The Zero Hour Read Online Free Page B

she’d seen no more than a dozen, and they always sent a wave of revulsion washing over her.
    She had never been to Valerie’s apartment before—they’d always met at bars and restaurants. This studio apartment, with its improvised kitchenette off to one side, had once been an upstairs parlor in some nineteenth-century industrial magnate’s town house. Once this room had been done up in opulent high-Brahmin style. Now the walls and ceilings were covered with mirrors, a high-tech bordello. The furnishings were cheap, black-painted. A worn mustard-yellow bean-bag chair, a relic of the seventies. An old tape deck and a towering set of speakers whose cloth was fraying. Valerie’s home looked the way it was supposed to look, like the lair of a hooker.
    “Here you go,” Peter announced. “The body snatchers have come and gone. The ME on call is Rena Goldman. She looks like a resident, but she’s a real doc.”
    “Where is she?”
    “Over there, talking to your pal Herlihy.”
    Valerie Santoro lay on her back, sprawled on her enormous bed. The black coverlet was encrusted with her dried blood. One hand was splayed back coyly as if beckoning one and all into her bed. Her hair was shoulder-length and dyed ash-blond; her lips bore traces of lipstick. Sarah felt her stomach lurch, looked quickly away. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s her. Okay?”

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    In the small parking lot adjacent to a petrol station, the Prince of Darkness located the rented four-wheel-drive vehicle, a Toyota Double Cab with four seats, a canvas cover over the back, and a long-distance fuel tank. A tent was strapped on to the roof rack, and in the back were a gas stove and lamp, a change of clothes, and a pair of sunglasses. A sticker on the back identified the car’s owner as Imperial Car Rental of Cape Town. If anyone happened to stop him for any reason, he’d just be another poor fool on a camping tour of the desert.
    He felt the hood. It was warm, which told him the car had not been here long. This was good.
    Looking quickly around the lot, he assured himself that no one could see what he was doing. Then he knelt to the ground beside the Toyota’s door and felt underneath the frame until he came upon a smooth, newly soldered patch. Baumann pushed at it until the ignition key slid out from beneath the soldering.
    A few blocks away he parked the car next to an international telephone box and removed a handful of one-rand coins from the glove box. He dialed a long series of numbers, fed the coins into the slot, and in twenty seconds had an international connection.
    A man’s voice answered: “Greenstone Limited.”
    “Customer service, please,” Baumann said.
    “One moment, please.”
    There was a pause, a few clicks, then a male voice said: “Customer service.”
    “Do you ship by air?” Baumann asked.
    “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