The Fifth Horseman (30 page)

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

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

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

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

“What the hell does that mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How about evacuating the city?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In any event, it’s not urgent.”

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

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

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