Paris in the Winter
From the fragments of various conversations I had been able to overhear, it was clear that Sheldon's team was frantically trying to locate and neutralize Nikolas Van der Rohe before the end of the year. But as the last day of 1999 dawned, most of the usual gang was still camped out in my house. They appeared to be very frustrated, and I guessed that Mr. V. was eluding them. A sense of gloom settled in, growing deeper by the minute. I suspected that many of them believed they had failed, and that the price of their failure might turn out to be the destruction of two American cities. It all seemed so unreal that I'm not sure I actually grasped it. In those long-ago days of pre-9/11 innocence, it seemed impossible that anyone could hate us enough to want to inflict such incomprehensible damage on innocent people.
But whether or not any of us actually believed that Armageddon was at hand, a palpable sense of relief washed over the room when Dr. Malenkov's email arrived late that morning:
DONT LET IFFEL TOWR CLOK REECH ZED
I knew about the clock on the Eiffel Tower that was counting down the minutes to the millennium, but I had to ask Sheldon who Zed was. "That's just another way of saying zero," he explained, to the general amusement of the agents.
Within a few minutes, Sheldon and his cohorts were busily involved in more telephone conversations than there were agents, as several of them were adroitly juggling multiple phones. I tried to follow some of the conversations, but they spoke in hushed tones and pointedly wandered away every time I approached. The phone calls gradually tapered off, and everybody seemed happy.
By mid-afternoon, CNN was reporting that the huge digital clock on the Eiffel Tower, featuring 25-foot-high numerals that had been counting the minutes to the millennium for five years, had mysteriously failed just a few hours before midnight[6] – which, I belatedly realized, would reach Paris seven hours before it hit Dallas. I had assumed that all of Van der Rohe's targets would be in the U.S., and thus I had neglected to consider the impact of longitude and time zones on the arrival of the millennium.
We had cut it pretty close. And there was still one more to go.
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