Piccardi looked at the head of the manifest. “Yeah. An old rust bucket.
Been coming in here with that shit about once a month for the last three, four months.”
Angelo pondered the paper a moment. You’d look an awful fool downtown sending them after five-hundredpound barrels when the one they’re looking for weighs fifteen hundred. This was a heavy case. No time and no manpower to waste. Besides, there was a regular pattern to the shipping. He laid the manifest on his stack of completed papers. As he did, the name of the ship that had delivered the cargo caught his eye. It was “S.S. Dionysos.”
Huge sunglasses, their lenses as dark as eye patches, shielded the pimp’s eyes from the harsh light of day. Morning was not Rico Diaz’s best time.
From his tape deck the echoes of Bobby Womack’s “Road of Life” vibrated through his customized Lincoln; soul had seemed more appropriate for this meeting than disco. He hurried the car down Seventh Avenue, putting as much space between him and his turf as he could. No reason to be spotted by the brothers with these two in the car-although, he thought with a contemptuous sideways glance at his FBI control agent, they could easily pass for a pair of Johns off to party time with his ladies.
“Rico, we got a little problem.”
Rico did not answer his control. His eyes, invisible behind the shades, were studying the man in the back seat in the rearview mirror. He had not seen him before, and he did not like what he saw. The man had a mean and sterile face, the face of someone who enjoyed squashing little bugs between his fingertips.
“That Arab girl you told us about. She left the Hampshire House this morning. To fly out to LA.”
Rico gestured indifferently at the filthy gray ridges of snow along the avenue. “She be a lucky lady.”
“Except she didn’t get on the plane, Rico.”
The pimp felt a chill quiver of apprehension flick through his stomach. He regretted now that he hadn’t taken a wake-up jolt of coke before leaving his pad. “So?”
“So we’d like to talk to your friend who dealt with her.”
The quiver of apprehension became a knot squeezing Rico’s bowels. “No way, man. He a mean motherfucker.”
“I didn’t expect he’d be studying for the priesthood, Rico. What’s he do?”
The pimp emitted a low, soft groan. “You know, man. He make a little dope here and there.”
“Good. That’s good, Rico. We’ll bring him in to have a talk about dope. No way in the world he’ll trace it back to you.”
“Come on, man.” Rico could feel a trickle of sweat sliding along his spine and it wasn’t because he was warm in his five-thousand-dollar knee-length mink-lined coat. “You say to him, `Arab lady, Hampshire House’ and they be only one nigger in New York he gonna be thinking about.
“Mr. Diaz.”
It was the man in the back seat. Rico studied the flat, emotionless face.
“What we have here is a matter of greatest importance. And urgency. We need your help.”
“You got it already.”
“I know that and we’re very appreciative of what you’ve already done. But we’re very, very anxious to find that girl. We’ve got to talk to your friend.” The agent took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, leaned forward and offered one to Rico. The black pushed it away.
“You’re very important to us, Mr. Diaz. We’re not going to do anything that would compromise you in any way, believe me. There will be no way your friend can trace our visit to you from the nature of our questions. I promise you.” The agent lit his own cigarette, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Frank,” he said to Rico’s control in the front seat, “I understand one of Mr. Diaz’s girl friends is in some difficulty with the New York police.”
“Yeah,” Frank replied, “if you consider five years in the slammer difficult, she is.”
“Can you arrange to get the charges dropped? In view of the importance of Mr. Diaz’s cooperation?”
“I suppose so.”
“Today?”
“If T really had to.”
“You will.”
Through the rearview mirror, Rico noticed the man turn his eyes back to him. “The girl is yours, Mr. Diaz, but we need your help. Believe me there’ll be no way in the world your friend’ll trace this back to you. No way.”
Why, Rico thought angrily, why did I ever put a bag of shit in this machine? Anita was the only hundred-dollar tricker he had. There was a gold mine in her pussy. Two, three thousand dollars a week she brought in, twice the earnings of his other girls. She was the principal mainstay of a very expensive lifestyle and no one had to explain to Rico what was going to happen to that if he didn’t come through for these two. They’d clean her slate all right if he talked; but keep his mouth shut and it would be bye-bye, baby, five years upstate for Anita and some mean times for Rico until he found a girl to replace her.
“You sure they no way this get back?”
“Trust us.”
Rico slammed the heel of a hand onto the steering wheel. Dumb bitch, he thought. I told her never to stiff a John. He swallowed nervously, running the fine calculations through.his street-smart brain, reckoning up the dangerous balance, pitting the risks against the spiraling cost of good coke, against the cash required for the out-front display a man had to have to keep his standing on the street.
His control agent had to lean forward to catch the whispered reply when bitterly, reluctantly, it came. “Franco. Apartment Five A, 213 West Fifty-fifth.”
The girl the FBI agents were looking for was thirty-five miles north of Manhattan driving a Budget Rent-a-Car up the New York State Thruway toward Albany. Laila Dajani had picked the car up in Buffalo two weeks earlier. As an additional precaution, she had removed the car’s license plates and replaced them with a pair of New Jersey number plates stolen by Palestinian agents six months earlier from a U.S. tourist’s car parked in Baden-Baden, Germany.
Whalid was in the seat beside her. It was 10 A.M. and he was fiddling with the dials of the radio, trying to catch a news bulletin. “Maybe”-he smiled at his sister”they’ll have something on the Israelis starting their pull-back.”
Laila gave him a hurried glance. There’s been quite a change in my brother in the past few hours, she thought. Perhaps it was the medicine she’d gotten him. He hadn’t complained about his ulcer since she’d picked him up.
Laila eased the car into the outside lane to pass a huge refrigerated truck, being careful as she did to stay well within the fifty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit. This was no time to be arrested for speeding. If he’s so relaxed, she told herself, maybe it’s because it’s over for him now. All he had to do was sit in the safe house she’d found in the upstate countryside and wait while she and Kamal spent another twentyfour hours in the city, Kamal standing vigil over the bomb with his rats and his air gun, she in the hotel to which she’d moved waiting to bring him to the safe house two hours before the bomb was due to explode.
Once Qaddafi’s plans had been implemented-and Laila had no doubt that the Americans would accept his ultimatum-he would tell Washington where the bomb was and radio the code that would break the firing circuits. They, in the meantime, would have worked their way west to Canada, using false Canadian passports and papers. Their destination would be Vancouver, where a second safe house awaited them. A Panamanian freighter, Greek-run but Libyan-owned, was due there to pick them up December 25. The Canadians, they calculated, wouldn’t be watching their piers too closely on Christmas Day.
Laila turned off the Thruway at Spring Valley and a few minutes later pulled into a huge shopping mall, being sure to drive well to the back of its half empty parking lot.