The Zero Hour

“Now, I know the distance and the time between the bits of the stripe we’re interested in-the sequence of magnetic impulses, let’s call it. I can calculate it on the basis of the rate at which the playback head is revolving. I know the periodicity. So, I tell the computer what I’m looking for and to pull out any signals of interest. Then we put sort of a digital ‘picture’ of the magnetic information onto a computer, using a specially constructed piece of equipment, a helical-scan tape playback mechanism that converts the analog signal to a digital signal. It’s the same technology as a compact-disc player or a digital audio tape, right? Really, it’s a modified digital compact cassette playback unit that can play back the recovered audio tape as if it were high-density digital tape.”

“Look,” Sarah broke in at last. “Computer stuff is obviously not my area of expertise, which is why I’m talking to you. You’re saying you may be able to unerase this tape, right?”

“That’s right.”

“How long would it take you?”

“The process might take a few hours, maybe. But to do it right, a week, probably-”

“Okay. I’d like to hire your services on a contract basis. Could you have something for me in two or three days?”

“Three days?” Gelman gasped. “I mean, theoretically, yes, but-”

“That would be great,” Sarah said. “Thanks.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Baumann awoke with a pounding headache, covered in a cold sweat. The linen bedsheet around him was soaked, as if he’d been doused with gallons of cold water. He drew back the heavy drapes to let in the strong morning sunlight. Looking down at the Avenue des Portugais, then up at the sky, he estimated that it was eight or nine o’clock. He had badly needed the sleep, but there was much to be done today.

For a few moments he sat on the edge of the bed and massaged his temples to ease the headache. His head spun with the residue of nightmares. He had dreamed he was back in the hole, that black chamber of horrors.

He had abided the floggings, the “cuts” with a cane while you were strapped, spread-eagled, to the three-legged mare, a prison physician standing dourly by. But the hole, or the “bomb,” as some called it, was the worst place in Pollsmoor, a dank horrific place it had taken all of his strength to endure without cracking. The hole was where they put you to punish you for fighting in the exercise yard, for striking a boer, for no reason at all other than that the chief warder didn’t like your face. Actually, he had spent no more than a month there in all his years at Pollsmoor. It meant solitary confinement, a bare concrete cell, a “punishment regime” of maize porridge and watery broth and more porridge.

No cigarettes, no newspapers, no letters, no visitors. No radio, no television. No contact with the outside world; no leaving the tiny, fetid, unlighted cell, whose walls began to close in on you. You lived like an animal in a cage rank with your own urine and excrement from the shallow hole in the ground into which you had to relieve yourself.

Why was he having this dream again? What did it mean? That his subconscious didn’t believe he was out of prison? That his mind understood things on a higher plane: he was still not out of prison?

He took a long, almost unbearably hot shower. Then he got into one of the hotel’s thick white cotton robes (“Hôtel Raphaël Paris” stitched in gold on the breast), settled into one of the suite’s chaises longues, and began to make telephone calls. As he spoke-his French, slightly British-accented, was impeccable-he idly combed his damp hair straight back.

***

He’d flown into Orly from Geneva’s Cointrin Airport, on a false passport provided by Dyson’s staff. Travel within the European Economic Community had become remarkably casual since he’d been locked away. No one gave his Swiss passport so much as a passing glance. But however Dyson’s people had procured the passport, he didn’t trust it. If it was forged, was the forgery top-notch? Was the forger an informer for the Swiss authorities? If it was a legitimate passport, what if it had been flagged as missing? If someone in the Swiss government had been paid off, how secure was that transaction?

Dyson had offered to supply a full set of the documents he’d need-passports, driver’s licenses, credit cards-but he’d politely turned down the offer. Dyson-supplied paper was a sheep’s bell: if he chose, Dyson could keep close tabs on his whereabouts.