The Zero Hour

The Bureau had come close to cracking the Oklahoma City case, but so much of it was luck. One of the investigators had found a twisted scrap of truck axle with a legible vehicle identification number on it, and he fed that number into Rapid Start, one of the Bureau’s many databases, and then we were off. That was good, basic scut work-but the Bureau had also lucked out when it was discovered that a nearby ATM video camera had captured an image of the rental truck that contained the bomb. And then a cop happened to stop a guy for speeding, a guy who happened to be driving without a license. How many lucky breaks could MINOTAUR really count on?

Perry Taylor’s death had changed everything. None of them really believed he’d been killed in a routine mugging. It was as if Baumann were in the next room now. They could hear his footsteps, his breathing, his approach. He was no longer an abstraction, a code name. He was here.

Lost in her thoughts, Sarah didn’t notice at first that Jared had disappeared.

She looked around, then rose slowly to get a better vantage point. She slipped the files into her shoulder bag. Jared was gone.

She was not yet nervous. Jared was impulsive, prone to run off without thinking, and now he had an accomplice.

She called his name. Several people turned around to look at her.

She called his name again, louder.

“Dammit, Jared,” she said. “Where the hell are you?”

She tightened her fists in anger and frustration, walked aimlessly around the landscaped field, yelled for him.

No answer.

She told herself not to overreact, not to be overprotective. Any moment he’d pop up behind her, laughing at the prank he’d pulled off, and she’d deliver a stern lecture about not fooling around that way in a strange city.

And after she’d circled the field and realized he really wasn’t there, that he probably wasn’t playing a trick, her heart began thudding.

She followed the path near where he and his new friend had been playing, toward the northeast part of the field, which dropped off suddenly into a densely wooded area, and when she heard his cries she began to run.

Three rough-looking late-adolescent boys had circled Jared and were jabbing at him. One of them was grabbing his new leather jacket. Another was wielding a baseball bat. Jared’s face was flushed, his eyes wide with fear.

“Hey!” she called out. “Back off! Leave him alone!”

They turned to look at her, and then two of them approached her.

“Mommy!” Jared cried out.

“Mommy!” mimicked one of them, with dreadlocks and a wispy adolescent goatee.

“Fuck you, bitch,” the other said, waving the bat.

Sarah knew the basics of hand combat, but the truth was she had never had to defend herself physically, not once in her career outside of the FBI Academy, not once when she didn’t have a gun, and right now her gun was in the office suite on West Thirty-seventh Street.

And then she felt a numbing blow to her abdomen, at precisely the same time that Jared let out a terrified scream, and she felt her purse being yanked from her shoulder. One of the young men had swung at her with the bat. With a great fury she lunged at the two attackers, while her son was slammed to the ground by the other, who yanked off his leather jacket. Jared let out a terrible scream.

She hit one of them in the jaw. He barely flinched, grabbed her waist, kneed her in the solar plexus, while the other approached, brandishing a bat. She screamed for help, but barely a sound escaped her throat. “Just leave him alone,” she finally shouted, trying to regain her balance, but they kept coming at her, grabbing her neck, kicking at her abdomen. She screamed again.

“Back off!” said a male voice to her right. “You let her go!” She caught a glimpse of a slender bespectacled man in jeans and a dark-blue T-shirt, walking stiffly toward them. He lunged at the assailants. One of the kids, who had been menacing Jared, turned to fend off this newcomer; the one with the bat swung at him and cracked into his hip, hard.

The man doubled up in pain. His glasses skittered to the ground a few feet away, one lens popped out of the bent frame.

And then, as quickly as they had appeared, the three young men disappeared, tearing off at top speed. Jared was in a heap on the ground, sobbing. Blood was pouring down his forehead, sheeting down. She rushed to him, threw her arms around him.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “My God. Are you all right? Are you all right?”

“Hurt,” came his small, muffled voice.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, feeling his blood-sticky scalp for the source of the gushing blood. He’d been wounded in the head. She squeezed him tight, feeling his body rise and fall rhythmically with his sobs. He winced when she touched a spot, a large gash. She looked up, saw the man in the blue T-shirt getting awkwardly to his feet.

“Is he okay?” the man asked. He had soft brown eyes, a tousled head of salt-and-pepper hair. He clutched his hip, bent down to retrieve his glasses, which looked damaged beyond repair. “Looks like he got hit bad.”