The Zero Hour

After twenty minutes of concentrated work, checking and rechecking all fittings and connections, Baumann was finished. The bomb was now armed, which meant that the entire basement area was off-limits. Anyone passing within twenty-five feet-a guard, a janitor, anyone-would set off the bomb, which would destroy the building, with Baumann still in it. To protect himself until he got out, he had jammed shut the external locks of all doors to the basement. They could be opened from the inside, but not the outside. After he was gone, if a bomb squad somehow managed to force a door open-well, that would be unfortunate for them.

Baumann was excited and nervous, as he was whenever he did a job, although he had never before done something of this magnitude.

He glanced at his watch. The helicopter was probably on its way to take him, and his hostage, from the roof of the building directly to Teterboro Airport, a few miles from the city. That way, there was no chance of an arrest at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport.

The helicopter pilot might not come through-Baumann trusted no one, and had considered that possibility-but it was unlikely. He had offered the pilot so much money it was impossible to imagine that he wouldn’t be there. Moreover, there were probably a dozen appropriate pilots who would have gladly taken his assignment, but this one seemed the most likely to keep the bargain, the most motivated.

***

“Did he hang up?” Pappas asked.

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “The line went dead. He said, ‘I think I hear voices,’ and the line went dead.”

“Either he discovered Jared, or Jared hung up so he wouldn’t be overheard. We’d better hope it’s the latter. And we’d better hope he calls again. It’s our only hope.”

“Alex, Jared doesn’t know where he is. He just knows he’s locked in a room in the basement of some kind of bank building, and that could be a thousand places.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Pappas said. “Next time he calls, we’ll run a trace.”

“It’s a cellular phone, Alex!”

“Boy, you’re so upset you’re not thinking clearly.”

“I can barely think. We can trace it, can’t we?”

When a couple of criminals kidnapped an Exxon executive a few years ago, she suddenly recalled, they’d used a cellular phone to call in their ransom demands, mistakenly thinking cellular phones can’t be traced. That had been their undoing.

“But only if Jared calls again,” Pappas said.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

There are only four places in Manhattan where a helicopter is permitted to land, four officially designated heliports. One is at West Thirtieth Street and Twelfth Avenue, by the West Side Highway; another is on East Thirty-fourth Street; still another on East Sixtieth Street.

The fourth is the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, located at Pier Six on the East River. Some people call it by its old name, the Wall Street Heliport; helicopter pilots just call it Downtown. It is run by the Port Authority of the City of New York and has twelve parking spaces for choppers.

Since space in the city is so prohibitively expensive, most of the helicopter charter companies that do business in Manhattan are located in New Jersey. One of the smaller charter companies, based at Allaire Airport in Farmingdale, New Jersey, fifty-five miles to the southwest of New York City, was Executive Class Aircraft Charters, certificated by the FAA as an air-taxi operator. Of Executive’s six full-time pilots, Dan Hammond was, at fifty-one, the oldest. Flying was a young man’s game, and there were hardly any helicopter pilots older than fifty-five. Most of them were in their late twenties or thirties. It wasn’t a matter of burnout, but of the medical exam you had to take every year to qualify. The longer you lived, the more likely you were to fail the medical, for one reason or another. And once you flunked the medical, they wouldn’t let you fly.

Dan Hammond’s ugly little secret was that his hearing was going. They hadn’t caught it on last year’s exam, but his doctor had told him he’d never pass this time. His ears had done yeoman work for fifty-one years, and now, after a quarter-century of rock concerts (the Stones, the Dead) and flying in noisy old Hueys in Vietnam, the Bell 205, and then thousands of short hops in the Jet Rangers, they were signing over and out.

It didn’t make much difference to Executive if Hammond was forced to resign. There were dozens of low-time, upstart, rookie pilots, with the bare minimum of a thousand flight hours in a turbine helicopter, waiting in the wings to take his place. So what if the low-time kids didn’t know how to fly the ASTAR, the jewel of Executive’s fleet? A hundred hours of flying time and they could do it too.

It was time to leave, anyway. The economy was lousy, which had really hit the helicopter charter companies hard. Executive Class Aircraft Charters was on the verge of bankruptcy.