The Fifth Horseman (21 page)

His irritation became evident displeasure when he heard a voice saying, “This is Eddie. How about a party?”

Fifteen minutes later Enrico’s lime-green custom-built Lincoln paused at Forty-sixth and Broadway just long enough to allow a figure to emerge from the shadows and slip into the front seat.

As he guided the car into the traffic, Enrico glared disdainfully at the man beside him, the collar of his beige overcoat turned up to screen his face. Enrico was typical of dozens of men and women being contacted in these predawn hours in bars, on street corners, in restaurants and bedrooms around New York. He was an FBI informer.

He owed that distinction to the fact that he had been caught one night with a dozen dime bags of heroin in his car. It was not that Enrico scored horse. He was a gentleman. The bags were for one of his girls. But it had come down to doing eight to fifteen in Atlanta or walkingand talking, from time to time, with the Bureau. Besides pimping, Enrico, the son of a black mother and a Puerto Rican father, was a senior member of the FALN Puerto Rican underground, a group of considerable interest to the FBI.

“I got something heavy, Rico,” his control agent said.

“Man,” Rico sighed, maneuvering deftly through the late traffic, “you always got something heavy.”

“We’re looking for Arabs, Rico.”

“No Arabs fucking my girls. They too rich for that.”

“Not that kind of Arab, Rico. The kind that likes to blow people up, not screw them. Like your FALN friends.” Rico eyed the agent warily. “I need anything you got on Arabs, Rico. Arabs looking for guns, papers, cards, a safe house, whatever.”

“Ain’t heard about none of that.”

“Suppose you just ask around for us, Rico?”

Rico groaned softly, all the strains and tensions of his double life encapsulizcd in the sound. Still, life was a deal. You made, you took, you gave, you got. The man wanted something, the man give something.

“Hey, man,” he said in that low gentle voice he reserved for special moments. “One of my ladies, she be in this thing with the Pussy Posse down at the Eighteenth Precinct.”

“What kind of thing, Rico?”

“Hey, you know, this John, he don’t want to pay and…

“And she’s looking at three to five for armed robbery?”

There was an almost reluctant, liquid roll to Rico’s answer. “Yeahhh.”

“Pull over here.” The agent waved to the curb. “It’s heavy, Rico. Real heavy. You get me what I need on Arabs, I’ll get you your girl.”

Watching him disappear down Broadway, Rico could only think of the girl waiting for him on the gold silk mattress, of her long muscular legs, the soft lips and the swiftly moving tongue he was training to perform the arts of her new calling. Sighing reluctantly, he drove off, not back toward his Forty-third Street fiat but east toward the East River Drive.

For fifteen minutes, Lisa Dyson had kept the men in Jack Eastman’s White House office captivated with her profoundly disturbing portrait of the man threatening to destroy New York City. Every facet of Qaddafi’s life was covered in the CIA’s report: his lonely, austere boyhood in the desert tending his father’s herds; the brutal trauma of being cast from the family tent by his ambitious father and sent away to school; how he had been despised as an ignorant Bedouin by his schoolmates, humiliated because he was so poor that he bad to sleep on the floor of a mosque and walk twelve miles each weekend to his parents’ camp.

The CIA had indeed found his bunkmates at the military school where his political ambitions had begun to emerge. The portrait they gave of a youthful Qaddafi, however, was anything but that of a masturbating, eagerly lecherous young Arab male. He had been instead a zealous Puritan, sworn to a vow of chastity until he had overthrown Libya’s King; abjuring alcohol and tobacco and urging his fellows to follow his example. Indeed, as Lisa Dyson pointed out, he still flew into wild temper tantrums when he heard that his Prime Minister was fooling around with the Lebanese hostesses on Libya’s national airline or womanizing with bar girls in Rome.

The report described the carefully planned coup. that had given him control on September 1, 1969, at the age of twenty-seven, of a nation with $2 billion a year in oil revenues, pointing out the code word he’d assigned the operations: “El Kuds”-Jerusalem.

It detailed the extreme, xenophobic version of Islam he had imposed on his nation: the return to the Sharia, the Koranic law, cutting off a thief’s hand, stoning adultresses to death, putting drinkers under the lash; his conversion of Libya’s churches to mosques, his decrees forbidding the teaching of English and ordering all signs and documents written in Arabic; how he had banned brothels and alcohol; how he had personally led, pistol in hand, the raids that had closed Tripoli’s nightclubs, ordering strippers to dress, gleefully smashing up bottles like a Prohibition cop. There was his “cultural revolution” that had sent illiterate mobs into the street burning the works of Sartre, Baudelaire, Graham Greene, Henry James; smashing into private homes in search of whiskey; storming through the bunk rooms of the oilfield tool pushers, ripping Playboy centerfolds from their walls.

Most terrifying of all was the long history of terrorist actions for which he had been directly or indirectly responsible: his repeated attempts to assassinate Anwar Sadat, to organize a coup in the Saudi Arabian Army; how he’d funneled millions into Lebanon to foment the bloody Lebanese civil war and other millions to aid the Ayatollah Khomeini’s overthrow of the Shah.

“‘Muammar al-Qaddafi is essentially a lonely man, a man without friends or advisers,”’ Lisa Dyson read with the singsong Scandinavian speech pattern of the tiny Minnesota village in which she’d been raised. “‘In every instance, his reaction to new situations has been to retreat back to the old and the secure. He has discovered all too often that rigidity works, and he will inevitably become rigid in difficult circumstances.”’

She cleared her throat and pushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead.

“‘Most important, it is the Agency’s conviction that in a moment of great crisis he would be perfectly prepared to play the role of a martyr, to bring the roof down over his head and destroy the house if he is not allowed to have his own way.” `He likes to be unpredictable, and,”’ she concluded, ” `his favorite tactic in a crisis will be to lunge for his enemy’s weakest spot.”’

“Jesus Christ!” Eastman groaned. “He certainly found it in New York City.”

“That, gentlemen,” Lisa Dyson noted, closing her report, “is Muammar al-Qaddafi.”

Bernie Tamarkin had followed her, leaning tensely forward, elbows on his knees, his hands clasped so tightly together his knuckles glowed. He stood up and began to stride around Eastman’s office, tugging nervously at his mat of curly hair. Without being asked, he started to offer his evaluation of the material Lisa Dyson had just read.

“We’re looking at a very, very dangerous man here. First of all, he was humiliated as a kid and he’s never gotten over it. He was the dirty little Bedouin boy despised by everybody else, and he’s been out for revenge ever since. This business about keeping his family in a tent until everyone else in Libya has a house. Bullshitl He’s still punishing his father for taking him out of his desert and throwing him into that school.”

“I think there are some vital clues for us in the desert’s impact on him,”

Dr. Turner, the CIA’s Psychiatric Division head, noted. He was a big man, his bald head meticulously shaved, delicate gold-rim glasses on his nose.

“Our key to getting to him may be religion-God and the Koran.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Tamarkin was still pacing. His own reputation as a terrorist negotiator had been considerably enhanced by his skillful use of an Arab ambassador familiar with the Koran during the Kannifi Black Muslim crisis in Washington a few years before. “But I doubt it. This guy thinks he’s God. That stuff about raiding the nightclubs. The story about how he goes to the hospital disguised as a beggar asking for a doctor to come to help his dying father, then throws off his robes and orders the doctor out of the country when he tells him to give his father an aspirin. That’s omnipotence. The man is playing God. And you don’t negotiate with God.”

“Do we have to take this man at his word?” Eastman asked him. “Is he the kind of guy who really could go through with something like this? Could he be bluffing?”

“Not a chance.” There was not, Eastman noted grimly, a hint of hesitation in Tamarkin’s reply. “Don’t doubt that son of a bitch even for a second.

Don’t ever, ever question his readiness to pull that trigger, because he’ll pull it just to show you he can.” Tamarkin moved to Eastman’s desk. “The one vital, essential thing you’ve got to convey to the President or whoever’s going to deal with Qaddafi is this: don’t challenge him. We’ve got to forget our big nationalistic ego. We can’t get into one of those macho, head-on collisions, have a couple of forty-fivecaliber penises waving at each other. Do that and he’ll feel threatened. And New York will go.”

“All right,” Eastman snapped, “I’ll inform the President. But what are we supposed to do? That’s what you’re here to tell us.”

“Well, right off I’d point out that the guy who wrote the book on how to handle situations like this is a Dutchman over in Amsterdam. I’d sure as hell like to have him here in our corner when push gets to shove.”

“If he’s a Dutchman and he’s in Holland he’s not going to do us much good tonight in Washington, D.C., is be?” barked Eastman.

“Look, that’s not my problem. I’m just saying if there’s some way to get him here it would be a big help. Now, as far as Qaddafi’s concerned, the first thing I’d work on is the fact he’s a loner. Has no friends. Whoever negotiates with him has to insinuate himself into his confidence. Become his friend.”

Eastman made hurried notes on the yellow legal pad before him. “You know,”

he said to Tamarkin, “one thing that struck me in that report is the concern he’s always shown for his people. Getting them better housing, things like that. Is there a reservoir of sympathy there we can play on to get him to respond to the people up in New York?”

The psychiatrist sat up with a sudden, almost spastic reflex. His dark eyes widened as he stared incredulously at the National Security Assistant.

“Never!” he said. “This man hates New York. It’s New York he’s after, not Israel, not those settlements of theirs. New York is everything this guy loathes. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah. Money. Power. Wealth. Corruption. Materialism. It’s everything that’s threatening that austere, spartan desert civilization of his. It’s the moneylenders in the Temple; it’s the effete, degenerate society he despises.”

Tamarkin’s eyes darted around the room to be sure that his message was registering on everyone there. “The first thing you’ve got to understand is this: deep down inside, whether he knows it or not, what this guy really wants to do is destroy New York.”

The screaming jangle of an alarm bell galvanized the men manning the National Security Council communications center in the basement of the West Wing. The duty officer jabbed at three red buttons by his desk.

Thirty seconds later, Jack Eastman came running into the room.

“The Allen has found Qaddafi, sir!” the duty officer shouted.

Eastman grabbed the secure phone that linked the room to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon.

“Where is he?”

“In a villa, by the sea, just outside Tripoli,” the admiral running the center announced. “The Allen intercepted his voice on a call half an hour ago and traced it back there. The Agency confirms it’s one of his terrorist headquarters.”

“Terrific!”

“I have just had Admiral Moore at Sixth Fleet on the blower. They can put a three-kiloton missile through the front door of that villa in thirty seconds.”

“Don’t you fucking dare!”

Eastman had the reputation of being “tight-assed,” for never flapping no matter how severe the pressures on him were, but he screamed out his order to the Pentagon admiral. “The President has made it absolutely clear there’s to be no military action in this situation without his express orders. You make damn sure everybody out there understands that.”

“Yes, sir.”

Eastman thought for a second. Should he wake the President? On his urging he had gone to sleep to husband his strength for the crisis. No, he told himself, let him get his sleep. He’ll need it.

“Tell Andrews to start one of the Doomsday planes for Libya right away.” The Doomsday planes were three converted 747s that bristled with electronic gadgetry and sensitive communications equipment.

They could stay aloft for seventy-two hours and were designed to provide the President with an airborne command post in the event of a nuclear war. “I want them to set up a secure communications channel Qaddafi can use to talk from that villa to Washington.”

Eastman paused. He was sweating. “Get State,” he ordered the duty officer beside him. “Tell them to have the charge in Tripoli get out to that villa right away. Tell him …” Eastman reflected carefully on his words. “Instruct him to inform Qaddafi that the President of the United States requests the privilege of a conversation with him.”

The thud of horse’s hoofs echoed along the deserted bridle path of Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. An earlymorning ground fog wrapped the French capital’s park, and the advancing rider emerged from the shadows en-folding the path like some phantom horseman of legend. It was appropriate that he did, for nothing could have better suited the character of the head of the SDECE, France’s intelligence service, than that almost conspiratorial obscurity cloaking his morning ride.

In an age when the CIA pointed the way to its headquarters with highway signs and the names of British intelligence agents were bandied about in Parliamentary debates, the agency over which General Henri Bertrand presided remained obsessed with secrecy. No telephone book, no street directory, no Bottin contained its name or the address of its headquarters.