The Zero Hour

Straining to keep a semblance of order and calm, Sarah stood before the MINOTAUR task force. “Whatever our private suspicions,” she said, “we can’t rule out the possibility that Perry Taylor died in a-well, I hesitate to use the word ‘routine,’ but there it is-a routine holdup. At least that’s the way it looks to both the Bureau’s Crime Labs and Washington Police Homicide.”

“In a parking lot in broad daylight?” asked George Roth.

“It was early evening,” she said.

“But the sun was out,” Roth persisted.

“Okay, right, but his car was parked in a fairly remote area of the lot.”

Pappas shook his head, but Sarah couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“Look,” Roth said, “Baumann wants us to think Taylor was held up. Does anyone here seriously think that’s what happened? I don’t know Taylor. You feebees, tell me: was he a drug user?”

“Of course not,” Vigiani said. “Obviously Baumann did this. Which means he’s in the U.S.”

Russell Ullman, to whom Perry Taylor had been something of a father figure, had been silent for most of the meeting. His eyes were rimmed in red. Now he spoke, his voice weak. “Has Crime Labs looked into the MO of the murders at Pollsmoor Prison to establish a correlation?”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “But there’s nothing.”

“How so?” Pappas asked.

“Taylor appears to have died from bullet wounds in the throat and forehead at fairly close range.”

“What do you think?” Vigiani exploded. “Baumann’s going to leave a signature-a billboard saying, ‘Here I am’? Come on!”

“All right,” Sarah said calmly. “You all may be right.”

Roth asked: “Any similarity between Taylor’s death and the death of your call-girl friend back in Boston?”

Sarah shook her head. “Ballistics tells me no.”

“If Duke was killed by Henrik Baumann,” said Pappas, “that tells us he’s not unwilling to kill a major FBI official, with all the heat that brings down. The question then is, what would his motive be? Nothing appears to have been stolen from Taylor or his car, except a wallet.”

“Baumann might have wanted the ID cards,” Ullman said. “Or he might have wanted to make it look like a mugging.”

“The motive,” Vigiani said, “was to try to paralyze the hunt for him. And if he’d kill Duke Taylor, he’d certainly kill any of us in an instant.”

***

On Jared’s third day in New York, on a Sunday afternoon, he insisted on going to the park to play. Sarah had worked all day Saturday, and had planned to work all day Sunday too, but at the last moment she relented. It was important for her to spend some family time with Jared. And she could do some work while he played. So they went to Strawberry Fields at West Seventy-second Street, and she read files while he batted a softball around by himself. It would have been a sad sight, this solitary kid in a brand-new leather jacket (a gift from Peter), tossing a ball up into the air and batting it, then running after it and starting all over again, were it not for the fact that he was so clearly enjoying himself.

In short order he had befriended another boy of roughly the same age who took turns pitching to him and then being pitched to. Relieved that he had met someone, Sarah returned to reading Bureau intelligence files on terrorist attempts within the United States.

The truth was, she was discovering, the Bureau’s record on catching terrorists was spotty. In 1986, she read, a domestic group called the El Rukin organization tried to buy an antitank weapon from an FBI undercover agent, intending to pull off some terrorist act in the United States in exchange for money from the Libyan government. A couple of years later, the FBI arrested four members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who were trying to buy a heat-seeking antiaircraft missile in Florida.

Fine, but what about all the black-market weapons sales that the Bureau didn’t catch? Barely months after the TRADEBOM investigation, which Alex Pappas was justly so proud of, a ring of Sudanese terrorists was arrested in New York, and members of the Abu Nidal organization were apprehended in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Missouri.

Pappas talked of probabilities, but what were the odds, really, that the special working group would catch this terrorist-and without a photograph?

People liked to joke about the World Trade Center terrorists, with their rinky-dink operation, returning to Ryder Truck Rental to get their five-hundred-dollar security deposit back, but Sarah didn’t find it amusing. Sure, the World Trade Center bombers were jokers, clowns, amateurs, but look what they had accomplished. And imagine what a top-notch, professional terrorist like Henrik Baumann could do.