The Zero Hour

“Baccanale it is,” Dyson said. “Very good. The Brueghel’s called Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery-very special, I’ve always thought.” He sighed. “Most of the Renoirs are from Buenos Aires; the El Greco came from Saarbrücken, as I recall. The Vermeer, I’m told, came from the Gardner in Boston, but what do I know? The Dalís were picked up in Barcelona, and the Cézanne… Marty, where the hell’d the Cézanne come from?”

“A private collection outside Detroit,” Lomax answered without looking up from his notes. “Grosse Pointe Farms, I believe.”

Dyson extended his hands, spread them out, palms up. “Don’t get me wrong, Baumann. I don’t put on my cat-burglar togs and rip off the stuff myself. I don’t even commission the heists. They just come to me. Black-market dealers around the world must just figure me for an easy mark-man without a country and all that.”

“But not without a checkbook,” Baumann said.

“Right,” Dyson said. A housekeeper appeared with a tray of coffee and smoked salmon sandwiches, served them, and noiselessly vanished. “I mean, let’s face it,” Dyson went on, “I’m not exactly going to just show up at Sotheby’s Important Old Masters sale, am I? Not if I want to stay out of Leavenworth or wherever the hell it is the U.S. government wants to stash me. Anyway, stolen art’s a bargain-stuff goes for maybe seven or ten percent of the crazy prices they hold you up for at Wildenstein or Thaw or Christie’s-”

“I assume you didn’t break me out of Pollsmoor to talk about art, Mr. Dyson,” Baumann interrupted. “You had a ‘business proposition.’”

Dyson regarded Baumann for a long moment over his reading glasses, his eyes steely. Then his face relaxed into a smile. “I like a fellow who’s all business,” he said to his assistant.

Dyson’s cellular phone trilled on the table in front of him. He picked it up, flipped it open, and barked: “Yes?… Good God, what time is it there?… Does Mr. Lin ever sleep?… All right.” He pushed a button to sever the connection. Looking directly at Baumann, he went on: “The Chinese are going to take over Asia, believe you me.” He shook his head. “So they say you’re the best in the world.”

Baumann nodded curtly. “So I’ve been told. But if I were really so good, I wouldn’t have spent the last six years in jail, would I?”

“Too modest,” Dyson said. “My sources tell me BOSS screwed up. Not you.”

Baumann shrugged but did not reply.

“You were instructed to take out a member of the Mossad’s assassination unit, the kidon. Someone who was getting under Pretoria’s skin. Only it turned out the guy you whacked was some big-deal case officer-what’s the term, a katsa? Do I have this right?”

“More or less.”

“And then there’s lots of diplomatic fallout between Tel Aviv and Pretoria. Which sort of threatened to screw up Pretoria’s A-bomb program, which relied on Israel’s cooperation. So you get locked away. Life sentence. Spare them any embarrassment. Right?”

“Roughly.” Dyson had the basic idea right, and Baumann was uninterested in correcting the details. The salient fact was that this enigmatic billionaire had gone to great trouble to extract Baumann from prison, and men like this did not do such things out of humanitarian impulses.

About two months earlier, Baumann had been visited in his cell one afternoon by a priest, who, after a few moments of aimless chatter about Baumann’s religious faith, had leaned close and whispered to the prisoner that a “friend” from the outside wanted to aid his escape. The patron, a man of great resources, would be in touch soon through confederates. Baumann would be reassigned to the auto-repair shop at once.

Baumann had listened without comment.

A few days later, he had been transferred to auto repairs. A young fellow from the prison commandant’s office came by a month or so after that, ostensibly to discuss a problem with his car’s ignition system, but really to let him know that things were now in place.

“Now then,” Dyson said, opening a folder that Martin Lomax had slid before him. “I have a few questions for you.”

Baumann merely raised his eyebrows.

“Call it a job interview,” Dyson said. “What’s your real name, Mr. Baumann?”

Baumann looked at Dyson blankly. “Whatever you’d like it to be. It’s been so long I really don’t remember.”

Lomax whispered something to Dyson, who nodded and went on: “Let’s see. Born in the western Transvaal. Only son of tobacco farmers. Boers. Members of the Nationalist Party.”

“My parents were poorly educated and hardly political,” Baumann interrupted.

“You left the University of Pretoria. Recruited there to BOSS-what’s it called now, the Department of National Security or something, the DNS?”

“It’s been renamed again,” Lomax said. “Now it’s the National Intelligence Service.”