The Fifth Horseman (57 page)

“What are all those rented trucks doing here?” she asked McAndrews. “Are they part of your exercise?”

“Yes,” the Major answered. “We used them to bring some material in. Infrastructure support.”

“Since when,” Grace inquired, “is the Army so wealthy it can afford to go out and rent trucks with the taxpayers’ money instead of using its own vehicles?”

Major McAndrews gave another nervous little laugh.

“Well, ma’am, our military vehicles are pretty cumbersome to maneuver around crowded cities like Manhattan. They’re apt to tie up traffic something fierce. So we use these rented trucks. To avoid inconveniencing the civilian population, so to speak.” The FBI agent masquerading as as an Army major smiled, immensely pleased by the nimbleness of his reply.

“I see.” Grace offered him her hand. “Oh, by the way, there’s a young MP lieutenant here named Daly who was very kind to my son last night. I promised I’d have a cup of coffee with him if I came back to do a story. Do you suppose someone could find him for me?”

“How many Hertz trucks you figure there are moving in New York on any given day?” Angelo Rocchia addressed his question to the young Irishman running the Fourth Avenue truckrental agency.

“We’re doing thirty-five to forty a day right here, and we got two other Brooklyn locations. You add in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens. Man, I don’t know. Four, five hundred at the least. Maybe more on a big day. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

Angelo was sitting in the manager’s cramped office. Through an interior window he could follow the activities of the FBI forensic people in the garage. They’re doing everything they can with that truck, he thought, but I don’t think you can count on it. Not unless we get more time to find this barrel of gas than I think we do. Before him was the steadily thickening accumulation of reports of the FBI’s operation. One file was missing.

Classified, the head of the FBI forensic team had told him.

What was so important in this that the government had to classify it, wouldn’t let the people who had to find the barrel know what it was? Angelo grabbed a peanut from his pocket and flipped it into his mouth, pondering that, then once again the idea that had struck him a few minutes before in the yard popped into his head. Far out, he thought, really far out. Still, I got nothing to do here except wait for some son of a bitch from the FBI to ask me to run out for coffee. A bunch of telephone calls is all, he told himself. What else do I have to do?

He took out his notepad and picked up the telephone.

“First Precinct?” he asked. “Give me your I-24 man.” The I-24 man was the precinct desk clerk, the officer in charge of the station-house blotter which recorded the daily flow of crimes in each of the seventy-two precincts of the New York Police Department from wife beatings and drunken brawls to murders.

“Hey,” he said when he had identified himself. “Pull out your sheets for last Friday and tell me if you got any Sixty-ones on there for leaving the scene.”

Grace Knowland smiled affectionately at the earnest young officer opposite her. They were sipping coffee on the stools of a Madison Avenue drugstore, the lieutenant shyly telling Grace about himself and just as shyly hinting at how much he’d like to see her again.

“Of course, I’m not really an MP,” Lieutenant Daly said. “I’m infantry.

This is temporary duty.”

“Well, you were lucky to get it. It must be tremendous to be assigned to New York just like that.”

“Not as tremendous as you’d think. I mean, they moved us here in such a hurry, we have to sleep on the floor in there in sleeping bags and live off cold C rations.”

“What!” Grace’s anger was that of a million mothers listening to their soldier son’s woes. “You mean the U.S. Army can afford to rent a bunch of Hertz and Avis trucks and leave them sitting around that armory all day long and they can’t afford to give you boys a hot meal?”

“Oh, those aren’t Army trucks.”

“They’re not?”

“No. It’s the civilians running that exercise in there that use them.”

“Civilians? Why should they want trucks like that to. study snow removal?”

“Beats me. They have some kind of technical equipment they put in there.

Then they go out and drive around for hours. Probably measuring something.

Pollution, maybe.”

Grace swallowed the last sips of her coffee, reflecting thoughtfully on his words. “Probably. Here.” She reached for the check. “Let me have that.

Damn!” she groaned, picking her loose change from her pocketbook. “I think I left my compact down in the major’s office. Could you escort me back down to look for it?”

Ten minutes later she gave the young officer a friendly kiss on the cheek and ran down the armory steps, waving to a taxi moving up Park.

As she slipped into the back seat, she pulled out her notebook and scribbled a number on its cover. It was for that scrap of information, not a missing compact, that she had returned to the armory. The number was the New Jersey license of one of the rented Avis trucks parked on the armory floor.

Abe Stern surveyed the frightened and dismayed men around him at the underground command post below Foley Square as Quentin Dewing began their now hourly review of the situation. It was already 10:30 A.M. and the almost jubilant atmosphere that had accompanied the dispatch of thousands of New York police officers with their photographs of the three Dajanis onto the sidewalks of the city had disappeared as the minutes had ticked by without a single conclusive lead or sighting.

The Mayor tried hard to concentrate on the reports of the men at the conference table, but he couldn’t. All he could think about were the people, the people for whose lives he was responsible walking on the streets above the command post, going into the courthouses, the subways, sitting in offices, in City Hall Park, up in the towers of the World Trade Center or the crowded flats of the Alfred E. Smith housing project. Down here they were going to live if that awful device, wherever it was, went off. They had provisions, real provisions, not the rotten and inedible protein crackers in the shelters. They would allow them to survive.

Eventually, they would be able to crawl out of here into whatever satanic landscape was left on the ground above them.

What about the people up there? What, Abe Stern had kept asking himself, is my moral obligation to them? He had at his disposal a facility that was unique in the United States. It was called Line 1,000 and had originally been set up by John Lindsay in the hot and fearful summers of the sixties.

It was a direct radio and television link from his desk at City Hall and his study at Gracie Mansion to the control desk of WNYC, the city’s broadcasting station. On his order, the WNYC desk man would make three calls to the three primary Emergency Broadcasting System stations, WNBG, WCBS and WABC. All three stations on receiving that call would push an emergency alert button which set an alarm bell ringing in the control room of every radio and television station in the New York area. When it went off, those stations were required by law to interrupt their regular programming and request their audiences to stand by for an emergency message. Within two minutes of picking up Line 1,000 the Mayor’s voice could be heard live on over one hundred radio and television stations. Not even the President could address his countrymen so rapidly in an emergency.

Perhaps, Abe Stern pondered, I should go on the air and tell the people to get out of the city any way they can. That idiot Oglethorpe they had sent up from Washington yesterday had said that panic, the classic fire-in-the-nightclub, everyone-rushes-for-the-door-and-no-one-getsout kind of panic, might not be applicable to this situation. People tended to behave much better in great crises than you expected them to do. And even if Oglethorpe was wrong and there was pandemonium, at least, as he’d told the President yesterday, he’d have saved some lives.

His thoughts were interrupted by a babble of noise from the squawk box on the conference table. Since last night they had been linked by a direct line to the men and women trying to manage the crisis from the NSC conference room, and he recognized the President’s voice inquiring anxiously about the progress of their search. He’s counting on us, Stern thought, listening to the worried string of words pouring from the box. All that confident “Don’t worry, Abe, we’ll talk him out of it” business of yesterday had disappeared. Three times the Chief Executive reported that they had tried to reestablish contact with Qaddafi in the past hour.

Nothing had worked; the Libyan remained adamant in his refusal to talk. The President sketched out the military preparations he had ordered for a forcible removal of the West Bank settlements if it came to that. Stern paled. He was anything but an ardent Zionist., but the prospect of his countrymen and the Israelis coming into conflict due to the diabolical plotting of this zealot in Libya sickened him. Still, he thought, if that’s the price we have to pay to save this city, so be it.

Grace Knowland pushed open the doors of the New York Times Building and strode quickly up to the security guards barring the way to the elevators. As usual, the lobby of the most influential newspaper in the world was vibrant with an air of subdued purpose. From one wall, a marble bust of the Times’s founder, Adolph Ochs, surveyed the passing throng with grim, unsmiling mien, a reminder to all who entered its precincts of the high sense of purpose with which he had endowed his paper.

The front page of Ochs’s journal still bore his slogan, “All the news that’s fit to print,” and six million trees a year fell as a consequence of the determined efforts of the Times’s editors to honor his imperious command.

From the reception rooms of the Kremlin to gossip culled in the locker rooms of Madison Square Garden, the seventy-two-page paper on sale in the vending machine opposite Ochs’s bust this December morning contained more news, more statistics, more figures, more results, more interviews, more analysis and more commentary than any other newspaper in the world.

Grace’s destination was the newsroom on the third floor. It sprawled over an acre and a half, an area so vast that its editors had, on occasion, employed binoculars to keep track of their reporters’ movements and loudspeakers to summon them from their desks. Today, the place looked more like the actuarial clerk’s bullpen at Metropolitan Life than a set for Front Page. Diffused overhead lighting bathed the place in its sterile glow; chest-high partitions broke the area into a series of little mazes; there was enough fake-wood Formica around to equip half a dozen fast-food franchises, and, final assault on the sensibilities of the paper’s oldtime reporters, there was even carpeting on the floor.

Grace’s first gesture was to telephone Avis’s New York headquarters. She quickly obtained the information she wanted: the truck she had noted at the armory belonged to the company’s New Brunswick, New Jersey, truckrental agency. Catching the bureaucracy of New York City in the heedless expenditure of the taxpayers’ money was one of her special pleasures, and from the instant she spotted the rental trucks lined up on the armory floor her reporter’s instincts had told her that once again she had caught some government agency stupidly squandering the city’s meager resources.

She picked up the phone again and dialed the New Brunswick agency, glancing around as she did to be sure no one was near enough to overhear her. What she was about to do was considered a sin at The New York Times — not a mortal sin, perhaps, but a good, solid, venial one.

“This is Desk Officer Lucia Harris of the New York State Police, Pauling Barracks,” she told the girl who answered the phone. “We’ve had a motor-vehicle collision here involving one of your vehicles. The driver was DOA at Pauling General, and unfortunately he didn’t have any ID on him. Can you give me the details on your rental agreement so we can run a trace on him?” She gave the girl the number of the truck.

“It’ll take a moment. Shall I call you back?”

“That’s all right. I’ll hold.”

A few minutes later the Avis girl was on the phone again. “His driver’s license gives him as John McClintock, 104 Clear View Avenue, Las Vegas.

It’s Nevada license 432701-6, issued May 4, 1979. Valid until May 4, 1983.”

Grace jotted the information down on her notepad. Why, in God’s name, would anybody look for a snowremoval expert in Las Vegas? She glanced at her watch. It was a few minutes past eleven, just after eight in Las Vegas.

From directory assistance she got the telephone number of a John McClintock at the address on the agreement. His phone rang, unanswered, for a long time before a woman replied.

“May I speak to Mr. John McClintock, please?”

“I’m sorry. He’s not here,” the voice replied.

“I see. Is he in Las Vegas?”

The woman hesitated. “Who’s calling? This is Mrs. McClintock.”

“Oh,” Grace answered quickly. “This is the First National City Bank in New York. We have a transfer here for him and I need his instructions on how to handle it. Could you tell me where I can reach him?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Mrs. McClintock replied. “He’s out of town for a few days.”

“Is there some number where I could contact him?”

This time there was a long pause before Mrs. McClintock answered. “Well, I don’t think I’m really allowed to tell you that. He’s away on government business. You’d better contact his office down at the Federal Building., Grace thanked Mrs. McClintock and hung up, feeling, as she did, a nervous chill in her intestines, the first flow of her reporter’s adrenaline warning her that something was very wrong with this story. A few minutes later, she was through to the Federal Building in Las Vegas.

“Q Section Safeguards, O’Reilly speaking,” a voice answered when Grace got McClintock’s extension. Safeguards, she asked herself, puzzled. Safeguards against what?