are strictly controlled by the lengthy list of rules set out in Volume 19 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Part 128. They must demonstrate to the satisfaction of the U.S. Customs Service that their shipping facilities are secure, and that everyone who works for them has been subjected to a thorough background security check.

John F. Kennedy International Airport in Idlewild, New York, is the single customs entry point, the funnel through which all express packages from Europe must pass. In order to speed up the customs procedures, most of the express consignment shippers transmit a manifest in advance, by computer, to enable U.S. Customs to clear the planeload of packages in advance. After all, the U.S. Customs Service cannot possibly inspect even one of every thousand packages that pass through JFK.

Etienne Charreyron, the bomb-disposal expert in Lièges, Belgium, whom Baumann had hired to construct the fusing systems, sent two parcels on two separate days through DHL in Brussels. Each package contained a custom-designed fusing system, concealed in the hollow body of a Sony CFD-30 CD/radio/cassette player.

Charreyron knew the basic route of packages sent by DHL. He knew that Brussels was DHL’s European hub. He knew that a package sent from the DHL office in Brussels was sent via one of DHL’s private 727 jets, in which it was stuffed into one of six or seven large containers, or “cans,” as they’re called in shipping terminology. Each can might contain one to two thousand packages.

He knew that the packages containing the fusing mechanisms would arrive at one or two o’clock in the morning at JFK Airport, go through customs, and be loaded on a DHL jet to Cincinnati, DHL’s U.S. hub, by nine in the morning. By the next day they would be in the hands of the man who had ordered them. In all, the transit time would be two business days.

Charreyron had done his homework, and he had chosen a good, low-risk way to send the detonators. But he had not figured on Senior Inspector Edna Mae Johnson.

Johnson had worked for the U. S. Customs Service for thirty-six years. A stout black woman of ferocious intelligence and unwavering attention, she was known by friends and admirers as Eagle Eye, and by many who got in her way by less admiring nicknames, most of them unprintable. Her husband of forty-odd years had learned the hard way not to bother trying to pull one over on Edna Mae.

So had the licensed customs brokers who dealt with her each night when the express consignments came in. They all knew that when Inspector Johnson was on duty, nothing would ever be allowed to slide by. Everything would go strictly according to Hoyle. With a fine-tooth comb—no, with a goddam microscope!—she went through the manifests, the airbills, and the commercial invoices (the official U.S. Customs form, actually called a Customs Entry, which listed a package’s contents, value, and use), looking for any discrepancies.

A few of the customs brokers swore that finding a discrepancy gave Edna Mae an orgasm. If she found one, you could bank on the fact that she would make things right, even if it meant holding an entire planeload.

Two words everyone in the courier business most feared were “break bulk”: this meant to make the shipping company open a container and spend three hours or so sorting through the two thousand packages for that one miserable little letter envelope whose paperwork was fouled up. Inspector Johnson certainly did not hesitate to break bulk. There were those who suspected she rather enjoyed it. When a customs broker groaned, she’d snap, “Well,
I
sure as hell didn’t make the mistake. And you call yourself a business!”

So if you were in the express consignment business and Edna Mae Johnson was on for the night, you made extra sure to do things right. You made sure that the things they always wanted to inspect by hand—animal products, drugs, vitamins, foodstuffs—were put in a separate container, so you didn’t delay thousands of other packages.

And you made sure that the declared value on the airbill matched the declared value on the Customs Entry. And you made sure that no single shipment exceeded 550 pounds, that no single piece exceeded 124 pounds, that the total of the length, width, and height of a piece didn’t exceed 118 inches.

If you didn’t, Edna Mae Johnson most certainly would.

*   *   *

Actually all the paperwork on the DHL express consignment that night was perfectly in order. Inspector Johnson reviewed the manifest—she always worked from hard copy, because she was convinced that mistakes were made when the computer screen was used—and found nothing to object to.