The Zero Hour

“Yes,” Brian said. “In fact, she had breast cancer.”

“Oh,” Jared said, somewhere between sad and bored.

“She was young,” Sarah said.

“It happens. It’s a horrible thing.” He paused. “You’re divorced?”

“Yeah,” she said, and quickly said, “You’re great with kids-do you have a son?”

“Clare wanted to have a kid before she got sick. We both did. Before I got my Ph.D. and went into academia, I worked for the Canadian Government Children’s Bureau as a counselor. I worked with a lot of kids Jared’s age. He’s a terrific little guy.”

“I think so, but I’m biased.”

“So, you’re alone here? I mean, you and your son?”

Sarah hesitated. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

“Me, too. It’s a tough city to be lonely in.”

“I said alone, not lonely. Anyway, it’s a better place to be alone in than, say, Jackson, Mississippi.”

“Listen, I hope this isn’t too… forward, but I’ve got a couple of tickets to a performance of Beethoven’s late quartets at Carnegie Hall, day after tomorrow.” He reddened as he talked. “I got them for me and a colleague of mine, but-”

“But she can’t make it,” Sarah interrupted, “and you hate to waste a ticket, right?”

“He, actually. He decided to leave the city early and return to Canada. I don’t know if this is your kind of thing, or whatever-”

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “I love chamber music, and the late quartets are among my favorites, but I’m just not a reliable companion these days. I’m in New York on some very pressing business, and my pager’s always going off, and I often have to go in to work at odd times of day or night.”

“That’s all right,” Brian said.

“I don’t think so,” she said. She was drawn to Brian, but instinctively distrustful of any stranger in the city. “Thanks anyway. And-listen, thank you so much for your help.”

“Can I take your number anyway?”

She hesitated, thought it over. “All right,” she said, and gave it to him.

“So can I call you sometime?”

She shrugged, smiled. “Sure.”

“I will. Jared, you’re going to be fine. Just don’t wash your hair for a couple of days. You heard the doctor.”

“Yeah, I can deal with that,” Jared said.

“I thought so. Take care.” He shook Sarah’s hand. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The encrypted message Baumann had faxed by SATCOM emerged with a beep from one of Malcolm Dyson’s personal fax machines in his inner office. From the rest room, where, wheelchair-bound, he found the simple act of relieving himself a veritable Bataan death march, he heard the fax and wheeled out to get it.

Faxes that came through these lines were for his eyes only; mostly they contained political intelligence of a highly confidential nature that could affect a major deal, or they spelled out details of blatantly illegal transactions he preferred his staff not to know too much about.

Recently the Dyson corporate jet had been flying to Moscow quite a bit, and to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, where Dyson’s minions were hacking through some Byzantine dealings in grain and sugar, Siberian oil, and copper refined in Kazakhstan. Most of these undertakings were extremely sensitive, involving massive bribes to politicians. Had one of them soured?

But this one, sender unspecified, was a meaningless jumble of words. He stared at it mystified for a few seconds until he realized that it was the substitution cipher he had worked out with Baumann.

He buzzed for Lomax and had him do the cryptographic heavy lifting. Lomax took the fax and the pocket dictionary to his office and returned half an hour later with the message in clear.

Dyson donned his reading glasses and studied the translation. “The hell’s this supposed to mean?” he asked his aide. “‘Leak your end’ and ‘American intelligence partially knowledgeable’?”

Lomax answered with another question. “If there’s a leak, how does he know it’s from our end?”

“‘Leak,’” Dyson said with a scowl. “How serious a leak? He doesn’t say he’s abandoning the operation; it can’t be that serious.”

“I don’t know.”

“The fuck is ‘partially knowledgeable,’ anyway?”

“Don’t know.”

“I’ve told exactly two people,” Dyson said. “You and Kinzel.” Johann Kinzel ran the Zug, Switzerland, office of Dyson & Company, and was one of Dyson’s few confidants.

“You’ve hardly told Kinzel a thing,” Martin Lomax reminded him. “The roughest outline, really.”

“You two’ve talked about this, though, I’m sure.”

“Of course,” Lomax said. “He’s made all the banking arrangements. But all of our conversations have been on the secure phone.”

Dyson gave his underling a scorching stare. “On the Russian’s phones, I assume.”

“Of course.”

Dyson shook his head. “Those phones are secure-the only ones I want you or Kinzel to use. What the hell does he mean? This office is swept every other day. Arcadia gets a good going-over every Monday. And we can’t even raise the guy, can we? This is exactly how I didn’t want it.”

“At least we know he’s in New York.”

“Cold comfort. One week remaining, and we don’t even know what he’s done.”

“The main thing is that you not be connected in any way.”