Before his agent driver had even answered, Booth had picked up the radio and called his headquarters in the Seventh Regiment Armory. “Get someone down to the Municipal Building,” he ordered, “and pick up the plans for the Baruch Houses. I’ll be waiting for them in our control van at Columbia and Houston.”
As their car reached Houston Street, Booth spotted a yellow Hertz van parked at the corner. Four black metal discs, not much larger than silver dollars, and the slim pod slung from its undercarriage were the only indications the truck wasn’t being used to deliver packages or move someone’s furniture.
It was, in fact, a rolling scientific laboratory, one of the two hundred that Booth’s NEST teams were using throughout the city. The little black discs were hooked to a boron trifluoride neutron detector that could pick up neutrons flowing from the tiniest speck of plutonium. The pod was connected to a germanium gamma-ray scanner tied, in turn, to a minicomputer in the van of the truck with its own televisionlike screen for an oscilloscope. Not only could that detector pick up gamma rays over the maximum distance possible, a distance that was a closely guarded secret, but it could “read” them, determine what isotope of what element was throwing them off.
Booth walked over to the suntanned man beside the driver. Jack Delaney was a weapons designer at Livermore, a Ph.D. from Berkeley, who got his suntan scaling the Sierras on his weekends.
“Nothing,” Delaney said.
Booth looked down the street toward the housing project, its thirteen-story towers thrusting into the skyline with a brutish inelegance born of municipal economy. “Not surprising. It’s got to be on the top floors.”
He continued to study the project. Over two hundred people, most of them on welfare, in thirtyfive apartments. Moving around in there without being noticed wasn’t going to be easy. A second, unmarked FBI car glided up behind them. An agent got out and handed Booth a thick roll of blueprints.
Booth climbed into the crowded rear of the van. At the back, an FBI agent was already undressing Delaney. “You wiring him?” Booth asked.
The agent nodded. He was taping to Delaney’s chest a Kel, a radio microphone that would allow Booth to follow his progress through the project from the truck. An ivory plastic button like a hearing aid was stuck to his ear, the receiver on which he’d get Booth’s instructions.
The NEST director spread out the blueprint on a small camp table and studied it. A matchbox, he thought. The emanations they were looking for weren’t going to have any difficulty penetrating the walls and the ceilings of the Baruch Houses.
“Okay,” Booth announced after a few calculations. “We’ll do the top six floors. Although there’s almost no chance it’s below the top four. You two guys take Building A. Why don’t you be insurance salesmen?”
The New York FBI agent who was going to accompany Booth’s scientist waved a warning finger. “Down here a debt collection agency’s better.”
“If you say so,” Booth agreed. Getting in close to pin down a bomb site with precision after a first reading was the trickiest, most dangerous part of the business, and he wasn’t going to go against a local agent’s advice.
His scientists, for the most part, knew nothing about firearms, so they had to work with an FBI agent to protect them. They needed an infinite variety of disguises that would allow them to glide unnoticed through those areas where a bomb might be hidden and armed terrorists might be alert for their presence: telephone repairmen, gas meter readers, delivery men. For Building B he had already decided to use a black chemist and a black female FBI agent.
Delaney picked up his portable detector. It was a box the size of an attachb case or a traveling salesman’s sample case.
As soon as the two had gone, Booth supervised by radio the dispatch of teams to the remaining buildings. Then, with the blueprint before him, he followed the progress of his teams, apartment by apartment, floor by floor, through the buildings.
Delaney came on, his final floor completed.
“Listen,” Booth ordered, “go up and have a look at the roof.”
Delaney groaned. “The elevator’s broken down.”
“So what?” his boss answered. “You’re a mountain climber, aren’t you?”
Several minutes later, the panting Californian emerged on the roof. There was nothing before him except the distant skyline of Brooklyn. His detector was silent. He looked, disgusted, at the grayish stains speckling the roof.
“John,” he reported, “there’s absolutely nothing up here. Nothing but a lot of old pigeon skit.”
As he watched the members of the White House press corps drift into the Oval Office, it occurred to the President that they represented the only element in this crisis that was under control. How much longer, he wondered, are we going to be able to go on saying that?
While they formed into a crescent around his desk, jockeying for position, some striving to make those selfconscious jokes with which they deceived themselves and their colleagues into thinking they were on intimate terms with the President of the United States, he scanned their faces, searching for any indication that one of them might be privy to his government’s frightful secret. To his relief, he sensed most of them had nothing more important on their minds at the moment than deciding where to have lunch.
In any event, nothing in his own manner could have betrayed the strain he was under unless it was the quick tap dance of his fingertips on his massive oak Presidential desk framed from the timbers of H.M.S. Resolute and offered by Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes.
The little ceremony his press secretary opened with a few ritual words was part of the charade they were acting out to convince the press that nothing unusual was going on. It was the Presidential proclamation of the thirty-third anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Chief Executive was halfway through it when he saw Jack Eastman glide unobtrusively into the room and lean against the office wall. With his index and forefinger, his national-security adviser made a scissors movement across his tie — cut it short.
The President rushed through the remaining text, then, as quickly as he could while still appearing to be unhurried, moved for the door. The instant he had settled into his private office, Eastman joined him.
“Mr. President,” he announced. “He’s ready to talk!”
Timmy Walsh and Jeremy Oglethorpe walked slowly up Broadway, then turned toward the big plateglass doors of the New York State Office Building.
For a moment they let the outflow sweep past them; the pretty black secretaries flaunting their style and elegance, their makeup all in place, flaring glasses frequently setting off the high arch of their cheekbones; the pasty-faced, overweight state office workers huddling together in conversations so intense they might have been discussing a mufti-million-dollar highway extension when in fact, Walsh knew, they were probably arguing the point spread on tonight’s Knicks’ game.
He’d selected the building as the first of their “random” sample of New York’s air-raid shelters deliberately. Give Rockefeller’s and Albany’s interest in the shelter program, the buildings should have the Rolls Royce of New York City’s shelters.
They pushed through the lobby, past the elevator banks to the familiar yellow-and-black sign over a door leading to the cellar. At least, Walsh noted, the sign was clean.
He gave his shield to the janitor at the desk in the building superintendent’s office. “New York Police, Office of Civil Preparedness,” he announced. “Doing a survey of the air-raid shelters, want to see how the biscuits, the portable toilets and all are being maintained.”
“Oh sure,” the janitor said. “Air-raid shelter. Got the keys right here.”