The Fifth Horseman

PART IV

In the capital of the United States it was just after 3:30 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, Monday, December 14. Three and a half hours had gone by since the explosion of Qaddafi’s bomb, yet on the surface nothing in the sleeping capital indicated the crisis at hand. Beneath the surface, however, the best technological resources of the U.S. government were already in action in response to the orders that had been pouring out of the Pentagon since midnight.

Eight miles off the I-87 linking Baltimore and Washington, in the outskirts of Olney, Maryland, a red brick building vaguely resembling a submarine’s conning tower peeped above the snow-covered pastures. Buried five floors below those frozen fields was the National Warning Center. Its heart was a communications console on which rested a round black dialing block slightly larger than the dialing block of an old cradle phone. Its face bore only three digits-0, 1 and 3. That phone was tied to 2,300 warning points across the United States and through them to every air-raid siren in the country.

Twenty-four hours a day a man sat in front of it ready to dial double three for Armageddon, the numbers that would warn the United States that a nuclear attack was hurtling toward its cities.

One floor below was an enormous computer programmed to count the pieces which would be left over after Armageddon. The havoc that would be wreaked on each metropolitan area in the United States by any imaginable range of nuclear weapons was stored on the computer. Now, in response to a query from its technicians, it was spewing out an appallingly precise compilation of the devastation a three-megaton blast would cause in New York.

A few miles away at Fort Meade, Maryland, some of the twenty thousand employees of the National Security Agency skimmed through the most complex and sophisticated computer facilities in the world. Stored on them were the harvest of the NSA’s worldwide eavesdropping systems, global electronic vacuum cleaners that scooped radio transmissions and telephone calls from the atmosphere, broke them down into key categories for rapid retrieval, then dumped them onto the NSA’s computer. The information stored there had already allowed the NSA to foil a major terrorist operation on United States soil. Now the heirs to cryptologists who had broken Japan’s naval code in World War 11 hunted for the word, the phrase, the message that would allow the FBI to foil this one.

At the FBI and across the Potomac River at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, orders were flowing around the world instructing FBI agents and CIA station chiefs to undertake a relentless effort to find out who had delivered to Qaddafi the secret of the hydrogen bomb, how he had built it, and who might have been in charge of an effort to hide it in New York.

At the underground emergency command post in the Maryland countryside where the NEST nuclear-explosive search teams had been ordered into action, half a dozen tense officials prepared for the most complex and deadly search their organization had ever been asked to undertake.

Six times in its short history, NEST had rushed its teams into the streets of an American city. No one had found out about them. In a few hours, two hundred men and their detection equipment were scheduled to be prowling the streets of Manhattan in postal vans and rented Hertz, Ryder and Avis trucks and no one would know they were there or what they were looking for.

Two NEST aircraft, a Beechcraft King Air 100 twin jet and an H-500 helicopter, both bearing markings that could not be traced to the U.S. government, had already landed at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, with an advance party of twenty men, a closed communicalions circuit for two hundred and a dozen boron trifiuoride neutron detectors. From NEST’s Western headquarters on Highland Street, Las Vegas, just two blocks from the Sahara Hotel and the neon glitter of the Strip, dozens of detection devices stored at the old Nevada nuclear testing ranges were being flown into McGuire by a unique facility at NEST’s disposal-the largest fleet of rental jets in the United States, kept in Las Vegas for the city’s high-rolling clients.

The man who would have the terrifying responsibility of leading the search was approaching New York on the New Jersey Turnpike in an unmarked government car. John Booth looked the quintessential Westerner: lean and muscled, well over six feet tall, with the coarse, grainy complexion of a man whose face was often exposed to the elements. As usual, he was wearing cowboy boots, a checkered shirt and, around his neck, a silver-andturquoise Navajo charm suspended on a rawhide thong.

Booth’s emergency call had caught him, as inevitably such a summons would, on a winter’s weekend, skiing off the bowls of Copper Mountain, Colorado.

Now, rushing toward the city ahead, Booth felt the nervous inroads of what he called his “but-for-the-grace-of-God feeling” knotting his intestines.

It was always there, that angry, half-nauseous sensation, whenever Booth’s beeper called him to lead his NEST nuclear search teams into the streets of an American community. Those teams were Booth’s brainchild. Long before the first novelist had written the first atomic-bombin-Manhattan thriller, Booth had seen the menace of nuclear terrorism coming. His first, apocalyptic vision of that possibility had come in the most unlikely of places, amidst the silvery-green olive groves and terraced fields of a little Spanish fishing village called Palomares.

He had been sent there with a team of fellow scientists and weapons designers in 1964 to try to find the nuclear weapons jettisoned by a crashing B-52. They had the best detection devices, the most sophisticated techniques available, at their disposal. And they couldn’t find the missing bomb.

If they couldn’t find a full-fledged bomb in the open countryside, it didn’t require much imagination on John Booth’s part to realize how terrifyingly difficult it would be to find a nuclear weapon hidden by a group of terrorists in an attic or a cellar of some city.

From the moment he had returned to Los Alamos, where he was a senior weapons designer, he had fought to prepare the United States for the crisis he knew would beset an American city one day. Yet, despite all his efforts, Booth was all too well aware of something few laymen would have even suspected looking at the sophisticated equipment his teams employed: how dreadfully inadequate they were, how tragically limited was their ability to perform the task for which they were intended. The problem was taking that equipment into the builtup downtown area of a big city. There the tightly packed blocks, the highrise forests of glass and steel provided an abundance of natural screening to smother the telltale emissions that could lead his men to a hidden bomb as a scent takes a bloodhound to his quarry.

Outside, the sulfurous fumes, the roseate glow of the burn-off fires of the Jersey refineries flickered like the flames of a technological hell as they fell away behind his speeding car. He climbed up the Jersey Heights, then started the long loop down toward the Lincoln Tunnel. Suddenly, there it was before him across the black sweep of the Hudson: the awesome grandeur of Manhattan Island. Booth thought of something Scott Fitzgerald had once written, a phrase that had struck him years ago as an undergraduate at Cornell. To see Manhattan like that, from afar, was to catch it “in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

Booth shuddered. The skyline of Manhattan held no promise of beauty for him. What was waiting for him at the other end of the Lincoln Tunnel was the final refinement of the hell he most feared, the ultimate challenge to the techniques he and his men had so carefully assembled.

In Washington, D.C., half a dozen lights were burning in the West Wing of the White House. It was a little doll’s house of a building sandwiched between the more familiar fagade of the Executive Mansion and the gray Victorian hulls of the Executive Office Building. With its narrow corridors thick with wall-to-wall carpeting, its walls lined with Currier and Ives prints and oils of eighteenth-century Whig politicians, the West Wing looked more like the home of a Middleburg, Virginia, foxhunting squire than what it was, the real seat of power of the President of the United States.

Jack Eastman was upstairs in his second-floor office contemplating the unappetizing dish of Beefy Mac he had bought from the basement vending machine to replace the Sunday supper he had forgotten to eat. Like the walls of most Washington offices, his were covered with photos and citations, the milestones along the road that had taken him to the White House. There was Eastman as a young F-86 pilot in Korea, his graduation certificate from the Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program; four sixteenth-century Delft porcelains he had purchased in Brussels during a tour at NATO headquarters. Before Eastman in a hinged silver frame were pictures of his wife and his nineteen-year-old daughter, Cathy, taken two years before on the June morning she graduated from Washington’s Cathedral School.

The National Security Assistant picked listlessly at a twist of macaroni with his plastic fork. Inevitably, helplessly almost, his eyes turned back to the slender figure before him in her white graduation dress, her new diploma grasped defiantly in her hand. At first glance, the long, virtually angular face she had gotten from her mother seemed glazed with a solemnity appropriate to the moment. Yet Eastman could read there a hidden smile curling mischievously at the end of her lips. From the time she’d been a baby squirming in his arms that smile had been a secret bond between them, the special gauge of the love of father and daughter.

He stared at that smile now, unable to turn away, unable to think of anything except his proud girl in her white dress. The movements of his jaw slowed, then stopped. Nausea crept through his stomach. Slowly, despairingly, he lowered his head to the waiting cradle of his arms, struggling to stop the sobs, searching for the discipline he’d been so long trained to exercise. Jack Eastman’s only child was a sophomore at Columbia University in New York City.

Laila Dajani hurried past the black limousines. They were always there, lined up like mourners’ cars waiting outside the funeral of a politician or a Mafia chieftain. For an instant, she looked with pity and contempt at the knot of gawkers clustered by the door, waiting, despite the cold, the time, the fact that it was Sunday night, to savor whatever bizarre pleasure it was they got from watching someone famous walk into New York’s Studio 54.

Inside, she was overwhelmed once again by the scene: the twelve landing lights of a Boeing 707, the multicolored strobes hurling a sparkling firestorm of light and color against the nylon drapes; the waiters slithering past in their satin shorts; the horde of liquid forms on the dance floor frozen, then released, in the incandescent glare of the strobes. Bianca Jagger was there, dancing frantically in satin jogging shorts; so, too, was Marisa Berenson, lolling on a banquette as though she were holding court. In front of Laila a frail black in leather pants, bare-chested except for a studded black leather vest, hands chained to a truss around his genitals, swayed in lascivious response to the ecstasy of some private dream.

Laila twisted through the crowd, waving, blowing an occasional kiss, indifferent to the hands caressing her black satin pants. When she finally found the group she was looking for, she glided up behind a boy whose long blond hair hung to the collar of a white silk shirt. She threw her arms around him, letting her fingernails scurry over the skin exposed by his unbuttoned shirt while her mouth nibbled his ear in quick, teasing bites.

“Michael, darling, can you forgive me for being so late?”

Michael Laylor turned to her. He had the face of an angel: blue eyes, features that were almost too perfect in their regularity, lips slightly parted; the whole framed in a halo of blond hair that gave him an open, innocent regard.

Innocence was not, as Laila had had the grateful occasion to discover, an attribute of his. He circled his hand under her hair so that the nape of her neck was caught in the soft vise of his thumb and other fingers. With a languorous movement he drew her face down to his and held it there, their lips barely touching. Finally, reluctantly, be released her.

“I’d forgive you anything.”

Laila circled the banquette and slid down onto the cushion beside him.

Across the way a joint was moving from hand to hand. Michael reached for it and passed it to her. Laila, still shaken by her experience in the garage, inhaled a full breath, holding the smoke in her lungs every second she could before letting it glide out her nostrils. Michael started to pass it on, but before he did she grabbed it back and gulped another lungful. Then she sat back, eyes closed, waiting, praying for the gentle numbness to seep through her. She opened her eyes to see Michael staring down at her, a crooked half-smile on his face.

“Dance?”

As soon as they reached the dance floor, she hurled herself into the music, eyes closed, racing off alone along the crashing tide of sound, away from everything, the grass finally enclosing her in its protective cocoon.

“Black bitch!”

The shrill scream shattered Laila’s reverie. The young black she bad noticed on the way in was slumping to the floor, blood spurting from his temple, his mouth open in a prayer of pain from the blow, from the agonizing tear of his weird harness. His aggressor, a squat young white with a beer drinker’s belly and a floppy leather hat, planted a vicious kick in his groin before two bouncers could shove him away.

Laila shuddered. “Oh God,” she whispered. “How awful! Let’s sit down.” Her hand clutched Michael’s tightly as they started back to their banquette.

Dizzy from the grass, the scene on the dance floor, she leaned against him, raising her head toward his. Her eyes were glistening.

“What a hideous world we live in!”

Michael studied her. She seemed distant, distraught almost. Perhaps, he told himself, the new Mexican grass was too strong. He stroked her auburn hair as they sat down. He could see she was still far away, running down her own track.

“Why is it always the ones like him that get hurt?” she asked. “The weak, the helpless?” Michael didn’t answer; he knew she didn’t want an answer.

“For people like that there’s never any justice until they start to use the violence others use against them. And then there’s more violence and more violence and more violence.”

Hearing her own words, she trembled.

“You don’t believe that, Linda.”

“Oh yes I do. They”-she waved scornfully to the crowded dance floor-“never hear anything until it’s too late. They’re only interested in their bodies, their pleasures, their money. The poor, the homeless, the wronged-that doesn’t interest them. Until there’s violence, the world is deaf.” Her voice fell until it was barely a whisper. “You know, there’s a saying in our Koran. A terrible saying, really, but true: `If God should punish men according to what they deserve, he would not leave on the back of the earth so much as a beast.”’

“Your Koran? I thought you were Christian, Linda.”

Laila stiffened, suddenly wary of the grass. “You know what I mean. The Koran’s Arabic, isn’t it?”

From across the banquette someone waved another joint toward them. Michael pushed it away.

“Let’s go back to the studio.”

Laila cupped his face in her hands, her long fingers fondling the skin on his temples. She held him like that for a while, gazing at his beautiful face.

“Yes, Michael. Take me home.”

As they walked toward the door, a chubby paw beckoned to them out of the darkness.

“Linda, darling! You’re stunning, duh-voon!”

She turned to see the pudgy figure of Truman Capote, resembling a scaled-down Winston Churchill in a mauve velvet jumpsuit.

“Come meet all these lovely people.”

With the pride of a jeweler pointing out his choice baubles, he introduced them to the gaggle of Italian pseudo-nobles fawning over him.

“The Principessa’s giving a luncheon in my honor tomorrow,” he gushed, indicating a gray-haired woman whose taut facial skin was evidence of more than one visit to the fashionable plastic surgeons of Rio. “You must come.”

The bright eyes swept over Michael. “And do bring this lovely creature along.” Capote leaned over to her. “Everyone will be there tomorrow. Gianni is coming from ‘Iurino just for me.” His voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper. “Even Teddy’s coming. Isn’t that marvelous?”

With a kiss and a promise, Laila managed to extricate them from Capote’s grasp. Leaving, she heard his voice squealing through the shadows after them, its high timbre rising above the din of the club. “Don’t forget Tuesday lunch, darlings! Everyone will be there!”

“They’re here, sir.”

The words had no sooner drifted from Jack Eastman’s intercom than “they” were in his office, terrorist experts from State and the CIA: Dr. John Turner, head of the Agency’s Psychiatric Affairs Division; Lisa Dyson, the thirtyfive-yearold CIA officer who had what was referred to in the Agency as the “Libyan account”; Bernie Tamarkin, a Washington psychiatrist and a recognized world authority on the behavioral psychology of terrorists in stress situations.

Eastman scrutinized them all, noticing the faint flush on their faces, sensing the shortened rhythm of their breathing. Nervous, he thought.

Everybody peaks when they come to the White House.

As soon as they had sat down, Lisa Dyson passed out copies of an eighteen-page document. It was enclosed in an embossed white folder bearing the pale-blue seal of the CIA, a “Top Secret” stamp and the words “Personality and Political Behavior Study: Muammar al-Qaddafi.”

The study was part of a secret program run by the CIA since the late fifties, an effort to employ the techniques of psychiatry to study the personality and character development of a selected group of world leaders in intimate detail, to try to predict with some degree of certainty how they would respond in a crisis. Castro, Charles de Gaulle, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Mao Tse-tung, the Shah, Nasser, all had been put under the dissecting glare of the CIA’s analysts. Indeed, some of the perceptions turned up in the profiles of Castro and Khrushchev had been of vital help to John F. Kennedy in dealing with both men during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Each involved prodigious expense and effort. Everything about a “target”

was examined: what had influenced his life, what its major traumas were, how he had responded to them, whether he had developed certain characteristic defense mechanisms. Agents were sent all over the world to determine one precise fact, to explore just one facet of a man’s character.

Old military-schoolmates were hunted down and probed to find out if a man masturbated, drank, was finicky about his food, went to church, how he responded to stress. Did he like boys? Or women? Or both? Had be had a mother fixation? Trace him where you could through his oral, anal, genital stages. Find out if he had a large or small penis. If he had sadistic tendencies. Once a CIA agent had been smuggled into Cuba for the sole purpose of talking to a whore with whom Castro had often gone to bed when he was a student.

Eastman turned back the folder of his study and looked at the portrait inside of the man who was threatening to massacre his daughter and five million other Americans.

He sighed and turned to Lisa Dyson. She had a mane of long blond hair that streamed below her shoulder blades. Her slender hips were forced into blue jeans so tight the men around her could not miss the welt made in them by the edge of her panties. “All right, miss, why don’t you start by summing up just what that report of yours tells us about this son of a bitch and how he’s going to act in a crisis,” Eastman ordered.

Lisa reflected a moment, searching for the phrase, for the one all-embracing thought, that would capture the essence of those eighteen pages she knew so well.

“What this tells us,” she answered, “is that he’s as shrewd as a desert fox and twice as dangerous.”

In New York, Times Square was empty. A chill wind sweeping up from the distant harbor twisted the cottony tufts of steam spurting from the Con Ed manhole covers and sent the night’s harvest of litter scuttling along the sidewalks and curbs. The predominant sound was the clattering of the suspensions of the Checker cabs as they hurtled over the potholes of Broadway in their flight downtown.

At Forty-third and Broadway a pair of half-frozen whores huddled in the doorway of a Steak and Brew Burger, listlessly calling to the few late-night passersby. Three blocks away, in the warmth of a third-floor walkup, its walls and ceilings painted black, their pimp lolled on a mattress wrapped in a gold satin sheet. He was a lean black with a precisely trimmed goatee. He had on a white beaver hat with a three-inch brim, and, despite the almost total lack of illumination in the room, dark glasses screened his eyes. His hips, covered by the white silk folds of an Arab djellabah, twitched suggestively to the rhythms of Donna Summer’s voice flooding out of his stereo system.

Enrico Diaz turned to the girl beside him. She was the third and newest member of his stable. He reached for the ornament dangling around his neck on a gold chain. It was a representation of the male sex organ and it was there that he kept his finest Colombian coke. He was about to offer the girl a jolt and a loving stroke, the assurance that she was his main woman, when the phone rang.

His irritation became evident displeasure when he heard a voice saying, “This is Eddie. How about a party?”

Fifteen minutes later Enrico’s lime-green custom-built Lincoln paused at Forty-sixth and Broadway just long enough to allow a figure to emerge from the shadows and slip into the front seat.

As he guided the car into the traffic, Enrico glared disdainfully at the man beside him, the collar of his beige overcoat turned up to screen his face. Enrico was typical of dozens of men and women being contacted in these predawn hours in bars, on street corners, in restaurants and bedrooms around New York. He was an FBI informer.

He owed that distinction to the fact that he had been caught one night with a dozen dime bags of heroin in his car. It was not that Enrico scored horse. He was a gentleman. The bags were for one of his girls. But it had come down to doing eight to fifteen in Atlanta or walkingand talking, from time to time, with the Bureau. Besides pimping, Enrico, the son of a black mother and a Puerto Rican father, was a senior member of the FALN Puerto Rican underground, a group of considerable interest to the FBI.

“I got something heavy, Rico,” his control agent said.

“Man,” Rico sighed, maneuvering deftly through the late traffic, “you always got something heavy.”

“We’re looking for Arabs, Rico.”

“No Arabs fucking my girls. They too rich for that.”

“Not that kind of Arab, Rico. The kind that likes to blow people up, not screw them. Like your FALN friends.” Rico eyed the agent warily. “I need anything you got on Arabs, Rico. Arabs looking for guns, papers, cards, a safe house, whatever.”

“Ain’t heard about none of that.”

“Suppose you just ask around for us, Rico?”

Rico groaned softly, all the strains and tensions of his double life encapsulizcd in the sound. Still, life was a deal. You made, you took, you gave, you got. The man wanted something, the man give something.

“Hey, man,” he said in that low gentle voice he reserved for special moments. “One of my ladies, she be in this thing with the Pussy Posse down at the Eighteenth Precinct.”

“What kind of thing, Rico?”

“Hey, you know, this John, he don’t want to pay and…

“And she’s looking at three to five for armed robbery?”

There was an almost reluctant, liquid roll to Rico’s answer. “Yeahhh.”

“Pull over here.” The agent waved to the curb. “It’s heavy, Rico. Real heavy. You get me what I need on Arabs, I’ll get you your girl.”

Watching him disappear down Broadway, Rico could only think of the girl waiting for him on the gold silk mattress, of her long muscular legs, the soft lips and the swiftly moving tongue he was training to perform the arts of her new calling. Sighing reluctantly, he drove off, not back toward his Forty-third Street fiat but east toward the East River Drive.

For fifteen minutes, Lisa Dyson had kept the men in Jack Eastman’s White House office captivated with her profoundly disturbing portrait of the man threatening to destroy New York City. Every facet of Qaddafi’s life was covered in the CIA’s report: his lonely, austere boyhood in the desert tending his father’s herds; the brutal trauma of being cast from the family tent by his ambitious father and sent away to school; how he had been despised as an ignorant Bedouin by his schoolmates, humiliated because he was so poor that he bad to sleep on the floor of a mosque and walk twelve miles each weekend to his parents’ camp.

The CIA had indeed found his bunkmates at the military school where his political ambitions had begun to emerge. The portrait they gave of a youthful Qaddafi, however, was anything but that of a masturbating, eagerly lecherous young Arab male. He had been instead a zealous Puritan, sworn to a vow of chastity until he had overthrown Libya’s King; abjuring alcohol and tobacco and urging his fellows to follow his example. Indeed, as Lisa Dyson pointed out, he still flew into wild temper tantrums when he heard that his Prime Minister was fooling around with the Lebanese hostesses on Libya’s national airline or womanizing with bar girls in Rome.

The report described the carefully planned coup. that had given him control on September 1, 1969, at the age of twenty-seven, of a nation with $2 billion a year in oil revenues, pointing out the code word he’d assigned the operations: “El Kuds”-Jerusalem.

It detailed the extreme, xenophobic version of Islam he had imposed on his nation: the return to the Sharia, the Koranic law, cutting off a thief’s hand, stoning adultresses to death, putting drinkers under the lash; his conversion of Libya’s churches to mosques, his decrees forbidding the teaching of English and ordering all signs and documents written in Arabic; how he had banned brothels and alcohol; how he had personally led, pistol in hand, the raids that had closed Tripoli’s nightclubs, ordering strippers to dress, gleefully smashing up bottles like a Prohibition cop. There was his “cultural revolution” that had sent illiterate mobs into the street burning the works of Sartre, Baudelaire, Graham Greene, Henry James; smashing into private homes in search of whiskey; storming through the bunk rooms of the oilfield tool pushers, ripping Playboy centerfolds from their walls.

Most terrifying of all was the long history of terrorist actions for which he had been directly or indirectly responsible: his repeated attempts to assassinate Anwar Sadat, to organize a coup in the Saudi Arabian Army; how he’d funneled millions into Lebanon to foment the bloody Lebanese civil war and other millions to aid the Ayatollah Khomeini’s overthrow of the Shah.

“‘Muammar al-Qaddafi is essentially a lonely man, a man without friends or advisers,”’ Lisa Dyson read with the singsong Scandinavian speech pattern of the tiny Minnesota village in which she’d been raised. “‘In every instance, his reaction to new situations has been to retreat back to the old and the secure. He has discovered all too often that rigidity works, and he will inevitably become rigid in difficult circumstances.”’

She cleared her throat and pushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead.

“‘Most important, it is the Agency’s conviction that in a moment of great crisis he would be perfectly prepared to play the role of a martyr, to bring the roof down over his head and destroy the house if he is not allowed to have his own way.” `He likes to be unpredictable, and,”’ she concluded, ” `his favorite tactic in a crisis will be to lunge for his enemy’s weakest spot.”’

“Jesus Christ!” Eastman groaned. “He certainly found it in New York City.”

“That, gentlemen,” Lisa Dyson noted, closing her report, “is Muammar al-Qaddafi.”

Bernie Tamarkin had followed her, leaning tensely forward, elbows on his knees, his hands clasped so tightly together his knuckles glowed. He stood up and began to stride around Eastman’s office, tugging nervously at his mat of curly hair. Without being asked, he started to offer his evaluation of the material Lisa Dyson had just read.

“We’re looking at a very, very dangerous man here. First of all, he was humiliated as a kid and he’s never gotten over it. He was the dirty little Bedouin boy despised by everybody else, and he’s been out for revenge ever since. This business about keeping his family in a tent until everyone else in Libya has a house. Bullshitl He’s still punishing his father for taking him out of his desert and throwing him into that school.”

“I think there are some vital clues for us in the desert’s impact on him,”

Dr. Turner, the CIA’s Psychiatric Division head, noted. He was a big man, his bald head meticulously shaved, delicate gold-rim glasses on his nose.

“Our key to getting to him may be religion-God and the Koran.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Tamarkin was still pacing. His own reputation as a terrorist negotiator had been considerably enhanced by his skillful use of an Arab ambassador familiar with the Koran during the Kannifi Black Muslim crisis in Washington a few years before. “But I doubt it. This guy thinks he’s God. That stuff about raiding the nightclubs. The story about how he goes to the hospital disguised as a beggar asking for a doctor to come to help his dying father, then throws off his robes and orders the doctor out of the country when he tells him to give his father an aspirin. That’s omnipotence. The man is playing God. And you don’t negotiate with God.”

“Do we have to take this man at his word?” Eastman asked him. “Is he the kind of guy who really could go through with something like this? Could he be bluffing?”

“Not a chance.” There was not, Eastman noted grimly, a hint of hesitation in Tamarkin’s reply. “Don’t doubt that son of a bitch even for a second.

Don’t ever, ever question his readiness to pull that trigger, because he’ll pull it just to show you he can.” Tamarkin moved to Eastman’s desk. “The one vital, essential thing you’ve got to convey to the President or whoever’s going to deal with Qaddafi is this: don’t challenge him. We’ve got to forget our big nationalistic ego. We can’t get into one of those macho, head-on collisions, have a couple of forty-fivecaliber penises waving at each other. Do that and he’ll feel threatened. And New York will go.”

“All right,” Eastman snapped, “I’ll inform the President. But what are we supposed to do? That’s what you’re here to tell us.”

“Well, right off I’d point out that the guy who wrote the book on how to handle situations like this is a Dutchman over in Amsterdam. I’d sure as hell like to have him here in our corner when push gets to shove.”

“If he’s a Dutchman and he’s in Holland he’s not going to do us much good tonight in Washington, D.C., is be?” barked Eastman.

“Look, that’s not my problem. I’m just saying if there’s some way to get him here it would be a big help. Now, as far as Qaddafi’s concerned, the first thing I’d work on is the fact he’s a loner. Has no friends. Whoever negotiates with him has to insinuate himself into his confidence. Become his friend.”

Eastman made hurried notes on the yellow legal pad before him. “You know,”

he said to Tamarkin, “one thing that struck me in that report is the concern he’s always shown for his people. Getting them better housing, things like that. Is there a reservoir of sympathy there we can play on to get him to respond to the people up in New York?”

The psychiatrist sat up with a sudden, almost spastic reflex. His dark eyes widened as he stared incredulously at the National Security Assistant.

“Never!” he said. “This man hates New York. It’s New York he’s after, not Israel, not those settlements of theirs. New York is everything this guy loathes. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah. Money. Power. Wealth. Corruption. Materialism. It’s everything that’s threatening that austere, spartan desert civilization of his. It’s the moneylenders in the Temple; it’s the effete, degenerate society he despises.”

Tamarkin’s eyes darted around the room to be sure that his message was registering on everyone there. “The first thing you’ve got to understand is this: deep down inside, whether he knows it or not, what this guy really wants to do is destroy New York.”

The screaming jangle of an alarm bell galvanized the men manning the National Security Council communications center in the basement of the West Wing. The duty officer jabbed at three red buttons by his desk.

Thirty seconds later, Jack Eastman came running into the room.

“The Allen has found Qaddafi, sir!” the duty officer shouted.

Eastman grabbed the secure phone that linked the room to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon.

“Where is he?”

“In a villa, by the sea, just outside Tripoli,” the admiral running the center announced. “The Allen intercepted his voice on a call half an hour ago and traced it back there. The Agency confirms it’s one of his terrorist headquarters.”

“Terrific!”

“I have just had Admiral Moore at Sixth Fleet on the blower. They can put a three-kiloton missile through the front door of that villa in thirty seconds.”

“Don’t you fucking dare!”

Eastman had the reputation of being “tight-assed,” for never flapping no matter how severe the pressures on him were, but he screamed out his order to the Pentagon admiral. “The President has made it absolutely clear there’s to be no military action in this situation without his express orders. You make damn sure everybody out there understands that.”

“Yes, sir.”

Eastman thought for a second. Should he wake the President? On his urging he had gone to sleep to husband his strength for the crisis. No, he told himself, let him get his sleep. He’ll need it.

“Tell Andrews to start one of the Doomsday planes for Libya right away.” The Doomsday planes were three converted 747s that bristled with electronic gadgetry and sensitive communications equipment.

They could stay aloft for seventy-two hours and were designed to provide the President with an airborne command post in the event of a nuclear war. “I want them to set up a secure communications channel Qaddafi can use to talk from that villa to Washington.”

Eastman paused. He was sweating. “Get State,” he ordered the duty officer beside him. “Tell them to have the charge in Tripoli get out to that villa right away. Tell him …” Eastman reflected carefully on his words. “Instruct him to inform Qaddafi that the President of the United States requests the privilege of a conversation with him.”

The thud of horse’s hoofs echoed along the deserted bridle path of Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. An earlymorning ground fog wrapped the French capital’s park, and the advancing rider emerged from the shadows en-folding the path like some phantom horseman of legend. It was appropriate that he did, for nothing could have better suited the character of the head of the SDECE, France’s intelligence service, than that almost conspiratorial obscurity cloaking his morning ride.

In an age when the CIA pointed the way to its headquarters with highway signs and the names of British intelligence agents were bandied about in Parliamentary debates, the agency over which General Henri Bertrand presided remained obsessed with secrecy. No telephone book, no street directory, no Bottin contained its name or the address of its headquarters.

No Who’s Who, no Baedeker of French government officialdom listed Bertrand’s name or that of any of his subordinates. In fact, Bertrand was not even the General’s real name. It was a nom de service he’d adopted when, as a young captain in the Foreign Legion, he was recruited for the service in 1954 during the Indochinese War.

Expertly, Bertrand reigned his mount to a walk and started back to the stable of the Polo de Paris. He had belonged to that exclusive body for fifteen years, yet never once had his name appeared in the green members’ directory the club published annually. Walking through its white gate, he started in surprise at the figure waiting in the shadows to greet him. Only a matter of gravest urgency could have brought Palmer Whitehead, the Paris station chief of the CIA, out here at this hour of the morning.

“Alors, vieux?” Bertrand said, swinging off his horse. Then, before Whitehead could reply, he suggested, “Come with me while I walk her down.”

For five minutes the two men walked the horse around the huge greensward where Rothschild barons and Argentinian gauchos played polo. The CIA station chief did not reveal the existence of the bomb in New York to his French counterpart; he told him instead that the U.S. government had incontrovertible evidence that Qaddafi had made an atomic bomb, probably from plutonium diverted from the French reactor, and was planning to use it for terrorist purposes. They needed desperately the identity of anyone who might have been involved in the Libyan’s project.

“You understand,” Bertrand told the American when he’d finished, “that since this involves nuclear matters, I’ll have to have the agreement of my principals before I begin. Although, in view of what you’ve told me, I’m sure there will be no problem.”

The American nodded gravely. “I understand there’s a personal message from the President on its way to the P-lysee now.” Leaving, he added one last phrase. “And please, Henri, be very, very discreet and very, very quick.”

Sally Eastman awoke the instant she heard the metallic snap of the front door closing. The crunch of doors closing in the watches of the night had been the background music to her twenty-seven-year marriage: doors closing in bungalows adjoining Air Force bases in Colorado, France, Germany and Okinawa as her husband rushed off to alerts; in Brussels during their NATO tours, and here in Washington, first on Jack’s assignments to the Pentagon, and now at the White House.

She lay awake listening to his footsteps follow their familiar course to the kitchen for a glass of milk, then their weary march up the stairs of their Colonial clapboard house.

She snapped on her night light as the bedroom door opened. The years had given Sally Eastman an unnerving ability to read in the lines of her husband’s face the gravity of the crisis that had kept him from their bed. Seeing him, she sat up abruptly, hugging the blanket against her ten-year-old nightgown.

“What time is it?”

Her voice rang with those faintly imperious, metallic undertones so often found in women who had gone to Vassar or Smith in the early fifties, lived with roommates called Bootsie or Muffin and developed in the wasteland of their middle years an inordinate affection for alcohol.

Eastman sank onto the bed. “Just after four.”

Three hours, he’d calculated; he had three hours to catch the sleep he so desperately needed while the Doomsday jet was streaking over the Atlantic.

“You look very worried. Is it something we can talk about?”

Eastman rubbed his weary eyes and shook his head as though somehow that gesture might ease the fatigue numbing his brain. On the maple chest of drawers opposite him was another picture in a silver frame. This one had been taken in Wiesbaden in 1961, and it showed Major Eastman and his wife proudly displaying their newborn daughter.

Eastman thought back to the President’s injunction to secrecy in the Pentagon war room. The National Security Assistant was used to carrying the awful burden of secrecy. He had borne it many times, in many crises, although never one as personally painful as this.

“I’m afraid not, Sal.” He looked at his wife, at her angular, decent face yielding sadly to age now, a mirror of the hurts and loneliness of their strained and empty marriage. Why the hell shouldn’t I tell her? he suddenly thought. Doesn’t she have at least as much right to know as I do? “If I tell you, neither you nor I have the right to tell anyone else, understand?”

His wife nodded her head dutifully.

“Anyone,” stressed Eastman.

“Oh my Godl” Sally Eastman shrieked after her husband had outlined Qaddafi’s threat. “What a bastardl” Her body jerked upright almost violently. “Cathyl Jesus Christ, Jack, we’ve got to call Cathy right away and get her out of there.” A perplexed, half-frightened, half-angry look swept Sally Eastman’s features. “Haven’t you called her already?”

Eastman shook his head.

“Why not, for God’s sake?”

“Sally, we can’t.”

“Can’t? What do you mean, can’t? Of course we can. We have to.”

“Jack, for God’s sake, we don’t have to tell her there’s a bomb in New York! We’ll tell her … ” Sally Eastman’s eyes flashed wildly. “I’ll tell her Mother’s going into the hospital for an operation.”

“Sally, understand me. I’ve been crying my insides out all night for Cathy.

But we just don’t have the right to save our own family. Not when there are millions of families in New York who can’t save themselves.”

“Jack, we’re not going to violate any secrecy.”

“We’re violating a trust.”

“A trust? How about all the other people in that room? You don’t think they’re not on the phone right now, saving their daughters? Calling their girl friends? Or their goddamn stockbrokers? How about the President?

“Don’t you suppose he’s going to call that dancer son of his and get him out of there?”

“No, Sally, I don’t. Not this President.”

Joints creaking, Jack rose from the bed. He walked to the window. Nowhere in the neighborhood was there another light burning; all he could see was the regular pattern of street lights falling on the snow and the sbadowy outlines of his neighbors’ homes looming behind them. What decisions, he thought almost angrily, had they had to make tonight? Whether to have the vet put down the aging family dog? Whether they should have a child’s teeth straightened? Was it time to trade in the station wagon?

He looked at his wife still clutching the blanket to her bare shoulders.

“Sally, one person in that room, just one, breaks his trust.” He was begging for her understanding. “He calls his mother. And she calls her brother. And he calls his partner. And he calls his daughter. And she calls her boy friend. And it’s out. It’s gone public. And Qaddafi blows the bomb, because that’s what he’s threatening to do if this gets out. And five million people and our lovely Cathy die because someone in that room didn’t live up to his trust, couldn’t handle the moral obligation-”

“Moral obligation! My God, the only moral obligation we have is to our daughter. If she were a soldier on duty, all right. If we were betraying a secret, all right. But we’re not. We’re only saving her life.”

“By using information I hold in trust.”

“Oh dear God, Jack, it’s not buying stocks with insider’s knowledge! It’s our daughter’s life.”

Sally Eastman looked at her husband through a film of angry tears. If there had been one constant in her feelings for him through twenty-seven years of marriage it was respect. Not understanding. Try though she had, she had never been able to understand his soldier’s mind and, dear God, she could not understand it now. But respect him she did.

“All right, darling,” she whispered, “come to bed.”

Eastman undressed quickly and slipped under the covers beside her.

“What time do you have to get up?”

“The switchboard will call.”

Sally leaned over him before switching off her night light, reading the deep hurt in his green eyes. Then she leaned down and kissed him.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, it was just after 10 A.M. when a black Peugeot 204 maneuvered into its reserved parking place in front of one of the Flemish fagades, all of them identical, of the red brick houses lining Amsterdam’s Keerkstraat.

The man getting out of the car was a short, stocky sixty-year-old, his cheeks glowing with the healthy tone of a burgomeister in a Frans Hals oil.

Tucked primly under one arm was a worn black leather briefcase. A few minutes later, in his austere office looking onto the Keerkstraat, Henrick Jagerman opened the case and took out the ingredients of the snack with which he inevitably began his working day: a steaming thermos of black coffee and an apple.

Jagerman was the son of a poor factory worker who had become a prison inspector in the slums of Amsterdam. Trailing along after his father, Jagerman had first felt the stirrings of the uncommon vocation which had brought him to his present office, a deep fascination with the criminal mind. He put himself through college and medical school guiding tourists along the canals and around the museums of Amsterdam, then became a psychiatrist specializing in criminology. When Holland’s forward-looking government decided to set up a task force to study the best ways to deal with terrorist situations, Jagerman had been chosen to sit on it as its psychiatric counselor.

Four times since, when Palestinians seized the French ambassador to The Hague in 1974, when common convicts captured a choir visiting the capital’s jail for a Christmas service, during the two train seizures staged by Holland’s dissident Moluccan community, Jagerman had had the chance to put the theories he had developed in his long hours in prisoners’ cells into practice. So successful were they that he had become known around the world as Dr. Terrorism, admired by policemen and feared by terrorists for the original and innovative methods with which he used manipulative psychology to resolve hostage situations.

He had, quite literally, written the bible on how to deal with terrorists.

Compiled in a limited six-hundredpage edition, it was locked in the vaults of a score of national police services, the indispensable and rigorously secret tool they called on whenever terrorists struck on their soil.

Jagerman had barely turned his attention to the first item on his desk, when, unbidden, his secretary entered the office. He recognized immediately the flustered face of the American ambassador trailing behind her.

The ambassador indicated he had to talk to him alone, then told him what had happened. A jet of the Queen’s Flight, he said, was waiting at Schiphol to fly him to Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, where Air France was holding the Washington-bound Concorde for his arrival.

“With luck,” the ambassador remarked, giving his watch a nervous glance, “we can have you at the White House by nine Washington time.”

Jack Eastman was snoring. His wife stared at his body, crumpled in the deep sleep he had long ago learned to force on himself in a crisis.

Forgive me, Jack, she thought. Noiselessly, Sally slipped from the bed and tiptoed out of the room. She walked carefully down the stairs to the telephone in the front hall. The first numbers she dialed were 212, the area code for New York City.

Laila lay on her back, gazing upward into the comforting nothingness of the high-ceilinged room, to the ill-defined point where all form and shape were obliterated by the darkness. The cloying odor of the incense Michael had burned mingled with the lingering fumes left by their grass and the pungent odor their lovemaking had wrung from their bodies.

It was dark except for one pale shaft of light falling across the room and onto the bed from a floor lamp burning in the studio next door. Here and there, along its advance, its soft glow highlighted bits and pieces of the clothing they’d flung about the room in their rush to the bed: Laila’s black satin trousers crumpled in a heap by the door; Michael’s silk shirt spilling from the bed; her flimsy panties wadded into a tight knot and hurled to the floor.

Michael was sprawled on his stomach. He was sound asleep, his head buried in the comforting arc of Laila’s breast and shoulder. One arm lay across her body, its motionless fingers clutching her other breast. To her right, a traveler’s alarm clock in a leather frame rested on Michael’s night table. Its luminous dial read 6:15.

Tenderly, yet absentmindedly, Laila stroked the long hanks of hair spilling down Michael’s back and tried to drive from her consciousness every thought except the recollected pleasure of her spent passion. The light cleaving the room caught the hairs along Michael’s forearm, turning them into a gossamer’s web of silver threads. Everything, it suddenly seemed to Laila, came down to that arm, to the hand encircling her breast. She had to perform one act, one deliberate reflex of the will to move it, to rouse her sleeping lover. All the rest would follow inevitably in the wake of that gesture, each inexorable step leading toward the act to which the luminous hands of the clock summoned her.

She thought of a line from Sartre: “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.”

There was no one there to make her move that hand, to put her feet onto the course she had chosen for them. The will to act — or not to act — was hers, and her alone.

Her eyes stared into the darkness overhead. We have no destinies, Sartre had written, other than those we forge ourselves. Well, she thought, I have forged mine. And for better or for worse, the time had come to accomplish it.

She took her free hand and lifted Michael’s wrist from her breast. She drew it to her lips and tenderly kissed his fingertips. He stirred.

“You’re not going?” His eyes blinked reluctantly open and peered up to her.

Sleep had softened their hue from bright blue to a gentle gray.

“I have to, my love, the time has come.”

“Stay,” he whispered.

“Michael, my love, my darling. I can’t. I have to go. I have to.”

She lay there an instant, then she slid out from under his arms and slithered to the floor.

Michael watched dreamy-eyed as she wriggled into her tight black pants, pulled her blouse over her head, scooped her panties from the floor and stuffed them into her handbag.

“When will I see you again?”

“I don’t know, Michael.”

“Let’s have lunch. My shooting will be finished at twelve.”

“I can’t today.” There was an aching in her stomach now. “I’m having lunch with Calvin Klein’s people.”

“Then we’ll go to Capote’s lunch together tomorrow.”

Laila felt as though someone had jammed a thick wad of wool into her mouth.

She nodded, but it was seconds before her larynx formed the words she wanted.

“Yes, Michael. We’ll go to Truman’s together.”

She came back to the bed and threw herself on top of him. Her mouth flayed at his, her twisting lips driving his back against his teeth until they hurt, her belt buckle, the heavy buttons of her blouse, driving into his bare flesh. Finally she slipped a hand around his neck, clasped the hair over his forehead, and slowly pulled his head back down onto the pillow.

For a moment, she lay there on top of him, staring down at his face with such intensity it frightened him. Then, like an awakening dreamer, she shook her head. She got up.

“Don’t move, darling. I’ll let myself out.”

He heard her voice calling to him through the shadows. “Goodbye, my love.” Then he heard the door slamming behind her and she was gone.

A police ambulance on emergency call hurtled through the orange haze of Columbus Circle, the heehaw bleat of its siren filling the empty square with a sound that was to many the background music of New York City.

Laila Dajani watched it go, then continued her march toward the Hampshire House. Just ahead of her, Sanitation Department workers hurled black plastic sacks of garbage into the maw of their truck, its clanging metallic jaws piercing the slumber of the apartment dwellers in the buildings above them. In the darkened park to her left, the sneakers of the earlymorning joggers were already crunching over the dry snow. From Brooklyn Heights to Forest Hills, in Harlem and the South Bronx, along Park Avenue and down to the Village, the lights were blinking on in the darkened facades as the seven million residents of the city she and her brothers meant to destroy prepared to face another day.

The proud, cantankerous, dangerous, dirty, awesome, difficult yet finally magnificent metropolis to which they all belonged was unique, the ultimate expression of man’s eternal vocation to gather himself in communities. New York was emphatically not just another city; it was the very essence of cityhood, the example of the best and the worst the urban experience had produced. From the marshes beyond Jamaica to the tenements of Queens, the developments of Staten Island and the ghettos of Harlem, New York was a microcosm of mankind, a Tower of Babel in which all the races, peoples and religions of the world had their representation. The city contained such an assembly of peoples its population statistics were a cliche, yet, like most cliches, accurate. There were more blacks in New York than there were in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria; more Jews than there were in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa combined; more Puerto Ricans than in San Juan, more Italians than in Palermo, more Irish than in Cork. Somewhere, in some corner of the five boroughs, there was a touch of almost everything the world had spawned: the smells of Shanghai, the clamor of Naples, the beer of Munich, the bossa-nova beat of Porto Allegro, the patois of Haiti.

Tibetans, Khmers, Basques, Galicians, Circassians, Kurds, every oppressed and dissident population on earth chose to voice its miseries here. Its crowded, often decaying neighborhoods housed 3,600 places of worship, at least one for every cult, sect and religion invented by man in his ceaseless search for God.

It was a city of contrasts and contradictions, of promises made and promises unfulfilled. New York was the heart of the capitalist society, a symbol of unsurpassed wealth; yet it was also so broke it could barely meet the interest payments on its debts. New York contained the finest medical facilities in the world; yet every day, people who couldn’t afford them died from lack of care, and the infant mortality rate in the South Bronx was higher than it was in the bustees of Calcutta.

New York possessed a city university whose student body was larger than the population of many cities, yet one person in eight in New York couldn’t speak English and her public-school system produced a regular flow of barely literate graduates.

As the pharaohs of Egypt, the Greeks of Antiquity, the Parisians of the Napoleonic era had set the architectural standards of their times, so the New Yorkers of the age of glass and steel had stamped the seal of their architectural genius on the urban skyline of the world. Yet a quarter of all the buildings in the city were substandard, and beyond the glittering magnificence of lower Manhattan, Park and Fifth Avenues loomed the wastelands of the South Bronx, Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

No other metropolis in the world offered its inhabitants greater hope of material success or a wider variety of intellectual and cultural rewards.

Its museums, the Metropolitan, the Modern, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, housed more Impressionists than the Louvre, more Botticellis than Florence, more Rembrandts than Amsterdam. New York was the United States’s bank, its fashion model, designer and photographer; its publisher, advertiser, publicist, playwright and artist. The theaters, concert halls, ballets, jazz clubs of Broadway, off Broadway and off-off Broadway were the incubators in which a nation’s taste and thought were nurtured.

The people awakening this Monday morning on the island purchased by Peter Minuit in 1626 for twentyfour dollars could, if they had the resources, buy virtually anything in their city: the ridiculous gold Mickey Mouse watches at Cartier’s; the sublime, a Renoir at the Findlay Galleries; diamonds from black-frocked Hasidic Jews on Forty-seventh Street; stolen television sets in fence operations as elaborate as small department stores; chocolate-covered ants from Argentina, pola-bear steaks from Nepal, wildcat gizzards from Canton. Yet, in the midst of all that material affluence, an eighth of the population in New York lived on welfare. Half the nation’s drug addicts crowded her streets. Her police precincts recorded a theft every three minutes, a holdup every twelve, four rapes and two murders a day. More prostitutes circulated through her streets than in the avenues of Paris.

There were, in fact, three New Yorks: the oases of mid-and lower Manhattan, of corporate headquarters and highrise splendor; a glittering world of discotheques, penthouses, Carey Cadillacs and rented limousines, candlelit sit-down dinners high in the glass sheaths of the Olympic Towers, 800 Fifth Avenue, the United Nations Plaza. There were the declining working-class suburbs of Queens, the Bronx, those parts of Brooklyn where trees still grew and a dwindling population clung to memories of the Brighton Beach Express, Ebbets Field and Coney Island’s Steeplechase. There was the necropolis, the dying ghettos of Bronxvdle, Hispanic Harlem, Williamsburg, the South Bronx. And, in a sense, there was yet another New York, a transient city of 3.5 million people who daily crowded into the nine square miles south of Central Park. Space salesmen, television executives, lawyers, stockbrokers, doctors, odd-lot dealers, publishers, ad men, commodity brokers, bankers-they were the administrators of America’s Rome, controlling an empire from their glass-and-steel towers.

Wall Street’s name might be an epithet to the Marxists of the globe; it was still, seventy years after Lenin’s voyage to the Finland Station, the unchallenged financial center of the world. On this December morning, men in its board rooms would discuss loans to France’s railroads, Vienna’s waterworks, Oslo’s public transport, the governments of Ecuador, Malaysia and Kenya. Copper mines in Zaire, tin in Bolivia, phosphate in Jordan, sheep in New Zealand, rice in Thailand, hotels in Bali, shipping fleets in Ceylon would all be affected by the decisions made or postponed this Monday morning in two of the world’s largest banks, the First National City and the Chase Manhattan.

At Rockefeller Center, CBS’s “Black Rock” and the ABC Building, the United States’s three television networks ordered programs that set values, influenced behavior, affected social change in the remotest areas of the earth.

Two blocks away were the citadels of the Prophets of Consumerism, the ad men of Madison Avenue. They had forced a revolution on the world, the revolution of rising expectations. Spread to every corner of the earth by the communications they had so effectively mastered, its contagion had brought to millions the material benefits and spiritual dissatisfactions which were the malaise of the American Age.

Collectively, they were, those men and women, the most affluent, the most capable and the most influential people on earth.

They were also the ideal hostages for an austere zealot burning to reorder the world with the very technology and communications of which they were the proud inventors and masters.

The man who had the awesome and frustrating job of administering their city made an effort to scrunch down against the worn upholstery of his black Chrysler as it slipped through the early-Monday-morning rush-hour traffic already clogging the East River Drive. The gesture was understandable; no mayor of New York was anxious to be spotted by his constituents seventy-two hours after a major snowstorm had hit the city.

Abe Stern flailed at the pall of smoke filling his official limousine with a little pawlike hand. The Mayor was a diminutive fireplug of a man, barely five feet, two inches tall. He was completely bald and in three weeks he would be sixty-nine; yet vitality still snapped from his figure as static electricity sometimes snaps from light switches on a cold dry day. He turned to the source of the smoke, his three-hundred-pound detective bodyguard puffing an afterbreakfast Dutch Master while he read the Daily News sports pages in the front seat.

“Richy,” he growled. “I’m going to tell the Commissioner to give you a raise so you can buy yourself a decent cigar for a change.”

“Sorry, Mr. Mayor. Smoke bother you?”

Stern grunted and turned his attention to his press aide in the seat beside him. “So how many trucks did we finally put on the streets?”

“Three thousand one hundred and sixty-two,” Victor Ferrari replied.

“Son of a bitchl”

In barely two hours, Stern would have to face a snarling City Hall press corps, its members ready to savage him for his administration’s failure to clean the city’s streets quickly enough after Friday’s snowstorm. It was an experience to which he looked forward with a delight akin to that of a man going to his dentist for a root-canal treatment.

“Six thousand fucking trucks this city’s got and the Sanitation Department can barely get half of them out on the streets!”

Ferrari squirmed. “Well, you know how it is, Mr. Mayor. Most of them trucks is twenty years old.”

“Are, Victor, are. God,” Stern groaned, “I’ve got a bodyguard who wants to choke me to death, a Sanitation Commissioner who can’t get the snow off the streets and a press officer who can’t speak English.”

The press officer cleared his throat apprehensively. “There’s another thing, Mr. Mayor.”

“I don’t want to know about it.”

“Friedkin of the Sanitation Workers wants triple time for yesterday.”

Stern stared angrily out at the black surface of the East River, trying to think how he could skewer the union leader at his press conference. For all his protesting to the contrary, he delighted in the rough give-and-take of a press conference. “Feisty” was the adjective most commonly employed to describe Abe Stern, and the word was well chosen. He’d been born in a tenement on the Lower East Side, the son of a Polish-Jewish immigrant father, a pants presser in a tailor shop, and a Russian-born mother who stitched up cheap frocks in a nonunion sweatshop in the Garment District.

It had been a tough neighborhood, predominantly Jewish with satellites of Irish and Italian immigrants along its fringes, a neighborhood where a kid’s stature was measured by his skill with his fists. That had been fine with Abe Stern. He loved to fight. He dreamed of becoming a prizefighter like his idol, the light heavyweight champion Battling Levinsky. He could still recall drifting off to sleep in the tenement on the stifling summer nights, the murmur of conversation flowing through the open windows from the adults on the fire escape, while he dreamed of the triumphs his fists would win him one day.

A brutal physical reality had ended that dream of Abe Stern’s. At sixteen, he stopped growing. If God had not given Abe the body to fulfill his boyhood dream, however, He had given him something much more precious: a good mind. Abe trained it first at CCNY, then studying the law by night at NYU. By the time he passed his bar exams, he had a new idol, a different kind of fighter from the boxer he had idolized as a boy. It was the cripple in the White House whose patrician accent offered hope to a nation mired in depression. Abe had become a politician.

He’d begun in the 1934 Congressional campaign as a Tammany district captain in Sheepshead Bay, working door to door, getting out the vote, cementing the first of the friendships that would ultimately carry him to City Hall and what was often regarded as the second elective office in-the United States. There was no one who understood the complex chemistry of New York City and its governing structures better than the cocky little man in the back of his official limousine. Abe Stern had done it all in his long climb up the ladder. He’d worked the synagogues and the soda fountains, made the Wednesday-night smokers, the maudlin Irish wakes, the bingo games; sat attendant at saints’-day dinners honoring a procession of saints of a variety to bedazzle the most religious of minds. His stomach had been assaulted by enough blintzes, pizzas, chop suey, knishes, pretzels and foot-long red hots to ruin the digestive tracts of a battalion of Gaylord Hausers. His off-key tenor voice had sung the “Hatikvah” in Sheepshead Bay, “Wrap the Green Flag Round Me, Boys” in Queens, opera in Little Italy and Spanish love songs in Hispanic Harlem. Indeed, consciously or unconsciously, many of his electors had given him their vote because they saw in his tough little figure a mirror image of what they thought of as themselves. To them, Abe Stern was New York.

The car phone rang. Ferrari started to reach for it, but the Mayor’s little hand shot past his.

“Gimme that. This is the Mayor,” he barked. He grunted twice, said, “Thanks, darling,” then hung up. As he did, a beatific smile lit up his face.

“What’s up?” Ferrari asked.

“Would you believe it? The President wants to see me right away. White House just called the Mansion. They even got a plane waiting for me out at Marine Air Terminal.” Abe Stern leaned close to his press aide and his voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s about the South Bronx redevelopment scheme. I got a hunch they’re finally going to come up with our two billion bucks.”

Laila Dajani, ravenous after her long night of lovemaking, blotted up the yellow remnants of her softboiled egg with a scrap of the slightly burned toast whose acrid aroma filled the kitchen of her Hampshire House suite.

She took a final nervous swallow of the Chinese tea she had brewed herself as soon as she returned to the hotel, piled her dishes into the sink and looked around the suite. Everything was ready.

“WINS, ten-ten on your dial. It’s seven-thirty and a chilly twenty-three degrees in mid-Manhattan,” a voice announced from the transistor on her coffee table. “The weather man has promised us another clear, cold one. And don’t forget, there are only twelve more shopping days left until Christmas …”

Laila snapped off the radio and picked up her Hermes address book. She ran a crimson fingernail down the entries under “C” until she found the one she was looking for-“Colombe.” She stepped to the phone and dialed the number written beside it, methodically adding as she did the number 2 to each of its seven digits.

For a long time the phone rang unanswered. Finally Laila heard the click of a receiver being lifted from its cradle.

“Self…’ she said in Arabic.

“… Al Islam,” came the reply-the Sword of Islam, the code name Muammar al-Qaddafi had assigned to his nuclear program in 1973.

“Begin your operation,” she ordered, still using her native tongue. Then she hung up.

The man who had answered Laila’s call stepped into the storeroom of a Syrian bakery just off Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Two men waited for him. All three were Palestinians. All three were volunteers. All three had been chosen by Kamal Dajani from among two dozen volunteers in a training camp of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, outside Aleppo in Syria, over a year before.

None of them had any idea who Laila was or from where she had been calling.

They had only been told to wait by the telephone every morning at seven-thirty for the order she had just delivered.

They removed a lead chest from the storeroom’s unused oven and methodically broke open the seals that held it shut. Its interior was divided into two halves. In one was a collection of metal rings the size of a nickel. In the other were several rows of greenish-gray pills about as big as Alka-Seltzer tablets. Carefully, they snapped a tablet into each of the rings in the chest.

When they had finished, they opened the first of three identical wooden crates stacked in one corner of the room and lifted out one of its inhabitants. It was a pigeon, not a homing pigeon but an ordinary gray pigeon of the kind raised by kids all over New York in rooftop lofts. They snapped a ring to the bird’s leg, put him back in his crate and lifted out the next one.

As soon as the rings had been hooked to all the pigeons, the senior Palestinian embraced the other two warmly. “Ma salaam,” he murmured, “till we meet in Tripoli, insh’ Allah.” He picked up one of the three crates and left for a car parked in the street outside. The other two followed at fifteen-minute intervals.

Across the river, on the lower end of Manhattan Island, the Police Commissioner of the City of New York was enjoying a rare moment of silence and introspection. From the window of his office on the fourteenth floor of Police Plaza, Michael Bannion watched the first light steal over the rooftops of the city entrusted to his care. Ahead, looming behind the towers of the Alfred E. Smith housing project, was the familiar silhouette of the Brooklyn Bridge. To his left, far beyond the U.S. Courthouse in Foley Square, Bannion could just make out the tip of the eightstory tenement in which he had been born fifty-eight years before.

Bannion could spend-the rest of his life in the filtered purity of offices like this; his nostrils would always be filled with the smells that had permeated that dark tenement’s stairwells, the odors of his boyhood, the stench of the cabbage boiling in its kitchens, the reek of urine drifting from the toilets on each landing, the heavy aroma of the wax rubbed into its wooden banisters.

A telephone’s ring summoned Bannion back to the massive mahogany table that was the unofficial symbol of his office, the desk used by Teddy Roosevelt in his years as Police Commissioner. It was his private phone. He recognized immediately the voice of Harvey Hudson, the assistant director of the FBI in charge of the Bureau’s New York office.

“Michael,” he said, “I’ve got something urgent which concerns us both. I hate to take you out of your office, but for a number of reasons I don’t want to get into over the phone, I think we’d better discuss it over here.

It will require,” he added, “the services of your Detective Division.”

Bannion looked at the crowded appointments list his detective secretary had laid out on his desk.

“You’ve got to be kidding, Harv?”

“No, Michael,” Hudson answered. Bannion was struck by a curious catch in his voice. “It’s very, very urgent. It comes from the top, the very top.”

“Since when does your director tell the NYPD what to do?”

“It’s not from the director, Michael. It’s from the President.”

On the floor below the Commissioner’s office, the Chief of Detectives, Al Feldman, was staring at a young man advancing toward his office door between the gray metal desks of the junior detectives’ bullpen. He was a “contract,” a patrolman forced on his division because he’d had an uncle who’d been a deputy chief inspector in the Seventh Division. Just as Feldman had predicted he would, he’d fucked up.

Feldman waved a cold cigar at the youth, directing him toward the worn piece of carpet thrown over the linoleum flooring in front of his desk.

“You follow baseball, O’Malley?”

The question perplexed the redfaced young man. He was expecting a dressing-down, not a chat about sports. “Yeah, sure, Chief. You know, I watch it on TV in the summer. Take the wife out to Shea once in a while, see the Mets.”

“So what happens, a guy’s got two strikes on him, he swings and he misses?”

“Well, uh, he’s out, Chief.”

“Right,” Feldman snarled. He plucked a silver patrolman’s shield from his desk drawer and flung it across the desk. “And so are you. Tomorrow you’re back in uniform.”

His gesture reflected the littleknown fact that New York detectives served at the pleasure of their chief and could be instantly returned to the blue uniforms from which their gold detective’s shield had freed them. Feldman had not even had time to savor the delight his action had given him when his phone rang.

“The PC wants you,” the Commissioner’s secretary announced, “forthwith.”

There must have been half a million apartments in New York, more even, in which the almost identical scene was taking place this December morning. The TV was on, its volume, as always, turned up too high. Tommy Knowland, thirteen, moved an occasional spoonful of Rice Krispies and sliced bananas to his mouth with no apparent assistance from eyes that remained totally concentrated on Good Morning America blaring from the set before him.

Grace Knowland sipped her coffee on the chair beside his, studying her son with tender fascination. Even there at the breakfast table, without a trace of makeup, with thus far no effort at beauty beyond a dash of cold water on her face to rouse her and a few swift strokes of her hairbrush, she looked marvelous. Her eyes were clear, her face alive and engaging, the breasts that had excited more than a few admiring glances at Forlini’s the evening before thrusting out against the lapels of the man’s silk bathrobe she wore over her negligee.

“Aw, come off it!” Tommy’s spoon fell to his plate with a clank. “Jeez, Mom, how can Howard Cosell say something like that?”

Grace laughed softly. “I’m sure I don’t know. But what I do know is I can’t send him a bill for a broken plate.”

Her son grimaced and turned his attention back to the television set.

“Tommy, did you ever …” Grace sipped her coffee thoughtfully. “I mean after your father and I divorced, were you sad you didn’t have any brothers or sisters?”

It seemed for an instant as though her question had made no impact on her son. Finally, when a female face appeared on the screen, he turned to his mother. “Naw, Mom, not really. Yeck,” he squawked, “Rona Barrett’s next.

Turn it off, Mom.”

“Gotta run.” He sprang from the table, blotted his mouth with a napkin, grabbed for a pile of books and gave his mother’s cheek a quick, wet stab with his lips. “Hey, don’t forget I got my match at the armory tonight. You coming?”

“Of course, darling.”

The door slammed. Grace sat pensively listening to the sound of her son’s footsteps running down the hall. Running out of my life, too, she thought.

How much time is left? Two, three years. Then he’ll be gone. Off to his own world, his own life. Instinctively, her hand dropped to her negligee. Did she detect a first faint swelling there? Of course not. That was ridiculous, she knew. There couldn’t possibly be a concrete manifestation yet of the life she carried inside her. She took a cigarette, struck a match, then stopped with the flame inches from its destination. If she was going to go through with it, she should stop smoking, shouldn’t she? That’s what all the doctors said. With a slow, uncertain movement, she shook out the match’s flame.

Red-eyed from lack of sleep, Jack Eastman wrestled with the first assignment the President had given him for the day: how to keep the crisis enveloping the White House a secret. No head of state in the world lived as public an existence as the President of the United States.

Brezhnev could spend two weeks in the hospital and not a word would appear anywhere. The President of France could drive to a regular appointment with a girl friend and get caught only because he was maladroit enough to bang into another car on the Champs-Elysees at four in the morning. Everywhere the American President went, however, he was dogged by his corps of journalists. When they were not being briefed, they lounged around the White House press room, their sensitive antennas always alert for the one off-key chord which would indicate that something unusual was going on.

“First thing,” Eastman told the key aides he had assembled around his desk.

“I don’t want any reporters sniffing around the West Wing. If anyone in here’s scheduled to see a reporter, tell them to take him down to the mess for coffee.”

He picked up the President’s schedule for the day from his desk. It was, as always, divided into two parts, the public program published every morning in The Washington Post and his private schedule circulated only to the White House staff. The public schedule for Monday, 14 December, listed four events.

The first item was no problem. Eastman thought for a moment about the second, the budget meeting.

“Let’s get Charlie Schultz to sit in for the President,” he suggested.

Schultz was the newly appointed chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. “Tell him the President wants his opinion on the effect the budget cuts will have on the economy.”

“Should we tell him what’s going on?” someone asked.

“Hell, no. Why should he know about it?” Eastman turned to the press secretary. He had decided he would have to be informed of the crisis. “What about the Declaration and the Christmas-tree lighting?” Both were public events; both would have to be covered by the White House press corps. “Can we scrub them?”

“We’ll have a hell of a lot of explaining to do if we do. Those guys out there will be all over us.”

“Suppose we give him a cold?”

“Then they’ll want to talk to Dr. McIntyre. ‘Is he taking medication?

What’s his temperatureT Jack, you just can’t fool around with the President’s public appearances without an airtight cover story. And airtight cover stories arean’t easily come by in this town.”

“The Human Rights business I can see,” Eastman answered. “If the shit hits the fan while he’s in the Oval office we can probably get him out of there in a hurry without anybody catching on. But, Jesus Christ, if something happens while he’s down there lighting that Christmas tree, we’ll never be able to rush him out of there without the whole world knowing something’s going on.”

“Still, if you want to keep this a secret you’re going to have to take a chance and let him go.” The press secretary stretched his long legs toward Eastman’s desk. “The best way to keep this a secret is to keep up the front. That’s how JFK’s people played the Missile Crisis: people went out to dinners, stuff like that, to maintain a fagade. We’ll have to do the same thing.”

“How are we going to get people in and out of here all day without the press finding out something’s going on?” Eastman asked.

“Again,” his colleague replied, “I’d say look at what the Kennedy people did. They told people to use their own cars. Double up so that they didn’t have a parade of limousines coming in. They even had Rusk and McNamara come in sitting on the floor of their cars”

Eastman couldn’t resist laughing at the thought of Delbert Crandell, the Secretary of Energy, crammed onto the floor of his car. At least some good, he thought, would come out of all this.

“O.K.,” he said. “Do it your way. Just make damn sure it doesn’t leak.”

The headquarters of the SDECE, France’s intelligence service, are on the Boulevard Mortier behind Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris’s Twentieth Arrondissement, a neighborhood so drab that even on the brightest of spring days it somehow seems as depressingly gray as a Utrillo winter scene. From the street, the building that houses the SDECE looks like an old army caserne, which it in fact is, its paint peeling away like dead skin flaking off a sunburned limb.

The decrepitude ends at the front door. Inside the headquarters, gleaming banks of computer consoles place all the wizardry of the electronic age at the disposition of a service traditionally known more for the Gallic panache of its operatives than for their technical skills. Years of Congressional probes and public outcries might have sanitized the SDECE’s friendly rivals at the CIA; General Bertrand’s service could still recruit the mercenary forces required to overthrow the odd African dictator, engage the services of Corsican gunmen whose normal pursuits involved the sale of a little white powder, or set up its Kuala Lumpur operative in a whorehouse.

Such places were, after all, traditional venues for the exchange of information, and the French were far too appreciative of the foibles of the flesh to abandon them entirely in favor of devices as sterile as satellite photos.

The SDECE director, General Henri Bertrand, was seated at his desk deeply absorbed in a study of Vietnamese penetration into the Golden Triangle opium trade in Burma when his deputy came in with a thick computer printout. It contained everything the SDECE had on the sale to Libya of the reactor from which the Americans suspected Qaddafi had obtained plutonium.

Bertrand was familiar with much of the material. Security in nuclear matters had been a very delicate point in the French capital since the day in April 1979 when an Israeli hit team had blown apart the inner core of an experimental reactor destined for Iraq only weeks before it was due to be delivered to Baghdad. He glanced at it quickly and then told his deputy, “Ask Cornedeau to join me, would you?”

Cornedeau was the agency’s nuclear scientist, a bald, intense young man who had graduated from the Polytechnique, France’s great center of scientific learning, a decade before.

“Sit down, Patrick,” Bertrand ordered. Swiftly, he reviewed for him what had happened.

Patrick Cornedeau smiled and took an unlit pipe from his pocket. He was trying to give up cigarettes and it was the security blanket he employed whenever he felt the urge for nicotine rising in him.

“Well, if Qaddafi is really after plutonium, he couldn’t have picked a tougher way to get it.”

“Perhaps, cher ami, it was the only one available to him.”

Bertrand’s scientist shrugged his shoulders. He had gamed dozens of ways by which a dictator like Qaddafi could get the bomb: hijack a plutonium shipment, do what the Indians did — buy a Canadian heavy-water reactor that runs on natural uranium and duplicate it right down to the thumbtacks. But this was different. Cheating with a standard light-water reactor was the toughest challenge of all.

Cornedeau got up and walked over to the blackboard hanging on one wall of Bertrand’s office. For a minute he stood in front of it, idly tossing a piece of chalk in his hand, marshaling his thoughts like a schoolmaster about to begin a lecture.

“Mon general,” he said, “if you’re going to cheat on a nuclear reactor, any reactor, you cheat with the fuel. When the fuel burns, or fissions, it gives off heat, boils water to make steam to run turbines to make electricty. It also sends a stream of stray neutrons flying around. Some of them”-he punched the blackboard-“go banging into the unburned fuel, lowly enriched uranium in this case, and start a reaction in there which converts a part of that into plutonium.

“In this reactor,” he continued, making a sketch on the blackboard, “the fuel is in a pressurized core inside the shell that looks like this. You change it only once a year. It comes in enormous, heavy bundles of fuel rods. To get it out, you have to shut down your reactor. Then you need two weeks’ time, a lot of heavy equipment and plenty of people. Don’t forget we have twenty technicians assigned to it. There is absolutely no way the Libyans could have gotten the fuel out of there, spirited it away some dark night, without some of them noticing it.”

Bertrand drew on his Gauloise. “And what happens to that fuel when it comes out?”

“First of all, it’s so hot, radioactively speaking, it would turn you into a walking cancer cell if you got close to it. The assemblies are packed in lead shells and taken to a storage pond where they’re left to cool off.”

“And so the rods just sit there in the pond. What prevents Qaddafi from taking them out and getting the plutonium?”

“The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna has inspectors who are responsible for seeing that people don’t cheat on these things. They run at least two inspections a year down there. And in between they have sealed cameras run on sealed lines which constantly monitor the pond. There are usually at least two of them there, timed to take wide-angle shots of the pond every fifteen minutes or so.”

“And that, presumably, doesn’t leave him enough time to remove the rods?”

“Goodness, no. You’ve got to put them into huge, shielded lead containers if you don’t want to be irradiated yourself. They have to be handled by heavy cranes. You need at least an hour for the operation. Two is more likely.”

“Could the inspectors alter the film?”

“No. They don’t even develop them. That’s done in Vienna. Besides, they also lower gamma-ray analyzers into the pond each time they make an inspection, to be sure the rods are radioactive. That way they can be sure a switch hasn’t been made.”

Bertrand leaned back, his head pressed against the headrest of his chair, his half-closed eyes focused on one corner of the ceiling. “You make a very persuasive case against the Libyans being capable of obtaining plutonium from this thing.”

“I think it’s very, very unlikely, Chief.”

“Unless they had complicity at some stage in their operations.”

“But where, how?”

“Personally, I have always managed to contain my enthusiasm for the workings of the United Nations.”

Comedau crossed the room and slumped into his chair, his legs sprawled uncomfortably before him. His superior was an old-school Gaullist and everyone in the house knew he shared the former President’s distaste for a body de Gaulle had once referred to as “Le Machin”the thingumajig.

“Sure, Chief,” he sighed. “The agency has its limitations. But the real problem isn’t them. It’s that no one really wants effective controls. The companies that sell the reactors, like Westinghouse and our friends over at Framatome, give a lot of public lip service to the idea, but privately they oppose controls like poison. No Third World government wants those inspectors running around their country. And we haven’t been very anxious to tighten controls ourselves, despite everything we say. There’s too much at stake in our reactor sales.”

“Well, my boy,” the General murmured through the veil of cigarette smoke now cloaking him like a shroud, “a sound balance of payments is an imperative of state with which it’s difficult to argue these days. I think you should get the inspection reports from Vienna immediately. Also ask our representative there whether he has any coffee-house gossip about inspectors being bought, bribed. Or too enamored of the bar girls or whatever it is they have over there now.” There was a sudden brightening in the General’s eyes as he recalled his last visit to the Austrian capital in 1971. “Handsome creatures, those Viennese. One could hardly blame the odd Japanese for going off the deep end for one of them.” He leaned forward. “What about our own people down in Libya? What do we have on them?”

“We’ve got their security clearances over at the DST. And, of course, the DST has recorded all their telephone conversations coming into this country.”

“Who was our senior representative down there?”

“A Monsieur de Serre,” Cornedeau replied. “He’s been back for a couple of months waiting for his next posting.”

Bertrand looked at the Hermes clock in a black onyx frame on his desk. It was almost lunchtime. “Do we have his current whereabouts?”

“I believe so. He’s here in Paris.”

“Good. Get his address for me. While you’re getting all that material from our friends at the DST, I’ll see if I can’t have a cup of coffee and a chat with Monsieur de Serre.”

The sight of the three grave and unfamiliar men surrounding Harvey Hudson, the director of the New York office of the FBI, told Michael Bannion that something very, very serious was going on in his city. Just how serious dawned on the Police Commissioner when he heard the words “Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories” appended to his introduction to the suntanned man with an ornament around his neck sitting at Hudson’s left.

Bannion looked at Hudson. The Commissioner had darkblue eyes, “the color of Galway Bay on a June morning,” his grandmother had once loved to tell him.

They were clouded with fear and concern, with a question he did not have to articulate.

“Yes, Michael, it’s happened.”

Bannion sank into his place at the conference table.

“How long have you had it?”

“Since last night.”

Normally, that answer would have provoked a burst of Celtic fury from Bannion. It was typical of the Bureau. Even in a matter that concerned the life and death of thousands of the people in his city, the FBI hadn’t brought his force into their confidence immediately. This time, he reined in his fury and listened with growing horror as Hudson reviewed the threat and what had been done about it.

“We’ve got until three o’clock tomorrow afternoon to find that device,”

Hudson concluded. “And we’ve got to do it without anyone finding out that we’re looking for something. We’re under the strictest orders from the White House to keep this secret.”

Bannion glanced at his watch. It was three minutes past eight. Just a month ago, he recalled, he and Hudson had discussed the possibility of nuclear terrorism together. “People have been shouting `the nuclear terrorists are coming’ for years,” he had cynically remarked to his FBI colleague. “How, I want to know-galloping down the Hudson Valley Re Lochinvar?” Now they had arrived and he felt totally, helplessly inadequate to deal with them.

“Don’t your people out at Los Alamos have some technological resources we can employ to track it down?” Bannion asked John Booth. “These things have to give off some kind of radiation, don’t they?”

It was indicative of the secrecy that shrouded NEST’s operations that the Police Commissioner of New York didn’t know that the NEST teams existed or anything about the way they operated. Quickly, as succinctly as he could, Booth described to the Commissioner and the rest of the conference room how his teams would work.

“Aren’t people going to spot your rented trucks?” the Commissioner asked.

“It’s very unlikely. The only giveaway is a small device like a radar pod we attach to the undercarriage. You’d have to really look for it.” Booth took a long drag on his cigarette. “The whole concept behind the operation is to be very discreet, unobtrusive. We don’t want the terrorist sitting on his bomb up in the attic to know we’re out there looking for him.”

“How about helicopters?”

Booth glanced at his watch. “Our own choppers should be getting into the air now. We’ve borrowed three more from New York Airways and we’re equipping them with detection devices.

They’ll be ready in an hour or so. I decided to start them on the waterfront. The choppers are very effective down there. They can run over the wharves very quickly and they can read through those thin warehouse roofs without much trouble.” He grimaced. “Although if it’s in a ship, we’d have to do a foot search to pick it up. The deck layers would shield out the rays we’re looking for.”

Those words brought all the frustrations, the hopelessness of his task welling up in Booth. He stubbed out his cigarette with an angry, impatient gesture. “Look, Commissioner, don’t expect any miracles from us, because there aren’t going to be any. We’ve got the best technology there is and it’s completely inadequate.”

The scientist saw the startled bulge of the Commissioner’s blue eyes, the nervous tic of his Adam’s apple. “All the tactical advantages are with our adversaries. My trucks can only read up to four stories. The choppers can only read down two at best. Everything in between’s a blank. If whoever put this bomb there wanted to shield it, all they would have to do is throw a water bed over it and we couldn’t pick it up three feet away.” Booth’s nervous hands went up to the Navajo medallion Bannion had noted on his neck.

The scientist made no effort to conceal his anguish, his deep sense of implicit guilt at being forced to admit to the men around him that he was incapable of finding in the streets of their city one of the terrible weapons he had spent a lifetime designing.

“Without intelligence, gentlemen, to narrow down the search area there’s no way in the world we can find that bomb in the time we’ve been given.”

Two stories below the director’s conference room, a telephone rang in one of the offices assigned to the FBI’s intelligence unit. The agent picked it up.

“Hey, man, this is Rico.”

The agent sat up, suddenly alert. He activated the device that would record his incoming call.

“Watcha got for me, Rico?”

“Not much, man. I spent the whole night looking, but the only thing I got is this brother, he be asked to get some medicine for an Arab lady.”

“Drugs or medicine, Rico?”

“No, we don’t,” Hudson, the New York FBI chief, “She didn’t want to get no prescription, didn’t want to have to mess with no fuckin’ doctor.”

“What’d she look like?”

“The brother, he don’t know. He just take it to her hotel.”

“Where was that, Rico?”

“The Hampshire House.”

Upstairs, Al Feldman, the Chief of Detectives, rolled his cold cigar in his mouth and pondered John Booth’s despairing words. Figures, he thought. Just like those scientific bastards. They always expect someone else to clean up their shit after them.

“So what exactly are we looking for?” he asked.

Booth circulated a sketch and description of the device prepared at Los Alamos from Qaddafi’s blueprint.

“Do we know approximately when this came into the country?” Bannion inquired.

“No, we don’t,” Hudson, the New York FBI chief, replied. “But the assumption is it was recently. The CIA figures it would have been shipped from one of six places: Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran or Aden. They may have smuggled it across the border from Canada. That doesn’t take much doing. Or they may have run it through a normal port of entry disguised as something else.”

Down the table, Hudson’s superior, Quentin Dewing, the assistant director for investigation foy the Bureau, flown up from Washington during the night to take overall command of the search, cleared his throat. He had old-fashioned clear-plastic-rimmed glasses, gray hair slicked to his head with lashes of Brylcreem, a darkblue suit, and a white handkerchief squared to a precise half an inch rising from its pocket. An insurance executive, Feldman had thought contemptuously when he had been introduced.

“What this means is we’re going to have to go through every waybill and manifest for every piece of cargo that’s come in from one of those countries in the last few months. We’ll start with the latest shipments and work our way back.”

“By three o’clock tomorrow?” asked the stunned Police Commissioner.

“By three o’clock today!”

Feldman ignored their exchange, scrutinizing instead the material Booth had circulated around the room. “Tell me something,” he asked the scientist, “could this be broken into pieces, smuggled in and reassembled here?”

“Technologically, I’d say that’s almost impossible.”

“Well, it’s nice we got some good news today.” Feldman pointed his cigar at the drawing. “That fifteen-hundredpound weight is going to eliminate a lot of shipments. It’s also going to rule out high floors in buildings without elevators.” He laid the material back on the table. “How about the people who put it there? Do we have any leads on them at all?”

“For the moment we have nothing precise.” Hudson pointed to a flaxen-haired agent in his midthirties seated across from Feldman. “Farrell here is the Bureau’s Palestinian expert. He came up from D.C. last night. Frank, give us a quick rundown on what we do have.”

Ranged neatly on the table before the agent were computer summaries of all the Bureau’s ongoing Middle East investigations. They included items as diverse as a suspected traffic in prostitutes between Miami and the Persian Gulf, an illegal shipment of four thousand M-16 automatic rifles to the Christian Lebanese Phalange, the efforts of the Iranian revolutionary regime to infiltrate assassination squads into the United States to carry out their revolutionary justice on United States soil, and the document Farrell picked up in response to Hudson’s order.

“We have files on twenty-one Americans who went through Qaddafi’s terrorist training camps. All of them were Arab born. Nineteen Palestinians.

Seventeen males, four females.”

“Have you jumped them? What did you turn up?”

The young agent coughed nervously in answer to Feldman’s query. “Most of them went over there between 1975 and 1977. We put them under surveillance when they came back, but they never did a damn thing wrong. We couldn’t even catch them lifting a candy bar from the five-and-tencent store. So we ran out of court orders for the surveillance because of lack of probable cause.”

“So you stopped watching them?”

The FBI man nodded.

“My God!” Feldman’s already dumpy figure slumped deeper into his chair.

“You mean to tell me Qaddafi has the perfect terrorist sleeper operation set up in this country and the FBI hasn’t got a single one of those people under surveillance?”

“That’s the law, Mr. Feldman. We’ve been after them since last night and managed to locate four of them thus far.”

“That isn’t a law! It’s a fucking covenant for a suicide pact.”

Michael Bannion turned to his angry Chief of Detectives, anxious to calm him and at the same time intrigued by what had just been said. “You know, Al, you’d have to be interested by the fact that the Arab community in New York is within walking distance of the Brooklyn docks. Do we have anything on PLO activity over there?”

“Not a helluva lot,” Feldman replied. “There are a couple of bodegas, little family grocery stores, we suspect are fronting a gun traffic that may have PLO ties. When Arafat came to the UN, his bodyguards gave our people the slip a few times and wound up over there. Now, you might think they went over for a cup of coffee. Or you might choose to think they went to set up some sleepers.” Feldman shrugged. “Take your choice.”

“Do your people have any penetration into the PLO?”

Bannion turned to the speaker, Clifford Salisbury, an assistant director of the CIA, specializing in Palestinian affairs. “The only penetration activity we’re allowed these days is against organized crime. Besides,”

Bannion added acidly, “I can’t afford two patrolmen in my police cars. I’m certainly not going to waste money trying to penetrate the PLO.”

What the Police Commissioner did not bother to add was that there were only four Arabic-speaking officers among the 24,000 men and women on his force, and none of them was assigned to cover Palestinian activities. The fact was, Brooklyn’s Arabic community had always been notably law-abiding. There had been, since the early sixties, a sharp rise in immigration, many of the newcomers Palestinian; still, there had been only one recorded incident of attempted PLO terrorism in the New York area.

Dewing, the deputy director of the FBI, rapped his knuckles on the conference table. “Gentlemen, we’ve got to get this search organized and under way as fast as we can. Can we agree, in view of the words `New York Island’ in Qaddafi’s threat message, to concentrate NEST’s efforts on Manhattan?”

There was a mumble of agreement.

“Booth will run his operation independently for secrecy’s sake. We’ll support him with drivers to protect his men.”

The scientists had chosen to work with the tight-lipped agents of the Bureau rather than local police officers since they had begun operations.

“Where do I start?” Booth wanted to know. “The Battery or the Bronx?”

“I’d suggest the Battery,” Bannion said. “You’re closer to the waterfront down there. They would have had less distance to carry that thing. Besides, everybody hates Wall Street.”

“Right,” the deputy director rejoined. “Second: manpower. We’re running an ‘All Hands’ on this, bringing in five thousand agents. I’ve ordered Treasury, Customs, Narcotics and the Task Force on West Fifty-seventh to make their personnel available. Commissioner, can we have the services of your Detective Division?”

“You’ve got them.”

“If Washington wants us to be discreet with this, what are we going to use for communications?” Feldman asked. “Too much traffic on our frequencies will make the guys in the press room at headquarters sit up. The family fights, the horseshit jobs’ll pass right over their heads. But something like this they’ll pick up right away. The volume would be a tipoff.”

“We’ll use our gold band,” Dewing said. The FBI employed ten frequencies, five locally in their blue band, five nationally in what was referred to as their gold band. “And whenever possible the telephone.”

“Al,” Hudson turned to the Chief of Detectives, “what’s the best way to set this up?”

“I’d recommend a one on one,” the Chief replied. “One fed with one of my men. That way you can pair up your feds who don’t know the city with my guys who do.

“We’ll break them down into task forces,” he continued. “Assign one the docks, a second the airports. We’ll have a third task force to systematically comb all the usual places, hotels, car-rental agencies.”

Feldman bit down on his cold cigar. “Arabs coming into this town, they go to Queens and it’ll be ‘Oh-oh, there goes the neighborhood,’ right?

But like the PC says, over there in Arab town Brooklyn they’d blend in. We ought to start our third task force there. Search the place inside out. See if we can find anything out of synch.”

“Yeah, I agree,” Hudson said.

Feldman was leaning back, thinking. “We’ve got to narrow this thing down if we’re ever going to get anywhere. Get a tighter focus on the kind of people we’re looking for. What the hell kind of people are they, anyway?”

Hudson turned a commanding eye to the Bureau’s Palestinian expert.

“Well, as a general rule,” Farrell noted, “they tend to live pretty well on assignments. They have plenty of money. They go middle class, which most of them are anyway. I mean, they usually don’t go hiding out in slums or rabbit warrens. They learned a long time ago the best way to blend into the stream is to posit yourself just above the middle-class level. The other thing, they tend to stay pretty close to their own kind. Don’t seem to trust the other ethnics very much.”

The Chief of Detectives digested his words. “Something else too, I’d say.

If you wanted to pull off a caper like this, you’d put it in the hands of someone who knew his way around, been here before. Otherwise, your people’d leave a string of clues behind them. Blow the operation right away.”

“Mr. Feldman has a very good point.” It was Salisbury, the CIA representative. “We can also assume, I think, that the kind of people who would do this would be sophisticated, cold-blooded and smart enough to realize that their chances of success lay in holding it very, very tight.

I’m convinced we’re looking for a small, coherent group of intelligent, highly motivated people.

“And,” he continued, “I’m also convinced the kind of person Qaddafi would assign an operation like this to would have already left his — or her-traces somewhere in one of the world’s intelligence services. We’re in touch with every intelligence agency in the world that has files on Palestinian terrorists. They’re sending us descriptions and photographs of everyone in their files. I suggest that we separate out those who have spent time in this country and are intelligent, sophisticated and educated, and concentrate on them.”

“How many do you figure that would be?” Feldman demanded.

Salisbury made a few silent calculations. “There are about four hundred known and identified Palestinian terrorists at large. My guess is we’ll find fifty to seventy-five of them who meet our specs.”

The detective shook his head in dismay. “That’s too many. Too fucking many.

Job like this, you gotta get it down to two or three to have a chance. If we’re going to save this city, my friend, we’ve got to have one or two faces, not a portrait gallery.”

The first of the two agents flashed his gold shield at the desk clerk so discreetly that the young man didn’t realize who his visitors were until he heard the words “FBI.” Then, like most people confronted with a federal law-enforcement officer, he came quickly to attention.

“May we see your register, please?”

The clerk dutifully submitted the black bound guest register of the Hampshire House to the agents’ scrutiny. The index finger of the senior man ran down the pages, then stopped at the address Hamra Street, Beirut, Lebanon, after the name Linda Nahar. Suite 3202, he noted, and glanced up at the key bank. The key was missing.

“Is Miss Nahar in 3202 in?”

“Oh,” replied the clerk, “you just missed her. She checked out forty minutes ago. She said she’d be back, though. In a week.”

“I see. Did she tell you where she was going?”

“The airport. She was flying out to LA on the earlybird flight.”

“Did she leave you a forwarding address?”

“No.”

“Do you suppose you could tell us something about Miss Nahar?”

Ten minutes later, the two agents were back in their car, smoking. The clerk had been singularly unhelpful.

“What do you think, Frank?”

“I think it’s probably a waste of time. Some woman who’s afraid of doctors.”

“So do I. Except she did decide to leave this morning, didn’t she?”

“Why don’t we get your informer and work over his contact?”

“That might be a little heavy. Rico deals with some bad people.” The agent looked at his watch. “Let’s check the flight lists and find out what plane she took. We’ll have somebody do a check on her when she gets out there.”

“There’s one major point we’ve all overlooked.” Authority flowed from Michael Bannion’s voice like sound waves from a pitching fork, and everyone in the room turned to him. “Are you going to apply the White House’s injunction to secrecy to the men running the investigation, Harv?”

“No, certainly not. How are we going to get them to pull out all the stops if we don’t tell them the truth?”

“Good Godl” Bannion shook his head in dismay. “Tell my men there’s a hydrogen bomb hidden on this island, that it’s going to go off in a few hours and wipe the city off the face of the earth? They’re human. They’ll panic. The first thing they’ll say to themselves is, ‘I gotta get the kids out of here. I gotta call the old lady. Tell her to get the kids outa school and head for her mother’s up in Troy.’ “

“You seem to have singularly little confidence in your men, Commissioner.”

Bannion’s blue eyes flashed as he looked down the table to the austere presence of Quentin Dewing, the assistant director of the FBI.

“My men, in whom I have the greatest confidence, Mr. Dewing, don’t come from Montana, South Dakota and Oregon like yours do. They come from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens. They’ve got their wives, their kids, their mothers, their uncles, their aunts, their pals, their girl friends, their dogs, their cats, their canaries trapped in this goddamned city. They’re men, not supermen. You’d better find a cover story to give them. And let me tell you something else, Mr. Dewing, it had better be a goddamn good cover story, because if it isn’t, there’s going to be a panic on this island the likes of which neither you nor I nor anybody else has ever seen.”

Grace Knowland turned up her coat collar to deflect the wind that hit her as soon as she emerged from the BMT’s Chambers Street subway station. It was almost 8:45. Hurrying through City Hall Park, Grace almost fell on the ill-cleaned, half-sanded path. The Mayor, she thought tartly, can’t even keep his own sidewalk shoveled.

She smiled at the policeman manning the gate leading to the Mayor’s offices and stepped into the noisy bustle of the press room. Still clutching her coat about her, she pulled her mail from her pigeonhole, tossed a quarter into the paper cup by the coffee machine and poured herself a steaming cup of black coffee.

A stir at the doorway interrupted her. Vic Ferrari, a blue cornflower twisted into the lapel of his gray flannel suit, stepped into the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have a brief announcement. His Honor is very sorry, but he won’t be able to keep his appointment with you this morning.”

Ferrari, unfazed, let the storm of jeers and catcalls which followed his words abate. Tolerating the ill-humor of the New York press was only one of the minor trials involved in being the press secretary of the Mayor of New York.

“The Mayor was invited to Washington earlier this morning by the President to discuss certain budgetary questions of concern to them both.”

The room erupted. New York’s chronic financial problems had been a running story for years, and the questions fiew at Ferrari.

“Victor,” Grace asked, “when do you expect the Mayor back?”

“Later on in the day. I’ll keep you posted.”

“By shuttle, as usual?”

“I suppose so.”

“Hey, Vic,” a television reporter yelled from the rear of the circle of newsmen around Ferrari, “would this have anything to do with the South Bronx?”

Just the faintest glimmer of acknowledgment crossed Ferrari’s face, a swift illumination akin to the look on a mediocre poker player’s face when he’s filled an inside straight. One journalist in the room caught it-and Grace Knowland was probably the only person there who didn’t play poker. “I said I didn’t want to speculate on the subject of their meeting,” Ferrari insisted.

As unobtrusively as she could, Grace slipped to her phone and dialed the Times city desk. “Bill,” she whispered to her editor, “something’s up on the South Bronx. Stern’s gone to Washington. I want to shuttle down and try to ride back with him.” Her editor agreed immediately. Before leaving, she decided to make a second call, this one to Angelo. His phone seemed to ring interminably.

Finally an unfamiliar voice replied. “He’s not here,” he said. “They’re all off at a meeting someplace.”

Funny, Grace thought, hanging up the phone, he told her he was going to catch up on his paperwork this morning.

As she edged, almost surreptitiously, toward the door, she heard a snarl rising from the circle in which the others still clustered around the press secretary. “All this is lovely, Vic,” a voice asked, “but we happen to have a real problem on our hands here. Just when does this city plan to finish getting the fucking snow out of Queens?”

The man the City Hall press corps was so anxious to question was at that moment entering the private office of the President of the United States.

“Mr. President, you’re looking terrific. Wonderful. Marvelous.” Abe Stern’s adjectives succeeded each other in little barks, like a string of exploding Chinese firecrackers. He seemed to bounce across the room to the man at the desk as though he was being propelled by springs concealed in the soles of his shoes. “Job must agree with you. You’ve never looked so good.”

The President, who was wan and haggard from lack of sleep, waved Abe Stern to an apricot sofa and waited while a steward poured coffee for them both.

In the background, barely audible, were the strains of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The President preferred the intimacy of this room to the imposing formality of the Oval Office next door with all its symbols and majestic trappings, constant reminders of the authority and burdens of the Presidency of the United States. He’d furnished it with the comfortable memorabilia of his past: his Air Force commission, an aerial photo of his ranch taken from a helicopter, a few souvenirs from his early non-political days. On his desk was the handcrafted Steuben crystal vase his wife had given him for his last birthday, the graceful vessel jammed with multicolored jelly beans.

“So,” the beaming Stern declared as the steward left the room, “we’re finally going to get together on the funding of the South Bronx, are we?”

The President set his coffee cup onto its saucer with a rattle. “I’m sorry, Abe, I had to practice a little deception to get you down here this morning. That’s not why I asked you here.”

The Mayor’s eyebrows twitched into peaks of incomprehension.

“We have a terrible crisis on our hands, Abe, and it involves New York City.”

Stern emitted a sound that was half a sigh, half a growl. “Well, it can’t be the end of the world, Mr. President. Crises come, crises go, New York City’s lived with them all.”

There was a sudden watery glimmer in the President’s eyes as he looked at the little man before him. “You’re wrong, Abe. This is one crisis New York City can’t live with.”

Harvey Hudson, the director of the FBI’s New York office, clambered up the steps of the auditorium, followed by the Police Commissioner and his Chief of Detectives. While the New Yorkers settled into chairs between the American flag and the blue-and-gold banner of the Bureau, Hudson moved to the speaker’s lectern. It was not yet nine o’clock in the morning of Monday, December 14. Hudson looked at the gathering for a second, took a slow breath and leaned toward the microphone.

“Gentlemen, we have a crisis on our hands.”

His words produced a nervous rustle, then dead silence. “A group of Palestinian terrorists have hidden a barrel of chlorine gas somewhere in New York, almost certainly here on Manhattan Island.” Behind Hudson, Bannion studied the faces of his detectives, watching for their reaction to the FBI director’s words.

“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the toxic qualities of chlorine gas. You probably all remember what happened up in Canada not so long ago when they had that chlorine gas spill after a train accident and had to move a quarter of a million people. It’s deadly, dangerous stuff.

“The fact that it’s here and we’re looking for it must be kept a total secret. We’re explaining it to you because you’re all intelligent, responsible police officers, but if it ever got out to the public, the panic the news might cause could be devastating.”

Bannion’s experienced eyes read the worry and concern on his detectives’ faces. Christ, he thought, what would have happened if we’d told them the truth?

Hudson moved through the remaining details of the cover story: a Palestinian commando was somewhere in the area with orders to detonate the barrel of gas if the Israelis didn’t release ten of their fellow terrorists being held in Israeli jails. “The lives of an awful lot of people are going to depend on our getting to that barrel before they can blow it up. This is what it looks like.”

A blowup of Los Alamos’ sketch of Qaddafi’s bomb, its nuclear details carefully masked, appeared on the screen behind Hudson. “Some of you will be assigned to try to run down the perpetrators, others will do an area-by-area combing operation; the rest of you will scour the piers and docks to see if we can pick up some trace of how it came in. We’ll do a one on one, NYPD with fed, Bomb Squad with Bomb Squad, major case with major case, kidnap with kidnap, and so on down the line.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” a voice called out from the rear of the auditorium, “why doesn’t someone just tell the Israelis to give the Arabs their goddamn prisoners back and get off our backs?”

Bannion stirred at the sound of the New York accent ringing through the anonymous speaker’s voice. He bad expected that reaction. He gestured to Hudson, then strode to the lectern and took the microphone from the FBI director’s hands. “That’s the Israelis’ problem, not yours.” The dead air in the auditorium seemed to quiver under the impact of his angry words.

“Your job is to find that goddamn barrel.” The Police Commissioner paused, trying to infuse his voice with just the right blend of urgency and anger.

“And find it in one God-awful hurry.”

The Secret Service agent waiting outside the main entrance of the Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., moved up to the two men as soon as they got out of their black government Ford. He verified with a discreet glance their papers identifying them as senior officials of the Department of Defense, then gestured to them to follow him into the busy Treasury lobby. He led them along its marble hall to a heavy door marked “Exit,” down two flights of stairs to the building’s cellar, then along a dimly lit corridor to a second door, this one locked.

That door gave onto an almost unknown aspect of the American White House, a tunnel running underneath East Executive Avenue into the basement of the East Wing. The passage had been employed for years to keep the identity of participants in affairs of state-and occasionally that of individuals involved in affairs other than those of state-a secret. Already it had been used a dozen times in this crisis to bring people into the White House without anyone in the press or the public becoming aware that they were there.

Preceded by their Secret Service escort, the two men entered the tunnel.

From overhead, the rumble of traffic rang through the shadowy passage like a clap of distant thunder.

David Hannon was a senior civil servant in the Civil Preparedness Agency; Jim Dixon was his assistant for research into the effects of nuclear weapons. Each had devoted the major part of his adult life to the study of one horrifying subject: the devastation that nuclear and tbermonuclear weapons could wreak on the plains, the cities and the people of the United States. The unthinkable was as familiar to them as a balance sheet to a CPA. They had been to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed the test shots in the Nevada deserts, helped plan and construct the tidy Colonial homes, the cute bungalows, the lifelike John and Jane dolls on which the military planners of the fifties had measured the effects of each successive generation of nuclear warheads.

Their escort took them through the East Wing basement under the White House itself and into the West Wing offices of the National Security Council, where he turned them over to a Marine Corps major.

“The meeting’s just started,” the major informed them, indicating a couple of folding chairs near the NSC conference-room door. “They’ll be getting to you in a few minutes.”

Inside the conference room, the President had just waved Abe Stern into the chair beside his, while the regular members of the NSC Crisis Committee took their places at the table. The black bar of white numerals on the wall recorded the time, 9:03.

“We’re keeping the Governor of New York informed by phone of the crisis,” the President began. “I personally gave the Mayor a very brief review of what’s happened a few moments ago and asked him to join us here. Because it’s his city and his people who are at risk, we’ll waive our normal classification procedures for him.”

He nodded to Tap Bennington. By tradition, the NSC Crisis meetings began with a briefing by the director of the CIA.

“First of all, our request to the Soviets to intervene with the Israelis following the call to our people in Tel Aviv worked. Sixth Fleet Intelligence reports the Israelis stood down an assault on Libya at three-twenty-seven A.M. I think we can now consider them contained.”

A tilt of the CIA director’s head acknowledged the approving mumble his words had produced. “The thrust of the Agency’s efforts right now is to uncover some precise indication of who physically could have put this in New York for Qaddafi, to aid the Bureau’s search for the device.” He paused. “Unfortunately, thus far we have nothing concrete.”

“Has there been any answer from the charge in Tripoli to Eastman’s message?” the President asked.

“Not yet, sir. The plane is now on station, though. We’re ready to set up a communications channel as soon as we have Qaddafi’s reply.”

“Good.” The swiftness with which the President articulated the word was revealing of his deeply held conviction that once he had contacted Qaddafi be would be able to reason with him, to lead him, through the power of the faith and logic in which he himself so firmly believed, to some acceptable resolution of the crisis.

“Tap, how much lateral movement has Qaddafi got? Does he run his own ship?

Are there any constraints on his options?”

“No, sir. He’s under no constraints at all. Not from his military. Nor from his public. He runs it all himself.”

The President frowned, but said nothing. He turned to the director of the FBI. “Mr. Webster?”

As, one after another, the men at the table reviewed their agencies’ actions in the past few hours, Abe Stern listened in silence. He was still stunned, still dazed by the mind-numbing words the President had uttered to him a few minutes earlier. When Admiral Fuller concluded, however, with the news that the Sixth Fleet’s carriers and nuclear submarines were nearing their positions off the Libyan seacoast, he leaned forward, his chubby little hands clasped on the table before him. It was as though he were waking from a nightmare.

“Gentlemen, the Israelis were right.”

The sober faces around the NSC conference table turned to the stranger in their midst.

“You shouldn’t have stopped them. The man is an irresponsible international criminal and the Israelis had the right answer: destroy himl”

“Our first concern, Mr. Mayor,” Jack Eastman quietly noted, “has been the lives of the people in your city.”

There was no stopping the Mayor, however. “The man is another Hitler. He’s violated every single precept of international behavior there is. He’s killed, murdered and terrorized every corner of the globe to get his way.

He destroyed Lebanon with his money, which he poured into Beirut right through our good American banks, by the way. He was behind Khomeini. He’s out to kill every friend we have in the Middle East from Sadat to the Saudis and then destroy us by shutting off our oil. And we’ve sat on our asses for five years and let him get away with it like we were a bunch of Chamberlains cringing before another Hitler.” Stern’s face was red with anger, with his fury at what his city faced. He looked at the President.

“Even your own damn fool of a brother made an ass out of himself and you-running around this country licking his boots. Like those idiots in the German-American Band barking ‘Heil Hitler’ at their rallies in 1940.”

The Mayor paused just an instant to catch his breath, then was off again.

“Now he’s gone and put a bomb in my town, in the midst of my people, and you propose to get down on your hands and knees and give him what he wants?

To a Hitler? To a madman? Instead of clobbering the bastard?”

“The fact of the matter is, Mr. Mayor,” Admiral Fuller replied, “clobbering Libya isn’t going to save New York.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“It happens to be the case.”

“Why?”

“Because destroying Libya isn’t going to give us any guarantee that the bomb in New York won’t go off.”

The Mayor slapped both his hands on the table. He half rose out of his seat, his eyebrows twitching in anger, as he looked down the table to the beribboned Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“You mean to sit here and tell me that after all the billions and billions and billions of dollars we’ve poured into your goddamn military machine for the last thirty years, all that money my city needed so badly and never gotafter all that, you’re telling me your navies and your armies can’t save my people, can’t save my city from a crackpot, half-mad tinhorn dictator running a country that’s nothing but a lot of sand and camel crap?”

“And oil,” someone remarked.

The Admiral’s bony face took on the mournful look of an aging bloodhound.

“There’s only one thing that can save your city for sure, Mr. Mayor, and that’s finding the bomb and defusing it.”

“Who’d they give you?”

Detective First Grade Angelo Rocchia wiped his hands on the towel rack of the FBI’s washroom as he addressed the question to his detective partner, Henry Ludwig. Ludwig gestured with his heavy hand toward a slim, curly-haired black smoking at the far end of the room. “Joe Token down there.

Who’d you get?”

Angelo gave a disdainful glance toward a young agent running a comb through his wavy blond hair a few washbasins away. He exhaled a weary breath, then leaned forward to ponder his own face in the mirror over Ludwig’s basin. He could see a few glistening traces still remaining of the antiwrinkle cream he rubbed under his eyes and around his mouth every morning. It was something he’d been doing since August, since just after he’d begun his affair with The New York Times’s Grace Knowland.

His appearance was something that had always concerned Angelo. He had learned as a young detective on Manhattan’s East Side that dress and respect went hand in hand. First you had to impress the doormen to get up to see your “clients”; then, once you got there, a little respect was just the attitude you wanted to inspire in them.

Angelo’s money, his pals joked, went two places, into his stomach and onto his back. He never gambled. Never played the ponies. Never pissed it away on the broads. This morning he was wearing a navy-blue suit, $350 marked down at F. R. Tripler, a heavy cotton shirt with the French cuffs and the initials on the pocket, a brocaded white silk tie, one of half a dozen ties he bought each year at the Customs Shop’s January clearance sale.

Angelo touched his tie and brushed his hair with his hand. “Know something, Dutchman?” he mumbled to his NYPD partner. “Something’s wrong with this one. Too heavy. FBI’s focusing in. Task Force is focusing in. I seen four Narcs. All for one shitty barrel.”

Without waiting for an answer he strolled along the row of white washbasins to the FBI agent with whom he had been assigned to work. “Terrific-looking tie you’ve got there, son,” he said, casting a pitying glance at the narrow, stringy piece of cloth dangling around the young man’s neck. “Where’d you get it?”

“Oh.” Jack Rand smiled. “Do you like it? I got it at Denver Dry Goods.”

The mention of his base station reminded the twentyeight-year-old agent of just how tired he was after his allnight flight into the city. Despite himself, he yawned sleepily. Angelo gave his partner a sour glance, then clapped a heavy hand on the agent’s shoulder. “Come on, kid. Let’s see where they want us to go.”

In a large room nearby, a dozen gray government-issue desks had been pushed into a square. At one, an agent and a senior detective handed out pier assignments. At others, men drew up duty rosters, set radio code signals, issued radios. Everyone was shouting at the same time: “We don’t have enough radios. Call the Plaza, we need more radios.” “Get us some unmarked cars. Kind that don’t look like police cars.” “We getting overtime for this?” “Who’s covering at nine tomorrow?”

A hand brushed Angelo’s elbow as he moved to the assignment desk. He turned to find himself looking into the sparkling black eyes of the Chief of Detectives. Feldman put his face close to his. “Pull out all the stops on this one, Angelo. Don’t worry about anything. Civilian complaints. Nothing. We’ll cover you.”

Without waiting for a reply, Feldman moved across the room in search of the next ear to which he could whisper his injunction.

Rand returned from the assignment desk and passed Angelo a slip of paper with their destination on it. The New Yorker looked at it, then at the knot of men crowding the desk where each team was being given an FBI radio set for their New York police car. That operation, Angelo concluded, was going to take all day. Casually, he eased his way over to the desk, stooped down, tucked a radio under his arm and began to slide away.

“Hey!” the FBI desk clerk screamed. “Where the hell do you think you’re going with that?”

“Where am I going?” Angelo growled. “To the Brooklyn Army Base piers, where I’m supposed to go. Where else would I be going? To Roosevelt Raceway?”

“You can’t do that!” The bespectacled clerk was almost beside himself with rage. “You haven’t signed the form. You gotta sign the paper. It has to be dated and signed.”

Angelo gave Rand a disgusted glance. “Would you believe that? A barrel of gas out there ready to kill a bunch of people and we have to sign a paper before we can go out and look for it?”

He grabbed the paper the frantic clerk was waving at him. “I tell you, kid, if the world was about to blow up there’d still be a fucking clerk out there somewhere, saying, ‘Hey, wait. First you gotta sign the fucking paper.”

For the first time in his life David Hannon was face to face with an American President. He removed a circular blue-and-white plastic wheel not much thicker than a dime from his breast pocket and set it on the table before him. It was a nuclear-bomb-effects computer designed by the Lovelace Foundation, the revised 1962 edition computed for sea-level conditions. Hannon was never without it. There was almost nothing he couldn’t tell you about nuclear explosions with that wheel: how many pounds pressure per square inch would break a glass window, snap a steel arch or hemorrhage your lungs; the degree of burns you’d get twenty-three miles away from a five-megaton burst; how much fallout it would take to kill you 219 miles away from an eighty-kiloton explosion; the time the fallout would need to reach you-1ind how long you’d go on living once you’d been exposed to it. He glanced at the wheel. New York, he thought reassuringly, was at sea level. There would be no need to make any adjustments in his calculations.

“Let’s get going.”

Hannon recognized the familiar face of the President’s National Security Assistant. He selfconsciously touched his wavy white hair to make sure it was in place and gave a nervous tug to his striped tie.

“Sir, in New York with a three-megaton thermonuclear explosion we’ve got a situation that is unique in the world. All those tall buildings. The thrust of our studies has always been what we can do to the Soviets, not what they can do to us. And since they don’t have any tall buildings, this is a circumstance where the data runs out, so to speak.” Little dew balls of sweat began to gleam on Hannon’s head. “The fact of the matter is, we just can’t say with total precision what this weapon is going to do to Manhattan. The damage would be so great, it’s almost inconceivable.”

Hannon rose and walked to the map of the New York area his deputy had just pinned to the display board of the conference room. A series of concentric circles, blue, red, green and black, moved out from the narrow pencil of Manhattan Island at its center. “What we’ve done is work out here our best estimate of the destruction it would cause, based on our computer calculations. Since we don’t know exactly where this device is, we’ve assumed for the purpose of our study that it’s here.” His finger indicated Times Square. “In that case, the blue circle represents Zone A from ground zero out to three miles.”

He moved his finger along its circumference, down Chambers Street in lower Manhattan in the south, over the East River by the Williamsburg Bridge, through Greenpoint in Brooklyn, Long Island City in Queens, across upper Manhattan at Ninety-sixth Street, and, west of the Hudson, around Union City, Hoboken and parts of Jersey City. “Nothing inside this circle is going to survive in any recognizable form.”

“Nothing?” the President asked, incredulous. “Nothing at all?”

“Nothing, sir. The devastation will be total.”

“I just can’t believe that.” Tap Bennington thought of the view he had so often had of Manhattan Island driving down to the Jersey entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel: of those glittering ramparts of glass and steel stretching from the World Trade Center up through Wall Street to midtown and beyond.

That all that could be flattened by one thermonuclear device was inconceivable, the CIA director thought. This had to be an overstatement of some bureaucrat too long lost in his charts.

“Sir,” Hannon replied, “the blast wave a device like this will produce is going to generate winds unlike anything that has ever existed on earth.”

“Not even at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”

“Remember we employed atomic, not hydrogen, bombs in those cities. And with comparatively low yields. The winds they creates were just summer breezes compared to what this one’s going to produce.”

The bureaucrat turned back to the slender blue ribbon twisting around the heart of Manhattan Island: Wall Street Greenwich Village, Fifth and Park Avenues, Central Park, the East and West Sides. “We know from our studies in both of those cities that modern steel and concrete buildings just disappeared. Poof!” Hannon snapped his fingers. “Like that. With the winds this is going to produce you’re going to have skyscrapers literally flying all over the landscape. Disintegrating in seconds…They’ll blow away like Long Island beach buts in a hurricane.”

Hannon turned to his audience again. He was so controlled and composed he might have been addressing a class at the War College. “If this really goes off, gentlemen, all that will be left of Manhattan Island as we know it today is a smoldering pile of debris.”

For seconds, the men at the table struggled to digest the enormity of Hannon’s words.

“How about survivors in the area?” Abe Stern asked, nodding toward the blue circle inside which were trapped, at that very moment, perhaps five million people.

“Survivors? In there?” Hannon gave the Major a look of total incredulity.

“There won’t be any.”

“Good God!” Stern gasped. For an instant he looked as though he was going to suffer a stroke.

“And fire?” asked Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense.

“The fire this will create,” Hannon replied, “will be unlike anything in human experience. If this device explodes, it’s going to release a heat burst that’ll set houses on fire all over Westchester County, New Jersey and Long Island. You’ll have tens, hundreds of thousands of wooden houses bursting into flames like matches exploding.”

Hannon glanced at his map. “Inside the first circle, what will happen first is that the thermal pulse, the heat of the fireball, will be passed little diminished through the glass sheaths of all those modern buildings in the center of Manhattan. Now, when you look inside those glass skyscrapers, what do you see? Curtains. Rugs.

Desks covered with papers. In other words, fuel. What will happen is, you’ll have a million fires lit instantly on Park Avenue. Then, of course, the blast will hit and turn the place into piles of smoking rubbish.”

“Christ!” One of the deputies along the conference room wall said. “Imagine those poor people in those glass buildings!”

“Actually,” Hannon replied, “according to our calculations, glass buildings may turn out to be less dangerous than you’d imagine, provided, of course, they’re well away from the shot. At the enormous pressure those things generate, those glass structures are going to fragment into millions of tiny pieces which are not going to have a high degree of penetration. I mean, they’ll make you look like a pincushion, but they won’t kill you.”

Is this guy for real? Eastman asked himself. He stared at Hannon, the square pink fingernails of his thumbs pressed tensely together, his heavy shoulders and upper body untidily enclosed in a gabardine suit. Doesn’t he realize he’s talking about people, Eastman thought, living flesh-and-blood people, not a chain of numbers spat out by a computer?

“What are the possibilities of survivors outside your first circle?” the President asked.

“We’ll begin having survivors,” Hannon answered, “inside the second circle, three to six miles from ground zero.” He mechanically ran his finger along the circle’s red circumference encompassing the rest of lower Manhattan, South Brooklyn, Jackson Heights, La Guardia Airport, Rikers Island, Secaucus and Jersey City, the guts of the most important metropolitan area in the world. “Fifty percent of the population in this area will be killed.

Forty percent will be injured. Ten percent will survive.”

“Only ten percent?” Abe Stern’s voice was a whisper. He looked at Hannon’s map, but he didn’t see those colored circles, the rigid crisscrossing pattern of streets and highways. He saw his city, the city he had walked and studied, loved and cursed through half a century of politics and campaigns. He saw the Jewish neighborhoods out around Sheepshead Bay where he had hiked through stairways redolent with the smell of gefilte fish in the thirties getting out the vote; the frightening vistas of the South Bronx he had come here to save; the boardwalk at Coney with the guys in the stands hawking frozen custard, Nathan’s Famous and foot-long franks; the barrios of Spanish Harlem and the crowded alleys of Chinatown smelling of salted fish, smoked duck and preserved egg; of Little Italy festooned in red and green for the saint whose gaudy statue was paraded through an exultant throng; of those endless neighborhoods of two-family row houses and tenements in Bensonhurst, Astoria and the Bronx; the homes of his people: the cabdrivers, waiters, barbers, clerks, electricians, firemen and cops who had spent a lifetime of struggle to get where they were, all of them now trapped because they lived inside a thin red line on a map.

“Do you mean to tell me only one New Yorker in ten in there is going to come out unscathed?” he asked. “Half of them are going to die?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about the impact of this on your other areas?” the President queried.

“Most of Jersey City, upper Manhattan and Flatbush are just going to fall over. Low-rise buildings will collapse. Anything under ten stories will come down.”

“What are the chances of survivors inside the green circle?” Eastman asked, the sharp upward flaring of his voice revealing the depth of his personal concern. The campus of Columbia University lay inside its boundary.

“Out there,” Hannon answered, “glass is going to be flying. Interior partitions are going to go. Anybody who’s not in a cellar is going to risk being badly bruised or cut up by flying glass and debris. We reckon ten percent in that belt dead and forty to fifty percent injured.

“The black outer circle,” he continued, “defines the blast-damage limit.”

It went as far as JFK Airport and the southern border of Westchester County and enclosed a great swath of New Jersey’s wealthiest bedroom communities.

“Glass, light walls will go down there. Anybody outside will risk severe body burns.”

“How about the fallout?” the President queried.

“God forbid, sir, if there is an onshore wind blowing when this thing explodes to drive the fallout up into New York State and New England, it’ll contaminate a swath of land thousands of miles square. Right up into Vermont. Nobody will be able to live there for generations to come.”

“Look, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is.” Abe Stern had begun to recover his composure. “I’d like to know one thing from you. God forgive me for using the expression for something like this, but I want the bottom line. How many of my people are going to be killed if this thing goes off?”

“Yes, sir.” Hannon opened the pages of a stack of papers enclosed in a stiff black cover ostentatiously stamped “Top Secret.” That pile of paper was the indispensable crutch of the modern bureaucrat, a computer printout.

This one had been spewed out during the watches of the night by the computer in the National Warning Center. Everything that would happen to the Mayor’s city should Qaddafi’s bomb explode was on those pages. It was as if some computerized Cassandra had uttered an infallible prophecy recording in minute, macabre detail the instant future which awaited New York in that awful eventuality; what percentage of the buildings along Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn would remain standing (zero); the number of dead on Eighth Avenue, Manhattan, between Thirtyfourth and Thirty-sixth Streets (100 percent); the percentage of the population of Glen Cove, Long Island, that would die from exposure to radioactive fallout (10 percent); how many private dwellings in East Orange, New Jersey, would suffer severe damage (7.2 percent); the destiny of the people of Queens (57.2 percent would die from blast and fire, 5 percent from the fallout, 32.7 percent would be injured).

It was a multimillion dollar Baedeker to the unthinkable, right down to how many nurses, pediatricians, osteopaths, plumbers, hospital beds, airport runways, and, naturally, government tax records, would survive in each corner of the affected area. Hannon methodically toted up the horror encapsulated in those dark chains of numbers.

“The total dead, sir, for the conditions we’ve been given in the five boroughs and New Jersey would be 6.74 million.”