The Zero Hour

Sarah cleared her throat and launched into a summary of the information they had so far and read aloud from a paraphrased summary of the NSA intel intercepts. Annoyingly enough, she explained, she couldn’t give copies of the actual intercepts to them, since none of them had been cleared, though she was working on getting at least one of them cleared to act as liaison with NSA from now on. She didn’t explain-no reason for them to know-that CIA and FBI were now at each other’s throats over the leak of the NSA intercept to the FBI. But the two agencies were always skirmishing, and it would blow over. She explained about the CD-ROM that had been stolen from Warren Elkind and copied, and then returned to him.

“Has anyone talked to this Elkind guy?” asked Lieutenant George Roth, who then popped a breath mint into his mouth.

“Not yet,” Sarah said. “The New York office sent a couple of agents to talk to him. They briefed him about the threat, but he seemed fairly unconcerned, said he gets threats all the time. Which is true-his security people are always handling one threat or another. But he won’t talk, won’t submit to questioning. His attorney was with him, wouldn’t let him answer anything.”

“Prick,” said Roth. “We should just let the fuckers bomb the bank, or zap Elkind, or whatever they want to do. Serve him right.”

“It’s his right not to talk to us,” Sarah said.

Pappas said, “We should try again. Maybe you should try talking to him.”

“I’m working on it,” Sarah said. “In my own way. He’ll talk, I promise you. One of the main things we want to find out is what was on the CD-ROM in question. Ken, why would a terrorist want a CD-ROM?”

“The possibilities are endless,” Ken said. “My guess is that the CD contains something that would allow the bad guys to penetrate the bank’s security. Passwords, keys, that sort of thing.”

“How easy is it to copy a CD-ROM? Is it tough?”

“Oh, God, no way. Shit, it’s practically like photocopying the thing. For a couple thousand bucks you can get a CD-ROM player that has a writable CD-ROM drive in it. Pinnacle Microsystems makes one; so does Sony.”

“All right. Russell, have you reached the Israelis, and are they being helpful?”

“Yes to the first, no to the second,” Ullman replied. “The Mossad is one tight-lipped bunch. They wouldn’t confirm that Elkind is one of their, what you call, sayans. Wouldn’t even say if anyone in Mossad had ever been in touch with the guy. Off the record they confirm they know about Elkind’s kinky side, mostly because he’s a big contributor to Israel and all that, and they like to be informed. They say they don’t know anything about terrorism and any connection to Elkind, but they might just be playing it close to the vest.”

“Anything from flight records?” Sarah asked.

“Nothing from any of the major carriers, or even the minor ones,” Christine Vigiani said. “But I wouldn’t expect to find anything unless he’s traveling under his real name or a known alias, and he wouldn’t do that if he’s got any smarts.”

“Sarah,” Pappas put in, “we might want to contact every intelligence service we have ties to-the British SIS, both MI6 and MI5, the French SDECE, the Spanish, the Germans. The Russians may well have something in their archives from Soviet times.”

“Good idea,” Sarah said. “You want to coordinate that? Request any records of Henrik Baumann under his true name, any known aliases, the names of any friends or relatives or associates. Any name we can trawl up. This guy has a record of doing tricks in the terrorist business for years, so he has to have left some trail.”

Pappas nodded and jotted down a note. “I should warn you, we may have to apply some serious pressure. Counterterrorism is like motherhood and apple pie-everyone says they’re for it, everyone says they’ll help, until it comes to the crunch. But I’ll put out the word worldwide.”

There was a hoarse bark of laughter, and Lieutenant Roth said: “I like this. This investigation is so top-secret we can’t tell a soul, except for a few thousand people around the world, from Madrid to Newfoundland. That’s really keeping the lid on.”

“Look-” Pappas began with exasperation.

Sarah turned to the cop slowly with a vacant expression. “Lieutenant Roth, either you’re with us or you’re out of here. It’s as simple as that. If you want to leave, please do so now.”

She folded her arms and stared.

A crooked half-smile slowly appeared on one side of Roth’s mouth. He nodded, almost a bow. “My apologies,” he said.

“Accepted. Now, Ken, we’ve already done a complete database search of Bureau records, but since this is your specialty, maybe you could go over it again and do it right.”

“I’ll try,” Ken said, “but I really don’t know squat about the terrorism indices.”