The Zero Hour (35 page)

“So you think Henrik Baumann has been hired by the Libyans?” asked Sarah.

“It’s possible. Looks that way,” Herbert Massie said.

“Bravo,” said Harry Whitman.

“Well done,” Sarah said. “All right, now, I want that fusing mechanism put back together, boxed up, and delivered to that Mail Boxes Etc. site
today
.”

“What the hell—?” said Chief of Detectives McSweeney.

“Sarah,” said Whitman, “you’re out of your mind.”

“No,” she said. “I want a surveillance team put on the site. At some point someone has to show up to claim the package. Let me remind you, we don’t know it’s Baumann, by the way. We
assume
it is.”

“Agent Cahill,” Massie’s voice came, high and strained, “we’re far from finished examining it.”

“If we hold off any longer, Baumann’s bound to get suspicious, and he won’t show up. It’s got to arrive today—one day late is okay, but no more. Also, I want a trap-and-trace on the Mail Boxes phone line, in case Baumann—or whoever it is—calls about the package. If I were in his place, I would.”

“You didn’t hear me, did you?” Massie said. “I said, we’re not done. We’re not packing this up yet.”

Deputy Commissioner Alfonse Mitchell glowered at Sarah and shook his head slowly.

“Okay,” Sarah said, backing down. “Get a duplicate of the tape player if you can, box that up in the exact same packaging, and get it over to Mail Boxes today, using a regular DHL truck, with their other stuff. Oh, and one more thing. Customs usually uses yellow tape to seal packages it’s opened, saying ‘Opened by U.S. Customs’ or something like that. Make sure there’s no yellow tape on it. I want it to look like everything went fine with it.” She looked around the table once again. “We’re going to catch the bastard,” she said.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

In the next days, Baumann worked almost nonstop, renting not one but two furnished apartments in different parts of the city, under different aliases assumed by entirely different personas. He paid cash; let the real estate agents think what they wanted. Greed would always prevail; the Realtors would keep their silence. On a bleak, foul-smelling street not far from the Fulton Fish Market he took a short-term rental on a tiny street-level warehouse space barely big enough to park a compact car in.

He contacted the computer whiz (the “cracker,” as he’d been taught to say), but the cracker, to his credit, insisted on meeting in person. Baumann knew only that the man was in his late twenties, was pompous to the point of megalomania, and worked only sporadically, but for fantastic sums of money. Most important, he came highly recommended by the intermediary in Amsterdam, who called him a man of rare skill, “ultra-slick, a serious wizard.”

The cracker’s name was Leo Krasner. He did work for businessmen who didn’t like their credit ratings and wanted them repaired; for private investigators; for news reporters. He would work for any organization that interested him, except the government.

Krasner’s fame had spread in the underworld of computer crackers early in 1991. It is a matter of record that during the Persian Gulf War of that year, the Cable News Network hired a number of computer hackers, crackers, and phreakers to circumvent the U.S. government’s onerous press restrictions. These computer wizards were paid to intercept transmissions to and from military satellites and decrypt them. Krasner was heavily relied upon by CNN and other television networks, as well as by investors who wanted to know what was going on.

Baumann arranged to meet Krasner in a brightly lit but shabby little restaurant on the far West Side whose smeared plate-glass windows looked out onto the verminous street.

Leo Krasner was short, not much over five feet, and enormously obese. His doughy face was framed by immense porkchop sideburns. His unwashed hair spilled over his collar. He wore tinted aviator-frame glasses.

Baumann introduced himself, using an American alias and legend. Krasner offered a damp, pudgy hand to shake. After a minute or so of chitchat that was clearly going nowhere, Baumann came right to the point and told him what he wanted.

Krasner, who had been cupping his mouth in his small, round fist, looked up at Baumann slowly and gave a cryptic half-smile. A man sat down at a nearby table, set down a gym bag, and began to read a crummy paperback of Saul Bellow’s
Mr. Sammler’s Planet.
“This is some very high-profile shit,” Krasner said. “It’s going to bring down an enormous amount of heat. I may not be able to work for a very, very long time.”

“Perhaps yes, perhaps no.”

“I assume you’re talking some very, very big bucks.”

“A six-figure payment for a few days’ work,” Baumann said.

“
Six-figure
?” Krasner snorted. “Go find a high school kid. You gotta be kidding.”

“Do you want to suggest a fee? You’re the subcontractor, after all. Give me a bid.”

“My bid is a million dollars, take it or leave it.”

“I don’t have anywhere near that kind of money,” Baumann said.

“Then what kind of serious offer will you make?”

“If I really scrape and borrow and beg, I can come up with half that. But it will take enormous effort to scrape together.”

“In gold. Currency’s going to take a serious beating after this goes down.”

“Done. Are you at all familiar with the systems used by the Manhattan Bank?”

“Sure, I know the Manhattan Bank. A little background work, a little calling around, and I’m all set.” He extended his moist hand to shake. “No problem.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Over coffee half an hour later, Pappas said: “They were right, Sarah. Had you given up that fusing device, you’d not only have lost an incredibly valuable mass of information, but you’d have risked losing a crucial piece of evidence.”

“The idea wasn’t to throw the thing away,” Sarah said, exasperated because she knew Pappas was right. “It was to keep everything intact so as not to alert Baumann, and…” Her voice faded. “All right, I was wrong. I’ll admit it.”

Pappas nodded once. “Ah, well. To err is human, to forgive is not Bureau policy. Water under the bridge. Mail Boxes opens in, what, fifteen minutes or so? Hours are nine to seven, weekdays. You got a team in place?”

“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.