“That’s right,” came Massie’s voice after a moment’s hesitation. The tension in the room was electric.
“Uh, Ms. Cahill,” said Alfonse Mitchell of the NYPD, “you’re overlooking the most important thing of all. There isn’t going to be any destruction. We have the goddam fusing mechanism! Without it, our terrorists don’t have a bomb, now do they?”
“Oh, that’s good,” Sarah snapped. “Would you like my group to start packing now, or can we have a couple of days to sort of wind down?”
“Sarah,” Harry Whitman warned.
“I’m sorry,” Sarah apologized. “That’s just a ridiculous, even dangerous, comment to make. How do we know there aren’t a dozen fusing mechanisms just like this one, that have already been sent into the country and have already been picked up? Or, if this really is the one and only, how do we know that my terrorist can’t just pick up the phone and order another one? Have it sent in another way?”
“Right,” said Assistant FBI Director Walsh. “We can’t rule out that possibility.”
Alfonse Mitchell sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee in smoldering silence.
“Agent Massie,” Sarah said, “from what I know about how pagers work, you can’t just buy a pager, you have to lease the telephone service at the same time, isn’t that right?”
“Well, yes and no,” Massie said. “You can buy a pager anywhere. But if you want it to work, you need to lease the service.”
“Well, that’s our lead,” Sarah said, looking around the table with a smile. “We trace the pager to the paging service, and find out who signed on for the service. Even assuming they gave a false name, they have to give so much information when they sign up for a pager that we’ll be able to trace-”
“No,” Massie said. “Not that simple.”
Alfonse Mitchell smiled behind his coffee cup.
“Why not?” asked Sarah.
“First of all, the serial number plate has been removed from the pager. The designer of this thing seems to be fairly slick.”
“But aren’t there other ways-” Sarah began.
“You buy a pager from a paging company,” Harry Whitman said, “and you lease the service, right? Then you buy another pager-just the pager, no service-from a second source. Now, each pager is programmed to respond to a digital code sequence. So all you do is you study the first pager, and alter the second one, so that it responds to the same digital code sequence as the first one-”
“You’re losing us, here,” interrupted Assistant Director Walsh.
“I get it,” Sarah said. “The pager in the fusing mechanism works like the one that came with the leased service, but if we were to try to trace it, we couldn’t. Very clever.”
“You got it,” said Herbert Massie. “But I’ve been trying to get to the main attraction, here. Listen up. Our techs have a theory as to who’s behind all this.”
“Who?” Sarah asked.
“Libya.”
“Jesus!” exploded Harry Whitman.
“How do you know?” asked Assistant Director Walsh.
“All right,” Massie said. “Someone in the lab is getting the day off. The timer is one of the ones Ed Wilson sold Libya back in 1976.”
Sarah and some of the other FBI people present knew what Herbert Massie was talking about, but none of the police could possibly have been expected to know. Indeed, the story of Libya and its business dealings with the rogue CIA agent Edwin Wilson has been written about-but not entirely.
It is a matter of public record that Edwin Wilson-a CIA officer who went “off the reservation,” as they say in the intelligence business-and an associate sold Muammar Qaddafi twenty tons of Semtex plastic explosive, which later turned up in numerous terrorist attacks around the world. It is also a matter of public record that Wilson sold the Libyan government three thousand electronic explosives timers.
What is not publicly known is where and how Wilson got them. He got them from the very source that custom-makes them for the CIA. Wilson placed the order for these three thousand timers with a man who lives outside of Washington, D.C., a renowned inventor with over six hundred patents to his name, who has for years constructed high-tech gadgets for the U.S. intelligence community. This man, who once built satellites for the Air Force at Edwards Air Force Base, is widely considered a genius.
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.”