The Zero Hour

She leaped down the staircase and grabbed the still body and could only see the back of Jared’s head. Was he dead, was he unconscious? Would he be blind, paralyzed for life? Suddenly Jared let out a great, blood-curdling scream, and she yelled with relief. She tried to pull his head out, but it was stuck. Pulling and twisting as gently as she could, she extricated his head from the gap between stair and riser and looked at his bruised red face and saw he was all right. She cuddled him to her shoulder and chanted, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

He was fine. Ten minutes later he stopped crying, and she gave him a bottle of formula.

Only then did she realize how much of a hostage a mother really was.

Now, her mind spun with thoughts as she sank into a chair, momentarily weak and dizzy.

That “Brian Lamoreaux” was the cover for a South African-trained terrorist named Henrik Baumann was grotesque, yet in some horrible way logical. What did she know about the man except that he had tried to save Jared and her in Central Park…

… in a setup, that was suddenly clear. He had arranged the mugging-probably had paid some eager teenagers to attack this little boy for the sheer fun of it and some cash besides, a good-faith payment up front and the rest afterward. Then he had “happened” to be there, and had rushed in to help them out-a clever way to meet a woman suspicious of this new city. He must have known they didn’t have his photograph, or else he would certainly have never dared to insinuate himself into her life; the risk of exposure would otherwise have been far too great. He acted the bumbling, frail intellectual, the exact opposite of his true persona, but could not disguise his naked body-his muscular, powerful torso, his broad thighs, his well-defined biceps. Why had she given so little thought to his superbly conditioned, sinewy body? Yes, men worked out these days, so why wouldn’t a Canadian architecture professor? But why hadn’t she suspected that there was something not right about this man she knew hardly at all?

She thought of the few nights they had made love-what a misnomer, what a fraudulently inappropriate phrase; no, they had had sex-and felt a shiver of revulsion and a wave of nausea.

Revulsion, not betrayal. She cared now only about Jared.

Everything moved in slow motion, stop-action photography, unreal. She was trapped in a nightmare.

After a minute, the paralyzing fear gave way to steely resolve. She ordered all members of the task force to assemble at once, then she put in a request to the Department of Energy to mobilize the Nuclear Emergency Search Team.

She had to find Jared. To find Jared was to find Baumann; to find Baumann was now a matter of pressing concern to the entire FBI, to the City of New York.

***

Baumann surveyed the twelve banker boxes, stacked in four piles of three each, lined up against one wall. Each box was sealed with bright antitamper tape marked FDIC EVIDENCE.

He knew that no one in the building would have touched those boxes during the few hours he’d have to leave them there. After all, he had arranged with the Greenwich Trust Bank for these boxes of FDIC “evidence” to be held in the basement for an audit tomorrow. The officer at the Greenwich Trust Bank had in turn contacted the building manager and secured his approval to leave the boxes in the basement storage area overnight. The space was often used for deliveries, so the building manager had no objections.

The boxes contained the C-4, but since plastic explosive is roughly twice as heavy as the paper that was supposed to be inside, he had only half-filled the boxes with C-4 and then placed stacks of phony bank papers on top of the explosive. The weight of each box was therefore reasonable, and in any case, sealed as they were, no one would dare open them.

It made sense, certainly, for these boxes to be stacked here, but the precise location was no accident. They were against the elevator shaft, in the core of the building. Like most buildings, this one had an extremely strong core and was cantilevered out from that. To set off the bomb here was to maximize the chance of bringing the building down and ensuring that the Network was destroyed. It was a simple matter of structural engineering.

And just a floor above were the Unisys mainframes of the Network.

From his briefcase he drew out a roll of what appeared to be white clothesline. With a commercially available pre-inked rubber stamp, he had marked it ANTI-TAMPER/DO NOT REMOVE/TAMPER DETECTION SYSTEM IN OPERATION. He looped the cord securely over and around the twelve boxes several times.

This was the DetCord, the diameter of which was two-tenths of an inch. One end of it, tied in a triple-roll knot, he fed into one of the boxes and into the C-4 explosive.