The Zero Hour

“The consequences for the American economy are, according to the Federal Reserve chairman, incalculable. We have two reports now, from Washington, where the White House is said to be ‘gravely concerned’ as this disaster unfolds, but first from New York City, where an estimated three million small investors and bank depositors have had their entire life savings wiped out.”

Then there was videotape footage of desperate crowds storming Manhattan Bank branch offices in Bedford-Stuyvesant and the Bronx. Dyson took a cigar from the humidor on his desk and snipped its end with intense concentration, muttering, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, folks.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY

Warren Elkind’s inner office was chaos. His desk phone rang nonstop; young men and women rushed in and out with messages. It was crisis mode. His bank was crashing and burning. Sarah stood at his office door, still.

“Where the hell have you been?” Elkind shouted to her across the room. “This fucking computer virus, or whatever the hell it is, has emptied the bank’s coffers, down to the last penny, and now they’re telling me they’re never going to unwind this mess-”

“So now you want to talk.”

“Christ! All right, I want everyone out of here. Everyone!”

When the office was cleared out, Sarah came closer. “When you called me, you mentioned Malcolm Dyson. You think he’s behind this?”

“How the hell do I know? I’m saying it’s a possibility.”

“There’s nothing in your FBI file about Malcolm Dyson.”

“It’s sealed, for God’s sake!”

“What’s sealed?”

“The scumbag probably blames me. He was indicted in the biggest insider-trading scandal ever to hit Wall Street, which is why he went fugitive, but he probably blames me. Thinks he’d still be a U.S. citizen, free and clear and living in Westchester, if I hadn’t turned him in.”

Sarah said, coming still closer: “Did you turn him in?”

“It wasn’t exactly that way,” Elkind said.

“You were the witness that turned him in,” Sarah said. “You were the only one who knew. You made the case.”

“He needed the bank’s help in financing an immense stock buyout, and he offered to cut me in. I refused. I’m a banker, not a kamikaze pilot.”

“You turned him in to the SEC,” Sarah prompted.

“Not quite so simple.”

“Nothing ever is.”

“After the SEC got on to him, he invited me to lunch at the Harvard Club. He wanted to make sure we ‘got our stories straight’-i.e., that I’d lie for him. By then I’d agreed to cooperate with the SEC. The SEC investigator wired me. He wanted to tape a tiny microphone and battery pack to my undershirt, but I wasn’t wearing any, and they didn’t want to tape it to my skin. So the guy offered me his undershirt to wear! I told him, look, I don’t wear polyester blends. But I wore the guy’s undershirt anyway. They found an empty supply closet next to the dining room and sat there while I broadcast to the tape recorder. I was terrified Dyson would find out.”

“I guess he eventually did. He didn’t threaten you or anything?”

“No. The one time I was convinced he’d go ballistic, and go after me, was when he was almost killed by the feds, in a botched shootout. I didn’t go out in public for weeks, let me tell you.”

“When was that?”

“The date, you mean?”

“Right.”

“I’ll never forget it. It was the day of my wife’s birthday-we were at ‘21’ celebrating, and they brought a phone to the table. It was one of my clients in Europe. He told me Malcolm Dyson had been fired on by U.S. marshals in an ambush in Monaco, that his wife and daughter had been killed, and that he’d been wounded. That he’d probably be paralyzed for life. I remember thinking, shit, I wish they’d gotten him too. When you strike at a king, you must kill him, as the saying goes. This was going to be one guy out for revenge. That was June twenty-sixth.”

“That’s tomorrow.”

June 26 was also the day when, according to the second telephone intercept, the final payment was scheduled to be made to a Panamanian bank.

“Excuse me,” Sarah said. “I’ve got to get going.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

“I want you to contact the Justice Department,” Sarah told Vigiani, “and get a list of all known employees, colleagues, associates, and friends of Malcolm Dyson, who might be located in Switzerland. Then get in touch with NSA and have them pull up voice samples of any of those people they have in their archives. And have them try to do a voice match with the two voices in the intercepted phone conversation.”

There was a knock on the door to Sarah’s office. Roth pushed it open, saw that Sarah was meeting with Vigiani, but barreled ahead anyway: “Listen, Sarah, I got a call-”

“Roth,” Sarah said curtly, “I’m in a meeting.”

“Yeah, well, you might want to listen to this. We just got a call on the twenty-four-hour line from the police in Mount Kisco, New York. Responding to that NCIC lookout we put out.”

Sarah looked up. “Yes?”

“A couple of hours ago they got a theft report from an excavation company out there. One thousand pounds of C-4 plastic explosive was stolen from its warehouse last night.”