It was indicative of the secrecy that shrouded NEST’s operations that the Police Commissioner of New York didn’t know that the NEST teams existed or anything about the way they operated. Quickly, as succinctly as he could, Booth described to the Commissioner and the rest of the conference room how his teams would work.
“Aren’t people going to spot your rented trucks?” the Commissioner asked.
“It’s very unlikely. The only giveaway is a small device like a radar pod we attach to the undercarriage. You’d have to really look for it.” Booth took a long drag on his cigarette. “The whole concept behind the operation is to be very discreet, unobtrusive. We don’t want the terrorist sitting on his bomb up in the attic to know we’re out there looking for him.”
“How about helicopters?”
Booth glanced at his watch. “Our own choppers should be getting into the air now. We’ve borrowed three more from New York Airways and we’re equipping them with detection devices.
They’ll be ready in an hour or so. I decided to start them on the waterfront. The choppers are very effective down there. They can run over the wharves very quickly and they can read through those thin warehouse roofs without much trouble.” He grimaced. “Although if it’s in a ship, we’d have to do a foot search to pick it up. The deck layers would shield out the rays we’re looking for.”
Those words brought all the frustrations, the hopelessness of his task welling up in Booth. He stubbed out his cigarette with an angry, impatient gesture. “Look, Commissioner, don’t expect any miracles from us, because there aren’t going to be any. We’ve got the best technology there is and it’s completely inadequate.”
The scientist saw the startled bulge of the Commissioner’s blue eyes, the nervous tic of his Adam’s apple. “All the tactical advantages are with our adversaries. My trucks can only read up to four stories. The choppers can only read down two at best. Everything in between’s a blank. If whoever put this bomb there wanted to shield it, all they would have to do is throw a water bed over it and we couldn’t pick it up three feet away.” Booth’s nervous hands went up to the Navajo medallion Bannion had noted on his neck.
The scientist made no effort to conceal his anguish, his deep sense of implicit guilt at being forced to admit to the men around him that he was incapable of finding in the streets of their city one of the terrible weapons he had spent a lifetime designing.
“Without intelligence, gentlemen, to narrow down the search area there’s no way in the world we can find that bomb in the time we’ve been given.”
Two stories below the director’s conference room, a telephone rang in one of the offices assigned to the FBI’s intelligence unit. The agent picked it up.
“Hey, man, this is Rico.”
The agent sat up, suddenly alert. He activated the device that would record his incoming call.
“Watcha got for me, Rico?”
“Not much, man. I spent the whole night looking, but the only thing I got is this brother, he be asked to get some medicine for an Arab lady.”
“Drugs or medicine, Rico?”
“No, we don’t,” Hudson, the New York FBI chief, “She didn’t want to get no prescription, didn’t want to have to mess with no fuckin’ doctor.”
“What’d she look like?”
“The brother, he don’t know. He just take it to her hotel.”
“Where was that, Rico?”
“The Hampshire House.”
Upstairs, Al Feldman, the Chief of Detectives, rolled his cold cigar in his mouth and pondered John Booth’s despairing words. Figures, he thought. Just like those scientific bastards. They always expect someone else to clean up their shit after them.
“So what exactly are we looking for?” he asked.
Booth circulated a sketch and description of the device prepared at Los Alamos from Qaddafi’s blueprint.
“Do we know approximately when this came into the country?” Bannion inquired.
“No, we don’t,” Hudson, the New York FBI chief, replied. “But the assumption is it was recently. The CIA figures it would have been shipped from one of six places: Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran or Aden. They may have smuggled it across the border from Canada. That doesn’t take much doing. Or they may have run it through a normal port of entry disguised as something else.”
Down the table, Hudson’s superior, Quentin Dewing, the assistant director for investigation foy the Bureau, flown up from Washington during the night to take overall command of the search, cleared his throat. He had old-fashioned clear-plastic-rimmed glasses, gray hair slicked to his head with lashes of Brylcreem, a darkblue suit, and a white handkerchief squared to a precise half an inch rising from its pocket. An insurance executive, Feldman had thought contemptuously when he had been introduced.
“What this means is we’re going to have to go through every waybill and manifest for every piece of cargo that’s come in from one of those countries in the last few months. We’ll start with the latest shipments and work our way back.”
“By three o’clock tomorrow?” asked the stunned Police Commissioner.
“By three o’clock today!”
Feldman ignored their exchange, scrutinizing instead the material Booth had circulated around the room. “Tell me something,” he asked the scientist, “could this be broken into pieces, smuggled in and reassembled here?”
“Technologically, I’d say that’s almost impossible.”
“Well, it’s nice we got some good news today.” Feldman pointed his cigar at the drawing. “That fifteen-hundredpound weight is going to eliminate a lot of shipments. It’s also going to rule out high floors in buildings without elevators.” He laid the material back on the table. “How about the people who put it there? Do we have any leads on them at all?”
“For the moment we have nothing precise.” Hudson pointed to a flaxen-haired agent in his midthirties seated across from Feldman. “Farrell here is the Bureau’s Palestinian expert. He came up from D.C. last night. Frank, give us a quick rundown on what we do have.”
Ranged neatly on the table before the agent were computer summaries of all the Bureau’s ongoing Middle East investigations. They included items as diverse as a suspected traffic in prostitutes between Miami and the Persian Gulf, an illegal shipment of four thousand M-16 automatic rifles to the Christian Lebanese Phalange, the efforts of the Iranian revolutionary regime to infiltrate assassination squads into the United States to carry out their revolutionary justice on United States soil, and the document Farrell picked up in response to Hudson’s order.
“We have files on twenty-one Americans who went through Qaddafi’s terrorist training camps. All of them were Arab born. Nineteen Palestinians.
Seventeen males, four females.”
“Have you jumped them? What did you turn up?”
The young agent coughed nervously in answer to Feldman’s query. “Most of them went over there between 1975 and 1977. We put them under surveillance when they came back, but they never did a damn thing wrong. We couldn’t even catch them lifting a candy bar from the five-and-tencent store. So we ran out of court orders for the surveillance because of lack of probable cause.”
“So you stopped watching them?”
The FBI man nodded.
“My God!” Feldman’s already dumpy figure slumped deeper into his chair.
“You mean to tell me Qaddafi has the perfect terrorist sleeper operation set up in this country and the FBI hasn’t got a single one of those people under surveillance?”