A few doors away from the room in which Abe Stern was completing his telephone call to Jerusalem, the handful of men directing the search operation gathered around the FBI’s Quentin Dewing’s table for a hastily called conference. For the first time there was an undercurrent of hysteria in their gathering, the first stirrings of panic before the enormity of their failure. Their concerns were worsened by the calls coming every fifteen minutes now from the White House, frantic demands for news, making it painfully clear how close the center of government was to panic, too.
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.