Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  Avram tried not to let that bother him, but he was only human. And strangely enough the idea of being watched by Lathrop made him less uncomfortable than his sure knowledge of how much Lathrop would enjoy watching him. The smug confidence he would exude. He was unsurpassed in his ability to see without being seen, gliding like a phantom among the masses. And he was just as good a choreographer of others’ movements. A master of the dance, with all the conceit of one. Though Avram accepted the need to follow along, and could not dispute its wisdom given the stakes, he could have very easily lived without being put through his complicated paces on this bitter winter morning — street by street, station to station. Yes, of course, the dance had been expected. But Avram sometimes wondered if Lathrop took it to excessive lengths, led him through some twists and turns for no reason other than his own amusement.

  Avram did his best to suspend these thoughts, and pushed off the balustrade. Then he went downstairs and followed the path of miniature suns to where the escalators ran between the MetLife tower’s lobby and the concourse.

  His phone bleeped again and he stopped to answer.

  “Okay,” Lathrop said in his ear. “The ramp to the East Side IRT’s just ahead toward Lexington. You know the one.”

  Avram remained at a standstill as waves of men and women parted around him, sweeping in from every direction, moving toward the escalators and various railway gates.

  “I know it,” he said, glancing at the passage.

  “Wait two minutes after I sign off, use that big brass clock over the information booth to count down,” Lathrop said. “Then walk to the ramp… not too fast, not too slow. When you reach the stairs—”

  “You’ll get back to me,” Avram said.

  * * *

  At five minutes to eight, San Jose time, Pete Nimec zipped down from his office on the top floor of UpLink’s Rosita Avenue headquarters to enter a secure conference room in its underground bowls, where he found Megan and Roland Thibodeau, one of his two Global Field Supervisors, already seated at its boardroom-style table.

  “Where’s Ricci?” he asked, noting the absence of Thibodeau’s equal in rank with annoyance.

  Megan shook her head to indicate she didn’t know.

  “Ain’t seen him,” Thibodeau said. Attired in a midnight-blue Sword uniform shirt and pants — his optional preference over a business suit — he ran a hand across his walrus mustache, the bristling remnant of a full brown beard that he had recently whittled off in obvious but unexplained correlation with his diminishing, if still considerably padded, waistline.

  Nimec motioned at the room’s large wall-mounted plasma screen.

  “We’re about to have a video hookup with New York,” he said. “He knew about it Friday afternoon. I told him before we left.”

  “So did I,” Thibodeau said. His throaty Cajun accent made the word “I” come out sounding like ahh. “Don’t appear to have done no good.”

  Nimec frowned.

  “Either of you try reaching him on his cell?”

  “More than once,” Megan said.

  “Got his voicemail, that’s about it,” Thibodeau said.

  Nimec’s frown deepened. This was clearly not turning out to be his morning.

  “We need him here for the meeting,” he said. “It’s too important for him to miss.”

  “Could give you plenty examples of Ricci not being around when we need him of late, except you’d know about most of ’em before I opened my mouth.” Thibodeau glanced down at the table, still swiping at his mustache. “Some men does dead before they time,” he said in a near undertone.

  Nimec looked at him from where he stood inside the doorway.

  “What are you telling me, Rollie?” he said.

  Thibodeau lifted his gaze, turned it slowly and heavily onto Nimec’s.

  “I’m tellin’ you not to wait,” he said.

  * * *

  Avram descended the stairs to the subway, paid his fare with a Metrocard, and went over to the compass rose at the center of the mezzanine floor, a connecting hub for multiple northbound, southbound, and crosstown lines that was the second busiest in Manhattan, surpassed in usage only by the station where he was headed. Even now, past the morning rush hour, there were riders bustling around him, turnstiles clacking in his ears, trains rumbling toward and away from the platforms a level below.

  He stood against the compass’s round focal pillar and faced north — the only cardinal point marked on the rosette.

  His cellular beeped twice — the alert tone for another e-mail. Avram called the new message up on the display and opened it.

  TAKE THE UNDERPASS TO YOUR RIGHT, it read.

  * * *

  Back in the coffeehouse with his cell phone to his ear, Malisse was going through the requisite formality of asking how it happened.

  “Help me to understand, please,” he said in a quiet voice, his words carrying a faint Flemish accent. “Why would you vacate your post when you knew our man was in the building, and could leave the building at any time?”

  “Who says I vacated?” Jeffreys replied. “Did I say I vacated?”

  “I believe,” Malisse said, “you did.”

  “Uh-uh, no way you heard me say it. Because that’d mean the post was unattended when I stepped out, and I can tell you it ain’t so. Never been so in all my years here. Never will be, either.”

  Malisse sighed over his mug… steam rising from an ordinary but full-bodied Italian roast this time.

  “I’m merely trying to determine what went wrong—”

  “That’s fine,” Jeffreys said. “But stick to what I told you and don’t twist my words around. This spy business feels lousy enough without me havin’ to be insulted by your accusations.”

  “No disrespect was intended.”

  “Fine,” Jeffreys repeated. And took an audible breath. “What went wrong is I went on a ten-minute break fully thinkin’ our man would be up in the big room a while.”

  “Waiting for his appointment.”

  “Uh-huh. What he called an important appointment.”

  “But he didn’t wait for it.”

  “No, he didn’t. And since my spotter don’t know anything about my snoopin’, and you and my bosses don’t want nobody told about it, I couldn’t very well have him question our man about where he was goin’. Bein’ none of our security team’s affair, it’d make both of them suspicious.”

  “But our man did leave behind a note.”

  “For his customer, right.”

  “Katari.”

  “Right,” Jeffreys said. “Two, three sentences. Just to apologize for runnin’ out like he did, explain some emergency came up that wouldn’t take long, and ask him to sit tight in the Club till he got back.”

  “Which he… Katari, that is… continues to do as we speak.”

  “Right again,” Jeffreys said.

  Malisse remained silent as a group of people at a nearby booth cleared out and filed past him toward the door. What was he to comment? Crude at best, Plan A was at least out of the way, albeit disposed of sooner than anticipated. Already well formulated in his mind, Plan B would be far more elegant and effective. Expensive, too, alas… but Lembock had put no restrictions on his budget, and his years in the Sûreté had left him with expert contacts even here in New York.

  “I’d like to ask one more question,” he said. “Without casting any blame or insult at you, but rather for future reference. So we can decide how to best adjust our methods of working together.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Is this morning break of yours something regular?”

  “Regular as my sixty-five-year-old ass startin’ to hurt,” Jeffreys replied. “Also regular as me havin’ an urge to smoke a cigarette, which the law says I got to do on the goddamn street here in this city.”

  Malisse smiled ruefully, and told himself he should have known it all along.

  * * *

  His ears filled with the metallic rattle and squeal of an arr
iving train, Avram trotted from the mouth of the underpass to the wide 42nd Street shuttle station, where the S line between Times Square and Grand Central operated on four tracks. The two trains currently waiting were on Track 1 and Track 3. Though the train on Track 1 was almost packed, its doors had been left open for additional riders to squeeze aboard. A lighted sign above the platform said it would be the next out.

  Avram presumed the train he’d just heard clanking to a stop was on Track 3 to his right. It sat empty, its doors closed. The conductor would open them for passengers once its alternate was about to move, and close them again moments after receiving the signal that the other had begun its return trip from Times Square, providing a continuous and, by the standards of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, impressively punctual service loop between the stations.

  Avram reached the platform with ample time to catch the train on Track 1, but let it go without him. Lathrop had directed him to board the third car of the second train to leave the station.

  And so Avram did, dancing to his lead.

  Among the first of the passengers through the train’s retracting doors, he saw plenty of unoccupied seats inside. A rare thing in itself, their availability was a distinct lure, but he felt too charged with nervous energy to take one. Instead he chose to stand, gripping a hand rung as the car loaded up with people. That the choice was his own, and not another shot called by Lathrop, made it all the more desirable.

  The train idled with its doors wide open for several minutes. As he waited for it to get underway, Avram found himself listening to a scrawny, long-haired kid who’d strolled aboard playing an acoustic guitar riotous with decals and hand-painted decorations. A donation can in front of him, he’d launched into a Mexican-flavored instrumental that was a fierce tease to Avram’s memory, something he recognized but couldn’t quite place, but associated with summer nights of another, distant time. Ten, eleven years old, a portable transistor radio hidden under his pillow, he’d spent so many of those nights listening to top-forty rock and roll in violation of his father’s rigid decree, alone with the secret pleasure that only came when youth came into contact with the forbidden.

  WABC AM, he thought. Cousin Brucie playing all your favorite hits.

  Avram almost didn’t notice when the train’s doors finally slid closed. He’d become captivated by the musician, who was now midway through a flawless rendition of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the Big Band standard, keeping rhythm with some kind of jangling percussive setup on his foot, beating out its extended drum solo on the body, pick guard, and edges of his guitar. As they started pulling from the station, the guitar player concluded his second piece with another radical shift in musical styles, chopping out the introductory chords to an up-tempo country-and-western tune with vocals. His singing clear and strong over the cacophonous noise of the train, he belted out lyrics about riding the rails, and having to get on out of town in a hurry without a dime for a cup of coffee.

  Impressed, Avram was certain the kid had timed his set so the third song, with its loud strumming, would coincide with the train’s startup — a smart, practical touch, since the complicated single-note melody lines of his other numbers would have been buried under the loud racket of its wheels moving over the tracks.

  He listened with pleasure for the rest of the short ride, wholly engaged by his skill and cleverness. Lathrop, their secretive rendezvous, all of its roundabout maneuverings faded from his mind. What pure talent, he thought. What marvelous, underappreciated talent.

  A squeal of brakes now, and the train jolted into Times Square.

  Before making his exit, Avram waited for the crowd of discharging passengers around him to thin out, eased his way over to the guitarist, and leaned down to slip a crisply folded ten-dollar bill into the can at his feet.

  “Wow,” the kid said. “Appreciate it.”

  Avram straightened, hesitated.

  “That first song,” he said. “The one you played while people were getting on at Grand Central… what’s its name?”

  “ ‘Walk, Don’t Run,’ ” the kid answered with a smile. “By the Ventures, that sixties group. Figure it kind of goes with the action around here, you know?”

  Avram looked at him in silence. A smile flashed across his own lips only to vanish after the briefest of moments.

  Then he turned, stepped onto the platform, and reached for the ringing cell phone in his coat pocket.

  * * *

  When dealing with her peers and superiors at UpLink San Jose, Noriko Cousins had found that an inverse logic tended to prevail over their discussions, at least from where she sat… which was to say the stuff Noriko felt ought to be hardest to communicate generally turned out to be fairly easy, while the easy stuff was often a gargantuan pain in the ass for her to get across. Hard-easy, easy-hard, she wasn’t sure what made it so, but thought it might be some kind of East Coast — West Coast thing. People living and working out there on the edge of the lazy, hazy, crazy Pacific just seemed to have synapses that were routed along very different paths from her own.

  At any rate, Noriko had decided to begin with hard-easy at this morning’s video-conference, and work her way toward easy-hard, which ran contrary to her policy of always getting the most onerous task of the day out of her hair before anything else. Yes, class, that’s correct, she thought, here again logic was coiled in on itself like the proverbial snake eating its own tail. But she figured that if you were going to start out that way, you might as well do it with total commitment. Also, she hadn’t yet decided how to make her easy-hard argument to her respected SanJo colleagues — namely persuading them to keep their oversized shoes from clomping all over her turf — and wanted to buy some time in the hope that some creative ideas would burst upon her as they rolled merrily along.

  “The problem with our country’s export law is twofold, or maybe threefold,” she said now, more or less facing the Webcam above her desktop’s flat-screen display. Three thousand miles away in their SanJo conference room, their faces in perfect resolution, Pete Nimec, Rollie Thibodeau, and Megan Breen the Ice Queen waited. “First, regulatory controls change with the political and economic tides, and that makes them ambiguous to everyone except specialized lawyers,” Noriko went on. “Second, we have firms selling goods overseas that instruct those hired-gun trade attorneys to search for loopholes with magnifying glasses. Then there are companies that have been slow to put comprehensive export management systems in place, resulting in decent employees throughout the corporate hierarchy… top executives, members of the sales force, people at every level of every division and department… who want to comply with the rules but are utterly lost in the muddle. And then there are people in those same positions who know how to exploit the confusion for a crooked buck.”

  “Tough shovin’ an oar through those waters,” Rollie Thibodeau said.

  “Very.” Noriko motioned toward the coffee carafe beside her. “Anybody care for some of this?” she said, and held the pot up toward the camera’s eye. “It’s nice and hot.”

  Smiles.

  “Sure,” Nimec said. “Cream and a pinch of sugar.”

  “Yuck. Don’t allow any on premises.”

  “Then I’ll pass.”

  Noriko sipped from her cup. There, class, was what we consider a prime instance of injecting a moderate dose of levity into a serious discussion, acceptable in most forums, and highly recommended for loosening up its participants.

  “Dual-use items are a category that can really drive you crazy,” she said after a moment. “The government has to evaluate whether a product marketed for some harmless commercial purpose could be applied in some way that threatens our national security. If there’s a determination that it might, the question becomes what’s going where… or who’s okay to receive a certain product from us, and who needs to be stopped from getting hold of it. But another country with firms capable of manufacturing that same commodity, or something similar, might disagree with our assessment, or be mov
ed by conflicting economic and political interests, and refuse to go along with a proposed international ban. There are predictable rounds of lobbying, negotiation, and compromise before any accord is reached. And say we leverage what we want. Or most of it. With the spread of existing technologies, and the arrival of new ones, any controls have practical limits… as we know from hard experience.”

  She read immediate understanding on all the faces in her display.

  “That lab in Canada, Earthglow,” Megan said, airing their shared recollection. “Its scientists imported the same equipment you’d find in a factory that makes powdered baby formula to create a freeze dried medium for dispersal of its gene bombs. Then they used the same microencapsulation tech that’s used for perfume samplers to stabilize the agent.”

  Noriko nodded and drank some coffee.

  “The application of export policies isn’t fixed in place — and it can’t be,” she said. “For a lot of reasons, usually involving shifts in political winds. Diplomatic relationships with countries change for the better or worse. Treaties are made and nullified. Restrictions are relaxed as incentives or goodwill gestures, tightened as safeguards or penalties. Sometimes licenses are issued for products shipped to our closest allies. Sometimes a product becomes so readily available outside our borders that whatever bans we put on it become irrelevant and hurt our companies competitively unless they’re modified…. It depends. Even when you go to the opposite extreme, embargo a country by classifying it as a denied party, it can find legal, borderline legal, or patently illegal ways to get around the prohibition.” Noriko paused, lifting her cup to her chin again. “You guys really should try this coffee, it’s my personal blend.”

  “Another time, thanks,” Megan said. “I’ve already filled my morning quota.”

  Noriko shrugged, sipped.

  “Getting back on point, I want to give you an example of dual-use hardware in action… and then talk about its distribution,” she said. “My cute little Mini Cooper — chili red, christened Sue Marie by moi—has an adaptive cruise control system that automatically slows it down if I drive over a hump in the road and come up short on an overturned semi. It uses sensors that aren’t too different from the ones you’d find in a cruise-missile seeker. In fact, the semiconductors that regulate electrical current through the system are Gunn diodes, which are used in thyratron switches, which have a wide range of laser-based civilian and military applications.” She took a deep swallow of coffee, held a finger up in a just-a-minute gesture, freshened her cup. “As a couple of for-instances, you’ll find these kickers in surgical equipment and multichannel, or tunable, lasers used for optical communications networks. You’ll also find them in nuclear triggering units… and potentially hard-kill high energy beam weapons. UpLink makes high-capacity Gunn diodes and builds oscillators around them. Armbright manufactures its own versions… and loathe though I am to admit it, they’re not only competitive with ours, they’re superior.”