Oglethorpe was fifty-eight, stout, myopic and given to wearing floppy bow ties because a secretary had once told him they gave him a debonair look. Professionally, he was an academic bureaucrat, a product of that curious union between the groves of academe and the capital’s corridors of power spawned by the nation’s universities in their insatiable thirst for federal funds. “Think tanks,” research institutes, government consultancies-the organizations which employed men like Oglethorpe had sprung up like mushrooms after a warm rain along the Potomac in the years since the war. A projection of the impact of zerobase population on housing starts in 2005; the future oadmium-stockpile requirements of the computer industry; the impact accuracy of the MX missile over a spectrum of reentry speeds-no subject was too arcane for their scrutiny. Even, as Senator William Proxmire had learned to his fury, a study of the social pecking order in South American whorehouses.
Oglethorpe belonged to one of the most prestigious among them, the Stanford Research Institute attached to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. His specialty was figuring out how to evacuate American cities in the event of a Soviet thermonuclear attack. Except, of course, that the word “evacuation” was never used in his work to refer to the operation. The government bureaucracy had decided it was a negative-association word like “cancer” and had replaced it with a more palatable term, “crisis relocation.”
For thirty years, Oglethorpe had devoted himself to the subject with a zealousness no less total than the devotion offered by one of Sister Theresa’s nursing nuns to the poor of Calcutta. The crowning achievement of his career had been the recent publication of his monumental 425page work The Feasibility of Crisis Relocation in the Northeastern United States. It had required the services of twenty people for three years and had cost the U.S. government more money than even Oglethorpe cared to admit. Since then, he had devoted most of his working hours to the most difficult challenge that report had posed, evacuating New York City-and that despite the fact that he had never lived there and personally couldn’t stand the place. His lack of firsthand knowledge of the city whose evacuation concerned him, however, had never troubled the federal bureaucracy; such things seldom do.
What had troubled Oglethorpe during those long years was the massive indifference of his countrymen to his efforts to provide for their well-being on the day of the Ultimate Disaster. Approaching retirement, it sometimes seemed to Oglethorpe that he was a kind of ultimate disaster himself, a man of undisputed talent and ability whose hour had never seemed to come.
Yet, on this morning of Monday, December 14, it had. Oglethorpe had just given two sharp raps of his spoon to his egg when the phone rang. He almost choked hearing a Pentagon colonel introduce his caller as the Secretary of Defense. No one higher than a GS10 had ever called him at his home. Two minutes later, his breakfast in the nook uneaten, he was getting into a gray U.S. Navy sedan, preparing to speed first to his office to pick up the documents he would need in the hours to come, then to Andrews AFB.
* * *
Across the Potomac from. Oglethorpe’s Arlington home, the haggard advisers who were gathered around Jack Eastman’s conference table in the West Wing of the White House each reacted in a different way to the Dutch psychiatrist joining their group. To Lisa Dyson, the CIA’s blond Libyan Desk officer, he brought a promise of fresh our to a gathering going stale from a night of intense and occasionally acrimonious discussion.
Bernie Tamarkin, the Washington psychiatrist who specialized in dealing with terrorists, looked on Henrick Jagerman with the awe of a young cellist about to meet Pablo Casals for the first time. Jack Eastman saw in his stocky figure the incarnation of the one hope he had for a nonviolent resolution to this ghastly crisis.
The introductions completed, Jagerman took the seat Eastman indicated at the head of the table. Barely an hour ago, he had been hurtling across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound, sipping ice-cold Dom Perignon cham-pagne and studying the psychological portrait of Qaddafi a CIA operative had given him at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Now here he was in the councils of the most powerful nation on earth, expected to offer a strategy that could prevent a catastrophe of unthinkable dimension.
“Have you established contact with Qaddafi yet?” he inquired when Eastman concluded his review of the situation.
“Unfortunately, we haven’t,” the American admitted, “although we do have a secure communications channel set up which we can use when we do.”
Jagerman looked at the ceiling. There was a large black mole in the middle of his forehead. It resembled, he was fond of pointing out, the tikka, the stain Hindus often painted there to represent the Third Eye that perceives the truth beyond appearances.
“In any event, it’s not urgent.”
“Not urgent?” Eastman was aghast. “We have barely thirty hours left to talk him out of this mess and you say getting hold of him isn’t urgent?”
“After the success of his test in the desert the man is in a state of psychic erection-clinically speaking, a state of paranoic hypertension.”
Jagerman’s tone hF.d the authoritative ring of a distinguished surgeon offering his diagnosis to a circle of interns. “That explosion has confirmed to him that he now possesses what he’s been looking for for years, absolute, total power. He sees at last, that all the possibilities he sought are open to him: destroying Israel, becoming the undisputed leader of the Arabs, master of the world’s oil supplies. Speaking to him right now could be a fatal error. Better let that stewpot cool down a bit before we take off the cover to see what’s inside.”
He pinched his nostrils with his fingers and tried to clear his aural passages, blocked by the Concorde’s abnormally rapid descent in response to the White House’s orders for speed.
“You see,” he continued, “the most dangerous moments in a terrorist situation are the first ones. Then the terrorist’s anxiety quotient is very, very high. He’s frequently in a state of hysteria that can drive him to the irrational in a second. You must ventilate him. Let him express his views, his grievances.” The Du: chman started. “By the way, these communications facilities, I presume, will allow us to hear his voice?”
“Well, there’s a possible security problem, but …”
“We must hear his voice,” Jagerman insisted. A man’s voice was for him an indispensable window onto his psyche, the element with which he could evaluate his character, the shifts in his sentiments, eventually predict his behavior patterns. In a hostage crisis, he recorded every word exchanged with the terrorists, then listened over and over again to their voices, hunting for shifts in speech patterns, in tone, in usage, looking for hidden clues that could guide his own search for mastery of the situation.
“Who should talk to him?” Eastman asked. “The President, I suppose.”
“Absolutely not.” Jagerman sounded almost shocked that Eastman had even suggested it. “The President is the person who can give him what he wants-or at least he thinks he is. He’s the last person who should talk to him.” The psychiatrist took a sip of the cup of coffee someone had placed at his elbow. “Our aim,” he went on, “must be to gain time to allow the police to find that bomb. If we let the President speak to him, how are we going to stall for time if we have to? Qaddafi can force him into a corner, a yes-or-no situation. He can demand an immediate answer he knows the President can give him.”
Jagerman noted with satisfaction that the people around the table were following his logic. “That’s why you insert the negotiator between the terrorist and authority. If the terrorist asks for something immediately, a negotiator can always stall by telling him that he has to go to speak to those in authority to get it for him. Time,” he smiled, “is always on the side of authority. As time goes by, terrorists become less and less sure of themselves. Vulnerable. As one must hope Qaddafi will.”
“What kind of person should this negotiator be?” Eastman asked.
“An older man. It’s possible he might perceive a younger man as a threat
.
Someone placid, a man who will listen, who can draw him on if he lapses into silence. A father figure the way Nasser was to him when he was young.
Above all, someone who’ll inspire a sense of confidence. His attitude must be: `I sympathize with your aims. I want to help you achieve them.’ “
The Dutchman knew that task well. Five times he had had to fill it, talking terrorists through their first irrational, dangerous stage, coaxing them slowly back to reality, imposing the rhythms of normality on them, finally bringing them to accept the role he had in mind for them: becoming conquered heroes by sparing their hostages’ lives. Four times those tactics had worked brilliantly. Better in this situation, he thought, not to think about the fifth.
“The first contact will be decisive,” he continued. “Qaddafi must realize immediately that we’re taking him seriously.” His quick bright eyes surveyed the room. “In view of what he’s done, what I’m about to say may sound grotesque, but it’s a vital part of the strategy. We must begin by telling him he’s right. That not only is his complaint against Israel perfectly justified, but we’re prepared to help him find a reasonable solution to it.”
“All this presumes, of course,” Lisa Dyson observed, “that he’ll talk to us. It would be very much in character for him to say,” she gave Jagerman an angelic smile, “please forgive my French, Doctor, `Screw you. Don’t talk to me. Just do what I say.’ ”
These American girls, Jagerman thought. Their language is worse than a Dutch prison warden’s. “Don’t worry, young lady,” he replied. “He’ll talk. Your excellent study makes that clear. That dirty little Arab boy from the desert the kids all ridiculed once is now going to become the hero of all the Arabs by imposing his will on the most important man in the world. Believe me, he’ll talk.”
“I hope to Christ you’re right.” Eastman had been following Jagerman with feelings that were a mixture of his skepticism of the psychiatrist’s trade and his desperate hope that this man could provide them with the answers they needed. “But don’t forget, Doctor, we’re not dealing here with some wild-eyed terrorists holding a gun against a little old lady’s head. This man has the power to kill six million people in his hands. And he knows it.”
Jagerman nodded. “Quite right,” he agreed. “But what we are dealing with are certain immutable psychological patterns and principles. They apply to a chief of state just as well as they do to a terrorist gunman. Most terrorists see themselves as oppressed luminaries striving to avenge some wrong. Clearly, the man we have in front of us here is a luminary, a true religious fanatic, which complicates matters, because religion can always radicalize a man, as we all saw in Iran with Khomeini.”
Jagerman glanced toward Lisa Dyson, an approving, paternal air in his regard. “Once again, your portrait is most instructive. He knows that you Americans, like the English, the French, even the Russians, think he’s crazy. Well, he’s going to prove you’re wrong. He, that miserable, despised Arab, is going to force you to make his impossible dream come true. And to prove to you he’s not as crazy as you think he is, he’s ready to pay the final price: to destroy you and himself and his own people if he has to to get his way.”
* * *
Angelo Rocchia glanced at the group of men warming their hands by the old coal stove in one corner of the office of the pier boss of the Hellenic Stevedore Company. Dock bosses. Italians mostly, with a token black in their circle, the Mob’s reluctant concession to the pressures of the times. In their leather caps, their faded lumberjackets and dungarees, they were a casting man’s dream for a remake of On the Waterfront. Their conversation was a series of guttural grunts, a mixture of English and Sicilian, touching on sex and the cold, money and the Knicks, punctuated by regular hostile glances at Angelo and the FBI man beside him.
No one, the detective knew, was as unwelcome on the docks as a cop. Those guys, he thought cheerfully, have got to be going crazy trying to figure out what the hell we’re doing here. Beyond the office, from the huge pier of the Brooklyn Ocean Terminal, Angelo could hear the snarl of forklift trucks, the clang of metal, the grinding of the cranes hoisting pallets of cargo out of the holds of the four ships tied up to the terminal’s wharves.
It was a soup-tonuts pier, one of the few piers left in the Port of New York that still handled the old loose cargo slung onto the pallets, an anachronism in the days of containerized cargo.
Angelo remembered the old days when everything had come in on pallets and the longshoremen went at them like a rat pack, eating away at their loads at every stage of their progress along the docks. Pilferage then had been a fringe benefit of being a longshoreman.
Not anymore. Everything was containers now. Three, four days it would take to unload by crane and hand the ships tied up at the terminal. Across the bay, in the modern container ports at Elizabeth and Newark, they took off thirty tons in half an hour, snapped a hustler, a tow cab onto each container and drove it away. The savings to the shippers were enormous and the conversion had probably saved the Port of New York.
It had done something else too, and Angelo was well aware of what it was.
It had turned the port into a smugglers’ paradise. Customs had to pay the cost of busting open a container, unloading it and repacking it while the shippers stood by screaming bloody murder because their shipment was being harassed. As a result, the random sampling of goods for Customs’ purposes had been practically abandoned. Customs just didn’t touch a container unless they had hard intelligence on it. You could run a hundred barrels of whatever this stuff was they were looking for across those docks over there in Jersey, Angelo reflected, and there was no way in the world anyone would find out what you were doing.
He rubbed his eyes and turned his attention back to his methodical progress through the manifest of the Lash Turkiye, fifty-two cargoes, each one different, it seemed, each loaded in a different port. Already he had picked up two shipments that had fitted into the frame they were looking for. There was nothing in the last dozen cargoes. Wearily, Angelo tossed the manifest on top of the others he had already finished and reached for the next one in the pile before him.
As he spread it out on the table, he felt a familiar rumble in his stomach.
“Hey,” he called to the pier boss. Tony Piccardi was seated at a long counter in front of a row of bank-teller-like windows. “That restaurant, Salvatore’s, over there on Fifth Avenue. It still open?”
Piccardi looked up from the documents he was checking for one of the truckers standing in front of his window. “No. The old guy died a couple of years back.”
“Too bad. He made a manicotti you wouldn’t believe.”
Jack Rand glanced impatiently at his detective partner. Bullshitting. Since he arrived he had spent half of his time bullshitting with these guys, mostly in Italian. Impatiently, the young agent flicked over a page of his manifest. He started at the sight of the first entry on his new page.
“I’ve got one,” he called, his voice sliding sharply upward with excitement.
Angelo leaned over and followed Rand’s finger across the manifest.
Shippers: Libyan Oil Service, Tripoli, Libya.
Consignees: Kansas Drill International, Kansas City, Kansas.
Marks and Numbers: LOS 8477/8484.
Quantity: Five pallets.
Description: Oil Drilling Equipment.
Gross Weight: 17,000 tbs.
“Yeah,” he agreed, “that’s a live one all right. Better call it in.”
Rand moved off toward the phone, and Angelo went back to his own manifest.
It was the shortest one he’d studied, listing barely a dozen items. Guy owns this ship, Angelo mused, can’t be making much money. He went quickly through the usual run of Mediterranean products: Greek olive oil in tins, Syrian copperware. He stopped short at the word “Benghazi.”
That had a familiar ring. Uncle Giacomo. That’s where the British captured Uncle Giacomo in 1941. In Benghazi, Libya. He studied the entry.
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Shipper: Am Al Fasi Export, Benghazi.
Consignee: Durkee Filters, 194 Jewel Avenue, Queens.
Marks and Numbers: 18/378.
Quantity: One pallet.
Description: 10 barrels of Diatome.
Gross Weight: 5,000 tbs.
Angelo thought for a second. Ten barrels, so each one weighed five hundred pounds, well below the size they were looking for.
“Hey, Tony,” he said to the pier boss. “Take a look at this.” He thrust the manifest at Piccardi. “What’s this stuff?”
“Kind of white powder. Busted-up seashells.”
“What the hell do they use that for?”
“I don’t know. Filtering water, I think. Swimming pools, you know?”
“Sure. I use mine all the time.” Angelo noted the word “Filters” by the name of the consignee. “You know this ship?”
Piccardi looked at the head of the manifest. “Yeah. An old rust bucket.
Been coming in here with that shit about once a month for the last three, four months.”
Angelo pondered the paper a moment. You’d look an awful fool downtown sending them after five-hundredpound barrels when the one they’re looking for weighs fifteen hundred. This was a heavy case. No time and no manpower to waste. Besides, there was a regular pattern to the shipping. He laid the manifest on his stack of completed papers. As he did, the name of the ship that had delivered the cargo caught his eye. It was “S.S. Dionysos.”
* * *
Huge sunglasses, their lenses as dark as eye patches, shielded the pimp’s eyes from the harsh light of day. Morning was not Rico Diaz’s best time.
From his tape deck the echoes of Bobby Womack’s “Road of Life” vibrated through his customized Lincoln; soul had seemed more appropriate for this meeting than disco. He hurried the car down Seventh Avenue, putting as much space between him and his turf as he could. No reason to be spotted by the brothers with these two in the car-although, he thought with a contemptuous sideways glance at his FBI control agent, they could easily pass for a pair of Johns off to party time with his ladies.
The Fifth Horseman Page 24
