The Zero Hour

So if you were in the express consignment business and Edna Mae Johnson was on for the night, you made extra sure to do things right. You made sure that the things they always wanted to inspect by hand-animal products, drugs, vitamins, foodstuffs-were put in a separate container, so you didn’t delay thousands of other packages.

And you made sure that the declared value on the airbill matched the declared value on the Customs Entry. And you made sure that no single shipment exceeded 550 pounds, that no single piece exceeded 124 pounds, that the total of the length, width, and height of a piece didn’t exceed 118 inches.

If you didn’t, Edna Mae Johnson most certainly would.

***

Actually all the paperwork on the DHL express consignment that night was perfectly in order. Inspector Johnson reviewed the manifest-she always worked from hard copy, because she was convinced that mistakes were made when the computer screen was used-and found nothing to object to.

As she continued processing the paperwork, she returned to her computer terminal and called up the consolidated Customs Entry. She saw a message flash on her computer screen: INTENSIVE.

The automated system was programmed to assign, completely at random, the designation “Intensive” every once in a while to an express consignment. “Intensive” meant that a hold was placed on the plane’s cargo while a physical inspection was done.

She looked up at the customs broker and said, “Well, Charles, this is not your night. This shipment’s going to hold.”

“Oh, God,” the customs broker moaned.

“Come on now, you’d better get to work and notify DHL. They’ve got some offloading to do.”

Six large cans were removed from the DHL jet and transferred to a customs holding area. There, DHL employees were instructed to break bulk. A team of dogs was brought in to sniff the parcels. No explosives were found, but one DHL package sent from Florence, Italy, was discovered to contain seven large white truffles, packed in perfumed soap chips in a desperate attempt to conceal the truffles’ pungent fungal aroma.

Inspector Johnson picked out a few dozen parcels and had them put through the mobile X-ray van. Several of them she instructed DHL employees to slit open. She did a visual inspection, satisfied herself that the contents were as described on the airbill, and had DHL employees reseal them with bright-yellow tape that informed the recipients that the parcels had been opened by U.S. Customs.

One of the parcels she put through the X-ray machine was, according to its airbill and its Customs Entry, a CD/radio/cassette player. Although the X ray showed that the piece of equipment inside likely was, in fact, a CD/radio/cassette player, Edna Mae Johnson didn’t like its weight.

It was heavier than it should be. She was always looking for drugs, and Lord knows these drug dealers were always thinking of new ways to smuggle drugs. She had DHL cut the package open, and she took the matte-black Sony CFD-30 apart. As she did, she admired its sleek shape and thought how much her grandson Scott would like something like this. She wondered what it cost.

She took a screwdriver and carefully pulled off the bottom plate. Inside, instead of the normal guts, she found a black box with little lights on top of it. It was something electronic, and definitely something that didn’t belong there.

“The hell-?” she said aloud.

***

The entire parcel was immediately sent over to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms for inspection.

There, the dummy CD-and-cassette player was found to house a black plastic shoebox-sized utility box with a metal lid. The shoebox contained a microwave sensor as well as some peculiar fittings and brackets and wires and screw posts.

In one place, a battery was clearly meant to fit. And then there were those damned screw posts, which were meant to be attached to something. One of the ATF agents realized that if a blasting cap was attached to the screw posts…

No, it couldn’t be, could it?

Inside the dummy shell of the Sony CD player was an ingeniously constructed fusing mechanism for an extremely sophisticated bomb.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

At six in the morning, as Sarah was lying in bed trying to rouse herself, the phone rang.

Forty-five minutes later, she entered the conference room belonging to the assistant director of the FBI in charge of the New York office, a burly, six-foot-seven-inch, white-haired Irishman named Joseph Walsh. Seated next to him, and the only face she recognized, was Harry Whitman, the chief of the Joint Terrorist Task Force. She felt her stomach flip over when she was introduced to the two she didn’t know, both in shirtsleeves: an overweight black man named Alfonse Mitchell, who was the first deputy commissioner of the NYPD; and the chief of detectives of the NYPD, a small, wiry man named Thomas McSweeney. This was a high-powered gathering, and it had to be serious.