The Zero Hour

By the time the bellboy knocked on his door to deliver the suits on hangers, the boxes of shoes, and the rest of the clothing he had purchased that morning, Baumann had sketched out a diagram of action-very rough, but a workable plan, he felt sure. Then he got dressed and went out for a walk.

Stopping into a tabac, he bought a carte de téléphone, the plastic card with a magnetized strip issued by France Telecom, which would allow him to place several international calls from any public phone booth. He found one in the basement of a café and, after debating this next step for a few moments, placed a call to New Haven, Connecticut. Using the address he’d copied down from the slip accompanying Sumner Robinson’s traveler’s checks, he obtained Robinson’s home number from directory assistance.

A woman’s voice answered. It was late in the evening there, and at first she seemed startled, as if awakened by the call.

“Is that Mrs. Robinson?” Baumann inquired in a plummy, grand-public-school, Sloane Ranger British accent. “Name’s Nigel Clarke, calling from Paris.” He spoke, as someone once said, as if he had the Elgin Marbles in his mouth.

The woman confirmed she was Sumner Robinson’s wife and asked immediately whether everything was all right with her husband.

“Oh, my Lord, not to worry,” Baumann went on. “The thing of it is, I found your husband’s passport, in a cab, of all places-”

He listened to her for a moment and went on, “Got your number from directory assistance. But tell your husband he shouldn’t worry-I have it here, safe and sound. Tell me what to do, how to get it to him-” He listened again.

“Quite right,” he said, “at Charles de Gaulle airport.” Baumann’s voice was jolly, though his eyes were steely-cold. He heard someone clamber down the stairs. A young woman, exhaling a cumulus cloud of cigarette smoke, saw he was using the telephone and flashed him a look of irritation. He gave her a level, gray, warning stare; she flushed, threw her cigarette to the floor, and went back up the stairs.

“Oh, not leaving Paris till the end of the week, is he? Brilliant… Right, well, the problem is that I’m getting on a plane back to London in just a few seconds, you see, and-oh, damn it all, that’s the final boarding call, I’m afraid I will have to run-but if you’ll give me an address I’ll send it off by DHL or some other overnight service the very instant I get to my house.” He pronounced it “hice.” He chuckled pleasantly while the woman burbled her gratitude for his generosity. “Heavens, no, I wouldn’t hear of it. Shouldn’t cost more than a few pounds anyway.” He pronounced it “pineds.”

He had done the right thing, he knew. True, the American businessman might not have reported his passport lost or stolen and applied to the American embassy for a replacement. Now, however, his wife would call him at the hotel, tell him that his passport had been recovered by a nice Englishman at Charles de Gaulle Airport, but not to worry, Mr. Cooke or Clarke or whatever his name was going to send the passport by express mail right away.

Sumner Robinson would wonder how his passport ended up in a cab. Perhaps he’d wonder whether he’d put it into his safe after all. In any case, he would not report the passport lost or stolen today or even tomorrow-since it would be on its way back to him in a matter of hours. The friendly Brit would certainly get around to sending it the next day: why the hell else would he have called New Haven, after all?

The passport would be valid at least three full days. Perhaps even more, though Baumann would never take the chance.

He hung up the receiver and mounted the stairs to the street level. “The phone’s all yours,” he told the young woman who had been waiting to use the phone, giving her a cordial smile and the tiniest wink.

***

Baumann had dinner alone at the hotel. By the time dinner was over, a large carton had been delivered to his room containing the MLink-5000. He unpacked it, read through the operating instructions, ran it through its paces. Turning the thumbscrews on the back panel, he pulled out the handset, then flipped open the unit’s top, adjusted the angle of elevation, and placed two calls.

The first was to a bank in Panama City, which confirmed that the first payment had been made by Dyson.

The second was to Dyson’s private telephone line. “The job has begun,” he told his employer curtly, and hung up.

***

In the last decade it has become considerably more difficult to forge an American passport. Not impossible, of course: to a skilled forger, nothing is impossible. But Baumann, familiar though he was with the rudiments, was hardly a professional forger. That he left to others.

In a day or so he’d contact a forger he knew and trusted. But in the meantime, he’d have to do his best, in the six hours until he had to arrive at Charles de Gaulle for his early-morning commuter flight to Amsterdam.