Bannion pushed through the circle of admirers around the detective and clapped him heartily on the shoulder. “Great work,” he enthused.
“Wonderful. You’ll get a citation for this. I’m going to try to swing you Chief of the Telegraph Bureau.
Get you inspector’s money for what you did.”
The officer in charge of the Emergency Service Squad joined them. “Excuse me, Commissioner,” he said, “but shouldn’t we put some of those yellow-and-black radiation warning signs around the area?”
Twenty feet away, in the circle of television lights, the three men could hear the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information reading her prepared text for the press: “… explosive charge attached to the barrel of chlorine gas has now been deactivated. The barrel will shortly be transported in a bomb-disposal vehicle to the explosives range at Rodman’s Neck for further analysis and ultimate disposal.”
The Commissioner turned back to the Emergency Squad officer.
“No,” he replied. “Just put out the usual `Crime Scene’ signs.”
Every fiber of Laila Dajani’s being was concentrated on the concrete ribbon of the Saw Mill River Parkway slipping past the wheels of her car.
It was as if it was only now, in this final determined flight, that she had mastered the injunction of her terror master, Carlos: don’t think.
Instead of the doubt and hesitation that had plagued her for days, her mind was focused on one simple, overwhelming desire: to survive, to get to Canada, to Vancouver and home.
So intent was she on her driving that she did not see the blinking red lights or hear the first burst of the siren. When she finally saw the yellow New York State Police car moving up behind her in her rearview mirror, she did not hesitate. Somehow they had found her, traced the car.
But she was not going to let the Americans catch her, not now. She drove the accelerator to the floor.
Behind her, the New York State policeman saw her car bound forward. His instructions were strict. In a case like this you didn’t play the macadam cowboy, try to force the fleeing car off the road like they did in the movies. You kept the fleeing car in sight while you called in help. He reached for his radio.
Laila saw her speedometer register 90, 95, 100, 110. She held the accelerator on the floorboard, trying to squeeze a few last thrusts of force from her car’s straining engine. The police car had dropped back a bit, now its red lights perhaps half a mile behind her. A little bit more, she thought, and she could risk leaving the highway, trying to lose him somehow in the open country.
Her mind was so wrapped up in her flight that she did not see the black stain of ice spreading like an ink blot from the shoulder of the highway, the surface glistening faintly in the path of her headlights. For just an instant as her front wheels hit it, she sensed a gentle, almost euphoric sense of helplessness as the car went into a skid. Then she hit the guard rail. The car flipped like a toy, somersaulted into the southbound lane and crashed upside down. The cascade of sparks from steel scraping concrete that drifted up as it skidded over the highway found in seconds the spillings of her ruptured gas tank.
By the time the state trooper reached the site, the car was an orange ball of flame, too hot to approach. Through their gusting swirls, he caught a quick glimpse of Laila’s corpse, a black stick figure in an orange fog.
“Christ!” said a passerby beside him. “Just like those guys used to burn themselves over in ‘nam.”
The trooper shook his head. “Crazy broad,” he said wonderingly. “Whatever got into her? All I had her for on the radar was seven miles over the limit.”
The first instinctive reaction of most of the relieved and exhausted men in the NSC conference room at the news that the bomb had been found and defused was to urge the President to launch the missiles targeted on Libya in the nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean. It was only 6:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, two and a half hours before the extension of Qaddafi’s ultimatum was due to expire, and he would not be expecting an attack.
The President overruled his advisers. The two million Libyans the U.S.
rockets would destroy would, he argued, be as innocent victims as the citizens of New York would have been.
The Israelis, Bennington pointed out, would do it anyway. No, the President argued, they would not. Their urge to do so would be swiftly tempered by the sobering realization that Qaddafi now had deployed along his eastern frontier a string of missiles capable of causing untold destruction in Israel if an attack was launched on his country. For both Israel and Libya, a day of cold realism was dawning: their mutual possession of the weapons of mass destruction promised them no happier a salvation than possession of those weapons had offered the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. for three decades-the prospect of mutual suicide.
“But for God’s sake, Mr. President,” the CIA chief protested, “we’re not going to let him get away with this?”
“No,” the President replied, “we are not.”
For Muammar al-Qaddafi and the knot of men around him in the Villa Pietri, the two-and-a-half-hour wait for the expiration of their ultimatum was a slow descent toward hell, toward the growing certainty that the gamble had failed, that they and two million of their countrymen would shortly die to pay for the error of their leader whose unbending fanaticism they had been all too ready to follow.
As the minutes rolled by after nine with nothing happening, no rockets streaking toward their shores over the radar screen, their fear and resignation turned to incomprehension. So great had the tension become that the terse message from Washington informing them the bomb had been found and defused was greeted with relief and even, by some, with satisfaction.
Two minutes later, the radio operator returned bearing a second message, marked for the eyes only of the Libyan dictator. Qaddafi paled slightly reading it. Whom was it from? The CIA? The Mossad?
He looked at the men around him, recalling their growing bitterness and disillusionment as the failure of his scheme had become evident. What did it matter whom it was from? The answer was probably here, somewhere in this circle of faces ringing him, jailing him in the consequences of his act.
He rose and left the room, headed up to the villa and down the path to the sea. For a long time he stood there by the water’s edge. Then he turned away to face inland, toward the distant solitude of his desert. As he did, the paper he clasped in his hand, the paper his radio clerk had handed him a few minutes before, dropped to the ground. The wind picked it up and sent it scurrying along the beach, until gradually it disappeared from sight. It bore just fifteen words, a prophetic message from the fourth chapter of the Koran: Wheresoever ye shall be, death will overtake you, even though you be in lofty towers.