The Fifth Horseman (52 page)

Angelo got his first good look at his quarry in the fluorescent glare of the elevator. He was in his late twenties, a pale, almost fragile figure with uncombed black hair and a thick drooping moustache that seemed somehow a pathetic boast for a virility he did not possess. Above all, he was a worried, perplexed young man; Angelo could almost smell the fear oozing from his glands like some malodorous secretion.

Everyone, Dewing, the Police Commissioner, Salisbury of the CIA, Hudson, the Chief of Detectives, was waiting for them when the doors slid open on the twenty-sixth floor. For just a second, after the Arab had been led away for a hasty arraignment, Angelo and Rand were celebrities.

“Good work,” the Police Commissioner said in that mellow baritone he reserved for promotion ceremonies and Communion-breakfast speechmaking.

“First break we’ve had all day.”

As soon as he had been fingerprinted, photographed and arraigned, the Arab, who had given his name as Suleiman Kaddourri, was led into the FBI’s interrogation room. The room was as far removed from the public’s idea of what an interrogation center should look like as a Hamburger Heaven was from the Tour d’Argent. In fact, it resembled nothing quite so much as a middle-class suburban living room. Thick wall-to-wall carpeting blanketed the floor. The prisoner’s chair was a comfortable deepblue sofa covered with scatter cushions. In front of it was a coffee table with newspapers, cigarettes and a bubbling coffee maker. A pair of armchairs were ranged on the opposite side of the table for the FBI interrogators. The whole, carefully contrived atmosphere was, of course, a hoax designed to relax and disarm a prisoner. Every sound in the room, from the lighting of a match to the rustle of a piece of paper, was picked up and recorded by sensitive, noise-activated microphones in the walls. From behind two of the halfdozen watercolors on the walls, television cameras focused tightly on the prisoner’s face. On one wall was a huge photomural of the skyline of New York. It concealed a one-way viewing window. Behind that window was the interrogation room’s semi-darkened control booth from which a dozen senior officials could see and hear everything that went on inside. Angelo’s special status as the arresting officer won him entry to the booth. Fascinated, he studied the faces in the gloom around him.

“Hey, Chief,” he whispered, gesturing to an ‘unfamiliar figure in a white open-necked shirt whose collar was pressed down over the lapels of his blue suit, “who’s the new girl in town?”

Feldman’s eyes followed his glance. “Israeli intelligence,” he answered.

“Mossad.”

In the interrogation room itself, the Arab, his handcuffs removed, was perched warily on the edge of the sofa. Frank Farrell, the Bureau’s Palestinian expert, was pouring coffee as gaily, Angelo thought in disgust, as a waitress serving breakfast at a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge. The second FBI agent in the room, Leo Shannon, a genial New York Irishman who specialized in interrogations and terrorist negotiations, reached into his pocket and laid a white card on the table. Angelo groaned.

“Would you believe it?” he said to the Chief of Detectives. “Guy wants to blow up some gas that’s going to kill Christ knows how many people in this city, and they got to give him the fucking card?”

Feldman gave a resigned shrug of his shoulders. The “card” was the slip of paper all New York policemen and FBI agents carry bearing the warning to a prisoner of his civil rights based on the Supreme Court’s Miranda decision.

Shannon “gave” it to him by informing the Arab he could remain silent if he chose or refuse to talk except in the presence of a lawyer. Everyone in the control booth tensed. It was a critical moment. Their efforts to find Qaddafi’s hydrogen bomb could come to a dead halt right here. If the man asked for a lawyer it might be hours before they could start to question him, hours more before they could make a deal with his lawyer to let him off in return for talking.

Whether from ignorance of the law or indifference, the Arab gave Shannon a halfhearted wave of his hand. He didn’t need any lawyers, he said as the men in the booth sighed gratefully. He had nothing to say to anybody.

Behind Angelo, the door to the control booth opened. An agent in shirtsleeves stepped in, blinked a second in the shadows, then stepped over to Dewing. “We’ve got a sheet on him from the prints,” he announced triumphantly.

The men in the booth tightened into a knot around the FBI’s assistant director, forgetting for a moment the scene on the other side of the one-way glass. As soon as the Arab’s fingerprints had been taken they had been sent to FBI headquarters in Washington, where the memory bank of the Bureau’s IBM computer compared them with millions of prints taken from everyone arrested in the country during the past ten years. A second computer out at Langley put them into a CIA IBM containing all the fingerprints of Palestinian terrorists available to the world’s intelligence agencies. That machine had registered “tilt” three minutes after ingesting the prints. It had identified them as belonging to Nabil Suleiman. He had been born in Bethlehem in 1951 and had been picked up and printed first by the Israelis after an antigovernment demonstration at Jerusalem’s Arab College in 1969. In 1972 he had been arrested for possession of a firearm and given six months in jail. Released, he had disappeared for six months, an absence subsequently traced by Mossad to one of George Habbash’s PFLP training camps in Lebanon. In 1975 he had been identified by an informer as one of two men who left a charge of explosives in a shopping basket in Jerusalem’s Mahne Yehuda open-air market. Three elderly women had been killed and seventeen other people injured in the explosion. Since then he had vanished from sight.

“Did you run his prints past State and the INS?” Dewing asked as he compared the photograph attached to the file with the man in the interrogation booth.

“Yes, sir,” the agent who had brought the file answered. “There’s no record of a visa. He’s an illegal.”

Inside the interrogation room, the Arab was giving his address as the Century Hotel, 844 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. “Get a couple of our cars down there right away,” Hudson ordered, hearing his words. They were, for all practical purposes, the last the Arab intended to speak for some time.

Overtaken by some shift in his mood, he muttered, “I want a lawyer,” to the two FBI men before him, then refused to speak any further.

Angelo studied the Arab. Scared, he mused, scared absolutely shitless. His failure with Benny the Fence in front of Rand still rankled. The young agent was in the shadows behind him, somehow more at ease in these corridors of officialdom than Angelo was.

Angelo leaned toward Feldman. “Chief,” he whispered, “let me have ten minutes with him while they’re running down a lawyer. After all, he’s mine, isn’t he?”

Five minutes later, Angelo settled into the chair opposite the Arab with a weary sigh and a complaint about the heat in the room. He took a sack of Planter’s Peanuts out of his pocket and spilled a mound into his palm.

“Peanut, kid?” he asked. Closed up like an oyster, the detective thought, watching the Arab defiantly shake his head. Angelo tossed half the handful into his mouth and offered it again to the prisoner. “Go on. You don’t need a lawyer to eat a peanut … Nabil.”

He had held off on the name, then came down hard on it, his eyes fixed on the Arab’s face as he pronounced it. He saw him start as though he had received a jolt of static electricity. Angelo sat back in his armchair and slowly chewed the rest of the peanuts, deliberately allowing the Arab time to reflect on the fact that his real identity was known. Finally, he cleaned his hands with a little clap and leaned forward.

“Kid, you know, different guys got different ways of operating.” He used the same husky, confidential voice he had employed unsuccessfully with Benny. “Bureau’s got their way. I got mine. Me, I say always level with a guy. Let him know where he’s at.”

“I don’t want to talk,” the Arab snarled.

“Talk?” Angelo laughed. “Who asked you to talk? Just listen.” He settled back in his chair again. “Now, what we got you on here is receiving stolen goods. Bunch of plastic Benny Moscowitz got for you on consignment Friday a week for five hundred dollars.” Angelo paused and gave the Arab a friendly smile. “By the way, kid, you paid too much. Two and a half’s the going price.”

He could have been a priest trying to talk a young husband out of a divorce. “You can figure that’s one to three, depending on your sheet and the judge. Now, the matter of interest to us here is not that. It’s where it went. Who you did it for.”

“I said I didn’t want to talk.” There had been no softening in the Arab’s defiant tone.

“Don’t, kid. You don’t have to. You heard what the card says.” Reassurance dripped from Angelo’s voice. He thoughtfully munched a couple of peanuts, then jerked his head toward the New York mural on the wall to his left. “See that?” he asked.

The Arab nodded.

“One-way window. They got about twenty guys back there watching us. Judges.

Feds. Like that. Got a guy there in a white shirt’s very interested in you.” Angelo paused, letting the Arab’s curiosity peak. “Comes from that Israeli outfit there, whatta they call it? Mossad.” Again Angelo waited, pretending to chew a peanut, watching the Arab through half-closed eyes.

The fear he was looking for was there all right.

“Now, this is how things stand, kid.” His voice took on a matter-of-fact tone, as though he was totally disinterested in what he was about to say.

“You’re an illegal. We know that. Ran your fingerprints at the INS, and we know you never had no U.S. visa. Okay? We got this treaty with the Israelis. Extradite terrorists. Boom!” Angelo snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Guy’s on his way down to the Federal Courthouse now for the papers. That Mossad fellow’s got a plane waiting for you, just for you, out at JFK. They figure to have you on it by midnight.”

Angelo could see how rapidly the Arab was blinking. Scared out of his mind, he thought. “Because we’re going to hand you over. Got to. Have no choice.

We got no reason to hold you. Not on some lousy charge of receiving stolen goods.” He clapped his hands and brushed his trouser leg as though he was getting ready to go. “You don’t want to talk to us. It’s your right.

Perfect right. But as a result we got no reason to hold on to you.”

Angelo began to rise.

“Hey,” the Arab said. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s simple,” Angelo explained. “You help us, we help you. You talk to us, we make you a material witness. Then we gotta keep you here. Can’t extradite you anymore.” He was on his feet now, tipping up on his toes, slowly stretching his joints. “You don’t want to talk, what could we do? We gotta hand you over. It’s the law.

“You know those Mossad gu;1s out there better than I do. I mean, from what I hear they don’t care too much for them little white cards and all.”

Angelo let a little smile flicker an instant at the edges of his mouth, relishing the tension in the man’s face. “Particularly when they got a chance to spend eight hours on an airplane all alone with a guy put a bomb in a shopping basket, killed three little old Jewish ladies, you know what I mean? I mean, how tender do you figure they’re going to want to be with a guy like that?”

The Arab’s face lightened as though a bright light had been switched on at the mention of the bomb in a basket. So, Angelo thought, you did it, you little creep.

“Hey,” the Arab muttered, “what do you want?”

Angelo settled slowly back into his interrogator’s chair. He crossed his legs and delicately hitched up the crease of his trousers. “Just a talk, kid. Just a little talk.”

Grace Knowland started impatiently at the sight of her son on the steps of the Seventh Regiment Armory in midtown Manhattan. It was after seven.

He should have been inside already, changing for his match.

“Hey, Mom,” he called down in a voice shrill with adolescent anger, “the match is off.” Grace strode up the steps and kissed his reluctantly offered cheek.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. They got some soldiers there and nobody can go in. They won’t even let me go down to the locker rooms to get my racket so I can play Andy tomorrow.”

Grace winced. It had been that kind of a day, her trip to Washington wasted because the Mayor hadn’t come back on the shuttle as usual, her fruitless efforts all afternoon to worm something about the South Bronx out of his press secretary, the rush to get here for her son’s match only to find it had been canceled.

“I’ll see what I can do about the racket, dear.”

She walked up to the military policeman at the door. “What’s going on? My son was supposed to play a tennis match here tonight.”

The soldier banged his black mittens together with a smack and stamped his boots in the cold. “Lady, I don’t know. All I know is I got orders to seal off the area to the public tonight. They got some kind of mobilization exercise going on in there.”

“Well, surely,” Grace cajoled, “you can’t imagine my son’s going to disturb anybody just going down to the locker room to get his tennis racket?”

The soldier squirmed uncomfortably. “Listen, lady, what can I tell you? I got my orders. No unauthorized personnel in the area.”

Grace felt a surge of anger rising inside her. “Who’s in charge here?”

“The lieutenant. You want I get the lieutenant?”

The military policeman was back a few minutes later with a clean-shaven young officer in freshly pressed fatigues. He eyed Grace appreciatively.

“Tell me, Lieutenant.” She covered the cutting edge of her question with a frosting of sweetness. “Just whht is it that’s going on here tonight that’s so important a thirteen-year-old boy can’t go down to the locker room to get his tennis racket?”

The officer laughed. “It’s nothing, ma’am. Just some kind of snowremoval test they’re running. A bunch of people trying to figure out how they can help the city the next time you get a big snowstorm. That’s all.”