The Zero Hour

He examined Sumner Robinson’s passport closely. The days when one could just scissor out the original owner’s photograph and paste in one’s own were long gone. Now, the key page of the U.S. passport, which contained photo and identifying information, was laminated with a clear plastic oversheet, a “counterfoil,” designed as a security feature. Another security feature was the emblem of an American bald eagle, taken from the Great Seal of the United States, which grasped in its talons the arrows of war and the olive branch of peace. The eagle, which also appeared in gold ink on the front of the passport, was printed on the counterfoil in green ink, slightly overlapping the passport holder’s photograph.

Lost in concentration, Baumann sucked at his front teeth. He knew the U.S. State Department had spent a fortune on special, forge-proof passport paper manufactured by a company called Portal’s. Yet the security of the passport actually hinged on a single, cheap piece of clear plastic tape.

He called down to the hotel’s front desk, told the clerk he urgently needed an electric typewriter to prepare a contract. Would the clerk send one up to his room? Certainly, he was told, although it would take a few minutes to open the office containing the typewriters; it was closed for the evening.

A few blocks from the hotel he located a photocopy-and-printing shop that was open all night, blazing with fluorescent light. He instructed the clerk to photocopy and reduce the eagle image on the front of the passport, explaining offhandedly that he needed to put an American eagle on the front of a three-ring binder for a presentation to a major French client early in the morning. No laws against that. Then, on a Canon 500 color laser copier, the eagle was reproduced onto a sheet of clear crack-and-peel label stock in green ink. Baumann had several copies made: it was easy to make mistakes. After a brief stop at a coin-operated automated photo booth, he returned to the Raphaël.

There he meticulously removed the old counterfoil laminate from the passport, careful not to rip too much of the paper underneath. With an X-Acto knife, he removed Robinson’s photograph and replaced it with his own. Inserting the sheet of clear plastic label stock into the electric typewriter provided by the hotel, he pecked out the exact same biographical data that had appeared on Robinson’s passport and had been lifted off with the old laminate.

By three o’clock in the morning, he was satisfied with the result. Only the closest inspection would reveal that the passport had been dummied up. And departing from Paris’s busy Charles de Gaulle Airport as he was, on a crowded commuter flight, he knew the French inspectors would scarcely have time for even the most cursory of glimpses at this American businessman’s passport.

He ran a steaming-hot bath and soaked in it for a long time while he meditated. Then he dozed for about two hours, arose, dressed, and finished packing his Louis Vuitton suitcase.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Prince of Darkness had begun.

Dyson put down the telephone and felt a shiver of anticipation. He had hired the best (he hired only the best), and this savant of the terrorist netherworld would do his thing, and in precisely two weeks the deed would be done.

He pressed a button on his desk phone to summon his aide-de-camp, Martin Lomax.

Dyson & Company A.G.’s corporate headquarters building on the Rue du Rhône in Geneva was a glass cube that, during the day, reflected the buildings around it. It was a stealth office building: depending on the time of day and the angle from which you looked, the glass-walled box disappeared. At night it lit up a fierce yellow-white as Dyson’s traders worked, barking out orders halfway around the world.

Dyson’s office was on the top floor, southwest corner. It was entirely white: white leather sofas, white wall-to-wall carpet, white fabric covering the interior walls. Even his massive, irregularly shaped desktop had been hewn from an immense vein of white Carrara marble.

Only the artwork, here tastefully sparse, provided splashes of color. There was Rubens’s picture of three women, Virtue, seized from a rich man during the Second World War. A Van Dyck (Holy Family with St. Anne and an Angel) had disappeared some time ago in Italy, only to reemerge at Dyson & Company A.G. Holbein’s St. Catherine had made its way from a stash in East Germany soon after the Wall fell.