The Zero Hour

No, Charreyron would live. Baumann shook his hand cordially, got into his rented car, and drove off. Doing business with someone he knew from another life was an enormous risk-but so too had been his escape from Pollsmoor. He could not proceed with this undertaking until he knew for certain whether his whereabouts remained unknown.

There were ways to find out. He had been driving through the Meuse Valley, along the Sambre River, which meets the Meuse River at Namur. This stretch of the road was breathtakingly beautiful, with high cliffs and canals, farmhouses and the ruins of ancient brick buildings. After he’d passed through Andenne, and before he’d reached Namur, he pulled off the road and drove around until he located a long stretch of woods, a line of trees beside a clearing. There he switched off the engine.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Of the fifty-six FBI field offices and four hundred resident agencies throughout the United States and Puerto Rico, the New York office is generally considered both the best assignment and the worst. From the ABSCAM convictions against members of Congress for taking bribes, to the siege against the five major Mafia families, to the bombing of the World Trade Center, New York has always had the sexiest cases.

New York is the largest of the field offices, with some twelve hundred agents. It occupies eight floors of the Jacob J. Javits Federal Building, at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan. Unlike all the other field offices, New York is headed not by a special agent in charge but by an assistant FBI director, because it is both bigger and more important than the others.

Sarah had always found the Javits building gloomy. Tall and plain, with a facing of black stone alternating with sandstone, it is set in the middle of a forlorn cement “park” studded with concrete planters holding marigolds, ferns, and petunias-some landscape designer’s valiant attempt to make the setting cheery. Pigeons skitter across the broad granite ledges around a reflecting pool.

On her first morning, she arrived before eight, already perspiring from the heat. The one-bedroom furnished apartment she was subletting was on West Seventy-first Street near Columbus Avenue, very close to the subway stop, a Gray’s Papaya, several decent pizza places, and a Greek coffee shop. For the first couple of days, she had lived on nothing but Greek salads and slices of pizza. What else could you ask for?

Daylight, perhaps? Somehow, by some ingenious stroke of architecture, all of the apartment windows gave onto shadowed air shafts. It was always midnight in her small bedroom, in the cheaply furnished living/dining room, dark enough to grow mushrooms.

For the first time in years, Sarah was living alone. It was disorienting, at times lonely, but not entirely unpleasant. She’d stayed up late the night before, reading in the tub and drinking wine. She played a recording of the Beethoven late quartets she’d picked up at Tower Records and listened to it until it began to sound like Philip Glass.

Jared was away at camp in upstate New York. For months he’d demanded to go to summer sleep-over camp, and she had kept refusing. The money was too tight these days, she’d explained; he could go to day camp near Boston.

But with the sudden transfer to New York, and the wrench that threw into her son’s life, she had to scrape together the money. The new assignment brought with it an increase in salary, which made paying for camp feasible. Anyway, it was certainly better for him to spend a couple of weeks in camp (though he’d wanted a month) than to live in New York City, not a place for eight-year-old boys, she thought.

The lobby of 26 Federal Plaza was cavernous, with high marble walls, several long elevator banks, cash machines. She felt small. She presented her credentials at the reception desk, and was directed to Counterterrorism, in a corner of the twenty-third floor.

A very tall, thin, good-looking man of forty introduced himself as Harry Whitman, the chief of the Joint Terrorist Task Force. He wore a khaki summer-weight suit with a standard-issue white shirt and, the one grace note, a bright turquoise tie.

“So, you’re Sarah Cahill,” he said. “Welcome.”

“Thanks.”

His office was sparsely decorated with a small, autographed photo of Hoover-not a good sign, Sarah mused-and, for some reason, a large official photo of George Bush in a fake-gilt frame, propped on its side against the side of his desk. Bush had been out of office for years. Definitely not a good sign.

“You and the rest of the special task force will be located off-site,” he said. “I’ll introduce you to the others in a couple of minutes, and explain how the joint task force operates. You’re in charge of a code-name operation. But first things first. I guess Perry Taylor in D.C. liked you, but he likes you even more now.”

“Why?”

“Thanks to your suggestion, Perry shook the bushes in South Africa for a lead on your terrorist.”

“And?”