The Fifth Horseman

PART VI

Angelo Rocchia studied the three buildings the Italian shopkeeper, Signora Marcello, had indicated to him. They enjoyed a similarity of decay: shabby four-story tenements, broken fire escapes dangling down their fagades like limbs splintered off a tree, the same faded paint peeling from their barred windows and doors. “Rooms to Let-Inquire Superintendent 305 Hicks,” read a sign on one.

“Railroad flats,” Angelo observed. “Probably belong to some slumlord waiting for a fire. Stuffs illegals in here and charges them by the head.”

The pair stepped into the hallway of 305 Hicks. Garbage was piled to the level of the stairs in a stinking mound of rotting food, bottles, beer cans, cartons. Even worse was the stench, the acrid, all-enveloping odor of urine that seemed to hang on the stairwell like a moist, invisible film.

“Watch this, kid.” Angelo picked up a bottle and lobbed it at a pile of garbage. Before the agent’s horrified eyes, a gray battalion of rats came scurrying out of the heap of refuse.

Angelo chortled at the young man’s sudden loss of poise, then walked over to the door marked “Superintendent” and gave a gentle rap. There was a clatter of chains. The door, firmly secured on the inside, opened just a crack. An elderly black in denim overalls peered out. Angelo flashed his badge so fast the man could only catch a glittering of gold. Rand almost choked in disbelief at what he heard next.

“Working with the Board of Health,” Angelo told the black. He jerked his head toward the mound of garbage. “Got a lot of garbage over there. Fire hazard. Gonna have to do something here.”

While Rand and Angelo watched, the apprehensive superintendent undid one by one the locks and chains sealing him into the security of his little room.

“Look, mister, what can I do? These people here, they animals. They just open the door, throw the stuff down here.” He shook his head in helpless dismay, seeking Angelo’s sympathy for the impossibility of his job.

“Yeah, well, we got a lot of violations here. Gonna have to write some of them up.” Angelo reached into his pocket for the photograph of the girl pickpocket. “Hey, by the way, you know this girl here? Colombian. Big tits.

You could spot ‘em a mile away. Carmen, they call her.”

The superintendent looked at the photo. A nervous roll of his Adam’s apple, the quick dart of his tongue on his lips betrayed to both men the recognition he wanted to conceal. “No, no, I don’t know her.”

“Too bad.” Angelo looked straight into the black’s eyes. “I thought we could help each other out, you know what I mean?” The detective sighed and drew out his notepad. “At least a dozen violations you got here.” He started by waving at the garbage, at the ill-lit stairwell.

“Hey, mister, wait a minute,” the super pleaded. “Don’t get excited.

Landlord, he makes me pay the summonses.”

“Yeah? Well, it looks to me like you got about five hundred bucks’ worth.”

Angelo could see the nervous, frightened glimmer the mention of that sum brought to the super’s eyes. He was probably, Angelo calculated a decent hard-working guy trying to raise a family in that jungle. And Angelo also knew that the poor man was well aware his tenants would gladly put a knife in his back if they thought he’d given any of them up to the police: He threw his arm around the black’s shoulders.

“Look, friend, I don’t want to stiff you with all this paper. Just tell me what flat she’s in. We know she’s here.”

For an instant, the super’s eyes seemed to roll as wildly as an epileptic’s in a seizure, looking for any half-open crack in the doors along the hallway.

“She’s in 207, second floor. Second door on the right.” “She up there now?”

The super shrugged. “They all the time in and out. Fifteen people up there sometimes.”

Angelo and Rand loitered just a second on the sidewalk outside. “Angelo,”

Rand urged, “we should call in help. This could be big, very big.”

“Yeah,” the detective mumbled. “Fifteen guys. You might want to think about that. Only two of us.” Angelo picked at the stubble on his chin. “But, generally, pickpockets aren’t armed. They don’t want to go in for armed robbery. On the other hand …” He shook his head. “Sneaking a bunch of cops into a neighborhood like this is going to be like trying to sneak the sun past a rooster. Come on.” He had made up his mind. “We’ll take them ourselves.”

As he started up the stairs, Angelo reached not for his gun but for his wallet. He took out a Chase Manhattan calendar printed on a supple but firm slip of plastic. He flicked the card at Rand. “I’ll open the door with this. You step in and freeze them.”

“Jesus Christ, Angelo,” the agent almost gasped. “We can’t do that. We haven’t got a warrant.”

“Don’t worry about it, kid,” Angelo said, drawing up to the second door on the right on the second floor. “It ain’t a perfect world.”

“Gorgeous!”

Michael Naylor pirouetted around the model frozen in artificial grace under the arc lights of his studio, then dropped to one knee at just the point where he knew he would catch the mauve lights reverberating off the satin of her Saint-Laurent evening gown. “Fantasticl” He clicked his Haselblad.

“Unbelievablel”

He continued through a dozen shots and a dozen adjectives, each word more extravagant than the one that had preceded it, then straightened up, sweating from the strain and the lights. “Thanks, darling,” he told the model, “that’ll be all for now.”

He saw Laila as he stepped out of the circle of the spots. She had slipped in so quietly he hadn’t even noticed her arrival.

“Lindal” he gasped. “I thought you had a-“

She stifled his words with a kiss. “I got out of my lunch,” she said. “Take me to lunch.”

“Police-don’t move!”

The angry words ricocheted around the flat with the force of a caroming pelote ball. Angelo and Jack Rand stood just inside the door the detective had opened with his plastic bank calendar. They were in the classic policeman’s half-crouch, each clasping his revolver before him with outstretched hands. The suddenness of their entry, the intimidating sight of their arms froze the room’s halfdozen occupants.

The place was, just as Angelo had expected it would be, wall-to-wall mattresses, a squalid, ill-lit room reeking of sweat and cheap cologne. A clothesline filled with dripping undershorts, bras, tee shirts and blue jeans bisected it like a limp set of signal flags dressing an aging vessel’s masthead. There was only one piece of furniture in the room, a dilapidated sofa, its springs popping through its torn upholstery. Sitting on one end of it, stirring a casserole set on a hot plate on the floor, was the girl with the big tits.

Angelo recognized her immediately. He stood up, put his pistol back into his holster, stepped over one Colombian sprawling terrified on a mattress and drew up beside her. He sniffed at the stew bubbling in the casserole.

“Smells good,” he remarked. “Too bad you’re not going to get to eat it. Get your coat, muchacha. You’re coming in.”

Angelo was about to articulate the first question he wanted to ask her when the answer came springing like a fury from a mattress along the wall and bounded toward him, shouting, “Why you take my mujer?”

“Freeze!”

It was Rand, still in the doorway, his weapon drawn. Torres, the man in the second photo, stopped instantly. He was a gaunt-faced youth with drawn, tubercular cheeks, a sallow complexion and a mass of uncombed black curls spilling over his forehead.

“Take that thing off,” Rand ordered, waving his combat Magnum at the geometric patterns of the red poncho enveloping the Colombian. Despite Angelo’s comments on the street, the agent was going to take no chances on an arm being bidden under its folds.

“Thanks, kid.” There was both gratitude and new respect in Angelo’s tone.

Torres pulled the poncho over his head. He was naked except for unmatching socks and filthy yellow-gray jockey shorts. Angelo stepped over to him, took the pickpocket’s photograph from his pocket, studied it, then looked up, smiling, at Torres.

“Well, now,” he said, “you, my friend, are just the guy we’re looking for.

You’re coming in, too.”

Torres began to babble a protest of his innocence in a blend of Spanish and English. Angelo cut him short. “The guy whose wallet you boosted down at the terminal Friday picked your picture out of a pile. You’re going in. But first you and I are going to have a little talk.”

One of the three men sprawled on the mattresses stirred at Angelo’s words.

He was a sour-looking older man. “Officer, he new in town. He no much score yet.” His hand was groping under his mattress for his roll of cash. “I help straighten out.” He looked at the detective with a leering smile.

“Fuck you!” Angelo growled. “This isn’t a shakedown.” He pointed to the man, the two others in the room and a second girl crouched in one corner.

“All of you get out of here. Right nowl Or I’ll call in Immigration to check your papers.”

The four South Americans vanished at the mention of Immigration with an alacrity that was astonishing. As the door closed on the last of them, Angelo returned his attention to Torres. “I want to know one thing from you. Where’d that card go? Who’d you make the dip for?”

From behind him, Angelo heard a quick burst of idiomatic Spanish. He understood only one phrase, derechos civiles-civil rights. He gave the girl with the big tits an annoyed stare. She was still perched over her bubbling casserole, her pretty face suffused with sullen hostility. This one, Angelo mused, has got to go. He looked at Rand, still standing in the doorway.

Goody-goody two shoes over there, too.

“Take her down to the car,” he ordered. “I’ll bring him down as soon as he gets his clothes on.”

Rand hesitated a moment. He’s going to work him over, he thought. He wanted to say something, but not in front of these two. Too much was at stake to let them glimpse at any difference between them. “Let’s go,” he said to the girl with the big tits.

Torres had picked up a pair of jeans and was starting to put them on when Rand and the girl left.

“Drop those things,” Angelo commanded. “You’re not going anywhere yet. I said I wanted to talk to you. Where’d the cards from the wallet you boosted last Friday go? Who buys your fresh cards?”

“Hey, what you mean?” Torres was trembling, but he tried to force an air of defiance into his voice.

“You heard me. You did that dip in the terminal Friday on consignment. You were told to set up a guy just like the guy you hit. I want to know where that fucking card went.”

Torres stepped warily back a couple of paces, almost tumbling over a mattress as he did, until he was only inches from the wall. On the hot plate, the girl’s stew was still bubbling noisily. Angelo followed him.

“Meester,” the Colombian was pleading, “I got civil rights.”

“Civil rights? You got no civil rights, you little cocksucker. Your civil rights are down there where you left ‘em, in Bogota.”

The detective moved closer to Torres. He was at least a head taller than the Colombian. Torres was shivering from the cold, from fear, from the terrible sense of impotence nakedness always imposes in a prisoner before his captors. His hands were spread over his genitals, drawing together his shoulders and making him look even more emaciated than he was. He had just taken another half-step toward the wall when Angelo moved. The detective’s gesture was so swift Torres didn’t even see it coming. Angelo’s right hand shot up, caught him by the neck under the chin and literally threw him against the wall. The Colombian’s head banged twice against the plaster. He went limp. His hands fell to his sides. As they did, Angelo’s left hand ripped into his crotch, grabbing and squeezing his testicles with all his strength.

The Colombian shrieked in agony.

“Okay, motherfucker,” Angelo growled. “Now you either tell me where that card went or I’ll rip these things out of here and stuff them down your goddamn throat.”

“Talk! I talk!” Torres shrieked.

Angelo relaxed his grip slightly.

“Union Street. Benny. The fence there.”

Angelo squeezed again. “Where on Union Street?”

Torres shrieked, tears of pain rolling down his face. “By Sixth Avenue.

Across from supermarket. Second floor.”

Angelo released the pickpocket. He tumbled to the floor, writhing in pain.

“Get your pants on,” Angelo ordered. “You and I are going to see Benny.”

Laila Dajani had been silent through most of her lunch at Orsini’s, picking indifferently at her tagliatelle verdi and salad, barely touching her Bardolino wine, destroying, apparently, what little appetite she had with half a dozen cigarettes. Yet, on the way to the restaurant, she’d told Michael at least three times she had something very serious to talk about.

Her silence had not disturbed her lover. Michael had devoured a plate of fettucine, followed by fegato alla Veneziana, calf’s liver and onions, all to still the ravenous appetite for which she was largely responsible. The waiter cleared away their dishes and gave the table a desultory flick of his napkin.

“Dessert?”

“No,” Michael replied. “Two espressos.”

As he left, Michael leaned toward Laila. She had changed her clothes and was wearing an eggshell-white Givenchy blouse that clung hungrily to every indentation of her braless breasts. “You said you had something you wanted to talk to me about.”

Laila reached for another cigarette, lit it, exhaled slowly, thoughtfully.

“I want to think about us a moment.”

Michael grinned lasciviously. “Okay, I’m thinking.”

“Michael, we need more fantasy in our lives.”

Michael had just taken a sip of his espresso, and he almost spilled it with the laughter that followed her words. “Darling, what did you have in mind?

Do you want me to whip you or something?”

“Michael, we’ve got to do crazy, wonderful things together. Like that.” She snapped her fingers. “On a whim. Just because we want to. Because it’s for us.”

Michael gave a gentle laugh and reached for her hand. “Like what?”

Laila swallowed nervously, trying to feign thought.

“Crazy things. I don’t know. Like going off somewhere on the spur of the moment together. The two of us, alone. No baggage even, just ourselves.” A smile suddenly brightened her face. “Look, I’ve got to go to Montreal one day this week to see a collection. I’ll go tomorrow on the first plane. You come up tomorrow, too. There’s a direct flight to Quebec at noon. We’ll meet at the Chateau Frontenac. Do you know it?” She was rushing on, now trying to sweep him up in the torrent of her words, painfully aware of the undertow of hysteria in her voice. “It’s the most marvelous place! Lovely, quaint streets just like Paris. We’ll ride on sleighs and eat warm croissants in bed for breakfast and walk along the Saint Lawrence and go shopping in the wonderful little shops they have. Oh, Michael darling, do it. For me. Please.”

Her hands took his, stroking them tenderly.

Michael kissed her fingertips. “Angel, I can’t. Impossible. I’ve got two Vogue shootings tomorrow I can’t possibly cancel. Besides, I thought we were going to Truman Capote’s lunch.”

“Oh, Michael! Who gives a damn about that little creep and all those fawning toads swarming around him? I want us to do something for ourselves, for ourselves alone.”

Michael sipped his espresso. “Now, if you want to do something really crazy, I have an idea. I’ve got a friend at one of the agencies who has a flat down in Acapulco. He’s always offering to lend it to me. We’ll take the Friday-night plane and spend a mad, crazy weekend in the sun together.”

He shivered. “I mean, Quebec, it’s cold up there.”

Laila extended a hand and lovingly caressed his cheeks, playfully skimming the skin of his ears with her long fingernails. “That’s a wonderful idea, darling.” She paused. “But I just have this feeling about tomorrow. You know how superstitious we Arabs are. Come on, let’s do it. Please.”

Michael picked up the check the waiter had just set on the table. “Angel, I can’t. Really. If I break these shootings I’ve got tomorrow, I might as well go down and sign up for my unemployment checks.”

Laila watched him counting out the money for the check. How far do I dare go, she asked herself, how far?

Outside, the air was chill with the moist, gray promise of snow. “Do you have another shooting?” she asked.

“No, I’m through for the day.”

Laila slipped an arm around Michael’s waist. “Then let’s go back to the studio,” she said.

“To what,” the Baron Claude de Fraguier, Secretary General of the French Foreign Office, asked Henri Bertrand, “do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected visit?”

The director of France’s intelligence service was looking for an ashtray.

With a gesture of his head, the Baron indicated one on an Empire gueridon halfway across the room.

“On April fifteenth, 1973,” Bertrand replied, returning to his armchair, the outsized ashtray clutched awkwardly in his hand, “you people signed a Monsieur PaulHenri de Serre of the Atomic Energy Commission to a threeyear contract to serve as a technical adviser to India’s nuclear program. He returned to this country in November 1975, some six months before his contract was due to expire. The dossier which my colleagues at the DST have given me on Monsieur de Serre fails to indicate why he came home early.

Perhaps your people could enlighten me?”

The Baron stared at Bertrand. He disliked both the man and his service.

“May I ask why you wish to know?”

“No,” Bertrand replied, concealing with his inscrutable features the pleasure he took in pronouncing the word. “You may not. Although I might add that my inquiry has the sanction of the highest authority.”

These people, the Baron reflected distastefully. Constantly invoking the office of the Presidency to cover their intrusions into the domains of others. “You will probably find, cher ami,” he said, ordering up the dossier, “a reason as commonplace as a poor widowed mother dying of cancer in the Dordogne.”

When an aide laid de Serre’s dossier on his desk, the Baron opened it himself, careful to keep its contents well out of reach of Bertrand’s eyes.

A reference tab was affixed to the document terminating de Serre’s Indian service. It referred to a sealed envelope in the dossier containing a letter from the French ambassador in New Delhi to the Baron’s predecessor.

The Baron opened it and read it, studiously ignoring as he did the manifest impatience of the SDECE director. When he had finished, he folded the letter, placed it back in its envelope, returned the envelope to its place and passed the dossier back to his assistant.

“Just as one might have expected,” he said, his voice as cutting as long years of practice could make it, “a sordid little affair. Just the sort of thing to interest your services. Your friend Monsieur de Serre was caught employing the diplomatic valise to smuggle Indian antiquities out of the country. Quite valuable objects, as it turned out. Rather than risking any embarrassment with our Indian friends, he was recalled and returned to his post at the Atomic Energy Commission.”

“Interesting.” Bertrand methodically twisted his cigarette stub into the ashtray in his hand. So there is our fissure, he thought. The search for these little flaws, for the barely perceptible cracks in the smooth fagade of a man’s character that could be widened and exploited, was the very essence of Bertrand’s calling. The heavy hands of the brass Empire clock on the Baron’s desk showed that it was already half past six. The velvet mantle of evening, the magic hour of legend and lovers, was settling over Paris. If he was going to pursue this tonight, he would have to hurry. He hesitated. Really, he should leave it to the morning. Still, his CIA colleague had seemed very concerned. And the Arabs, he knew, worked late.

“I’m sorry, morn cher,” he informed the Baron. “I’m going to have to use your facilities to get off an urgent message to our man at the embassy in Tripoli. In view of what you’ve just told me, it can’t wait until I get back to my headquarters.”

Jeremy Oglethorpe, Washington’s evacuation expert, gawked at the sight before him like a little boy on Christmas morning discovering on his livingroom floor an electric-train set that went beyond his wildest fantasies. Spread over an entire wall of the command center at the Metropolitan Transit Authority Building in Brooklyn was an action map of New York’s subway system, each of the 450 stations of its three divisions identified by name and a light, every one of the 207 trains moving at that moment on its 237 miles of track marked by a flashing red light.

“Wonderful!” he gasped. “Even more impressive than I imagined it would be.”

He was sitting in the superintendent’s glassed-in central booth in the center of the room with the chief of operations, a genial, slightly overweight black. Spread on the desk before him was a map of the system and beside it a thick sheaf of notes in a gray-and-white Stanford Research Institute binder. “I’ve done a lot of work studying your system, Chief.

You’ve got six thousand cars available?”

“We had 5,062 today. You’ve always got some in for repairs, inspections.”

“And you can put two hundred and fifty people in a car?”

“Only if you want to start a riot. Two hundred’s our limit.”

Oglethorpe grunted. My figure is good for my scenario, he thought. “Chief, I want you to think about a problem with me. Suppose we’ve got to evacuate Manhattan in an emergency. Fast, real fast. And we don’t want to take people out to Brooklyn or Queens. We want to move them up here.”

Oglethorpe’s judgy fingers skirted the terminals of the upper Bronx, 242nd Street, Woodlawn Road, 205th Street, 241st Street, Dyre Avenue, and Pelham Bay Park.

The chief twisted a plastic cup of black coffee in his hand and studied Oglethorpe with a skeptical eye. “Why would you want to do all this?”

“Well, say we’re afraid there’s a nuclear bomb in Manhattan. Or the Russians are coming.”

The chief thought awhile, then stood and peered down at the system’s map.

“Okay. The first thing you’d want to think about are the trains already moving in the system when you sound your alert. I guess you keep ‘em going all the way through. Take an IRT number five going into Fulton Street in lower Manhattan. Give the motorman an announcement, ‘We have to evacuate Manhattan because of an emergency threat.’ Then tell him to run straight up to Dyre Avenue nonstop and dump his load.”

Oglethorpe was frantically noting down his words.

“Now,” the trainman continued, “that might be a little difficult. New Yorkers don’t like being told what to do very much.” He gave a little laugh. “You’ll want some help there in the Bronx. Some of those people aren’t going to want to get off the train.

They’ll insist on going back to get their wives or their kids, or their mothers-in-law. Or their pet canaries. We’d have to devise a loop. Up to the Bronx. Drop them. Out to Brooklyn,” he continued.

“Why all the way to Brooklyn?” Oglethorpe queried.

“Because we can’t turn trains around in the middle of the system. You’d use the local track to load and go onto the express track once they’re loaded.

Run ‘em nonstop right up to the Bronx and start all over again.”

“Terrific!” Oglethorpe was almost trembling with excitement. Obviously, this was the answer. With a little order, a little control. “Now tell me,”

he said, “on the basis you’ve outlined here, allowing for the minor problems that always crop up, how much time do you think it would take under this plan to clear Manhattan?”

“Probably four to six hours. Maybe a bit more.”

“And if we asked you to take people out of Queens and Brooklyn too?”

“Then we’ve got a much bigger problem.”

Oglethorpe sat down, studying his notes, going through the papers of his SRI study. He was beaming. He looked at Walsh, the smile on his face almost triumphant. “I told you this was the answer. Now look, Chief, if you started right now, with any help you wanted, could you get this plan down on paper for me, everything, logistics, signaling systems, timing, everything, in two hours?”

“I think so.”

“Terrific.” Oglethorpe looked again at Walsh. “We’re going to have a terrific plan.”

“Sure, you’ll have a terrific plan, mister,” the chief agreed. His voice was low and cool, so fully controlled he might have been an anchor man reading out the evening news. “And there’ll only be one thing wrong with it.”

“What’s that?”

“It won’t work.”

“Won’t work?” Oglethorpe looked as though he’d just received a blow in the stomach. “What do you mean it won’t work?”

“Who do you think are going to drive those trains for you?”

“Why,” Oglethorpe replied, “your motormen. Who else?” “Not if they know there’s an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island, my friend. They’ll take their first train up to Dyre Avenue all right. And then they’ll be out of the station door with everyone else. The switchmen, the yardsmen you need to turn the trains around-they’ll be gone, too.”

“Well,” Oglethorpe muttered, “we won’t tell them. We’ll say it’s a practice.”

The chief laughed, a rich, warm laugh from deep in his overextended stomach. “You’re going to clear three and a half million people off Manhattan Island and try to make them believe you’re doing it for fun? For some kind of exercise?” The pitch of his laughter skirted upward at the thought of how ludicrous it all was. “Mister, there’s not a New Yorker alive who’d believe horseshit like that. I tell you, half an hour after you start this, every car in the system’ll be laid down on the tracks up there in the Bronx and every motorman in town’ll be running for the bills.”

Oglethorpe listened in dismayed silence, one hand clutching his carefully written notes and the papers of his SRI study.

“You can’t evacuate this city with the subways,” the chief said, “or any other way, for that matter.” He looked sadly at the papers in Oglethorpe’s fingers. “All you got there, mister, is a handful of dreams.”

Puzzled and angry, John Booth followed the steady cackle of NEST’s ultra-high-transmission network. The normally phlegmatic NEST director was as distraught as a man who has just been told his wife is expecting triplets. Three times since he had gotten back to his Seventh Regiment Armory headquarters, his helicopters overflying lower Manhattan had reported high radiation readings only to see them mysteriously disappear when his foot search teams moved in.

Like everything else in NEST, the radio facility set up in the locker rooms used by the tennis players who usually employed the armory’s main floor was designed to be independent and self-contained. Everything from batteries, spare parts and screwdrivers to hand-held transceivers and mobile transceivers for the trucks and helicopters had been flown in from Las Vegas. That way Both could feel reasonably certain that local CB fans, newsnapers or TV stations wouldn’t pick up any indication of what was going on by eavesdropping on his transmissions.

On the wall of the locker room were huge color aerialsurvey maps of New York’s five boroughs, maps whose resolution was so fine you could identify with a loupe the color of a hat on a woman walking down Fifth Avenue. Thev were part of a file of maps of 170 U.S. cities held available twentyfour hours a day at NEST’s Washington offices.

Suddenly Booth heard an excited call rise over the chatter on the network.

“Feather Three to base. I have a positive.” Feather Three was one of the trio of New York Airways helicopters Both had pressed into service.

Jesus Christ, Booth prayed, please don’t let this be another false alarm, I’ll go crazy.

The technician and the pilot were back on the air, pinning their reading down to a hotel two doors from Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue, when one of them shouted. “Son of’ a bitch, it’s fading!” A few seconds passed and his voice was back. “No, it’s not, John. It’s moving! It’s moving up Sixth Avenue!”

Booth hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. Of course, that was it!

The clever bastards had hidden the bomb in the back of a truck and were circulating through the city.

Trembling with nervous excitement, Booth and the men in the command post followed the steady progress of the target up Sixth Avenue, across Thirtyfourth Street. Suddenly the chopper, whose pilot had been trying to get some idea of which truck in the maze of traffic below was giving off radiation, came back on the air. “Target no longer moving.”

“Where is he?”

“Seems to be at Bryant Park, Sixth and Forty-second!”

Booth ordered half a dozen NEST vans and FBI cars to converge on the intersection.

“I’ve got it!” shouted the technician in the first van to reach the scene.

“Where are you?” Booth demanded.

“Just down Fifth from the corner,” came the answer, “right in front of the New York Public Library.”

The numerals on the bar clock hung on the wood-paneled wall of the National Security Council conference room read 1428. A sense of helplessness infused the room. Coffee cups, half-eaten sandwiches, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs littered the table along with piles of top-secret cables from CIA, State and Pentagon. Nothing in those cables or the messages delivered to the room over its sophisticated communications network had brought its occupants any solace, any promise of a satisfactory resolution to the crisis. Barely twenty-four hours before the expiration of the ultimatum of the zealot of Tripoli they were, as Harold Brown had so bitterly observed, the “pitiful giant” once mockingly described by Mao Tse-tung, all the vast panoply of U.S.

resources useless. Little by little as they had followed the progress of the search for the bomb in New York in regular hourly reports from the city, one thing had become appallingly clear: so frightening were the dimensions of the task, so painfully slow the manner in which it had to be carried out, there was no hope of finding the device in the time Qaddafi had allocated them. As for the secret messages that had reached the White House from every major world capital and leader, they all, without exception, urged the President to remain firm in the face of Qaddafi’s menace. None of them, however, had offered the slightest specific suggestion on how to do that without imperiling New York and its people. It was the Iranian crisis all over again. America’s allies were free with their advice but notably timorous when it came to help or action.

Just after half past two, a Navy chief petty officer interrupted a CIA report from Paris with the announcement that the last of the Sixth Fleet’s ships had reached the one-hundred-kilometer limit set down earlier by Qaddafi. The President greeted the news with a mixture of relief and concern. Fundamentally, he was certain all their hopes came down to the enterprise he could now begin: trying to reason with a man four thousand miles away, a man who, only a generation ago, would have been just the inconsequential ruler of a lot of sand, but who, thanks to oil, the technological genius of twentieth-century man and his own countrymen’s madness in hurling their most precious knowledge into the public domain, now had the power to force his zealot’s vision on the world. Mankind could afford tyrants in the day of the sword, the President reflected. Not anymore.

While the white squawk box buzzed with the spaceage jargon of the Doomsday jet reestablishing the communications link to Tripoli, he gave a last glance at the yellow legal pad before him. On it were the notes he had made listening to the psychiatrists’ advice: Flatter him; play up to his vanity as a world leader.

He’s a loner. Must become his friend. Show him I’m the person who can help him out of the corner into which he’s painted himself.

Voice always soft, nonthreatening.

Never give him the impression I don’t take him seriously.

Keep him in a position of fundamental uncertainty; he must never know exactly where he’s at.

Good maxims for a police negotiator. But were they really going to be any help to him? He swallowed, feeling the tension constrict his throat. Then he turned to Eastman and indicated he was ready.

“Mr. Qaddafi,” he began, once he had confirmed that the Libyan had followed the fleet’s withdrawal. “I want to address the very grave problem posed by your letter. I understand how ardently you want to see justice done for your fellow Arabs in Palestine. I want you to know that I share those sentiments, Mr. Qaddafi, I=’

The Libyan cut into his speech. His voice was as gentle as it had been two hours before, but his words were no more encouraging than they had been then.

“Please, Mr. President, do not waste my time or yours with speeches. Have the Israelis begun to evacuate the occupied territories or have they not?”

“No stress reading at all,” the CIA technician monitoring the voice stress analyzer reported. “He’s perfectly relaxed.”

“Mr. Qaddafi,” the President pressed on, striving to control his own emotions, “I understand your impatience to reach a settlement. I share it.

But we must lay together the basis for a durable peace, one that will satisfy all parties conoerned, not one forced on the world by a threat such as the one you have made to New York.”

“Words, Mr. President.” The Libyan, to the Chief Executive’s irritation, had interrupted him again. “The same kind of hollow, hypocritical words you have been feeding my Palestinian brothers for thirty years.”

“I assure you I speak with the utmost sincerity,” the President rejoined — to no avail. Qaddafi, ignoring him, was continuing. “Your Israeli allies bomb and shell Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon with American planes and guns, kill Arab women and children with American bullets, and what do you offer in return? Words-while you go right on selling the Israelis more arms so that they can go on killing more of our people. Every time the Israelis seize my brothers’ lands with their illegal settlements, what do you do? You give us more of your pious words, your spokesmen wringing their hands in public in Washington. But have you ever done anything to stop the Israelis? No! Never!

“Well, Mr. President, from now on you and the other leaders of your country can save your words. The time for them has passed. At last the Arab people of Palestine have the means of obtaining the justice that should have been theirs long ago, and they are going to get it, Mr. President, because if they do not, millions of your people are going to die to pay for the injustices that have been committed against them.”

The impact of Qaddafi’s words was heightened by the flat, monotonous voice in which he uttered them, a voice so devoid of passion it seemed to Eastman that the Libyan leader could have been a broker reading off stock quotations to a client, or a pilot going through his preflight checklist.

For Tamarkin and Jagerman, the precise, well-controlled voice was the final confirmation of something each had suspected: this man would not hesitate to carry out his threat.

“I cannot really believe, Mr. Qaddafi,” the President continued, “that a man like you. a man so proud of having carried out his revolution without bloodshed, a man of compassion and charity, can really be serious about employing this satanic device, this instrument of hell, to kill and maim millions and millions of innocent men and women.”

“Mr. President.” For the first time, there was a slight undercurrent of stridency in Qaddafi’s tone. “Why can’t you believe it?”

The President was staggered that the man could even ask the question. “It’s totally irrational, a wholly irresponsible act, sir. It’s—”

“Such as your act when you Americans dropped a similar weapon on the Japanese? Where was the compassion and charity in that? It’s all right to kill, burn, maim thousands of yellow Asiatics or Arabs or Africans, but not clean, white Americans. Is that it? Who created this satanic device, as you call it, in the first place? German Jews. Who are the only people who have ever used it? White Christian Americans. Who are the nations that stockpile these engines that can destroy the world? Your civilized, advanced, industrial societies. They are products of your world, Mr. President, not mine. And now it is we of the other world who are going to use them to right the injustices you have committed against us.”

The President was frantically scrutinizing his yellow legal pad. How inappropriate the words he had written there seemed to him now that he was actually confronted by this man. “Mr. Qaddafi.” The usually stern and confident baritone wavered. “No matter how strongly you may feel about the injustices done to the Palestinians, surely you will acknowledge that it’s not my innocent countrymen in New York who are responsible-the blacks in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Puerto Ricans, the millions of ordinary, hard-working men and women struggling there to make a living?”

“Oh yes, they are responsible, Mr. President,” came the reply. “All of them. Who is responsible for creating Israel in the first place? You Americans are. Who provided them with the arms they used in four wars against us? You Americans did. Whose money keeps them alive? Yours.”

“Do you suppose that, even if the Israelis should agree, temporarily, to withdraw, they would let you get away with this?” the President asked.

“What guarantees can you hope to have that this solution of yours can last?”

Clearly, the President’s question was one for which the Libyan was prepared. “Order your satellites that are observing my country now to study our desert along our eastern border from the seacoast to Al-Kufra. Perhaps you will find some new constructions there. My SCUD missiles are not like yours, Mr. President, they cannot travel around the world and strike a pin as yours can, but they can fly a thousand kilometers and find the coast of Israel. That is all they have to do. They are all the guarantee I will need when this is done.”

My God, the President thought, it’s even worse than I had imagined. He doodled frantically on his legal pad, hoping for some magic thought that would strike the responsive chord he had thus far been unable to find.

“Mr. Qaddafi, I have followed the progress of your revolution with genuine admiration. I know how well you’ve used your great oil wealth to bring your people material progress and prosperity.” He was groping and he knew it.

“Whatever your feelings are about New York, surely you don’t want to see your nation and your people destroyed in a thermonuclear holocaust?”

“My people are prepared to die for the cause if necessary, Mr. President, just as I am.” Again the Libyan had lapsed into English to shorten the exchange.

“Mao Tse-tung accomplished the greatest revolution in history with a minimum of bloodshed,” the President rejoined. That was a lie, but it reflected the psychiatrists’ advice. Invoke Mao, they had said, he sees himself as an Arabic Mao. “You have the same opportunity if you will be reasonable, remove your threat to New York and work with me toward a just and lasting Middle East peace.”

“Be reasonable, Mr. President?” came the answer. “Being reasonable to you means that Palestinian Arabs can be driven from their homes, can be forced to live in refugee camps for thirty years. Being reasonable means that Palestinian Arabs should stand by and watch the creeping annexation of their homeland by these Israeli settlements. Being reasonable means that we Arabs should let you Americans and your Israeli allies go on preventing the Palestinians from enjoying their God-given right to a homeland, a nation, while we continue selling you the oil to run your factories and your cars, to heat your homes. All that is reasonable. But when my brothers and I tell you, who are responsible for their misery, `Give us the justice you have denied us so long, or we will strike,’ suddenly that is unreasonable.

Suddenly, because we ask for justice, we are fanatics. You cannot understand just as you couldn’t understand when the Iranian people turned their wrath on you.”

As Qaddafi was speaking, Jagerman slipped a piece of paper up the table to the President. On it he had written the words “The greater-goal tactic?”

The phrase summarized a maneuver the Dutchman had suggested earlier: trying to persuade Qaddafi to drop his threat to New York by getting him to associate with the President on some specific plan to achieve an even greater goal than the one he was seeking. Escalate his ambitions into something beyond those he had defined. Unfortunately, no one in the National Security Council conference room had been able to suggest a practical way of applying the theory. Suddenly, as he looked at the note, an idea struck the President. It was so bold, so dramatic, it might capture Qaddafi’s imagination.

“Mr. Qaddafi,” he said, unable to conceal the excitement in his voice. “I have a proposal to make to you. Release the millions of my fellow Americans in New York from your dire menace and I will fly to Libya immediately, unescorted, in Air Force One. I, the President of the United States, will allow you to hold me as your hostage while together we work, hand in hand, to find a plan to give the world and your Palestinian brothers something even greater than what you have proposed-a real, durable peace, acceptable to all. We will do it together, and yours will be a glory greater than Saladdin’s, because it will have been won without bloodshed.”

The President’s wholly unexpected proposal stunned his advisers. Eastman was aghast. It was absolutely unthinkable: the President of the United States becoming the hostage of an Arab oil despot, locked up in some desert oasis like a commercial traveler kidnapped for ransom by the Barbary Coast pirates two hundred years ago.

Finally, Qaddafi’s voice once again filled the room. “Mr. President, I admire you for your offer. I respect you for it. But it is not necessary.

My letter is clear. Its terms are clear. That is all that we ask. There is no need for any further discussion between you and me either here or anywhere else.”

“Mr. Qaddafi.” The President almost interrupted the Libyan. “I cannot urge you strongly enough to accept my proposal. We have been in contact in the last two hours with every major leader in the world. And all your fellow Arab leaders: President Sadat, Mr. Assad, King Hussein, King Khalid, even Yassir Arafat.

All of them, without exception, condemn your initiative. You are alone, isolated as you will not be if you agree to my proposal.”

“I do not speak in their names, Mr. President.” The Libyan’s Arabic continued to flow into the room in the slow, unmodulated cadence he had employed almost from the beginning. “I speak for the people, the Arab people. It is their brothers who have been dispossessed, not those of our leaders and kings rotting in their palaces.” Suddenly there was a shift in Qaddafi’s tone, a stirring of impatience and irritation. “All this talk is useless, Mr. President. What must be done must be done.”

“We’re getting some strain,” the technician manning the voice analyzer announced.

“You had thirty years to do justice to my people and you did nothing. Now you have twentyfour hours.”

Anger seized the President in a swift, uncontrollable tide. “Mr. Qaddafi!”

To the psychiatrists’ dismay he was virtually shouting. “We will not be blackmailed. We will not be coerced by your unreasonable, impossible demands, by your outrageous action!”

A long, ominous silence followed his outburst. Then Qaddafi’s voice returned as calm and as unhurried as it had been earlier. “Mr. President, there is nothing impossible about my demands. I am not asking for Israel’s destruction. I only ask for what is just-that my Palestinian brothers have the home God meant for all people to have on the land He gave them. We Arabs were in the right for thirty years, but neither war nor political methods allowed us to achieve our objective, because we did not have the strength. Now we do, Mr. President, and either you will force the Israelis to give us the justice that is ours or, like Samson in your Bible, we will pull down the roof of the temple on ourselves and all the others that are in it.”

While Muammar al-Qaddafi was delivering his threat to the President, one of the terrorists he counted on to help carry it out if necessary was getting ready to make love in a bedroom in New York City. Why am I here?

Laila Dajani asked herself. She knew the answer. Because I’m weak. Because I lack the steel in my soul the others have, that steel Carlos always said was the one indispensable ingredient of a revolutionary. I’m fatally prone to the terrorist’s mortal sin, she admitted. I think too much.

The door opened and Michael walked in, a bath towel knotted around his slender waist, a glass of white wine in each hand. He bent down, kissed her gently, handed her her glass, then lay down on the bed beside her. For a moment they lay there in silence, Michael’s hand slowly, distractedly almost, running over the surface of her breasts.

“Michael?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Come to Quebec tomorrow.”

Michael propped himself up on his elbow and stared down at Laila. Even in the half-light of his bedroom, he could see the sorrow on her face, the nascent sparkle of tears rising in her eyes.

“Linda, for Christ’s sake, what is it with this Quebec thing? You’re obsessed with it.”

Laila rolled over, squashed out her cigarette, pulled a new one from her pack and lit it. “Michael, I told you I was superstitious, didn’t I?”

Michael let his head sink back onto his pillow. So that’s it, he thought.

“There’s an old Egyptian fortuneteller I go to over in Brooklyn. An incredible place. Once you get inside you’d think you were on the banks of the Nile. His wife is all done up in black like a Bedouin woman. Her face is tattooed. She brings you a cup of masbout, Arabic coffee.” She paused.

“He takes your cup and holds it. He asks your name, your mother’s name, your date of birth. Then he goes into a kind of trance, praying. You’re not allowed to smoke or cross your legs or your arms-that cuts the current between you. Every so often, he stops praying and talks to you.”

Laila sat up, leaning against the backrest of the bed, smoking intently.

“Michael, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you some of the things this man has predicted for me.”

“Like a secret rendezvous in Quebec?”

She ignored him.

“I went to him this morning. At the end, just before I left, he tensed up as though something terrible was happening. He said, `There is someone very close to you. A man. A young blond man.’ He said in Arabic, `He’s a messawarati.” Michael, do you know what a messawarati is?”

Michael rolled his head on his pillow. “A lecherous infidel?”

“Please, darling. Be serious. A photographer: How could he possibly have known that, Michael? He said, `He’s in very great danger here. Very soon.

Tomorrow. He must leave New York before tomorrow.”’

Laila clasped his hand, awed by the chance she was taking. “Michael, please. Go to Quebec tomorrow.”

Michael rose up again on one elbow, looking at her sorrowful face, at the two tears glistening on her cheekbones. What ridiculous, superstitious creatures women can be, he thought.

Tenderly, he kissed away each teardrop. “You’re sweet, my darling,” he said, “to think of me like that.” Then he laughed softly. “But realty I haven’t got room in my life for the prophecies of old Arab fortunetellers.”

Laila rolled over on top of him, her back and shoulders raised so that the long swirls of her hair hung down around his face, enclosing it in an auburn canopy. I tried, she thought, gazing solemnly at her lover, God knows I tried.

“Too bad, Michael,” she whispered. “Oh, too bad!”

In Washington, the President was trembling. Qaddafi’s reference to Samson’s destruction of the Temple had shaken him as nothing had since he’d watched the Libyan’s fireball exploding on the Pentagon’s screens at midnight.

“Jack,” he ordered, his words coming in a hoarse whisper. “Tell the Doomsday to arrange for some communications problems over the next few minutes. I want some time to think about this.”

When the squawk box fell silent the Chief Executive studied the faces around the table. They too were aghast. It was as if the full measure of the drama they faced had only just become apparent in the obduracy and fanaticism of the man in Libya.

“Gentleman,” the President asked, “what do you think?”

At the end of the table, Admiral Fuller seemed to pull his head down into his shirt collar like a wizened old sea turtle withdrawing into his shell.

“Sir, I think he’s only going to leave us one option-military action.”

“I don’t agree.” The Secretary of State, had intervened almost before the Admiral had finished. “There is another option, and I think we should make a decision to act on it very quickly. Instead of going on trying to reason with a very unreasonable man, we must use the precious time we have left to force some kind of an accommodation out of the Israelis that will satisfy him and save New York.”

“That, at least, has the advantage of being an initiative that requires very little time,” Bennington noted sarcastically. “Only the thirty seconds it’s going to take Begin to say no. The Agency has been pointing out for the last five years that those damn settlements were a menace to peace and were going to land us in serious trouble one day. Unfortunately, no other agency in the government wanted to do anything about them.”

For just a second, listening to his advisers, the President yearned to unleash a primal scream. Was there no crisis so terrible it couldn’t shake the agencies of the U.S. government out of their stereotyped pattern of response: the Pentagon urging us to blow the bastard to bits; State recommending we back down; the CIA trying to cover its ass the way it has been ever since Iran?

“Jack?” he said wearily to his National Security Assistant.

“I come back to what I said half an hour ago, Mr. President. The essence of this crisis is time. If we can get the Israelis to come up with some kind of concession, then maybe we can use it to get Qaddafi to lift his threat.

Or at least extend his deadline so we’ll have a better chance of finding this damn thing in New York before our time runs out.”

The President’s eyes passed over Delbert Crandell. He had no desire to read the intimation of a prophecy fulfilled that he knew he’d find on the Energy Secretary’s face. “What do you people read into this?” he asked the psychiatrists.

Tamarkin looked at the notes he had hastily jotted down while listening to Qaddafi. He was horrified by how inadequate they appeared, by how little, finally, he had to offer the President. “I think we’re dealing with an omnipotent personality here. One with a slight but by no means disabling streak of paranoia. People like that tend to have trouble handling open-ended situations. Multiple possibilities. The thing is not to give him a fulcrum on which to crystallize his actions. He’s probably counting on you to either capitulate or threaten him with destruction. In other words, to make his decision for him. If, instead, you throw a whole series of specific, peripheral problems at him he might be at a loss.”

“I’m inclined to agree with my young colleague,” Jagerman noted approvingly. “If I may, sir, I would suggest there is little to be gained by pressing him further on the why of his action. He’s quite convinced he’s right, and you’re only going to make him more intractable by arguing the point. I think you should get instead onto the how and try to distract him with a lot of low-level, semi-technical questions about how to implement his plan. You recall my reference to the ‘hamburger or chicken option’?’

The President nodded. Jagerman’s phrase sounded grotesque in the present situation, but it described a technique for handling terrorist-hostage crises that was in every secret-police manual in the world. Jagerman himself had helped formulate it. Distract the terrorists, it maintained, keep them busy dealing with an unending stream of questions and problems not related to the central point at issue. The example invariably given to demonstrate how the principle worked was the recommended response to a terrorist’s request for food: What did he want, hamburger or chicken? The leg or the wing? Rare or well done? Mustard or ketchup? On a bun? Toasted?

How about relish? Sweet or sour? Pickles? Did he take it with onions?

Distracting a terrorist with such an unceasing barrage of questions frequently helped to calm him down, to expose him to reality and, ultimately, to make him more malleable. The Dutchman added a number of refinements to the technique. For example, he always had food sent in on normal china, glasses and silverware. This, he maintained, subtly introduced an element of civility into the police-terrorist relationship.

Furthermore, he had the terrorist, where possible, wash the plates before returning them, to force him to begin responding to authority.

“If you can succeed in getting a variant of that working,” Jagerman counseled, “then you can perhaps suggest he continue with Mr. Eastman while you are talking with the Israelis.”

“We can always try,” the President replied grimly. “Get him back, Jack.”

“Mr. Qaddafi,” he began again, “there are now, as you know, fortyeight Israeli settlements in what you refer to as the occupied territories. Over ten thousand people are settled there. The logistical problems involved in moving them in the very limited time you’ve given us are staggering.”

“Mr. President.” The Libyan’s quiet, courteous tone was unchanged. “Those people set up their settlements in a few hours. You know that. They sneak in under the cover of night, and at dawn they present the world with a fait accompli. If they can go in a few hours, they can leave in twentyfour.”

“But, Mr. Qaddafi,” the President persisted, “now they have their homes, their possessions, their factories, their farms, their schools, their synagogues. You can’t expect them to walk away and leave all that in twentyfour hours.”

“I can and I do. Their property will be guarded. Once the Palestinian Arab nation is established they will be allowed to return and collect what is theirs.”

“How can we be sure that we won’t have chaos and disorder as the Israelis withdraw?”

“The people in their joy at rediscovering their homeland will preserve order.”

“Joyous they may well be, but I’m not sure that’s going to be enough to preserve order, sir. Shouldn’t we ask King Hussein to furnish Jordanian troops?”

“Certainly not. Why should that imperialistic stooge reap the glory of this?”

“How about the PLO?”

“No. They are compromising traitors. We must use the men of the Refusal Front.”

“We will need to work out arrangements very, very carefully. Know what units would be involved. Who their commanders are. Where they will come from. How they would identify themselves. How will we coordinate their movements with the Israelis? All this requires close planning and discussion.”

There was another of Tripoli’s long and unexplained silences before Qaddafi replied “You shall have it.”

“And the bomb in New York? I presume when these arrangements are made you will tell us where it is and radio instructions to your people who are guarding it to deactivate it?”

Again there was a long silence. “The bomb is set to detonate automatically at the expiration of my ultimatum. The only signal its radio is programmed to receive is a negative signal known only to me to deactivate it.”

Eastman let out a low whistle as the interpreter finished his work. “What a clever bastard! That’s his guarantee we don’t dump the missiles on him at the last moment. We have to keep him alive to save New York.”

“Either that,” Bennington answered, “or it’s a very shrewd …” He pursed his lips, thinking. “He could be lying, you know. And lying about the SCUD missiles too.” He turned abruptly to the President. “Mr. President, it would make all the difference to our planning to know if he’s lying or not.

We have a device here that we’ve developed at the Agency which could be invaluable to us if we can get him to agree to speak to you over a television linkup.”

“What is it, Tap?”

“It’s a machine that employs laser beams to scan the musculature of a man’s eyeballs at ultra-high speeds while he’s talking. It picks up certain characteristic changes in the muscle patterns that occur if a man is lying.”

The President gave Bennington an admiring smile. “You’re right. Let’s try it.”

“Mr. Qaddafi,” he said as he resumed his dialogue, “in the very complex discussions we’re going to have to have here on movements on the West Bank, it would be helpful if we could see as well as hear each other. That way we can work out our arrangements on maps and aerial photographs so that there’s no chance of error. Would you be agreeable to setting up a television link between us? We can fly in immediately the necessary equipment.”

Again there was a long pause from Tripoli. Bennington distractedly twisted a pipe cleaner in the stem of his Dunhill, silently praying that Qaddafi would agree. To his astonishment the Libyan did, with no reluctance at all.

Further, he had his own equipment immediately available in his headquarters.

Poor bastard, Bennington thought, detecting a note of pride in his reply.

Probably so caught up with technology as a plaything that he keeps forgetting how far we’re ahead of him.

While the technician on the Doomsday jet prepared to set up a television link that would relay Tripoli’s signal to the Atlantic COMSAT satellite, then back to the antennas and communication discs in the spaceage garden adjoining the CIA’s headquarters, a pair of Agency scientists wheeled their eye scanner into the National Security Council conference room.

The conferees looked on, fascinated, as they set up this latest gadget in an arsenal of weapons designed by the CIA to break down the most resistant barriers of the human conscience and force men to divulge emotions so hidden they were sometimes unaware they had them. It looked vaguely like a portable X-ray machine. Two small black metal tubes like the eyepieces of a pair of fieldglasses protruded from the top. From these, two beams of light were already dancing over the television screen on which Qaddafi’s face was expected to appear. Highintensity laser beams, they would be trained on his eyeballs and would read for the minicomputer at the heart of the scanner the slightest variations in the size or shape of their surface.

The results would be instantly compared to the control data already stored in the computer bank, and be printed out on the mini-television screen attached to the scanner.

For a few seconds, Tripoli’s television signal expanded and contracted on the screen as haphazardly as a multiplying amoeba caught under a microscope’s glare. Then, suddenly, it coalesced into a sharp image of the Libyan leader. Curiously, the sight was almost reassuring. Qaddafi appeared so boyish, so timidly serious, that it seemed inconceivable that he could carry out his threat. In his simple khaki blouse with no decoration other than his colonel’s epaulets, he looked more like a professor of tactics at the infantry school than a man who would be the avenging sword of God.

Eastman could detect no hint of strain or tension on his face. Indeed, there was only one register of feeling there, the intimation of an ironic smile trying, with minimal success, to intrude on the precise set of his mouth.

The little pinpoints of light from the scanner skated over the screen, then came to rest astride each eyeball like a pair of contact lenses.

“We’re registering,” one of the technicians stated.

This time, you son of a bitch, we’ve got you, Bennington thought, taking as he did a long, satisfied puff of his pipe.

Opposite the President, a red light glowed on the television camera relaying his image back to Tripoli.

“They’re set,” Eastman whispered.

The images of the two leaders were now projected side by side on the screens of the conference-room wall, the President trying, despite the strain, to force some indication of personal warmth onto his face, Qaddafi’s regard as devoid of emotion as a Roman bust.

“Mr. Qaddafi,” the President said, resuming the dialogue, “I think we will both find this visual link we’ve established very helpful in dealing with the difficult problems we face. When we were speaking a few moments ago, I believe you had just told me that the bomb in New York is controlled by an automatic timing device which only you can alter by a radio signal from Tripoli. Is that correct?”

Every face in the room was turned to the image of Qaddafi on the screen, the two bright lights of the scanner riveted to his eyeballs. Before he replied to the President, his right hand reached up to the pocket of his battle blouse. He unbuttoned it with almost tantalizing slowness. Then he drew a pair of dark sunglasses from its folds and, while the audience in the White House looked on in dismay, placed them defiantly over his eyes.

“Son of a bitch!” gasped one of the CIA technicians.

The smile that had been struggling for ascendancy on the Libyan’s face burst forth. “Yes, Mr. President,” he answered, “you are correct.”

Compared to the National Security Council conference room the underground command post from which Muammar al-Qaddafi was addressing the President was almost spartan in its simplicity. Not much larger than a pair of double bedrooms, it was divided in half by a chest-high cement partition topped by a thick panel of glass. Qaddafi sat in one half at a simple wooden desk on which was trained the television camera transmitting his image to Washington. Just off camera was a twenty-eightyear-old Libyan graduate student from the University of Texas who was serving as his interpreter in much the same way as the State Department Arabists were serving the President.

In the second room, five men sat at a gray metallic desk. There were no maps on the wall, no blinking telephones at their elbows, no piles of secret cables offering advice stacked before them. There wasn’t even a rug on the floor. They included Qaddafi’s Prime Minister Salam Jalloud; his chief of intelligence; Vladimir Illitch Sanchez “Carlos,” the elegant Venezuelan terrorist; and a short man with thick eyeglasses and long, unkempt blond hair. He was a German, born in a little village in the Bavarian foothills, who had found his true vocation at West Berlin’s Free University in the early sixties as a professional student radical. Among his several degrees was a doctorate in psychology, and it was that which accounted for his presence in the Villa Pietri. In return for $50,000 in a Swiss bank, he had agreed to become Qaddafi’s psychiatric adviser. The fact that Qaddafi was even speaking to the President went against his primary recommendation. It was he who had persuaded the Libyan to reject the charge’s first initiative. Qaddafi’s reluctance to agree and his instant and irrational rage at sighting the Sixth Fleet on his radar had confirmed the German’s conviction that as his Washington counterparts had suspected, Qaddafi really did want to talk to the President.

“My time. Mr. President,” Qaddafi was saying, “is as valuable as yours. I have no intention whatsoever of becoming involved in a long and revealing dialogue with your adviser Eastman while leaving you free to concentrate your energies on other things.”

“But,” the President protested, “I’ve got to talk with Mr. Begin about your note.”

The German smiled. That was exactly the reply he had told Qaddafi the American would make.

The Libyan stared at the television camera from behind his dark glasses. A faint smile twisted away at one side of his mouth. “Surely, Mr. President,”

he said, his voice suddenly chill, “you don’t mean to tell me that fifteen hours have gone by since my explosion and you have not yet started discussing the implementation of my demands with the Israelis?”

The image of the President was being screened on an ordinary commercial television set, a twenty-four-inch Philips color receiver. The Americans were delivering a tight closeup of his head and shoulders. That was the shot the psychiatrists had recommended. A close visual contact with a figure of authority often aided a terrorist negotiation.

It aided, in any case, the task of the two young men manipulating the machine which fixed a pair of light beams to the eyes of the President on the screen before them. Manufactured by the Standarten Optika of Stuttgart, the machine had come to Carlos’s attention when the West German police had used it to interrogate the suspected killers of German financier Dietrich Vallmar. With the German psychiatrist’s help, he had brought it to Tripoli.

“Of course I have,” he answered. “At great length and in great detail. And I can assure you Mr. Begin’s initial reaction is very favorable. That’s why it’s so important that I resume my discussions with him.”

One of the two technicians training the eye scanner on the President’s face started. The green line darting across the oscilloscope of the screen of his machine had taken a jagged, sawtooth pattern as it ran over the high-speed computerized printout of the President’s words. He hit a red button that allowed him to speak to Qaddafi, isolated in the other room.

“Ya sidi,” he said, “the President is lying!”

The Libyan didn’t move a facial muscle. He took off his dark glasses and leaned to the camera. “Mr. President,” he said, “I thought you were an honest, decent man. I find out you are not. Not only are you despising of our abilities to cope with the technology of your world, but you have lied to me. Further conversation between us is useless. You now have twentyfour hours left in which to put the terms of my letter into effect or the bomb will explode.”

From inside his red Avis Econoline van, the technician of the first NEST team to reach Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue surveyed the broad steps of the New York Public Library. The oscilloscope of his detector registered a steady gross gamma count of .14 millirads an hour. Yet, to his utter astonishment, there were no other trucks, no cars immobilized in front of the library. Nothing stood between the pods of his detector and its monumental staircase.

“What in hell is going on?” the uncomprehending scientist asked rhetorically.

He did not have time to answer his question before John Booth had climbed into the front of the van. He studied the oscilloscope, then the view from the van, as wholly mystified as his scientist. From the radio net, he got the helicopter confirmation: the telltale emission was coming from somewhere across the street. By now, the area was full of unmarked FBI and police cars. Two more NEST vans had driven up behind his. Each confirmed the first van’s reading.

Booth studied the scene, completely baffled. Was it possible that someone had carried a ton-and-a-half device into that building before the first van had reached the spot? He looked at the building. No, he told himself, the radiation would never get through its thick floors and ceilings to the choppers.

“Shit!” he growled. “Maybe we’ve been following some guy who had a barium milkshake who’s just got off the bus here.”

He ordered four scientists with portable detectors across the street, then followed himself in the footsteps of their FBI escort. The four men drifted through the kids on roller skates gliding along the sidewalk, earphones glued to their ears so that not a note of the disco rhythm to which they moved eluded them, past a pair of handsome blacks in Afros and a sidewalk vendor selling kitchenware.

They worked in a kind of triangular pattern, approaching the steps from different angles so that they could converge on the direction from which their readings were coming.

“It’s over there,” said the technician beside whom Booth was walking. He tilted his head toward Prudence, one of the two stone lions guarding the steps. Half a dozen people reading the morning paper or a paperback book or just staring into space sat along the granite wall behind the lion.

“It’s got to be one of them,” Booth said.

As they approached, the emanation shifted. Sure enough, one of the people on the wall, an elderly, stooped woman in a frayed black coat, had begun to shuffle down the steps. Indicating to the others to move back, Booth, the scientist and an FBI agent followed her, then as discreetly as possible drew around her. She had a gaunt, waxen face, colored only by two russet circles of rouge on her sunken cheeks; sad, jaded reminders of what might have been her vanished beauty. At the sight of the agent’s shield, she clutched to her shrunken bosom the black plastic shopping bag she was carrying. A hurt and bewildered air seized her features.

“I’m very sorry, Officer,” she stammered. “I didn’t know it was wrong to do it. I’m on welfare.”

With one of her bony hands she brushed at the wisp of gray hair dangling from under a cloth stocking cap and smiled imploringly at the bulky agent.

“Times are fearfully bad and I, I …” she stammered again, “I just didn’t see no harm in pickin’ it up to take home. I didn’t know they were government property. Honest, I didn’t.”

Booth leaned forward. “Pardon me, ma’am, what did you pick up?”

Timidly she opened her plastic shopping bag and offered it to Booth for his inspection. He looked in and saw a gray mass. He plunged in his hand and drew out the still-warm body of a dead pigeon, recognizing as he did the deadly substance dangling in the ring on its leg.

“Oh, my God!” he exclaimed. “How long ago did you pick this up?”

“Only about five minutes ago. Just before you folks come up the steps.”

Dear Christ, Booth thought, staring down at the tablet in its metallic ring. So that’s it. That’s why all those readings kept disappearing on us.

He looked pityingly at the old woman. “Ma’am, we’d like to ask you, for your own good, to come with us to the hospital. You see, some of these pigeons have bad diseases”-he patted her arm reassuringly-“but they’ll give you a fine dinner there tonight, you’ll see.”

For the third time in barely five hours, the men responsible for the search for the bomb in New York City were gathered around the desk of Quentin Dewing in the underground emergency command post.

“Harvey,” Dewing asked the director of the FBI’s New York office, “have you picked up any trace of that guy from Boston that trained in Qaddafi’s camps?”

Hudson shook his head. “Negative. And we’ve had fifty guys pounding the pavements over there in Brooklyn for the last two hours. The dockers who handled those barrels at the Brooklyn Army Terminal didn’t recognize him, either.”

“Well, widen the search. I want every belly-dancing joint and Arab restaurant from New Haven to Philadelphia checked out. I still think that’s the best thing we’ve got going.”

There was a sharp cough from the far end of the conference table. “What’s the matter, Chief?” Dewing asked Al Feldman.

The Chief of Detectives plucked at one of his nostrils avith a forefinger.

“If these guys are half as smart as you people tell us they are, the last place they’re going to be eating lunch is in some Arab restaurant. They’re probably going to a pizza joint or a Hamburger Heaven.”

“Well, we’ve got to cover everything. How about our forensic operations?

What do we have on the house where the barrels went, Chief?”

Dewing had assigned the job of sifting through the Queens house for clues to the NYPD’s forensic unit. The Hertz van that had picked up the barrel he’d turned over to an FBI forensic team flown up from the National Crime Laboratory in Washington. Both groups were responsible for picking through their targets in painstaking detail, searching for anything, a fingerprint, a hairpin, a matchbox, soil on the doormat or grease caught between the treads of the van’s tires, that could reveal something about the people who had used them.

Feldman took a black notebook from his inside pocket and laid it on the desk. “The place belongs to a retired stockbroker out in Bay Shore.

Inherited it from his sister. Woman rented it from him last August. She gave him a year’s rent in cash, so he wasn’t inclined to ask her too many questions. We had an Identikit drawing on that Arab lady who checked out of the Hampshire House this morning done up from the clerks and the maid who knew her and ran it past him. He thinks it was her.”

“The embassy in Beirut finally came up with her visa application,”

Salisbury of the CIA interrupted. “The name she registered under at the Hampshire House, the whole thing’s a fake. They’ve sent us her picture, but none of our intelligence sources have anything on her. The only thing we know is she came into the country at JFK on TWA Flight 701 November twenty-sixth.”

Dewing grunted. “Keep after her. How about the house itself, Chief?”

“From what the neighbors say, whoever was using it wasn’t around very much.

My forensic chief says there aren’t a lot of signs of life inside either.

But we do have a numbers guy on the corner, who thinks he saw a Hertz truck around there last week.”

“What sort of sewage system do they have out there?”

Feldman, barely able to suppress a laugh, turned to his questioner, John Booth. What the hell kind of a question is that? he asked himself. “City sewers.”

“I’m going to send some of my people out to have a look at them. People who are in close physical contact with the material used in this will leave radioactive traces in their urine and feces. It’s not much, but if we find something it will at least give us confirmation that this is the shipment we’re after.”

Dewing acknowledged his words with a crisp authoritative gesture and went back to Feldman. “When can we expect your report?”

“In an hour or so. They’ve dusted a couple of fingerprints. We’re scouring the neighborhood, the stores and all for people who might have known them.

And the phone company’s getting a call report together for us.”

“How about our people with the truck, Harv?”

Hudson had checked on their activities before coming to the meeting.

“They’re just setting up, Mr. Dewing. All we know at the moment is the truck had two hundred and fifty-two miles on the clock when it came back in that night. Which tells us that the bomb can be anywhere within a circle with a 125-mile radius.”

That, Dewing thought, is really helpful.

“And our efforts to follow up on the stolen ID?” he asked Feldman.

“We’ve got the dip and we’re moving in on the fence he did it for.”

“Isn’t there some way we can speed that line of investigation up?” the FBI assistant director demanded impatiently.

“Mr. Dewing, you want to be a. bit gentle here. Some of these guys, you come down too hard, too fast and they’ll shut up on you. Then you’re nowhere, my friend, nowhere at all.”

“Up there.”

Pedro Torres, the Colombian pickpocket, gestured with his head to the second story of the brick tenement across the street. He was in the back of Angelo Rocchia’s Corvette, wrists handcuffed in his lap, his hands resting protectively over his throbbing groin. Carmen, his girl, was already at the Seventy-eighth Precinct being booked.

Angelo and Rand scrutinized the building from the car’s front seat. The windows were filthy and a fire escape obstructed what little view inside the grime allowed.

“What’s it look like in there?” Angelo asked.

Torres shrugged. “Big room. One girl. Benny in there.”

The detective grunted. “Typical. They try to set up so they look like some kind of wholesale house. Secretary in a glass cage and all. Buy anything.

Cameras, TVs, power tools, rugs, auto parts, whatever. Lot of ‘em rent guns. Have sixty to seventy Saturday-night specials stashed in there. Rent ‘em out for twenty bucks a night and a cut of the take.”

He turned down Sixth Avenue and began to look for a parking space well out of the line of vision from the fence’s window.

“We’ve set ‘em up ourselves. Open a shop. Send a couple of streetwise guys into the bars. Tell the bartender, `We’re doing a job, fixing up this new place there. We need some tools, you know? Couple tools. Cost so fucking much money for drills and all. Hell, I seen one up the street there, guy wants a hundred and forty dollars for it.’ Next thing you know, a guy comes in, says, ‘Hey, you want to buy a drill?’ ‘Yeah, what kind of drill?’

‘Brand new,’ the guy replies. ‘1’m a plumber by trade. Normally I wouldn’t do this, but I gotta have money, get s^m; bus tickets. Got a sick aunt up there in the Catskills.’ ” Angelo gave a gleeful laugh, one of the first Rand had heard from the New Yorker. “Operation like that you can bring in guys like our friend there in the back seat by the carload.”

As he was talking, Angelo had deftly slipped the car into a tight parking space half a block up Sixth. “Okay,” he said, yanking on the hand brake, “bring him in.” He jerked his thumb at Torres. “A minute after I get in there. Throw a coat over his bracelets so you don’t draw a crowd.”

He took a cigar from his coat pocket and lit it, then picked an old racing form out from under the dashboard and strolled off up Sixth, his face buried in the form sheet.

He paused at the light on the corner. Up Union, just fifty yards from the fence’s building, a blue-and-white Con Ed truck was stopped. Its crewmen were setting up sawhorses and unloading a jackhammer. Must be ours, Angelo figured. At the rear corner of the building, three spades in denims, goatees, black sunglasses and floppy berets lounged against the wall, laughing loudly. They too, Angelo realized, were probably fellow detectives.

The fence operation was marked only by a sign on the door, “Long Island Trading,” and the proprietor’s name, B. Moscowitz, in the lower righthand corner. As Angelo had predicted, a mousy secretary, listlessly polishing her fingernails, sat by the door.

She looked at Angelo. Clearly, she wasn’t expecting visitors. “What can I do for you, mister?”

Benny was in the next room, behind a glass partition. He was a wizened little man in his late fifties, wearing a vest and shirtsleeves, his shirt undone, his tie askew. Horn-rimmed glasses perched on his bald head. His lower lip, the detective noted, pushed forward like that of a pouting child fighting to hold back tears.

“It’s him I want to see,” Angelo replied. Before the girl could protest, he had stepped across the room into Benny’s office.

“Who the fuck are you?” Benny snarled.

Angelo gave him the shield.

The fence’s face didn’t betray even a flicker of emotion. “Whatta you want with me? I run a legitimate business here. Legitimate trading company. I got nothing to do with cops.”

Angelo stood above his desk looking down at the agitated fence. He slowly rolled his cigar between his thumb and forefinger, striving to fix Benny with his gray eyes, giving the little man the full force of what he called his Godfather look. Finally he lifted his cigar from his mouth. “Got a friend of yours here, wants to say hello to you.”

He turned to the door, and, as he had hoped, Rand and Torres were standing there. Angelo waved them into the office.

“Who is this fucking creep?” Benny roared. “I never seen him before in my life.”

From the Godfather, Angelo became the Prosecuting Attorney. “Pedro Torres,”

he intoned, “do you recognize and identify Mr. Benjamin Moscowitz here present as the individual who requested you to pick the pocket of a commuter in the Long Island Rail Road Terminal for his identity papers Friday morning and to whom you delivered same?” The legal jargon was utterly meaningless, but it occasionally shook up guys like Benny.

Torres shifted on his feet. “Yeah,” he replied, “it’s heem.”

“The fucking spic don’t know what he’s talking about,” Benny shrieked.

“What is this anyway, some kind of setup?” He leaped to his feet, his arms flailing in the air.

Angelo turned to Rand. “Get him out of here,” he said. He pointed his cigar at the fence. “Sit down, Benny, I want to talk to you.”

The fence, still babbling a protest, settled in his chair. Angelo perched on one corner of his desk so that he towered over him. He rested there, his face set, building the edge, letting the flow of Benny’s angry words trickle away to nothingness like the last sparks spurting from a dying Roman candle. The room, he noted, was a pigsty of papers, files, overflowing trashcans.

“Look, Benny, I know from the Colombian there you’re doing fifty cards a week.” Angelo’s voice vibrated with the husky, sincere tone of a salesman trying to close an order. “But I’m not interested in fifty. I only want to know about the one you did for order last Friday.”

“Hey, what do you mean? I don’t do nothing like that.”

Angelo bestowed a cold smile on Benny that was meant to tell him that they both knew how meaningless that protest was. “Torres out there hits the guy at the terminal after the nine A.M. train. Brings the papers here. Ten o’clock some guy is renting a Hertz truck with them over on Fourth Avenue.”

“Listen, you guys got some fucking nerve.” Benny’s snarls were as defiant as ever, but under their surface Angelo detected the first tremulous quiver of concern.

“This is a legitimate shop here. I got records. All kinds of records. Tax records. You want to see my records?”

“Benny, I don’t want to see nothing. I just want to know where that card went. It’s very important to me, Benny.” An understated sense of menace seeped into the friendly salesman’s tone on the last words, but if it frightened the fence, he gave no indication of it.

“I didn’t do nothing wrong. I’m a secondhand dealer. I got all that stuff there, legitimate.” He waved at the vast jumble of goods he was fencing.

“Benny.” There was no friendly intimacy left in Angelo’s voice now. “I don’t give a fuck what you’ve got here. Talk to me about this day, this one day, last Friday. Torres there comes in with some ID he found, right? We all know he found it. And it went right back out. Where, Benny? Where did it go?”

Behind Angelo the office door opened and closed softly. It was Rand. He had turned Torres over to a backup team downstairs. The mousy secretary, Angelo noted, was still doing her nails as though nothing unusual was happening.

She must be used to seeing cops in here, he thought. Her boss probably gets busted all the time and gets off with a good lawyer.

“I don’t know nothing about that.”

“Benny.” Angelo waved his cigar at an “Out to Lunch” sign behind the office door. “You don’t cooperate with us, we’re going to close you down. You’re going to be flying that thing for a month.”

Benny sat, despondent but defiant, in his chair.

“We’ll close you down, Benny. And if we do, I hope you got a lot of fire insurance.” Very slowly, very deliberately, Angelo scattered the ashes from his cigar over some of the rubbish strewn on the floor. “Real firetrap you got here. Owner’s away, fires happen, you know what I mean?”

Benny paled. “You son of a bitch. You wouldn’t …

“Who said anything?” Angelo asked, flicking some more ashes on the papers on the fence’s desk. “Hell of a fire this place’d make, though.”

“I’ll get you on a civilian complaint. Tell ‘em you threatened to burn me out.”

Angelo remembered Feldman’s whispered injunction a few hours earlier. “You know what you can do with your civilian complaint, Benny? You can shove it up your ass.”

The fence blinked, perplexed. He bad been arrested six times and walked each time. This time there was an element of menace, of coercion, he hadn’t experienced before. “Okay,” he said, resignation creeping into his voice.

“I don’t keep much cash around here, but we’ll make a deal.”

“Benny.” Angelo’s voice was low but firm. “That’s not the kind of deal I’m talking about. I don’t give a shit what you’re doing in here. I don’t give a shit how many welfare checks you’re making, whatever. I only want to know one thing, Benny: where did that card go?”

“Hey,” Benny said, mustering what defiance remained. “You gotta let me call my lawyer. I got a right to call my lawyer.”

“Sure thing, Benny.” The mirthless smile spread over Angelo’s teeth. “Call your lawyer.” The cigar came out of the detective’s mouth. With a low chuckle, he tapped the ashes on the fence’s desk. “What is he, anyway, your lawyer-some kind of fucking fireman?”

The dark-brown eyes that had been so full of fury a few minutes before were soft and liquid now, brimming with tears. Angelo studied his quarry. There came in every interrogation a critical moment like this when a man hovered on the brink, when one deft thrust could nudge him over. Or when, afraid of the consequences of giving somebody up, he’d step back, go in and take the collar. The detective leaned close to Benny, real warmth on his features this time. His voice was a hoarse seductive whisper. “All I need to know is where that card went, Benny. Then you and I got no problems.”

The lip, the lower lip, thrust out in its permanent pout, quivered slightly. The fence’s chin sank into his chest. It remained there awhile before he looked up at the detective. “Fuck it,” he said, “bust me.”

“Angelo.” It was Rand, his voice as soft and well modulated as that of a bank vice-president extending a new client a line of credit. “Perhaps you could let Mr. Moscowitz and me have a word together before we take him in?”

The detective looked irritably at the younger man, then at the fence. A sense of impotent rage, of humiliation, caused by his failure in front of Rand overwhelmed him. “Sure, kid,” he replied, making no effort to conceal his bitterness. “Talk to the motherfucker if you want.” He got up from Benny’s desk, his joints creaking, and walked wearily to the door to the anteroom. “Try to sell him a little fire insurance while you’re at it.”

“Mr. Moscowitz,” Rand said as the door closed behind his partner, “you are, I presume, of the Jewish faith?” He let his eyes rest on the gold Star of David peeking through the fence’s open shirt.

Benny looked at him, stunned. What the fuck have we got here, he thought scornfully, some kind of professor or something, talking like that, “of the Jewish faith”? His chin thrust defiantly forward. “Yeah. I’m Jewish. So what?”

“And you are, I presume, concerned about the security and well-being of the State of Israel?”

“Hey,” Benny’s poise was returning. “What are you cops doing? Selling bonds for Israel?”

“Mr. Moscowitz.” Rand leaned forward, his arms resting on the fence’s desk.

“What I’m about to tell you, I’m telling you in the strictest confidence, because I think you of all people should know it. It is of far greater concern to the State of Israel than the sale of a few bonds.”

Angelo was watching them through the glass panels. Benny seemed first skeptical, then concerned, then intensely interested. Finally his puckered little face exploded with emotion. He leaped up from his desk, barged through the door into the anteroom, headed past Angelo toward the window without even glancing at the detective. He thrust an angry outstretched arm at the window.

“It was a fucking Arab son of a bitch who wanted it.” He pronounced the word A-rab. “Hangs out there in that bar down the street!”

Tiens, General Henri Bertrand thought. Our cardinal has metamorphosed into Sacha Guitry going to Maxim’s. Once again he was in the elegant study of PaulHenri de Serre, the nuclear physicist who had supervised the construction and initial operations of Libya’s Frenchbuilt nuclear reactor. This time de Serre was dressed in a burgundy velvet dinner jacket and black tie. On his feet, the director of the SDECE noted, were black velvet pumps, their toes embroidered with gold brocade.

“So sorry to keep you waiting.” De Serre’s greeting was effusive, particularly so in view of the fact that Bertrand’s visit had interrupted a small sit-down dinner he was offering a group of friends. “We were just finishing dessert.” He went to his desk and picked up a mahogany humidor. “Do have a cigar,” he said, opening its heavy lid. “Try one of the Davidoff Chateau-Lafites.

They’re excellent.”

While Bertrand carefully prepared the cigar, the scientist stepped to the bar and poured two balloons of cognac from a crystal decanter. He offered one to Bertrand, then sank into a leather armchair opposite him, savoring as he did his first taste of his own cigar. “Tell me, any progress on the matter we spoke of this morning?”

Bertrand sniffed his cognac. It was superb. His eyes were half closed, a weary, melancholy gaze on his face. “Virtually none at all, I’m afraid.

There was one point I thought I should review with you, however.” The fatigue of his long and difficult day had weakened the General’s voice.

“That early breakdown that forced you to remove the fuel rods.”

“Ah, yes.” De Serre waved his cigar expansively. “Rather embarrassing that, since the fuel in question was French-made. Most of our uranium fuel, as you are perhaps aware, is American-made.”

Bertrand nodded. “I was somewhat surprised you hadn’t mentioned the incident in our chat this morning.”

“Well, cher ami”-there was no indication of concern or discomfiture in de Serre’s reply-“it’s such a technical, complex business I really didn’t think it was the sort of thing you were interested in.”

“I see.”

The conversation between the two men drifted on inconclusively for fifteen more minutes. Finally, with a weary sigh, Bertrand drained his cognac glass and got to his feet.

“Well, cher monsieur, you must excuse me once again for imposing on your time, but these matters …” Bertrand’s voice dwindled away. He started for the door, then paused to stare in rapt wonder at the bust glowing in its cabinet in the center of the room.

“Such a magnificent piece,” he remarked. “I’m sure the Louvre has few like it.”

“Quite true.” De Serre made no attempt to conceal his pride. “I’ve never seen anything there to match it.”

“You must have had an awful time persuading the Libyans to give you an export permit to take it out of the country.”

“Oh!” The scientist’s voice seemed to ring with the memory of recollected frustrations. “You can’t imagine how difficult it was.”

“But you finally managed to persuade them, did you not?” Bertrand said, chuckling softly.

“Yes. After weeks, literally weeks of arguing.”

“Well, you are a lucky man, Monsieur de Serre. A lucky man. I really must be on my way.”

The General strolled to the door. His hand was on the knob when he stopped.

For a moment he hesitated. Then he spun around. There was no hint of fatigue on his face now. The eyes that were usually half closed were wide open, glimmering with malice.

“You’re a liarl”

The scientist paled and tottered half a step backward.

“The Libyans didn’t give you an export permit to take that bust out of the country. They haven’t given anybody a permit to take anything out of there for the past five years!”

De Serre staggered backward across the room and collapsed in his leather armchair. His usually florid features glistened with the clammy pallor of the physically ill; the hand that clutched his cognac glass quivered lightly.

“This is preposterous!” he gasped. “Outrageous!”

Bertrand towered above him like Torquemada contemplating a heretic stretched out on his rack. “We spoke to the Libyans. And incidentally had a chance to learn about your misadventures in India. You’ve been lying to me,” he intoned, “since I walked in that door this morning. You’ve been lying about that reactor and how the Libyans cheated on it, and I know damn well you have.” The General was following his instincts, stabbing in the dark for the target the inquisitor in him told him was there. He leaned down and placed his powerful thumbs in the ridges of the scientist’s collarbones. “But you’re not going to lie anymore, my friend. You’re going to tell me everything that happened down there. Not in an hour. Not tomorrow morning. Right now.”

The General squeezed de Serre’s collarbones so hard he squirmed in pain.

“Because if you don’t, I shall personally see to it that you spend the rest of your life in Fresnes Prison. Do you know what prison is like?”

The word “prison” brought a wild, almost hallucinated flicker to de Serre’s eyes. “They don’t serve Davidoffs and Remy Martins after dinner at Fresnes, cher am!. What they do after dinner at Fresnes is sit around and bugger helpless old bastards like you silly.”

Bertrand felt the panic beginning to overwhelm the man. It was now, in these first instants of fear and hysteria, that all the advantages were with the inquisitor. Break him, the General’s instincts told him, break him quickly before he can start to reassemble his shattered psyche. Those long-honed instincts also suggested where the trembling man in the armchair would be most vulnerable.

“You think you’re going to retire in a few months, don’t you?” He almost hissed the words. “And you’re going to need every sou of your pension to go on living like this, aren’t you? I know because I spent the afternoon studying your bank accounts. Including the secret one you’ve been building up illegally in the Cosmos Bank in Geneva.”

De Serre gasped.

“You’re going to cooperate with me, Monsieur de Serre. Because if you don’t, I’m going to ruin you. By the time I’m finished with you, your wife won’t have enough money to bring you oranges out at Fresnes.”

Bertrand relaxed the pressures on de Serre’s collarbones and allowed his voice to take on a more gentle tone. “But if you do cooperate, I’ll promise you this. What brings me here is very important. So important that I shall go personally to the President of the Republic and intercede with him on your behalf. I’ll see that this is written off as completely as your little episode in India was.”

De Serre’s face was gray now. His chest heaved twice and his jaw fell open.

My God, Bertrand thought, the bastard is going to have a heart attack on me. A gagging sound rumbled up from the depths of de Serre’s bowels. The scientist let his cognac glass tumble to the floor and clapped his hand to his mouth to staunch the flow of vomit that spurted through his fingers and cascaded in a vile-smelling yellow-green stream down his burgundy dinner jacket’s lapels and onto the lap of his black trousers. Desperately, he pawed at his pocket for a handkerchief.

Bertrand grabbed his own handkerchief to clean him up, but the scientist had already half collapsed, holding his head in his hands, his chest shaking with sobs.

“Oh God, oh God!” The voice was shrill. “I didn’t want to do it. They made me!”

Bertrand picked up the cognac glass, went to the bar and filled it with Fernet Branca, the dark-brown liqueur the French use to settle queasy stomachs. He had his man. There was no need to continue playing the Spanish Inquisitor. He brought the glass back to the shaking scientists. As de Serre gratefully sipped it, Bertrand dabbed at the worst of the mess on his dinner jacket.

“If you were coerced,” he said, his tone as reassuring as that of an aging family physician at the bedside of a familiar patient, “it will make everything easier. Begin at the beginning and tell me exactly what happened.”

De Serre sobbed. “I didn’t want to,” three more times before he was able to continue.

“Every weekend I used to go down to Leptis Magna. One could find things occasionally in the sands there, particularly after a storm.” He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, fighting to regain his composure. “There was a Libyan guard I met there. Sometimes, for a few dinars, he’d indicate where I could find things. Then one day he asked me into his but for tea.

He had that bust.” He pointed to the stone head glowing in its cabinet with what seemed now a mocking beauty. For a pathetic instant, de Serre stared at it as an older man might look at a younger woman with whom he is desperately in love at the moment of parting. “He offered it to me for ten thousand dinars.”

“An insignificant sum, 1 suppose, for such a piece?”

“God, yes.” De Serre sniffled. “It’s worth millions. Two weeks later, I was going to Paris for the Pentecost weekend. The Libyans had never, never looked at my bags, so I decided to take it with me.”

“And at the airport, Customs went right for your bags?”

“Yes.” De Serre seemed puzzled by the swiftness of Bertrand’s observation.

“Why wouldn’t they, since they had set you up? And then what happened?”

The wild, terrified look that had swept de Serre’s face earlier at the mention of the word “prison” illuminated his features with a fear akin to that of a trapped animal. He gagged and gulped at the Fernet Branca.

“They put me in prison.” The man, Bertrand saw, was becoming hysterical.

“Their prison was a black hole. A black hole with no light and no windows.

I couldn’t even stand up. There was nothing in it, no bed, no toilet bowl, nothing. I had to live in my own excrement.” De Serre shook. A touch of madness glowed on his face now, a glimpse of how close he must have come to insanity in that hole. Poor son of a bitch, Bertrand thought. He knew something about holes like that. No wonder he almost went over the edge when I mentioned the word “prison.” The scientist’s fingers clutched the flesh of Bertrand’s arms. “There were rats in there. In the dark I could hear them. I could feel them brushing against me. Biting me.” He shrieked involuntarily at his recollection of the rats’ nibbling bites, their jabbing little paws. “They gave me rice once a day. I had to eat it with my fingers before the rats could get it.” De Serre was crying uncontrollably now. “I got dysentery. For three days I sat in a corner in my own shit screaming at the rats.

“Then they came for me. They said I had violated their antiquities law.

They refused to let me call the consul. They said I would either have to spend a year in a jail like that or …”

“Or help them divert plutonium from the reactor?”

“Yes.”

The word was a quick, despairing gasp. Bertrand rose, took de Serre’s empty glass and refilled it with Fernet Branca.

“After what they had put you through, who can blame you?” he said, passing the glass to the trembling scientist. “How did you do it?”

De Serre took a gulp of the drink, then sat still a moment, panting, trying to regain his composure.

“It was relatively simple. The most frequent problem in any light-water reactor is faulty fuel rods. Some failure in the cladding that surrounds them. The fission products that build up in there as the fuel burns leak out through the fault into the reactor’s cooling water and contaminate it.

We pretended that had happened in our case.”

“But,” Bertrand said, thinking back to his talk with his scientific adviser, “those reactors are such complex machines. They have such an array of safety devices built into them. How did you manage such a thing?”

De Serre shook his head, still trying to force the ugly images of the last few minutes from his mind. “Cher monsieur, the reactors themselves are perfect. They are equipped with so many marvelous safety systems they are, indeed, inviolable. It’s the little things around them that are always vulnerable. It’s like …” de Serre paused. “Years ago, I had a dear friend who raced Formula One cars. I was with him once at the Grand Prix in Monte Carlo. He was racing with Ferrari then, and they had given him a superb new twelve-cylinder prototype. Worth millions, it was. The car broke down the first time he went past the Hotel de Paris. Not because anything was wrong with Monsieur Ferrari’s beautiful engine. But because a two-franc rubber gasket failed to hold.

“In this case, we started with the instruments that measure the radioactivity in each of the reactor’s three fuel compartments. They’re like all instruments of that sort. They work on rheostats based on a zero setting. By simply altering the setting upward, we arranged to have the instrument tell us there was radioactivity-when, of course, there wasn’t any. We drew off a sample of the cooling water and sent it to the lab for analysis. Since the lab was run by the Libyans, they gave us the answer we wanted.”

“How about the inspectors and safeguards of the United Nations in Vienna?”

“We notified the International Atomic Energy Agency that we were shutting down the reactor to remove a faulty fuel charge. By mail, of course, to win a few days. As we had suspected they would, they sent out a team of inspectors to watch us make the change.”

“How did you convince them that something was really wrong with your fuel?”

“We didn’t have to. We had the printouts from the faked meters which we then set back to their zero setting. We had the lab results. And the fuel itself was so radioactive, who would want to get near it?”

“And they didn’t suspect that you were faking?”

“The only thing they got suspicious about was the fact that all three of the reactor’s fuel charges went bad at the same time. You see, the fuel is loaded into three completely sealed-off compartments. But the fuel had all come from the same source, so it was conceivable. Barely, but conceivable.”

“And how did you get the fuel rods out of the storage pond after they’d left their cameras there taking pictures every fifteen minutes?”

“The Libyans had worked that out. The cameras the IAEA use are Austrian-made, Psychotronics. The Libyans bought half a dozen of them through an intermediary. Each camera has two lenses, a wide-angle and a normal, and they are set to go off in a sequence. The Libyans listened to the IAEA’s cameras with very sensitive stethoscopes until they had worked out the sequence. Then with their own cameras they shot the same scene the IAEA’s cameras were shooting from exactly the same spot. They blew up big prints and placed them in front of the IAEA’s cameras, so what those cameras were doing, in effect, was taking a picture of a picture.”

“And so they took out the fuel rods at their leisure.” Again Bertrand thought back to his conversation with his scientific adviser. “But how did they fool the inspectors when they came back to see if the rods were still there?”

“Quite simply. When they took the real fuel rods out they put dummy rods treated with cobalt 60 back into the pond. They give off the same bluish glow, the Czerinkon effect, that the real fuel rods do. And they give an identical reading on the gamma-ray detectors the IAEA inspectors put into the pond to check what’s in there.”

Bertrand could not suppress a glimmer of admiration for the Libyans’

ingenuity. “How did they separate out the plutonium?” The hostility had left his voice now, replaced by a sympathy for the shattered man before him.

“I wasn’t involved in that at all. I only saw the place where they did it once. It was in an agricultural substation fifteen miles up the seacoast from the plant. They had a set of designs for a small reprocessing plant they got in the United States. A company over there, Phillips Petroleum, circulated them in the sixties. They contained very detailed sketches and designs of all the components in the process. They had made shortcuts.

Neglected quite a number of basic safety precautions. But the fact is, everything you need to build a plant like that is available on the world market. There is nothing that’s required that’s so exotic as to be unobtainable.”

“Isn’t all that terribly dangerous?” The director of the SDECE thought back to his young scientist’s warning in the morning about radiation.

De Serre was suddenly distracted by the stench of the vomit on his dinner jacket, an acrid reminder of the nightmare through which he had just passed. “God, I’ve got to get out of these clothes,” he said. “Look, they were volunteers, all of them. Palestinians. I shouldn’t wish to write an insurance policy on their lives. In five, ten years …” De Serre shrugged. “But they got their plutonium.”

“How many bombs would they be able to make with it?”

“They told me they were reprocessing two kilograms of plutonium a day.

Enough for two bombs a week. That was back in June. Altogether, allowing for error, I should say they should have been able to get enough for forty bombs out of there.”

Bertrand whistled softly, spilling as he did the ashes of his Davidoff.

“Mon Dieu! Could you recognize any of those people in a photograph?”

“Perhaps. The man I dealt with was a Palestinian, not a Libyan. Heavy fellow with a moustache. Spoke perfect French.”

“Get out of those clothes,” Bertrand ordered. “You’re coming to the Boulevard Mortier with me.”

The scientist staggered to his feet, vomit dripping from his filth-covered pants, and started for the door. “I’ll go and change.”

Bertrand followed him. “I trust,” he said, “that in the circumstances you won’t mind if I accompany you.”

There comes a time in every international crisis when the President of the United States feels the need to get away for a few moments from his formal circle of advisers, to isolate himself with the one or two intimates with whom he feels totally at ease, in whose judgment and candor his confidence is total. In the dark moments after Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt inevitably turned to the frail figure of Harry Hopkins. The voice that Jack Kennedy listened to in the White House corridors during the Cuban Missile Crisis was that of his brother Bobby. Now, in the aftermath of his disastrous phone call with Qaddafi, the President was alone with Jack Eastman, pacing slowly up and down the colonnaded terrace linking the West Wing to the Executive Mansion.

The afternoon sun was still warm, and all around them melting snowdrops pattered to the ground with the gentle rustle of a light rain. The President was silent, his hands thrust into his pockets. At the end of the colonnade, a Secret Service agent, arms folded across his chest, kept a discreet watch.

“You know, Jack,” the President said finally, “I got the feeling we’re like a guy who’s got some obscure virus and none of the miracle drugs his doctor recommends seem to do anything for it.” He stopped and looked across the White House gardens toward the Ellipse. Somewhere down there was the national Christmas tree he was supposed to light in a couple of hours, a reassuring annual demonstration of hope, an affirmation of the constancy of certain values his nation liked to think it stood for in good times and bad. Hope, it occurred to him, was in precious short supply at the moment.

He stopped and threw an arm around Eastman’s shoulder. “Where do we go from here?”

Eastman had been waiting for the question. “Well, one place I don’t think we go is back to him. You’d have to crawl. And despite what the doctors say, I don’t think he’s going to be reasoned out of this. Not after listening to him.”

“Neither do I―” The President withdrew his hand and ran it through his wavy hair. “That leaves us Begin, doesn’t it?”

“Begin or those people in New York finding that damn thing., The two men resumed their pacing.

“We offer Begin some kind of ironclad guarantee of his state inside the ‘sixty-seven borders if he’ll agree to get out of the West Bank. Get the Soviets to subscribe to it, which they certainly will. It’s the only reasonable solution to that damn mess out there anyway.” The President waited for his friend and adviser’s reaction.

“It is.” Eastman shook his head. “But in these circumstances? I just don’t see Begin agreeing. Not unless you’re prepared to pull out all the stops.

Remember what General Ellis said last night? Are you ready to go in there and get those people out if he refuses? Or at least threaten to?”

Again the President was silent. The implications of what Eastman had just said were not pleasant to contemplate. But, he thought grimly, contemplating the thermonuclear destruction of New York was far worse.

“I’ve got no choice, Jack. I’ve got to go after him. Let’s get back to the conference room.”

William Webster of the FBI was just hanging up his phone when they returned.

“What’s up?” Eastman asked.

“It was New York. There’s a bomb up there all right. They just picked up traces of radioactivity around a house out in Queens where it was apparently hidden for a few hours last Friday.”

By the standards of the city he administered, the office of the Mayor of New York was miniscule, smaller than that of many a secretary in the great glass sheaths of Wall Street and mid-Manhattan. Abe Stern sat in it now, staring at the oil of Fiorello La Guardia on the wall opposite him, fighting to control the anger and frustration surging through his nervous system. Just as the President was, he too was making a determined effort to put on a fagade of normality. For the past thirty minutes it had consisted of talking to the City Hall press corps gathered like a swarm of angry hornets around his antique cherry-wood desk, trying to explain the logistics of snow removal. He saw with relief the last of the reporters disappear and ordered in his next visitor, the Manager of his Budget Bureau. “What do you want?” he snapped at the mildmannered, bespectacled CPA.

“The Police Commissioner wants to mobilize his force for some kind of emergency, Your Honor.”

“Well, let him.”

“But,” the Budget Manager protested nervously, “that means we’ll have to pay them overtime.”

“So what? Pay it.” Stern was beside himself with exasperation.

“But, my goodness, do you realize what that will do to the budget?”

“I don’t give a damn!” Stern was almost shouting. “Give the Commissioner what he asks for, for God’s sake!”

“All right, all right,” the intimidated accountant said, opening his briefcase, “but, in that case, I’ve got to have your signature on the authorization.”

Stern grabbed the paper from his hand and stabbed at it with his pen, shaking his head in dismay. The last man on earth, he thought, the very last, will be a bureaucrat.

As the man left, Stern turned his back on him and looked out across the snow-covered lawn of City Hall down to the old Tweed Courthouse, an enduring monument to the potential for graft inherent in his office. I can’t stand this anymore, he thought. He jabbed at one of the buttons on his telephone console. “Michael,” he asked, “where the hell is that guy who was going to tell us how to evacuate this place?

“Tell him to wait,” the Mayor ordered when he heard the answer. “I’m coming, too.” In a flash, Stern was into the pantry beside his office-its refrigerator stocked with tomato juice, the only drink he consumed-down a flight of stairs and out of the building by his semisecret side entrance.

Five minutes later, he was being buckled into a helicopter on top of Police Plaza, Oglethorpe beside him, the Police Commissioner and Lieutenant Walsh in the back. Entranced, he watched as slowly his city took shape below him in pace with the chopper’s thudding ascent into the afternoon sky. He could see the tight cluster of Chinatown, so closely woven together that it looked as if it had been constructed with Tinker Toys; the Fulton Fish Market and the brownish-gray wakes of the shipping along the East River; then Wall Street and Exchange Place, and all around them, reflecting back the glory of the afternoon sun, the proud glass-and-steel cylinders of lower Manhattan. This city’s got so much going for it, Stern thought, so much energy, such strength and vitality. His eyes studied the rectangular canyons below, the yellow forms of the cabs clogging the streets, the scurrying figures of his people on the sidewalks, recklessly darting through traffic. Ahead, he caught a glimpse of a Staten Island ferry scuttling like a sand crab over the slate-gray surface of the harbor. It just wasn’t possible, Abe Stern told himself, it wasn’t possible that some distant fanatic would destroy all this. He blinked, feeling the sting in his eyes, hearing as he did the jabbering of the Civil Defense expert beside him interrupting his nightmare.

“The subways are apparently going to be a problem,” Oglethorpe was remarking, “unless we can find a way to run the evacuation without telling people what’s going on.”

“Not tell people what’s going on?” The Mayor started to shout and not just to make himself heard over the thump of the rotors. “Are you crazy? You can’t do anything in this town without telling people what’s going on. I want to use those subways, I gotta tell the head of the Transit Workers his people got to do special shifts. ‘Emergency?’ he’s going to say to me.

‘What’s the emergency?’ And then he’s going to say, ‘Hey, listen, I gotta tell Vic Gottbaum and the Municipal Workers.’ And Gottbaum’s gonna say, ‘Listen, I can’t keep this from Al Shanker and the teachers.’ “

The Police Commissioner leaned forward. “That’s his problem, Abe. At that point we haven’t got a train driver left in the city, you realize that?”

Stern spun angrily around to confront his Police Commissioner. He was about to yell something, then stopped himself. Instead, he turned back and crumpled dejectedly into his seat.

“Our only hope is a highway mode evacuation.” Oglethorpe was looking down at the Battery. “But down here we’ve got some real problems. The Holland and Brooklyn Battery Tunnels, our best escape routes, only have two lanes each. We figure the best you can do is seven hundred fifty vehicles per lane hour, calculate five people to a vehicle, that’s fifteen thousand people an hour.” Oglethorpe stopped. “We’ve got about a million people down here to clear. It’s going to be a terrible scene. You’ll have to have awfully good police control. I mean, your officers will have to be ready to shoot the people who want to break the line and disrupt things.”

Do that, Walsh thought grimly, and you’ll have to shoot nine tenths of the people in the city. And some of them are going to shoot right back.

They were skimming up the Hudson now, passing midtown. “Up here we’re in better shape,” Oglethorpe offered hopefully. “We’ve got six lanes in the Lincoln Tunnel, nine on the George Washington Bridge and twelve between the Major Deegan and Bruckner Expressways. That would give us an outflow of about a hundred thousand people an hour.” Oglethorpe was getting hoarse from shouting over the rotors; yet he plowed on, a determined slave to his facts and figures, to all those years down there in Washington making things work on the charts and computers. “We’ll need plenty of police to handle the movement on the ramps. Helicopters to monitor the traffic flow.”

Abe Stern wasn’t listening anymore. He turned again in his seat to face the Police Commissioner. His old friend’s face mirrored what he had expected to see, the reflection of his own despair.

“It isn’t going to work, is it, Michael?”

“No, Abe, it’s not.” Bannion looked down at the rooftops of the tenements crowding the Upper West Side, the snow-filled sweep of the park. “Maybe thirty, forty years ago. A different time. A different city. Maybe we would have had the discipline then, I don’t know. Now?” Sadly he shook his head.

“Now, there’s no way we can do it. We’ve all changed too much.”

Oglethorpe, ignoring their exchange, rattled on about the need for good, disciplined crowd control, about the right system to manage the flow to the bridges.

“Oh, shut up!” Stern barked. The jolted bureaucrat blushed. “The whole thing is crazy. We’re wasting our time. We’re not going to evacuate this city. I’m going back to tell the President to forget it. We’re stuck here and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.” He leaned forward and gave a sharp jab to the pilot. “Turn this thing around,” he ordered. “Take us back to the plaza.”

The helicopter pivoted in a tight arc. As it did, the panorama of Manhattan Island below them seemed to tilt end on end for an instant, rising up to meet the horizon, a flashing insight, Abe Stern reflected, into the upside-down world they were living in.

On the surface the scene in the spacious sitting room six thousand eight hundred seventy-five miles from New York City was one of touching domestic tranquility. Menachem Begin’s youngest daughter, Hassia, sat at the grand piano of his official residence entertaining her father with the crystalline notes of a Chopin etude. A menorah, two of its eight candle branches flickering was set in the window. Begin himself had lit the candles just an hour earlier to mark the first night of Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights.

He was sitting now in a leather wing chair, legs crossed, chin resting in the cat’s cradle of his folded fingers, apparently wholly absorbed in his daughter’s music. In fact his mind was miles away, where it had been all day, on the crisis confronting his nation. His armed forces were on alert.

Just before he sat down he had talked with the military governor of the West Bank and the embassy in Washington. The West Bank was quiet; if the Palestinians who were to benefit from Qaddafi’s appalling initiative were aware of what was going on, they gave no indication of it. So, too, was Washington. Nothing, the embassy reported, had leaked out to indicate to the United States’s public the crisis at hand. Of even greater concern to the Israeli Prime Minister was the fact that the embassy’s usually reliable sources inside the White House had revealed nothing of the debates in the government’s inner councils.

His daughter finished her etude with a flourish. Begin rose, walked to the piano and kissed her gently on the forehead. As he did, his wife appeared in the doorway.

“Menachem,” she announced, “the President of the United States is calling.”

Hassia saw her father stiffen the way he often did when he was about to review a guard of honor, then march from the room. He settled into the office where he had taken the President’s first call and listened in stolid silence to his proposal for a solution to the crisis. He would call an emergency joint session of Congress. The United States would offer Israel the ironclad guarantee of its nuclear umbrella inside the 1967 frontiers.

The Chairman of the Central Committee had already agreed to associate the Soviet Union publicly and formally with the U.S. declaration. In return, the Israeli government would announce its immediate, unilateral decision to withdraw its forces, administration and settlements from the occupied territories and return them to Arab jurisdiction. Begin paled visibly listening to the President, but otherwise he appeared completely composed.

“In other words, Mr. President,” he said when the American had finished, “you are asking me and my people to yield to a tyrant’s blackmail.”

“Mr. Begin,” the President rejoined, “what I am asking you to do is to accept the only reasonable solution to the gravest international crisis the world has ever faced.”

“The only reasonable solution was the one we were prevented from carrying out this morning by the Soviet Union-with, or without, your nation’s complicity.” Again the Jewish leader pronounced the words without heat, nothing in his manner indicating the interior storm shaking him.

“If that were a reasonable solution,” the President replied, “I could — and would — have invoked it hours ago. But my first consideration in this crisis, Mr. Begin, is to save lives, the lives of six million innocent people in New York — and, indeed, the lives of two million equally innocent Libyans.”

“But you are asking us to abandon the fundamentals of our national sovereignty in response to an action which is criminal, which is without precedent in history, which you yourself told me this morning jeopardizes the very foundations of world peace and international order.”

“My proposal doesn’t impinge on your nation’s sovereignty, Mr. Begin.” The Prime Minister could sense the American’s exasperation. “Israel has no claims to sovereignty over the West Bank and it never has had. Those lands were given to the Arabs of Palestine by the United Nations in 1947 at the same time your people were given a state.”

“I’m sorry, the United Nations did not give those lands, or any other lands, to the Jewish people.” There was a confidence born of belief, of deep conviction, in the Israeli leader’s voice. “Those lands were given to the Jewish people by the God of our forefathers, once and forever.”

“Surely, Mr. Begin,” the President protested, “you cannot as a responsible leader of the twentieth century, of the thermonuclear age, be pretending to order the world on the basis of a forty-century-old religious legend?”

Begin adjusted his tie and leaned back in his chair. “That legend, as you call it, has sustained us, nourished, preserved us, united as a distinct people, for four thousand years. However difficult it may be for you to comprehend, Mr. President, for a Jew to have the right to settle on this land, on any part of it, is as indispensable an attribute of his nation’s sovereignty as an American’s right to travel from New York to California.”

“To settle on another people’s land? Land that has been theirs for two thousand years? To deprive them of the very right of national existence for which your own people claimed and fought for so many generations? All that in the name of an event, a religious moment, which may, or may not, have ever taken place? Surely you can’t be serious?”

“I have never been more serious. But what is at issue here is not those settlements you so oppose. They are just a handful of people, finally. They do nobody any harm. You are trying to force another nation to an act it refuses for moral reasons, for reasons which go to the core of its right to exist. Are we or are we not a sovereign land? If we are forced to crawl out of the West Bank before a totalitarian dictator-and need I remind you of our experience at the hands of such men? — you will turn us into slaves, destroy our belief in ourselves and our nationhood.”

“My proposal, Mr. Begin, offers your nation the very thing it has wanted so long, a firm guarantee of its survival. It will reinforce your national will, not weaken it.” The American’s slow, precise enunciation revealed to the Israeli how hard he was struggling to control his emotions.

“Guarantees of our survival, Mr. President? What faith do you think my people are going to have in your guarantees after they’ve seen that you, the one nation in the world that was supposed to be our friend, our ally, have coerced us into acting against our will, our interests, our very right to survive? Why-” Begin hesitated to say what be was about to say but the intensity of his feelings was so deep he couldn’t restrain himself-“it’s as if Franklin Roosevelt had said to my people, ‘Go to those camps. I’ll guarantee Hitler’s good behavior to you.”’

The President’s control over his impatience was slipping away again, his frustration and anger at being trapped in this seemingly hopeless dilemma beginning to tell on him. “Mr. Begin, I am not questioning Israel’s right to survive. What I am questioning is Israel’s right to continue a policy which is nothing other than a cold-blooded, calculating effort to annex another people’s land. Those settlements of yours have no valid justification whatsoever-“

This time Begin interrupted him. “In another time, Mr. President, in another way, perhaps the future of those settlements could be discussed. But not like this. Not under this threat.”

“Mr. Begin, the reason those settlements are there is because you put them there. Against our will. Against the Camp David agreement. If we are in this dreadful impasse today it is due to your stubborn persistence in carrying out a policy the whole world-and even a majority of your nation-condemned.”

“Whatever the feelings of the people of this country may be about those settlements, Mr. President, their feelings about their nation are unshakeable. And they will see in your demand, just as I do, an invasion of their national rights and sovereignty.”

This time there was a long pause. When the President resumed, his voice was suddenly resigned and weary. “I told you at the beginning of our conversation, Mr. Begin, that I believe this proposition is the only reasonable way out of this dilemma. Accept it, renounce your claims to the West Bank, and you will give your own nation peace and save the lives of six million New Yorkers.” He paused, waiting for an answer that did not come. “But if you refuse,” the President continued, “I am not going to see six million of my countrymen massacred because you will not rectify the consequences of a policy that has no basis in justice or political fact. It will be the most painful order I will ever have to give, Mr. Begin, but if you will not remove those settlements from the West Bank, then the armed forces of the United States will.”

Begin paled and sank slowly back against his chair. So there it was, the naked threat of force he had expected from the moment this conversation had begun. A strange vision swept through his mind. He was a four-year-old boy in Lodz trembling at his window as a galloping mass of mounted Cossacks rampaged through his ghetto, wielding great staves like swords, lashing the heads and shoulders of any helpless Jews in their way, trampling their twitching bodies under their horses’ thudding hoofs.

His voice was hoarse with sadness when he finally replied. “So we come to that, do we? The final act, the final, if I may say it, betrayal?” Begin sighed. “We live in a terrible world, Mr. President. All the values we counted on to guide us, all the precepts of world order, are disintegrating about us. Someone, some people must somehow find the courage to stop it. I had hoped and believed you and your people would, but I was wrong.” The Israeli could almost sense the distant President’s discomfiture at his words. “We are a democracy. I cannot reply to your demand-or threat-alone. Only my government can. I will call an emergency Cabinet meeting immediately.”

Begin’s first act after he had hung up was to ask his wife to bring him a glass of water. Trembling slightly, he took one of the pills his doctors had urged him to use in moments of stress.

In New York, winter’s quick-falling dusk was dropping its silken shroud over the city. Already the four men crouched in the window, fieldglasses trained on the entrance of the Long Island Bar and Grill across the street, were beginning to have trouble distinguishing the features of the customers entering the bar.

“Shit,” Angelo Rocchia moaned, “if the son of a bitch doesn’t hurry up, we’ll have to stuff Denny here in the back seat of a car and use the old Kotex-box gimmick.” The “Kotex-box gimmick” was a standard police tactic, putting an informer in a car with a box, into which eye slits had been cut, over his head. That way he could identify someone without giving away his own identity.

Benny the Fence, squatting at the window of his “store” between Angelo and Jack Rand, had no intention of getting involved in that. He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes before five. “He ought to be along any minute,”

he said. “He’s usually in there by five.”

“Somebody’s ass is going to be in a sling if he doesn’t turn up.” It was the deputy director of the New York office of the FBI standing behind Rocchia, Rand and Benny. Harvey Hudson, the director of the office, had ordered him to take charge of the stake-out as soon as the emergency command post had been informed of Benny the Fence’s story. Half a dozen other police officers and FBI men, one holding a line open to the command post, drifted in and out of the shadows of the Long Island Trading Company’s anteroom. Benny’s secretary sat at her desk, feet twitching to the Top Ten tunes coming from her transistor, totally bored by what was going on around her. Her employer’s cooperation with the police had been total. The Arab who came each night to the bar across the street for a Seven-and-Seven had first established contact with Benny three weeks ago through the bartender. He had rented a snub-nosed .38 that he returned, unfired, the next day. Ten days ago he had told Benny be wanted plastic, a good fresh card, and some ID. The fence had sized the man up as a guy with dough. He’d asked for-and gotten-$250 for the papers, a price well above the going market rate. Then, last Wednesday, the Arab had asked him for a “tailor-made,” a Friday-morning hit on a guy in his midthirties, medium height, not blond. For that he had sprung $500.

Benny’s information had forced the directors of the search operation to make some fast decisions. It was unlikely that the Arab had picked up the truck himself. He looked like an intermediary, a buried sleeper with street contacts to whom someone who knew the right words bad come for help. But he was clearly the only link to the man who had rented it. The FBI had wanted to bring in the bartender right away and grill him. Bannion and Feldman of the NYPD had objected strenuously. Benny and guys like the bartender made it a point not to know each other too well. Jump the barman and you might let the word out that the bar was hot, scare away the Arab and wind up with no lead to the renter of the van. They had recommended the trap waiting in the street below, assuming the Arab would keep to his normal routine and show up for his evening drink.

Nothing down on Union Street would have indicated to the untrained eye that anything unusual was going on. Yet the neighborhood was alive with detectives and agents. The Con Ed FBI crew was still there busily tearing up the pavement. They had been reinforced by three real Con Ed men who knew how to operate a jackhammer. In relays, they’d begun to drift into the bar for a drink, and three of them in blue overalls sat by the bar now nursing Miller Lites. An Econoline van belonging to a Queens television repair shop was parked behind the bar. Four agents were inside staring out of its one-way windows, guarding the rear of the bar. The trio of blacks Angelo had spotted earlier were jiving now at Sixth and Union, blocking that escape route.

By five minutes after five, there was still no sign of the Arab. Suddenly behind him, Angelo heard Benny growl, “There he goes.”

He pointed to a slender young man in a sheepskin jacket walking past the flashing red Budweiser sign into the bar. Rand rose.

He was wearing an Army fatigue jacket, blue jeans and a turtleneck someone had found for him, looking, Angelo thought uncharitably, like a stockbroker ready to go slumming. He headed down the stairs. A minute later, Angelo followed him.

As soon as he opened the door of the bar he saw the Arab alone on a stool halfway down the counter sipping his Seven-and-Seven. Rand was two stools away. Angelo strolled casually down the bar until he was behind the Arab.

Gently but firmly, he pressed the muzzle of his .38 to his back while, at the same time, with his left, he gave him a flash of the shield.

“Police,” he said, “we want to talk to you.”

The Arab twisted around to face him. Rand was already off his stool, his own arm discreetly drawn, blocking one way out. Three fellow FBI men in Con Ed overalls shifted into a half moon to seal off the other.

“Hey,” gasped the Arab, “what’s all this about?”

“We’ll tell you downtown,” Angelo said.

Outwardly, General Henri Bertrand appeared as composed as ever, the expression on his face set in the weary, inscrutable gaze for which he was so well known. Inwardly, he was seething with frustration. For almost an hour, PaulHenri de Serre had been sitting at his Boulevard Mortier desk going through the SDECE’s collection of photographs of Arab terrorists and scientists, trying to find a familiar face. He had found none.

The General had no doubts about the sincerity of his efforts. The man was ready to do anything to mitigate the consequences of what he had done in Libya. Bertrand was also sure, as a result of a few questions in his car en route to the office, that de Serre was innocent of any involvement in the death of his colleague Alain Prevost. That, like the manner in which the Libyans had set de Serre himself up, had to be the work of Qaddafi’s secret service. The bastards, he reflected, are getting better. Maybe the KGB is training them. A point, it suddenly occurred to him, to run down when this was over.

He looked at his scientist. De Serre was completing his second run-through of the pictures. “Still no one that looks familiar?”

De Serre shook his head apologetically. “Nobody.”

“Damn.” The Gauloise in the corner of Bertrand’s mouth wriggled as he inhaled. He was sure every photograph available was there on his desk. The CIA wouldn’t have held out on him, not on this. He relations with Israel’s Mossad were extremely close, as they had been for over thirty years. He was certain they would come up with everything they had. They could try to do an Identikit portrait of the Arab scientist, but Bertrand had little confidence in such portraits. They could tell you what a man didn’t look like, that he didn’t wear glasses or have a beard, but they were quite ineffectual when it came to providing a description of what he did look like.

Suddenly, the General stopped his measured pacing of the office and picked up his telephone. The Palestinian had spoken excellent French, hadn’t he?

Those most likely to hold something back in sensitive matters, he had learned long ago, were those usually closest to home. It took him several minutes to locate his friendly rival, Paul-Robert de Villeprieux, the director of France’s internal-security agency, the DST.

“Tell me, cher ami,” he asked when Villeprieux came to the phone at the Neuilly apartment in which he was dining with friends, “would your people be apt to have anything, anything at all, on Arabs, Palestinians probably, involved in nuclear matters, which just might not be available in my dossiers?”

The suspicion of a satisfied smile appeared on Bertrand’s face at the long silence which greeted his question.

“I shall have to call you back on that, I’m afraid,” Villeprieux finally replied.

“Don’t bother,” Bertrand said. “Just call the secretary general of the P-lysee and ask for the President’s authorization to send me whatever you have. Immediately.”

Half an hour later two gendarmes from the DST’s headquarters delivered another locked attache case to Bertrand’s office. It contained a thick envelope bearing a red wax seal and the legend “The contents of this envelope are not to be divulged without the express authorization of the President of the Republic or, in his absence from the country, the Minister of the Interior.” Inside was the long-suppressed story of the Dajanis’ unsuccessful effort to steal plutonium from Cadarache and their expulsion from France.

Bertrand handed Whalid Dajani’s picture to de Serre. “Was this your man?”

The scientist paled. “Yes,” he answered. “That’s he.”

Bertrand passed Kamal’s photograph across the table. “How about him?”

De Serre studied the terrorist’s picture closely. “Yes, I think he was one of the people I noticed at the reprocessing plant.”

“And her?” Bertrand gave him Laita’s picture.

De Serre shook his head. “No. There were never any women around.”

Bertrand was already on his phone. “Open up a photo-facsimile line to Langley,” he ordered, “and tell our friend Whitehead the photos of the people he is looking for are on their way to Washington.”

Why the hell doesn’t he hurry? Laila Dajani fumed. I stand out on this street like a Saudi prince in a synagogue. It was seven-thirty, and West Eighth Street swarmed with NYU students, shoppers, late-night bargain seekers. Finally, Laila saw Kamal drifting out of the pizza joint, his checkered cap jammed onto his head, his black leather jacket’s collar turned up, a rectangular box of pizza under his arm. They fell into step and started down West Eighth, moving away from Fifth Avenue.

“Everything all right up there?” her brother asked.

Laila nodded. “Except Whalid is drinking again. He bought himself a bottle this morning.”

“Let him drink. He can’t do us any harm anymore.” Kamal stared at the passersby on the sidewalk, the garishly lit shops, the odoriferous fast-food stores. His eyes caught those of an emaciated teenage whore lurking in the shadows at the top of the stoop of a brownstone. She glared at him. Kamal snorted.

A few minutes before he had had her for twentyfive dollars, brutally, quickly, mechanically. It was the kind of imprudence he should never have indulged in. But, he had told himself, it might be his last time, and he had slammed himself at the girl with savage anger until she had cried out in pain.

Why did you cry, child? he thought, looking at her now. After all, you’ll be able to do it a few more times before you fry. He turned his eyes away, back to the passing crowd.

I loathe this street, Kamal reflected. I loathe these people. I loathe this city. It’s not the Jews I hate, he suddenly realized. It’s these people.

All of them. Satiated. Smug. Indifferent. Lording it over the earth. He spat. Why do we all hate them so much, he wondered? The Baader-Meinhoff people he had known in Germany, his Italian friends, the Iranians, those strange dour Japanese he’d once trained with in Syria. What is in these people that makes us hate them so much? Were the Romans hated like them once?

“What are you going to do tonight?” he asked his sister.

“Nothing,” she replied. “I took a room at the Hilton. I won’t leave until I’m ready to come for you.”

“Good.” Kamal stopped. To his right was 74 West Eighth, a hardware store.

“What time have you got?”

Laila checked her watch. “Seven-thirty-six.”

“I’ll meet you right here at one tomorrow. If you’re not here I’ll be back at one-ten, then one-twenty. If you don’t show up by then, I’ll go back. If they catch you, you’ve got to keep quiet until then.” Kamal had stopped and glared intently at his sister. “For God’s sake, if something should happen to the car and you show up late at the garage, be sure I know it’s you.

Because once I get back there I’ll be ready to set it off at the first noise I hear.”

He squeezed her hand. “Ma salaam,” he said. “All will be well, inch’

Allah.”

Then he strode off alone, off to his last lonely vigil with his rats and his bomb in the midst of the people and the city he proposed to destroy.

“Come here, baby.”

Enrico Diaz sprawled on his gold silk mattress like some Oriental nabob, his head and shoulders leaning against the black walls of his flat, his knees drawn up, legs spread apart, the soft satiny folds of his djellabah falling down to his bare ankles. He was flying, winging to a distant place on the coke he had snorted ten minutes ago, the blood surging in his brain as his mind fled through clear, crystal prisms of delight.

Two of his girls lolled in a corner of the pad, sharing the joint whose slightly rancid odor mingled with the Ceylonese incense burning in the bronze censers hanging from the walls. His third girl, Anita, squatted like a suplicant on the gold-covered mattress before Rico. She was a twentyfive-yearold Swede from northern Minnesota, a lanky raw-boned girl whose blond hair tumbled in unkempt strands to the small of her back. It was to her that Rico’s command was addressed.

“Yeah, honey.”

Anita snuggled forward toward the pimp. Her fleshy lips were fixed in the sullen pout everyone told her made her look like Marilyn Monroe. She was wearing skintight emerald disco pants Rico had bought her-albeit with her own earnings-and one of the strapless black lace bras she wore to work because she could snap it off with one deft gesture and flick it challengingly at her waiting clients.

“You know what your man did for you today?”

Anita shook her head.

“He buy you five years.” Enrico drew out the number, lacing it with the Southern intonation he so despised.

“Hey, honey, you …?”

“Yeah. I seen a man, we got those charges dropped.”

Anita was about to gush out her gratitude when Enrico sat bolt upright. His hands shot out and grabbed two fistfuls of girl’s hair. Brutally, he jerked her forward. She shrieked.

“Dumb cunt! I told you never to stiff no John, didn’t I?”

“Rico, you’re hurting,” Anita whispered.

The pimp’s response was to yank harder. “I don’t want no cops sniffing around my women.”

Rico dropped one of his hands, reached under the mattress and drew out a switchblade knife. Anita gagged with terror as he snapped the steel blade open. Before the petrified girl could move, he whipped it across her lips, keeping the blade a precise eighth of an inch above their pulpy surface. “I oughtta streak your lips.”

A razor’s slash down the lips was the pimp’s traditional vengeance on a girl who has strayed. No surgeon, no matter how skilled his fingers, could fully repair the cut.

“But I ain’t.” Rico snapped the blade shut and tossed the knife over his shoulder. With tantalizing, lascivious slowness his free hand took the hem of his djellabah and inched it up his dark, muscular calves to his knees, then back down his thighs, revealing the dark cavern of his crotch and the slowly stiffening form of his member. While his left hand continued to hold the terrified Anita’s head firmly in place, the right reached leisurely toward his snuffbox for a pinch of coke. With sensual, deliberate gestures he patted the white powder around the tip of his organ, then once again grabbed Anita’s head.

“Now,” he announced, “you going to have a little talk with my friend down there. You going to tell him you sorry you gave old Rico so much trouble.”

He pulled the girl forward, thrusting her head into his groin. Obediently, she bent to her task, long red fingernails dancing their way around his testicles as her slithering tongue licked at the coke.

He released her head and leaned back against the wall. “Yeahhh,” he groaned in pleasure.

That was when the doorbell rang.

At the sight of the two men in old GI khakis and black berets standing on his doorstep, Rico went limp. The taller of the two jerked his head at the staircase. “Vdmonos,” he said. “Hay trabajo-let’s go, we’ve got work to do.”

In Jerusalem, the carillon of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher tolled 2 A.M. Tuesday, December 15. Each resonant note was hurled across the old city by the winter wind sweeping the hills of Judea. Eyes half closed in strain and sadness. Menachem Begin studied the warring members of his government assembled around him in his Cabinet Room. Just as he had foreseen it would, the President’s threatening phone call had produced the bitterest, most acrimonious debate the room had ever known; worse than those that had preceded the 1967 war, more vindictive than the recriminations that had followed the 1973 conflict, more impassioned than those that had led to the raid on Entebbe.

While the heated words swirled around him, Begin silently reckoned up the balance of the fourteen men who shared with him the responsibility of governing their nation. As he had expected, the most vigorous reaction to the President’s threat had come from Benny Ranan. The former paratrooper was on his feet now, waving his arms, urging a full and immediate mobilization of the Israeli Defense Forces to oppose any American intervention on their soil.

His most ardent supporter was Rabbi Orent of the religious parties. It was a strange but fitting union, the mystic believer and the indifferent atheist, the synagogue and the kibbutz, the man who loved the land because God had given it to his people and the man who cared for it because it could be made to bring forth good fruit. A lot of Israel’s strength, Begin thought, was reflected in that alliance.

To his surprise, the most articulate advocate of a compromise with the Americans had been his Minister of the Interior, Yusi Nero, a man the Israeli public usually labeled a hawk. Seize the occasion to force from the Americans and the Soviets guarantees so ironclad their state could never again be menaced, he argued. That would allow them to begin reducing the crushing armament burden which would destroy their nation in the long run more surely than Qaddafi and his bomb.

Begin leaned forward, clearing his throat to get his ministers’ attention.

Despite all the tensions of the day he remained as cool and as poised as he had been at dawn when the President’s first call came in, the clean white handkerchief folded in his suit coat pocket, the tie firmly knotted and precisely in place.

“I would like to remind all of you,” he said, “of what is our fundamental responsibility to the nation and to history. We must remain united.

Whenever we Jews have allowed our enemies-or our friends-to divide us, the result has been a disaster.”

“My dear Menachem.” It was Yadin, drawing quietly on his pipe as he spoke.

“It is all well and good to speak of unity now, but if we are confronted with this disaster it’s because of a policy you insisted on following in total disregard of its effect on our unity. Taking Arab lands for these settlements=’

“Arab lands!” The voice of Rabbi Orent exploded through the room. The leader of the religious parties was as far removed from the traditional image of the pale, stoop-shouldered rabbinical student as it was possible to be. He was six three, a two-hundred-pound former discus thrower and paratroop captain who was an outspoken supporter of the Gush Emonim, the Block of the Faithful, the movement whose followers had defied their countrymen, the Arabs and most of the world by flinging up their settlements on the land seized by Israel from Jordan during the 1967 war. “Once and for all, let it be clearly understood that there is no such thing as Arab territory or Arab land here. This is the Land of Israel, the eternal heritage of our fathers. The Arabs who have dwelt upon it have done so by usurping our right. They have no more claim to it than a squatter has to the dwelling he has taken over while the owner is away!”

The words that Orent articulated with such passionate intensity reflected the ideas of the founder of the Gush Emonim. Ironically, it was not to Begin or Arik Sharon or Moshe Dayan or any of the other legendary figures of modern Israel that the settlers owed their loyalty, but to a man who, like Orent, was a rabbi. He was a frail ninetyyear-old who might have been a survivor of the world that had disappeared forever into the gas chambers of Dachau and Auschwitz, a gentle Eastern European ghetto patriarch dispensing wisdom and cheer to his grandchildren at the end of the day. Rav Zvi Kook was anything but that. The wizened, bearded old man, barely five feet tall, was, however improbable, the heir to the mantle of militant Judaism, the successor to the vengeful warriors of the Old Testament in whose pages he had found the source and justification of the messianic vision that inflamed him and his followers.

Like most ideas capable of inspiring men to zealotry, his benefited from their great simplicity. God had chosen the Jewish people as His Elect to reveal His Nature and Works to mankind through prophecy. He had promised Abraham and the Children of Israel the land of Canaan as evidence of the bond between them. Just as a tree can bring forth fruit only when its roots are plunged into the soil that gives it life, so, Rav Kook taught, the Jewish people could realize their God-given destiny only when they were installed upon the land-all of it-that God had deeded them. Go forth and claim it, he had told his followers, as the instruments of God’s Holy Will, the vehicles of His prophecy.

“Be not deceived,” Orent intoned, waving a warning finger at Begin. “No Jew can renounce our claim to the land God deeded us. Our settlers went forth to nourish our land with their sweat and toil, but they will nourish it with their blood as well if anyone tries to take it from them.”

Begin shuddered, both from the prospect of civil strife and from the implacable fanaticism in the rabbi’s voice, a fanaticism he well knew he had done much to encourage. Sadly he turned to Yaacov Dorit, the commander of the Israeli Defense Forces. The Israeli leader had a genius for forcing his Cabinet to a decision by forcing it to confront, as starkly as he could, the issues before it. “General,” he asked, “can we count on the Army to evacuate the settlements forcibly if it is ordered to do so?”

“Are you going to tell the Army why?”

Begin blinked, perplexed by Dorit’s reply.

“Because if you do,” the General went on, “they’ll never do it. The Army reflects the majority of this country, and whatever the majority thinks about the settlements, it’s not going to be in favor of manhandlingand maybe killing-Israelis for Qaddafi. Or even to save New York.”

“And suppose we don’t give them the real reason?” Begin inquired.

“Then they won’t do it either.”

Begin turned an infinitely sad regard to the men at the table. “You see, my friends, I do not believe we have the option of capitulating in front of Qaddafi’s threat, even if we wanted to. We would destroy the nation in civil disor der and bloodshed if we did.” As he spoke, he employed a revealing nervous reflex, twisting the frame of his glasses between his thumb and forefinger. “I will be accused of falling prey to the Massada complex for what I am about to say, but it i9-my sincere belief we have no choice. We must resist Qaddafi, and the Americans if it comes to it.”

“The Americans are bluffing,” Ranan growled. “I don’t believe they’ve got the military capacity to come in here, and if they do we’ll tear them to pieces.”

Begin eyed him coolly. “I wish I shared your sentiments, Benny.” He sighed.

“Alas, I do not.”

From the reception this kid is getting you’d have thought we were bringing in Yassir Arafat himself, Angelo Rocchia mused. The car that had sped the Arab he had arrested from the Long Island Bar and Grill to the cellar of Federal Plaza had pulled up in front of the direct elevator reserved for FBI use; two other cars each filled with agents had stopped just behind it. Their occupants, hands ready on concealed weapons, swarmed around them as protectively as Secret Service men shielding a President in a hostile crowd.

Angelo got his first good look at his quarry in the fluorescent glare of the elevator. He was in his late twenties, a pale, almost fragile figure with uncombed black hair and a thick drooping moustache that seemed somehow a pathetic boast for a virility he did not possess. Above all, he was a worried, perplexed young man; Angelo could almost smell the fear oozing from his glands like some malodorous secretion.

Everyone, Dewing, the Police Commissioner, Salisbury of the CIA, Hudson, the Chief of Detectives, was waiting for them when the doors slid open on the twenty-sixth floor. For just a second, after the Arab had been led away for a hasty arraignment, Angelo and Rand were celebrities.

“Good work,” the Police Commissioner said in that mellow baritone he reserved for promotion ceremonies and Communion-breakfast speechmaking.

“First break we’ve had all day.”

As soon as he had been fingerprinted, photographed and arraigned, the Arab, who had given his name as Suleiman Kaddourri, was led into the FBI’s interrogation room. The room was as far removed from the public’s idea of what an interrogation center should look like as a Hamburger Heaven was from the Tour d’Argent. In fact, it resembled nothing quite so much as a middle-class suburban living room. Thick wall-to-wall carpeting blanketed the floor. The prisoner’s chair was a comfortable deepblue sofa covered with scatter cushions. In front of it was a coffee table with newspapers, cigarettes and a bubbling coffee maker. A pair of armchairs were ranged on the opposite side of the table for the FBI interrogators. The whole, carefully contrived atmosphere was, of course, a hoax designed to relax and disarm a prisoner. Every sound in the room, from the lighting of a match to the rustle of a piece of paper, was picked up and recorded by sensitive, noise-activated microphones in the walls. From behind two of the halfdozen watercolors on the walls, television cameras focused tightly on the prisoner’s face. On one wall was a huge photomural of the skyline of New York. It concealed a one-way viewing window. Behind that window was the interrogation room’s semi-darkened control booth from which a dozen senior officials could see and hear everything that went on inside. Angelo’s special status as the arresting officer won him entry to the booth. Fascinated, he studied the faces in the gloom around him.

“Hey, Chief,” he whispered, gesturing to an ‘unfamiliar figure in a white open-necked shirt whose collar was pressed down over the lapels of his blue suit, “who’s the new girl in town?”

Feldman’s eyes followed his glance. “Israeli intelligence,” he answered.

“Mossad.”

In the interrogation room itself, the Arab, his handcuffs removed, was perched warily on the edge of the sofa. Frank Farrell, the Bureau’s Palestinian expert, was pouring coffee as gaily, Angelo thought in disgust, as a waitress serving breakfast at a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge. The second FBI agent in the room, Leo Shannon, a genial New York Irishman who specialized in interrogations and terrorist negotiations, reached into his pocket and laid a white card on the table. Angelo groaned.

“Would you believe it?” he said to the Chief of Detectives. “Guy wants to blow up some gas that’s going to kill Christ knows how many people in this city, and they got to give him the fucking card?”

Feldman gave a resigned shrug of his shoulders. The “card” was the slip of paper all New York policemen and FBI agents carry bearing the warning to a prisoner of his civil rights based on the Supreme Court’s Miranda decision.

Shannon “gave” it to him by informing the Arab he could remain silent if he chose or refuse to talk except in the presence of a lawyer. Everyone in the control booth tensed. It was a critical moment. Their efforts to find Qaddafi’s hydrogen bomb could come to a dead halt right here. If the man asked for a lawyer it might be hours before they could start to question him, hours more before they could make a deal with his lawyer to let him off in return for talking.

Whether from ignorance of the law or indifference, the Arab gave Shannon a halfhearted wave of his hand. He didn’t need any lawyers, he said as the men in the booth sighed gratefully. He had nothing to say to anybody.

Behind Angelo, the door to the control booth opened. An agent in shirtsleeves stepped in, blinked a second in the shadows, then stepped over to Dewing. “We’ve got a sheet on him from the prints,” he announced triumphantly.

The men in the booth tightened into a knot around the FBI’s assistant director, forgetting for a moment the scene on the other side of the one-way glass. As soon as the Arab’s fingerprints had been taken they had been sent to FBI headquarters in Washington, where the memory bank of the Bureau’s IBM computer compared them with millions of prints taken from everyone arrested in the country during the past ten years. A second computer out at Langley put them into a CIA IBM containing all the fingerprints of Palestinian terrorists available to the world’s intelligence agencies. That machine had registered “tilt” three minutes after ingesting the prints. It had identified them as belonging to Nabil Suleiman. He had been born in Bethlehem in 1951 and had been picked up and printed first by the Israelis after an antigovernment demonstration at Jerusalem’s Arab College in 1969. In 1972 he had been arrested for possession of a firearm and given six months in jail. Released, he had disappeared for six months, an absence subsequently traced by Mossad to one of George Habbash’s PFLP training camps in Lebanon. In 1975 he had been identified by an informer as one of two men who left a charge of explosives in a shopping basket in Jerusalem’s Mahne Yehuda open-air market. Three elderly women had been killed and seventeen other people injured in the explosion. Since then he had vanished from sight.

“Did you run his prints past State and the INS?” Dewing asked as he compared the photograph attached to the file with the man in the interrogation booth.

“Yes, sir,” the agent who had brought the file answered. “There’s no record of a visa. He’s an illegal.”

Inside the interrogation room, the Arab was giving his address as the Century Hotel, 844 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. “Get a couple of our cars down there right away,” Hudson ordered, hearing his words. They were, for all practical purposes, the last the Arab intended to speak for some time.

Overtaken by some shift in his mood, he muttered, “I want a lawyer,” to the two FBI men before him, then refused to speak any further.

Angelo studied the Arab. Scared, he mused, scared absolutely shitless. His failure with Benny the Fence in front of Rand still rankled. The young agent was in the shadows behind him, somehow more at ease in these corridors of officialdom than Angelo was.

Angelo leaned toward Feldman. “Chief,” he whispered, “let me have ten minutes with him while they’re running down a lawyer. After all, he’s mine, isn’t he?”

Five minutes later, Angelo settled into the chair opposite the Arab with a weary sigh and a complaint about the heat in the room. He took a sack of Planter’s Peanuts out of his pocket and spilled a mound into his palm.

“Peanut, kid?” he asked. Closed up like an oyster, the detective thought, watching the Arab defiantly shake his head. Angelo tossed half the handful into his mouth and offered it again to the prisoner. “Go on. You don’t need a lawyer to eat a peanut … Nabil.”

He had held off on the name, then came down hard on it, his eyes fixed on the Arab’s face as he pronounced it. He saw him start as though he had received a jolt of static electricity. Angelo sat back in his armchair and slowly chewed the rest of the peanuts, deliberately allowing the Arab time to reflect on the fact that his real identity was known. Finally, he cleaned his hands with a little clap and leaned forward.

“Kid, you know, different guys got different ways of operating.” He used the same husky, confidential voice he had employed unsuccessfully with Benny. “Bureau’s got their way. I got mine. Me, I say always level with a guy. Let him know where he’s at.”

“I don’t want to talk,” the Arab snarled.

“Talk?” Angelo laughed. “Who asked you to talk? Just listen.” He settled back in his chair again. “Now, what we got you on here is receiving stolen goods. Bunch of plastic Benny Moscowitz got for you on consignment Friday a week for five hundred dollars.” Angelo paused and gave the Arab a friendly smile. “By the way, kid, you paid too much. Two and a half’s the going price.”

He could have been a priest trying to talk a young husband out of a divorce. “You can figure that’s one to three, depending on your sheet and the judge. Now, the matter of interest to us here is not that. It’s where it went. Who you did it for.”

“I said I didn’t want to talk.” There had been no softening in the Arab’s defiant tone.

“Don’t, kid. You don’t have to. You heard what the card says.” Reassurance dripped from Angelo’s voice. He thoughtfully munched a couple of peanuts, then jerked his head toward the New York mural on the wall to his left. “See that?” he asked.

The Arab nodded.

“One-way window. They got about twenty guys back there watching us. Judges.

Feds. Like that. Got a guy there in a white shirt’s very interested in you.” Angelo paused, letting the Arab’s curiosity peak. “Comes from that Israeli outfit there, whatta they call it? Mossad.” Again Angelo waited, pretending to chew a peanut, watching the Arab through half-closed eyes.

The fear he was looking for was there all right.

“Now, this is how things stand, kid.” His voice took on a matter-of-fact tone, as though he was totally disinterested in what he was about to say.

“You’re an illegal. We know that. Ran your fingerprints at the INS, and we know you never had no U.S. visa. Okay? We got this treaty with the Israelis. Extradite terrorists. Boom!” Angelo snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Guy’s on his way down to the Federal Courthouse now for the papers. That Mossad fellow’s got a plane waiting for you, just for you, out at JFK. They figure to have you on it by midnight.”

Angelo could see how rapidly the Arab was blinking. Scared out of his mind, he thought. “Because we’re going to hand you over. Got to. Have no choice.

We got no reason to hold you. Not on some lousy charge of receiving stolen goods.” He clapped his hands and brushed his trouser leg as though he was getting ready to go. “You don’t want to talk to us. It’s your right.

Perfect right. But as a result we got no reason to hold on to you.”

Angelo began to rise.

“Hey,” the Arab said. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s simple,” Angelo explained. “You help us, we help you. You talk to us, we make you a material witness. Then we gotta keep you here. Can’t extradite you anymore.” He was on his feet now, tipping up on his toes, slowly stretching his joints. “You don’t want to talk, what could we do? We gotta hand you over. It’s the law.

“You know those Mossad gu;1s out there better than I do. I mean, from what I hear they don’t care too much for them little white cards and all.”

Angelo let a little smile flicker an instant at the edges of his mouth, relishing the tension in the man’s face. “Particularly when they got a chance to spend eight hours on an airplane all alone with a guy put a bomb in a shopping basket, killed three little old Jewish ladies, you know what I mean? I mean, how tender do you figure they’re going to want to be with a guy like that?”

The Arab’s face lightened as though a bright light had been switched on at the mention of the bomb in a basket. So, Angelo thought, you did it, you little creep.

“Hey,” the Arab muttered, “what do you want?”

Angelo settled slowly back into his interrogator’s chair. He crossed his legs and delicately hitched up the crease of his trousers. “Just a talk, kid. Just a little talk.”

Grace Knowland started impatiently at the sight of her son on the steps of the Seventh Regiment Armory in midtown Manhattan. It was after seven.

He should have been inside already, changing for his match.

“Hey, Mom,” he called down in a voice shrill with adolescent anger, “the match is off.” Grace strode up the steps and kissed his reluctantly offered cheek.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. They got some soldiers there and nobody can go in. They won’t even let me go down to the locker rooms to get my racket so I can play Andy tomorrow.”

Grace winced. It had been that kind of a day, her trip to Washington wasted because the Mayor hadn’t come back on the shuttle as usual, her fruitless efforts all afternoon to worm something about the South Bronx out of his press secretary, the rush to get here for her son’s match only to find it had been canceled.

“I’ll see what I can do about the racket, dear.”

She walked up to the military policeman at the door. “What’s going on? My son was supposed to play a tennis match here tonight.”

The soldier banged his black mittens together with a smack and stamped his boots in the cold. “Lady, I don’t know. All I know is I got orders to seal off the area to the public tonight. They got some kind of mobilization exercise going on in there.”

“Well, surely,” Grace cajoled, “you can’t imagine my son’s going to disturb anybody just going down to the locker room to get his tennis racket?”

The soldier squirmed uncomfortably. “Listen, lady, what can I tell you? I got my orders. No unauthorized personnel in the area.”

Grace felt a surge of anger rising inside her. “Who’s in charge here?”

“The lieutenant. You want I get the lieutenant?”

The military policeman was back a few minutes later with a clean-shaven young officer in freshly pressed fatigues. He eyed Grace appreciatively.

“Tell me, Lieutenant.” She covered the cutting edge of her question with a frosting of sweetness. “Just whht is it that’s going on here tonight that’s so important a thirteen-year-old boy can’t go down to the locker room to get his tennis racket?”

The officer laughed. “It’s nothing, ma’am. Just some kind of snowremoval test they’re running. A bunch of people trying to figure out how they can help the city the next time you get a big snowstorm. That’s all.”

My day, it suddenly occurred to Grace, may not be wholly wasted after all.

“That’s very interesting.” Her handbag was open and she picked over its jumble for her press card. “I’m with The New York Times and it happens I’m very much into the problem of getting the snow off the streets of this city. I’d like to talk to the officer in charge of your test and find out what you’re learning.”

“1’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t help you on that. I got nothing to do with the operation itself,” the young lieutenant replied. “They just sent us up here from Dix last night to handle the security. Tell you what, ma’am, if your son’ll describe where his racket is to me, I’ll go down and try to find it and at the same time I’ll tell them you want to speak to someone.”

The officer was thumping the strings of Tommy’s racket against the butt of his hand when he returned. “Hey,” he said, “that’s strung real light. You must be a good player.” He turned to Grace. “They told me all inquiries about the operation are to be referred to Major McAndrews, First Armory PIO.” He handed Grace a slip of paper. “Here’s his phone number. If you come back to do a story,” he mumbled shyly, “how about having a cup of coffee with a stranger in these parts?”

Grace smiled, noting his name, Daly, on the black-and-gold swatch above the pocket of his field jacket. “Of course. If I come back, I’d be delighted.”

Angelo was sitting back in his interrogator’s chair, chewing an occasional peanut, as relaxed as though he were chatting with a fellow cop about the Giants’ chances of making the NFL playoffs.

“Okay,” he said to the Arab before him, “so you do the odd job for the Libyan embassy over at the United Nations. How do they get hold of you?”

“They leave a message at the bar.”

“How do yolt fix your meets?”

“I add four to the day of the month and then go to the corner of that street and First Avenue. Like if it’s the ninth, I go t — Thirteenth and First.”

Angelo nodded. “Always at the same time?”

“No. From one to five. I add an hour each time, then start over again.”

“And you always meet the same contact?”

“Not always. I have a copy of Newsweek in my hand. They make the contact.”

“Okay. So how did this one go?”

“The contact was a girl.”

“You remember the day?”

The Arab hesitated. “It had to be Tuesday the first, because the meet was at Fifth Street.”

“Remember what she looked like?”

“Pretty. Long brown hair. She was wearing a fur coat.”

“An Arab?”

The prisoner shifted his regard from Angelo’s eyes, ashamed of his betrayal. “Probably. But we spoke English.”

“So what did she want?”

“Fresh cards. She told me to bring her fresh cards at ten the next morning.”

“And you went to Benny?”

The Arab nodded his head.

“Then what happened?”

“I gave her the cards. She said. ‘Come for a walk.’ We go a few blocks and we stop at a camera store. She told me to go in and buy a camera.”

“And you did?”

“I went to a bar first and practiced signing a few times.”

“Then you got the camera?”

“Yeah.” The Arab sighed, aware of how deeply he was involving himself in all this. “So she said, okay, it was good. She wanted more fresh cards and a driver’s license for Friday morning, ten o’clock. For a guy in his mid thirties. She gave me a thousand bucks. Friday the meet was over on Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn. She didn’t show up. A guy came instead.”

Angelo’s irritation at Dewing’s interruption of his interrogation was manifest. The FBI official walked authoritatively into the room, sat down in the chair beside his and took over the interrogation without even consulting him.

“Excuse me, Mr. Rocchia,” he said, “but I thought our friend here might look at some photographs for us. They’ve just come in from overseas.”

He passed the photo of Laila from the DST dossiers that Henri Bertrand had forwarded to the CIA barely twenty minutes earlier. “By any chance would this be the girl who contacted you?” he asked.

The Arab looked at the photograph, then at Angelo, wary and mistrustful of this intruder who had snapped the current developing between them. The detective, silently cursing Dewing, gave the Arab what he hoped was a particularly friendly smile.

“That’s her.”

Dewing passed Whalid’s picture to him. “Was this the guy you got the plastic for?”

The Arab laid the photo on the coffee table, shaking his head.

“How about him?” Dewing passed Kamal’s picture across the table.

The Arab studied it a moment, then looked up. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s him.”

The sight of the halfdozen exhausted, haggard men sitting around the National Security Council conference room in their dinner jackets would have been comical if the reason behind it were not so potentially tragic.

In a few moments, as part of their determined effort to conceal the crisis behind a fagade of normality, they would join their wives in the Executive Mansion for cocktails in the Blue Room. Then, in the State Dining Room, they would dine off the Lincoln gold service the Presi dent’s wife loved, at a banquet honoring the departing dean of Washington’s diplomatic corps, the ambassador of Bolivia.

Jack Eastman began their session by noting that nothing in the evening newscasts gave any indication the press was onto the crisis.

“Slender satisfaction,” the President remarked curtly and turned to the communication which had come in from the Israeli government while he had been changing his clothes. “I guess Begin leaves us no choice except to do it for him, does he?” The President’s voice was gruff as he asked the question, but he was a highly emotional man, and, looking at him, Eastman sensed how deeply pained he was. “What are the chances they’ll oppose our action?” he asked Bennington.

“More than fifty-fifty, I’m afraid, sir.”

The President slouched uncomfortably in his chair, his forefingers picking at his lips, his head bowed as though in prayer. He had laid claim to this office because he’d promised his nation a kind of vigorous leadership he sensed it needed and wanted. Yet nothing had quite prepared him for the lonely agony the exercise of power could-entail or for how complex issues that seemed simple from the outside became when you had to deal with them.

“We’re trapped between the fires of two fanatics, gentlemen. We can’t allow six million Americans to die because of their rigidity. If it comes down to it, we’ll have to act. Harold,” he said to his Secretary of Defense, “I want the Rapid Deployment Force ready to move at an hour’s notice.” The Rapid Deployment Force was a composite body of Army, Marine, Air Force and Navy units assembled after the Iranian crisis for swift movement to anywhere on the globe in a cris’s. “And Warren,” he ordered his Deputy Secretary of State, “you get to Hussein and Assad in total secrecy and make sure we can use their airfields as staging areas if we have to.”

He rose. His movements, Eastman observed, suddenly had the stilted, uncertain gestures of the elderly or the infirm. He had reached the door when Webster of the FBI called out, “Mr. President!”

The Missourian was holding his telephone in his hand, and his usually laconic features were alight with an excitement. “New York has made a positive identification of at least three of the people involved in this. They’ll have forty thousand people out looking for them at dawn!”

“Thank God!” Some of the color returned to the President’s face, and for just an instant an intimation of the shy smile the world associated with him reappeared. “Maybe now I’ll be able to digest my dinner after all.”

As he was leaving the National Security Council conference room for the reception upstairs, the Secretary of Energy paused a moment, then turned and walked determinedly to a public phone booth in the West Wing basement.

The number Delbert Crandell dialed rang interminably before a young woman answered. Her voice became sullen the instant she recognized her caller.

“What happened to you last night? I waited up for you until four.”

“Never mind that.” Crandell had no time to waste on explanations. “I’ve got something very important for you to do.”

The girl groaned and stirred in her bed, the rose satin sheets slipping off her naked breasts as she did. The litter, the charmless disorder, in Cindy Garrett’s bedroom was an accurate reflection of the disorder in her life.

She had come to Washington in 1976 from a small town near Mobile, Alabama, fleeing the stigma of a pregnancy brought on by the town’s deputy sheriff.

As a parting gift her former lover had landed her a job as a receptionist in the offices of an Alabama Congressman he had befriended in a hit-and-run investigation. Her employment had been abruptly terminated by his constituents’ angry protests after Cindy had appeared nude in Playboy magazine’s “The Girls of Washington Revisited.” Fortunately, a chance meeting with Crandell at a Georgetown cocktail party a few evenings later had opened the way to employment that was not only less demanding and better paid but, in Cindy’s case, infinitely more suitable.

“What do you want?” Wariness as thick as the wrinkle cream glistening under her eyes lurked behind her reply.

“I want you to drive up to New York right away. Go to the apartment and-“

“Ah cain’t go to New York,” Cindy squawked in protest.

“The hell you cain’t!” Crandell couldn’t abide the redclay accent that crept into Cindy’s voice after a few bourbons or in her unguarded moments.

“You’re going to do what I tell you to do. Get the car and get up there as fast as you can. You know the painting over the fireplace?”

“The icky one that looks like someone peed on it?”

“Yes.” The “icky” one was a Jackson Pollack appraised by Crandell’s insurance adjusters at $350,000. “And the one to the left of the television?”

“The one with those funny eyes?”

“Right.” That was a Picasso. “Get those two and the gray one in the bedroom.” Crandell did not need to identify his Modigliani further. “And bring them back down here. Just as fast as you can drive.”

“Ah, honey, ah really have to-” Cindy began, hoping that coquetry might somehow spare her the ordeal her lover had just proposed.

“Shut up!” Crandell interrupted. “Just get your ass moving to New York.” He hung up, then decided to make a second call, this one to his real-estate agent at Douglas Elliman in New York. Finally, relaxed for almost the first time since this crisis had begun, he hurried up the stairs to the Blue Room.

Harvey Hudson, the New York director of the FBI, listened with growing concern to his deputy’s account of Grace Knowland’s conversation at the Seventh Regiment Armory. “How can we be so unlucky?”

His aide nodded sympathetically and continued his report. “So she got all excited when the MP said ‘snow removal.’ She pulled out her press card and insisted on talking to somebody. They finally gave her the cutout number we’re using to protect NEST. It’s a dummy line that’s supposed to go to First Armory PIO. Rings downstairs. She’s on the line now, insisting on a briefing on our `snow removal’ exercise tomorrow morning.”

Hudson clutched his head in dismay. “Can you imagine? Some fucking kid can’t get a tennis racket and we risk blowing the whole operation to The New York Times?” He tugged at the ends of his red-and-yellow bow tie, dangling like wilting vines from each side of his shirt collar. He seemed to have shrunk physically from the strains of this terrible day, from the horror that had come with each hour that had gone by with Qaddafi’s bomb undiscovered.

“Okay,” he ordered. “You stuff somebody into an Army uniform and get him up to that armory tomorrow morning. Give that woman the goddamndest song-and-dance briefing on snow removal that anybody’s ever heard. I don’t care what the hell you tell her, but make it good. The one thing we don’t need right now is to have The New York Times on our backsl”

In the Blue Room of the White House, a Marine Corps band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Smiling warmly, his wife the rigorous one pace behind him that protocol prescribed, the President strode into the diplomatic reception. Admiringly, Jack Eastman watched the couple drift through the room, shaking hands, chatting, laughing politely at the Bulgarian ambassador’s clumsy attempt at humor. Quite a performance, Eastman thought. You could fault the man for his infuriating tendency to vacillate, for his lack of personal warmth, but one thing you couldn’t take away from him was his icy self-control, his stoic front in a crisis.

Eastman was about to sip his grapefruit juice when he felt a slight pressure at his elbow. It was his wife, late as usual. He bent down to kiss her, smelling as he did the alcohol on her breath.

“Darling,” she whispered as he pulled away from her, “I’ve got to talk to you. Alone.”

Eastman wanted to laugh. Talking privately to your wife at diplomatic receptions was a privilege not accorded to high government officials.

Sally had him by the arm. “It’s about Cathy.”

Her husband tensed, then followed as she threaded deftly through the room seeking out an empty corner by the bar. When she found it she turned to him almost angrily. “She’s home,” she blurted.

“Home?” Eastman was stunned. “How come?”

“Because what you laid on me last night was too heavy, Jack.” Sally Eastman’s brief show of defiance had already passed and tears diluted her eyes. “I’m a mother, not a soldier.”

“Sal-“

She turned at his word, moved to the bar and thrust her glass at a bartender. “A vodka martini on the rocks,” she ordered.

Eastman stepped behind her, fighting now to maintain his own composure.

“Sally,” he hissed, “you had no right to do that. No right at all.”

His wife turned around. The mascara was beginning to run a bit as the tears started to unravel the careful fagade of her worn and tired face. She started to reply, but before she could, Eastman leaned and brushed his lips to her forehead. “But thank God you did,” he whispered. “Dab up the eyes. We’ve got to go back to the party.”

The battered Toyota slid silently past the deserted warehouses. Rico was in front, beside the driver. To his right, through the high wire fence wrapping the Bayonne docks, he could catch an occasional glimpse of the black sheen of the harbor and, in the distance, the gleaming lights of Manhattan.

“Aquf.”

The driver stopped and snapped off the headlights. They were in total darkness. The only sound the pimp could hear was the keening of the sea gulls down by the water’s edge.

The three men left the car and walked down a long alley toward the rear of an abandoned loft. At the end of the alley, the leader rapped on a door. It opened, and from the darkness inside a flashlight’s narrow beam trapped each face a brief instant in its glow.

“Venga,” a voice commanded.

As soon as he stepped into the loft, Rico knew why he was there. At one end a long wooden slab rested upon a pair of trestles. Five chairs were ranged behind it. A pair of kerosene lanterns were on the table, their flickering glow falling on two portraits on the wall, Che Guevara and the founder of the FALN.

The Puerto Rican movement was the only terrorist organization firmly implanted on the soil of the United States, and it had succeeded in maintaining its integrity there because of procedures as ruthless as the one about to begin. It was the trial of a traitor, and Rico noted to his intense relief that the accused was already in place, firmly bound and gagged, in a chair facing the trestle table.

Rico, as a senior member of the FALN, took his place in one of the judges’ chairs. He tried to avoid looking at the accused, at his wildly moving eyes, at the veins bulging in his neck as he strained to articulate through his gag the defense he would not be permitted to make.

The trial, which was nothing more than a ritualized justification for murder, was brief. The accused was a police informer, brought up from Philadelphia to be “tried” in Bayonne because it would be easier to execute his sentence here. When the evidence had been heard, the man in the center of the table polled his fellow judges. One after another they intoned, “Muerte.”

No one suggested clemency. With the exception of a few people like Rico, the leadership of the FALN was composed of lower-middle-class intellectuals, second-rate history instructors and professional graduate students, and mercy was not a feeling that registered in the sterile reaches of their academic, revolutionary minds.

On the table in front of the chief judge was a Walther P38. Wordlessly, he passed it along the table to Rico. This too was a FALN ritual. To kill deliberately in cold blood on the orders of the organization was the ultimate proof of a man’s loyalty.

Rico took the gun, got up and walked around the table. Trembling slightly, concentrating his eyes on a corner of the warehouse floor so that he did not have to look at his victim’s head, he drew the pistol up, pushed off the safety, felt briefly for the soft flesh of the temple and pulled the trigger.

There was a sharp click.

Rico looked down to see the mocking laughter in his victim’s eyes. Six men moved out of the shadows, thrust Rico into the chair, bound and gagged him.

“There is a traitor in this room,” the chief judge announced in Spanish.

“But it is not he.”

This time there was no need for a trial. It had already taken place before Rico arrived. The chief judge took back the Walther and drew out the clip.

Methodically, he filled it with 9mm. cartridges, then slapped it shut with the heel of his hand. He offered it to the figure who stepped from the shadows at the back of the loft. It was the man Rico had given to the FBI.

Noiselessly, the man walked around the table and placed the cold black barrel to Rico’s temple. He stood there a moment. Then he pulled the trigger and blew Rico’s brains halfway across the loft.

Angelo Rocchia stared from his office window, out across the darkened, snow-frosted rooftops of lower Manhattan, feeling as he did the heat burning up his throat. The Rolaids, he thought, cursing himself for ordering the spaghetti al pesto, where did I put the Rolaids?

He turned back to his desk and started to fumble through its drawers. There was little to distinguish his office from most of the others on the detectives’ floor of Police Plaza. On his blotter was a desk set made of the shields that had marked his progress through the department-and life.

Hung from the walls were the obligatory career photos: Angelo graduating from the Police Academy, being congratulated on the four citations he had won by an assortment of commissioners, at the Columbian Society banquet the night he had been elected president of the Department’s Italian-American fraternal association. There was a portrait of Maria and one of his late wife, the black felt mourning button he had worn religiously for a year now fixed to its silver frame.

He found his tube of Rolaids, popped one into his mouth and returned to the window, waiting anxiously for the relief it would bring. They said heart attacks sometimes started this way, with the burning in the gut and all. So many of the older guys were going that way, the guys he had come in with right after the war; what with the hours, the strain, the fear, the smoking, they said your chances were a lot worse than most people’s.

He never should have eaten so much, but he wanted to take the kid out, show him Forlini’s. He had made him stick around while he typed up their fives, the supplementary investigation reports, that left every NYPD investigation, even one as critical as this, inches deep in paper. A good detective, he’d kept reminding the kid, always keeps his paper up.

Shit, what did they want to know, these kids like Rand? he suddenly asked himself. Wanted to have it all right away, they did. Learning slowly, putting it all together the hard way, they had no time for that. You saw them all over the Department now, figured they already had all the answers, didn’t have to pay their dues the way the older guys had, out there doing the horseshit jobs, getting down the routine, the routine, the routine until it was as much a part of you as your dandruff or your body odor, soaking up experience until certain things became such a natural reaction you didn’t even think about them anymore.

Angelo could see Rand now sitting opposite him in Forlini’s telling him how good the wine was, at the same time letting him know he didn’t approve of throwing guys like the pickpocket against the wall. Already so sure of himself he was just a little patronizing to the older guy.

He started at the sound of the telephone, its jangle echoing through the deserted offices.

“Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get you all day.ţ

Hearing her voice, Angelo slid happily into his desk chair. “I’ve been enjoying a typical New York detective’s day. Looking for a needle in the haystack with a bunch of the boys.”

“I called you this morning, but they said everybody was off at a meeting.”

“Yeah. Got a lot of people on this.” Angelo’s voice was gruff, but the gruffness was as transparent as his office window. “I shoulda called you, Grace, but I wasn’t certain …” He hesitated. “I mean after last night and all.”

“I know. I thought a great deal about last night, too, Angelo. I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to keep the baby.”

“Grace, you don’t really mean that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You want another kid that bad?”

“I do.”

How can so much happen in twenty-four hours? Angelo wondered. How can things suddenly change so much? “Grace, if that-” he dabbed at the touch of dampness on his forehead-“if that’s what you really, honestly want, I mean, what the hell, a detective first grade’s pension doesn’t go very far these days, but I wouldn’t know what to do when I retire anyway. There was a guy a couple of months ago was talking to me about taking something in security over at American Express. What I mean is, Grace, if it’s what you really want, I’ll do the right thing by you, you know?”

“Angelo.” She pronounced his name as tenderly as she sometimes did when they were lying beside each other in the darkness of his bedroom, but there was something distant there, too, and it wasn’t just because they were speaking over the phone. “That’s a wonderful thing to say and I’ll never forget you for having said it.” He could hear her slowly inhaling her cigarette. He’d been after her to give that up, except she’d never listened. “But that’s not what I want, Angelo.”

“What do you mean, that’s not what you want?” He tried to conceal the hurt and surprise with the roughness of his voice.

“Angelo, I am not trying to force you to marry me. That’s not why I’m doing this. I tried to tell you last night. I want a child, yes. But not another marriage.”

“For Christ’s sake, Grace, you’re not going to try to bring up a kid just like that? All by yourself? Without a father?”

“I won’t be the first woman in New York to do it, Angelo.”

“Goddammit.” Rage escaped Angelo like steam hissing from a ruptured heating duct. “Grace, you can’t do this.”

“Yes, I can, Angelo. The world has changed a lot, you know.”

“And what about me? It’s my child, too, after all. What am I supposed to do? Come around once a year, pat him on the cheek and say, `Hey, kid, how you getting on? Old lady teaching you how to throw a forward pass and all?”’

“Angelo.” She sounded so quiet, so determined, that the detective’

understood just how completely her mind was made up. “One of the reasons I want this child is because I hope he-or she-will have some of those qualities I love and admire so much in you. But I’m having it for myself, because I want it and I’m ready to accept the responsibilities that go with having it. Alone. Of course, if you want to see the child, there’ll always be a place for you in his or her and my life.”

“Thanks, Grace. Thanks a lot.” As he pronounced the words, Angelo could feel the dull ache constricting his stomach. He was staring out through the windows to the city lights again. This time their edges were blurred and indistinct because Angelo Rocchia had just understood that the last love affair of his life was drawing to an end.

“I’ll call you someday and we can have a nice talk about it.”

When they had hung up, he started to unfold his portable camp bed.

Lieutenant Walsh’s Office of Civil Preparedness had passed out a bunch of them during Friday’s snow emergency and some of them had gotten lost — like the one that had happened to get lost behind Angelo’s door. He had hung up his tie and taken off his cufflinks when he saw the night desk man, Terry Keegan, in his doorway.

“Sleeping in?” Keegan asked.

“Yeah. I got to be over to Hertz Rent-A-Truck at Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, sixthirty tomorrow morning.” That, Angelo reflected, was typical of a detective’s life. Tonight you’re a hero, tomorrow you’re a hack, assigned to be an errand boy for the FBI forensic guys busting up the truck that got the barrels. “Christ, the older I get, the more I hate these early calls.”

“Me too.” Keegan laughed. “Like that ballbreaker they gave us back in ‘fifty-two when we were just breaking in up at the Tenth Precinct. You remember that one?”

“Do I?” Angelo laughed. It had been a hit and run, a leaving the scene, with the victim DOA. Every morning they had had to get out on the West Side Highway at sixthirty stopping cars in the bitter winter cold. “Excuse me, sir, do you go by this way every day? See anything that looked like an accident last Friday?” A thousand cars they must have stopped.

“It was an out-of-town salesman, came in to his office every Friday, remember?” Angelo said. “Come up with the kind of car because his brother-in-law had one just like it.”

“Yeah.” Keegan smiled at the memory, its pain washed away by time. “And the guy walked on us anyway because his lawyer said the other guy died of a heart attack.”

Angelo was stretching, yawning. “All the work that went into that one horseshit collar.”

“You imagine the overtime we’d make if we bad that kind of a case today?”

“Shit,” Angelo sighed, “they never put that kind of effort into a case anymore.”

Keegan disappeared and Angelo stepped to the window for a last glimpse of his city. He thought of that barrel of gas someone had hidden somewhere out there. What kind of guy would do something like that? he wondered. Could he look at the pictures of the people he’d killed in the papers the next day? Could he stand to watch kids, parents, relatives crying their hearts out on television for the people he’d killed? He shook his head. So much had changed since he had come up, the world was so different now.

He turned out the light and lay down on his camp bed, letting the kaleidoscope of oncoming sleep tumble the images before his mind, of Grace looking up at him in Forlini’s, of his reproachful young FBI partner, of a frightened Arab and a handsome young detective, his hair as black as the shadows of the night, stopping the cars on the West Side Highway so long ago. _