The Zero Hour

This inventor knew that Edwin Wilson was an employee of the CIA-but not that Wilson was acting on his own behalf, not for the Agency. He should have been alerted by the fact that Wilson paid for the timers in cash, and not by purchase order. Wilson had cleverly duped him.

The gadgeteer designed and built three thousand timers, encased in black plastic, measuring three inches square by approximately half an inch high. On the outside of the timer was an LED and an on/off switch. The timer went from zero to 150 hours, in one-hour increments. As recently as 1988, these timers have repeatedly turned up in bombs set by Arab terrorists.

“So you think Henrik Baumann has been hired by the Libyans?” asked Sarah.

“It’s possible. Looks that way,” Herbert Massie said.

“Bravo,” said Harry Whitman.

“Well done,” Sarah said. “All right, now, I want that fusing mechanism put back together, boxed up, and delivered to that Mail Boxes Etc. site today.”

“What the hell-?” said Chief of Detectives McSweeney.

“Sarah,” said Whitman, “you’re out of your mind.”

“No,” she said. “I want a surveillance team put on the site. At some point someone has to show up to claim the package. Let me remind you, we don’t know it’s Baumann, by the way. We assume it is.”

“Agent Cahill,” Massie’s voice came, high and strained, “we’re far from finished examining it.”

“If we hold off any longer, Baumann’s bound to get suspicious, and he won’t show up. It’s got to arrive today-one day late is okay, but no more. Also, I want a trap-and-trace on the Mail Boxes phone line, in case Baumann-or whoever it is-calls about the package. If I were in his place, I would.”

“You didn’t hear me, did you?” Massie said. “I said, we’re not done. We’re not packing this up yet.”

Deputy Commissioner Alfonse Mitchell glowered at Sarah and shook his head slowly.

“Okay,” Sarah said, backing down. “Get a duplicate of the tape player if you can, box that up in the exact same packaging, and get it over to Mail Boxes today, using a regular DHL truck, with their other stuff. Oh, and one more thing. Customs usually uses yellow tape to seal packages it’s opened, saying ‘Opened by U.S. Customs’ or something like that. Make sure there’s no yellow tape on it. I want it to look like everything went fine with it.” She looked around the table once again. “We’re going to catch the bastard,” she said.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

In the next days, Baumann worked almost nonstop, renting not one but two furnished apartments in different parts of the city, under different aliases assumed by entirely different personas. He paid cash; let the real estate agents think what they wanted. Greed would always prevail; the Realtors would keep their silence. On a bleak, foul-smelling street not far from the Fulton Fish Market he took a short-term rental on a tiny street-level warehouse space barely big enough to park a compact car in.

He contacted the computer whiz (the “cracker,” as he’d been taught to say), but the cracker, to his credit, insisted on meeting in person. Baumann knew only that the man was in his late twenties, was pompous to the point of megalomania, and worked only sporadically, but for fantastic sums of money. Most important, he came highly recommended by the intermediary in Amsterdam, who called him a man of rare skill, “ultra-slick, a serious wizard.”

The cracker’s name was Leo Krasner. He did work for businessmen who didn’t like their credit ratings and wanted them repaired; for private investigators; for news reporters. He would work for any organization that interested him, except the government.

Krasner’s fame had spread in the underworld of computer crackers early in 1991. It is a matter of record that during the Persian Gulf War of that year, the Cable News Network hired a number of computer hackers, crackers, and phreakers to circumvent the U.S. government’s onerous press restrictions. These computer wizards were paid to intercept transmissions to and from military satellites and decrypt them. Krasner was heavily relied upon by CNN and other television networks, as well as by investors who wanted to know what was going on.

Baumann arranged to meet Krasner in a brightly lit but shabby little restaurant on the far West Side whose smeared plate-glass windows looked out onto the verminous street.

Leo Krasner was short, not much over five feet, and enormously obese. His doughy face was framed by immense porkchop sideburns. His unwashed hair spilled over his collar. He wore tinted aviator-frame glasses.

Baumann introduced himself, using an American alias and legend. Krasner offered a damp, pudgy hand to shake. After a minute or so of chitchat that was clearly going nowhere, Baumann came right to the point and told him what he wanted.