The Zero Hour

NYNEX Cellular Site Number 269 was an area of approximately three irregularly shaped city blocks almost at the southernmost tip of Manhattan Island, near the South Street Seaport. The omnidirectional antenna received and transmitted signals to and from all NYNEX-serviced car phones and cellular phones situated within a chunk of real estate bordered by Water Street, Broad Street, Whitehall Street, and the one-block-long Stone Street. Running parallel to Stone, and dividing the almost-but-not-quite-rectangle into three wedges, were two short streets, Bridge and Pearl. Jutting into the rectangle from the Water Street side, and ending at Pearl, was Moore Street, one block long and paved in cobblestone.

Contained within this area are the blue-glass tower of the New York Health and Racquet Club; a large, twenty-story NYNEX building; and, across Water Street, a new forty-story office-building tower adorned with art deco ornamentation and built around a sizable plaza. This is One New York Plaza; beneath it is a shopping arcade, which can be entered at the corner of Water and Broad. On Pearl Street is the immense forty-story blue-glass tower called the Broad Financial Center, headquarters of the NASDAQ Financial Exchange. Across Whitehall is a pair of black forty-story towers, One State Street Plaza and Battery Park Plaza.

A team of twenty-two uniformed cops and FBI street agents was dispatched immediately to search the area for any building that contained a sign for the Greenwich Trust Bank.

A cell site is not a precise designation: there are areas of overlap, sections of streets that may be serviced by one of two or even three different cells. It was clear, however, that the cell site that was transmitting back and forth to Sarah’s Motorola phone was Cell Site 269. Jared was stationary, located within one building, so there was no handing-off between cell sites to complicate things.

Moreover, each NYNEX cell site is configured into three “phases,” which divide the area into three segments: alpha, beta, and gamma. If the cell site is a circular pattern, as it roughly is, each phase of each antenna serves one-third of the area of that circle.

From the carrier frequency signal, the FBI tech was soon able to determine that Jared was transmitting from the gamma phase of Cell Site 269, which narrowed the search down to no larger than a one-square-block area. This meant the area around Moore Street, between Pearl and Water.

One of the search team assigned to the Wall Street area, a rookie cop named Julio Seabra, turned right up Moore Street, which was narrow and paved in cobblestone. For some reason, there were security cameras on the second-floor level of the buildings here, trained on the street. And then he saw a gleaming new twenty-story structure of glass and steel. There, at street level, was a two-foot-square brass plaque indicating the presence of an office of the Greenwich Trust Bank.

Officer Seabra stared at the sign for a few seconds before he remembered to radio the command center.

***

“We got the address,” Pappas shouted.

“Oh, thank God,” Sarah said. “Where?”

“Not a skyscraper or anything. Some twenty-story building right off Water Street, on Moore.”

“What’s in it?”

“A Greenwich Trust office on the street level, which is how the street cop pegged it. Not a branch office or anything, but some administrative offices-”

His desk phone rang, and he picked it up before the first ring was finished. “Yep?” He listened for a few seconds, then his eyes became round. “Christ almighty.”

He hung up the phone. “On the mezzanine level of that building, unmarked and basically invisible to the public, is a huge data-processing center called the Network, which is-”

“All right,” Sarah interrupted. “Alex, I want you and two junior people to stay here. One is to man my phone in case Jared calls again. The other stays by the STU-III in case of direct contact from CIA or anyone else. You run the show here. Roth, you I want downtown with me, directing operations, being traffic cop. Everyone else reports immediately to NYO Command Center.”

“Right.”

“Okay, I need you to establish phone contact with whoever’s in charge of the Network. If there’s any way they can do it, I want them to shut down operations immediately. Notify all member banks to halt all funds transfers. And get us a cruiser immediately.”

“You got it.”

“I want the entire block evacuated, including all surrounding buildings.”

Roth snapped, “Are you crazy? You know how many huge motherfucker office buildings are down there? There’s New York Plaza, One State Street, Battery Park, a NYNEX building, the Broad Financial Center-”

“Do it,” Sarah said. “Notify the police commissioner-we’ve got the authority-and block off the streets with pylons and sawhorses and cruisers and patrolmen, whatever they’ve got. Block off sidewalks. I want every patrolman they can get down there. No one is to enter the area. I want every building evacuated.”