“I certainly can, Commissioner, but I also have no trouble imagining the menace this poses to the people of this city.”
“Absolutely. Our problem is it would be sheer, utter madness to order the evacuation of Manhattan Island for one barrel of chlorine gas. That leaves us only one alternative, finding that barrel before the public learns it’s here. And that’s where we need your help, Mr. Gelb. If this leaks to the public before we find it, there’s going to be panic out there. I shudder to think of the hysteria that could overtake New York if this gets out.
“I’m leveling with you, Mr. Gelb, and I’ve got to ask you for your help and cooperation in return. I know how you people feel up there about requests like this, but I’ve got to plead with you to hold off printing this until we can pin down the location of that barrel.”
Gelb interrupted him. “How did that barrel get here, Commissioner?”
“Well, we’re not one hundred percent certain.”
“Christ, you mean there’s a barrel of chlorine gas in this city and your people aren’t sure how the hell it got here?”
“Our suspicion is that it came in through the piers, in a shipment of heavy petroleum products. But, frankly, our concern is not how it got here but where it went.”
“Commissioner.” Gelb was about to address himself to Bannion’s demand when he stopped. “What about all those people up at the Seventh Regiment Armory with their rented vans? What have they got to do with this?”
“They’re a federal unit looking for any telltale gas leakages that could give us an indication of where the barrel is. Now, I want to tell you, Mr. Gelb, we’ll keep you informed on this. You have my word on it. But I beg you, for God’s sake, hold off printing it until we’ve found the barrel.”
“I’m not authorized to make a commitment like that, Commissioner. That’s up to Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Rosenthal.”
“Well, I cannot stress enough just how important this is. I’ll take it up with Mr. Sulzberger myself if you like.”
God help us, Bannion thought as he hung up, when they find out we’ve been lying to them.
Angelo Rocchia held the horn of the salesman’s Pontiac down until its strident blare brought three shirt-sleeved FBI agents scurrying out into the cold from their Hertz garage.
“Open those damn doors,” the detective ordered, waving at the entrance of their improvised forensic laboratory. “I got a present for you.”
His reception was anything but warm. “A yellow truck,” the director who had earlier told him to wait out in the office muttered when Angelo outlined his theory. “That’s all you’re going on? Some guy with a yellow truck scraped his fender?”
“At least you know it wasn’t an Avis truck hit him,” Angelo replied. “You can do a spectrographic analysis to see if you can get a paint matchup.
I’ll get a bunch of guys and go back there to see if we can find the guy who left the note.”
The lab director lapsed into silence studying the barely visible scrape on the Pontiac’s fender. “Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “It’ll take some time.
But I guess it’s probably worth it.”
When Angelo came back into the garage after calling in his request for a dozen plainclothesmen, the Bureau’s experts were already at work. One of them was moving some kind of gray metallic scanner along the fender.
Probably some high-intensity magnetic device, the detective thought. He must be trying to pull out any metallic scraps embedded in there. Curious, he squatted beside the man.
“What’s that you got there?” he asked.
“Geiger counter.”
“Geiger counter!”
“Checking to see if there’s any lingering radiation on here.”
Angelo’s face whitened. He felt his thigh muscles sag and he teetered back on his heels so that he had to thrust a hand to the cold concrete floor to keep himself from falling over. Those lying bastards, he thought. So that’s why they had those classified reports. They had this all the time and they didn’t tell us. Lied to us, kept us deliberately in the dark.
He staggered to his feet. Rand was over by a workbench busily interrogating an FBI technician. He knew. Those bastards from South Dakota and Tacoma, Washington, in their skinny ties and their wash-and-dry suits, they told them, sure, because they’re feds. But me, the guy whose city this is, the guy who’s got his people here, me they don’t trust. He was abreast of Rand now, and he struck the younger man’s shoulder with such force he started to tumble forward.
“Cut the bullshit,” Angelo snarled. “You and I got work to do.”
He almost ran to his car, then, when they were inside, slammed the door shut with such a furious jolt Rand looked up perplexed.
“What’s the matter?”
“You knew it all the time, didn’t you?”
“Knew what, for God’s sake?”
“You’ve been giving me a stroke like everybody else, haven’t you? It isn’t chlorine gas they got in that goddamn barrel. It’s a fucking atomic bomb.”
Angelo turned his ignition key so hard he almost snapped it off in the lock, then jammed the car into gear.
“This is my own home, my own people and they don’t trust me!” he roared.
There was a world of feeling in his shout, of fear and rage, bitterness and humiliation, the savage, wounded pride of the stag at bay. “You, a halfass kid out of a Louisiana law school, doesn’t even have two years in the Bureau, they trust, but me, a guy with thirty years on his ticket, me they don’t trust. All those fucking years and when they got something like this they still don’t trust youl”
He stomped so hard on his accelerator, the car fishtailed forward over the rutted snow and ice, its spinning tires shrieking in protest. The yardman he had quizzed earlier looked on, amazed. Man, he thought, he never going to get where he going driving like that.
Three hours. With a glance at the clock in the NSC conference room, the President measured once again how imminent was the horror facing them.
It was six minutes to noon. Exactly three hours and six minutes remained before the expiration of Qaddafi’s ultimatum. Men cling to hopes in a crisis as a dying believer clings to his faith, and the President still strove to cling to his despite the remorseless, inexorable pressures wringing them from his soul. At least in the last great American crisis in Iran, the United States had not had to decide its actions in the face of an ultimatum, an ultimatum laid down by a man the President had no doubt was ready to wreak the nuclear holocaust on six million innocent people.
Suddenly he interrupted the desultory flow of conversation around him. He had had an idea. It wasn’t much of an idea, but, in the situation, anything was worthwhile. “Jack,” he told his National Security Assistant. “I want to talk to Abe Stern.”
“Abe,” he said when he got the Mayor on their tie line to New York, “the sands are running down. In a short while, a very short while, we are going to have to act, and once we do there will be no turning back.”
“I understand, Mr. President,” Stern replied. “What do you propose to do?”
“The advance elements of the Rapid Deployment Force are on the ground in Germany now, refueled and ready to move on to the Middle East. We received secret assurance from President Assad in Syria half an hour ago that they’ll be allowed to land in Damascus. The Sixth Fleet Amphibious Marine Landing Force would land in Lebanon simultaneously with their arrival. The two would hook up, then move into the West Bank to clear out the settlements.”
“The Israelis will fight, Mr. President.”
“I know, Abe.” The President’s words came in a soft groan. “But I will make our very limited objectives clear to them, and the rest of the world, before we go in.”