The Fifth Horseman (31 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell do they use that for?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rico, we got a little problem.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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