The Fifth Horseman (67 page)

He ran a nervous hand through his curly black hair, as closely cut almost as it had been when he served in the Marine Corps. There was an awesome responsibility to his office as publisher of the paper that considered itself the conscience of America: a responsibility Sulzberger felt every bit as intensely as the President of the United States felt the burden of his office. What were his responsibilities now, he asked himself, what were the obligations of the Times to the city, to the nation now?

He turned from the window back to his massive walnut desk and his surprisingly modest office, its walls decorated with Times artifacts, historic front pages and stern and sober oils of the father and grandfather who had preceded him in this room.

The door opened. “They’re here, Mr. Sulzberger,” his secretary announced, and she showed Abe Rosenthal, Art Gelb, Grace Knowland and Myron Pick, an assistant managing editor, into the room.

Rosenthal was still seething with anger at the Police Commissioner for having dared to lie to The New York Times, for concealing from the citizens of the city the terrible threat that menaced them.

“Can you imagine, Punch,” he said, referring to the publisher by the nickname that had followed him from childhood, “an atomic bomb in this city that could kill ten, twenty thousand people and they don’t say a word to anybody?”

Sulzberger was seated now, his hands folded before him as though in prayer, his lips pressed against the knuckle of his left index finger. His head moved slowly back and forth as he listened to his senior editor. “It’s not an atomic bomb, Abe. And it’s not ten thousand people. It’s the whole city.”

As they listened in growing horror, he recounted the details of the pleading telephone call he had just received from the President. “Needless to say, he begged us not to use this information.”

He looked at each of his employees. Despite the vastness of his enterprise, he knew them all personally. “That’s not all he asked us, I’m afraid.” His remote, melancholy eyes looked at each face in turn. “He’s also asked us to restrict this information to those of us who already know about it. To tell absolutely no one else. No one.”

Grace Knowland’s hand went instinctively to her mouth to stifle the gasp forming there. Tommy, she thought, where is he?

“My God, I can’t believe it!” It was Myron Pick. “He expects us to just sit here and wait to be thermonuclearized? Not even to warn our families?”

“Precisely.” Sulzberger, whose own wife and child were only a few blocks away, reiterated Qaddafi’s injunction to secrecy and his warning that he would detonate his device instantly if an evacuation was begun.

“Why the hell should we?” Pick demanded. “Just because the President tells us to? How do we know he’s telling the truth? Presidents have lied to us.

And why the hell should his judgment on what to do in this situation be any better than ours just because seventy million people voted for him in an election?”

“Myron.” The publisher studied his agitated editor. “Forget about the President. Forget about Qaddafi. Forget about everything except one thing: what is the responsibility of The New York Times to the people of this city?”

“Well, I think it’s clear. Publish just as fast as we can. Warn the people that this city is threatened with destruction and tell them to save themselves any way they can.”

“Jesus, Myron, you can’t possibly mean thatt” Grace Knowland said.

“I certainly do. We’ve got it. Our obligation is to publish it. Doesn’t experience teach us that nothing is gained when we hold back the truth?

Look at the Bay of Pigs.”

The Times had had the story of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the CIA’s involvement in it but had effectively squelched it on the urging of President Kennedy. Later, both the paper and the President regretted the decision, realizing that the story’s publication might have prevented a national disaster.

“For Christ’s sake, Myron, this isn’t the Bay of Pigs. We’re talking about doing something that might cost millions of lives. Yours and mine included.”

Both Grace and Pick were on their feet shouting furiously at each other.

“We’re talking about the rights and obligations of this paper,” Pick roared. “I say it’s our right and duty to warn the people of this city what’s about to happen to them.”

“Who the bell do you think you are to put yourself over the President? Why do you have some God-given right to do whatever you see fit just because you’re a newspaper editor? To risk people’s lives for some principle?”

Grace was beginning to sob in anguish and concern. “Like those horrible people out there in Wisconsin who published the secret of the hydrogen bomb. Now a million people in this city, including my son, may die just because they had to make a point about their goddamn freedom of the press.”

“We have no proof Qaddafi got his hydrogen-bomb secrets from those papers,”

Pick shouted back at her.

“Well, he damn well didn’t get it sitting out in the desert meditatingl”

“Quiet, both of you. Sit down.” Sulzberger was on his feet. Usually his voice retained, despite the authority that was his, a kind of youthful timidity, but there were no traces of it present at the moment. “Neither one of you is addressing the problem. Art,” he said, turning to Gelb, “what do you think?”

“It seems to me that the U.S. government has no convincing plan that can save this city beyond some vague hope for a miracle of some sort. I mean the only response the government seems to have been able to put together is flooding the Village with FBI agents and detectives.”

Abe Rosenthal looked morosely at his friend and associate. “Maybe the problem, Art, is there isn’t any other response.”

“Then,” Gelb said, “maybe our obligation is to say to the people, `Get out of the city any way you can.’ So there’d be chaos in the street, but maybe a couple of million people would make it. At least the Times would have saved them.”

“And killed how many others?” Rosenthal peered at Gelb through his outsized dark-framed glasses. “Let’s get a couple of points straight here. First, if we feel our responsibility to the people of this city is to warn them about what might happen so they can run for the hills, then there is absolutely no question of holding it to publish an extra of the Times. Punch”-he turned to the publisher”has got to pick up the phone right now and give it to the television networks.

“That would mean we’re voting to shout ‘Fire!’ in the crowded theater, because to let the news out like that, with no warning or preparation, will start a panic that is surely going to kill a million people, bomb or no bomb.”

Rosenthal got up. He was in his shirtsleeves, his tie undone, the untidy roll of fat he never managed to control despite all his sporadic efforts at dieting spilling over the top of his trousers. He seemed to be clawing at the air with his fingertips as he strode nervously about the room. “The second thing is, nobody has elected The New York Times to be the government of the United States. We’re supposed to monitor the government’s decisions, not make them. Okay, Presidents have lied to us, but I don’t think this one is lying, not about this. He’s made a decision, and millions of lives are involved with it, including our own. I think we have to go with him.” He stopped. “Anyhow, it’s your decision, Punch.”

The publisher turned away from his four employees and stepped again to the window. Already the gray pallor of evening hung upon the city. He had made many a hard decision in this room, the decision to defy Richard Nixon and publish the Pentagon Papers, to overrule his editors and hold the secret of the Glomar Explorer at the request of the CIA. None of them had compared even remotely in their importance to this one.

Finally he walked around to the front of his desk. “My dear friends-” he choked as he articulated the words”our responsibility, it seems to me, our ultimate responsibility, is to the people of this city. If breaking the secret is going to put their lives in jeopardy, then it seems to me we must keep the secret and accept all the consequences of our act by ourselves-by ourselves alone.”

Sulzberger thrust his fists into the pockets of his gray flannel suit. “The President says the ultimatum expires at nine o’clock. I intend to stay here in this office until then. I leave it to the rest of you to follow the dictates of your consciences. If you want to leave, go ahead. Just do it quietly. You have my solemn promise the matter will never be mentioned between us again.

“Otherwise, I’m afraid there’s nothing to do except to go on preparing tomorrow’s paper-and pray we’ll be alive to publish it.”

Kamal had insisted they take a different route into the city in the unlikely event they had been seen on their trip up to Spring Valley, and Laila had chosen to come down the East Side along the FDR Drive after crossing the Third Avenue Bridge to avoid the tolls on the Triboro. Since leaving, they had barely spoken. Fingers clenched to the steering wheel, her eyes full of tears, still in a state of quasi-shock from the horrible scene she had witnessed, Laila drove like a robot. Only fear and the memories of her dead father had prevented her from spinning the car off into the roadside ditch and trying to somehow flee her demented brother.

Exhausted, her nerves shattered, she was resigned to fate, to carrying this enterprise through to the end she had never believed possible.

Kamal sat beside her in silence, listening to the radio.

It said nothing. He studied the flow of traffic moving out of the city, the lights on Roosevelt Island and Queens beyond. Everything seemed perfectly normal. Even the distant wail of the sirens was a part of the city’s daily landscape. His eyes studied the green rectangle of the United Nations Building, the towers of light and glass beyond it, a technological universe that by now should have been reduced to a lifeless slag heap. The people in the buildings above, in the traffic enveloping their car, were alive while at this instant, perhaps, in Libya or Palestine or both, Arabs, his brothers, were dying, helpless once again before their enemies because his brother had been a traitor.

Suddenly, seized by an uncontrollabe rage, he hammered the dashboard with his fist. Failure, failure, failure, he raged; failure eats at us like maggots in a corpse. We are always the joke, the poor fools whose plans go astray.

He tapped the chest of his leather jacket, reassuring himself for the hundredth time that the checklist was there. Introduce the code to reopen the case, he thought. Switch the tapes. Punch 636 to start the right cassette with the firing instruction. One minute, no more. Ahead of them he saw the highway sign “15TH STREET-EXIT FOR 14TH STREET.” He tapped Laila’s arm.

“This is it, remember?”

“How’s it going?”

Angelo Rocchia didn’t have to look up from the charts on which he was following the progress of the search in the crowded streets around Sheridan Square to recognize the voice. The Mayor’s gruff yet slightly high-pitched way of speaking always reminded Angelo of the time when he was a kid and Fiorello La Guardia used to read the funny papers over the radio on Sunday mornings during the newspaper strike.

“Not good, Your Honor. Too many buildings. Too few guys. Too little time,”

Angelo commented grimly.

Abe Stern shook his head in dismayed agreement. He put his chunky hand on Angelo’s shoulder. “We took a big chance on you, my friend. I hope to God you were right.”

As he wandered off, hands behind his back, head bowed in concern, his words, “We took a big chance on you” kept coming back to Angelo like one of those Hindu phrases the kids kept repeating to themselves-except in their case they were supposed to bring you peace.

Every time they cross out another street on that map without finding the barrel, the detective realized, there’s another pair of eyes in this room on me.

Where did I go wrong, he asked himself yet again, where, where? The FBI lab in Brooklyn had called in the results of their analysis of the salesman’s fender. The paint matchup checked. There was the whore. They had found two countermen in a pizza joint four doors down from the broad’s brownstone who recognized the guy. Everything checked. So why hadn’t they found it?

He walked back to the desk he and Rand had been assigned, concentrating so intently he banged his thigh on the sharp edge of a filing cabinet along his path. As he sat down on the desk, rubbing his leg in pain and frustration, he turned to his young partner. “What the hell did we do wrong, kid? What do they teach you to do down there in Quantico in a case like this?”

“Angelo,” Rand replied in what he meant to be a quiet, comforting manner, “in Quantico they teach us to always go by the book, but you don’t seem to believe much in the book.”

Angelo gave his shoulders a despairing toss. “There are times to go by the book, times to forget it. Problem is knowing when to do which.” Wearily, he rubbed his eyes in the palm of his hand. “My book says when something doesn’t work, you go back to square one and start all over again. Try to find out where you went wrong.”

“Mine does, too.”

Angelo rubbed his still-aching leg, studying the crowded room, the strained faces trying to conceal their fear, listening to the strangely subdued voices of the men working the radios, the phones, consulting the pictures and the chart on the wall. It had all seemed so logical, so straightforward when he was down there in the underground command post. Was it really possible this bomb was somewhere else, uptown, and they were all looking for it down here because he’d made a mistake? He stopped himself. There were things it was better not to think about.

“Square one is back where that guy’s car was hit, right?”

Rand grunted his agreement as Angelo was getting to his feet.

“I’m going to ask Feldman to let us out of here for ten minutes. Let’s go back there and walk through this one more time.”

Kamal saw the flashing red lights first, just after they passed Irving Place, coming up to Union Square. “Slow down,” he ordered.