Whalid ignored him. “Why go on waiting around here? Why don’t we get going now?” he asked.
“Because our orders are to wait here until the announcement is made or the bomb explodes.”
“For God’s sake, Kamal, don’t be such a fool! That bomb’s never going to explode.”
“Never? Why not?” Kamal’s blue eyes were chill and lusterless as they contemplated his brother.
“Because the Americans are going to agree. They haven’t got any choice. You know that.”
“There is only one thing I know for sure, my brother.” Whalid squirmed uncomfortably listening to the flat, menacing tone of Kamal’s voice. “That is that we have orders and I will see we follow them. All of us.”
“We found it!”
The jubilant shout echoed through the silent chamber, as jarring, as discordant, as a shout in a library. The room in which it rang out was the operational center of the United States’s ultrasecret communications intelligence agency, the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland.
The scores of men and women hunched over the blinking lights of individual computer terminals in the room were searching for what an Air Force colonel had earlier described to the President as the right snowflake in a blizzard an electronic blizzard. Their computer terminals flashed out the distinctive print of every sound, phone call, radio message, Morse-code transmission moving in and out of the East Coast of the United States. They were being compared with the sounds captured by the U.S.S. Allen that had come out of Libya and had been relayed to the NSA’s computers. From the instant Qaddafi agreed to extend his ultimatum, the search had been on for the signal the Agency was sure he would have had to send to reprogram the detonator of his bomb.
The man who had found it, a balding forty-two-yearold Ph.D. from MIT, leaped from his console. The signal was nothing more than a 1.2-second burst of noise, a string of zeroes and ones, the binary system of transmission in which all international communications, even those of the human voice, were made. But it matched up perfectly with a burst caught by the Allen coming from the Libyan seacoast a few miles from the Villa Pietri a few hundredths of a second before the NSA’s scanners had intercepted it hurtling toward Manhattan.
The MIT scientist took his data to another computer bank and, employing triangulation and electronic devices, some so secret their existence was unknown outside of the NSA headquarters, wrested a vital secret from the overpopulated orbital plane of the earth: he discovered which of the thousands of satellites littering the skies Qaddafi was using to transmit his signals.
By the time the Dajanis had settled into their upstate safe house, the search for their hidden bomb was already well under way. On the waterfront, the NEST and FBI teams sweeping the rotting piers protuding into the Hudson found rats, garbage, winos, the battered desks and upturned chairs of Customs officers who had once, in the heyday of those docks, swept through steamer trunks from Vuitton and matched leather baggage from Mark Cross. They found frightened stockbrokers from Pelham, aspiring lawyers from Sullivan and Cromwell, CPAs from Price Waterhouse, layout artists from Jackson, McGee, a fashion designer apprenticed to Charley Cole cowering in the shadows of the piers’ “reception rooms,”
some nearly hysterical with fright; everything, in short, except a trace of the bomb for which they were searching.
Across town, progress was slower. The NEST-FBI teams in their Con Ed overalls were able to move quickly, but the door-to-door police follow-up was a nightmare. Dozens of apartments in the area were unoccupied at the time; owners away at work. The police could have used their battering rams on them, but that, Abe Stern and the Commissioner knew, would provoke unbelievable problems. They would have to station a precious policeman at every opened door to stand guard. Otherwise New York’s litigious citizenry, Stern pointed out, would be certain to sue the city for millions in real or imagined losses-assuming there would be a city left for them to sue. At the police teams’ recommendation, a list was made of all unoccupied apartments for a follow-up effort if the first full sweep of the search area failed to turn up Qaddafi’s device.
And there were those determinedly civil-rights-conscious New Yorkers who were not going to let a police officer across their threshold without a search warrant, even if he was ostensibly trying to save them from escaping gas. In that case, a call for a warrant went back to the Sixth Precinct.
There a team of federal judges and U.S. attorneys ordered to duty by the President filled in the protesting citizen’s name and address on a pre-drafted warrant and authorized entry by walkie-talkie.
At 156 Bleecker Street, a pair of detectives burst into a junkies’ shooting gallery. Half a dozen addicts lay around the room on mattresses, some cooking up their next shot, others spaced out in the euphoria of an earlier hit. The detectives kicked over the junkies’ cooker, smashed their hypodermic needles, flushed their dope down the toilet, then left, leaving the uncomprehending addicts to gape at the door slamming shut behind them.
In three different places, search teams stumbled on burglars busting a flat. Having no time to waste on petty thievery, they ordered the astonished burglars to drop their loot and run for the front door.
At Quintana’s Bar in the West Village, the sight of the agents’ shield brought a shower of goodies onto the floor: knives, brass knuckles, pills, coke, pot, heroin; any piece of evidence that the collection of petty crooks in the bar wanted to get rid of before the shakedown they were sure was coming. The agents pocketed the knives, flushed away the pills and the pot, searched the cellar, then stalked out, leaving the bar’s unsearched clients spluttering in rage. There were lovers whose coupling was interrupted or fights momentarily calmed, delinquent muggers routed out of stairwells. In a garret on Cornelia Street police found the decaying corpse of a suicide hanging from the rafter to which he had tied himself, and on Thompson Street the body of an elderly woman who had apparently died of the cold in her unheated flat.
The search turned up barrels of every description: old wine kegs, beer barrels, barrels of chemicals and motor oil, of old rags; even, in a cellar on Washington Place, three barrels of hoarded gasoline left from World War II. Every one had to be carefully, meticulously scrutinized and eliminated by NEST’s scientists.
Each move made out on the streets was carefully, painstakingly logged at the Sixth Precinct on huge maps, on great sheets of photos now covering one whole wall of the station house. Feldman studied the stain of the area searched. It was like a glob of heavy liquid slowly, ever so slowly, spreading over the map. They were in a race between the tantalizing slowness of its advance and the clock, and for the moment, the despairing Chief of Detectives realized, the clock was winning.
In the NSC conference room, the same Air Force colonel who had briefed the President and his advisers shortly after Qaddafi’s threat came in Sunday night stood once again before his charts. “The man has been extremely clever in his choice of a satellite to handle his transmission, Mr. President,” he declared. “He’s using an absolutely forgotten bird up there called Oscar. It was designed for amateur radio enthusiasts and put up by NASA. Quite frankly, once it was hung up there, everybody simply forgot about it. We don’t even carry it in our classified listing of all the satellites currently in space.”
The colonel cleared his throat in nervous acknowledgment of his service’s shortcomings. “And I’ve also got to say that for his purposes it’s the perfect bird. Since these ham radio operators it was designed for can’t afford a lot of expensive equipment, there’s a lot of power in its down leg back to earth. A relatively small receiver could pick up a coded communication like this with no trouble at all.”