Eastman turned back the folder of his study and looked at the portrait inside of the man who was threatening to massacre his daughter and five million other Americans.
He sighed and turned to Lisa Dyson. She had a mane of long blond hair that streamed below her shoulder blades. Her slender hips were forced into blue jeans so tight the men around her could not miss the welt made in them by the edge of her panties. “All right, miss, why don’t you start by summing up just what that report of yours tells us about this son of a bitch and how he’s going to act in a crisis,” Eastman ordered.
Lisa reflected a moment, searching for the phrase, for the one all-embracing thought, that would capture the essence of those eighteen pages she knew so well.
“What this tells us,” she answered, “is that he’s as shrewd as a desert fox and twice as dangerous.”
In New York, Times Square was empty. A chill wind sweeping up from the distant harbor twisted the cottony tufts of steam spurting from the Con Ed manhole covers and sent the night’s harvest of litter scuttling along the sidewalks and curbs. The predominant sound was the clattering of the suspensions of the Checker cabs as they hurtled over the potholes of Broadway in their flight downtown.
At Forty-third and Broadway a pair of half-frozen whores huddled in the doorway of a Steak and Brew Burger, listlessly calling to the few late-night passersby. Three blocks away, in the warmth of a third-floor walkup, its walls and ceilings painted black, their pimp lolled on a mattress wrapped in a gold satin sheet. He was a lean black with a precisely trimmed goatee. He had on a white beaver hat with a three-inch brim, and, despite the almost total lack of illumination in the room, dark glasses screened his eyes. His hips, covered by the white silk folds of an Arab djellabah, twitched suggestively to the rhythms of Donna Summer’s voice flooding out of his stereo system.
Enrico Diaz turned to the girl beside him. She was the third and newest member of his stable. He reached for the ornament dangling around his neck on a gold chain. It was a representation of the male sex organ and it was there that he kept his finest Colombian coke. He was about to offer the girl a jolt and a loving stroke, the assurance that she was his main woman, when the phone rang.
His irritation became evident displeasure when he heard a voice saying, “This is Eddie. How about a party?”
Fifteen minutes later Enrico’s lime-green custom-built Lincoln paused at Forty-sixth and Broadway just long enough to allow a figure to emerge from the shadows and slip into the front seat.
As he guided the car into the traffic, Enrico glared disdainfully at the man beside him, the collar of his beige overcoat turned up to screen his face. Enrico was typical of dozens of men and women being contacted in these predawn hours in bars, on street corners, in restaurants and bedrooms around New York. He was an FBI informer.
He owed that distinction to the fact that he had been caught one night with a dozen dime bags of heroin in his car. It was not that Enrico scored horse. He was a gentleman. The bags were for one of his girls. But it had come down to doing eight to fifteen in Atlanta or walkingand talking, from time to time, with the Bureau. Besides pimping, Enrico, the son of a black mother and a Puerto Rican father, was a senior member of the FALN Puerto Rican underground, a group of considerable interest to the FBI.
“I got something heavy, Rico,” his control agent said.
“Man,” Rico sighed, maneuvering deftly through the late traffic, “you always got something heavy.”
“We’re looking for Arabs, Rico.”
“No Arabs fucking my girls. They too rich for that.”
“Not that kind of Arab, Rico. The kind that likes to blow people up, not screw them. Like your FALN friends.” Rico eyed the agent warily. “I need anything you got on Arabs, Rico. Arabs looking for guns, papers, cards, a safe house, whatever.”
“Ain’t heard about none of that.”
“Suppose you just ask around for us, Rico?”
Rico groaned softly, all the strains and tensions of his double life encapsulizcd in the sound. Still, life was a deal. You made, you took, you gave, you got. The man wanted something, the man give something.
“Hey, man,” he said in that low gentle voice he reserved for special moments. “One of my ladies, she be in this thing with the Pussy Posse down at the Eighteenth Precinct.”
“What kind of thing, Rico?”
“Hey, you know, this John, he don’t want to pay and…
“And she’s looking at three to five for armed robbery?”
There was an almost reluctant, liquid roll to Rico’s answer. “Yeahhh.”
“Pull over here.” The agent waved to the curb. “It’s heavy, Rico. Real heavy. You get me what I need on Arabs, I’ll get you your girl.”
Watching him disappear down Broadway, Rico could only think of the girl waiting for him on the gold silk mattress, of her long muscular legs, the soft lips and the swiftly moving tongue he was training to perform the arts of her new calling. Sighing reluctantly, he drove off, not back toward his Forty-third Street fiat but east toward the East River Drive.
For fifteen minutes, Lisa Dyson had kept the men in Jack Eastman’s White House office captivated with her profoundly disturbing portrait of the man threatening to destroy New York City. Every facet of Qaddafi’s life was covered in the CIA’s report: his lonely, austere boyhood in the desert tending his father’s herds; the brutal trauma of being cast from the family tent by his ambitious father and sent away to school; how he had been despised as an ignorant Bedouin by his schoolmates, humiliated because he was so poor that he bad to sleep on the floor of a mosque and walk twelve miles each weekend to his parents’ camp.
The CIA had indeed found his bunkmates at the military school where his political ambitions had begun to emerge. The portrait they gave of a youthful Qaddafi, however, was anything but that of a masturbating, eagerly lecherous young Arab male. He had been instead a zealous Puritan, sworn to a vow of chastity until he had overthrown Libya’s King; abjuring alcohol and tobacco and urging his fellows to follow his example. Indeed, as Lisa Dyson pointed out, he still flew into wild temper tantrums when he heard that his Prime Minister was fooling around with the Lebanese hostesses on Libya’s national airline or womanizing with bar girls in Rome.
The report described the carefully planned coup. that had given him control on September 1, 1969, at the age of twenty-seven, of a nation with $2 billion a year in oil revenues, pointing out the code word he’d assigned the operations: “El Kuds”-Jerusalem.
It detailed the extreme, xenophobic version of Islam he had imposed on his nation: the return to the Sharia, the Koranic law, cutting off a thief’s hand, stoning adultresses to death, putting drinkers under the lash; his conversion of Libya’s churches to mosques, his decrees forbidding the teaching of English and ordering all signs and documents written in Arabic; how he had banned brothels and alcohol; how he had personally led, pistol in hand, the raids that had closed Tripoli’s nightclubs, ordering strippers to dress, gleefully smashing up bottles like a Prohibition cop. There was his “cultural revolution” that had sent illiterate mobs into the street burning the works of Sartre, Baudelaire, Graham Greene, Henry James; smashing into private homes in search of whiskey; storming through the bunk rooms of the oilfield tool pushers, ripping Playboy centerfolds from their walls.
Most terrifying of all was the long history of terrorist actions for which he had been directly or indirectly responsible: his repeated attempts to assassinate Anwar Sadat, to organize a coup in the Saudi Arabian Army; how he’d funneled millions into Lebanon to foment the bloody Lebanese civil war and other millions to aid the Ayatollah Khomeini’s overthrow of the Shah.