The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  Perhaps, Abe Stern pondered, I should go on the air and tell the people to get out of the city any way they can. That idiot Oglethorpe they had sent up from Washington yesterday had said that panic, the classic fire-in-the-nightclub, everyone-rushes-for-the-door-and-no-one-getsout kind of panic, might not be applicable to this situation. People tended to behave much better in great crises than you expected them to do. And even if Oglethorpe was wrong and there was pandemonium, at least, as he’d told the President yesterday, he’d have saved some lives.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a babble of noise from the squawk box on the conference table. Since last night they had been linked by a direct line to the men and women trying to manage the crisis from the NSC conference room, and he recognized the President’s voice inquiring anxiously about the progress of their search. He’s counting on us, Stern thought, listening to the worried string of words pouring from the box. All that confident “Don’t worry, Abe, we’ll talk him out of it” business of yesterday had disappeared. Three times the Chief Executive reported that they had tried to reestablish contact with Qaddafi in the past hour.

  Nothing had worked; the Libyan remained adamant in his refusal to talk. The President sketched out the military preparations he had ordered for a forcible removal of the West Bank settlements if it came to that. Stern paled. He was anything but an ardent Zionist., but the prospect of his countrymen and the Israelis coming into conflict due to the diabolical plotting of this zealot in Libya sickened him. Still, he thought, if that’s the price we have to pay to save this city, so be it.

  * * *

  Grace Knowland pushed open the doors of the New York Times Building and strode quickly up to the security guards barring the way to the elevators. As usual, the lobby of the most influential newspaper in the world was vibrant with an air of subdued purpose. From one wall, a marble bust of the Times’s founder, Adolph Ochs, surveyed the passing throng with grim, unsmiling mien, a reminder to all who entered its precincts of the high sense of purpose with which he had endowed his paper.

  The front page of Ochs’s journal still bore his slogan, “All the news that’s fit to print,” and six million trees a year fell as a consequence of the determined efforts of the Times’s editors to honor his imperious command.

  From the reception rooms of the Kremlin to gossip culled in the locker rooms of Madison Square Garden, the seventy-two-page paper on sale in the vending machine opposite Ochs’s bust this December morning contained more news, more statistics, more figures, more results, more interviews, more analysis and more commentary than any other newspaper in the world.

  Grace’s destination was the newsroom on the third floor. It sprawled over an acre and a half, an area so vast that its editors had, on occasion, employed binoculars to keep track of their reporters’ movements and loudspeakers to summon them from their desks. Today, the place looked more like the actuarial clerk’s bullpen at Metropolitan Life than a set for Front Page. Diffused overhead lighting bathed the place in its sterile glow; chest-high partitions broke the area into a series of little mazes; there was enough fake-wood Formica around to equip half a dozen fast-food franchises, and, final assault on the sensibilities of the paper’s oldtime reporters, there was even carpeting on the floor.

  Grace’s first gesture was to telephone Avis’s New York headquarters. She quickly obtained the information she wanted: the truck she had noted at the armory belonged to the company’s New Brunswick, New Jersey, truckrental agency. Catching the bureaucracy of New York City in the heedless expenditure of the taxpayers’ money was one of her special pleasures, and from the instant she spotted the rental trucks lined up on the armory floor her reporter’s instincts had told her that once again she had caught some government agency stupidly squandering the city’s meager resources.

  She picked up the phone again and dialed the New Brunswick agency, glancing around as she did to be sure no one was near enough to overhear her. What she was about to do was considered a sin at The New York Times — not a mortal sin, perhaps, but a good, solid, venial one.

  “This is Desk Officer Lucia Harris of the New York State Police, Pauling Barracks,” she told the girl who answered the phone. “We’ve had a motor-vehicle collision here involving one of your vehicles. The driver was DOA at Pauling General, and unfortunately he didn’t have any ID on him. Can you give me the details on your rental agreement so we can run a trace on him?” She gave the girl the number of the truck.

  “It’ll take a moment. Shall I call you back?”

  “That’s all right. I’ll hold.”

  A few minutes later the Avis girl was on the phone again. “His driver’s license gives him as John McClintock, 104 Clear View Avenue, Las Vegas.

  It’s Nevada license 432701-6, issued May 4, 1979. Valid until May 4, 1983.”

  Grace jotted the information down on her notepad. Why, in God’s name, would anybody look for a snowremoval expert in Las Vegas? She glanced at her watch. It was a few minutes past eleven, just after eight in Las Vegas.

  From directory assistance she got the telephone number of a John McClintock at the address on the agreement. His phone rang, unanswered, for a long time before a woman replied.

  “May I speak to Mr. John McClintock, please?”

  “I’m sorry. He’s not here,” the voice replied.

  “I see. Is he in Las Vegas?”

  The woman hesitated. “Who’s calling? This is Mrs. McClintock.”

  “Oh,” Grace answered quickly. “This is the First National City Bank in New York. We have a transfer here for him and I need his instructions on how to handle it. Could you tell me where I can reach him?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” Mrs. McClintock replied. “He’s out of town for a few days.”

  “Is there some number where I could contact him?”

  This time there was a long pause before Mrs. McClintock answered. “Well, I don’t think I’m really allowed to tell you that. He’s away on government business. You’d better contact his office down at the Federal Building., Grace thanked Mrs. McClintock and hung up, feeling, as she did, a nervous chill in her intestines, the first flow of her reporter’s adrenaline warning her that something was very wrong with this story. A few minutes later, she was through to the Federal Building in Las Vegas.

  “Q Section Safeguards, O’Reilly speaking,” a voice answered when Grace got McClintock’s extension. Safeguards, she asked herself, puzzled. Safeguards against what?

  “Mr. McClintock, please.”

  “This is his desk, but he’s out of town for a few days.”

  Grace gave a little giggle which, she hoped, would convince O’Reilly that he was dealing with a dumb woman. “Oh,” she said, “what’s he off safeguarding?”

  “Who’s calling?” The voice was chill and formal.

  Again Grace invoked Citibank. “Can you tell me where I can reach him?”

  “No, I can’t. The nature of his business and his whereabouts are classified information.”

  Stunned, Grace set the telephone back in its socket. Why would the U.S. government feel it had to make a snow-removal exercise in New York classified information? And bring in people from Las Vegas to work on it?

  My God, she realized, those trucks have nothing to do with snow removal!

  That’s just a cover.

  She thought of Angelo’s phrase last night, “a typical detective’s day, running around looking for a needle in a haystack.” And the Mayor. Why had the President given him a Presidential jet to fly back to New York yesterday?

  She called Angelo’s office. There was no answer. She took out the secret NYPD telephone directory he had given her and frantically began to call, one after another, the offices of a dozen senior detectives. Not a single one answered.

  * * *

  Two minutes later, Grace was standing by the desk of Deputy Managing Editor Art Gelb. She waited until he had finished talking to another reporter, then leaned down to him. “Art,” she whispered. “I’ve got some
thing I’ve got to talk to you about right away. I think it may be very, very big.”

  * * *

  There had been six “sixty-ones;” crimes of leaving the scene of an accident, recorded on the daily crime sheets of the seventy-three precincts of the New York Police Department on Friday, December 11.

  Because of the snowstorm that number was, as Angelo had guessed it would be, well above the Department’s daily average.

  One of the six was a serious case under active investigation. It involved an elderly black woman knocked over by a motorcyclist on the pedestrian crossing at Broadway and Cathedral Parkway and transported to St. Luke’s Hospital with a broken hip. The five remaining cases all bore the same notation under the heading “Disposition”: “Detective McCann is assigned to this case.” To the outsider, he might well have appeared to be the busiest investigative officer in the New York Police Department.

  He in fact did not exist. Detective McCann was the wastebasket. His name after each of those complaints indicated the sentiments of the NYPD toward such a minor crime as leaving the scene of an accident involving a scraped fender: a lot of paperwork for nothing.

  Angelo had covered nineteen precincts and four of the recorded incidents when he called the Tenth Precinct in west midtown, the area in which he had conducted his earlymorning hunt for a hit-and-run driver years before.

  “Yeah, I got a Sixty-one here,” the clerk replied. “Procter and Gamble salesman got his fender scraped.”

  “OK,” Angelo said. “Read it to me.”

  “Complainant M-42 indicates that between the hours of one and two P.M., Friday, December 11, his motor vehicle, a 1978 Pontiac bearing New York number plate 349271 was parked in front of 149 West Thirty-seventh Street, and when he came out he observed the fender had a crease in it. Under his windshield an unknown person or persons had left a note stating: `A yellow truck hit you and took off.’ Complainant interviewed Friday, December 11, Tenth Precinct by Officer Natale. Detective McCann assigned to this case with request it be marked closed pending a further development, at which time proper and prompt police action will be taken.”

  Angelo couldn’t resist a laugh at the Department’s bureaucratese. “Tell me about that `proper and prompt police action’ you got in mind,” he remarked.

  “That note really said a yellow truck?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK. Give me the salesman’s name and address.”

  * * *

  On the other side of the United States the first warm rays of sunshine glinted off the great green rolls of Pacific surf crashing onto the Santa Monica seashore. An earlymorning jogger had just turned off the beach and headed up the cliff toward his seaside cottage. He was a hundred yards from his front door when he heard the clatter of his telephone.

  Still panting, the West Coast correspondent of The New York Times grabbed the phone and instantly recognized the caller from the intense, confidential murmur rippling from his receiver. “I’ve got something very important for you,” Art Gelb told him. “Get your stringer in Reno down to Las Vegas right away. There’s a John McClintock who works in some kind of a safeguards section in the Federal Building on Highland Street there. I want your guy to find out urgently exactly what it is this guy McClintock does and call me back as soon as he’s got it.”

  Angelo Rocchia eased the telephone back into its cradle, thinking hard as he did it. The Procter & Gamble salesman whose fender had been scraped was out making his calls on the West Side of Manhattan, his office had just told Angelo. He wouldn’t be phoning in before nightfall. There was no way to spot his car on the city’s streets; the Cincinnati soapmakers had long ago abandoned the practice of branding their salesmen’s vehicles with the company’s familiar trademark of a smiling man in a crescent moon against a darkblue field of stars.

  The only suggestion the helpful office manager had been able to make was that if Angelo wanted to reach him in a hurry he call on De Pasquale’s Hero Sandwich Bar on West Thirty-fifth just off Ninth Avenue. The salesmen working the West Side gathered there for coffee and Danish around eleven.

  He would probably be there, and if he wasn’t someone who could pin down the neighborhood where he was working probably would be.

  Four hundred Hertz trucks out there, Angelo thought, and how many yellow trucks on top of that? It was a very, very wild unscientific idea. He glanced into the garage at the busy array of FBI forensic experts. Not the kind of idea they were apt to appreciate. Almost reluctantly, he heaved his heavy frame from the Hertz manager’s chair and stalked into the garage with his deceptively awkward gait.

  It had been the salesman’s rear left fender that had gotten the scrape, so it would probably have been the truck’s right side that had done it. Angelo surveyed the pieces of the right side of the van lined against the wall of the garage, counting on them fourteen red circles, each one numbered, each representing a different bump or scrape. He picked up the sheaves of spectrographic analysis that corresponded to the numbers. Inconclusive, just as he had thought they’d be. They had identified positively traces of three brands of paint on the truck’s right panels, two used by General Motors, one by Ford. Together, the models that employed those three brands of paint represented just over fifty-five percent of the cars on the highway. A lot of help, Angelo mused, a real lot of help.

  “Something I can do for you, Detective?”

  The speaker was the agent in charge of the forensic team. His words contained, the New Yorker noted, about as much warmth as those of a bank security guard questioning a teenage Puerto Rican loitering in his lobby.

  “No,” Angelo replied. “Just looking around.”

  “Well, why don’t you wait out there in the manager’s office where you’ll be more comfortable? We’ll let you know if we’ve got anything for you.”

  I’m about as welcome in here, Angelo thought, as an archbishop in an abortion mill. Was it because of those classified papers they’d pulled out of the files? Or just the feds’ traditional mistrust of other law-enforcement agencies?

  In a corner of the garage, he noted his young partner earnestly talking to one of his colleagues. He had barely gotten the time of day from him since they arrived. No one seems to want me around here, or anyplace else for that matter, he reflected bitterly, thinking back to his telephone conversation of the night before. He strolled over to Rand and tossed a conspiratorial arm over his shoulder like a coach who’s about to send a tight end onto the field with a criticial third downplay.

  “Come here, kid,” he growled, edging him away from his fellow agents. There was no question of telling him what he really had in mind. The young agent was much too procedures-conscious for that. He’d say, “Have headquarters send out someone else,” and that wasn’t Angelo’s idea at all. On the other hand, one thing you could probably count on Rand for was a sense of solidarity, the “We’re all cops together, so don’t rat to the boss” thing.

  He would lose Rand’s respect, but why the hell should he care about that?

  “Listen, kid,” he whispered, “Cover for me for an hour or so, will you? Your guys got nothing for me and-” he winked at the FBI agent “I got a little something over here, a little biscuit I haven’t seen for a while. I’m going to just drop in and say hello to her.”

  Rand whitened in shock more than anger. “My God, Angelo, you can’t do that!

  Don’t you realize how desperately important it is to find this-” He was about to say “bomb” when he caught himself.

  “This what?” Angelo asked. There it was again, this thing they kept dropping in front of him, then pulling away.

  “The barrel of gas we’re looking for.”

  “Tell me, kid, what’s so secret about chlorine gas the government has to classify stuff on it? Or is it really chlorine gas they got in that barrel?”

  “Of course it is.”

  For a second Angelo gazed at him, his eyes as appraising as they had been twentyfour hours earlier scrutinizing the dip in the front seat of
his car. Then he jerked his head toward the agent in charge. “Your friend over there wants somebody to run out for coffee and a Danish while I’m gone, tell him they got a diner just up the street. I got the very clear message that’s all he figures a New York cop is good for anyway.”

  “Angelo.” Rand was almost begging. “Going away like that is like …” The young man paused, trying to think of the worst example he could cite. “Like a soldier deserting his post in wartime.”

  The New Yorker snorted, squeezing the young agent’s shoulders as he did.

  “Don’t worry about it, kid. I’ll see if she’s got a friend for you.”

  * * *

  Arthur Gelb paced his office in the third-floor newsroom of The New York Times. The deputy managing editor was a lanky, intense man, all kinetic energy and raw nerve ends, a man who kept his staff in a state of constant tension — some would have said terror-with a nonstop flow of ideas, suggestions and queries. Like the paper he so proudly represented, he was not so much a conservative as he was a man devoted to a certain notion of responsibility. Above all, he was dedicated to the proposition that if it hadn’t happened in the pages of The New York Times it hadn’t happened at all, and to his growing anger he sensed that something very important was happening in his city and the Times didn’t know about it.

  Gelb suddenly stopped his pacing. Rushing through the maze of the newsroom was one of the dozen men he had sent to scour the precincts to find out what was going on after Grace’s whispered conversation. On his face Gelb could read that special sense of purpose always present on a young reporter’s visage when he knows he’s about to impress his editor.

  “This is what’s going onl” he gasped, out of breath, dropping the photos of the Dajanis onto Gelb’s desk. “They’re Palestinians. Cop killers. Everyone in town’s out looking for them.”