The viewer made a grating noise and stopped humming. Abrams said, “I’m afraid the time has run out.”
O’Brien looked at the machine sharply. “That wasn’t three full minutes. Send a letter to the Times, Abrams.”
“Yes, sir.”
O’Brien put his hands in his pockets. “Gets cold up here.”
“Perhaps we should go inside.”
O’Brien ignored the suggestion and said, “Do you speak Russian, Abrams?”
Abrams glanced at the older man. This was not the sort of question one asked unless one already knew the answer. “Yes. My parents—”
“Right.” O’Brien nodded. “I thought someone told me you spoke it. We have some Russian-speaking clients. Jewish emigrés down in Brooklyn. Near your neighborhood. I believe.”
Abrams nodded. “I’m rusty, but I’m sure I could communicate with them.”
“Good. Would it be too much of an imposition if I asked you to sharpen your Russian? I can get you State Department language tapes.”
Abrams glanced at him. “All right.”
O’Brien stared off into the west for several seconds, then said, “When you were a detective, you sometimes had duty protecting the Russian Mission to the UN on East Sixty-seventh.”
Abrams looked at O’Brien for a second, then said, “As a condition of my severance from the force, I signed an oath not to speak of my past duties.”
“Did you? Oh, yes, you were in police intelligence, weren’t you? The Red Squad.”
“They don’t call it that anymore. That sounds too—”
“Too much like what it is. By God, we live in an age of euphemism, don’t we? What did you call it in the squad room when the bosses weren’t around?”
“The Red Squad.” He smiled.
O’Brien smiled too, then went on. “Actually, you weren’t protecting the Russian Mission at all, but spying on it… You pretty much knew the principal characters in the Soviet delegation to the UN.”
“Possibly.”
“How about Viktor Androv?”
“How about him?”
“Indeed. Have you ever been out to Glen Cove?”
Abrams turned and stared into the sun setting out over New Jersey. At length he answered, “I was only a city cop, Mr. O’Brien. Not James Bond. My authority ended at the city line. Glen Cove is Nassau County.”
“But you’ve been out there, certainly.”
“Possibly.”
“Did you keep any private notes on these people?”
Abrams replied with a touch of impatience, “My job was not to watch them the way the FBI watches them. My areas of responsibility were strictly limited to observing the contacts they made with groups and individuals who might be a danger to the City of New York and its people.”
“Who might that be?”
“The usual crew. Puerto Rican liberation groups, Black Panthers, Weather Underground. That’s all I was interested in. Look, if the Soviets wanted to steal chemical formulas from a midtown research lab, or steal Ratner’s recipe for cheese blintzes, I could not have cared less. That’s all I can say on that subject.”
“But as a citizen you would care, and you’d report that to the FBI, which you did on a few occasions.”
Abrams looked at O’Brien in the subdued light. The man knew entirely too much. Or possibly he was speculating. O’Brien was a superb trial attorney, and this was his style. Abrams did not respond.
O’Brien said, “Are you prepared for the July bar?”
“Were you?”
O’Brien smiled. “That was so long ago, I think I took the test in a log cabin.”
Abrams had heard that Patrick O’Brien had a disconcerting habit of shifting subjects, seemingly at random, the way a card-shark shuffles a deck before he deals himself a straight flush. Abrams said, “Were you going to make a point about bombings on Wall Street?”
O’Brien looked at him. “Oh… no. It’s just that today is the first of May. May Day. That reminded me of the May Day celebrations I used to see down in Union Square. Have you ever been to one?”
“Many. My parents used to take me. I used to go when I was on the force. A few times in uniform. The last few years undercover.”
O’Brien didn’t speak for some time, then said, “Look out there. The financial center of America. Of the world, really. What would be the effect of a low-yield nuclear weapon on Wall Street?”
“It might interrupt five minutes of trading.”
“I’d like a serious answer.”
Abrams lit a cigarette, then said, “Hundreds of thousands dead.”
O’Brien nodded. “The best financial minds in the nation vaporized. There would be economic ruin for millions, national chaos, and panic.”
“Possibly.”
“Leading to social disorder, street violence, political instability.”
“Why are we talking about low-yield nuclear weapons on Wall Street, Mr. O’Brien?”
“Just a happy May Day thought. An extrapolation of a swarthy little black-clad Anarchist or Communist tossing one of those bowling ball-shaped bombs with a lighted fuse.” O’Brien pulled out a pewter flask and poured a shot into the cap. He drank. “I have a cold.”
“You look fine.”
He laughed. “I’m supposed to be at George Van Dorn’s place out on Long Island. If it should ever come up, I have a cold.”
Abrams nodded. To be an accomplice to small deceptions, especially one involving O’Brien’s partner, George Van Dorn, he knew, could lead to bigger deceptions.
O’Brien poured another shot and passed it to Abrams. “Cognac. Decent stuff.”
Abrams drank it and passed back the cap.
O’Brien had another, then put it away. He seemed lost in thought, then said, “Information. This is a civilization which rests almost entirely on information — its manufacture, storage, retrieval, and dissemination. We have gotten ourselves to a point in our development where we could not function as a society without those billions of bits of information. Think of all the stock and bond transactions, the commodities exchange, metals exchange, checking- and savings-account balances, credit card transactions, international transfers of funds, corporate records… Much of that is handled down there.” He nodded off into the distance. “Imagine millions of people trying to prove what they lost. We would be reduced to a nation of paupers.”
Abrams said, “Are we talking about low-yield nuclear weapons on Wall Street again?”
“Perhaps.” O’Brien walked along the roof and stopped at the railing at the eastern end of the observation deck. He looked down at the Rockefeller Center complex. “Incredible place. Did you know that there are over four acres of rooftop gardens on these buildings?”
Abrams came up beside him. “I don’t think I knew that.”
“Well, it’s a fact. And that will cost you another quarter.” O’Brien took the quarter from Abrams and deposited it in another electronic viewer. He bent over and peered through the lenses, swiveled the viewer, and adjusted the focus. O’Brien said, “Glen Cove is about twenty-five miles and a world away from here. I’m trying to see if I can pick out Van Dorn’s pyrotechnics.”
“Pyrotechnics?”
“It’s a long story, Abrams. But in a nutshell, Van Dorn, who lives next door to the Russians, allegedly harasses them. You may have read about it.”
“I may have.”
O’Brien swiveled and focused again. “They are going to sue him, in Nassau County Court. They’ve been obliged to retain local attorneys, of course. Have a look.”
“At the local attorneys?”
“No, Mr. Abrams, Glen Cove.”
Abrams bent his tall frame over the viewer and adjusted the focus. The Hempstead Plains rose toward the Island’s hilly North Shore, an area of wealth, privilege, and privacy. Although he could see very little detail at this distance, he knew, as O’Brien suggested, that he was looking at another world. “I don’t see the rocket’s red glare,” he commented.