The Zero Hour

Sarah, of course, remembered it well. On July 21, 1976, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the British ambassador to Ireland, was killed when a land mine detonated in a culvert under the road on which he was driving, in the countryside near Dublin. Ewart-Biggs had been ambassador for a mere three weeks.

The assassination was the work of the IRA’s Provisional Wing. But it has long remained a matter of much speculation who actually carried out the bombing. British Intelligence later learned that it was a paid professional hit-that it was not done by the IRA.

But by now it is a matter of certainty within intelligence circles, based on forensic and intelligence data, that Ewart-Biggs was killed by the same mysterious person who killed Carrero Blanco in Madrid. The name has never been made public.

“This Baumann,” said Vigiani fuzzily through a lungful of smoke, “is one mean motherfucker, if you’ll pardon my French.”

***

“Agent Cahill?” the Technical Services analyst said over the secure link a little more than an hour later. “Your question about the timer?”

“Yes?”

“Well, I think you may be on to something, ma’am. I looked at it real close, and a couple other guys here looked at it, and we all pretty much agreed it’s almost identical to the timers that Edwin Wilson sold Libya in 1976.”

“‘Almost identical’?”

“It’s built just like those timers, ma’am, but it’s not one of them. You know the black plastic box that houses the timer? Well, I ran the plastic through a melting-point test, and I found it melts at three hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit, so now I can say for certain it’s not the same timer.”

“You’re sure.”

“Positive. We’ve got several of the Wilson timers, as you call them, and they’re all made from a nylon resin, which melts at five hundred and two degrees Fahrenheit. But the one we got here, that’s an acetel resin. This one’s different.”

“So it’s a fake? You think someone made a fake timer that looked just like the Libyan one to make the bomb look like it was done by the Libyans?”

“That’s what I’m saying, ma’am. There’s no other reason why someone would construct a duplicate timer except to fool the counterterrorist folks like you. Someone’s trying to snow us.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

AAAA Construction and Excavation was an eyesore on the outskirts of the otherwise lovely Westchester County town of Mount Kisco, New York. It was nothing more than a small brick structure surrounded by trailers, set in a field of rubble, surrounded by alarmed barbed-wire fencing.

Four A, as its seven employees called it, advertised construction and specialty blasting in the Manhattan Yellow Pages, in a small red-outlined box that featured a line drawing of a crane with dirt cascading from its shovel. It was the first listing under “excavation” in the Yellow Pages, thanks to all those A’s.

Its demoralized and underpaid employees thought a better emblem would have been a dollar bill with wings on it, to symbolize the fact that Four A had been losing money steadily for the last four years, ever since David Nickelsen, Jr., had taken over the family business after his father, the company’s founder, suffered a stroke.

But AAAA Construction and Excavation suited Henrik Baumann’s purposes just fine. He’d gone through the Yellow Pages listings of construction companies and rejected any that didn’t have the licenses-from ATF and the local municipality-to use or store explosives.

That still left quite a few candidates. But of those, only a few fit the desired profile: small, privately held, and in sufficiently bad financial shape not to immediately turn away an English guy who was calling to discuss some private business regarding C-4.

Fortunately, David Nickelsen, Jr., was not overburdened with scruples. Baumann knew it would not be difficult to find someone in this line of work who’d do business with him. Nickelsen listened to the proposition of the well-dressed man who identified himself as John McGuinness from Bristol, England, and agreed to do business. Whether it was Mr. McGuinness’s polite manners or his offer of fifty thousand dollars in cash that persuaded him, David Nickelsen, Jr., gladly accepted.

The Englishman explained that he represented a foreign buyer-he would not say more-who was having difficulty obtaining an export license for a major construction job in Kuwait. This buyer needed a five-hundred-foot roll of DetCord, several M6 Special Engineer Electrical Blasting Caps, and one thousand pounds of C-4, U.S. military designation Charge Demolition Block M-112.

But not just any Charge Demolition Block M-112. For technical reasons too complicated to go into, it had to have a specific manufacturer’s code.

What Baumann did not bother explaining was that the numbers he gave the corrupt construction-company owner referred to a certain manufacturer and lot. He had found these codes in a list of government contracts published in a journal called the Commerce Business Daily.