The Zero Hour

The telephone on a table against the wall rang. Ken got up to answer it.

“I’m inclined to leave Elkind out of this,” Phelan said.

“For you, Sarah,” Ken said.

Sarah took the phone. “Yes?”

“Agent Cahill, this is Duke Taylor, at headquarters.”

“Yes?” she said, her heart hammering. It had to be something serious.

“How fast can you get your bags packed and get on a plane to Washington?” Taylor asked. “I need to see you immediately.”

Part 3: KEYS

Be extremely subtle, even to the point

of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious,

even to the point of soundlessness.

Thereby you can be the director

of the opponent’s fate.

– Sun-tzu, The Art of War

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“Goedenavond, Mijnheer,” the portly little man in the corner booth said as he half rose to greet Baumann at the Hoppe, a well-known bruine krogen, or “brown café.” This was a type of pub peculiar to Amsterdam, so named for its tobacco-smoke-stained walls and ceilings. A loud and crowded place, poorly lit, it was located on Spui, in the middle of Amsterdam’s university section.

“Good evening,” Baumann replied, assessing the man, whose name was Jan Willem Van den Vondel, but-presumably because of his girth-was universally known by the nickname Bones.

Bones was a “mere,” an ex-mercenary who had worked in the Middle East and Africa under a bewildering variety of aliases. He had once been one of the dreaded affreux, the “frightful ones,” the white freelance soldiers who helped keep dictators in power throughout Africa and Asia. In the sixties and seventies, he had worked in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire), in Angola in the days when it was owned by the Portuguese, in white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in Yemen under the old monarchy, and in Iran under the Shah. In 1977 he had helped lead an unsuccessful effort to oust the Marxist government of Benin, a small country in West Africa. A year later he had been instrumental in aiding Ahmed Abdallah to seize the presidency of the Comoros Islands, an archipelago off the southeastern coast of Africa. A decade later, several of his employees, working as guards for President Abdallah, had assassinated the very man they had put into office.

Van den Vondel was loathsome in appearance, lacking in personal hygiene and malodorous. He had cauliflower ears as well as bad teeth, presumably stained by chewing tobacco, a wad of which bulged in his cheek.

Yet Bones had become one of the best forgers in the business. He had agreed to meet Baumann, a man he did not know, only because Baumann had been vouched for by a mutual friend, an ex-mercenary now residing in Marseilles whom Baumann had hired to do a nasty job in Ostend some ten years earlier. This Frenchman, who’d worked under Bones in the Belgian Congo, knew Baumann only as a wealthy American named Sidney Lerner-a cover Baumann had gone to a great deal of trouble to establish.

“Sidney Lerner” was one of the Mossad’s many thousands of sayanim, volunteers who help out the Israeli intelligence service out of a sense of loyalty to Israel. A sayan (Hebrew for “assistant”) must be 100 percent Jewish, but not an Israeli citizen; in fact, sayanim are always diaspora Jews, though they may have relatives in Israel. In the United States alone there are some fifty thousand sayanim. A doctor sayan, for instance, will treat a Mossad agent’s bullet wound without reporting it to the authorities. A sayan can refuse an assignment-they often do-but can be relied upon not to turn a Mossad agent in.

As Baumann had expected, the forger had asked this mutual friend why on earth Sidney Lerner couldn’t get his false papers from his katsa, his Mossad case officer. There were reasons, the mercenary said darkly. Are you interested or not? Bones was interested.

Baumann got right to the point. “I need three complete sets of documents.”

The forger’s eyes narrowed. “Belgian?”

“American and British.”

“Passports, driver’s licenses, et cetera?”

Baumann nodded, and took a sip of beer.

“But Mr. Lerner,” Van den Vondel said, “it’s much cheaper to get them in New York or London.”

“Speed is of greater importance to me than expense,” Baumann explained.

The forger flashed a big, feral gray smile. This was music to his cauliflower ears. “Tell me, please, Mr. Lerner, exactly what sort of schedule are you on?”

“I need them by tomorrow evening.”

Van den Vondel burst out laughing, as if this were the most riotously amusing joke he’d ever heard. “Oh, my,” he exclaimed helplessly between guffaws. “Oh, my. And I need to be the king of England.”

Baumann got to his feet. “I’m sorry we’re unable to do business,” he said.