The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  Torres had picked up a pair of jeans and was starting to put them on when Rand and the girl left.

  “Drop those things,” Angelo commanded. “You’re not going anywhere yet. I said I wanted to talk to you. Where’d the cards from the wallet you boosted last Friday go? Who buys your fresh cards?”

  “Hey, what you mean?” Torres was trembling, but he tried to force an air of defiance into his voice.

  “You heard me. You did that dip in the terminal Friday on consignment. You were told to set up a guy just like the guy you hit. I want to know where that fucking card went.”

  Torres stepped warily back a couple of paces, almost tumbling over a mattress as he did, until he was only inches from the wall. On the hot plate, the girl’s stew was still bubbling noisily. Angelo followed him.

  “Meester,” the Colombian was pleading, “I got civil rights.”

  “Civil rights? You got no civil rights, you little cocksucker. Your civil rights are down there where you left ‘em, in Bogota.”

  The detective moved closer to Torres. He was at least a head taller than the Colombian. Torres was shivering from the cold, from fear, from the terrible sense of impotence nakedness always imposes in a prisoner before his captors. His hands were spread over his genitals, drawing together his shoulders and making him look even more emaciated than he was. He had just taken another half-step toward the wall when Angelo moved. The detective’s gesture was so swift Torres didn’t even see it coming. Angelo’s right hand shot up, caught him by the neck under the chin and literally threw him against the wall. The Colombian’s head banged twice against the plaster. He went limp. His hands fell to his sides. As they did, Angelo’s left hand ripped into his crotch, grabbing and squeezing his testicles with all his strength.

  The Colombian shrieked in agony.

  “Okay, motherfucker,” Angelo growled. “Now you either tell me where that card went or I’ll rip these things out of here and stuff them down your goddamn throat.”

  “Talk! I talk!” Torres shrieked.

  Angelo relaxed his grip slightly.

  “Union Street. Benny. The fence there.”

  Angelo squeezed again. “Where on Union Street?”

  Torres shrieked, tears of pain rolling down his face. “By Sixth Avenue.

  Across from supermarket. Second floor.”

  Angelo released the pickpocket. He tumbled to the floor, writhing in pain.

  “Get your pants on,” Angelo ordered. “You and I are going to see Benny.”

  * * *

  Laila Dajani had been silent through most of her lunch at Orsini’s, picking indifferently at her tagliatelle verdi and salad, barely touching her Bardolino wine, destroying, apparently, what little appetite she had with half a dozen cigarettes. Yet, on the way to the restaurant, she’d told Michael at least three times she had something very serious to talk about.

  Her silence had not disturbed her lover. Michael had devoured a plate of fettucine, followed by fegato alla Veneziana, calf’s liver and onions, all to still the ravenous appetite for which she was largely responsible. The waiter cleared away their dishes and gave the table a desultory flick of his napkin.

  “Dessert?”

  “No,” Michael replied. “Two espressos.”

  As he left, Michael leaned toward Laila. She had changed her clothes and was wearing an eggshell-white Givenchy blouse that clung hungrily to every indentation of her braless breasts. “You said you had something you wanted to talk to me about.”

  Laila reached for another cigarette, lit it, exhaled slowly, thoughtfully.

  “I want to think about us a moment.”

  Michael grinned lasciviously. “Okay, I’m thinking.”

  “Michael, we need more fantasy in our lives.”

  Michael had just taken a sip of his espresso, and he almost spilled it with the laughter that followed her words. “Darling, what did you have in mind?

  Do you want me to whip you or something?”

  “Michael, we’ve got to do crazy, wonderful things together. Like that.” She snapped her fingers. “On a whim. Just because we want to. Because it’s for us.”

  Michael gave a gentle laugh and reached for her hand. “Like what?”

  Laila swallowed nervously, trying to feign thought.

  “Crazy things. I don’t know. Like going off somewhere on the spur of the moment together. The two of us, alone. No baggage even, just ourselves.” A smile suddenly brightened her face. “Look, I’ve got to go to Montreal one day this week to see a collection. I’ll go tomorrow on the first plane. You come up tomorrow, too. There’s a direct flight to Quebec at noon. We’ll meet at the Chateau Frontenac. Do you know it?” She was rushing on, now trying to sweep him up in the torrent of her words, painfully aware of the undertow of hysteria in her voice. “It’s the most marvelous place! Lovely, quaint streets just like Paris. We’ll ride on sleighs and eat warm croissants in bed for breakfast and walk along the Saint Lawrence and go shopping in the wonderful little shops they have. Oh, Michael darling, do it. For me. Please.”

  Her hands took his, stroking them tenderly.

  Michael kissed her fingertips. “Angel, I can’t. Impossible. I’ve got two Vogue shootings tomorrow I can’t possibly cancel. Besides, I thought we were going to Truman Capote’s lunch.”

  “Oh, Michael! Who gives a damn about that little creep and all those fawning toads swarming around him? I want us to do something for ourselves, for ourselves alone.”

  Michael sipped his espresso. “Now, if you want to do something really crazy, I have an idea. I’ve got a friend at one of the agencies who has a flat down in Acapulco. He’s always offering to lend it to me. We’ll take the Friday-night plane and spend a mad, crazy weekend in the sun together.”

  He shivered. “I mean, Quebec, it’s cold up there.”

  Laila extended a hand and lovingly caressed his cheeks, playfully skimming the skin of his ears with her long fingernails. “That’s a wonderful idea, darling.” She paused. “But I just have this feeling about tomorrow. You know how superstitious we Arabs are. Come on, let’s do it. Please.”

  Michael picked up the check the waiter had just set on the table. “Angel, I can’t. Really. If I break these shootings I’ve got tomorrow, I might as well go down and sign up for my unemployment checks.”

  Laila watched him counting out the money for the check. How far do I dare go, she asked herself, how far?

  Outside, the air was chill with the moist, gray promise of snow. “Do you have another shooting?” she asked.

  “No, I’m through for the day.”

  Laila slipped an arm around Michael’s waist. “Then let’s go back to the studio,” she said.

  * * *

  “To what,” the Baron Claude de Fraguier, Secretary General of the French Foreign Office, asked Henri Bertrand, “do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected visit?”

  The director of France’s intelligence service was looking for an ashtray.

  With a gesture of his head, the Baron indicated one on an Empire gueridon halfway across the room.

  “On April fifteenth, 1973,” Bertrand replied, returning to his armchair, the outsized ashtray clutched awkwardly in his hand, “you people signed a Monsieur PaulHenri de Serre of the Atomic Energy Commission to a threeyear contract to serve as a technical adviser to India’s nuclear program. He returned to this country in November 1975, some six months before his contract was due to expire. The dossier which my colleagues at the DST have given me on Monsieur de Serre fails to indicate why he came home early.

  Perhaps your people could enlighten me?”

  The Baron stared at Bertrand. He disliked both the man and his service.

  “May I ask why you wish to know?”

  “No,” Bertrand replied, concealing with his inscrutable features the pleasure he took in pronouncing the word. “You may not. Although I might add that my inquiry has the sanction of the highest authority.”

  These people, the Baron reflected distaste
fully. Constantly invoking the office of the Presidency to cover their intrusions into the domains of others. “You will probably find, cher ami,” he said, ordering up the dossier, “a reason as commonplace as a poor widowed mother dying of cancer in the Dordogne.”

  When an aide laid de Serre’s dossier on his desk, the Baron opened it himself, careful to keep its contents well out of reach of Bertrand’s eyes.

  A reference tab was affixed to the document terminating de Serre’s Indian service. It referred to a sealed envelope in the dossier containing a letter from the French ambassador in New Delhi to the Baron’s predecessor.

  The Baron opened it and read it, studiously ignoring as he did the manifest impatience of the SDECE director. When he had finished, he folded the letter, placed it back in its envelope, returned the envelope to its place and passed the dossier back to his assistant.

  “Just as one might have expected,” he said, his voice as cutting as long years of practice could make it, “a sordid little affair. Just the sort of thing to interest your services. Your friend Monsieur de Serre was caught employing the diplomatic valise to smuggle Indian antiquities out of the country. Quite valuable objects, as it turned out. Rather than risking any embarrassment with our Indian friends, he was recalled and returned to his post at the Atomic Energy Commission.”

  “Interesting.” Bertrand methodically twisted his cigarette stub into the ashtray in his hand. So there is our fissure, he thought. The search for these little flaws, for the barely perceptible cracks in the smooth fagade of a man’s character that could be widened and exploited, was the very essence of Bertrand’s calling. The heavy hands of the brass Empire clock on the Baron’s desk showed that it was already half past six. The velvet mantle of evening, the magic hour of legend and lovers, was settling over Paris. If he was going to pursue this tonight, he would have to hurry. He hesitated. Really, he should leave it to the morning. Still, his CIA colleague had seemed very concerned. And the Arabs, he knew, worked late.

  “I’m sorry, morn cher,” he informed the Baron. “I’m going to have to use your facilities to get off an urgent message to our man at the embassy in Tripoli. In view of what you’ve just told me, it can’t wait until I get back to my headquarters.”

  * * *

  Jeremy Oglethorpe, Washington’s evacuation expert, gawked at the sight before him like a little boy on Christmas morning discovering on his livingroom floor an electric-train set that went beyond his wildest fantasies. Spread over an entire wall of the command center at the Metropolitan Transit Authority Building in Brooklyn was an action map of New York’s subway system, each of the 450 stations of its three divisions identified by name and a light, every one of the 207 trains moving at that moment on its 237 miles of track marked by a flashing red light.

  “Wonderful!” he gasped. “Even more impressive than I imagined it would be.”

  He was sitting in the superintendent’s glassed-in central booth in the center of the room with the chief of operations, a genial, slightly overweight black. Spread on the desk before him was a map of the system and beside it a thick sheaf of notes in a gray-and-white Stanford Research Institute binder. “I’ve done a lot of work studying your system, Chief.

  You’ve got six thousand cars available?”

  “We had 5,062 today. You’ve always got some in for repairs, inspections.”

  “And you can put two hundred and fifty people in a car?”

  “Only if you want to start a riot. Two hundred’s our limit.”

  Oglethorpe grunted. My figure is good for my scenario, he thought. “Chief, I want you to think about a problem with me. Suppose we’ve got to evacuate Manhattan in an emergency. Fast, real fast. And we don’t want to take people out to Brooklyn or Queens. We want to move them up here.”

  Oglethorpe’s judgy fingers skirted the terminals of the upper Bronx, 242nd Street, Woodlawn Road, 205th Street, 241st Street, Dyre Avenue, and Pelham Bay Park.

  The chief twisted a plastic cup of black coffee in his hand and studied Oglethorpe with a skeptical eye. “Why would you want to do all this?”

  “Well, say we’re afraid there’s a nuclear bomb in Manhattan. Or the Russians are coming.”

  The chief thought awhile, then stood and peered down at the system’s map.

  “Okay. The first thing you’d want to think about are the trains already moving in the system when you sound your alert. I guess you keep ‘em going all the way through. Take an IRT number five going into Fulton Street in lower Manhattan. Give the motorman an announcement, ‘We have to evacuate Manhattan because of an emergency threat.’ Then tell him to run straight up to Dyre Avenue nonstop and dump his load.”

  Oglethorpe was frantically noting down his words.

  “Now,” the trainman continued, “that might be a little difficult. New Yorkers don’t like being told what to do very much.” He gave a little laugh. “You’ll want some help there in the Bronx. Some of those people aren’t going to want to get off the train.

  They’ll insist on going back to get their wives or their kids, or their mothers-in-law. Or their pet canaries. We’d have to devise a loop. Up to the Bronx. Drop them. Out to Brooklyn,” he continued.

  “Why all the way to Brooklyn?” Oglethorpe queried.

  “Because we can’t turn trains around in the middle of the system. You’d use the local track to load and go onto the express track once they’re loaded.

  Run ‘em nonstop right up to the Bronx and start all over again.”

  “Terrific!” Oglethorpe was almost trembling with excitement. Obviously, this was the answer. With a little order, a little control. “Now tell me,”

  he said, “on the basis you’ve outlined here, allowing for the minor problems that always crop up, how much time do you think it would take under this plan to clear Manhattan?”

  “Probably four to six hours. Maybe a bit more.”

  “And if we asked you to take people out of Queens and Brooklyn too?”

  “Then we’ve got a much bigger problem.”

  Oglethorpe sat down, studying his notes, going through the papers of his SRI study. He was beaming. He looked at Walsh, the smile on his face almost triumphant. “I told you this was the answer. Now look, Chief, if you started right now, with any help you wanted, could you get this plan down on paper for me, everything, logistics, signaling systems, timing, everything, in two hours?”

  “I think so.”

  “Terrific.” Oglethorpe looked again at Walsh. “We’re going to have a terrific plan.”

  “Sure, you’ll have a terrific plan, mister,” the chief agreed. His voice was low and cool, so fully controlled he might have been an anchor man reading out the evening news. “And there’ll only be one thing wrong with it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It won’t work.”

  “Won’t work?” Oglethorpe looked as though he’d just received a blow in the stomach. “What do you mean it won’t work?”

  “Who do you think are going to drive those trains for you?”

  “Why,” Oglethorpe replied, “your motormen. Who else?” “Not if they know there’s an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island, my friend. They’ll take their first train up to Dyre Avenue all right. And then they’ll be out of the station door with everyone else. The switchmen, the yardsmen you need to turn the trains around-they’ll be gone, too.”

  “Well,” Oglethorpe muttered, “we won’t tell them. We’ll say it’s a practice.”

  The chief laughed, a rich, warm laugh from deep in his overextended stomach. “You’re going to clear three and a half million people off Manhattan Island and try to make them believe you’re doing it for fun? For some kind of exercise?” The pitch of his laughter skirted upward at the thought of how ludicrous it all was. “Mister, there’s not a New Yorker alive who’d believe horseshit like that. I tell you, half an hour after you start this, every car in the system’ll be laid down on the tracks up there in the Bronx and every motorman in town’ll be running for the
bills.”

  Oglethorpe listened in dismayed silence, one hand clutching his carefully written notes and the papers of his SRI study.

  “You can’t evacuate this city with the subways,” the chief said, “or any other way, for that matter.” He looked sadly at the papers in Oglethorpe’s fingers. “All you got there, mister, is a handful of dreams.”

  * * *

  Puzzled and angry, John Booth followed the steady cackle of NEST’s ultra-high-transmission network. The normally phlegmatic NEST director was as distraught as a man who has just been told his wife is expecting triplets. Three times since he had gotten back to his Seventh Regiment Armory headquarters, his helicopters overflying lower Manhattan had reported high radiation readings only to see them mysteriously disappear when his foot search teams moved in.

  Like everything else in NEST, the radio facility set up in the locker rooms used by the tennis players who usually employed the armory’s main floor was designed to be independent and self-contained. Everything from batteries, spare parts and screwdrivers to hand-held transceivers and mobile transceivers for the trucks and helicopters had been flown in from Las Vegas. That way Both could feel reasonably certain that local CB fans, newsnapers or TV stations wouldn’t pick up any indication of what was going on by eavesdropping on his transmissions.

  On the wall of the locker room were huge color aerialsurvey maps of New York’s five boroughs, maps whose resolution was so fine you could identify with a loupe the color of a hat on a woman walking down Fifth Avenue. Thev were part of a file of maps of 170 U.S. cities held available twentyfour hours a day at NEST’s Washington offices.

  Suddenly Booth heard an excited call rise over the chatter on the network.

  * * *

  “Feather Three to base. I have a positive.” Feather Three was one of the trio of New York Airways helicopters Both had pressed into service.

  Jesus Christ, Booth prayed, please don’t let this be another false alarm, I’ll go crazy.