The Fifth Horseman

PART 1

The unseasonably cold December day drew to a close. Mounds of still-fresh snow, the heritage of the unexpected storm which had swept up the eastern seaboard seventy two hours before, lined the streets of the nation’s capital. That snow, and the freezing weather which had followed it, had kept most of the city’s 76,000 inhabitants indoors this Sunday afternoon, December 13.

The family dwelling behind the familiar faqade of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had left their living quarters only once, to walk through the streets around their dwelling, savouring as they did the surprise of the few countrymen they passed at finding their chief executive in their midst. Now the somber strains of Sibelius’ Finlandia filled the White House living quarters, a reminder of the pleasure the President of the United States found in the works of classical composers like Bach, Vivaldi and Wagner. In the dining-room fireplace a birch log fire cracked, giving the room a cozy, almost snug air. It also reminded the President of the place he preferred above all others, the sitting-room of his rambling ranch house with its huge stone fireplace. He could sit there before it for hours, thinking and dreaming.

Precisely at seven o’clock, the President and his family sat down to supper. On this December evening that family included his wife and two of their four children. Theirs could not have been a more informal group nor, appropriately enough, one more typical of a certain image of the two hundred and thirty million Americans over whom the man at the head of the table presided. Both he and his wife were wearing well-washed jeans. As she usually did on Sundays, she’d ordered the chef to prepare her husband’s favorite meal, gazpacho, chili and barbecued spareribs. The President invited his daughter to offer grace, and the four people joined hands around the table while she asked the Lord’s blessing on the simple meal they were about to eat. Then, with a smile for his wife, the President attacked his gazpacho.

The Presidency of the United States is a cruel burden, one to age any man, and the energetic glow of strength and purpose the President had brought to the White House had already begun to dim under the trials of his office.

The lines that crinkled the corners of his sad dark eyes were deeper and far more evident now than they had been when he entered this house, the deep auburn hair in which he took great pride was showing, at last, the gray he’d avoided for years.

Still, the nation led by the man dining in the White House this December evening remained the most powerful, the richest, the most wasteful, the most envied and imitated nation on earth, the world’s first producer of coal, steel, uranium, copper and natural gas. Her farmlands were a wonder of productivity. Nine tenths of the world’s computers, almost all its microprocessors, three quarters of its civil aircraft, a third of its automobiles came out of American factories.

All that was safeguarded by a military establishment which possessed a destructive capacity unique in human history; the most sophisticated network of satellites that technology could produce; by seven layers of electronic warning systems and radar installations so sensitive they would detect a migrating flight of ducks hundreds of miles from the U.S.

coastline. Indeed, the countrymen of the President could, that December evening, consider themselves a privileged caste, the people on earth least likely to be exposed to the horror of an enemy’s assault.

The President bad just finished the last of his soup when the phone rang in the sitting room next door. The sound was seldom heard in the living quarters of the White House. Unlike most of his predecessors, he preferred working off tightly worded pieces of paper, and his staff was trained to restrict his phone calls to only the most urgent messages. His wife rose to take it. A frown clouded her usually composed features when she came back.

“I’m sorry. It was Jack Eastman. He says he has to see you right away.”

Jack Eastman was the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs, a former Air Force major general who had taken over the corner office of the White House’s West Wing made famous by Henry Kissinger.

The President dabbed his lips with his napkin and excused himself. Two minutes later he opened the door of the living quarters himself. Eastman was a lean, youthful-looking fifty-three year old, all bone and muscle, one of those men to whom an old classmate, an old Army buddy, an old mistress can exclaim after twenty years of separation, “You haven’t changed a bit”

and, for once, mean it. One glance at Eastman told the President that this was not a routine interruption of his Sunday evening. He waved him to a seat and settled himself in a comfortable apricot wing chair beside the television set.

Two kinds of men had occupied the high office Eastman now held, presiding over the flow of documents that was the great trunk artery upon which the security of the United States depended. There were those like Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, ambitious men determined to run the world for the President of the United States from their seat beside the throne; or those like Al Haig, who had served Richard Nixon, products of the military, brilliant chiefs of staff, sorting out the options, honing the recommendations down to a fine point, but always careful to leave the real decision-making in the President’s hands.

Eastman belonged to the latter group. He was all business. Calculated flamboyance, the need for attention, an obsessive preoccupation with the media were as abhorrent to him as anonymity would have been to Henry Kissinger.

He handed the President a white folder. “Sir, I think you should begin by reading this. It’s the translation of a document that was delivered to the Madison Gate at lunchtime in the form of a tape recording in Arabic.”

The President opened the folder and took out the two typewritten pages it contained.

The President looked up at his adviser, consternation and astonishment on his face. “Jack, what in God’s name is this all about?”

“Sir, we just don’t know. We haven’t been able to determine whether this is really from Qaddafi or whether it’s just another hoax of some sort. But what’s of real concern is the fact that the nuclear-emergency command post at the Department of Energy out in Germantown tells us the design that came in with this thing is a very, very sophisticated piece of work. They’ve sent it on to Los Alamos for analysis. We’re waiting to hear from them now.

I’ve convened a Crisis Committee to deal with it for eight o’clock in the West Wing, and I thought you should know about it.”

The President pressed the index finger of his left hand to his lips, thinking hard.

“How about the Libyans?” he softly inquired. “Surely they don’t confirm the authenticity of this?”

“We haven’t been able to raise any of their people either here or in New York, Mr. President. But they have so few people stationed here it could just be a coiRcidence.”

“And our people in Tripoli?”

“State’s onto them. But it’s in the middle of the night over there, and getting hold of someone in authority in Tripoli in a hurry is always a problem.”

“Has someone run a voice analysis on the tape?”

“The Agency has, sir. Unfortunately, the result was inconclusive. There seems to be too much background noise on their comparison tapes.”

The President knotted his eyebrows in displeasure. The shortcomings of the CIA were one of his constant concerns.

“Jack.” His mind was moving forward now. “It seems to me highly unlikely that this is from Qaddafi. No head of a sovereign nation is going to try to blackmail us by hiding an atomic bomb in New York. At the very worst it would kill twenty, thirty thousand people. A man like Qaddafi has got to know we have the capacity to utterly destroy him and his entire nation in retaliation. He’d be mad to do something like that.”

Behind the President, through the room’s graceful windows, Eastman could see the lights of the White House Christmas tree, bright golden sparks flung against the December night.

“I agree, sir. I’m inclined to think it’s a hoax of some sort or, at the worst, a terrorist group masquerading behind Qaddafi for some reason.”

The President nodded. He had reread not so long ago the FBI’s 1977 study on the menace of nuclear terrorism and remembered clearly its conclusions: there was no danger of such an act from any of the identified and localized terrorist groups with one exception, the Palestinians. In the event of an Arab-Israeli peace settlement which left the Palestinian movement embittered and desperate, there were, the report warned, elements among them with the sophistication required for acts of nuclear terror.

The telephone rang. “Excuse me,” Eastman said. “It’s probably for me. I told the switchboard I was with you.”

As his National Security Assistant moved to the telephone, the President stared moodily out the window. He was not, he knew, the first American President to face the possibility that terrorists had hidden a nuclear device in an American city. That had been Gerald Ford. The year had been 1974, the city Boston, and that threat too had involved the intransigent Palestinian problem. It had come from a group of Palestinian terrorists who threatened to detonate an atomic device in the Massachusetts capital if eleven of their fellows held in Israeli jails were not released. Like all of the sixty-odd nuclear threats made against U.S. cities or institutions in the decade of the seventies, that one had turned out to be a hoax.

Before it bad, however, his predecessors in the White House had to ask themselves whether they should — or could — evacuate the city — and not a word had ever leaked to the Bostonians whose lives might have been at stake.

“Sir?”

The President started as he turned to look at his adviser. He had paled noticeably. He was holding the telephone with one hand cupped over its mouthpiece. “Los Alamos just called in a preliminary analysis of the blueprint. They say it’s a viable weapons design.”

Across the Potomac River from the White House an elegant auburn-haired young woman in her middle thirties hurried through the waiting room of National Airport and down the stairs leading toward the Eastern Airlines shuttle terminal. She stopped in front of a bank of gray metallic left-luggage lockers and chose one at random. She placed a small white envelope inside, rolled two quarters into the slot commanding its lock and removed the key. Then she opened a second and deposited a bulky shopping bag inside. It contained a blond wig and a tan polo coat. This time she did not remove the key. Her task completed, she crossed the hall to a telephone booth and swiftly dialed a number. When her party replied, she mumbled only two words into the receiver, the number of the key she held up before her: “K six-oh-two.”

Seconds later, she was rushing toward the terminal and the eight-o’clock shuttle to New York.

The man who had taken her telephone call carefully noted the numerals K602 on a slip of paper on which a telephone number, 202-456-1414, was already written. It was the number of the White House switchboard. He tucked the paper into the side pocket of his sheepskin coat and stepped out of his public telephone booth into the early-evening crowd flowing through New York’s Pennsylvania Station. He was in his late thirties, a florid-faced man with a thin black moustache and a tendency to corpulence that his bulky coat effectively concealed.

He sauntered through the waiting room, then hurried up the station steps and out into the cold. A few moments later he was at the corner of Broadway and forty-second Street, the edge of Times Square, savoring once again the torrents of light that had so impressed him years ago on his first visit to New York. No energy crisis here, he thought, staring at the glowing marquees, the garishly lit store windows, the advertising panels, sparkling carpets of color stretched out along the walls of night.

With the deliberate pace of a man who is looking for something, he crossed the street and started up Broadway. The spectacle on those sidewalks was even more grotesque, more Breughelian, than he had remembered. At Forty-third, a Salvation Army band and chorus, shivering in their blue uniforms, struggled through “O Come All Ye Faithful,” only a few yards away from a gaggle of whores in satin hot pants, the shiny fabrics of their trousers clinging so tightly to their hips and upper thighs that every detail of the wares they offered was available for inspection.

You found every face in the world in that crowd, he mused. Gawking tourists; well-dressed theatergoers indifferent to the throngs around them; black pimps in leather greatcoats and high-heeled shoes; slum kids down from uptown screeching at each other like migrating starlings; shuffling winos, hats held out for a couple of coins; potbellied cops, pickpockets scanning the crowd for a victim, soldiers and sailors, their faces so young, so trusting.

At Forty-sixth Street a Santa Claus so emaciated no amount of padding could disguise him adequately for his role listlessly tolled his bell before an empty alms bucket. Just behind him, a pair of black transvestites in hip-high leather boots and peroxided wigs called out from a doorway, the timbre of their falsettos leaving no doubt about their sex.

Crossing the street, sensing the vibrancy, the palpable, dynamic human dimension of those throngs, he felt a sharp twinge of pain cramp his stomach. The ulcer. He turned into a Howard Johnson and ordered a glass of milk. Then he renewed his march up Broadway.

Suddenly, the sound of Frank Sinatra singing “Regrets, I’ve had a few, too few to mention” told him he bad found what he was looking for. He entered a brightly lit radio and record shop, walked down its lines of albums and tapes to the banks of empty cassettes. Anxiously, nervously, he picked through them, looking for the one he wanted.

“Say, my friend,” the clerk announced, “we got a special on Sonys. Three for four ninety-nine.”

“No,” he replied. “I need a BASF, a thirtyminute BASF.”

The clerk shrugged and reached for a box on the shelf behind him. He threw three BASF tapes on the counter. “There you go. Three for five ninety-five.”

His customer picked one up. “Thanks,” he said, a hesitant, almost forced smile on his face, “but I only need one.”

A few blocks away from Times Square, at the Kennedy Child Study Center on East Sixty-seventh Street, the Daughters of Charity of the Order of Saint Vincent de Paul prepared to open a spectacle of a vastly different sort. Gently, as unobtrusively as possible, they shepherded their children toward the tinseled brilliance of the Christmas tree beckoning to them like a lighthouse of hope from the center of the auditorium.

The spastic uncertainty of the children’s movements, the slant of their eyes, the heavy tongues that rolled around their half-open mouths, all bore witness to the curse which lay upon their little bodies. They were mongoloids.

The mother superior motioned to the children to sit down, took an electric cord and plugged it into a socket. At the sight of the sparkling tissue of light inflaming the tree, a pathetic babble of discordant sound rose from the wondering faces around it.

The mother superior stepped toward their parents gathered around the room.

“Maria Rocchia,” she announced, “is going to open our program by singing for us the first lines of `O Little Town of Bethlehem.’”

She reached into the circle of uplifted faces and took the hand of a ten-year-old with black hair tied in pigtails that tumbled to her shoulder blades. Gently, the superior coaxed her toward the center of the circle.

The child stood there a moment, terrified. Finally she opened her mouth.

The only sound which escaped was a raucous bleat. Her head began to shake violently, sending her pigtails swirling about her. She stamped her feet in fury and frustration.

In the first row, a middle-aged man, his heavy torso wrapped in a well-pressed gray suit, reached a hand upward and plucked nervously at the collar of his white shirt. Each gesture of the child, each incoherent sound she emitted, sent a tremor of anguish through his heavy body. She was his only child. Since his wife had died of lymphatic cancer three years before, she had been in the nuns’ care.

Angelo Rocchia stared at his daughter as though somehow the intensity of the love radiating from his ruddy face might calm the tempest shaking her frail figure. Finally she stopped. A first hesitant sound, then another and another flowed from her mouth. The tone was harsh, yet the rhythm underlying it was perfect.

Angelo Rocchia dabbed with relief at the sweat sparkling on his temple just where the retreating skin of his forehead met the mass of his wavy gray hair. He unbuttoned the jacket of his suit and let his chest sag. As he did, one of the attributes of his calling became visible on his right hip.

It was a Smith and Wesson .38 heavy-barrel service revolver. He was a detective first grade of the New York Police Department.

Twenty-three miles from the White House, deep in the Maryland countryside, a man in an underground cocoon reached for a telephone at the same time the little girl in New York was concluding her carol. He was the duty officer of the Department of Energy’s Germantown, Maryland, nuclear-emergency command post, one of the dozens of steel-and-concrete moleholes, some secret, some not so secret, from which the United States would be run in an emergency or a nuclear war.

On the order flashed to him by Jack Eastman in the White House, minutes after Los Alamos’ preliminary analysis of the weapons design had come in, he was about to set into motion the most effective response the U.S.

government had been able to devise to the menace of nuclear terrorism. His gray telephone gave him access to the U.S. government’s “Autodin-Autovon”

closed military communications circuit, a global network whose five-digit numbers were listed in a seventy-four-page green volume that was probably the most secret telephone book in the world.

“National Military Command Center, Major Evans,” came a voice answering his call from another underground command post, this one far below the Pentagon.

“Department of Energy, Emergency Operations Center,” the warrant officer continued. He had no need to corroborate his identity or the source of his call since he was talking over a direct, secure line. “We have a nuclear emergency, code priority `Broken Arrow.”’

He suppressed a shiver speaking those words. They were the code for the highest priority assigned to a peacetime nuclear crisis by the Department of Energy.

“Emergency site New York City. We require airlift facilities for a full mobilization of our dedicated personnel and equipment.”

Those words were sending into action one of the most secret organizations under the control of the U.S. government, a collection of scientists and technicians kept on twenty-four-hour alert at the Department of Energy’s Germantown headquarters, at the nuclear-weapons laboratories in Los Alamos and in Livermore, California, and at the old nuclear testing ranges north of Las Vegas.

Inevitably the group was known officially by an acronym, “NEST” for “Nuclear Explosives Search Teams.” With their ultrasensitive neutron and gamma-ray detectors, their carefully refined and highly secret search techniques, the NEST teams represented the best scientific answer the United States had for the threat posed by the envelope delivered earlier in the day to the White House gate.

At the Pentagon, Major Evans pushed a series of code numbers onto the computer terminal at his communications console. In a second, the essential details of the emergency he had been requested to handle appeared on the television screen in front of him. He saw he would have to stage an airlift of two hundred men and their equipment out of Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque and Travis Air Force Base in northern California. The screen also showed him that the Military Air Command at Scott Air Force Base outside St. Louis had orders to assign an emergency of this sort top priority.

The major’s computer console provided a last injunction: the planes must be routed to the Air Force base nearest the emergency site to allow the government to run the coming operation in strict secrecy, as far from civilian eyes as possible. He flicked another query into his computer terminal.

“Your assembly area,” he told the warrant officer in Germantown, “will be McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey.” Eighteen miles southeast of Trenton, an hour’s fast driving from the Lincoln Tunnel, McGuire was the closest base to New York that could handle Starlifters. The Pentagon major looked at the clock overhead. As he was talking, his deputy beside him had already been in contact with the Scott Air Force Base operations desk.

“I mark nineteen fifty-nine Eastern,” he told Germantown. “Your first designated aircraft will reach Kirkland at eighteen-thirty Mountain.”

High in the night sky over Kansas, a C-141 carrying a load of spare engines to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas had just shifted course and was droning southwest to Albuquerque.

Hunched over his chart table, its navigator was already working out the details of the flight plan he would follow on his trip back to New York.

It was precisely eight o’clock when the President of the United States entered the National Security Council conference room in the West Wing of the White House. The men and women in the room rose the instant his familiar figure appeared in the doorway. To even his most sophisticated advisers, there was always a special aura about the personage of the President, some intimation of the crushing dimensions of the problems he bore, of the awesome power that was his, of the responsibilities which made the holder of his office unique among men. He motioned to them to sit, while he remained standing, biting his lower lip as he often did when he was trying to concentrate. Before coming down from his living quarters, he’d changed into a suit and tie, a reflection of the respect he, too, felt for the high office he held.

“I want to thank you all for being here tonight,” he said in the studied, mannered tone he liked to employ for dramatic effect, “and ask you to pray with me that what’s brought us here is just a hoax because …” his voice trailed off “… because if it’s not, we’ve got a long, long night ahead of us.”

He took his place in one of the inexpensive chairs upholstered in rust fabric ringing the oval conference table. The room was as unprepossessing, as unimaginative a place as the board room of a medium-sized Middle Western manufacturer of cardboard containers. Yet it was here that the thermonuclear Armageddon had been envisaged during the Cuban Missile Crisis; that the decisions which sent half a million Americans to fight and die in Vietnam had been debated; the plight of the fifty U.S. hostages seized by followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini pondered.

Its banal appearance was deceptive. At the touch of a button a massive screen came down from one wall. Another button swept aside a set of curtains to reveal an electronic mapboard. Beside each seat was a drawer containing a secure red telephone. Most important were the facilities of the White House Communications Center just beyond, holding the room in an Ifshaped embrace. There, banks of communications consoles with television-like screens linked the room and the White House to every vital nerve center of the U.S. government: the Pentagon, the CIA, State, the National Security Agency, the Strategic Air Command, NORAD’s National Command Center in Colorado Springs. A call coming out of that conference room could be dispatched to any U.S. military base in the world, to the gunnery officer of a guided-missile destroyer cruising off GuantAanamo Bay in Cuba, to most U.S. military aircraft in flight.

The President glanced at the two dozen people filling the room. The principals, seated at the conference table itself, constituted the inner core of the U.S. government, the same kind of ad-hoc emergency committee that had guided the government debates in the Iranian hostage crisis: the directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretaries of Defense and Energy and the Deputy Secretary of State, sitting in for the Secretary, who was on a tour of Latin America.

The President turned first to William Webster, the soft-spoken Missouri jurist who led the 8,400 agents of the FBI. Since the Boston incident, his Bureau had had the primary responsibility for handling nuclear extortion threats. “Bill,” he asked, “what have you got on this?”

“We’ve reason to believe, Mr. President, the extortion package was assembled outside the United States,” Webster began. “Our lab has established that the typewriter used for the note was Swiss made. An Olympic. Manufactured between 1965 and 1970 and never sold, as far as we’ve been able to determine, in this country. The blueprint paper is French.

Available only over there. The cassette was a standard thirtyminute West German BASF. The complete lack of background noise would indicate it was made in a studio under at least semiprofessional conditions. Unfortunately, there were no identifiable fingerprints on any of the material.”

The President’s next question was to a lean, bald man in a Harris tweed sports jacket and gray flannels sucking a pipe, on his right. Gardiner “Tap” Bennington, the heir to a Massachusetts textile fortune, had replaced Bill Casey as the head of the CIA six months earlier. The Yankee patrician was one of the last of the Agency’s old boys, a veteran of the OSS days when “Wild Bill” Donovan had plucked the nice young men off the playing field of Yale and Harvard and inspired them with the unseemly vocation of spying for their country.

“Do we have any intelligence to indicate a Palestinian terrorist group might be ready to try something like this, Tap?”

“Not really,ţsir. It’s something they’ve talked about for years. But it’s always sounded more like hashish talk to us than anything else. We did have one report in the intelligence community in 1978 that a bunch of them were being trained by the Libyans to pull an armed raid on a nuclear power plant. Hijack it, so to speak. But we were never able to confirm it.

“We’ve been pulsing all our Palestinian assets since this came in. There are people out there capable of making a nuclear device. And there’s material around. But so far we’ve had no indication that any of the groups we’re watching have married the two up.”

“How about the Israelis?” the President queried. “Have you been onto them?”

“Not yet, sir. It’s our feeling it’s still a bit early for that. For the moment we recommend holding this as tight as possible.”

“And the Libyans?” The President turned to address his question to Bob Fundseth, the Deputy Secretary of State. “Have we had any answer from Tripoli?”

“No, sir. The charge went personally to the army barracks at Bab Azizza where Qaddafi and most of his ministers live, saying he had an urgent communication from the government of the United States. The guards wouldn’t give him the time of day. Told him they had orders not to admit anyone before eight A.M.” Christopher glanced at the clock on the conference room wall. “That’s five hours from now.”

The President drummed the tabletop with his fingertips. That would seem to confirm his suspicion there was little likelihood that Qaddafi was behind this. “fell me, Tap,” he said to his CIA director, “would Qaddafi even have the capacity to do something like this? Where’s his nuclear program at these days?”

Bennington struck a match and noisily lit his pipe, a play he had learned from his second boss, Allan Dulles. “Well, sir, as you know, he’s never made any secret of his intention to get atomic bombs.” Bennington picked up a file stamped “Top Secret” from the table in front of him.

“We’ve been keeping a close eye on him and he’s done a number of things that concern us very much. He’s been literally flooding this country with students taking nuclear courses. Over a fifth of the Libyans who’ve studied here since 1973 have been enrolled in some kind of nuclear program or another.”

The President shook his head. If Qaddafi gave away his oil as cheaply as we give away our knowledge, he reflected, we wouldn’t have an energy crisis on our hands.

“All that, of course is ostensibly for peaceful purposes,” Bennington continued. “What really worries us are the secret initiatives he’s undertaken to get hold of plutonium or uranium for military purposes, the business in Chad, the link with the Paks which you’re aware of.”

The President was growing impatient. “Okay, Tap, but where is he right now?

Can he or can he not make a bomb?”

Bennington leaned back in his chair. “In our judgment, he’s at least five years away from it. He still has only one source of potential fissile material on Libyan soil, and that’s that nine-hundred-megawatt light-water reactor the French have just set up for him.”

The director of intelligence’s words struck a responsive note around the room. Pressed by the staggering deficits left in France’s balance of payments by the oil price rises of 1979, President Giscard d’Estaing had finally agreed to sell Libya a nuclear reactor, ostensibly to be employed to desalinize water.

Bennington leaned toward the President. “The reactor, as you know, is under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. They have inspectors down there regularly from Vienna. We’ve seen their reports and we see no evidence the Libyans have diverted fuel from the reactor.”

A loud honking noise seemed to explode in the room. It was the Secretary of Energy blowing his nose. Delbert Crandell had a face that was stained the roseate hue of the overfed and underexercised. He was a Texan, cross, outspoken, and at the same time a knowledgeable physicist. With a dab of his handkerchief he cleaned up a stray splotch of mucus from the conference table and returned it to his vest pocket.

“If the only thing that stands between us and Qaddafi’s making an atomic bomb from that French reactor of his,” he noted in his rasping voice, “is those UN people over there in Vienna, we’d best head for the bomb shelters right now. They’re like all those UN agencies. They’re so choked up by their Third World politics they couldn’t fart if they spent all night eating red beans and ham hocks.

They’ve got inspectors over there who can’t tell a screwdriver from a monkey wrench. Some South American dictator’s son who got the job because it was Argentina’s turn to fill the slot.”

It appeared for an instant that Crandell was through, but he was not.

Almost angrily, he turned to~ Bennington.

“I’ll tell you something else. Your own CIA, nuclear inspection program isn’t worth a shit, either. You’ve spent five years trying to figure out what the South Africans are up to, and you still don’t know. The Indians blew up a bomb under your nose and you didn’t have a clue they were going to do it. Hell, you people didn’t even know the Israelis had a bomb until Ed Teller came back and told you they’d built one-with our goddamn uranium smuggled out of that plant up there in Pennsylvania.”

The President rapped the table with his knuckles. “Gentlemen, we’re wandering. Could Qaddafi have gotten the plutonium he’d need to make nuclear weapons out of that French reactor if he had cheated on it?”

His glance addressed the question to Harold Brown. The President had asked Brown to return to Washington as his Science Adviser. No one in the room was better qualified to answer it than he was. Brown was a former director of the Livermore, California, weapons laboratory, expresident of Cal Tech and a brilliant nuclear physicist.

“Of course be could,” be answered. “The French and the Germans have been going around the world for years trying to tell people you can’t get nuclear weapons out of a nuclear power plant, so that they can sell more of them. Well, the fact is you can. We blew off a bomb made with plutonium that came from a reactor’s burnedout fuel rods fifteen years ago. They know that. We gave them the results.”

“Well, he’d still have to reprocess the plutonium, wouldn’t he? Find a way to get it out of those fuel rods?”

“Mr. President, there’s a common misconception in the world that reprocessing plutonium is a very complex, costly technique,” Brown replied.

“It isn’t. It’s nothing but straightforward chemistry and it’s all out there in the books. If you want to do it on an amateurish basis, you don’t need any of those complicated choppers or cold rooms. All you need is time, money and people and not all that much of any of them.”

The President’s skeptical regard told Brown that he wasn’t convinced.

“You know how the Russians clear a minefield, don’t you? They march a company of men through it, right? If Qaddafi used the same technique here, got himself twenty Palestinian commandos willing to expose themselves to more radiation than was good for them for the cause, then the whole thing would become almost terrifyingly simple. In six months they could extract enough plutonium from the used fuel rods of a reactor like that to make twenty bombs. In a couple of cow barns where a satellite would never spot them.”

The Science Adviser sighed. “The PLO gets plenty of commandos to volunteer for suicide raids. Why wouldn’t they be able to get twenty of them to volunteer to die of cancer to make a weapon that could destroy Israel?”

Two thirds of the way across the United States, Harold Agnew, the director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, stared anxiously out of his office window to the blinking lights of the lovely little community nestling at his feet on the Pajarito Plateau, seven thousand feet into the mountains of New Mexico. It was a quintessentially upper-middle-class American town of adobe homes and ranch-style houses, well-watered lawns and neat gardens; with the red-and-yellow-beacon of its McDonald’s, a Holiday Inn and, on the Municipal Building’s lawn, a red-painted thermometer measuring the community’s progress toward its United Way Fund goal.

And yet the sole reason for the existence of Los Alamos was the creation of the means of mass destruction. It was here thirty-six years before that man had designed and produced his first nuclear weapon. The office of Harold Agnew was a museum to that achievement. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Einstein, Bohr, ghosts of geniuses long dead, stared down from portraits on the wall at the man who was now the guardian of their great enterprise. The primitive lab at Berkeley where the first submicroscopic particle of plutonium had been produced, the world’s first atomic pile, the crew of the Enola Gay on the eve of their terrible voyage to Hiroshima-every milestone along that historic route was recorded by a photograph on Agnew’s wall.

Harold Agnew himself was one of the few men still alive of the score of scientists who had been present at the birth of the Atomic Age in a converted squash court under the west stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field on a bitter cold November day in 1942. He was a big, burly blond man with sloping shoulders and heavy arms, a man who looked as if he should have been a second-generation Swede running a gas station in northern Minnesota rather than the director of one of the most sophisticated scientific institutions in the world.

When he had marched up the mesa sprawled below him with Oppenheimer and Groves to build the first atomic bomb, all the plutonium on planet Earth could have fit on the head of a pin with room left over for a flight of angels to dance. And now? Agnew thought moodily, contemplating those blinking lights. That was a question which had come naturally during the trials of the last hour while a team of his weapons designers had labored over the blueprint delivered to the White House gate. They had broken the blueprint down into its components, picking it apart, hunting the one fatal flaw, the one violation of the very precise rules of nuclear weaponry which would render the design meaningless. Outside his office, on the huge Los Alamos computer banks, other men had run off the formulas that had come in with the design, checking neutron densities, heating factors, lens curvatures against the figures stored on the computer.

As the minutes had gone by, Agnew’s thoughts had frequently gone back to that exalting morning in Chicago almost forty years ago. He’d been down on the atomic pile with two friends and an ax that day, ready to cut a rope and flood the pile with a cadmium solution if the reaction ran away-and if they were still alive to cut it.

Enrico Fermi, the great Italian physicist, had been up on the balcony calmly giving orders in his rich tenor voice. The counter had started to go wild, running faster and faster like a heart fibrillating. Nothing had shaken the Italian’s composure. Finally he had taken out his slide rule, made a series of quick movements, then nodded his head and said, “It’s self-sustaining.” With those words, mankind had entered the era of the atom.

For Agnew, the exaltation, the exhilaration of that great moment were as alive now as they had been then. They had known at that instant they could beat the Germans to their terrible goal. But, above all, they had shared the conviction that man had mastered at last the elements of his globe, harnessed to his own ends its most primeval force.

The rasp of his buzzer interrupted him just as the last pale light of day was fleeing the mountainscape of New Mexico.

“We have your call to the White House,” his deputy announced. The scientist sighed and picked up the phone.

The incoming call was switched to the small white squawk box in the center of the oval table so that everyone in the National Security Council conference room could hear and address the scientist at Los Alamos.

“Mr. Agnew,” Jack Eastman declared, “have your people completed their appraisal of the atomic bomb on those blueprints?”

The voice filtering into the room through the white plastic holes in reply seemed strangely hesitant.

“Mr. Eastman, the drawing on the blueprint which you submitted to us is not for an atomic bomb.”

The men in the White House emitted what seemed an almost collective sigh of relief. The distant scientist did not hear them. He continued. “It’s my very sad duty to inform you that the design on the blueprint is for something a hundred times worse.”

A quick, nervous gasp in the distant scientist’s voice was audible to each of the men and women in the White House basement. “The blueprint is for a thermonuclear device, Mr. President, a three-megaton hydrogen bomb.”

Every time his bare fingertips touched the metal of the television antenna, the passenger of the Dionysos felt a numbing flash of pain spurt down his fingers to his wrists. Beneath him his feet, unaccustomed to snow and ice, slipped and skidded on the balf-frozen mounds left on the exposed rooftop by Friday’s snowstorm.

Warily, he glanced at the buildings around him. There was no light burning in any window from which someone could see what he was doing.

Off to his right was the river. With a compass, he fixed his television antenna at a very precise angle pointing toward its black expanse. She had followed her instructions perfectly in picking the building. There were no rooftops higher than his along the antenna’s carefully calculated line of vision, nothing that could block an incoming radio signal.

He took the six-foot needle of phosphorated bronze, smaller than an automobile aerial but capable of discerning the weakest burst of electronic noise, and fitted it carefully into the socket prepared for it in the television antenna. Every few seconds he had to stop to blow on his numbed fingertips, to give them the sense of precision they needed to make the connection he had practiced a hundred times between the aerial and the antenna.

When he had finished, he straightened up, stiff with cold, rubbing the aching scar on his neck as he did. Suddenly, from the street below, the clatter of voices drifted up to his rooftop. He peered down. Half a dozen people spilled out of the artist’s loft across the street. Impassively, he watched them glide off through the shadows, his ears following the crystalline ripple of the girls’ laughter as it faded in the night.

The President was the first person in the National Security Council conference room to break the shocked silence that had followed Harold Agnew’s revelation.

“My God!” he gasped. “Is this really possible? That Qaddafi could have done this without our finding out what he was up to?”

This time it was Agnew who hesitated. The hydrogen bomb represented the ultimate refinement in man’s search for the means of self-destruction.

Unlike the atomic bomb, which depended on converting to reality a widely understood scientific theory, it depended on the most potent secret unlocked by man’s brain since the cavemen of antiquity had harnessed fire.

It involved the one precisely perfect interweaving of the bomb’s key elements. There was only one. There was no “almost.” There was no margin whatsoever for error. That relationship was probably the most ferociously guarded secret on earth. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, of qualified physicists understood the theory of the atomic bomb. Barely three hundred people, perhaps fewer, were privy to the secret of the hydrogen bomb.

“I admit it strains credibility, sir,” Agnew replied “but the blunt fact is that this is a viable weapons design. Whether it’s from Qaddafi or someone else, someone, somewhere out there, has gotten hold of the secret of the hydrogen bomb.”

Exploding a hydrogen bomb was a task so complex it was often compared to setting a wet log ablaze with a single match. It required putting three competing processes into perfect balance under conditions of temperature and pressure so extreme they rivaled those at the core of the sun.

Essentially what was involved were two atomic “triggers” on either side of a mass of thermonuclear fuel enclosed in a liquid membrane of tritium.

Their explosion allowed for the perfectly symmetrical compression of the fuel which the tritium helped to drive up to the incredible temperatures needed for ignition. The entire assembly was wrapped in a cylinder of uranium 238 which turned some of the neutrons fleeing the atomic explosion back into the device, delaying its disintegration for the microsecond required to allow the whole process to take place.

“The device is meant to be contained in a cylinder roughly the size of an ordinary oil drum,” Agnew continued. “The length is about half again as long as a drum. We calculate it would weigh almost fifteen hundred pounds.

There are connecting wires meant, I presume, to be hitched up to some kind of separate control panel, probably a device that could receive an incoming radio burst and release an electrical impulse into the highexplosive charge.”

For several seconds there was not a sound in the conference room. The President cleared his throat.

“Where in God’s name would someone like Qaddafi have gotten the information to build something like this? Could he have gotten it from those articles that were published in Wisconsin in 1979?”

“No.” This time Agnew did not hesitate. “Those articles set out the theory behind the H bomb very completely. But they didn’t come to grips with the precise formula behind it, which is that absolutely perfect quantitive and qualitative interrelationship between its three competing elements. Without that, you’ve got no explosion.”

“And this design has that?”

“Yes, Mr. President, I’m sorry to have to tell you the configuration here is exact.”

Jack Eastman leaned forward toward the squawk box. “Mr. Agnew, I want to be very precise. What we’re dealing with here is a design, a blueprint, not a device in being. Are there still imponderables in here we haven’t talked about that could prevent this from going off?”

“Of course there are,” Agnew replied. “Everything depends, for example, on those atomic triggers exploding with perfect synchronization, and that in turn depends on detonating with absolute precision the high explosives that set them off. It’s a very, very complicated process.”

The President Coughed. “Mr. Agnew,” he asked, “assuming for the moment this device really existed and really was in New York and really was exploded, what would its effect be?”

For a long moment, the little squawk box in the center of the table was silent. Then, almost as though they came from some disembodied voice speaking from another world, Agnew’s words again filled the room.

“It would mean, sir, that, for all practical purposes, New York City would be wiped off the face of the earth.”

“Hey, lady, got room in there for me?”

The woman couldn’t help smiling at the speaker. He was a young Marine waiting to board the Eastern Airlines nine-o’clock shuttle from New York to Washington. Lasciviously, he eyed her figure swathed in her ankle-length red fox fur coat as she swept past him. Laila Dajani was used to men’s passes. With her long auburn hair, her black prominent eyes, the slight sensual pout of her wellffeshed lips, she had been attracting them since she was eighteen. She gave a casual toss to her hair and continued on to the shuttle terminal from the plane that had just flown her into the city from the nation’s capital. Her beauty, the way she invariably stood out in a crowd, was, she knew, a risk. To deliver her letter to the White House, she had worn the blond wig and an old polo coat which she had left in the second locker she had opened at National Airport.

She moved casually to the exit, spotting at the door the dark-coated driver of the limousine service she had used regularly since she arrived in New York.

“Nice trip, ma’am?”

“Lovely, thank you.”

Laila settled into the car’s comfortable upholstery. As they pulled away, she took out her compact and, pretending to adjust her makeup, scrutinized the traffic behind them in the mirror. They were not, as far as she could tell, being followed. She sank back into the seat and lit a cigarette. The car and the driver were a reflection of one of Carlos’s golden rules: a smart terrorist always travels first class. The best way to slip undetected about the world, the Venezuelan master terrorist maintained, was in that upper-middle-class spectrum which lay just below the level of the ostentatious rich, at the very heart of the society he meant to destroy.

The cover he had invented for Laila’s two visits to the United States was ideally designed to accomplish just that. She was on a buying trip for La Rive Gauche, a boutique for wealthy Lebanese on Beirut’s Hamra Street, an institution which had survived, as such places inevitably do, all the convulsions of the Lebanese civil war.

The shop’s elegant proprietor, the widow of a famous Druze chieftain, was a passionate supporter of the cause, an engaging woman who saw no contradiction in selling Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent and Courreges dresses by day and preaching violent revolution by night. Getting a fake Lebanese passport had been simple. Procuring stolen Lebanese passports for Palestinian terrorists was as easy in Beirut as buying postage stamps. Nor did she have the slightest difficulty in getting one of the 200,000 U.S.

visas issued annually in the Middle East. The overworked consul who had given her her visa hadn’t even bothered to make a phone call to check on her assumed identity; the Rive Gauche letter supporting her application had been enough for him.

And so, as Linda Nahar, a Lebanese Christian, she had haunted the showrooms of Bill Blass, Calvin Klein and Oscar de la Renta on her two trips to New York, the first in August, the second beginning in November. She had quickly become one of the newest ornaments of a certain New York world, weekending on Long Island, lunching at the Caravelle, disco dancing in the garish splendor of Studio 54.

The driver braked to a stop in front of the Hampshire House on Central Park South. She dismissed the car, picked up three messages at the reception desk and two minutes later stepped into the charming disorder of the suite she rented by the month on the thirty-second floor. It was littered with the impedimenta of her assumed calling: fashion brochures, copies of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Women’s Wear Daily. Indeed, her photograph in Women’s Wear at Diana Vreeland’s Pageant of Chinese Dress for the Met had caused Laila a moment of anguish. Fortunately for her, Women’s Wear was not a journal scrutinized with any intensity by the CIA’s Office of Palestinian Affairs.

She tossed her coat on a chair and mixed herself a drink. Moodily, she stepped to the window onto Central Park that constituted one of the sitting-room walls. Looking at the park in its pristine mantle of new snow, at the skaters gliding over the shell to her right, at all those proud fagades crawling with blinking pinholes of light, Laila shuddered unavoidably.

She took a long swallow of her whiskey and thought of Carlos. He was right.

Never think of the consequences of your mission, he warned, only of the unexpected problems that could prevent you from carrying it out. She drained her glass with two thirsty gulps and walked to her bathroom to draw a bath.

Before stepping into the tub, she gave herself an approving glance in the mirror: the taut, flat stomach, her firm buttocks, the defiant thrust of her breasts. For a long moment she lay there, luxuriating in the bath, caressing her skin with the bath oil’s thick, bubbly film, rubbing it through her earlobes, along the passageways of her neck, massaging it playfully over her breasts until her nipples stood erect. Lazily, she lifted one leg from the bath water and rubbed the foam along her thighs and inner legs. At the sight of her crimson toenails, she smiled. Imagine, she mused, a terrorist who paints her toenails.

She was brushing out the long mane of her hair when the phone rang. Picking it up, she heard the din of voices in the background.

“Where the devil are you?” she asked, a flashing undertone of anger in her voice.

“We’re having dinner at Elaine’s.” Her expression changed the instant she heard the caller’s voice. “We’re going on to the Fifty-four. Why don’t you join us?”

What better cover could she ask for? “Can you give me an hour?” Laila asked with a husky voice.

“An hour?” the voice answered. “I’d give you a lifetime if you’d take it.”

His usually bland features shrouded with concern, the President of the United States stared at the circle of advisers surrounding him. The last great crisis his nation had faced when the fanatical supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini had seized the U.S. Embassy in Teheran paled beside this threat. This was the ultimate act of political terrorism, the almost too inevitable conclusion to a decade of escalating terrorism. And, he reflected bitterly, if this really was true, a nation whose citizens were living in nomad tents barely a generation ago now possessed the power to destroy the most important city on the planet. Millions of people are being held hostage, he thought, to the extravagant demands of a zealous despot. He turned to Jack Eastman. “Jack, what contingency plans do we have to handle something like this?”

It was a question Eastman had anticipated. Locked in a safe in the West Wing were the contingency plans of the U.S. and the Soviets could reach comparable firepower wrapped in its black imitation-leather jacket with gold lettering. They covered everything: the speed with which the U.S. and the Soviets could reach comparable firepower thresholds, possible Chinese reactions, NATO disagreements, the security of the sea lanes; right down to how many C rations were necessary to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division into the Panama Canal Zone or land a division of Marines on Cyprus. Their origins went back to Henry Kissinger’s days. Eastman had reviewed them an hour ago. They dealt with every imaginable world crisisevery one, that is, except the one which now confronted the President of the United States.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Eastman replied, “we don’t have any.”

Eastman noted the flicker his words produced in the President’s dark eyes, the “laser look,” the familiar warning that he was angry. He had folded his hands on the table before him. “All right,” he said. “In any event, whether this is from Qaddafi, whether it’s from some terrorist group, some crazy scientist, or someone else, I wish to make one thing clear to you all: the fact that this threat, real or not, exists is to be kept an absolute secret.”

The President’s words reflected a U.S. government decision, taken during the Nixon administration and consistently adhered to since them, to avoid at all costs going public with nuclear threats. The knowledge that a threat existed in a given city could provoke a panicked reaction more devastating than the threatened explosion itself. Discrediting each nuclear hoax cost at least a million dollars, and no one wanted to see the government deluged by such threats. There was the danger that an irrational, semihysterical public opinion could paralyze the government’s ability to act in such a crisis. And in this case, the President was well aware, there was yet another reason: the ominous injunction to secrecy in the threat note.

“Well, if this really is from Qaddafi our answer’s simple.” It was Delbert Crandell, the Secretary of Energy. “Lather those bastards from one end of Libya to the other. That’s all. Wipe them out. Lay the Trident missiles on the subs we have on patrol in the Med on them. That’ll turn the damn place into a sea of glass in thirty seconds. There won’t be a goat left alive over there.”

Crandell sank back, satisfied. His words had a cathartic effect on the room. It was as though the outspoken Energy Secretary had given voice to a thought all had had but no one else had been prepared to express, the brutal but reassuring affirmation that, in the final analysis, the United States possessed the power to squash a menace such as this.

“Mr. Fundseth” There was a catch in the President’s voice as he addressed his Deputy Secretary of State, as though he, too, sought to be assured by Crandell’s brutal declaration. “What is the population of Libya?”

“Two million, sir, give or take a hundred thousand. Census figures over there aren’t very reliable.”

The President turned down the table toward the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Harry, how many people would we lose if a three-megaton device went off in New York? Without evacuation?”

“Sir, it would be difficult to give you an accurate figure on that without looking at some numbers.”

“I realize that, but give me your best estimate.”

The Chairman reflected a moment. “Between four and five million, sir.”

There was dead silence as the awful mathematics of Fuller’s figures registered on everyone in the room. The President sat back, lost for just a minute in a private thought no one in the room dared to interrupt. The giants of the world, the United States and the USSR, held each dither in strategic checkmate because they shared a parity of horror, an equilibrium once described with almost too perfect irony by the acronym for the philosophy on which the U.S.‘s thermonuclear strategy had been based-MAD, for “Mutual Assured Destruction.” I kill you, you kill me. It was the old Russian comedy, everybody dies.

But this, if it was true, was the terrible alteration in the rules of the game, that had haunted responsible world leaders for years, the end game in the struggle against nuclear proliferation for which his precedessor had fought so hard-and, characteristically, with so little success.

Detective First Grade Angelo Rocchia watched with pride the woman advancing through the restaurant, noting approvingly each head that turned for a second glimpse at the lithe movements of her figure. Men always had a second look at Grace Knowland. Her fluffy black hair was clipped in a pageboy bob that set off her higharched cheekbones, her dark eyes and her pert mouth. She was not quite medium height, but she was so well proportioned, so finely muscled, that her clothes, like the simple white blouse and beige skirt she was wearing tonight, always seemed molded to her body. Above all, Grace radiated a fresh, engaging vitality that belied the fact that she was thirtyfive, the mother of a fourteen-year-old boy, and had led a life not noteworthy for its placidity.

“Hi, darling,” she said, brushing his forehead with a quick, moist kiss.

“Not late, am I?”

She slid onto the red velvet seat beside him, right under his favorite oil of the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius. Forlini’s was, as Angelo liked to say, “the kind of place where things transpire.” A few blocks away from City Hall, it bad been for years a favorite hangout of top cops, judges, politicians, men from the DA’s office and minor Mafiosi.

He handed Grace a Campari and soda and raised his Black Label on the rocks to her. Angelo Rocchia drank very little, but he was fastidious about what he drank: “sipping scotch” and good wines, preferably the littleknown Chianti classicos of Tuscany.

“Cheers.”

“Cheers. I hope it wasn’t too difficult.”

Angelo lowered his glass and gave a slight move to his shoulders. “Each time, it’s the same thing. You think it can’t possibly hurt any more and it always does.”

Grace gently folded her hand over his. She had a pianist’s fingers, long, slender and strong, her almond-shaped nails trimmed short.

“What’s hard is making yourself understand there’s no hope.”

Grace saw a flicker of despair cross his face. “Let’s order.” She smiled.

“I’m famished.” Her gaiety was a forced effort to ease Angelo from the depression that inevitably gripped him on Sunday evenings.

“Evening, Inspector. Try the linguine. Terrific.”

Angelo looked up from his menu. Standing before his table was Salvatore “Twenty Percent Sal” Danatello, his corpulent figure bursting out of a pale-blue double-knit at least three sizes too small for him. The detective looked at him, a sneer of contempt easing over his face.

“How’s the family, Sal? Keeping your nose clean?”

The change in Angelo’s tone, the abrupt switch from the soft, intimate half-growl he used with her to this inquisitor’s voice, its timbre as cold, as cutting as a knife’s blade, always disturbed Grace.

“Sure thing, Inspector. You know me. Running a legitimate business. Payin’ my tax.”

“Terrific, Sally. You’re just the kind of decent, upright citizen this city needs.”

Sally hesitated a moment, hoping for the introduction Angelo had no intention whatsoever of making, then shufed off.

“Who’s that?” Grace asked.

“A wise guy.”

Grace understood the jargon of the New York Police Department. She watched the Mafioso’s disappearing figure with curiosity. “So it wasn’t his wife and kids you were asking about. What does he do?”

“Knows good lawyers. Been busted three times for loan sharking and walked every time.” Angelo snapped a breadstick in half and jabbed one jagged end into the butter dish before him. A sly grin crossed his face.

“Of course, The New York Times would say it was just another example of how we waste our resources prosecuting nonviolent crimes.”

Grace pressed her finger to her lips like a schoolteacher trying to hush an unruly classroom. “Truce?” It was a little sign between them, a convention they employed whenever the deeply held convictions inspired by their different vocations, hers as a City Hall reporter for the Times, his as a detective, clashed.

“Yeah, sure,” growled Angelo. “Truce. What the hell, The New York Times is probably right anyway. Sally’s collectors got a special, nonviolent way they clean up his bad debts.” ‘

Despite herself, Grace fell for his ploy with an inquiring tilt of her head.

“They put your fingers in a car door. Then they close the door.”

Angelo savored the horror sweeping her face just an instant. “It’s like the ad says. The man runs a full service bank.”

She couldn’t help laughing. He was a born actor, this detective of hers, with his Roman emperor’s profile, and his wavy gray hair that always made her think of Vittorio de Sica; hair she knew he had styled once a month to conceal the bald spot emerging at the back of his head.

They had met two years ago in his Homicide Squad office at 1 Police Plaza when Grace was doing a major takeout on violent crime in the city. With his dark suit, his white-on-white tie and shirt, the way he rolled his rs like a tenor at the Met, he had seemed closer to her idea of what a Mafia don should look like than a detective. She had noted the old-fashioned black mourning button in the lapel of his jacket, the nervous way he kept picking peanuts from his pocket. To stop smoking, he had explained.

For almost a year they had met for an occasional dinner every couple of weeks, nothing more binding between them than their deepening friendship.

Then, one steaming night in August, it had happened. They’d gone that evening to a little seafood restaurant in Sheepshead Bay. The bluefish were running and they had each ordered one broiled with sage and rosemary. For a long time they had lingered on the terrace, sipping espresso and the last of their Frascati in the fresh Atlantic breeze. Suddenly, there on the terrace, Grace had sensed a barely disguised yearning in the way Angelo’s eyes kept returning to the blouse she had partially unbuttoned in the warm night air. She’d been through three affairs since they met, each begun in promise and ended in pain. Angelo was not a handsome man; yet there was an undeniable appeal in his battered, craggy face. Above all, there was a solidity about him, a promise of strength like that of the old oak that has survived many an autumn storm. Walking out the door, Grace reached for his hand.

“Angelo, take me home with you,” she whispered.

Now, beside her, Angelo gave a soft groan as he contemplated the menu. They were after him, every time he took his Department physical, to lose a little weight. “Watch the blood pressure,” they’d say. Tomorrow, he thought, and ordered cannelloni, a bistecca Fiorentina, and a bottle of Castello Gabbiano Riserva 1975. Grace gave him a disapproving glance, then asked for a veal piccata and a green salad.

“Hey,” he mumbled, “I’m the policeman, remember?”

As the waiter moved away, they lapsed into silence. Grace seemed suddenly distant, absorbed in some private world of her own.

“What’s the matter?”

“I got some news yesterday.”

“Good or bade’

“Bad, I guess. I’m pregnant.”

Angelo set his whiskey down with a slow, deliberate movement. “You sure?”

She slipped her hand over his. “I’m sorry, darling. I wasn’t going to tell you. Not yet, anyway. Your question caught me while I was thinking about it.” She reached for her glass and took a measured sip. “It’s one of those things that should never happen anymore, I know. I was careless. You see, after I had Tommy I had some trouble. They told me it was very, very unlikely I’d ever conceive again.” She giggled and the corners of her dark eyes crinkled with her laughter. “And until you came along, I never did.”

“I guess I should take that as a compliment.” Angelo slid his heavy arm along the top of their seat so that his fingers rested lightly on her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I suppose it’s my fault. I should have been watching out. I guess I’m out of practice.”

“Sure. I guess so.”

Grace studied the detective an instant, an appraising coolness in her eyes, waiting for another word, another phrase. It did not come. She twisted and stretched her long fingers on the tablecloth. “It’s strange carrying a life inside you. I don’t think a man can ever understand just what that means to a woman. I’ve spent the last thirteen years living with the idea it would never happen to me again.” She took another drink. Her eyes were downcast, her voice suddenly plaintive. “And now it has.”

Angelo let his regard travel around the crowded restaurant a moment, taking in the heads leaning conspiratorily together, making, unmaking deals. As he did, he tried to puzzle out the mood of the woman beside him.

“Grace, tell me something. You’re not thinking about keeping it, are you?”

“Would that be so terrible?”

Angelo paled slightly. He took his drink, swallowed the last of his whiskey, then stared moodily at the glass clasped between his fingers.

“You know, I never told you, Grace, about Catherine and me. She had troubles, too. We tried for years to have a baby. She kept miscarrying and miscarrying. We didn’t know why.”

He lowered his glass to the table. “We couldn’t figure out what God or nature or whatever the hell you want to call it was trying to tell us.

Until Maria was born.” Angelo was a long way from their crowded Italian restaurant. “I’ll never forget going into the delivery room that morning.

I was so proud, so happy. I wanted a boy, sure, but a child, that’s what mattered. And there she was, this little tiny thing all red and shriveled, the nurse holding her up there by the ankles. Those hands, those little, tiny hands, were moving, kind of picking at the air like, and she was crying.”

He paused a moment. “And then I noticed her head. It didn’t seem quite right, you know? It wasn’t round. The nurse looked at me. They know right away. ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Rocchia,’ she said, ‘your daughter’s mongoloid.’ “

Angelo turned to Grace, the sorrow of that instant, of all the painful instants that followed it, on his face. “Believe me, Grace, I’d die before I’d hear those words again.”

“I understand you, darling.” Her hand closed over his.

“But they have a test now. It’s called amniocentesis. They can tell if a child’s going to be a mongoloid before it’s born.”

“How did you find that out?”

“I checked with my doctor.”

Angelo made no effort to conceal his astonishment. “So you’ve been thinking a lot about this?”

The waiter appeared with their dinner. They watched in awkward silence as he set their plates before them, then drifted off.

“I suppose I have. It’s caught me so much by surprise.” Grace picked at her veal. “You see, I know it’s the last chance for me, Angelo. I’m thirtyfive.”

“How about me?” There was an edge of petulance in his voice. “Do you really think a man is anxious to become a father at my age?”

Grace laid down her fork and meticulously dabbed at her lips with her napkin. “What I’m going to say sounds selfish, I know. And I guess it is.

But if I decide to have the child, it will be because I want it. Because I want something to help me fill the years I see ahead. Because this is a last chance and you don’t let go of last chances in life easily. But I’ll promise you one thing, Angelo. If I do decide to keep it, it’ll be my responsibility. I won’t burden you with the problems my decision causes. I won’t lay any responsibilities you don’t want on you.”

Angelo felt a sudden chill. “What do you mean? You’d want to bring it up like that, by yourself? Alone?”

“Yes, I think perhaps I would.” Again Grace rested her hand on his. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. Not now at least.” She smiled. “Guess what? Our beloved Mayor’s giving a press conference at nine tomorrow to explain why he hasn’t been able to get the snow off the streets. Because of my piece in this morning’s paper.”

Much farther up Manhattan, on Central Park South, Laila Dajani stepped out of the Hampshire House, shiny black satin disco pants flashing beneath her fur jacket.

“Studio Fifty-four,” the doorman ordered her cabdriver.

The driver looked at her appreciatively in his rearview mirror.

“Hey, you must know people, lady.”

“I have friends,” Laila smiled. Then, as they approached Fifty-seventh Street, she leaned forward. “You know, I’m going to change my mind. Take me to the corner of Thirty-second and Park.”

“Got friends there tool”

“Something like that.”

Laila stared out the window to stop the conversation. When they reached Thirty-second and Park she paid the. fare, smiled at the driver and began to stroll casually along the avenue. Her eyes remained fixed on the taillights of the cab, following them until they disappeared from sight. Then she quickly turned and hailed another cab. This time, she told the driver to take her where she really wanted to go.

In Washington, D.C., the FBI’s fortresslike headquarters at Tenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, seven blocks from the White House, blazed with lights. On the sixth floor of that headquarters the Bureau maintained a nuclear-emergency desk manned twentyfour hours a day by a trio of specially trained agents. It had been there since 1974 when the FBI assigned nuclear extortion a priority so urgent it was reserved for only a handful of major incidents headed by the most dreaded occurrence of all, Presidential assassination.

Sixty times in the years since, the agents at that desk had been confronted with nuclear threats. Most had been the work of cranks or demented ideologues, the “don’t touch the Alaskan tundra or we’ll put a bomb in Chicago” sort of thing. But a significant number of those threats had seemed deadly serious. They had included threats to blow up bundles of radioactive waste in Spokane, Washington, and New York City; warnings of nuclear bombs alleged to be hidden in Boston, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and four other American cities, and in a Long Beach, California, oil refinery. Some had been accompanied by designs of nuclear devices that had also been deemed “nuclear capable” by the weapons analysts of Los Alamos.

The Bureau’s response to those threats had, on occasion, included the deployment of hundreds of agents and technicians to the threatened cities.

Yet no word of their activities had ever reached the public.

Within half an hour of receiving the first alert from the White House, two teams of agents were onto the problem, a Crisis Assessment Team whose task was to determine whether the threat was real or not, and a Crisis Management Team responsible for dealing with it if it was. The fact that the extortion message was in a foreign language had immensely complicated their job. The first rule in an extortion case is to look at the extortion note or telephone call for clues. The Bureau employed a Syracuse University linguistic psychiatrist whose computers had proven to be remarkably accurate in providing a thumbnail description of an extortioner based on the language he had used in his threat note or phone call. In this case, however, his talents had been useless.

As soon as the first warning had come in, a team of agents had gone to the Carriage House Apartments, a four-story yellow stone apartment house at the junction of L and New Hampshire, abutting the building housing the Libyan Embassy. Two of its occupants had been relodged in the Washington Hilton, and listening devices trained on the embassy next door had been placed in the walls of their apartments. The same thing had been done to the Libyan UN embassy in New York. Taps had also been installed on the phones of all Libyan diplomats accredited to either the United States or the United Nations.

That operation had provided its first fruit while the NSC was discussing the consequence of Agnew’s report. Two Libyan diplomats, the ambassador to the United Nations and the first secretary of the Washington embassy, had been located. Both had vehemently denied that their nation could be involved in such an operation.

At 2031, just after Agnew had given his conclusive determination that the design was for a viable thermonuclear device, an “All Bureaus Alert” had been flashed out of the Bureau’s sixth-floor communications center. It ordered every FBI office in the United States and overseas to stand by for “emergency action demanding highest priority and allocation of all available manpower.”

FBI liaison agents to Israel’s Mossad, France’s SDECE, Britain’s MI5 and West Germany’s Landswehr were ordered to go through files, pulling out descriptions and, where available, fingerprint records and photographs of every known Palestinian terrorist in the world.

One floor above the communications center, Quentin Dewing, the FBI assistant director for investigation, was in the midst of organizing the mobilization of five thousand agents. Agents shoeing horses in Fargo, South Dakota, catching the last of the day’s sun on Malibu Beach, walking out of Denver’s Mile High Stadium, washing up the supper dishes in Bangor, Maine, were being ordered to leave immediately for New York, each order accompanied by a vital closing injunction: “Extreme, repeat, extreme discretion must be employed to conceal your movements from the public.”

Dewing concentrated his efforts in three areas. The nation’s bureaus were ordered to locate and take under permanent surveillance every known or suspected Palestinian radical.

In New York and in half a dozen cities on the Atlantic seaboard, FBI agents were in action in every ghetto, every high-crime area, “pulsing” informers, querying pimps, pushers, petty crooks, forgers, fences, hunting for anything on Arabs: Arabs looking for fake papers; Arabs looking for guns.

Arabs trying to borrow somebody’s safe house; anything, just as long as it had an Arab association.

His second effort was to lay the groundwork for a massive search for the device, if it existed, and those who might have brought it into the country. Twenty agents were already installed at the computers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service offices on I Street, methodically going through the 194 forms for every Arab who had entered the United States in the past six months. The U.S. address listed on each card was Telexed to the bureau concerned. The FBI intended to locate, within fortyeight hours, each of these visitors and clear them, one by one, of any suspected involvement in the threat.

Other agents were going through the files of the Maritime Association of the Port of New York looking for ships that had called at Tripoli, Benghazi, Latakia, Beirut, Basra or Aden in the past six months and subsequently dropped off cargo on the Atlantic seaboard. A similar operation was under way at the air freight terminal of every international airport between Maine and Washington, D.C.

Finally, Dewing had ordered a check run on every American who held, or had ever held, a “cosmic top secret” clearance for access to the secret of the hydrogen bomb. It was typical of the thoroughness with which Dewing’s bureau worked that shortly after 8 P.M. Mountain Time an FBI car turned into 1822 Old Santa Fe Trail, a twisting highway leading northeast out of the capital of New Mexico along the route over which the wagon trains of the old Santa Fe trail had once rolled. With its silver RFD mailbox, the yellow metallic newspaper tube with the words New Mexican on its side, the one-story adobe house at the end of the drive was a supremely average American home.

There was nothing average about the Polish-American mathematician who lived inside. Stanley Ulham was the man whose brain had unlocked the secret of the hydrogen bomb. It was one of the supreme ironies in history that on the spring morning in 1951 when he had made his fateful discovery, Stanley Ulham was trying to demonstrate with mathematical certainty that it was impossible to make the bomb based on the premise that had underlain years of scientific effort. He did. But in doing so, he uncovered the glimmering of an alternative approach that just might work.

He could have wiped that terrible knowledge from his blackboard with a swipe of his eraser, but he would not have been the scientist he was if he had. Chain-smoking Pall Malls, flailing feverishly at his blackboard with stubs of chalk, he laid bare the secret of the H bomb in one frantic hour of thought.

The FBI agent did not require even that much time to clear the father of the H bomb of any possible complicity in the threat to New York. Standing in his doorway, watching the agent drive away, Ulham couldn’t help remembering the words he had uttered to his wife on that fateful morning when he had made his discovery: “This will change the world.”

A gray veil of cigarette smoke hung over the National Security Council conference room despite the continuous functioning of the building’s intensive aircirculation system. It was a few minutes past ten; not quite two hours remained before the ultimatum period contained in the threat message was due to begin. Paper cups and plates littered with the remains of the cheese sandwiches and black-bean soup the President had ordered the White House kitchen to send in to the conferees were scattered along the table and by the 15ase of the room’s paneled walls.

At the far end of the room, three Air Force colonels finished assembling a group of charts and maps. The senior officer, a youthful-looking colonel with a tapestry of freckles covering his face, stepped forward.

“Mr. President, gentlemen, we’ve been asked how Qaddafi or a terrorist group could transmit a radio signal from Tripoli to New York to detonate the device on the blueprint we’ve been shown, and what technological resources we possess to prevent such a signal from coming in.

“Basically, there are three ways you can detonate this. The first is a kamikaze volunteer who baby-sits the bomb with orders to set it off at a certain time if he doesn’t get a counterorder.”

“Colonel,” Bennington interjected, “if this threat is really from Qaddafi, that is very much the last method he’d use. He’d want absolute control over this himself.”

“Right, sir,” the colonel replied. “In that case, there are two ways to do it, by telephone or radio.” The room was still, all eyes fixed on the speaker. “To attach the power pack you’d require for this to the ordinary telephone is a very simple matter. Just a question of opening the telephone and connecting a couple of wires. That way the pulse of an incoming call is routed into a preprogrammed signature detector. The pulse opens a circuit into a microprocessor in which a preprogrammed code has been stored. The microprocessor automatically compares it with the code, and if the two match it releases a five-volt charge of electricity into the bomb.

“The beauty of this is a wrong number can’t set it off by mistake; and all a man has to do to explode the bomb is call that number from anywhere in the world and feed it his signal.”

“It’s as easy as that?” the President, jarred, asked.

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid it is.”

“Can New York be isolated, absolutely sealed off from all incoming telephone calls?” the President asked.

“No, sir,” the Colonel replied. “I’m afraid that’s a technological impossibility.”

He turned authoritatively back to his briefing charts. “It is our judgment, however, that in a situation such as the one we’ve been given, Qaddafi or a terrorist group would choose radio to detonate the device. It would offer more flexibility and is completely independent of existing communications systems. For a transmission over this distance, he’d have to use long waves which bounce off the ionosphere and come back down to earth. That means low frequencies.”

“How many frequencies would be available to him for something like this?”

the President asked.

“From Tripoli to New York, a megahertz. One million cycles.”

“Ore million!” The President rubbed the stub of his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Could we jam all one million of those frequencies?”

“Sir, if you did that you’d wipe out all our own communications. We’d close down the police, the FBI, the military, the fire departments, everything we’d need in an emergency.”

“Never mind. Suppose I gave the order, could we do it?”

“No, sir.”

“Why?”

“We simply don’t have the transmitter capacity.”

“How about all our jamming devices in Europe?”

“They’re useless in this case. Too far away.”

“He’s going to need something to receive this radio signal in New York,”

Bennington remarked. “Some kind of directional antenna.”

“Yes, sir, the easiest thing would be to put one in a standard television antenna on a rooftop and connect it to a pre-amplifier. Then the signal could be picked up and transmitted to his bomb wherever it is in the building over the television antenna cable.”

“Surely you could put a fleet of helicopters over Manhattan and scan the frequencies he might use. Get his device to answer back, then pick it up by direction finders, triangulation?”

“Yes, sir, we have the capacity to do that. But it would work only if his system is programmed to respond. If it’s only programmed to receive, we’d get no reply.”

“Well, there’s another way to do it if it turns out to be from Qaddafi,”

Bennington said. His pipe was out and everyone in the room had to hang attendant on his words while he struck a match. “Explode half a dozen nukes in the atmosphere over Libya. That’ll set up an electromagnetic blanket that will smother any radio communications out of there for at least two hours. Shut them down completely.”

“Mr. President.” It was Eastman. “For my part I don’t believe this threat is really from Qaddafi; but in the unlikely event that it is, we’re going to have to make some assumptions, and the first one I would make is. that he’s not going to expose himself to such evident retaliation. He’ll have a fail-safe system like a ship hidden somewhere out there in the Atlantic”-he waved at the vast blue stain on the map behind the colonel-“from which he or someone else can always detonate the bomb if we lay a preventive strike on Libya.”

The President nodded in agreement and looked back at the briefing officer.

“The basic question to which we need an answer, Colonel, is this: Do we or do we not have any technological devices, systems or whatever which can guarantee that we can prevent a radio signal from being beamed into New York to detonate this thing if, in fact, it actually exists and it’s really in New York?”

The colonel tensed nervously at his question. “No, sir,” he replied. “I’m afraid that given the present state of the art, trying to intercept or stop an incoming signal like this is scientifically impossible. It’s like trying to catch the right snowflake in the middle of a blizzard.”

As he was speaking, the red light on the telephone at Eastman’s elbow flashed. It was the Army Signal Corps warrant officer in charge of the White House switchboard. Eastman stiffened listening to him.

“Mr. President,” he announced, “the switchboard’s just received a telephone message from an anonymous caller. He hung up before they could trace the call. He said there was a message for you of the utmost importance in locker K602 in the luggage containers next to the Eastern Airlines shuttle terminal at National Airport.”

One fly-specked light bulb dangling from an overhead cord lit the garage.

Its pale cone of light left pools of untouched shadow clinging to the garage’s walls and corners. At the back of the garage, a six-foot-wide cement loading dock rose above the black curds of oil and grease staining the floor. The dock’s back wall was a thin partition separating the garage from the abandoned warehousing area to the rear. Through it, a faint scraping sound drifted into the garage. Laila Dajani shuddered, listening to it. It was the sound of rats scurrying through the deserted warehouse.

Her brother Kamal sat on a cot set up at the end of the platform, near a forklift truck. The passenger of the Dionysos twisted an air pistol in one hand. To his right, against the wall, were his latest victims, a pair of dead rats.

Laila’s second brother, the eldest of the trio, had just entered the garage. Whalid Dajani was in agony. His face was pale; specks of sweat sparkled at his temples.

“Why don’t you take another pill?” Laila demanded, her tone almost peevish.

“I’ve already taken five. That’s all I’m supposed to take.” He showed his sister the package of Tagamet pills she had gotten for him to ease the pain of the ulcer for which he’d earlier gulped his glass of milk on Broadway.

“It says so on here.” His eyes turned away to the far end of the platform.

It was there, just inside the shadows, a long, dark form like that of a shark lurking below the surface of the water. It was painted black.

Stenciled in white around the barrel’s waist were the name and address of the import-export firm to which it had been destined. Cords kept it firmly lashed to the pallet on which it had arrived.

He dabbed at his damp brow. Don’t think, they had told him. Don’t think of anything but your mission. But how did you not think? How did you force from your mind what you’d seen: the faces, the seas and seas of faces, young faces, faces of misery and indifference, faces of laughter and happiness? The faces of little girls on their sleds in Central Park; of the black policeman telling him where to get off the subway; of the newsstand vendor, half snarling, half laughing “Good morning,” selling him his paper.

How could he not see the crowds, the buildings, the rushing cars, the lights that represented so many lives? Behind him, Whalid heard the cot creak as his brother got up. “I’m thirsty,” he mumbled. “Anyone want a Coke?”

Dazed, Whalid shook his head. Kamal stepped to a carton by the wall and pulled out a bottle of Chivas Regal whiskey. “Maybe this is the medicine you need.”

“God, no.” Whalid grimaced. “Not while my ulcer’s bothering me like this.”

Laila stirred impatiently. “How much time do we have left?”

“Enough,” Kamal answered. He picked a piece of cold pizza from a flat cardboard box by his cot. As he did, his sister noticed the name and address of the restaurant where he’d bought it printed on the carton.

“Are you sure no one’s going to be able to identify you in those places?” she asked.

Kamal gave her an angry glance. The constant boss. “Let’s set up our firing circuits,” he said.

“Why?” Whalid protested. “We still have plenty of time.”

“Because I don’t want anything to go wrong.”

Whalid sighed and walked over to a gray metal case the size of a large attach6 case resting on the floor beside his bomb. Nothing could have looked more innocent, more benign, than that case. Decals from TWA, Lufthansa, half a dozen of Europe’s best hotels were stuck to it. Indeed, the Customs officer at JFK had stopped Whalid as he was entering the country with it on Thursday bearing a Lebanese passport identifying him as Ibrahim Abboud, an electrical engineer.

“It’s a microprocessor tester,” Whalid had explained, “to check to see if computers are working properly.”

“Ah,” the Customs officer had remarked admiringly, closing the case that was designed to help destroy his city, “complicated, isn’t it?”

Just how complicated he could not have imagined. The case had-indeed been adapted from a microprocessor tester, a U.S.-made Testline Adit 1000. One blazing summer’s day in July, the technical director of the Libyan telephone system had showed a Testline 1000 to Ishui Kamaguchi, the resident director of Nippon Electric, the Japanese firm which had installed Libya’s telephones. What he wanted, he had explained, was an adaptation of the device which would offer a means of remote radio control of an electrical discharge, a system that would be both infallible and absolutely inviolable.

Six weeks later, Kamaguchi had presented the Libyans the case now on the garage floor and a bill for $165,000. Only the genius of the Japanese for miniaturization could have produced the array of fail-safe devices built into the case to frustrate any attempt to tamper with its functioning. It was equipped with a magnetic-field detector that would order it to detonate instantly if it picked up any indication of an attempt to burn out its electronic circuitry with a magnetic field. There were static filters to counter any efforts to jam its radio receiver. Three tiny tubes sensitive to pressure changes protected it against the danger of gunfire or an explosion. Once it was hooked up, the pressure change caused by a New York telephone book falling toward the case would be sufficient to activate its circuits.

While his brother watched intently, Whalid opened its triple locking system and folded back the case cover to reveal a pale-blue control panel. On it was a cathodetube screen, a keyboard and five keys bearing specific commands: END, AUTO, INIT, DATA, TEST. There was also a locked cassette player. Fixed into it was a thirtyminute BASF tape, a small red crescent in its upperright-hand corner. Programmed in Tripoli, it contained instructions for the case’s minicomputer.

Two connecting cords were neatly coiled inside the cover. One was designed to be hooked up to Whalid’s bomb, the other to the cable running pp to the antenna Kamal had installed on the roof. Each was equipped with a “dead man control.” If any effort was made to disengage them once they had been hooked up they would automatically activate the firing system. Hidden below the panel’s blue surface was a radio receiver, a microprocessor, the minicomputer and a brace of powerful, long-lasting lithium batteries.

As the two brothers watched, the cathodetube screen lit up with a green glow. The words “STAND BY” formed on the screen. Whalid glanced at them, then punched the key marked nrIT. The word “IDENTIFICATION” appeared on the screen.

Carefully, Whalid punched the code OIC2 onto the keyboard. The word “CORRECT” appeared on the screen. Had his code been wrong, “INCORRECT” would have appeared there and Whalid would have had exactly thirty seconds to correct his mistake or the case would have autodestructed.

On the screen, the words “STORAGE DATA” appeared. Whalid looked at the checklist in his sister’s hands, then punched F19A onto his keyboard.

Through the tape player’s window he could see the BASF cassette begin to spin. It turned for just under a minute, transmitting its program to the minicomputer’s memory bank. The tape stopped and the words “STORAGE DATA: OK” arose on the screen.

Whalid methodically punched three successive code numbers onto the keyboard, following each by tapping the key TEST. There was a pause after each code, then a phrase appeared on the screen: “COMPUTER CONTROL: OK”; “MICROPROCESSOR OK”; “RADIO FREQUENCY SIMULATION: OK.”

“All right,” Whalid said, “everything’s working properly. Now we’ll test the manual firing system.”

Fundamentally, the case had been designed to fire the bomb in response to a radio signal. It contained, however, a manually operated backup firing capability which any one of the three could operate if something went wrong. Whalid carefully formed the number 0636 on the keyboard. Those numbers had been chosen for their firing code because none of the Dajanis would ever forget them. They represented the date of the Battle of Yarmuk when the Arab warriors of Omar, the successor to the Prophet, defeated the Byzantines by the Sea of Galilee and established Arab domain over their lost homeland. As Whalid’s finger tapped the second “6,” the green light on the screen blinked off. For two seconds, it was replaced by a bright-red glow.

“It works.” Whalid shuddered. “We can detonate from here if we have to.” He glanced at his watch, then up at the ceiling. “We’ve got seventeen minutes to go.”

In Washington, D.C.‘s, National Airport, a tight police cordon screened off several dozen late-evening travelers stretching and straining to follow the progress of the FBI’s capital Bomb Squad. Cautiously, the agents scanned the bank of gray metal luggage lockers with Geiger counters, looking for radioactivity. They found none. Then three German shepherds trained to detect the scent of high explosives were led along the locker ranks. Finally, a pair of agents employing a touch as delicate, as precise as that of Japanese women assembling the circuitry of a computer chip unscrewed the door to locker K602 and gently eased it from its hinges.

To their relief, the only thing the agents found in the locker was an envelope leaning against the back of the compartment. Typed on it were the words “For the President of the United States.”

The message it contained was brief. It said that at midnight Washington time, 6 A.M. Libyan time, at a spot 153 miles due east of the junction of the twenty-fifth parallel and the tenth longitude, at the southern tip of the Awbari Sand Sea in the southwestern corner of Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi would provide the United States with a conclusive demonstration of his ability to carry out the threat enunciated in his earlier communication. To facilitate aerial observation of the demonstration, the Libyan dictator proposed a carefully defined air corridor running south to the site from the Mediterranean Sea through which U.S. observation planes would be allowed to by unmolested.

There was not a sound except for the dry rustle of the rats in the darkened warehouse. The three Dajanis squatted on the cold cement loading dock, waiting. Whalid held his watch in his hand, mesmerized by the sweep of its second hand. Again, he turned his regard upwards. Somewhere up there in the infinity of space, a tiny ball of metal tumbled through the canopy of night. It was a forgotten satellite, its existence known only to a handful of amateur redio operators around the world. Among them was the head of the Libyan state. Softly Whalid began to count off the passing seconds: “Three … two … one … zero.”

The sound of the last syllable hadn’t faded when it happened: the green light glowing on the screen of their control case blinked off. In a split second, another color replaced it in almost instantaneous response to the gesture of a man burning with hatred and fanaticism halfway around the world. It was the same ominous red glow that had appeared there a quarter of an hour ago.

Laila gasped. Whalid slumped forward, half relieved, half horror-stricken.

Kamal looked on in silence. The red glow faded and the words “RADIO FREQUENCY GLOBAL CONTROL: OK” appeared on the screen. Then they too faded and were replaced by the word “CONNECTION.” It was as though now that all their tests had been successfully run, the blue case before them was taking over, eliminating from the carefully elaborated chain of command any further need for the frail and uncertain intervention of human hands.

Whalid fitted the cable running from his bomb to the olive-drab circular plug an inch in diameter that connected it to the case. The next time the light on the screen glowed red, a flash of electricity from the case’s lithium batteries would pour through those pins to detonate the thermonuclear device lying on the platform.

Whalid stared at that black object he had created. Oh God, oh God, he thought, why did you ever give men such power?

“What’s the matter?” his brother asked.

Whalid started like a child in a classroom caught daydreaming by a teacher. His watch was still in his hand.

“The red light didn’t glow a full two seconds,” he replied. “Are you sure you connected the rod up on the roof to the cable tightly?”

“Of course.”

“I think we better check it.” Whalid took the pencil flashlight. “I’ll go up with you and hold this while you check it.”

The two men started for the door. Before they could get to it, Whalid doubled up in agony from the pain of his ulcer. “I can’t go,” he whispered, handing the flashlight to Laila. “You go and hold it for him.”

By the time Laila and Kamal returned, his spasm had passed. He was sitting on the dock, anguish no longer contorting his face.

“It’s all right,” Kamal said.

Whalid reached over and punched a final tap onto his keyboard, striking the word “END.” The control case was now locked. Only a code known to the three Dajanis could open it again.

“Whalid,” Kamal said, “you better spend the night here in case they’re looking for you. How about you, Laila?”

“Don’t worry about me, Kamal,” she replied. “No one will look for me where I’m going.”

Shortly after eleven-thirty, the President, riding in the front seat of an unmarked Secret Service car, rode up to the river entrance of the Pentagon. The members of the Crisis Committee, moving at irregular intervals to avoid drawing attention, had preceded him. An MP saluted the Chief Executive and led him to a plain white door under an archway bearing the words “JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF.” Its only identification was a set of figures, 2$890. A pair of guards, armed with sidearms, verify both visually and electronically the identity of each visitor, even that of the President of the United States, passing through that door. In addition, a closed-circuit television system records on videotape the face of everyone who enters, the hour and the day he came in, and his reason for being there.

There is good reason for that rigid security. Beyond that door lies an Ali Baba’s cave of the electronic age, the most mind-boggling display of technological wizardry of which twentiethcentury man is capable, the National Military Command Center of the United States.

Seated in a leather armchair at the oval conference table dominating Room 2B890, the President can, quite literally, watch the world go by. Every communication system the United States possesses, every electronic-surveillance network, all the vast electronic gadgetry at the disposition of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, all ultimately funnel into that immaculately white room not much larger than a small movie theater.

The newwork of KH-11 satellites girdling the globe can flash onto any one of its six movie-sized screens a live television picture of any quarter of the planet. So fine is the resolution those satellite cameras provide from ninety miles into space that the President, sitting in his armchair, can tell the difference between a Jersey and a Guernsey cow in a pasture in Nottingham, England, or note the color and make of an automobile leaving the gates of the Kremlin. He can talk to a Marine Corps lieutenant leading *a platoon on a patrol in Korea or eavesdrop on, and have instantly translated, a conversation between an airborne Russian MIG-23 fighter pilot and his air controller in Sebastapol. He could listen, thanks to the CIA, to the sound of men’s footsteps walking in certain offices in Moscow, Potsdam and Prague, overhear their most intimate conversations and clink of their vodka glasses, or count the clicks on their telephones as they dial a number.

And, from that leather armchair, the President could be both a spectator and a participant in the ultimate tragedy. He could order a Minuteman missile launched from its site in South Dakota, then, like a spectator in a movie house, watch on one of the screens before him as the thermonuclear horror he had wrought devastated the people, the streets, the tenements of some Soviet city.

The President settled his lanky frame into that armchair and indicated he was ready to begin. Despite his seventy odd years, there were no signs of strain or weariness on his face. On the wall opposite him, enclosed in a huge black frame to give contrast to the pictures they held, were six large screens used for displays.

The rear admiral in charge of the center, one of the five flag officers in command of the shifts that manned it twentv-four burs a day. seven days a week, moved behind his console. He began by flashing onto his six screens, with almost bewildering speed, a portrait of the military forces of the Soviet Union as they were deployed at that very moment: nuclear submarines, every one at sea pinpointed by a blinking red light on a world map; missile sites caught in a resolution so fine the men in the conference room could watch their Soviet sentries pacing their beats; Backfire bombers on the Black Sea Coast; SS-20 missiles along the Oder.

The Admiral plunged the screens into darkness with a button. There was nothing, he said, in the Soviet’s military posture to indicate that the Soviet’s armed forces were in an alert status beyond their normal readiness state. It was unlikely that the Soviets were involved in what was happening in Libya.

He turned back to his console and flicked a series of controls. Now a stretch of desolate sands reddening in the first light of morning appeared on the screen. At its center, barely visible, was a tower.

“There, Mr. President, is the location we were given on the note that was found in National Airport.”

A second screen lit up. On this one was a detailed resolution of the tower on the first. It was a spindly metal assembly resembling an old-fashioned oil-drilling rig, and at its top the men in the conference room could make out the outlines of a large cylindrical object looking like a barrel and resembling very closely the description of the device on the blueprint given to them by Harold Agnew three and a half hours earlier.

The Admiral turned again to his console. There had been, he noted, no satellites in position over Libya at the time the threat had been delivered to the White House. The precious satellites, whose orbits were set once each month by the NSC, were for the most part employed over the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Since the first alert, however, three KH-lls had been shifted into fixed orbits over Libya, and the images delivered by a second satellite rose on one of the six screens. It was a. cluster of buildings, the barracks compound of Bab Azizza to which the U.S. charge d’affaires had earlier been refused admission. Watching the screen, the men around the President could see the paratroopers who had turned the charg6 away stomping their feet in the morning chill.

The image moved as it was adjusted and stopped again, this time on a series of small buildings. A white circle popped up around one of them, indistinguishable from the others, a roof inside a little walled compound.

“Sir,” the Admiral said, “we believe this to be Qaddafi’s residence. We’ve had it under surveillance since shortly after Los Alamos’ first alert.

We’ve seen no evidence of any activity whatsoever or any sign that the building’s even occupied.”

“What makes you think that’s Qaddafi’s residence?”

The Admiral adjusted the focus of the satellite picture so that the walled compound enclosed in the white circle filled the screen. Clearly visible, in the compound yard, was a black tent and, apparently tethered to it, a camel.

“Sir, Intelligence informs us Qaddafi keeps a tent and a camel in his yard because he likes fresh camel’s milk for breakfast. This is the only residence at Bab Azziza that meets that description.”

The Admiral turned back to his display and called up a map of Libya’s Mediterranean Sea coast. On it, in the Gulf of Sidra, midway between Tripoli and Benghazi, was a spot of white light. Northwest of the light, not far from the island of Malta, was a blinking red light.

The blinking red light, the Admiral explained, was the U.S.S. Allen, an electronic-surveillance ship. It was crammed with sophisticated listening devices, like those with which the CIA had peered into the heart of the Soviet Union for years from its listening posts in Iran. The white light indicated the listening station to which the Allen was steaming at twenty-seven knots. Once there, she would be able to eavesdrop on every radio communication made in Libya and all of the telephone calls carried by her modern microwave communications system. Virtually every phone call made in Libya, from a man ordering a radio for his Toyota to a mistress arguing with a jealous lover, to any call made by Qaddafi himself on anything other than a buried, secure line would be intercepted, copied and stored on shipboard computers. NSA headquarters outside Washington had already sent to the Allen voice samples of Qaddafi and five key Libyan leaders. Every intercepted call would be run past those samples by the computer so that calls made by any of the six men could be culled instantly from the hundreds of thousands of other calls being made across the country.

The Mediterranean coast disappeared, to be replaced by a map of Libya. Down its western edge ran two closely parallel red lines, the air corridor laid down by Qaddafi in his message. Two thirds of the way down the corridor a naked eye could follow the progress of a flashing red light.

“Sir, we ordered a Blackbird out of Adana to provide us secondary observation as soon as we received word,” commented the Admiral. A Blackbird was an SR-71, a vastly improved version of the old U-2 spy plane, this one capable of flying over two thousand mph at 85,000 feet. They carried supersensitive heat and radiation sensors developed to monitor in minute detail China’s and France’s nuclear tests.

The President turned his attention back to the site identified in the National Airport note. Underneath the tower, in the quickening sunlight, the crisscross tracings of dozens of tire tracks were now clearly visible.

“Harold,” the President asked his Science Adviser, “what do you make of it?”

“It looks a lot like the pictures I’ve seen of the old Trinity test site.”

“Trinity” was the code name for the test of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. “Simple. Primitive. But efficient.”

Brown looked at the screen like a professor studying a student’s design, hunting for its flaws. “Somewhere around there we should be picking up some sign of the command post he’d use to set this thing off.”

“We’ve swept the area for it, sir,” the Admiral answered. “Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to spot anything.”

“Of course you haven’t.” The voice was Crandell’s, a rasp almost as harsh on the ears as the sound of gravel spilling down a metal chute. “Because there isn’t any. That Arab son of a bitch is jerking us off, that’s what he’s doing. Two million people. That’s all he’s got in his country, two million people. They’re so goddamned backward, most of ‘em, they can’t even drive a car without stripping the gears.

Know what a Frenchman told me once? He caught one of their pilots looking into the gas tank of one of those Mirage planes they sold ‘em to see if there was any gas left-with a match!”

The Secretary of Energy roared with laughter, savoring the image of the ignorant Arab blowing himself and his aircraft to pieces in his search for gasoline. “And you really believe those people could do something like this?”

The President ignored him. “Harold,” he said, “he’s going to be letting the world in on his secret if this works, isn’t he?”

“Not necessarily. That’s about as remote a part of the world as you can find down there. Only a few Bedouin tribes running around. Nearest town’s well over a hundred and fifty miles away. They’ll see a hell of a flash of light all right, but not much else.”

“What about fallout?”

The Admiral overheard the President. On one of the screens, superimposed over a map of southeast Africa, there appeared a sausage-shaped arc thrusting across southern Libya, northern Chad, the Sudan and into the southern corner of Saudi Arabia.

“Sir, this is the fallout pattern we’re predicting based on the strength and direction of the upper air winds over the site.”

“No radiation monitoring devices there,” Brown noted. “They’ll be reading a four or a five on their Richter scales in Europe. Probably put it down to an earthquake if it goes off.”

It was four minutes to midnight. There was little to do now but wait. On the clocks suspended on one wall of the room, the white numbers silently clicked off each passing sound.

The President’s eyes concentrated not on the test site but on the screen on which Qaddafi’s bungalow lay trapped in its circle of white. The details of the house and garden were clearly visible, the reddish tiles on the roof, the purplish splash of flowers beside the house. In the garden there was what looked like a child’s playground.

Is it really possible, he asked himself, that a man living in a pleasant little house like that, a. man with children, a man who believes in his God as devoutly as I believe in mine, could propose something as mad, as senseless, as this? What is there, he wondered, what hatred, what lust for power, what drive for revenge for a wrong that didn’t even affect him or his own people directly, that could drive him to so irrational an act? He shuddered.

Harold Brown sensed the President’s anguish. “Well, sir,” he said, in a voice so soft only the Chief Executive beside him could hear it, “either we have a terrible problem on our hands or the cruelest hoax anyone’s ever played on a U.S. government.”

The President nodded. He said nothing. He continued to gaze straight ahead, concentrating totally on the screens before him.

The numbers rolled away toward the last zero, droplets falling rhythmically to an instant past. There was no sound in the room except the whir of the ventilation system. Even the lieutenant colonels manning the consoles, as used to tension as runners are to cramps, were pale with the strain.

Eleven fifty-nine. Four precisely aligned zeroes appeared on the clocks’

panels. No one saw them. Every eye was on the screen along the room’s far wall, on the emptiness of the desert, on the frail tower planted on its sands like a withered tree trunk that had somehow survived there despite the ravages of time and nature.

Five seconds, ten seconds. Nothing happened. Fifteen seconds. Thirty seconds. The first creak of twisting armchairs indicated that the tension pent up in the room was easing. Forty-five seconds. Nothing, not even the eddying currents of a passing gust of wind, moved on the screen.

One minute. Men at last sat back in their armchairs. A relief so intense it was almost a physical presence enveloped the room.

“I told you the son of a bitch didn’t have it.” Satisfaction seemed to mix with the sweat sparkling on Crandell’s face.

Tap Bennington chewed on his pipe stem. “Mr. President, we’ve now got to decide what our response to the threat should be. I think we should review immediately the range of military options we ~ can address against Libya.”

Tap, just a minute, for God’s sake.” Warren Christopher of State was pleading. “We still have no confirmation whatsoever that Qaddafi is behind this.”

“You mean,” a furious Crandell demanded, “you propose to let that son of a bitch get off scot free just because his goddamn bomb―“

He never finished. A white wall of light seemed to explode from the screens of Room 2B890. So blindingly luminous was its flash, so painfully intense its glare, the men in the room flinched and shielded their eyes. Then, from ninety miles into space and a quarter of the way around the planet, the satellite cameras sucked up the fireball soaring over the Awbari Sand Sea and sent it hurtling onto the screens of the Pentagon, a roiling caldron of exploding gases: whites, reds, yellows and oranges, arranged in a dazzling kaleidoscope of light and fire.

For seconds, too stunned to react or speak, the two dozen men in the room stared, thanks to those cameras, at a sight no human eye had ever beheld, the bowels of hell, the incandescent heart of a thermonuclear explosion.

The first sound to intrude on the room came from seventy thousand feet over the site, from the pilot of the SR-71. Mechanically, indifferent to the spectacle below him, he read off the swiftly changing measurements of his instrument panels: a tide of thermal X rays, gamma rays, beta particles rushing past his detectors. His figures meant nothing to most of the men in the room. It did not matter. Everything they needed to know was right there on the screen before them, in the unsurpassable beauty and horror of a fireball rising from the desert floor.

The President squeezed Harold Brown’s forearm in his fingers. He had paled and his mouth hung half open, his lower lip curling downward with dismay.

Watching, mesmerized, he could think of only one thing: John the Divine’s Revelation of the Apocalypse: “… behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

Now, he thought, a Fifth Horseman has emerged from the entrails of hell to scourge humanity with terror, with arms so terrible even John’s hallucinating imagination could not have conceived them.

“My God,” he whispered to the man beside him. “Oh my God, Harold, how did he ever do it?”