The Fifth Horseman (26 page)

“No, we don’t,” Hudson, the New York FBI chief, “She didn’t want to get no prescription, didn’t want to have to mess with no fuckin’ doctor.”

“What’d she look like?”

“The brother, he don’t know. He just take it to her hotel.”

“Where was that, Rico?”

“The Hampshire House.”

Upstairs, Al Feldman, the Chief of Detectives, rolled his cold cigar in his mouth and pondered John Booth’s despairing words. Figures, he thought. Just like those scientific bastards. They always expect someone else to clean up their shit after them.

“So what exactly are we looking for?” he asked.

Booth circulated a sketch and description of the device prepared at Los Alamos from Qaddafi’s blueprint.

“Do we know approximately when this came into the country?” Bannion inquired.

“No, we don’t,” Hudson, the New York FBI chief, replied. “But the assumption is it was recently. The CIA figures it would have been shipped from one of six places: Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran or Aden. They may have smuggled it across the border from Canada. That doesn’t take much doing. Or they may have run it through a normal port of entry disguised as something else.”

Down the table, Hudson’s superior, Quentin Dewing, the assistant director for investigation foy the Bureau, flown up from Washington during the night to take overall command of the search, cleared his throat. He had old-fashioned clear-plastic-rimmed glasses, gray hair slicked to his head with lashes of Brylcreem, a darkblue suit, and a white handkerchief squared to a precise half an inch rising from its pocket. An insurance executive, Feldman had thought contemptuously when he had been introduced.

“What this means is we’re going to have to go through every waybill and manifest for every piece of cargo that’s come in from one of those countries in the last few months. We’ll start with the latest shipments and work our way back.”

“By three o’clock tomorrow?” asked the stunned Police Commissioner.

“By three o’clock today!”

Feldman ignored their exchange, scrutinizing instead the material Booth had circulated around the room. “Tell me something,” he asked the scientist, “could this be broken into pieces, smuggled in and reassembled here?”

“Technologically, I’d say that’s almost impossible.”

“Well, it’s nice we got some good news today.” Feldman pointed his cigar at the drawing. “That fifteen-hundredpound weight is going to eliminate a lot of shipments. It’s also going to rule out high floors in buildings without elevators.” He laid the material back on the table. “How about the people who put it there? Do we have any leads on them at all?”

“For the moment we have nothing precise.” Hudson pointed to a flaxen-haired agent in his midthirties seated across from Feldman. “Farrell here is the Bureau’s Palestinian expert. He came up from D.C. last night. Frank, give us a quick rundown on what we do have.”

Ranged neatly on the table before the agent were computer summaries of all the Bureau’s ongoing Middle East investigations. They included items as diverse as a suspected traffic in prostitutes between Miami and the Persian Gulf, an illegal shipment of four thousand M-16 automatic rifles to the Christian Lebanese Phalange, the efforts of the Iranian revolutionary regime to infiltrate assassination squads into the United States to carry out their revolutionary justice on United States soil, and the document Farrell picked up in response to Hudson’s order.

“We have files on twenty-one Americans who went through Qaddafi’s terrorist training camps. All of them were Arab born. Nineteen Palestinians.

Seventeen males, four females.”

“Have you jumped them? What did you turn up?”

The young agent coughed nervously in answer to Feldman’s query. “Most of them went over there between 1975 and 1977. We put them under surveillance when they came back, but they never did a damn thing wrong. We couldn’t even catch them lifting a candy bar from the five-and-tencent store. So we ran out of court orders for the surveillance because of lack of probable cause.”

“So you stopped watching them?”

The FBI man nodded.

“My God!” Feldman’s already dumpy figure slumped deeper into his chair.

“You mean to tell me Qaddafi has the perfect terrorist sleeper operation set up in this country and the FBI hasn’t got a single one of those people under surveillance?”

“That’s the law, Mr. Feldman. We’ve been after them since last night and managed to locate four of them thus far.”

“That isn’t a law! It’s a fucking covenant for a suicide pact.”

Michael Bannion turned to his angry Chief of Detectives, anxious to calm him and at the same time intrigued by what had just been said. “You know, Al, you’d have to be interested by the fact that the Arab community in New York is within walking distance of the Brooklyn docks. Do we have anything on PLO activity over there?”

“Not a helluva lot,” Feldman replied. “There are a couple of bodegas, little family grocery stores, we suspect are fronting a gun traffic that may have PLO ties. When Arafat came to the UN, his bodyguards gave our people the slip a few times and wound up over there. Now, you might think they went over for a cup of coffee. Or you might choose to think they went to set up some sleepers.” Feldman shrugged. “Take your choice.”

“Do your people have any penetration into the PLO?”

Bannion turned to the speaker, Clifford Salisbury, an assistant director of the CIA, specializing in Palestinian affairs. “The only penetration activity we’re allowed these days is against organized crime. Besides,”

Bannion added acidly, “I can’t afford two patrolmen in my police cars. I’m certainly not going to waste money trying to penetrate the PLO.”

What the Police Commissioner did not bother to add was that there were only four Arabic-speaking officers among the 24,000 men and women on his force, and none of them was assigned to cover Palestinian activities. The fact was, Brooklyn’s Arabic community had always been notably law-abiding. There had been, since the early sixties, a sharp rise in immigration, many of the newcomers Palestinian; still, there had been only one recorded incident of attempted PLO terrorism in the New York area.

Dewing, the deputy director of the FBI, rapped his knuckles on the conference table. “Gentlemen, we’ve got to get this search organized and under way as fast as we can. Can we agree, in view of the words `New York Island’ in Qaddafi’s threat message, to concentrate NEST’s efforts on Manhattan?”

There was a mumble of agreement.

“Booth will run his operation independently for secrecy’s sake. We’ll support him with drivers to protect his men.”

The scientists had chosen to work with the tight-lipped agents of the Bureau rather than local police officers since they had begun operations.

“Where do I start?” Booth wanted to know. “The Battery or the Bronx?”

“I’d suggest the Battery,” Bannion said. “You’re closer to the waterfront down there. They would have had less distance to carry that thing. Besides, everybody hates Wall Street.”

“Right,” the deputy director rejoined. “Second: manpower. We’re running an ‘All Hands’ on this, bringing in five thousand agents. I’ve ordered Treasury, Customs, Narcotics and the Task Force on West Fifty-seventh to make their personnel available. Commissioner, can we have the services of your Detective Division?”

“You’ve got them.”

“If Washington wants us to be discreet with this, what are we going to use for communications?” Feldman asked. “Too much traffic on our frequencies will make the guys in the press room at headquarters sit up. The family fights, the horseshit jobs’ll pass right over their heads. But something like this they’ll pick up right away. The volume would be a tipoff.”

“We’ll use our gold band,” Dewing said. The FBI employed ten frequencies, five locally in their blue band, five nationally in what was referred to as their gold band. “And whenever possible the telephone.”

“Al,” Hudson turned to the Chief of Detectives, “what’s the best way to set this up?”

“I’d recommend a one on one,” the Chief replied. “One fed with one of my men. That way you can pair up your feds who don’t know the city with my guys who do.

“We’ll break them down into task forces,” he continued. “Assign one the docks, a second the airports. We’ll have a third task force to systematically comb all the usual places, hotels, car-rental agencies.”

Feldman bit down on his cold cigar. “Arabs coming into this town, they go to Queens and it’ll be ‘Oh-oh, there goes the neighborhood,’ right?

But like the PC says, over there in Arab town Brooklyn they’d blend in. We ought to start our third task force there. Search the place inside out. See if we can find anything out of synch.”

“Yeah, I agree,” Hudson said.

Feldman was leaning back, thinking. “We’ve got to narrow this thing down if we’re ever going to get anywhere. Get a tighter focus on the kind of people we’re looking for. What the hell kind of people are they, anyway?”

Hudson turned a commanding eye to the Bureau’s Palestinian expert.

“Well, as a general rule,” Farrell noted, “they tend to live pretty well on assignments. They have plenty of money. They go middle class, which most of them are anyway. I mean, they usually don’t go hiding out in slums or rabbit warrens. They learned a long time ago the best way to blend into the stream is to posit yourself just above the middle-class level. The other thing, they tend to stay pretty close to their own kind. Don’t seem to trust the other ethnics very much.”

The Chief of Detectives digested his words. “Something else too, I’d say.

If you wanted to pull off a caper like this, you’d put it in the hands of someone who knew his way around, been here before. Otherwise, your people’d leave a string of clues behind them. Blow the operation right away.”

“Mr. Feldman has a very good point.” It was Salisbury, the CIA representative. “We can also assume, I think, that the kind of people who would do this would be sophisticated, cold-blooded and smart enough to realize that their chances of success lay in holding it very, very tight.

I’m convinced we’re looking for a small, coherent group of intelligent, highly motivated people.

“And,” he continued, “I’m also convinced the kind of person Qaddafi would assign an operation like this to would have already left his — or her-traces somewhere in one of the world’s intelligence services. We’re in touch with every intelligence agency in the world that has files on Palestinian terrorists. They’re sending us descriptions and photographs of everyone in their files. I suggest that we separate out those who have spent time in this country and are intelligent, sophisticated and educated, and concentrate on them.”

“How many do you figure that would be?” Feldman demanded.

Salisbury made a few silent calculations. “There are about four hundred known and identified Palestinian terrorists at large. My guess is we’ll find fifty to seventy-five of them who meet our specs.”

The detective shook his head in dismay. “That’s too many. Too fucking many.

Job like this, you gotta get it down to two or three to have a chance. If we’re going to save this city, my friend, we’ve got to have one or two faces, not a portrait gallery.”

The first of the two agents flashed his gold shield at the desk clerk so discreetly that the young man didn’t realize who his visitors were until he heard the words “FBI.” Then, like most people confronted with a federal law-enforcement officer, he came quickly to attention.

“May we see your register, please?”

The clerk dutifully submitted the black bound guest register of the Hampshire House to the agents’ scrutiny. The index finger of the senior man ran down the pages, then stopped at the address Hamra Street, Beirut, Lebanon, after the name Linda Nahar. Suite 3202, he noted, and glanced up at the key bank. The key was missing.

“Is Miss Nahar in 3202 in?”

“Oh,” replied the clerk, “you just missed her. She checked out forty minutes ago. She said she’d be back, though. In a week.”

“I see. Did she tell you where she was going?”

“The airport. She was flying out to LA on the earlybird flight.”

“Did she leave you a forwarding address?”

“No.”

“Do you suppose you could tell us something about Miss Nahar?”

Ten minutes later, the two agents were back in their car, smoking. The clerk had been singularly unhelpful.

“What do you think, Frank?”

“I think it’s probably a waste of time. Some woman who’s afraid of doctors.”

“So do I. Except she did decide to leave this morning, didn’t she?”

“Why don’t we get your informer and work over his contact?”

“That might be a little heavy. Rico deals with some bad people.” The agent looked at his watch. “Let’s check the flight lists and find out what plane she took. We’ll have somebody do a check on her when she gets out there.”

“There’s one major point we’ve all overlooked.” Authority flowed from Michael Bannion’s voice like sound waves from a pitching fork, and everyone in the room turned to him. “Are you going to apply the White House’s injunction to secrecy to the men running the investigation, Harv?”

“No, certainly not. How are we going to get them to pull out all the stops if we don’t tell them the truth?”

“Good Godl” Bannion shook his head in dismay. “Tell my men there’s a hydrogen bomb hidden on this island, that it’s going to go off in a few hours and wipe the city off the face of the earth? They’re human. They’ll panic. The first thing they’ll say to themselves is, ‘I gotta get the kids out of here. I gotta call the old lady. Tell her to get the kids outa school and head for her mother’s up in Troy.’ “

“You seem to have singularly little confidence in your men, Commissioner.”

Bannion’s blue eyes flashed as he looked down the table to the austere presence of Quentin Dewing, the assistant director of the FBI.