The Zero Hour (41 page)

“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. Either 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 met 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.

“That’s supposed to symbolize wisdom and industry and night,” Baumann said. He had always been an architecture buff; his time in Pollsmoor had given him ample time to read architectural histories. As a cover it was natural.

“How come those are empty?” Jared asked, pointing at two long niches flanking the portal.

“Excellent question. A well-known American sculptor was supposed to carve a statue of Frank W. Woolworth for one of those spaces, but for some reason it never got done.”

“Who was supposed to be in the other one?”

“They say Napoleon, but no one knows for sure.”

In the lobby, Baumann pointed out a plaster bracket near the ceiling, which he called a corbel. Jared could see only that it was a figure of a man with a mustache holding his knees, coins in both hands.

“Who’s that, do you think?” Baumann asked.

“Some old guy,” Jared said. “I don’t know. Weird-looking.”

“It is sort of weird-looking, you’re right. That’s old Mr. Woolworth,” Baumann said, “paying for his building with nickels and dimes. Because he paid all cash for the building. Mr. Woolworth’s office was modeled on Napoleon’s palace, with walls of green marble from Italy and gilded Corinthian capitals.” Jared didn’t know what Corinthian capitals were, but it sounded impressive.

“Where do you want to eat supper? McDonald’s?”

“Definitely,” Jared said.

“What do you know about the Manhattan Bank Building?” Sarah said suddenly.

Baumann was suddenly very alert. He turned to her casually, shrugged. “What do I
know
? I know it’s second-rate. Why do you ask?”

“Isn’t it designed by some famous architect?”

“Pelli, but not
good
Pelli. Now, you want to see good Pelli, take a look at the World Financial Center in Battery Park City. Look at the four towers—how, as the buildings rise, the proportion of windows to granite increases until the top is all reflecting glass. You can see the clouds float by in the tops of the towers. It’s amazing. Why are you so interested in the Manhattan Bank Building?”

“Just curious.”

“Hmm.” Baumann nodded contemplatively. “Say, listen,” he suddenly exclaimed, putting a hand on Jared’s shoulder. “I’ve got an idea. Jared, do you think you could teach me how to throw a pass?”

“Me? Sure,” Jared said. “When?”

“How about tomorrow afternoon?”

“I think Mom’s working.”

“Well, Sarah, maybe I could borrow Jared for the afternoon, while you’re at work. We could go to the park, just Jared and me. What do you say?”

“I guess that would be all right,” she said without conviction.

“Yeah!” Jared exclaimed. “Thanks, Mom!”

“Okay,” she said. “But you promise me you’ll be careful? I don’t want anything to happen to your head.”

“Come on, don’t worry so much,” Jared said.

“Okay,” she said. “Just be careful.”

*   *   *

Late at night, the phone rang. Startled out of a restless, anxious dream, Sarah picked it up,

“You fucking some guy?”

“Who is—”

“You fucking some guy? Right in front of my son?”