The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  He’d selected the building as the first of their “random” sample of New York’s air-raid shelters deliberately. Give Rockefeller’s and Albany’s interest in the shelter program, the buildings should have the Rolls Royce of New York City’s shelters.

  They pushed through the lobby, past the elevator banks to the familiar yellow-and-black sign over a door leading to the cellar. At least, Walsh noted, the sign was clean.

  He gave his shield to the janitor at the desk in the building superintendent’s office. “New York Police, Office of Civil Preparedness,” he announced. “Doing a survey of the air-raid shelters, want to see how the biscuits, the portable toilets and all are being maintained.”

  “Oh sure,” the janitor said. “Air-raid shelter. Got the keys right here.”

  He got up and walked to a huge box on the wall spilling over with keys of every imaginable size and shape. “One of these in here …” The voice faltered a bit. “Right here, someplace.” He began to scratch his head. For over three minutes, he stood there studying the board, fondling, then rejecting one key after another. “I know they’re here. Gotta be here someplace. Harryl” he shouted in exasperation. “Where the hell’s the key to the fucking air-raid shelter?”

  A black assistant custodian came over and gazed with equal consternation but, apparently, no greater sense of enlightenment at the cluttered key box. “Yeah,” he said, his head moving back and forth as though in prayer, “it’s gotta be here somewhere.”

  Oglethorpe’s eyes were on the clock on the wall. By now, five minutes had gone by and no key. Five minutes during which, in a crisis, his planner’s mind told him pandemonium, sheer pandemonium, would be building up in the corridors outside.

  “Here it is!” the janitor announced triumphantly.

  “Man, you sure that’s the key?” his aide asked, squinting at a heavy key hung on a red plastic ring. “It don’t look like the key to me.”

  “Gotta be,” his superior rejoined.

  It wasn’t.

  By the time they got back, over ten minutes, Oglethorpe noted, had elapsed.

  Finally the janitor found the missing key skillfully concealed under three others dangling from the same bank.

  It unlocked a huge, cavernous area, the ceiling interlaced by heating ducts so low Walsh had to bend in half to pass under them. Hung on the wall was a clipboard with a yellowed piece of paper flapping from it. It was a Civil Defense inventory dated January 3, 1959, listing the materials stored in the room: 6,000 water drums, 275 medical kits, 500 miniature Geiger counters, 2.5 million protein crackers.

  Walsh’s flashlight swept the huge chamber’s horizons, its gloom unmolested by the few fight bulbs hanging from the ceiling. “There they are!”

  Along one wall, under his flashlight’s beam, were thousands of khaki barrels and cases and cases of protein crackers. He tapped a barrel with his knuckles. It gave out a hollow echo.

  “Funny,” he said, “they’re supposed to be full.” He tapped another. It gave up the same unpromising sound. The men began to tap cans at random along the darkened walls until it seemed to shimmer with the hollow echoes they produced. Not a single barrel was full. Some Civil Defense expert on that January day two decades before had carefully lined up all those barrels-and then gone away leaving them empty.

  Walsh and Oglethorpe exchanged dismayed glances. “We better take a look at another one,” Walsh said, consolingly handing Oglethorpe the list of shelters in the neighborhood. “Pick one. Any one.”

  The one Oglethorpe chose was in the cellar of the MacKenzie Explosives Company at 105 Reade Street. Their arrival was greeted with a certain undertone of consternation, the natural reaction, perhaps, to a visit from the police in an establishment of that sort. Its office manager, a young man in his middle thirties in shirtsleeves and a striped tie, smiled in evident relief when Walsh told him why they were there.

  “Oh sure, that Civil Defense stuff. My father told me about that once. It’s down in the cellar.”

  He guided the trio down two flights of wooden steps into a sub-basement.

  They spotted what they were looking for immediately, neatly stacked against the wall in the midst of a bunch of old filing cabinets and broken desks.

  Walsh stepped over and thumped a water barrel. It gave out a resounding bonk.

  “Full up,” he reported.

  Walsh studied the wall. Three quarters of the way to the ceiling, just above the level of the cases of protein crackers, was a wiggly yellowish line. The surface of the wall below the line was notably darker than that above it.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Oh, that,” the office manager replied. “That’s the high-water mark of the flood we had a few years back.”

  “Flood?”

  “Had water that deep down here for three weeks almost.”

  Oglethorpe looked at Walsh. Then the bureaucrat ripped open the top case of protein crackers and thrust his hand inside. He drew out a sodden mass of yellow-brown sludge.

  Any last illusions Jeremy Oglethorpe had about the current viability of New York City’s shelter system faded as they entered the next shelter on their sample, the Hotel James at 127 Chambers Street. The room clerk’s alcove was the clue to the kind of place it was. It was screened off behind bars and a partition of bulletproof wire-meshed glass. The half-dozen young men lounging in the lobby were out the front door before Walsh had completed his introductory remarks, which he had.begun with the word “Police.” The desk clerk had never heard of an air-raid shelter in the Hotel Jamesor, for that matter, any place else.

  Walsh suggested that what they were looking for might be in the cellar. The clerk paled at the notion that anyone would be crazy enough even to think of going into the cellar of the Hotel James. Walsh persisted. With a shrug of incomprehension, the clerk pointed to a door across the hallway.

  The two started down a flight of creaking wooden steps, ducking under heating pipes from which torn cobwebs and shreds of asbestos stroked their faces. Out of the darkness ahead came a series of quick, rustling sounds.

  “Rats,” commented Walsh. “Nice place to spend a few nights.”

  The lights switched on and a skinny little guy emerged from the shadows. He was wearing a baseball cap and a warmup jacket. All of the athletic insignia that had once decorated it had been removed. Now the jacket was covered with buttons, medallions, decals, sew-on badges carrying messages like “Jesus Is Your Savior,” “The Redeemer Is Coming,” “Let Christ’s Way Be Your Way.”

  Walsh spoke to him. He replied in Spanish, a tongue made no easier for Oglethorpe to comprehend by the fact that the man had a cleft palate.

  For several minutes he and Walsh exchanged words in Spanish. “He says he’s never heard of the Civil Defense stuff,” Walsh reported. “But he remembers seeing some stuff he doesn’t know anything about out in a back room somewhere.”

  The little Puerto Rican led them through several back rooms stacked high with old hotel furniture until he came to the one he was looking for. Like a Swiss mountain guide trying to dig out a skier buried under an avalanche, he attacked the mound of junk before him, heaving his way through, mattresses littered with rat droppings, old bedsteads, box springs, bits and pieces of chairs and tables. Finally, with a guttural shout of victory, he flung away a last shattered chest of drawers and stood back. There, buried at the bottom of his pile of rubble, were the familiar khaki barrels and cracker cases of the old Civil Defense program.

  Oglethorpe gasped in dismay. Walsh moved over to him and draped his heavy arm around his shoulders. “Jerry, listen,” he whispered. “Up there, in the Police Commissioner’s office, I didn’t want to say anything, you know? In this town, you got to let the big guys down easy. These shelters, ten, fifteen years ago, maybe they might have saved somebody. Today? Forget it, Jerry. They ain’t going to save anybody today.”

  The Puerto Rican spoke up. “He says it’s his lunch hour,” Walsh reported.

  “He’s got to go
over to Brooklyn to hand out pamphlets for his church.”

  “Certainly,” Oglethorpe said. “We’re.finished.”

  The little Puerto Rican smiled and started off. Then, as though he’d forgotten something, he stopped and pulled from his pocket two of the pamphlets he’d be giving away in a few moments. He gave Walsh and Oglethorpe each one.

  Walsh looked at his. “Jesus Saves,” it read. “Bring your problems to Him.”

  He turned to the shattered bureaucrat. “You know, Jerry,” he remarked, “I think maybe the guy’s got something here.”

  * * *

  In the White House the members of the Crisis Committee were waiting in the National Security Council conference room when the President came downstairs from his press briefing. With the exception of the military, they were in shirtsleeves, ties askew, their disheveled hair and haggard faces indicative of the terrible strain under which they had been laboring for hours. They started to rise as the President entered, but he waved them to their places. He was in no mood for protocol formalities. While Eastman reviewed what had happened, he too removed the jacket of his gray suit, undid his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

  “The charge received a call from Qaddafi’s Prime Minister, Salam Jalloud, a few minutes ago,” Eastman said. “He would like to speak to you at sixteen hundred GMT.” The National Security Assistant glanced up at the clocks on the wall. “That’s in twenty-seven minutes, over the Doomsday aircraft facilities we proposed to him early this morning. Qaddafi speaks English, but we are reasonably certain he’ll insist, initially at least, on speaking Arabic. These two gentlemen”-he gestured to a pair of middle-aged men sitting tensely halfway down the conference table-“are State’s senior Arabic translators.

  “The way we propose to proceed if you agree is this: One of these two men will give us a simultaneous, confidential translation of Qaddafi’s Arabic so that we can know immediately what he has to say. Each time Qaddafi pauses to let us translate, the second interpreter will take over. While he’s interpreting, we’ll have a few moments to consider our answers. If we need more time, the second translator can interrogate Qaddafi on the precise meaning of one of his words or phrases.”

  The President nodded his approval.

  “We’re also, of course, taping both his words and the translation and taking him down in shorthand. The girls outside will type up the material for us in relays. And we have down there”-Eastman pointed to a black plastic console with a televisionlike screen attached to it = “a CIA voice stress analyzer, which will reveal any sign of nervous strain or tension in his voice.”

  “Better not use it on me.” The President smiled grimly. “You may be disappointed with the results you get.”

  Eastman coughed. “That brings us to another point, Mr. President.” He turned to Henrick Jagerman, Bernie Tamarkin and the CIA’s Dr. Turner, seated halfway along the table next to the edgy State Department Arabists.

  Their presence came as no surprise to the President. Although the fact was little known to the public, the counsel and observations of psychiatrists, particularly those attached to the CIA, had been employed in crises at the highest echelons of the U.S. government for years.

  “It is their very strong recommendation, based on their own experience in terrorist negotiations, that you do not speak to Qaddafi yourself.”

  The suddenness with which the President swiveled his head toward the psychiatrists revealed his irritation, but his voice remained calm and studiously courteous. “I want to thank you gentlemen for coming here to help us. Particularly you, Dr. Jagerman.”

  The Dutchman gave a ritualistic bob of his head.

  “Now, why is it you don’t want me to talk to him?”

  Jagerman quickly repeated the arguments he had made earlier to Eastman.

  “There is a second reason,” Tamarkin added. “To keep him tied up in a dialogue with a negotiator while we’re working out our strategy quietly and calmly. We force him to respond under pressure while we create the situations to which he has to respond in an orderly environment.”

  “It seems to me that we’re the ones who are responding under pressure at the moment,” the President noted tartly. “Who do you suggest should do the negotiating?”

  “We hope he’ll agree to work with Mr. Eastman,” Jagerman replied. “He’s known around the world for his closeness to you personally. His office gives him the necessary authority. And we think he has the proper personality for the job.”

  The President’s fingertips stroked the tabletop. “Very well, gentlemen,” he agreed. “I’ll accept your recommendation. We’ll see if he will. Your understanding of the psychology of power may not be as complete as your understanding of the psychiatry of terrorists. Now I want you to explain to me what would drive a man to do something like this. Is he crazy?”

  Jagerman clasped his hands before him and leaned forward, wishing he were in his office in Amsterdam, anywhere but here in this room with these terrible pressures weighing down on him. “It really doesn’t matter whether he’s crazy or not, Mr. President. What matters is how and why he behaves as he does; what motivates him.”

  “Then why in hell has he done such a mad thing?”

  “Ahl” The black arcs of Jagerman’s eyebrows spurted upward, setting the mole in the middle of his forehead dancing on a ridge of flesh. “The most striking aspect of this man’s character is that he is a loner. He was a loner as a boy at school, at the military academy in England. He’s a loner as a ruler. And isolation is dangerous. The lonelier a man is, the more dangerous he is apt to become. Fundamentally, terrorists are lonely, isolated people, outcasts of society banded into small groups by an ideal or a cause. The more isolated they are, the more they feel compelled to act. Violence becomes the terrorist’s way of proving to society that he exists.

  “As Qaddafi has found himself more and more isolated internationally, more and more cut off from the world community, the need to act, to prove to the world he’s there, has become greater and greater. Loneliness gives terrorists a superiority complex. They become gods, a law unto themselves, absolutely convinced of the rectitude of their position. Clearly, Qaddafi is absolutely persuaded of the righteousness of his point of view. And now with this H-bomb of his, he has become God, beyond reason, ready to administer justice himself.”

  “If the man is beyond reason,” the President interjected, “then why are we wasting our time talking to him?”

  “Mr. President, we’re not trying to reason with him. We are going to try to convince him of the necessity of giving us time just as we try to convince a terrorist of the necessity of giving us his hostages. Often, with time, the isolated, unreal world the terrorist lives in crumbles around him.

  Reality submerges him, and his defense mechanisms collapse. This could very well happen in Qaddafi’s case. All the unforeseen consequences of his action may suddenly overwhelm him.”

  The psychiatrist’s index finger shot up as it did whenever he wanted to issue a warning or stress a point. “That instant, if it comes, will be terribly dangerous. At that moment, a terrorist is ready to die, to commit suicide in a spectacular way. The risk that he may then destroy his hostages along with himself is immense. In this case …”

  Jagerman did not need to finish the sentence. Everyone had understood. “But there is also, at that moment, the golden chance to take the terrorist by the hand, so to speak, and lead him away from danger. To convince him he is a hero, a conquered hero yielding honorably to superior forces.”

  “And you hope that, somehow, we’ll be able to manipulate Qaddafi like that?”

  “It is a hope. No more. But the situation offers very little else.”

  “All right. But bow? How will we do it?”

  “That’s the ultimate goal, Mr. President. The tactics we will have to work out as we talk to him. That’s why opening a dialogue is so crucial. We will adapt our tactics from what we learn listening to him. One must always continue saying, ‘We accept the situation
because we know we’ll win in the end.”’

  Except, the Dutchman thought as he heard his words drift through the crowded room, in the end one doesn’t always win.

  * * *

  A bell over the door jingled. It was as though an alarm had gone off.

  Everyone in the bar’s dark interior, the halfdozen young men on its worn moleskin barstools, the squat, unshaven bartender, the trio,in black leather jackets playing pinball, turned to stare at the three policemen invading their sanctuary. There was not a sound in the place except for the click-clack of the lead ball still bouncing from bumper to bumper in the pinball machine and the ting of the lights flashing on its back panel.

  “You would have to say,” Angelo muttered to Rand, “that these guys know the heat when they see it.”

  Malone, head of the NYPD Pickpocket Squad, walked slowly down the bar, his eyes scrutinizing each face along his way. They belonged to the dips who were the regulars at the Flatbush Avenue Terminal of the Long Island Rail Road, resting up with coffee and tequila between rush hours. He stopped a few feet from the pinball machine, pointed at one of the three young men, then beckoned to him with his forefinger.

  “Hey, Mr. Malone.” The young man gave a nervous wriggle that would have passed as a clever move on a disco dance floor. “Why for you jostling me?

  Is nothing I’ve done. Nothing.”

  “We want to have a little talk with you. Out in the car.”

  The car was around the corner. Malone put the pickpocket into the front seat and got in beside him. Angelo circled the car to get in on the other side. Rand headed for the rear. “No,” Angelo ordered, “you go back and keep your eyes on the bar. Just in case.”

  Squeezed between the two detectives, the Colombian seemed to shrink under the impact of his nervous concern. His head swiveled from man to man like a weathervane buffeted by a swirling wind. “Why you busting me, Mr. Malone? Is nothing I do, I swear.” The voice was now almost a whimper.