The Fifth Horseman (38 page)

The NEST director spread out the blueprint on a small camp table and studied it. A matchbox, he thought. The emanations they were looking for weren’t going to have any difficulty penetrating the walls and the ceilings of the Baruch Houses.

“Okay,” Booth announced after a few calculations. “We’ll do the top six floors. Although there’s almost no chance it’s below the top four. You two guys take Building A. Why don’t you be insurance salesmen?”

The New York FBI agent who was going to accompany Booth’s scientist waved a warning finger. “Down here a debt collection agency’s better.”

“If you say so,” Booth agreed. Getting in close to pin down a bomb site with precision after a first reading was the trickiest, most dangerous part of the business, and he wasn’t going to go against a local agent’s advice.

His scientists, for the most part, knew nothing about firearms, so they had to work with an FBI agent to protect them. They needed an infinite variety of disguises that would allow them to glide unnoticed through those areas where a bomb might be hidden and armed terrorists might be alert for their presence: telephone repairmen, gas meter readers, delivery men. For Building B he had already decided to use a black chemist and a black female FBI agent.

Delaney picked up his portable detector. It was a box the size of an attachb case or a traveling salesman’s sample case.

As soon as the two had gone, Booth supervised by radio the dispatch of teams to the remaining buildings. Then, with the blueprint before him, he followed the progress of his teams, apartment by apartment, floor by floor, through the buildings.

Delaney came on, his final floor completed.

“Listen,” Booth ordered, “go up and have a look at the roof.”

Delaney groaned. “The elevator’s broken down.”

“So what?” his boss answered. “You’re a mountain climber, aren’t you?”

Several minutes later, the panting Californian emerged on the roof. There was nothing before him except the distant skyline of Brooklyn. His detector was silent. He looked, disgusted, at the grayish stains speckling the roof.

“John,” he reported, “there’s absolutely nothing up here. Nothing but a lot of old pigeon skit.”

As he watched the members of the White House press corps drift into the Oval Office, it occurred to the President that they represented the only element in this crisis that was under control. How much longer, he wondered, are we going to be able to go on saying that?

While they formed into a crescent around his desk, jockeying for position, some striving to make those selfconscious jokes with which they deceived themselves and their colleagues into thinking they were on intimate terms with the President of the United States, he scanned their faces, searching for any indication that one of them might be privy to his government’s frightful secret. To his relief, he sensed most of them had nothing more important on their minds at the moment than deciding where to have lunch.

In any event, nothing in his own manner could have betrayed the strain he was under unless it was the quick tap dance of his fingertips on his massive oak Presidential desk framed from the timbers of H.M.S. Resolute and offered by Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes.

The little ceremony his press secretary opened with a few ritual words was part of the charade they were acting out to convince the press that nothing unusual was going on. It was the Presidential proclamation of the thirty-third anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Chief Executive was halfway through it when he saw Jack Eastman glide unobtrusively into the room and lean against the office wall. With his index and forefinger, his national-security adviser made a scissors movement across his tie — cut it short.

The President rushed through the remaining text, then, as quickly as he could while still appearing to be unhurried, moved for the door. The instant he had settled into his private office, Eastman joined him.

“Mr. President,” he announced. “He’s ready to talk!”

Timmy Walsh and Jeremy Oglethorpe walked slowly up Broadway, then turned toward the big plateglass doors of the New York State Office Building.

For a moment they let the outflow sweep past them; the pretty black secretaries flaunting their style and elegance, their makeup all in place, flaring glasses frequently setting off the high arch of their cheekbones; the pasty-faced, overweight state office workers huddling together in conversations so intense they might have been discussing a mufti-million-dollar highway extension when in fact, Walsh knew, they were probably arguing the point spread on tonight’s Knicks’ game.

He’d selected the building as the first of their “random” sample of New York’s air-raid shelters deliberately. Give Rockefeller’s and Albany’s interest in the shelter program, the buildings should have the Rolls Royce of New York City’s shelters.

They pushed through the lobby, past the elevator banks to the familiar yellow-and-black sign over a door leading to the cellar. At least, Walsh noted, the sign was clean.

He gave his shield to the janitor at the desk in the building superintendent’s office. “New York Police, Office of Civil Preparedness,” he announced. “Doing a survey of the air-raid shelters, want to see how the biscuits, the portable toilets and all are being maintained.”

“Oh sure,” the janitor said. “Air-raid shelter. Got the keys right here.”

He got up and walked to a huge box on the wall spilling over with keys of every imaginable size and shape. “One of these in here …” The voice faltered a bit. “Right here, someplace.” He began to scratch his head. For over three minutes, he stood there studying the board, fondling, then rejecting one key after another. “I know they’re here. Gotta be here someplace. Harryl” he shouted in exasperation. “Where the hell’s the key to the fucking air-raid shelter?”

A black assistant custodian came over and gazed with equal consternation but, apparently, no greater sense of enlightenment at the cluttered key box. “Yeah,” he said, his head moving back and forth as though in prayer, “it’s gotta be here somewhere.”

Oglethorpe’s eyes were on the clock on the wall. By now, five minutes had gone by and no key. Five minutes during which, in a crisis, his planner’s mind told him pandemonium, sheer pandemonium, would be building up in the corridors outside.

“Here it is!” the janitor announced triumphantly.

“Man, you sure that’s the key?” his aide asked, squinting at a heavy key hung on a red plastic ring. “It don’t look like the key to me.”

“Gotta be,” his superior rejoined.

It wasn’t.

By the time they got back, over ten minutes, Oglethorpe noted, had elapsed.

Finally the janitor found the missing key skillfully concealed under three others dangling from the same bank.

It unlocked a huge, cavernous area, the ceiling interlaced by heating ducts so low Walsh had to bend in half to pass under them. Hung on the wall was a clipboard with a yellowed piece of paper flapping from it. It was a Civil Defense inventory dated January 3, 1959, listing the materials stored in the room: 6,000 water drums, 275 medical kits, 500 miniature Geiger counters, 2.5 million protein crackers.

Walsh’s flashlight swept the huge chamber’s horizons, its gloom unmolested by the few fight bulbs hanging from the ceiling. “There they are!”

Along one wall, under his flashlight’s beam, were thousands of khaki barrels and cases and cases of protein crackers. He tapped a barrel with his knuckles. It gave out a hollow echo.

“Funny,” he said, “they’re supposed to be full.” He tapped another. It gave up the same unpromising sound. The men began to tap cans at random along the darkened walls until it seemed to shimmer with the hollow echoes they produced. Not a single barrel was full. Some Civil Defense expert on that January day two decades before had carefully lined up all those barrels-and then gone away leaving them empty.

Walsh and Oglethorpe exchanged dismayed glances. “We better take a look at another one,” Walsh said, consolingly handing Oglethorpe the list of shelters in the neighborhood. “Pick one. Any one.”

The one Oglethorpe chose was in the cellar of the MacKenzie Explosives Company at 105 Reade Street. Their arrival was greeted with a certain undertone of consternation, the natural reaction, perhaps, to a visit from the police in an establishment of that sort. Its office manager, a young man in his middle thirties in shirtsleeves and a striped tie, smiled in evident relief when Walsh told him why they were there.

“Oh sure, that Civil Defense stuff. My father told me about that once. It’s down in the cellar.”

He guided the trio down two flights of wooden steps into a sub-basement.

They spotted what they were looking for immediately, neatly stacked against the wall in the midst of a bunch of old filing cabinets and broken desks.

Walsh stepped over and thumped a water barrel. It gave out a resounding bonk.

“Full up,” he reported.

Walsh studied the wall. Three quarters of the way to the ceiling, just above the level of the cases of protein crackers, was a wiggly yellowish line. The surface of the wall below the line was notably darker than that above it.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Oh, that,” the office manager replied. “That’s the high-water mark of the flood we had a few years back.”

“Flood?”

“Had water that deep down here for three weeks almost.”

Oglethorpe looked at Walsh. Then the bureaucrat ripped open the top case of protein crackers and thrust his hand inside. He drew out a sodden mass of yellow-brown sludge.

Any last illusions Jeremy Oglethorpe had about the current viability of New York City’s shelter system faded as they entered the next shelter on their sample, the Hotel James at 127 Chambers Street. The room clerk’s alcove was the clue to the kind of place it was. It was screened off behind bars and a partition of bulletproof wire-meshed glass. The half-dozen young men lounging in the lobby were out the front door before Walsh had completed his introductory remarks, which he had.begun with the word “Police.” The desk clerk had never heard of an air-raid shelter in the Hotel Jamesor, for that matter, any place else.

Walsh suggested that what they were looking for might be in the cellar. The clerk paled at the notion that anyone would be crazy enough even to think of going into the cellar of the Hotel James. Walsh persisted. With a shrug of incomprehension, the clerk pointed to a door across the hallway.

The two started down a flight of creaking wooden steps, ducking under heating pipes from which torn cobwebs and shreds of asbestos stroked their faces. Out of the darkness ahead came a series of quick, rustling sounds.

“Rats,” commented Walsh. “Nice place to spend a few nights.”

The lights switched on and a skinny little guy emerged from the shadows. He was wearing a baseball cap and a warmup jacket. All of the athletic insignia that had once decorated it had been removed. Now the jacket was covered with buttons, medallions, decals, sew-on badges carrying messages like “Jesus Is Your Savior,” “The Redeemer Is Coming,” “Let Christ’s Way Be Your Way.”

Walsh spoke to him. He replied in Spanish, a tongue made no easier for Oglethorpe to comprehend by the fact that the man had a cleft palate.

For several minutes he and Walsh exchanged words in Spanish. “He says he’s never heard of the Civil Defense stuff,” Walsh reported. “But he remembers seeing some stuff he doesn’t know anything about out in a back room somewhere.”

The little Puerto Rican led them through several back rooms stacked high with old hotel furniture until he came to the one he was looking for. Like a Swiss mountain guide trying to dig out a skier buried under an avalanche, he attacked the mound of junk before him, heaving his way through, mattresses littered with rat droppings, old bedsteads, box springs, bits and pieces of chairs and tables. Finally, with a guttural shout of victory, he flung away a last shattered chest of drawers and stood back. There, buried at the bottom of his pile of rubble, were the familiar khaki barrels and cracker cases of the old Civil Defense program.

Oglethorpe gasped in dismay. Walsh moved over to him and draped his heavy arm around his shoulders. “Jerry, listen,” he whispered. “Up there, in the Police Commissioner’s office, I didn’t want to say anything, you know? In this town, you got to let the big guys down easy. These shelters, ten, fifteen years ago, maybe they might have saved somebody. Today? Forget it, Jerry. They ain’t going to save anybody today.”

The Puerto Rican spoke up. “He says it’s his lunch hour,” Walsh reported.

“He’s got to go over to Brooklyn to hand out pamphlets for his church.”

“Certainly,” Oglethorpe said. “We’re.finished.”

The little Puerto Rican smiled and started off. Then, as though he’d forgotten something, he stopped and pulled from his pocket two of the pamphlets he’d be giving away in a few moments. He gave Walsh and Oglethorpe each one.

Walsh looked at his. “Jesus Saves,” it read. “Bring your problems to Him.”

He turned to the shattered bureaucrat. “You know, Jerry,” he remarked, “I think maybe the guy’s got something here.”

In the White House the members of the Crisis Committee were waiting in the National Security Council conference room when the President came downstairs from his press briefing. With the exception of the military, they were in shirtsleeves, ties askew, their disheveled hair and haggard faces indicative of the terrible strain under which they had been laboring for hours. They started to rise as the President entered, but he waved them to their places. He was in no mood for protocol formalities. While Eastman reviewed what had happened, he too removed the jacket of his gray suit, undid his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

“The charge received a call from Qaddafi’s Prime Minister, Salam Jalloud, a few minutes ago,” Eastman said. “He would like to speak to you at sixteen hundred GMT.” The National Security Assistant glanced up at the clocks on the wall. “That’s in twenty-seven minutes, over the Doomsday aircraft facilities we proposed to him early this morning. Qaddafi speaks English, but we are reasonably certain he’ll insist, initially at least, on speaking Arabic. These two gentlemen”-he gestured to a pair of middle-aged men sitting tensely halfway down the conference table-“are State’s senior Arabic translators.