The Zero Hour

Twenty years ago or so, Harry Whitman explained, an agent in the Criminal Division had attended the FBI Academy with a South African policeman. The FBI National Academy runs an intensive fifteen-week program at Quantico, Virginia, to train midlevel police officials in the latest investigative techniques. Out of the one hundred law-enforcement officials in each class, fifteen or twenty are foreign.

“This South African guy, name of Sachs, had gone to three FBI-run retraining sessions in Europe, so our people’d had a little bit of contact with him,” Whitman said. He and Sarah stood at the entrance to his office. “We checked him out with State and the Agency, to see if maybe the guy went bad. Negative. Luckily for us, this Sachs fellow’s now in the security services, so we got a line right into the heart of darkness. Had someone on the CIA team in Johannesburg make contact, real unofficial.”

“The CIA guy asked the South African cop for information on the alias Heinrich Fürst?”

Whitman nodded. “And anything else he could get. Taylor’s thinking was that if there was something rotten going on and our contact was party to it, this contact would trigger a flurry of communications. Right after our man met with this guy, we laid on the surveillance. Had the satellite cowboys monitor all signals traffic into and out of South Africa, checking the frequency of cable traffic to their embassy here.”

“And?”

“And nothing unusual went out. No frantic calls or telexes. You can’t prove a negative, but it’s a good sign the contact’s clean.”

“Maybe.”

“Next morning he came back to us with a name. Nothing on any Heinrich Fürst, but ‘Prince of Darkness,’ yes, oh my yes. ‘Everyone in the intelligence service knows who that is-fellow named Henrik Baumann.’ Code name, or cryptonym, is-or was-Zero, designating their most skilled agent. So we had our legat make an official request to several branches of the South African government, the attorney general, the police, blah blah blah, for all records on one Henrik Baumann. Passport applications, birth certificate, files, the works. Now we sit and wait. See if we really do have our man.”

“Are they being cooperative?” Sarah asked.

“Are you kidding? They’re frantic! They’re all alarmed that a former South African agent may be involved in terrorism. Especially a white guy left over from the old regime. They love to dump shit on the old government. Actually, I should call the Communications Center, see if anything came in.”

He picked up his desk phone and pressed a button. Sarah examined the discarded photograph of George Bush and wondered how long it had been resting on its side. Since Clinton’s inauguration?

“I see,” Whitman was saying to the telephone handset. “I see.” His eyebrows were arched.

Sarah looked up at him curiously, trying to interpret his tone.

Whitman hung up the phone and looked directly at her with a peculiar smile. “We’ve got a full set of prints-”

“Great.”

“-and a kink in the fishing line. Just over three weeks ago, our Mr. Baumann escaped from maximum-security lockup at Pollsmoor Prison. Pollsmoor police detectives discovered he was missing, found a couple of bodies, and opened an Escaping Docket to investigate an escape from lawful custody. They followed standard procedure-Form SAP-69, with the fugitive’s fingerprints, and a dossier containing court statements and other records were sent over from central records at the South African Criminal Bureau in Pretoria. But nothing turned up, not a trace of our friend. The South Africans normally don’t reach out to the international authorities in the case of an escaped prisoner, even a former member of their own security services. They’d all but given up looking for him, even put out a burn notice on the guy. Anyway, I’d say we’ve got the right man. Now let me take you to your lovely suite of offices and introduce you to the happy campers you’ll be working with.”

***

The “lovely suite of offices,” as Harry Whitman had put it, was the penthouse of a decrepit building in midtown Manhattan, on West Thirty-seventh Street near Seventh Avenue. The neighborhood was lousy, the ancient clattering elevator even less promising.

Once Sarah got off the elevator at the penthouse, however, the scenery changed dramatically.

The site, which the FBI was renting from a company that sold display fixtures to retail stores and had recently relocated to Stamford, Connecticut, had last been used by the FBI for a Chinatown drug sting operation, and so the security was already in place. Sarah entered a reception area that was walled off from the rest of the floor. A phony name was on the wall.