“What was the medicine?”
“Tagamet. It’s for ulcers.”
“So that’s our clue. We’re looking for an Arab with ulcers.” Dewing scowled in disgust. “Chief,” he said to Feldman, “what have you got?”
Feldman reacted as though he had been caught daydreaming. He had in fact been trying to assess the importance of these two leads the FBI had turned up and decide what, if anything, his division could do to expand them. “Not much. The detective in charge of one of the pier teams,” he gave a deferential inclination of his gray head to the FBI agent running the pier search, “called me to say he’d found some barrels from Libya that were well under our weight specs but which had been picked up by someone using stolen ID. I’ve got a car out checking the barrels’ consignee right now.”
Dewing mulled over his words. Working out of channels, he thought, but probably better not to make waves. “Good, Chief, keep us informed.”
He had just picked up his papers, closing the meeting, when a shirtsleeved agent from the radio room burst in. “Mr. Booth,” he cried, “your headquarters is on the line. One of your choppers got radiation!”
Booth shot from his seat and ran after the agent to the radio room. “Patch me onto my chopper,” he shouted at the duty operator.
“What are you reading?” he called to the technician as soon as he was through.
Booth could hardly hear the man’s voice over the thump of the helicopter’s rotors. “I got a real positive indication.” NEST never employed figures or the word “rads” over an open line in case anyone was eavesdropping. “It’s a few tenths.”
Booth whistled softly. A few tenths was a very, very hot reading, particularly since it almost certainly had to have filtered up from one or two stories below roof level.
“Where’s it coming from?”
Using maps in the radio room, Booth and a pair of New York detectives narrowed down the area from which the radiation seemed to be emanating to four highrises in the southeastern corner of the Baruch Housing Project just inside the East River Drive, a few dozen yards from the Williamsburg Bridge.
“Tell the chopper to get the hell out of there so we don’t tip our hand,”
Booth ordered, “and call in the manual search teams.”
Before the radio operator could deliver his instructions, Booth was running out of the underground command post, heading up the stairs two at a time toward the unmarked FBI car waiting for him in Foley Square.
In Paris, Henri Bertrand had been pacing his office in silence for several minutes digesting what his scientific adviser had told him about the IAEA inspection reports on Libya’s French-made reactor. Finally, Bertrand lit a new Gauloise from the stub of the one he was smoking and sank into his leather armchair.
“Is there no way of verifying that there really was something wrong with that fuel they took out of there so early?”
“Not for another six months or so. Until the rods have cooled down enough so you can work with them.”
“How very convenient.” Bertrand grimaced ever so slghtly. “What puzzles me is why Monsieur de Serre didn’t mention the incident when I talked to him.”
“Perhaps,” Cornedeau volunteered, “he felt it was too technical to be of interest to you.”
“Perhaps.”
The General bestowed what he hoped was an ironic smile on his young adviser. “You nuclear physicists are all alike. You really are a little Mafia trying to keep the rest of us away from the treasury of your knowledge. Because, one supposes, you’re persuaded that in our ignorance we’ll stop you from bestowing on the world the fruits of your great wisdom.”
Bertrand reached for the attach6 cases the representative of his sister service, the DST, had left on the desk. “We’ll have to bring in some people and start going through his material very, very carefully.”
His fingers picked their way through the thick stack of manila envelopes, each bearing a red “Ultra Secret” stamp, until he had found the name he was looking for.
“Personally,” he said, “I think I shall start at the top with the dossier of Monsieur de Serre.”
Angelo Rocchia was still chuckling over Gerald Putman’s last words when he, Rand and the head of the Pickpocket Squad got back to his Chevrolet.
“It certainly is gratifying,” the importer had said to them, “to see the lengths to which the Police Department is prepared to go to help just one citizen recover a stolen wallet.”
“Okay,” Angelo said, settling back in his car, “what have you got on her, Tommy?”
While his colleague searched for the girl’s identity file in his briefcase.
Angelo gave an almost surreptitious glance at Rand in the back seat. Our impatient young stud, he reflected with satisfaction, has calmed down a bit. Angelo took the girl’s card from the pickpocket expert’s hands.
Yolande Belindez, AKA Anita Sanchez, Maria Fernandez Born: Neiva, Colombia, July 17, 1959
Hair: Dark
Eyes: Green
Complexion: Medium
Identifying Marks or Scars: None
Arrest Record: London, Queen’s Jubilee, June 1977.
Sentenced two years, one suspended.
Munich, Oktoborfest, October 3, 1979. Sentenced two years, one suspended.
Known Associates: Pedro “Pepe” Torres, AKA Miguel Costanza, NYPD Ref 3742/51.
Tom Malone, the pickpocket expert, drew Torres’s photo and identity card from the file. Torres’s arrest record paralleled the girl’s.
“It isn’t much,” Angelo sighed, “but it’s something. Where do we go looking for them, Tommy?”
“There’s an area over here where they hang out,” Malone replied. “The South End. Off Atlantic Avenue. Let’s go down there and see if I can find somebody who owes me a favor.”
Before Angelo could start the car, the FBI radio on the seat beside him cackled. “Romeo Fourteen, respond to Base.”
Angelo got out of the car and walked to the pay telephone booth on the corner. Its walls were covered with obscene graffiti, its receiver dangled from the phone on a half-torn cord, and its coin box had been ripped open by vandals. “Bastards,” the detective growled. “I hope that goddamn barrel’s in their back yard.” He waved to Malone to bring the car and started up the avenue looking for another phone booth.
He found one, occupied by an elderly, gray-haired woman chatting feverishly about the Pentecostal service she had attended Sunday night. Angelo waited impatiently a moment, then flashed her his shield. The woman half shrieked in fright and yielded up the phone.
The men in the car couldn’t miss the change that had come over Angelo when he stepped out of the booth. He was whistling “Caro Nome” loudly and expertly; his stride was full of energy and purpose; and a grin, a real one this time, was spread all over his face.
He slipped into the driver’s seat, turned and whacked Rand’s knee with a heavy hand. His craggy features glowed with pride and satisfaction as he looked at the younger man. “That was Feldman on the phone. They sent a team out to that address in Queens where the barrels went. The place is a locked-up house with a big garage out back. Every barrel that company ever got is in there, kid. Every fucking barrel except one.”
An idea struck John Booth as his FBI driver threaded their car through the narrow and crowded streets of lower Manhattan. Information about the buildings they were searching-the thickness of the walls, the ceilings, the roof, the materials employed in their construction-was vital to his NEST teams. “This housing development,” he asked, “the city must have built it, right?”