The Fifth Horseman (7 page)

Angelo felt a sudden chill. “What do you mean? You’d want to bring it up like that, by yourself? Alone?”

“Yes, I think perhaps I would.” Again Grace rested her hand on his. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. Not now at least.” She smiled. “Guess what? Our beloved Mayor’s giving a press conference at nine tomorrow to explain why he hasn’t been able to get the snow off the streets. Because of my piece in this morning’s paper.”

Much farther up Manhattan, on Central Park South, Laila Dajani stepped out of the Hampshire House, shiny black satin disco pants flashing beneath her fur jacket.

“Studio Fifty-four,” the doorman ordered her cabdriver.

The driver looked at her appreciatively in his rearview mirror.

“Hey, you must know people, lady.”

“I have friends,” Laila smiled. Then, as they approached Fifty-seventh Street, she leaned forward. “You know, I’m going to change my mind. Take me to the corner of Thirty-second and Park.”

“Got friends there tool”

“Something like that.”

Laila stared out the window to stop the conversation. When they reached Thirty-second and Park she paid the. fare, smiled at the driver and began to stroll casually along the avenue. Her eyes remained fixed on the taillights of the cab, following them until they disappeared from sight. Then she quickly turned and hailed another cab. This time, she told the driver to take her where she really wanted to go.

In Washington, D.C., the FBI’s fortresslike headquarters at Tenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, seven blocks from the White House, blazed with lights. On the sixth floor of that headquarters the Bureau maintained a nuclear-emergency desk manned twentyfour hours a day by a trio of specially trained agents. It had been there since 1974 when the FBI assigned nuclear extortion a priority so urgent it was reserved for only a handful of major incidents headed by the most dreaded occurrence of all, Presidential assassination.

Sixty times in the years since, the agents at that desk had been confronted with nuclear threats. Most had been the work of cranks or demented ideologues, the “don’t touch the Alaskan tundra or we’ll put a bomb in Chicago” sort of thing. But a significant number of those threats had seemed deadly serious. They had included threats to blow up bundles of radioactive waste in Spokane, Washington, and New York City; warnings of nuclear bombs alleged to be hidden in Boston, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and four other American cities, and in a Long Beach, California, oil refinery. Some had been accompanied by designs of nuclear devices that had also been deemed “nuclear capable” by the weapons analysts of Los Alamos.

The Bureau’s response to those threats had, on occasion, included the deployment of hundreds of agents and technicians to the threatened cities.

Yet no word of their activities had ever reached the public.

Within half an hour of receiving the first alert from the White House, two teams of agents were onto the problem, a Crisis Assessment Team whose task was to determine whether the threat was real or not, and a Crisis Management Team responsible for dealing with it if it was. The fact that the extortion message was in a foreign language had immensely complicated their job. The first rule in an extortion case is to look at the extortion note or telephone call for clues. The Bureau employed a Syracuse University linguistic psychiatrist whose computers had proven to be remarkably accurate in providing a thumbnail description of an extortioner based on the language he had used in his threat note or phone call. In this case, however, his talents had been useless.

As soon as the first warning had come in, a team of agents had gone to the Carriage House Apartments, a four-story yellow stone apartment house at the junction of L and New Hampshire, abutting the building housing the Libyan Embassy. Two of its occupants had been relodged in the Washington Hilton, and listening devices trained on the embassy next door had been placed in the walls of their apartments. The same thing had been done to the Libyan UN embassy in New York. Taps had also been installed on the phones of all Libyan diplomats accredited to either the United States or the United Nations.

That operation had provided its first fruit while the NSC was discussing the consequence of Agnew’s report. Two Libyan diplomats, the ambassador to the United Nations and the first secretary of the Washington embassy, had been located. Both had vehemently denied that their nation could be involved in such an operation.

At 2031, just after Agnew had given his conclusive determination that the design was for a viable thermonuclear device, an “All Bureaus Alert” had been flashed out of the Bureau’s sixth-floor communications center. It ordered every FBI office in the United States and overseas to stand by for “emergency action demanding highest priority and allocation of all available manpower.”

FBI liaison agents to Israel’s Mossad, France’s SDECE, Britain’s MI5 and West Germany’s Landswehr were ordered to go through files, pulling out descriptions and, where available, fingerprint records and photographs of every known Palestinian terrorist in the world.

One floor above the communications center, Quentin Dewing, the FBI assistant director for investigation, was in the midst of organizing the mobilization of five thousand agents. Agents shoeing horses in Fargo, South Dakota, catching the last of the day’s sun on Malibu Beach, walking out of Denver’s Mile High Stadium, washing up the supper dishes in Bangor, Maine, were being ordered to leave immediately for New York, each order accompanied by a vital closing injunction: “Extreme, repeat, extreme discretion must be employed to conceal your movements from the public.”

Dewing concentrated his efforts in three areas. The nation’s bureaus were ordered to locate and take under permanent surveillance every known or suspected Palestinian radical.

In New York and in half a dozen cities on the Atlantic seaboard, FBI agents were in action in every ghetto, every high-crime area, “pulsing” informers, querying pimps, pushers, petty crooks, forgers, fences, hunting for anything on Arabs: Arabs looking for fake papers; Arabs looking for guns.

Arabs trying to borrow somebody’s safe house; anything, just as long as it had an Arab association.

His second effort was to lay the groundwork for a massive search for the device, if it existed, and those who might have brought it into the country. Twenty agents were already installed at the computers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service offices on I Street, methodically going through the 194 forms for every Arab who had entered the United States in the past six months. The U.S. address listed on each card was Telexed to the bureau concerned. The FBI intended to locate, within fortyeight hours, each of these visitors and clear them, one by one, of any suspected involvement in the threat.

Other agents were going through the files of the Maritime Association of the Port of New York looking for ships that had called at Tripoli, Benghazi, Latakia, Beirut, Basra or Aden in the past six months and subsequently dropped off cargo on the Atlantic seaboard. A similar operation was under way at the air freight terminal of every international airport between Maine and Washington, D.C.

Finally, Dewing had ordered a check run on every American who held, or had ever held, a “cosmic top secret” clearance for access to the secret of the hydrogen bomb. It was typical of the thoroughness with which Dewing’s bureau worked that shortly after 8 P.M. Mountain Time an FBI car turned into 1822 Old Santa Fe Trail, a twisting highway leading northeast out of the capital of New Mexico along the route over which the wagon trains of the old Santa Fe trail had once rolled. With its silver RFD mailbox, the yellow metallic newspaper tube with the words New Mexican on its side, the one-story adobe house at the end of the drive was a supremely average American home.

There was nothing average about the Polish-American mathematician who lived inside. Stanley Ulham was the man whose brain had unlocked the secret of the hydrogen bomb. It was one of the supreme ironies in history that on the spring morning in 1951 when he had made his fateful discovery, Stanley Ulham was trying to demonstrate with mathematical certainty that it was impossible to make the bomb based on the premise that had underlain years of scientific effort. He did. But in doing so, he uncovered the glimmering of an alternative approach that just might work.

He could have wiped that terrible knowledge from his blackboard with a swipe of his eraser, but he would not have been the scientist he was if he had. Chain-smoking Pall Malls, flailing feverishly at his blackboard with stubs of chalk, he laid bare the secret of the H bomb in one frantic hour of thought.

The FBI agent did not require even that much time to clear the father of the H bomb of any possible complicity in the threat to New York. Standing in his doorway, watching the agent drive away, Ulham couldn’t help remembering the words he had uttered to his wife on that fateful morning when he had made his discovery: “This will change the world.”

A gray veil of cigarette smoke hung over the National Security Council conference room despite the continuous functioning of the building’s intensive aircirculation system. It was a few minutes past ten; not quite two hours remained before the ultimatum period contained in the threat message was due to begin. Paper cups and plates littered with the remains of the cheese sandwiches and black-bean soup the President had ordered the White House kitchen to send in to the conferees were scattered along the table and by the 15ase of the room’s paneled walls.

At the far end of the room, three Air Force colonels finished assembling a group of charts and maps. The senior officer, a youthful-looking colonel with a tapestry of freckles covering his face, stepped forward.

“Mr. President, gentlemen, we’ve been asked how Qaddafi or a terrorist group could transmit a radio signal from Tripoli to New York to detonate the device on the blueprint we’ve been shown, and what technological resources we possess to prevent such a signal from coming in.

“Basically, there are three ways you can detonate this. The first is a kamikaze volunteer who baby-sits the bomb with orders to set it off at a certain time if he doesn’t get a counterorder.”

“Colonel,” Bennington interjected, “if this threat is really from Qaddafi, that is very much the last method he’d use. He’d want absolute control over this himself.”

“Right, sir,” the colonel replied. “In that case, there are two ways to do it, by telephone or radio.” The room was still, all eyes fixed on the speaker. “To attach the power pack you’d require for this to the ordinary telephone is a very simple matter. Just a question of opening the telephone and connecting a couple of wires. That way the pulse of an incoming call is routed into a preprogrammed signature detector. The pulse opens a circuit into a microprocessor in which a preprogrammed code has been stored. The microprocessor automatically compares it with the code, and if the two match it releases a five-volt charge of electricity into the bomb.

“The beauty of this is a wrong number can’t set it off by mistake; and all a man has to do to explode the bomb is call that number from anywhere in the world and feed it his signal.”

“It’s as easy as that?” the President, jarred, asked.

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid it is.”

“Can New York be isolated, absolutely sealed off from all incoming telephone calls?” the President asked.

“No, sir,” the Colonel replied. “I’m afraid that’s a technological impossibility.”

He turned authoritatively back to his briefing charts. “It is our judgment, however, that in a situation such as the one we’ve been given, Qaddafi or a terrorist group would choose radio to detonate the device. It would offer more flexibility and is completely independent of existing communications systems. For a transmission over this distance, he’d have to use long waves which bounce off the ionosphere and come back down to earth. That means low frequencies.”

“How many frequencies would be available to him for something like this?”

the President asked.

“From Tripoli to New York, a megahertz. One million cycles.”

“Ore million!” The President rubbed the stub of his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Could we jam all one million of those frequencies?”

“Sir, if you did that you’d wipe out all our own communications. We’d close down the police, the FBI, the military, the fire departments, everything we’d need in an emergency.”

“Never mind. Suppose I gave the order, could we do it?”

“No, sir.”

“Why?”

“We simply don’t have the transmitter capacity.”

“How about all our jamming devices in Europe?”

“They’re useless in this case. Too far away.”

“He’s going to need something to receive this radio signal in New York,”

Bennington remarked. “Some kind of directional antenna.”

“Yes, sir, the easiest thing would be to put one in a standard television antenna on a rooftop and connect it to a pre-amplifier. Then the signal could be picked up and transmitted to his bomb wherever it is in the building over the television antenna cable.”

“Surely you could put a fleet of helicopters over Manhattan and scan the frequencies he might use. Get his device to answer back, then pick it up by direction finders, triangulation?”

“Yes, sir, we have the capacity to do that. But it would work only if his system is programmed to respond. If it’s only programmed to receive, we’d get no reply.”

“Well, there’s another way to do it if it turns out to be from Qaddafi,”

Bennington said. His pipe was out and everyone in the room had to hang attendant on his words while he struck a match. “Explode half a dozen nukes in the atmosphere over Libya. That’ll set up an electromagnetic blanket that will smother any radio communications out of there for at least two hours. Shut them down completely.”

“Mr. President.” It was Eastman. “For my part I don’t believe this threat is really from Qaddafi; but in the unlikely event that it is, we’re going to have to make some assumptions, and the first one I would make is. that he’s not going to expose himself to such evident retaliation. He’ll have a fail-safe system like a ship hidden somewhere out there in the Atlantic”-he waved at the vast blue stain on the map behind the colonel-“from which he or someone else can always detonate the bomb if we lay a preventive strike on Libya.”