The Zero Hour

Nothing happened. There was no investigation, no mention in the local newspaper, nothing.

He had gotten away with it. It was like hunting a wildebeest, only a hundred times more exciting, more real.

And it had been so simple. Baumann solemnly swore to himself that he wouldn’t kill another human being again, because he was afraid that if he continued, he wouldn’t be able to stop.

It was then that a complete and stunning transformation overcame the young Baumann. His personality changed almost overnight. He turned outward, became lively and outgoing. He was witty, winning, suddenly popular. He began to play sports, to go out. He made lots of friends. Within a few years he took a great interest in girls.

His mother was baffled, but delighted. She attributed this miraculous change in her son to some mysterious effect of the hormonal surges of puberty. Whatever had clicked inside her son, she was grateful for it.

Only rarely did she pause to observe that her son’s newfound demeanor seemed hollow at its center. There was something dead in his eyes, something false in his joviality, something fundamentally false. With her, his closest (and only) living relative, he was polite, proper, even a touch formal. Between them there was, she sometimes felt, a dead space, a coldness.

She died when he was in his late twenties, already an accomplished operative for BOSS, the South African secret police. He made the funeral arrangements with an appropriate measure of grief, which he also displayed at her funeral. The small handful of friends and neighbors from their hometown who attended the service took note of how deeply distraught the young Baumann was, the poor thing, who’d lost his father so early and now his mother, and such a good and polite young man, too.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Deputy Assistant Director Duke Taylor escorted Sarah Cahill into his office and introduced her to Russell Ullman and Christine Vigiani, who got to their feet and welcomed her with grudging hospitality. They’d have been happier to meet a boa constrictor.

The air-conditioning was particularly strong here on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building. Why, Sarah wondered, did the directors of both CIA and FBI have seventh-floor offices? Did old J. Edgar himself say, “If that’s the way the Pickle Factory does it, me too?”

Sarah assessed them quickly. Ullman was big and towheaded, a corn-fed version of Peter. Vigiani looked smart as a whip and was probably trouble. Taylor she liked instantly, liked his serenity, his self-deprecating humor.

Settling into his high-backed leather desk chair, with a huge FBI seal behind him, Taylor said, “So, you were in Germany on the Lockerbie thing.”

“That’s right.”

“You got a lot of raves. Apparently you helped break the case.”

With a glint in her eye, she said: “You think if I cracked Lockerbie I’d be sitting here?”

“Where would you be?”

She shrugged. “Who knows?”

“But you know well enough that it took us twenty-one months to find the timing device, and that was what cracked the case. If it hadn’t been for you, we’d probably have cracked it-but it would have taken even longer. The Bureau owes you a major debt.”

“I’ll happily take a pay raise.”

“File says you showed strong leadership. You ran a squad in Heidelberg. Obviously you also like to speak your mind.”

“When I think it’s important. My superiors in Heidelberg got a little annoyed when I insisted there might be more to the case than a couple of Libyans.”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe Syria working with Iran. It’s just a theory. A few months before Pan Am 103 went down, a couple of guys from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command were arrested in Germany with barometric detonators. Who sponsors them? Syria. But because the Bush administration saw Syria as crucial to the Middle East peace process, they wanted to leave Syria alone. Then we needed Syria to take our side in the Gulf War, so they were definitely off the hook.”

“Interesting,” Taylor said. “No comment.”

“That sounds familiar.”

He smiled. “I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long in the Bureau.”

“I have a reputation for getting stuff done. I get cut a lot of slack.”

“Do you have a theory on the World Trade Center bombing too? Some people don’t think we’ve completely solved that one either.”

“You don’t really want to know.”

“Try me.”

“Well, we never really pursued the international angle adequately. It’s like Lockerbie-we just don’t want to know, because what do you do if you find out? Everyone seems to be happy pinning the blame on some incompetent followers of some blind sheik. But if you look at the evidence closely, you’ll see that one of members of the gang was an Iraqi sleeper agent. I think he was the control. I think Saddam Hussein was behind the Trade Center thing.”

“Did they call you in on OKBOMB?”

“No. By then I was in Boston. I wish they had.”

“If I’d been in charge then, I would have. Do you miss being in Counterterrorism?”