The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  The question was addressed to the director of the Washington Bureau, who’d been sent up to run the pier operation.

  “Things are moving a little faster than we’d hoped, Mr. Dewing. Lloyd’s Shipping Intelligence in London and the Maritime Association down at 80 Broad Street have furnished us the list of all the ships we’re looking for, the dates they came in and the piers they used.

  There were 3,816, about half the ships that called on the port in the last six months. Our dock teams have gotten through the manifests of eight hundred of them. We’ve been able to clear the cargoes on about half of them in the last hour. Washington’s really got the bureaus around the country fired up.”

  “Good. Mr. Booth?” Dewing said to the director of NEST. “What have you got for us?”

  Booth heaved himself wearily from his chair and walked to a map of Manhattan he had pinned on the wall. “We’ve had our organization fully operational since ten up in the Seventh Regiment Armory at 643 Park. Right now, I’ve got all two hundred of my vans and our choppers working lower Manhattan.” His finger ran along the tip of the island. “From Canal Street down to the Battery.”

  “Anything suspicious yet?” Dewing queried.

  The scientist turned glumly to the FBI man. “Sure. The problem with those detectors of ours is they don’t just pick up nuclear bombs. So far we’ve gotten an old lady who collects Big Ben alarm clocks with radium dials, the dump that supplies half the gardens in the city with fertilizer and two people coming out of a hospital who’d had barium milkshakes for a stomach X ray. But no bomb.” He looked once again at his map. “We’re covering the streets and the rooftops very thoroughly. But, as I told you gentlemen this morning, if it’s above the third story of one of those buildings, we’re not going to find it. We just haven’t got the equipment or the manpower to walk through them.”

  When Salisbury of the CIA had made his report, Dewing turned to Harvey Hudson, the Bureau’s New York director. He had control of coordinating the rest of the investigation.

  “I’ve got two things, Quent. One just came in from Boston and it looks very, very promising. It’s one of those guys who was trained in Qaddafi’s camps. Here’s his ticket and picture.” He passed a sheet of nmimeographed paper around the room.

  “This guy disappeared from his home Sunday morning about ten A.M. and hasn’t been seen since. New England Bell just finished a run-through of his phone records. He got a collect call from a pay phone at Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, two hours before he took off.”

  “Terrificl”

  “He drives a green Chevelle, Massachusetts number plates 792-K83. I’m going to send the flying squad”the flying squad was a team of fifty FBI agents and New York detectives being held in strategic reserve”into Brooklyn right now to see if they can pick up some trace of him.”

  “That’s the best lead we’ve had all morning,” Dewing said enthusiastically.

  “What was the other thing you’ve got?”

  “One of our informers, a black pimp with FALN ties, gave us a second-rate drug dealer who got some medicine Saturday for an Arab woman up at the Hampshire House. She checked out this morning and apparently gave the hotel a false lead on where she was going.”

  Hudson picked up the sheaf of paper on which he’d made a few notes on his way to the meeting. “We had to come down on the drug dealer pretty hard to get him to open up. It turned out she called him. A PLO/FALN link. Knew the right words. Asked him to get her the medicine because she didn’t want to go to a doctor herself. The problem is, the guy swears he never got a look at her. Just left the medicine at the desk, which the hotel confirms, by the way. She was a pretty good tipper, so we had some trouble getting the hotel staff to talk. Seems to be involved in fashion. A jet-set type.”

  “What was the medicine?”

  “Tagamet. It’s for ulcers.”

  “So that’s our clue. We’re looking for an Arab with ulcers.” Dewing scowled in disgust. “Chief,” he said to Feldman, “what have you got?”

  Feldman reacted as though he had been caught daydreaming. He had in fact been trying to assess the importance of these two leads the FBI had turned up and decide what, if anything, his division could do to expand them. “Not much. The detective in charge of one of the pier teams,” he gave a deferential inclination of his gray head to the FBI agent running the pier search, “called me to say he’d found some barrels from Libya that were well under our weight specs but which had been picked up by someone using stolen ID. I’ve got a car out checking the barrels’ consignee right now.”

  Dewing mulled over his words. Working out of channels, he thought, but probably better not to make waves. “Good, Chief, keep us informed.”

  He had just picked up his papers, closing the meeting, when a shirtsleeved agent from the radio room burst in. “Mr. Booth,” he cried, “your headquarters is on the line. One of your choppers got radiation!”

  Booth shot from his seat and ran after the agent to the radio room. “Patch me onto my chopper,” he shouted at the duty operator.

  “What are you reading?” he called to the technician as soon as he was through.

  Booth could hardly hear the man’s voice over the thump of the helicopter’s rotors. “I got a real positive indication.” NEST never employed figures or the word “rads” over an open line in case anyone was eavesdropping. “It’s a few tenths.”

  Booth whistled softly. A few tenths was a very, very hot reading, particularly since it almost certainly had to have filtered up from one or two stories below roof level.

  “Where’s it coming from?”

  Using maps in the radio room, Booth and a pair of New York detectives narrowed down the area from which the radiation seemed to be emanating to four highrises in the southeastern corner of the Baruch Housing Project just inside the East River Drive, a few dozen yards from the Williamsburg Bridge.

  “Tell the chopper to get the hell out of there so we don’t tip our hand,”

  Booth ordered, “and call in the manual search teams.”

  Before the radio operator could deliver his instructions, Booth was running out of the underground command post, heading up the stairs two at a time toward the unmarked FBI car waiting for him in Foley Square.

  * * *

  In Paris, Henri Bertrand had been pacing his office in silence for several minutes digesting what his scientific adviser had told him about the IAEA inspection reports on Libya’s French-made reactor. Finally, Bertrand lit a new Gauloise from the stub of the one he was smoking and sank into his leather armchair.

  “Is there no way of verifying that there really was something wrong with that fuel they took out of there so early?”

  “Not for another six months or so. Until the rods have cooled down enough so you can work with them.”

  “How very convenient.” Bertrand grimaced ever so slghtly. “What puzzles me is why Monsieur de Serre didn’t mention the incident when I talked to him.”

  “Perhaps,” Cornedeau volunteered, “he felt it was too technical to be of interest to you.”

  “Perhaps.”

  The General bestowed what he hoped was an ironic smile on his young adviser. “You nuclear physicists are all alike. You really are a little Mafia trying to keep the rest of us away from the treasury of your knowledge. Because, one supposes, you’re persuaded that in our ignorance we’ll stop you from bestowing on the world the fruits of your great wisdom.”

  Bertrand reached for the attach6 cases the representative of his sister service, the DST, had left on the desk. “We’ll have to bring in some people and start going through his material very, very carefully.”

  His fingers picked their way through the thick stack of manila envelopes, each bearing a red “Ultra Secret” stamp, until he had found the name he was looking for.

  “Personally,” he said, “I think I shall start at the top with the dossier of Monsieur de Serre.”

  * * *

  Angelo Rocchia was still chuckling over Gerald Putman
’s last words when he, Rand and the head of the Pickpocket Squad got back to his Chevrolet.

  “It certainly is gratifying,” the importer had said to them, “to see the lengths to which the Police Department is prepared to go to help just one citizen recover a stolen wallet.”

  “Okay,” Angelo said, settling back in his car, “what have you got on her, Tommy?”

  While his colleague searched for the girl’s identity file in his briefcase.

  Angelo gave an almost surreptitious glance at Rand in the back seat. Our impatient young stud, he reflected with satisfaction, has calmed down a bit. Angelo took the girl’s card from the pickpocket expert’s hands.

  Yolande Belindez, AKA Anita Sanchez, Maria Fernandez Born: Neiva, Colombia, July 17, 1959

  Hair: Dark

  Eyes: Green

  Complexion: Medium

  Identifying Marks or Scars: None

  Arrest Record: London, Queen’s Jubilee, June 1977.

  Sentenced two years, one suspended.

  Munich, Oktoborfest, October 3, 1979. Sentenced two years, one suspended.

  Known Associates: Pedro “Pepe” Torres, AKA Miguel Costanza, NYPD Ref 3742/51.

  Tom Malone, the pickpocket expert, drew Torres’s photo and identity card from the file. Torres’s arrest record paralleled the girl’s.

  “It isn’t much,” Angelo sighed, “but it’s something. Where do we go looking for them, Tommy?”

  “There’s an area over here where they hang out,” Malone replied. “The South End. Off Atlantic Avenue. Let’s go down there and see if I can find somebody who owes me a favor.”

  Before Angelo could start the car, the FBI radio on the seat beside him cackled. “Romeo Fourteen, respond to Base.”

  Angelo got out of the car and walked to the pay telephone booth on the corner. Its walls were covered with obscene graffiti, its receiver dangled from the phone on a half-torn cord, and its coin box had been ripped open by vandals. “Bastards,” the detective growled. “I hope that goddamn barrel’s in their back yard.” He waved to Malone to bring the car and started up the avenue looking for another phone booth.

  He found one, occupied by an elderly, gray-haired woman chatting feverishly about the Pentecostal service she had attended Sunday night. Angelo waited impatiently a moment, then flashed her his shield. The woman half shrieked in fright and yielded up the phone.

  The men in the car couldn’t miss the change that had come over Angelo when he stepped out of the booth. He was whistling “Caro Nome” loudly and expertly; his stride was full of energy and purpose; and a grin, a real one this time, was spread all over his face.

  He slipped into the driver’s seat, turned and whacked Rand’s knee with a heavy hand. His craggy features glowed with pride and satisfaction as he looked at the younger man. “That was Feldman on the phone. They sent a team out to that address in Queens where the barrels went. The place is a locked-up house with a big garage out back. Every barrel that company ever got is in there, kid. Every fucking barrel except one.”

  * * *

  An idea struck John Booth as his FBI driver threaded their car through the narrow and crowded streets of lower Manhattan. Information about the buildings they were searching-the thickness of the walls, the ceilings, the roof, the materials employed in their construction-was vital to his NEST teams. “This housing development,” he asked, “the city must have built it, right?”

  Before his agent driver had even answered, Booth had picked up the radio and called his headquarters in the Seventh Regiment Armory. “Get someone down to the Municipal Building,” he ordered, “and pick up the plans for the Baruch Houses. I’ll be waiting for them in our control van at Columbia and Houston.”

  As their car reached Houston Street, Booth spotted a yellow Hertz van parked at the corner. Four black metal discs, not much larger than silver dollars, and the slim pod slung from its undercarriage were the only indications the truck wasn’t being used to deliver packages or move someone’s furniture.

  It was, in fact, a rolling scientific laboratory, one of the two hundred that Booth’s NEST teams were using throughout the city. The little black discs were hooked to a boron trifluoride neutron detector that could pick up neutrons flowing from the tiniest speck of plutonium. The pod was connected to a germanium gamma-ray scanner tied, in turn, to a minicomputer in the van of the truck with its own televisionlike screen for an oscilloscope. Not only could that detector pick up gamma rays over the maximum distance possible, a distance that was a closely guarded secret, but it could “read” them, determine what isotope of what element was throwing them off.

  Booth walked over to the suntanned man beside the driver. Jack Delaney was a weapons designer at Livermore, a Ph.D. from Berkeley, who got his suntan scaling the Sierras on his weekends.

  “Nothing,” Delaney said.

  Booth looked down the street toward the housing project, its thirteen-story towers thrusting into the skyline with a brutish inelegance born of municipal economy. “Not surprising. It’s got to be on the top floors.”

  He continued to study the project. Over two hundred people, most of them on welfare, in thirtyfive apartments. Moving around in there without being noticed wasn’t going to be easy. A second, unmarked FBI car glided up behind them. An agent got out and handed Booth a thick roll of blueprints.

  Booth climbed into the crowded rear of the van. At the back, an FBI agent was already undressing Delaney. “You wiring him?” Booth asked.

  The agent nodded. He was taping to Delaney’s chest a Kel, a radio microphone that would allow Booth to follow his progress through the project from the truck. An ivory plastic button like a hearing aid was stuck to his ear, the receiver on which he’d get Booth’s instructions.

  The NEST director spread out the blueprint on a small camp table and studied it. A matchbox, he thought. The emanations they were looking for weren’t going to have any difficulty penetrating the walls and the ceilings of the Baruch Houses.

  “Okay,” Booth announced after a few calculations. “We’ll do the top six floors. Although there’s almost no chance it’s below the top four. You two guys take Building A. Why don’t you be insurance salesmen?”

  The New York FBI agent who was going to accompany Booth’s scientist waved a warning finger. “Down here a debt collection agency’s better.”

  “If you say so,” Booth agreed. Getting in close to pin down a bomb site with precision after a first reading was the trickiest, most dangerous part of the business, and he wasn’t going to go against a local agent’s advice.

  His scientists, for the most part, knew nothing about firearms, so they had to work with an FBI agent to protect them. They needed an infinite variety of disguises that would allow them to glide unnoticed through those areas where a bomb might be hidden and armed terrorists might be alert for their presence: telephone repairmen, gas meter readers, delivery men. For Building B he had already decided to use a black chemist and a black female FBI agent.

  Delaney picked up his portable detector. It was a box the size of an attachb case or a traveling salesman’s sample case.

  As soon as the two had gone, Booth supervised by radio the dispatch of teams to the remaining buildings. Then, with the blueprint before him, he followed the progress of his teams, apartment by apartment, floor by floor, through the buildings.

  Delaney came on, his final floor completed.

  “Listen,” Booth ordered, “go up and have a look at the roof.”

  Delaney groaned. “The elevator’s broken down.”

  “So what?” his boss answered. “You’re a mountain climber, aren’t you?”

  Several minutes later, the panting Californian emerged on the roof. There was nothing before him except the distant skyline of Brooklyn. His detector was silent. He looked, disgusted, at the grayish stains speckling the roof.

  “John,” he reported, “there’s absolutely nothing up here. Nothing but a lot of old pigeon skit.”

  * * *

  A
s he watched the members of the White House press corps drift into the Oval Office, it occurred to the President that they represented the only element in this crisis that was under control. How much longer, he wondered, are we going to be able to go on saying that?

  While they formed into a crescent around his desk, jockeying for position, some striving to make those selfconscious jokes with which they deceived themselves and their colleagues into thinking they were on intimate terms with the President of the United States, he scanned their faces, searching for any indication that one of them might be privy to his government’s frightful secret. To his relief, he sensed most of them had nothing more important on their minds at the moment than deciding where to have lunch.

  In any event, nothing in his own manner could have betrayed the strain he was under unless it was the quick tap dance of his fingertips on his massive oak Presidential desk framed from the timbers of H.M.S. Resolute and offered by Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes.

  The little ceremony his press secretary opened with a few ritual words was part of the charade they were acting out to convince the press that nothing unusual was going on. It was the Presidential proclamation of the thirty-third anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Chief Executive was halfway through it when he saw Jack Eastman glide unobtrusively into the room and lean against the office wall. With his index and forefinger, his national-security adviser made a scissors movement across his tie — cut it short.

  The President rushed through the remaining text, then, as quickly as he could while still appearing to be unhurried, moved for the door. The instant he had settled into his private office, Eastman joined him.

  “Mr. President,” he announced. “He’s ready to talk!”

  * * *

  Timmy Walsh and Jeremy Oglethorpe walked slowly up Broadway, then turned toward the big plateglass doors of the New York State Office Building.

  For a moment they let the outflow sweep past them; the pretty black secretaries flaunting their style and elegance, their makeup all in place, flaring glasses frequently setting off the high arch of their cheekbones; the pasty-faced, overweight state office workers huddling together in conversations so intense they might have been discussing a mufti-million-dollar highway extension when in fact, Walsh knew, they were probably arguing the point spread on tonight’s Knicks’ game.