Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  The problem, though, at least over the past couple of days, was that all it seemed to do was remind Tony of how very wrong things were. The interest he and Pat had in the games was a huge part of their friendship — was intertwined with it, you could say. Every so often they’d sandwich an alternate topic of conversation between heated debates over stats, wins, and losses, almost as if to prove they could, like a couple of hardcore alcoholics trying to convince themselves they were really just social drinkers. Of course, those departures from their subject of choice were hardly what Tony considered sweeping in scope, and tended to swing between venting about their jobs and observations about female acquaintances past and present… juicy commentaries and footnotes often laid out in terms that might not be considered clear signs of male maturity to someone in a position to overhear them. It wasn’t that they made a deliberate attempt stay away from the serious shit, and there were enough exceptions to the rule. Tony felt closer to Pat than he’d ever been to his own brother, knew he could share virtually any secret with him, open up to him when something important needed to be confided… and he’d always figured Pat felt the same. Twenty-five goddamned years, they’d been friends. A quarter century. Over that time they had trusted each other with all kinds of things, protected each other a load of different ways, but hadn’t needed to waste too many words in the process. You take a couple of guys from Brooklyn who’ve hung out since they were teenagers, put them together at a sports bar to watch a ballgame and drink a few cold ones, they aren’t all of a sudden going to turn into weepy members of the studio audience on the Dr. Phil show. That, Tony thought, was not what they’d have foremost in mind when they got together after work needing to shake off a million different varieties of stress… but it also didn’t qualify them as two slobbering, jockstrap-sniffing morons.

  And yet Pat had been gone a while now. Over a week. Too long, and under circumstances much too suspicious for Tony to box up his concerns for even a minute. He’d known what Pat had going on the side, of course. Wouldn’t have been shocked to learn he’d been treating himself to a little something extra on top of it every now and then… can’t eat the same pie every day, he always said. Tony had been originally hoping he’d decided to have his fill of la vida loca, celebrate some of the big new sales commissions he’d been netting these last few months with a weekend fling to the Caribbean or somewhere. God knew he’d had enough practice running cover stories to the wife.

  Still, though. A week. A week and counting. It was way, way too long for Tony to explain away.

  Tony didn’t like it, not a bit.

  There was missing, and there was missing. And after what Tony had heard the other night — making him frustrated enough to leave those answering-machine messages, and then get into that nasty argument only to have the phone slammed down in his ear — after all that, it wasn’t doing him one iota of good to read about yesterday’s Madison Square Garden face-off between the Islanders and Rangers. To the contrary, it only got his mind veering off into dark places he wanted to avoid.

  And so Tony had quit on the sports pages and started flipping through the daily rags front to back. He hadn’t been aware of looking for a particular type of news article, hadn’t consciously realized that he had been skimming over the world, national, and business reports, and totally bypassing the editorial columns and entertainment dish to peruse the city sections, paying closest attention to pieces about local crimes and accidents… his eye drawn toward any shred of information, any apparent clue, that could somehow help him figure out what could have happened to Pat.

  Seated at his desk now, his hot cider steaming in front of him, Tony went through the automatic motions of peeking at the general news in today’s Post and then once again found himself turning to the NYPD DAILY BLOTTER section. He skimmed quickly down the latest batch of dreary, depressing items scratched together by police, hospital, and morgue beat reporters every night. Listed under separate borough headers, and summarized in bulleted paragraphs, they seemed pretty typical: A trannie prostitute discovered bound and beaten to death on a Bryant Park bench. A boiler explosion in the South Bronx that had killed a couple of senior citizens and hospitalized three firefighters with acute smoke inhalation. Gang-related tensions that had erupted into shootings and stabbings in a midtown nightclub. Some Harlem kid who’d gotten nabbed while breaking into a Mercedes-Benz SUV that turned out to be owned by a hoton-the-charts rap artist and packed to the roof with crack cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, plus a small arsenal of illegal firearms for good measure….

  Then Tony’s eyes landed on the final piece in the column and widened with agitated dismay. He gasped in a sharp, sudden breath, almost choking as some of the half-chewed food his mouth went down his windpipe.

  The single-paragraph bulletin read: Police are asking for help locating Corinna Banks, a 31-year-old, 120-pound woman with blond hair who was last seen at 3:30 P.M. Monday dropping off her daughter, Andrea, age 4, at an indoor playspace known as GoKids on Fifth Avenue and E. 22nd Street. Ms. Banks is said to have been wearing a black beret, a dark wool scarf, a yellow ski coat with black trim, and leather knee boots. It is thought she returned to her apartment at 333 E. 19th Street (between First and Second avenues) after leaving the playspace. Anyone with information of her whereabouts is asked to call the NYPD TIPS hotline provided at the bottom of this column, or contact Detective Ismael Ruiz, 10th Precinct, at (212) 555-4682. You will not have to reveal your identity.

  Tony grabbed the napkin spread open on his desk, hacking up chunks of blueberry muffin.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said shakily to himself. “Oh my fucking God.”

  He was still trying to catch his breath as he reached for the telephone.

  * * *

  A yarmulke on his head, dressed in a black suit and overcoat, and carrying a hardshell black leather briefcase, Delano Malisse felt like a gross fraud as he stepped into the DDC building minutes behind Hoffman. It was not posing as one of Jewish faith that gave him, the experienced undercover investigator, a sense that he was a blatant masquerader, but rather being disguised as a person of any religious persuasion. He had seen too much human baseness to believe in a guiding hand on high, an almighty being in whose image the species had been molded… unless, perhaps, God was an ogre who enjoyed peeking down at the world between his spread, hairy toes and having himself a good belly laugh at all its warts and vulgar messes. By and large, the human species uglied things up with degenerate behavior, which wasn’t to say it lacked qualities Malisse thought worth preservation. Man had proven capable of making tasty food, building durable and attractive structures, drawing some pretty pictures, spinning an occasional clever tale, and stringing musical notes together in a pleasant fashion — although at least three of the four were faded, irreclaimable skills in this day and age.

  Malisse, however, had other pressing concerns right now.

  He strode up to where Jeffreys sat on the guard platform, hoping his fellow dramatic player had rehearsed their little scene.

  “Hello,” Malisse said. “I’m Mr. Friedman, here to see Norman Green.”

  “Got your name right here, sir.” A mediocre actor at best, Jeffreys had glanced at his guest book a touch too quickly, looking uncomfortable, betraying anticipation of his lines. Still, he was new to the craft, and his stiffening informant’s guilt could have been expected to keep him out of the moment. “Go straight on up to the tenth floor. I’ll buzz upstairs so he can meet you.”

  Malisse thanked him and exited stage left via the elevator. It had been a clumsy transition but would serve its purpose.

  Green was waiting outside the car as its doors opened. His resemblance to Lembock, his first cousin, was strikingly noticeable. Ancient, bone-thin, and snowy-haired, he wore a dark pinstriped suit with a white breast-pocket handkerchief, and gold-framed pince-nez glasses on the bridge of his sharply downcurved nose. His knitted yarmulke was black with a blue trim pattern, held firmly in place with a solid gold clip.

&
nbsp; Malisse extended his hand to Green and smiled, appreciating his lenses and careful, elegant dress as reminders of an old-world refinement that many would consider quaint. How had so much been lost nowadays? he wondered.

  “You’re looking well, Duvi,” Green said in Flemish. Although the two had never before laid eyes on each other, he stood pumping Malisse’s arm as if they were the fondest of friends. Here, now, was a fine, seasoned performer. “How was your flight in?”

  “A success.” Malisse shrugged. “I landed alive.”

  Green chuckled, put a hand across his shoulders, steered him around toward the turnstiles.

  “Come, Duvi, I’ll show you where to hang your overcoat.” And then, dropping his voice to a bare whisper: “As well as where Hoffman has left his coat and attaché case while he prays.”

  * * *

  It was a quarter past noon in San Jose as Pete Nimec stood looking out at Rosita Avenue through the window beside Megan’s desk. If he’d leaned his cheek flat against the pane, bent back on his knees, and cranked his neck a bit to the right, he might have seen the very edge of Mount Hamilton’s eastern flank overlooking the city skyline to the northeast. From where he stood, however, the view was fairly restricted. This had taken some getting used to, and with understandable reason. Megan’s office at UpLink SanJo was catercorner to the boss’s far plusher suite next door — which Gordian only visited three or four times a month, max, since his stepdown — and the great rugged heave of the slope had always seemed to smack right up against your eyes through its floor-to-ceiling window.

  “How did things go with Ricci?” Megan asked now, drawing his attention from the office towers across the street.

  “I haven’t spoken to him,” Nimec said. “Plan to do that in about an hour.”

  Megan shot him a glance.

  “The conference he conveniently skipped out on was yesterday,” she said.

  “Meg, he accounted for—”

  “I want him leaving for New York tomorrow, the next day at the latest.”

  “I know.”

  “So why haven’t you already had your talk?”

  “WOW,” Nimec said.

  Megan looked confused.

  “Wow?” she said.

  “WOW, capital letters, right,” Nimec said. “It’s short for Women Opposed to War.”

  Megan’s puzzled expression had deepened.

  “Are we participants in the same conversation here?” she said. “Because I’m having a tough time following it, Pete.”

  Nimec stepped away from the window and sat down opposite her.

  “WOW’s a group based in San Fran, claims to have maybe five thousand members all told. There’s an Internet site for it, natch,” he said. “The organizers are big into peace, and lately they’ve had it in for us.”

  “By ‘us’… you mean UpLink.”

  Nimec gave her a nod.

  “They’ve posted all kinds of negative stuff,” he said. “From their standpoint, we’re belligerent global agitators.”

  “You’re joking.”

  Nimec shook his head.

  “It’s a free country,” he said, shrugging. “That’s what they believe.”

  “Because we’re a DoD contractor?”

  “Designing the mechanisms of carnage, right,” Nimec said. “And because of the security forces… they call them quasi-militaristic units… we put at our foreign stations.”

  Megan gave him a look.

  “You are kidding me,” she said.

  Nimec reached out and tapped the back of her computer screen.

  “You want to log on to their home page?” he said. “I did it last night. What’s on there comes from open sources. Newspaper reports, politicians, even our own press releases… the facts are accurate, but they know how to cut and paste them in ways that hurt.”

  Megan frowned thoughtfully.

  “Context is everything,” she said. “Can you give me examples?”

  “Sure,” Nimec said. “They’re critical of how we handled our run-in with those rogue paramilitaries in Gabon last year. They say we violated Brazil’s national sovereignty that time we fought off the sabotage team in Mato Grosso. The same for when terrorists came after our satcom ground station in Russia—”

  Nimec saw Megan’s eyes widen.

  “I lived through that one and we were almost massacred there, Pete,” she said. “They also went after the Russian president, whom our Sword ops saved from cold-blooded assassination.”

  “So we could sink our hooks into him and his government,” Nimec said. “It’s part of a grand scheme we’ve hatched to muscle up on vulnerable, cash-strapped societies for our own omnicapitalistic motives.”

  “Omnicapitalistic?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Nimec said. “I’m still trying to figure out quasi-militaristic.”

  Megan shook her head.

  “These WOW people,” she said. “May I assume they offer their bright ideas about what we should do to defend ourselves against attack?”

  Nimec gave a nod.

  “Their position’s that sharing art, music, and poetry is always the best response to violence.”

  “Always.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Against any aggressor.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “In every instance, whatever the circumstances.”

  “Something about it elevating the human condition, right.” Nimec shrugged. “Bongo dancing might be recommended, too, but I’d have to check online to be positive.”

  Megan gave him a look and then went back to shaking her head.

  “We weren’t being singled out alone, if that makes you feel better,” Nimec said. “They’ve got a whole list of evildoers who are keeping everybody else from the next step in evolution. Corporations, political parties… there’s even some writer who cranks out paperback thrillers, I forget his name.”

  Megan was quiet a moment. She tucked a loose tress of auburn hair behind her ear.

  “Okay,” she said. “How does this nonsense connect to Ricci?”

  “Last week a couple of women tried to get through security at our Cupertino R and D plant,” Nimec said. “No fancy tactics involved. They piggyback their way into a main entrance around lunchtime, when they know there’s a lot of foot traffic. Wait for employees to get smartcard authorization, slip in behind them.” He shrugged. “Our tailgate sensors picked them up at the door, tagged them as intruders. Then security watched to see what they were up to. The procedure’s routine… we have visitors all the time who don’t bother checking in at the guard desk for a pass. Act like it’s an inconvenience we impose on them for no good reason, and they’re in too much of a hurry. Usually it turns out the person’s okay — a salesman, a staffer’s friend or relative — and he or she just needs to learn that kind of thing won’t wash in our facilities.”

  “And this time?”

  “The guards caught them trying use our computers and held them for the cops.”

  “Do we know what they were trying to access in those machines?” Megan said.

  Nimec shook his head.

  “Security closed in too soon, a mistake I won’t let them forget,” he said. “But we did find out the women are members of a certain group I’ve been talking about.”

  Megan raised her eyebrows.

  “No,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Nimec said. “And there’s more. You remember those jerk kids who got busted trying to crack our system a few months ago, plaster our Web site with smut?”

  “The two UCLA students,” Megan said. “Brothers, weren’t they?”

  Nimec nodded.

  “They did recon for months,” he said. “Internet port scans, network sweeps, everything they could do to probe us. At its peak it was happening once, twice an hour. Our techies figured an attack was coming, waited for our intruder detection software to backtrace their IP signatures, fed them phony passwords and entry codes. When the college boys tried using them to compromise our system, w
e nailed them.”

  Megan looked at him again.

  “Pete, are you telling me they were… ah, how shall I put it… agents of WOW?”

  “Something like that,” he said. “Probably less stupid than calling them Brothers Opposed to War.”

  “BOW,” Megan said. “Cute, Pete.”

  Nimec shrugged. “Anyway, one of the ladies that got nabbed in Cupertino happens to be Mom,” he said.

  Megan sighed heavily.

  “Tell me that Ricci’s their dear old dad, and it’s your fault if I keel over sideways with an embolism.”

  Nimec smiled.

  “The day before yesterday, we got a phone call from the feds about the case they’re building… this was late, after I’d let Ricci know about our conference and headed on home,” he said. “What I started explaining to you before is that Ricci’s the one who took the call. Spoke to the lead investigator, who told him about a meeting scheduled for early the next morning between the FBI and prosecutors from the attorney general’s office. They offered to let us have somebody sit in and listen, give input, whatever — a last-minute courtesy invite. The law still hasn’t caught up to computer crime, and they’re looking at different statutes that are already in the books, figuring out what sort of case they can build. Ricci thought he ought to head out to the capital, and you won’t hear me argue he was wrong.”