The man who would have the terrifying responsibility of leading the search was approaching New York on the New Jersey Turnpike in an unmarked government car. John Booth looked the quintessential Westerner: lean and muscled, well over six feet tall, with the coarse, grainy complexion of a man whose face was often exposed to the elements. As usual, he was wearing cowboy boots, a checkered shirt and, around his neck, a silver-andturquoise Navajo charm suspended on a rawhide thong.
Booth’s emergency call had caught him, as inevitably such a summons would, on a winter’s weekend, skiing off the bowls of Copper Mountain, Colorado.
Now, rushing toward the city ahead, Booth felt the nervous inroads of what he called his “but-for-the-grace-of-God feeling” knotting his intestines.
It was always there, that angry, half-nauseous sensation, whenever Booth’s beeper called him to lead his NEST nuclear search teams into the streets of an American community. Those teams were Booth’s brainchild. Long before the first novelist had written the first atomic-bombin-Manhattan thriller, Booth had seen the menace of nuclear terrorism coming. His first, apocalyptic vision of that possibility had come in the most unlikely of places, amidst the silvery-green olive groves and terraced fields of a little Spanish fishing village called Palomares.
He had been sent there with a team of fellow scientists and weapons designers in 1964 to try to find the nuclear weapons jettisoned by a crashing B-52. They had the best detection devices, the most sophisticated techniques available, at their disposal. And they couldn’t find the missing bomb.
If they couldn’t find a full-fledged bomb in the open countryside, it didn’t require much imagination on John Booth’s part to realize how terrifyingly difficult it would be to find a nuclear weapon hidden by a group of terrorists in an attic or a cellar of some city.
From the moment he had returned to Los Alamos, where he was a senior weapons designer, he had fought to prepare the United States for the crisis he knew would beset an American city one day. Yet, despite all his efforts, Booth was all too well aware of something few laymen would have even suspected looking at the sophisticated equipment his teams employed: how dreadfully inadequate they were, how tragically limited was their ability to perform the task for which they were intended. The problem was taking that equipment into the builtup downtown area of a big city. There the tightly packed blocks, the highrise forests of glass and steel provided an abundance of natural screening to smother the telltale emissions that could lead his men to a hidden bomb as a scent takes a bloodhound to his quarry.
Outside, the sulfurous fumes, the roseate glow of the burn-off fires of the Jersey refineries flickered like the flames of a technological hell as they fell away behind his speeding car. He climbed up the Jersey Heights, then started the long loop down toward the Lincoln Tunnel. Suddenly, there it was before him across the black sweep of the Hudson: the awesome grandeur of Manhattan Island. Booth thought of something Scott Fitzgerald had once written, a phrase that had struck him years ago as an undergraduate at Cornell. To see Manhattan like that, from afar, was to catch it “in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
Booth shuddered. The skyline of Manhattan held no promise of beauty for him. What was waiting for him at the other end of the Lincoln Tunnel was the final refinement of the hell he most feared, the ultimate challenge to the techniques he and his men had so carefully assembled.
In Washington, D.C., half a dozen lights were burning in the West Wing of the White House. It was a little doll’s house of a building sandwiched between the more familiar fagade of the Executive Mansion and the gray Victorian hulls of the Executive Office Building. With its narrow corridors thick with wall-to-wall carpeting, its walls lined with Currier and Ives prints and oils of eighteenth-century Whig politicians, the West Wing looked more like the home of a Middleburg, Virginia, foxhunting squire than what it was, the real seat of power of the President of the United States.
Jack Eastman was upstairs in his second-floor office contemplating the unappetizing dish of Beefy Mac he had bought from the basement vending machine to replace the Sunday supper he had forgotten to eat. Like the walls of most Washington offices, his were covered with photos and citations, the milestones along the road that had taken him to the White House. There was Eastman as a young F-86 pilot in Korea, his graduation certificate from the Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program; four sixteenth-century Delft porcelains he had purchased in Brussels during a tour at NATO headquarters. Before Eastman in a hinged silver frame were pictures of his wife and his nineteen-year-old daughter, Cathy, taken two years before on the June morning she graduated from Washington’s Cathedral School.
The National Security Assistant picked listlessly at a twist of macaroni with his plastic fork. Inevitably, helplessly almost, his eyes turned back to the slender figure before him in her white graduation dress, her new diploma grasped defiantly in her hand. At first glance, the long, virtually angular face she had gotten from her mother seemed glazed with a solemnity appropriate to the moment. Yet Eastman could read there a hidden smile curling mischievously at the end of her lips. From the time she’d been a baby squirming in his arms that smile had been a secret bond between them, the special gauge of the love of father and daughter.
He stared at that smile now, unable to turn away, unable to think of anything except his proud girl in her white dress. The movements of his jaw slowed, then stopped. Nausea crept through his stomach. Slowly, despairingly, he lowered his head to the waiting cradle of his arms, struggling to stop the sobs, searching for the discipline he’d been so long trained to exercise. Jack Eastman’s only child was a sophomore at Columbia University in New York City.
Laila Dajani hurried past the black limousines. They were always there, lined up like mourners’ cars waiting outside the funeral of a politician or a Mafia chieftain. For an instant, she looked with pity and contempt at the knot of gawkers clustered by the door, waiting, despite the cold, the time, the fact that it was Sunday night, to savor whatever bizarre pleasure it was they got from watching someone famous walk into New York’s Studio 54.
Inside, she was overwhelmed once again by the scene: the twelve landing lights of a Boeing 707, the multicolored strobes hurling a sparkling firestorm of light and color against the nylon drapes; the waiters slithering past in their satin shorts; the horde of liquid forms on the dance floor frozen, then released, in the incandescent glare of the strobes. Bianca Jagger was there, dancing frantically in satin jogging shorts; so, too, was Marisa Berenson, lolling on a banquette as though she were holding court. In front of Laila a frail black in leather pants, bare-chested except for a studded black leather vest, hands chained to a truss around his genitals, swayed in lascivious response to the ecstasy of some private dream.
Laila twisted through the crowd, waving, blowing an occasional kiss, indifferent to the hands caressing her black satin pants. When she finally found the group she was looking for, she glided up behind a boy whose long blond hair hung to the collar of a white silk shirt. She threw her arms around him, letting her fingernails scurry over the skin exposed by his unbuttoned shirt while her mouth nibbled his ear in quick, teasing bites.