“If that were a reasonable solution,” the President replied, “I could — and would — have invoked it hours ago. But my first consideration in this crisis, Mr. Begin, is to save lives, the lives of six million innocent people in New York — and, indeed, the lives of two million equally innocent Libyans.”
“But you are asking us to abandon the fundamentals of our national sovereignty in response to an action which is criminal, which is without precedent in history, which you yourself told me this morning jeopardizes the very foundations of world peace and international order.”
“My proposal doesn’t impinge on your nation’s sovereignty, Mr. Begin.” The Prime Minister could sense the American’s exasperation. “Israel has no claims to sovereignty over the West Bank and it never has had. Those lands were given to the Arabs of Palestine by the United Nations in 1947 at the same time your people were given a state.”
“I’m sorry, the United Nations did not give those lands, or any other lands, to the Jewish people.” There was a confidence born of belief, of deep conviction, in the Israeli leader’s voice. “Those lands were given to the Jewish people by the God of our forefathers, once and forever.”
“Surely, Mr. Begin,” the President protested, “you cannot as a responsible leader of the twentieth century, of the thermonuclear age, be pretending to order the world on the basis of a forty-century-old religious legend?”
Begin adjusted his tie and leaned back in his chair. “That legend, as you call it, has sustained us, nourished, preserved us, united as a distinct people, for four thousand years. However difficult it may be for you to comprehend, Mr. President, for a Jew to have the right to settle on this land, on any part of it, is as indispensable an attribute of his nation’s sovereignty as an American’s right to travel from New York to California.”
“To settle on another people’s land? Land that has been theirs for two thousand years? To deprive them of the very right of national existence for which your own people claimed and fought for so many generations? All that in the name of an event, a religious moment, which may, or may not, have ever taken place? Surely you can’t be serious?”
“I have never been more serious. But what is at issue here is not those settlements you so oppose. They are just a handful of people, finally. They do nobody any harm. You are trying to force another nation to an act it refuses for moral reasons, for reasons which go to the core of its right to exist. Are we or are we not a sovereign land? If we are forced to crawl out of the West Bank before a totalitarian dictator-and need I remind you of our experience at the hands of such men? — you will turn us into slaves, destroy our belief in ourselves and our nationhood.”
“My proposal, Mr. Begin, offers your nation the very thing it has wanted so long, a firm guarantee of its survival. It will reinforce your national will, not weaken it.” The American’s slow, precise enunciation revealed to the Israeli how hard he was struggling to control his emotions.
“Guarantees of our survival, Mr. President? What faith do you think my people are going to have in your guarantees after they’ve seen that you, the one nation in the world that was supposed to be our friend, our ally, have coerced us into acting against our will, our interests, our very right to survive? Why-” Begin hesitated to say what be was about to say but the intensity of his feelings was so deep he couldn’t restrain himself-“it’s as if Franklin Roosevelt had said to my people, ‘Go to those camps. I’ll guarantee Hitler’s good behavior to you.”’
The President’s control over his impatience was slipping away again, his frustration and anger at being trapped in this seemingly hopeless dilemma beginning to tell on him. “Mr. Begin, I am not questioning Israel’s right to survive. What I am questioning is Israel’s right to continue a policy which is nothing other than a cold-blooded, calculating effort to annex another people’s land. Those settlements of yours have no valid justification whatsoever-“
This time Begin interrupted him. “In another time, Mr. President, in another way, perhaps the future of those settlements could be discussed. But not like this. Not under this threat.”
“Mr. Begin, the reason those settlements are there is because you put them there. Against our will. Against the Camp David agreement. If we are in this dreadful impasse today it is due to your stubborn persistence in carrying out a policy the whole world-and even a majority of your nation-condemned.”
“Whatever the feelings of the people of this country may be about those settlements, Mr. President, their feelings about their nation are unshakeable. And they will see in your demand, just as I do, an invasion of their national rights and sovereignty.”
This time there was a long pause. When the President resumed, his voice was suddenly resigned and weary. “I told you at the beginning of our conversation, Mr. Begin, that I believe this proposition is the only reasonable way out of this dilemma. Accept it, renounce your claims to the West Bank, and you will give your own nation peace and save the lives of six million New Yorkers.” He paused, waiting for an answer that did not come. “But if you refuse,” the President continued, “I am not going to see six million of my countrymen massacred because you will not rectify the consequences of a policy that has no basis in justice or political fact. It will be the most painful order I will ever have to give, Mr. Begin, but if you will not remove those settlements from the West Bank, then the armed forces of the United States will.”
Begin paled and sank slowly back against his chair. So there it was, the naked threat of force he had expected from the moment this conversation had begun. A strange vision swept through his mind. He was a four-year-old boy in Lodz trembling at his window as a galloping mass of mounted Cossacks rampaged through his ghetto, wielding great staves like swords, lashing the heads and shoulders of any helpless Jews in their way, trampling their twitching bodies under their horses’ thudding hoofs.
His voice was hoarse with sadness when he finally replied. “So we come to that, do we? The final act, the final, if I may say it, betrayal?” Begin sighed. “We live in a terrible world, Mr. President. All the values we counted on to guide us, all the precepts of world order, are disintegrating about us. Someone, some people must somehow find the courage to stop it. I had hoped and believed you and your people would, but I was wrong.” The Israeli could almost sense the distant President’s discomfiture at his words. “We are a democracy. I cannot reply to your demand-or threat-alone. Only my government can. I will call an emergency Cabinet meeting immediately.”
Begin’s first act after he had hung up was to ask his wife to bring him a glass of water. Trembling slightly, he took one of the pills his doctors had urged him to use in moments of stress.
* * *
In New York, winter’s quick-falling dusk was dropping its silken shroud over the city. Already the four men crouched in the window, fieldglasses trained on the entrance of the Long Island Bar and Grill across the street, were beginning to have trouble distinguishing the features of the customers entering the bar.
“Shit,” Angelo Rocchia moaned, “if the son of a bitch doesn’t hurry up, we’ll have to stuff Denny here in the back seat of a car and use the old Kotex-box gimmick.” The “Kotex-box gimmick” was a standard police tactic, putting an informer in a car with a box, into which eye slits had been cut, over his head. That way he could identify someone without giving away his own identity.
Benny the Fence, squatting at the window of his “store” between Angelo and Jack Rand, had no intention of getting involved in that. He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes before five. “He ought to be along any minute,”
he said. “He’s usually in there by five.”
“Somebody’s ass is going to be in a sling if he doesn’t turn up.” It was the deputy director of the New York office of the FBI standing behind Rocchia, Rand and Benny. Harvey Hudson, the director of the office, had ordered him to take charge of the stake-out as soon as the emergency command post had been informed of Benny the Fence’s story. Half a dozen other pol
ice officers and FBI men, one holding a line open to the command post, drifted in and out of the shadows of the Long Island Trading Company’s anteroom. Benny’s secretary sat at her desk, feet twitching to the Top Ten tunes coming from her transistor, totally bored by what was going on around her. Her employer’s cooperation with the police had been total. The Arab who came each night to the bar across the street for a Seven-and-Seven had first established contact with Benny three weeks ago through the bartender. He had rented a snub-nosed .38 that he returned, unfired, the next day. Ten days ago he had told Benny be wanted plastic, a good fresh card, and some ID. The fence had sized the man up as a guy with dough. He’d asked for-and gotten-$250 for the papers, a price well above the going market rate. Then, last Wednesday, the Arab had asked him for a “tailor-made,” a Friday-morning hit on a guy in his midthirties, medium height, not blond. For that he had sprung $500.
Benny’s information had forced the directors of the search operation to make some fast decisions. It was unlikely that the Arab had picked up the truck himself. He looked like an intermediary, a buried sleeper with street contacts to whom someone who knew the right words bad come for help. But he was clearly the only link to the man who had rented it. The FBI had wanted to bring in the bartender right away and grill him. Bannion and Feldman of the NYPD had objected strenuously. Benny and guys like the bartender made it a point not to know each other too well. Jump the barman and you might let the word out that the bar was hot, scare away the Arab and wind up with no lead to the renter of the van. They had recommended the trap waiting in the street below, assuming the Arab would keep to his normal routine and show up for his evening drink.
Nothing down on Union Street would have indicated to the untrained eye that anything unusual was going on. Yet the neighborhood was alive with detectives and agents. The Con Ed FBI crew was still there busily tearing up the pavement. They had been reinforced by three real Con Ed men who knew how to operate a jackhammer. In relays, they’d begun to drift into the bar for a drink, and three of them in blue overalls sat by the bar now nursing Miller Lites. An Econoline van belonging to a Queens television repair shop was parked behind the bar. Four agents were inside staring out of its one-way windows, guarding the rear of the bar. The trio of blacks Angelo had spotted earlier were jiving now at Sixth and Union, blocking that escape route.
By five minutes after five, there was still no sign of the Arab. Suddenly behind him, Angelo heard Benny growl, “There he goes.”
He pointed to a slender young man in a sheepskin jacket walking past the flashing red Budweiser sign into the bar. Rand rose.
He was wearing an Army fatigue jacket, blue jeans and a turtleneck someone had found for him, looking, Angelo thought uncharitably, like a stockbroker ready to go slumming. He headed down the stairs. A minute later, Angelo followed him.
As soon as he opened the door of the bar he saw the Arab alone on a stool halfway down the counter sipping his Seven-and-Seven. Rand was two stools away. Angelo strolled casually down the bar until he was behind the Arab.
Gently but firmly, he pressed the muzzle of his .38 to his back while, at the same time, with his left, he gave him a flash of the shield.
“Police,” he said, “we want to talk to you.”
The Arab twisted around to face him. Rand was already off his stool, his own arm discreetly drawn, blocking one way out. Three fellow FBI men in Con Ed overalls shifted into a half moon to seal off the other.
“Hey,” gasped the Arab, “what’s all this about?”
“We’ll tell you downtown,” Angelo said.
* * *
Outwardly, General Henri Bertrand appeared as composed as ever, the expression on his face set in the weary, inscrutable gaze for which he was so well known. Inwardly, he was seething with frustration. For almost an hour, PaulHenri de Serre had been sitting at his Boulevard Mortier desk going through the SDECE’s collection of photographs of Arab terrorists and scientists, trying to find a familiar face. He had found none.
The General had no doubts about the sincerity of his efforts. The man was ready to do anything to mitigate the consequences of what he had done in Libya. Bertrand was also sure, as a result of a few questions in his car en route to the office, that de Serre was innocent of any involvement in the death of his colleague Alain Prevost. That, like the manner in which the Libyans had set de Serre himself up, had to be the work of Qaddafi’s secret service. The bastards, he reflected, are getting better. Maybe the KGB is training them. A point, it suddenly occurred to him, to run down when this was over.
He looked at his scientist. De Serre was completing his second run-through of the pictures. “Still no one that looks familiar?”
De Serre shook his head apologetically. “Nobody.”
“Damn.” The Gauloise in the corner of Bertrand’s mouth wriggled as he inhaled. He was sure every photograph available was there on his desk. The CIA wouldn’t have held out on him, not on this. He relations with Israel’s Mossad were extremely close, as they had been for over thirty years. He was certain they would come up with everything they had. They could try to do an Identikit portrait of the Arab scientist, but Bertrand had little confidence in such portraits. They could tell you what a man didn’t look like, that he didn’t wear glasses or have a beard, but they were quite ineffectual when it came to providing a description of what he did look like.
Suddenly, the General stopped his measured pacing of the office and picked up his telephone. The Palestinian had spoken excellent French, hadn’t he?
Those most likely to hold something back in sensitive matters, he had learned long ago, were those usually closest to home. It took him several minutes to locate his friendly rival, Paul-Robert de Villeprieux, the director of France’s internal-security agency, the DST.
“Tell me, cher ami,” he asked when Villeprieux came to the phone at the Neuilly apartment in which he was dining with friends, “would your people be apt to have anything, anything at all, on Arabs, Palestinians probably, involved in nuclear matters, which just might not be available in my dossiers?”
The suspicion of a satisfied smile appeared on Bertrand’s face at the long silence which greeted his question.
“I shall have to call you back on that, I’m afraid,” Villeprieux finally replied.
“Don’t bother,” Bertrand said. “Just call the secretary general of the P-lysee and ask for the President’s authorization to send me whatever you have. Immediately.”
Half an hour later two gendarmes from the DST’s headquarters delivered another locked attache case to Bertrand’s office. It contained a thick envelope bearing a red wax seal and the legend “The contents of this envelope are not to be divulged without the express authorization of the President of the Republic or, in his absence from the country, the Minister of the Interior.” Inside was the long-suppressed story of the Dajanis’ unsuccessful effort to steal plutonium from Cadarache and their expulsion from France.
Bertrand handed Whalid Dajani’s picture to de Serre. “Was this your man?”
The scientist paled. “Yes,” he answered. “That’s he.”
Bertrand passed Kamal’s photograph across the table. “How about him?”
De Serre studied the terrorist’s picture closely. “Yes, I think he was one of the people I noticed at the reprocessing plant.”
“And her?” Bertrand gave him Laita’s picture.
De Serre shook his head. “No. There were never any women around.”
Bertrand was already on his phone. “Open up a photo-facsimile line to Langley,” he ordered, “and tell our friend Whitehead the photos of the people he is looking for are on their way to Washington.”
* * *
Why the hell doesn’t he hurry? Laila Dajani fumed. I stand out on this street like a Saudi prince in a synagogue. It was seven-thirty, and West Eighth Street swarmed with NYU students, shoppers, late-night bargain seekers. Finally, Laila saw Kamal drifting out of the pizza joint, his checkered cap jammed onto his head, hi
s black leather jacket’s collar turned up, a rectangular box of pizza under his arm. They fell into step and started down West Eighth, moving away from Fifth Avenue.
“Everything all right up there?” her brother asked.
Laila nodded. “Except Whalid is drinking again. He bought himself a bottle this morning.”
“Let him drink. He can’t do us any harm anymore.” Kamal stared at the passersby on the sidewalk, the garishly lit shops, the odoriferous fast-food stores. His eyes caught those of an emaciated teenage whore lurking in the shadows at the top of the stoop of a brownstone. She glared at him. Kamal snorted.
A few minutes before he had had her for twentyfive dollars, brutally, quickly, mechanically. It was the kind of imprudence he should never have indulged in. But, he had told himself, it might be his last time, and he had slammed himself at the girl with savage anger until she had cried out in pain.
Why did you cry, child? he thought, looking at her now. After all, you’ll be able to do it a few more times before you fry. He turned his eyes away, back to the passing crowd.
I loathe this street, Kamal reflected. I loathe these people. I loathe this city. It’s not the Jews I hate, he suddenly realized. It’s these people.
All of them. Satiated. Smug. Indifferent. Lording it over the earth. He spat. Why do we all hate them so much, he wondered? The Baader-Meinhoff people he had known in Germany, his Italian friends, the Iranians, those strange dour Japanese he’d once trained with in Syria. What is in these people that makes us hate them so much? Were the Romans hated like them once?
“What are you going to do tonight?” he asked his sister.
“Nothing,” she replied. “I took a room at the Hilton. I won’t leave until I’m ready to come for you.”
“Good.” Kamal stopped. To his right was 74 West Eighth, a hardware store.
“What time have you got?”
Laila checked her watch. “Seven-thirty-six.”
The Fifth Horseman Page 39
