The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  Don’t ever, ever question his readiness to pull that trigger, because he’ll pull it just to show you he can.” Tamarkin moved to Eastman’s desk. “The one vital, essential thing you’ve got to convey to the President or whoever’s going to deal with Qaddafi is this: don’t challenge him. We’ve got to forget our big nationalistic ego. We can’t get into one of those macho, head-on collisions, have a couple of forty-fivecaliber penises waving at each other. Do that and he’ll feel threatened. And New York will go.”

  “All right,” Eastman snapped, “I’ll inform the President. But what are we supposed to do? That’s what you’re here to tell us.”

  “Well, right off I’d point out that the guy who wrote the book on how to handle situations like this is a Dutchman over in Amsterdam. I’d sure as hell like to have him here in our corner when push gets to shove.”

  “If he’s a Dutchman and he’s in Holland he’s not going to do us much good tonight in Washington, D.C., is be?” barked Eastman.

  “Look, that’s not my problem. I’m just saying if there’s some way to get him here it would be a big help. Now, as far as Qaddafi’s concerned, the first thing I’d work on is the fact he’s a loner. Has no friends. Whoever negotiates with him has to insinuate himself into his confidence. Become his friend.”

  Eastman made hurried notes on the yellow legal pad before him. “You know,”

  he said to Tamarkin, “one thing that struck me in that report is the concern he’s always shown for his people. Getting them better housing, things like that. Is there a reservoir of sympathy there we can play on to get him to respond to the people up in New York?”

  The psychiatrist sat up with a sudden, almost spastic reflex. His dark eyes widened as he stared incredulously at the National Security Assistant.

  “Never!” he said. “This man hates New York. It’s New York he’s after, not Israel, not those settlements of theirs. New York is everything this guy loathes. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah. Money. Power. Wealth. Corruption. Materialism. It’s everything that’s threatening that austere, spartan desert civilization of his. It’s the moneylenders in the Temple; it’s the effete, degenerate society he despises.”

  Tamarkin’s eyes darted around the room to be sure that his message was registering on everyone there. “The first thing you’ve got to understand is this: deep down inside, whether he knows it or not, what this guy really wants to do is destroy New York.”

  * * *

  The screaming jangle of an alarm bell galvanized the men manning the National Security Council communications center in the basement of the West Wing. The duty officer jabbed at three red buttons by his desk.

  Thirty seconds later, Jack Eastman came running into the room.

  “The Allen has found Qaddafi, sir!” the duty officer shouted.

  Eastman grabbed the secure phone that linked the room to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon.

  “Where is he?”

  “In a villa, by the sea, just outside Tripoli,” the admiral running the center announced. “The Allen intercepted his voice on a call half an hour ago and traced it back there. The Agency confirms it’s one of his terrorist headquarters.”

  “Terrific!”

  “I have just had Admiral Moore at Sixth Fleet on the blower. They can put a three-kiloton missile through the front door of that villa in thirty seconds.”

  “Don’t you fucking dare!”

  Eastman had the reputation of being “tight-assed,” for never flapping no matter how severe the pressures on him were, but he screamed out his order to the Pentagon admiral. “The President has made it absolutely clear there’s to be no military action in this situation without his express orders. You make damn sure everybody out there understands that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Eastman thought for a second. Should he wake the President? On his urging he had gone to sleep to husband his strength for the crisis. No, he told himself, let him get his sleep. He’ll need it.

  “Tell Andrews to start one of the Doomsday planes for Libya right away.” The Doomsday planes were three converted 747s that bristled with electronic gadgetry and sensitive communications equipment.

  They could stay aloft for seventy-two hours and were designed to provide the President with an airborne command post in the event of a nuclear war. “I want them to set up a secure communications channel Qaddafi can use to talk from that villa to Washington.”

  Eastman paused. He was sweating. “Get State,” he ordered the duty officer beside him. “Tell them to have the charge in Tripoli get out to that villa right away. Tell him …” Eastman reflected carefully on his words. “Instruct him to inform Qaddafi that the President of the United States requests the privilege of a conversation with him.”

  * * *

  The thud of horse’s hoofs echoed along the deserted bridle path of Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. An earlymorning ground fog wrapped the French capital’s park, and the advancing rider emerged from the shadows en-folding the path like some phantom horseman of legend. It was appropriate that he did, for nothing could have better suited the character of the head of the SDECE, France’s intelligence service, than that almost conspiratorial obscurity cloaking his morning ride.

  In an age when the CIA pointed the way to its headquarters with highway signs and the names of British intelligence agents were bandied about in Parliamentary debates, the agency over which General Henri Bertrand presided remained obsessed with secrecy. No telephone book, no street directory, no Bottin contained its name or the address of its headquarters.

  No Who’s Who, no Baedeker of French government officialdom listed Bertrand’s name or that of any of his subordinates. In fact, Bertrand was not even the General’s real name. It was a nom de service he’d adopted when, as a young captain in the Foreign Legion, he was recruited for the service in 1954 during the Indochinese War.

  Expertly, Bertrand reigned his mount to a walk and started back to the stable of the Polo de Paris. He had belonged to that exclusive body for fifteen years, yet never once had his name appeared in the green members’ directory the club published annually. Walking through its white gate, he started in surprise at the figure waiting in the shadows to greet him. Only a matter of gravest urgency could have brought Palmer Whitehead, the Paris station chief of the CIA, out here at this hour of the morning.

  “Alors, vieux?” Bertrand said, swinging off his horse. Then, before Whitehead could reply, he suggested, “Come with me while I walk her down.”

  For five minutes the two men walked the horse around the huge greensward where Rothschild barons and Argentinian gauchos played polo. The CIA station chief did not reveal the existence of the bomb in New York to his French counterpart; he told him instead that the U.S. government had incontrovertible evidence that Qaddafi had made an atomic bomb, probably from plutonium diverted from the French reactor, and was planning to use it for terrorist purposes. They needed desperately the identity of anyone who might have been involved in the Libyan’s project.

  “You understand,” Bertrand told the American when he’d finished, “that since this involves nuclear matters, I’ll have to have the agreement of my principals before I begin. Although, in view of what you’ve told me, I’m sure there will be no problem.”

  The American nodded gravely. “I understand there’s a personal message from the President on its way to the P-lysee now.” Leaving, he added one last phrase. “And please, Henri, be very, very discreet and very, very quick.”

  * * *

  Sally Eastman awoke the instant she heard the metallic snap of the front door closing. The crunch of doors closing in the watches of the night had been the background music to her twenty-seven-year marriage: doors closing in bungalows adjoining Air Force bases in Colorado, France, Germany and Okinawa as her husband rushed off to alerts; in Brussels during their NATO tours, and here in Washington, first on Jack’s assignments to the Pentagon, and now at the White House.

  She lay awake listening to his footst
eps follow their familiar course to the kitchen for a glass of milk, then their weary march up the stairs of their Colonial clapboard house.

  She snapped on her night light as the bedroom door opened. The years had given Sally Eastman an unnerving ability to read in the lines of her husband’s face the gravity of the crisis that had kept him from their bed. Seeing him, she sat up abruptly, hugging the blanket against her ten-year-old nightgown.

  “What time is it?”

  Her voice rang with those faintly imperious, metallic undertones so often found in women who had gone to Vassar or Smith in the early fifties, lived with roommates called Bootsie or Muffin and developed in the wasteland of their middle years an inordinate affection for alcohol.

  Eastman sank onto the bed. “Just after four.”

  Three hours, he’d calculated; he had three hours to catch the sleep he so desperately needed while the Doomsday jet was streaking over the Atlantic.

  “You look very worried. Is it something we can talk about?”

  Eastman rubbed his weary eyes and shook his head as though somehow that gesture might ease the fatigue numbing his brain. On the maple chest of drawers opposite him was another picture in a silver frame. This one had been taken in Wiesbaden in 1961, and it showed Major Eastman and his wife proudly displaying their newborn daughter.

  Eastman thought back to the President’s injunction to secrecy in the Pentagon war room. The National Security Assistant was used to carrying the awful burden of secrecy. He had borne it many times, in many crises, although never one as personally painful as this.

  “I’m afraid not, Sal.” He looked at his wife, at her angular, decent face yielding sadly to age now, a mirror of the hurts and loneliness of their strained and empty marriage. Why the hell shouldn’t I tell her? he suddenly thought. Doesn’t she have at least as much right to know as I do? “If I tell you, neither you nor I have the right to tell anyone else, understand?”

  His wife nodded her head dutifully.

  “Anyone,” stressed Eastman.

  “Oh my Godl” Sally Eastman shrieked after her husband had outlined Qaddafi’s threat. “What a bastardl” Her body jerked upright almost violently. “Cathyl Jesus Christ, Jack, we’ve got to call Cathy right away and get her out of there.” A perplexed, half-frightened, half-angry look swept Sally Eastman’s features. “Haven’t you called her already?”

  Eastman shook his head.

  “Why not, for God’s sake?”

  “Sally, we can’t.”

  “Can’t? What do you mean, can’t? Of course we can. We have to.”

  “Jack, for God’s sake, we don’t have to tell her there’s a bomb in New York! We’ll tell her … ” Sally Eastman’s eyes flashed wildly. “I’ll tell her Mother’s going into the hospital for an operation.”

  “Sally, understand me. I’ve been crying my insides out all night for Cathy.

  But we just don’t have the right to save our own family. Not when there are millions of families in New York who can’t save themselves.”

  “Jack, we’re not going to violate any secrecy.”

  “We’re violating a trust.”

  “A trust? How about all the other people in that room? You don’t think they’re not on the phone right now, saving their daughters? Calling their girl friends? Or their goddamn stockbrokers? How about the President?

  “Don’t you suppose he’s going to call that dancer son of his and get him out of there?”

  “No, Sally, I don’t. Not this President.”

  Joints creaking, Jack rose from the bed. He walked to the window. Nowhere in the neighborhood was there another light burning; all he could see was the regular pattern of street lights falling on the snow and the sbadowy outlines of his neighbors’ homes looming behind them. What decisions, he thought almost angrily, had they had to make tonight? Whether to have the vet put down the aging family dog? Whether they should have a child’s teeth straightened? Was it time to trade in the station wagon?

  He looked at his wife still clutching the blanket to her bare shoulders.

  “Sally, one person in that room, just one, breaks his trust.” He was begging for her understanding. “He calls his mother. And she calls her brother. And he calls his partner. And he calls his daughter. And she calls her boy friend. And it’s out. It’s gone public. And Qaddafi blows the bomb, because that’s what he’s threatening to do if this gets out. And five million people and our lovely Cathy die because someone in that room didn’t live up to his trust, couldn’t handle the moral obligation-”

  “Moral obligation! My God, the only moral obligation we have is to our daughter. If she were a soldier on duty, all right. If we were betraying a secret, all right. But we’re not. We’re only saving her life.”

  “By using information I hold in trust.”

  “Oh dear God, Jack, it’s not buying stocks with insider’s knowledge! It’s our daughter’s life.”

  Sally Eastman looked at her husband through a film of angry tears. If there had been one constant in her feelings for him through twenty-seven years of marriage it was respect. Not understanding. Try though she had, she had never been able to understand his soldier’s mind and, dear God, she could not understand it now. But respect him she did.

  “All right, darling,” she whispered, “come to bed.”

  Eastman undressed quickly and slipped under the covers beside her.

  “What time do you have to get up?”

  “The switchboard will call.”

  Sally leaned over him before switching off her night light, reading the deep hurt in his green eyes. Then she leaned down and kissed him.

  * * *

  On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, it was just after 10 A.M. when a black Peugeot 204 maneuvered into its reserved parking place in front of one of the Flemish fagades, all of them identical, of the red brick houses lining Amsterdam’s Keerkstraat.

  The man getting out of the car was a short, stocky sixty-year-old, his cheeks glowing with the healthy tone of a burgomeister in a Frans Hals oil.

  Tucked primly under one arm was a worn black leather briefcase. A few minutes later, in his austere office looking onto the Keerkstraat, Henrick Jagerman opened the case and took out the ingredients of the snack with which he inevitably began his working day: a steaming thermos of black coffee and an apple.

  Jagerman was the son of a poor factory worker who had become a prison inspector in the slums of Amsterdam. Trailing along after his father, Jagerman had first felt the stirrings of the uncommon vocation which had brought him to his present office, a deep fascination with the criminal mind. He put himself through college and medical school guiding tourists along the canals and around the museums of Amsterdam, then became a psychiatrist specializing in criminology. When Holland’s forward-looking government decided to set up a task force to study the best ways to deal with terrorist situations, Jagerman had been chosen to sit on it as its psychiatric counselor.

  Four times since, when Palestinians seized the French ambassador to The Hague in 1974, when common convicts captured a choir visiting the capital’s jail for a Christmas service, during the two train seizures staged by Holland’s dissident Moluccan community, Jagerman had had the chance to put the theories he had developed in his long hours in prisoners’ cells into practice. So successful were they that he had become known around the world as Dr. Terrorism, admired by policemen and feared by terrorists for the original and innovative methods with which he used manipulative psychology to resolve hostage situations.

  He had, quite literally, written the bible on how to deal with terrorists.

  Compiled in a limited six-hundredpage edition, it was locked in the vaults of a score of national police services, the indispensable and rigorously secret tool they called on whenever terrorists struck on their soil.

  Jagerman had barely turned his attention to the first item on his desk, when, unbidden, his secretary entered the office. He recognized immediately the flustered face of the American ambassador t
railing behind her.

  The ambassador indicated he had to talk to him alone, then told him what had happened. A jet of the Queen’s Flight, he said, was waiting at Schiphol to fly him to Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, where Air France was holding the Washington-bound Concorde for his arrival.

  “With luck,” the ambassador remarked, giving his watch a nervous glance, “we can have you at the White House by nine Washington time.”

  * * *

  Jack Eastman was snoring. His wife stared at his body, crumpled in the deep sleep he had long ago learned to force on himself in a crisis.

  Forgive me, Jack, she thought. Noiselessly, Sally slipped from the bed and tiptoed out of the room. She walked carefully down the stairs to the telephone in the front hall. The first numbers she dialed were 212, the area code for New York City.

  * * *

  Laila lay on her back, gazing upward into the comforting nothingness of the high-ceilinged room, to the ill-defined point where all form and shape were obliterated by the darkness. The cloying odor of the incense Michael had burned mingled with the lingering fumes left by their grass and the pungent odor their lovemaking had wrung from their bodies.

  It was dark except for one pale shaft of light falling across the room and onto the bed from a floor lamp burning in the studio next door. Here and there, along its advance, its soft glow highlighted bits and pieces of the clothing they’d flung about the room in their rush to the bed: Laila’s black satin trousers crumpled in a heap by the door; Michael’s silk shirt spilling from the bed; her flimsy panties wadded into a tight knot and hurled to the floor.

  Michael was sprawled on his stomach. He was sound asleep, his head buried in the comforting arc of Laila’s breast and shoulder. One arm lay across her body, its motionless fingers clutching her other breast. To her right, a traveler’s alarm clock in a leather frame rested on Michael’s night table. Its luminous dial read 6:15.

  Tenderly, yet absentmindedly, Laila stroked the long hanks of hair spilling down Michael’s back and tried to drive from her consciousness every thought except the recollected pleasure of her spent passion. The light cleaving the room caught the hairs along Michael’s forearm, turning them into a gossamer’s web of silver threads. Everything, it suddenly seemed to Laila, came down to that arm, to the hand encircling her breast. She had to perform one act, one deliberate reflex of the will to move it, to rouse her sleeping lover. All the rest would follow inevitably in the wake of that gesture, each inexorable step leading toward the act to which the luminous hands of the clock summoned her.