The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  “Rico, we got a little problem.”

  Rico did not answer his control. His eyes, invisible behind the shades, were studying the man in the back seat in the rearview mirror. He had not seen him before, and he did not like what he saw. The man had a mean and sterile face, the face of someone who enjoyed squashing little bugs between his fingertips.

  “That Arab girl you told us about. She left the Hampshire House this morning. To fly out to LA.”

  Rico gestured indifferently at the filthy gray ridges of snow along the avenue. “She be a lucky lady.”

  “Except she didn’t get on the plane, Rico.”

  The pimp felt a chill quiver of apprehension flick through his stomach. He regretted now that he hadn’t taken a wake-up jolt of coke before leaving his pad. “So?”

  “So we’d like to talk to your friend who dealt with her.”

  The quiver of apprehension became a knot squeezing Rico’s bowels. “No way, man. He a mean motherfucker.”

  “I didn’t expect he’d be studying for the priesthood, Rico. What’s he do?”

  The pimp emitted a low, soft groan. “You know, man. He make a little dope here and there.”

  “Good. That’s good, Rico. We’ll bring him in to have a talk about dope. No way in the world he’ll trace it back to you.”

  “Come on, man.” Rico could feel a trickle of sweat sliding along his spine and it wasn’t because he was warm in his five-thousand-dollar knee-length mink-lined coat. “You say to him, `Arab lady, Hampshire House’ and they be only one nigger in New York he gonna be thinking about.

  “Mr. Diaz.”

  It was the man in the back seat. Rico studied the flat, emotionless face.

  “What we have here is a matter of greatest importance. And urgency. We need your help.”

  “You got it already.”

  “I know that and we’re very appreciative of what you’ve already done. But we’re very, very anxious to find that girl. We’ve got to talk to your friend.” The agent took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, leaned forward and offered one to Rico. The black pushed it away.

  “You’re very important to us, Mr. Diaz. We’re not going to do anything that would compromise you in any way, believe me. There will be no way your friend can trace our visit to you from the nature of our questions. I promise you.” The agent lit his own cigarette, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Frank,” he said to Rico’s control in the front seat, “I understand one of Mr. Diaz’s girl friends is in some difficulty with the New York police.”

  “Yeah,” Frank replied, “if you consider five years in the slammer difficult, she is.”

  “Can you arrange to get the charges dropped? In view of the importance of Mr. Diaz’s cooperation?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Today?”

  “If T really had to.”

  “You will.”

  Through the rearview mirror, Rico noticed the man turn his eyes back to him. “The girl is yours, Mr. Diaz, but we need your help. Believe me there’ll be no way in the world your friend’ll trace this back to you. No way.”

  Why, Rico thought angrily, why did I ever put a bag of shit in this machine? Anita was the only hundred-dollar tricker he had. There was a gold mine in her pussy. Two, three thousand dollars a week she brought in, twice the earnings of his other girls. She was the principal mainstay of a very expensive lifestyle and no one had to explain to Rico what was going to happen to that if he didn’t come through for these two. They’d clean her slate all right if he talked; but keep his mouth shut and it would be bye-bye, baby, five years upstate for Anita and some mean times for Rico until he found a girl to replace her.

  “You sure they no way this get back?”

  “Trust us.”

  Rico slammed the heel of a hand onto the steering wheel. Dumb bitch, he thought. I told her never to stiff a John. He swallowed nervously, running the fine calculations through.his street-smart brain, reckoning up the dangerous balance, pitting the risks against the spiraling cost of good coke, against the cash required for the out-front display a man had to have to keep his standing on the street.

  His control agent had to lean forward to catch the whispered reply when bitterly, reluctantly, it came. “Franco. Apartment Five A, 213 West Fifty-fifth.”

  * * *

  The girl the FBI agents were looking for was thirty-five miles north of Manhattan driving a Budget Rent-a-Car up the New York State Thruway toward Albany. Laila Dajani had picked the car up in Buffalo two weeks earlier. As an additional precaution, she had removed the car’s license plates and replaced them with a pair of New Jersey number plates stolen by Palestinian agents six months earlier from a U.S. tourist’s car parked in Baden-Baden, Germany.

  Whalid was in the seat beside her. It was 10 A.M. and he was fiddling with the dials of the radio, trying to catch a news bulletin. “Maybe”-he smiled at his sister”they’ll have something on the Israelis starting their pull-back.”

  Laila gave him a hurried glance. There’s been quite a change in my brother in the past few hours, she thought. Perhaps it was the medicine she’d gotten him. He hadn’t complained about his ulcer since she’d picked him up.

  Laila eased the car into the outside lane to pass a huge refrigerated truck, being careful as she did to stay well within the fifty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit. This was no time to be arrested for speeding. If he’s so relaxed, she told herself, maybe it’s because it’s over for him now. All he had to do was sit in the safe house she’d found in the upstate countryside and wait while she and Kamal spent another twentyfour hours in the city, Kamal standing vigil over the bomb with his rats and his air gun, she in the hotel to which she’d moved waiting to bring him to the safe house two hours before the bomb was due to explode.

  Once Qaddafi’s plans had been implemented-and Laila had no doubt that the Americans would accept his ultimatum-he would tell Washington where the bomb was and radio the code that would break the firing circuits. They, in the meantime, would have worked their way west to Canada, using false Canadian passports and papers. Their destination would be Vancouver, where a second safe house awaited them. A Panamanian freighter, Greek-run but Libyan-owned, was due there to pick them up December 25. The Canadians, they calculated, wouldn’t be watching their piers too closely on Christmas Day.

  Laila turned off the Thruway at Spring Valley and a few minutes later pulled into a huge shopping mall, being sure to drive well to the back of its half empty parking lot.

  “Whalid,” she told her brother, “you’ve probably got a less memorable face than I have. Why don’t you do the shopping? There’s no sense in taking any chances we don’t need to.”

  Whalid smiled and slipped out of the car. As he did, Laila flicked on the radio. She felt herself growing more nervous, more desperate, with each passing moment. She played with the dial until she settled on the loud wail of a Dolly Parton lament. She turned it up as loud as she dared, hoping that somehow the din would overwhelm the black thoughts assailing her.

  Almost desperately, she clutched at the steering wheel. Don’t, she told herself, don’t, don’t, don’t think.

  But Michael’s image would not leave her: Michael calcinated to black ash; Michael at the instant the incandescent heat seared the life from his body in a flash of pain. It’s not going to go off, she kept telling herself.

  It’s not. But in the depths of her soul there was the whisper what if it does?

  She started, her painful reverie broken by the sound of Whalid opening the car door. He got in and Laila reached for the ignition key. As she did, she caught a glimpse of the shopping bag’ he had set on the seat between them.

  Aghast, she half pulled a fifth of Johnnie Walker from the bag. “What about your ulcer?”

  “Don’t worry about my ulcer.” Her brother smiled. “It’s fine now.”

  * * *

  In Paris, the lunch hour was already over. General Henri Bertrand’s eyes were half closed and the vacant expression
on his face as he advanced along the corridor of an apartment in the city’s elegant Sixteenth Arrondissement gave the impression his mind was miles away. It was, in fact, concentrated with a connoisseur’s delight on the twitching buttocks of the Spanish maid leading him toward her employer’s study.

  “Monsieur will be with you in a moment,” she intoned, opening the door.

  The director of France’s intelligence agency nodded gravely and entered the room. It was a miniature museum. One wall was a large window overlooking the Bois. The other three were lined with display cases, each subtly illuminated and backed with velvet fabrics that set off the priceless collection of Oriental and Greco-Roman antiquities they contained. Bertrand himself had been born in Indochina and he had more than a layman’s appreciation of Oriental art. Some of the Hindu pieces, notably a finely chiseled stone representation of Shiva which Bertrand judged to date back to the seventh or eighth century, were priceless.

  The centerpiece of the collection was an enormous Roman head three or four times life size locked in a display cabinet in the center of the room.

  Wrapped in the diffused glow cast by a spotlight overhead, that ancient marble radiated a beauty such as Bertrand had rarely contemplated.

  Behind him, the SDECE director heard a door opening. He turned to find himself facing a portly bald man in a scarlet silk dressing gown buttoned tightly around his neck, its flaring skirt falling to his ankles. A mandarin, Bertrand thought, or a cardinal on his way into the Sistine Chapel for a conclave.

  PaulHenri de Serre was a senior member of France’s nuclear establishment.

  He had begun his career working on Zoe, France’s first atomic reactor, a device so primitive its control rods had been manipulated with an engine taken from a Singer sewing machine. Most recently, he had supervised the Libyan project, overseeing the reactor’s construction, then presiding over its functioning during the critical first six months of its operation.

  “How like our American friends to wave an accusing finger at us,” he sighed when Bertrand, after apologizing for disturbing his host’s siesta, explained the reason for his visit. “They’ve been jealous of our program for years. The very idea the Libyans could have somehow extracted plutonium from our reactor is ridiculous.”

  Bertrand took out a Gauloise and politely asked de Serre if he minded if he smoked. Seconds later, the cigarette was in its usual resting place in the righthand corner of his mouth, fixed there so firmly it appeared to be an appendage to his lips. He sat back in the high leather wing chair de Serre had offered, his hand folded over the slight paunch forming on his midriff.

  “Our scientific people confirm what you say,” he noted. “Damned embarrassing for us if it did happen, however. Tell me, cher monsieur, did anything take place down there that gave you any grounds for suspicion?

  Anything that seemed unusual, out of the ordinary?”

  “Nothing at all,” De Serre sipped thoughtfully on the coffee that Paquita, the Spanish maid, had brought them. “Now, this is not to say I don’t belive that Qaddafi wouldn’t like to get his hands on some plutonium. Every time the word `nuclear’ comes up, there’s a gleam in his people’s eyes. I’m merely saying be didn’t get it from us.”

  “Would you have any idea where he might have gotten it?”

  “Quite frankly, no.”

  “How about your personnel? Were there any among them with pronounced sympathies for the Arab cause? Sympathies that might have made them amenable to a plea for help from the Libyans?”

  “As you know, all of our people were given security checks by the DST before being assigned to the project. To weed out just the sort of individual you’re talking about. They all came down more or less sympathetic to the Arab cause. Although, I might add, working with the Libyans tended to disabuse most of them of those notions rather swiftly.”

  “Difficult people, are they?”

  “Impossible.”

  The General noted with interest the vehemence with which de Serre seemed to spit out the word. Here is one man, he thought, who bears the Libyans no affection.

  Their conversation continued for another half hour. Nothing in it, it seemed to the head of the SDECE, opened up an avenue his agency might want to explore. The source of Qaddafi’s plutonium was probably elsewhere; an outright theft, perhaps.

  “Well, cher monsieur, I think I’ve taken up quite enough of your time,” he declared, rising from his armchair.

  “If there’s anything else I can do, please don’t hesitate to call on me,” his host murmured.

  Turning to leave, Bertrand was once again struck by the breathtaking beauty of the head locked in its display case in the center of the room, by the perfect serenity of that marble mask casting its stone gaze across the centuries.

  “A remarkable piece,” he said admiringly. “Where did you get it?”

  “It came originally from Leptis Magna on the Libyan seacoast.” De Serre’s eyes caressed his treasure with an expression so adoring that it struck his visitor. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed.” Bertrand waved at the glowing display cabinets lining the study.

  “Your entire collection is extraordinary.” He stepped to the head of Shiva he had noted earlier. “This is quite unusual. At least a thousand years old, I should have thought. Did you get it in India?”

  “Yes. I was assigned out there as a technical adviser in the early seventies.”

  The General stared appreciatively at the delicately wrought stone sculpture. “You’re a fortunate man,” he sighed, “a fortunate man indeed.”

  * * *

  Jack Rand finished the last manifest of the Hellenic Stevedore Company’s Brooklyn pier and laid it carefully on the stack of papers on the desk.

  He buttoned his shirt collar and started to tighten his tie, noting irritably as he did that his partner had already finished. Angelo Rocchia’s feet were propped up on the desk and he was gnawing a Hostess cupcake to which he had helped himself from the clutter of half-eaten jelly doughnuts and pastries scattered around the office’s hot plate.

  Once again Angelo and Tony Piccardi were bullshitting.

  “I think everything’s fine here,” Rand announced. “Let’s get on to the next pier.”

  Angelo concealed his annoyance with a cold smile. Slowly, very deliberately, he licked the chocolate-cupcake crumbs from his fingertips.

  This guy, he thought, is an unmitigated pain in the ass. I’ve never seen anybody in such a fucking hurry. Unless, it suddenly occurred to him, someone’s told him something they haven’t bothered to tell me.

  The detective lowered his feet to the ground and contemplated for a moment his own stack of completed manifests. Then he reached over, flicked through it and pulled one out. Ignoring Rand, he turned to the pier boss. “Hey, Tony, you got any other paper on this shipment?”

  Piccardi glanced at the manifest of the Dionysos, then reached for a black looseleaf notebook. He kept one on every ship that left cargo on the pier.

  It contained a copy of the bill of lading for each piece of cargo unloaded, the arrival notice sent to the broker handling the cargo, his delivery order cleared by Customs, and a pier sheet. Piccardi turned to the pier sheet for the ten barrels of diatome consigned to Durkee Filters in Queens.

  It gave the name of the trucker who had made the pickup, the license number of his truck, the time he left the docks and the details of his load.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “I remember this. Murphy usually picks this guy’s stuff up. Their guy didn’t come in that day. Guy in a Hertz truck made the pickup.”

  Rand peered down at the manifest. “Angelo,” he said, “these barrels weigh five hundred pounds apiece.”

  “No kidding?” Angelo gave Piccardi a look of illfeigned wonder. “Kid here, he’s got a mind like a computer.”

  “So, in view of that, why are we wasting time on this when we’ve got two more piers to cover?”

  Angelo twisted around on his stool until he faced the you
ng agent. The smile, the wide toothy smile, was there, but his eyes had lost none of their chill. “Kid, you know something? You are right. Send this thing downtown, it’ll be ‘What’samatter? Can’t those guys divider But just for us, let’s check it out. That way tonight, over there in that Howard Johnson Motor Lodge they got you in, you put your head on the pillow, you’re going to sleep. You’ll know you’ve covered. Haven’t left anything hanging. Tony,” the detective interrogated the pier boss, “anybody here deal with this likely to remember anything about it?”

  Piccardi pointed to two names at the bottom of the pier sheet. “Maybe the checker and the loader that handled the stuff.”

  Angelo got up, his knee joints creaking. “Paisan, how about you taking us up there and introducing us to them?” He gave a wave of his index finger to Rand. “Come on, kid. Here’s your chance to see what a Brooklyn pier looks like.”

  * * *

  The Brooklyn Ocean Terminal was an endless dark cavern as wide as a football field and twice as long. The odor of burlap mingled in the dust-clogged air with the scent of spices, nuts and coffee, giving it a strange resemblance to an Oriental bazaar. At intervals along its length, shafts of light penetrated the dimness from the doors opening onto the ships tied up at the pier. Forklift trucks darted and circled through the pools of light they formed like water bugs skimming the surface of a pond.

  Marching down the pier, Angelo Rocchia and Jack Rand passed pyramiding stacks of Greek olive oil, silver cans of cornseed oil from Turkey, dried raisins from the Sudan, sacks of Indian cashew nuts, bales of cotton from Pakistan, stinking cowhides from Afghanistan, burlap bags of coffee beans from Kenya.

  The New Yorker waved at the row of goods disappearing into the shadows.

  “You poke around in the corners, you wouldn’t believe the shit these longshoremen got stashed away.”

  “Hey, Tony,” Angelo called after Piccardi, “tell me something. You get many rental trucks making pickups down here?”