The Fifth Horseman

PART V

An interminable clutter of New York traffic loomed up before Angelo Rocchia’s four-year-old Chevrolet, blocking its route to the exit ramp.

Beside Rocchia, Jack Rand gave his watch an anxious glance. “Maybe we ought to check in.”

“Check in? What for, for Christ’s sake? To tell them we’re stuck on the Brooklyn Bridge?” This kid’s really got a bug up his ass, Angelo thought.

He plucked a peanut from the bag tucked into the pocket of his suit jacket.

“Here,” he said, “relax. Enjoy the sights. The good part’s coming up. The asshole of Brooklyn.”

Slowly, painfully, he funneled the car off the bridge ramp, sped along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and then the Gowanus Expressway, until he turned toward Second Avenue, Brooklyn, and his destination. The young agent gawked at the sight spreading along their route: a line of three-and four-story tenements, every other one of them, almost, a gutted shell. The walls, those that were still standing, were covered with obscene graffiti. Windows were broken everywhere. Those on the ground floor were barred. Doors were padlocked. Rubbish littered the sidewalks. The place stank of urine, of feces, of ashes.

On the street corners, men and kids warmed their hands over flickering fires of rubbish set in old trashcans or lit on a patch of the sidewalk.

Rand stared at them, blacks and Hispanics, an occasional flash of hatred for their passing car illuminating the otherwise expressionless faces of those for whom the American dream was a nightmare, a distant, unobtainable mirage quivering mockingly from across the narrow neck of water over which their car had just passed.

“Got anything like this in South Dakota?” Angelo asked. “You know what they get for murder one down here? Ten bucks. Ten bucks to kill a man.” He shook his head sadly. “Used to be a nice neighborhood, too. Italian. Few Irish.

Some of these people they got here now, they live worse than animals in the Bronx Zoo. Arabs be doing us a favor, they gas the place.”

The FBI radio on the seat between them crackled. There was no mistaking the speaker’s flat Midwestern accent. Angelo burst into laughter.

“You remember when they snatched Calvin Klein’s kid a couple of years ago?”

Rand didn’t.

“We had a bunch of you guys from South Dakota in on that one too. I’m riding in this thing monitoring your frequency plus the pigeon with a wire.

We’ve already sprung the kid got the perp, but the FBI, they wanted to stay out. Thought there might be more people. And suddenly I hear”-Angelo mimicked the accent—” `Foxtrot Four to Base. There are two suspicious-looking Negro males loitering on the corner of One Hundred Thirty-fifth and St. Nicholas Avenue.’” Angelo laughed again, a short, harsh burst of noise. “Shit! That’s all they got up there, for Christ’s sake, is suspicious-looking spades. Hanging around. Scoring dope. You could rupture every nose in South Dakota with the coke they sell up there.”

Rand looked at him. There was a taut, teeth-baring smile on Angelo’s face, but there was no smile in his eyes. Something, the young agent thought, is disturbing this man.

“Angelo, I live in Denver.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Considerable, in fact. Have you ever been out West?”

“Out West? Sure, I been out West.” Angelo gave the agent a regard that mixed pity with contempt. “I was up in Albany once.” He produced another mirthless laugh. “You know what they say, kid? Once you get past Yonkers, everything out there’s Bridgeport.”

He waved a hand past the sagging fagade of a Catholic church. “Over there,” he noted, with a certain pride in his voice, “is Joey Gallo’s old turf. His docks are down there.”

Rand followed his gesture toward the lowlying piers pushing into the gray sludge of the harbor. “Do the rackets still control the piers?”

What’s with this guy? Angelo thought. Next thing he’ll want to know is, is the Pope Catholic? “Of course. Profacci family. Anthony Scotto.”

“And you guys can’t break them?”

“Break them, you kidding? They own all the stevedore companies that lease the piers. And the union local on every pier is owned by the mob that owns the stevedore company. If a guy hasn’t got an uncle, a brother, a cousin inside the union to recommend him, forget it, he don’t work. What happens his first day down there, guy comes up to him, says, `Hey, we’re taking a collection for Tony Nazziato. Broke his leg over to Pier Six.’ He says, ‘Tony who?’ and he never works again. Because old Tony, he’s up there in the union hall, and he could run the hundred on that broken leg of his.

It’s an understanding. Like everything on the piers.”

Enough of this, Angelo thought. He gave the agent a quizzical regard. “They sent you all the way from Denver just for a crummy barrel of chlorine gas.”

Rand swallowed hastily. “I’d hardly call chlorine gas crummy. You heard what they said about how toxic it was.”

“Yeah, well, you know what I figure? At least two thousand of you guys been pulled in here, all for that little barrel.”

The New Yorker’s face, Rand noted, seemed relaxed, but the cold set of his gray eyes had not changed.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” the agent replied. He hesitated a moment.

“You must be getting close to retirement age, Angelo.”

Okay, Angelo said to himself, the kid wants to change the subject, we’ll change the subject. “Sure. I could retire. I got the years. But I like the job. Like the excitement. Nobody’s breaking my balls. What would I do, I retire? Sit out there on Long Island somewhere and listen to the grass grow?”

Just the thought of retirement reminded him that it was here, in this precinct, that he had walked his first beat. In 1947. He’d been so close to home he could drop in for coffee in the house where he’d been born, kiss Ma, talk with the old man in the tailor shop he had set up when he came over from Sicily after the first war, lounge in the back room where Angelo had pushed the needle himself on Saturday afternoons, listening to the Metropolitan Opera, to his old man belting out Rigoletto, Trovatore, Traviata. Knew them all, his old man. Where did they go, all those years, Angelo thought, where did they go?

“You been with the Bureau long?” he asked Rand.

“Three years. Since I got out of Tulane Law School.”

Figures, Angelo thought. I always get the veterans.

Angelo fell silent for a moment, looking again at the once familiar neighborhood, resembling now the blastedout villages he’d fought over north of Naples in the winter of ‘43. Those years in the service, the force. He’d done all right. For an Italian. The Police and Fire Departments in the city belonged to the Irish. The Italians had the Sanitation. Jews owned the teachers. They said New York was a melting pot, but its heat could thaw things out only so much.

“You married, kid?”

“Yes,” Rand replied. “We have two children. How about you?”

For the first time he noted a softening in the detective’s gray eyes. “I lost my wife to cancer some years ago. We had one child, a daughter.” The words were issued like pronunciamento, a definitive statement that permitted no further questions.

Angelo turned off the avenue and drew up to a gate. He flashed his detective’s shield at the guard inside, who waved them ahead. They rolled down a slight incline to a huge three-story fagade of yellowing cement opening before a dark cavern that looked a little like a covered railroad stand. Overhead, a walkway linked the building to a pair of massive warehouses. They were quintessential U.S. government functional: squat and tasteless, without any redeeming frill or folly. Four railroad tracks ran into the pier’s dim recesses. Painted overhead in black block letters were the words “PASSENGER TERMINAL.”

“The end of the line for the kid in Upper Seventeen,” Angelo mused.

“What?” the startled Rand asked.

“Shit. Forget it. It was an ad during the war. You weren’t even born then.”

He flicked a peanut into his mouth and shook his head as though in disbelief. “I shipped out of here in ‘forty-two.”

A bitter gust of wind tore off the bay, flinging up to their nostrils the putrid odor of the dirty sea water lapping the docks. Angelo headed toward a shacklike booth at the end of the pier, its windows coated with fly specks, grime and dust.

“Would you believe that?” he asked. “U.S. Customs Office. You could walk a circus elephant past those windows and the guy inside wouldn’t notice.”

Angelo led the way into the dimly lit office. Decals of the Knicks, the Jets, old postcards, a yellowing Playboy centerfold were stuck to the walls. In one corner sat a hot plate in a little puddle of cold coffee. It was surrounded by an open can of Nescafe, a pair of mugs, their handles chipped, a jar of Creem, a few cubes of sugar, each capped with its matching crown of flies. The Customs officer had his feet up on the desk, a copy of the Daily News open to the sports page on his lap.

“Oh, yeah, they told me you were coming,” he said at the flash of Angelo’s gold shield. Without getting up, he added, “They’re waiting for you next door in the stevedores’ office.”

That office was little different from Customs. Stacked by month on a table were six piles of paper, almost a foot high, the manifests of the ships that had called at the pier in the last six months.

Angelo took off his overcoat and folded it neatly over a filthy cabinet. He plucked a few peanuts from his pocket and offered them to Rand. “Have a peanut, kid, and let’s get to work. Remember, the va piano, va sano.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means, my friend, a good cop is a guy who takes his time.”

The Mayor’s chubby hands, the hands Abe Stern had once imagined jabbing and punching their way through the glare of a prize ring, were pressed flat against the White House windowpane. Despair etched every line that seventy years of toil and struggle had left upon his face. Six million seven hundred thousand people, he thought over and over again, six million seven hundred thousandl A holocaust even worse than the tragedy that had swept the remnants of his father’s family into the gas chambers of Auschwitz; and all of it accomplished in the glare and incandescence of a few terrible seconds.

“Mr. President.” His voice was a harsh plea. “We gotta do something for those people up there. We got to.”

The President was perched on the corner of his desk, his weight supported by one foot. He had brought the Mayor back here to his private office after the NSC meeting to try to both brace and prepare him for the ordeal they were going to share.

“We are, Abe,” he answered. “We’re going to negotiate our way out of it. No man can be as unreasonable, as irrational as this. In the meantime, what’s important is to keep calm, not to let ourselves give in to panic.”

“Mr. President, that’s not enough for me. You have to perceive your responsibilities in this mess to the people of this country as a whole. Me, I have to perceive mine in terms of those six million people up there that that fanatic is threatening to kill. What are we going to do to save them, Mr. President?”

The President rose and walked to the window. His countrymen had elected him to this high office because they yearned for a return to the simpler, sterner values he’d tried, in his campaign, to incarnate. Now his abilities as a leader were being tested as no American President’s had been since the war. In the last great national crisis President Kennedy had been able to stand eyeball to eyeball with Khrushchev, he knew, because he had behind him the awesome power of the United States. That was denied him here. How could he even threaten Qaddafi with the U.S.‘s military power when the Libyan well knew its use would mean three or four American dead for every Libyan killed?

“Abe, for God’s sake,” he said, his voice cracking slightly as he spoke, “don’t you think if I knew something more we could do for those people we’d be doing it?”

“How about evacuating the city?”

“You read his letter, Abe. If we start doing that, he says he’s going to explode the bomb. Do you want to risk that? Before we’ve even talked to him?”

“What I don’t want to do is let that son of a bitch dictate his terms to us, Mr. President. Can’t we find some way to clear the city without his finding out about it? Do it at night? Cut the radios, the television, the phone systems? There’s got to be a way.”

The President turned from his window. He could not bear the beauty of that sight this morning, the clean sweep of snow, the Washington Monument soaring into the blue sky, the spartan rigidity of its design bespeaking another, simple time.

“Abe.” His voice was quiet and reflective. “He’s thought this through very carefully. The whole key to his strategic equation is the fact that in New York he’s got that uniquely vulnerable dense concentration of people. All his calculations depend on that. He knows if we clear the city he’s dead.

He’s got to have someone hidden up there with a powerful shortwave radio transmitter ready to flash him the word the moment someone says ‘evacuation.’”

“Mr. President, there’s only one thing I can think about and that’s the six million seven hundred thousand people in New York City this thing may kill.

The least I can do for them is to warn them. Get on radio and television and tell them to run for the bridges.”

“Abe.” There was no reproach in the President’s voice. “Do that and maybe you’ll save a million people. But they’ll be the rich with cars. How about the blacks, the Hispanics in Bedford 5tuyvesant and East Harlem? They’ll barely be out of the front door when the bomb goes off.”

“At least they’ll write on my tombstone, `He saved one million of his people.’”

The President shook his head, agonizing with the little man in his dilemma.

“And the history books may also say, Abe, that you helped cause the death of five million others by acting precipitously.”

For a minute, neither man said anything. Then the President went on.

“Besides, Abe, can you imagine the pandemonium you’d cause trying to evacuate New York?”

“Of course I can.” Petulance flared from the Mayor like a flame spurting from a sharply struck match. “I know my people. But I’ve got to do something. I’m not going back up there and sit around Gracie Mansion for the next thirty hours, Mr. President, waiting for your charm and persuasive talents to save six million New Yorkers from a madman.”

The Mayor thrust an outstretched index finger toward the vista beyond the window. “How about all those guys over there in Civil Defense at the Pentagon, been spending millions of dollars of our money for the last thirty years? What are we waiting for? Let them start earning their money.

Give me the best people you got. I’ll take them back with me and sit them down with my people. We’ll see if they can’t come up with something.”

“All right, Abe,” the President replied, “you got them. I'll have Caspar Weinberger get them out to Andrews right away.” He placed one of his outsized hands on the Mayor’s shoulder. “And if they come up with something, anything, that looks like it might work, we’ll do it, Abe. I promise you.” He squeezed the old man’s shoulder. “But it won’t come to that. Once we get through to him, we’ll find a way to talk him out of this.

Believe me. In the meantime,” he sighed, “we’ve got to put up a good front.” He took a slip of paper from his desk and stood up. “I guess the time to start is right now.”

A score of White House journalists were waiting outside. The President smiled, bantered with a couple of them, then read the innocuous three-line statement on his paper. They had discussed the question of federal aid for New York in the new budget, it read, and had agreed to close, continuing discussions on the matter over the next few days.

“Mr. Mayor,” a voice called from the circle of reporters, “what the hell’s going to happen to New York if you don’t get the money?”

The President could see that the question had caught Abe Stern by surprise, his thoughts far closer probably to the East River than to the Potomac.

“Don’t you worry about New York City, young man,” be snapped, when his mind had returned to the White House. “New York City can take care of itself.”

Jeremy Painter Oglethorpe spooned the egg from the double boiler at the first tinkle of his three-minute timer, flicked a slice of Pepperidge Farm stohemill oatmeal bread toast from the toaster, and poured a cup of coffee from his Mr. Coffee machine. With meticulousness born from twenty years of habit, he set the ingredients of his breakfast down in the breakfast nook of his Arlington, Virginia, split-level. Breakfast, like the rest of Oglethorpe’s life, was a series of well-worn rituals. He would close the working day now opening before him as precisely as he had begun it, a rigid eight and a half hours hence, with the rattle of the ice in a pitcher of martinis on the sideboy in the dining room.

Oglethorpe was fifty-eight, stout, myopic and given to wearing floppy bow ties because a secretary had once told him they gave him a debonair look. Professionally, he was an academic bureaucrat, a product of that curious union between the groves of academe and the capital’s corridors of power spawned by the nation’s universities in their insatiable thirst for federal funds. “Think tanks,” research institutes, government consultancies-the organizations which employed men like Oglethorpe had sprung up like mushrooms after a warm rain along the Potomac in the years since the war. A projection of the impact of zerobase population on housing starts in 2005; the future oadmium-stockpile requirements of the computer industry; the impact accuracy of the MX missile over a spectrum of reentry speeds-no subject was too arcane for their scrutiny. Even, as Senator William Proxmire had learned to his fury, a study of the social pecking order in South American whorehouses.

Oglethorpe belonged to one of the most prestigious among them, the Stanford Research Institute attached to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. His specialty was figuring out how to evacuate American cities in the event of a Soviet thermonuclear attack. Except, of course, that the word “evacuation” was never used in his work to refer to the operation. The government bureaucracy had decided it was a negative-association word like “cancer” and had replaced it with a more palatable term, “crisis relocation.”

For thirty years, Oglethorpe had devoted himself to the subject with a zealousness no less total than the devotion offered by one of Sister Theresa’s nursing nuns to the poor of Calcutta. The crowning achievement of his career had been the recent publication of his monumental 425page work The Feasibility of Crisis Relocation in the Northeastern United States. It had required the services of twenty people for three years and had cost the U.S. government more money than even Oglethorpe cared to admit. Since then, he had devoted most of his working hours to the most difficult challenge that report had posed, evacuating New York City-and that despite the fact that he had never lived there and personally couldn’t stand the place. His lack of firsthand knowledge of the city whose evacuation concerned him, however, had never troubled the federal bureaucracy; such things seldom do.

What had troubled Oglethorpe during those long years was the massive indifference of his countrymen to his efforts to provide for their well-being on the day of the Ultimate Disaster. Approaching retirement, it sometimes seemed to Oglethorpe that he was a kind of ultimate disaster himself, a man of undisputed talent and ability whose hour had never seemed to come.

Yet, on this morning of Monday, December 14, it had. Oglethorpe had just given two sharp raps of his spoon to his egg when the phone rang. He almost choked hearing a Pentagon colonel introduce his caller as the Secretary of Defense. No one higher than a GS10 had ever called him at his home. Two minutes later, his breakfast in the nook uneaten, he was getting into a gray U.S. Navy sedan, preparing to speed first to his office to pick up the documents he would need in the hours to come, then to Andrews AFB.

Across the Potomac from. Oglethorpe’s Arlington home, the haggard advisers who were gathered around Jack Eastman’s conference table in the West Wing of the White House each reacted in a different way to the Dutch psychiatrist joining their group. To Lisa Dyson, the CIA’s blond Libyan Desk officer, he brought a promise of fresh our to a gathering going stale from a night of intense and occasionally acrimonious discussion.

Bernie Tamarkin, the Washington psychiatrist who specialized in dealing with terrorists, looked on Henrick Jagerman with the awe of a young cellist about to meet Pablo Casals for the first time. Jack Eastman saw in his stocky figure the incarnation of the one hope he had for a nonviolent resolution to this ghastly crisis.

The introductions completed, Jagerman took the seat Eastman indicated at the head of the table. Barely an hour ago, he had been hurtling across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound, sipping ice-cold Dom Perignon cham-pagne and studying the psychological portrait of Qaddafi a CIA operative had given him at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Now here he was in the councils of the most powerful nation on earth, expected to offer a strategy that could prevent a catastrophe of unthinkable dimension.

“Have you established contact with Qaddafi yet?” he inquired when Eastman concluded his review of the situation.

“Unfortunately, we haven’t,” the American admitted, “although we do have a secure communications channel set up which we can use when we do.”

Jagerman looked at the ceiling. There was a large black mole in the middle of his forehead. It resembled, he was fond of pointing out, the tikka, the stain Hindus often painted there to represent the Third Eye that perceives the truth beyond appearances.

“In any event, it’s not urgent.”

“Not urgent?” Eastman was aghast. “We have barely thirty hours left to talk him out of this mess and you say getting hold of him isn’t urgent?”

“After the success of his test in the desert the man is in a state of psychic erection-clinically speaking, a state of paranoic hypertension.”

Jagerman’s tone hF.d the authoritative ring of a distinguished surgeon offering his diagnosis to a circle of interns. “That explosion has confirmed to him that he now possesses what he’s been looking for for years, absolute, total power. He sees at last, that all the possibilities he sought are open to him: destroying Israel, becoming the undisputed leader of the Arabs, master of the world’s oil supplies. Speaking to him right now could be a fatal error. Better let that stewpot cool down a bit before we take off the cover to see what’s inside.”

He pinched his nostrils with his fingers and tried to clear his aural passages, blocked by the Concorde’s abnormally rapid descent in response to the White House’s orders for speed.

“You see,” he continued, “the most dangerous moments in a terrorist situation are the first ones. Then the terrorist’s anxiety quotient is very, very high. He’s frequently in a state of hysteria that can drive him to the irrational in a second. You must ventilate him. Let him express his views, his grievances.” The Du: chman started. “By the way, these communications facilities, I presume, will allow us to hear his voice?”

“Well, there’s a possible security problem, but …”

“We must hear his voice,” Jagerman insisted. A man’s voice was for him an indispensable window onto his psyche, the element with which he could evaluate his character, the shifts in his sentiments, eventually predict his behavior patterns. In a hostage crisis, he recorded every word exchanged with the terrorists, then listened over and over again to their voices, hunting for shifts in speech patterns, in tone, in usage, looking for hidden clues that could guide his own search for mastery of the situation.

“Who should talk to him?” Eastman asked. “The President, I suppose.”

“Absolutely not.” Jagerman sounded almost shocked that Eastman had even suggested it. “The President is the person who can give him what he wants-or at least he thinks he is. He’s the last person who should talk to him.” The psychiatrist took a sip of the cup of coffee someone had placed at his elbow. “Our aim,” he went on, “must be to gain time to allow the police to find that bomb. If we let the President speak to him, how are we going to stall for time if we have to? Qaddafi can force him into a corner, a yes-or-no situation. He can demand an immediate answer he knows the President can give him.”

Jagerman noted with satisfaction that the people around the table were following his logic. “That’s why you insert the negotiator between the terrorist and authority. If the terrorist asks for something immediately, a negotiator can always stall by telling him that he has to go to speak to those in authority to get it for him. Time,” he smiled, “is always on the side of authority. As time goes by, terrorists become less and less sure of themselves. Vulnerable. As one must hope Qaddafi will.”

“What kind of person should this negotiator be?” Eastman asked.

“An older man. It’s possible he might perceive a younger man as a threat.

Someone placid, a man who will listen, who can draw him on if he lapses into silence. A father figure the way Nasser was to him when he was young.

Above all, someone who’ll inspire a sense of confidence. His attitude must be: `I sympathize with your aims. I want to help you achieve them.’ “

The Dutchman knew that task well. Five times he had had to fill it, talking terrorists through their first irrational, dangerous stage, coaxing them slowly back to reality, imposing the rhythms of normality on them, finally bringing them to accept the role he had in mind for them: becoming conquered heroes by sparing their hostages’ lives. Four times those tactics had worked brilliantly. Better in this situation, he thought, not to think about the fifth.

“The first contact will be decisive,” he continued. “Qaddafi must realize immediately that we’re taking him seriously.” His quick bright eyes surveyed the room. “In view of what he’s done, what I’m about to say may sound grotesque, but it’s a vital part of the strategy. We must begin by telling him he’s right. That not only is his complaint against Israel perfectly justified, but we’re prepared to help him find a reasonable solution to it.”

“All this presumes, of course,” Lisa Dyson observed, “that he’ll talk to us. It would be very much in character for him to say,” she gave Jagerman an angelic smile, “please forgive my French, Doctor, `Screw you. Don’t talk to me. Just do what I say.’ ”

These American girls, Jagerman thought. Their language is worse than a Dutch prison warden’s. “Don’t worry, young lady,” he replied. “He’ll talk. Your excellent study makes that clear. That dirty little Arab boy from the desert the kids all ridiculed once is now going to become the hero of all the Arabs by imposing his will on the most important man in the world. Believe me, he’ll talk.”

“I hope to Christ you’re right.” Eastman had been following Jagerman with feelings that were a mixture of his skepticism of the psychiatrist’s trade and his desperate hope that this man could provide them with the answers they needed. “But don’t forget, Doctor, we’re not dealing here with some wild-eyed terrorists holding a gun against a little old lady’s head. This man has the power to kill six million people in his hands. And he knows it.”

Jagerman nodded. “Quite right,” he agreed. “But what we are dealing with are certain immutable psychological patterns and principles. They apply to a chief of state just as well as they do to a terrorist gunman. Most terrorists see themselves as oppressed luminaries striving to avenge some wrong. Clearly, the man we have in front of us here is a luminary, a true religious fanatic, which complicates matters, because religion can always radicalize a man, as we all saw in Iran with Khomeini.”

Jagerman glanced toward Lisa Dyson, an approving, paternal air in his regard. “Once again, your portrait is most instructive. He knows that you Americans, like the English, the French, even the Russians, think he’s crazy. Well, he’s going to prove you’re wrong. He, that miserable, despised Arab, is going to force you to make his impossible dream come true. And to prove to you he’s not as crazy as you think he is, he’s ready to pay the final price: to destroy you and himself and his own people if he has to to get his way.”

Angelo Rocchia glanced at the group of men warming their hands by the old coal stove in one corner of the office of the pier boss of the Hellenic Stevedore Company. Dock bosses. Italians mostly, with a token black in their circle, the Mob’s reluctant concession to the pressures of the times. In their leather caps, their faded lumberjackets and dungarees, they were a casting man’s dream for a remake of On the Waterfront. Their conversation was a series of guttural grunts, a mixture of English and Sicilian, touching on sex and the cold, money and the Knicks, punctuated by regular hostile glances at Angelo and the FBI man beside him.

No one, the detective knew, was as unwelcome on the docks as a cop. Those guys, he thought cheerfully, have got to be going crazy trying to figure out what the hell we’re doing here. Beyond the office, from the huge pier of the Brooklyn Ocean Terminal, Angelo could hear the snarl of forklift trucks, the clang of metal, the grinding of the cranes hoisting pallets of cargo out of the holds of the four ships tied up to the terminal’s wharves.

It was a soup-tonuts pier, one of the few piers left in the Port of New York that still handled the old loose cargo slung onto the pallets, an anachronism in the days of containerized cargo.

Angelo remembered the old days when everything had come in on pallets and the longshoremen went at them like a rat pack, eating away at their loads at every stage of their progress along the docks. Pilferage then had been a fringe benefit of being a longshoreman.

Not anymore. Everything was containers now. Three, four days it would take to unload by crane and hand the ships tied up at the terminal. Across the bay, in the modern container ports at Elizabeth and Newark, they took off thirty tons in half an hour, snapped a hustler, a tow cab onto each container and drove it away. The savings to the shippers were enormous and the conversion had probably saved the Port of New York.

It had done something else too, and Angelo was well aware of what it was.

It had turned the port into a smugglers’ paradise. Customs had to pay the cost of busting open a container, unloading it and repacking it while the shippers stood by screaming bloody murder because their shipment was being harassed. As a result, the random sampling of goods for Customs’ purposes had been practically abandoned. Customs just didn’t touch a container unless they had hard intelligence on it. You could run a hundred barrels of whatever this stuff was they were looking for across those docks over there in Jersey, Angelo reflected, and there was no way in the world anyone would find out what you were doing.

He rubbed his eyes and turned his attention back to his methodical progress through the manifest of the Lash Turkiye, fifty-two cargoes, each one different, it seemed, each loaded in a different port. Already he had picked up two shipments that had fitted into the frame they were looking for. There was nothing in the last dozen cargoes. Wearily, Angelo tossed the manifest on top of the others he had already finished and reached for the next one in the pile before him.

As he spread it out on the table, he felt a familiar rumble in his stomach.

“Hey,” he called to the pier boss. Tony Piccardi was seated at a long counter in front of a row of bank-teller-like windows. “That restaurant, Salvatore’s, over there on Fifth Avenue. It still open?”

Piccardi looked up from the documents he was checking for one of the truckers standing in front of his window. “No. The old guy died a couple of years back.”

“Too bad. He made a manicotti you wouldn’t believe.”

Jack Rand glanced impatiently at his detective partner. Bullshitting. Since he arrived he had spent half of his time bullshitting with these guys, mostly in Italian. Impatiently, the young agent flicked over a page of his manifest. He started at the sight of the first entry on his new page.

“I’ve got one,” he called, his voice sliding sharply upward with excitement.

Angelo leaned over and followed Rand’s finger across the manifest.

“Yeah,” he agreed, “that’s a live one all right. Better call it in.”

Rand moved off toward the phone, and Angelo went back to his own manifest.

It was the shortest one he’d studied, listing barely a dozen items. Guy owns this ship, Angelo mused, can’t be making much money. He went quickly through the usual run of Mediterranean products: Greek olive oil in tins, Syrian copperware. He stopped short at the word “Benghazi.”

That had a familiar ring. Uncle Giacomo. That’s where the British captured Uncle Giacomo in 1941. In Benghazi, Libya. He studied the entry.

Angelo thought for a second. Ten barrels, so each one weighed five hundred pounds, well below the size they were looking for.

“Hey, Tony,” he said to the pier boss. “Take a look at this.” He thrust the manifest at Piccardi. “What’s this stuff?”

“Kind of white powder. Busted-up seashells.”

“What the hell do they use that for?”

“I don’t know. Filtering water, I think. Swimming pools, you know?”

“Sure. I use mine all the time.” Angelo noted the word “Filters” by the name of the consignee. “You know this ship?”

Piccardi looked at the head of the manifest. “Yeah. An old rust bucket.

Been coming in here with that shit about once a month for the last three, four months.”

Angelo pondered the paper a moment. You’d look an awful fool downtown sending them after five-hundredpound barrels when the one they’re looking for weighs fifteen hundred. This was a heavy case. No time and no manpower to waste. Besides, there was a regular pattern to the shipping. He laid the manifest on his stack of completed papers. As he did, the name of the ship that had delivered the cargo caught his eye. It was “S.S. Dionysos.”

Huge sunglasses, their lenses as dark as eye patches, shielded the pimp’s eyes from the harsh light of day. Morning was not Rico Diaz’s best time.

From his tape deck the echoes of Bobby Womack’s “Road of Life” vibrated through his customized Lincoln; soul had seemed more appropriate for this meeting than disco. He hurried the car down Seventh Avenue, putting as much space between him and his turf as he could. No reason to be spotted by the brothers with these two in the car-although, he thought with a contemptuous sideways glance at his FBI control agent, they could easily pass for a pair of Johns off to party time with his ladies.

“Rico, we got a little problem.”

Rico did not answer his control. His eyes, invisible behind the shades, were studying the man in the back seat in the rearview mirror. He had not seen him before, and he did not like what he saw. The man had a mean and sterile face, the face of someone who enjoyed squashing little bugs between his fingertips.

“That Arab girl you told us about. She left the Hampshire House this morning. To fly out to LA.”

Rico gestured indifferently at the filthy gray ridges of snow along the avenue. “She be a lucky lady.”

“Except she didn’t get on the plane, Rico.”

The pimp felt a chill quiver of apprehension flick through his stomach. He regretted now that he hadn’t taken a wake-up jolt of coke before leaving his pad. “So?”

“So we’d like to talk to your friend who dealt with her.”

The quiver of apprehension became a knot squeezing Rico’s bowels. “No way, man. He a mean motherfucker.”

“I didn’t expect he’d be studying for the priesthood, Rico. What’s he do?”

The pimp emitted a low, soft groan. “You know, man. He make a little dope here and there.”

“Good. That’s good, Rico. We’ll bring him in to have a talk about dope. No way in the world he’ll trace it back to you.”

“Come on, man.” Rico could feel a trickle of sweat sliding along his spine and it wasn’t because he was warm in his five-thousand-dollar knee-length mink-lined coat. “You say to him, `Arab lady, Hampshire House’ and they be only one nigger in New York he gonna be thinking about.

“Mr. Diaz.”

It was the man in the back seat. Rico studied the flat, emotionless face.

“What we have here is a matter of greatest importance. And urgency. We need your help.”

“You got it already.”

“I know that and we’re very appreciative of what you’ve already done. But we’re very, very anxious to find that girl. We’ve got to talk to your friend.” The agent took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, leaned forward and offered one to Rico. The black pushed it away.

“You’re very important to us, Mr. Diaz. We’re not going to do anything that would compromise you in any way, believe me. There will be no way your friend can trace our visit to you from the nature of our questions. I promise you.” The agent lit his own cigarette, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Frank,” he said to Rico’s control in the front seat, “I understand one of Mr. Diaz’s girl friends is in some difficulty with the New York police.”

“Yeah,” Frank replied, “if you consider five years in the slammer difficult, she is.”

“Can you arrange to get the charges dropped? In view of the importance of Mr. Diaz’s cooperation?”

“I suppose so.”

“Today?”

“If T really had to.”

“You will.”

Through the rearview mirror, Rico noticed the man turn his eyes back to him. “The girl is yours, Mr. Diaz, but we need your help. Believe me there’ll be no way in the world your friend’ll trace this back to you. No way.”

Why, Rico thought angrily, why did I ever put a bag of shit in this machine? Anita was the only hundred-dollar tricker he had. There was a gold mine in her pussy. Two, three thousand dollars a week she brought in, twice the earnings of his other girls. She was the principal mainstay of a very expensive lifestyle and no one had to explain to Rico what was going to happen to that if he didn’t come through for these two. They’d clean her slate all right if he talked; but keep his mouth shut and it would be bye-bye, baby, five years upstate for Anita and some mean times for Rico until he found a girl to replace her.

“You sure they no way this get back?”

“Trust us.”

Rico slammed the heel of a hand onto the steering wheel. Dumb bitch, he thought. I told her never to stiff a John. He swallowed nervously, running the fine calculations through.his street-smart brain, reckoning up the dangerous balance, pitting the risks against the spiraling cost of good coke, against the cash required for the out-front display a man had to have to keep his standing on the street.

His control agent had to lean forward to catch the whispered reply when bitterly, reluctantly, it came. “Franco. Apartment Five A, 213 West Fifty-fifth.”

The girl the FBI agents were looking for was thirty-five miles north of Manhattan driving a Budget Rent-a-Car up the New York State Thruway toward Albany. Laila Dajani had picked the car up in Buffalo two weeks earlier. As an additional precaution, she had removed the car’s license plates and replaced them with a pair of New Jersey number plates stolen by Palestinian agents six months earlier from a U.S. tourist’s car parked in Baden-Baden, Germany.

Whalid was in the seat beside her. It was 10 A.M. and he was fiddling with the dials of the radio, trying to catch a news bulletin. “Maybe”-he smiled at his sister”they’ll have something on the Israelis starting their pull-back.”

Laila gave him a hurried glance. There’s been quite a change in my brother in the past few hours, she thought. Perhaps it was the medicine she’d gotten him. He hadn’t complained about his ulcer since she’d picked him up.

Laila eased the car into the outside lane to pass a huge refrigerated truck, being careful as she did to stay well within the fifty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit. This was no time to be arrested for speeding. If he’s so relaxed, she told herself, maybe it’s because it’s over for him now. All he had to do was sit in the safe house she’d found in the upstate countryside and wait while she and Kamal spent another twentyfour hours in the city, Kamal standing vigil over the bomb with his rats and his air gun, she in the hotel to which she’d moved waiting to bring him to the safe house two hours before the bomb was due to explode.

Once Qaddafi’s plans had been implemented-and Laila had no doubt that the Americans would accept his ultimatum-he would tell Washington where the bomb was and radio the code that would break the firing circuits. They, in the meantime, would have worked their way west to Canada, using false Canadian passports and papers. Their destination would be Vancouver, where a second safe house awaited them. A Panamanian freighter, Greek-run but Libyan-owned, was due there to pick them up December 25. The Canadians, they calculated, wouldn’t be watching their piers too closely on Christmas Day.

Laila turned off the Thruway at Spring Valley and a few minutes later pulled into a huge shopping mall, being sure to drive well to the back of its half empty parking lot.

“Whalid,” she told her brother, “you’ve probably got a less memorable face than I have. Why don’t you do the shopping? There’s no sense in taking any chances we don’t need to.”

Whalid smiled and slipped out of the car. As he did, Laila flicked on the radio. She felt herself growing more nervous, more desperate, with each passing moment. She played with the dial until she settled on the loud wail of a Dolly Parton lament. She turned it up as loud as she dared, hoping that somehow the din would overwhelm the black thoughts assailing her.

Almost desperately, she clutched at the steering wheel. Don’t, she told herself, don’t, don’t, don’t think.

But Michael’s image would not leave her: Michael calcinated to black ash; Michael at the instant the incandescent heat seared the life from his body in a flash of pain. It’s not going to go off, she kept telling herself.

It’s not. But in the depths of her soul there was the whisper what if it does?

She started, her painful reverie broken by the sound of Whalid opening the car door. He got in and Laila reached for the ignition key. As she did, she caught a glimpse of the shopping bag’ he had set on the seat between them.

Aghast, she half pulled a fifth of Johnnie Walker from the bag. “What about your ulcer?”

“Don’t worry about my ulcer.” Her brother smiled. “It’s fine now.”

In Paris, the lunch hour was already over. General Henri Bertrand’s eyes were half closed and the vacant expression on his face as he advanced along the corridor of an apartment in the city’s elegant Sixteenth Arrondissement gave the impression his mind was miles away. It was, in fact, concentrated with a connoisseur’s delight on the twitching buttocks of the Spanish maid leading him toward her employer’s study.

“Monsieur will be with you in a moment,” she intoned, opening the door.

The director of France’s intelligence agency nodded gravely and entered the room. It was a miniature museum. One wall was a large window overlooking the Bois. The other three were lined with display cases, each subtly illuminated and backed with velvet fabrics that set off the priceless collection of Oriental and Greco-Roman antiquities they contained. Bertrand himself had been born in Indochina and he had more than a layman’s appreciation of Oriental art. Some of the Hindu pieces, notably a finely chiseled stone representation of Shiva which Bertrand judged to date back to the seventh or eighth century, were priceless.

The centerpiece of the collection was an enormous Roman head three or four times life size locked in a display cabinet in the center of the room.

Wrapped in the diffused glow cast by a spotlight overhead, that ancient marble radiated a beauty such as Bertrand had rarely contemplated.

Behind him, the SDECE director heard a door opening. He turned to find himself facing a portly bald man in a scarlet silk dressing gown buttoned tightly around his neck, its flaring skirt falling to his ankles. A mandarin, Bertrand thought, or a cardinal on his way into the Sistine Chapel for a conclave.

PaulHenri de Serre was a senior member of France’s nuclear establishment.

He had begun his career working on Zoe, France’s first atomic reactor, a device so primitive its control rods had been manipulated with an engine taken from a Singer sewing machine. Most recently, he had supervised the Libyan project, overseeing the reactor’s construction, then presiding over its functioning during the critical first six months of its operation.

“How like our American friends to wave an accusing finger at us,” he sighed when Bertrand, after apologizing for disturbing his host’s siesta, explained the reason for his visit. “They’ve been jealous of our program for years. The very idea the Libyans could have somehow extracted plutonium from our reactor is ridiculous.”

Bertrand took out a Gauloise and politely asked de Serre if he minded if he smoked. Seconds later, the cigarette was in its usual resting place in the righthand corner of his mouth, fixed there so firmly it appeared to be an appendage to his lips. He sat back in the high leather wing chair de Serre had offered, his hand folded over the slight paunch forming on his midriff.

“Our scientific people confirm what you say,” he noted. “Damned embarrassing for us if it did happen, however. Tell me, cher monsieur, did anything take place down there that gave you any grounds for suspicion?

Anything that seemed unusual, out of the ordinary?”

“Nothing at all,” De Serre sipped thoughtfully on the coffee that Paquita, the Spanish maid, had brought them. “Now, this is not to say I don’t belive that Qaddafi wouldn’t like to get his hands on some plutonium. Every time the word `nuclear’ comes up, there’s a gleam in his people’s eyes. I’m merely saying be didn’t get it from us.”

“Would you have any idea where he might have gotten it?”

“Quite frankly, no.”

“How about your personnel? Were there any among them with pronounced sympathies for the Arab cause? Sympathies that might have made them amenable to a plea for help from the Libyans?”

“As you know, all of our people were given security checks by the DST before being assigned to the project. To weed out just the sort of individual you’re talking about. They all came down more or less sympathetic to the Arab cause. Although, I might add, working with the Libyans tended to disabuse most of them of those notions rather swiftly.”

“Difficult people, are they?”

“Impossible.”

The General noted with interest the vehemence with which de Serre seemed to spit out the word. Here is one man, he thought, who bears the Libyans no affection.

Their conversation continued for another half hour. Nothing in it, it seemed to the head of the SDECE, opened up an avenue his agency might want to explore. The source of Qaddafi’s plutonium was probably elsewhere; an outright theft, perhaps.

“Well, cher monsieur, I think I’ve taken up quite enough of your time,” he declared, rising from his armchair.

“If there’s anything else I can do, please don’t hesitate to call on me,” his host murmured.

Turning to leave, Bertrand was once again struck by the breathtaking beauty of the head locked in its display case in the center of the room, by the perfect serenity of that marble mask casting its stone gaze across the centuries.

“A remarkable piece,” he said admiringly. “Where did you get it?”

“It came originally from Leptis Magna on the Libyan seacoast.” De Serre’s eyes caressed his treasure with an expression so adoring that it struck his visitor. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Indeed.” Bertrand waved at the glowing display cabinets lining the study.

“Your entire collection is extraordinary.” He stepped to the head of Shiva he had noted earlier. “This is quite unusual. At least a thousand years old, I should have thought. Did you get it in India?”

“Yes. I was assigned out there as a technical adviser in the early seventies.”

The General stared appreciatively at the delicately wrought stone sculpture. “You’re a fortunate man,” he sighed, “a fortunate man indeed.”

Jack Rand finished the last manifest of the Hellenic Stevedore Company’s Brooklyn pier and laid it carefully on the stack of papers on the desk.

He buttoned his shirt collar and started to tighten his tie, noting irritably as he did that his partner had already finished. Angelo Rocchia’s feet were propped up on the desk and he was gnawing a Hostess cupcake to which he had helped himself from the clutter of half-eaten jelly doughnuts and pastries scattered around the office’s hot plate.

Once again Angelo and Tony Piccardi were bullshitting.

“I think everything’s fine here,” Rand announced. “Let’s get on to the next pier.”

Angelo concealed his annoyance with a cold smile. Slowly, very deliberately, he licked the chocolate-cupcake crumbs from his fingertips.

This guy, he thought, is an unmitigated pain in the ass. I’ve never seen anybody in such a fucking hurry. Unless, it suddenly occurred to him, someone’s told him something they haven’t bothered to tell me.

The detective lowered his feet to the ground and contemplated for a moment his own stack of completed manifests. Then he reached over, flicked through it and pulled one out. Ignoring Rand, he turned to the pier boss. “Hey, Tony, you got any other paper on this shipment?”

Piccardi glanced at the manifest of the Dionysos, then reached for a black looseleaf notebook. He kept one on every ship that left cargo on the pier.

It contained a copy of the bill of lading for each piece of cargo unloaded, the arrival notice sent to the broker handling the cargo, his delivery order cleared by Customs, and a pier sheet. Piccardi turned to the pier sheet for the ten barrels of diatome consigned to Durkee Filters in Queens.

It gave the name of the trucker who had made the pickup, the license number of his truck, the time he left the docks and the details of his load.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I remember this. Murphy usually picks this guy’s stuff up. Their guy didn’t come in that day. Guy in a Hertz truck made the pickup.”

Rand peered down at the manifest. “Angelo,” he said, “these barrels weigh five hundred pounds apiece.”

“No kidding?” Angelo gave Piccardi a look of illfeigned wonder. “Kid here, he’s got a mind like a computer.”

“So, in view of that, why are we wasting time on this when we’ve got two more piers to cover?”

Angelo twisted around on his stool until he faced the young agent. The smile, the wide toothy smile, was there, but his eyes had lost none of their chill. “Kid, you know something? You are right. Send this thing downtown, it’ll be ‘What’samatter? Can’t those guys divider But just for us, let’s check it out. That way tonight, over there in that Howard Johnson Motor Lodge they got you in, you put your head on the pillow, you’re going to sleep. You’ll know you’ve covered. Haven’t left anything hanging. Tony,” the detective interrogated the pier boss, “anybody here deal with this likely to remember anything about it?”

Piccardi pointed to two names at the bottom of the pier sheet. “Maybe the checker and the loader that handled the stuff.”

Angelo got up, his knee joints creaking. “Paisan, how about you taking us up there and introducing us to them?” He gave a wave of his index finger to Rand. “Come on, kid. Here’s your chance to see what a Brooklyn pier looks like.”

The Brooklyn Ocean Terminal was an endless dark cavern as wide as a football field and twice as long. The odor of burlap mingled in the dust-clogged air with the scent of spices, nuts and coffee, giving it a strange resemblance to an Oriental bazaar. At intervals along its length, shafts of light penetrated the dimness from the doors opening onto the ships tied up at the pier. Forklift trucks darted and circled through the pools of light they formed like water bugs skimming the surface of a pond.

Marching down the pier, Angelo Rocchia and Jack Rand passed pyramiding stacks of Greek olive oil, silver cans of cornseed oil from Turkey, dried raisins from the Sudan, sacks of Indian cashew nuts, bales of cotton from Pakistan, stinking cowhides from Afghanistan, burlap bags of coffee beans from Kenya.

The New Yorker waved at the row of goods disappearing into the shadows.

“You poke around in the corners, you wouldn’t believe the shit these longshoremen got stashed away.”

“Hey, Tony,” Angelo called after Piccardi, “tell me something. You get many rental trucks making pickups down here?”

“Naw,” Piccardi replied. “Two, three a week. Depends.”

He led them up to a cluster of longshoremen unloading pallets of copper tubing and beckoned to a short swarthy man, a cargo hook dangling from his right hand. Angelo noted the whites of the man’s eyes. They were spider-webbed with little pink tracings. Likes the vino, he thought.

Piccardi showed the man the sheet. “Guy here wants to know you remember anything about this pickup.”

Behind the man, work had stopped. The circle of longshoremen looked at Rand and Angelo in sullen, hostile silence. The docker didn’t even bother to look at Piccardi’s sheet. “Naw,” he said, his voice a hoarse rasp. “I wouldn’t remember nothing about it.”

Booze has got his voice too, Angelo mused. He reached into his pocket for a pack of Marlboros. It had been years since he’d given up smoking, but he always carried a pack, right beside his peanuts.

“Here, gumba,” he said to the docker in Italian, “have a smoke.”

As the man lit up, Angelo continued. “Look, what I got here got nothing to do with putting anybody locally in the can, you know what I mean?”

The docker gave Piccardi a wary glance. At that instant, all Angelo’s seemingly meaningless chatter in Piccardi’s office had its reward. With a barely discernible movement of his eyebrows, the pier boss indicated he was all right.

“What do them barrels look like?” Angelo prodded gently.

“Hey, you know, they’re big cans. Big fucking cans. Like garbage cans.”

“You remember the guy made the pickup?”

“No.”

“I mean, you know, was he a regular? A guy who knows his way around down here? Do the right thing and all?”

It was the tradition of the piers to “smear” the longshoremen who handled your load, to slip them five or ten dollars for their help. Angelo’s mention of the custom brought to the docker’s face the first intimation of a feeling, other than that of ill-will, that the detective had seen on it.

“Yeah.” The reply was a long growl. “Now I remember that jerk. He forgot.

We had to let him know something was dragging. You know-” he half whistled, half blew a spurt of air through his teeth-“put a little kabootz on him.

When he got the message, he come half a yard. Sure.” There was even a smile on the docker’s saturnine features. “I remember him.”

Angelo’s thick eyebrows rose. Who comes up with fifty bucks? he wondered. No Italian. No Irishman. In fact, no one who’s been around the docks. Has to be a stranger, a guy who isn’t onto it.

“You remember what he looked like?”

“Hey, you know, he was a guy. What could I tell you? A guy…

“Angelo.” Rand’s voice was sharp. “We’re wasting our time here. Let’s get on to the next dock.”

“Sure, kid, we’re on our way.” Angelo indicated Piccardi’s pier sheet. “How about the other guy that handled the load? The checker?”

“He’s on a break over at the Longshoremen’s Club.”

“Okay, kid, let’s stop in there on our way out.” Before Rand could articulate the protest Angelo knew was coming, the detective threw an arm around his shoulder. “Let me tell you what happens in an Italian club like this longshoremen’s place, kid,” he said, his voice a friendly growl. “They play Italian card games. You know how an Italian card game is? Everybody sits at the same side of the table.”

He gave a jovial laugh and slapped Rand on the back. “You interview guys at an Italian card game, it goes like this. `Who shot the guy?’ ‘Hey, I don’t know, I didn’t see nothin’. I was playing cards. Had my back to the door.’

So you ask the next guy, `What’d you see?T ‘Nothing, what could I tell you?

I was sitting my back to the door. Playing cards.’

“It’s always like that. Everybody sits on the same side. With their backs to the door. Nobody’s ever on the other three sides.” Angelo laughed, then stopped his march back down the pier. This guy, he told himself, is going to be no help to me in that club. I won’t get the time of day out of anybody with him standing beside me.

“Look, kid,” he cajoled. “You’re in a hurry. I’m in a hurry.” He took the pier sheet from Piccardi and pointed to the license number of the truck that had made the pickup. “While I’m in there, why don’t you go to Tony’s office, call Hertz, find out where this truck comes from and get what they have off the rental agreement?”

Less than five minutes later, Angelo was back. His visit to the club had been totally unproductive. Rand handed him a slip of paper with the details of the Hertz truck’s rental agreement on it. The truck had been rented at a Hertz truck agency on Fourth Avenue, just behind the docks, at ten Friday morning, a few minutes before the pier sheet showed it had reached the pier. It had been returned at the end of the day. The man who had rented it bad used his American Express card to pay. His New York State driver’s license gave his name and address: Gerald Putman, Inter-ocean Imports, 123 Cadman Plaza West, Brooklyn.

Angelo gave the address an appraising glance. “Looks legitimate to me.

Let’s just check it out. One telephone call and we know we’re clean.” He picked up the telephone directory, found Inter-ocean’s number and dialed it.

Rand heard Angelo identifying himself to a switchboard operator, then asking for Putman. In the silence that followed, the New Yorker gave the agent a bemused smile. “Ever heard of a truck driver who’s got a secretary?”

“Mr. Putman,” he announced. “Detective Angelo Rocchia, New York Police Department. We’ve been informed by the Hertz Rent-A-Truck office over on Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, that you rented one of their vehicles last Friday morning around ten and we’d just like to-“

Three feet away, Rand could hear Putman’s surprised and angry voice interrupting the detective. “I what? Listen, officer, last Friday was the day I lost my wallet. I spent the whole morning right here in this office.”

The headquarters of the pier search of which Angelo Rocchia and Jack Rand were a small part was in New York’s emergency command center. It had become operational a few minutes after nine. Buried three floors below the State Supreme Court Building on Foley Square, it was an ideal place to manage a crisis in secret. So infrequently bad the center been used in the years since it had been installed by the Lindsay administration that nearly everyone involved with it, including the City Hall press corps, had forgotten it was there.

It was entered through an obscure side door to the courthouse. Basically, it was just a huge underground cavern divided into areas by salmon-pink wood panels eight feet high. Everything else in it was administrative gray: gray walls, gray floors, gray filing cabinets, gray redundant furniture thrown out of City Hall, gray faces on the policemen assigned to watch over it twenty-four hours a day. The last time the place had been used was during the great blackout in July 1977, when, to the Police Department’s embarrassment, its lights had gone out along with everyone else’s. Someone had forgotten to keep its generators serviced.

Quentin Dewing, the FBI assistant director for investigation, had taken on the job of organizing the center. He did it in the methodical, careful manner for which the Bureau was famous. By the time the Police Commissioner and Al Feldman, his Chief of Detectives, had finished dispatching their manpower, he was ready to give them a guided tour of the place. The first room, designed to be the center’s switchboard in an emergency, he had assigned to the effort to run down the Arabs who, according to their forms, had come into the New York area in the last six months. The room had fifty telephone lines. Each was manned by an agent, some holding open phones to JFK or the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington.

On one desk was a minicomputer serving as a central locator file. Every incoming name and address was punched into it. If the person belonging to the name hadn’t been found and cleared in two hours, the computer dumped the name into a higher-priority file.

The operation next door was even more impressive. It had been designated by Dewing as the headquarters for the pier search. Maps of New York and New Jersey’s 578 miles of waterfront hung on the walls. All of the waterfront’s two hundred piers were listed on charts under the maps.

Every time one of the teams working the piers came across a suspicious piece of cargo, the name and address of the consignee was telephoned to the center. If the cargo had been delivered in the New York area, the center dispatched a team of Customs inspectors or drug enforcement agents to track it down. If it had been shipped outside New York, an agent from the nearest FBI office was sent after it.

The tour completed, Dewing took Bannion and Feldman to his own command post set up in what was meant to be the Mayor’s suite in an emergency. Next door, the CIA and the FBI had installed multiflex printout receivers to deliver to the New York operation the harvest of their files and their overseas contacts.

While the Chief listened, resting against an old desk, his arms folded across his chest, Dewing explained how Clifford Salisbury of the CIA was combing through the terrorist files, sorting out those individuals who had spent time in the United States and appeared to have a high level of sophistication. On a morning like this, Al Feldman looked every one of his sixty-two years. His hair, what was left of it, was grayish white and greasy, popping out from his skull in disorderly little spirals that invariably sprinkled a glaze of dandruff on the shoulders of his dark suit. He picked his nose and looked at the CIA man, at the pile of dossiers on his desk.

Terrific, he thought, he’ll have a hundred of those things before he’s through. And they would be perfectly useless. What would you do with them?

Take them out to some bartender in Arab town and say, “Hey, have you ever seen this guy? This guy? This guy?” After three or four photos, the guy would have switched off. Be so confused, he wouldn’t be able to recognize a picture of his sister.

Feldman pulled a Camel from a pack that looked as if he’d slept on it and lit it. He had a lot of respect for the methodical, almost ponderous approach the Bureau used. Most investigations were, after all, like this one, shaped like a pyramid. They started across a broad base and worked, hopefully, to one very precise point. It was a proven system. Given a week, ten days, it got results.

The trouble is, Feldman thought, this guy has forgotten he’s only got thirty hours. Qaddafi will have fried this place and he’ll still be in Phase Three of his investigation. If all this is going to get anywhere, Feldman mused, we’ve got to have that big break, the Son of Sam parking ticket, the one face in the crowd to look for. And we’ve got to have it awfully fast.

“Excuse me, Mr. Dewing,” he said, looking at his watch. “I told my intelligence officer who covers the Arab neighborhoods over in Brooklyn there to bring in the material he’s got on the PLO. I’d better go find him.”

“Of course, Chief. It would be helpful if we could have a look at anything worthwhile you might have.” The tone of the FBI man’s voice made it clear how unlikely he thought that possibility was.

The intelligence officer was a genial, freckle-faced Irishman to whom the Department, with a fine sense of balance, had also assigned the responsibility of following the activities of the Jewish Defense League. His files contained almost nothing worthwhile and hadn’t since the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. Police intelligence represented educated gossip, a tip picked up by a cop on the beat from a friendly bartender or grocer, an item squeezed from an informer: “The Arab Red Crescent Society, 135 Atlantic Avenue, which has filed for a tax exemption as a charity, is suspected of raising funds for the PLO.” “The Damascus Coffee House, 204 Atlantic Avenue, is frequently patronized by supporters of George Habbash.”

With the FOI that material could eventually come under public scrutiny, and since no one wanted it out, nothing worthwhile ever went into the files.

The good stuff was held “on the bip,” in an intelligence officer’s personal notebook that no one but he had the right to open, and the Irishman’s listed this December morning thirty-eight PLO suspects, most of them among the younger, poorer Palestinian immigrants living in the neighborhoods crowding up toward the fringes of the black slums of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“At least we know where they are,” Feldman commented. “Not like the ones they’ve got in there. Bring them all in. Grill them. Establish everything they’ve been doing in the last seventy-two hours.”

“On what grounds, Chief?”

“Find some. Immigration papers. Half of ‘em probably are illegals anyway.”

“Christ! We do that, we’ll have every civil-rights lawyer in the city on our backs.”

And so what, Feldman was about to add, there may not be any civil-rights lawyers around in a couple of days anyway, when a plainclothesman interrupted. “Telephone, Chief.”

It was Angelo Rocchia. The Chief was neither surprised nor irritated by the fact that Rocchia had called him directly, short-circuiting the formal chain of command that Dewing had just finished showing him. He knew who the good guys in his division were, the solid diggers whose work could make him look good upstairs, and those guys he had always encouraged to act independently, to come directly to him with a problem. He listened to Angelo’s story, then uttered the three words used more often than any others in the Detective Division of the New York Police Department: “Repeat that again.”

This time, Feldman scrawled a series of hasty notes on a pad on the desk.

When Angelo had finished, it took him five seconds to reach a decision.

“You get over to that guy’s office in Brooklyn and see if you can get a line on who grabbed his wallet,” he ordered. “I’ll have someone else cover your piers.”

As he talked, he was already dialing the head of the Pickpocket Squad on a second phone. “Get the photos of all the dips who work Brooklyn,” he ordered, “and get your ass over to 123 Cadman Plaza West.”

“Got something, Chief?” the intelligence officer asked.

“I doubt it,” Feldman growled. “I’m going to get a cup of coffee, though.”

The Chief headed toward the custodian’s office, where he had spotted a Silex and a hot plate. It was the first moment he’d had to himself since he left his office two hours earlier, and, meditating almost, he blew at the hot black coffee, then glanced at the wall over the hot plate. Stuck to it was what appeared to be an old Civil Defense poster bearing the once familiar “CD” in its black circle and white triangle. He noted its government printing number and the headline “PROCEDURE TO FOLLOW IN THE EVENT OF A THERMONUCLEAR ATTACK.”

Seven points were listed there, beginning with “1. Stay clear of all windows.”

Feldman scanned the list.

At the last line, the detective burst out laughing. No words could have rammed up better than the ones he saw there the insane, desperate mess they were in:

“We got a situation in this town …” Angelo Rocchia, Jack Rand noted with exasperation, was embarked on yet another of his monologues.

The FBI agent was still burning at the freewheeling manner with which the New Yorker had bypassed the chain of command and gotten them taken off their pier assignment to go chasing pickpockets. Like the Marines, the FBI taught its recruits that discipline was the key to success: spiritual discipline to build character, intellectual discipline in an investigation, collective discipline when working as a team so that every team member knew he could count on every other team member to do exactly what he was supposed to do. That kind of discipline, Rand reflected sourly, was a quality conspicuously lacking in his New York partner.

If Angelo was aware of the young man’s anger, however, he gave no indication of it. He went on as though he were lecturing a group of recruits at the Police Academy. “Dips in this townT pick your pocket by appointment. No big deal. Custom work, they call it. Fence comes to the dip, says, `Hey, Charlie, I need some fresh cards noon tomorrow. No more than two, three hours old. Wanta buy a color TV for the old lady, it’s her birthday.’ So the dip takes the job on consignment. He gets to keep the cash in the guy’s wallet and gets a couple of yards for his ID and two, three cards. Guy’s got a whole lot of plastic, the dip’ll hold a few cards back. Sell ‘em to somebody else for a dime apiece. He’ll make two, three hundred bucks on the deal. That ain’t bad.”

Yards, Rand thought, dimes. They can’t even speak English in this city.

“So, Angelo, if I understand you, what you’re suggesting is that something like this might have happened here.”

“I think it might have, yeah”

“Angelo, how many pickpockets would you reckon work the New York area?”

Angelo whistled softly, maneuvering his Chevrolet as he did into the inside lane to get a jump on the traffic at the stop light ahead. “Three, four, five hundred.”

Rand tapped the crystal of his Rolex. “It’s after eleven, Angelo. And that damn barrel’s supposed to go off at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Do you really think we’re going to find an interrogate five hundred pickpockets? Pick out of that mess the one who may-or may not-have stolen the guy’s wallet, find out whom he gave it to, locate that guy, all by three o’clock tomorrow?”

“Kid, how the fuck would I know?” Angelo was moving along Fulton Street now, and he could see the outlines of Cadman Plaza rising by the exit loops of the Brooklyn Bridge. “But for now, it’s the best thing we’ve got. In fact, for now it’s the only thing we’ve got.”

He was already searching for an illegal parking place close to their destination. “Besides, you and I aren’t going to bust this thing. None of us are here. We’re just window-dressing. It’s the people in Washington who gotta handle this one, not us.”

The people in Washington bad been in semipermanent session since their first Crisis Committee meeting with Abe Stern. The President came and went, depending on his schedule and his efforts to maintain a fagade of normality for the benefit of the press. He had just rejoined the meeting after turning over the session of his Council of Economic Advisers to Charlie Schultz.

“Have we heard from Tripoli? Is Qaddafi ready to talk?” he asked the Deputy Secretary of State as he lowered himself into his chair.

“Sir, we’ve just had the consulate on the blower” the Deputy Secretary of State replied. “The charge’s still out at the villa where Qaddafi’s supposed to be staying.”

A few seats away, Harold Brown spoke. It was almost as though he was thinking out loud. “You know, since the beginning of this thing no one has actually seen Qaddafi or heard his threat articulated from his own lips.

This is, after all, such a fantastic escalation of the threat level. Are we sure he’s behind it? Could he have been kidnapped? The victim of some kind of Palestinian coup?”

Almost automatically, the attention in the room shifted to the CIA’s Bennington. The stack of papers in front of his chair was conspicuously higher than anyone else’s. That reflected the fact that since the Cuban Missile Crisis it had been government policy to make the raw input of intelligence sources available to the President in an emergency even if they differed, rather than having an agency analyst synthesize the material for him.

“We’ve looked at that one,” Bennington replied, “and our decision is no.

The nuclear program has always been strictly Qaddafi’s work. He keeps his own Palestinians on a tight leash and under close guard. His relations with Arafat and the PLO have been more than strained since he broke with them because he accused them of being too ready to compromise. And our voice analysts have now confirmed that that’s his voice on the original tape.”

“Better late than never,” the President tartly observed. “Do we have anything new from New York?”

Before William Webster of the FBI could answer, the red warning light on the Deputy Secretary of State’s telephone flashed. “Sir,” he said, after listening a second, “the operations center is pulling in a Cherokee NODIS

from Tripoli.” A Cherokee NODIS was the State Department’s highest cable priority, a term assigned it by Dean Rusk in honor of his native Cherokee County, Georgia. “We’ll have it in a second.”

In the Department’s seventh-floor operations center the incoming coded text was automatically fed into a computer which decoded it instantaneously and printed a clear text on the duty officer’s cable console. He, in turn, relayed it immediately to the White House communications center, where a warrant officer pushed a button on another console that spewed out a printed text as fast as the cable’s words rose on the screen. The Deputy Secretary had barely hung up his phone when the warrant officer handed the message to Eastman.

“Sir,” he said, glancing at it, “the charg6 has just spoken personally with Qaddafi.”

“And?”

“And he says everything he has to say is in his original message. He refuses to talk to you.”

The New York Police Department, Gerald Putman thought, is a much maligned body. He had not even bothered to report his wallet to the police as lost or stolen, assuming, as he supposed any citizen in a similar situation would, that his report would be lost in a morass of bureaucratic indifference and ineptitude. Yet here in his office were an obviously senior detective, the head of the Pickpocket Squad and a federal officer, all trying to help him establish what had happened to his wallet.

“All right, Mr. Putman,” Angelo Rocchia said, “let’s just go through that one more time. You spent all Friday morning here in this office. Then, at about…’

“Twelve-thirty.”

The detective checked his notebook. “Right. You went over to the Fulton Fish Market to Luigi’s for lunch. At approximately two P.M. you reached for your wallet to get your American Express card to pay the check and found your wallet was missing, right?”

“Right.”

“You returned here, where you keep a record of all your credit card numbers, and had your secretary call them to report the loss.”

“That’s correct, Officer.”

“And you didn’t bother to notify the local precinct?”

Putman gave Angelo an awkward smile. “I’m sorry, Officer, I just thought that with everything you people have to do these days, something like this would, you know …” His voice dwindled to an embarrassed mumble.

The detective returned the smile, but his gray eyes were cold and appraising. Angelo liked to give people like Putman the impression he was a little slow, a bit of a plodder. It never hurt to disarm a client, to get him to relax a bit. Putman was in his midthirties, medium height, a trifle stocky, with a dark tan and a swarthy complexion. Maybe an Italian had wandered into the bed of one of Putman’s WASP ancestors, Angelo mused.

“Now, Mr. Putman, let’s go over everything that happened to you that day very slowly, very carefully. First of all, where do you keep your wallet?”

“Right here.” Putman tapped the right hip pocket of his pants. He was wearing gray slacks, a blue button-down shirt and a striped tie. Everything in his office, the thick wall-to-wall carpeting, the understated mahogany furniture, the huge window looking over to the tip of Manhattan, indicated upper-middle-class affluence.

“You were wearing an overcoat, I suppose?” This time the question came from the head of the Pickpocket Squad whom Feldman had ordered to meet Angelo here.

“Oh yes,” Putman replied. “I’ve got it right there.”

He walked to a closet and took out a Cheviot tweed coat he had bought at Burberry’s in London. The head of the Pickpocket Squad examined it, then slipped his fingers up its high-cut center vent.

“Convenient.” He smiled.

Methodicallyţ prompted by Angelo, Putman recreated his activities of Friday, December 11. He’d gotten up at 7 A.M. in his home in Oyster Bay.

His wife had driven him, as she did regularly, to the station, where he’d bought The Wall Street Journal and waited only two minutes on the platform for the 8:07 Long Island Rail Road train. On the way in, he had sat next to his friend and squash partner Grant Esterling, an IBM executive. He’d gotten off, as always, at the Flatbush Avenue Terminal and walked the rest of the way to his office. He remembered absolutely nothing unusual, out of the way, on the train, at the terminal or on his ten-minute walk to the office: no one bumping into him, no one shoving him, no jarring movement, nothing.

When be had finished, the room was so quiet that all four men could hear the tick-tock of the old-fashioned grandfather’s clock in one corner of Putman’s office. Rand impatiently crossed, then uncrossed his legs.

“It sounds like we got a very artistic bit of work here,” the head of the Pickpocket Squad noted with respect.

“It sure does.” Angelo made a swift doodle in his notepad, a stick figure of a doll. My good idea, he mused, doesn’t look so good anymore. He rose.

“Mr. Putman,” he said, “we’re going to show you some pictures. Take all the time you want to look at them. Study them very carefully and tell us if you think you’ve ever seen any of these people anywhere before.”

If travel broadened, the young men and women in the procession of photographs Angelo laid one by one on Putman’s desk should have constituted a unique cultural elite. Only a handful of experienced travelers could claim the knowledge of the capitals of the world they possessed. No great international gathering from the Olympic Games in Montreal or Lake Placid, the election of a Pope in the Vatican, the Queen’s Jubilee in London, the World Cup in Buenos Aires could be celebrated without their presence. They were the best of the world’s pickpockets, and, almost without exception, the dark-haired, dark-complexioned youths in the mug shots passing through Gerald Putman’s hands were Colombian.

As the Basque country exports shepherds, Antwerp diamond cutters, so that Latin American nation exported coffee, emeralds, cocaine-and pickpockets.

There were in the miserable calles of Bogota, the Colombian capital, a whole series of Faginesque pickpocketing schools. Poor farm children were literally sold into servitude to the schools’ masters to learn the trade.

In the Plaza Bolivia, along the Avenue Santander, they were taught every trick of the art, how to slit a pocket with a razor, open unnoticed a handbag, pluck a Rolex watch from an unsuspecting wrist. As a graduation exercise they had to demonstrate fingers so skilled they could slip a wallet from a pocket to which was sewn a line of jingle bells without causing a single bell to ring.

Once trained, they assembled into teams of twos and threes, because a good dip never worked alone, and fanned out all over the world in search of the crowds, conventions, tourists and unsuspecting pockets from which they extracted well over a million dollars a year.

Putman had gone through almost fifty photos when suddenly he stopped and stared at the photo of a girl, dark rolls of hair falling to her shoulders, her breasts thrusting challengingly against a tightly drawn white silk blouse.

“Oh yes,” he said with a nervous half-chuckle, “I think I recognize this one. I think that’s the girl I nearly knocked down the other day at the foot of the stairway coming down the train platform.” The memory of the incident came flooding back. “Of course. It’s her all right. It was quite embarrassing. I ran right into her and she had to grab onto me to keep from falling.”

“Mr. Putman,” Angelo asked very quietly, “could the other day have been Friday?”

The importer hesitated, trying to reconstruct the moment in his mind. “My goodness,” he said, “you know, I think it was.”

The detective took the photograph back and studied the girl’s pretty face, her provocative breasts so defiantly exposed to the policeman’s. camera.

“You didn’t bump into her, Mr. Putman, she bumped into you. They love to work with girls with big tits. She jams those knockers into you while the dip boosts your wallet.”

He noticed a flush on the importer’s cheeks. “Don’t worry, Mr. Putman.

Everybody gets turned on by girls with big tits. Even guys like you from Oyster Bay.”

Abe Stern glanced angrily at Jeremy Oglethorpe. The evacuation expert was bustling around the Police Commissioner’s office, hanging flow charts, diagrams, maps with those damnable colored circles all over them onto walls and easels, displaying an energy so frenetic he might have been a Madison Avenue account executive about to make a presentation for a new toothpaste account.

The Mayor had elected to bring him here rather than to City Hall because the Police Commissioner’s office was more secure than his. They had come by helicopter right from the Marine Air Terminal to the pad on the roof.

“Well,” Oglethorpe announced, surveying his display with quiet pride, “I think I’m ready if your people are.”

The Police Commissioner turned to one of the two inspectors he had summoned to the meeting. “Where the hell is Walsh?” he growled.

“He’s on his way, sir.”

Walsh was Timothy Walsh, thirty-seven, a six-footthree-inch Brooklyn-born lieutenant who presided over the NYPD’s Office of Civil Preparedness. He was a shrewd, ambitious, empire-building Irishman who had been moved to Civil Preparedness from the Intelligence Bureau with orders to make it snap, and snap it did. Any kind of catastrophe that might strike the city was supposed to be in his bailiwick. Walsh, however, had a solid preference for those that were the high-media-exposure areas, the areas that could get you applause from the Commissioner’s office, beef up your budget, swell your staff; things like power failures, hurricanes, flooding, blizzards.

Evacuation and civil defense were at the bottom of the pile. The problem with civil defense, Timothy Walsh was fond of remarking, was, “People don’t want to know. It’s ‘Hey, look, don’t bother me with those fucking Russian bombs. I got a foot of snow in my driveway.”’

His own thoughts on the subject were succinctly summed up in a phrase he often repeated to his deputy: “Every so often I go down to Washington and genuflect on the altar of the thermonuclear holocaust so I can keep the federal money coming in for the things that really count in this city, like getting some more portable generators for our next power failure.”

Now, whistling cheerfully, Walsh nodded at the detective manning the electric gate leading to the Police Commissioner’s suite and found himself quickly ushered into his office. At the sight of all the heavies in the room, Walsh’s cheerfulness disappeared.

“Walsh, have we got a plan to evacuate this city in a crisis?” the Police Commissioner demanded.

Oh-oh, Walsh thought, why is he asking that? Better use a little soft-shoe routine here. Toss a few balls in the air and see which way the wind is blowing. Such a plan did, in fact, exist. It was called “The New York Target Support Area Operational Survival Plan, Volume I, Basic Plan.” Drawn up in 1972, it contained 202 pages and was generally acknowledged to be worthless. So worthless, Walsh had never bothered to read it; nor, as far as he knew, had anyone else in his department.

“Sir, the last time we looked at evacuation was a report we did in December 1977 for Commissioner Codd. Con Ed wanted to start running liquefied natural gas up the East River to their storage farm at Berrian’s Island and we were asked if we could clear the East Side in a helluva hurry if there was a spill.”

“And?”

“And the conclusion was it was an absolutely hopeless job. Better not to let the LNG up the river in the first place.”

The Police Commissioner grunted. “Well, sit down and listen to this man here. Between now and four o’clock this afternoon, you and he have got to come up with a plan to clear this city in the shortest possible time.”

Walsh folded his large frame onto the Police Commissioner’s blue sofa, a whole series of alarm bells ringing in his psyche as he did. He watched Oglethorpe moving to his charts. There was something vaguely familiar, it occurred to him, about the face of the man above the blue polkadot tie.

Oglethorpe took up a rubber-tipped pointer and began, a professor lecturing a class. “Fortunately, the problem of evacuating New York City is one that we have spent a great deal of time in studying. I don’t need to tell you it’s a staggering challenge. The shortest time we’ve been able to come up with for clearing the city in our crisisrelocation studies is three days.”

“Three days!” Abe Stern snapped. “That son of a bitch over in Tripoli is barely giving us three hoursl”

Oglethorpe grimaced his acknowledgment. Unfortunately, as he explained, all Civil Defense evacuation plans were built around what he called “a wartime scenario.” In it, the United States would have five to six days warning of a Soviet thermonuclear attack because of certain preparations the Russians would have to make which would be observed by U.S. satellites. This prospect was one they hadn’t thought a great deal about.

“To be safe,” Oglethorpe went on, “we’ve got to plan on evacuating Manhattan, the southern Bronx, most of Queens and Brooklyn and a strip of New Jersey river shore four miles deep.”

“How many people will that involve?” Abe Stern asked.

“Eleven million.”

The Mayor groaned softly. Walsh looked at him. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he thought, what do you evacuate eleven million people for? Only one thing.

Oglethorpe turned back to his map. “One thing we do know, it’s going to be a ground burst. That means fallout, bad fallout. Looking at New York’s prevailing winds tells you that Queens and Long Island have the highest probability of getting heavy fallout. We’ve got the Weather Service monitoring the winds for us now and it looks like they’re going to get drenched if this goes. The best natural fallout shelter for those people is the cellar. In New York State you’ve got one of the highest cellar percentages in the country-seventy-three percent.” Oglethorpe was on familiar ground now, dealing with statistics, numbers, figures. “Unfortunately, that figure drops down to twenty-two percent out on Long Island because the island’s got a high water table. Those people are going to be in a lot of trouble out there if this thing explodes.”

“Shouldn’t we evacuate them too?” the Mayor queried.

“How?” Oglethorpe replied. “They can’t swim off that island, and if we pull them back toward the bridges we’ll be exposing them to more fallout and the possibility of burns.” Normally the mildmannered Oglethorpe wouldn’t have replied in so brutal a fashion, but New Yorkers, he firmly believed, liked tough, pragmatic speakers.

“The one thing we’ve got to avoid at all costs is moving people into fallout. So that means unless there’s a shift in the weather patterns our evacuation is going to have to go north up into Westchester and west into Jersey.

“The first thing I’d do is shut off all access to the city when we get our ‘go.’ Make all access one way-outbound. Now, here in Manhattan only twenty-one percent of your people have first cars. Very low figure compared to the national average. That means eighty percent of the people have got to get out by other means. We’ll want to mobilize ail the buss we can lay our hands on. Any large truck fleets we can get, too. Luckily, we’ve got the use of the subways, which were more or less denied to us in our wartime scenario. We’ll want to make large use of them.

Load them up, switch them into the express lanes and tell them to go like hell. Send as many as we can into the upper Bronx. Take people as far up there as you can, and tell them to get out and walk.”

“Jesus Christ!” It was the Police Commissioner contemplating the chaos Oglethorpe’s ideas were going to produce. “Can you imagine the field day the looters are going to have?”

Oglethorpe smiled. “Sure, there are going to be plenty of scavengers combing your luxury highrises,” he admitted. “But if they’re ready to run the risk of being incinerated for a color TV, well, so be it. You can hardly expect your police, whom you’re going to need for more important matters anyway, to run around booking them as though Manhattan was going to be here on Wednesday morning.”

“Where are you going to put all those people?” the Mayor asked. “You can’t just take them out and dump them in a street in the Bronx or over in the Jersey Flats in the middle of winter.”

“Well, sir.” Oglethorpe straightened up. “Crisis relocation is based on the concept of risk areas and host areas. We move population from overpopulated risk areas to underpopulated host areas. In our New York `wartime scenario’

“-he was looking at a map of New York State = `we contemplated moving people as far out as Syracuse and Rochester. Here we’ll want to work much closer in. Ask the authorities in Westchester to prepare to welcome these people in what we in Civil Defense call `congregate care facilities’-schools and hospitals.”

Terrific, Walsh thought, listening to him. This is beautiful. Can you imagine the look on the Police Chief’s face up there in Scarsdale when we call up and say, Hey, Chief, look, we’re sending you up half a million of our best Bedford-Stuyvesant blacks for the weekend? The guy’ll go fucking bananas.

Suddenly it occurred to Walsh where he’d seen Oglethrope before. It was in Washington at a briefing in the Pentagon on crisis relocation. He’d come away from it convinced the idea of even trying to evacuate New York was bullshit, The New York temperament, the unruliness of the population, the sheer staggering size of it, it was all too overwhelming; better not to even think about it.

“How about the old, the infirm, the people who just can’t get up and move like that?” the Mayor was asking.

Oglethorpe gave a hopeless shrug. “You’ll just have to tell them to go underground and pray.”

He turned back to his chart. It had all been so clear in their studies.

Why, they had gamed the evacuation of New York three times in Washington in March 1977 on the computer, gradually working the time down from three days eighteen hours to three days flat. Everything was beautifully laid out, indexed and tabulated. You knew you had 3.8 million housing units in your risk area, with an average occupancy of 3.0 persons, ranging from 3.8 in Suffolk County to 2.2 in Manhattan. You knew you had 75,000 persons, 21,400 occupied units and 19,600 first autos per zip code in Nassau County, 40,000 persons, 19,400 units and 4,300 first autos in Manhattan.

They were going to use, for example, 310 commercial aircraft flying out of eight risk-area airports, seventy-one flights an hour over three days to move 1.24 million people. They had said it couldn’t be done, but they had found out how, turnaround times, everything. The trains. They knew how they’d use the six rail routes in and out of the city, how they’d maximize traffic flow. They had even figured out how they’d use the freight cars in the Jersey yards, thirty box cars and three locomotives a train; 2,500

people, which gave you an average space allowance of six square feet per person.

They bad counted in the Staten Island ferries, reckoning that taking over the automobile space they could get five thousand people onto a ferry. Even New York’s 125 tugboats and 250 open barges were included in their plans.

They had spent weeks identifying nine special highway routes suitable for getting people out of the city. It was all so well thought outright down to the fact that there were a quarter of a million people on Manhattan Island with pets who’d drive you crazy if they couldn’t take them along and half a million people with no luggage. But it was all based on three days-three days of careful, organized effort, not one spastic surge for the bridges like they were being asked to look at here.

Oglethorpe shook his head, trying to root out the dismay this disorderly problem caused his orderly mind, and plowed ahead. “The highways and the subways will have to be our principal modes. Everybody inside the five-PSI circle”-that was the five-pounds-per-squareinch-over-pressure circle, the second ring the Mayor had seen in Washington-“has got to come out. Personally, I’m happy if we can evacuate down to two PSI. Do that and we’ll be in great shape.

“We’ve got to maintain an orderly flow of cars out of the city. There are lots of ways. We can do it alphabetically. Broadcast the instructions on radio and TV: `Vehicles registered in the names of people beginning with A through D leave now!’ Or odd-even license plates. Do it by zip codes. Start with the high-risk zip codes at the Manhattan core and roll our risk out.”

“Look,” the Police Commissioner pointed out, “this place is an island. Cars are going to break down, overheat, run out of gas and jam the tunnels and bridges up. People are going to overload them with their families and their belongings. Remember those pictures of the people on the roads in France in 1940? Pushing baby carriages full of pots and pans?”

“Yes,” Oglethorpe agreed, “but our psychologists assure us that if a family has a car, they’ll use it. It gives them mobility and provides them with a sense of security.”

Timothy Walsh stirred uncomfortably. I think I’m dreaming here, he told himself. All these beautiful charts, these maps, these nice ideas. He looked at the Mayor and the Police Commissioner, so desperately attentive it was almost as though they were silently wishing that somehow all this could really be done.

“Look, mister,” Walsh said, “I don’t want to throw sour grapes around here, but I’m not sure you understand some of the facts of life in this town. You want to evacuate alphabetically? Tell Mr. Abbott to get in his car and go first? And you think Mr. Rodriguez up there in Spanish Harlem is going to sit around and watch him go tooling off? Sure he is. What Mr. Rodriguez is going to do is to be down there on the street corner with his Saturday-night special and he’s going to tell Mr. Abbott to get the fuck out of his car and walk. He’s riding.”

“That’s what the police are for. To maintain order and prevent that sort of thing.”

“The police?” Walsh couldn’t help laughing. “What makes you think the cops are going to obey? I tell you half of them are going to be out there on the street corner with their thirty-eights. Right beside Mr. Rodriguez. They are going to take over the first car they see and head for the hills, too.”

Walsh shrugged at the impracticality of it all. “All this stuff is great if you’ve got a bunch of trained soldiers. But you haven’t got any soldiers here. Just a bunch of scared people.”

“All right, Walsh,” the Police Commissioner barked angrily, “that’s enough of that.” Yet, despite his irate words, a sickening voice inside him told him that the lieutenant was probably right. He looked at Abe Stern. There was no expression on the Mayor’s face, no hint of what he really thought of all this.

“We will rely on TV and radio as an instant channel to communicate with the population,” Oglethorpe continued, grateful for the Police Commissioner’s support. “I’d close the banks immediately and announce you’ve done it.

Otherwise, everyone will rush to draw out their savings.”

A sudden burst of inspiration registered on Oglethorpe’s face like a tide of sunlight flooding out from behind a storm cloud. “For radio and TV, I recommend we employ an old scheme of ours called CHAT.” He smiled, almost condescendingly. “That’s an acronym for Crisis Home Alert Technique.

Unfortunately, the FCC would never let us use it.

“What you do is have all the radio and TV stations announce an important message from the President — in this case, the Mayor. As soon as he goes on, all the radio and television stations reduce their modulation to sixty percent of normal. That way, everybody has to turn the volume way, way up to hear him. As part of his speech, he tells everybody to leave their radios and televisions on all the time to receive instructions. Now, when you have something important to announce, you tell the stations to move their modulation back to normal. I can tell you the noise that will come out of these TV sets will shake the house down. Of course,” Oglethorpe added apologetically, “it’s not very much help if you’re deaf.”

Oh boy, Walsh thought. Still, there was one reassuring thing in what Oglethorpe had said-use radio and television. Because one thing you sure as hell weren’t going to use if you wanted to alert anybody was the old Civil Defense siren system. Once in the fifties there had been 750 sirens in the city, tested once a week, audible to ninety-five percent of the population.

Now, Walsh knew, there were barely three hundred that worked, and most of those were crumbling in disrepair. The siren system’s most recent contribution to the city welfare had come in Herald Square when one had toppled into the street, almost killing a lady shopper heading for Macy’s.

“It’s very important,” Oglethorpe was saying, “that all the messages we give the public over TV are very supportive. The public must be assured that we have a plan, that everything’s been worked out and they’ll be taken care of when they get to where they’re going. Our plans must be precise enough and credible enough to reassure the people and prevent panic.”

He turned next to a chart on one of his stands. Its heading was one word, “TAKE.” “We can show this chart on the television at intervals so that people will take the right things with them.”

Walsh looked at the list. Extra socks, a thermos of water, a can opener, candles, matches, transistor, toothbrush and toothpaste, Kotex, toilet paper, special medicine, Social Security card, credit cards.

Oglethorpe turned the page. The one beneath was headed “DO NOT TAKE.” It listed firearms, narcotics, alcohol.

The man is a genius, Walsh thought. He’s managed to find the three items nobody in this town is going to go anywhere without in an emergency.

“What we’ve got to do is get on top of it and stay on top of it,”

Oglethorpe declared. “I’d like to devote the next three hours to a helicopter survey of your access routes to confirm our SRI information.

Then I’d like to get over to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority headquarters on Jay Street in the Bronx with your people to set up a subway plan.”

Oh my God, thought Walsh. Jay Street’s in Brooklyn! This guy’s going to save New York and he doesn’t even know the difference between Brooklyn and the Bronx!

“Just a minute.” It was Abe Stern’s authoritative voice. “It seems to me we’re overlooking one of the most important elements in the whole damn picture here. This city has, or at least it used to have when Rockefeller was governor, one of the best systems of air-raid shelters in the world.

Why the hell aren’t we using them?”

Oglethorpe beamed. No one needed to remind an old Civil Defense warhorse like him of Rockefeller’s program. In the late fifties and early sixties, thanks to Rockefeller’s zealousness, New York’s shelter program had been the pride of the whole Civil Defense establishment. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the city’s Public Works Department had selected and licensed sixteen thousand shelters designed to accommodate 6.5 million people in cellars and at the core of the city’s buildings. The yellow-and-black fallout-shelter sign had become as familiar a part of the city’s landscape as the white and red “WALK” and “DON’T WALK” signs introduced at about the same time. Millions of city and matching federal dollars had been employed to stock the shelters with the basic ingredients that would allow their occupants to survive underground for fourteen days: carbohydrate candy, protein crackers wrapped in individual packs in wax paper, twelve crackers per individual three times a day providing the minimum survival ration of 750 calories; medical kits, penicillin, drinking water, the containers convertible into chemical toilets, chemical toilet paper, Kotex and miniature Geiger counters so that survivors could peridocially crawl outside and check the level of radioactivity in the rubble above their heads.

“Of course, Your Honor,” Oglethorpe replied. “Those shelters should be a vital part of our program.”

“Walsh,” the Police Commissioner growled, “just what sort of condition are they in?”

That was not a question Walsh was anxious to answer. The people the shelters were accommodating most frequently these days were teenage junkies. They had discovered the phenobarb pills in the medical kits and it was now a race to see who could get them out first, the junkies or Walsh’s men. The junkies were winning.

“The Department of General Services’ Division of Public Structures is responsible for them, sir. I believe they look at them periodically.” Like about once every ten years, Walsh thought.

“And those crackers and all that stuff, are they still good?”

“Uh, there may be a little problem with them, sir.”

“What kind of problem, Walsh?”

“Well, you see, when they had that big hurricane and flood in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1975, we pulled a bunch of them out and sent them down to the people down there.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Everybody who ate them got sick.”

It was a few minutes before half past four, Paris time, when General Henri Bertrand, the director of France’s intelligence service, returned to his office from his interview with PaulHenri de Serre, the man who had installed Libya’s French reactor. The initiatives he had ordered earlier in the day after his first contact with the CIA’s Paris station chief had borne fruit. On his desk were four attache cases belonging to the DST, France’s internal-security agency. They contained the dossiers of all the Frenchmen assigned to work on the Libyan reactor and transcripts of all the telephone calls they had made to France.

The transcripts represented only a miniscule part of the material swept from the atmosphere each day by the DST in its communications laboratory on the top floor of its Rue de Saussaies headquarters, just behind the Ministry of the Interior. There white-smocked technicians functioning in a controlled, dust-free environment employed oscilloscopes, high-speed computers, ultrasensitive direction finders and listening devices to record every transmission and international telephone call originating on French soil, then stored them up on the computers from which they had been patiently culled. It was the ultimate transposition of the old concierge-as-watchdog system to the technology of the twentieth century.

Bertrand was still signing for the DST’s documents when his phone rang. It was his scientific adviser, Patrick Cornedeau. “Chief,” he said, “the inspection reports came in from Vienna an hour ago. I’ve just finished going through them and there’s something I should see you about right away.”

Cornedeau brought a file of papers three inches thick enclosed in a blue-and-white folder stamped with the seal of the United Nations into the General’s office. Bertrand gasped looking at it.

“Dear Lord! Did you have to wade through all that?”

“I did,” replied Cornedeau, scratching his bald pate, “and I’m confused.”

“Good,” his superior replied. “I prefer confusion to certitude in my operatives.”

Cornedeau placed the reports on Bertrand’s desk and began to thumb through them.

“On May seventh, the Libyans informed the IAEA in Vienna they had found radioactivity in their reactor’s cooling system. They said they had concluded they had a faulty fuel charge and they were shutting down the reactor to take out the fuel.”

Cornedeau pointed to his report. “The IAEA immediately sent a team of three inspectors to Libya. A Jap, a Swede and a Nigerian. Good people. They were present while the fuel was taken out and put into the storage pond. They installed their sealed cameras I told you about this morning around the pond. They’ve run two inspections since.”

“To what result?”

“Everything is perfect. The cameras’ records are complete. They saw no sign whatsoever of any attempt to take out the fuel. And at each inspection they checked the level of radioactivity coming out of the fuel in the pond with their gamma-ray analyzers. It was perfect.”

“In that case,” the General remarked, “I don’t see the reason for your confusion.”

“It’s this.” Cornedeau got up and returned to his blackboard. “To make a bomb, you want very, very pure plutonium 239. Normally, the plutonium you’d get out of the fuel burned up in a reactor like this one contains a very high percentage of another isotope, plutonium 240. You can make bombs with it, but it’s a tricky business.”

“Interesting,” Bertrand commented, “but what’s the relevance here?”

“Time,” Cornedeau continued. “The shorter the time the fuel is in the reactor, the more plutonium 239 it’s going to contain.”

Bertrand squirmed apprehensively in his chair. “And how much would there be in the fuel they took out?”

“That’s what concerns me.” Cornedeau turned to the blackboard to reconfirm the calculations he had already made in his head. “If you wanted to get ideal, ninetyseven-percent weapons-grade plutonium out of this reactor’s fuel, you’d leave it in the reactor exactly twenty-seven days.”

He turned back to Bertrand. “Chief, that happens to be just how long they kept the fuel in that reactor down there.”

The idea for the meeting was Quentin Dewing’s. Every ninety minutes, the FBI’s assistant director for investigation had decreed that the principals running the New York search effort would gather around his desk at the underground command post to review their progress. He looked at them now, coughed nervously and pointed to the FBI assistant director in charge of the effort to locate every Arab who had come into the area in the past six months.

“All the names we’re after have come in from Washington or JFK and are on the computer next door,” the man announced. “There are 18,372 of them.”

The dimension of his figure sent a shock wave through the room. “I’ve got two thousand people out there running them down. They’ve already cleared 2,102 names. Those they can’t locate on first effort but which seem okay we’re putting into Category Blue on the computer. Those who were unavailable but who looked doubtful are going into Category Green. Clear cases of infiltration we’re putting into Category Red.”

“How many of those have you got?” Dewing asked.

“Right now, two.”

“What are you doing about them?”

“I’ve stripped fifty agents out of my pool and put them to work on the Red and Green names. As we clear more people, I’ll be shifting additional agents to the effort.”

Dewing nodded, satisfied. “Henry?”

The question was addressed to the director of the Washington Bureau, who’d been sent up to run the pier operation.

“Things are moving a little faster than we’d hoped, Mr. Dewing. Lloyd’s Shipping Intelligence in London and the Maritime Association down at 80 Broad Street have furnished us the list of all the ships we’re looking for, the dates they came in and the piers they used.

There were 3,816, about half the ships that called on the port in the last six months. Our dock teams have gotten through the manifests of eight hundred of them. We’ve been able to clear the cargoes on about half of them in the last hour. Washington’s really got the bureaus around the country fired up.”

“Good. Mr. Booth?” Dewing said to the director of NEST. “What have you got for us?”

Booth heaved himself wearily from his chair and walked to a map of Manhattan he had pinned on the wall. “We’ve had our organization fully operational since ten up in the Seventh Regiment Armory at 643 Park. Right now, I’ve got all two hundred of my vans and our choppers working lower Manhattan.” His finger ran along the tip of the island. “From Canal Street down to the Battery.”

“Anything suspicious yet?” Dewing queried.

The scientist turned glumly to the FBI man. “Sure. The problem with those detectors of ours is they don’t just pick up nuclear bombs. So far we’ve gotten an old lady who collects Big Ben alarm clocks with radium dials, the dump that supplies half the gardens in the city with fertilizer and two people coming out of a hospital who’d had barium milkshakes for a stomach X ray. But no bomb.” He looked once again at his map. “We’re covering the streets and the rooftops very thoroughly. But, as I told you gentlemen this morning, if it’s above the third story of one of those buildings, we’re not going to find it. We just haven’t got the equipment or the manpower to walk through them.”

When Salisbury of the CIA had made his report, Dewing turned to Harvey Hudson, the Bureau’s New York director. He had control of coordinating the rest of the investigation.

“I’ve got two things, Quent. One just came in from Boston and it looks very, very promising. It’s one of those guys who was trained in Qaddafi’s camps. Here’s his ticket and picture.” He passed a sheet of nmimeographed paper around the room.

“This guy disappeared from his home Sunday morning about ten A.M. and hasn’t been seen since. New England Bell just finished a run-through of his phone records. He got a collect call from a pay phone at Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, two hours before he took off.”

“Terrificl”

“He drives a green Chevelle, Massachusetts number plates 792-K83. I’m going to send the flying squad”the flying squad was a team of fifty FBI agents and New York detectives being held in strategic reserve”into Brooklyn right now to see if they can pick up some trace of him.”

“That’s the best lead we’ve had all morning,” Dewing said enthusiastically.

“What was the other thing you’ve got?”

“One of our informers, a black pimp with FALN ties, gave us a second-rate drug dealer who got some medicine Saturday for an Arab woman up at the Hampshire House. She checked out this morning and apparently gave the hotel a false lead on where she was going.”

Hudson picked up the sheaf of paper on which he’d made a few notes on his way to the meeting. “We had to come down on the drug dealer pretty hard to get him to open up. It turned out she called him. A PLO/FALN link. Knew the right words. Asked him to get her the medicine because she didn’t want to go to a doctor herself. The problem is, the guy swears he never got a look at her. Just left the medicine at the desk, which the hotel confirms, by the way. She was a pretty good tipper, so we had some trouble getting the hotel staff to talk. Seems to be involved in fashion. A jet-set type.”

“What was the medicine?”

“Tagamet. It’s for ulcers.”

“So that’s our clue. We’re looking for an Arab with ulcers.” Dewing scowled in disgust. “Chief,” he said to Feldman, “what have you got?”

Feldman reacted as though he had been caught daydreaming. He had in fact been trying to assess the importance of these two leads the FBI had turned up and decide what, if anything, his division could do to expand them. “Not much. The detective in charge of one of the pier teams,” he gave a deferential inclination of his gray head to the FBI agent running the pier search, “called me to say he’d found some barrels from Libya that were well under our weight specs but which had been picked up by someone using stolen ID. I’ve got a car out checking the barrels’ consignee right now.”

Dewing mulled over his words. Working out of channels, he thought, but probably better not to make waves. “Good, Chief, keep us informed.”

He had just picked up his papers, closing the meeting, when a shirtsleeved agent from the radio room burst in. “Mr. Booth,” he cried, “your headquarters is on the line. One of your choppers got radiation!”

Booth shot from his seat and ran after the agent to the radio room. “Patch me onto my chopper,” he shouted at the duty operator.

“What are you reading?” he called to the technician as soon as he was through.

Booth could hardly hear the man’s voice over the thump of the helicopter’s rotors. “I got a real positive indication.” NEST never employed figures or the word “rads” over an open line in case anyone was eavesdropping. “It’s a few tenths.”

Booth whistled softly. A few tenths was a very, very hot reading, particularly since it almost certainly had to have filtered up from one or two stories below roof level.

“Where’s it coming from?”

Using maps in the radio room, Booth and a pair of New York detectives narrowed down the area from which the radiation seemed to be emanating to four highrises in the southeastern corner of the Baruch Housing Project just inside the East River Drive, a few dozen yards from the Williamsburg Bridge.

“Tell the chopper to get the hell out of there so we don’t tip our hand,”

Booth ordered, “and call in the manual search teams.”

Before the radio operator could deliver his instructions, Booth was running out of the underground command post, heading up the stairs two at a time toward the unmarked FBI car waiting for him in Foley Square.

In Paris, Henri Bertrand had been pacing his office in silence for several minutes digesting what his scientific adviser had told him about the IAEA inspection reports on Libya’s French-made reactor. Finally, Bertrand lit a new Gauloise from the stub of the one he was smoking and sank into his leather armchair.

“Is there no way of verifying that there really was something wrong with that fuel they took out of there so early?”

“Not for another six months or so. Until the rods have cooled down enough so you can work with them.”

“How very convenient.” Bertrand grimaced ever so slghtly. “What puzzles me is why Monsieur de Serre didn’t mention the incident when I talked to him.”

“Perhaps,” Cornedeau volunteered, “he felt it was too technical to be of interest to you.”

“Perhaps.”

The General bestowed what he hoped was an ironic smile on his young adviser. “You nuclear physicists are all alike. You really are a little Mafia trying to keep the rest of us away from the treasury of your knowledge. Because, one supposes, you’re persuaded that in our ignorance we’ll stop you from bestowing on the world the fruits of your great wisdom.”

Bertrand reached for the attach6 cases the representative of his sister service, the DST, had left on the desk. “We’ll have to bring in some people and start going through his material very, very carefully.”

His fingers picked their way through the thick stack of manila envelopes, each bearing a red “Ultra Secret” stamp, until he had found the name he was looking for.

“Personally,” he said, “I think I shall start at the top with the dossier of Monsieur de Serre.”

Angelo Rocchia was still chuckling over Gerald Putman’s last words when he, Rand and the head of the Pickpocket Squad got back to his Chevrolet.

“It certainly is gratifying,” the importer had said to them, “to see the lengths to which the Police Department is prepared to go to help just one citizen recover a stolen wallet.”

“Okay,” Angelo said, settling back in his car, “what have you got on her, Tommy?”

While his colleague searched for the girl’s identity file in his briefcase.

Angelo gave an almost surreptitious glance at Rand in the back seat. Our impatient young stud, he reflected with satisfaction, has calmed down a bit. Angelo took the girl’s card from the pickpocket expert’s hands.

Tom Malone, the pickpocket expert, drew Torres’s photo and identity card from the file. Torres’s arrest record paralleled the girl’s.

“It isn’t much,” Angelo sighed, “but it’s something. Where do we go looking for them, Tommy?”

“There’s an area over here where they hang out,” Malone replied. “The South End. Off Atlantic Avenue. Let’s go down there and see if I can find somebody who owes me a favor.”

Before Angelo could start the car, the FBI radio on the seat beside him cackled. “Romeo Fourteen, respond to Base.”

Angelo got out of the car and walked to the pay telephone booth on the corner. Its walls were covered with obscene graffiti, its receiver dangled from the phone on a half-torn cord, and its coin box had been ripped open by vandals. “Bastards,” the detective growled. “I hope that goddamn barrel’s in their back yard.” He waved to Malone to bring the car and started up the avenue looking for another phone booth.

He found one, occupied by an elderly, gray-haired woman chatting feverishly about the Pentecostal service she had attended Sunday night. Angelo waited impatiently a moment, then flashed her his shield. The woman half shrieked in fright and yielded up the phone.

The men in the car couldn’t miss the change that had come over Angelo when he stepped out of the booth. He was whistling “Caro Nome” loudly and expertly; his stride was full of energy and purpose; and a grin, a real one this time, was spread all over his face.

He slipped into the driver’s seat, turned and whacked Rand’s knee with a heavy hand. His craggy features glowed with pride and satisfaction as he looked at the younger man. “That was Feldman on the phone. They sent a team out to that address in Queens where the barrels went. The place is a locked-up house with a big garage out back. Every barrel that company ever got is in there, kid. Every fucking barrel except one.”

An idea struck John Booth as his FBI driver threaded their car through the narrow and crowded streets of lower Manhattan. Information about the buildings they were searching-the thickness of the walls, the ceilings, the roof, the materials employed in their construction-was vital to his NEST teams. “This housing development,” he asked, “the city must have built it, right?”

Before his agent driver had even answered, Booth had picked up the radio and called his headquarters in the Seventh Regiment Armory. “Get someone down to the Municipal Building,” he ordered, “and pick up the plans for the Baruch Houses. I’ll be waiting for them in our control van at Columbia and Houston.”

As their car reached Houston Street, Booth spotted a yellow Hertz van parked at the corner. Four black metal discs, not much larger than silver dollars, and the slim pod slung from its undercarriage were the only indications the truck wasn’t being used to deliver packages or move someone’s furniture.

It was, in fact, a rolling scientific laboratory, one of the two hundred that Booth’s NEST teams were using throughout the city. The little black discs were hooked to a boron trifluoride neutron detector that could pick up neutrons flowing from the tiniest speck of plutonium. The pod was connected to a germanium gamma-ray scanner tied, in turn, to a minicomputer in the van of the truck with its own televisionlike screen for an oscilloscope. Not only could that detector pick up gamma rays over the maximum distance possible, a distance that was a closely guarded secret, but it could “read” them, determine what isotope of what element was throwing them off.

Booth walked over to the suntanned man beside the driver. Jack Delaney was a weapons designer at Livermore, a Ph.D. from Berkeley, who got his suntan scaling the Sierras on his weekends.

“Nothing,” Delaney said.

Booth looked down the street toward the housing project, its thirteen-story towers thrusting into the skyline with a brutish inelegance born of municipal economy. “Not surprising. It’s got to be on the top floors.”

He continued to study the project. Over two hundred people, most of them on welfare, in thirtyfive apartments. Moving around in there without being noticed wasn’t going to be easy. A second, unmarked FBI car glided up behind them. An agent got out and handed Booth a thick roll of blueprints.

Booth climbed into the crowded rear of the van. At the back, an FBI agent was already undressing Delaney. “You wiring him?” Booth asked.

The agent nodded. He was taping to Delaney’s chest a Kel, a radio microphone that would allow Booth to follow his progress through the project from the truck. An ivory plastic button like a hearing aid was stuck to his ear, the receiver on which he’d get Booth’s instructions.

The NEST director spread out the blueprint on a small camp table and studied it. A matchbox, he thought. The emanations they were looking for weren’t going to have any difficulty penetrating the walls and the ceilings of the Baruch Houses.

“Okay,” Booth announced after a few calculations. “We’ll do the top six floors. Although there’s almost no chance it’s below the top four. You two guys take Building A. Why don’t you be insurance salesmen?”

The New York FBI agent who was going to accompany Booth’s scientist waved a warning finger. “Down here a debt collection agency’s better.”

“If you say so,” Booth agreed. Getting in close to pin down a bomb site with precision after a first reading was the trickiest, most dangerous part of the business, and he wasn’t going to go against a local agent’s advice.

His scientists, for the most part, knew nothing about firearms, so they had to work with an FBI agent to protect them. They needed an infinite variety of disguises that would allow them to glide unnoticed through those areas where a bomb might be hidden and armed terrorists might be alert for their presence: telephone repairmen, gas meter readers, delivery men. For Building B he had already decided to use a black chemist and a black female FBI agent.

Delaney picked up his portable detector. It was a box the size of an attachb case or a traveling salesman’s sample case.

As soon as the two had gone, Booth supervised by radio the dispatch of teams to the remaining buildings. Then, with the blueprint before him, he followed the progress of his teams, apartment by apartment, floor by floor, through the buildings.

Delaney came on, his final floor completed.

“Listen,” Booth ordered, “go up and have a look at the roof.”

Delaney groaned. “The elevator’s broken down.”

“So what?” his boss answered. “You’re a mountain climber, aren’t you?”

Several minutes later, the panting Californian emerged on the roof. There was nothing before him except the distant skyline of Brooklyn. His detector was silent. He looked, disgusted, at the grayish stains speckling the roof.

“John,” he reported, “there’s absolutely nothing up here. Nothing but a lot of old pigeon skit.”

As he watched the members of the White House press corps drift into the Oval Office, it occurred to the President that they represented the only element in this crisis that was under control. How much longer, he wondered, are we going to be able to go on saying that?

While they formed into a crescent around his desk, jockeying for position, some striving to make those selfconscious jokes with which they deceived themselves and their colleagues into thinking they were on intimate terms with the President of the United States, he scanned their faces, searching for any indication that one of them might be privy to his government’s frightful secret. To his relief, he sensed most of them had nothing more important on their minds at the moment than deciding where to have lunch.

In any event, nothing in his own manner could have betrayed the strain he was under unless it was the quick tap dance of his fingertips on his massive oak Presidential desk framed from the timbers of H.M.S. Resolute and offered by Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes.

The little ceremony his press secretary opened with a few ritual words was part of the charade they were acting out to convince the press that nothing unusual was going on. It was the Presidential proclamation of the thirty-third anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Chief Executive was halfway through it when he saw Jack Eastman glide unobtrusively into the room and lean against the office wall. With his index and forefinger, his national-security adviser made a scissors movement across his tie — cut it short.

The President rushed through the remaining text, then, as quickly as he could while still appearing to be unhurried, moved for the door. The instant he had settled into his private office, Eastman joined him.

“Mr. President,” he announced. “He’s ready to talk!”

Timmy Walsh and Jeremy Oglethorpe walked slowly up Broadway, then turned toward the big plateglass doors of the New York State Office Building.

For a moment they let the outflow sweep past them; the pretty black secretaries flaunting their style and elegance, their makeup all in place, flaring glasses frequently setting off the high arch of their cheekbones; the pasty-faced, overweight state office workers huddling together in conversations so intense they might have been discussing a mufti-million-dollar highway extension when in fact, Walsh knew, they were probably arguing the point spread on tonight’s Knicks’ game.

He’d selected the building as the first of their “random” sample of New York’s air-raid shelters deliberately. Give Rockefeller’s and Albany’s interest in the shelter program, the buildings should have the Rolls Royce of New York City’s shelters.

They pushed through the lobby, past the elevator banks to the familiar yellow-and-black sign over a door leading to the cellar. At least, Walsh noted, the sign was clean.

He gave his shield to the janitor at the desk in the building superintendent’s office. “New York Police, Office of Civil Preparedness,” he announced. “Doing a survey of the air-raid shelters, want to see how the biscuits, the portable toilets and all are being maintained.”

“Oh sure,” the janitor said. “Air-raid shelter. Got the keys right here.”

He got up and walked to a huge box on the wall spilling over with keys of every imaginable size and shape. “One of these in here …” The voice faltered a bit. “Right here, someplace.” He began to scratch his head. For over three minutes, he stood there studying the board, fondling, then rejecting one key after another. “I know they’re here. Gotta be here someplace. Harryl” he shouted in exasperation. “Where the hell’s the key to the fucking air-raid shelter?”

A black assistant custodian came over and gazed with equal consternation but, apparently, no greater sense of enlightenment at the cluttered key box. “Yeah,” he said, his head moving back and forth as though in prayer, “it’s gotta be here somewhere.”

Oglethorpe’s eyes were on the clock on the wall. By now, five minutes had gone by and no key. Five minutes during which, in a crisis, his planner’s mind told him pandemonium, sheer pandemonium, would be building up in the corridors outside.

“Here it is!” the janitor announced triumphantly.

“Man, you sure that’s the key?” his aide asked, squinting at a heavy key hung on a red plastic ring. “It don’t look like the key to me.”

“Gotta be,” his superior rejoined.

It wasn’t.

By the time they got back, over ten minutes, Oglethorpe noted, had elapsed.

Finally the janitor found the missing key skillfully concealed under three others dangling from the same bank.

It unlocked a huge, cavernous area, the ceiling interlaced by heating ducts so low Walsh had to bend in half to pass under them. Hung on the wall was a clipboard with a yellowed piece of paper flapping from it. It was a Civil Defense inventory dated January 3, 1959, listing the materials stored in the room: 6,000 water drums, 275 medical kits, 500 miniature Geiger counters, 2.5 million protein crackers.

Walsh’s flashlight swept the huge chamber’s horizons, its gloom unmolested by the few fight bulbs hanging from the ceiling. “There they are!”

Along one wall, under his flashlight’s beam, were thousands of khaki barrels and cases and cases of protein crackers. He tapped a barrel with his knuckles. It gave out a hollow echo.

“Funny,” he said, “they’re supposed to be full.” He tapped another. It gave up the same unpromising sound. The men began to tap cans at random along the darkened walls until it seemed to shimmer with the hollow echoes they produced. Not a single barrel was full. Some Civil Defense expert on that January day two decades before had carefully lined up all those barrels-and then gone away leaving them empty.

Walsh and Oglethorpe exchanged dismayed glances. “We better take a look at another one,” Walsh said, consolingly handing Oglethorpe the list of shelters in the neighborhood. “Pick one. Any one.”

The one Oglethorpe chose was in the cellar of the MacKenzie Explosives Company at 105 Reade Street. Their arrival was greeted with a certain undertone of consternation, the natural reaction, perhaps, to a visit from the police in an establishment of that sort. Its office manager, a young man in his middle thirties in shirtsleeves and a striped tie, smiled in evident relief when Walsh told him why they were there.

“Oh sure, that Civil Defense stuff. My father told me about that once. It’s down in the cellar.”

He guided the trio down two flights of wooden steps into a sub-basement.

They spotted what they were looking for immediately, neatly stacked against the wall in the midst of a bunch of old filing cabinets and broken desks.

Walsh stepped over and thumped a water barrel. It gave out a resounding bonk.

“Full up,” he reported.

Walsh studied the wall. Three quarters of the way to the ceiling, just above the level of the cases of protein crackers, was a wiggly yellowish line. The surface of the wall below the line was notably darker than that above it.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Oh, that,” the office manager replied. “That’s the high-water mark of the flood we had a few years back.”

“Flood?”

“Had water that deep down here for three weeks almost.”

Oglethorpe looked at Walsh. Then the bureaucrat ripped open the top case of protein crackers and thrust his hand inside. He drew out a sodden mass of yellow-brown sludge.

Any last illusions Jeremy Oglethorpe had about the current viability of New York City’s shelter system faded as they entered the next shelter on their sample, the Hotel James at 127 Chambers Street. The room clerk’s alcove was the clue to the kind of place it was. It was screened off behind bars and a partition of bulletproof wire-meshed glass. The half-dozen young men lounging in the lobby were out the front door before Walsh had completed his introductory remarks, which he had.begun with the word “Police.” The desk clerk had never heard of an air-raid shelter in the Hotel Jamesor, for that matter, any place else.

Walsh suggested that what they were looking for might be in the cellar. The clerk paled at the notion that anyone would be crazy enough even to think of going into the cellar of the Hotel James. Walsh persisted. With a shrug of incomprehension, the clerk pointed to a door across the hallway.

The two started down a flight of creaking wooden steps, ducking under heating pipes from which torn cobwebs and shreds of asbestos stroked their faces. Out of the darkness ahead came a series of quick, rustling sounds.

“Rats,” commented Walsh. “Nice place to spend a few nights.”

The lights switched on and a skinny little guy emerged from the shadows. He was wearing a baseball cap and a warmup jacket. All of the athletic insignia that had once decorated it had been removed. Now the jacket was covered with buttons, medallions, decals, sew-on badges carrying messages like “Jesus Is Your Savior,” “The Redeemer Is Coming,” “Let Christ’s Way Be Your Way.”

Walsh spoke to him. He replied in Spanish, a tongue made no easier for Oglethorpe to comprehend by the fact that the man had a cleft palate.

For several minutes he and Walsh exchanged words in Spanish. “He says he’s never heard of the Civil Defense stuff,” Walsh reported. “But he remembers seeing some stuff he doesn’t know anything about out in a back room somewhere.”

The little Puerto Rican led them through several back rooms stacked high with old hotel furniture until he came to the one he was looking for. Like a Swiss mountain guide trying to dig out a skier buried under an avalanche, he attacked the mound of junk before him, heaving his way through, mattresses littered with rat droppings, old bedsteads, box springs, bits and pieces of chairs and tables. Finally, with a guttural shout of victory, he flung away a last shattered chest of drawers and stood back. There, buried at the bottom of his pile of rubble, were the familiar khaki barrels and cracker cases of the old Civil Defense program.

Oglethorpe gasped in dismay. Walsh moved over to him and draped his heavy arm around his shoulders. “Jerry, listen,” he whispered. “Up there, in the Police Commissioner’s office, I didn’t want to say anything, you know? In this town, you got to let the big guys down easy. These shelters, ten, fifteen years ago, maybe they might have saved somebody. Today? Forget it, Jerry. They ain’t going to save anybody today.”

The Puerto Rican spoke up. “He says it’s his lunch hour,” Walsh reported.

“He’s got to go over to Brooklyn to hand out pamphlets for his church.”

“Certainly,” Oglethorpe said. “We’re.finished.”

The little Puerto Rican smiled and started off. Then, as though he’d forgotten something, he stopped and pulled from his pocket two of the pamphlets he’d be giving away in a few moments. He gave Walsh and Oglethorpe each one.

Walsh looked at his. “Jesus Saves,” it read. “Bring your problems to Him.”

He turned to the shattered bureaucrat. “You know, Jerry,” he remarked, “I think maybe the guy’s got something here.”

In the White House the members of the Crisis Committee were waiting in the National Security Council conference room when the President came downstairs from his press briefing. With the exception of the military, they were in shirtsleeves, ties askew, their disheveled hair and haggard faces indicative of the terrible strain under which they had been laboring for hours. They started to rise as the President entered, but he waved them to their places. He was in no mood for protocol formalities. While Eastman reviewed what had happened, he too removed the jacket of his gray suit, undid his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

“The charge received a call from Qaddafi’s Prime Minister, Salam Jalloud, a few minutes ago,” Eastman said. “He would like to speak to you at sixteen hundred GMT.” The National Security Assistant glanced up at the clocks on the wall. “That’s in twenty-seven minutes, over the Doomsday aircraft facilities we proposed to him early this morning. Qaddafi speaks English, but we are reasonably certain he’ll insist, initially at least, on speaking Arabic. These two gentlemen”-he gestured to a pair of middle-aged men sitting tensely halfway down the conference table-“are State’s senior Arabic translators.

“The way we propose to proceed if you agree is this: One of these two men will give us a simultaneous, confidential translation of Qaddafi’s Arabic so that we can know immediately what he has to say. Each time Qaddafi pauses to let us translate, the second interpreter will take over. While he’s interpreting, we’ll have a few moments to consider our answers. If we need more time, the second translator can interrogate Qaddafi on the precise meaning of one of his words or phrases.”

The President nodded his approval.

“We’re also, of course, taping both his words and the translation and taking him down in shorthand. The girls outside will type up the material for us in relays. And we have down there”-Eastman pointed to a black plastic console with a televisionlike screen attached to it = “a CIA voice stress analyzer, which will reveal any sign of nervous strain or tension in his voice.”

“Better not use it on me.” The President smiled grimly. “You may be disappointed with the results you get.”

Eastman coughed. “That brings us to another point, Mr. President.” He turned to Henrick Jagerman, Bernie Tamarkin and the CIA’s Dr. Turner, seated halfway along the table next to the edgy State Department Arabists.

Their presence came as no surprise to the President. Although the fact was little known to the public, the counsel and observations of psychiatrists, particularly those attached to the CIA, had been employed in crises at the highest echelons of the U.S. government for years.

“It is their very strong recommendation, based on their own experience in terrorist negotiations, that you do not speak to Qaddafi yourself.”

The suddenness with which the President swiveled his head toward the psychiatrists revealed his irritation, but his voice remained calm and studiously courteous. “I want to thank you gentlemen for coming here to help us. Particularly you, Dr. Jagerman.”

The Dutchman gave a ritualistic bob of his head.

“Now, why is it you don’t want me to talk to him?”

Jagerman quickly repeated the arguments he had made earlier to Eastman.

“There is a second reason,” Tamarkin added. “To keep him tied up in a dialogue with a negotiator while we’re working out our strategy quietly and calmly. We force him to respond under pressure while we create the situations to which he has to respond in an orderly environment.”

“It seems to me that we’re the ones who are responding under pressure at the moment,” the President noted tartly. “Who do you suggest should do the negotiating?”

“We hope he’ll agree to work with Mr. Eastman,” Jagerman replied. “He’s known around the world for his closeness to you personally. His office gives him the necessary authority. And we think he has the proper personality for the job.”

The President’s fingertips stroked the tabletop. “Very well, gentlemen,” he agreed. “I’ll accept your recommendation. We’ll see if he will. Your understanding of the psychology of power may not be as complete as your understanding of the psychiatry of terrorists. Now I want you to explain to me what would drive a man to do something like this. Is he crazy?”

Jagerman clasped his hands before him and leaned forward, wishing he were in his office in Amsterdam, anywhere but here in this room with these terrible pressures weighing down on him. “It really doesn’t matter whether he’s crazy or not, Mr. President. What matters is how and why he behaves as he does; what motivates him.”

“Then why in hell has he done such a mad thing?”

“Ahl” The black arcs of Jagerman’s eyebrows spurted upward, setting the mole in the middle of his forehead dancing on a ridge of flesh. “The most striking aspect of this man’s character is that he is a loner. He was a loner as a boy at school, at the military academy in England. He’s a loner as a ruler. And isolation is dangerous. The lonelier a man is, the more dangerous he is apt to become. Fundamentally, terrorists are lonely, isolated people, outcasts of society banded into small groups by an ideal or a cause. The more isolated they are, the more they feel compelled to act. Violence becomes the terrorist’s way of proving to society that he exists.

“As Qaddafi has found himself more and more isolated internationally, more and more cut off from the world community, the need to act, to prove to the world he’s there, has become greater and greater. Loneliness gives terrorists a superiority complex. They become gods, a law unto themselves, absolutely convinced of the rectitude of their position. Clearly, Qaddafi is absolutely persuaded of the righteousness of his point of view. And now with this H-bomb of his, he has become God, beyond reason, ready to administer justice himself.”

“If the man is beyond reason,” the President interjected, “then why are we wasting our time talking to him?”

“Mr. President, we’re not trying to reason with him. We are going to try to convince him of the necessity of giving us time just as we try to convince a terrorist of the necessity of giving us his hostages. Often, with time, the isolated, unreal world the terrorist lives in crumbles around him.

Reality submerges him, and his defense mechanisms collapse. This could very well happen in Qaddafi’s case. All the unforeseen consequences of his action may suddenly overwhelm him.”

The psychiatrist’s index finger shot up as it did whenever he wanted to issue a warning or stress a point. “That instant, if it comes, will be terribly dangerous. At that moment, a terrorist is ready to die, to commit suicide in a spectacular way. The risk that he may then destroy his hostages along with himself is immense. In this case …”

Jagerman did not need to finish the sentence. Everyone had understood. “But there is also, at that moment, the golden chance to take the terrorist by the hand, so to speak, and lead him away from danger. To convince him he is a hero, a conquered hero yielding honorably to superior forces.”

“And you hope that, somehow, we’ll be able to manipulate Qaddafi like that?”

“It is a hope. No more. But the situation offers very little else.”

“All right. But bow? How will we do it?”

“That’s the ultimate goal, Mr. President. The tactics we will have to work out as we talk to him. That’s why opening a dialogue is so crucial. We will adapt our tactics from what we learn listening to him. One must always continue saying, ‘We accept the situation because we know we’ll win in the end.”’

Except, the Dutchman thought as he heard his words drift through the crowded room, in the end one doesn’t always win.

A bell over the door jingled. It was as though an alarm had gone off.

Everyone in the bar’s dark interior, the halfdozen young men on its worn moleskin barstools, the squat, unshaven bartender, the trio,in black leather jackets playing pinball, turned to stare at the three policemen invading their sanctuary. There was not a sound in the place except for the click-clack of the lead ball still bouncing from bumper to bumper in the pinball machine and the ting of the lights flashing on its back panel.

“You would have to say,” Angelo muttered to Rand, “that these guys know the heat when they see it.”

Malone, head of the NYPD Pickpocket Squad, walked slowly down the bar, his eyes scrutinizing each face along his way. They belonged to the dips who were the regulars at the Flatbush Avenue Terminal of the Long Island Rail Road, resting up with coffee and tequila between rush hours. He stopped a few feet from the pinball machine, pointed at one of the three young men, then beckoned to him with his forefinger.

“Hey, Mr. Malone.” The young man gave a nervous wriggle that would have passed as a clever move on a disco dance floor. “Why for you jostling me?

Is nothing I’ve done. Nothing.”

“We want to have a little talk with you. Out in the car.”

The car was around the corner. Malone put the pickpocket into the front seat and got in beside him. Angelo circled the car to get in on the other side. Rand headed for the rear. “No,” Angelo ordered, “you go back and keep your eyes on the bar. Just in case.”

Squeezed between the two detectives, the Colombian seemed to shrink under the impact of his nervous concern. His head swiveled from man to man like a weathervane buffeted by a swirling wind. “Why you busting me, Mr. Malone? Is nothing I do, I swear.” The voice was now almost a whimper.

“I’m not busting you,” Malone replied. “Just giving you a chance to get on the plus side for the next time we take you in.”

He took out the photos of Yolande Belindez and Torres and placed them before the pickpovket. As he did, Angelo’s attention was totally concentrated on the young man’s face. For a fleeting instant he saw there what he was looking for, the sudden apprehensive flicker of recognition.

“Know these guys?” Malone asked.

The pickpocket paused. “No. I no know. Never seen.” Before he knew what had happened, Angelo had slipped the young man’s right forearm between his own arms, grasped his fingertips and was slowly, steadily pushing them backward.

“My friend here asked you a question.”

Sweat broke out on the pickpocket’s forehead. Again his head swiveled wildlv from one detective to the other. “Hey, man, I no see. No see.”

Angelo squeezed harder. The pickpocket squealed in pain.

“You ever tried boosting somebody’s wallet with your hand in a cast? You don’t talk to my friend there, I’ll snap these tendons like crackers.”

“Hey,” the pickpocket screamed in pain. “I talk. I talk.” Angelo eased the pressure. “They new in town. I only seen them once. Maybe twice.”

“Where they live?”

“Hicks Street. Over by the Expressway. I no know house. Only one time I see, I swear.”

Angelo released his fingers. “Grncias, amigo,” he said, opening the door to let the dip out. “Appreciate your help.”

Henri Bertrand loathed reading the transcripts of wiretaps. The director of French intelligence had no scruples about their morality. It was rather that he inevitably found the exercise depressing. Nothing, he had discovered long ago, revealed quite as completely the emptiness, the banality, the squalor of most lives as did that harvest of the electronic scanning of an unguarded soul.

When he had started to comb his way through the transcripts of PaulHenri de Serre’s conversations, it was with the expectation that he would find in them the imprint of an exalted spirit, of-a man with the love of beauty needed to assemble the collection of ancient objects Bertrand had admired in his apartment.

He had found instead a petty, scheming bureaucrat; a dull, banal man with no trace of the weaknesses someone might exploit to get his cooperation. He had no mistresses; or, if he did, he didn’t talk to them. Indeed, the man’s rigorous marital fidelity, Bertrand had thought with a chuckle, might be seen as the only aberration in his character.

The interminable transcript through which he was laboring dated to November a year ago. It was with the administrative director of the Fusion Research Center at Fontenay-aux-Roses, and, Bertrand noted with relief, it was finally concluding with a personal exchange. He skimmed it rapidly.

Alain Prevost. Bertrand took a slow, meditative drag on his Gatiloise, trying to remember where it was he had heard that name before. Then he had it: the murder in the Bois de Boulogne.

A strange voice filtered into the National Security Council conference room over the same white plastic squawk box through which Harold Agnew had revealed barely eighteen hours before the existence of Qaddafi’s hydrogen bomb. It belonged to an Air Force brigadier general sitting at the communications console of the Doomsday 747, thirtyfive thousand feet above the Mediterranean.

“Eagle One to Eagle Base,” he said. “Secure communications circuit to Fox Base is now operational.” “Fox Base” was the code designation for Tripoli.

“All contacts verified and functioning. Fox Base advises Fox One will be on line in sixty seconds.”

The mutter of conversation in the room stopped at the words “Fox One.” For a moment, there was no noise except for the whir of the ventilation equipment and the occasional scraping of a chair. Each of the men and women present reacted in his or her own way to the fact that in a few seconds they would be listening to the voice of the man threatening six million of their countrymen.

A cackle of static broke from the squawk box, and suddenly Qaddafi’s voice filled the conference room. Since he was speaking over a secure, scrambled line, his voice had a peculiar resonance as though it was percolating slowly upward through a vat of water or had been taken from the sound track of a late-night movie about an extraterrestial invasion of planet Earth.

“This is Muammar al-Qaddafi, Secretary General of the Libyan People’s Congress,” the voice said in Arabic.

Jack Eastman leaned forward as soon as the translators had finished. “Mr.

Qaddafi, this is Jack Eastman, the President’s National Security Assistant.

I wish first to give you the personal assurances of the President of the United States that the communications channel over which we are speaking is a secure voice channel audible only to the people around you and the people here with me in the White House. For the purposes of our conversation I have with me Mr. E. R. Sheehan of the Department of State, who will translate our remarks into Arabic for you, and yours into English for us.”

Eastman gestured with his head to the translator.

“Your arrangements are satisfactory,” Qaddafi replied when he had finished.

“I am now ready to address the President.”

“Thank you, sir,” Eastman answered politely. “The President has asked me to tell you first that he takes the contents of your letter with the utmost seriousness. He is conferring now with our senior people to discuss how we can best take action on your proposals, and has asked me to serve as his personal liaison with you as we try to reach together some resolution of the issues you have raised. There are a number of points in your letter on which we would like to ask you for clarification. Have you considered what interim security arrangements are to be made on the West Bank as the Israelis withdraw?”

The three psychiatrists exchanged satisfied smiles. Eastman was slipping brilliantly into his role of negotiator, ending with a question that would force Qaddafi to go on talking and at the same time lead him to believe he was going to get what he wanted.

There was a long silence before Qaddafi came back on the line. Even in Arabic, everyone in the room could detect the change in his tone.

“Mr. Eastman. The only person in your country to whom I am prepared to speak is the President.”

The men at the table waited for Qaddafi to continue, but only the faint drone of the sound amplifier emerged from the squawk box.

“Stall,” Tamarkin said to Eastman. “Tell him you’ve summoned the President.

He’s on the way. Tell him anything you want, just as long as you keep him talking.”

Eastman had resumed speaking for only a few seconds when Qaddafi’s voice came back on the line. This time the Libyan spoke directly in English.

“Mr. Eastman, I am not going to tumble into your traps as easily as that.

If what I have to discuss with the President is not important enough for him to receive my communication himself, I have nothing further to say to you. Do not contact me again if the President is not prepared to talk personally with me.”

Again the drone of the amplifier came over the open line. “Mr. Qaddafi?”

Eastman said.

“Eagle One to Eagle Base.” It was the Air Force Brigadier in the Doomsday jet. “Fox Base has cut the circuit.”

Angelo Rocchia and Jack Rand cruised slowly southeast down Hicks Street, the street indicated by the pickpocket Angelo had grilled a few minutes earlier. The street, it seemed to the Denver-based agent, was almost as miserable, as depressing as the one they had driven through earlier on their way to the docks: the same obscene graffiti on the walls, the same shattered windows, padlocked doors, the same cannibalized hulks of the cars abandoned by the curb. 1n a third-floor window just above their car, Rand spotted an old derelict, a woman, peering down at them. Yellow-gray hair was strewn around her head in a disordered jumble. One hand clutched a faded housecoat around her shoulders, the other the neck of a pint of Four Roses. Pasted to the window, just beneath her gaunt face, was a string of paper cut-out dolls. Rand shuddered. There was more despair, more hopelessness writ upon that face than the young agent was prepared to handle. He turned to Angelo beside him.

“What do we do?” Rand asked. “A door-to-door?”

Angelo was silent a moment, thinking. “No,” he answered. “We do that, the word’ll get around the heat’s on the street. They’ll figure we’re from Immigration. Half of these people are illegals. Hit some of these places here, what you have to be concerned about is you don’t get trampled by the mob running out of the front door. We got to figure out something else.”

They passed a tiny grocery store, a hole in the wall with a couple of half-empty crates of wilted vegetables piled against its window. Angelo noted the proprietor’s name painted in white on the door panel.

“I got an idea,” he said, looking for a parking place.

The two picked their way along the rubble-and garbage-littered sidewalk, back to the grocery store.

“Let me do the talking in here,” Angelo warned.

Once again there was the familiar tinkle of a bell over the door. The odor of garlic, of cheap salami and of cold cuts assaulted their nostrils as they stepped inside. It was, Rand observed, a cramped cubbyhole of a place, not even half the size of the Holiday Inn bedrooms he had so often slept in. Cans, bottles of oil, packages of pasta, dried soups, noodles were strewn about in a disordered jumble. In the ancient freezing cabinet, packages of frozen foods, TV dinners, pizzas, some torn open, others filthy from being picked over, were littered about.

The face of a plump elderly woman in black, gray hair gathered in a tight bun at the nape of her neck, rose up above a refrigerating cabinet crammed with milk, butter and an array of frozen junk foods. She eyed warily the two unfamiliar faces intruding into her store.

“Signora Marcello?” Angelo asked, coming down hard with the accent.

The woman grunted.

Angelo moved a step closer to her, consciously stressing the space separating him from Rand. His voice dropped to a husky half-whisper. “I got a problem. I need a little help.” There was no question of telling her he was a cop, he knew that. Older women like her, born in the old country, didn’t talk to cops, period. “Niece of mine, nice Italian girl, got mugged last Sunday coming home from the ten-o’clock Mass over there to Saint Anthony’s on Fourth Avenue.”

He leaned toward the woman, as though he was a priest about to hear her confession. “That’s the fidanzato,” he whispered, jerking a thumb at Rand.

An intimation of dislike crossed her face. “He’s not an Italian, but what are you going to do, kids the way they are these days? Good Catholic boy, though. German.”

He drew back slightly, sensing the bond of understanding that was growing between him and the woman. His heavy head moved back and forth in apparent sadness and disbelief. “Would you believe that people could do a thing like that to a nice girl, one of ours, just received Our Lord, right there almost on the church steps? Beat her up, grab her bag?”

He stepped closer until his face was only inches from Signora Marcello’s, his voice a whisper, each of his words designed to arouse her prejudices. “South Americanos, they were. Spics.” He spat out the last word. “They come from around here.”

Angelo reached into his pocket and drew out the photos of Torres and Yolande Belindez. “Friend of mine, Italian detective downtown, got me these pictures.” Angelo grimaced. “But cops, you know, what could they do?” He tapped the pictures. “Me, I’m the oldest. I’m going to get them. For the honor of the famiglia, capito? You ever seen these two?”

“Ai, ai,” the old woman groaned. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph! Whatsa become this place?” She reached for a pair of broken glasses. “This one I know.” A gnarled finger thumped the picture of the girl with the big tits. “She come in here every day, buy a bottle of milk.”

“You know her name?”

“Sure. Itsa Carmen. Carmen something.”

“You know where she lives?”

“Down the street, next to the bar. Three buildings, all alike. She lives there.”

The only person in the National Security Council conference room not shocked by Qaddafi’s brutal interruption of his communication with Eastman was the President. He had expected it. Heads of state, no matter how irrationally they may behave, do not respond to the same psychological imperatives as desperate and isolated terrorists.

“Wait a decent interval,” he ordered, “then tell the Doomsday I’m on the line ready to talk to him.” He glanced along the table to the three psychiatrists. “Gentlemen, while we’re waiting I want you to give me the best advice you can on how to deal with this man. Dr. Jagerman?”

Jagerman sighed, regretting again the web of circumstances that had brought him into this room. “First of all, Mr. President, you must neither threaten him nor give in. But plant in his mind the idea that what he wants is not totally impossible.”

“Even though it in fact is?”

“Ja, ja.” The Dutchman underlined his words with two abrupt inclinations of his head. “We must deceive him into thinking that he can succeed.” Jagerman caressed the skin of his mole with his fingertips, almost as if he were touching a talisman. “Try to avoid direct confrontation, because that will only reinforce his negative attitudes. From his first few words, he seems quite composed and in command of his emotions. Contrary to what you might think, that’s good. It’s weak, insecure people who frighten easily that are dangerous. They’re apt to lash out at you at the slightest provocation.”

There was a slight pause while the psychiatrist marshaled the last of his thoughts. “Tactically, sir, I would try to persuade him to accept the dialogue with Mr. Eastman. Tell him that that way you yourself will be free to concentrate all your time and energy on resolving the problems he has raised in his letter. It’s really very, very important that we lure him into that ongoing dialogue.”

The President folded his hands on the desk, composing his thoughts, preparing himself for the ordeal ahead. He took a breath that swelled the frame of his thoracic cage until his blue shirt went taut, then let it out in one long, weary burst. “All right, Jack,” he said. “I’m ready.”

As the President leaned to the white squawk box, a flush of pink seeped above the ridge line of his collar like water spreading over a blotter. It was a manifestation of his hidden anger; his anger at the humiliation he felt having to act out this comedy; his anger as the proud leader of the most powerful nation on earth at being forced to humble himself before a man who would kill, six million of his fellows.

“Colonel Qaddafi,” he began as soon as the Libyan leader was back on the line, “this is the President of the United States. The message which you addressed to my government yesterday has been the object of a close and detailed study by my principal advisers and myself. We are still in the midst of that process. However, you must have no doubt, sir, that both I and my government condemn the action you have taken. No matter how strongly you feel about the issues that divide us in the Middle East or the injustices that have been inflicted on the Arab people of Palestine, your attempt to resolve the problem by threatening the lives of six million innocent Americans in New York City is a totally irresponsible and deplora-ble action.”

The President’s blunt words sent concern sluicing over the faces of the psychiatrists. Tamarkin grabbed a silk foulard from the breast pocket of his jacket and dabbed at the sweat glistening on his temples. Jagerman sat stiffly upright, his head cocked slightly backward as though he was already waiting to hear the distant rumble of the Apocalypse. The Chief Executive ignored them. He jabbed his finger at the State Department’s Arabist.

“Translate that. And don’t you damn well modify my tone by so much as one iota.”

The President leaned forward as the translator’s last phrase ended, determined to resume speaking before Qaddafi could break in with a reply.

“You are a soldier, Mr. Qaddafi, and as a soldier you know that I have, at my fingertips, the power to destroy, instantly, every living creature in your nation. I want you to understand that I shall not hesitate to use that power, whatever the consequences may be, if you force me to do so.”

Eastman smiled in silent approval. He hasn’t listened to a damned thing the psychiatrists had to say, he thought.

“Most men in my position, sir, would have used that power to destroy you the minute they read your letter. I did not because it is my ardent desire to find a peaceful solution to this problem. To find it together with you and your help. As you are perhaps aware, I have never, during my Presidential campaign and since my inauguration, ceased to proclaim my conviction that there can be no durable resolution to the problem of the Middle East which does not take into account the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people. But you must not forget, sir, that the attainment of the objectives you set forth in your letter does not depend on my government alone. That is why I would like to suggest to you that my close counselor, Mr. Eastman, remain in permanent contact with you as a link between us while I negotiate with Jerusalem.”

Drained, emotionally, by his effort, the President slumped back in his chair. “How’d we do?” he asked Eastman, tugging at his sweat-dampened shirt collar as the translator started to work.

“Terrific!” his adviser replied. “A-okay.”

A few minutes later, the Libyan’s answering voice poured forth from the squawk box. Its tone seemed slight, almost as though the dictator was subconsciously trying to apologize for intruding on the White House gathering. There was nothing apologetic, however, about the words Qaddafi employed.

“Mr. President, I have not called you to discuss my letter. Its terms are very clear. They require no discussion or amplification on my part-only action on your part. I have no intention of entering into a discussion with you now or in the future.”

Qaddafi paused to allow the State Department expert to interpret his words.

Jagerman and Tamarkin gave each other quick glances of professional concern.

“Mr. President,” the Libyan continued. “The sole reason for my communication is to warn you that we have discovered on our radar screens and radio channels the presence of your Sixth Fleet menacing our shores. I will not be intimidated by your martial posturing, Mr. President. I will not be threatened.”

“That arrogant son of a bitch!” The voice, skirting lotto voce under the interpreter’s words, belonged to Delbert Crandell, the Secretary of Energy.

“He thinks he’s being threatened?”

“Those ships are now twenty kilometers off my coastline. I want them withdrawn immediately to a distance of at least one hundred kilometers from my shores, Mr. President. If they are not, I shall reduce the time in the ultimatum I gave you by five hours, from twenty-one hundred GMT tomorrow to sixteen hundred GMT.”

The President shook his head, stupefied by the boldness of the man. Handing out ultimatums seemed to come easily to him.

“Mr. Qaddafi, in view of the threat you yourself have already posed to the citizens of New York City, I find your request not only extravagant but wholly unexpected. However, because of my very real desire to find, with you, a peaceful solution to this crisis, I am prepared to discuss it immediately with my advisers and convey to you our decision in a few minutes’ time.”

The Chief Executive gave an angry, accusatory regard iro the men around hm.

“None of your well-thought-out game plans predicted this, gentlemen,” he noted acidly. “How the hell do we handle it?” He turned to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Harry, what do you recommend?”

“I’m very much opposed to pulling those ships back, Mr. President,” Admiral Fuller replied. “The whole purpose of this exercise was to provide him with a highly visible reminder of what the consequences of setting that bomb off are going to be. Very clearly we’ve succeeded. Take those ships away and their absence just might make it easier for him to set the bomb off if it comes to it.”

“Caspar?”

“I concur,” the Secretary of Defense answered.

“Alex?”

The Secretary of State, recalled from Latin America, twisted a ballpoint pen in his fingers, subconsciously playing for a few seconds to run the alternatives past the screen of his brain one more time. “Military considerations aside, I think that with a man of his reputation it would be a fatal mistake to open a negotiation with a concession like this. I’m convinced it’ll tend to make him wholly intractable farther down the line. I say refuse.”

“Wrap?”

“The man seems bent on a showdown, Mr. President If that’s what he’s looking for, then shouldn’t we let him know right now we’re ready for it?”

The President’s dark eyes focused on Bennington’s blandly self-assured patrician face. My CIA director, he thought, always ready to answer one question with another so that on the record you can never nail him to a position. He must have studied under Henry Kissinger when he was at Harvard.

“Jack?”

Eastman leaned back in his chair, uncomfortably aware of the attention on him. “I’m afraid that I’m going to go against the consensus, Mr. President.

The problem we face is how do we keep those six million people in New York alive, and I say it’s with the one thing Qaddafi’s trying to take away from us, time. We need those five hours in New York to find that bomb a lot more than we need the Sixth Fleet off Libya’s seacoast.”

“You’re recommending we pull those ships back?”

“Yes, sir.” Eastman tried to force the image of the slender girl in her white graduation dress from his mind, to be sure he was responding to the President’s question on nothing other than a cold analysis of the situation. “The reality of those extra hours is far more important to us than QaddaVs perceptions of our strength or weaknesses. And if it comes to that, we certainly don’t need the Sixth Fleet to destroy Libya.”

“I find one thing strange in all this,” the President remarked. “Why five hours? Why not fifteen? Why not right away? If he’s really so upset, why such a minimal demand?” He was silent a second, trying, unsuccessfully, to provide himself with an answer to his question. He shifted his attention to the psychiatrists. “How do you people analyze this?”

Once again, Henrick Jagerman felt his skin prickle with nervous apprehension. What he was about to recommend would be bitterly resented, he was sure, by half the men in the room.

“First, to answer your question, sir, I think his request betrays a fundamental insecurity on his part. He is subconsciously testing the water, hoping for your acquiescence as a reassurance that this awful gamble of his is going to pay off. We see this attitude all the time in terrorists on our first contact. They’re aggressive, demanding. ‘Do this right away or I’ll kill a hostage.’ My advice then is do what the terrorist asks, and my advice to you is do what Qaddafi asks. You will be showing him he can get things done by working through you. You will implant very subtly in his mind the notion that, ultimately, he may succeed if he goes on working with you. But I would attach a price to it. Use your agreement as a lure to get him into the discussion he’s resisting.”

The President nodded and lapsed into silence, trapped now in that hard and lonely place referred to in Harry Truman’s plaque on his desk, the end of the line where the buck stops and one man has to make the decisions in the solitude of his soul.

“All right,” he sighed. “Harry, tell the fleet to get ready to pull back.”

“Jesus Christ! You can’t cave in to that bastard like that, Mr. President.

You’ll go down in history as America’s Neville Chamberlain if you do!”

The President turned his heavy head with exquisite slowness toward the Secretary of Energy. “Mr. Crandell, I am not about to cave in to Qaddafi or anyone else.” He doled out the words with the slow, measured cadence of a funeral drum. “I am, playing for what Mr. Eastman has properly pointed out is the most valuable asset in this crisis-” the dark eyes glanced up at the clocks on the wall — “time.”

He used the same measured tone with the Libyan leader. “Mr. Qaddafi,” he said, explaining his decision, “I want you to know that I am doing this for one reason only: to show you how serious and sincere I am in my desire to find with you a way out of this crisis that will be satisfactory to us both. My order is conditional on your agreemeilt to begin intensive discussions on how we can do it.”

An abnormally long delay, filled only by the menacing buzzing on the empty voice channel, followed his words. Something strange is going on in Tripoli, Eastman thought.

When Qaddafi’s voice returned at last, he spoke once again in English. “As long as your ships are there, no discussion. When they have gone, we will talk. Insh’ Allah.”

The squawk box went dead.