The Fifth Horseman

PART VII

The President allowed the icy jets of water to batter him, savoring the numbness their chill streams inflicted on his exhausted body. His shower stall adjacent to the Presidential bedroom suite was still referred to in the White House as “Lyndon Johnson’s wakeup shower.” The Texan had ordered it installed during the Vietnam War, cursing as he did the inability of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to force the water pressure high enough to satisfy him. The current Chief Executive had every reason to be thankful for its presence. He’d been living on black coffee and its periodic assaults for twentyfour hours. At 4:30 A.M. he had finally left the NSC conference room to return to the living quarters in the hopes of getting a couple of hours’ sleep. His gesture had been futile.

Toweling himself dry, he reviewed for the hundredth time the terrifyingly few assets and options the United States possessed to meet Qaddafi’s threat, hoping against all reason to discover somewhere in the recesses of his mind the one solution they had overlooked. Amin, Khomeini and now this man: zealots menacing the whole fragile balance of international conduct and behavior. And why? He couldn’t help thinking of the words he had read trying to force sleep onto his racing mind last night, a fragment of Aeschylus he’d found in the Wisdom of the Ages he kept by his bedside:

How prophetic, he told himself again. Because it is with our feathers that their arrows are made, all the arms, the science, the technology we in the West have thrust at Qaddafi and everyone else who wanted them in our gluttonous, uncontrollable appetite for energy and capital.

His mess steward had set his usual breakfast on his bedroom desk: coffee, grapefruit, two softboiled eggs and a slice of wholewheat toast. He gulped the juice and the coffee and ignored the rest. He had no stomach for food this morning. Then he punched the remote-control panel that allowed him to watch, simultaneously, the three television sets at the foot of his bed.

Listening to the opening sequences of Good Morning America, The Today Show and The CBS Morning News, he noted with relief that no hint of the crisis had leaked to the media-despite the notorious permeability of his capital.

Before going downstairs, he opened the door to his wife’s bedroom and tiptoed to the bed where she lay crumpled in sleep. He bent down and kissed her, savoring as he did the comforting warmth of her sleeping body.

Her eyes blinked open. She reached for his hand. “Darling,” she whispered, “are you all right?”

The President nodded grimly.

“Is there anything new?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

With his hand, she patted the sheets by the side of the bed. Gratefully almost, the Chief Executive sat down beside her. There was no one, not even Eastman, in whose wisdom and judgment the President had greater confidence.

Half a dozen times since the crisis had begun, he had unburdened himself to her here in this bedroom or the sitting room next door, relieved in those intimate instants of the need of maintaining the stern, composed faBade he felt forced to give to his advisers.

For a moment he was silent, his hands clasped between his knees, his shoulders slumping forward. Then he shuddered, depressed by the weight of his thoughts.

“What is it, my love?”

The President reached for his wife’s hands. She could see, despite the dimness of her bedroom, the patina of tears in his eyes. She pressed his flesh to her. He began to tremble, ever so faintly, like the ground tremor provoked by a distant explosion.

“I’m afraid,” he whispered. “My God, I’m so afraid it’s going to go wrong.”

His wife sat up and wordlessly slipped out from under her bedcovers. For an instant she sat beside him, a comforting arm thrown around his shoulders.

Then, with her husband beside her, she turned and slipped to her knees.

There, in his wife’s darkened bedroom, his face in his hands, the President began a private, desperate prayer for the strength he would need in the hours ahead.

In New York, it was 7:15 A.M. when Abe Stern, numb with exhaustion, sat down at the dining-room table in Gracie Mansion and began to poke at the scrambled eggs his housekeeper had set before him. Next to his plate was a one-page summary of the events of the last four hours. One word would have been sufficient “nothing.” Stern had returned at 3 A.M. to the Federal mansion that had sheltered New York’s mayors since 1942. He might just as well have stayed downtown-like the President, he hadn’t been able to sleep.

The discovery of traces of radiation, first out in Queens, then in the truck that had picked up the missing barrel, the knowledge that two Palestinians involved in Qaddafi’s nuclear program had picked up the Dionysos’ cargo, had shattered the one hope Stern had clung to all during the desperate hours of Monday, the illusion that somehow, maybe just somehow, the bomb wasn’t there.

From the transistor beside him the WNYC Travelers’ Timetable droned out early traffic advisories for the first commuters heading into his city.

Stern sickened listening to them. Three million people heading into the city, perhaps to die, totally ignorant of the menace threatening them. That had led to the bitterest argument he had had with the President since the crisis had begun. Confronted with the certainty that there was a thermonuclear device in Manhattan, he had asked the White House at midnight for permission to seal off Manhattan to incoming traffic, close down every bridge, tunnel, and railroad line into the city.

The military bad backed him up; barring New York’s three million commuters from the city would have brought the potential American loss from the explosion of Qaddafi’s bomb much closer to the even-tradeoff point at which the Libyan would lose the advantage he held. The President and the rest of the Crisis Committee had all opposed him. There was no way Manhattan Island could be cut off from the rest of the world in silence, and the risk that the implacable zealot in Tripoli would detonate his device as soon as he found out what was happening was too great to be acceptable. You could not, the President had argued once again, take the chance of condemning five million New Yorkers to death to save three million commuters. Everyone threatened by this terrifying end act of political terrorism would have to share the risks equally, the President had ruled.

And so right now, Abe Stern thought, in the cold morning air in Darien and Greenwich, White Plains and Red Bank, New Jersey, people were gathering in bus stations and along train platforms, or lingering over a cup of coffee as they waited for the honk of a carpool driver. Soon they would be flooding into New York over the railroads and bridges he had wanted to cut, innocently heading for another day’s work and very possibly their deaths.

He pushed his eggs away, unable to eat. Should I have agreed? he asked himself again. How the hell can a man decide where his obligations lie in such a horrible dilemma?

His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of his wife in the doorway, her gaunt figure wrapped in the faded rose satin dressing gown she had bought at Abraham and Strauss fifteen years before.

“Why are you up so early?” he asked.

Wordlessly, she moved to the sideboard, poured herself a glass of orange juice from the pitcher there, and sat down beside him. “What’s the matter?

You didn’t sleep last night.”

“Nothing’s the matter,” Stern rejoined irritably. “I couldn’t sleep, is all.”

His wife pointed a reproachful finger toward his plate. “How come you’re eating eggs for breakfast? You know Mort told you eggs were bad for your cholesterol.”

“So what? What is he anyway, some kind of genius because he went to Harvard?” Stern thrust his knife angrily at the butter dish, cut a thick slab and spread it defiantly on a piece of toast he had no appetite to eat. “I get a heart attack, it’s not going to be from eating eggs, believe me. What time’s your plane?”

Ruth was due to leave, as she did every year at this time, to spend the holidays in Miami with their daughter and son-in-law. She’d planned her departure two weeks ago, and the knowledge that she, at least, would be spared, not by any violation of his trust but by fate, had made Abe Stern’s anguish just a little easier to bear in the past few hours.

“I don’t know if I’m going.”

“What do you mean, not going?” There was an intimation of panic in the Mayor’s astonished reply. “You got to go.ţ

“Why are you in such a hurry I should leave town? You got a girl or something?”

“Ruth! Look at me! Thirty-two years we’ve been married. Have I ever done something like that to you? What girl would want me anyway? Get the plane.”

Ruth poured herself a cup of black coffee and sipped it thoughtfully. She was a year younger than Abe, her hair thin and white now, clinging to her head like sad wisps of angel’s beard left behind on an old Christmas tree abandoned in the back yard. “I was kidding, Abe. About the girl.” Her dark eyes gazed at her husband over the rim of the coffee cup she held before her lips. “But something’s wrong, Abe. You’ve got something on your mind.

Must be a big problem.”

Stern sighed. After so many years of marriage there were no secrets anymore. “Yeah,” he answered, “I got a problem all right. But I can’t tell you about it. Please, Ruth, get the plane. Go down to Miami-for me.”

His wife got up and moved behind him, letting her arms hang down until she could cradle Stern’s cheeks in her aged and arthritic fingers. “Don’t tell me, Abe. It’s all right. But, you got a problem, this is where I belong.

Not in Miami.”

Stern reached up and clasped her bony hands. Outside, through the dining-room windows, the first gleamings of dawn were reflected off the dark channel of Hell Gate, creeping across Ward’s Island and onto the tenements of Queens.

How lovely it all is, the Mayor of New York reflected, his hands tightening around those of his wife, how lovely it is.

At the underground command post where Abe Stern had spent most of his sleepless night, the whole thrust of the mammoth search effort had now taken on a new dimension. All the manpower available was now concentrated on the most extensive manhunt any American city had ever known, the pursuit of Whalid, Kamal and Laila Dajani.

Al Feldman had been up all night coordinating the NYPD’s contribution to the search. With three identified suspects in hand, the decision had been taken to throw the full resources of the 24,000-man police force into the search. The Dajanis were being described, to keep the secret of the bomb, as cop killers. Right now in every station house, in every precinct in the five boroughs, the patrolmen coming onto the day shift were being handed photos of the Dajanis, part of the thousands printed overnight. The men coming off the night shift were put into civilian clothes, given photos and held on duty. The headquarters switchboard was ordering the men and women of the four-to-twelve to report to their precincts at 10 A.M. so that by midday every police officer in New York City would be out looking for the three Palestinians. Forget everything, they were being ordered: burglars, traffic and parking violations, purse snatchers, junkies, whores, fighting drunks. Just find some trace of the neighborhood in which the three alleged cop killers had last been seen.

Feldman had laid down basic guidelines for the search pattern, based on the conviction that no matter how hard they had tried to avoid it, the Dajanis would have had to come into contact with certain aspects of New York life.

Every newsstand vendor, every druggist, every counterman, cashier and short-order cook at every hamburger joint, fast-food franchise, pancake house, soda fountain, pizza parlor and Hero sandwich shop in the city was to be shown the Dajanis’ photos. So, too, were the owners, clerks, salesmen and checkout-counter operators of every food store in town from the crummiest mom-and-pop store in Sheepshead Bay to the biggest Grand Union supermarket in Queens. Pushcart operators selling soft drinks and sandwiches off the sidewalks were to be queried, the attendants in all the big public lavatories, in the city’s Turkish baths.

The vice cops were all brought in and ordered to check the city’s countless prostitutes, massage parlors, “contact” centers, fieabag hotels to see if the Dajanis had patronized any of them. A similar effort against the city’s dope dealers was assigned to the Narcotics Squad.

Patrolmen were assigned to all the toll booths, inbound and outbound, at all the bridges and tunnels with orders to scrutinize the passengers of every car passing through them. The three thousand men of the Transit Police were fully mobilized and assigned to watch every turnstile and station entrance in the subway system. The muggers might have a field day in New York’s subways this Tuesday, December 15, but the Dajanis would have no better than a fifty-fifty chance of using them without getting caught.

The thousands of FBI agents freed from the pier and personnel searches were assigned to cover every hotel, roominghouse and car-rental agency in the city. Others were assigned New York’s real-estate agencies with orders to validate every lease that had been signed in the past six months, looking for the place where the bomb might be hidden. Still others were teamed with the crimeprevention specialists in each of the NYPD’s precincts, telephoning contacts and names on each precinct’s business index file for any indication from shopowners and small merchants of new, suspicious activities in their neighborhoods. FBI agents paired with NEST scientists with hand-held Geiger counters were instructed to comb methodically all the city’s abandoned buildings.

There had been a bitter debate just before dawn over the potential use of the media. Feldman had urged giving the Dajanis’ photos and the cop-killer cover story to the papers and television stations. That way they could have mobilized most of the city’s population in the search. He had been overruled by Eastman in Washington. The National Security Assistant’s mistrust of Qaddafi after the scanner incident was total; there was every chance one or all of the Dajanis were kamikaze volunteers baby-sitting the bomb, and the sight of their photos on television might cause them to panic and set it off.

Now, with his orders out, his plans set, the Chief had nothing to do but think and wait. For ten minutes he had been doing just that, sipping black coffee and trying to remember what he might have overlooked. Only by the greatest act of will was he able to keep himself from picking up the phone on his desk, calling his home out in Forest Hills and quietly but firmly telling his wife to get the hell out of there.

He was thinking about doing just that when he saw the Police Commissioner, red-eyed and exhausted, standing over him. I wonder how Bannion is dealing with this one, Feldman asked himself. The Commissioner had ostentatiously moved back to Manhattan from the Island after his appointment to “demonstrate a sense of solidarity with the people of New York.” I’ll bet, the Chief told himself maliciously, Marie Bannion’s demonstrating her solidarity with the people of New York right now barrel-assing through Yonkers in an unmarked police car.

Then, looking into his Commissioner’s blue eyes alight with the same fright he felt, Feldman was ashamed.

“What do you think, Chief?” Bannion asked. “Can we make it?”

Feldman took a swallow of his bitter black coffee and stared up at Bannion.

For a moment he sat there looking at him, thinking, appraising both the situation and his answer. Why lie? the Chief told himself. Why con him or myself or anybody else?

“No, Commissioner,” he answered, “not in the time we got left, no way.”

Angry and frustrated, Angelo Rocchia stalked the huge parking area of the Hertz Rent-A-Truck agency at 354 Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, its expanse filled with a motley collection of trucks painted not in the familiar Hertz yellow and blue but in the commercial colors of the agency’s leasing clients: the Omaha Hotel Supply Company, Junior’s Restaurant, Sabrett’s Kosher Frankfurters, F. Rabinowitz Caterers.

It was already close to midmorning, and, as he had expected he was going to be, he was nothing more than a glorified gofer for the FBI forensic experts pulling apart the truck the Dajanis had used to pick up their load of barrels at the Brooklyn Army Terminal pier only a few blocks away. In fact, he wasn’t even a gofer. The FBI men were so studiously absorbed in their work they had completely ignored him.

The truck was lying in a hundred pieces on the floor of one of the agency’s three garages. It had been sealed off to its curious employees and turned into a miniature crime laboratory. Even Angelo had to admire the thoroughness of the FBI effort. Every one of the thirty-seven bumps, scrapes, indentations on the truck’s body and fenders, some so small they were barely visible, had been circled in red. Spectrographic-analysis equipment had been flown up from Washington and set up to examine paint chips from each, hoping to find one that would reveal some clue as to where the truck had gone when the Dajanis had rented it on Friday. The young couple who had taken it out Saturday had been brought in and grilled to see if the Dajanis had left anything behind, a matchbox, a restaurant napkin or carton, a map, anything that might have suggested where they had been.

The tires had been pulled apart, every speck of dirt and grime impregnated in their treads vacuumed out and studied for the one peculiarity that might indicate a particular place in which the truck had been parked. The floor mat had been carefully vacuumed and the results studied in the search for a speck of soil from the Dajanis’ shoes that might indicate the kind of ground over which they had been walking.

Nothing was too outlandish. The FBI had learned that painters had been working on Friday on the Willis Avenue Bridge linking the Bronx and Lipper Manhattan. They had gone over the van’s roof with microscopes to see if even a speck of paint could be found there to establish that the truck had used that route into the city. Someone had been through the computers at the Parking Violations Bureau at Park Avenue South and Thirty-first looking for unpaid parking tickets. That was SUP in New York since the Son of Sam murders.

It was marvelous, Angelo thought, precise, scientific and marvelous; yet he knew very well that up until now the whole staggering FBI effort had revealed virtually nothing. The FBI had rapidly determined with photographs that the rental had indeed been made by Kamal and Whalid just before ten Friday morning. They had explained that they were going to move some furniture to a new apartment. That in itself indicated that someone had briefed them on rental procedures, because had they said they were going to make a pickup of commercial goods from the docks their stolen driver’s license wouldn’t have worked. They would have needed a commercial license. Their whole effort would have ended there. The desk clerk in the trailer that served as the renting office had remembered that Whalid had inquired about the load the Econoline van they’d been offered could carry and had seemed relieved to learn it could handle five thousand pounds with no problems.

They had left, according to the time automatically punched onto the rental agreement, at 9:57. Kamal had returned the truck, alone, at 6:17, after the rental office had closed. The only other precise thing they had on it was the time, 11:22, that the guard at the gate down on the pier had signed them out with their load on his dispatch sheet.

Angelo stared across Fourth Avenue to the kids playing in an open schoolyard, the red brick outline of Engine Company 23 and the spire of the Church of St. Thomas Aquinas. He knew this area. Forty, fifty years ago, the two-and three-story turn-of-the-century tenements had housed an Italian neighborhood, heavy Mob turf. He was lost in his recollections when he heard a voice beside him hissing, “Hey, what are you guys looking for in there? A murderer?”

“Yeah,” Angelo answered. He recognized the yardman who had checked in the van. “A murderer who hasn’t got around to murdering anybody yet.” Casually he draped a friendly arm around the man’s shoulders. “Listen, let’s just go through what happened last Friday night one more time.”

“Hey.” The man’s irritation was evident. “I told them guys in there already. Friday this place”-he gestured at the cluttered yard-“was a goddamn ice-skating rink. What the hell am I going to do, waste my time talking to some guy checking in a van when I gotta clean this place up? Angelo resumed his pacing and his recollections. Suddenly he stopped. Snow and ice. It was a proven fact. You could look it up on the computer.

Snowstorms were hell on the accident rate, particularly the first snowstorm of the year. And what, he asked himself, do Arabs know about driving on snow? They didn’t know snow from shit.

The men waiting for the President in the NSC conference room were as exhausted as he was. A few had managed to catnap an hour or two in a chair; most were living on coffee and their dwindling reserves of nervous energy. As soon as he sat down, Eastman reviewed the one substantial development of the last two hours. The Chairman of the Central Committee had just sent a report from the Russian ambassador in Tripoli. On Soviet insistence he had pleaded with Qaddafi to resume negotiations with Washington. The Libyan had been absolutely unyielding.

“At least, for once we’re getting some help from our Soviet friends,” the President noted grimly. “What I’m interested in now is the status of the Rapid Deployment Force,” he told Eastman. “Get the military in here.”

Three major generals of the Army, the Air Force and the Marines appeared at Eastman’s side at the summons of the buzzer. They were responsible for planning the forcible removal of the Israeli settlements from the West Bank. The Marine took charge of the briefing. The 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and the Second Armored Brigade in Fort Hood, Texas, he reported, had been mobilized during the night. At dawn, men and equipment had been loaded onto their waiting C-5As and were airborne now in twelve separate flights en route to Germany. The lead flight was already far out over the Atlantic Ocean.

The Marine stepped forward and pushed a button that lifted the covering from one of the television sets on the wall. On the screen was an image showing the position of the Sixth Fleet Marine Amphibious Force, two helicopter carriers and four attack transports. They were twenty nautical miles from the Lebanese seacoast, just northeast of Beirut.

“Mr. President,” Admiral Fuller, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said, “we’ve got some decisions to make right now. The first concerns those flights from Fort Bragg and Fort Hood. Do we keep them en route to their restaging bases in Germany or do we turn them back? The first flights are coming up to their stop-or-go line.”

“We’ve received Chancellor Schmidt’s clearance to use our fields in Germany for restaging and refueling,” the Secretary of State reported. The President had expected Schmidt’s approval, but it was still a formality which had to be honored.

“The second decision involves landing the Marines,” Fuller said. “General, explain.”

The Marine stepped to the television set and indicated the map of the Mediterranean shoreline that now appeared there. “We have three possible landing areas, Mr. President. Here in southern Lebanon at Tyre, north of Beirut at lunieh Bay where the Christian Separatist movement is centered or up in Latakia in Syria. Tyre is closest to the scene, but if the Israelis oppose us from the outset we’ll have a grave problem giving our beachhead adequate air cover. Our current plan is to use the aircraft from the Sixth Fleet on a shuttle basis, putting them down at Jordanian airports to refuel.”

“Mr. President.” Again it was the Secretary of State. “We’ve discussed this with King Hussein and he has agreed to let us use his airfields and has promised absolute secrecy until our decision is taken.”

“How about the units of the RDF?” the President asked. “Where would you propose to put them in?”

“The only feasible spot, sir, is Damascus,” Admiral Fuller replied.

“They’ve got the airfield facilities we’d need for our heavy equipment, and it’s astride the ground communications to the West Bank.”

“Has this been discussed with Assad?”

“No, sir,” the Secretary of State answered. “We thought that had better wait for your go-ahead. We don’t have the same confidential relationship with him that we have with the King. Although, in the circumstances, it’s hardly likely he’ll object.”

“All right.” The President sat forward in his chair. “Move the RDF units on to Germany. Hold them on alert status ready to go on to the Middle East as soon as we give the orders. Brief the ambassador in Damascus on the situation and what we’ll want from Assad, but tell him not to contact him until he receives the order.”

He glanced at the Marine Corps General. “Set your planning up to put our forces into Junieh Bay. They can count on a friendly reception there, and if we decide to go ahead with this, cutting down on casualties is going to be a lot more important than a few hours’ time.” He was pensive a moment, then turned to the Secretary of State. “Prepare a message to be sent to the Chairman on the red line to Moscow over my signature telling him what we’re doing and why. Ask him to see that it’s relayed to Qaddafi.

Do the same thing via our charge in Tripoli. We don’t want Qaddafi to have any misconceptions about these moves that would lead him to act precipitously. And tell the Chairman we would welcome his putting maximum pressure on Qaddafi to at least extend his ultimatum.”

“How about the Israelis, Mr. President?” the Secretary of State asked.

“Shouldn’t we tell them too? If they realize we’re not bluffing they might be more amenable to the idea of getting those settlements out of there themselves and avoiding this whole ghastly mess.”

“Sir,” Admiral Fuller countered, “if we’re going to have a showdown with them, I’d sure hate to tell them eight or ten hours ahead of time what we’re going to do.”

His words were followed by an awkward silence as everyone in the room waited for the President to reply.

“Don’t worry, Admiral,” he said firmly. “We don’t have to tell them.

They’ll find out for themselves.”

A pair of military policemen escorted Grace Knowland down the broad wooden staircase of New York’s Seventh Regiment Armory toward a lean officer in khakis waiting at the foot of the stairs.

“Major McAndrews, First Army PIO,” he said, his face radiant with the studied congeniality of a seasoned PR man. “We’re certainly grateful to you for the interest you’re taking in what we are doing here.”

He led her along the basement corridor to a well-lit office. “This is Major Calhoun,” he said, introducing her to a bespectacled man rising to greet her from behind his desk. “He’s our operations officer.”

The two men offered Grace a chair. “How do you like your coffee?” McAndrews asked jovially.

“Black. Straight up.”

While McAndrews hurried off to get it, Calhoun casually put his feet on his desk, lit a cigarette and waved at the maps spread over his office walls.

“Basically,” he began, “what we’re doing here is having a look at the resources we have in the First Army area which can provide federal military relief assistance to New York in the event of natural disasters, such as the snowstorm you had here last week. Or a power failure or a hurricane.

Essentially, we’re making an inventory of our capabilities to provide rapid federal disaster assistance to the city.”

The major got up, took a pointer and began to tick off on the maps the First Army’s military installations.

“We begin with McGuire Air Force Base down here in New Jersey,” he said.

“They can handle Starlifters, but, of course, they’re not much help in getting snow off the streets, are they?” The major laughed at his little joke and continued his well-rehearsed briefing. It had been carefully prepared at Federal Plaza and designed to last half an hour, long enough, the FBI had calculated, to exhaust the journalistic possibilities inherent in snow removal.

“Any questions?” he asked, concluding.

“Yes,” Grace answered. “I’d like to go in and talk to your people actually working on the exercise.”

The officer coughed nervously. “Well, that’s a little bit difficult at the moment. They’re all working, and since reaction time is an important factor in our calculations, we wouldn’t want to interrupt them. It might skewer our results, so to speak. Tell you what I’ll do, though. If you come back at three tomorrow when we wind up, I’ll see to it you have all the time with them you want.”

“Exclusively?”

“No one else is in on it.”

“Fair enough.” Grace gave the officer a satisfied smile and closed the steno pad she had used for her notes.

McAndrews offered to escort her out of the armory. As they passed through the huge assembly area where her son played tennis, something odd struck her. A panel of rope netting, high enough to stop everything but the wildest of lobs, sealed off the tennis courts from the rest of the armory’s main floor. There was nothing unusual about that. The net was always there to keep stray balls from bouncing around among the olive-drab vehicles of the National Guard unit that used the armory. Except this morning there were no olive-drab vehicles behind it, only half a dozen rented Avis, Hertz and Ryder trucks.

“What are all those rented trucks doing here?” she asked McAndrews. “Are they part of your exercise?”

“Yes,” the Major answered. “We used them to bring some material in. Infrastructure support.”

“Since when,” Grace inquired, “is the Army so wealthy it can afford to go out and rent trucks with the taxpayers’ money instead of using its own vehicles?”

Major McAndrews gave another nervous little laugh.

“Well, ma’am, our military vehicles are pretty cumbersome to maneuver around crowded cities like Manhattan. They’re apt to tie up traffic something fierce. So we use these rented trucks. To avoid inconveniencing the civilian population, so to speak.” The FBI agent masquerading as as an Army major smiled, immensely pleased by the nimbleness of his reply.

“I see.” Grace offered him her hand. “Oh, by the way, there’s a young MP lieutenant here named Daly who was very kind to my son last night. I promised I’d have a cup of coffee with him if I came back to do a story. Do you suppose someone could find him for me?”

“How many Hertz trucks you figure there are moving in New York on any given day?” Angelo Rocchia addressed his question to the young Irishman running the Fourth Avenue truckrental agency.

“We’re doing thirty-five to forty a day right here, and we got two other Brooklyn locations. You add in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens. Man, I don’t know. Four, five hundred at the least. Maybe more on a big day. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

Angelo was sitting in the manager’s cramped office. Through an interior window he could follow the activities of the FBI forensic people in the garage. They’re doing everything they can with that truck, he thought, but I don’t think you can count on it. Not unless we get more time to find this barrel of gas than I think we do. Before him was the steadily thickening accumulation of reports of the FBI’s operation. One file was missing.

Classified, the head of the FBI forensic team had told him.

What was so important in this that the government had to classify it, wouldn’t let the people who had to find the barrel know what it was? Angelo grabbed a peanut from his pocket and flipped it into his mouth, pondering that, then once again the idea that had struck him a few minutes before in the yard popped into his head. Far out, he thought, really far out. Still, I got nothing to do here except wait for some son of a bitch from the FBI to ask me to run out for coffee. A bunch of telephone calls is all, he told himself. What else do I have to do?

He took out his notepad and picked up the telephone.

“First Precinct?” he asked. “Give me your I-24 man.” The I-24 man was the precinct desk clerk, the officer in charge of the station-house blotter which recorded the daily flow of crimes in each of the seventy-two precincts of the New York Police Department from wife beatings and drunken brawls to murders.

“Hey,” he said when he had identified himself. “Pull out your sheets for last Friday and tell me if you got any Sixty-ones on there for leaving the scene.”

Grace Knowland smiled affectionately at the earnest young officer opposite her. They were sipping coffee on the stools of a Madison Avenue drugstore, the lieutenant shyly telling Grace about himself and just as shyly hinting at how much he’d like to see her again.

“Of course, I’m not really an MP,” Lieutenant Daly said. “I’m infantry.

This is temporary duty.”

“Well, you were lucky to get it. It must be tremendous to be assigned to New York just like that.”

“Not as tremendous as you’d think. I mean, they moved us here in such a hurry, we have to sleep on the floor in there in sleeping bags and live off cold C rations.”

“What!” Grace’s anger was that of a million mothers listening to their soldier son’s woes. “You mean the U.S. Army can afford to rent a bunch of Hertz and Avis trucks and leave them sitting around that armory all day long and they can’t afford to give you boys a hot meal?”

“Oh, those aren’t Army trucks.”

“They’re not?”

“No. It’s the civilians running that exercise in there that use them.”

“Civilians? Why should they want trucks like that to. study snow removal?”

“Beats me. They have some kind of technical equipment they put in there.

Then they go out and drive around for hours. Probably measuring something.

Pollution, maybe.”

Grace swallowed the last sips of her coffee, reflecting thoughtfully on his words. “Probably. Here.” She reached for the check. “Let me have that.

Damn!” she groaned, picking her loose change from her pocketbook. “I think I left my compact down in the major’s office. Could you escort me back down to look for it?”

Ten minutes later she gave the young officer a friendly kiss on the cheek and ran down the armory steps, waving to a taxi moving up Park.

As she slipped into the back seat, she pulled out her notebook and scribbled a number on its cover. It was for that scrap of information, not a missing compact, that she had returned to the armory. The number was the New Jersey license of one of the rented Avis trucks parked on the armory floor.

Abe Stern surveyed the frightened and dismayed men around him at the underground command post below Foley Square as Quentin Dewing began their now hourly review of the situation. It was already 10:30 A.M. and the almost jubilant atmosphere that had accompanied the dispatch of thousands of New York police officers with their photographs of the three Dajanis onto the sidewalks of the city had disappeared as the minutes had ticked by without a single conclusive lead or sighting.

The Mayor tried hard to concentrate on the reports of the men at the conference table, but he couldn’t. All he could think about were the people, the people for whose lives he was responsible walking on the streets above the command post, going into the courthouses, the subways, sitting in offices, in City Hall Park, up in the towers of the World Trade Center or the crowded flats of the Alfred E. Smith housing project. Down here they were going to live if that awful device, wherever it was, went off. They had provisions, real provisions, not the rotten and inedible protein crackers in the shelters. They would allow them to survive.

Eventually, they would be able to crawl out of here into whatever satanic landscape was left on the ground above them.

What about the people up there? What, Abe Stern had kept asking himself, is my moral obligation to them? He had at his disposal a facility that was unique in the United States. It was called Line 1,000 and had originally been set up by John Lindsay in the hot and fearful summers of the sixties.

It was a direct radio and television link from his desk at City Hall and his study at Gracie Mansion to the control desk of WNYC, the city’s broadcasting station. On his order, the WNYC desk man would make three calls to the three primary Emergency Broadcasting System stations, WNBG, WCBS and WABC. All three stations on receiving that call would push an emergency alert button which set an alarm bell ringing in the control room of every radio and television station in the New York area. When it went off, those stations were required by law to interrupt their regular programming and request their audiences to stand by for an emergency message. Within two minutes of picking up Line 1,000 the Mayor’s voice could be heard live on over one hundred radio and television stations. Not even the President could address his countrymen so rapidly in an emergency.

Perhaps, Abe Stern pondered, I should go on the air and tell the people to get out of the city any way they can. That idiot Oglethorpe they had sent up from Washington yesterday had said that panic, the classic fire-in-the-nightclub, everyone-rushes-for-the-door-and-no-one-getsout kind of panic, might not be applicable to this situation. People tended to behave much better in great crises than you expected them to do. And even if Oglethorpe was wrong and there was pandemonium, at least, as he’d told the President yesterday, he’d have saved some lives.

His thoughts were interrupted by a babble of noise from the squawk box on the conference table. Since last night they had been linked by a direct line to the men and women trying to manage the crisis from the NSC conference room, and he recognized the President’s voice inquiring anxiously about the progress of their search. He’s counting on us, Stern thought, listening to the worried string of words pouring from the box. All that confident “Don’t worry, Abe, we’ll talk him out of it” business of yesterday had disappeared. Three times the Chief Executive reported that they had tried to reestablish contact with Qaddafi in the past hour.

Nothing had worked; the Libyan remained adamant in his refusal to talk. The President sketched out the military preparations he had ordered for a forcible removal of the West Bank settlements if it came to that. Stern paled. He was anything but an ardent Zionist., but the prospect of his countrymen and the Israelis coming into conflict due to the diabolical plotting of this zealot in Libya sickened him. Still, he thought, if that’s the price we have to pay to save this city, so be it.

Grace Knowland pushed open the doors of the New York Times Building and strode quickly up to the security guards barring the way to the elevators. As usual, the lobby of the most influential newspaper in the world was vibrant with an air of subdued purpose. From one wall, a marble bust of the Times’s founder, Adolph Ochs, surveyed the passing throng with grim, unsmiling mien, a reminder to all who entered its precincts of the high sense of purpose with which he had endowed his paper.

The front page of Ochs’s journal still bore his slogan, “All the news that’s fit to print,” and six million trees a year fell as a consequence of the determined efforts of the Times’s editors to honor his imperious command.

From the reception rooms of the Kremlin to gossip culled in the locker rooms of Madison Square Garden, the seventy-two-page paper on sale in the vending machine opposite Ochs’s bust this December morning contained more news, more statistics, more figures, more results, more interviews, more analysis and more commentary than any other newspaper in the world.

Grace’s destination was the newsroom on the third floor. It sprawled over an acre and a half, an area so vast that its editors had, on occasion, employed binoculars to keep track of their reporters’ movements and loudspeakers to summon them from their desks. Today, the place looked more like the actuarial clerk’s bullpen at Metropolitan Life than a set for Front Page. Diffused overhead lighting bathed the place in its sterile glow; chest-high partitions broke the area into a series of little mazes; there was enough fake-wood Formica around to equip half a dozen fast-food franchises, and, final assault on the sensibilities of the paper’s oldtime reporters, there was even carpeting on the floor.

Grace’s first gesture was to telephone Avis’s New York headquarters. She quickly obtained the information she wanted: the truck she had noted at the armory belonged to the company’s New Brunswick, New Jersey, truckrental agency. Catching the bureaucracy of New York City in the heedless expenditure of the taxpayers’ money was one of her special pleasures, and from the instant she spotted the rental trucks lined up on the armory floor her reporter’s instincts had told her that once again she had caught some government agency stupidly squandering the city’s meager resources.

She picked up the phone again and dialed the New Brunswick agency, glancing around as she did to be sure no one was near enough to overhear her. What she was about to do was considered a sin at The New York Times — not a mortal sin, perhaps, but a good, solid, venial one.

“This is Desk Officer Lucia Harris of the New York State Police, Pauling Barracks,” she told the girl who answered the phone. “We’ve had a motor-vehicle collision here involving one of your vehicles. The driver was DOA at Pauling General, and unfortunately he didn’t have any ID on him. Can you give me the details on your rental agreement so we can run a trace on him?” She gave the girl the number of the truck.

“It’ll take a moment. Shall I call you back?”

“That’s all right. I’ll hold.”

A few minutes later the Avis girl was on the phone again. “His driver’s license gives him as John McClintock, 104 Clear View Avenue, Las Vegas.

It’s Nevada license 432701-6, issued May 4, 1979. Valid until May 4, 1983.”

Grace jotted the information down on her notepad. Why, in God’s name, would anybody look for a snowremoval expert in Las Vegas? She glanced at her watch. It was a few minutes past eleven, just after eight in Las Vegas.

From directory assistance she got the telephone number of a John McClintock at the address on the agreement. His phone rang, unanswered, for a long time before a woman replied.

“May I speak to Mr. John McClintock, please?”

“I’m sorry. He’s not here,” the voice replied.

“I see. Is he in Las Vegas?”

The woman hesitated. “Who’s calling? This is Mrs. McClintock.”

“Oh,” Grace answered quickly. “This is the First National City Bank in New York. We have a transfer here for him and I need his instructions on how to handle it. Could you tell me where I can reach him?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Mrs. McClintock replied. “He’s out of town for a few days.”

“Is there some number where I could contact him?”

This time there was a long pause before Mrs. McClintock answered. “Well, I don’t think I’m really allowed to tell you that. He’s away on government business. You’d better contact his office down at the Federal Building., Grace thanked Mrs. McClintock and hung up, feeling, as she did, a nervous chill in her intestines, the first flow of her reporter’s adrenaline warning her that something was very wrong with this story. A few minutes later, she was through to the Federal Building in Las Vegas.

“Q Section Safeguards, O’Reilly speaking,” a voice answered when Grace got McClintock’s extension. Safeguards, she asked herself, puzzled. Safeguards against what?

“Mr. McClintock, please.”

“This is his desk, but he’s out of town for a few days.”

Grace gave a little giggle which, she hoped, would convince O’Reilly that he was dealing with a dumb woman. “Oh,” she said, “what’s he off safeguarding?”

“Who’s calling?” The voice was chill and formal.

Again Grace invoked Citibank. “Can you tell me where I can reach him?”

“No, I can’t. The nature of his business and his whereabouts are classified information.”

Stunned, Grace set the telephone back in its socket. Why would the U.S. government feel it had to make a snow-removal exercise in New York classified information? And bring in people from Las Vegas to work on it?

My God, she realized, those trucks have nothing to do with snow removal!

That’s just a cover.

She thought of Angelo’s phrase last night, “a typical detective’s day, running around looking for a needle in a haystack.” And the Mayor. Why had the President given him a Presidential jet to fly back to New York yesterday?

She called Angelo’s office. There was no answer. She took out the secret NYPD telephone directory he had given her and frantically began to call, one after another, the offices of a dozen senior detectives. Not a single one answered.

Two minutes later, Grace was standing by the desk of Deputy Managing Editor Art Gelb. She waited until he had finished talking to another reporter, then leaned down to him. “Art,” she whispered. “I’ve got something I’ve got to talk to you about right away. I think it may be very, very big.”

There had been six “sixty-ones;” crimes of leaving the scene of an accident, recorded on the daily crime sheets of the seventy-three precincts of the New York Police Department on Friday, December 11.

Because of the snowstorm that number was, as Angelo had guessed it would be, well above the Department’s daily average.

One of the six was a serious case under active investigation. It involved an elderly black woman knocked over by a motorcyclist on the pedestrian crossing at Broadway and Cathedral Parkway and transported to St. Luke’s Hospital with a broken hip. The five remaining cases all bore the same notation under the heading “Disposition”: “Detective McCann is assigned to this case.” To the outsider, he might well have appeared to be the busiest investigative officer in the New York Police Department.

He in fact did not exist. Detective McCann was the wastebasket. His name after each of those complaints indicated the sentiments of the NYPD toward such a minor crime as leaving the scene of an accident involving a scraped fender: a lot of paperwork for nothing.

Angelo had covered nineteen precincts and four of the recorded incidents when he called the Tenth Precinct in west midtown, the area in which he had conducted his earlymorning hunt for a hit-and-run driver years before.

“Yeah, I got a Sixty-one here,” the clerk replied. “Procter and Gamble salesman got his fender scraped.”

“OK,” Angelo said. “Read it to me.”

“Complainant M-42 indicates that between the hours of one and two P.M., Friday, December 11, his motor vehicle, a 1978 Pontiac bearing New York number plate 349271 was parked in front of 149 West Thirty-seventh Street, and when he came out he observed the fender had a crease in it. Under his windshield an unknown person or persons had left a note stating: `A yellow truck hit you and took off.’ Complainant interviewed Friday, December 11, Tenth Precinct by Officer Natale. Detective McCann assigned to this case with request it be marked closed pending a further development, at which time proper and prompt police action will be taken.”

Angelo couldn’t resist a laugh at the Department’s bureaucratese. “Tell me about that `proper and prompt police action’ you got in mind,” he remarked.

“That note really said a yellow truck?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. Give me the salesman’s name and address.”

On the other side of the United States the first warm rays of sunshine glinted off the great green rolls of Pacific surf crashing onto the Santa Monica seashore. An earlymorning jogger had just turned off the beach and headed up the cliff toward his seaside cottage. He was a hundred yards from his front door when he heard the clatter of his telephone.

Still panting, the West Coast correspondent of The New York Times grabbed the phone and instantly recognized the caller from the intense, confidential murmur rippling from his receiver. “I’ve got something very important for you,” Art Gelb told him. “Get your stringer in Reno down to Las Vegas right away. There’s a John McClintock who works in some kind of a safeguards section in the Federal Building on Highland Street there. I want your guy to find out urgently exactly what it is this guy McClintock does and call me back as soon as he’s got it.”

Angelo Rocchia eased the telephone back into its cradle, thinking hard as he did it. The Procter & Gamble salesman whose fender had been scraped was out making his calls on the West Side of Manhattan, his office had just told Angelo. He wouldn’t be phoning in before nightfall. There was no way to spot his car on the city’s streets; the Cincinnati soapmakers had long ago abandoned the practice of branding their salesmen’s vehicles with the company’s familiar trademark of a smiling man in a crescent moon against a darkblue field of stars.

The only suggestion the helpful office manager had been able to make was that if Angelo wanted to reach him in a hurry he call on De Pasquale’s Hero Sandwich Bar on West Thirty-fifth just off Ninth Avenue. The salesmen working the West Side gathered there for coffee and Danish around eleven.

He would probably be there, and if he wasn’t someone who could pin down the neighborhood where he was working probably would be.

Four hundred Hertz trucks out there, Angelo thought, and how many yellow trucks on top of that? It was a very, very wild unscientific idea. He glanced into the garage at the busy array of FBI forensic experts. Not the kind of idea they were apt to appreciate. Almost reluctantly, he heaved his heavy frame from the Hertz manager’s chair and stalked into the garage with his deceptively awkward gait.

It had been the salesman’s rear left fender that had gotten the scrape, so it would probably have been the truck’s right side that had done it. Angelo surveyed the pieces of the right side of the van lined against the wall of the garage, counting on them fourteen red circles, each one numbered, each representing a different bump or scrape. He picked up the sheaves of spectrographic analysis that corresponded to the numbers. Inconclusive, just as he had thought they’d be. They had identified positively traces of three brands of paint on the truck’s right panels, two used by General Motors, one by Ford. Together, the models that employed those three brands of paint represented just over fifty-five percent of the cars on the highway. A lot of help, Angelo mused, a real lot of help.

“Something I can do for you, Detective?”

The speaker was the agent in charge of the forensic team. His words contained, the New Yorker noted, about as much warmth as those of a bank security guard questioning a teenage Puerto Rican loitering in his lobby.

“No,” Angelo replied. “Just looking around.”

“Well, why don’t you wait out there in the manager’s office where you’ll be more comfortable? We’ll let you know if we’ve got anything for you.”

I’m about as welcome in here, Angelo thought, as an archbishop in an abortion mill. Was it because of those classified papers they’d pulled out of the files? Or just the feds’ traditional mistrust of other law-enforcement agencies?

In a corner of the garage, he noted his young partner earnestly talking to one of his colleagues. He had barely gotten the time of day from him since they arrived. No one seems to want me around here, or anyplace else for that matter, he reflected bitterly, thinking back to his telephone conversation of the night before. He strolled over to Rand and tossed a conspiratorial arm over his shoulder like a coach who’s about to send a tight end onto the field with a criticial third downplay.

“Come here, kid,” he growled, edging him away from his fellow agents. There was no question of telling him what he really had in mind. The young agent was much too procedures-conscious for that. He’d say, “Have headquarters send out someone else,” and that wasn’t Angelo’s idea at all. On the other hand, one thing you could probably count on Rand for was a sense of solidarity, the “We’re all cops together, so don’t rat to the boss” thing.

He would lose Rand’s respect, but why the hell should he care about that?

“Listen, kid,” he whispered, “Cover for me for an hour or so, will you? Your guys got nothing for me and-” he winked at the FBI agent “I got a little something over here, a little biscuit I haven’t seen for a while. I’m going to just drop in and say hello to her.”

Rand whitened in shock more than anger. “My God, Angelo, you can’t do that!

Don’t you realize how desperately important it is to find this-” He was about to say “bomb” when he caught himself.

“This what?” Angelo asked. There it was again, this thing they kept dropping in front of him, then pulling away.

“The barrel of gas we’re looking for.”

“Tell me, kid, what’s so secret about chlorine gas the government has to classify stuff on it? Or is it really chlorine gas they got in that barrel?”

“Of course it is.”

For a second Angelo gazed at him, his eyes as appraising as they had been twentyfour hours earlier scrutinizing the dip in the front seat of his car. Then he jerked his head toward the agent in charge. “Your friend over there wants somebody to run out for coffee and a Danish while I’m gone, tell him they got a diner just up the street. I got the very clear message that’s all he figures a New York cop is good for anyway.”

“Angelo.” Rand was almost begging. “Going away like that is like …” The young man paused, trying to think of the worst example he could cite. “Like a soldier deserting his post in wartime.”

The New Yorker snorted, squeezing the young agent’s shoulders as he did.

“Don’t worry about it, kid. I’ll see if she’s got a friend for you.”

Arthur Gelb paced his office in the third-floor newsroom of The New York Times. The deputy managing editor was a lanky, intense man, all kinetic energy and raw nerve ends, a man who kept his staff in a state of constant tension — some would have said terror-with a nonstop flow of ideas, suggestions and queries. Like the paper he so proudly represented, he was not so much a conservative as he was a man devoted to a certain notion of responsibility. Above all, he was dedicated to the proposition that if it hadn’t happened in the pages of The New York Times it hadn’t happened at all, and to his growing anger he sensed that something very important was happening in his city and the Times didn’t know about it.

Gelb suddenly stopped his pacing. Rushing through the maze of the newsroom was one of the dozen men he had sent to scour the precincts to find out what was going on after Grace’s whispered conversation. On his face Gelb could read that special sense of purpose always present on a young reporter’s visage when he knows he’s about to impress his editor.

“This is what’s going onl” he gasped, out of breath, dropping the photos of the Dajanis onto Gelb’s desk. “They’re Palestinians. Cop killers. Everyone in town’s out looking for them.”

Gelb picked up the photographs one by one, studying each of the three in turn. “Who did they kill?”

“Two patrolmen in Chicago two weeks ago.”

“Chicago?” Gelb frowned. Since when had New York’s police been so devoted to their brethren in the Windy City? “Get Grace Knowland for me, will you?

I want to make a phone call.”

Gelb passed the three pictures to her when she entered his office. “These are your needle in the haystack. Three Palestinians that are supposed to have killed two cops out in Chicago two weeks ago. Except there hasn’t been a cop killed in Chicago for three months. I just checked with the Tribune.”

As Grace studied the pictures, Gelb picked up his phone and dialed Patricia McGuire, the Deputy Police Commissioner for Public Information. She took his call immediately. New York City officials didn’t keep the Times’s deputy managing editor on hold.

“Patty, I want to know what the hell’s going on. There’s a fake snowremoval exercise up in the Seventh Regiment Armory that’s got nothing to do with getting the snow oft the streets. And half the cops in the city are out looking for three Palestinians who didn’t do what you told them they did. What’s going on, Patty? You’ve got something here, some kind of major Palestinian terrorist action, and I want to know what it is.”

There was a long, pained silence when he had finished speaking.

“I’m sorry, Arthur,” the woman answered. “I’m afraid I don’t have the authority to answer your question. Are you in your office?”

“I am.”

“I’ll ask the Commissioner to call you right back.”

The odor of salami, of garlic, of provolone, olive oil and fresh peppers swept over Angelo like a veil of incense as he stepped inside De Pasquale’s Hero Sandwich Shop on West Thirty-fifth Street. The detective took a deep, approving breath, then surveyed the place: a lunch counter with a dozen red moleskin stools, half of them occupied, a few booths in back, a counterman slapping heros together in readiness for the lunch-hour rush, the heavy mama in black hovering protectively near the cash register. Leave it to the drummers, he thought, they always find the best joint in the neighborhood.

He stepped over to the woman, nodded at the flasks of Chianti behind her and asked her in his best Sicilian-accented Italian for a glass of Ruffino.

“Bellissima signora,” he said as she gave him the wine with an approving smile, “you know Mr. McKinney, the Procter and Gamble salesman?”

“Sure,” the woman answered. “He’sa down there.” She indicated a middle-aged man in a gabardine overcoat, a coffee and Danish before him, reading The Wall Street Journal in one of the booths.

Angelo strolled over to the man and, as discreetly as possible, gave him the shield. “Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all.” The salesman wore horn-rimmed glasses, and his ash-blond hair was retreating back from his forehead with evident rapidity. He was neat and well dressed; almost too neat, it occurred to Angelo, for someone who had to spend his days wandering in and out of grocery stores.

McKinney relaxed when Angelo explained the reason he had looked him up.

Despite their seemingly innocent calling, men like the Procter and Gamble salesman were aware of a lot of things; such as which Italian wholesaler on the West Side was, in fact, a Mafia front running collections and payoffs in the numbers operations the Mob forced small storeowners to conduct as part of their businesses. “Oh yes,” he said, “well, really, I gave them everything I had on that in my accident report at the station house.”

“I understand.” Angelo nodded sympathetically, leaning closer to the salesman as he did, so that no one could eavesdrop on their conversation. “Look, we’ve got a very, very important investigation under way, and it’s possible, just possible, that your accident might provide us with some very important clues. The note they left under your windshield wiper did say a yellow truck, you’re absolutely sure of that?”

“Oh yes.” McKinney’s reply was quick and assured. “I even showed it to the officer at the station house.”

“Right.” Angelo sipped his wine. “Now, I want you to understand what I have here’s got nothing to do with you, but it’s very important I get the exact location of the accident and the exact time frame when it took place.”

“Yes. But it’s all there in the report.”

“Sure. But I just want to be absolutely certain. Now, you’re sure you parked it at one o’clock?”

“Positive. I picked up the one-o’clock news headlines on WCBS just before I got out of the car.”

“Okay. And how long were you gone?”

“Let’s see.” McKinney frowned, trying to recollect. He bent down and took a black order book from the briefcase at his side. “I made three calls,” he said, flipping through its long white sheets. “The last one was the supermarket up on the corner. I don’t sell them, they’re handled by the office, so all I do there is just say hello to the manager, check my shelf facings, see what the competition is doing. In all, I wouldn’t have been away from the car for more than half an hour, forty minutes.”

Angelo made a few hasty jottings on the notepad he had taken from his pocket. “And the place you parked, 149 West Thirty-seventh? You’re sure of that?”

“Oh yes, I wrote it down right away.” The man blushed slightly.

Why is he lying to me? Angelo wondered. He obviously has nothing to do with this. Maybe he’s trying to hide something. Probably was off screwing a biscuit on company time. Let’s come around on him another way. He sat back, smiling. “I understand you live up there in White Plains?”

“Yes. Do you know it?”

“Yeah. Nice place. I used to think when the wife was still alive we ought to move up there. Get the fresh air and all. You married?”

“Yes. I have three children.”

Angelo bestowed his most approving smile on the salesman and leaned toward him again. “Believe me, Mr. McKinney, when I tell you this has nothing to do with you at all. But I got to be sure of that location. You’re sure you parked at 149 West Thirty-seventh?”

The Procter & Gamble salesman bristled with nervous irritation. “Yes, of course. Why are you going on so?”

“Because, Mr. McKinney, there is no way in the world you could have parked your car at 149 West Thirty-seventh Street last Friday, or any other day, for that matter. I drove by there coming up here. It’s a warehouse garage for a courier outfit with three driveways facing on the street, and it’s a very, very busy place. You couldn’t leave a car there for five minutes without starting a riot.”

McKinney went scarlet. His hands shook slightly. Angelo felt sorry for him, but the guy irritated him. Why was he lying, playing games like this? Had to be a biscuit. And when he found the dent in his fender, he got nervous.

Figured when the company saw the address on his insurance declaration, they’d ask him what the hell he was doing there.

“Look, my friend, giving false information to the police is a very serious charge. Get you in a lot of trouble with your company. I don’t want to make no problem for you, because I know you’re a good, law-abiding citizen, but I have got to know where that car was hit.”

McKinney looked up from the Formica tabletop. “Will this go anywhere?”

“Absolutely not. Don’t worry about it. This is just between us. Where were you for real?”

“Down on Christopher Street.”

“The yellow truck on the note? That’s true?”

The dejected salesman nodded.

“And the time? Was it one o’clock?”

“No. I parked at eleven-thirty. I know because I listened to the first stock market report on the radio. I bought a hundred Teltron shares two weeks ago …”

Angelo wasn’t listening. He was making some quick calculations. The Hertz truck leaves the pier at 11:22. If they took the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and came up the West Side it would take twenty, twentyfive minutes to get to Christopher Street.

“How long were you parked?”

The man’s embarrassment was now manifest and intense. “Not long. There’s a bar down there. I had to see the barman and leave a message for someone. Fifteen, twenty minutes at the most.”

“Do you remember the street number where you parked?”

“No.” McKinney shook his head. “But I could find it for you.”

Michael Bannion, the Police Commissioner, paled reading the note an aide passed to him in the underground command post.

“What’s the matter?” Harvey Hudson of the FBI demanded. “Don’t tell me we’ve got some more bad news?”

“About the worse we could get.” Bannion grimaced. “The New York Times is onto the story and I’ve got to find a way to get them off it.”

No wonder this guy didn’t want to let the office know where he got his fender dented, Angelo mused as his stupefied eyes absorbed the scene around his car. I’m really out of touch. I thought he was after a biscuit when it was really a beating he was looking for.

They were in the heart of the “rough trade” area of Greenwich Village, and the detective, sickened and fascinated, couldn’t take his eyes off the scene on the sidewalks: young men in studded black leather Hell’s Angels jackets and boots, chains dangling from their belts or swinging from their wrists, motorcycle caps and aviator glasses on their heads, characters out of a bad fifties movie. He’d heard about the scene at the headquarters.

These guys were cruisers, looking for soft trade from Wall Street or uptown, guys in their Brooks Brothers suits who, for whatever sick reason, came down here at lunchtime to get beaten with chains and whips in the “reception rooms” installed in the abandoned piers across the street.

He glanced at McKinney, not knowing whether to feel contempt or pity for the man. What bizarre urge could drive a nice guy like that from White Plains into this sick jungle of sadism, perversion and violence?

“You’re sure you’re not going to report this to anyone?” The salesman’s voice quavered as he formed the question.

“Don’t worry,” Angelo reassured him. “This is just going to be between you and me.”

“It was right here.” The salesman had turned his face away as he indicated a spot on the sidewalk along Christopher. “I went to have a drink there at the Badlands on the corner.” His finger indicated a bar a few doors away. “I had to leave a message…” The salesman’s voice cracked with shame and embarrassment. “I have a friend-“

“Forget it.” Angelo curtly cut him off. “That doesn’t interest me.”

So they would have turned off West Street and headed up Christopher, the detective pondered. That means, if my theory about the truck is correct, this barrel of gas has got to be around here someplace. Between the river and Fifth-say, Broadway to be sure. Otherwise the Palestinians would have come in by the East Side, over the Brooklyn Bridge.

Angelo studied the cruisers lolling along the sidewalks. Regulars, most of them. There was a good chance one of them put the note under the windshield wiper. Get a dozen guys down here in a big hurry, start asking questions and you just might get the answer you were looking for. And then there was this guy’s car. The dent was low, on the rear fender, probably from a bumper.

“Mr. McKinney, believe me I’ll see your office doesn’t find out about this, but we’re going to have to call them and tell them you won’t be selling any more soap today. We gotta get this fender over to Brooklyn in a big hurry.”

He laughed. “You know, it may turn out to be a lucky thing you didn’t get it fixed right away.”

Michael Bannion’s voice poured from Arthur Gelb’s telephone with the resonance, the imperiousness, of a Wagnerian overture. “Mr. Gelb,” he said, “forgive me for not getting back to you right away, but as you have correctly surmised we have what may be a very serious problem on our hands.”.

“I know,” The New York Timess impatient editor replied, crooking his phone in his elbow so that he was ready to take notes of their conversation.

“What is it?”

“I am going to tell you something in the strictest confidence, Mr. Gelb, because I know you and the Times have the safety and well-being of the people of this city at heart just as I do. Those three Palestinians we’re looking for have hidden a barrel of chlorine gas somewhere in the city. It is, as you know, a deadly substance and they’re threatening to blow it up if certain of their political conditions aren’t met.”

Gelb whistled softly. “Jesus Christl What are they asking for?”

“For the moment their demands have been rather vaguely stated, but they apparently involve those Israeli settlements in what used to be Jordan and the Arab section of Jerusalem.” Gelb was already frantically making notes on a piece of copy paper, nodding excitedly to Grace Knowland as he did.

“I’m sure you can imagine the panic and chaos this would cause if the information got out to the public before we’ve been able to pin down more precisely the location of the barrel.”

“I certainly can, Commissioner, but I also have no trouble imagining the menace this poses to the people of this city.”

“Absolutely. Our problem is it would be sheer, utter madness to order the evacuation of Manhattan Island for one barrel of chlorine gas. That leaves us only one alternative, finding that barrel before the public learns it’s here. And that’s where we need your help, Mr. Gelb. If this leaks to the public before we find it, there’s going to be panic out there. I shudder to think of the hysteria that could overtake New York if this gets out.

“I’m leveling with you, Mr. Gelb, and I’ve got to ask you for your help and cooperation in return. I know how you people feel up there about requests like this, but I’ve got to plead with you to hold off printing this until we can pin down the location of that barrel.”

Gelb interrupted him. “How did that barrel get here, Commissioner?”

“Well, we’re not one hundred percent certain.”

“Christ, you mean there’s a barrel of chlorine gas in this city and your people aren’t sure how the hell it got here?”

“Our suspicion is that it came in through the piers, in a shipment of heavy petroleum products. But, frankly, our concern is not how it got here but where it went.”

“Commissioner.” Gelb was about to address himself to Bannion’s demand when he stopped. “What about all those people up at the Seventh Regiment Armory with their rented vans? What have they got to do with this?”

“They’re a federal unit looking for any telltale gas leakages that could give us an indication of where the barrel is. Now, I want to tell you, Mr. Gelb, we’ll keep you informed on this. You have my word on it. But I beg you, for God’s sake, hold off printing it until we’ve found the barrel.”

“I’m not authorized to make a commitment like that, Commissioner. That’s up to Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Rosenthal.”

“Well, I cannot stress enough just how important this is. I’ll take it up with Mr. Sulzberger myself if you like.”

God help us, Bannion thought as he hung up, when they find out we’ve been lying to them.

Angelo Rocchia held the horn of the salesman’s Pontiac down until its strident blare brought three shirt-sleeved FBI agents scurrying out into the cold from their Hertz garage.

“Open those damn doors,” the detective ordered, waving at the entrance of their improvised forensic laboratory. “I got a present for you.”

His reception was anything but warm. “A yellow truck,” the director who had earlier told him to wait out in the office muttered when Angelo outlined his theory. “That’s all you’re going on? Some guy with a yellow truck scraped his fender?”

“At least you know it wasn’t an Avis truck hit him,” Angelo replied. “You can do a spectrographic analysis to see if you can get a paint matchup.

I’ll get a bunch of guys and go back there to see if we can find the guy who left the note.”

The lab director lapsed into silence studying the barely visible scrape on the Pontiac’s fender. “Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “It’ll take some time.

But I guess it’s probably worth it.”

When Angelo came back into the garage after calling in his request for a dozen plainclothesmen, the Bureau’s experts were already at work. One of them was moving some kind of gray metallic scanner along the fender.

Probably some high-intensity magnetic device, the detective thought. He must be trying to pull out any metallic scraps embedded in there. Curious, he squatted beside the man.

“What’s that you got there?” he asked.

“Geiger counter.”

“Geiger counter!”

“Checking to see if there’s any lingering radiation on here.”

Angelo’s face whitened. He felt his thigh muscles sag and he teetered back on his heels so that he had to thrust a hand to the cold concrete floor to keep himself from falling over. Those lying bastards, he thought. So that’s why they had those classified reports. They had this all the time and they didn’t tell us. Lied to us, kept us deliberately in the dark.

He staggered to his feet. Rand was over by a workbench busily interrogating an FBI technician. He knew. Those bastards from South Dakota and Tacoma, Washington, in their skinny ties and their wash-and-dry suits, they told them, sure, because they’re feds. But me, the guy whose city this is, the guy who’s got his people here, me they don’t trust. He was abreast of Rand now, and he struck the younger man’s shoulder with such force he started to tumble forward.

“Cut the bullshit,” Angelo snarled. “You and I got work to do.”

He almost ran to his car, then, when they were inside, slammed the door shut with such a furious jolt Rand looked up perplexed.

“What’s the matter?”

“You knew it all the time, didn’t you?”

“Knew what, for God’s sake?”

“You’ve been giving me a stroke like everybody else, haven’t you? It isn’t chlorine gas they got in that goddamn barrel. It’s a fucking atomic bomb.”

Angelo turned his ignition key so hard he almost snapped it off in the lock, then jammed the car into gear.

“This is my own home, my own people and they don’t trust me!” he roared.

There was a world of feeling in his shout, of fear and rage, bitterness and humiliation, the savage, wounded pride of the stag at bay. “You, a halfass kid out of a Louisiana law school, doesn’t even have two years in the Bureau, they trust, but me, a guy with thirty years on his ticket, me they don’t trust. All those fucking years and when they got something like this they still don’t trust youl”

He stomped so hard on his accelerator, the car fishtailed forward over the rutted snow and ice, its spinning tires shrieking in protest. The yardman he had quizzed earlier looked on, amazed. Man, he thought, he never going to get where he going driving like that.

Three hours. With a glance at the clock in the NSC conference room, the President measured once again how imminent was the horror facing them.

It was six minutes to noon. Exactly three hours and six minutes remained before the expiration of Qaddafi’s ultimatum. Men cling to hopes in a crisis as a dying believer clings to his faith, and the President still strove to cling to his despite the remorseless, inexorable pressures wringing them from his soul. At least in the last great American crisis in Iran, the United States had not had to decide its actions in the face of an ultimatum, an ultimatum laid down by a man the President had no doubt was ready to wreak the nuclear holocaust on six million innocent people.

Suddenly he interrupted the desultory flow of conversation around him. He had had an idea. It wasn’t much of an idea, but, in the situation, anything was worthwhile. “Jack,” he told his National Security Assistant. “I want to talk to Abe Stern.”

“Abe,” he said when he got the Mayor on their tie line to New York, “the sands are running down. In a short while, a very short while, we are going to have to act, and once we do there will be no turning back.”

“I understand, Mr. President,” Stern replied. “What do you propose to do?”

“The advance elements of the Rapid Deployment Force are on the ground in Germany now, refueled and ready to move on to the Middle East. We received secret assurance from President Assad in Syria half an hour ago that they’ll be allowed to land in Damascus. The Sixth Fleet Amphibious Marine Landing Force would land in Lebanon simultaneously with their arrival. The two would hook up, then move into the West Bank to clear out the settlements.”

“The Israelis will fight, Mr. President.”

“I know, Abe.” The President’s words came in a soft groan. “But I will make our very limited objectives clear to them, and the rest of the world, before we go in.”

“It may not be enough, Mr. President. Don’t forget, they have nuclear weapons, too.”

“I think I know how we can contain that threat. I’ll ask the Russians to make it clear to them what the consequences of their employing nuclear weapons would be. They might not believe that from us, but they’ll believe it from them all right. Before we get to that, though, Abe, there’s one other card we can play. You.”

“Me?”

“You. Call Begin yourself, Abe. Plead with him. Try to make him see the madness in not pulling out of those settlements.”

“Can I tell him you’re ready to-“

“Abe,” the President interrupted, “tell him anything you want. Just get him to agree to go on the air and announce that those damn settlements are coming out.”

Angelo Rocchia parked his Chevrolet at 189 Christopher Street in approximately the same spot in which the Procter & Gamble salesman’s car had been parked Friday morning. The detective was still seething with rage. He slumped againt the car seat, a walkie-talkie in one hand, a detailed block-by-block map of the neighborhood he had gotten at the Sixth Precinct spread on his knees. Twenty men were already combing the area he had designated on that map, from the river on the west over to Hudson Street on the east, two blocks north and south, knocking on every door, calling on every shop, interrogating every passerby, trying to find the author of the note.

Angelo wondered how much time they had. They’d probably lie to you if you asked them about that, too, he thought bitterly. Suddenly, a terrible urge swept through him, a single desire so terrible he trembled with feeling: to clasp in his arms the one person in the world he bad left, the frail figure he could talk to only with his eyes, to grab her, hug her misshapen body to his. And to get her as far away from this city as he could.

He was so lost in his recollections of her pathetic efforts to babble out the words of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” that he didn’t see the plainclothesman draw up to the car. He was followed by a young man in his midtwenties, his legs in black denims so close-fitting they might have been a ballet dancer’s tights, his bleached blond hair heaped high, Elvis Presley style, on his head. He had a coppercolored boxer on a leash. Angelo got out of the car.

“Would you repeat to Detective Rocchia here what you just told me?” the plainclothesman ordered.

“Oh yes, certainly, of course. I was walking Ashoka here, I have to walk him a lot, he needs the outdoors so, poor thing, he just can’t stand being cooped up all day in my little flat, can you, darling?” The young man bent down to pat the animal as Angelo scowled. “And I was right over there.” He gestured to the other side of the street. “And I heard this awful scraping noise. I looked up and I just saw this yellow truck starting up and going up Christopher Street. So I went across the street and I saw they’d scraped some poor man’s fender-“

“And you left the note?”

“Yes.”

“Was it a Hertz truck?”

“Oh, well,” the young man was perplexed. “I don’t know, it could have been, but it was going up the street and I didn’t see that much. And trucks and me, well…’

“Terrific. You’re a big help.”

“Was there anybody else around here might have seen it?”

“Well, there were two of those simply ghastly cruiser types that hang out down here right there.” He indicated a storefront almost adjacent to Angelo’s Chevrolet.

“You know them?”

The young man blushed. “I have nothing to do with that type of person. They hang our across the street=’ he gestured toward the river-“in that old pier there”

Angelo beckoned to Rand. “Come on,” he growled. “We gotta find these two.”

The President of the United States had been right. There had been no need to inform the Israelis about the U.S. military preparations to move into the West Bank. Israeli intelligence had discerned the basic outlines of the U.S. moves almost from the moment they began. A source inside the U.S. Rhine Main Air Force Base in Frankfurt, Germany, had informed the embassy in Bonn of the arrival of the C-5As of the Rapid Deployment Force. Radar had picked up the movements of the Sixth Fleet’s Marine Amphibious Force, and its ships had been kept under discreet aerial surveillance as they moved up the Lebanese seacoast toward Junieh Bay.

The most revealing and complete portrait of U.S. intentions, however, had been provided by a Mossad “asset” inside King Hussein’s Amman Palace, a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Jordanian Air Force attached to the King’s personal staff. Yusi Avidar, the intelligence chief whose secret call had alerted the CIA to Israel’s plans for a preemptive strike at Libya, reviewed the information his agent bad sent across the Allenby Bridge. Like their American counterparts, the Israelis had been in a quasi-permanent crisis session for over twenty-four hours; their nerves were strained, their tempers on edge.

“So, gentlemen,” General Avidar concluded. “There is no question about it: the Americans are coming.”

“Let’s leak it to the world press right away,” Benny Ranan suggested. “That will stop the Americans in their tracks. Public opinion will force the President to attack Qaddafi.”

Yigal Yadin looked at the man, appalled. “Have you gone mad, Benny?” he asked. “If the Americans discover six million people in New York may get killed because of our settlements, there won’t be a single American alive who won’t back the President in coming in here and taking them out themselves.”

“Damn it!” It was General Avidar. “Can’t this nation ever acknowledge it was wrong? Are we going to another holocaust because we can’t admit a mistake and pull them out ourselves, for God’s sake?”

“Our mistake was not carrying through our strike on Libya yesterday,” Ranan said.

Begin, calm as ever, turned to the intelligence chief. “The original mistake was in your intelligence service’s failure to find out what this man was doing so that we could destroy him and his project before he got his bombs.”

The General began to protest, but Begin cut him off with a wave of his hand. “I read the reports. You never took him seriously, even after we found the Pakistani connection. He didn’t have the technological resources, you maintained, the infrastructure. He was just a pompous boaster. He=’

An aide interrupted. “Excuse me,” he said to the Prime Minister. “The Mayor of New York wants to speak to you urgently.”

The spectacle sickened Angelo: the filthy, debrislittered old pier, the gloomy office, probably once the Customs shed, the man half naked cowering in the corner like some frightened animal, the two “cruisers” in leather jackets, one dangling a studded belt from his hand. The detective started to go into the dimness, then stopped, disgusted. Let them come to me, he thought.

“Hey, you,” he barked at the cruiser with the belt, “come out here. I want to talk to you.”

The youth edged sullenly toward the doorway and Angelo’s bulky figure.

“Hey, listen, what is this?” he protested. “He’s a consenting adult, for Christ’s sake. We got civil rights now, don’t you know that?”

“Forget it,” Angelo snarled. “I’m not interested in what you’re doing in there. Friday your friend over here sees a yellow truck scrape a guy’s Pontiac over there on Christopher Street. He says you saw it, too”

“Yeah,” the young man replied. His sidekick was just behind him now, glaring hostilely over his shoulder, arrogantly whacking his belt in his palm. Their client was crouched in the recesses of the darkened office, hiding his head in his hands, sobbing, convinced, probably, that he was about to be arrested and his career ruined.

“So what?”

“I just want to know if you remember anything about the truck, is all.”

“Hertz truck. One of them vans there. What about it?”

“You sure it was a Hertz truck?”

“Yeah, sure. It had them blue stripes on it”

Angelo took a Hertz sales brochure from his pocket. Pictured on it was the spectrum of Hertz trucks rented in the New York area. “Do you suppose you could show me which model it was?”

“Right here.” The youth’s forefinger stabbed at the photo of the Econoline van. Angelo glanced at Rand, then back at the youth.

“Thanks, kid,” he said. “Give you a good-conduct medal one of these days.”

He turned and, with Rand behind him, ran out of the pier, dodged across the West Street traffic and raced for his car.

As Angelo Rocchia scrambled into his Chevrolet, just twelve blocks away in front of a hardware store at 74 West Eighth Street another man slipped into the front seat of a car pausing at the curb. Kamal Dajani noted that his sister had on her blond wig. It changed her so completely that she looked, sitting there beside him, like a total stranger.

No policeman, even one equipped with a picture of her, could identify her now, he thought with satisfaction.

She headed into MacDougal Street and then, through Waverly Place, over to Sixth Avenue, letting the car glide in and out of the traffic with a deft and gentle touch. At Fourteenth she moved into the outside lane, waiting to turn left, stopping as she did at the red light.

“Is everything all right?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the rearview mirror to see if they were being followed.

“Of course everything is all right.”

“There’s been no news on the radio.”

“I know,” Kamal replied, his own eyes scrutinizing the throngs rushing to beat the “Don’t Walk” sign. “I have a transistor.”

“You don’t suppose there’s any possibility the Americans won’t agree, do you?”

Kamal remained silent, staring at the crowds thronging the sidewalks, at the Christmas decorations and the white slashes of the advertising banners promising “Clearance Sale: Everything Must Go” and “All Stock Reduced.”

Nothing there, he realized, to indicate that anyone in this city even suspected the enormity of the threat under which they were living.

Nervously, Laila lit a cigarette, struggling to concentrate on her driving, painfully aware that this was not the moment to bang somebody’s fender the way Kamal had done with his truck.

“How do you feel about it, Kama]?” she asked, stopping for another light.

“Feel about what?”

“About this, for God’s sake! The bomb. About what’s going to happen if the Americans don’t agree. Don’t you feel anything? Triumph or vengeance or remorse or something?”

“No, Laila, I don’t feel a damn thing. I learned not to feel a long time ago.”

He lapsed into his dour silence again, staring straight ahead toward the grayish stain of the Hudson. Then, almost as though his body had been struck by a muscle spasm, he sat up and turned to his sister.

“No,” he said. “That was wrong. I do feel something.

Hate. I used to think I was doing this for Palestine or the cause or Father or whatever. But I realized last night the real reason I’m doing it is because I hate these people and the world they made for us to live in with their television and their movies and their banks and their cars and their goddamn tourists in their white shirts and their straw hats and their cameras, climbing all over our monuments, running the world the way they wanted it run for the last thirty years-my thirty years!”

“My Godl” His sister shuddered. “Why do you hate them so much?”

“Hatred doesn’t need reasons, Laila,” Kamal replied. “That’s the trouble with people like you and Whalid. You always need reasons.” Angrily, he grabbed at the map of New York on the seat. They were in the outgoing tide of traffic now, moving up the West Side of the city. “Don’t go the way you did the last time,” he ordered.

“My?”

“Because I don’t want to go through any toll gates in the city. If they’re looking for us, that’s where they’ll be.”

Of all the pleas and threats, boasts and arguments Menachem Begin had heard since the President’s first telephone call, none had moved him quite as much as that articulated by the Mayor of New York. Begin had met the Mayor twice-once on a visit to New York for a fund-raising banquet, later when the Mayor had brought a group of New York Zionists to visit Israel.

He was listening to the Mayor at his desk, staring at the exquisitely peaceful vista of the Judean hills, dark welts gilded with the ghostly patina of a full moon, under those December stars which once were to have promised mankind a better world in which to live. How do I respond to this man, he asked himself, how do I answer the unanswerable?

“Look, Mr. Begin,” Stern was saying, “I’m pleading with you on behalf of every single man, woman and child in this city, Italian, Irish, black, Puerto Rican, whatever. But why do you think he put this bomb here and not in Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Washington? Because he knows there are three million Jews here, more than there are in Israel, that’s why.”

“Ah,” Begin interrupted. “That is the essence of this terrible tragedy, Mr. Mayor. A tyrant has succeeded in pitting brother against brother, friend against friend, as Roman emperors once forced their captives to slaughter each other in the arenas for their entertainment.”

“The essence of this tragedy, Mr. Begin;” the Mayor’s distant voice was tremulous with anger and concern, “is not that at all. It’s your government’s refusal to take a handful of Jewish people off land which belonged to us two thousand years ago and hasn’t belonged to us since. And your mistake in putting them there in the first place.”

“My dear friend,” Begin pleaded with the Mayor, “please believe me when I tell you I share every one of your concerns, your fears, your angers. They have been ours since this terrible ordeal began. But what you and the President are talking about is not those settlements. It is the very life of this nation. You are asking us to commit national suicide by handing this land over to a people who are sworn to destroy us. Our people, Mr. Stern, that part of us which is here, were in the camps. We were on the road to Jerusalem in 1948. We were in Sinai in 1956. We were on the Golan in ‘67. We were on the canal in ‘73. Our sacrifices, our blood on those battlefields, gave a dignity to our existence-and yours as well. They also gave us the right to survive, Mr. Stern, and that is a right we cannot and will not surrender.”

“Look, Mr. Begin, all that is fine, but no one is asking you to commit suicide. All we are asking you to do is get the hell off land that doesn’t belong to you anyway. Let the poor Palestinians have their place in the sun, too. That’s going to satisfy Qaddafi and it’s going to save my people.

We’ll deal with Qaddafi afterwards, but I’ve got to save my people. That is the number-one priority, people. If I’ve learned nothing else in the hell of these hours, it’s that. The people come first. The rest of it doesn’t matter.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mayor.” Begin had set his glasses on his desk and was rubbing the bridge of his nose in fatigue and strain. “But the rest does matter. The principles do count. If we destroy the principles by which we live through cowardice or expediency or fear or whatever reason, we will destroy the basis of our existence. For all its faults, we were bequeathed a civilized order by our fathers. Are we going to bequeath our children chaos and the jungle?”

A few doors away from the room in which Abe Stern was completing his telephone call to Jerusalem, the handful of men directing the search operation gathered around the FBI’s Quentin Dewing’s table for a hastily called conference. For the first time there was an undercurrent of hysteria in their gathering, the first stirrings of panic before the enormity of their failure. Their concerns were worsened by the calls coming every fifteen minutes now from the White House, frantic demands for news, making it painfully clear how close the center of government was to panic, too.

Dewing didn’t even wait for everyone to sit down before he turned to Al Feldman. The Chief of Detectives looked terrible. His pallor was gray; his shirt stank with the stench of the nervous sweat that had soaked into it in the last thirty-six hours. His voice shook as he replied to Dewing’s query about Angelo Rocchia. “He’s as solid as anybody I got.”

The Chief did not — have to continue, because Angelo, followed by Rand, entered the room while he was still talking.

“Sit down,” Dewing told the detective, pointing to a chair at the end of the table, “and tell us your story.”

Angelo dropped onto the chair, unbuttoning his collar as he did. He was breathless, panting from his frantic drive downtown from Christopher Street, from the sprint from his car to Dewing’s conference room. He had never been in this underground command post before, and the frenetic nervous energy exploding all around him, men running and shouting, doors slamming, phones ringing, radios crackling and Telexes stuttering, told him everything he needed to know about the gravity of the situation.

As quickly, as tersely as he could, he sketched the background of his idea, the story of the Procter & Gamble salesman, the relationship on which everything depended: the time the van had been clocked out of the Brooklyn pier by the security guard, the time required to drive from the pier to Christopher Street, his reasonably precise idea of when the salesman’s car had been hit.

There was a huge map of Manhattan on the wall and he indicated Christopher Street on it, stabbing its way from the Hudson River toward the heart of Greenwich Village.

“If this was the van we’re looking for, then reason has got to tell you the barrel is going to be somewhere in here, between Fourteenth on the north, Houston Street on the south, the river on the west, and Sixth Avenue or maybe Fifth on the east. Otherwise they’d have come up the East Side.” He traced out the area with his fingertips as he spoke.

“If this is the truck we’re looking for.” The speaker was Dewing, his features tightened into a cold mask of concentration. “That’s a big if.” He turned to Harvey Hudson. “How many Hertz trucks did you say circulate in this city?”

“Roughly five hundred, Mr. Dewing.”

“And how many of those are vans?”

“Over half.”

Dewing’s gaze went back to Angelo. “And you got onto this just because you told yourself Arabs don’t know how to drive on snow?”

Angelo had already taken an intense dislike to the man. “Yes,” he answered, making no effort to conceal the hostility in his voice. “That’s right.”

Dewing pondered the map behind the detective. “That’s about a four-or five-mile trip, isn’t it?”

Angelo looked over to Feldman, hoping for some sign of support, then nodded his agreement.

“The truck had two hundred and fifty miles on it when it came back in, didn’t it?”

“So what? If you’re carrying what they got in that barrel, the first thing you’re going to want to do with it is get it to wherever the hell it’s going. Then you’re going to dump those other barrels out in Queens. Then maybe you’re going to spend the afternoon driving up and down the Long Island Expressway to make things hard for the cops, how would I know?”

“Harvey,” Dewing said, “when will we have that paint matchup?”

“In an hour.”

The FBI assistant director grimaced. “That’s an hour we haven’t got.

Chief,” he asked Feldman, “what do you think about this? He’s your man. Can we search that area house by house?”

“It’s a big area,” Feldman replied. “Couple hundred blocks in there. Goddamn rat’s nest of a neighborhood, too. But what else have we got to go on?”

“You realize that if we’re going to search that area in a hurry, we’ll have to commit every single resource we have to the effort? There’ll be nothing left for anything else.”

The Chief looked at his wristwatch. “Do you see a better way to use the time we’ve got left?”

Dewing’s mouth twitched in nervous indecision. It was an awful choice to have to make. “God help us if we’re wrong,” he said.

He was on the verge of ordering the search when Harvey Hudson interrupted.

A yellow classified phone book was spread on his lap. “Just a minute, Mr.

Dewing. Hertz has got a Rent-A-Truck agency located right up the street from where the accident took place. Must be vans going back and forth down there all the time.”

There was an instant of stricken silence before Dewing exploded.

“Jesus Christ!” he shouted at Feldman. “You let this old buffoon of a detective come in here and get us within a hair of concentrating all our resources on one part of the city and he hasn’t even checked this out? This solid guy of yours?”

Angelo was on his feet before the shocked Feldman could answer. He pulled his notebook from his pocket, flipped it open, ripped out a page, crumpled it in his fist and hurled it at Dewing. “Here, Mr. whatever the hell your fucking name is,” he growled, “here’s the record of the vans that went in and out of that station last Friday. One out at eight-seventeen in the morning and two back in the afternoon.”

Angelo’s neck twisted back in the strange jerking movement of a man leaving a barber’s chair as he started to rebutton his shirt collar. He took a menacing step toward Dewing. “I may be an old buffoon, mister, but I’ll tell you what you are. You’re a fucking liar. You’ve been holding out on us from the beginning, haven’t you? Sent us out there like blind men because you didn’t trust us.” Angelo thrust his finger at the startled Rand. “Him you trust, because he’s one of you, comes from Washington. Me you don’t trust. Those people up there on the streets, the ones this thing is going to wipe out, them you don’t trust. What do you care? You’re safe down here in this cellar. But them-“

“Rocchial” It was Bannion’s commanding voice, but Angelo’s rage was too great to be checked now. He was towering over Dewing as twentyfour hours earlier he had towered over Benny the Fence. “Because it isn’t chlorine gas in that barrel, is it? It’s a fucking atomic bomb, going to clear this place out and them along with it. Ghettos?” He laughed harshly. “We’re not going to have to worry about the ghettos anymore. The whole city will be one fucking ghetto after that thing goes off.”

Angelo stopped, his chest heaving. He could feel the thudding of his heart racing to the fury he had just unleashed. “Well, I told you where you can find your bomb,” he said, his voice finally under control. “Look there or not, I don’t care, because as far as I’m concerned, I’m finished. You don’t trust me, mister, well, fuck you. I don’t trust you either.”

Before any of the astonished men in the room could react, the detective had stridden past Dewing, opened the door and slammed it behind him.

“Al,” the Police Commissioner ordered his Chief of Detectives. “Go after him, for Christ’s sake! We can’t have him running around the city shouting ‘Atomic bomb’ at the top of his lungs.”

The President had introduced four newcomers into his exhausted circle of advisers in the National Security Council conference room: the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Majority and Minority Leaders of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

He had been keeping the four men abreast of the developing crisis in secret briefings, but now that the awful moment of decision was at hand he wanted them associated with it.

One by one, the President had called on each of the men in the room to voice his opinion. At the far end of the table, the Secretary of State was summing up in his characteristically succinct manner what was their virtually unanimous recommendation.

“We cannot, Mr. President, allow six million Americans to die because another nation, however friendly, refuses to modify the consequences of a policy we have always opposed. Land the Marines and the Rapid Deployment Force. Associate the Soviets with our action to fix the Israelis in place. Inform Qaddafl of what we are doing and let him follow the action through his embassy in Damascus. That will save New York, and when we’ve defused that threat, then we can deal with him.”

There was an undertone of coughs and of throats being cleared, a kind of chorus of approval at the Secretary’s words. The President thanked him formally. Then he let his eyes sweep the faces around the table, studying each grim mien he saw there. “Harold,” he said to his Science Adviser, “I think you’re the one person we haven’t heard from.”

Harold Brown’s elbows were resting on the table, his shoulders drooping as though he was crushed by the implications of what he was about to say. He was a nuclear physicist, one of that high priesthood that had nurtured and furthered for mankind the scourge and the blessing of the shattered atom.

With growing alarm he had watched as the civilized world had drifted, indolent and uncaring, to this inevitable end when a zealot with a bomb could impose his will by the threat of violence so terrible it brooked no opposition.

“Mr. President.” He took a deep breath as he began. “The last crisis I lived through in this room was the Iranian crisis, and the events of those days are still painfully embedded in my mind. This country needed friends badly in those days, Mr. President, and may I remind you we had only one, Israel. When the chips were down, it was they alone who were ready to stand with us. The Saudis and the Egyptians, perhaps, in their way. But, above all, it was the Israelis who answered the call.

“Our supposed allies the Germans, the French, when we needed them, when we asked them to stand up and be counted, they turned their backs. They were so concerned about their oil, they were prepared to see this nation humiliated and humbled, our diplomats executed, provided we did nothing to disturb the tranquil pattern of their existence. Those are moments I cannot forget, Mr. President. Are we now to turn our arms on the one people who stood by us when we needed them? At the behest of a dictator who loathes us, our nation and everything we stand for?”

“I share the feelings of everyone about those settlements, about the Israelis’ intransigence on so many points. But what is at issue here transcends those settlements, Mr. President. There are moral issues that are beyond debate and discussion, and this is one of them. There is a point beyond which a nation, like a man, cannot go and still maintain its dignity and self-respect. I say we are at that point.”

Silence, a silence of pain and anguish, stilled the room when Brown had finished. The President rose. He looked at the clock on the wall opposite.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I should like to meditate in the Rose Garden for a moment on what you have said.”

Al Feldman caught up with Angelo a few feet from the exit of the command post. He threw his arms around the detective and tugged him to the guards’ quarters in which he had laughed at the fake Civil Defense poster.

“Angelo,” he murmured, sitting him down in the midst of a row of green metal lockers, their inside doors covered with Playboy centerfolds, “you were right. Those guys did lie to you. They had to.” Patiently, the Chief explained the details of Qaddafi’s threat. “Dewing didn’t mean to blow up at you like that, but you got to understand the strain we’re all living under.”

Angelo looked into his boss’s frightened eyes. “I’m sorry, Chief. It wasn’t him. It’s my fault. Some other things have been working on me the past couple of days.”

“Where were you running off to?”

“The Kennedy Center. See the kid.”

The Chief pulled a Camel from his battered pack, lit it and exhaled his first drag with a sympathetic sigh. Angelo’s attachment to his mongoloid daughter was well known in the Division. “And get her out of here?”

“Yeah.”

Feldman rose and placed a trembling hand on his detective’s shoulder. He squeezed it tightly. “Okay, Angelo. Go get her. Anybody earned a ticket up to Connecticut, it’s you. Just keep your mouth shut, okay? I’m going back in there and sell them on your idea, because I think you’re right.”

The two men walked to the exit side by side. Angelo reached for Feldman’s hand. “Thanks, Chief,” he said. Then he turned right, past the guards, toward the stairs and safety.

The men around Dewing’s table were still debating Angelo’s idea when Feldman slipped back into the room. He made a discreet gesture toward Bannion to indicate that the situation was contained, then eased back into his place. He was still attempting to pick up the threads of the argument when a.plainclothesman entered the room and placed a slip of paper in front of him.

“Jesus Christ!” he roared as he read it. “Rocchia was rightl”

He jumped from his chair and almost ran to the map of the city.

“One of our vice cops just interrogated a teenage wbore who works out of a brownstone right here.” The startled men around him watched as he hammered the map. “At 27 West Eighth. She identified one of these three Arabs, the one they call Kamal, as one of her clients last night.”

“Is she sure?” Bannion asked. “Those girls see a lot of traffic down there.”

“Absolutely. Apparently he’s a sadistic bastard, and he banged the life out of her while he was doing it.” Feldman’s gaze went back to the map. “That’s almost at Fifth. Right in the corner of the area Rocchia gave us.”

His words had a galvanic effect on the men in the room. Hudson felt like standing up and cheering. Bannion had the smile on his face of an Irish racetrack tout who has just had a hundred-to-one shot come in.

“Chief,” Dewing asked, “how long would it take us to search out that area your man gave us?”

Feldman scrutinized the map. “We better push the search area east to Broadway to be sure.” He paused, making his calculations. “Twelve hours.

Give me twelve hours and we’ll find the goddamn thing, I promise you.”

But on this Tuesday, December 15, there were not twelve hours left. There were only two. For five agonizing moments, the men in the National Security Council conference room had sat in silence waiting for their leader’s return. Only Jack Eastman had gone upstairs with him. He too, however, had left him at the Oval Office door. He had stood there watching as, all alone, the President had paced the driveway beyond, hands in his pockets, his head sunk almost into his chest, meditating, praying, doing whatever it was that great leaders must do in the unbearable loneliness of the exercise of power. He had not uttered a word to Eastman when he came back in.

Now he stood at the head of the table, his fists still thrust deep into his pockets, calm yet clearly resolute, trying to find just the words he wanted.

“Gentlemen,” he said finally, his voice barely a whisper, “I have reached a decision. It is certainly the worst any man who has held my office has ever had to make, but I am deeply, unshakably convinced that it is the one I must make. I am for better or worse the President of two hundred and thirty million Americans, and however deeply concerned I am about the fate of New York City and all of its people, my responsibility is to all of this country and all of its people. We are confronted with what is, finally, an act of war against this nation. If we cower before that threat, if we bow to blackmail and agree to blackmail in turn one of this country’s surest allies, we will abandon our birthright and condemn ourselves sooner or later to destruction as surely as the sun will set this night.”

He paused to catch the breath for which he was straining. “It is now one o’clock. Qaddafi’s ultimatum expires at three. Admiral Fuller, I want the Poseidon missiles on the Mediterranean submarines targeted on Libya. All of them. Do everything you can to minimize fallout from their explosion on Egypt and Tunsia.

“Alex,” he said to his Secretary of State, “prepare flash messages for the Chairmen of the CPs of the Soviet Union and China and for Mr. Begin, Giscard, Helmut Schmidt and Mrs. Thatcher, informing them of the reasons for our action. Make it clear to all of them that in this crisis we expect their full support. Release them coincidentally with our action.”

He looked down the table to his ashen Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The Admiral’s fingertips trembled visibly on the tabletop.

“If by two-thirty our time we have not found and defused that bomb or Qaddafi has not agreed to extend his ultimatum, then, Admiral Fuller, you will destroy Libya with those missiles.”

“Why, Mr. Rocchia! What a pleasant surpise!” The little nun of the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul looked at the detective in the hallway of the Kennedy Child Study Center on East Sixty-seventh Street with pleasure and amazement. “Whatever brings you here at this time of the day? Not bad news, I hope?”

“No, it’s not that, Sister.” Angelo shifted his weight from foot to foot in nervous embarrassment. “I got to take Maria away for a couple of days.

To see some of the family up in Connecticut.”

“Well, really, Inspector, that’s a very unusual procedure. I don’t know if Mother Superior-“

Angelo interrupted. “It’s urgent, Sister. This sister of my wife, she came East for two days. She’s never met Maria.” He glanced impatiently at his watch. “Look, I’m in a hurry here. Would you get her things together, please?”

“Can’t you leave her for the rest of the afternoon at least?”

“No, Sister.” The irritation was easing back into the detective’s voice. “I told you I’m in a hurry.”

“All right,” she said. “Why don’t you wait by the playground window while I get her and her things?”

She took the detective into the center, to a bay window giving onto an interior playground. Every time Angelo looked through that window he felt tears rise in his eyes. It was a playground like any other in the city, seesaws and swings, a jungle gym and sandboxes. The children playing there now were a little younger than Maria, probably the class below hers. He watched them, his heart aching for them, sensing the agony in the distorted faces, the pain in their deformed mouths, the frustration raging in those little bodies against fingers that refused a mind’s commands, at legs that tottered uncertainly with each effort at movement. He could read the passing spasms of sadness in those bright eyes, the silent barometer of their revolt against life’s injustices. How often had he seen it in his own daughter’s eyes?

The children inside had seen Angelo, and some of them gathered around in a semicircle beyond the window, gawking at him, bodies twitching under the impact of the gestures of curiosity and greeting they could not perform. He was going to be able to get Maria away, but they were going to stay. And from the moment he had sensed the frenzied, almost hysterical air in the command post he’d realized that this time maybe everything wasn’t going to turn out all right like it did on television, catch the guy in the last two minutes and tune in next week for another episode. Maybe there was not going to be a next week for this town or for those kids.

Five minutes after she’d left, the min returned, clutching Maria’s hand in hers. Angelo was no longer by the playground window. She took Maria into the entry hall, but he wasn’t there either. Impatiently, she went to the door onto Sixty-seventh Street and looked down to the place where he always parked, illegally, his Chevrolet. It was gone.

Far up into the dairy and timber country of northern Minnesota, just a few miles south of the Canadian border near the town of Great Falls, there is a small U.S. government reservation. Its gate is discreetly guarded by armed men identified as belonging to the Department of Forests and Fisheries, and the reservation itself consists of acres of gently rolling land, some wooded, some planted, some, apparently, intended as pasture land; all of it enclosed in a barbed-wire fence.

The guards are in fact employees of the Department of Defense, and those miles of barbed-wire fence are an enormous transmitting aerial servicing the radio from which the thermonuclear-missile-bearing submarines of the U.S. Navy are commanded. It is in a state of constant transmission employing low-frequency, extremely lowwave radio bands, well below 10 HRZ because such long waves are uniquely capable of penetrating water to the great depths at which the submarines lie. Each submarine on station on the ocean floor trails its own aerial, a thin strip of wire as long as the two-mile barbed-wire fence in northern Minnesota from which it receives its messages.

At exactly 1304, less than ninety seconds after the President had issued his order. two submarines, the U.S.S. Henry Clay and the U.S.S. Daniel Webster. one twenty miles southwest of Cyprus, the other buried in a deep ocean trough below Sicily, reacted to a modification in the constantly varied pattern emitted by the fence. The radio operator on each sub brought the signal, automatically decoded by the boat’s computers, to his duty officer, who, in turn, delivered it to the submarine’s captain.

The captains and the executive officers, employing matching keys, unlocked their subs’ war safes and took out preprogrammed IBM punch cards which they inserted into the computers that commanded each ship’s sixteen Poseidon missiles. Those IBM cards bore all the data the submarines’ firing mechanisms would need to launch their missiles and the fourteen warheads each contained onto the Libyan targets set out on them, with an accuracy so precise that none of them would fall more than a hundred feet from its selected impact point. That task completed, the officers, joined now by their gunnery officers, opened their firing control systems with ten rigorously defined fail-safe measures. Seconds later, at 1307, each submarine flashed a return message to Minnesota. “Missiles Armed and Targeted,” it read. “Vessel in DEFCON [1] Red.” “DEFCON Red” was the highest alert posture of the U.S. armed forces, the conditions of readiness that indicated that a state of war was at hand.

At the same time that the submarines’ messages were flashing through the ether, another message was arriving in the White House communications center over the twin Teleprinters linking it to the Pentagon’s terminal of the red line to Moscow.

As always, the communication came in two languages, the first in the original Russian, the second in English as translated in Moscow by a Soviet linguist. In view of the urgency of the crisis, the President rushed into the communications center himself to follow the message as it came in. A State Department Russian expert was beside him, responsible for verifying the accuracy of the Soviet translation and for pointing out to the President any subtle nuances in meaning or language.

There was none in this case. The message was brief and to the point.

Scanning it, the President felt his legs tremble. He placed a hand on the shoulder of the stunned State Department official at his side.

“Thank God!” he gasped.

In the New York command post six men were on the telephone at the same time, each shouting to make his voice heard over the din of the others. Bannion was in the process of commandeering the Sixth Precinct station house on the Lower West Side as a subheadquarters for the upcoming search effort. Feldman was beside him assembling the men and material they would require. A few chairs away the usually imperturbable Booth was roaring at the NEST’s Seventh Regiment Armory headquarters, asking for every available man, scientist and detection device. Harvey Hudson was mobilizing a team of federal judges to issue a flood of search warrants that would justify entry into closed apartments, offices, buildings or the dwellings of civil-rights-conscious New Yorkers who would otherwise refuse to let a detective or an FBI agent past their front door.

So chaotic were the conditions in the room that, for a few seconds, no one heard the sound coming from the squawk box on the conference-room table. To his horror, Abe Stern suddenly realized the President was talking and not a person in the room was listening.

He grabbed the phone before him and told the switchboard to feed the President’s call onto his line. “Mr. President,” he apologized, “I’m sorry, but we’re in a state of near-hysteria here. We think we’ve got a fix on where it is.”

The President, still shaken by the events and decisions of the past twenty minutes, wasn’t listening.

“Abe,” he said, “I’ve just had the Soviets on the red line. They’ve forced Qaddafi to extend the deadline in his ultimatum by six hours-until nine o’clock tonight.”