Perhaps, Abe Stern pondered, I should go on the air and tell the people to get out of the city any way they can. That idiot Oglethorpe they had sent up from Washington yesterday had said that panic, the classic fire-in-the-nightclub, everyone-rushes-for-the-door-and-no-one-getsout kind of panic, might not be applicable to this situation. People tended to behave much better in great crises than you expected them to do. And even if Oglethorpe was wrong and there was pandemonium, at least, as he’d told the President yesterday, he’d have saved some lives.
His thoughts were interrupted by a babble of noise from the squawk box on the conference table. Since last night they had been linked by a direct line to the men and women trying to manage the crisis from the NSC conference room, and he recognized the President’s voice inquiring anxiously about the progress of their search. He’s counting on us, Stern thought, listening to the worried string of words pouring from the box. All that confident “Don’t worry, Abe, we’ll talk him out of it” business of yesterday had disappeared. Three times the Chief Executive reported that they had tried to reestablish contact with Qaddafi in the past hour.
Nothing had worked; the Libyan remained adamant in his refusal to talk. The President sketched out the military preparations he had ordered for a forcible removal of the West Bank settlements if it came to that. Stern paled. He was anything but an ardent Zionist., but the prospect of his countrymen and the Israelis coming into conflict due to the diabolical plotting of this zealot in Libya sickened him. Still, he thought, if that’s the price we have to pay to save this city, so be it.
Grace Knowland pushed open the doors of the New York Times Building and strode quickly up to the security guards barring the way to the elevators. As usual, the lobby of the most influential newspaper in the world was vibrant with an air of subdued purpose. From one wall, a marble bust of the Times’s founder, Adolph Ochs, surveyed the passing throng with grim, unsmiling mien, a reminder to all who entered its precincts of the high sense of purpose with which he had endowed his paper.
The front page of Ochs’s journal still bore his slogan, “All the news that’s fit to print,” and six million trees a year fell as a consequence of the determined efforts of the Times’s editors to honor his imperious command.
From the reception rooms of the Kremlin to gossip culled in the locker rooms of Madison Square Garden, the seventy-two-page paper on sale in the vending machine opposite Ochs’s bust this December morning contained more news, more statistics, more figures, more results, more interviews, more analysis and more commentary than any other newspaper in the world.
Grace’s destination was the newsroom on the third floor. It sprawled over an acre and a half, an area so vast that its editors had, on occasion, employed binoculars to keep track of their reporters’ movements and loudspeakers to summon them from their desks. Today, the place looked more like the actuarial clerk’s bullpen at Metropolitan Life than a set for Front Page. Diffused overhead lighting bathed the place in its sterile glow; chest-high partitions broke the area into a series of little mazes; there was enough fake-wood Formica around to equip half a dozen fast-food franchises, and, final assault on the sensibilities of the paper’s oldtime reporters, there was even carpeting on the floor.
Grace’s first gesture was to telephone Avis’s New York headquarters. She quickly obtained the information she wanted: the truck she had noted at the armory belonged to the company’s New Brunswick, New Jersey, truckrental agency. Catching the bureaucracy of New York City in the heedless expenditure of the taxpayers’ money was one of her special pleasures, and from the instant she spotted the rental trucks lined up on the armory floor her reporter’s instincts had told her that once again she had caught some government agency stupidly squandering the city’s meager resources.
She picked up the phone again and dialed the New Brunswick agency, glancing around as she did to be sure no one was near enough to overhear her. What she was about to do was considered a sin at The New York Times — not a mortal sin, perhaps, but a good, solid, venial one.
“This is Desk Officer Lucia Harris of the New York State Police, Pauling Barracks,” she told the girl who answered the phone. “We’ve had a motor-vehicle collision here involving one of your vehicles. The driver was DOA at Pauling General, and unfortunately he didn’t have any ID on him. Can you give me the details on your rental agreement so we can run a trace on him?” She gave the girl the number of the truck.
“It’ll take a moment. Shall I call you back?”
“That’s all right. I’ll hold.”
A few minutes later the Avis girl was on the phone again. “His driver’s license gives him as John McClintock, 104 Clear View Avenue, Las Vegas.
It’s Nevada license 432701-6, issued May 4, 1979. Valid until May 4, 1983.”
Grace jotted the information down on her notepad. Why, in God’s name, would anybody look for a snowremoval expert in Las Vegas? She glanced at her watch. It was a few minutes past eleven, just after eight in Las Vegas.
From directory assistance she got the telephone number of a John McClintock at the address on the agreement. His phone rang, unanswered, for a long time before a woman replied.
“May I speak to Mr. John McClintock, please?”
“I’m sorry. He’s not here,” the voice replied.
“I see. Is he in Las Vegas?”
The woman hesitated. “Who’s calling? This is Mrs. McClintock.”
“Oh,” Grace answered quickly. “This is the First National City Bank in New York. We have a transfer here for him and I need his instructions on how to handle it. Could you tell me where I can reach him?”
“I’m afraid I can’t,” Mrs. McClintock replied. “He’s out of town for a few days.”
“Is there some number where I could contact him?”
This time there was a long pause before Mrs. McClintock answered. “Well, I don’t think I’m really allowed to tell you that. He’s away on government business. You’d better contact his office down at the Federal Building., Grace thanked Mrs. McClintock and hung up, feeling, as she did, a nervous chill in her intestines, the first flow of her reporter’s adrenaline warning her that something was very wrong with this story. A few minutes later, she was through to the Federal Building in Las Vegas.
“Q Section Safeguards, O’Reilly speaking,” a voice answered when Grace got McClintock’s extension. Safeguards, she asked herself, puzzled. Safeguards against what?
“Mr. McClintock, please.”
“This is his desk, but he’s out of town for a few days.”
Grace gave a little giggle which, she hoped, would convince O’Reilly that he was dealing with a dumb woman. “Oh,” she said, “what’s he off safeguarding?”
“Who’s calling?” The voice was chill and formal.
Again Grace invoked Citibank. “Can you tell me where I can reach him?”
“No, I can’t. The nature of his business and his whereabouts are classified information.”
Stunned, Grace set the telephone back in its socket. Why would the U.S. government feel it had to make a snow-removal exercise in New York classified information? And bring in people from Las Vegas to work on it?
My God, she realized, those trucks have nothing to do with snow removal!
That’s just a cover.
She thought of Angelo’s phrase last night, “a typical detective’s day, running around looking for a needle in a haystack.” And the Mayor. Why had the President given him a Presidential jet to fly back to New York yesterday?
She called Angelo’s office. There was no answer. She took out the secret NYPD telephone directory he had given her and frantically began to call, one after another, the offices of a dozen senior detectives. Not a single one answered.