The Zero Hour

“Yes, sir, depending on destination.”

“London.”

“Yes, sir, we do.”

“All right, thank you,” Baumann said. “I’ll call back with an order.”

He hung up the phone and returned to the Toyota.

It was almost dusk when he passed through Port Nolloth, on the Atlantic Coast. From there, he headed northwest. Asphalt-paved highways became gravel roads and then dirt paths, which ventured feebly across the parched savannah. A few kilometers down the road, a forlorn cluster of huts sprang up. Beside them nattered a scraggly herd of goats.

When he passed the last hut, he checked his odometer. After traveling exactly four and a half kilometers farther, he pulled to a stop and got out.

The sun was setting, immense and orange, but the air remained stiflingly, staggeringly hot. This was the Kalahari, the great sand veld thousands of kilometers broad. He had just crossed the South African border into Namibia.

The border between Namibia and South Africa is for the most part unmarked, unguarded, and unfenced. It bisects villages where tribes have lived for centuries, oblivious to the outside world. Crossing back and forth between South Africa and its neighbors-Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique-is simple. Thousands of Africans cross in either direction every day.

Wearing his dark sunglasses, Baumann stood beside the vehicle, drinking greedily from his flask of cold water and enjoying the eerie, otherworldly landscape: the cracked, dry riverbeds, the high ocher and russet sand dunes, the gray-green shrubs and the scrubby acacia bushes. The heat rippled up from the striated expanse of sand.

For ten minutes or so he enjoyed the silence, broken only by the high whistle of the wind. Mere hours ago he had been looking through a narrow, barred window at a miserly patch of sky, and now he was standing in the middle of an expanse so vast that, as far as he looked in any direction, he could see no signs of civilization. He had never doubted he would taste freedom again, but now that it was here, it was intoxicating.

The noise came first, almost imperceptibly, and then he could make out the tiny black dot in the sky. Slowly, slowly, the dot grew larger, and the noise crescendoed, until, with a deafening clatter, the helicopter hovered directly overhead.

It banked to one side, righted itself, then swooped down for a landing. The sand swirled around him in clouds, raining against the lenses of his sunglasses, stinging his eyes, bringing tears. He squinted, ran toward the unmarked chopper, and ducked down beneath the whirring blades as he approached the fuselage.

The pilot, in a drab-green flight jacket, gave him a brusque nod as he hopped in. Without a word, the pilot reached down to his left side and pulled up on the collective pitch control lever, which resembled the arm of an emergency brake. The helicopter rose straight up into the air.

Baumann put on the headphones to block out the sound and leaned back to enjoy the flight to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia and the site of the country’s only international airport.

Baumann had not gotten much sleep the night before, yet he was still alert. This was fortunate. For the next few hours he would need to remain vigilant.

CHAPTER FIVE

Valerie Santoro, call girl and entrepreneur, had been a beautiful woman. Even in death her body was voluptuous. She’d worked hard to maintain it for her clients. Her breasts were pert, too perfect: she’d obviously had silicone implants. Only the face was Sarah unable to look at: part of the forehead was missing. Dark blood was caked around the irregular-shaped chunk removed by the bullet at the point of exit. Inconsistent, Sarah knew, with suicide.

The pale-blue eyes looked challengingly at Sarah, regarding her with contemptuous disbelief. The lips, pale and devoid of lipstick, were slightly parted.

“Not a bad-looking babe,” Peter said. “Check out the bush.”

Her pubic hair had been shaved into the shape of a Mercedes-Benz emblem, a perfect, painstaking replica. Who had done this for her?

“Classy chick, huh? The snitch’s snatch.”

Sarah did not answer.

“What’s the matter, lost your sense of humor?”

The photographer from the ID unit was hard at work with his Pentax 645, snapping still photos of the crime scene and the body “in cadence,” as they call it-in sequence, in a grid, providing a photographic record designed to anticipate all of a jury’s questions. Every few seconds some part of her-her right cheek; her left hand, loosely curled into a fist; a perfectly oval breast-was illuminated by the camera’s lightning.

“What was the name of that call-girl service she worked for again?”

“Stardust Escort Service,” Sarah replied distantly. “The poshest call-girl business in Boston.”

“She used to brag she was doing the mayor, or the governor, or was it Senator-”

“She had an impressive clientele,” Sarah agreed. “Let’s leave it at that.”