A bell over the door jingled. It was as though an alarm had gone off.
Everyone in the bar’s dark interior, the halfdozen young men on its worn moleskin barstools, the squat, unshaven bartender, the trio,in black leather jackets playing pinball, turned to stare at the three policemen invading their sanctuary. There was not a sound in the place except for the click-clack of the lead ball still bouncing from bumper to bumper in the pinball machine and the ting of the lights flashing on its back panel.
“You would have to say,” Angelo muttered to Rand, “that these guys know the heat when they see it.”
Malone, head of the NYPD Pickpocket Squad, walked slowly down the bar, his eyes scrutinizing each face along his way. They belonged to the dips who were the regulars at the Flatbush Avenue Terminal of the Long Island Rail Road, resting up with coffee and tequila between rush hours. He stopped a few feet from the pinball machine, pointed at one of the three young men, then beckoned to him with his forefinger.
“Hey, Mr. Malone.” The young man gave a nervous wriggle that would have passed as a clever move on a disco dance floor. “Why for you jostling me?
Is nothing I’ve done. Nothing.”
“We want to have a little talk with you. Out in the car.”
The car was around the corner. Malone put the pickpocket into the front seat and got in beside him. Angelo circled the car to get in on the other side. Rand headed for the rear. “No,” Angelo ordered, “you go back and keep your eyes on the bar. Just in case.”
Squeezed between the two detectives, the Colombian seemed to shrink under the impact of his nervous concern. His head swiveled from man to man like a weathervane buffeted by a swirling wind. “Why you busting me, Mr. Malone? Is nothing I do, I swear.” The voice was now almost a whimper.
“I’m not busting you,” Malone replied. “Just giving you a chance to get on the plus side for the next time we take you in.”
He took out the photos of Yolande Belindez and Torres and placed them before the pickpovket. As he did, Angelo’s attention was totally concentrated on the young man’s face. For a fleeting instant he saw there what he was looking for, the sudden apprehensive flicker of recognition.
“Know these guys?” Malone asked.
The pickpocket paused. “No. I no know. Never seen.” Before he knew what had happened, Angelo had slipped the young man’s right forearm between his own arms, grasped his fingertips and was slowly, steadily pushing them backward.
“My friend here asked you a question.”
Sweat broke out on the pickpocket’s forehead. Again his head swiveled wildlv from one detective to the other. “Hey, man, I no see. No see.”
Angelo squeezed harder. The pickpocket squealed in pain.
“You ever tried boosting somebody’s wallet with your hand in a cast? You don’t talk to my friend there, I’ll snap these tendons like crackers.”
“Hey,” the pickpocket screamed in pain. “I talk. I talk.” Angelo eased the pressure. “They new in town. I only seen them once. Maybe twice.”
“Where they live?”
“Hicks Street. Over by the Expressway. I no know house. Only one time I see, I swear.”
Angelo released his fingers. “Grncias, amigo,” he said, opening the door to let the dip out. “Appreciate your help.”
Henri Bertrand loathed reading the transcripts of wiretaps. The director of French intelligence had no scruples about their morality. It was rather that he inevitably found the exercise depressing. Nothing, he had discovered long ago, revealed quite as completely the emptiness, the banality, the squalor of most lives as did that harvest of the electronic scanning of an unguarded soul.
When he had started to comb his way through the transcripts of PaulHenri de Serre’s conversations, it was with the expectation that he would find in them the imprint of an exalted spirit, of-a man with the love of beauty needed to assemble the collection of ancient objects Bertrand had admired in his apartment.
He had found instead a petty, scheming bureaucrat; a dull, banal man with no trace of the weaknesses someone might exploit to get his cooperation. He had no mistresses; or, if he did, he didn’t talk to them. Indeed, the man’s rigorous marital fidelity, Bertrand had thought with a chuckle, might be seen as the only aberration in his character.
The interminable transcript through which he was laboring dated to November a year ago. It was with the administrative director of the Fusion Research Center at Fontenay-aux-Roses, and, Bertrand noted with relief, it was finally concluding with a personal exchange. He skimmed it rapidly.
ADMINISTRATOR: By the way, cher ami, we’re go ing to have a Nobel here.
DE SERAE: Don’t be fatuous, Jean. The Swedes will never give a Nobel to anyone even remotely con nected with our program.
ADMINISTRATOR: Well, you’re wrong. Do you re member Alain Prevost?
DE SERRE: That rather ploddy type who worked on the submarine reac tor at Pierrelatte years ago?
ADMINISTRATOR: That’s he. In strictest confi dence, he and his people at the laser-beam complex have just made the fusion breakthrough we’ve all been hoping for.
DE SERRE: They blew up the bubble?
ADMINISTRATOR: Shattered it. Prevost has been invited to the P-lysee at four next Tuesday to tell Giscard and a select Cabinet what it all means.
DE SBRRE: My God! Perhaps you’re right. Give Prevost my congratulations. Although I never would have dreamed he had the intel lectual resources for such a thing. Au revoir.
Alain Prevost. Bertrand took a slow, meditative drag on his Gatiloise, trying to remember where it was he had heard that name before. Then he had it: the murder in the Bois de Boulogne.
A strange voice filtered into the National Security Council conference room over the same white plastic squawk box through which Harold Agnew had revealed barely eighteen hours before the existence of Qaddafi’s hydrogen bomb. It belonged to an Air Force brigadier general sitting at the communications console of the Doomsday 747, thirtyfive thousand feet above the Mediterranean.
“Eagle One to Eagle Base,” he said. “Secure communications circuit to Fox Base is now operational.” “Fox Base” was the code designation for Tripoli.
“All contacts verified and functioning. Fox Base advises Fox One will be on line in sixty seconds.”
The mutter of conversation in the room stopped at the words “Fox One.” For a moment, there was no noise except for the whir of the ventilation equipment and the occasional scraping of a chair. Each of the men and women present reacted in his or her own way to the fact that in a few seconds they would be listening to the voice of the man threatening six million of their countrymen.
A cackle of static broke from the squawk box, and suddenly Qaddafi’s voice filled the conference room. Since he was speaking over a secure, scrambled line, his voice had a peculiar resonance as though it was percolating slowly upward through a vat of water or had been taken from the sound track of a late-night movie about an extraterrestial invasion of planet Earth.
“This is Muammar al-Qaddafi, Secretary General of the Libyan People’s Congress,” the voice said in Arabic.
Jack Eastman leaned forward as soon as the translators had finished. “Mr.
Qaddafi, this is Jack Eastman, the President’s National Security Assistant.
I wish first to give you the personal assurances of the President of the United States that the communications channel over which we are speaking is a secure voice channel audible only to the people around you and the people here with me in the White House. For the purposes of our conversation I have with me Mr. E. R. Sheehan of the Department of State, who will translate our remarks into Arabic for you, and yours into English for us.”