The Zero Hour

“My private life is my own affair.”

“Not for someone in your position of prominence.”

“There’s no difference between what you people are doing now and the way you went after Charlie Chaplin. You don’t find it repulsive?”

“Oh, sometimes I do,” Sarah admitted. “But this kind of gamesmanship is something I’ll bet you’re quite familiar with.”

“That’s Machiavellian-”

“Right-since the end justifies it. Everyone’s always in favor of privacy unless we’re invading the ‘privacy’ of terrorists or assassins-then they’re all in favor of our ‘intelligence.’ I’d have thought that the threat of a terrorist attack on your own bank would have persuaded you to cooperate long ago, but I guess not. Now the choice is yours: tell me everything, or lose your career, maybe even your family.”

Sarah called to mind the society-page photographs she had seen of Warren Elkind’s socialite wife, Evangeline Danner Elkind, at one benefit or another, duly recorded in Town & Country and the Times. She was an anorexic blonde, once beautiful but now the taut-skinned victim of one too many face-lifts. She was what Tom Wolfe called a “social X ray.” She and her husband had four children, one at Choate, one at Exeter, one at Vassar, one doing drugs and living off Dad’s money in Miami.

Obviously Evangeline Elkind knew nothing of her husband’s proclivities, and the threat of public exposure was potent. Sarah was disgusted with herself, though outwardly she seemed calculating and cool.

Of course, it was far from a sure thing that to own up to his regular liaisons with Valerie would destroy his marriage and family. Marriages and families sometimes had unexpected artesian sources of resiliency. But his career as America’s most powerful banker, or even second- or third-most-powerful banker, would assuredly be ruined.

She went on, “Valerie Santoro was hired to steal a CD-ROM from your briefcase-”

“Nothing was stolen from my briefcase!”

“No. She ‘borrowed’ it for a while, then returned it to the front desk at the Four Seasons.”

He stared at Sarah again, and this time she was sure she could see the blood drain from his face. “What are you-”

“A CD-ROM. Did you ‘misplace’ it while you were at the hotel?”

“Oh, Jesus God. Oh, Jesus God.” Elkind’s face seemed to cave in.

“What happened to it?”

“The disk-I thought it fell out of my suitcase. I mean, it was meaningless to anyone else-no one would know what was on it. Then when it turned up, I knew it had just fallen out somewhere. The front desk said it had been found in a trash container-”

“What was on it?”

“Every year we get one of those CD-ROMs that’s got an entire year’s worth of authentication codes on it, a different computer ‘key’ for each day. They’re used to send money around the world by computer, encoded digitally. That’s why I was in Boston, for one of those bank security meetings. Once a year the heads of the bank, or their designated proxies, meet and exchange computer keys.”

“Someone who had that cryptographic key-”

“-could get into our computers and falsify transactions and steal billions of dollars. Can’t even think about it.”

“But if the bank is suddenly missing an enormous sum of money, wouldn’t the Federal Reserve just bail you out?”

“Christ, no. All these banking reforms. The Fed talks about ‘moral hazard’-that we’re not strict enough with depositors. The truth is, only eight percent of Manhattan Bank’s assets are secure-in government bonds, triple-A-rated securities-basically liquid.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it would only take a loss of about a hundred million dollars to make us insolvent. Now, will you just tell me what you want me to do, please?”

“I want to see your director of security,” Sarah said. “Right now.”

***

The Manhattan Bank’s director of security was a formidable, very tall woman in her late forties named Rosabeth Chapman. She was ex-Bureau, which gave Sarah the notion that they’d have common ground on which to schmooze.

Rosabeth Chapman, however, was not a schmoozer. She had the charm of a meter maid. She had a firm, intimidating way of speaking, a perfect pale-blond bouffant hairdo, precise pink lipstick. She spoke in a contralto, and her three male associates listened in respectful silence. Warren Elkind seemed to have a fondness for dominant women.

“You’re asking us to activate a crisis-management approach. You want us to come up with a ‘game plan,’ as you call it. Yet you have absolutely no evidence of an impending attack on Manhattan Bank, whether the headquarters building or any of our branches.”

“That’s not quite accurate,” Sarah said. “We have an intercepted telephone conversation-”

“Which is meaningless. It’s talk; it’s a hollow threat.”

“Threats are more than we usually get in this business-” Sarah began.

“Are you aware how many threats are made against this bank?”