The Fifth Horseman (60 page)

Angelo’s face whitened. He felt his thigh muscles sag and he teetered back on his heels so that he had to thrust a hand to the cold concrete floor to keep himself from falling over. Those lying bastards, he thought. So that’s why they had those classified reports. They had this all the time and they didn’t tell us. Lied to us, kept us deliberately in the dark.

He staggered to his feet. Rand was over by a workbench busily interrogating an FBI technician. He knew. Those bastards from South Dakota and Tacoma, Washington, in their skinny ties and their wash-and-dry suits, they told them, sure, because they’re feds. But me, the guy whose city this is, the guy who’s got his people here, me they don’t trust. He was abreast of Rand now, and he struck the younger man’s shoulder with such force he started to tumble forward.

“Cut the bullshit,” Angelo snarled. “You and I got work to do.”

He almost ran to his car, then, when they were inside, slammed the door shut with such a furious jolt Rand looked up perplexed.

“What’s the matter?”

“You knew it all the time, didn’t you?”

“Knew what, for God’s sake?”

“You’ve been giving me a stroke like everybody else, haven’t you? It isn’t chlorine gas they got in that goddamn barrel. It’s a fucking atomic bomb.”

Angelo turned his ignition key so hard he almost snapped it off in the lock, then jammed the car into gear.

“This is my own home, my own people and they don’t trust me!” he roared.

There was a world of feeling in his shout, of fear and rage, bitterness and humiliation, the savage, wounded pride of the stag at bay. “You, a halfass kid out of a Louisiana law school, doesn’t even have two years in the Bureau, they trust, but me, a guy with thirty years on his ticket, me they don’t trust. All those fucking years and when they got something like this they still don’t trust youl”

He stomped so hard on his accelerator, the car fishtailed forward over the rutted snow and ice, its spinning tires shrieking in protest. The yardman he had quizzed earlier looked on, amazed. Man, he thought, he never going to get where he going driving like that.

Three hours. With a glance at the clock in the NSC conference room, the President measured once again how imminent was the horror facing them.

It was six minutes to noon. Exactly three hours and six minutes remained before the expiration of Qaddafi’s ultimatum. Men cling to hopes in a crisis as a dying believer clings to his faith, and the President still strove to cling to his despite the remorseless, inexorable pressures wringing them from his soul. At least in the last great American crisis in Iran, the United States had not had to decide its actions in the face of an ultimatum, an ultimatum laid down by a man the President had no doubt was ready to wreak the nuclear holocaust on six million innocent people.

Suddenly he interrupted the desultory flow of conversation around him. He had had an idea. It wasn’t much of an idea, but, in the situation, anything was worthwhile. “Jack,” he told his National Security Assistant. “I want to talk to Abe Stern.”

“Abe,” he said when he got the Mayor on their tie line to New York, “the sands are running down. In a short while, a very short while, we are going to have to act, and once we do there will be no turning back.”

“I understand, Mr. President,” Stern replied. “What do you propose to do?”

“The advance elements of the Rapid Deployment Force are on the ground in Germany now, refueled and ready to move on to the Middle East. We received secret assurance from President Assad in Syria half an hour ago that they’ll be allowed to land in Damascus. The Sixth Fleet Amphibious Marine Landing Force would land in Lebanon simultaneously with their arrival. The two would hook up, then move into the West Bank to clear out the settlements.”

“The Israelis will fight, Mr. President.”

“I know, Abe.” The President’s words came in a soft groan. “But I will make our very limited objectives clear to them, and the rest of the world, before we go in.”

“It may not be enough, Mr. President. Don’t forget, they have nuclear weapons, too.”

“I think I know how we can contain that threat. I’ll ask the Russians to make it clear to them what the consequences of their employing nuclear weapons would be. They might not believe that from us, but they’ll believe it from them all right. Before we get to that, though, Abe, there’s one other card we can play. You.”

“Me?”

“You. Call Begin yourself, Abe. Plead with him. Try to make him see the madness in not pulling out of those settlements.”

“Can I tell him you’re ready to-“

“Abe,” the President interrupted, “tell him anything you want. Just get him to agree to go on the air and announce that those damn settlements are coming out.”

Angelo Rocchia parked his Chevrolet at 189 Christopher Street in approximately the same spot in which the Procter & Gamble salesman’s car had been parked Friday morning. The detective was still seething with rage. He slumped againt the car seat, a walkie-talkie in one hand, a detailed block-by-block map of the neighborhood he had gotten at the Sixth Precinct spread on his knees. Twenty men were already combing the area he had designated on that map, from the river on the west over to Hudson Street on the east, two blocks north and south, knocking on every door, calling on every shop, interrogating every passerby, trying to find the author of the note.

Angelo wondered how much time they had. They’d probably lie to you if you asked them about that, too, he thought bitterly. Suddenly, a terrible urge swept through him, a single desire so terrible he trembled with feeling: to clasp in his arms the one person in the world he bad left, the frail figure he could talk to only with his eyes, to grab her, hug her misshapen body to his. And to get her as far away from this city as he could.

He was so lost in his recollections of her pathetic efforts to babble out the words of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” that he didn’t see the plainclothesman draw up to the car. He was followed by a young man in his midtwenties, his legs in black denims so close-fitting they might have been a ballet dancer’s tights, his bleached blond hair heaped high, Elvis Presley style, on his head. He had a coppercolored boxer on a leash. Angelo got out of the car.

“Would you repeat to Detective Rocchia here what you just told me?” the plainclothesman ordered.

“Oh yes, certainly, of course. I was walking Ashoka here, I have to walk him a lot, he needs the outdoors so, poor thing, he just can’t stand being cooped up all day in my little flat, can you, darling?” The young man bent down to pat the animal as Angelo scowled. “And I was right over there.” He gestured to the other side of the street. “And I heard this awful scraping noise. I looked up and I just saw this yellow truck starting up and going up Christopher Street. So I went across the street and I saw they’d scraped some poor man’s fender-“

“And you left the note?”

“Yes.”

“Was it a Hertz truck?”

“Oh, well,” the young man was perplexed. “I don’t know, it could have been, but it was going up the street and I didn’t see that much. And trucks and me, well…’

“Terrific. You’re a big help.”

“Was there anybody else around here might have seen it?”

“Well, there were two of those simply ghastly cruiser types that hang out down here right there.” He indicated a storefront almost adjacent to Angelo’s Chevrolet.

“You know them?”

The young man blushed. “I have nothing to do with that type of person. They hang our across the street=’ he gestured toward the river-“in that old pier there”

Angelo beckoned to Rand. “Come on,” he growled. “We gotta find these two.”

The President of the United States had been right. There had been no need to inform the Israelis about the U.S. military preparations to move into the West Bank. Israeli intelligence had discerned the basic outlines of the U.S. moves almost from the moment they began. A source inside the U.S. Rhine Main Air Force Base in Frankfurt, Germany, had informed the embassy in Bonn of the arrival of the C-5As of the Rapid Deployment Force. Radar had picked up the movements of the Sixth Fleet’s Marine Amphibious Force, and its ships had been kept under discreet aerial surveillance as they moved up the Lebanese seacoast toward Junieh Bay.

The most revealing and complete portrait of U.S. intentions, however, had been provided by a Mossad “asset” inside King Hussein’s Amman Palace, a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Jordanian Air Force attached to the King’s personal staff. Yusi Avidar, the intelligence chief whose secret call had alerted the CIA to Israel’s plans for a preemptive strike at Libya, reviewed the information his agent bad sent across the Allenby Bridge. Like their American counterparts, the Israelis had been in a quasi-permanent crisis session for over twenty-four hours; their nerves were strained, their tempers on edge.

“So, gentlemen,” General Avidar concluded. “There is no question about it: the Americans are coming.”

“Let’s leak it to the world press right away,” Benny Ranan suggested. “That will stop the Americans in their tracks. Public opinion will force the President to attack Qaddafi.”

Yigal Yadin looked at the man, appalled. “Have you gone mad, Benny?” he asked. “If the Americans discover six million people in New York may get killed because of our settlements, there won’t be a single American alive who won’t back the President in coming in here and taking them out themselves.”

“Damn it!” It was General Avidar. “Can’t this nation ever acknowledge it was wrong? Are we going to another holocaust because we can’t admit a mistake and pull them out ourselves, for God’s sake?”

“Our mistake was not carrying through our strike on Libya yesterday,” Ranan said.

Begin, calm as ever, turned to the intelligence chief. “The original mistake was in your intelligence service’s failure to find out what this man was doing so that we could destroy him and his project before he got his bombs.”

The General began to protest, but Begin cut him off with a wave of his hand. “I read the reports. You never took him seriously, even after we found the Pakistani connection. He didn’t have the technological resources, you maintained, the infrastructure. He was just a pompous boaster. He=’

An aide interrupted. “Excuse me,” he said to the Prime Minister. “The Mayor of New York wants to speak to you urgently.”

The spectacle sickened Angelo: the filthy, debrislittered old pier, the gloomy office, probably once the Customs shed, the man half naked cowering in the corner like some frightened animal, the two “cruisers” in leather jackets, one dangling a studded belt from his hand. The detective started to go into the dimness, then stopped, disgusted. Let them come to me, he thought.

“Hey, you,” he barked at the cruiser with the belt, “come out here. I want to talk to you.”

The youth edged sullenly toward the doorway and Angelo’s bulky figure.

“Hey, listen, what is this?” he protested. “He’s a consenting adult, for Christ’s sake. We got civil rights now, don’t you know that?”

“Forget it,” Angelo snarled. “I’m not interested in what you’re doing in there. Friday your friend over here sees a yellow truck scrape a guy’s Pontiac over there on Christopher Street. He says you saw it, too”

“Yeah,” the young man replied. His sidekick was just behind him now, glaring hostilely over his shoulder, arrogantly whacking his belt in his palm. Their client was crouched in the recesses of the darkened office, hiding his head in his hands, sobbing, convinced, probably, that he was about to be arrested and his career ruined.

“So what?”

“I just want to know if you remember anything about the truck, is all.”

“Hertz truck. One of them vans there. What about it?”

“You sure it was a Hertz truck?”

“Yeah, sure. It had them blue stripes on it”

Angelo took a Hertz sales brochure from his pocket. Pictured on it was the spectrum of Hertz trucks rented in the New York area. “Do you suppose you could show me which model it was?”

“Right here.” The youth’s forefinger stabbed at the photo of the Econoline van. Angelo glanced at Rand, then back at the youth.

“Thanks, kid,” he said. “Give you a good-conduct medal one of these days.”

He turned and, with Rand behind him, ran out of the pier, dodged across the West Street traffic and raced for his car.

As Angelo Rocchia scrambled into his Chevrolet, just twelve blocks away in front of a hardware store at 74 West Eighth Street another man slipped into the front seat of a car pausing at the curb. Kamal Dajani noted that his sister had on her blond wig. It changed her so completely that she looked, sitting there beside him, like a total stranger.

No policeman, even one equipped with a picture of her, could identify her now, he thought with satisfaction.

She headed into MacDougal Street and then, through Waverly Place, over to Sixth Avenue, letting the car glide in and out of the traffic with a deft and gentle touch. At Fourteenth she moved into the outside lane, waiting to turn left, stopping as she did at the red light.

“Is everything all right?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the rearview mirror to see if they were being followed.

“Of course everything is all right.”

“There’s been no news on the radio.”

“I know,” Kamal replied, his own eyes scrutinizing the throngs rushing to beat the “Don’t Walk” sign. “I have a transistor.”

“You don’t suppose there’s any possibility the Americans won’t agree, do you?”

Kamal remained silent, staring at the crowds thronging the sidewalks, at the Christmas decorations and the white slashes of the advertising banners promising “Clearance Sale: Everything Must Go” and “All Stock Reduced.”

Nothing there, he realized, to indicate that anyone in this city even suspected the enormity of the threat under which they were living.