“Dead!” Whalid gasped.
Sulafa Dajani caressed his shaking head. “She jumped from a very high building while the police were questioning her.”
Whalid slumped against his mother’s shoulder. “Oh my God,” he sobbed.
“Frangoise, my poor Frangoise.”
Kamal got up and lit a cigarette. He stared at his weeping brother.
“I did it,” Whalid cried. “I killed her.”
Kamal circled behind him and squeezed his shoulders with his powerful fingers. If there was any pity in his gesture it was not so much for his brother’s grief as for his stupidity.
“Whalid, you didn’t kill her. They did.”
Whalid looked at him, uncomprehending.
“You don’t believe that she jumped from that window, do you?”
Alarm and horror swept his brother’s grief-ravaged face. “The French police wouldn’t …”
“Don’t be a poor fool! They threw her out of that window, for God’s sake.
Those French you loved so much. You wanted to be so damn loyal to. What do you think happened?” Kamal was flinging his words in short, bitter bursts.
“And God knows what they did to her first.”
Whalid turned to his mother, blinking through tears of sorrow and disbelief, searching for knowledge, for consolation.
Sulafa Dajani shrugged her graceful shoulders. “It is the way of all our enemies.” She kissed her first son’s forehead. “Go to Libya with your brother. You belong there now. B’is Allah-it is God’s will.”
PART III
The only sound reaching Muammar Al — Qaddafi’s ears was the low and mournful sigh of a distant wind. No Teleprinter’s hum, no radio’s cackle, no jangling telephone marred the perfect quiet of his desert. As was only natural, he had chosen to pass the critical hours preceding the test of his hydrogen bomb in the solitude of the spaces in which he had found his faith and nurtured his dreams.
His command post was the symbol of that vanishing race by whose precepts he strove to reorder the future, his ever present Bedouin tent. Not a single manifestation of the technology he sought to harness intruded on its spartan precincts. There were no television screens here parading the world before his eyes, no smartly uniformed aides laying out the options available to him, no blinking panels of light to remind him of the strength of his massed armies. Qaddafi was alone with the oneness of the desert and the stillness of his soul.
Here, he knew, there was neither the time nor the place for the useless or the complex. As the oncoming light of day stripped away the illusions of the night, so the emptiness of these expanses stripped life to its fundamentals. All here gave way to the inexorable struggle to survive.
Since time immemorial the intensity of that struggle had made the desert the incubator of the spiritual, its inhuman solitude the catalyst that had driven men to the extreme. Moses in the Sinai, Christ in the wilderness, the Prophet on his Hegira: each, in turn, had thrust on mankind the visions engendered by their desert retreats. Others had, too: visionaries and zealots, fanatics and spiritualists, part of the unending parade of austere and alarming men that through the centuries had emerged from those trackless wastes to trouble the settled world around them.
Immersed now in the reassuring familiarity of his desert, the latest of that long and troubling line awaited the results of his test in perfect calm. If it had worked, it was now, he reasoned, in their first flash of anger, that the Americans would lash out against him. If that was God’s will, then he was ready to perish here in the surroundings that had formed him. If it had failed, he would have one course open: he would condemn the “plot” fomented within his borders, arrest a few Palestinians and stage a mock trial to mollify the anger of the Americans and the world.
His alert ears picked up the flutter of a helicopter coming to announce the result. to return him to his capital in triumph or shame. He watched unmoved as it drew up, then fluttered to rest fifty yards from his tent. A man leaped out.
“Ya sidi!” he shouted. “It worked!”
His first reaction to the news was to bow his head in prayer, a prayer of awe and gratitude for the power that now rested in his hands. Woven into the multicolored strands of the prayer rug on which he bowed his head were the outlines of the Islamic sanctuary which with that power he would now claim in the name of his faith and his people, Jerusalem’s Mosque of Omar.
The President of the United States sat motionless at the head of the conference table in the National Military Command Center. He too had greeted the desert explosion with a prayer, a prayer for help in what he had instantly understood was the gravest crisis his nation had ever faced. Now he was staring straight ahead, his index finger pressed to his lips, every fiber of his being concentrated on the dilemma before him.
“The first thing I would like to say,” he announced finally, “is all our actions must be based on the assumption that there is a hydrogen bomb hidden in New York,” the President continued. “And we have also got to assume that Qaddafi is deadly serious when he threatens to detonate it if any word of this gets to the public.”
In a strange way, the President thought, he may have done us a serivce. If word of this ever got out, we’d probably have an outburst of public opinion that would close down every option we have except forcing the Israelis out of the West Bank. He leaned forward and folded his hands on the table, letting his glance travel over his advisers ranged around the table, then the military men at their command consoles. “I don’t think I need remind any of you of the moral obligation this places on everyone here. There are certainly some of us who have persons very close to us who may be threatened by this. But each of us has got to remember that the lives of five million of our countrymen may depend on keeping it a secret.”
“Jack”-he glanced at his National Security Assistant-“do you have any specifics to recommend on that?”
“Well, sir, it goes without saying, only use secure telephones when talking about it.” It was well known in Washington that the Soviets intercepted microwave calls in and out of the White House-just as the United States monitored those going to the Kremlin. “And no secretaries. If anyone has to write anything, write it by hand. With no carbons.”
“How do we keep this from the press?” Bennington asked.
It was a vital question. There were two thousand journalists accredited to the White House. Forty or fifty of them were in almost constant attendance on its grounds during the day, the most able among them convinced on arising each morning that the government would lie to them at least once before sundown. Leaks were a way of life in the capital, and gossip on government secrets the main topics of conversation at its cocktail parties and dinners and the lunches at the Sans Souci and Jean Pierre’s where its luminaries picked each other’s brains as assiduously as they picked their Maryland soft-shelled crab.
“Should we tell the press secretary?” the President asked.
“I’m not sure,” Eastman replied. “If we don’t, his reaction will be more natural if he gets any queries on it. But if we do tell him, he’d damn well better be prepared to lie, stonewall and deny this damn thing right into the ground.”
“If we do tell him,” William Webster of the FBI drawled, “he can tell us right away if anyone in the media’s focusing in on it.”
“Don’t worry,” Eastman said, “if anyone in the media starts to focus in, we’ll hear about it fast enough. The most important thing is to hold this as close as possible. The Kennedy people held on to the Missile Crisis for a week because only fifteen people in the government knew about it. You’re also going to have to maintain the fagade of a normal existence. That’s the best way to keep the press off the track.”