The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  Dewing didn’t even wait for everyone to sit down before he turned to Al Feldman. The Chief of Detectives looked terrible. His pallor was gray; his shirt stank with the stench of the nervous sweat that had soaked into it in the last thirty-six hours. His voice shook as he replied to Dewing’s query about Angelo Rocchia. “He’s as solid as anybody I got.”

  The Chief did not — have to continue, because Angelo, followed by Rand, entered the room while he was still talking.

  “Sit down,” Dewing told the detective, pointing to a chair at the end of the table, “and tell us your story.”

  Angelo dropped onto the chair, unbuttoning his collar as he did. He was breathless, panting from his frantic drive downtown from Christopher Street, from the sprint from his car to Dewing’s conference room. He had never been in this underground command post before, and the frenetic nervous energy exploding all around him, men running and shouting, doors slamming, phones ringing, radios crackling and Telexes stuttering, told him everything he needed to know about the gravity of the situation.

  As quickly, as tersely as he could, he sketched the background of his idea, the story of the Procter & Gamble salesman, the relationship on which everything depended: the time the van had been clocked out of the Brooklyn pier by the security guard, the time required to drive from the pier to Christopher Street, his reasonably precise idea of when the salesman’s car had been hit.

  There was a huge map of Manhattan on the wall and he indicated Christopher Street on it, stabbing its way from the Hudson River toward the heart of Greenwich Village.

  “If this was the van we’re looking for, then reason has got to tell you the barrel is going to be somewhere in here, between Fourteenth on the north, Houston Street on the south, the river on the west, and Sixth Avenue or maybe Fifth on the east. Otherwise they’d have come up the East Side.” He traced out the area with his fingertips as he spoke.

  “If this is the truck we’re looking for.” The speaker was Dewing, his features tightened into a cold mask of concentration. “That’s a big if.” He turned to Harvey Hudson. “How many Hertz trucks did you say circulate in this city?”

  “Roughly five hundred, Mr. Dewing.”

  “And how many of those are vans?”

  “Over half.”

  Dewing’s gaze went back to Angelo. “And you got onto this just because you told yourself Arabs don’t know how to drive on snow?”

  Angelo had already taken an intense dislike to the man. “Yes,” he answered, making no effort to conceal the hostility in his voice. “That’s right.”

  Dewing pondered the map behind the detective. “That’s about a four-or five-mile trip, isn’t it?”

  Angelo looked over to Feldman, hoping for some sign of support, then nodded his agreement.

  “The truck had two hundred and fifty miles on it when it came back in, didn’t it?”

  “So what? If you’re carrying what they got in that barrel, the first thing you’re going to want to do with it is get it to wherever the hell it’s going. Then you’re going to dump those other barrels out in Queens. Then maybe you’re going to spend the afternoon driving up and down the Long Island Expressway to make things hard for the cops, how would I know?”

  “Harvey,” Dewing said, “when will we have that paint matchup?”

  “In an hour.”

  The FBI assistant director grimaced. “That’s an hour we haven’t got.

  Chief,” he asked Feldman, “what do you think about this? He’s your man. Can we search that area house by house?”

  “It’s a big area,” Feldman replied. “Couple hundred blocks in there. Goddamn rat’s nest of a neighborhood, too. But what else have we got to go on?”

  “You realize that if we’re going to search that area in a hurry, we’ll have to commit every single resource we have to the effort? There’ll be nothing left for anything else.”

  The Chief looked at his wristwatch. “Do you see a better way to use the time we’ve got left?”

  Dewing’s mouth twitched in nervous indecision. It was an awful choice to have to make. “God help us if we’re wrong,” he said.

  He was on the verge of ordering the search when Harvey Hudson interrupted.

  A yellow classified phone book was spread on his lap. “Just a minute, Mr.

  Dewing. Hertz has got a Rent-A-Truck agency located right up the street from where the accident took place. Must be vans going back and forth down there all the time.”

  There was an instant of stricken silence before Dewing exploded.

  “Jesus Christ!” he shouted at Feldman. “You let this old buffoon of a detective come in here and get us within a hair of concentrating all our resources on one part of the city and he hasn’t even checked this out? This solid guy of yours?”

  Angelo was on his feet before the shocked Feldman could answer. He pulled his notebook from his pocket, flipped it open, ripped out a page, crumpled it in his fist and hurled it at Dewing. “Here, Mr. whatever the hell your fucking name is,” he growled, “here’s the record of the vans that went in and out of that station last Friday. One out at eight-seventeen in the morning and two back in the afternoon.”

  Angelo’s neck twisted back in the strange jerking movement of a man leaving a barber’s chair as he started to rebutton his shirt collar. He took a menacing step toward Dewing. “I may be an old buffoon, mister, but I’ll tell you what you are. You’re a fucking liar. You’ve been holding out on us from the beginning, haven’t you? Sent us out there like blind men because you didn’t trust us.” Angelo thrust his finger at the startled Rand. “Him you trust, because he’s one of you, comes from Washington. Me you don’t trust. Those people up there on the streets, the ones this thing is going to wipe out, them you don’t trust. What do you care? You’re safe down here in this cellar. But them-“

  “Rocchial” It was Bannion’s commanding voice, but Angelo’s rage was too great to be checked now. He was towering over Dewing as twentyfour hours earlier he had towered over Benny the Fence. “Because it isn’t chlorine gas in that barrel, is it? It’s a fucking atomic bomb, going to clear this place out and them along with it. Ghettos?” He laughed harshly. “We’re not going to have to worry about the ghettos anymore. The whole city will be one fucking ghetto after that thing goes off.”

  Angelo stopped, his chest heaving. He could feel the thudding of his heart racing to the fury he had just unleashed. “Well, I told you where you can find your bomb,” he said, his voice finally under control. “Look there or not, I don’t care, because as far as I’m concerned, I’m finished. You don’t trust me, mister, well, fuck you. I don’t trust you either.”

  Before any of the astonished men in the room could react, the detective had stridden past Dewing, opened the door and slammed it behind him.

  “Al,” the Police Commissioner ordered his Chief of Detectives. “Go after him, for Christ’s sake! We can’t have him running around the city shouting ‘Atomic bomb’ at the top of his lungs.”

  * * *

  The President had introduced four newcomers into his exhausted circle of advisers in the National Security Council conference room: the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Majority and Minority Leaders of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

  He had been keeping the four men abreast of the developing crisis in secret briefings, but now that the awful moment of decision was at hand he wanted them associated with it.

  One by one, the President had called on each of the men in the room to voice his opinion. At the far end of the table, the Secretary of State was summing up in his characteristically succinct manner what was their virtually unanimous recommendation.

  “We cannot, Mr. President, allow six million Americans to die because another nation, however friendly, refuses to modify the consequences of a policy we have always opposed. Land the Marines and the Rapid Deployment Force. Associate the Soviets with our action to fix the Israelis in place. Inform Qaddafl of what we are d
oing and let him follow the action through his embassy in Damascus. That will save New York, and when we’ve defused that threat, then we can deal with him.”

  There was an undertone of coughs and of throats being cleared, a kind of chorus of approval at the Secretary’s words. The President thanked him formally. Then he let his eyes sweep the faces around the table, studying each grim mien he saw there. “Harold,” he said to his Science Adviser, “I think you’re the one person we haven’t heard from.”

  Harold Brown’s elbows were resting on the table, his shoulders drooping as though he was crushed by the implications of what he was about to say. He was a nuclear physicist, one of that high priesthood that had nurtured and furthered for mankind the scourge and the blessing of the shattered atom.

  With growing alarm he had watched as the civilized world had drifted, indolent and uncaring, to this inevitable end when a zealot with a bomb could impose his will by the threat of violence so terrible it brooked no opposition.

  “Mr. President.” He took a deep breath as he began. “The last crisis I lived through in this room was the Iranian crisis, and the events of those days are still painfully embedded in my mind. This country needed friends badly in those days, Mr. President, and may I remind you we had only one, Israel. When the chips were down, it was they alone who were ready to stand with us. The Saudis and the Egyptians, perhaps, in their way. But, above all, it was the Israelis who answered the call.

  “Our supposed allies the Germans, the French, when we needed them, when we asked them to stand up and be counted, they turned their backs. They were so concerned about their oil, they were prepared to see this nation humiliated and humbled, our diplomats executed, provided we did nothing to disturb the tranquil pattern of their existence. Those are moments I cannot forget, Mr. President. Are we now to turn our arms on the one people who stood by us when we needed them? At the behest of a dictator who loathes us, our nation and everything we stand for?”

  “I share the feelings of everyone about those settlements, about the Israelis’ intransigence on so many points. But what is at issue here transcends those settlements, Mr. President. There are moral issues that are beyond debate and discussion, and this is one of them. There is a point beyond which a nation, like a man, cannot go and still maintain its dignity and self-respect. I say we are at that point.”

  Silence, a silence of pain and anguish, stilled the room when Brown had finished. The President rose. He looked at the clock on the wall opposite.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I should like to meditate in the Rose Garden for a moment on what you have said.”

  * * *

  Al Feldman caught up with Angelo a few feet from the exit of the command post. He threw his arms around the detective and tugged him to the guards’ quarters in which he had laughed at the fake Civil Defense poster.

  “Angelo,” he murmured, sitting him down in the midst of a row of green metal lockers, their inside doors covered with Playboy centerfolds, “you were right. Those guys did lie to you. They had to.” Patiently, the Chief explained the details of Qaddafi’s threat. “Dewing didn’t mean to blow up at you like that, but you got to understand the strain we’re all living under.”

  Angelo looked into his boss’s frightened eyes. “I’m sorry, Chief. It wasn’t him. It’s my fault. Some other things have been working on me the past couple of days.”

  “Where were you running off to?”

  “The Kennedy Center. See the kid.”

  The Chief pulled a Camel from his battered pack, lit it and exhaled his first drag with a sympathetic sigh. Angelo’s attachment to his mongoloid daughter was well known in the Division. “And get her out of here?”

  “Yeah.”

  Feldman rose and placed a trembling hand on his detective’s shoulder. He squeezed it tightly. “Okay, Angelo. Go get her. Anybody earned a ticket up to Connecticut, it’s you. Just keep your mouth shut, okay? I’m going back in there and sell them on your idea, because I think you’re right.”

  The two men walked to the exit side by side. Angelo reached for Feldman’s hand. “Thanks, Chief,” he said. Then he turned right, past the guards, toward the stairs and safety.

  * * *

  The men around Dewing’s table were still debating Angelo’s idea when Feldman slipped back into the room. He made a discreet gesture toward Bannion to indicate that the situation was contained, then eased back into his place. He was still attempting to pick up the threads of the argument when a.plainclothesman entered the room and placed a slip of paper in front of him.

  “Jesus Christ!” he roared as he read it. “Rocchia was rightl”

  He jumped from his chair and almost ran to the map of the city.

  “One of our vice cops just interrogated a teenage wbore who works out of a brownstone right here.” The startled men around him watched as he hammered the map. “At 27 West Eighth. She identified one of these three Arabs, the one they call Kamal, as one of her clients last night.”

  “Is she sure?” Bannion asked. “Those girls see a lot of traffic down there.”

  “Absolutely. Apparently he’s a sadistic bastard, and he banged the life out of her while he was doing it.” Feldman’s gaze went back to the map. “That’s almost at Fifth. Right in the corner of the area Rocchia gave us.”

  His words had a galvanic effect on the men in the room. Hudson felt like standing up and cheering. Bannion had the smile on his face of an Irish racetrack tout who has just had a hundred-to-one shot come in.

  “Chief,” Dewing asked, “how long would it take us to search out that area your man gave us?”

  Feldman scrutinized the map. “We better push the search area east to Broadway to be sure.” He paused, making his calculations. “Twelve hours.

  Give me twelve hours and we’ll find the goddamn thing, I promise you.”

  * * *

  But on this Tuesday, December 15, there were not twelve hours left. There were only two. For five agonizing moments, the men in the National Security Council conference room had sat in silence waiting for their leader’s return. Only Jack Eastman had gone upstairs with him. He too, however, had left him at the Oval Office door. He had stood there watching as, all alone, the President had paced the driveway beyond, hands in his pockets, his head sunk almost into his chest, meditating, praying, doing whatever it was that great leaders must do in the unbearable loneliness of the exercise of power. He had not uttered a word to Eastman when he came back in.

  Now he stood at the head of the table, his fists still thrust deep into his pockets, calm yet clearly resolute, trying to find just the words he wanted.

  “Gentlemen,” he said finally, his voice barely a whisper, “I have reached a decision. It is certainly the worst any man who has held my office has ever had to make, but I am deeply, unshakably convinced that it is the one I must make. I am for better or worse the President of two hundred and thirty million Americans, and however deeply concerned I am about the fate of New York City and all of its people, my responsibility is to all of this country and all of its people. We are confronted with what is, finally, an act of war against this nation. If we cower before that threat, if we bow to blackmail and agree to blackmail in turn one of this country’s surest allies, we will abandon our birthright and condemn ourselves sooner or later to destruction as surely as the sun will set this night.”

  He paused to catch the breath for which he was straining. “It is now one o’clock. Qaddafi’s ultimatum expires at three. Admiral Fuller, I want the Poseidon missiles on the Mediterranean submarines targeted on Libya. All of them. Do everything you can to minimize fallout from their explosion on Egypt and Tunsia.

  “Alex,” he said to his Secretary of State, “prepare flash messages for the Chairmen of the CPs of the Soviet Union and China and for Mr. Begin, Giscard, Helmut Schmidt and Mrs. Thatcher, informing them of the reasons for our action. Make it clear to all of them that in this crisis we expect their full support. Release them coincidentally with our ac
tion.”

  He looked down the table to his ashen Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The Admiral’s fingertips trembled visibly on the tabletop.

  “If by two-thirty our time we have not found and defused that bomb or Qaddafi has not agreed to extend his ultimatum, then, Admiral Fuller, you will destroy Libya with those missiles.”

  * * *

  “Why, Mr. Rocchia! What a pleasant surpise!” The little nun of the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul looked at the detective in the hallway of the Kennedy Child Study Center on East Sixty-seventh Street with pleasure and amazement. “Whatever brings you here at this time of the day? Not bad news, I hope?”

  “No, it’s not that, Sister.” Angelo shifted his weight from foot to foot in nervous embarrassment. “I got to take Maria away for a couple of days.

  To see some of the family up in Connecticut.”

  “Well, really, Inspector, that’s a very unusual procedure. I don’t know if Mother Superior-“

  Angelo interrupted. “It’s urgent, Sister. This sister of my wife, she came East for two days. She’s never met Maria.” He glanced impatiently at his watch. “Look, I’m in a hurry here. Would you get her things together, please?”

  “Can’t you leave her for the rest of the afternoon at least?”

  “No, Sister.” The irritation was easing back into the detective’s voice. “I told you I’m in a hurry.”

  “All right,” she said. “Why don’t you wait by the playground window while I get her and her things?”

  She took the detective into the center, to a bay window giving onto an interior playground. Every time Angelo looked through that window he felt tears rise in his eyes. It was a playground like any other in the city, seesaws and swings, a jungle gym and sandboxes. The children playing there now were a little younger than Maria, probably the class below hers. He watched them, his heart aching for them, sensing the agony in the distorted faces, the pain in their deformed mouths, the frustration raging in those little bodies against fingers that refused a mind’s commands, at legs that tottered uncertainly with each effort at movement. He could read the passing spasms of sadness in those bright eyes, the silent barometer of their revolt against life’s injustices. How often had he seen it in his own daughter’s eyes?