The Baron opened it and read it, studiously ignoring as he did the manifest impatience of the SDECE director. When he had finished, he folded the letter, placed it back in its envelope, returned the envelope to its place and passed the dossier back to his assistant.
“Just as one might have expected,” he said, his voice as cutting as long years of practice could make it, “a sordid little affair. Just the sort of thing to interest your services. Your friend Monsieur de Serre was caught employing the diplomatic valise to smuggle Indian antiquities out of the country. Quite valuable objects, as it turned out. Rather than risking any embarrassment with our Indian friends, he was recalled and returned to his post at the Atomic Energy Commission.”
“Interesting.” Bertrand methodically twisted his cigarette stub into the ashtray in his hand. So there is our fissure, he thought. The search for these little flaws, for the barely perceptible cracks in the smooth fagade of a man’s character that could be widened and exploited, was the very essence of Bertrand’s calling. The heavy hands of the brass Empire clock on the Baron’s desk showed that it was already half past six. The velvet mantle of evening, the magic hour of legend and lovers, was settling over Paris. If he was going to pursue this tonight, he would have to hurry. He hesitated. Really, he should leave it to the morning. Still, his CIA colleague had seemed very concerned. And the Arabs, he knew, worked late.
“I’m sorry, morn cher,” he informed the Baron. “I’m going to have to use your facilities to get off an urgent message to our man at the embassy in Tripoli. In view of what you’ve just told me, it can’t wait until I get back to my headquarters.”
Jeremy Oglethorpe, Washington’s evacuation expert, gawked at the sight before him like a little boy on Christmas morning discovering on his livingroom floor an electric-train set that went beyond his wildest fantasies. Spread over an entire wall of the command center at the Metropolitan Transit Authority Building in Brooklyn was an action map of New York’s subway system, each of the 450 stations of its three divisions identified by name and a light, every one of the 207 trains moving at that moment on its 237 miles of track marked by a flashing red light.
“Wonderful!” he gasped. “Even more impressive than I imagined it would be.”
He was sitting in the superintendent’s glassed-in central booth in the center of the room with the chief of operations, a genial, slightly overweight black. Spread on the desk before him was a map of the system and beside it a thick sheaf of notes in a gray-and-white Stanford Research Institute binder. “I’ve done a lot of work studying your system, Chief.
You’ve got six thousand cars available?”
“We had 5,062 today. You’ve always got some in for repairs, inspections.”
“And you can put two hundred and fifty people in a car?”
“Only if you want to start a riot. Two hundred’s our limit.”
Oglethorpe grunted. My figure is good for my scenario, he thought. “Chief, I want you to think about a problem with me. Suppose we’ve got to evacuate Manhattan in an emergency. Fast, real fast. And we don’t want to take people out to Brooklyn or Queens. We want to move them up here.”
Oglethorpe’s judgy fingers skirted the terminals of the upper Bronx, 242nd Street, Woodlawn Road, 205th Street, 241st Street, Dyre Avenue, and Pelham Bay Park.
The chief twisted a plastic cup of black coffee in his hand and studied Oglethorpe with a skeptical eye. “Why would you want to do all this?”
“Well, say we’re afraid there’s a nuclear bomb in Manhattan. Or the Russians are coming.”
The chief thought awhile, then stood and peered down at the system’s map.
“Okay. The first thing you’d want to think about are the trains already moving in the system when you sound your alert. I guess you keep ‘em going all the way through. Take an IRT number five going into Fulton Street in lower Manhattan. Give the motorman an announcement, ‘We have to evacuate Manhattan because of an emergency threat.’ Then tell him to run straight up to Dyre Avenue nonstop and dump his load.”
Oglethorpe was frantically noting down his words.
“Now,” the trainman continued, “that might be a little difficult. New Yorkers don’t like being told what to do very much.” He gave a little laugh. “You’ll want some help there in the Bronx. Some of those people aren’t going to want to get off the train.
They’ll insist on going back to get their wives or their kids, or their mothers-in-law. Or their pet canaries. We’d have to devise a loop. Up to the Bronx. Drop them. Out to Brooklyn,” he continued.
“Why all the way to Brooklyn?” Oglethorpe queried.
“Because we can’t turn trains around in the middle of the system. You’d use the local track to load and go onto the express track once they’re loaded.
Run ‘em nonstop right up to the Bronx and start all over again.”
“Terrific!” Oglethorpe was almost trembling with excitement. Obviously, this was the answer. With a little order, a little control. “Now tell me,”
he said, “on the basis you’ve outlined here, allowing for the minor problems that always crop up, how much time do you think it would take under this plan to clear Manhattan?”
“Probably four to six hours. Maybe a bit more.”
“And if we asked you to take people out of Queens and Brooklyn too?”
“Then we’ve got a much bigger problem.”
Oglethorpe sat down, studying his notes, going through the papers of his SRI study. He was beaming. He looked at Walsh, the smile on his face almost triumphant. “I told you this was the answer. Now look, Chief, if you started right now, with any help you wanted, could you get this plan down on paper for me, everything, logistics, signaling systems, timing, everything, in two hours?”
“I think so.”
“Terrific.” Oglethorpe looked again at Walsh. “We’re going to have a terrific plan.”
“Sure, you’ll have a terrific plan, mister,” the chief agreed. His voice was low and cool, so fully controlled he might have been an anchor man reading out the evening news. “And there’ll only be one thing wrong with it.”
“What’s that?”
“It won’t work.”
“Won’t work?” Oglethorpe looked as though he’d just received a blow in the stomach. “What do you mean it won’t work?”
“Who do you think are going to drive those trains for you?”
“Why,” Oglethorpe replied, “your motormen. Who else?” “Not if they know there’s an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island, my friend. They’ll take their first train up to Dyre Avenue all right. And then they’ll be out of the station door with everyone else. The switchmen, the yardsmen you need to turn the trains around-they’ll be gone, too.”
“Well,” Oglethorpe muttered, “we won’t tell them. We’ll say it’s a practice.”
The chief laughed, a rich, warm laugh from deep in his overextended stomach. “You’re going to clear three and a half million people off Manhattan Island and try to make them believe you’re doing it for fun? For some kind of exercise?” The pitch of his laughter skirted upward at the thought of how ludicrous it all was. “Mister, there’s not a New Yorker alive who’d believe horseshit like that. I tell you, half an hour after you start this, every car in the system’ll be laid down on the tracks up there in the Bronx and every motorman in town’ll be running for the bills.”
Oglethorpe listened in dismayed silence, one hand clutching his carefully written notes and the papers of his SRI study.
“You can’t evacuate this city with the subways,” the chief said, “or any other way, for that matter.” He looked sadly at the papers in Oglethorpe’s fingers. “All you got there, mister, is a handful of dreams.”