“Look, kid,” he cajoled. “You’re in a hurry. I’m in a hurry.” He took the pier sheet from Piccardi and pointed to the license number of the truck that had made the pickup. “While I’m in there, why don’t you go to Tony’s office, call Hertz, find out where this truck comes from and get what they have off the rental agreement?”
Less than five minutes later, Angelo was back. His visit to the club had been totally unproductive. Rand handed him a slip of paper with the details of the Hertz truck’s rental agreement on it. The truck had been rented at a Hertz truck agency on Fourth Avenue, just behind the docks, at ten Friday morning, a few minutes before the pier sheet showed it had reached the pier. It had been returned at the end of the day. The man who had rented it bad used his American Express card to pay. His New York State driver’s license gave his name and address: Gerald Putman, Inter-ocean Imports, 123 Cadman Plaza West, Brooklyn.
Angelo gave the address an appraising glance. “Looks legitimate to me.
Let’s just check it out. One telephone call and we know we’re clean.” He picked up the telephone directory, found Inter-ocean’s number and dialed it.
Rand heard Angelo identifying himself to a switchboard operator, then asking for Putman. In the silence that followed, the New Yorker gave the agent a bemused smile. “Ever heard of a truck driver who’s got a secretary?”
“Mr. Putman,” he announced. “Detective Angelo Rocchia, New York Police Department. We’ve been informed by the Hertz Rent-A-Truck office over on Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, that you rented one of their vehicles last Friday morning around ten and we’d just like to-“
Three feet away, Rand could hear Putman’s surprised and angry voice interrupting the detective. “I what? Listen, officer, last Friday was the day I lost my wallet. I spent the whole morning right here in this office.”
The headquarters of the pier search of which Angelo Rocchia and Jack Rand were a small part was in New York’s emergency command center. It had become operational a few minutes after nine. Buried three floors below the State Supreme Court Building on Foley Square, it was an ideal place to manage a crisis in secret. So infrequently bad the center been used in the years since it had been installed by the Lindsay administration that nearly everyone involved with it, including the City Hall press corps, had forgotten it was there.
It was entered through an obscure side door to the courthouse. Basically, it was just a huge underground cavern divided into areas by salmon-pink wood panels eight feet high. Everything else in it was administrative gray: gray walls, gray floors, gray filing cabinets, gray redundant furniture thrown out of City Hall, gray faces on the policemen assigned to watch over it twenty-four hours a day. The last time the place had been used was during the great blackout in July 1977, when, to the Police Department’s embarrassment, its lights had gone out along with everyone else’s. Someone had forgotten to keep its generators serviced.
Quentin Dewing, the FBI assistant director for investigation, had taken on the job of organizing the center. He did it in the methodical, careful manner for which the Bureau was famous. By the time the Police Commissioner and Al Feldman, his Chief of Detectives, had finished dispatching their manpower, he was ready to give them a guided tour of the place. The first room, designed to be the center’s switchboard in an emergency, he had assigned to the effort to run down the Arabs who, according to their forms, had come into the New York area in the last six months. The room had fifty telephone lines. Each was manned by an agent, some holding open phones to JFK or the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington.
On one desk was a minicomputer serving as a central locator file. Every incoming name and address was punched into it. If the person belonging to the name hadn’t been found and cleared in two hours, the computer dumped the name into a higher-priority file.
The operation next door was even more impressive. It had been designated by Dewing as the headquarters for the pier search. Maps of New York and New Jersey’s 578 miles of waterfront hung on the walls. All of the waterfront’s two hundred piers were listed on charts under the maps.
Every time one of the teams working the piers came across a suspicious piece of cargo, the name and address of the consignee was telephoned to the center. If the cargo had been delivered in the New York area, the center dispatched a team of Customs inspectors or drug enforcement agents to track it down. If it had been shipped outside New York, an agent from the nearest FBI office was sent after it.
The tour completed, Dewing took Bannion and Feldman to his own command post set up in what was meant to be the Mayor’s suite in an emergency. Next door, the CIA and the FBI had installed multiflex printout receivers to deliver to the New York operation the harvest of their files and their overseas contacts.
While the Chief listened, resting against an old desk, his arms folded across his chest, Dewing explained how Clifford Salisbury of the CIA was combing through the terrorist files, sorting out those individuals who had spent time in the United States and appeared to have a high level of sophistication. On a morning like this, Al Feldman looked every one of his sixty-two years. His hair, what was left of it, was grayish white and greasy, popping out from his skull in disorderly little spirals that invariably sprinkled a glaze of dandruff on the shoulders of his dark suit. He picked his nose and looked at the CIA man, at the pile of dossiers on his desk.
Terrific, he thought, he’ll have a hundred of those things before he’s through. And they would be perfectly useless. What would you do with them?
Take them out to some bartender in Arab town and say, “Hey, have you ever seen this guy? This guy? This guy?” After three or four photos, the guy would have switched off. Be so confused, he wouldn’t be able to recognize a picture of his sister.
Feldman pulled a Camel from a pack that looked as if he’d slept on it and lit it. He had a lot of respect for the methodical, almost ponderous approach the Bureau used. Most investigations were, after all, like this one, shaped like a pyramid. They started across a broad base and worked, hopefully, to one very precise point. It was a proven system. Given a week, ten days, it got results.
The trouble is, Feldman thought, this guy has forgotten he’s only got thirty hours. Qaddafi will have fried this place and he’ll still be in Phase Three of his investigation. If all this is going to get anywhere, Feldman mused, we’ve got to have that big break, the Son of Sam parking ticket, the one face in the crowd to look for. And we’ve got to have it awfully fast.
“Excuse me, Mr. Dewing,” he said, looking at his watch. “I told my intelligence officer who covers the Arab neighborhoods over in Brooklyn there to bring in the material he’s got on the PLO. I’d better go find him.”
“Of course, Chief. It would be helpful if we could have a look at anything worthwhile you might have.” The tone of the FBI man’s voice made it clear how unlikely he thought that possibility was.
The intelligence officer was a genial, freckle-faced Irishman to whom the Department, with a fine sense of balance, had also assigned the responsibility of following the activities of the Jewish Defense League. His files contained almost nothing worthwhile and hadn’t since the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. Police intelligence represented educated gossip, a tip picked up by a cop on the beat from a friendly bartender or grocer, an item squeezed from an informer: “The Arab Red Crescent Society, 135 Atlantic Avenue, which has filed for a tax exemption as a charity, is suspected of raising funds for the PLO.” “The Damascus Coffee House, 204 Atlantic Avenue, is frequently patronized by supporters of George Habbash.”