Well, there was no choice.
He opened the restaurant door and stepped into the dark air-conditioned interior. He looked around. It was empty. In the rear of the restaurant, a Chinese man sat behind a counter punching numbers into a calculator. Ullman spoke into his transmitter, giving his location. Then he approached the Chinese man and said, “You see someone come in here?”
The man gazed warily at Ullman, then pointed toward the rear of the restaurant. Ullman saw a rest room, raced to it, flung open the door, and stepped in.
A sink, a toilet; no stall, no window, no place to hide. And no one here.
He quickly turned back to the corridor, looked left and right, saw the kitchen. This was the only place the sweatshirted man could have gone.
He pushed open the swinging double doors to the small kitchen, surprising a couple of elderly Chinese men doing prep work, cutting up vegetables. Without explanation, he walked in, looked around, saw no one else. Then he saw the delivery door and ran toward it, ignoring shouts of protest from the kitchen workers.
The door gave onto a narrow alley, where he was assaulted by the stench of rotten food garbage. He looked around and saw nothing. The man in the sweatshirt must have escaped through this door and run down the alley.
Shit.
He’d gotten away. Ullman stepped carefully down a slimy set of three iron stairs into the alley, past bulging black plastic trash bags.
“I think I lost him,” Ullman said into his Walkman.
“All right,” the voice replied. “We’ll send a couple of guys down where you are to see if we can nab him.”
Ullman glanced around, then moved quietly over toward the blue metal Dumpster, which overflowed with more disgusting food garbage, and as he glanced behind it, he felt something grab his throat. He lost his footing as he was yanked behind the Dumpster. He felt something squeeze his trachea with an excruciatingly painful force. He reached for his pistol, but before he could do so, something slammed into his right eye.
Everything went red. He doubled over in pain and gasped. For a moment he could not speak. He wondered whether his eye had burst. Somehow he realized that the object that had just smashed into his eyeball was the barrel of a handgun. With his one good eye he found himself looking into a man’s ice-blue eyes.
“Who are you?” the man whispered.
“FBI,” Ullman croaked. “Baumann-”
“Man, you got the wrong guy,” Baumann said as he crushed the young blond man’s trachea with one hand, killing him instantly.
The FBI man had been agile and strong, but also clearly inexperienced. And he had seen Baumann’s face-disguised, yes, but that was still too great a risk. Baumann removed the dead man’s wallet and found the FBI ID card, which identified him as Special Agent Russell Ullman. He pocketed the card and murmured to himself, “You got the wrong guy.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The plastic explosive Composition C-4, so beloved by terrorists, usually comes in rectangular blocks an inch high, two inches wide, and eleven inches long. Each block, wrapped in clear or green plastic, weighs one and a quarter pounds. Its color is pure white.
C-4’s compactness makes it appealing to the U.S. military, and of course to terrorists. For terrorists, one of its most useful attributes is that it doesn’t have an odor: it is therefore quite difficult to detect. It is not, however, impossible to detect.
What is unknown outside exclusive intelligence and law-enforcement circles is that certain types of C-4 are much more readily detectable than others. For obvious reasons, counterterrorists prefer that terrorists and potential terrorists know as little as possible about these various types of C-4.
Having served in South African intelligence, however, Baumann knew quite a lot about explosives. He knew that the active ingredient in C-4 is the compound cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, which is entirely odorless. In fact, it is the impurities in most plastic explosives that are sniffed out by trained dogs or mechanical sensors.
He knew, too, the well-concealed fact that all C-4 in America is made in one of seven manufacturing plants. Six of the manufacturers use either nitroglycerine or the compound EGDN in the manufacture of dynamite, which contaminates the C-4 made at the same time. This contaminant makes most C-4 detectable.
Only one company in America makes a pure, “uncontaminated” C-4. Baumann knew which one it was.
He also had a reasonably good plan to get some.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
As a technology procurement specialist in the Network Administration Department of the Manhattan Bank, Rick DeVore handled a lot of telephone solicitations. That was his job; he did it without complaining and was always friendly but firm. The truth was, in the computer business, a lot of selling took place over the phone, so you couldn’t refuse to take calls. But if you stayed on the phone too long, you’d never get anything done. So Rick DeVore was quick to screen out the jokers, those selling junk, stuff he had no interest in.
The vendor on the phone this morning, however, seemed to know what he was talking about.
“Hi, I’m Bob Purcell from Metrodyne Systems in Honolulu,” the voice on the phone said.
“How’re you doing?” Rick said neutrally, not encouraging, but not discouraging either. Metrodyne was one of the hottest software companies these days, located in the hottest new city for software companies, Honolulu. They wrote add-ons for Novell networks.
“Good, thanks. Listen, I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I was calling to let you know about the availability of a new security NLM that allows for run-time encryption of files regardless of format or network.”
“Uh huh,” DeVore said, doodling on his pink “While You Were Out” telephone message pad. He flashed on a mental image of himself and Deb last night and wondered if it was true that men think about sex every five minutes.
The Metrodyne vendor went on, with increasing enthusiasm: “Every time you save a file it’s automatically encrypted on your Novell network, and every time you open the file it’s decrypted. It’s really great. Just like the way a file is compressed and decompressed automatically, without the user even being aware of it. I think every Novell user should have it. I was wondering if you’d have some time for me to come by and talk to you about-”
“Gee, that sounds cool,” DeVore said sincerely, “but you know, we don’t use Novell anymore. We just switched to NT Advanced Server.” This was Microsoft’s networking software. “Sorry.”
“Oh, no, that’s great,” said the salesman. “We’ve got a version that runs on NT too-we really want to address the variety of the marketplace. Do you mind if I ask, what are you currently using for security?”
“Well, I-”
“I mean, are you relying on what comes out of the box for security? Because we’ve engineered our product to make up for the weaknesses in NT’s security. As you know, NT doesn’t even do encryption, you’ve got to encrypt everything separately. But ours does across-the-board encryption-”
“Listen,” Rick DeVore said, shifting into terminate-call mode, “I’ve pretty much said all I can responsibly tell you. Sorry. I’m really not at liberty to talk about this stuff. But if you’d like to send me a demo of your product I’d be happy to take a look at it. Okay?”
When he’d taken a mailing address and a contact name, Leo Krasner hung up the phone and turned to his SPARC-20 workstation.
He’d learned all he had to about what software the bank used.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
The Technical Services analyst, on the secure direct line to the Hoover Building, sounded as young as an adolescent. His high-pitched voice actually cracked several times as he spoke.
“Agent Cahill, I’m Ted Grabowski,” he said tentatively. “I’ve been assigned to work on the piece of equipment, the fusing mechanism.”