“Thank God!” he gasped.
In the New York command post six men were on the telephone at the same time, each shouting to make his voice heard over the din of the others. Bannion was in the process of commandeering the Sixth Precinct station house on the Lower West Side as a subheadquarters for the upcoming search effort. Feldman was beside him assembling the men and material they would require. A few chairs away the usually imperturbable Booth was roaring at the NEST’s Seventh Regiment Armory headquarters, asking for every available man, scientist and detection device. Harvey Hudson was mobilizing a team of federal judges to issue a flood of search warrants that would justify entry into closed apartments, offices, buildings or the dwellings of civil-rights-conscious New Yorkers who would otherwise refuse to let a detective or an FBI agent past their front door.
So chaotic were the conditions in the room that, for a few seconds, no one heard the sound coming from the squawk box on the conference-room table. To his horror, Abe Stern suddenly realized the President was talking and not a person in the room was listening.
He grabbed the phone before him and told the switchboard to feed the President’s call onto his line. “Mr. President,” he apologized, “I’m sorry, but we’re in a state of near-hysteria here. We think we’ve got a fix on where it is.”
The President, still shaken by the events and decisions of the past twenty minutes, wasn’t listening.
“Abe,” he said, “I’ve just had the Soviets on the red line. They’ve forced Qaddafi to extend the deadline in his ultimatum by six hours-until nine o’clock tonight.”
PART VIII
The area in which the men of the underground command post had decided Qaddafi’s thermonuclear device had to be hidden consisted of a rectangular slice of the Lower West Side of Manhattan.
It covered the major part of Greenwich Village, a jumble of 2,579 miles of streets, 25,000 buildings of every description: brownstones, restored Federal homes, apartment houses, co-ops, condos, converted lofts, rotting piers, abandoned warehouses, small industries, garages, bars, restaurants, dives and discos.
There were the collapsing piers along the Hudson where once, in the twenties and thirties, luxury liners had berthed. There was the Gansevoort Meat Market; a touch of Little Italy in the southern area surrounding Bleecker and Carmine Streets; big middle-class developments like Washington Square Village and the West Village Houses; upper-middle-class apartments and homes north of Washington Square; the vast New York University complex around the square. Close to the river there was a conglomeration of transient businesses, repair shops, artisans’ ateliers and the gay SM area where the Proctor & Gamble salesman had been visiting when his fender was scraped. And, above all, from Seventh Avenue South over to Broadway and from West Third up to West Eighth, there was the tourist center of Greenwich Village with its nightclubs, jazz joints, theaters, bars, cafes, restaurants, whores, dope peddlers, hustlers, chess players, poets, con men, bums and tourists by the thousands, a transient, storied area graced with one of the highest crime rates in New York City.
Once again Quentin Dewing laid out the general approach for the search, setting it up in a rigorously orderly fashion, like a military operation.
First he intended to send teams of NEST and FBI men through the area. They would “walk” every building in blue Con Edison overalls, surveying it from top to bottom, but they wouldn’t actually enter offices or apartments unless they hit a hot reading. Twentyfive of the FBI’s New York agents and twentyfive detectives would be standing by as a strategic reserve, ready to rush out whenever they found radiation.
Following the NEST teams would come a slower, more methodical door-to-door, room-to-room search for the barrel. Three thousand FBI agents and all the NYPD’s available plainsclothesmen would be assigned to the task. Dewing’s idea was to run them in teams of two, two teams to a building, so that there would be a backup in case of trouble. Because of the barrel’s weight, they would limit their search to the first two floors in buildings with no elevators and would pay particular attention to garages and cellars.
Bannion had turned up an idea to conceal what was happening from the public. One man would identify himself as a police officer, the other as an official of the gas company. Lieutenant Hogan’s Office of Civil Preparedness delivered to the precinct hundreds of pencillike yellow Geiger counters-removed from the air-raid shelters-which the search officers could identify to the unsuspecting public as gas detectors.
One question remained to be decided: where to begin. Dewing, Hudson and Feldman gathered in front of a huge map of the area.
“I would say right off the bat,” Feldman said, “that there are two places in there it won’t be. The first’s the meat market. Very law-abiding area, one of the lowest crime rates in the city.” He bestowed an angelic smile on Dewing. “It’s completely run by the Mob. And that tightly structured old Italian neighborhood. Unless these guys speak Arab with a big Italian accent, they’d set off alarm bells just walking down the street in there.
“Since we got an ID on this guy at Eighth near Fifth from that hooker,”
Feldman continued, “I’d say start around Washington Square. Then maybe move up, cover Eighth to Fourteenth and Broadway to Sixth Avenue.
After that, work back toward the river.
“Except for one thing,” the Chief concluded. “I’d get people into those piers right away. That’s got to be the perfect place to hide something.”
“All right,” Dewing agreed. “We’ll proceed on the basis you’ve outlined.”
Feldman had just started back to the desk Dewing had assigned him when the familiar hulking figure drifted up beside him.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Feldman demanded. “I figured you’d be in New Haven by now.”
Angelo shrugged. “Got anything for me to do?” he asked.
Laila Dajani drove down the quiet Spring Valley street to the house she had rented as a temporary hideaway for her brother and herself. It had belonged to an elderly widowed vice-president of the Chemical Bank who had died of cancer in October. His son and heir, who lived fifty miles away in Connecticut, had been delighted to rent it to Laila for a month during the holidays. As had been the case with the retired stockbroker from whom she had rented the house in Queens that they had used as a cover for their import firm, their transaction had been simple: a letter of agreement and two thousand dollars in cash, half for a month’s rent, half as deposit.
Laila turned into the driveway and continued into the open garage, thinking again what perfect concealment the bland sameness of this street offered.
Kamal did not agree. He paused a moment, leaving the garage to scrutinize the houses of their neighbors, each house set on its plot of a quarter of an acre.
“It’s not good,” be said. “Too many people.”
Laila did not answer. She opened the front door and stepped inside. Whalid was in the den off the entry hall, sprawled on a sofa in his stockinged feet, a bottle of whiskey, a quarter of it gone, on the table beside him.
She continued to the kitchen. It was littered with unwashed dishes left over from her brother’s breakfast and supper. Tossed into the wastebasket was an empty bottle. So, she thought, that bottle in the den isn’t his first.
Kamal was looking scornfully at Whalid’s Johnnie Walker bottle when she returned to the study. “Taking care of your ulcer?” he asked his brother.