Inside the interrogation room, the Arab was giving his address as the Century Hotel, 844 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. “Get a couple of our cars down there right away,” Hudson ordered, hearing his words. They were, for all practical purposes, the last the Arab intended to speak for some time.
Overtaken by some shift in his mood, he muttered, “I want a lawyer,” to the two FBI men before him, then refused to speak any further.
Angelo studied the Arab. Scared, he mused, scared absolutely shitless. His failure with Benny the Fence in front of Rand still rankled. The young agent was in the shadows behind him, somehow more at ease in these corridors of officialdom than Angelo was.
Angelo leaned toward Feldman. “Chief,” he whispered, “let me have ten minutes with him while they’re running down a lawyer. After all, he’s mine, isn’t he?”
Five minutes later, Angelo settled into the chair opposite the Arab with a weary sigh and a complaint about the heat in the room. He took a sack of Planter’s Peanuts out of his pocket and spilled a mound into his palm.
“Peanut, kid?” he asked. Closed up like an oyster, the detective thought, watching the Arab defiantly shake his head. Angelo tossed half the handful into his mouth and offered it again to the prisoner. “Go on. You don’t need a lawyer to eat a peanut … Nabil.”
He had held off on the name, then came down hard on it, his eyes fixed on the Arab’s face as he pronounced it. He saw him start as though he had received a jolt of static electricity. Angelo sat back in his armchair and slowly chewed the rest of the peanuts, deliberately allowing the Arab time to reflect on the fact that his real identity was known. Finally, he cleaned his hands with a little clap and leaned forward.
“Kid, you know, different guys got different ways of operating.” He used the same husky, confidential voice he had employed unsuccessfully with Benny. “Bureau’s got their way. I got mine. Me, I say always level with a guy. Let him know where he’s at.”
“I don’t want to talk,” the Arab snarled.
“Talk?” Angelo laughed. “Who asked you to talk? Just listen.” He settled back in his chair again. “Now, what we got you on here is receiving stolen goods. Bunch of plastic Benny Moscowitz got for you on consignment Friday a week for five hundred dollars.” Angelo paused and gave the Arab a friendly smile. “By the way, kid, you paid too much. Two and a half’s the going price.”
He could have been a priest trying to talk a young husband out of a divorce. “You can figure that’s one to three, depending on your sheet and the judge. Now, the matter of interest to us here is not that. It’s where it went. Who you did it for.”
“I said I didn’t want to talk.” There had been no softening in the Arab’s defiant tone.
“Don’t, kid. You don’t have to. You heard what the card says.” Reassurance dripped from Angelo’s voice. He thoughtfully munched a couple of peanuts, then jerked his head toward the New York mural on the wall to his left. “See that?” he asked.
The Arab nodded.
“One-way window. They got about twenty guys back there watching us. Judges.
Feds. Like that. Got a guy there in a white shirt’s very interested in you.” Angelo paused, letting the Arab’s curiosity peak. “Comes from that Israeli outfit there, whatta they call it? Mossad.” Again Angelo waited, pretending to chew a peanut, watching the Arab through half-closed eyes.
The fear he was looking for was there all right.
“Now, this is how things stand, kid.” His voice took on a matter-of-fact tone, as though he was totally disinterested in what he was about to say.
“You’re an illegal. We know that. Ran your fingerprints at the INS, and we know you never had no U.S. visa. Okay? We got this treaty with the Israelis. Extradite terrorists. Boom!” Angelo snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Guy’s on his way down to the Federal Courthouse now for the papers. That Mossad fellow’s got a plane waiting for you, just for you, out at JFK. They figure to have you on it by midnight.”
Angelo could see how rapidly the Arab was blinking. Scared out of his mind, he thought. “Because we’re going to hand you over. Got to. Have no choice.
We got no reason to hold you. Not on some lousy charge of receiving stolen goods.” He clapped his hands and brushed his trouser leg as though he was getting ready to go. “You don’t want to talk to us. It’s your right.
Perfect right. But as a result we got no reason to hold on to you.”
Angelo began to rise.
“Hey,” the Arab said. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s simple,” Angelo explained. “You help us, we help you. You talk to us, we make you a material witness. Then we gotta keep you here. Can’t extradite you anymore.” He was on his feet now, tipping up on his toes, slowly stretching his joints. “You don’t want to talk, what could we do? We gotta hand you over. It’s the law.
“You know those Mossad gu;1s out there better than I do. I mean, from what I hear they don’t care too much for them little white cards and all.”
Angelo let a little smile flicker an instant at the edges of his mouth, relishing the tension in the man’s face. “Particularly when they got a chance to spend eight hours on an airplane all alone with a guy put a bomb in a shopping basket, killed three little old Jewish ladies, you know what I mean? I mean, how tender do you figure they’re going to want to be with a guy like that?”
The Arab’s face lightened as though a bright light had been switched on at the mention of the bomb in a basket. So, Angelo thought, you did it, you little creep.
“Hey,” the Arab muttered, “what do you want?”
Angelo settled slowly back into his interrogator’s chair. He crossed his legs and delicately hitched up the crease of his trousers. “Just a talk, kid. Just a little talk.”
* * *
Grace Knowland started impatiently at the sight of her son on the steps of the Seventh Regiment Armory in midtown Manhattan. It was after seven.
He should have been inside already, changing for his match.
“Hey, Mom,” he called down in a voice shrill with adolescent anger, “the match is off.” Grace strode up the steps and kissed his reluctantly offered cheek.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. They got some soldiers there and nobody can go in. They won’t even let me go down to the locker rooms to get my racket so I can play Andy tomorrow.”
Grace winced. It had been that kind of a day, her trip to Washington wasted because the Mayor hadn’t come back on the shuttle as usual, her fruitless efforts all afternoon to worm something about the South Bronx out of his press secretary, the rush to get here for her son’s match only to find it had been canceled.
“I’ll see what I can do about the racket, dear.”
She walked up to the military policeman at the door. “What’s going on? My son was supposed to play a tennis match here tonight.”
The soldier banged his black mittens together with a smack and stamped his boots in the cold. “Lady, I don’t know. All I know is I got orders to seal off the area to the public tonight. They got some kind of mobilization exercise going on in there.”
“Well, surely,” Grace cajoled, “you can’t imagine my son’s going to disturb anybody just going down to the locker room to get his tennis racket?”
The soldier squirmed uncomfortably. “Listen, lady, what can I tell you? I got my orders. No unauthorized personnel in the area.”
Grace felt a surge of anger rising inside her. “Who’s in charge here?”
“The lieutenant. You want I get the lieutenant?”
The military policeman was back a few minutes later with a clean-shaven young officer in freshly pressed fatigues. He eyed Grace appreciatively.
“Tell me, Lieutenant.” She covered the cutting edge of her question with a frosting of sweetness. “Just whht is it that’s going on here tonight that’s so important a thirteen-year-old boy can’t go down to the locker room to get his tennis racket?”
The officer laughed
. “It’s nothing, ma’am. Just some kind of snowremoval test they’re running. A bunch of people trying to figure out how they can help the city the next time you get a big snowstorm. That’s all.”
My day, it suddenly occurred to Grace, may not be wholly wasted after all.
“That’s very interesting.” Her handbag was open and she picked over its jumble for her press card. “I’m with The New York Times and it happens I’m very much into the problem of getting the snow off the streets of this city. I’d like to talk to the officer in charge of your test and find out what you’re learning.”
“1’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t help you on that. I got nothing to do with the operation itself,” the young lieutenant replied. “They just sent us up here from Dix last night to handle the security. Tell you what, ma’am, if your son’ll describe where his racket is to me, I’ll go down and try to find it and at the same time I’ll tell them you want to speak to someone.”
The officer was thumping the strings of Tommy’s racket against the butt of his hand when he returned. “Hey,” he said, “that’s strung real light. You must be a good player.” He turned to Grace. “They told me all inquiries about the operation are to be referred to Major McAndrews, First Armory PIO.” He handed Grace a slip of paper. “Here’s his phone number. If you come back to do a story,” he mumbled shyly, “how about having a cup of coffee with a stranger in these parts?”
Grace smiled, noting his name, Daly, on the black-and-gold swatch above the pocket of his field jacket. “Of course. If I come back, I’d be delighted.”
* * *
Angelo was sitting back in his interrogator’s chair, chewing an occasional peanut, as relaxed as though he were chatting with a fellow cop about the Giants’ chances of making the NFL playoffs.
“Okay,” he said to the Arab before him, “so you do the odd job for the Libyan embassy over at the United Nations. How do they get hold of you?”
“They leave a message at the bar.”
“How do yolt fix your meets?”
“I add four to the day of the month and then go to the corner of that street and First Avenue. Like if it’s the ninth, I go t — Thirteenth and First.”
Angelo nodded. “Always at the same time?”
“No. From one to five. I add an hour each time, then start over again.”
“And you always meet the same contact?”
“Not always. I have a copy of Newsweek in my hand. They make the contact.”
“Okay. So how did this one go?”
“The contact was a girl.”
“You remember the day?”
The Arab hesitated. “It had to be Tuesday the first, because the meet was at Fifth Street.”
“Remember what she looked like?”
“Pretty. Long brown hair. She was wearing a fur coat.”
“An Arab?”
The prisoner shifted his regard from Angelo’s eyes, ashamed of his betrayal. “Probably. But we spoke English.”
“So what did she want?”
“Fresh cards. She told me to bring her fresh cards at ten the next morning.”
“And you went to Benny?”
The Arab nodded his head.
“Then what happened?”
“I gave her the cards. She said. ‘Come for a walk.’ We go a few blocks and we stop at a camera store. She told me to go in and buy a camera.”
“And you did?”
“I went to a bar first and practiced signing a few times.”
“Then you got the camera?”
“Yeah.” The Arab sighed, aware of how deeply he was involving himself in all this. “So she said, okay, it was good. She wanted more fresh cards and a driver’s license for Friday morning, ten o’clock. For a guy in his mid thirties. She gave me a thousand bucks. Friday the meet was over on Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn. She didn’t show up. A guy came instead.”
Angelo’s irritation at Dewing’s interruption of his interrogation was manifest. The FBI official walked authoritatively into the room, sat down in the chair beside his and took over the interrogation without even consulting him.
“Excuse me, Mr. Rocchia,” he said, “but I thought our friend here might look at some photographs for us. They’ve just come in from overseas.”
He passed the photo of Laila from the DST dossiers that Henri Bertrand had forwarded to the CIA barely twenty minutes earlier. “By any chance would this be the girl who contacted you?” he asked.
The Arab looked at the photograph, then at Angelo, wary and mistrustful of this intruder who had snapped the current developing between them. The detective, silently cursing Dewing, gave the Arab what he hoped was a particularly friendly smile.
“That’s her.”
Dewing passed Whalid’s picture to him. “Was this the guy you got the plastic for?”
The Arab laid the photo on the coffee table, shaking his head.
“How about him?” Dewing passed Kamal’s picture across the table.
The Arab studied it a moment, then looked up. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s him.”
* * *
The sight of the halfdozen exhausted, haggard men sitting around the National Security Council conference room in their dinner jackets would have been comical if the reason behind it were not so potentially tragic.
In a few moments, as part of their determined effort to conceal the crisis behind a fagade of normality, they would join their wives in the Executive Mansion for cocktails in the Blue Room. Then, in the State Dining Room, they would dine off the Lincoln gold service the Presi dent’s wife loved, at a banquet honoring the departing dean of Washington’s diplomatic corps, the ambassador of Bolivia.
Jack Eastman began their session by noting that nothing in the evening newscasts gave any indication the press was onto the crisis.
“Slender satisfaction,” the President remarked curtly and turned to the communication which had come in from the Israeli government while he had been changing his clothes. “I guess Begin leaves us no choice except to do it for him, does he?” The President’s voice was gruff as he asked the question, but he was a highly emotional man, and, looking at him, Eastman sensed how deeply pained he was. “What are the chances they’ll oppose our action?” he asked Bennington.
“More than fifty-fifty, I’m afraid, sir.”
The President slouched uncomfortably in his chair, his forefingers picking at his lips, his head bowed as though in prayer. He had laid claim to this office because he’d promised his nation a kind of vigorous leadership he sensed it needed and wanted. Yet nothing had quite prepared him for the lonely agony the exercise of power could-entail or for how complex issues that seemed simple from the outside became when you had to deal with them.
“We’re trapped between the fires of two fanatics, gentlemen. We can’t allow six million Americans to die because of their rigidity. If it comes down to it, we’ll have to act. Harold,” he said to his Secretary of Defense, “I want the Rapid Deployment Force ready to move at an hour’s notice.” The Rapid Deployment Force was a composite body of Army, Marine, Air Force and Navy units assembled after the Iranian crisis for swift movement to anywhere on the globe in a cris’s. “And Warren,” he ordered his Deputy Secretary of State, “you get to Hussein and Assad in total secrecy and make sure we can use their airfields as staging areas if we have to.”
He rose. His movements, Eastman observed, suddenly had the stilted, uncertain gestures of the elderly or the infirm. He had reached the door when Webster of the FBI called out, “Mr. President!”
The Missourian was holding his telephone in his hand, and his usually laconic features were alight with an excitement. “New York has made a positive identification of at least three of the people involved in this. They’ll have forty thousand people out looking for them at dawn!”
“Thank God!” Some of the color returned to the President’s face, and for just an instant an intimation of the shy smile the world associated with him reappeared. “Maybe now I’ll be able to digest m
y dinner after all.”
* * *
As he was leaving the National Security Council conference room for the reception upstairs, the Secretary of Energy paused a moment, then turned and walked determinedly to a public phone booth in the West Wing basement.
The number Delbert Crandell dialed rang interminably before a young woman answered. Her voice became sullen the instant she recognized her caller.
“What happened to you last night? I waited up for you until four.”
“Never mind that.” Crandell had no time to waste on explanations. “I’ve got something very important for you to do.”
The girl groaned and stirred in her bed, the rose satin sheets slipping off her naked breasts as she did. The litter, the charmless disorder, in Cindy Garrett’s bedroom was an accurate reflection of the disorder in her life.
She had come to Washington in 1976 from a small town near Mobile, Alabama, fleeing the stigma of a pregnancy brought on by the town’s deputy sheriff.
As a parting gift her former lover had landed her a job as a receptionist in the offices of an Alabama Congressman he had befriended in a hit-and-run investigation. Her employment had been abruptly terminated by his constituents’ angry protests after Cindy had appeared nude in Playboy magazine’s “The Girls of Washington Revisited.” Fortunately, a chance meeting with Crandell at a Georgetown cocktail party a few evenings later had opened the way to employment that was not only less demanding and better paid but, in Cindy’s case, infinitely more suitable.
“What do you want?” Wariness as thick as the wrinkle cream glistening under her eyes lurked behind her reply.
“I want you to drive up to New York right away. Go to the apartment and-“
“Ah cain’t go to New York,” Cindy squawked in protest.
“The hell you cain’t!” Crandell couldn’t abide the redclay accent that crept into Cindy’s voice after a few bourbons or in her unguarded moments.
“You’re going to do what I tell you to do. Get the car and get up there as fast as you can. You know the painting over the fireplace?”
The Fifth Horseman Page 41