The Zero Hour

“Look, just make it easier on all of us,” Sarah said. “Go home. Jared doesn’t want to go out to dinner with you tonight.”

“Kid needs a father,” Peter said quietly.

“Yeah,” Sarah agreed. “It’s just not clear you’re the one.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

At a few minutes after four o’clock in the afternoon, the office mail courier, a chubby middle-aged black man, dropped a small yellow bubble-pack envelope, about four inches wide by five inches long, into Sarah’s in basket. “Just came in,” he said. “Rush.”

“Thanks, Sammy,” she said. The label bore the return address of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

She tore open the envelope, removed the tape, and put it in a tape player.

The voices were indistinct, forlorn, distant conversations in a wind tunnel. Even played on the most high-fidelity tape deck Sarah could wangle from Audio Services, the acoustic quality of the tape recording was woefully bad. But once you got used to it, you could make out the words.

Will Phelan-brow furrowed, intently concentrating, stroking his mustache absently with his pinkie-sat at the conference table beside Ken, who leaned way back in his chair, arms folded across his ample belly, eyes closed.

Sarah provided the narration. “This one,” she said, “is just a routine dunning call.” A man’s voice identified himself as being “from Card Services” and left an 800 number. Then a beep, then the synthesized female voice of the answering machine’s day/time stamp announced: “Monday, four-twelve P.M.”

“All right,” Sarah said. “Listen.”

Another man’s voice. If the first voice sounded lost in an electronic maelstrom, this one was even more distant, bobbing on crashing waves of static.

“Mistress? It’s Warren.” A surge of crackly static, then: “… the Four Seasons at eight o’clock tonight. Room 722. I’ve been hard for days thinking about you. Had to jerk off in the lavatory on the plane. Probably against some FAA law. I’m going to have to be punished.”

Phelan arched his eyebrows and turned to look at Ken, who seemed on the verge of exploding with laughter.

A beep. The day/time voice stamp announced: “Monday, five-twenty P.M.”

Phelan cleared his throat and rumbled: “All right, you got-”

“Wait,” Sarah interrupted. “One more.”

A rush of static, hollow and metallic. The next voice was male, high-pitched, British-accented. The connection was distant; every few seconds it broke up.

“Valerie, it’s Simon. Good evening.” Slow, deliberate, phlegmatic. “Your friend is staying in Room 722 at the Four Seasons Hotel. You are looking for a small, round, flat object that looks like a compact disk you might play on your stereo…”

A break, then: “… gold-colored. It may or may not be in a square sleeve. It will almost certainly be in his briefcase.” A long rush of static. “A van will be parked down the street from the hotel this evening. You will take the disk to the van, hand it over, and wait for it to be copied. Then you will return the disk to the hotel’s front desk. You will tell them you found it. When you return home, you will be visited by a friend around midnight, who will give you the rest of what we’ve agreed upon. Goodbye.”

A beep, then the mechanical voice: “Monday, six oh five P.M.”

Sarah clicked the tape off, looked at the two men.

A long beat of silence.

Phelan said: “Is this admissible?”

“Easily,” said Ken. “Bruce Gelman’s got credentials up the wazoo.”

“This some kind of CD-ROM they’re talking about?” Phelan asked.

Sarah said, “Probably. The situation we have here-the five-thousand-dollar payoff in bills cut in half, the theft of a computer disk-this isn’t a run-of-the-mill pimp-killing-a-prostitute thing. This is a fairly elaborate setup, I’d guess.”

Phelan nodded contemplatively. “By whom and for what?”

“My theory is that Warren Elkind was set up to be robbed by Valerie. That Elkind had something, or has access to something-something computer-related-that’s worth a lot to some people with a lot of resources.” Sarah ejected the cassette tape from the machine and idly turned it over several times.

Phelan sighed long and soulfully. “There’s something there,” he admitted. “But not enough to go on. What’d you turn up from the computer search?”

She explained that the interagency computer search for any mention of Elkind’s name had yielded exactly 123 references. The information had come over the teletype, instead of by letter, because Phelan, fortunately, had marked the search “immediate” rather than routine. Most of the references were garbage-“overhears,” as they’re called in the intelligence community. Some CIA flunky in Jakarta heard Warren Elkind’s name mentioned in connection with a major banking arrangement with the Indonesian government. Someone in U.S. military intelligence in Tel Aviv had heard a rumor (false, it turned out) that Elkind had once accepted a bribe from an Israeli minister. Someone else had heard that Elkind had bribed a member of the Israeli government. A lot of junk.