The Zero Hour

“Sure, Aaron did, but over a much longer period of time. Babe Ruth’s career was shorter than Aaron’s, for one thing. The Babe wasn’t even a full-time hitter-for the first six years of his career, he split his time between pitching and playing outfield, Jared.”

Jared hesitated, fixed Pappas with a long stare. “The best was Willie Mays.”

“Oh, so you’re dumping Hank Aaron now.”

“Mays was one of the greatest fielders ever. And Ruth had an advantage-the ballparks in the nineteen-twenties were smaller.”

“Oh, for God’s sake-” Pappas began.

“Boys,” Sarah interrupted. “If we don’t eat, I’m going to pass out and Jared’s going to have to hitchhike home.”

Jared finished his supper quickly and disappeared downstairs to the basement to play with Pappas’s ancient Victrola. Sarah and Pappas, sitting at the table and poking at the remains of the cannolis, could hear the distant ghost strains of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.

They talked for a while about the darkroom Pappas was building in the basement, about the adult-education course he was taking in black-and-white photography. Sarah ran the details of the Valerie Santoro murder by him, mentioning the database search and the still-unclear involvement of a banker named Warren Elkind.

“I seriously doubt,” she said, “that the head of the Manhattan Bank killed Valerie.”

“Why? Rich people don’t murder?”

“Come on. There’s something more to this.”

“There always is, kid. Always is. When someone decides to become an FBI informant, he or she’s taking a chance.”

“Sure, but…”

“You know the pay’s the same whether you develop an asset or not.”

“My job is to protect the source-”

“Sarah, if you really want to protect a source, you’ll never use her information, and what good is that? Look, always go with your gut instinct. You’re suspicious about your informant’s murder, don’t leave it to the locals. See if the answering-machine tape turns up anything. Whether it’s the Mob or your banker, you’ll know soon enough. Speaking of the Mob, you still seeing that Italian guy?”

Sarah gave him a blank stare and said in mock indignation: “Is that supposed to be funny? Do all Italians belong to the Mafia?”

“Yeah, and all Greeks have souvlaki stands,” Pappas replied. “What’s his name again-Angelo?”

“Andrew,” Sarah said, “and he’s history.”

“He was a nice-looking guy.”

“Not my type.”

“Not potential father material?”

“Alex, he’d pretend Jared wasn’t even there. He couldn’t deal with the fact that I had a son.”

“You probably won’t believe me when I tell you you’ll find the right kind of guy-for you as well as for Jared. You’re the one who’s got to fall in love with him. Jared-Jared’ll come around.”

“You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

Pappas nodded. “It’ll happen. Plus, whoever you get serious about is going to have to pass Jared’s scrutiny, and he’s an excellent judge of character. Gotta be-he likes me, doesn’t he? So don’t worry so much. It’ll happen.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Within hours after Edwin Chu and George Frechette, the NSA cryptanalysts, received the encrypted fragment of telephone conversation captured by a Rhyolite spy satellite above Switzerland, Edwin Chu broke the code.

Actually, the NSA’s Cray supercomputers, using all available analytical skills, including several cryptanalytic techniques unknown outside the agency, broke it. But Edwin Chu had hovered over the computer and had done what he could to help-sort of a binary backseat driver.

The National Security Agency is always interested in new encryption schemes, so the work Chu did with the Cray late that night and into the early morning wasn’t purely to satisfy his own curiosity.

But that was a large part of it.

It wasn’t easy. In fact, had Chu been more senior and had more clout, cracking the code would have taken less than an hour, rather than eight hours. He’d wanted to use the latest generation of Cray supercomputers, but had to settle instead for an older Cray.

“I was sort of hoping this would be RC-4,” he explained to Frechette, referring to a commercially available encryption package. The only cryptographic software that NSA permitted to be exported out of the United States used algorithms of a certain length, specifically 40-bit. The best-known of these software packages were RC-2 and RC-4, tunable ciphers that were reasonably secure-except from the NSA, which has special-purpose chips designed to crack them in just a few minutes.

“Piece of cake,” he modestly announced to George Frechette, handing him a set of headphones. “There’s supposed to be this new crypto firm in Zurich that’s been making new secure voice-encryption phones and told the Agency to go fuck off.”

“Good for them,” Frechette murmured. Unknown encryption schemes paid their mortgages.