The Zero Hour

This particular Airtel was addressed to ADIC NY, the assistant director of the FBI in charge of the New York office. It was from Perry Taylor, and it listed members of a special working group of the Joint Terrorist Task Force, code-named Operation MINOTAUR, along with their affiliations. Five of them were FBI: two from headquarters, two from the Boston office, and one recently retired from the Boston office.

Baumann understood at once that these were the names of the FBI agents who had been assigned to investigate an “alleged,” “impending” act of terrorism in New York City. It was Baumann they were after.

He had the names of his hunters.

He did not want to take the time to bring the papers to a photocopy shop, so he copied down the names and identifying information and replaced the papers neatly in the briefcase. Then he got out of his car, opened the trunk of Taylor’s Olds, replaced the briefcase, and shut the trunk. He quickly leaned over to retrieve the transmitter from the rear bumper-it was too risky to leave it there any longer. He felt along the underside of the bumper until his fingers slid up against the magnetized transmitter and closed around it, and then he heard someone speak very close to him.

“Freeze,” the voice said. “FBI.”

Baumann whirled around and saw Perry Taylor standing just a few feet away, and he could not suppress a smile. He had been sloppy, or perhaps he had underestimated Taylor. Taylor must have seen someone standing next to his car, must have left the supermarket by some unseen exit. He had no shopping bags.

This was a very bad situation indeed, and Baumann’s head spun. He did not want to kill Perry Taylor; that had not been his intention at all. Baumann gave an abashed smile, laughed awkwardly. He spoke in a Southern accent, which by now felt natural. “Of all the places to drop a contact lens,” he said.

He could see Taylor hesitate. “Where’d you drop it?” Taylor asked skeptically. Had he seen Baumann open the trunk?

No one was walking by, no one even close. No one could see them. “Right… right here, somewhere, it’s got to be,” Baumann said, shaking his head. “Man, it’s one of those days.”

“I know what you mean,” Taylor said. “Here, let me help you.”

Of course: Taylor didn’t have a gun with him. His gun was locked in his trunk. Taylor moved closer, pretending to help Baumann look for the lost contact lens, but really-Baumann was sure of it-to grab Baumann, catch him off base, perhaps attempt to disarm him.

“Thanks,” Baumann said, and waited for Taylor to come closer, and when Taylor did, Baumann’s right hand shot toward Taylor’s throat, as quick as the dart of a snake’s tongue, and got hold of the FBI man’s trachea and squeezed, and Perry Taylor sank to the ground dead, looking very much like a middle-aged man overcome by the sweltering heat of a Washington summer evening.

Part 4: FINGERPRINTS

Under fragrant bait there is certain

to be a hooked fish.

– Sun-tzu, The Art of War

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Police around the world still use the old Henry system of fingerprint classification, which groups fingerprints by their various features, their loops, arches, whorls, and ridges.

It is a fairly baroque system. A loop may be ulnar or radial; a central pocket loop may be plain or tented. Whorls come in four types: plain, center-loop, double-loop, or accidental. Additionally, a whorl can be an inside tracing, an outside tracing, or a “meet” tracing. Then there are ridges. Every fingerprint has a unique pattern of ridges, enclosures, ending ridges, and bifurcations, places where the ridge lines end or split in two. To make a positive identification, one must have eight or more points of identification, also called Galton’s details, after the nineteenth-century English scientist Sir Francis Galton. Under the Henry classification system, unfortunately, comparisons have to be done manually, in a print-by-print search, which can take weeks or even months.

But since 1986 a different, computerized method of sorting and storing prints has been in use in the United States. It is called the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, and it uses high-speed optical scanners to analyze prints, digitalize them, and store them in computerized form. The position of minutiae are counted on a 512-pixel-per-inch scale and converted into a series of numbers, which can easily be compared with others. Loops and whorls are effectively turned into bytes and bits. Using AFIS, the FBI and major police forces around the nation have the remarkable ability to compare fingerprints at the rate of nine thousand a minute.