Now he quickly turned the keys in the locks and entered the apartment.
This was his fifth time searching Sarah’s apartment. She was scrupulous and left no files lying around, no personal notebooks with notes on the investigation, no computer disks. She was making this difficult… but not impossible. He now knew where she worked-the top-secret location of Operation MINOTAUR. He knew the phone number of the task force’s headquarters. Soon he would know more. At any moment she might let down her guard, begin to talk about her work, pillow talk, worried confidences. It was possible. At the very least, his proximity to her afforded him possibilities of access he’d never have dreamed of.
Yes, there were hazards. There was an element of risk for the hunted to befriend the hunter, spend so much time with her, make love to her. But it was not a great risk, because he knew there were no photographs of him. Apart from a very generic and useless physical description-which could have described 20 percent of the males in New York City-the task force had no idea what he looked like. The South African secret service had no photographs of him on file, and the prison’s photographs had been destroyed. It was a certainty that the FBI had put together an Identi-Kit, but it would do them no good. Whatever the South Africans had feebly attempted to put together would bear no resemblance to the way he looked now, not in a million years.
They might know his true eye color, but that was easily taken care of. Changing the color of one’s eyes can be as simple as using standard, generally available colored contact lenses, but this is not a disguise for professionals. A careful observer can always tell you are wearing corneal contact lenses, which can raise nettlesome questions. Baumann had had special lenses custom-designed for him by an optometrist in Amsterdam. They were prosthetic scleral soft lenses, which cover the entire eye, not just the iris, and can be comfortably worn for twelve hours. The color tones were natural, the lenses large, with iris flecks (which standard contact lenses do not have). The most suspicious observer would not have known that his eyes were blue, not a gentle brown.
Naturally, if she became suspicious, she would have to be killed at once, just as he had killed Perry Taylor and Russell Ullman. But why in the world would she suspect she was sleeping with the enemy? She wouldn’t.
It was all a game, an exhilarating game. A dance with the devil.
As he combed the apartment, in all the likely hiding places and the not-so-likely ones, among Jared’s belongings, he could hear faint traffic noises from the street, a car alarm, a siren.
And then, at last, there was something.
A notepad. A blank notepad on her bedside table. The top sheet was blank, but it bore the imprint of a scrawl that had been made on the leaf above it. He rubbed lightly against the indentation with a soft lead pencil, and the scrawl appeared, white script against black.
Thomas Allen Moffatt.
They had one of his aliases. How in the world had they gotten it? So they likely knew he had used the stolen Thomas Moffatt passport to enter the country.
He exhaled very slowly. A near miss. He had reserved a van for tomorrow in Moffatt’s name.
Well, that would have to change.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
“A nuclear weapon,” Pappas said, “is not what I’m worried about.”
“Why not?” Sarah asked.
“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean a nuke wouldn’t be terrifying. But the physics of an A-bomb are easy; it’s the actualization that’s tough. It’s far too impractical, too difficult to construct.”
“But if our terrorist has the resources and the ability-?”
“The plain fact is, a nuke would destroy much of the city, and that’s not what the intel intercept seems to be hinting at. They’re talking about a targeted attack on a bank, not on the entire city.”
Sarah nodded. “Makes sense. We can’t rule anything out, but in some ways a giant conventional bomb is scarier, because it’s much harder to detect. Much harder.”
“Right.”
“So what are my options?” she asked.
“Obviously you can’t order a bomb sweep of the entire city. But you can order sweeps of every Manhattan Bank branch office. That’s certainly feasible. We have the personnel for that right here in the New York office.”
“NYPD Bomb Squad?”
“They only get called in when you have a bomb ticking right in front of you. Otherwise they don’t move. They’re good, but you’ve got to have a bomb.”
“And if we do have a bomb?”
“Then it’s your call,” Pappas said. “But you’re not only going to have an emergency on your hands, you’re also going to have an ugly turf battle. The NYPD Bomb Squad is one of the oldest and most experienced in the country, but they’re experienced mostly with relatively low-tech stuff, homemade bombs and the like. Then you’ll have ATF, which has the responsibility for all crimes involving explosives. They have the bomb capability, and they’re going to want to play. And then there’s the Army, which is responsible for bomb disposal over the entire continental landmass of the United States, other than in the sea or on the bases of other military services. They’re going to want in, and they’re going to argue-quite rightly-that they’re substantially better equipped than the NYPD.”
“And there’s NEST,” Sarah said.
“Right,” Pappas said. “And ever since Harvey’s Casino, they’re going to want to play too.”
NEST is an acronym for the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, the best bomb squad in the United States by far and, naturally, the most secretive. It is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, but is actually managed by a private contractor. Charged with searching for and rendering safe all suspected nuclear explosives, NEST is based in Las Vegas, Nevada (the Nevada nuclear weapons test site is ninety miles away). A portion of its equipment is also located at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and its East Coast facilities are based in Germantown, Maryland.
The incident involving Harvey’s Casino in State Line, Nevada, near Lake Tahoe, will not soon be forgotten by those in NEST. In 1981, a man who owed the casino a gambling debt of a quarter of a million dollars decided to liquidate his debt in the best way he could think of. He placed a complex, though not sophisticated, bomb in the casino, consisting of a thousand pounds of dynamite, and made an extortion demand: forgive the debt, or the place would blow up. Either way, he figured, he couldn’t lose.
The bomb, which had six different fusing systems, sat there ticking for three days while everyone argued about whose responsibility it was. No one was avoiding responsibility; on the contrary, quite a few different parties wanted to take charge of defusing the bomb.
There was the city-which really meant two guys from the fire department who’d gone through a rudimentary three-week training program at hazardous devices school. They had the backing of the politicos. Then there was the Army, which announced that it had the legal responsibility for the bomb. NEST showed up, did a careful study, and declared, this is one complex bomb; why don’t you let us handle it? But the city told both NEST and the Army to take off; its two firemen would take care of the bomb.
Both NEST and the Army were faced with a dilemma: if the city handled the bomb and anything went wrong, they’d both be held responsible, legally and morally. So they came to a decision. Throw us out of town, they declared-in writing. Otherwise, we’ll move in and attempt to render it safe.
The city did as they asked and told the Army and NEST to leave town by sunset.
The explosion that resulted caused some twelve million dollars’ worth of damage and left a huge gaping hole in Harvey’s Casino. The firemen who had insisted on rendering the bomb safe unfortunately did not have much of a grasp of elementary physics. Never again would NEST give up control to the locals without a fight.