There had been a bitter debate just before dawn over the potential use of the media. Feldman had urged giving the Dajanis’ photos and the cop-killer cover story to the papers and television stations. That way they could have mobilized most of the city’s population in the search. He had been overruled by Eastman in Washington. The National Security Assistant’s mistrust of Qaddafi after the scanner incident was total; there was every chance one or all of the Dajanis were kamikaze volunteers baby-sitting the bomb, and the sight of their photos on television might cause them to panic and set it off.
Now, with his orders out, his plans set, the Chief had nothing to do but think and wait. For ten minutes he had been doing just that, sipping black coffee and trying to remember what he might have overlooked. Only by the greatest act of will was he able to keep himself from picking up the phone on his desk, calling his home out in Forest Hills and quietly but firmly telling his wife to get the hell out of there.
He was thinking about doing just that when he saw the Police Commissioner, red-eyed and exhausted, standing over him. I wonder how Bannion is dealing with this one, Feldman asked himself. The Commissioner had ostentatiously moved back to Manhattan from the Island after his appointment to “demonstrate a sense of solidarity with the people of New York.” I’ll bet, the Chief told himself maliciously, Marie Bannion’s demonstrating her solidarity with the people of New York right now barrel-assing through Yonkers in an unmarked police car.
Then, looking into his Commissioner’s blue eyes alight with the same fright he felt, Feldman was ashamed.
“What do you think, Chief?” Bannion asked. “Can we make it?”
Feldman took a swallow of his bitter black coffee and stared up at Bannion.
For a moment he sat there looking at him, thinking, appraising both the situation and his answer. Why lie? the Chief told himself. Why con him or myself or anybody else?
“No, Commissioner,” he answered, “not in the time we got left, no way.”
Angry and frustrated, Angelo Rocchia stalked the huge parking area of the Hertz Rent-A-Truck agency at 354 Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, its expanse filled with a motley collection of trucks painted not in the familiar Hertz yellow and blue but in the commercial colors of the agency’s leasing clients: the Omaha Hotel Supply Company, Junior’s Restaurant, Sabrett’s Kosher Frankfurters, F. Rabinowitz Caterers.
It was already close to midmorning, and, as he had expected he was going to be, he was nothing more than a glorified gofer for the FBI forensic experts pulling apart the truck the Dajanis had used to pick up their load of barrels at the Brooklyn Army Terminal pier only a few blocks away. In fact, he wasn’t even a gofer. The FBI men were so studiously absorbed in their work they had completely ignored him.
The truck was lying in a hundred pieces on the floor of one of the agency’s three garages. It had been sealed off to its curious employees and turned into a miniature crime laboratory. Even Angelo had to admire the thoroughness of the FBI effort. Every one of the thirty-seven bumps, scrapes, indentations on the truck’s body and fenders, some so small they were barely visible, had been circled in red. Spectrographic-analysis equipment had been flown up from Washington and set up to examine paint chips from each, hoping to find one that would reveal some clue as to where the truck had gone when the Dajanis had rented it on Friday. The young couple who had taken it out Saturday had been brought in and grilled to see if the Dajanis had left anything behind, a matchbox, a restaurant napkin or carton, a map, anything that might have suggested where they had been.
The tires had been pulled apart, every speck of dirt and grime impregnated in their treads vacuumed out and studied for the one peculiarity that might indicate a particular place in which the truck had been parked. The floor mat had been carefully vacuumed and the results studied in the search for a speck of soil from the Dajanis’ shoes that might indicate the kind of ground over which they had been walking.
Nothing was too outlandish. The FBI had learned that painters had been working on Friday on the Willis Avenue Bridge linking the Bronx and Lipper Manhattan. They had gone over the van’s roof with microscopes to see if even a speck of paint could be found there to establish that the truck had used that route into the city. Someone had been through the computers at the Parking Violations Bureau at Park Avenue South and Thirty-first looking for unpaid parking tickets. That was SUP in New York since the Son of Sam murders.
It was marvelous, Angelo thought, precise, scientific and marvelous; yet he knew very well that up until now the whole staggering FBI effort had revealed virtually nothing. The FBI had rapidly determined with photographs that the rental had indeed been made by Kamal and Whalid just before ten Friday morning. They had explained that they were going to move some furniture to a new apartment. That in itself indicated that someone had briefed them on rental procedures, because had they said they were going to make a pickup of commercial goods from the docks their stolen driver’s license wouldn’t have worked. They would have needed a commercial license. Their whole effort would have ended there. The desk clerk in the trailer that served as the renting office had remembered that Whalid had inquired about the load the Econoline van they’d been offered could carry and had seemed relieved to learn it could handle five thousand pounds with no problems.
They had left, according to the time automatically punched onto the rental agreement, at 9:57. Kamal had returned the truck, alone, at 6:17, after the rental office had closed. The only other precise thing they had on it was the time, 11:22, that the guard at the gate down on the pier had signed them out with their load on his dispatch sheet.
Angelo stared across Fourth Avenue to the kids playing in an open schoolyard, the red brick outline of Engine Company 23 and the spire of the Church of St. Thomas Aquinas. He knew this area. Forty, fifty years ago, the two-and three-story turn-of-the-century tenements had housed an Italian neighborhood, heavy Mob turf. He was lost in his recollections when he heard a voice beside him hissing, “Hey, what are you guys looking for in there? A murderer?”
“Yeah,” Angelo answered. He recognized the yardman who had checked in the van. “A murderer who hasn’t got around to murdering anybody yet.” Casually he draped a friendly arm around the man’s shoulders. “Listen, let’s just go through what happened last Friday night one more time.”
“Hey.” The man’s irritation was evident. “I told them guys in there already. Friday this place”-he gestured at the cluttered yard-“was a goddamn ice-skating rink. What the hell am I going to do, waste my time talking to some guy checking in a van when I gotta clean this place up? Angelo resumed his pacing and his recollections. Suddenly he stopped. Snow and ice. It was a proven fact. You could look it up on the computer.
Snowstorms were hell on the accident rate, particularly the first snowstorm of the year. And what, he asked himself, do Arabs know about driving on snow? They didn’t know snow from shit.
The men waiting for the President in the NSC conference room were as exhausted as he was. A few had managed to catnap an hour or two in a chair; most were living on coffee and their dwindling reserves of nervous energy. As soon as he sat down, Eastman reviewed the one substantial development of the last two hours. The Chairman of the Central Committee had just sent a report from the Russian ambassador in Tripoli. On Soviet insistence he had pleaded with Qaddafi to resume negotiations with Washington. The Libyan had been absolutely unyielding.
“At least, for once we’re getting some help from our Soviet friends,” the President noted grimly. “What I’m interested in now is the status of the Rapid Deployment Force,” he told Eastman. “Get the military in here.”