Dorothy shuddered. Every since poor Tom’s boy had told her he had rented his father’s house to foreigners for Christmas, she had wondered what kind of people they were. Was this the answer? There was only a second’s hesitation before she picked up the phone.
“Operator,” she said, “please give me the police.”
Al Feldman’s despairing plea for time had affected everyone in the NSC conference room from the President to the twenty-five-year-old Vassar girl responsible for keeping track of the classified documents flowing in and out of the chamber. It was as if the exhausted, desperate Chief of Detective’s voice had suddenly incarnated for each man and woman in the room the five million New Yorkers whose lives were at risk because of the decision they had made. Bennington of the CIA was the first to break the stricken silence.
“Mr. President,” he said. “I have a suggestion. It’s a tactic that might allow us to convert the limited extension of his ultimatum into an indefinite one. Let’s get Begin. Tell him we want to go ahead with our West Bank operation. Except it will be mutually agreed it’s just a show to gain us time to let New York find the device. He’ll certainly agree to that.
Then we’ll tell Qaddafi we’re going in. Invite him to send observers from his embassy in Damascus along with our forces to verify that we really are doing it. Just landing and deploying our forces and moving them up to the West Bank is going to take close to ten hours. If it comes to it, we can actually move in, fight a couple of sham battles with the Israelis. The important thing is, if we can get him to agree to this, then we, not Qaddafi, will be controlling the time element in the crisis.”
The President looked around the room, a first glimmer of hope registering in his face. “Caspar,” he asked the Secretary of Defense, “what do you think?”
“Mr. President, try it. With so much at stake, it’s worth trying anything.”
A police car bearing two uniformed officers of the Spring Valley police screeched to a stop in front of Dorothy Bums’s home three minutes after her call. Visibly excited, she confided to them what she had seen and heard.
“Probably been watching too many TV programs lately,” the first officer whispered to his partner as they trudged through the snow to the house next door. When there was no answer at the front door, they circled the house looking for telltale signs of a forced entry. There were none. They returned to the front door and decided to give it a try. It was open.
The first officer drew his pistol and poked his head inside. “Anybody home?” he shouted.
Silence followed his cry. “We’d better have a look,” he said, advancing down the hallway. He paused at the door of the den and looked inside.
“Jesus Christ!” he yelled back to his deputy. “Get the State Policel The old lady wasn’t kidding!”
An atmosphere as despairing, as hopeless, as that in the NSC conference room gripped Qaddafi’s command post in the basement of the Villa Pietri.
As always, even when he was in a crowded room, Qaddafi was alone, slouched at the head of the table, morose and withdrawn. The men around him murmured their exchanges in restrained little ripples of noise that would not intrude on their chieftain’s silence.
The passing hours had brought to the Libyan and the men around him the growing certitude that their ghastly gamble was failing. Each understood full well what the consequences of failure would be. As the time had passed with no sign of Israeli acquiescence to their demands, Qaddafi had withdrawn, spiritually, from their gathering. He was a man of dark and unpredictable moods, capable of temper tantrums so violent he could, literally, smash the furniture of his office and roll on the floor in rage.
Once he had personally shaved the head of his Prime Minister, Salam Jalloud, because the latter had violated the puritanical standards of his revolution by consorting with bar girls in Rome. And there were his periodic retreats to the desert, pilgrimages to his past in which be sought in the austerity and loneliness of the sands the strength to confront a world he did not always choose to understand.
The dark, brooding eyes studied the men around him now. Like most revolutions, his had been nourished by the blood of its makers. Of the band of brothers that had overthrown Libya’s King Idris in 1969, only Jalloud remained. The others were dead, disgraced or in exile, replaced by a new generation of followers of more certain loyalty and less menacing demeanor. Qaddvtfi pondered each face in turn. Which among them would remain loyal to the end of this trial? And which among them would be the first to raise the dagger, to accuse their leader of the dictator’s unforgivable sin-failure?
A shout from the communications center next door interrupted his meditation. “Ya sidi!” a clerk cried. “It is the American airplane. The President wishes to talk to you. The Americans have accepted your terms!”
The men in the room let out a collective jubilant roar of triumph; they did, that is, with one exception-Qaddafi. He remained motionless and unsmiling, fixed in the position he had been in for hours. Finally he raised a finger.
“Tell the President this time I will talk to him,” he intoned.
Three police cars of the New York State Police, C Troop, their red rooftop lights slowly revolving, lined the road in front of the house in which Whalid Dajani had been killed. An ambulance, its doors open, stood in the driveway. Across the street, a circle of neighbors and of kids who had interrupted their afternoon walk home from school looked on in shock and concern. Murder was not an everyday occurrence in the quiet byways of Spring Valley.
In the den, the police hovered around Whalid’s body. The impact of his errant bullet was circled in red on the wall. A fingerprinting team was already dusting for prints while a trooper with a piece of chalk traced out the exact position of his corpse on the floor. Above him, a police photographer recorded the scene from every angle.
“Take his prints down at the morgue,” the captain in charge of the investigation ordered, “and tell the coroner to run an autopsy on him.” He looked at the broken fifth of Johnnie Walker on the floor, then cast a scornful glance at Whalid’s corpse. “I’ll bet he’ll find enough alcohol in there to open a distillery. Come on,” he said, squatting down beside the body, “let’s see if he’s got any ID on him.”
While he started through Whalid’s pants, another trooper picked up the suit coat. He pulled out Whalid’s passport and flicked it open. “Hey, Charlie,” he said to the captain, “he’s a fucking Arab.”
The captain held the passport photo up beside Whalid’s face, still contorted by the agony of his dying struggle for air. He grunted, satisfied at the matchup, then went through its pages until he found what he was looking for: the entry stamp an INS officer at JFK had placed on it. “Poor bastard, didn’t have time to do much Christmas shopping,” he said, noting the date, December 9. “I’ll go down to the car and call this in.”
The captain, unaware of the emergency in New York, sauntered out of the house, stopping as he did to order the ambulance men to pick up the body.
At the curb he lit a cigarette, then finally picked up the speaker of his car radio. “Okay,” he said when his headquarters replied. “I have the details on this stiff “we got up here in Spring Valley.”
Muammar al-Qaddafi listened impassively to the President’s recital of his proposed U.S. movement into the West Bank. No such restraint fettered the men around him. They were already preparing to celebrate the enormity of the triumph their leader’s gamble had won.