The Fifth Horseman

PART VIII

The area in which the men of the underground command post had decided Qaddafi’s thermonuclear device had to be hidden consisted of a rectangular slice of the Lower West Side of Manhattan.

It covered the major part of Greenwich Village, a jumble of 2,579 miles of streets, 25,000 buildings of every description: brownstones, restored Federal homes, apartment houses, co-ops, condos, converted lofts, rotting piers, abandoned warehouses, small industries, garages, bars, restaurants, dives and discos.

There were the collapsing piers along the Hudson where once, in the twenties and thirties, luxury liners had berthed. There was the Gansevoort Meat Market; a touch of Little Italy in the southern area surrounding Bleecker and Carmine Streets; big middle-class developments like Washington Square Village and the West Village Houses; upper-middle-class apartments and homes north of Washington Square; the vast New York University complex around the square. Close to the river there was a conglomeration of transient businesses, repair shops, artisans’ ateliers and the gay SM area where the Proctor & Gamble salesman had been visiting when his fender was scraped. And, above all, from Seventh Avenue South over to Broadway and from West Third up to West Eighth, there was the tourist center of Greenwich Village with its nightclubs, jazz joints, theaters, bars, cafes, restaurants, whores, dope peddlers, hustlers, chess players, poets, con men, bums and tourists by the thousands, a transient, storied area graced with one of the highest crime rates in New York City.

Once again Quentin Dewing laid out the general approach for the search, setting it up in a rigorously orderly fashion, like a military operation.

First he intended to send teams of NEST and FBI men through the area. They would “walk” every building in blue Con Edison overalls, surveying it from top to bottom, but they wouldn’t actually enter offices or apartments unless they hit a hot reading. Twentyfive of the FBI’s New York agents and twentyfive detectives would be standing by as a strategic reserve, ready to rush out whenever they found radiation.

Following the NEST teams would come a slower, more methodical door-to-door, room-to-room search for the barrel. Three thousand FBI agents and all the NYPD’s available plainsclothesmen would be assigned to the task. Dewing’s idea was to run them in teams of two, two teams to a building, so that there would be a backup in case of trouble. Because of the barrel’s weight, they would limit their search to the first two floors in buildings with no elevators and would pay particular attention to garages and cellars.

Bannion had turned up an idea to conceal what was happening from the public. One man would identify himself as a police officer, the other as an official of the gas company. Lieutenant Hogan’s Office of Civil Preparedness delivered to the precinct hundreds of pencillike yellow Geiger counters-removed from the air-raid shelters-which the search officers could identify to the unsuspecting public as gas detectors.

One question remained to be decided: where to begin. Dewing, Hudson and Feldman gathered in front of a huge map of the area.

“I would say right off the bat,” Feldman said, “that there are two places in there it won’t be. The first’s the meat market. Very law-abiding area, one of the lowest crime rates in the city.” He bestowed an angelic smile on Dewing. “It’s completely run by the Mob. And that tightly structured old Italian neighborhood. Unless these guys speak Arab with a big Italian accent, they’d set off alarm bells just walking down the street in there.

“Since we got an ID on this guy at Eighth near Fifth from that hooker,”

Feldman continued, “I’d say start around Washington Square. Then maybe move up, cover Eighth to Fourteenth and Broadway to Sixth Avenue.

After that, work back toward the river.

“Except for one thing,” the Chief concluded. “I’d get people into those piers right away. That’s got to be the perfect place to hide something.”

“All right,” Dewing agreed. “We’ll proceed on the basis you’ve outlined.”

Feldman had just started back to the desk Dewing had assigned him when the familiar hulking figure drifted up beside him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Feldman demanded. “I figured you’d be in New Haven by now.”

Angelo shrugged. “Got anything for me to do?” he asked.

Laila Dajani drove down the quiet Spring Valley street to the house she had rented as a temporary hideaway for her brother and herself. It had belonged to an elderly widowed vice-president of the Chemical Bank who had died of cancer in October. His son and heir, who lived fifty miles away in Connecticut, had been delighted to rent it to Laila for a month during the holidays. As had been the case with the retired stockbroker from whom she had rented the house in Queens that they had used as a cover for their import firm, their transaction had been simple: a letter of agreement and two thousand dollars in cash, half for a month’s rent, half as deposit.

Laila turned into the driveway and continued into the open garage, thinking again what perfect concealment the bland sameness of this street offered.

Kamal did not agree. He paused a moment, leaving the garage to scrutinize the houses of their neighbors, each house set on its plot of a quarter of an acre.

“It’s not good,” be said. “Too many people.”

Laila did not answer. She opened the front door and stepped inside. Whalid was in the den off the entry hall, sprawled on a sofa in his stockinged feet, a bottle of whiskey, a quarter of it gone, on the table beside him.

She continued to the kitchen. It was littered with unwashed dishes left over from her brother’s breakfast and supper. Tossed into the wastebasket was an empty bottle. So, she thought, that bottle in the den isn’t his first.

Kamal was looking scornfully at Whalid’s Johnnie Walker bottle when she returned to the study. “Taking care of your ulcer?” he asked his brother.

Whalid ignored him. “Why go on waiting around here? Why don’t we get going now?” he asked.

“Because our orders are to wait here until the announcement is made or the bomb explodes.”

“For God’s sake, Kamal, don’t be such a fool! That bomb’s never going to explode.”

“Never? Why not?” Kamal’s blue eyes were chill and lusterless as they contemplated his brother.

“Because the Americans are going to agree. They haven’t got any choice. You know that.”

“There is only one thing I know for sure, my brother.” Whalid squirmed uncomfortably listening to the flat, menacing tone of Kamal’s voice. “That is that we have orders and I will see we follow them. All of us.”

“We found it!”

The jubilant shout echoed through the silent chamber, as jarring, as discordant, as a shout in a library. The room in which it rang out was the operational center of the United States’s ultrasecret communications intelligence agency, the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland.

The scores of men and women hunched over the blinking lights of individual computer terminals in the room were searching for what an Air Force colonel had earlier described to the President as the right snowflake in a blizzard an electronic blizzard. Their computer terminals flashed out the distinctive print of every sound, phone call, radio message, Morse-code transmission moving in and out of the East Coast of the United States. They were being compared with the sounds captured by the U.S.S. Allen that had come out of Libya and had been relayed to the NSA’s computers. From the instant Qaddafi agreed to extend his ultimatum, the search had been on for the signal the Agency was sure he would have had to send to reprogram the detonator of his bomb.

The man who had found it, a balding forty-two-yearold Ph.D. from MIT, leaped from his console. The signal was nothing more than a 1.2-second burst of noise, a string of zeroes and ones, the binary system of transmission in which all international communications, even those of the human voice, were made. But it matched up perfectly with a burst caught by the Allen coming from the Libyan seacoast a few miles from the Villa Pietri a few hundredths of a second before the NSA’s scanners had intercepted it hurtling toward Manhattan.

The MIT scientist took his data to another computer bank and, employing triangulation and electronic devices, some so secret their existence was unknown outside of the NSA headquarters, wrested a vital secret from the overpopulated orbital plane of the earth: he discovered which of the thousands of satellites littering the skies Qaddafi was using to transmit his signals.

By the time the Dajanis had settled into their upstate safe house, the search for their hidden bomb was already well under way. On the waterfront, the NEST and FBI teams sweeping the rotting piers protuding into the Hudson found rats, garbage, winos, the battered desks and upturned chairs of Customs officers who had once, in the heyday of those docks, swept through steamer trunks from Vuitton and matched leather baggage from Mark Cross. They found frightened stockbrokers from Pelham, aspiring lawyers from Sullivan and Cromwell, CPAs from Price Waterhouse, layout artists from Jackson, McGee, a fashion designer apprenticed to Charley Cole cowering in the shadows of the piers’ “reception rooms,”

some nearly hysterical with fright; everything, in short, except a trace of the bomb for which they were searching.

Across town, progress was slower. The NEST-FBI teams in their Con Ed overalls were able to move quickly, but the door-to-door police follow-up was a nightmare. Dozens of apartments in the area were unoccupied at the time; owners away at work. The police could have used their battering rams on them, but that, Abe Stern and the Commissioner knew, would provoke unbelievable problems. They would have to station a precious policeman at every opened door to stand guard. Otherwise New York’s litigious citizenry, Stern pointed out, would be certain to sue the city for millions in real or imagined losses-assuming there would be a city left for them to sue. At the police teams’ recommendation, a list was made of all unoccupied apartments for a follow-up effort if the first full sweep of the search area failed to turn up Qaddafi’s device.

And there were those determinedly civil-rights-conscious New Yorkers who were not going to let a police officer across their threshold without a search warrant, even if he was ostensibly trying to save them from escaping gas. In that case, a call for a warrant went back to the Sixth Precinct.

There a team of federal judges and U.S. attorneys ordered to duty by the President filled in the protesting citizen’s name and address on a pre-drafted warrant and authorized entry by walkie-talkie.

At 156 Bleecker Street, a pair of detectives burst into a junkies’ shooting gallery. Half a dozen addicts lay around the room on mattresses, some cooking up their next shot, others spaced out in the euphoria of an earlier hit. The detectives kicked over the junkies’ cooker, smashed their hypodermic needles, flushed their dope down the toilet, then left, leaving the uncomprehending addicts to gape at the door slamming shut behind them.

In three different places, search teams stumbled on burglars busting a flat. Having no time to waste on petty thievery, they ordered the astonished burglars to drop their loot and run for the front door.

At Quintana’s Bar in the West Village, the sight of the agents’ shield brought a shower of goodies onto the floor: knives, brass knuckles, pills, coke, pot, heroin; any piece of evidence that the collection of petty crooks in the bar wanted to get rid of before the shakedown they were sure was coming. The agents pocketed the knives, flushed away the pills and the pot, searched the cellar, then stalked out, leaving the bar’s unsearched clients spluttering in rage. There were lovers whose coupling was interrupted or fights momentarily calmed, delinquent muggers routed out of stairwells. In a garret on Cornelia Street police found the decaying corpse of a suicide hanging from the rafter to which he had tied himself, and on Thompson Street the body of an elderly woman who had apparently died of the cold in her unheated flat.

The search turned up barrels of every description: old wine kegs, beer barrels, barrels of chemicals and motor oil, of old rags; even, in a cellar on Washington Place, three barrels of hoarded gasoline left from World War II. Every one had to be carefully, meticulously scrutinized and eliminated by NEST’s scientists.

Each move made out on the streets was carefully, painstakingly logged at the Sixth Precinct on huge maps, on great sheets of photos now covering one whole wall of the station house. Feldman studied the stain of the area searched. It was like a glob of heavy liquid slowly, ever so slowly, spreading over the map. They were in a race between the tantalizing slowness of its advance and the clock, and for the moment, the despairing Chief of Detectives realized, the clock was winning.

In the NSC conference room, the same Air Force colonel who had briefed the President and his advisers shortly after Qaddafi’s threat came in Sunday night stood once again before his charts. “The man has been extremely clever in his choice of a satellite to handle his transmission, Mr. President,” he declared. “He’s using an absolutely forgotten bird up there called Oscar. It was designed for amateur radio enthusiasts and put up by NASA. Quite frankly, once it was hung up there, everybody simply forgot about it. We don’t even carry it in our classified listing of all the satellites currently in space.”

The colonel cleared his throat in nervous acknowledgment of his service’s shortcomings. “And I’ve also got to say that for his purposes it’s the perfect bird. Since these ham radio operators it was designed for can’t afford a lot of expensive equipment, there’s a lot of power in its down leg back to earth. A relatively small receiver could pick up a coded communication like this with no trouble at all.”

“Well, for God’s sake, can’t your Air Force blow that damn thing out of the sky with one of our missiles?” Crandell asked.

“Del, just a minute.” Jack Eastman bridled at yet another of Crandell’s proposals for instant, ill-thought-out action. “We have every reason to assume this bomb is programmed to detonate automatically if it doesn’t receive a countersignal. Blow that thing out of the skies and how will Qaddafi stand it down if somehow we’re able to convince him not to detonate it before his ultimatum expires?”

“Jack, when in hell are you going to wake up to the fact that the man is not going to compromise?”

The President interrupted his quarreling advisers with a weary wave of his hand. He turned to the Air Force colonel. “For the time being at least,” he asked, “can you blanket all transmission out of that satellite? Shut it down completely?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then do it.”

Mesmerized and uncomprehending, the three Dajanis sat in front of the television set in the den of their rented house in upstate New York.

There were only minutes left, yet the screen before them contained no image of the President announcing a new Middle East settlement or a national emergency, no frenzied Mayor telling New Yorkers to flee their city, no humbled Menachem Begin proclaiming that his nation was withdrawing from East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Instead, the screen flickered with the interminable images of a soap opera featuring a psychiatrist trapped in an adulterous relationship with a patient.

Laila was close to hysteria. “It’s gone wrong!” she sniffled. “It hasn’t worked. It’s going to explode!”

Whalid set his half-filled whiskey glass on the TV set and put an arm around her shoulders. “They must be talking in secret. Who knows? Maybe he’s going to extend the ultimatum.” On the floor of the den was a blue metallic case, similar to the detonation case attached to Whalid’s bomb except that it contained none of the protective devices the Japanese had built into the original. It too was connected to a slender needle rising almost invisibly above the TV antenna on the roof. “If he is, we’ll find out soon enough.”

“What time is it?” Kamal asked for the third time in five minutes.

“Four minutes to three,” Whalid replied Kamal got up and walked to the window onto the quiet, deserted suburban street. “Maybe the Americans refused, after all. Will we hear it explode up here?” he asked his brother.

He was talking about an event that was going to cause the deaths of six million people, yet he put the question to Whalid as though he were asking him if they would be able to hear a door slam across the street.

“No,” Whalid replied. “There might be a flash of light. Or if you were out in the street you might feel the heat. There would be a cloud, the mushroom cloud.

That we’d see.” Whalid pointed to the window behind Kamal. “The weather’s clear enough.”

On the television set, the announcer droned a final tease about the next day’s episode of the soap opera while an image of the sun setting to the throb of violins faded from the screen. It was replaced by that of a man marching past the shelves of a supermarket extolling the virtues of a can of spaghetti with real Italian-style meat sauce.

“Look!” Laila shrieked, pointing at the screen. “It’s three o’clock and they’re showing that! It’s failed! It’s gone all wrong!”

Kamal turned from the window. He studied their silent radio receiver, then the television set. “Calm yourself,” he ordered his sister. “Do you have no dignity?” He turned and with his gliding walk stalked through the hall, out of the front door and onto the snow-covered lawn.

Whalid watched him through the window as Kamal marched slowly up and down, eyes fixed on the distant horizon, as purposeful, as determined, as a beast waiting by a water hole for a lesser animal to appear. The scientist glanced at his watch. Three minutes past three. If something had happened, the signal would have arrived on their radio by now.

Whalid Dajani shuddered, reached for the whiskey bottle and with a shaking hand poured a large dollop into his glass.

Laila remained on the couch, her knees drawn up to her chest in a trance of horror and ill-comprehension. There had never been any question this was going to happen. The logic of their act was irrefutable, overwhelming. It had been evident from the beginning that the Americans would have to give them what they wanted. Yet, clearly, they had not, and now they were paying the price that was never supposed to be paid.

Suddenly she sat up, her finger thrust at the television set. “Wait a minute,” she cried. “That station is in New York and it’s still on!”

“That’s right.”

It was Kamal standing in the doorway to the den. He looked at Laila, at his brother slumped in his chair, one hand on his whiskey glass on the table beside him, at their silent radio receiver. “It’s seven minutes past three. We had no word of an extension of the ultimatum. Clearly, the bomb was meant to explode and did not. Why?”

Thirty-five miles away in New York City, the frightened men at the Sixth Precinct had one eye on the clock, the other on the stain spreading all too slowly over the map of the area they were searching. Al Feldman, at the center of the room, wanted to cry out in frustration. Why hadn’t they found it? Why was it taking so long? Three times Washington had called on the direct line they had installed here, urging them to hurry, warning them that there would be no extension this time, that after nine o’clock there was nothing, only the void.

Up until now there had been no panic, no hysteria, nobody breaking down.

That was because they still had time, and time was hope, tangible, palpable hope. But what was going to happen at six o’clock if they hadn’t found it?

At seven, at eight when there was just one more hour remaining? Would they hold then? Or would they panic like the frightened animals they would be, rush to the door, stampede for cars, for the telephones, shriek the news of the coming disaster to friends and relatives? It would take only one or two people then to break and it would all collapse. One voice shouting “Fire!”

in the dark and crowded theater. There would be a hundred voices screaming “Fire,” Feldman realized, all of them in this building. We don’t have six hours, the Chief suddenly understood. We probably don’t even have five. At seven o’clock it will all be over. The news will break and five million human beings will become five million rabbits trying to run before the flames of a forest fire.

The cackle of the squawk box linking them to the NSC conference room in the White House interrupted his baleful meditation. “Any progress to report?”

Jack Eastman’s voice asked.

Normally Feldman honored the formality of the chain of command in a crisis as religiously as a priest guards the secrets of his confessional. Now, however, he leaned past the Commissioner and Dewing to address the squawk himself. “No, none,” he answered, his voice so hoarse he could have been a perfect candidate for an antismoking commercial. “Is the President there?”

“Yes,” came the familiar soft voice.

“Mr. President, this is Al Feldman, the Chief of Detectives up here. I have got to tell you, sir, there is no way we are going to find that bomb before nine o’clock tonight. Either you got to get us more time, Mr. President, or you got to tell the people what’s happening. You can’t let them die trapped up here like rats.”

Kamal Dajani was perched on the imitation-mahogany cabinet of the now silent TV set, his arms folded, studying his brother with a steady, imperturbable gaze.

“What are you looking at me for?” Whalid took an anxious gulp of his whiskey. “Get yourself a drink. Celebrate. We won. The Israelis must be moving out of the West Bank right now. They’ll probably announce it tonight.”

Kamal remained as immobile as an actor caught in the concluding freeze frame of a police serial on the TV set his legs concealed.

Whalid lurched to his feet. “We got to get going.” He looked at Laila.

“Your things ready? We’re going home. To Jerusalem.”

He started toward the door. Kamal didn’t budge. Whaled turned back to him.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” he demanded. His face was flushed, his voice beginning to thicken under the impact of strain and whiskey.

“Why didn’t the bomb go off, Whaled?”

“Kamal, you damn fool.” Whalid swayed in the doorway like a sapling hit by a gust of wind. “Can’t you understand anything? That bomb was never meant to go off. You knew that. Qaddafi knew that. It was just a threat, a way to right a wrong, to get us justice.”

His brother glared at him with sullen probing eyes.

“And you wanted to be sure of that, did you?”

“The trouble with you, Kamal, is you’re still back there in your training camp in Damascus playing with your chunks of plastic.” Whalid was beginning to shout. “You thought this was going to be like ambushing a bus full of kids, or hijacking some people in a plane, didn’t you? But this is five million people. We can’t go home to Palestine over the bodies of five million innocent people, you damn fooll There has to be another way.”

Whalid grasped at the top of the sofa for support. “I didn’t build a bomb to kill five million people. I built it to make us even with the rest of the world. The Jews have it. The Americans have it. The French have it. The Chinese have it. The Russians have it. The English have it. Now, thanks to me, we have it. And we’re going to get our homes back with it. They must be finishing up their agreement right now. That’s why we haven’t heard anything.”

“Oh no, Whalid. I don’t believe that’s why we haven’t heard anything.” The words were as soft, as gentle, as a kitten’s purr. “I believe Qaddafi wanted that bomb to explode and the reason it didn’t is you did something to it while we were up on the roof Sunday fixing the aerial. That’s why you’ve been so relaxed since then. That’s why you started to treat your ulcer with whiskey again, isn’t it?”

Whalid was silent. His breath was coming in shortening bursts, an oil slick of nervous sweat beginning to clot the pores of his temple.

“You’re a traitor. A drunk and a traitor!” Kamal rose, each of his limbs seeming to follow his action individually like the legs of a folding bridge table snapping out one by one. “What did you do, Whalid?”

Whalid stood immobile before his younger brother’s advance. His lower jaw trembled slightly as he tried unsuccessfully to give sound to the words fear had trapped in his throat.

“What did you do, Whalid?”

Kamal’s right hand flicked out like a rattlesnake’s tongue. The calloused ridges below his little finger, the ridge of flesh that had chopped the life from Alain Prevost in the Bois de Boulogne, crashed against his brother’s cheekbone. Whalid shrieked in pain as the bone cracked. His scream was choked off by the fingertips of Kamal’s left hand driving a wedge into the recess of his solar plexus. The breath burst from Whalid’s mouth as air explodes from a punctured balloon. He tottered backward, hit a chair, then crashed into the maple table the house’s owner had once used as a desk. Dishes, his whiskey bottle, the framed portraits of the dead banker’s grandchildren cascaded to the ground in a clatter of breaking glass and splintering wood.

“You know what’s happening now because of you? The Americans are preparing to destroy Qaddafi. They’re going to wipe him out because he’s at their mercy, because of you, because of whatever you did to that bomb.”

Whalid was choking, trying almost to bite the air in his effort to bring the breath back to his lungs. He gagged.

“I want to know what you did to it.”

“No I”

Kamal’s foot drove with crushing force into his brother’s crotch. Whalid screamed in agony as the tip of Kamal’s shoe crushed his testicles against the flesh of his groin.

“Kaman” It was Laila. “For God’s sake, stop it. He’s your brother!”

“He’s a traitor. He’s a filthy dirty traitorl” Kamal’s foot lashed out once more, a swift vicious stroke to the base of his brother’s spine. “Tell me what you did to it, you bastard.”

“No.”

Again the foot smashed forward, this time into the kidneys of the figure crumpled in the fetal position on the floor.

“Tell me!”

Kamal hadn’t seen his sister pick up the whiskey bottle. Yet, instinctively, he sensed the swish of air as it descended toward him. He moved forward enough, just enough, so that instead of smashing it against his skull she crashed it down onto the vertebrae at the head of his spine.

He buckled under the blow, then, off balance, stumbled back against the sofa.

Whalid rolled over, reaching for his pocket. He had his gun in his wavering, untrained hand as his brother flung himself at him. His first shot exploded just over Kamal’s shoulder. There was no second. The fingers of Kamal’s right hand, pressed together into a wedge of flesh and bone, smashed against his trachea just below his Adam’s apple, forcing it backward against the bone of his neck until its delicate membranes snapped apart like elastic bands stretched beyond their breaking point.

A look of surprise melting swiftly into horror spread over Whalid’s face.

His mouth and jaws contorted in a grotesque and futile effort to inhale the air that would never again reach his lungs.

Kamal stood over him, rubbing the ridge of his right hand almost meditatively in his left palm. Laila was transfixed, her mouth agape with horror, still not quite comprehending what had happened.

“What did you do to him?” she gasped.

“What a traitor deserves. I killed him.”

Kamal knelt down beside his brother. Whalid’s face was grayish purple, his eyes bulging, whites protruding from their sockets, imploring them silently for some stay of the death he realized was overtaking him.

“It takes a couple of minutes for them to die,” Kamal announced matter-of-factly. With a quick heave, he rolled his brother onto his stomach as a calloused vet might turn over the still-warm body of a dog. “I want the checklist.”

He patted the hip pockets of Whalid’s trousers. There was something hard in the left one. Kamal reached in and thrust the object he pulled out up to his sister. It was a thirtyminute BASF tape, and both of them recognized instantly the tiny red crescent in its upper righthand corner.

“That’s why it didn’t go off. The bastard put another tape in there while we were up on the roof.”

Furiously, Kamal rolled his brother back over onto his back again. His face was bluish purple now, the eyes slightly less protruding, the hysteria of a moment ago replaced by a fearing resignation to the death that was only seconds away. Kamal bent down and pressed his lips against his brother’s ear, shouting to make sure his dying brain would record the message, would send the angry curse spinning around him as he stumbled toward the void.

“Your bomb is going to go off!” he yelled. “Because I’m going to set it off. You lost, traitor!”

Dorothy Burns had been about to leave for the Tuesday-afternoon tea of her Aquinas discussion group when she thought she heard a shot. Never, except on the television programs that comforted the lonely nights of her widowhood, had Dorothy heard a gunshot. Anxiously she rushed to her bedroom window and stared at the house next door. She was about to turn away again when she saw the man, almost pulling the woman behind him, burst from the front door and run to the garage. Then she saw the car back recklessly down the driveway and go careening off up the street.

Dorothy shuddered. Every since poor Tom’s boy had told her he had rented his father’s house to foreigners for Christmas, she had wondered what kind of people they were. Was this the answer? There was only a second’s hesitation before she picked up the phone.

“Operator,” she said, “please give me the police.”

Al Feldman’s despairing plea for time had affected everyone in the NSC conference room from the President to the twenty-five-year-old Vassar girl responsible for keeping track of the classified documents flowing in and out of the chamber. It was as if the exhausted, desperate Chief of Detective’s voice had suddenly incarnated for each man and woman in the room the five million New Yorkers whose lives were at risk because of the decision they had made. Bennington of the CIA was the first to break the stricken silence.

“Mr. President,” he said. “I have a suggestion. It’s a tactic that might allow us to convert the limited extension of his ultimatum into an indefinite one. Let’s get Begin. Tell him we want to go ahead with our West Bank operation. Except it will be mutually agreed it’s just a show to gain us time to let New York find the device. He’ll certainly agree to that.

Then we’ll tell Qaddafi we’re going in. Invite him to send observers from his embassy in Damascus along with our forces to verify that we really are doing it. Just landing and deploying our forces and moving them up to the West Bank is going to take close to ten hours. If it comes to it, we can actually move in, fight a couple of sham battles with the Israelis. The important thing is, if we can get him to agree to this, then we, not Qaddafi, will be controlling the time element in the crisis.”

The President looked around the room, a first glimmer of hope registering in his face. “Caspar,” he asked the Secretary of Defense, “what do you think?”

“Mr. President, try it. With so much at stake, it’s worth trying anything.”

A police car bearing two uniformed officers of the Spring Valley police screeched to a stop in front of Dorothy Bums’s home three minutes after her call. Visibly excited, she confided to them what she had seen and heard.

“Probably been watching too many TV programs lately,” the first officer whispered to his partner as they trudged through the snow to the house next door. When there was no answer at the front door, they circled the house looking for telltale signs of a forced entry. There were none. They returned to the front door and decided to give it a try. It was open.

The first officer drew his pistol and poked his head inside. “Anybody home?” he shouted.

Silence followed his cry. “We’d better have a look,” he said, advancing down the hallway. He paused at the door of the den and looked inside.

“Jesus Christ!” he yelled back to his deputy. “Get the State Policel The old lady wasn’t kidding!”

An atmosphere as despairing, as hopeless, as that in the NSC conference room gripped Qaddafi’s command post in the basement of the Villa Pietri.

As always, even when he was in a crowded room, Qaddafi was alone, slouched at the head of the table, morose and withdrawn. The men around him murmured their exchanges in restrained little ripples of noise that would not intrude on their chieftain’s silence.

The passing hours had brought to the Libyan and the men around him the growing certitude that their ghastly gamble was failing. Each understood full well what the consequences of failure would be. As the time had passed with no sign of Israeli acquiescence to their demands, Qaddafi had withdrawn, spiritually, from their gathering. He was a man of dark and unpredictable moods, capable of temper tantrums so violent he could, literally, smash the furniture of his office and roll on the floor in rage.

Once he had personally shaved the head of his Prime Minister, Salam Jalloud, because the latter had violated the puritanical standards of his revolution by consorting with bar girls in Rome. And there were his periodic retreats to the desert, pilgrimages to his past in which be sought in the austerity and loneliness of the sands the strength to confront a world he did not always choose to understand.

The dark, brooding eyes studied the men around him now. Like most revolutions, his had been nourished by the blood of its makers. Of the band of brothers that had overthrown Libya’s King Idris in 1969, only Jalloud remained. The others were dead, disgraced or in exile, replaced by a new generation of followers of more certain loyalty and less menacing demeanor. Qaddvtfi pondered each face in turn. Which among them would remain loyal to the end of this trial? And which among them would be the first to raise the dagger, to accuse their leader of the dictator’s unforgivable sin-failure?

A shout from the communications center next door interrupted his meditation. “Ya sidi!” a clerk cried. “It is the American airplane. The President wishes to talk to you. The Americans have accepted your terms!”

The men in the room let out a collective jubilant roar of triumph; they did, that is, with one exception-Qaddafi. He remained motionless and unsmiling, fixed in the position he had been in for hours. Finally he raised a finger.

“Tell the President this time I will talk to him,” he intoned.

Three police cars of the New York State Police, C Troop, their red rooftop lights slowly revolving, lined the road in front of the house in which Whalid Dajani had been killed. An ambulance, its doors open, stood in the driveway. Across the street, a circle of neighbors and of kids who had interrupted their afternoon walk home from school looked on in shock and concern. Murder was not an everyday occurrence in the quiet byways of Spring Valley.

In the den, the police hovered around Whalid’s body. The impact of his errant bullet was circled in red on the wall. A fingerprinting team was already dusting for prints while a trooper with a piece of chalk traced out the exact position of his corpse on the floor. Above him, a police photographer recorded the scene from every angle.

“Take his prints down at the morgue,” the captain in charge of the investigation ordered, “and tell the coroner to run an autopsy on him.” He looked at the broken fifth of Johnnie Walker on the floor, then cast a scornful glance at Whalid’s corpse. “I’ll bet he’ll find enough alcohol in there to open a distillery. Come on,” he said, squatting down beside the body, “let’s see if he’s got any ID on him.”

While he started through Whalid’s pants, another trooper picked up the suit coat. He pulled out Whalid’s passport and flicked it open. “Hey, Charlie,” he said to the captain, “he’s a fucking Arab.”

The captain held the passport photo up beside Whalid’s face, still contorted by the agony of his dying struggle for air. He grunted, satisfied at the matchup, then went through its pages until he found what he was looking for: the entry stamp an INS officer at JFK had placed on it. “Poor bastard, didn’t have time to do much Christmas shopping,” he said, noting the date, December 9. “I’ll go down to the car and call this in.”

The captain, unaware of the emergency in New York, sauntered out of the house, stopping as he did to order the ambulance men to pick up the body.

At the curb he lit a cigarette, then finally picked up the speaker of his car radio. “Okay,” he said when his headquarters replied. “I have the details on this stiff “we got up here in Spring Valley.”

Muammar al-Qaddafi listened impassively to the President’s recital of his proposed U.S. movement into the West Bank. No such restraint fettered the men around him. They were already preparing to celebrate the enormity of the triumph their leader’s gamble had won.

“Mr. President,” the Libyan replied when the American had finished, “your terms are unacceptable.”

His advisers looked at him aghast, but Qaddafi ignored them. “I do not intend to substitute an American occupation of my brothers’ lands for an Israeli one. The terms of my letter were simple. I want Begin to renounce to the world and his people publicly and forever Israel’s claims to our lands. And then I want the Israelis to leave immediately their settlements and East Jerusalem. There is no need to extend my ultimatum for that. All that I have asked can be accomplished in one hour. No more.”

As his interpreter began to translate his words, Qaddafi’s circle of advisers erupted in protest. “You can’t do this,” Jalloud protested. “We’ve won. They’re giving us what we want.”

Qaddafi smashed his fist into the table. “Fool!” he shouted. “Have you no vision? It is a trick to lull us, to win time for them.”

The President was back on the Doomsday circuit again.

He spoke very slowly this time, his tone as void of emotion as his adversary’s had so often been. “Mr. Qaddafi,” he said, “understand this, I beg you. There are, at this moment, thirtytwo Poseidon missiles targeted on your nation. They can destroy every living creature on Libyan soil. I will give the order to fire those missiles, even if it means the destruction of the finest city on earth, if you have not agreed to extend your ultimatum and end this unacceptable attempt to blackmail another nation by eight o’clock tonight. I pray God, sir, you believe my words.”

The Libyan did not stir on hearing them. Nor did he choose to measure the horror and dismay they caused in the men around him as the finality of what they were heading to had registered on them.

“I cannot and I will not live in a world without justtice for my brothers,”

he answered. “I and my people are ready to die for the justice you deny us.”

His intelligence chief exploded at his words. “Nol” he shouted. “We are not. You have no right. You have no right to sacrifice us and our children, a whole nation, for this. You can’t go through with it.”

Qaddafi did not look at the man when he replied. His dark unfathomable eyes were riveted to some distant vision whose outlines only they could perceive.

“I can, my brother,” he whispered, “and I have.”

As Qaddafi lapsed into an impenetrable silence, a third of the way around the world in the city he menaced three men stared at a map of Greenwich Village. Al Feldman had held Angelo Rocchia and Jack Rand at his Sixth Precinct search headquarters as part of his mobile reserve.

“Something isn’t right,” he told them, studying the areas they had already searched. “We should have found the damn thing by now.”

Angelo shuddered. “Christ,” he said, “you don’t suppose I could have been wrong, do you?”

He was interrupted by a shout to Feldman from across the room. “Hey, Chief,” an officer called, “they want you on the amplifier to the other command post.”

Among the underground headquarters’ many communication circuits was a copy of the New York State Police’s intelligence network, and Feldman’s caller had just torn a routine allpoints bulletin from its Teleprinter.

“Chief,” he said, “they got a DOA up in Spring Valley. Suspected murder.

The guy’s an Arab and his ident is close to one of those guys we’re looking for.”

“Read it to me,” Feldman ordered.

The officer read:

“1532 Code 71 Caucasian Male discovered DOA, 32 High Farms Road by Spring Valley PD. NYSP Troop C, McManus IC, dispatched. Victim’s height approx. 5‘10”. Weight 185. ID given by Lebanese Passport 234671 issued Beirut November 22, 1979, as Ibrahim Abboud. Electronic Engineer born Beirut September 12, 1941. Entered USA JFK International Airport in December this year. Probable cause of death: violent assault. Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. Identifying marks or features: brown moustache. Tattoo inside right forearm of dagger, snake and heart.”

“Tattool Jesus Christ, did you say tattoo?” Feldman was shouting with excitement. “Get me that file the French sent us last night,” he screamed at Dewing. He rummaged through it until he found what he was looking for.

“That’s him!” he screamed. Everyone in the crowded top floor of the Six Precinct froze at his shout. “That’s one of the guys we’re looking forl”

At almost the same moment, Art Gelb of the Times was accepting a collect call from Las Vegas.

“Mr. Gelb,” came a distant and timid voice. “This is your Reno stringer.

I’m sorry it took a while to get the information you wanted about that guy McClintock.”

“Oh yeah, that guy in Safeguards out there. Some kind of chemical safeguards, I suppose.”

“No, Mr. Gelb,” the stringer replied. “He’s assigned to one of those hush-bush government-organizations that work in a restricted area out at McCarran Airport. It’s called NEST, for Nuclear Explosive Search Teams.

They’re meant to go out and look for hidden radioactive materials, stuff that might be stolen from a nuclear power plant. Eventually, even a hidden atomic bomb.”

The stringer continued, but Gelt wasn’t listening anymore. He had gone suddenly limp. Oh, my God, he thought, how they’ve lied to us!

The officer of the New York State Police Troop C in charge of investigating Whalid Dajani’s murder raced toward his squad car.

“Hurry, Captain,” his deputy shouted. “It’s an emergency.”

The captain grabbed the radio out of his hands, listened to Al Feldman a minute, then turned to his deputy. “Quick. Get that lady in there who saw them take off.”

Flushed and excited by her sudden prominence, Dorothy Burns was bundled out of her house and down to the squad car by two burly state policemen. Miles away, bursting with strain and excitement, Dewing and Feldman interrogated her in the chaos and confusion of their Sixth Precinct search headquarters.

They already had the time her call had been logged in by the Spring Valley police, 1532. From the overwrought woman they drew out two other vital pieces of information, a description of the man and woman she had seen running out of the house and the color of the car, dark green, in which they had raced off.

“It’s the other two!” Feldman said, listening to her. “It’s got to be.”

Bannion, Hudson and the CIA’s Salisbury were gathered around the Chief’s desk following the conversation. “Where the hell would they be racing off to?” Feldman asked the state trooper. “Are you near any big arterial highways up there?”

“Yeah,” the trooper replied. “There’s an entrance to the New York State Thruway about half a mile down the road.”

“In the direction they were going?”

Feldman looked at the men around him. “That’s it!” he shouted. “They’re taking off! They’re heading north before it explodes.” He turned back to the squawk box which linked him to the squad car in Spring Valley.

“Captain,” he yelled, “get a car up to the toll gates just as fast as you can drive! Try to get me a confirmation from the guys that collect the tolls that that’s where they went.”

The captain shouted an order. One of the three cars turned around and screeched off, its siren shrieking.

In New York Feldman shouted for a map of New York State. A dozen cops ran through the building looking for one. Finally a patrolman rushed up with an old Esso road map he had found in the glove compartment of his car.

Hastily, Feldman spread the map on his desk.

“They must be going north, right?” He checked his watch. “We know they took off thirty-seven minutes ago. They couldn’t have done more than fifty miles in that time.” He made a quick calculation, then jabbed the map north of Kingston. “They’ve got to be between Spring Valley and here. We’ve got to seal off that Thruway right away. Get police cars to close off every exit ramp. Have the State Police throw up roadblocks at Newburgh and Kingston.

Flood the highway with cars. Stop every green vehicle they see. We’ve got to take these bastards!”

Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor of The New York Times, stared at his deputy managing editor. The usually volatile, animated Gelb had a face on him as grim as a Florentine death mask.

“What the hell is the matter with you, Art?” Rosenthal asked. “Are you sick or something?”

Gelb closed Rosenthal’s office door to be sure that no one could overhear him, then repeated what his Las Vegas stringer had said. This time, it was Rosenthal who paled. He was a disheveled roly-poly man in his late fifties, sometimes described by his subordinates behind his back as a rumpled teddy bear. The description was inept. There was no Winnie-the-Pooh geniality in Abe Rosenthal. Without a word to Gelb he picked up his phone and called Police Plaza.

“I don’t give a damn where he is or what he’s doing,” he snarled at the Police Commissioner’s harassed detective-secretary. “I want to talk to him immediately and I’ll hold on here until you get him.”

It took several minutes to patch the call through the improvised lines to the Sixth Precinct, then to get Michael Bannion into a quiet corner away from the distress and turmoil of the search center.

Rosenthal wasted no time in chitchat when he heard the Commissioner’s voice. “I understand you told one of my editors your people are out looking for a barrel of chlorine gas hidden in this city, Commissioner?”

“Yes, sir, that’s right, Mr. Rosenthal, and I can’t tell you how much we’d appreciate your help at the Times in keeping this from the public until we’ve been able to locate and neutralize it.”

“Hidden by some Palestinian terrorists, I understand?”

“That is correct.” Despite the strain under which he had been living, Bannion’s baritone was as resonant, as commanding as ever.

“Commissioner, you’re a goddamn liar. There’s an atomic bomb in that barrel. There are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people in this city at risk and you’re refusing to tell them their lives are in danger.

You don’t expect The New York Times to go along with that, do you? To stand by silent, after we’ve been lied to, knowing that thousands of the people we serve are threatened with death?”

A stunned silence followed his words. At the Sixth Precinct, Bannion had clapped his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone. He was waving frantically at an aide. “Get Washingtonl” he shouted. “Get the President! The secret’s out!”

“I don’t believe it! Repeat that again,” Al Feldman roared at the squawk box on his desk.

“One of the toll-gate attendants at the Thruway entry up here just identified your Arabs,” replied the irritated state trooper up in Spring Valley. “But he said they were heading south toward the city, not north.”

By now a dozen men were around Feldman’s desk, all listening. “You absolutely certain of that? He’s sure it was them? Going south?”

“Of course, damn it. The guy only collects southbound tolls.” The knot of people around the Chief returned his astonished air. “They broke a five-dollar bill, and when he gave them back the change he saw the broad was cog.ţ

“Why?” Dewing demanded. “Why in hell would they be coming back to the city when they know it’s about to be destroyed?”

“Because for some reason they’ve got to get to that bomb,” Feldman replied.

“That’s what it’s got to be. They’re heading for the bomb.”

“Sweet Mother of Christ!” Bannion hammered his forehead with the heel of his hand. “If they left Spring Valley at three-thirty they might be here by now.”

The Police Commissioner almost knocked Dewing over lunging for the squawk box. “Patch me through to SPRINT!” he shouted. “SPRINT” was an acronym for Special Police Radio Inquiry Network, the multi-million-dollar core of the Department’s Communication Division that sprawled over two floors of Police Plaza and processed nineteen thousand calls a day on the 911 police emergency phone number.

“I want every available radio motor patrol unit, detective cruiser and emergency service truck routed to the Sixth Precinct immediately. Set up an airtight cordon. Fourteenth from the Hudson to Broadway, Broadway down to Houston, West Houston back to the river. Block off every street into the area with cars. I want every vehicle and pedestrian trying to enter the area stopped and all identities verified. Two of those three Palestinians we’re looking for are going to try to get in there.” Bannion stopped, flushed with excitement.

“Jim,” he told the captain running the center, “tell the precincts to get every available patrolman onto that cordon right away. Tell the West Side precincts to concentrate their men on Fourteenth Street, East Side and Queens on Broadway, downtown and Brooklyn on Houston. Have the barrier shop break out every sawhorse they’ve got. Move, Jim, move!”

Bannion pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. It didn’t occur to him for the moment to check his decisions with Dewing and the FBI. This was his city. Only speed was going to save it, and he wasn’t going to waste time arguing with anybody.

“Mr. Mayor,” he shouted. By the time Abe Stern was at his side he had the Fire Commissioner on the phone. “Tim,” he ordered, “get all your midtown apparatus onto the line Fourteenth-Broadway-West Houston immediately. Let my people use that equipment to block access to the area.”

There was a pause while the Fire Commissioner protested Bannion’s peremptory order. Even on their level, New York firemen regard their colleagues in the Police Department as warmly as a group of South Bronx juvenile delinquents might look on an assembly of Wall Street stockbrokers.

“Don’t fucking argue!” Bannion roared. “Do it! Here’s the Mayor.” He turned to Abe Stern and pointed at the squawk box. “Tell him!” he commanded his superior.

Stern had barely finished confirming his order when Bannion had cut that call and placed another, this one to his Deputy Commissioner for Public Information. “Patty,” he said, “in about two minutes you’re going to be swamped with calls from the media. Feed them the chlorine-gas cover story.”

Seven floors below the Deputy Commissioner’s offices in Police Plaza, Bannion’s first orders were already being put into effect. The SPRINT

complex was broken up into five radio rooms, one for each of the city’s five boroughs. In each, a dozen radio dispatchers controlled all the police cars in the boroughs from televisionlike computer consoles rigged to a keyboard. Through them, they knew what each of their cars was doing, whether its driver was having a cup of coffee or bringing in a murderer, and by flicking a couple of keys they could call and reassign every car in their command.

Almost in synchronization with the flicking of those keys, the undulating wail of police sirens began to rise from every corner of the city as patrol cars wheeled about and started their dash for the Village. Seconds later, their high-pitched chorus was joined by the deep wonk-work of the city’s fire apparatus converging on the police line. Within minutes, all Manhattan Island echoed to those vibrant bellows. The red lights of the oncoming police cars cascaded in the evening darkness down all the great arterial avenues: Ninth, Seventh, Broadway, Fifth. Stunned traffic policemen at the city’s major intersections barely had time to block traffic so that one car could scream past when the next came thundering down on them. From the sidewalks, New Yorkers, usually inured to such spectacles, looked on amazed.

SPRINT’s current-situation desk routed the incoming cars into position as they neared the area, slotting them into it block by block so that it was gradually sealed off like a water tap being twisted shut. Two or four cars were assigned to each intersection depending on its size. They parked abreast of each lane of traffic, lights flashing. One officer leaped out to reroute the traffic. The other rushed to the sidewalks to start checking the pedestrian flow. In commandeered taxicabs and police trucks, other policemen descended on the area from around Manhattan. Ten minutes after Bannion’s orders had been issued Police Department trucks were dropping off at each intersection the gray wooden sawhorses marked “POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS” that the NYPD used for traffic control.

The resulting traffic jams were monstrous; so, too, were the outraged protests of people being screened before they were allowed into their neighborhood. And, at 5:17, for the first time, the story went public.

WABC-TV interrupted a rerun of Batman with a flash from its newsroom.

Unmade-up and clearly rushed before the cameras, Bill Beutel, the anchorman of the station’s Eyewitness News Team, told his city, “A police emergency is in progress in the Greenwich Village area, where,” he reported, “Palestinian terrorists are alleged to have hidden a barrel of deadly chlorine gas.”

Ten minutes later, Patricia McGuire appeared before the media’s cameras at Police Plaza, announcing the cordon in the Village area and the hunt for the gas, and assuring the public that the city’s police authorities had the matter well in hand.

Arthur Sulzbetger, the publisher of The New York Times, stood by the window of his office on the fourteenth floor of the Times Building and pondered, horrified, the President’s words. From the canyon of Forty-third Street below came the snarl of traffic, tailgates clanging shut, the rasp of impatient taxis’ horns, a few distant roars of anger; the vibrant cacophony of the city, his city, the city that his family and his family’s paper had served for over a century.

He ran a nervous hand through his curly black hair, as closely cut almost as it had been when he served in the Marine Corps. There was an awesome responsibility to his office as publisher of the paper that considered itself the conscience of America: a responsibility Sulzberger felt every bit as intensely as the President of the United States felt the burden of his office. What were his responsibilities now, he asked himself, what were the obligations of the Times to the city, to the nation now?

He turned from the window back to his massive walnut desk and his surprisingly modest office, its walls decorated with Times artifacts, historic front pages and stern and sober oils of the father and grandfather who had preceded him in this room.

The door opened. “They’re here, Mr. Sulzberger,” his secretary announced, and she showed Abe Rosenthal, Art Gelb, Grace Knowland and Myron Pick, an assistant managing editor, into the room.

Rosenthal was still seething with anger at the Police Commissioner for having dared to lie to The New York Times, for concealing from the citizens of the city the terrible threat that menaced them.

“Can you imagine, Punch,” he said, referring to the publisher by the nickname that had followed him from childhood, “an atomic bomb in this city that could kill ten, twenty thousand people and they don’t say a word to anybody?”

Sulzberger was seated now, his hands folded before him as though in prayer, his lips pressed against the knuckle of his left index finger. His head moved slowly back and forth as he listened to his senior editor. “It’s not an atomic bomb, Abe. And it’s not ten thousand people. It’s the whole city.”

As they listened in growing horror, he recounted the details of the pleading telephone call he had just received from the President. “Needless to say, he begged us not to use this information.”

He looked at each of his employees. Despite the vastness of his enterprise, he knew them all personally. “That’s not all he asked us, I’m afraid.” His remote, melancholy eyes looked at each face in turn. “He’s also asked us to restrict this information to those of us who already know about it. To tell absolutely no one else. No one.”

Grace Knowland’s hand went instinctively to her mouth to stifle the gasp forming there. Tommy, she thought, where is he?

“My God, I can’t believe it!” It was Myron Pick. “He expects us to just sit here and wait to be thermonuclearized? Not even to warn our families?”

“Precisely.” Sulzberger, whose own wife and child were only a few blocks away, reiterated Qaddafi’s injunction to secrecy and his warning that he would detonate his device instantly if an evacuation was begun.

“Why the hell should we?” Pick demanded. “Just because the President tells us to? How do we know he’s telling the truth? Presidents have lied to us.

And why the hell should his judgment on what to do in this situation be any better than ours just because seventy million people voted for him in an election?”

“Myron.” The publisher studied his agitated editor. “Forget about the President. Forget about Qaddafi. Forget about everything except one thing: what is the responsibility of The New York Times to the people of this city?”

“Well, I think it’s clear. Publish just as fast as we can. Warn the people that this city is threatened with destruction and tell them to save themselves any way they can.”

“Jesus, Myron, you can’t possibly mean thatt” Grace Knowland said.

“I certainly do. We’ve got it. Our obligation is to publish it. Doesn’t experience teach us that nothing is gained when we hold back the truth?

Look at the Bay of Pigs.”

The Times had had the story of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the CIA’s involvement in it but had effectively squelched it on the urging of President Kennedy. Later, both the paper and the President regretted the decision, realizing that the story’s publication might have prevented a national disaster.

“For Christ’s sake, Myron, this isn’t the Bay of Pigs. We’re talking about doing something that might cost millions of lives. Yours and mine included.”

Both Grace and Pick were on their feet shouting furiously at each other.

“We’re talking about the rights and obligations of this paper,” Pick roared. “I say it’s our right and duty to warn the people of this city what’s about to happen to them.”

“Who the bell do you think you are to put yourself over the President? Why do you have some God-given right to do whatever you see fit just because you’re a newspaper editor? To risk people’s lives for some principle?”

Grace was beginning to sob in anguish and concern. “Like those horrible people out there in Wisconsin who published the secret of the hydrogen bomb. Now a million people in this city, including my son, may die just because they had to make a point about their goddamn freedom of the press.”

“We have no proof Qaddafi got his hydrogen-bomb secrets from those papers,”

Pick shouted back at her.

“Well, he damn well didn’t get it sitting out in the desert meditatingl”

“Quiet, both of you. Sit down.” Sulzberger was on his feet. Usually his voice retained, despite the authority that was his, a kind of youthful timidity, but there were no traces of it present at the moment. “Neither one of you is addressing the problem. Art,” he said, turning to Gelb, “what do you think?”

“It seems to me that the U.S. government has no convincing plan that can save this city beyond some vague hope for a miracle of some sort. I mean the only response the government seems to have been able to put together is flooding the Village with FBI agents and detectives.”

Abe Rosenthal looked morosely at his friend and associate. “Maybe the problem, Art, is there isn’t any other response.”

“Then,” Gelb said, “maybe our obligation is to say to the people, `Get out of the city any way you can.’ So there’d be chaos in the street, but maybe a couple of million people would make it. At least the Times would have saved them.”

“And killed how many others?” Rosenthal peered at Gelb through his outsized dark-framed glasses. “Let’s get a couple of points straight here. First, if we feel our responsibility to the people of this city is to warn them about what might happen so they can run for the hills, then there is absolutely no question of holding it to publish an extra of the Times. Punch”-he turned to the publisher”has got to pick up the phone right now and give it to the television networks.

“That would mean we’re voting to shout ‘Fire!’ in the crowded theater, because to let the news out like that, with no warning or preparation, will start a panic that is surely going to kill a million people, bomb or no bomb.”

Rosenthal got up. He was in his shirtsleeves, his tie undone, the untidy roll of fat he never managed to control despite all his sporadic efforts at dieting spilling over the top of his trousers. He seemed to be clawing at the air with his fingertips as he strode nervously about the room. “The second thing is, nobody has elected The New York Times to be the government of the United States. We’re supposed to monitor the government’s decisions, not make them. Okay, Presidents have lied to us, but I don’t think this one is lying, not about this. He’s made a decision, and millions of lives are involved with it, including our own. I think we have to go with him.” He stopped. “Anyhow, it’s your decision, Punch.”

The publisher turned away from his four employees and stepped again to the window. Already the gray pallor of evening hung upon the city. He had made many a hard decision in this room, the decision to defy Richard Nixon and publish the Pentagon Papers, to overrule his editors and hold the secret of the Glomar Explorer at the request of the CIA. None of them had compared even remotely in their importance to this one.

Finally he walked around to the front of his desk. “My dear friends-” he choked as he articulated the words”our responsibility, it seems to me, our ultimate responsibility, is to the people of this city. If breaking the secret is going to put their lives in jeopardy, then it seems to me we must keep the secret and accept all the consequences of our act by ourselves-by ourselves alone.”

Sulzberger thrust his fists into the pockets of his gray flannel suit. “The President says the ultimatum expires at nine o’clock. I intend to stay here in this office until then. I leave it to the rest of you to follow the dictates of your consciences. If you want to leave, go ahead. Just do it quietly. You have my solemn promise the matter will never be mentioned between us again.

“Otherwise, I’m afraid there’s nothing to do except to go on preparing tomorrow’s paper-and pray we’ll be alive to publish it.”

Kamal had insisted they take a different route into the city in the unlikely event they had been seen on their trip up to Spring Valley, and Laila had chosen to come down the East Side along the FDR Drive after crossing the Third Avenue Bridge to avoid the tolls on the Triboro. Since leaving, they had barely spoken. Fingers clenched to the steering wheel, her eyes full of tears, still in a state of quasi-shock from the horrible scene she had witnessed, Laila drove like a robot. Only fear and the memories of her dead father had prevented her from spinning the car off into the roadside ditch and trying to somehow flee her demented brother.

Exhausted, her nerves shattered, she was resigned to fate, to carrying this enterprise through to the end she had never believed possible.

Kamal sat beside her in silence, listening to the radio.

It said nothing. He studied the flow of traffic moving out of the city, the lights on Roosevelt Island and Queens beyond. Everything seemed perfectly normal. Even the distant wail of the sirens was a part of the city’s daily landscape. His eyes studied the green rectangle of the United Nations Building, the towers of light and glass beyond it, a technological universe that by now should have been reduced to a lifeless slag heap. The people in the buildings above, in the traffic enveloping their car, were alive while at this instant, perhaps, in Libya or Palestine or both, Arabs, his brothers, were dying, helpless once again before their enemies because his brother had been a traitor.

Suddenly, seized by an uncontrollabe rage, he hammered the dashboard with his fist. Failure, failure, failure, he raged; failure eats at us like maggots in a corpse. We are always the joke, the poor fools whose plans go astray.

He tapped the chest of his leather jacket, reassuring himself for the hundredth time that the checklist was there. Introduce the code to reopen the case, he thought. Switch the tapes. Punch 636 to start the right cassette with the firing instruction. One minute, no more. Ahead of them he saw the highway sign “15TH STREET-EXIT FOR 14TH STREET.” He tapped Laila’s arm.

“This is it, remember?”

“How’s it going?”

Angelo Rocchia didn’t have to look up from the charts on which he was following the progress of the search in the crowded streets around Sheridan Square to recognize the voice. The Mayor’s gruff yet slightly high-pitched way of speaking always reminded Angelo of the time when he was a kid and Fiorello La Guardia used to read the funny papers over the radio on Sunday mornings during the newspaper strike.

“Not good, Your Honor. Too many buildings. Too few guys. Too little time,”

Angelo commented grimly.

Abe Stern shook his head in dismayed agreement. He put his chunky hand on Angelo’s shoulder. “We took a big chance on you, my friend. I hope to God you were right.”

As he wandered off, hands behind his back, head bowed in concern, his words, “We took a big chance on you” kept coming back to Angelo like one of those Hindu phrases the kids kept repeating to themselves-except in their case they were supposed to bring you peace.

Every time they cross out another street on that map without finding the barrel, the detective realized, there’s another pair of eyes in this room on me.

Where did I go wrong, he asked himself yet again, where, where? The FBI lab in Brooklyn had called in the results of their analysis of the salesman’s fender. The paint matchup checked. There was the whore. They had found two countermen in a pizza joint four doors down from the broad’s brownstone who recognized the guy. Everything checked. So why hadn’t they found it?

He walked back to the desk he and Rand had been assigned, concentrating so intently he banged his thigh on the sharp edge of a filing cabinet along his path. As he sat down on the desk, rubbing his leg in pain and frustration, he turned to his young partner. “What the hell did we do wrong, kid? What do they teach you to do down there in Quantico in a case like this?”

“Angelo,” Rand replied in what he meant to be a quiet, comforting manner, “in Quantico they teach us to always go by the book, but you don’t seem to believe much in the book.”

Angelo gave his shoulders a despairing toss. “There are times to go by the book, times to forget it. Problem is knowing when to do which.” Wearily, he rubbed his eyes in the palm of his hand. “My book says when something doesn’t work, you go back to square one and start all over again. Try to find out where you went wrong.”

“Mine does, too.”

Angelo rubbed his still-aching leg, studying the crowded room, the strained faces trying to conceal their fear, listening to the strangely subdued voices of the men working the radios, the phones, consulting the pictures and the chart on the wall. It had all seemed so logical, so straightforward when he was down there in the underground command post. Was it really possible this bomb was somewhere else, uptown, and they were all looking for it down here because he’d made a mistake? He stopped himself. There were things it was better not to think about.

“Square one is back where that guy’s car was hit, right?”

Rand grunted his agreement as Angelo was getting to his feet.

“I’m going to ask Feldman to let us out of here for ten minutes. Let’s go back there and walk through this one more time.”

Kamal saw the flashing red lights first, just after they passed Irving Place, coming up to Union Square. “Slow down,” he ordered.

A fine, cold drizzle had begun to fall, half snow and half rain, and he leaned forward to peer through the blur of the windshield at the crowd in the square ahead. He could see half a dozen squad cars and two ladder trucks drawn up in a sort of crescent. The gray wooden barriers were out, and police and people were spilling into the square. Traffic police were waving cars away from Thirteenth Street and University Place, heading them onto Fourteenth.

“Stay well over to the right, so that no one gets a look at you,” he commanded his sister. “Maybe it’s a fire.” The choked-up traffic edged slowly west on Fourteenth Street toward Fifth Avenue. Near the corner, the crowds thickened. For a moment Kamal thought of lowering the window and asking what was happening. No, he told himself. With my accent, it’s too dangerous. Then, as they drew up to the intersection with Fifth, he understood. Two more fire trucks and a police car were drawn up in a line across Fifth from curb to curb, completely sealing off the avenue to traffic.

“They know where it is,” he said to Laila. His words came in that flat, mechanical manner of his, but inside the black unreasoning rage he had felt on the FDR Drive engulfed him once more. We have failed, he thought, we have failed again.

Laila inched the car along toward Sixth Avenue. It too was blocked off on the south side by police cars.

“It’s all over, Kamal,” she said. “We’ve got to get out. When they find Whalid they’ll know who we are. Then they’ll have police looking for us at every border crossing into Canada.”

Kamal said nothing. He was sitting rigidly upright, his back not even touching the seat of the car, staring straight ahead, tears of fury and frustration coursing down his cheeks.

Laila turned north on Sixth. Better get away from this traffic, she thought. She had driven two blocks when she felt Kamal’s hand squeeze her forearm so tightly she gave a little yelp of pain.

“Stop,” he said. “I’m getting out.”

“Kamal, you’re crazy!”

This time she screamed in pain at the pressure on her arm.

“Stop, I said. I’m going in on foot.”

He had opened the door before the car even came to a halt. “Go north,” he told her, “as fast as you can drive. At least one of us will get home.” He slid out, slammed the door shut and leaped to the sidewalk.

For a second, Laila was too stunned to react. She watched in the rearview mirror as he started back down the avenue in the rain, head low, the checkered cap pulled down, his collar turned up to conceal his face. He’ll never make it, she told herself. For an instant she considered putting the car in reverse, going back down the avenue after him, to urge him to flee with her. Instead she jammed the gear lever into drive. One simple thought bad overpowered her, like the rush of a powerful anesthetic. It was an almost demoniacal desire to get away, to survive, to get as far away from this city as fast as she could.

Barely fifteen blocks from Laila’s speeding car, Angelo bad once again stopped in front of the location at which the Proctor & Gamble salesman’s fender had been scraped. Unaware of the chlorine-gas threat or indifferent to it, the leather jackets prowled the sidewalk in search of their willing preys. Angelo looked at them scornfully, thinking with satisfaction for just an instant of the impact a bomb would have on this neighborhood. Then he turned his gaze back up the street.

If you were going into the Village with a truck, Christopher’s the way you’d go. A big, open street. You wanted to come into town lower down, you’d take Houston; farther uptown, Fourteenth.

“It’s simple, isn’t it, kid?” he said, ostensibly to Rand, in fact to himself.

“Maybe too simple.”

Angelo let the car begin to drift slowly up the street. The two men scrutinized the fagades along their way, looking for something, they were not sure what, searching for one flaw in their apparently faultless logic.

The man they were looking for was stalking through the rain up Seventh Avenue, sealed off from the bomb he wanted to detonate by the police lines on Fourteenth Street. Kamal had realized that the police were looking for someone. He’d walked down to a point across the street from their lines and seen the way they were checking everyone crossing their barricades. Was it him? Was it because of the one shot his brother had been able to get off before Kamal killed him?

He should never have left the garage. That was why we failed, he thought, we wanted too much to live. How could he get back in now? A disguise of some kind, but what kind? And where would he find it? Or should he just have the courage to pick a crowded street and take his chances?

Behind him, Kamal heard a siren’s wail. Instinctively, he drew away from the curb and pulled up his jacket collar. It was not a police car that swept by him, but an ambulance, the lights glowing in its van. As it reached the corner of Nineteenth, he could see its taillights flare bright red. The ambulance slowed, turned, then accelerated again, racing off into the rain and the dark.

Karnal watched it, frozen on the sidewalk. Then he broke into a run, his feet driving forward as fast as he could move them, racing for the corner, for the fading white form of the ambulance.

Angelo and Rand idled at the stop light at Christopher and Greenwich Streets, still scrutinizing in silence the street around them. Suddenly, Rand laid his hand on Angelo’s arm.

“Angelo,” he said. “Look.” His free hand waved excitedly toward the white arrow hanging from the stop light.

The older man glanced at him appreciatively. “Yeah,” Angelo mumbled. “One way. How about that?” He began talking to himself. “Suppose they weren’t going over toward the center of the Village. Suppose they turned east onto Christopher because they wanted to double back, get onto a westbound street like Charles. Or Barrow. And being real clever guys they hike all the way over there to Eighth to get their pizza pies to throw us off just in case somebody saw them. In that case, our mistake was beginning our search over there in the center of the Village instead of down here.”

He glanced at the bars on the street corners, the brick rear wall of Saint Luke’s School. The area, Angelo knew, hadn’t been searched yet. “Jesus Christ, kid,” he said, “you know you could just be right. That could just be it.” He shot the car through the intersection as the light changed. “We gotta get back there and convince them to flood a hundred guys down here to comb this place out.”

The sharp clap of Kamal’s running feet rang up from the pavement of Nineteenth Street. He ran fast, elbows digging, breathing through his mouth in steady gulps as he had been trained to do in the camps, his eyes, all his attention, concentrated on the white vehicle, a light blinking from its roof, on the other side of Eighth Avenue.

His hat flew off. He ignored it, ignored the stares of the people crossing Eighth Avenue. He’d take his chances on being recognized now. Success was too close not to be grasped in one final, furious lunge. He slowed down as he drew up to the ambulance. The rear doors were open and its stretcher was gone. Trotting by the brightly lit entrance hall of the tenement at 362 where the ambulance was parked, Kamal could see a gaggle of curious neighbors on the landing, peering from their doorways at the blue-coated figure of the ambulance driver easing the front end of the stretcher down the stairs.

He sprinted for the ambulance, slammed its rear doors shut and leaped into the driver’s seat. The engine was running. The siren, he thought, where’s the siren? I’ve got to have the siren to make it work. Frantically, his eyes swept the dashboard looking for the unfamiliar knob of the instrument that would guarantee his passage through the police lines.

Behind him, he heard angry shouts. He glanced in the sideview mirror. The blue-jacketed ambulance driver was running toward him, gesticulating wildly. On the tenement doorstep the intern in white had the end of the stretcher in one hand, a bottle of intravenous solution held over his dying patient in the other, a look of total disbelief affixed to his face. The siren, Kamal almost screamed out loud, where’s the siren? He turned. The attendant was only a few yards away, ready to leap for the door. No time left to look. Kamal threw the ambulance into gear and raced down the street. As he did, he heard the outraged ambulance driver shouting to a spectator, “Get nine-eleven!”

Kamal turned left at Ninth Avenue, finding at last the red knob that activated the ambulance’s siren. Sweating profusely, he rushed down Ninth to Fourteenth Street, then started to swing across the traffic toward the blockaded entry to Hudson Street. As he did, he almost screamed with joy at the sight before his rain-spattered windshield. A patrolman leaped into his squad car and pulled it out of line, opening a hole in the police cordon through which a second policeman was frantically waving him.

I made it, he thought, shooting through the gap in the cars, I’m inside!

Angelo, less than ten blocks away, was so concentrated on what he was going to say at the Sixth Precinct that he barely heard the dispatcher on his radio: “West Midtown and Lower Manhattan cars. Just stolen in vicinity 362 West Nineteenth Street, St. Vincent’s Ambulance Number 435, white with orange side markings.”

The driver of the ambulance, struggling for breath, ran up to the police barrier at Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Knowing the bureaucracy of his employers at the Emergency Medical Service, he had decided that the only way to save his dying patient was to run back to the hospital for a second ambulance himself.

“Hey,” one of the patrolmen at the barricade called out to him, “where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“Son of a bitch!” the driver exploded, gesturing at the police all around.

“Where the fuck were all you guys when my bus got stolen?”

“Oh, yeah,” the cop said. “We got that on the radio. That was your ambulance? You see the guy?”

“Yeah, I seen him. Almost had my hands on him.”

“Come here a second,” the cop said, leading the driver to one of the patrol cars in the cordon. He handed him Kamal’s picture. “He look like this?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“Christi” The patrolman leaned into the car and grabbed the speaker of his radio. “Central,” he shouted. “This is Car Six Able, Fourteenth and Eighth.

I have the complainant on the stolen Saint Vmny’s ambulance and he indicates the man who stole his ambulance may be the subject we’re looking for.”

Angelo heard the call as he was preparing to park his car at the Sixth Precinct station house on West Tenth Street. This time the words registered instantly on his mind. “Shit!” he exclaimed. “He’s inside!”

Damn it, he thought, why didn’t I think of that? I figured it was some drunk, some kid getting himself a tendollar ride. The guy must have known the cops would wave the ambulance through. Who’d figure?

“Where are you going?” Rand asked as Angelo spun his car into the broad alley paralleling the Sixth Precinct station house.

“To Charles and then Barrow to run a fast check on your ideal”

He rocketed along Charles leaning on his horn all the way. It was a quiet, mixed street of tenements, garages, private homes, a sidewalk cafe, trailing off as it neared the river into lofts, garages and half-empty warehouses. Crossing Greenwich Street, Angelo gasped. Parked down almost at the end of the street, close to the river’s edge, its interior lights still burning, he could see the white bulk of an ambulance. As soon as he saw it, Angelo switched off his headlights so that the car could glide silently up behind the ambulance. He picked out its orange stripes and, in the glow of its interior lights, he could read the words “St. Vincent’s Hospital” and its number, 435, on its white rear doors.

“It’s himI” he whispered to Rand. The ambulance was parked in front of a kind of a warehouse-loft, three stories high, a double garage fronting onto the street. The garage doors were closed, but beside them a door into the building was ajar. “He’s in there.”

He grabbed his radio mike, squinting as he did to read the numbers on the building across the street. He was proud of the fact he still had twenty-twenty vision and, as he liked to joke, could read upside down particularly well — so that he could read the papers on a guy’s desk.

“Ten-thirteen,” he called, “199 Charles. By the river.” There may have been an atomic bomb in New York, but Angelo knew that nothing was going to get help to the scene quicker than that “Assist patrolman” call. “The suspect we’re looking for is here,” he added.

“Come on, kid,” he said. “If he’s fooling around with a bomb that can blow up half the city in there, we can’t wait for help. We got to take him ourselves.” He gestured to the half-open door. “You stay there and give me backup.”

The street was silent and deserted. Off in the distance, Rand and Angelo could hear the rising wail of sirens, probably the first cars responding to their 10.13. They slipped out of the car, leaving its doors open to minimi7p noise, and headed for the warehouse. Its door gave onto a long, dingy corridor. At the far end they could see a flickering, uneven glow of light falling against the wall. Probably, Angelo guessed, a flashlight moving in a room just off the corridor. He pointed to it.

“There he is,” he whispered.

He peered down the corridor. He couldn’t see a thing, just the wavering light in the distance, and barely, just barely, he thought he heard noise at the end of the corridor. He stepped inside, moving quickly as he did behind the half-open door so that he was concealed by the shadow it cast and not silhouetted by the lights of the street outside. The detective stared down the corridor ahead of him. It was perhaps twenty-five, thirty feet long, but to Angelo it seemed interminable. He took a half-breath and slowly, deliberately, began to work his way along its length.

Inside Kamal Dajani squatted behind the black cylindrical form of his brother’s bomb on the loading ramp at the back of the garage. He spread his checklist onto the cement floor beside the blue metallic case containing the bomb’s firing mechanisms. Methodically, in the glare of his flashlight, he reviewed exactly what he had to do to reopen the case. First he had to punch the INIT button. When the green light glowed “IDENTIFICATION,” he would tap “OIC2” on the keyboard. Then, when the word “CORRECT” appeared he could tap the code 2F47 which would allow him to open the case and switch cassettes.

He rubbed his hands nervously, feeling the sweat greasing his palms, thinking. Maybe he should just take the chance of kicking it, of doing something violent to the box to trigger its protective devices. Kamal was too distrusting for that. Suppose his brother had somehow altered those systems? Then he might damage the entire package. There was no question of failing now. He glanced at his codes again and turned to the box.

Outside, Angelo was working his way, careful step by careful step, down the corridor. The trick was to listen for street noises outside, like the rumble of a passing truck, and use them as cover for your moves. Trouble was, this was such a quiet neighborhood that it seemed to Angelo the only thing he could hear in the darkness was the thump of his racing heart. He remembered what they had told him at the physical about the high blood pressure and how the heart attacks come at times like this from sudden stress. Not now, he begged some ill-defined deity, not now.

Somewhere up in the darkness he heard a dog bark. Oh shit, he thought, not that. Don’t let there be a dog around here. He stopped to listen for voices to see if more than one person were in there. He heard none. For a second he considered what his moves should be when he reached the door, now ten feet away. The guy in there had killed his own brother a couple of hours ago. And that thing he had could blow the whole Village away. You wouldn’t want to just tap on the door and say, “Hello-police,” at a time like this.

He resumed his advance. His pistol was pointing down, his finger outside the trigger guard. It was hard to see there, but he could whip it up and get off a fast hip shot if he had to. It was a heavy-barreled Smith and Wesson .38 because Angelo knew well the longer the barrel, the more accuracy you got. And it was a very impressive weapon if you ever had to face off anybody.

Inside, the word “CORRECT” gleamed in the reading window of the bomb’s control case. Kamal tapped on the keyboard the code to open the case, then removed the blank thirty-minute BASF tape his brother had placed inside. He picked up the original tape bearing its firing instructions for the bomb preprogrammed in Tripoli. As he did, a strange, incongruous memory overwhelmed him. It took him back several years to a windswept plateau above Damascus. His squad of fedayeen, out on a training mission, had stumbled on a bird’s nest filled with newborn birdlings. The squad leader had placed one in each of his recruits’ hands. Crush them, he ordered, crush them with one swift, brutal gesture. That, he had explained, was how a fedayee had to learn to stifle his emotions: coldly, completely, at the first stirrings of life.

It was a lesson Kamal Dajani had never forgotten. He could almost feel once again in his palm the slick pulp of the life he had snuffed out that day as slowly, deliberately, he fitted the original tape back into its sprockets in the detonation case.

Angelo was at the door. He froze. Outside, the wail of sirens was drawing closer. He cursed himself. Why didn’t I tell them to come in silently?

They’ll scare the guy. He inched forward and peeped inside. He could see a man’s head, bent over, and there it was right in front of him, the barrel they were all looking for, a long black object in the shadows. Despite his efforts to keep himself under control, he trembled sighting it.

He could barely see the figure behind its dark form. The guy was down there on his hands and knees working. All he was giving him was a head shot. And there was the barrel. You’d have to aim high so you didn’t hit that. The thing to do, Angelo understood, was to try to move him away from the barrel, then hold him away from it until help came up.

Angelo eased himself flat against the wall inside the doorway to narrow the angle of the return shot the guy could fire at him. Slowly he drew up his gun, pressing it to the wall for support. Angelo was no gun buff, you’d never find him out at a shooting range Sunday afternoons like some guys, but he was good reliable shot, in the nineties when he shot for the record twice a year at the police range up at Rodman’s Neck. He took his halfbreath, then roared the stock phrase that was drilled into every police officer in the city: “Police-don’t move!”

Kamal was so concentrated on the bomb’s detonation box that Angelo’s shout took him completely by surprise. Instinctively, he dove to the floor behind the barrel. Angelo fired.

He missed. The shot went high, just over the barrel. Kamal’s flashlight, jarred from his hand in his sudden fall, rolled down the loading ramp and tumbled with a thud onto the floor, two feet below. He reached for his own weapon, a Browning 9mm. fifteen-shot automatic. As he was falling, he had glimpsed the American in the doorway. Kamal stretched until he could peer around the end of the barrel at the vague outline of the doorway. Swiftly he sent a burst of fire tearing into the darkness toward the door, a pattern of six shots stitching it up and down.

Angelo wasn’t there. He was sprawled flat on the floor, his eyes clenched in fright, listening to the rounds roar past his head, then the whir of the ricochets bouncing around the doorway. He had dropped to the floor the instant he fired his first round, reacting without thinking, changing his stance from the one Kamal had seen at the instant he looked up in response to his shout.

He tried to lie still, his face pressed against the damp concrete, hoping the guy would think he’d killed him and make another move. Outside he heard footsteps racing down the corridor, then Rand’s voice shouting, “Angelo, Angelo, are you okay?”

In the street outside, two parked cars and the first Emergency Service truck screeched to a halt. The Emergency Service men, giants in helmets and bulletproof vests, leaped out, grabbing their shotguns from the long green boxes in the van of their truck, throwing shells of double-O buck into them as they charged for the door.

“Who’s in there?” they shouted at the first patrolman who had reached the scene.

“Two of our guys,” he answered. “Big guy in a gray topcoat, a guy in a gabardine raincoat.”

At the end of the corridor, Rand was drawing up to the doorway. Again Angelo could hear him shouting, “Angelo, are you okay?”

Don’t move into that doorway, kid! Angelo wanted to scream the warning. He lay there forcing himself into the floor, listening for the first warning rustle, watching for the first movement behind the barrel.

“You all right?”

For Christ’s sake, kid. It was as though Angelo was trying to shriek his thought to Rand by mental telepathy across the wall separating them: Don’t step into that fucking doorwayl

“Angelol”

Lying in the cement and filth, Angelo heard the two quick steps. Then everything happened at once: the head rising behind the barrel, the automatic banging away in the dark, five quick shots tearing over his head as he raised the Smith and Wesson in both hands and fired. The head behind the barrel jerked up, then tumbled backward. From behind him, Angelo heard a strange voice shouting, “Police-don’t movel” A burst of light from the Emergency Service lanterns flooded the room, and with it came the terrible boom of exploding shotgun barrels, two of them riddling Kamal Dajani’s body with double-O buckshot.

Angelo rolled over, limp with fear and spent emotion. He staggered to one knee. Rand was just behind him, crumpled against the back wall of the corridor where the force of Dajani’s bullets had hurled his body. The detective lurched to him. “Get an ambulancel” he yelled. “Get an ambulancel”

He knelt down beside Rand. One of Kamal’s shots had torn into his face just below the nose, turning his handsome features into a mush of blood and bone. Two other shots had hit him in the upper body, and blood oozed over his shirt, his jacket and his raincoat. Angelo cupped an arm behind Rand’s neck and lifted the bloody, unrecognizable face toward his, realizing as he did that they wouldn’t be needing an ambulance for Jack Rand. He pressed the lifeless head against his chest like a mother consoling a weeping child, only it was he who was weeping.

“How could I tell you, kid?” he cried. “Why couldn’t you figure it out? Why did you have to go by that goddamn book?”

Two Emergency Service men rushed into the room, stepping over Angelo and Rand’s body as they did. One had a Geiger counter. He ran it along the barrel, then looked aghast at his readings.

“Christi” he exclaimed. “Where are the scientists?”

The scientists were already there, alerted by Angelo’s first call, racing down the hall, John Booth at their head. The burly nuclear physicist saw the blue firing case and almost toppled an Emergency Service man leaping away from it.

“Who was here when this happened?”

An Emergency Service lieutenant pointed to Angelo.

“What was he doing?” Booth asked, indicating Kamal’s corpse. “Was he right next to that blue box?”

He gave a grateful sigh at Angelo’s reply. His first concern had been that the case was protected by a proximity detector that will trigger an automatic response if someone approaches it.

“Okay,” he said to the Emergency Service officer. “Two men on the door.

Everybody else out.”

With Jack Delaney, his mountain-climbing friend from the Livermore Laboratories, Booth squatted down on the floor beside the blue box. He saw the word “CORRECT” glowing on its screen. The dead terrorist, he realized, had been trying either to open the box or to give his computer new instructions. He scrutinized the olive-drab plugs linking the case to the aerial and the bomb. He understood instantly there was no question of disconnecting them.

“What do you think, Jack?” Delaney was an expert on firing mechanisms. “Do we try to get in there with the laser cannon?”

“Suppose it’s pressurized with inert gas.”

Booth nodded thoughtfully. That was a classic technique. Stuff the thing with helium or azote to protect it. If the case was opened and the gas started to escape, a gauge detected the drop in pressure and triggered the firing mechanism.

“We’ll punch a pinhole in it first. Go down to a hundredth of a millimeter and take a reading for escaping gas. If there’s any in there we’ll melt the plastic around the hole with the laser and seal it back up.”

“It’s a risk,” Delaney said, “but we could try it.”

A special NEST truck packed with sophisticated defusing devices accompanied Booth’s teams every time they went into action. Over a dozen times, his anonymous beige van had been flown by Booth’s aircraft from Las Vegas to some menaced U.S. city. Never before, however, had he and his fellow scientists had to use the equipment it contained.

Delaney and his two aides rushed in the truck’s highpowered laser gun with its independent power supply and set it up on the floor beside the case.

Booth sprawled flat on his stomach, aiming the gun at the flank of the case like a kid in a shooting gallery taking aim at a target. He marked with a speck of white paint the point at which he intended to punch a hole in the case, so that Delaney could install just below it his gas-detection device.

Booth took a breath and held it to still the nervous fluttering of his hands. He pressed the gun’s button and sent at the case one powerful jolt of light energy thinner than a pin but powerful enough to cut through the wall of a steel safe. Delaney’s eyes were fixed on the gas detector. The two men waited, not speaking, for thirty, forty-five seconds.

“It’s clean,” Delaney said finally.

Booth exuded an enormous sigh of relief and altered the firing mechanism of the gun to expand his beam. Employing it like a remotely controlled knife, be sliced four cuts two inches long in the form of a square into the case’s side wall. Delaney crept over and inserted a razor-thin scalpel into the top cuts. As delicately as a brain surgeon cutting a tumor from a vital nerve, he tugged on it until the plastic plaque tumbled to the ground.

Booth crawled over and with a high-intensity light peered into the transistored jungle of wiring inside. “My God,” he gasped, “how did the Libyans ever get access to something like this?”

Toward the rear of the case he spotted a pair of wires, one red, one blue.

They were thicker than the wires running into the heart of the box from the keyboard. The positive and negative lead from the power supply, he realized. They could slice them with the laser. He hesitated. No, he cautioned himself. Suppose it’s set to detonate if there’s a sudden drop in the current?

He returned to his slow, thoughtful study of the case’s interior. There was only one way to do it: burn out the computer’s memory bank. You could try to do it with an electromagnetic burst. Or flood it with ultraviolet rays.

Booth rolled over on his back, away from the case. He and Delaney weighed the alternatives. This was not something about which you would want to make a mistake.

“Ultraviolet,” Delaney said finally. “There might be some sensing device in there to pick up an electromagnetic beam.”

Again they sent to the truck outside for their specialized equipment.

Carefully, Booth aligned the objective of the ray’s beam-caster on a clump of plaques of resin covered with a forest of wires, the microprocessor chips that stored the computer’s memory. The two Emergency Service men guarding the door watched, their feelings a mixture of terror and fascination.

Finally Booth pulled back. “Jackl” he ordered. “You double-check that alignment.”

Delaney looked along the objective’s line of fire, studying its projected path intently. The transfixed Emergency Service men watched in horrified silence.

“Okay,” he said finally. “I think we’ve got it.”

Booth activated the machine. For fifteen interminable seconds there was not a sound in the room. Then suddenly a beep-beep-beep came from the case. It was faint and shrill, but to the tense men in the garage it sounded like a roar of gunfire.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” shrieked one of the Emergency Service men, furiously blessing himself. “It’s going off!”

Booth rolled over, the release of tension so great he broke into hysterical laughter.

“It’s not going to do anything anymore. It’s all over!” he roared. “The computer’s gone crazy.” Now he knew there was not even a million-in-one chance it could find its firing instructions.

Outside, the crowds, attracted by the shooting, by the dozen police vehicles cluttering Charles Street, were already pushing up against the police lines, gawking, exchanging excited speculation on what had happened. The media were there, the TV stations with the trucks setting up their cameras and their lights right in front of the warehouse doors, ready to record the statement Patricia McGuire, the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, was completing in the front seat of the Commissioner’s car.

A police ambulance pulled away from the curb, and four patrolmen opened a path in the crowd so that it could get out to West Street. It contained the bodies of Jack Rand and Kamal Dajani, riding off side by side on their last journey, to the police morgue.

Angelo slumped against the side of one of the Emergency Service trucks. He was pale and panting, hyperventilating, skirting along the edge of hysteria where tears and laughter are inextricably mingled. Over and over again he thought of Rand. What could I have done, he kept asking himself, how could I have kept him out of that doorway?

A young black patrolman came up to him, eyes sparkling with admiration.

“Hey,” he said, “terrific job. Hear you really blew that prick away.”

Angelo looked at him blankly, thinking as he did of the other body riding off to the morgue beside Rand. It had been the first time in thirty years as a New York police officer that he had to kill someone in the line of duty.

Bannion pushed through the circle of admirers around the detective and clapped him heartily on the shoulder. “Great work,” he enthused.

“Wonderful. You’ll get a citation for this. I’m going to try to swing you Chief of the Telegraph Bureau.

Get you inspector’s money for what you did.”

The officer in charge of the Emergency Service Squad joined them. “Excuse me, Commissioner,” he said, “but shouldn’t we put some of those yellow-and-black radiation warning signs around the area?”

Twenty feet away, in the circle of television lights, the three men could hear the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information reading her prepared text for the press: “… explosive charge attached to the barrel of chlorine gas has now been deactivated. The barrel will shortly be transported in a bomb-disposal vehicle to the explosives range at Rodman’s Neck for further analysis and ultimate disposal.”

The Commissioner turned back to the Emergency Squad officer.

“No,” he replied. “Just put out the usual `Crime Scene’ signs.”

Every fiber of Laila Dajani’s being was concentrated on the concrete ribbon of the Saw Mill River Parkway slipping past the wheels of her car.

It was as if it was only now, in this final determined flight, that she had mastered the injunction of her terror master, Carlos: don’t think.

Instead of the doubt and hesitation that had plagued her for days, her mind was focused on one simple, overwhelming desire: to survive, to get to Canada, to Vancouver and home.

So intent was she on her driving that she did not see the blinking red lights or hear the first burst of the siren. When she finally saw the yellow New York State Police car moving up behind her in her rearview mirror, she did not hesitate. Somehow they had found her, traced the car.

But she was not going to let the Americans catch her, not now. She drove the accelerator to the floor.

Behind her, the New York State policeman saw her car bound forward. His instructions were strict. In a case like this you didn’t play the macadam cowboy, try to force the fleeing car off the road like they did in the movies. You kept the fleeing car in sight while you called in help. He reached for his radio.

Laila saw her speedometer register 90, 95, 100, 110. She held the accelerator on the floorboard, trying to squeeze a few last thrusts of force from her car’s straining engine. The police car had dropped back a bit, now its red lights perhaps half a mile behind her. A little bit more, she thought, and she could risk leaving the highway, trying to lose him somehow in the open country.

Her mind was so wrapped up in her flight that she did not see the black stain of ice spreading like an ink blot from the shoulder of the highway, the surface glistening faintly in the path of her headlights. For just an instant as her front wheels hit it, she sensed a gentle, almost euphoric sense of helplessness as the car went into a skid. Then she hit the guard rail. The car flipped like a toy, somersaulted into the southbound lane and crashed upside down. The cascade of sparks from steel scraping concrete that drifted up as it skidded over the highway found in seconds the spillings of her ruptured gas tank.

By the time the state trooper reached the site, the car was an orange ball of flame, too hot to approach. Through their gusting swirls, he caught a quick glimpse of Laila’s corpse, a black stick figure in an orange fog.

“Christ!” said a passerby beside him. “Just like those guys used to burn themselves over in ‘nam.”

The trooper shook his head. “Crazy broad,” he said wonderingly. “Whatever got into her? All I had her for on the radar was seven miles over the limit.”

The first instinctive reaction of most of the relieved and exhausted men in the NSC conference room at the news that the bomb had been found and defused was to urge the President to launch the missiles targeted on Libya in the nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean. It was only 6:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, two and a half hours before the extension of Qaddafi’s ultimatum was due to expire, and he would not be expecting an attack.

The President overruled his advisers. The two million Libyans the U.S.

rockets would destroy would, he argued, be as innocent victims as the citizens of New York would have been.

The Israelis, Bennington pointed out, would do it anyway. No, the President argued, they would not. Their urge to do so would be swiftly tempered by the sobering realization that Qaddafi now had deployed along his eastern frontier a string of missiles capable of causing untold destruction in Israel if an attack was launched on his country. For both Israel and Libya, a day of cold realism was dawning: their mutual possession of the weapons of mass destruction promised them no happier a salvation than possession of those weapons had offered the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. for three decades-the prospect of mutual suicide.

“But for God’s sake, Mr. President,” the CIA chief protested, “we’re not going to let him get away with this?”

“No,” the President replied, “we are not.”

For Muammar al-Qaddafi and the knot of men around him in the Villa Pietri, the two-and-a-half-hour wait for the expiration of their ultimatum was a slow descent toward hell, toward the growing certainty that the gamble had failed, that they and two million of their countrymen would shortly die to pay for the error of their leader whose unbending fanaticism they had been all too ready to follow.

As the minutes rolled by after nine with nothing happening, no rockets streaking toward their shores over the radar screen, their fear and resignation turned to incomprehension. So great had the tension become that the terse message from Washington informing them the bomb had been found and defused was greeted with relief and even, by some, with satisfaction.

Two minutes later, the radio operator returned bearing a second message, marked for the eyes only of the Libyan dictator. Qaddafi paled slightly reading it. Whom was it from? The CIA? The Mossad?

He looked at the men around him, recalling their growing bitterness and disillusionment as the failure of his scheme had become evident. What did it matter whom it was from? The answer was probably here, somewhere in this circle of faces ringing him, jailing him in the consequences of his act.

He rose and left the room, headed up to the villa and down the path to the sea. For a long time he stood there by the water’s edge. Then he turned away to face inland, toward the distant solitude of his desert. As he did, the paper he clasped in his hand, the paper his radio clerk had handed him a few minutes before, dropped to the ground. The wind picked it up and sent it scurrying along the beach, until gradually it disappeared from sight. It bore just fifteen words, a prophetic message from the fourth chapter of the Koran: Wheresoever ye shall be, death will overtake you, even though you be in lofty towers.