I’ve convened a Crisis Committee to deal with it for eight o’clock in the West Wing, and I thought you should know about it.”
The President pressed the index finger of his left hand to his lips, thinking hard.
“How about the Libyans?” he softly inquired. “Surely they don’t confirm the authenticity of this?”
“We haven’t been able to raise any of their people either here or in New York, Mr. President. But they have so few people stationed here it could just be a coiRcidence.”
“And our people in Tripoli?”
“State’s onto them. But it’s in the middle of the night over there, and getting hold of someone in authority in Tripoli in a hurry is always a problem.”
“Has someone run a voice analysis on the tape?”
“The Agency has, sir. Unfortunately, the result was inconclusive. There seems to be too much background noise on their comparison tapes.”
The President knotted his eyebrows in displeasure. The shortcomings of the CIA were one of his constant concerns.
“Jack.” His mind was moving forward now. “It seems to me highly unlikely that this is from Qaddafi. No head of a sovereign nation is going to try to blackmail us by hiding an atomic bomb in New York. At the very worst it would kill twenty, thirty thousand people. A man like Qaddafi has got to know we have the capacity to utterly destroy him and his entire nation in retaliation. He’d be mad to do something like that.”
Behind the President, through the room’s graceful windows, Eastman could see the lights of the White House Christmas tree, bright golden sparks flung against the December night.
“I agree, sir. I’m inclined to think it’s a hoax of some sort or, at the worst, a terrorist group masquerading behind Qaddafi for some reason.”
The President nodded. He had reread not so long ago the FBI’s 1977 study on the menace of nuclear terrorism and remembered clearly its conclusions: there was no danger of such an act from any of the identified and localized terrorist groups with one exception, the Palestinians. In the event of an Arab-Israeli peace settlement which left the Palestinian movement embittered and desperate, there were, the report warned, elements among them with the sophistication required for acts of nuclear terror.
The telephone rang. “Excuse me,” Eastman said. “It’s probably for me. I told the switchboard I was with you.”
As his National Security Assistant moved to the telephone, the President stared moodily out the window. He was not, he knew, the first American President to face the possibility that terrorists had hidden a nuclear device in an American city. That had been Gerald Ford. The year had been 1974, the city Boston, and that threat too had involved the intransigent Palestinian problem. It had come from a group of Palestinian terrorists who threatened to detonate an atomic device in the Massachusetts capital if eleven of their fellows held in Israeli jails were not released. Like all of the sixty-odd nuclear threats made against U.S. cities or institutions in the decade of the seventies, that one had turned out to be a hoax.
Before it bad, however, his predecessors in the White House had to ask themselves whether they should — or could — evacuate the city — and not a word had ever leaked to the Bostonians whose lives might have been at stake.
“Sir?”
The President started as he turned to look at his adviser. He had paled noticeably. He was holding the telephone with one hand cupped over its mouthpiece. “Los Alamos just called in a preliminary analysis of the blueprint. They say it’s a viable weapons design.”
Across the Potomac River from the White House an elegant auburn-haired young woman in her middle thirties hurried through the waiting room of National Airport and down the stairs leading toward the Eastern Airlines shuttle terminal. She stopped in front of a bank of gray metallic left-luggage lockers and chose one at random. She placed a small white envelope inside, rolled two quarters into the slot commanding its lock and removed the key. Then she opened a second and deposited a bulky shopping bag inside. It contained a blond wig and a tan polo coat. This time she did not remove the key. Her task completed, she crossed the hall to a telephone booth and swiftly dialed a number. When her party replied, she mumbled only two words into the receiver, the number of the key she held up before her: “K six-oh-two.”
Seconds later, she was rushing toward the terminal and the eight-o’clock shuttle to New York.
The man who had taken her telephone call carefully noted the numerals K602 on a slip of paper on which a telephone number, 202-456-1414, was already written. It was the number of the White House switchboard. He tucked the paper into the side pocket of his sheepskin coat and stepped out of his public telephone booth into the early-evening crowd flowing through New York’s Pennsylvania Station. He was in his late thirties, a florid-faced man with a thin black moustache and a tendency to corpulence that his bulky coat effectively concealed.
He sauntered through the waiting room, then hurried up the station steps and out into the cold. A few moments later he was at the corner of Broadway and forty-second Street, the edge of Times Square, savoring once again the torrents of light that had so impressed him years ago on his first visit to New York. No energy crisis here, he thought, staring at the glowing marquees, the garishly lit store windows, the advertising panels, sparkling carpets of color stretched out along the walls of night.
With the deliberate pace of a man who is looking for something, he crossed the street and started up Broadway. The spectacle on those sidewalks was even more grotesque, more Breughelian, than he had remembered. At Forty-third, a Salvation Army band and chorus, shivering in their blue uniforms, struggled through “O Come All Ye Faithful,” only a few yards away from a gaggle of whores in satin hot pants, the shiny fabrics of their trousers clinging so tightly to their hips and upper thighs that every detail of the wares they offered was available for inspection.
You found every face in the world in that crowd, he mused. Gawking tourists; well-dressed theatergoers indifferent to the throngs around them; black pimps in leather greatcoats and high-heeled shoes; slum kids down from uptown screeching at each other like migrating starlings; shuffling winos, hats held out for a couple of coins; potbellied cops, pickpockets scanning the crowd for a victim, soldiers and sailors, their faces so young, so trusting.
At Forty-sixth Street a Santa Claus so emaciated no amount of padding could disguise him adequately for his role listlessly tolled his bell before an empty alms bucket. Just behind him, a pair of black transvestites in hip-high leather boots and peroxided wigs called out from a doorway, the timbre of their falsettos leaving no doubt about their sex.
Crossing the street, sensing the vibrancy, the palpable, dynamic human dimension of those throngs, he felt a sharp twinge of pain cramp his stomach. The ulcer. He turned into a Howard Johnson and ordered a glass of milk. Then he renewed his march up Broadway.
Suddenly, the sound of Frank Sinatra singing “Regrets, I’ve had a few, too few to mention” told him he bad found what he was looking for. He entered a brightly lit radio and record shop, walked down its lines of albums and tapes to the banks of empty cassettes. Anxiously, nervously, he picked through them, looking for the one he wanted.
“Say, my friend,” the clerk announced, “we got a special on Sonys. Three for four ninety-nine.”