At the far end of the room, three Air Force colonels finished assembling a group of charts and maps. The senior officer, a youthful-looking colonel with a tapestry of freckles covering his face, stepped forward.
“Mr. President, gentlemen, we’ve been asked how Qaddafi or a terrorist group could transmit a radio signal from Tripoli to New York to detonate the device on the blueprint we’ve been shown, and what technological resources we possess to prevent such a signal from coming in.
“Basically, there are three ways you can detonate this. The first is a kamikaze volunteer who baby-sits the bomb with orders to set it off at a certain time if he doesn’t get a counterorder.”
“Colonel,” Bennington interjected, “if this threat is really from Qaddafi, that is very much the last method he’d use. He’d want absolute control over this himself.”
“Right, sir,” the colonel replied. “In that case, there are two ways to do it, by telephone or radio.” The room was still, all eyes fixed on the speaker. “To attach the power pack you’d require for this to the ordinary telephone is a very simple matter. Just a question of opening the telephone and connecting a couple of wires. That way the pulse of an incoming call is routed into a preprogrammed signature detector. The pulse opens a circuit into a microprocessor in which a preprogrammed code has been stored. The microprocessor automatically compares it with the code, and if the two match it releases a five-volt charge of electricity into the bomb.
“The beauty of this is a wrong number can’t set it off by mistake; and all a man has to do to explode the bomb is call that number from anywhere in the world and feed it his signal.”
“It’s as easy as that?” the President, jarred, asked.
“Yes, sir, I’m afraid it is.”
“Can New York be isolated, absolutely sealed off from all incoming telephone calls?” the President asked.
“No, sir,” the Colonel replied. “I’m afraid that’s a technological impossibility.”
He turned authoritatively back to his briefing charts. “It is our judgment, however, that in a situation such as the one we’ve been given, Qaddafi or a terrorist group would choose radio to detonate the device. It would offer more flexibility and is completely independent of existing communications systems. For a transmission over this distance, he’d have to use long waves which bounce off the ionosphere and come back down to earth. That means low frequencies.”
“How many frequencies would be available to him for something like this?”
the President asked.
“From Tripoli to New York, a megahertz. One million cycles.”
“Ore million!” The President rubbed the stub of his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Could we jam all one million of those frequencies?”
“Sir, if you did that you’d wipe out all our own communications. We’d close down the police, the FBI, the military, the fire departments, everything we’d need in an emergency.”
“Never mind. Suppose I gave the order, could we do it?”
“No, sir.”
“Why?”
“We simply don’t have the transmitter capacity.”
“How about all our jamming devices in Europe?”
“They’re useless in this case. Too far away.”
“He’s going to need something to receive this radio signal in New York,”
Bennington remarked. “Some kind of directional antenna.”
“Yes, sir, the easiest thing would be to put one in a standard television antenna on a rooftop and connect it to a pre-amplifier. Then the signal could be picked up and transmitted to his bomb wherever it is in the building over the television antenna cable.”
“Surely you could put a fleet of helicopters over Manhattan and scan the frequencies he might use. Get his device to answer back, then pick it up by direction finders, triangulation?”
“Yes, sir, we have the capacity to do that. But it would work only if his system is programmed to respond. If it’s only programmed to receive, we’d get no reply.”
“Well, there’s another way to do it if it turns out to be from Qaddafi,”
Bennington said. His pipe was out and everyone in the room had to hang attendant on his words while he struck a match. “Explode half a dozen nukes in the atmosphere over Libya. That’ll set up an electromagnetic blanket that will smother any radio communications out of there for at least two hours. Shut them down completely.”
“Mr. President.” It was Eastman. “For my part I don’t believe this threat is really from Qaddafi; but in the unlikely event that it is, we’re going to have to make some assumptions, and the first one I would make is. that he’s not going to expose himself to such evident retaliation. He’ll have a fail-safe system like a ship hidden somewhere out there in the Atlantic”-he waved at the vast blue stain on the map behind the colonel-“from which he or someone else can always detonate the bomb if we lay a preventive strike on Libya.”
The President nodded in agreement and looked back at the briefing officer.
“The basic question to which we need an answer, Colonel, is this: Do we or do we not have any technological devices, systems or whatever which can guarantee that we can prevent a radio signal from being beamed into New York to detonate this thing if, in fact, it actually exists and it’s really in New York?”
The colonel tensed nervously at his question. “No, sir,” he replied. “I’m afraid that given the present state of the art, trying to intercept or stop an incoming signal like this is scientifically impossible. It’s like trying to catch the right snowflake in the middle of a blizzard.”
As he was speaking, the red light on the telephone at Eastman’s elbow flashed. It was the Army Signal Corps warrant officer in charge of the White House switchboard. Eastman stiffened listening to him.
“Mr. President,” he announced, “the switchboard’s just received a telephone message from an anonymous caller. He hung up before they could trace the call. He said there was a message for you of the utmost importance in locker K602 in the luggage containers next to the Eastern Airlines shuttle terminal at National Airport.”
One fly-specked light bulb dangling from an overhead cord lit the garage.
Its pale cone of light left pools of untouched shadow clinging to the garage’s walls and corners. At the back of the garage, a six-foot-wide cement loading dock rose above the black curds of oil and grease staining the floor. The dock’s back wall was a thin partition separating the garage from the abandoned warehousing area to the rear. Through it, a faint scraping sound drifted into the garage. Laila Dajani shuddered, listening to it. It was the sound of rats scurrying through the deserted warehouse.
Her brother Kamal sat on a cot set up at the end of the platform, near a forklift truck. The passenger of the Dionysos twisted an air pistol in one hand. To his right, against the wall, were his latest victims, a pair of dead rats.
Laila’s second brother, the eldest of the trio, had just entered the garage. Whalid Dajani was in agony. His face was pale; specks of sweat sparkled at his temples.
“Why don’t you take another pill?” Laila demanded, her tone almost peevish.
“I’ve already taken five. That’s all I’m supposed to take.” He showed his sister the package of Tagamet pills she had gotten for him to ease the pain of the ulcer for which he’d earlier gulped his glass of milk on Broadway.
“It says so on here.” His eyes turned away to the far end of the platform.
It was there, just inside the shadows, a long, dark form like that of a shark lurking below the surface of the water. It was painted black.
Stenciled in white around the barrel’s waist were the name and address of the import-export firm to which it had been destined. Cords kept it firmly lashed to the pallet on which it had arrived.