The Fifth Horseman (53 page)

My day, it suddenly occurred to Grace, may not be wholly wasted after all.

“That’s very interesting.” Her handbag was open and she picked over its jumble for her press card. “I’m with The New York Times and it happens I’m very much into the problem of getting the snow off the streets of this city. I’d like to talk to the officer in charge of your test and find out what you’re learning.”

“1’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t help you on that. I got nothing to do with the operation itself,” the young lieutenant replied. “They just sent us up here from Dix last night to handle the security. Tell you what, ma’am, if your son’ll describe where his racket is to me, I’ll go down and try to find it and at the same time I’ll tell them you want to speak to someone.”

The officer was thumping the strings of Tommy’s racket against the butt of his hand when he returned. “Hey,” he said, “that’s strung real light. You must be a good player.” He turned to Grace. “They told me all inquiries about the operation are to be referred to Major McAndrews, First Armory PIO.” He handed Grace a slip of paper. “Here’s his phone number. If you come back to do a story,” he mumbled shyly, “how about having a cup of coffee with a stranger in these parts?”

Grace smiled, noting his name, Daly, on the black-and-gold swatch above the pocket of his field jacket. “Of course. If I come back, I’d be delighted.”

Angelo was sitting back in his interrogator’s chair, chewing an occasional peanut, as relaxed as though he were chatting with a fellow cop about the Giants’ chances of making the NFL playoffs.

“Okay,” he said to the Arab before him, “so you do the odd job for the Libyan embassy over at the United Nations. How do they get hold of you?”

“They leave a message at the bar.”

“How do yolt fix your meets?”

“I add four to the day of the month and then go to the corner of that street and First Avenue. Like if it’s the ninth, I go t — Thirteenth and First.”

Angelo nodded. “Always at the same time?”

“No. From one to five. I add an hour each time, then start over again.”

“And you always meet the same contact?”

“Not always. I have a copy of Newsweek in my hand. They make the contact.”

“Okay. So how did this one go?”

“The contact was a girl.”

“You remember the day?”

The Arab hesitated. “It had to be Tuesday the first, because the meet was at Fifth Street.”

“Remember what she looked like?”

“Pretty. Long brown hair. She was wearing a fur coat.”

“An Arab?”

The prisoner shifted his regard from Angelo’s eyes, ashamed of his betrayal. “Probably. But we spoke English.”

“So what did she want?”

“Fresh cards. She told me to bring her fresh cards at ten the next morning.”

“And you went to Benny?”

The Arab nodded his head.

“Then what happened?”

“I gave her the cards. She said. ‘Come for a walk.’ We go a few blocks and we stop at a camera store. She told me to go in and buy a camera.”

“And you did?”

“I went to a bar first and practiced signing a few times.”

“Then you got the camera?”

“Yeah.” The Arab sighed, aware of how deeply he was involving himself in all this. “So she said, okay, it was good. She wanted more fresh cards and a driver’s license for Friday morning, ten o’clock. For a guy in his mid thirties. She gave me a thousand bucks. Friday the meet was over on Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn. She didn’t show up. A guy came instead.”

Angelo’s irritation at Dewing’s interruption of his interrogation was manifest. The FBI official walked authoritatively into the room, sat down in the chair beside his and took over the interrogation without even consulting him.

“Excuse me, Mr. Rocchia,” he said, “but I thought our friend here might look at some photographs for us. They’ve just come in from overseas.”

He passed the photo of Laila from the DST dossiers that Henri Bertrand had forwarded to the CIA barely twenty minutes earlier. “By any chance would this be the girl who contacted you?” he asked.

The Arab looked at the photograph, then at Angelo, wary and mistrustful of this intruder who had snapped the current developing between them. The detective, silently cursing Dewing, gave the Arab what he hoped was a particularly friendly smile.

“That’s her.”

Dewing passed Whalid’s picture to him. “Was this the guy you got the plastic for?”

The Arab laid the photo on the coffee table, shaking his head.

“How about him?” Dewing passed Kamal’s picture across the table.

The Arab studied it a moment, then looked up. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s him.”

The sight of the halfdozen exhausted, haggard men sitting around the National Security Council conference room in their dinner jackets would have been comical if the reason behind it were not so potentially tragic.

In a few moments, as part of their determined effort to conceal the crisis behind a fagade of normality, they would join their wives in the Executive Mansion for cocktails in the Blue Room. Then, in the State Dining Room, they would dine off the Lincoln gold service the Presi dent’s wife loved, at a banquet honoring the departing dean of Washington’s diplomatic corps, the ambassador of Bolivia.

Jack Eastman began their session by noting that nothing in the evening newscasts gave any indication the press was onto the crisis.

“Slender satisfaction,” the President remarked curtly and turned to the communication which had come in from the Israeli government while he had been changing his clothes. “I guess Begin leaves us no choice except to do it for him, does he?” The President’s voice was gruff as he asked the question, but he was a highly emotional man, and, looking at him, Eastman sensed how deeply pained he was. “What are the chances they’ll oppose our action?” he asked Bennington.

“More than fifty-fifty, I’m afraid, sir.”

The President slouched uncomfortably in his chair, his forefingers picking at his lips, his head bowed as though in prayer. He had laid claim to this office because he’d promised his nation a kind of vigorous leadership he sensed it needed and wanted. Yet nothing had quite prepared him for the lonely agony the exercise of power could-entail or for how complex issues that seemed simple from the outside became when you had to deal with them.

“We’re trapped between the fires of two fanatics, gentlemen. We can’t allow six million Americans to die because of their rigidity. If it comes down to it, we’ll have to act. Harold,” he said to his Secretary of Defense, “I want the Rapid Deployment Force ready to move at an hour’s notice.” The Rapid Deployment Force was a composite body of Army, Marine, Air Force and Navy units assembled after the Iranian crisis for swift movement to anywhere on the globe in a cris’s. “And Warren,” he ordered his Deputy Secretary of State, “you get to Hussein and Assad in total secrecy and make sure we can use their airfields as staging areas if we have to.”

He rose. His movements, Eastman observed, suddenly had the stilted, uncertain gestures of the elderly or the infirm. He had reached the door when Webster of the FBI called out, “Mr. President!”

The Missourian was holding his telephone in his hand, and his usually laconic features were alight with an excitement. “New York has made a positive identification of at least three of the people involved in this. They’ll have forty thousand people out looking for them at dawn!”

“Thank God!” Some of the color returned to the President’s face, and for just an instant an intimation of the shy smile the world associated with him reappeared. “Maybe now I’ll be able to digest my dinner after all.”

As he was leaving the National Security Council conference room for the reception upstairs, the Secretary of Energy paused a moment, then turned and walked determinedly to a public phone booth in the West Wing basement.

The number Delbert Crandell dialed rang interminably before a young woman answered. Her voice became sullen the instant she recognized her caller.

“What happened to you last night? I waited up for you until four.”

“Never mind that.” Crandell had no time to waste on explanations. “I’ve got something very important for you to do.”

The girl groaned and stirred in her bed, the rose satin sheets slipping off her naked breasts as she did. The litter, the charmless disorder, in Cindy Garrett’s bedroom was an accurate reflection of the disorder in her life.

She had come to Washington in 1976 from a small town near Mobile, Alabama, fleeing the stigma of a pregnancy brought on by the town’s deputy sheriff.

As a parting gift her former lover had landed her a job as a receptionist in the offices of an Alabama Congressman he had befriended in a hit-and-run investigation. Her employment had been abruptly terminated by his constituents’ angry protests after Cindy had appeared nude in Playboy magazine’s “The Girls of Washington Revisited.” Fortunately, a chance meeting with Crandell at a Georgetown cocktail party a few evenings later had opened the way to employment that was not only less demanding and better paid but, in Cindy’s case, infinitely more suitable.

“What do you want?” Wariness as thick as the wrinkle cream glistening under her eyes lurked behind her reply.

“I want you to drive up to New York right away. Go to the apartment and-“

“Ah cain’t go to New York,” Cindy squawked in protest.

“The hell you cain’t!” Crandell couldn’t abide the redclay accent that crept into Cindy’s voice after a few bourbons or in her unguarded moments.

“You’re going to do what I tell you to do. Get the car and get up there as fast as you can. You know the painting over the fireplace?”

“The icky one that looks like someone peed on it?”

“Yes.” The “icky” one was a Jackson Pollack appraised by Crandell’s insurance adjusters at $350,000. “And the one to the left of the television?”

“The one with those funny eyes?”

“Right.” That was a Picasso. “Get those two and the gray one in the bedroom.” Crandell did not need to identify his Modigliani further. “And bring them back down here. Just as fast as you can drive.”

“Ah, honey, ah really have to-” Cindy began, hoping that coquetry might somehow spare her the ordeal her lover had just proposed.

“Shut up!” Crandell interrupted. “Just get your ass moving to New York.” He hung up, then decided to make a second call, this one to his real-estate agent at Douglas Elliman in New York. Finally, relaxed for almost the first time since this crisis had begun, he hurried up the stairs to the Blue Room.

Harvey Hudson, the New York director of the FBI, listened with growing concern to his deputy’s account of Grace Knowland’s conversation at the Seventh Regiment Armory. “How can we be so unlucky?”

His aide nodded sympathetically and continued his report. “So she got all excited when the MP said ‘snow removal.’ She pulled out her press card and insisted on talking to somebody. They finally gave her the cutout number we’re using to protect NEST. It’s a dummy line that’s supposed to go to First Armory PIO. Rings downstairs. She’s on the line now, insisting on a briefing on our `snow removal’ exercise tomorrow morning.”

Hudson clutched his head in dismay. “Can you imagine? Some fucking kid can’t get a tennis racket and we risk blowing the whole operation to The New York Times?” He tugged at the ends of his red-and-yellow bow tie, dangling like wilting vines from each side of his shirt collar. He seemed to have shrunk physically from the strains of this terrible day, from the horror that had come with each hour that had gone by with Qaddafi’s bomb undiscovered.

“Okay,” he ordered. “You stuff somebody into an Army uniform and get him up to that armory tomorrow morning. Give that woman the goddamndest song-and-dance briefing on snow removal that anybody’s ever heard. I don’t care what the hell you tell her, but make it good. The one thing we don’t need right now is to have The New York Times on our backsl”

In the Blue Room of the White House, a Marine Corps band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Smiling warmly, his wife the rigorous one pace behind him that protocol prescribed, the President strode into the diplomatic reception. Admiringly, Jack Eastman watched the couple drift through the room, shaking hands, chatting, laughing politely at the Bulgarian ambassador’s clumsy attempt at humor. Quite a performance, Eastman thought. You could fault the man for his infuriating tendency to vacillate, for his lack of personal warmth, but one thing you couldn’t take away from him was his icy self-control, his stoic front in a crisis.

Eastman was about to sip his grapefruit juice when he felt a slight pressure at his elbow. It was his wife, late as usual. He bent down to kiss her, smelling as he did the alcohol on her breath.

“Darling,” she whispered as he pulled away from her, “I’ve got to talk to you. Alone.”

Eastman wanted to laugh. Talking privately to your wife at diplomatic receptions was a privilege not accorded to high government officials.

Sally had him by the arm. “It’s about Cathy.”

Her husband tensed, then followed as she threaded deftly through the room seeking out an empty corner by the bar. When she found it she turned to him almost angrily. “She’s home,” she blurted.

“Home?” Eastman was stunned. “How come?”

“Because what you laid on me last night was too heavy, Jack.” Sally Eastman’s brief show of defiance had already passed and tears diluted her eyes. “I’m a mother, not a soldier.”

“Sal-“

She turned at his word, moved to the bar and thrust her glass at a bartender. “A vodka martini on the rocks,” she ordered.

Eastman stepped behind her, fighting now to maintain his own composure.

“Sally,” he hissed, “you had no right to do that. No right at all.”

His wife turned around. The mascara was beginning to run a bit as the tears started to unravel the careful fagade of her worn and tired face. She started to reply, but before she could, Eastman leaned and brushed his lips to her forehead. “But thank God you did,” he whispered. “Dab up the eyes. We’ve got to go back to the party.”