The Zero Hour

“Whoever used the stolen Moffatt passport entered the country twelve days ago,” Pappas argued, “which is eight days after he broke out of Pollsmoor prison. The fit is too good. Plus all the other factors-”

“Chris,” Sarah said, “there’s no point in talking any further. We have a team on it in D.C. already, so we’ll have our answer soon.”

***

In fact, at that very moment, there were several FBI teams in Washington searching for Baumann.

One of the flight attendants had been located, at her apartment near Dupont Circle, and had actually laughed when the FBI agent asked her if she remembered the passenger in seat 17-C. The customs agent who had processed Baumann/Moffatt’s entry was similarly incredulous. “You gotta be kidding,” he said. “You know how many hundreds of people I processed that day?” FBI street agents were unable to turn up any cab drivers at Dulles who remembered taking a fare that resembled the sketch of Baumann’s face.

Another FBI team was poring over the flight manifest that United Airlines had just faxed over. They were fortunate to be dealing with an American carrier, because foreign ones tended to be recalcitrant. Some airlines would not turn over their flight manifests without a criminal subpoena-difficult to get, because Baumann was not being sought in a criminal matter. Or they’d request a “national security letter,” a classified document that must adhere to the attorney general’s stringent guidelines on foreign counterintelligence.

Thank God for American multinational conglomerates. In a few minutes, the FBI team knew Baumann had purchased his tickets in London, with cash, an open return. They were also able to study the I-94 form that all arriving passengers are required to fill out. The address Baumann had given was false, as they expected it to be-no such street existed in the town of Buffalo, New York.

More important, they now knew which seat Baumann had sat in, which meant they knew the name of the passenger who sat next to him. Baumann had sat on the aisle, but on his right had sat a woman named Hilda Guinzburg. An FBI team visited Mrs. Guinzburg, a feisty seventy-four-year-old, at her Reston, Virginia, home and showed her a copy of Thomas Allen Moffatt’s passport photograph from the State Department archives.

Mrs. Guinzburg shook her head. This was definitely not the man she had sat next to on her flight from London, she insisted. This confirmed that Moffatt’s passport photograph had been doctored and used by someone else.

And the I-94 form was then sent to the FBI’s ID section to test for latent fingerprints.

***

After changing out of his filthy clothes and showering, Leo Krasner went for a walk.

When he reached the burnished silver Manhattan Bank building, he strolled into the atrium as casually as he could and took the elevator to the twenty-third floor. The employee cafeteria was on this floor, so there was no security.

He found a bulletin board and posted a notice, then posted the identical notice on a board in an employee lounge. He posted several other copies on other bulletin boards on the floor.

Then he returned to his apartment and went to work.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

This is New York, where no one knows his neighbors, Baumann reflected as he turned the last key in Sarah Cahill’s triple-locked door.

He was out of breath and soaking wet. It was half past noon, but the sky was dark, and torrential rain was coming down with a Biblical vengeance. He wore a raincoat, the sort of tan belted topcoat just about every man in the city was wearing right now, although he had bought his in Paris from Charvet.

He had heard that when it rains in Manhattan the city comes to a halt and it becomes impossible to get a taxi, and it was true. It had taken him a long while to find a cab, which had then become stuck in the midday rush-hour traffic, exacerbated by the weather.

Sarah would not be home for hours, and Jared was still at the YMCA. True, there might have been problems if Sarah’s neighbors were home during the day (which they were not) or if one of them chanced to see him entering her apartment and mentioned it to her.

But this is New York. Strangers exhibit certain predictable behavior. Like women and their handbags. When a woman does not know you, she clutches her handbag as if it contained her life’s savings, though in fact rarely does it hold anything besides lipstick, compact, keys, grocery receipts, dry-cleaning slips, a scrawled note, and keys.

When a woman feels she knows you better, she will relax that grip. It is a mark of intimacy almost animalistic in nature. In your apartment, preparatory to lovemaking, she will go to the bathroom and, depending on what she needs, may leave her purse on the coffee table in front of you. Sarah had gone to use the phone on her second visit to his apartment. This told Baumann that despite her tough demeanor, she was a trusting person.