The Zero Hour (52 page)

She heard shouts, a scream, and she felt the floor come up and smack against the back of her head, as someone forced her to the ground and out of the way of the machinery.

She looked around, saw that the stairwell was empty, realized that the NEST men had moved out of the building, as per procedure.

“All right, Agent Cahill, let’s go! Move it!” came the voice of the man who had pushed her to the floor. He was wearing a bulky green suit, armored with Kevlar panels, and a helmet. “Out of the building!”

“No!” she shouted. “I’m not moving!”

“
Get the fuck out of here!
”

“Back off!” she shouted. “I’m staying here. My boy’s in there.”

“Move it! Out! You’re not in charge now—we are. Only Suarez can stay here, and he’s operating the machine.”

“Sorry,” Sarah said, steely. “If anything happens, I want to be here to assist. So prosecute me later. I don’t give a shit.”

She saw Lieutenant Colonel Suarez smile. “Yeah, she’s right,” he said. “I might need an assist. Let her stay.”

Suarez aimed the antenna at the bomb and fired off a super-high-powered blast of electromagnetic energy.

There was a loud crackling sound. Sarah, crouching out of the way of the EMP, felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. It felt as if the shock were running through her body.

There was a burning smell.

There, some seventy feet away, was the pile of boxes, DetCord looped around them. On top was the fusing mechanism. Its tiny ruby-red LED light was dark.

“Is that it?” Sarah asked.

“I—I think so,” Suarez said. “Uh, the sensor isn’t picking up any microwave emissions. Tom?”

The man in the green Kevlar protective suit said, “Spectrum analyzer finds no evidence of any electric flow. No current flowing through the thing.”

“Approach the device,” Suarez ordered.

The helmeted man in the protective gear lumbered through the doorway.

Sarah held her breath, found herself praying.

Suarez explained to her: “Everything about it seems to be dead, but EMP won’t defeat a mechanical fuse, so he’s got to look for himself.”

Tom approached the device, walking up to it slowly, and did not feel his foot brush against a taut, almost invisible wire. He unfolded a flat, canary-yellow screen and placed it behind the black box, then pointed a small cylindrical object at it.

Suarez explained: “Those are CB2 screens. They fluoresce when hit by X rays. He’s using a Min-X-Ray SS-100 portable fluoroscope to send X rays through the thing, so he can see an image on the screen. He knows what to look for—mostly, any deviation from the device you folks intercepted.”

“Looks clear,” Tom shouted.

“Clear,” Suarez shouted to the rest of the team members, some three hundred yards off.

Tom opened the black box and looked inside. All the solid-state electronic guts of the fusing mechanism had been fried.

The bomb was dead.

But something caught his eye, just a glint at first, and he felt his stomach go cold.

It was a large mechanical stopwatch. A big, old, round-faced stopwatch that appeared to have been modified. A sweep second hand was moving at a normal pace, but to Tom, seized with panic, it seemed to be racing.

Two wires came out of the watch, snaked out of the box into the explosives.

He whirled around, saw the simple trip wire he had set off as he approached the bomb. A low-tech kind of thing commandos used in the jungle. The kind of thing that’s not affected by electromagnetic pulses or anything fancy like that.

The second hand continued to sweep along the face of the stop watch, toward a steel pin, and when it made contact, the bomb would blow. A sixty-second stopwatch. Less than thirty seconds remained.

From behind him, Tom heard a shout: “What the hell…?”

“Back off!” Tom shouted hoarsely. “It’s not dead!”

A simple booby trap, Tom thought. It hadn’t been in the mechanism they had inspected. Of course: Baumann trusted nobody, not even whoever had made his fusing mechanism. He’d put in a backup.

Two wires.

Two wires emanated from the watch. What did that mean?

Did he dare cut the wires?

What if it were a collapsing circuit, which meant that if you cut the wires, the circuit would automatically close, and the fucking bomb would go off?

Tom felt his fingers tremble.

Cut the wires or not?

Two wires.

Less than ten seconds remained.

No. A collapsing circuit always needed three wires.

Just over five seconds before the steel second hand touched the steel pin …

He snipped the wires.

Involuntarily, he winced, braced himself.

A second … two … three.

Nothing.

He exhaled slowly, felt tears spring to his eyes.

The thing was dead. He turned around slowly, numbly, and said, too quietly: “The render-safe is complete. The thing’s dead.”

Suarez sank to the ground in involuntary expression of relief. Sarah braced herself against the doorjamb and stared at the bomb in disbelief. Tears of relief welled up in her eyes.

“The render-safe is complete,” Suarez called out. “The thing’s dead.”

And then Sarah’s walkie-talkie crackled. “Cahill, Cahill, Roth.”

“Roth, Cahill,” she replied. “Go ahead.”

“We’ve spotted your man.”

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

The area six miles in radius from the center of La Guardia Airport is officially La Guardia airspace. As Dan Hammond’s ASTAR approached the uncontrolled airspace above the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, he was contacted by La Guardia Class B service operations. Flying into a high-density air-traffic area as he was, his craft was now under strict ATC control. ATC mandates your helicopter route, at a prescribed altitude. For each flight, you’re issued a transponder code, which was in this case 3213. The transponder code tags up on the radar screen with your tail numbers, also known as registration numbers or N numbers. The tail numbers used to be painted only on the bottom of the aircraft, but now they are required to be visible from both sides. Also, because of drug-smuggling problems, the numbers are now required to be fully twelve inches high, which makes them visible from quite a distance.

Now, as he steered the chopper off into the controlled airspace just north of the helipad, he heard, “Helicopter three two one three, you’re north of your prescribed route. State your intentions.”

Hammond hit the talk switch. “I’ve—I’ve got problems—” he started to say, which was the beginning of his prepared line.

But the ATC interrupted: “Uh, helicopter three two one three, we’ve got a NOTAM posted for the area you’ve just entered.” A NOTAM is a Notice to Aviators and Mariners which declares a certain area off-limits.

A NOTAM? For what? Now, Hammond was momentarily confused. Who the hell would have expected this? What was the NOTAM all about?

He hit his talk switch again to ask.

CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

She raced up the stairwell to the twentieth floor of the building, up a narrow set of iron stairs that led up to the roof, and stepped out of the roof exit into the dank gray late-afternoon air. She gasped for breath. Behind her in the stairwell waited several police backups. Several much taller buildings loomed on two sides. Shouts and sirens and the honking of car horns rose from below.

Two shapes were silhouetted against the glare. She couldn’t see their faces, but she recognized them at once.

Jared. He was gagged and handcuffed. One heavy steel handcuff tightly encircled both of his tiny wrists. The other end of the cuff was attached to the plastic handle of a rectangular object, a box of some kind, which Sarah at once realized was a child’s plastic lunchbox. She looked again, not comprehending. Could she be seeing right?

His silken voice filled her with horror.

“Sarah,” Baumann said with repellent gentleness, “I don’t want to hurt Jared, but I will if I absolutely must. It’s up to you to see that doesn’t happen.”

“Your bomb’s dead,” she said, short of breath, gasping. “It’s pointless now for you to keep going.” She moved closer so that her walkie-talkie, locked in transmit mode, could pick up their conversation for the benefit of the listeners down below.

“No closer, please. Now, I’d rather get out of here than stay. So now you and I will make a deal.” It was strange: he was speaking in a South African accent and sounded like a different person.

“What do you want?” Sarah said, queasy with disgust at negotiating with this monster.

“In just a few minutes, I will be leaving the building. I’m taking Jared with me.”

“What do you mean, taking him
with
you?” She was exhausted, bone-tired, and couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Now she could see Jared’s face. His eyes were wide with fright; he appeared frozen.

“Only for the first part of my journey. Just far enough to guarantee safe passage. Traveler’s insurance. I promise you Jared will not be hurt as long as you cooperate.”

“You
promise
—!”

“There’s no reason for me to hurt your son. I’m quite fond of him.”

Something was gradually coming over her now, an iciness, a fusion of hatred and determination and fierce protectiveness that made her less afraid. “Take me instead,” she said, and took another step forward.

“Please, Sarah,” Baumann said. “For Jared’s sake, stay where you are. Listen carefully, please. I don’t want you or your people to make any mistakes. First I must make a phone call.” Baumann pulled from a pocket a cellular phone and punched a few numbers. He listened for a couple of seconds, then punched a few more. “There,” he said. “Thank you, Jared, for the use of your phone. Now the bomb is armed.” He put away the cell phone and held up a small object Sarah couldn’t quite make out. “This is a dead-man switch, Sarah. You know how it works, I assume. This button is connected to a small radio transmitter, and to a signal generator that produces a continuous tone. It’s transmitting that tone now. A one-milliwatt transmitter—very low-powered. Good only for line-of-sight. As long as I keep the button depressed, the signal is transmitted. But if I let go of the button, my transmitter stops sending the signal.”

“What are you saying?” she said, although she knew. Her voice shook.

“In Jared’s lunchbox is a small explosive device—half a block of C-4 connected to a blasting cap, which is connected in series with a paging device that has been modified. I’ve just called the pager, which caused the relay to close. Now there’s only one thing that’s keeping the bomb from detonating: the signal that my transmitter is generating. The normally closed relay is connected to a radio receiver—a scanner programmed for a specific frequency. As long as the receiver hears a signal—a continuously transmitted signal—it keeps the switch open, and he’s safe. But if the signal stops, or is interrupted, the relay closes, closing the circuit between battery and blasting cap, initiating the C-4. The bomb detonates. And Jared is gone. Just half a pound of C-4, no more, but quite enough to turn him into mist.” Jared’s eyes closed.

“You’re sick,” Sarah murmured. “You’re sick. He’s a child.”

“So, if anything happens to me—if, let’s say, you or any of your people are so impulsive as to shoot me—I release pressure on the switch, and the bomb blows up. If you try to jam the signal, the receiver will no longer see a clear signal, and Jared will die. If you attempt to grab Jared, you will take him out of the line of sight of my transmitter, and he will die. And don’t even think of trying the standard FBI negotiation tactic of waiting me out, because if the battery in either my transmitter or Jared’s receiver runs down, the bomb will go off.”

“And how do I know you’re telling the truth?” she asked hollowly. She knew that NEST, as well as members of her own team, were listening to this exchange over her walkie-talkie, and she was terrified that some hothead might make the mistake of trying to rush Baumann somehow.

“I suppose you don’t, do you? But do you want to take that chance?”

Sarah stared at Baumann, then at Jared, and said with a sudden passion: “How can you do this? Don’t you care for Jared, even a little?”

Baumann smiled cynically. “Don’t bother, Sarah.”

“I understand who you are, what kind of thing you are. I just thought you had some feelings for Jared. Would you really do this to Jared? I don’t believe you would.”

Baumann’s smile faded. She was right; he did feel almost tender toward the child, but such feelings were treacherous, and his escape was paramount. He knew Sarah would never allow her son to be harmed, and that was the point, after all.

“Don’t test me, Sarah,” he snapped. “Please don’t test me. Now, Jared is going to accompany me to a nearby airport. When I’m safely aboard a plane, he’ll be returned to you. Understand, Sarah, that if anyone makes an error, or is too aggressive, and Jared is killed, his blood will be on your hands.”

Sarah heard a faint noise in the distance, and she looked up. Gradually the noise grew louder, a noise she recognized. She looked up at the sky, startled at first by the
whump-whump-whump
noise. It was a helicopter, black and sleek, with tinted windows.

*   *   *

In the NEST command post, Dr. Richard Payne turned away from the walkie-talkie. “Suarez,” he barked, “get over here. I need some equipment.”

*   *   *

The
whump-whump-whump
of the helicopter rotor blades was now deafeningly loud and directly overhead.

Baumann shouted: “Are we clear? Are we in agreement?”

Sarah looked at Jared. Tears ran down his cheeks. “Yes,” she shouted back. The decision was not difficult. But could she trust him to release Jared once the helicopter landed? What choice did she really have?

The chopper blades whumped and thundered.

Baumann walked to the helicopter, clutching Jared. The fuselage of the helicopter hovered above the roof of the building, then softly landed. From below, through the racket, he could hear sirens, saw the reflection of red and blue lights against the surrounding buildings.

He jumped through the open helicopter door and shoved Jared onto the seat next to the pilot’s. With a quick, unseen motion, he clicked off the bomb inside the Power Rangers lunchbox, then switched off his transmitter.