The Zero Hour

Paul Morrison had been awakened at four-thirty this morning by a watch officer at the center, who had in turn been given a heads-up by the NSA’s deputy director of the Office of Telecommunications and Computer Services, concerning a SIGINT intercept deserving immediate attention. By the time Morrison arrived at his office in the center, the complete transcripts of the intercepted telephone conversation had been placed on his desk, having been secure-faxed over from NSA.

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TOP SECRET UMBRA

FILE: TCS-1747-322

D/OTCS, DD/OTCS, D/DIRNSA

COMINT intercept decryption. Transcription text complete.

VOICE I:… Mr. Heinrich Fürst/ [First?] has accepted the sales assignment.

VOICE II: He has? Excellent. When [blank] the field office in New York? [blank segment]

VOICE II: [blank segment] target being?

VOICE I: Warren Elkind [word segment blank]… attan Bank including [blank segment]

VOICE II: Oh. Right. Uh, so he’s, he’s serious about this.

VOICE I: He hired a professional.

VOICE II: I don’t doubt that. I’ve seen the guy’s dossier. Probably the smartest [three-second silence]… uh, one alive-

VOICE I:-the stupid ones don’t live-

VOICE II:-know that. But I’m concerned-what if he turns out to be a loose cannon? I mean, he’s hardly, he’s not fully controllable.

VOICE I:-get the job done.

VOICE II: But not traceable?

VOICE I: He’ll be taken care of.

VOICE II: Right. No doubt. But we, couldn’t we still be linked? Bringing down Wall Street-well, you saw what happened with the World Trade Center thing and with Oklahoma City. They didn’t rest until they found the guys. If we’re connected in any way-

VOICE I:-not going to happen. The boss knows what he’s doing.

TOP SECRET UMBRA

“All right,” said Hoyt Phillips, clearing his throat summarily. “There may or may not be something here.”

“Are you and I reading from the same document?” a woman seated across the table from him asked in astonishment. This was Margaret O’Connor, a small, fiery, thirty-four-year-old woman with short brown hair, a face full of freckles, and a surprisingly deep voice. She was the liaison from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Phillips’s thick white eyebrows shot up. “Don’t let’s overreact, now, folks,” he cautioned. “What we’ve got here is a couple of guys talking in a roundabout way-”

“Hoyt-” He was interrupted by a handsome black man in his early forties, wearing a blue suit and horn-rimmed glasses. Noah Willkie, the center’s liaison with the FBI, had been detailed to Langley for the last seven months. “There’s no denying they’re referring to a terrorist-‘probably the smartest one alive’-who’s been hired by someone, presumably their ‘boss.’ And they’re afraid this guy might not be ‘controllable,’ meaning he’s acting as an agent on their behalf, which is why he was hired.”

“Noah,” Phillips explained patiently, “if you’re at all familiar with NSA product, you know you’re always getting static, fragments of phone calls that inevitably sound scarier than they are. For heaven’s sake, some MIT student doing his junior year abroad in Vienna places a call to a buddy of his in London and uses the phrase ‘nuke,’ as in ‘I got nuked last night’-he got tanked on lager-and suddenly that trips an alarm somewhere and we’re all yanked out of bed in the middle of the night.”

Deputy Director Morrison watched his boss in silent frustration, wondering whether Phillips was genuinely unconcerned about the intercept or was simply undermining his deputy for reasons of his own. The director had approved Morrison’s suggestion that the meeting be an hour and a quarter earlier than usual, but then maybe Phillips was just covering his ass. Did he honestly believe this intercept was meaningless? Or was he posturing?

“Uh, Hoyt,” Morrison said gently, “I think this may bear some scrutiny. The transcript discusses a ‘target,’ obviously the Manhattan Bank. They’re talking about getting a ‘job’ done in a nontraceable way. They’re concerned about being linked. They’re talking about ‘bringing down Wall Street’-”

“Meaning what, exactly?” asked the DIA liaison, Wayne Carter.

“I don’t know if that’s a figure of speech or what, frankly,” Morrison admitted. “But they’re comparing it to the Trade Center bomb and Oklahoma City.”

“Do we know who these two are?” Margaret O’Connor asked the NSA liaison, Bob Halpern.

“No, we don’t,” Halpern replied. “The signal caught the attention of some of our cryppies because of its encryption scheme-they’d never seen one like it before.”

“Well, at least we have a name here,” said a CIA Operations officer, Richard Jarvis. “The name of the terrorist, right? Heinrich Fürst? That’s a hell of a lot.”

“It’s a code name,” Morrison replied. “And it doesn’t correspond to any alias or code name in any of our databases.”

“Christ,” someone snapped in disgust.