The Fifth Horseman (41 page)

The President shook his head, stupefied by the boldness of the man. Handing out ultimatums seemed to come easily to him.

“Mr. Qaddafi, in view of the threat you yourself have already posed to the citizens of New York City, I find your request not only extravagant but wholly unexpected. However, because of my very real desire to find, with you, a peaceful solution to this crisis, I am prepared to discuss it immediately with my advisers and convey to you our decision in a few minutes’ time.”

The Chief Executive gave an angry, accusatory regard iro the men around hm.

“None of your well-thought-out game plans predicted this, gentlemen,” he noted acidly. “How the hell do we handle it?” He turned to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Harry, what do you recommend?”

“I’m very much opposed to pulling those ships back, Mr. President,” Admiral Fuller replied. “The whole purpose of this exercise was to provide him with a highly visible reminder of what the consequences of setting that bomb off are going to be. Very clearly we’ve succeeded. Take those ships away and their absence just might make it easier for him to set the bomb off if it comes to it.”

“Caspar?”

“I concur,” the Secretary of Defense answered.

“Alex?”

The Secretary of State, recalled from Latin America, twisted a ballpoint pen in his fingers, subconsciously playing for a few seconds to run the alternatives past the screen of his brain one more time. “Military considerations aside, I think that with a man of his reputation it would be a fatal mistake to open a negotiation with a concession like this. I’m convinced it’ll tend to make him wholly intractable farther down the line. I say refuse.”

“Wrap?”

“The man seems bent on a showdown, Mr. President If that’s what he’s looking for, then shouldn’t we let him know right now we’re ready for it?”

The President’s dark eyes focused on Bennington’s blandly self-assured patrician face. My CIA director, he thought, always ready to answer one question with another so that on the record you can never nail him to a position. He must have studied under Henry Kissinger when he was at Harvard.

“Jack?”

Eastman leaned back in his chair, uncomfortably aware of the attention on him. “I’m afraid that I’m going to go against the consensus, Mr. President.

The problem we face is how do we keep those six million people in New York alive, and I say it’s with the one thing Qaddafi’s trying to take away from us, time. We need those five hours in New York to find that bomb a lot more than we need the Sixth Fleet off Libya’s seacoast.”

“You’re recommending we pull those ships back?”

“Yes, sir.” Eastman tried to force the image of the slender girl in her white graduation dress from his mind, to be sure he was responding to the President’s question on nothing other than a cold analysis of the situation. “The reality of those extra hours is far more important to us than QaddaVs perceptions of our strength or weaknesses. And if it comes to that, we certainly don’t need the Sixth Fleet to destroy Libya.”

“I find one thing strange in all this,” the President remarked. “Why five hours? Why not fifteen? Why not right away? If he’s really so upset, why such a minimal demand?” He was silent a second, trying, unsuccessfully, to provide himself with an answer to his question. He shifted his attention to the psychiatrists. “How do you people analyze this?”

Once again, Henrick Jagerman felt his skin prickle with nervous apprehension. What he was about to recommend would be bitterly resented, he was sure, by half the men in the room.

“First, to answer your question, sir, I think his request betrays a fundamental insecurity on his part. He is subconsciously testing the water, hoping for your acquiescence as a reassurance that this awful gamble of his is going to pay off. We see this attitude all the time in terrorists on our first contact. They’re aggressive, demanding. ‘Do this right away or I’ll kill a hostage.’ My advice then is do what the terrorist asks, and my advice to you is do what Qaddafi asks. You will be showing him he can get things done by working through you. You will implant very subtly in his mind the notion that, ultimately, he may succeed if he goes on working with you. But I would attach a price to it. Use your agreement as a lure to get him into the discussion he’s resisting.”

The President nodded and lapsed into silence, trapped now in that hard and lonely place referred to in Harry Truman’s plaque on his desk, the end of the line where the buck stops and one man has to make the decisions in the solitude of his soul.

“All right,” he sighed. “Harry, tell the fleet to get ready to pull back.”

“Jesus Christ! You can’t cave in to that bastard like that, Mr. President.

You’ll go down in history as America’s Neville Chamberlain if you do!”

The President turned his heavy head with exquisite slowness toward the Secretary of Energy. “Mr. Crandell, I am not about to cave in to Qaddafi or anyone else.” He doled out the words with the slow, measured cadence of a funeral drum. “I am, playing for what Mr. Eastman has properly pointed out is the most valuable asset in this crisis-” the dark eyes glanced up at the clocks on the wall — “time.”

He used the same measured tone with the Libyan leader. “Mr. Qaddafi,” he said, explaining his decision, “I want you to know that I am doing this for one reason only: to show you how serious and sincere I am in my desire to find with you a way out of this crisis that will be satisfactory to us both. My order is conditional on your agreemeilt to begin intensive discussions on how we can do it.”

An abnormally long delay, filled only by the menacing buzzing on the empty voice channel, followed his words. Something strange is going on in Tripoli, Eastman thought.

When Qaddafi’s voice returned at last, he spoke once again in English. “As long as your ships are there, no discussion. When they have gone, we will talk. Insh’ Allah.”

The squawk box went dead.

Angelo Rocchia studied the three buildings the Italian shopkeeper, Signora Marcello, had indicated to him. They enjoyed a similarity of decay: shabby four-story tenements, broken fire escapes dangling down their fagades like limbs splintered off a tree, the same faded paint peeling from their barred windows and doors. “Rooms to Let-Inquire Superintendent 305 Hicks,” read a sign on one.

“Railroad flats,” Angelo observed. “Probably belong to some slumlord waiting for a fire. Stuffs illegals in here and charges them by the head.”

The pair stepped into the hallway of 305 Hicks. Garbage was piled to the level of the stairs in a stinking mound of rotting food, bottles, beer cans, cartons. Even worse was the stench, the acrid, all-enveloping odor of urine that seemed to hang on the stairwell like a moist, invisible film.

“Watch this, kid.” Angelo picked up a bottle and lobbed it at a pile of garbage. Before the agent’s horrified eyes, a gray battalion of rats came scurrying out of the heap of refuse.

Angelo chortled at the young man’s sudden loss of poise, then walked over to the door marked “Superintendent” and gave a gentle rap. There was a clatter of chains. The door, firmly secured on the inside, opened just a crack. An elderly black in denim overalls peered out. Angelo flashed his badge so fast the man could only catch a glittering of gold. Rand almost choked in disbelief at what he heard next.

“Working with the Board of Health,” Angelo told the black. He jerked his head toward the mound of garbage. “Got a lot of garbage over there. Fire hazard. Gonna have to do something here.”

While Rand and Angelo watched, the apprehensive superintendent undid one by one the locks and chains sealing him into the security of his little room.

“Look, mister, what can I do? These people here, they animals. They just open the door, throw the stuff down here.” He shook his head in helpless dismay, seeking Angelo’s sympathy for the impossibility of his job.

“Yeah, well, we got a lot of violations here. Gonna have to write some of them up.” Angelo reached into his pocket for the photograph of the girl pickpocket. “Hey, by the way, you know this girl here? Colombian. Big tits.

You could spot ‘em a mile away. Carmen, they call her.”

The superintendent looked at the photo. A nervous roll of his Adam’s apple, the quick dart of his tongue on his lips betrayed to both men the recognition he wanted to conceal. “No, no, I don’t know her.”

“Too bad.” Angelo looked straight into the black’s eyes. “I thought we could help each other out, you know what I mean?” The detective sighed and drew out his notepad. “At least a dozen violations you got here.” He started by waving at the garbage, at the ill-lit stairwell.

“Hey, mister, wait a minute,” the super pleaded. “Don’t get excited.

Landlord, he makes me pay the summonses.”

“Yeah? Well, it looks to me like you got about five hundred bucks’ worth.”

Angelo could see the nervous, frightened glimmer the mention of that sum brought to the super’s eyes. He was probably, Angelo calculated a decent hard-working guy trying to raise a family in that jungle. And Angelo also knew that the poor man was well aware his tenants would gladly put a knife in his back if they thought he’d given any of them up to the police: He threw his arm around the black’s shoulders.

“Look, friend, I don’t want to stiff you with all this paper. Just tell me what flat she’s in. We know she’s here.”

For an instant, the super’s eyes seemed to roll as wildly as an epileptic’s in a seizure, looking for any half-open crack in the doors along the hallway.

“She’s in 207, second floor. Second door on the right.” “She up there now?”

The super shrugged. “They all the time in and out. Fifteen people up there sometimes.”

Angelo and Rand loitered just a second on the sidewalk outside. “Angelo,”

Rand urged, “we should call in help. This could be big, very big.”

“Yeah,” the detective mumbled. “Fifteen guys. You might want to think about that. Only two of us.” Angelo picked at the stubble on his chin. “But, generally, pickpockets aren’t armed. They don’t want to go in for armed robbery. On the other hand …” He shook his head. “Sneaking a bunch of cops into a neighborhood like this is going to be like trying to sneak the sun past a rooster. Come on.” He had made up his mind. “We’ll take them ourselves.”

As he started up the stairs, Angelo reached not for his gun but for his wallet. He took out a Chase Manhattan calendar printed on a supple but firm slip of plastic. He flicked the card at Rand. “I’ll open the door with this. You step in and freeze them.”

“Jesus Christ, Angelo,” the agent almost gasped. “We can’t do that. We haven’t got a warrant.”

“Don’t worry about it, kid,” Angelo said, drawing up to the second door on the right on the second floor. “It ain’t a perfect world.”

“Gorgeous!”

Michael Naylor pirouetted around the model frozen in artificial grace under the arc lights of his studio, then dropped to one knee at just the point where he knew he would catch the mauve lights reverberating off the satin of her Saint-Laurent evening gown. “Fantasticl” He clicked his Haselblad.

“Unbelievablel”

He continued through a dozen shots and a dozen adjectives, each word more extravagant than the one that had preceded it, then straightened up, sweating from the strain and the lights. “Thanks, darling,” he told the model, “that’ll be all for now.”

He saw Laila as he stepped out of the circle of the spots. She had slipped in so quietly he hadn’t even noticed her arrival.

“Lindal” he gasped. “I thought you had a-“

She stifled his words with a kiss. “I got out of my lunch,” she said. “Take me to lunch.”

“Police-don’t move!”

The angry words ricocheted around the flat with the force of a caroming pelote ball. Angelo and Jack Rand stood just inside the door the detective had opened with his plastic bank calendar. They were in the classic policeman’s half-crouch, each clasping his revolver before him with outstretched hands. The suddenness of their entry, the intimidating sight of their arms froze the room’s halfdozen occupants.

The place was, just as Angelo had expected it would be, wall-to-wall mattresses, a squalid, ill-lit room reeking of sweat and cheap cologne. A clothesline filled with dripping undershorts, bras, tee shirts and blue jeans bisected it like a limp set of signal flags dressing an aging vessel’s masthead. There was only one piece of furniture in the room, a dilapidated sofa, its springs popping through its torn upholstery. Sitting on one end of it, stirring a casserole set on a hot plate on the floor, was the girl with the big tits.

Angelo recognized her immediately. He stood up, put his pistol back into his holster, stepped over one Colombian sprawling terrified on a mattress and drew up beside her. He sniffed at the stew bubbling in the casserole.

“Smells good,” he remarked. “Too bad you’re not going to get to eat it. Get your coat, muchacha. You’re coming in.”

Angelo was about to articulate the first question he wanted to ask her when the answer came springing like a fury from a mattress along the wall and bounded toward him, shouting, “Why you take my mujer?”

“Freeze!”

It was Rand, still in the doorway, his weapon drawn. Torres, the man in the second photo, stopped instantly. He was a gaunt-faced youth with drawn, tubercular cheeks, a sallow complexion and a mass of uncombed black curls spilling over his forehead.

“Take that thing off,” Rand ordered, waving his combat Magnum at the geometric patterns of the red poncho enveloping the Colombian. Despite Angelo’s comments on the street, the agent was going to take no chances on an arm being bidden under its folds.

“Thanks, kid.” There was both gratitude and new respect in Angelo’s tone.

Torres pulled the poncho over his head. He was naked except for unmatching socks and filthy yellow-gray jockey shorts. Angelo stepped over to him, took the pickpocket’s photograph from his pocket, studied it, then looked up, smiling, at Torres.