The Fifth Horseman (10 page)

“You mean,” a furious Crandell demanded, “you propose to let that son of a bitch get off scot free just because his goddamn bomb―“

He never finished. A white wall of light seemed to explode from the screens of Room 2B890. So blindingly luminous was its flash, so painfully intense its glare, the men in the room flinched and shielded their eyes. Then, from ninety miles into space and a quarter of the way around the planet, the satellite cameras sucked up the fireball soaring over the Awbari Sand Sea and sent it hurtling onto the screens of the Pentagon, a roiling caldron of exploding gases: whites, reds, yellows and oranges, arranged in a dazzling kaleidoscope of light and fire.

For seconds, too stunned to react or speak, the two dozen men in the room stared, thanks to those cameras, at a sight no human eye had ever beheld, the bowels of hell, the incandescent heart of a thermonuclear explosion.

The first sound to intrude on the room came from seventy thousand feet over the site, from the pilot of the SR-71. Mechanically, indifferent to the spectacle below him, he read off the swiftly changing measurements of his instrument panels: a tide of thermal X rays, gamma rays, beta particles rushing past his detectors. His figures meant nothing to most of the men in the room. It did not matter. Everything they needed to know was right there on the screen before them, in the unsurpassable beauty and horror of a fireball rising from the desert floor.

The President squeezed Harold Brown’s forearm in his fingers. He had paled and his mouth hung half open, his lower lip curling downward with dismay.

Watching, mesmerized, he could think of only one thing: John the Divine’s Revelation of the Apocalypse: “… behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

Now, he thought, a Fifth Horseman has emerged from the entrails of hell to scourge humanity with terror, with arms so terrible even John’s hallucinating imagination could not have conceived them.

“My God,” he whispered to the man beside him. “Oh my God, Harold, how did he ever do it?”

The answer to an anguished President’s question could be traced back to a November afternoon in Paris not quite one year before the Libyan’s threat message had been delivered to the White House gate.

France’s President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, punctual as usual, entered the Cabinet Room of his Elysee Palace precisely at four o’clock that afternoon.

He circled the table to greet first the Prime Minister, then the Ministers of Finance, Industry, Foreign Affairs, the Interior and Defense. When he got to Pierre Foucault, Chairman of France’s Atomic Energy Commission, a broad smile broke out on his composed features.

“Bravo, mon cher,” he said to his old friend and schoolmate.

Foucault’s reply was a glance at the empty chair beside his. The scientist he had summoned to this restricted and secret meeting was late.

A slight flaring of his nostrils betrayed Giscard’s irritation. “We shall proceed as planned,” he said. He took his seat at the head of the table and, in — that slow, precise enunciation he reserved for particularly solemn occasions, began.

“Messieurs,” he declared, “I have asked you here today to inform you of an event that is certain to have an overwhelming impact on the destiny of our nation. A team of French scientists working at our laser fusion research center at Fontenay-aux-Roses has succeeded within the past week in solving one of the most formidable scientific challenges in man’s history. Indeed, they have done something scientists around the world have been trying to do for thirty years-produce energy from fusion. The results of their work will ultimately permit this country, and indeed the entire world, to resolve the most intransigent problem we all face, the global energy crisis.”

He paused to allow the impact of his words to register. “We have asked the man responsible for our success, Monsieur Alain Pr6vost, to join us, but he has apparently been held up in traffic, so I shall ask Monsieur Foucault to begin.”

The President nodded to his Atomic Energy Chairman, who picked up the carafe in front of him and filled his water glass. He took a sip. Then he held up the glass as though he were about to propose a toast.

“Messieurs,” he began, “the meaning of our breakthrough is that the water in this glass …” he paused an instant for dramatic effect, swirling the water in his upraised glass, allowing it to glisten in the pale sunlight, “is now a source of energy capable of lighting the lamps of mankind. It means that there is now in this glass of water alone enough energy to meet the power requirements of the entire city of Paris and all its inhabitants for fortyeight hours.”

Foucault brought the glass back to the ministerial table with a sharp crash. The men around him gasped. He paused, savoring the shock his words had produced. Then he began again, his voice softer. “Until now, man has met his energy needs by exploiting the heritage of the past, the coal, oil, gas and uranium buried in the earth’s crust. His long-term survival on this planet has depended, however, on finding a new source of energy, one that is by its very nature virtually inexhaustible. There are only two, the sun-and water.

“With water,” he said, “we begin with the most abundant resource on the planet. It is, after all, everywhere. All water contains one of the simplest atoms on earthdeuterium, or, as we say, ‘heavy hydrogen.’ This water glass is full of them. If we can bang two of these atoms together hard enough so that they meld-that is, fusethe result is a release of energy so enormous it staggers the mind.

“Let me give you an example. One kilogram of the petroleum we now purchase at such an exorbitant cost in the Persian Gulf releases thirteen kilowatt hours of energy when it burns. One kilogram of heavy hydrogen, properly fused, will release …” again Poucault paused, measuring each word for dramatic effect, “ninety-one million kilowatt hours of energy.”

The ministers let out what was nearly a collective gasp.

“The search for this energy form,” he told his now spellbound audience, “goes back to the 1930s when the English astrophysicists at the Cavendish Laboratories realized that this was the process which explained the unac-countable energy releases of the sun and the stars. If it could be done in the stars, they asked, why couldn’t it be done on earth?”

Foucault leaned forward, savoring for an instant the role of a pedagogue.

“It meant, messieurs, dealing with time in billionths of seconds. A billionth of a second is to one second as one second is to three hundred and thirtytwo years. It meant creating conditions of temperature and pressure that are equivalent to hell on earth.

“The Soviets made the first great leap forward in 1958 with the ingenious use of magnetic force to produce the effect we sought. In the late sixties when the scientific community introduced the power of the laser beam into our work, real progress began. As you all know, we here in France have been at the forefront of laser technology. Our stunning and quite unexpected breakthrough of a fortnight ago comes as a result of the scientific advances we made in the late seventies developing our new carbondioxide laser.

“I must caution you all,” the Minister warned, “on the need for the utmost secrecy about our advance. What we have done is to demonstrate for the first time the scientific feasibility of the fusion process. Applying it commercially will require years and years of work. The potential commercial benefits to this country of our head start, however, are incalculable. We must not allow the premature disclosure of our discovery to deprive France of the just-and immeasurable-rewards of our scientists’ work.”

So mesmerized were the men around the table, no one noticed a hussier slip into the council chamber and discreetly hand an envelope to the Minister of the Interior. The Minister glanced at its contents, then, his face a register of the gravity of the message he had just read, turned to Valery Giscard d’Estaing.

“Monsieur le President,” he said, interrupting Foucault’s speech, “the Brigade Criminelle of the Prefecture of Police has just informed me they have discovered a car with a corpse in it abandoned in the Allee de Longchamps in the Bois de Boulogne. The corpse has been tentatively identified through a laissez-passer issued to attend this meeting. It appears to belong to this scientist we are waiting for―” he glanced at his paper — “Alain Prevost.”

Three blue police vans, yellow roof lights blinking, marked the scene.

A cordon of policemen screened off passersby, prostitutes and poodle walkers gawking in morbid curiosity at the Renault and the shrouded figure laid out on the ground beside it. Ignoring his policemen’s salutes, the Minister of the Interior, trailed by Pierre Foucault, swept through the cordon up to Maurice Lemuel, head of the Police Judiciaire, France’s top police investigatory force.

“Alors?” barked the Minister.

Lemuel turned to a plastic sheet laid out on the Bois de Boulogne grass. On it were two items, a wallet and a slide rule, its white lacquer surface yellowed by age and use.

“That’s all?” the Minister asked. “No sign of the documents he was carrying?”

“That’s all, sir,” Lemuel replied. “That and the pass we identified him with.”

The Minister turned to the Atomic Energy Chairman. “It’s perfectly incredible,” he said, his voice full of barely controlled anger. “You let these people go walking about Paris carrying secret papers as though they were taking shirt, to the laundry.”

“Olivier,” Foucault protested, “these men are scientists. They lust don’t think about security the way you do.”

“Maybe they don’t,” the Minister said. “But you’re supposed to. You’re personally responsible for the security of your agency. Which has been appallingly bad in this case.” He turned back to Lemuel. “What have you learned?”

“Very little,” the policeman answered. “We’ll need an autopsy to be sure of the cause of death. I would guess from the expression on his face that he was either smothered or had his windpipe broken by a very forceful, expert karate blow.”

Shortly after 4:30 A.M. the following day a telephone’s harsh summons jarred the stillness of the Minister of the Interior’s private apartment above the Place Beauvau. He groaned. From under the covers, his hand flayed uncertainly at the darkness, searching out the sound.

His caller was the Atomic Energy Chairman. “They called,” Foucault gasped.

“The people who killed Prevost. They want a million francs for the attache case. They just got through to our director of research at Fontenay, Pierre Lebrun. They told him if we want it back he has to be at the Cintra Bar on the Vieux-Port in Marseilles at exactly twelve noon today with one million francs in hundredfrane notes in a plastic shopping bag of the Bazaar d’Hotel de Ville. He’s supposed to wear a darkblue suit, black shoes, a white shirt and tie and a felt hat.”

Despite the seriousness of his caller’s words, the Minister could not help laughing. “Dressed like that, your poor Monsieur Lebrun is going to stand out like a nun in a whorehouse down there.”

He rose from his bed, looking about for his clothes. “Have Monsieur Lebrun at my office at eight o’clock,” he ordered. “I’m going to convene a meeting of my top people immediately.”

The four senior police officials of the French Republic sat respectfully in front of the Interior Minister’s desk, a gift from Napoleon to one of his distant predecessors. rhey were Paul-Robert de Villeprieux, the director of the DST, France’s counter-espionage service; his bald, slightly stoop-shouldered colleague General Henri Bertrand, head of what was familiarly known in the Ministry as La Piscine (” the Pool”), the SDECE, France’s intelligence service; Maurice Fraguier, the forty-five-yearold director general of the National Police; and General Marcel Piqueton, commander of the forty-thousand-man Gendarmerie Nationale. The Minister quickly summarized the details of the extortionist’s call.

“Gentlemen,” he said, sipping at the black coffee he had ordered for them all, “what are your views?”

Fraguier, chief of the Police Nationale, began. “Quite frankly, Monsieur le Ministre, I had suspected we were dealing with an affair of state here, a theft of industrial secrets by a foreign intelligence service, the CIA probably, or the KGB. This message makes it quite clear it’s a banal case of extortion organized by the Corsican milieu. This is characteristic of the way the Corsicans behave in payoff delivery situations.” Fraguier lit a cigarette and sat back in his chair. “It doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to predict how it’s going to work. Right near the Cintra Bar down there in Marseilles they’ve got the biggest Corsican neighborhood in France, the ‘Bread Basket.’ They’ll use it for the payoff, because they feel safe in there.

“They’ll let Monsieur Lebrun sit and marinate for a while in the Cintra while they study the neighborhood to make sure we’re not around. Then he’ll get a telephone call. He’ll be told to leave immediately for another address up in the Bread Basket by a very precise route. They’ve picked l’heure du pastis, so they’ll probably send him to another bar and they’ll give him a pseudonym, Jean Dupont. Once he’s in the bar he’ll get another call with the instructions as to where to leave the money. It will be very nearby, but out of sight of the bar. The trashcan in front of 17 Rue Belles pcuelles. Or they’ll say, `Hang it on the handlebars of the blue bicycle leaning against the door of 10 Rue des Trois-Lucs. Do it immediately and come back to the bar.’ When they’ve picked up the payoff, he’ll get a last call telling him where the papers are.”

The Minister placed his hands before him as though in prayer, lightly tapping his fingertips together, contemplating the scenario his police chief had outlined. He turned to the head of the SDECE. Eyes half closed like a monk in meditation, a Gauloise cigarette that never seemed to move dangling from his mouth, General Henri Bertrand sat motionless on his spindly chair. The perfect stillness of the man was attested to by the inch-and-a-half-long ash dangling at the end of his cigarette. He spoke and it spilled over the lapels of his gray suit.