The Zero Hour

But what appeared to be a Norman Rockwell painting on the outside had turned into Hopper. Taylor’s closer friends and colleagues knew that he and his wife, unable to bear children, had adopted a beautiful baby girl who had died of measles at the age of five. Then they adopted a four-year-old boy who grew up to be the heartbreak of their lives, constantly in trouble with the law, hostile far beyond the normal adolescent rebelliousness, addicted to drugs, a bafflement to his amiable suburban parents. Though Taylor talked about his home life from time to time, he never brought his problems to work. Noah Willkie respected that.

Taylor was eating his typically Spartan lunch when Willkie arrived: a salad, a roll, a can of Fresca. He greeted Willkie warmly, offered him a cup of coffee, and made small talk for a while.

Willkie remembered hearing that Hoover, who was none too fond of the idea of black FBI agents, disapproved even more roundly of his people drinking coffee on the job. Once Hoover had been so enraged to see an agent drinking coffee in his office that he transferred the offending agent clear across the country.

While Willkie reported on the morning’s meeting, and then on Paul Morrison’s odd remarks outside headquarters, Taylor nodded thoughtfully. After Willkie had finished, Taylor did not speak for a long while. Willkie noticed for the first time very quiet classical music emanating from a boom-box radio on the windowsill. He looked around at the award plaques on the wall, at the dictionary stand, the FBI ceramic stein with Taylor’s name on it, a coffee mug emblazoned “Are We Having Fun Yet?”

“Well, I guess the first thing is to run the name Heinrich Fürst through the Terrorist Information Database,” Taylor mused. “Through General, too.”

“Right,” Willkie agreed, “but Paul Morrison at the CTC says he’s already done it, and you know how much better their stuff is than ours.”

“They say it’s better,” Taylor said, smiling. “But if we put one of our best searchers on it-Kendall or Wendy, say-maybe we’ll turn up something. Don’t forget, this is just the NSA’s guess at how the name is spelled, based on a transcription of a spoken conversation. There are probably hundreds of different ways of spelling, or transliterating, the same name.”

“I wouldn’t be optimistic.”

“Fair enough. No reason to be. Next, we take the profiles of every known terrorist in the world and find some way of narrowing them down, winnowing out the wrong ones.”

“I think you can eliminate the pure ideologues,” Willkie suggested. “Abu Nidal’s people. Hezbollah. PFLP. Sendero Luminoso.”

Taylor shook his head. “I don’t think it’s so easy, Noah. Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, whatever you want to call them-they may be Maoist, but they contract out to Colombian narcotics traffickers, right?”

Willkie nodded.

“These days, anyone’s for sale. Ideology sometimes doesn’t seem to matter at all. The only terrorists we can eliminate are those who are dead or locked up. And that still leaves the board wide open-what about terrorists we’ve never heard of, going out for the first time?”

“This reference to ‘the smartest one alive’ or whatever,” Willkie objected. “You don’t call a neophyte the smartest one alive. Anyway, who’d hire a neophyte, right? My guess is, it’s someone with a track record. We may not have anything on him-or her-but whoever it is has got to be experienced.”

“Good point,” Taylor conceded. He shrugged. “But that doesn’t help us any. So let’s go about this from the other direction: the target. The Manhattan Bank.”

“If that’s really the target. It may be a target. Or not a target at all.”

“Also true. But what if we run a complete search on the bank and on Elkind? See if there’ve been any threats. Check out any international operations the bank’s involved in. See if Elkind has any enemies. He may have enemies he doesn’t even know about. Call up everything we’ve got.”

“Hey, you’re talking like you expect me to help you out. I already got a full-time job. Remember? You picked me for it.”

“Oh, I don’t mean you, Willkie. We’ve got plenty of people to do stuff like that. But you can keep us plugged in, give us a heads-up if anything comes along of interest. The CIA may not consider this worthy of study, but then, they’re full of shit.” He gave a big, ebullient smile. “Thanks for coming to me with this. I have to admit I won’t exactly be crushed if we catch the asshole before CIA does.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO