“What are all those rented trucks doing here?” she asked McAndrews. “Are they part of your exercise?”
“Yes,” the Major answered. “We used them to bring some material in. Infrastructure support.”
“Since when,” Grace inquired, “is the Army so wealthy it can afford to go out and rent trucks with the taxpayers’ money instead of using its own vehicles?”
Major McAndrews gave another nervous little laugh.
“Well, ma’am, our military vehicles are pretty cumbersome to maneuver around crowded cities like Manhattan. They’re apt to tie up traffic something fierce. So we use these rented trucks. To avoid inconveniencing the civilian population, so to speak.” The FBI agent masquerading as as an Army major smiled, immensely pleased by the nimbleness of his reply.
“I see.” Grace offered him her hand. “Oh, by the way, there’s a young MP lieutenant here named Daly who was very kind to my son last night. I promised I’d have a cup of coffee with him if I came back to do a story. Do you suppose someone could find him for me?”
“How many Hertz trucks you figure there are moving in New York on any given day?” Angelo Rocchia addressed his question to the young Irishman running the Fourth Avenue truckrental agency.
“We’re doing thirty-five to forty a day right here, and we got two other Brooklyn locations. You add in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens. Man, I don’t know. Four, five hundred at the least. Maybe more on a big day. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
Angelo was sitting in the manager’s cramped office. Through an interior window he could follow the activities of the FBI forensic people in the garage. They’re doing everything they can with that truck, he thought, but I don’t think you can count on it. Not unless we get more time to find this barrel of gas than I think we do. Before him was the steadily thickening accumulation of reports of the FBI’s operation. One file was missing.
Classified, the head of the FBI forensic team had told him.
What was so important in this that the government had to classify it, wouldn’t let the people who had to find the barrel know what it was? Angelo grabbed a peanut from his pocket and flipped it into his mouth, pondering that, then once again the idea that had struck him a few minutes before in the yard popped into his head. Far out, he thought, really far out. Still, I got nothing to do here except wait for some son of a bitch from the FBI to ask me to run out for coffee. A bunch of telephone calls is all, he told himself. What else do I have to do?
He took out his notepad and picked up the telephone.
“First Precinct?” he asked. “Give me your I-24 man.” The I-24 man was the precinct desk clerk, the officer in charge of the station-house blotter which recorded the daily flow of crimes in each of the seventy-two precincts of the New York Police Department from wife beatings and drunken brawls to murders.
“Hey,” he said when he had identified himself. “Pull out your sheets for last Friday and tell me if you got any Sixty-ones on there for leaving the scene.”
Grace Knowland smiled affectionately at the earnest young officer opposite her. They were sipping coffee on the stools of a Madison Avenue drugstore, the lieutenant shyly telling Grace about himself and just as shyly hinting at how much he’d like to see her again.
“Of course, I’m not really an MP,” Lieutenant Daly said. “I’m infantry.
This is temporary duty.”
“Well, you were lucky to get it. It must be tremendous to be assigned to New York just like that.”
“Not as tremendous as you’d think. I mean, they moved us here in such a hurry, we have to sleep on the floor in there in sleeping bags and live off cold C rations.”
“What!” Grace’s anger was that of a million mothers listening to their soldier son’s woes. “You mean the U.S. Army can afford to rent a bunch of Hertz and Avis trucks and leave them sitting around that armory all day long and they can’t afford to give you boys a hot meal?”
“Oh, those aren’t Army trucks.”
“They’re not?”
“No. It’s the civilians running that exercise in there that use them.”
“Civilians? Why should they want trucks like that to. study snow removal?”
“Beats me. They have some kind of technical equipment they put in there.
Then they go out and drive around for hours. Probably measuring something.
Pollution, maybe.”
Grace swallowed the last sips of her coffee, reflecting thoughtfully on his words. “Probably. Here.” She reached for the check. “Let me have that.
Damn!” she groaned, picking her loose change from her pocketbook. “I think I left my compact down in the major’s office. Could you escort me back down to look for it?”
Ten minutes later she gave the young officer a friendly kiss on the cheek and ran down the armory steps, waving to a taxi moving up Park.
As she slipped into the back seat, she pulled out her notebook and scribbled a number on its cover. It was for that scrap of information, not a missing compact, that she had returned to the armory. The number was the New Jersey license of one of the rented Avis trucks parked on the armory floor.
Abe Stern surveyed the frightened and dismayed men around him at the underground command post below Foley Square as Quentin Dewing began their now hourly review of the situation. It was already 10:30 A.M. and the almost jubilant atmosphere that had accompanied the dispatch of thousands of New York police officers with their photographs of the three Dajanis onto the sidewalks of the city had disappeared as the minutes had ticked by without a single conclusive lead or sighting.
The Mayor tried hard to concentrate on the reports of the men at the conference table, but he couldn’t. All he could think about were the people, the people for whose lives he was responsible walking on the streets above the command post, going into the courthouses, the subways, sitting in offices, in City Hall Park, up in the towers of the World Trade Center or the crowded flats of the Alfred E. Smith housing project. Down here they were going to live if that awful device, wherever it was, went off. They had provisions, real provisions, not the rotten and inedible protein crackers in the shelters. They would allow them to survive.
Eventually, they would be able to crawl out of here into whatever satanic landscape was left on the ground above them.
What about the people up there? What, Abe Stern had kept asking himself, is my moral obligation to them? He had at his disposal a facility that was unique in the United States. It was called Line 1,000 and had originally been set up by John Lindsay in the hot and fearful summers of the sixties.
It was a direct radio and television link from his desk at City Hall and his study at Gracie Mansion to the control desk of WNYC, the city’s broadcasting station. On his order, the WNYC desk man would make three calls to the three primary Emergency Broadcasting System stations, WNBG, WCBS and WABC. All three stations on receiving that call would push an emergency alert button which set an alarm bell ringing in the control room of every radio and television station in the New York area. When it went off, those stations were required by law to interrupt their regular programming and request their audiences to stand by for an emergency message. Within two minutes of picking up Line 1,000 the Mayor’s voice could be heard live on over one hundred radio and television stations. Not even the President could address his countrymen so rapidly in an emergency.