The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  None of them had any idea who Laila was or from where she had been calling.

  They had only been told to wait by the telephone every morning at seven-thirty for the order she had just delivered.

  They removed a lead chest from the storeroom’s unused oven and methodically broke open the seals that held it shut. Its interior was divided into two halves. In one was a collection of metal rings the size of a nickel. In the other were several rows of greenish-gray pills about as big as Alka-Seltzer tablets. Carefully, they snapped a tablet into each of the rings in the chest.

  When they had finished, they opened the first of three identical wooden crates stacked in one corner of the room and lifted out one of its inhabitants. It was a pigeon, not a homing pigeon but an ordinary gray pigeon of the kind raised by kids all over New York in rooftop lofts. They snapped a ring to the bird’s leg, put him back in his crate and lifted out the next one.

  As soon as the rings had been hooked to all the pigeons, the senior Palestinian embraced the other two warmly. “Ma salaam,” he murmured, “till we meet in Tripoli, insh’ Allah.” He picked up one of the three crates and left for a car parked in the street outside. The other two followed at fifteen-minute intervals.

  * * *

  Across the river, on the lower end of Manhattan Island, the Police Commissioner of the City of New York was enjoying a rare moment of silence and introspection. From the window of his office on the fourteenth floor of Police Plaza, Michael Bannion watched the first light steal over the rooftops of the city entrusted to his care. Ahead, looming behind the towers of the Alfred E. Smith housing project, was the familiar silhouette of the Brooklyn Bridge. To his left, far beyond the U.S. Courthouse in Foley Square, Bannion could just make out the tip of the eightstory tenement in which he had been born fifty-eight years before.

  Bannion could spend-the rest of his life in the filtered purity of offices like this; his nostrils would always be filled with the smells that had permeated that dark tenement’s stairwells, the odors of his boyhood, the stench of the cabbage boiling in its kitchens, the reek of urine drifting from the toilets on each landing, the heavy aroma of the wax rubbed into its wooden banisters.

  A telephone’s ring summoned Bannion back to the massive mahogany table that was the unofficial symbol of his office, the desk used by Teddy Roosevelt in his years as Police Commissioner. It was his private phone. He recognized immediately the voice of Harvey Hudson, the assistant director of the FBI in charge of the Bureau’s New York office.

  “Michael,” he said, “I’ve got something urgent which concerns us both. I hate to take you out of your office, but for a number of reasons I don’t want to get into over the phone, I think we’d better discuss it over here.

  It will require,” he added, “the services of your Detective Division.”

  Bannion looked at the crowded appointments list his detective secretary had laid out on his desk.

  “You’ve got to be kidding, Harv?”

  “No, Michael,” Hudson answered. Bannion was struck by a curious catch in his voice. “It’s very, very urgent. It comes from the top, the very top.”

  “Since when does your director tell the NYPD what to do?”

  “It’s not from the director, Michael. It’s from the President.”

  * * *

  On the floor below the Commissioner’s office, the Chief of Detectives, Al Feldman, was staring at a young man advancing toward his office door between the gray metal desks of the junior detectives’ bullpen. He was a “contract,” a patrolman forced on his division because he’d had an uncle who’d been a deputy chief inspector in the Seventh Division. Just as Feldman had predicted he would, he’d fucked up.

  Feldman waved a cold cigar at the youth, directing him toward the worn piece of carpet thrown over the linoleum flooring in front of his desk.

  “You follow baseball, O’Malley?”

  The question perplexed the redfaced young man. He was expecting a dressing-down, not a chat about sports. “Yeah, sure, Chief. You know, I watch it on TV in the summer. Take the wife out to Shea once in a while, see the Mets.”

  “So what happens, a guy’s got two strikes on him, he swings and he misses?”

  “Well, uh, he’s out, Chief.”

  “Right,” Feldman snarled. He plucked a silver patrolman’s shield from his desk drawer and flung it across the desk. “And so are you. Tomorrow you’re back in uniform.”

  His gesture reflected the littleknown fact that New York detectives served at the pleasure of their chief and could be instantly returned to the blue uniforms from which their gold detective’s shield had freed them. Feldman had not even had time to savor the delight his action had given him when his phone rang.

  “The PC wants you,” the Commissioner’s secretary announced, “forthwith.”

  * * *

  There must have been half a million apartments in New York, more even, in which the almost identical scene was taking place this December morning. The TV was on, its volume, as always, turned up too high. Tommy Knowland, thirteen, moved an occasional spoonful of Rice Krispies and sliced bananas to his mouth with no apparent assistance from eyes that remained totally concentrated on Good Morning America blaring from the set before him.

  Grace Knowland sipped her coffee on the chair beside his, studying her son with tender fascination. Even there at the breakfast table, without a trace of makeup, with thus far no effort at beauty beyond a dash of cold water on her face to rouse her and a few swift strokes of her hairbrush, she looked marvelous. Her eyes were clear, her face alive and engaging, the breasts that had excited more than a few admiring glances at Forlini’s the evening before thrusting out against the lapels of the man’s silk bathrobe she wore over her negligee.

  “Aw, come off it!” Tommy’s spoon fell to his plate with a clank. “Jeez, Mom, how can Howard Cosell say something like that?”

  Grace laughed softly. “I’m sure I don’t know. But what I do know is I can’t send him a bill for a broken plate.”

  Her son grimaced and turned his attention back to the television set.

  “Tommy, did you ever …” Grace sipped her coffee thoughtfully. “I mean after your father and I divorced, were you sad you didn’t have any brothers or sisters?”

  It seemed for an instant as though her question had made no impact on her son. Finally, when a female face appeared on the screen, he turned to his mother. “Naw, Mom, not really. Yeck,” he squawked, “Rona Barrett’s next.

  Turn it off, Mom.”

  “Gotta run.” He sprang from the table, blotted his mouth with a napkin, grabbed for a pile of books and gave his mother’s cheek a quick, wet stab with his lips. “Hey, don’t forget I got my match at the armory tonight. You coming?”

  “Of course, darling.”

  The door slammed. Grace sat pensively listening to the sound of her son’s footsteps running down the hall. Running out of my life, too, she thought.

  How much time is left? Two, three years. Then he’ll be gone. Off to his own world, his own life. Instinctively, her hand dropped to her negligee. Did she detect a first faint swelling there? Of course not. That was ridiculous, she knew. There couldn’t possibly be a concrete manifestation yet of the life she carried inside her. She took a cigarette, struck a match, then stopped with the flame inches from its destination. If she was going to go through with it, she should stop smoking, shouldn’t she? That’s what all the doctors said. With a slow, uncertain movement, she shook out the match’s flame.

  * * *

  Red-eyed from lack of sleep, Jack Eastman wrestled with the first assignment the President had given him for the day: how to keep the crisis enveloping the White House a secret. No head of state in the world lived as public an existence as the President of the United States.

  Brezhnev could spend two weeks in the hospital and not a word would appear anywhere. The President of France could drive to a regular appointment with a girl friend and get caught only because he was maladroit enough
to bang into another car on the Champs-Elysees at four in the morning. Everywhere the American President went, however, he was dogged by his corps of journalists. When they were not being briefed, they lounged around the White House press room, their sensitive antennas always alert for the one off-key chord which would indicate that something unusual was going on.

  “First thing,” Eastman told the key aides he had assembled around his desk.

  “I don’t want any reporters sniffing around the West Wing. If anyone in here’s scheduled to see a reporter, tell them to take him down to the mess for coffee.”

  He picked up the President’s schedule for the day from his desk. It was, as always, divided into two parts, the public program published every morning in The Washington Post and his private schedule circulated only to the White House staff. The public schedule for Monday, 14 December, listed four events.

  9:00 A.M. National Security Briefing

  10:00 A.M. Budget Meeting

  11:00 A.M.Remarks commemorating the anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

  5:25 P.M. Depart for lighting National Christmas Tree, Ellipse

  The first item was no problem. Eastman thought for a moment about the second, the budget meeting.

  “Let’s get Charlie Schultz to sit in for the President,” he suggested.

  Schultz was the newly appointed chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. “Tell him the President wants his opinion on the effect the budget cuts will have on the economy.”

  “Should we tell him what’s going on?” someone asked.

  “Hell, no. Why should he know about it?” Eastman turned to the press secretary. He had decided he would have to be informed of the crisis. “What about the Declaration and the Christmas-tree lighting?” Both were public events; both would have to be covered by the White House press corps. “Can we scrub them?”

  “We’ll have a hell of a lot of explaining to do if we do. Those guys out there will be all over us.”

  “Suppose we give him a cold?”

  “Then they’ll want to talk to Dr. McIntyre. ‘Is he taking medication?

  What’s his temperatureT Jack, you just can’t fool around with the President’s public appearances without an airtight cover story. And airtight cover stories arean’t easily come by in this town.”

  “The Human Rights business I can see,” Eastman answered. “If the shit hits the fan while he’s in the Oval office we can probably get him out of there in a hurry without anybody catching on. But, Jesus Christ, if something happens while he’s down there lighting that Christmas tree, we’ll never be able to rush him out of there without the whole world knowing something’s going on.”

  “Still, if you want to keep this a secret you’re going to have to take a chance and let him go.” The press secretary stretched his long legs toward Eastman’s desk. “The best way to keep this a secret is to keep up the front. That’s how JFK’s people played the Missile Crisis: people went out to dinners, stuff like that, to maintain a fagade. We’ll have to do the same thing.”

  “How are we going to get people in and out of here all day without the press finding out something’s going on?” Eastman asked.

  “Again,” his colleague replied, “I’d say look at what the Kennedy people did. They told people to use their own cars. Double up so that they didn’t have a parade of limousines coming in. They even had Rusk and McNamara come in sitting on the floor of their cars”

  Eastman couldn’t resist laughing at the thought of Delbert Crandell, the Secretary of Energy, crammed onto the floor of his car. At least some good, he thought, would come out of all this.

  “O.K.,” he said. “Do it your way. Just make damn sure it doesn’t leak.”

  * * *

  The headquarters of the SDECE, France’s intelligence service, are on the Boulevard Mortier behind Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris’s Twentieth Arrondissement, a neighborhood so drab that even on the brightest of spring days it somehow seems as depressingly gray as a Utrillo winter scene. From the street, the building that houses the SDECE looks like an old army caserne, which it in fact is, its paint peeling away like dead skin flaking off a sunburned limb.

  The decrepitude ends at the front door. Inside the headquarters, gleaming banks of computer consoles place all the wizardry of the electronic age at the disposition of a service traditionally known more for the Gallic panache of its operatives than for their technical skills. Years of Congressional probes and public outcries might have sanitized the SDECE’s friendly rivals at the CIA; General Bertrand’s service could still recruit the mercenary forces required to overthrow the odd African dictator, engage the services of Corsican gunmen whose normal pursuits involved the sale of a little white powder, or set up its Kuala Lumpur operative in a whorehouse.

  Such places were, after all, traditional venues for the exchange of information, and the French were far too appreciative of the foibles of the flesh to abandon them entirely in favor of devices as sterile as satellite photos.

  The SDECE director, General Henri Bertrand, was seated at his desk deeply absorbed in a study of Vietnamese penetration into the Golden Triangle opium trade in Burma when his deputy came in with a thick computer printout. It contained everything the SDECE had on the sale to Libya of the reactor from which the Americans suspected Qaddafi had obtained plutonium.

  Bertrand was familiar with much of the material. Security in nuclear matters had been a very delicate point in the French capital since the day in April 1979 when an Israeli hit team had blown apart the inner core of an experimental reactor destined for Iraq only weeks before it was due to be delivered to Baghdad. He glanced at it quickly and then told his deputy, “Ask Cornedeau to join me, would you?”

  Cornedeau was the agency’s nuclear scientist, a bald, intense young man who had graduated from the Polytechnique, France’s great center of scientific learning, a decade before.

  “Sit down, Patrick,” Bertrand ordered. Swiftly, he reviewed for him what had happened.

  Patrick Cornedeau smiled and took an unlit pipe from his pocket. He was trying to give up cigarettes and it was the security blanket he employed whenever he felt the urge for nicotine rising in him.

  “Well, if Qaddafi is really after plutonium, he couldn’t have picked a tougher way to get it.”

  “Perhaps, cher ami, it was the only one available to him.”

  Bertrand’s scientist shrugged his shoulders. He had gamed dozens of ways by which a dictator like Qaddafi could get the bomb: hijack a plutonium shipment, do what the Indians did — buy a Canadian heavy-water reactor that runs on natural uranium and duplicate it right down to the thumbtacks. But this was different. Cheating with a standard light-water reactor was the toughest challenge of all.

  Cornedeau got up and walked over to the blackboard hanging on one wall of Bertrand’s office. For a minute he stood in front of it, idly tossing a piece of chalk in his hand, marshaling his thoughts like a schoolmaster about to begin a lecture.

  “Mon general,” he said, “if you’re going to cheat on a nuclear reactor, any reactor, you cheat with the fuel. When the fuel burns, or fissions, it gives off heat, boils water to make steam to run turbines to make electricty. It also sends a stream of stray neutrons flying around. Some of them”-he punched the blackboard-“go banging into the unburned fuel, lowly enriched uranium in this case, and start a reaction in there which converts a part of that into plutonium.

  “In this reactor,” he continued, making a sketch on the blackboard, “the fuel is in a pressurized core inside the shell that looks like this. You change it only once a year. It comes in enormous, heavy bundles of fuel rods. To get it out, you have to shut down your reactor. Then you need two weeks’ time, a lot of heavy equipment and plenty of people. Don’t forget we have twenty technicians assigned to it. There is absolutely no way the Libyans could have gotten the fuel out of there, spirited it away some dark night, without some of them noticing it.”

  Bertrand drew on
his Gauloise. “And what happens to that fuel when it comes out?”

  “First of all, it’s so hot, radioactively speaking, it would turn you into a walking cancer cell if you got close to it. The assemblies are packed in lead shells and taken to a storage pond where they’re left to cool off.”

  “And so the rods just sit there in the pond. What prevents Qaddafi from taking them out and getting the plutonium?”

  “The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna has inspectors who are responsible for seeing that people don’t cheat on these things. They run at least two inspections a year down there. And in between they have sealed cameras run on sealed lines which constantly monitor the pond. There are usually at least two of them there, timed to take wide-angle shots of the pond every fifteen minutes or so.”

  “And that, presumably, doesn’t leave him enough time to remove the rods?”

  “Goodness, no. You’ve got to put them into huge, shielded lead containers if you don’t want to be irradiated yourself. They have to be handled by heavy cranes. You need at least an hour for the operation. Two is more likely.”

  “Could the inspectors alter the film?”

  “No. They don’t even develop them. That’s done in Vienna. Besides, they also lower gamma-ray analyzers into the pond each time they make an inspection, to be sure the rods are radioactive. That way they can be sure a switch hasn’t been made.”

  Bertrand leaned back, his head pressed against the headrest of his chair, his half-closed eyes focused on one corner of the ceiling. “You make a very persuasive case against the Libyans being capable of obtaining plutonium from this thing.”

  “I think it’s very, very unlikely, Chief.”

  “Unless they had complicity at some stage in their operations.”

  “But where, how?”

  “Personally, I have always managed to contain my enthusiasm for the workings of the United Nations.”