The Zero Hour (45 page)

“Such as?” Whitman prompted.

“Location of the bomb, for one thing. Is it going to be placed outside or inside the building? Most bombs are placed outside buildings so that the damage will be visible, easily seen and photographed, for maximum psychological impact.”

“If it’s placed inside the building…?” Sarah asked.

“The rule of thumb is that a bomb confined inside a building will do five times more damage than one placed outside. Then again, look what happened in Oklahoma City.”

“You’re still not telling us
anything
!” Walsh shouted.

Sarah could see Cameron Crowley compress his lips to contain his irritation. “Blast analysis is a complicated business,” he said quietly. “The geometry of the charge has some effect on the peak pressure of the shock wave that emanates from the explosive. The shock waves always move at a ninety-degree angle to the surface of the explosives. We don’t know if the charge is going to be shaped, or spherical, or what. Is there any way for the explosive to vent and thus be diffused? Also, we don’t know what building it’s going to be placed into. Different substances have different abilities to withstand the shock front. Glass generally yields between one and three p.s.i. when hit with a front-on load. A typical masonry wall—a good, well-made brick wall—will break at eight to twelve p.s.i. And if there’s steel reinforcing, well, steel has a modulus of elasticity, called Young’s modulus—”

“Goddammit,” Walsh said. He was not a thick or ignorant man, far from it, but he was famously impatient with scientific bluster that served in his opinion to muffle practicalities. “What you’re saying is that a thousand pounds of C-4, if placed intelligently inside a reasonably sized Manhattan office building, can do a fuck of a lot of damage.”

“Yes, sir,” Crowley said. “A fuck of a lot.”

The intercom on the AD’s desk buzzed. Walsh lumbered over to it, hit the switch, and said: “Dammit, Marlene, I said hold all calls.”

“Sorry, sir, but it’s urgent, for Agent Cahill.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake. Cahill?”

Sarah strode to the phone. “Yes? Alex, I’m in a—Uh huh … I don’t understand, what do you mean he called it in himself?… All right.”

She hung up and turned to the three FBI men, who had been watching her throughout the conversation.

“That was Alex Pappas. Roth got a call from NYPD Homicide. They located a body in a drainage tunnel under the streets in the Wall Street area. The victim seems to be the guy who planted the computer virus in the Manhattan Bank.”

“
Baumann
?” Whitman gasped.

“Some guy Baumann hired, a computer-hacker type.”

Walsh sat bolt upright. “How do you know this?”

“Seems the victim had had a call put in to 911 after his death.”

“The hell you talking about, Agent Cahill?” Walsh thundered.

“It’s complicated. Seems this computer guy was afraid he’d be knocked off. Had some tape recorder call 911 with a report of his own homicide. I didn’t quite follow. The point is—”

“Is this for real?” Whitman said.

“Apparently so. An emergency-medical team and some guys from the fire department went down in the tunnels and found a body. Homicide and some of our people are on their way over to the victim’s apartment right now.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

Ken Alton examined the computer equipment at Leo Krasner’s apartment with the admiration of a fellow hacker. He whistled. The guy had a nice Macintosh Duo with a docking station for a removable Powerbook, a couple of enormous Apple color screens, an IBM with a Pentium processor, and a SPARC-20 Unix-based workstation, all networked together. There was also a new 1,200-d.p.i. color PostScript printer and a Xerox color scanner.

Jesus, there was even an alpha-test prototype from the Hewlett-Packard/Intel/Sun consortium, the HPIS-35. This was a scientific workstation containing a network of five high-performance RISC processors in the SPARC/Pentium family, plus three gallium-arsenide multiprocessors from HP Labs.

Very cool.

He tried to access the HPIS-35 and the SPARC-20, but a password was necessary—of course. He said, “Shit,” got to his feet, and lumbered around the apartment.

“What?” Roth asked.

Ken ignored him. He wandered around, thinking.

In the bedroom, on the nightstand, Ken found a palm-top computer. And he knew he had the problem solved.

The palm-top could be connected to the workstation by means of a spread-spectrum link. In other words, the guy could use his palm-top in the bedroom to do stuff on the workstation in the living room. And of course there was a protocol built into it that accessed the workstation by giving the password. This was for easy access.

Even geniuses got lazy once in a while, Ken knew.

Quickly he listed the files on each machine. Some of the documents looked potentially interesting, but then, on the SPARC, he came across a couple of intriguing files, intriguing because they each had a JPEG extension. JPEG was a standardized image-compression mechanism, so named for the committee that wrote the standard, the Joint Photographic Experts Group. Each file with a JPEG extension was around 39K in size, just about the right size for a good-quality black-and-white photograph, but probably not big enough for color.

Ah, Ken thought. Hence the scanner. All you do is run a photo through the scanner, which stores the image in either color or in a gray-scale. A black-and-white photo is broken down into particles, or pixels, each of which is assigned a gray-scale value between 1 and 256. The JPEG program takes this big hunk of data and identifies the redundancies in it and then compresses it. So you end up with a computer file, a binary file, a bunch of ones and zeroes. The compression certainly isn’t perfect—it’s “lossy,” as the techies call it—but it has the advantage of making extremely small files if you use the default quality setting.

Ken didn’t know exactly how JPEG worked—you heard buzz phrases like discrete cosine transforms, chrominance subsampling, and coefficient quantization—but he knew how to use it. That was all that counted.

Well, he mused, if he’s storing images, he’s got to have a display program on here, something that will grab the image and convert it, an interactive image-manipulation and display program.

He typed “xv brit.jpeg &” and hit enter. This was the command for a common display program.

“Whaddaya got there?” Roth asked, standing over Ken’s shoulder.

“We’ll see…” Ken said.

In a few seconds the screen was filled with a high-resolution photographic image of a man, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, ruggedly handsome man of around forty. Though the picture seemed to have been taken with a long lens in some kind of public place, a restaurant or something, the man’s face was perfectly clear.

“Is that the dead guy?” Roth asked.

“No,” Ken said. “Leo Krasner’s tape-recorded message to 911 said he had a picture of the man who had hired him. This has got to be one of the pictures in question.”

“Who is—?”

“I think it’s Baumann.”

With a few more keystrokes, he converted the JPEG file to PostScript, a format for printing images, and sent it over to the printer.

“Hey!” Roth shouted to the others. “I think we have our guy.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

As supervisor of the Information Processing Division of the Greenwich Trust Bank, Walter Grimmer, fifty-two, was in charge of the bank’s Moore Street facility, located just off Water Street in lower Manhattan—in the same anonymous building that housed the super-secret Network.

Grimmer had been with the bank for sixteen years, after twelve years at Chemical Bank. He didn’t particularly like his job, didn’t like his colleagues. In fact, when you came right down to it, though he was a CPA, he didn’t even enjoy accounting. Never had. He loved his wife and his two daughters and enjoyed puttering around their house in Teaneck, New Jersey. But he had already begun counting down the months until retirement.

There were many more of them.

And it was days like today that made him think seriously about early retirement. The day had started with a call from a new assistant to the bank’s chief financial officer, letting him know about an imminent visit from the FDIC. Great. How could you top that? Maybe at his next checkup the doctor would find a polyp.

Oh, the FDIC, the goddam FDIC. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was the bane of Grimmer’s existence.

The FDIC supervised all state-chartered banks, which meant banks that weren’t members of the Federal Reserve, weren’t national, didn’t have the initials “N.A.” in their legal title. They rated these banks for soundness, on a scale from one to five, one being the best. This was called a Uniform Bank Rating, the CAMEL rating. “CAMEL” was an acronym derived from a jumble of factors: capital, asset quality, management, earnings, and liquidity.

Depending on the bank’s CAMEL rating, which was always kept secret from the bank, the FDIC inspected the bank either annually or every eighteen months. The eighteen-month cycle was for banks rated one or two. Banks rated three or less, or which had assets of over $250 million, were inspected annually.

Walter Grimmer didn’t know for sure, but he suspected that Greenwich Trust rated a middling three. Which meant that every year, a team of eight to twelve FDIC examiners barged in and took over the place for as much as six weeks. They reviewed the bank’s loan portfolio, the adequacy of its capital in relation to the risk of its portfolio, the stability of its earnings, its liquidity. Then they brought the whole happy adventure to a rousing finale with a wrap-up meeting with the bank’s president and executive committee.

Loads of fun. And Walter Grimmer, lucky Walter Grimmer, had the honor and privilege of serving as the bank’s liaison to the FDIC.

The guy who’d called this morning, the assistant to the chief financial officer, had phoned to let Grimmer know that for some damn reason the FDIC had to come back for an
additional
examination, as if once a year weren’t enough. Computer runs had been ordered. Something like a dozen boxes of documentation for the FDIC were going to be shipped in late this afternoon, and Grimmer was supposed to sign for them.

Did it have something to do with the collapse of the Manhattan Bank?

Was that why the FDIC was making a surprise visit?

“Where the heck am I going to put a dozen boxes?” Grimmer had wailed. “I don’t have room here for a dozen boxes!”

“I know,” the assistant said sympathetically. “The delivery service will bring them right down to the basement of the building and leave them there until FDIC shows up tomorrow. Just overnight. Then it’s their problem.”

“The basement? We can’t leave them there!”

“Mr. Grimmer, we’ve already cleared it with the building manager. Just make sure you’re there to sign for them, okay?”

*   *   *

The deliveryman from Metro-Quik Courier Service groaned as he pulled his delivery truck up to the modern-looking building on Moore Street, in the Wall Street area. The damned street was paved with cobblestones, which really did a number on the truck’s suspension. It was a narrow, one-way street that ran from Pearl Street to Water Street. He’d had no problem picking up the boxes at the storage facility in Tribeca, but he’d gotten lost several times trying to find the downtown facility of the Greenwich Trust Bank.

At least the boxes were filled with paper, not floor tiles or something. He loaded the twelve sealed boxes, each sealed with bright-yellow tape marked
FDIC EVIDENCE
, onto a dolly and moved them into the basement of the building.

“Sign right here, please,” he told Walter Grimmer as he handed him a clipboard.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

Vigiani burst into Sarah’s office without knocking. “We got a match.”

“A match?”

“I mean, the NSA did. That phone intercept. We got the names to attach to the voices now.”

“Let’s hear.”

“A guy named Martin Lomax, who’s apparently a close associate of Malcolm Dyson’s, and someone named Johann Kinzel, who’s Dyson’s money man.”

“Great work. I think we just locked this up. We’ve got a prosecutable case now. Bravo.”

Pappas knocked on the door and said, “Sarah, we need to talk.”

She knew Pappas’s face well, knew it was serious. “What is it?”

“There’s been another murder,” he said. “There was a body found in an alley in your neighborhood. The report just came in.”

“Whose?”

“Sarah,” Pappas said, putting his arm around her, “it’s Peter.”

*   *   *

Hunched over the toilet, vomiting.

Bitter tears burning her nostrils. She wanted to call Jared, wanted to go get him now, didn’t know what to do. There was a right time, a right way, to tell an eight-year-old something so wrenching.

Then she remembered she had given him her cellular phone this morning to keep in his backpack, in case she needed to reach him. In case of emergency.

But no. She couldn’t call him. It had to be done in person.

It would be harder because of Jared’s anger toward his father. The wounds were already open; the pain would be unbearable.

She needed to go for a walk.

*   *   *

Roth called headquarters, asked for Sarah. Pappas answered. “She’s not here,” he said. “I don’t know where she is. I just gave her the bad news about her ex-husband. She left about fifteen minutes ago.”

“I’ll try her at home,” Roth said. “If you see her, tell her we got our guy.”

“What do you—”

“I mean, we got a picture—a photo of Baumann.”

“What are you talking about?”

But Roth hung up, and then dialed Sarah’s apartment. He got the machine, calculated she might be on the way home, maybe to get her kid, so he left a message.

In a coffee shop across the street from headquarters, Sarah sat, red-eyed, dazed.

Peter was dead.

How could it possibly be a coincidence? What if Baumann had meant to get her, and had got to Peter instead—Peter, who was in town and might well have tried to go to her apartment …

Jared.
Was Jared next?