The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  “Have we heard from Tripoli? Is Qaddafi ready to talk?” he asked the Deputy Secretary of State as he lowered himself into his chair.

  “Sir, we’ve just had the consulate on the blower” the Deputy Secretary of State replied. “The charge’s still out at the villa where Qaddafi’s supposed to be staying.”

  A few seats away, Harold Brown spoke. It was almost as though he was thinking out loud. “You know, since the beginning of this thing no one has actually seen Qaddafi or heard his threat articulated from his own lips.

  This is, after all, such a fantastic escalation of the threat level. Are we sure he’s behind it? Could he have been kidnapped? The victim of some kind of Palestinian coup?”

  Almost automatically, the attention in the room shifted to the CIA’s Bennington. The stack of papers in front of his chair was conspicuously higher than anyone else’s. That reflected the fact that since the Cuban Missile Crisis it had been government policy to make the raw input of intelligence sources available to the President in an emergency even if they differed, rather than having an agency analyst synthesize the material for him.

  “We’ve looked at that one,” Bennington replied, “and our decision is no.

  The nuclear program has always been strictly Qaddafi’s work. He keeps his own Palestinians on a tight leash and under close guard. His relations with Arafat and the PLO have been more than strained since he broke with them because he accused them of being too ready to compromise. And our voice analysts have now confirmed that that’s his voice on the original tape.”

  “Better late than never,” the President tartly observed. “Do we have anything new from New York?”

  Before William Webster of the FBI could answer, the red warning light on the Deputy Secretary of State’s telephone flashed. “Sir,” he said, after listening a second, “the operations center is pulling in a Cherokee NODIS

  from Tripoli.” A Cherokee NODIS was the State Department’s highest cable priority, a term assigned it by Dean Rusk in honor of his native Cherokee County, Georgia. “We’ll have it in a second.”

  In the Department’s seventh-floor operations center the incoming coded text was automatically fed into a computer which decoded it instantaneously and printed a clear text on the duty officer’s cable console. He, in turn, relayed it immediately to the White House communications center, where a warrant officer pushed a button on another console that spewed out a printed text as fast as the cable’s words rose on the screen. The Deputy Secretary had barely hung up his phone when the warrant officer handed the message to Eastman.

  “Sir,” he said, glancing at it, “the charg6 has just spoken personally with Qaddafi.”

  “And?”

  “And he says everything he has to say is in his original message. He refuses to talk to you.”

  * * *

  The New York Police Department, Gerald Putman thought, is a much maligned body. He had not even bothered to report his wallet to the police as lost or stolen, assuming, as he supposed any citizen in a similar situation would, that his report would be lost in a morass of bureaucratic indifference and ineptitude. Yet here in his office were an obviously senior detective, the head of the Pickpocket Squad and a federal officer, all trying to help him establish what had happened to his wallet.

  “All right, Mr. Putman,” Angelo Rocchia said, “let’s just go through that one more time. You spent all Friday morning here in this office. Then, at about…’

  “Twelve-thirty.”

  The detective checked his notebook. “Right. You went over to the Fulton Fish Market to Luigi’s for lunch. At approximately two P.M. you reached for your wallet to get your American Express card to pay the check and found your wallet was missing, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You returned here, where you keep a record of all your credit card numbers, and had your secretary call them to report the loss.”

  “That’s correct, Officer.”

  “And you didn’t bother to notify the local precinct?”

  Putman gave Angelo an awkward smile. “I’m sorry, Officer, I just thought that with everything you people have to do these days, something like this would, you know …” His voice dwindled to an embarrassed mumble.

  The detective returned the smile, but his gray eyes were cold and appraising. Angelo liked to give people like Putman the impression he was a little slow, a bit of a plodder. It never hurt to disarm a client, to get him to relax a bit. Putman was in his midthirties, medium height, a trifle stocky, with a dark tan and a swarthy complexion. Maybe an Italian had wandered into the bed of one of Putman’s WASP ancestors, Angelo mused.

  “Now, Mr. Putman, let’s go over everything that happened to you that day very slowly, very carefully. First of all, where do you keep your wallet?”

  “Right here.” Putman tapped the right hip pocket of his pants. He was wearing gray slacks, a blue button-down shirt and a striped tie. Everything in his office, the thick wall-to-wall carpeting, the understated mahogany furniture, the huge window looking over to the tip of Manhattan, indicated upper-middle-class affluence.

  “You were wearing an overcoat, I suppose?” This time the question came from the head of the Pickpocket Squad whom Feldman had ordered to meet Angelo here.

  “Oh yes,” Putman replied. “I’ve got it right there.”

  He walked to a closet and took out a Cheviot tweed coat he had bought at Burberry’s in London. The head of the Pickpocket Squad examined it, then slipped his fingers up its high-cut center vent.

  “Convenient.” He smiled.

  Methodicallyţ prompted by Angelo, Putman recreated his activities of Friday, December 11. He’d gotten up at 7 A.M. in his home in Oyster Bay.

  His wife had driven him, as she did regularly, to the station, where he’d bought The Wall Street Journal and waited only two minutes on the platform for the 8:07 Long Island Rail Road train. On the way in, he had sat next to his friend and squash partner Grant Esterling, an IBM executive. He’d gotten off, as always, at the Flatbush Avenue Terminal and walked the rest of the way to his office. He remembered absolutely nothing unusual, out of the way, on the train, at the terminal or on his ten-minute walk to the office: no one bumping into him, no one shoving him, no jarring movement, nothing.

  When be had finished, the room was so quiet that all four men could hear the tick-tock of the old-fashioned grandfather’s clock in one corner of Putman’s office. Rand impatiently crossed, then uncrossed his legs.

  “It sounds like we got a very artistic bit of work here,” the head of the Pickpocket Squad noted with respect.

  “It sure does.” Angelo made a swift doodle in his notepad, a stick figure of a doll. My good idea, he mused, doesn’t look so good anymore. He rose.

  “Mr. Putman,” he said, “we’re going to show you some pictures. Take all the time you want to look at them. Study them very carefully and tell us if you think you’ve ever seen any of these people anywhere before.”

  If travel broadened, the young men and women in the procession of photographs Angelo laid one by one on Putman’s desk should have constituted a unique cultural elite. Only a handful of experienced travelers could claim the knowledge of the capitals of the world they possessed. No great international gathering from the Olympic Games in Montreal or Lake Placid, the election of a Pope in the Vatican, the Queen’s Jubilee in London, the World Cup in Buenos Aires could be celebrated without their presence. They were the best of the world’s pickpockets, and, almost without exception, the dark-haired, dark-complexioned youths in the mug shots passing through Gerald Putman’s hands were Colombian.

  As the Basque country exports shepherds, Antwerp diamond cutters, so that Latin American nation exported coffee, emeralds, cocaine-and pickpockets.

  There were in the miserable calles of Bogota, the Colombian capital, a whole series of Faginesque pickpocketing schools. Poor farm children were literally sold into servitude to the schools’ masters to learn the trade.

  In the Plaza Bolivi
a, along the Avenue Santander, they were taught every trick of the art, how to slit a pocket with a razor, open unnoticed a handbag, pluck a Rolex watch from an unsuspecting wrist. As a graduation exercise they had to demonstrate fingers so skilled they could slip a wallet from a pocket to which was sewn a line of jingle bells without causing a single bell to ring.

  Once trained, they assembled into teams of twos and threes, because a good dip never worked alone, and fanned out all over the world in search of the crowds, conventions, tourists and unsuspecting pockets from which they extracted well over a million dollars a year.

  Putman had gone through almost fifty photos when suddenly he stopped and stared at the photo of a girl, dark rolls of hair falling to her shoulders, her breasts thrusting challengingly against a tightly drawn white silk blouse.

  “Oh yes,” he said with a nervous half-chuckle, “I think I recognize this one. I think that’s the girl I nearly knocked down the other day at the foot of the stairway coming down the train platform.” The memory of the incident came flooding back. “Of course. It’s her all right. It was quite embarrassing. I ran right into her and she had to grab onto me to keep from falling.”

  “Mr. Putman,” Angelo asked very quietly, “could the other day have been Friday?”

  The importer hesitated, trying to reconstruct the moment in his mind. “My goodness,” he said, “you know, I think it was.”

  The detective took the photograph back and studied the girl’s pretty face, her provocative breasts so defiantly exposed to the policeman’s. camera.

  “You didn’t bump into her, Mr. Putman, she bumped into you. They love to work with girls with big tits. She jams those knockers into you while the dip boosts your wallet.”

  He noticed a flush on the importer’s cheeks. “Don’t worry, Mr. Putman.

  Everybody gets turned on by girls with big tits. Even guys like you from Oyster Bay.”

  * * *

  Abe Stern glanced angrily at Jeremy Oglethorpe. The evacuation expert was bustling around the Police Commissioner’s office, hanging flow charts, diagrams, maps with those damnable colored circles all over them onto walls and easels, displaying an energy so frenetic he might have been a Madison Avenue account executive about to make a presentation for a new toothpaste account.

  The Mayor had elected to bring him here rather than to City Hall because the Police Commissioner’s office was more secure than his. They had come by helicopter right from the Marine Air Terminal to the pad on the roof.

  “Well,” Oglethorpe announced, surveying his display with quiet pride, “I think I’m ready if your people are.”

  The Police Commissioner turned to one of the two inspectors he had summoned to the meeting. “Where the hell is Walsh?” he growled.

  “He’s on his way, sir.”

  Walsh was Timothy Walsh, thirty-seven, a six-footthree-inch Brooklyn-born lieutenant who presided over the NYPD’s Office of Civil Preparedness. He was a shrewd, ambitious, empire-building Irishman who had been moved to Civil Preparedness from the Intelligence Bureau with orders to make it snap, and snap it did. Any kind of catastrophe that might strike the city was supposed to be in his bailiwick. Walsh, however, had a solid preference for those that were the high-media-exposure areas, the areas that could get you applause from the Commissioner’s office, beef up your budget, swell your staff; things like power failures, hurricanes, flooding, blizzards.

  Evacuation and civil defense were at the bottom of the pile. The problem with civil defense, Timothy Walsh was fond of remarking, was, “People don’t want to know. It’s ‘Hey, look, don’t bother me with those fucking Russian bombs. I got a foot of snow in my driveway.”’

  His own thoughts on the subject were succinctly summed up in a phrase he often repeated to his deputy: “Every so often I go down to Washington and genuflect on the altar of the thermonuclear holocaust so I can keep the federal money coming in for the things that really count in this city, like getting some more portable generators for our next power failure.”

  Now, whistling cheerfully, Walsh nodded at the detective manning the electric gate leading to the Police Commissioner’s suite and found himself quickly ushered into his office. At the sight of all the heavies in the room, Walsh’s cheerfulness disappeared.

  “Walsh, have we got a plan to evacuate this city in a crisis?” the Police Commissioner demanded.

  Oh-oh, Walsh thought, why is he asking that? Better use a little soft-shoe routine here. Toss a few balls in the air and see which way the wind is blowing. Such a plan did, in fact, exist. It was called “The New York Target Support Area Operational Survival Plan, Volume I, Basic Plan.” Drawn up in 1972, it contained 202 pages and was generally acknowledged to be worthless. So worthless, Walsh had never bothered to read it; nor, as far as he knew, had anyone else in his department.

  “Sir, the last time we looked at evacuation was a report we did in December 1977 for Commissioner Codd. Con Ed wanted to start running liquefied natural gas up the East River to their storage farm at Berrian’s Island and we were asked if we could clear the East Side in a helluva hurry if there was a spill.”

  “And?”

  “And the conclusion was it was an absolutely hopeless job. Better not to let the LNG up the river in the first place.”

  The Police Commissioner grunted. “Well, sit down and listen to this man here. Between now and four o’clock this afternoon, you and he have got to come up with a plan to clear this city in the shortest possible time.”

  Walsh folded his large frame onto the Police Commissioner’s blue sofa, a whole series of alarm bells ringing in his psyche as he did. He watched Oglethorpe moving to his charts. There was something vaguely familiar, it occurred to him, about the face of the man above the blue polkadot tie.

  Oglethorpe took up a rubber-tipped pointer and began, a professor lecturing a class. “Fortunately, the problem of evacuating New York City is one that we have spent a great deal of time in studying. I don’t need to tell you it’s a staggering challenge. The shortest time we’ve been able to come up with for clearing the city in our crisisrelocation studies is three days.”

  “Three days!” Abe Stern snapped. “That son of a bitch over in Tripoli is barely giving us three hoursl”

  Oglethorpe grimaced his acknowledgment. Unfortunately, as he explained, all Civil Defense evacuation plans were built around what he called “a wartime scenario.” In it, the United States would have five to six days warning of a Soviet thermonuclear attack because of certain preparations the Russians would have to make which would be observed by U.S. satellites. This prospect was one they hadn’t thought a great deal about.

  “To be safe,” Oglethorpe went on, “we’ve got to plan on evacuating Manhattan, the southern Bronx, most of Queens and Brooklyn and a strip of New Jersey river shore four miles deep.”

  “How many people will that involve?” Abe Stern asked.

  “Eleven million.”

  The Mayor groaned softly. Walsh looked at him. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he thought, what do you evacuate eleven million people for? Only one thing.

  Oglethorpe turned back to his map. “One thing we do know, it’s going to be a ground burst. That means fallout, bad fallout. Looking at New York’s prevailing winds tells you that Queens and Long Island have the highest probability of getting heavy fallout. We’ve got the Weather Service monitoring the winds for us now and it looks like they’re going to get drenched if this goes. The best natural fallout shelter for those people is the cellar. In New York State you’ve got one of the highest cellar percentages in the country-seventy-three percent.” Oglethorpe was on familiar ground now, dealing with statistics, numbers, figures. “Unfortunately, that figure drops down to twenty-two percent out on Long Island because the island’s got a high water table. Those people are going to be in a lot of trouble out there if this thing explodes.”

  “Shouldn’t we evacuate them too?” the Mayor queried.

  “How?” Oglethorpe replied. “They can’t swim off
that island, and if we pull them back toward the bridges we’ll be exposing them to more fallout and the possibility of burns.” Normally the mildmannered Oglethorpe wouldn’t have replied in so brutal a fashion, but New Yorkers, he firmly believed, liked tough, pragmatic speakers.

  “The one thing we’ve got to avoid at all costs is moving people into fallout. So that means unless there’s a shift in the weather patterns our evacuation is going to have to go north up into Westchester and west into Jersey.

  “The first thing I’d do is shut off all access to the city when we get our ‘go.’ Make all access one way-outbound. Now, here in Manhattan only twenty-one percent of your people have first cars. Very low figure compared to the national average. That means eighty percent of the people have got to get out by other means. We’ll want to mobilize ail the buss we can lay our hands on. Any large truck fleets we can get, too. Luckily, we’ve got the use of the subways, which were more or less denied to us in our wartime scenario. We’ll want to make large use of them.

  Load them up, switch them into the express lanes and tell them to go like hell. Send as many as we can into the upper Bronx. Take people as far up there as you can, and tell them to get out and walk.”

  “Jesus Christ!” It was the Police Commissioner contemplating the chaos Oglethorpe’s ideas were going to produce. “Can you imagine the field day the looters are going to have?”

  Oglethorpe smiled. “Sure, there are going to be plenty of scavengers combing your luxury highrises,” he admitted. “But if they’re ready to run the risk of being incinerated for a color TV, well, so be it. You can hardly expect your police, whom you’re going to need for more important matters anyway, to run around booking them as though Manhattan was going to be here on Wednesday morning.”

  “Where are you going to put all those people?” the Mayor asked. “You can’t just take them out and dump them in a street in the Bronx or over in the Jersey Flats in the middle of winter.”