The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  Angelo commented grimly.

  Abe Stern shook his head in dismayed agreement. He put his chunky hand on Angelo’s shoulder. “We took a big chance on you, my friend. I hope to God you were right.”

  As he wandered off, hands behind his back, head bowed in concern, his words, “We took a big chance on you” kept coming back to Angelo like one of those Hindu phrases the kids kept repeating to themselves-except in their case they were supposed to bring you peace.

  Every time they cross out another street on that map without finding the barrel, the detective realized, there’s another pair of eyes in this room on me.

  Where did I go wrong, he asked himself yet again, where, where? The FBI lab in Brooklyn had called in the results of their analysis of the salesman’s fender. The paint matchup checked. There was the whore. They had found two countermen in a pizza joint four doors down from the broad’s brownstone who recognized the guy. Everything checked. So why hadn’t they found it?

  He walked back to the desk he and Rand had been assigned, concentrating so intently he banged his thigh on the sharp edge of a filing cabinet along his path. As he sat down on the desk, rubbing his leg in pain and frustration, he turned to his young partner. “What the hell did we do wrong, kid? What do they teach you to do down there in Quantico in a case like this?”

  “Angelo,” Rand replied in what he meant to be a quiet, comforting manner, “in Quantico they teach us to always go by the book, but you don’t seem to believe much in the book.”

  Angelo gave his shoulders a despairing toss. “There are times to go by the book, times to forget it. Problem is knowing when to do which.” Wearily, he rubbed his eyes in the palm of his hand. “My book says when something doesn’t work, you go back to square one and start all over again. Try to find out where you went wrong.”

  “Mine does, too.”

  Angelo rubbed his still-aching leg, studying the crowded room, the strained faces trying to conceal their fear, listening to the strangely subdued voices of the men working the radios, the phones, consulting the pictures and the chart on the wall. It had all seemed so logical, so straightforward when he was down there in the underground command post. Was it really possible this bomb was somewhere else, uptown, and they were all looking for it down here because he’d made a mistake? He stopped himself. There were things it was better not to think about.

  “Square one is back where that guy’s car was hit, right?”

  Rand grunted his agreement as Angelo was getting to his feet.

  “I’m going to ask Feldman to let us out of here for ten minutes. Let’s go back there and walk through this one more time.”

  * * *

  Kamal saw the flashing red lights first, just after they passed Irving Place, coming up to Union Square. “Slow down,” he ordered.

  A fine, cold drizzle had begun to fall, half snow and half rain, and he leaned forward to peer through the blur of the windshield at the crowd in the square ahead. He could see half a dozen squad cars and two ladder trucks drawn up in a sort of crescent. The gray wooden barriers were out, and police and people were spilling into the square. Traffic police were waving cars away from Thirteenth Street and University Place, heading them onto Fourteenth.

  “Stay well over to the right, so that no one gets a look at you,” he commanded his sister. “Maybe it’s a fire.” The choked-up traffic edged slowly west on Fourteenth Street toward Fifth Avenue. Near the corner, the crowds thickened. For a moment Kamal thought of lowering the window and asking what was happening. No, he told himself. With my accent, it’s too dangerous. Then, as they drew up to the intersection with Fifth, he understood. Two more fire trucks and a police car were drawn up in a line across Fifth from curb to curb, completely sealing off the avenue to traffic.

  “They know where it is,” he said to Laila. His words came in that flat, mechanical manner of his, but inside the black unreasoning rage he had felt on the FDR Drive engulfed him once more. We have failed, he thought, we have failed again.

  Laila inched the car along toward Sixth Avenue. It too was blocked off on the south side by police cars.

  “It’s all over, Kamal,” she said. “We’ve got to get out. When they find Whalid they’ll know who we are. Then they’ll have police looking for us at every border crossing into Canada.”

  Kamal said nothing. He was sitting rigidly upright, his back not even touching the seat of the car, staring straight ahead, tears of fury and frustration coursing down his cheeks.

  Laila turned north on Sixth. Better get away from this traffic, she thought. She had driven two blocks when she felt Kamal’s hand squeeze her forearm so tightly she gave a little yelp of pain.

  “Stop,” he said. “I’m getting out.”

  “Kamal, you’re crazy!”

  This time she screamed in pain at the pressure on her arm.

  “Stop, I said. I’m going in on foot.”

  He had opened the door before the car even came to a halt. “Go north,” he told her, “as fast as you can drive. At least one of us will get home.” He slid out, slammed the door shut and leaped to the sidewalk.

  For a second, Laila was too stunned to react. She watched in the rearview mirror as he started back down the avenue in the rain, head low, the checkered cap pulled down, his collar turned up to conceal his face. He’ll never make it, she told herself. For an instant she considered putting the car in reverse, going back down the avenue after him, to urge him to flee with her. Instead she jammed the gear lever into drive. One simple thought bad overpowered her, like the rush of a powerful anesthetic. It was an almost demoniacal desire to get away, to survive, to get as far away from this city as fast as she could.

  * * *

  Barely fifteen blocks from Laila’s speeding car, Angelo bad once again stopped in front of the location at which the Proctor & Gamble salesman’s fender had been scraped. Unaware of the chlorine-gas threat or indifferent to it, the leather jackets prowled the sidewalk in search of their willing preys. Angelo looked at them scornfully, thinking with satisfaction for just an instant of the impact a bomb would have on this neighborhood. Then he turned his gaze back up the street.

  If you were going into the Village with a truck, Christopher’s the way you’d go. A big, open street. You wanted to come into town lower down, you’d take Houston; farther uptown, Fourteenth.

  “It’s simple, isn’t it, kid?” he said, ostensibly to Rand, in fact to himself.

  “Maybe too simple.”

  Angelo let the car begin to drift slowly up the street. The two men scrutinized the fagades along their way, looking for something, they were not sure what, searching for one flaw in their apparently faultless logic.

  * * *

  The man they were looking for was stalking through the rain up Seventh Avenue, sealed off from the bomb he wanted to detonate by the police lines on Fourteenth Street. Kamal had realized that the police were looking for someone. He’d walked down to a point across the street from their lines and seen the way they were checking everyone crossing their barricades. Was it him? Was it because of the one shot his brother had been able to get off before Kamal killed him?

  He should never have left the garage. That was why we failed, he thought, we wanted too much to live. How could he get back in now? A disguise of some kind, but what kind? And where would he find it? Or should he just have the courage to pick a crowded street and take his chances?

  Behind him, Kamal heard a siren’s wail. Instinctively, he drew away from the curb and pulled up his jacket collar. It was not a police car that swept by him, but an ambulance, the lights glowing in its van. As it reached the corner of Nineteenth, he could see its taillights flare bright red. The ambulance slowed, turned, then accelerated again, racing off into the rain and the dark.

  Karnal watched it, frozen on the sidewalk. Then he broke into a run, his feet driving forward as fast as he could move them, racing for the corner, for the fading white form of the ambulance.

  * * *

  Ange
lo and Rand idled at the stop light at Christopher and Greenwich Streets, still scrutinizing in silence the street around them. Suddenly, Rand laid his hand on Angelo’s arm.

  “Angelo,” he said. “Look.” His free hand waved excitedly toward the white arrow hanging from the stop light.

  The older man glanced at him appreciatively. “Yeah,” Angelo mumbled. “One way. How about that?” He began talking to himself. “Suppose they weren’t going over toward the center of the Village. Suppose they turned east onto Christopher because they wanted to double back, get onto a westbound street like Charles. Or Barrow. And being real clever guys they hike all the way over there to Eighth to get their pizza pies to throw us off just in case somebody saw them. In that case, our mistake was beginning our search over there in the center of the Village instead of down here.”

  He glanced at the bars on the street corners, the brick rear wall of Saint Luke’s School. The area, Angelo knew, hadn’t been searched yet. “Jesus Christ, kid,” he said, “you know you could just be right. That could just be it.” He shot the car through the intersection as the light changed. “We gotta get back there and convince them to flood a hundred guys down here to comb this place out.”

  * * *

  The sharp clap of Kamal’s running feet rang up from the pavement of Nineteenth Street. He ran fast, elbows digging, breathing through his mouth in steady gulps as he had been trained to do in the camps, his eyes, all his attention, concentrated on the white vehicle, a light blinking from its roof, on the other side of Eighth Avenue.

  His hat flew off. He ignored it, ignored the stares of the people crossing Eighth Avenue. He’d take his chances on being recognized now. Success was too close not to be grasped in one final, furious lunge. He slowed down as he drew up to the ambulance. The rear doors were open and its stretcher was gone. Trotting by the brightly lit entrance hall of the tenement at 362 where the ambulance was parked, Kamal could see a gaggle of curious neighbors on the landing, peering from their doorways at the blue-coated figure of the ambulance driver easing the front end of the stretcher down the stairs.

  He sprinted for the ambulance, slammed its rear doors shut and leaped into the driver’s seat. The engine was running. The siren, he thought, where’s the siren? I’ve got to have the siren to make it work. Frantically, his eyes swept the dashboard looking for the unfamiliar knob of the instrument that would guarantee his passage through the police lines.

  Behind him, he heard angry shouts. He glanced in the sideview mirror. The blue-jacketed ambulance driver was running toward him, gesticulating wildly. On the tenement doorstep the intern in white had the end of the stretcher in one hand, a bottle of intravenous solution held over his dying patient in the other, a look of total disbelief affixed to his face. The siren, Kamal almost screamed out loud, where’s the siren? He turned. The attendant was only a few yards away, ready to leap for the door. No time left to look. Kamal threw the ambulance into gear and raced down the street. As he did, he heard the outraged ambulance driver shouting to a spectator, “Get nine-eleven!”

  Kamal turned left at Ninth Avenue, finding at last the red knob that activated the ambulance’s siren. Sweating profusely, he rushed down Ninth to Fourteenth Street, then started to swing across the traffic toward the blockaded entry to Hudson Street. As he did, he almost screamed with joy at the sight before his rain-spattered windshield. A patrolman leaped into his squad car and pulled it out of line, opening a hole in the police cordon through which a second policeman was frantically waving him.

  I made it, he thought, shooting through the gap in the cars, I’m inside!

  Angelo, less than ten blocks away, was so concentrated on what he was going to say at the Sixth Precinct that he barely heard the dispatcher on his radio: “West Midtown and Lower Manhattan cars. Just stolen in vicinity 362 West Nineteenth Street, St. Vincent’s Ambulance Number 435, white with orange side markings.”

  * * *

  The driver of the ambulance, struggling for breath, ran up to the police barrier at Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Knowing the bureaucracy of his employers at the Emergency Medical Service, he had decided that the only way to save his dying patient was to run back to the hospital for a second ambulance himself.

  “Hey,” one of the patrolmen at the barricade called out to him, “where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  “Son of a bitch!” the driver exploded, gesturing at the police all around.

  “Where the fuck were all you guys when my bus got stolen?”

  “Oh, yeah,” the cop said. “We got that on the radio. That was your ambulance? You see the guy?”

  “Yeah, I seen him. Almost had my hands on him.”

  “Come here a second,” the cop said, leading the driver to one of the patrol cars in the cordon. He handed him Kamal’s picture. “He look like this?”

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “Christi” The patrolman leaned into the car and grabbed the speaker of his radio. “Central,” he shouted. “This is Car Six Able, Fourteenth and Eighth.

  I have the complainant on the stolen Saint Vmny’s ambulance and he indicates the man who stole his ambulance may be the subject we’re looking for.”

  Angelo heard the call as he was preparing to park his car at the Sixth Precinct station house on West Tenth Street. This time the words registered instantly on his mind. “Shit!” he exclaimed. “He’s inside!”

  Damn it, he thought, why didn’t I think of that? I figured it was some drunk, some kid getting himself a tendollar ride. The guy must have known the cops would wave the ambulance through. Who’d figure?

  “Where are you going?” Rand asked as Angelo spun his car into the broad alley paralleling the Sixth Precinct station house.

  “To Charles and then Barrow to run a fast check on your ideal”

  He rocketed along Charles leaning on his horn all the way. It was a quiet, mixed street of tenements, garages, private homes, a sidewalk cafe, trailing off as it neared the river into lofts, garages and half-empty warehouses. Crossing Greenwich Street, Angelo gasped. Parked down almost at the end of the street, close to the river’s edge, its interior lights still burning, he could see the white bulk of an ambulance. As soon as he saw it, Angelo switched off his headlights so that the car could glide silently up behind the ambulance. He picked out its orange stripes and, in the glow of its interior lights, he could read the words “St. Vincent’s Hospital” and its number, 435, on its white rear doors.

  “It’s himI” he whispered to Rand. The ambulance was parked in front of a kind of a warehouse-loft, three stories high, a double garage fronting onto the street. The garage doors were closed, but beside them a door into the building was ajar. “He’s in there.”

  He grabbed his radio mike, squinting as he did to read the numbers on the building across the street. He was proud of the fact he still had twenty-twenty vision and, as he liked to joke, could read upside down particularly well — so that he could read the papers on a guy’s desk.

  “Ten-thirteen,” he called, “199 Charles. By the river.” There may have been an atomic bomb in New York, but Angelo knew that nothing was going to get help to the scene quicker than that “Assist patrolman” call. “The suspect we’re looking for is here,” he added.

  “Come on, kid,” he said. “If he’s fooling around with a bomb that can blow up half the city in there, we can’t wait for help. We got to take him ourselves.” He gestured to the half-open door. “You stay there and give me backup.”

  The street was silent and deserted. Off in the distance, Rand and Angelo could hear the rising wail of sirens, probably the first cars responding to their 10.13. They slipped out of the car, leaving its doors open to minimi7p noise, and headed for the warehouse. Its door gave onto a long, dingy corridor. At the far end they could see a flickering, uneven glow of light falling against the wall. Probably, Angelo guessed, a flashlight moving in a room just off the corridor. He pointed to it.

  “There he is,” he whispered. />
  He peered down the corridor. He couldn’t see a thing, just the wavering light in the distance, and barely, just barely, he thought he heard noise at the end of the corridor. He stepped inside, moving quickly as he did behind the half-open door so that he was concealed by the shadow it cast and not silhouetted by the lights of the street outside. The detective stared down the corridor ahead of him. It was perhaps twenty-five, thirty feet long, but to Angelo it seemed interminable. He took a half-breath and slowly, deliberately, began to work his way along its length.

  * * *

  Inside Kamal Dajani squatted behind the black cylindrical form of his brother’s bomb on the loading ramp at the back of the garage. He spread his checklist onto the cement floor beside the blue metallic case containing the bomb’s firing mechanisms. Methodically, in the glare of his flashlight, he reviewed exactly what he had to do to reopen the case. First he had to punch the INIT button. When the green light glowed “IDENTIFICATION,” he would tap “OIC2” on the keyboard. Then, when the word “CORRECT” appeared he could tap the code 2F47 which would allow him to open the case and switch cassettes.

  He rubbed his hands nervously, feeling the sweat greasing his palms, thinking. Maybe he should just take the chance of kicking it, of doing something violent to the box to trigger its protective devices. Kamal was too distrusting for that. Suppose his brother had somehow altered those systems? Then he might damage the entire package. There was no question of failing now. He glanced at his codes again and turned to the box.

  * * *

  Outside, Angelo was working his way, careful step by careful step, down the corridor. The trick was to listen for street noises outside, like the rumble of a passing truck, and use them as cover for your moves. Trouble was, this was such a quiet neighborhood that it seemed to Angelo the only thing he could hear in the darkness was the thump of his racing heart. He remembered what they had told him at the physical about the high blood pressure and how the heart attacks come at times like this from sudden stress. Not now, he begged some ill-defined deity, not now.