She moved casually to the exit, spotting at the door the dark-coated driver of the limousine service she had used regularly since she arrived in New York.
“Nice trip, ma’am?”
“Lovely, thank you.”
Laila settled into the car’s comfortable upholstery. As they pulled away, she took out her compact and, pretending to adjust her makeup, scrutinized the traffic behind them in the mirror. They were not, as far as she could tell, being followed. She sank back into the seat and lit a cigarette. The car and the driver were a reflection of one of Carlos’s golden rules: a smart terrorist always travels first class. The best way to slip undetected about the world, the Venezuelan master terrorist maintained, was in that upper-middle-class spectrum which lay just below the level of the ostentatious rich, at the very heart of the society he meant to destroy.
The cover he had invented for Laila’s two visits to the United States was ideally designed to accomplish just that. She was on a buying trip for La Rive Gauche, a boutique for wealthy Lebanese on Beirut’s Hamra Street, an institution which had survived, as such places inevitably do, all the convulsions of the Lebanese civil war.
The shop’s elegant proprietor, the widow of a famous Druze chieftain, was a passionate supporter of the cause, an engaging woman who saw no contradiction in selling Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent and Courreges dresses by day and preaching violent revolution by night. Getting a fake Lebanese passport had been simple. Procuring stolen Lebanese passports for Palestinian terrorists was as easy in Beirut as buying postage stamps. Nor did she have the slightest difficulty in getting one of the 200,000 U.S.
visas issued annually in the Middle East. The overworked consul who had given her her visa hadn’t even bothered to make a phone call to check on her assumed identity; the Rive Gauche letter supporting her application had been enough for him.
And so, as Linda Nahar, a Lebanese Christian, she had haunted the showrooms of Bill Blass, Calvin Klein and Oscar de la Renta on her two trips to New York, the first in August, the second beginning in November. She had quickly become one of the newest ornaments of a certain New York world, weekending on Long Island, lunching at the Caravelle, disco dancing in the garish splendor of Studio 54.
The driver braked to a stop in front of the Hampshire House on Central Park South. She dismissed the car, picked up three messages at the reception desk and two minutes later stepped into the charming disorder of the suite she rented by the month on the thirty-second floor. It was littered with the impedimenta of her assumed calling: fashion brochures, copies of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Women’s Wear Daily. Indeed, her photograph in Women’s Wear at Diana Vreeland’s Pageant of Chinese Dress for the Met had caused Laila a moment of anguish. Fortunately for her, Women’s Wear was not a journal scrutinized with any intensity by the CIA’s Office of Palestinian Affairs.
She tossed her coat on a chair and mixed herself a drink. Moodily, she stepped to the window onto Central Park that constituted one of the sitting-room walls. Looking at the park in its pristine mantle of new snow, at the skaters gliding over the shell to her right, at all those proud fagades crawling with blinking pinholes of light, Laila shuddered unavoidably.
She took a long swallow of her whiskey and thought of Carlos. He was right.
Never think of the consequences of your mission, he warned, only of the unexpected problems that could prevent you from carrying it out. She drained her glass with two thirsty gulps and walked to her bathroom to draw a bath.
Before stepping into the tub, she gave herself an approving glance in the mirror: the taut, flat stomach, her firm buttocks, the defiant thrust of her breasts. For a long moment she lay there, luxuriating in the bath, caressing her skin with the bath oil’s thick, bubbly film, rubbing it through her earlobes, along the passageways of her neck, massaging it playfully over her breasts until her nipples stood erect. Lazily, she lifted one leg from the bath water and rubbed the foam along her thighs and inner legs. At the sight of her crimson toenails, she smiled. Imagine, she mused, a terrorist who paints her toenails.
She was brushing out the long mane of her hair when the phone rang. Picking it up, she heard the din of voices in the background.
“Where the devil are you?” she asked, a flashing undertone of anger in her voice.
“We’re having dinner at Elaine’s.” Her expression changed the instant she heard the caller’s voice. “We’re going on to the Fifty-four. Why don’t you join us?”
What better cover could she ask for? “Can you give me an hour?” Laila asked with a husky voice.
“An hour?” the voice answered. “I’d give you a lifetime if you’d take it.”
His usually bland features shrouded with concern, the President of the United States stared at the circle of advisers surrounding him. The last great crisis his nation had faced when the fanatical supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini had seized the U.S. Embassy in Teheran paled beside this threat. This was the ultimate act of political terrorism, the almost too inevitable conclusion to a decade of escalating terrorism. And, he reflected bitterly, if this really was true, a nation whose citizens were living in nomad tents barely a generation ago now possessed the power to destroy the most important city on the planet. Millions of people are being held hostage, he thought, to the extravagant demands of a zealous despot. He turned to Jack Eastman. “Jack, what contingency plans do we have to handle something like this?”
It was a question Eastman had anticipated. Locked in a safe in the West Wing were the contingency plans of the U.S. and the Soviets could reach comparable firepower wrapped in its black imitation-leather jacket with gold lettering. They covered everything: the speed with which the U.S. and the Soviets could reach comparable firepower thresholds, possible Chinese reactions, NATO disagreements, the security of the sea lanes; right down to how many C rations were necessary to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division into the Panama Canal Zone or land a division of Marines on Cyprus. Their origins went back to Henry Kissinger’s days. Eastman had reviewed them an hour ago. They dealt with every imaginable world crisisevery one, that is, except the one which now confronted the President of the United States.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Eastman replied, “we don’t have any.”
Eastman noted the flicker his words produced in the President’s dark eyes, the “laser look,” the familiar warning that he was angry. He had folded his hands on the table before him. “All right,” he said. “In any event, whether this is from Qaddafi, whether it’s from some terrorist group, some crazy scientist, or someone else, I wish to make one thing clear to you alclass="underline" the fact that this threat, real or not, exists is to be kept an absolute secret.”
The President’s words reflected a U.S. government decision, taken during the Nixon administration and consistently adhered to since them, to avoid at all costs going public with nuclear threats. The knowledge that a threat existed in a given city could provoke a panicked reaction more devastating than the threatened explosion itself. Discrediting each nuclear hoax cost at least a million dollars, and no one wanted to see the government deluged by such threats. There was the danger that an irrational, semihysterical public opinion could paralyze the government’s ability to act in such a crisis. And in this case, the President was well aware, there was yet another reason: the ominous injunction to secrecy in the threat note.