The Zero Hour

Actually, there was first a great flash of light, a bright yellow-white light that grew steadily in intensity, followed by an explosion, an orange ball of fire that gave off smoke both white and black. The helicopter, a flaming orb, pitched wildly in the air, and as it fell apart, a million pieces plummeted to the river below.

“Roth,” Sarah said, embracing him. “Normally I don’t like it when my people keep me in the dark-but I suppose I’ll have to make an exception this time. Good job.”

It had all come clear to her. NEST, listening in to the transmission over her walkie-talkie, must have provided Roth with a transmitter that would work with the bomb that Baumann had engineered. They’d handed it to Roth before he boarded the helicopter a few blocks away. Strictly speaking, she thought, Roth hadn’t done anything illegal.

Actually, that wasn’t quite true. He hadn’t actually detonated the thing himself, but he’d switched the bomb on, while the transmitter concealed in his waistband stayed on-it had been on since before Baumann had gotten into the helicopter-and as long as Roth was within a few hundred yards of the bomb it wouldn’t detonate.

Roth had been bluffing, at least in part-he hadn’t told Baumann that he had a transmitter hidden in his pants, and that that was the only tone source. As soon as the helicopter moved out of the range of the transmitter-over water, just as the NEST team had calculated, though it was a risky calculation, to be sure-the bomb had gone off. But no one would ever know, and certainly no one on the roof of the building would ever say anything, not even to each other, about what had happened. No one would ever be able to prove anything, and after all, justice had been done.

All in all, the explosion had taken less than a second.

CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

Malcolm Dyson switched off CNN and wheeled around in a fury to the bank of telephones next to his desk.

“The goddam so-called Prince of Darkness fucked it up!” he shouted to the empty study, and was surprised when someone answered.

“That he did,” said a man who was coming through the door, accompanied by two other men. Dyson looked around, bewildered. Three others were climbing in through the windows. He recognized their dark-blue windbreakers, the big yellow block letters. They were federal marshals of the United States government, he could see. He would never forget the first time he had seen these dark-blue windbreakers with the yellow lettering, on the night that his wife and daughter were killed.

“What-?” he began.

“That he did,” the man said. “He gave us an extraditable offense, Mr. Dyson. But you and your people helped us too.”

“The hell you talking about?” Dyson managed to choke out.

“See, now that we’ve got hard evidence of your role in international terrorism, the Swiss government will no longer protect you. It can’t. It’s given you up. You’re being extradited to the U.S.” The marshal cuffed Dyson and, with the others, led him away, out of the study and down the long main corridor of the mansion Malcolm Dyson called Arcadia. “A nice place you got here,” the lead marshal said, gawking. “Very nice indeed.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

The burial service was held at a bleak cemetery south of Boston, where the Cronin family had several plots. Jared didn’t cry. Neither did he cry at the funeral. He was stoic, impassive, and talked hardly at all.

Teddy Williams cried, though, and they were genuine tears, and Sarah cried as well, and her tears were genuine too. The sky was gray, the clouds drifting by like cigar smoke.

After it was over, but before the small crowd dispersed, Pappas turned to Sarah and smiled sadly.

“How you doing, boss?” he said.

“The way you’d think,” she replied.

“True you’re being promoted to headquarters?”

She nodded again.

“The big time, huh? Onward and upward.”

“I guess.”

He lowered his voice so Jared couldn’t hear. “Jared’ll get through this okay. He’s a strong kid.”

“Yeah, he’ll be okay. It’s hard for him-all the more given how, you know, ambivalent he was about his father.”

“Same for you, I expect.”

“Yeah. But less so. I didn’t like the guy, but we had a son together. The most precious thing in my life. So you can’t exactly call it a mistake that I married him. I mean, I shouldn’t have, but I did, and something wonderful came out of all that hell.”

“Your luck with men’s bound to change.”

“Maybe,” she said, and turned and walked over to Jared, took his hand. Pappas took Jared’s other hand, and together the three of them walked toward the car. “I guess anything’s possible.”

CODA

Sweet Bobby Higgins was tried and eventually found innocent of the murder of Valerie Santoro.

Malcolm Dyson was imprisoned in the United States and died of a heart attack in prison.

The Manhattan Bank was declared insolvent, its stock worthless. The Federal Reserve Bank negotiated a deal with Citicorp to buy what remained of the Manhattan Bank’s assets. Warren Elkind committed suicide two days later.

AUTHOR’S NOTE