The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  “Of course I have,” he answered. “At great length and in great detail. And I can assure you Mr. Begin’s initial reaction is very favorable. That’s why it’s so important that I resume my discussions with him.”

  One of the two technicians training the eye scanner on the President’s face started. The green line darting across the oscilloscope of the screen of his machine had taken a jagged, sawtooth pattern as it ran over the high-speed computerized printout of the President’s words. He hit a red button that allowed him to speak to Qaddafi, isolated in the other room.

  “Ya sidi,” he said, “the President is lying!”

  The Libyan didn’t move a facial muscle. He took off his dark glasses and leaned to the camera. “Mr. President,” he said, “I thought you were an honest, decent man. I find out you are not. Not only are you despising of our abilities to cope with the technology of your world, but you have lied to me. Further conversation between us is useless. You now have twentyfour hours left in which to put the terms of my letter into effect or the bomb will explode.”

  * * *

  From inside his red Avis Econoline van, the technician of the first NEST team to reach Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue surveyed the broad steps of the New York Public Library. The oscilloscope of his detector registered a steady gross gamma count of .14 millirads an hour. Yet, to his utter astonishment, there were no other trucks, no cars immobilized in front of the library. Nothing stood between the pods of his detector and its monumental staircase.

  “What in hell is going on?” the uncomprehending scientist asked rhetorically.

  He did not have time to answer his question before John Booth had climbed into the front of the van. He studied the oscilloscope, then the view from the van, as wholly mystified as his scientist. From the radio net, he got the helicopter confirmation: the telltale emission was coming from somewhere across the street. By now, the area was full of unmarked FBI and police cars. Two more NEST vans had driven up behind his. Each confirmed the first van’s reading.

  Booth studied the scene, completely baffled. Was it possible that someone had carried a ton-and-a-half device into that building before the first van had reached the spot? He looked at the building. No, he told himself, the radiation would never get through its thick floors and ceilings to the choppers.

  “Shit!” he growled. “Maybe we’ve been following some guy who had a barium milkshake who’s just got off the bus here.”

  He ordered four scientists with portable detectors across the street, then followed himself in the footsteps of their FBI escort. The four men drifted through the kids on roller skates gliding along the sidewalk, earphones glued to their ears so that not a note of the disco rhythm to which they moved eluded them, past a pair of handsome blacks in Afros and a sidewalk vendor selling kitchenware.

  They worked in a kind of triangular pattern, approaching the steps from different angles so that they could converge on the direction from which their readings were coming.

  “It’s over there,” said the technician beside whom Booth was walking. He tilted his head toward Prudence, one of the two stone lions guarding the steps. Half a dozen people reading the morning paper or a paperback book or just staring into space sat along the granite wall behind the lion.

  “It’s got to be one of them,” Booth said.

  As they approached, the emanation shifted. Sure enough, one of the people on the wall, an elderly, stooped woman in a frayed black coat, had begun to shuffle down the steps. Indicating to the others to move back, Booth, the scientist and an FBI agent followed her, then as discreetly as possible drew around her. She had a gaunt, waxen face, colored only by two russet circles of rouge on her sunken cheeks; sad, jaded reminders of what might have been her vanished beauty. At the sight of the agent’s shield, she clutched to her shrunken bosom the black plastic shopping bag she was carrying. A hurt and bewildered air seized her features.

  “I’m very sorry, Officer,” she stammered. “I didn’t know it was wrong to do it. I’m on welfare.”

  With one of her bony hands she brushed at the wisp of gray hair dangling from under a cloth stocking cap and smiled imploringly at the bulky agent.

  “Times are fearfully bad and I, I …” she stammered again, “I just didn’t see no harm in pickin’ it up to take home. I didn’t know they were government property. Honest, I didn’t.”

  Booth leaned forward. “Pardon me, ma’am, what did you pick up?”

  Timidly she opened her plastic shopping bag and offered it to Booth for his inspection. He looked in and saw a gray mass. He plunged in his hand and drew out the still-warm body of a dead pigeon, recognizing as he did the deadly substance dangling in the ring on its leg.

  “Oh, my God!” he exclaimed. “How long ago did you pick this up?”

  “Only about five minutes ago. Just before you folks come up the steps.”

  Dear Christ, Booth thought, staring down at the tablet in its metallic ring. So that’s it. That’s why all those readings kept disappearing on us.

  He looked pityingly at the old woman. “Ma’am, we’d like to ask you, for your own good, to come with us to the hospital. You see, some of these pigeons have bad diseases”-he patted her arm reassuringly-“but they’ll give you a fine dinner there tonight, you’ll see.”

  * * *

  For the third time in barely five hours, the men responsible for the search for the bomb in New York City were gathered around the desk of Quentin Dewing in the underground emergency command post.

  “Harvey,” Dewing asked the director of the FBI’s New York office, “have you picked up any trace of that guy from Boston that trained in Qaddafi’s camps?”

  Hudson shook his head. “Negative. And we’ve had fifty guys pounding the pavements over there in Brooklyn for the last two hours. The dockers who handled those barrels at the Brooklyn Army Terminal didn’t recognize him, either.”

  “Well, widen the search. I want every belly-dancing joint and Arab restaurant from New Haven to Philadelphia checked out. I still think that’s the best thing we’ve got going.”

  There was a sharp cough from the far end of the conference table. “What’s the matter, Chief?” Dewing asked Al Feldman.

  The Chief of Detectives plucked at one of his nostrils avith a forefinger.

  “If these guys are half as smart as you people tell us they are, the last place they’re going to be eating lunch is in some Arab restaurant. They’re probably going to a pizza joint or a Hamburger Heaven.”

  “Well, we’ve got to cover everything. How about our forensic operations?

  What do we have on the house where the barrels went, Chief?”

  Dewing had assigned the job of sifting through the Queens house for clues to the NYPD’s forensic unit. The Hertz van that had picked up the barrel he’d turned over to an FBI forensic team flown up from the National Crime Laboratory in Washington. Both groups were responsible for picking through their targets in painstaking detail, searching for anything, a fingerprint, a hairpin, a matchbox, soil on the doormat or grease caught between the treads of the van’s tires, that could reveal something about the people who had used them.

  Feldman took a black notebook from his inside pocket and laid it on the desk. “The place belongs to a retired stockbroker out in Bay Shore.

  Inherited it from his sister. Woman rented it from him last August. She gave him a year’s rent in cash, so he wasn’t inclined to ask her too many questions. We had an Identikit drawing on that Arab lady who checked out of the Hampshire House this morning done up from the clerks and the maid who knew her and ran it past him. He thinks it was her.”

  “The embassy in Beirut finally came up with her visa application,”

  Salisbury of the CIA interrupted. “The name she registered under at the Hampshire House, the whole thing’s a fake. They’ve sent us her picture, but none of our intelligence sources have anything on her. The only thing we know is she came into the country at JFK on TWA Flight 701 November twenty-sixth.”<
br />
  Dewing grunted. “Keep after her. How about the house itself, Chief?”

  “From what the neighbors say, whoever was using it wasn’t around very much.

  My forensic chief says there aren’t a lot of signs of life inside either.

  But we do have a numbers guy on the corner, who thinks he saw a Hertz truck around there last week.”

  “What sort of sewage system do they have out there?”

  Feldman, barely able to suppress a laugh, turned to his questioner, John Booth. What the hell kind of a question is that? he asked himself. “City sewers.”

  “I’m going to send some of my people out to have a look at them. People who are in close physical contact with the material used in this will leave radioactive traces in their urine and feces. It’s not much, but if we find something it will at least give us confirmation that this is the shipment we’re after.”

  Dewing acknowledged his words with a crisp authoritative gesture and went back to Feldman. “When can we expect your report?”

  “In an hour or so. They’ve dusted a couple of fingerprints. We’re scouring the neighborhood, the stores and all for people who might have known them.

  And the phone company’s getting a call report together for us.”

  “How about our people with the truck, Harv?”

  Hudson had checked on their activities before coming to the meeting.

  “They’re just setting up, Mr. Dewing. All we know at the moment is the truck had two hundred and fifty-two miles on the clock when it came back in that night. Which tells us that the bomb can be anywhere within a circle with a 125-mile radius.”

  That, Dewing thought, is really helpful.

  “And our efforts to follow up on the stolen ID?” he asked Feldman.

  “We’ve got the dip and we’re moving in on the fence he did it for.”

  “Isn’t there some way we can speed that line of investigation up?” the FBI assistant director demanded impatiently.

  “Mr. Dewing, you want to be a. bit gentle here. Some of these guys, you come down too hard, too fast and they’ll shut up on you. Then you’re nowhere, my friend, nowhere at all.”

  * * *

  “Up there.”

  Pedro Torres, the Colombian pickpocket, gestured with his head to the second story of the brick tenement across the street. He was in the back of Angelo Rocchia’s Corvette, wrists handcuffed in his lap, his hands resting protectively over his throbbing groin. Carmen, his girl, was already at the Seventy-eighth Precinct being booked.

  Angelo and Rand scrutinized the building from the car’s front seat. The windows were filthy and a fire escape obstructed what little view inside the grime allowed.

  “What’s it look like in there?” Angelo asked.

  Torres shrugged. “Big room. One girl. Benny in there.”

  The detective grunted. “Typical. They try to set up so they look like some kind of wholesale house. Secretary in a glass cage and all. Buy anything.

  Cameras, TVs, power tools, rugs, auto parts, whatever. Lot of ‘em rent guns. Have sixty to seventy Saturday-night specials stashed in there. Rent ‘em out for twenty bucks a night and a cut of the take.”

  He turned down Sixth Avenue and began to look for a parking space well out of the line of vision from the fence’s window.

  “We’ve set ‘em up ourselves. Open a shop. Send a couple of streetwise guys into the bars. Tell the bartender, `We’re doing a job, fixing up this new place there. We need some tools, you know? Couple tools. Cost so fucking much money for drills and all. Hell, I seen one up the street there, guy wants a hundred and forty dollars for it.’ Next thing you know, a guy comes in, says, ‘Hey, you want to buy a drill?’ ‘Yeah, what kind of drill?’

  ‘Brand new,’ the guy replies. ‘1’m a plumber by trade. Normally I wouldn’t do this, but I gotta have money, get s^m; bus tickets. Got a sick aunt up there in the Catskills.’ ” Angelo gave a gleeful laugh, one of the first Rand had heard from the New Yorker. “Operation like that you can bring in guys like our friend there in the back seat by the carload.”

  As he was talking, Angelo had deftly slipped the car into a tight parking space half a block up Sixth. “Okay,” he said, yanking on the hand brake, “bring him in.” He jerked his thumb at Torres. “A minute after I get in there. Throw a coat over his bracelets so you don’t draw a crowd.”

  He took a cigar from his coat pocket and lit it, then picked an old racing form out from under the dashboard and strolled off up Sixth, his face buried in the form sheet.

  He paused at the light on the corner. Up Union, just fifty yards from the fence’s building, a blue-and-white Con Ed truck was stopped. Its crewmen were setting up sawhorses and unloading a jackhammer. Must be ours, Angelo figured. At the rear corner of the building, three spades in denims, goatees, black sunglasses and floppy berets lounged against the wall, laughing loudly. They too, Angelo realized, were probably fellow detectives.

  The fence operation was marked only by a sign on the door, “Long Island Trading,” and the proprietor’s name, B. Moscowitz, in the lower righthand corner. As Angelo had predicted, a mousy secretary, listlessly polishing her fingernails, sat by the door.

  She looked at Angelo. Clearly, she wasn’t expecting visitors. “What can I do for you, mister?”

  Benny was in the next room, behind a glass partition. He was a wizened little man in his late fifties, wearing a vest and shirtsleeves, his shirt undone, his tie askew. Horn-rimmed glasses perched on his bald head. His lower lip, the detective noted, pushed forward like that of a pouting child fighting to hold back tears.

  “It’s him I want to see,” Angelo replied. Before the girl could protest, he had stepped across the room into Benny’s office.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Benny snarled.

  Angelo gave him the shield.

  The fence’s face didn’t betray even a flicker of emotion. “Whatta you want with me? I run a legitimate business here. Legitimate trading company. I got nothing to do with cops.”

  Angelo stood above his desk looking down at the agitated fence. He slowly rolled his cigar between his thumb and forefinger, striving to fix Benny with his gray eyes, giving the little man the full force of what he called his Godfather look. Finally he lifted his cigar from his mouth. “Got a friend of yours here, wants to say hello to you.”

  He turned to the door, and, as he had hoped, Rand and Torres were standing there. Angelo waved them into the office.

  “Who is this fucking creep?” Benny roared. “I never seen him before in my life.”

  From the Godfather, Angelo became the Prosecuting Attorney. “Pedro Torres,”

  he intoned, “do you recognize and identify Mr. Benjamin Moscowitz here present as the individual who requested you to pick the pocket of a commuter in the Long Island Rail Road Terminal for his identity papers Friday morning and to whom you delivered same?” The legal jargon was utterly meaningless, but it occasionally shook up guys like Benny.

  Torres shifted on his feet. “Yeah,” he replied, “it’s heem.”

  “The fucking spic don’t know what he’s talking about,” Benny shrieked.

  “What is this anyway, some kind of setup?” He leaped to his feet, his arms flailing in the air.

  Angelo turned to Rand. “Get him out of here,” he said. He pointed his cigar at the fence. “Sit down, Benny, I want to talk to you.”

  The fence, still babbling a protest, settled in his chair. Angelo perched on one corner of his desk so that he towered over him. He rested there, his face set, building the edge, letting the flow of Benny’s angry words trickle away to nothingness like the last sparks spurting from a dying Roman candle. The room, he noted, was a pigsty of papers, files, overflowing trashcans.

  “Look, Benny, I know from the Colombian there you’re doing fifty cards a week.” Angelo’s voice vibrated with the husky, sincere tone of a salesman trying to close an order. “But I’m not interested in fifty. I only want to know about the one you did for order
last Friday.”

  “Hey, what do you mean? I don’t do nothing like that.”

  Angelo bestowed a cold smile on Benny that was meant to tell him that they both knew how meaningless that protest was. “Torres out there hits the guy at the terminal after the nine A.M. train. Brings the papers here. Ten o’clock some guy is renting a Hertz truck with them over on Fourth Avenue.”

  “Listen, you guys got some fucking nerve.” Benny’s snarls were as defiant as ever, but under their surface Angelo detected the first tremulous quiver of concern.

  “This is a legitimate shop here. I got records. All kinds of records. Tax records. You want to see my records?”

  “Benny, I don’t want to see nothing. I just want to know where that card went. It’s very important to me, Benny.” An understated sense of menace seeped into the friendly salesman’s tone on the last words, but if it frightened the fence, he gave no indication of it.

  “I didn’t do nothing wrong. I’m a secondhand dealer. I got all that stuff there, legitimate.” He waved at the vast jumble of goods he was fencing.

  “Benny.” There was no friendly intimacy left in Angelo’s voice now. “I don’t give a fuck what you’ve got here. Talk to me about this day, this one day, last Friday. Torres there comes in with some ID he found, right? We all know he found it. And it went right back out. Where, Benny? Where did it go?”

  Behind Angelo the office door opened and closed softly. It was Rand. He had turned Torres over to a backup team downstairs. The mousy secretary, Angelo noted, was still doing her nails as though nothing unusual was happening.

  She must be used to seeing cops in here, he thought. Her boss probably gets busted all the time and gets off with a good lawyer.

  “I don’t know nothing about that.”