The Fifth Horseman (20 page)

Booth shuddered. The skyline of Manhattan held no promise of beauty for him. What was waiting for him at the other end of the Lincoln Tunnel was the final refinement of the hell he most feared, the ultimate challenge to the techniques he and his men had so carefully assembled.

In Washington, D.C., half a dozen lights were burning in the West Wing of the White House. It was a little doll’s house of a building sandwiched between the more familiar fagade of the Executive Mansion and the gray Victorian hulls of the Executive Office Building. With its narrow corridors thick with wall-to-wall carpeting, its walls lined with Currier and Ives prints and oils of eighteenth-century Whig politicians, the West Wing looked more like the home of a Middleburg, Virginia, foxhunting squire than what it was, the real seat of power of the President of the United States.

Jack Eastman was upstairs in his second-floor office contemplating the unappetizing dish of Beefy Mac he had bought from the basement vending machine to replace the Sunday supper he had forgotten to eat. Like the walls of most Washington offices, his were covered with photos and citations, the milestones along the road that had taken him to the White House. There was Eastman as a young F-86 pilot in Korea, his graduation certificate from the Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program; four sixteenth-century Delft porcelains he had purchased in Brussels during a tour at NATO headquarters. Before Eastman in a hinged silver frame were pictures of his wife and his nineteen-year-old daughter, Cathy, taken two years before on the June morning she graduated from Washington’s Cathedral School.

The National Security Assistant picked listlessly at a twist of macaroni with his plastic fork. Inevitably, helplessly almost, his eyes turned back to the slender figure before him in her white graduation dress, her new diploma grasped defiantly in her hand. At first glance, the long, virtually angular face she had gotten from her mother seemed glazed with a solemnity appropriate to the moment. Yet Eastman could read there a hidden smile curling mischievously at the end of her lips. From the time she’d been a baby squirming in his arms that smile had been a secret bond between them, the special gauge of the love of father and daughter.

He stared at that smile now, unable to turn away, unable to think of anything except his proud girl in her white dress. The movements of his jaw slowed, then stopped. Nausea crept through his stomach. Slowly, despairingly, he lowered his head to the waiting cradle of his arms, struggling to stop the sobs, searching for the discipline he’d been so long trained to exercise. Jack Eastman’s only child was a sophomore at Columbia University in New York City.

Laila Dajani hurried past the black limousines. They were always there, lined up like mourners’ cars waiting outside the funeral of a politician or a Mafia chieftain. For an instant, she looked with pity and contempt at the knot of gawkers clustered by the door, waiting, despite the cold, the time, the fact that it was Sunday night, to savor whatever bizarre pleasure it was they got from watching someone famous walk into New York’s Studio 54.

Inside, she was overwhelmed once again by the scene: the twelve landing lights of a Boeing 707, the multicolored strobes hurling a sparkling firestorm of light and color against the nylon drapes; the waiters slithering past in their satin shorts; the horde of liquid forms on the dance floor frozen, then released, in the incandescent glare of the strobes. Bianca Jagger was there, dancing frantically in satin jogging shorts; so, too, was Marisa Berenson, lolling on a banquette as though she were holding court. In front of Laila a frail black in leather pants, bare-chested except for a studded black leather vest, hands chained to a truss around his genitals, swayed in lascivious response to the ecstasy of some private dream.

Laila twisted through the crowd, waving, blowing an occasional kiss, indifferent to the hands caressing her black satin pants. When she finally found the group she was looking for, she glided up behind a boy whose long blond hair hung to the collar of a white silk shirt. She threw her arms around him, letting her fingernails scurry over the skin exposed by his unbuttoned shirt while her mouth nibbled his ear in quick, teasing bites.

“Michael, darling, can you forgive me for being so late?”

Michael Laylor turned to her. He had the face of an angel: blue eyes, features that were almost too perfect in their regularity, lips slightly parted; the whole framed in a halo of blond hair that gave him an open, innocent regard.

Innocence was not, as Laila had had the grateful occasion to discover, an attribute of his. He circled his hand under her hair so that the nape of her neck was caught in the soft vise of his thumb and other fingers. With a languorous movement he drew her face down to his and held it there, their lips barely touching. Finally, reluctantly, be released her.

“I’d forgive you anything.”

Laila circled the banquette and slid down onto the cushion beside him.

Across the way a joint was moving from hand to hand. Michael reached for it and passed it to her. Laila, still shaken by her experience in the garage, inhaled a full breath, holding the smoke in her lungs every second she could before letting it glide out her nostrils. Michael started to pass it on, but before he did she grabbed it back and gulped another lungful. Then she sat back, eyes closed, waiting, praying for the gentle numbness to seep through her. She opened her eyes to see Michael staring down at her, a crooked half-smile on his face.

“Dance?”

As soon as they reached the dance floor, she hurled herself into the music, eyes closed, racing off alone along the crashing tide of sound, away from everything, the grass finally enclosing her in its protective cocoon.

“Black bitch!”

The shrill scream shattered Laila’s reverie. The young black she bad noticed on the way in was slumping to the floor, blood spurting from his temple, his mouth open in a prayer of pain from the blow, from the agonizing tear of his weird harness. His aggressor, a squat young white with a beer drinker’s belly and a floppy leather hat, planted a vicious kick in his groin before two bouncers could shove him away.

Laila shuddered. “Oh God,” she whispered. “How awful! Let’s sit down.” Her hand clutched Michael’s tightly as they started back to their banquette.

Dizzy from the grass, the scene on the dance floor, she leaned against him, raising her head toward his. Her eyes were glistening.

“What a hideous world we live in!”

Michael studied her. She seemed distant, distraught almost. Perhaps, he told himself, the new Mexican grass was too strong. He stroked her auburn hair as they sat down. He could see she was still far away, running down her own track.

“Why is it always the ones like him that get hurt?” she asked. “The weak, the helpless?” Michael didn’t answer; he knew she didn’t want an answer.

“For people like that there’s never any justice until they start to use the violence others use against them. And then there’s more violence and more violence and more violence.”

Hearing her own words, she trembled.

“You don’t believe that, Linda.”

“Oh yes I do. They”-she waved scornfully to the crowded dance floor-“never hear anything until it’s too late. They’re only interested in their bodies, their pleasures, their money. The poor, the homeless, the wronged-that doesn’t interest them. Until there’s violence, the world is deaf.” Her voice fell until it was barely a whisper. “You know, there’s a saying in our Koran. A terrible saying, really, but true: `If God should punish men according to what they deserve, he would not leave on the back of the earth so much as a beast.”’

“Your Koran? I thought you were Christian, Linda.”

Laila stiffened, suddenly wary of the grass. “You know what I mean. The Koran’s Arabic, isn’t it?”

From across the banquette someone waved another joint toward them. Michael pushed it away.

“Let’s go back to the studio.”

Laila cupped his face in her hands, her long fingers fondling the skin on his temples. She held him like that for a while, gazing at his beautiful face.

“Yes, Michael. Take me home.”

As they walked toward the door, a chubby paw beckoned to them out of the darkness.

“Linda, darling! You’re stunning, duh-voon!”

She turned to see the pudgy figure of Truman Capote, resembling a scaled-down Winston Churchill in a mauve velvet jumpsuit.

“Come meet all these lovely people.”

With the pride of a jeweler pointing out his choice baubles, he introduced them to the gaggle of Italian pseudo-nobles fawning over him.

“The Principessa’s giving a luncheon in my honor tomorrow,” he gushed, indicating a gray-haired woman whose taut facial skin was evidence of more than one visit to the fashionable plastic surgeons of Rio. “You must come.”

The bright eyes swept over Michael. “And do bring this lovely creature along.” Capote leaned over to her. “Everyone will be there tomorrow. Gianni is coming from ‘Iurino just for me.” His voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper. “Even Teddy’s coming. Isn’t that marvelous?”

With a kiss and a promise, Laila managed to extricate them from Capote’s grasp. Leaving, she heard his voice squealing through the shadows after them, its high timbre rising above the din of the club. “Don’t forget Tuesday lunch, darlings! Everyone will be there!”

“They’re here, sir.”

The words had no sooner drifted from Jack Eastman’s intercom than “they” were in his office, terrorist experts from State and the CIA: Dr. John Turner, head of the Agency’s Psychiatric Affairs Division; Lisa Dyson, the thirtyfive-yearold CIA officer who had what was referred to in the Agency as the “Libyan account”; Bernie Tamarkin, a Washington psychiatrist and a recognized world authority on the behavioral psychology of terrorists in stress situations.

Eastman scrutinized them all, noticing the faint flush on their faces, sensing the shortened rhythm of their breathing. Nervous, he thought.

Everybody peaks when they come to the White House.

As soon as they had sat down, Lisa Dyson passed out copies of an eighteen-page document. It was enclosed in an embossed white folder bearing the pale-blue seal of the CIA, a “Top Secret” stamp and the words “Personality and Political Behavior Study: Muammar al-Qaddafi.”

The study was part of a secret program run by the CIA since the late fifties, an effort to employ the techniques of psychiatry to study the personality and character development of a selected group of world leaders in intimate detail, to try to predict with some degree of certainty how they would respond in a crisis. Castro, Charles de Gaulle, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Mao Tse-tung, the Shah, Nasser, all had been put under the dissecting glare of the CIA’s analysts. Indeed, some of the perceptions turned up in the profiles of Castro and Khrushchev had been of vital help to John F. Kennedy in dealing with both men during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Each involved prodigious expense and effort. Everything about a “target”

was examined: what had influenced his life, what its major traumas were, how he had responded to them, whether he had developed certain characteristic defense mechanisms. Agents were sent all over the world to determine one precise fact, to explore just one facet of a man’s character.

Old military-schoolmates were hunted down and probed to find out if a man masturbated, drank, was finicky about his food, went to church, how he responded to stress. Did he like boys? Or women? Or both? Had be had a mother fixation? Trace him where you could through his oral, anal, genital stages. Find out if he had a large or small penis. If he had sadistic tendencies. Once a CIA agent had been smuggled into Cuba for the sole purpose of talking to a whore with whom Castro had often gone to bed when he was a student.

Eastman turned back the folder of his study and looked at the portrait inside of the man who was threatening to massacre his daughter and five million other Americans.

He sighed and turned to Lisa Dyson. She had a mane of long blond hair that streamed below her shoulder blades. Her slender hips were forced into blue jeans so tight the men around her could not miss the welt made in them by the edge of her panties. “All right, miss, why don’t you start by summing up just what that report of yours tells us about this son of a bitch and how he’s going to act in a crisis,” Eastman ordered.

Lisa reflected a moment, searching for the phrase, for the one all-embracing thought, that would capture the essence of those eighteen pages she knew so well.

“What this tells us,” she answered, “is that he’s as shrewd as a desert fox and twice as dangerous.”

In New York, Times Square was empty. A chill wind sweeping up from the distant harbor twisted the cottony tufts of steam spurting from the Con Ed manhole covers and sent the night’s harvest of litter scuttling along the sidewalks and curbs. The predominant sound was the clattering of the suspensions of the Checker cabs as they hurtled over the potholes of Broadway in their flight downtown.

At Forty-third and Broadway a pair of half-frozen whores huddled in the doorway of a Steak and Brew Burger, listlessly calling to the few late-night passersby. Three blocks away, in the warmth of a third-floor walkup, its walls and ceilings painted black, their pimp lolled on a mattress wrapped in a gold satin sheet. He was a lean black with a precisely trimmed goatee. He had on a white beaver hat with a three-inch brim, and, despite the almost total lack of illumination in the room, dark glasses screened his eyes. His hips, covered by the white silk folds of an Arab djellabah, twitched suggestively to the rhythms of Donna Summer’s voice flooding out of his stereo system.

Enrico Diaz turned to the girl beside him. She was the third and newest member of his stable. He reached for the ornament dangling around his neck on a gold chain. It was a representation of the male sex organ and it was there that he kept his finest Colombian coke. He was about to offer the girl a jolt and a loving stroke, the assurance that she was his main woman, when the phone rang.