The Zero Hour

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.”