The Fifth Horseman (61 page)

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

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

“Feel about what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Roughly five hundred, Mr. Dewing.”

“And how many of those are vans?”

“Over half.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In an hour.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was an instant of stricken silence before Dewing exploded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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