The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  Comedau crossed the room and slumped into his chair, his legs sprawled uncomfortably before him. His superior was an old-school Gaullist and everyone in the house knew he shared the former President’s distaste for a body de Gaulle had once referred to as “Le Machin”the thingumajig.

  “Sure, Chief,” he sighed. “The agency has its limitations. But the real problem isn’t them. It’s that no one really wants effective controls. The companies that sell the reactors, like Westinghouse and our friends over at Framatome, give a lot of public lip service to the idea, but privately they oppose controls like poison. No Third World government wants those inspectors running around their country. And we haven’t been very anxious to tighten controls ourselves, despite everything we say. There’s too much at stake in our reactor sales.”

  “Well, my boy,” the General murmured through the veil of cigarette smoke now cloaking him like a shroud, “a sound balance of payments is an imperative of state with which it’s difficult to argue these days. I think you should get the inspection reports from Vienna immediately. Also ask our representative there whether he has any coffee-house gossip about inspectors being bought, bribed. Or too enamored of the bar girls or whatever it is they have over there now.” There was a sudden brightening in the General’s eyes as he recalled his last visit to the Austrian capital in 1971. “Handsome creatures, those Viennese. One could hardly blame the odd Japanese for going off the deep end for one of them.” He leaned forward. “What about our own people down in Libya? What do we have on them?”

  “We’ve got their security clearances over at the DST. And, of course, the DST has recorded all their telephone conversations coming into this country.”

  “Who was our senior representative down there?”

  “A Monsieur de Serre,” Cornedeau replied. “He’s been back for a couple of months waiting for his next posting.”

  Bertrand looked at the Hermes clock in a black onyx frame on his desk. It was almost lunchtime. “Do we have his current whereabouts?”

  “I believe so. He’s here in Paris.”

  “Good. Get his address for me. While you’re getting all that material from our friends at the DST, I’ll see if I can’t have a cup of coffee and a chat with Monsieur de Serre.”

  * * *

  The sight of the three grave and unfamiliar men surrounding Harvey Hudson, the director of the New York office of the FBI, told Michael Bannion that something very, very serious was going on in his city. Just how serious dawned on the Police Commissioner when he heard the words “Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories” appended to his introduction to the suntanned man with an ornament around his neck sitting at Hudson’s left.

  Bannion looked at Hudson. The Commissioner had darkblue eyes, “the color of Galway Bay on a June morning,” his grandmother had once loved to tell him.

  They were clouded with fear and concern, with a question he did not have to articulate.

  “Yes, Michael, it’s happened.”

  Bannion sank into his place at the conference table.

  “How long have you had it?”

  “Since last night.”

  Normally, that answer would have provoked a burst of Celtic fury from Bannion. It was typical of the Bureau. Even in a matter that concerned the life and death of thousands of the people in his city, the FBI hadn’t brought his force into their confidence immediately. This time, he reined in his fury and listened with growing horror as Hudson reviewed the threat and what had been done about it.

  “We’ve got until three o’clock tomorrow afternoon to find that device,”

  Hudson concluded. “And we’ve got to do it without anyone finding out that we’re looking for something. We’re under the strictest orders from the White House to keep this secret.”

  Bannion glanced at his watch. It was three minutes past eight. Just a month ago, he recalled, he and Hudson had discussed the possibility of nuclear terrorism together. “People have been shouting `the nuclear terrorists are coming’ for years,” he had cynically remarked to his FBI colleague. “How, I want to know-galloping down the Hudson Valley Re Lochinvar?” Now they had arrived and he felt totally, helplessly inadequate to deal with them.

  “Don’t your people out at Los Alamos have some technological resources we can employ to track it down?” Bannion asked John Booth. “These things have to give off some kind of radiation, don’t they?”

  It was indicative of the secrecy that shrouded NEST’s operations that the Police Commissioner of New York didn’t know that the NEST teams existed or anything about the way they operated. Quickly, as succinctly as he could, Booth described to the Commissioner and the rest of the conference room how his teams would work.

  “Aren’t people going to spot your rented trucks?” the Commissioner asked.

  “It’s very unlikely. The only giveaway is a small device like a radar pod we attach to the undercarriage. You’d have to really look for it.” Booth took a long drag on his cigarette. “The whole concept behind the operation is to be very discreet, unobtrusive. We don’t want the terrorist sitting on his bomb up in the attic to know we’re out there looking for him.”

  “How about helicopters?”

  Booth glanced at his watch. “Our own choppers should be getting into the air now. We’ve borrowed three more from New York Airways and we’re equipping them with detection devices.

  They’ll be ready in an hour or so. I decided to start them on the waterfront. The choppers are very effective down there. They can run over the wharves very quickly and they can read through those thin warehouse roofs without much trouble.” He grimaced. “Although if it’s in a ship, we’d have to do a foot search to pick it up. The deck layers would shield out the rays we’re looking for.”

  Those words brought all the frustrations, the hopelessness of his task welling up in Booth. He stubbed out his cigarette with an angry, impatient gesture. “Look, Commissioner, don’t expect any miracles from us, because there aren’t going to be any. We’ve got the best technology there is and it’s completely inadequate.”

  The scientist saw the startled bulge of the Commissioner’s blue eyes, the nervous tic of his Adam’s apple. “All the tactical advantages are with our adversaries. My trucks can only read up to four stories. The choppers can only read down two at best. Everything in between’s a blank. If whoever put this bomb there wanted to shield it, all they would have to do is throw a water bed over it and we couldn’t pick it up three feet away.” Booth’s nervous hands went up to the Navajo medallion Bannion had noted on his neck.

  The scientist made no effort to conceal his anguish, his deep sense of implicit guilt at being forced to admit to the men around him that he was incapable of finding in the streets of their city one of the terrible weapons he had spent a lifetime designing.

  “Without intelligence, gentlemen, to narrow down the search area there’s no way in the world we can find that bomb in the time we’ve been given.”

  * * *

  Two stories below the director’s conference room, a telephone rang in one of the offices assigned to the FBI’s intelligence unit. The agent picked it up.

  “Hey, man, this is Rico.”

  The agent sat up, suddenly alert. He activated the device that would record his incoming call.

  “Watcha got for me, Rico?”

  “Not much, man. I spent the whole night looking, but the only thing I got is this brother, he be asked to get some medicine for an Arab lady.”

  “Drugs or medicine, Rico?”

  “No, we don’t,” Hudson, the New York FBI chief, “She didn’t want to get no prescription, didn’t want to have to mess with no fuckin’ doctor.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  “The brother, he don’t know. He just take it to her hotel.”

  “Where was that, Rico?”

  “The Hampshire House.”

  * * *

  Upstairs, Al Feldman, the Chief of Detectives, rolled his cold cigar in his mouth and pondered John Booth’
s despairing words. Figures, he thought. Just like those scientific bastards. They always expect someone else to clean up their shit after them.

  “So what exactly are we looking for?” he asked.

  Booth circulated a sketch and description of the device prepared at Los Alamos from Qaddafi’s blueprint.

  “Do we know approximately when this came into the country?” Bannion inquired.

  “No, we don’t,” Hudson, the New York FBI chief, replied. “But the assumption is it was recently. The CIA figures it would have been shipped from one of six places: Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran or Aden. They may have smuggled it across the border from Canada. That doesn’t take much doing. Or they may have run it through a normal port of entry disguised as something else.”

  Down the table, Hudson’s superior, Quentin Dewing, the assistant director for investigation foy the Bureau, flown up from Washington during the night to take overall command of the search, cleared his throat. He had old-fashioned clear-plastic-rimmed glasses, gray hair slicked to his head with lashes of Brylcreem, a darkblue suit, and a white handkerchief squared to a precise half an inch rising from its pocket. An insurance executive, Feldman had thought contemptuously when he had been introduced.

  “What this means is we’re going to have to go through every waybill and manifest for every piece of cargo that’s come in from one of those countries in the last few months. We’ll start with the latest shipments and work our way back.”

  “By three o’clock tomorrow?” asked the stunned Police Commissioner.

  “By three o’clock today!”

  Feldman ignored their exchange, scrutinizing instead the material Booth had circulated around the room. “Tell me something,” he asked the scientist, “could this be broken into pieces, smuggled in and reassembled here?”

  “Technologically, I’d say that’s almost impossible.”

  “Well, it’s nice we got some good news today.” Feldman pointed his cigar at the drawing. “That fifteen-hundredpound weight is going to eliminate a lot of shipments. It’s also going to rule out high floors in buildings without elevators.” He laid the material back on the table. “How about the people who put it there? Do we have any leads on them at all?”

  “For the moment we have nothing precise.” Hudson pointed to a flaxen-haired agent in his midthirties seated across from Feldman. “Farrell here is the Bureau’s Palestinian expert. He came up from D.C. last night. Frank, give us a quick rundown on what we do have.”

  Ranged neatly on the table before the agent were computer summaries of all the Bureau’s ongoing Middle East investigations. They included items as diverse as a suspected traffic in prostitutes between Miami and the Persian Gulf, an illegal shipment of four thousand M-16 automatic rifles to the Christian Lebanese Phalange, the efforts of the Iranian revolutionary regime to infiltrate assassination squads into the United States to carry out their revolutionary justice on United States soil, and the document Farrell picked up in response to Hudson’s order.

  “We have files on twenty-one Americans who went through Qaddafi’s terrorist training camps. All of them were Arab born. Nineteen Palestinians.

  Seventeen males, four females.”

  “Have you jumped them? What did you turn up?”

  The young agent coughed nervously in answer to Feldman’s query. “Most of them went over there between 1975 and 1977. We put them under surveillance when they came back, but they never did a damn thing wrong. We couldn’t even catch them lifting a candy bar from the five-and-tencent store. So we ran out of court orders for the surveillance because of lack of probable cause.”

  “So you stopped watching them?”

  The FBI man nodded.

  “My God!” Feldman’s already dumpy figure slumped deeper into his chair.

  “You mean to tell me Qaddafi has the perfect terrorist sleeper operation set up in this country and the FBI hasn’t got a single one of those people under surveillance?”

  “That’s the law, Mr. Feldman. We’ve been after them since last night and managed to locate four of them thus far.”

  “That isn’t a law! It’s a fucking covenant for a suicide pact.”

  Michael Bannion turned to his angry Chief of Detectives, anxious to calm him and at the same time intrigued by what had just been said. “You know, Al, you’d have to be interested by the fact that the Arab community in New York is within walking distance of the Brooklyn docks. Do we have anything on PLO activity over there?”

  “Not a helluva lot,” Feldman replied. “There are a couple of bodegas, little family grocery stores, we suspect are fronting a gun traffic that may have PLO ties. When Arafat came to the UN, his bodyguards gave our people the slip a few times and wound up over there. Now, you might think they went over for a cup of coffee. Or you might choose to think they went to set up some sleepers.” Feldman shrugged. “Take your choice.”

  “Do your people have any penetration into the PLO?”

  Bannion turned to the speaker, Clifford Salisbury, an assistant director of the CIA, specializing in Palestinian affairs. “The only penetration activity we’re allowed these days is against organized crime. Besides,”

  Bannion added acidly, “I can’t afford two patrolmen in my police cars. I’m certainly not going to waste money trying to penetrate the PLO.”

  What the Police Commissioner did not bother to add was that there were only four Arabic-speaking officers among the 24,000 men and women on his force, and none of them was assigned to cover Palestinian activities. The fact was, Brooklyn’s Arabic community had always been notably law-abiding. There had been, since the early sixties, a sharp rise in immigration, many of the newcomers Palestinian; still, there had been only one recorded incident of attempted PLO terrorism in the New York area.

  Dewing, the deputy director of the FBI, rapped his knuckles on the conference table. “Gentlemen, we’ve got to get this search organized and under way as fast as we can. Can we agree, in view of the words `New York Island’ in Qaddafi’s threat message, to concentrate NEST’s efforts on Manhattan?”

  There was a mumble of agreement.

  “Booth will run his operation independently for secrecy’s sake. We’ll support him with drivers to protect his men.”

  The scientists had chosen to work with the tight-lipped agents of the Bureau rather than local police officers since they had begun operations.

  “Where do I start?” Booth wanted to know. “The Battery or the Bronx?”

  “I’d suggest the Battery,” Bannion said. “You’re closer to the waterfront down there. They would have had less distance to carry that thing. Besides, everybody hates Wall Street.”

  “Right,” the deputy director rejoined. “Second: manpower. We’re running an ‘All Hands’ on this, bringing in five thousand agents. I’ve ordered Treasury, Customs, Narcotics and the Task Force on West Fifty-seventh to make their personnel available. Commissioner, can we have the services of your Detective Division?”

  “You’ve got them.”

  “If Washington wants us to be discreet with this, what are we going to use for communications?” Feldman asked. “Too much traffic on our frequencies will make the guys in the press room at headquarters sit up. The family fights, the horseshit jobs’ll pass right over their heads. But something like this they’ll pick up right away. The volume would be a tipoff.”

  “We’ll use our gold band,” Dewing said. The FBI employed ten frequencies, five locally in their blue band, five nationally in what was referred to as their gold band. “And whenever possible the telephone.”

  “Al,” Hudson turned to the Chief of Detectives, “what’s the best way to set this up?”

  “I’d recommend a one on one,” the Chief replied. “One fed with one of my men. That way you can pair up your feds who don’t know the city with my guys who do.

  “We’ll break them down into task forces,” he continued. “Assign one the docks, a second the airports. We’ll have a third task force to systematically comb a
ll the usual places, hotels, car-rental agencies.”

  Feldman bit down on his cold cigar. “Arabs coming into this town, they go to Queens and it’ll be ‘Oh-oh, there goes the neighborhood,’ right?

  But like the PC says, over there in Arab town Brooklyn they’d blend in. We ought to start our third task force there. Search the place inside out. See if we can find anything out of synch.”

  “Yeah, I agree,” Hudson said.

  Feldman was leaning back, thinking. “We’ve got to narrow this thing down if we’re ever going to get anywhere. Get a tighter focus on the kind of people we’re looking for. What the hell kind of people are they, anyway?”

  Hudson turned a commanding eye to the Bureau’s Palestinian expert.

  “Well, as a general rule,” Farrell noted, “they tend to live pretty well on assignments. They have plenty of money. They go middle class, which most of them are anyway. I mean, they usually don’t go hiding out in slums or rabbit warrens. They learned a long time ago the best way to blend into the stream is to posit yourself just above the middle-class level. The other thing, they tend to stay pretty close to their own kind. Don’t seem to trust the other ethnics very much.”

  The Chief of Detectives digested his words. “Something else too, I’d say.

  If you wanted to pull off a caper like this, you’d put it in the hands of someone who knew his way around, been here before. Otherwise, your people’d leave a string of clues behind them. Blow the operation right away.”

  “Mr. Feldman has a very good point.” It was Salisbury, the CIA representative. “We can also assume, I think, that the kind of people who would do this would be sophisticated, cold-blooded and smart enough to realize that their chances of success lay in holding it very, very tight.

  I’m convinced we’re looking for a small, coherent group of intelligent, highly motivated people.

  “And,” he continued, “I’m also convinced the kind of person Qaddafi would assign an operation like this to would have already left his — or her-traces somewhere in one of the world’s intelligence services. We’re in touch with every intelligence agency in the world that has files on Palestinian terrorists. They’re sending us descriptions and photographs of everyone in their files. I suggest that we separate out those who have spent time in this country and are intelligent, sophisticated and educated, and concentrate on them.”