The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  “How many do you figure that would be?” Feldman demanded.

  Salisbury made a few silent calculations. “There are about four hundred known and identified Palestinian terrorists at large. My guess is we’ll find fifty to seventy-five of them who meet our specs.”

  The detective shook his head in dismay. “That’s too many. Too fucking many.

  Job like this, you gotta get it down to two or three to have a chance. If we’re going to save this city, my friend, we’ve got to have one or two faces, not a portrait gallery.”

  * * *

  The first of the two agents flashed his gold shield at the desk clerk so discreetly that the young man didn’t realize who his visitors were until he heard the words “FBI.” Then, like most people confronted with a federal law-enforcement officer, he came quickly to attention.

  “May we see your register, please?”

  The clerk dutifully submitted the black bound guest register of the Hampshire House to the agents’ scrutiny. The index finger of the senior man ran down the pages, then stopped at the address Hamra Street, Beirut, Lebanon, after the name Linda Nahar. Suite 3202, he noted, and glanced up at the key bank. The key was missing.

  “Is Miss Nahar in 3202 in?”

  “Oh,” replied the clerk, “you just missed her. She checked out forty minutes ago. She said she’d be back, though. In a week.”

  “I see. Did she tell you where she was going?”

  “The airport. She was flying out to LA on the earlybird flight.”

  “Did she leave you a forwarding address?”

  “No.”

  “Do you suppose you could tell us something about Miss Nahar?”

  Ten minutes later, the two agents were back in their car, smoking. The clerk had been singularly unhelpful.

  “What do you think, Frank?”

  “I think it’s probably a waste of time. Some woman who’s afraid of doctors.”

  “So do I. Except she did decide to leave this morning, didn’t she?”

  “Why don’t we get your informer and work over his contact?”

  “That might be a little heavy. Rico deals with some bad people.” The agent looked at his watch. “Let’s check the flight lists and find out what plane she took. We’ll have somebody do a check on her when she gets out there.”

  * * *

  “There’s one major point we’ve all overlooked.” Authority flowed from Michael Bannion’s voice like sound waves from a pitching fork, and everyone in the room turned to him. “Are you going to apply the White House’s injunction to secrecy to the men running the investigation, Harv?”

  “No, certainly not. How are we going to get them to pull out all the stops if we don’t tell them the truth?”

  “Good Godl” Bannion shook his head in dismay. “Tell my men there’s a hydrogen bomb hidden on this island, that it’s going to go off in a few hours and wipe the city off the face of the earth? They’re human. They’ll panic. The first thing they’ll say to themselves is, ‘I gotta get the kids out of here. I gotta call the old lady. Tell her to get the kids outa school and head for her mother’s up in Troy.’ “

  “You seem to have singularly little confidence in your men, Commissioner.”

  Bannion’s blue eyes flashed as he looked down the table to the austere presence of Quentin Dewing, the assistant director of the FBI.

  “My men, in whom I have the greatest confidence, Mr. Dewing, don’t come from Montana, South Dakota and Oregon like yours do. They come from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens. They’ve got their wives, their kids, their mothers, their uncles, their aunts, their pals, their girl friends, their dogs, their cats, their canaries trapped in this goddamned city. They’re men, not supermen. You’d better find a cover story to give them. And let me tell you something else, Mr. Dewing, it had better be a goddamn good cover story, because if it isn’t, there’s going to be a panic on this island the likes of which neither you nor I nor anybody else has ever seen.”

  * * *

  Grace Knowland turned up her coat collar to deflect the wind that hit her as soon as she emerged from the BMT’s Chambers Street subway station. It was almost 8:45. Hurrying through City Hall Park, Grace almost fell on the ill-cleaned, half-sanded path. The Mayor, she thought tartly, can’t even keep his own sidewalk shoveled.

  She smiled at the policeman manning the gate leading to the Mayor’s offices and stepped into the noisy bustle of the press room. Still clutching her coat about her, she pulled her mail from her pigeonhole, tossed a quarter into the paper cup by the coffee machine and poured herself a steaming cup of black coffee.

  A stir at the doorway interrupted her. Vic Ferrari, a blue cornflower twisted into the lapel of his gray flannel suit, stepped into the room.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I have a brief announcement. His Honor is very sorry, but he won’t be able to keep his appointment with you this morning.”

  Ferrari, unfazed, let the storm of jeers and catcalls which followed his words abate. Tolerating the ill-humor of the New York press was only one of the minor trials involved in being the press secretary of the Mayor of New York.

  “The Mayor was invited to Washington earlier this morning by the President to discuss certain budgetary questions of concern to them both.”

  The room erupted. New York’s chronic financial problems had been a running story for years, and the questions fiew at Ferrari.

  “Victor,” Grace asked, “when do you expect the Mayor back?”

  “Later on in the day. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “By shuttle, as usual?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Hey, Vic,” a television reporter yelled from the rear of the circle of newsmen around Ferrari, “would this have anything to do with the South Bronx?”

  Just the faintest glimmer of acknowledgment crossed Ferrari’s face, a swift illumination akin to the look on a mediocre poker player’s face when he’s filled an inside straight. One journalist in the room caught it-and Grace Knowland was probably the only person there who didn’t play poker. “I said I didn’t want to speculate on the subject of their meeting,” Ferrari insisted.

  As unobtrusively as she could, Grace slipped to her phone and dialed the Times city desk. “Bill,” she whispered to her editor, “something’s up on the South Bronx. Stern’s gone to Washington. I want to shuttle down and try to ride back with him.” Her editor agreed immediately. Before leaving, she decided to make a second call, this one to Angelo. His phone seemed to ring interminably.

  Finally an unfamiliar voice replied. “He’s not here,” he said. “They’re all off at a meeting someplace.”

  * * *

  Funny, Grace thought, hanging up the phone, he told her he was going to catch up on his paperwork this morning.

  As she edged, almost surreptitiously, toward the door, she heard a snarl rising from the circle in which the others still clustered around the press secretary. “All this is lovely, Vic,” a voice asked, “but we happen to have a real problem on our hands here. Just when does this city plan to finish getting the fucking snow out of Queens?”

  * * *

  The man the City Hall press corps was so anxious to question was at that moment entering the private office of the President of the United States.

  “Mr. President, you’re looking terrific. Wonderful. Marvelous.” Abe Stern’s adjectives succeeded each other in little barks, like a string of exploding Chinese firecrackers. He seemed to bounce across the room to the man at the desk as though he was being propelled by springs concealed in the soles of his shoes. “Job must agree with you. You’ve never looked so good.”

  The President, who was wan and haggard from lack of sleep, waved Abe Stern to an apricot sofa and waited while a steward poured coffee for them both.

  In the background, barely audible, were the strains of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The President preferred the intimacy of this room to the imposing formality of the Oval Office next door with all its symbols and majestic trappings, constant r
eminders of the authority and burdens of the Presidency of the United States. He’d furnished it with the comfortable memorabilia of his past: his Air Force commission, an aerial photo of his ranch taken from a helicopter, a few souvenirs from his early non-political days. On his desk was the handcrafted Steuben crystal vase his wife had given him for his last birthday, the graceful vessel jammed with multicolored jelly beans.

  “So,” the beaming Stern declared as the steward left the room, “we’re finally going to get together on the funding of the South Bronx, are we?”

  The President set his coffee cup onto its saucer with a rattle. “I’m sorry, Abe, I had to practice a little deception to get you down here this morning. That’s not why I asked you here.”

  The Mayor’s eyebrows twitched into peaks of incomprehension.

  “We have a terrible crisis on our hands, Abe, and it involves New York City.”

  Stern emitted a sound that was half a sigh, half a growl. “Well, it can’t be the end of the world, Mr. President. Crises come, crises go, New York City’s lived with them all.”

  There was a sudden watery glimmer in the President’s eyes as he looked at the little man before him. “You’re wrong, Abe. This is one crisis New York City can’t live with.”

  * * *

  Harvey Hudson, the director of the FBI’s New York office, clambered up the steps of the auditorium, followed by the Police Commissioner and his Chief of Detectives. While the New Yorkers settled into chairs between the American flag and the blue-and-gold banner of the Bureau, Hudson moved to the speaker’s lectern. It was not yet nine o’clock in the morning of Monday, December 14. Hudson looked at the gathering for a second, took a slow breath and leaned toward the microphone.

  “Gentlemen, we have a crisis on our hands.”

  His words produced a nervous rustle, then dead silence. “A group of Palestinian terrorists have hidden a barrel of chlorine gas somewhere in New York, almost certainly here on Manhattan Island.” Behind Hudson, Bannion studied the faces of his detectives, watching for their reaction to the FBI director’s words.

  “I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the toxic qualities of chlorine gas. You probably all remember what happened up in Canada not so long ago when they had that chlorine gas spill after a train accident and had to move a quarter of a million people. It’s deadly, dangerous stuff.

  “The fact that it’s here and we’re looking for it must be kept a total secret. We’re explaining it to you because you’re all intelligent, responsible police officers, but if it ever got out to the public, the panic the news might cause could be devastating.”

  Bannion’s experienced eyes read the worry and concern on his detectives’ faces. Christ, he thought, what would have happened if we’d told them the truth?

  Hudson moved through the remaining details of the cover story: a Palestinian commando was somewhere in the area with orders to detonate the barrel of gas if the Israelis didn’t release ten of their fellow terrorists being held in Israeli jails. “The lives of an awful lot of people are going to depend on our getting to that barrel before they can blow it up. This is what it looks like.”

  A blowup of Los Alamos’ sketch of Qaddafi’s bomb, its nuclear details carefully masked, appeared on the screen behind Hudson. “Some of you will be assigned to try to run down the perpetrators, others will do an area-by-area combing operation; the rest of you will scour the piers and docks to see if we can pick up some trace of how it came in. We’ll do a one on one, NYPD with fed, Bomb Squad with Bomb Squad, major case with major case, kidnap with kidnap, and so on down the line.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” a voice called out from the rear of the auditorium, “why doesn’t someone just tell the Israelis to give the Arabs their goddamn prisoners back and get off our backs?”

  Bannion stirred at the sound of the New York accent ringing through the anonymous speaker’s voice. He bad expected that reaction. He gestured to Hudson, then strode to the lectern and took the microphone from the FBI director’s hands. “That’s the Israelis’ problem, not yours.” The dead air in the auditorium seemed to quiver under the impact of his angry words.

  “Your job is to find that goddamn barrel.” The Police Commissioner paused, trying to infuse his voice with just the right blend of urgency and anger.

  “And find it in one God-awful hurry.”

  * * *

  The Secret Service agent waiting outside the main entrance of the Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., moved up to the two men as soon as they got out of their black government Ford. He verified with a discreet glance their papers identifying them as senior officials of the Department of Defense, then gestured to them to follow him into the busy Treasury lobby. He led them along its marble hall to a heavy door marked “Exit,” down two flights of stairs to the building’s cellar, then along a dimly lit corridor to a second door, this one locked.

  That door gave onto an almost unknown aspect of the American White House, a tunnel running underneath East Executive Avenue into the basement of the East Wing. The passage had been employed for years to keep the identity of participants in affairs of state-and occasionally that of individuals involved in affairs other than those of state-a secret. Already it had been used a dozen times in this crisis to bring people into the White House without anyone in the press or the public becoming aware that they were there.

  Preceded by their Secret Service escort, the two men entered the tunnel.

  From overhead, the rumble of traffic rang through the shadowy passage like a clap of distant thunder.

  * * *

  David Hannon was a senior civil servant in the Civil Preparedness Agency; Jim Dixon was his assistant for research into the effects of nuclear weapons. Each had devoted the major part of his adult life to the study of one horrifying subject: the devastation that nuclear and tbermonuclear weapons could wreak on the plains, the cities and the people of the United States. The unthinkable was as familiar to them as a balance sheet to a CPA. They had been to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed the test shots in the Nevada deserts, helped plan and construct the tidy Colonial homes, the cute bungalows, the lifelike John and Jane dolls on which the military planners of the fifties had measured the effects of each successive generation of nuclear warheads.

  Their escort took them through the East Wing basement under the White House itself and into the West Wing offices of the National Security Council, where he turned them over to a Marine Corps major.

  “The meeting’s just started,” the major informed them, indicating a couple of folding chairs near the NSC conference-room door. “They’ll be getting to you in a few minutes.”

  * * *

  Inside the conference room, the President had just waved Abe Stern into the chair beside his, while the regular members of the NSC Crisis Committee took their places at the table. The black bar of white numerals on the wall recorded the time, 9:03.

  “We’re keeping the Governor of New York informed by phone of the crisis,” the President began. “I personally gave the Mayor a very brief review of what’s happened a few moments ago and asked him to join us here. Because it’s his city and his people who are at risk, we’ll waive our normal classification procedures for him.”

  He nodded to Tap Bennington. By tradition, the NSC Crisis meetings began with a briefing by the director of the CIA.

  “First of all, our request to the Soviets to intervene with the Israelis following the call to our people in Tel Aviv worked. Sixth Fleet Intelligence reports the Israelis stood down an assault on Libya at three-twenty-seven A.M. I think we can now consider them contained.”

  A tilt of the CIA director’s head acknowledged the approving mumble his words had produced. “The thrust of the Agency’s efforts right now is to uncover some precise indication of who physically could have put this in New York for Qaddafi, to aid the Bureau’s search for the device.” He paused. “Unfortunately, thus far we have nothing concrete.”

  “Has there been any answer from the ch
arge in Tripoli to Eastman’s message?” the President asked.

  “Not yet, sir. The plane is now on station, though. We’re ready to set up a communications channel as soon as we have Qaddafi’s reply.”

  “Good.” The swiftness with which the President articulated the word was revealing of his deeply held conviction that once he had contacted Qaddafi be would be able to reason with him, to lead him, through the power of the faith and logic in which he himself so firmly believed, to some acceptable resolution of the crisis.

  “Tap, how much lateral movement has Qaddafi got? Does he run his own ship?

  Are there any constraints on his options?”

  “No, sir. He’s under no constraints at all. Not from his military. Nor from his public. He runs it all himself.”

  The President frowned, but said nothing. He turned to the director of the FBI. “Mr. Webster?”

  As, one after another, the men at the table reviewed their agencies’ actions in the past few hours, Abe Stern listened in silence. He was still stunned, still dazed by the mind-numbing words the President had uttered to him a few minutes earlier. When Admiral Fuller concluded, however, with the news that the Sixth Fleet’s carriers and nuclear submarines were nearing their positions off the Libyan seacoast, he leaned forward, his chubby little hands clasped on the table before him. It was as though he were waking from a nightmare.

  “Gentlemen, the Israelis were right.”

  The sober faces around the NSC conference table turned to the stranger in their midst.

  “You shouldn’t have stopped them. The man is an irresponsible international criminal and the Israelis had the right answer: destroy himl”

  “Our first concern, Mr. Mayor,” Jack Eastman quietly noted, “has been the lives of the people in your city.”