Finally, Qaddafi’s voice once again filled the room. “Mr. President, I admire you for your offer. I respect you for it. But it is not necessary.
My letter is clear. Its terms are clear. That is all that we ask. There is no need for any further discussion between you and me either here or anywhere else.”
“Mr. Qaddafi.” The President almost interrupted the Libyan. “I cannot urge you strongly enough to accept my proposal. We have been in contact in the last two hours with every major leader in the world. And all your fellow Arab leaders: President Sadat, Mr. Assad, King Hussein, King Khalid, even Yassir Arafat.
All of them, without exception, condemn your initiative. You are alone, isolated as you will not be if you agree to my proposal.”
“I do not speak in their names, Mr. President.” The Libyan’s Arabic continued to flow into the room in the slow, unmodulated cadence he had employed almost from the beginning. “I speak for the people, the Arab people. It is their brothers who have been dispossessed, not those of our leaders and kings rotting in their palaces.” Suddenly there was a shift in Qaddafi’s tone, a stirring of impatience and irritation. “All this talk is useless, Mr. President. What must be done must be done.”
“We’re getting some strain,” the technician manning the voice analyzer announced.
“You had thirty years to do justice to my people and you did nothing. Now you have twentyfour hours.”
Anger seized the President in a swift, uncontrollable tide. “Mr. Qaddafi!”
To the psychiatrists’ dismay he was virtually shouting. “We will not be blackmailed. We will not be coerced by your unreasonable, impossible demands, by your outrageous action!”
A long, ominous silence followed his outburst. Then Qaddafi’s voice returned as calm and as unhurried as it had been earlier. “Mr. President, there is nothing impossible about my demands. I am not asking for Israel’s destruction. I only ask for what is just-that my Palestinian brothers have the home God meant for all people to have on the land He gave them. We Arabs were in the right for thirty years, but neither war nor political methods allowed us to achieve our objective, because we did not have the strength. Now we do, Mr. President, and either you will force the Israelis to give us the justice that is ours or, like Samson in your Bible, we will pull down the roof of the temple on ourselves and all the others that are in it.”
While Muammar al-Qaddafi was delivering his threat to the President, one of the terrorists he counted on to help carry it out if necessary was getting ready to make love in a bedroom in New York City. Why am I here?
Laila Dajani asked herself. She knew the answer. Because I’m weak. Because I lack the steel in my soul the others have, that steel Carlos always said was the one indispensable ingredient of a revolutionary. I’m fatally prone to the terrorist’s mortal sin, she admitted. I think too much.
The door opened and Michael walked in, a bath towel knotted around his slender waist, a glass of white wine in each hand. He bent down, kissed her gently, handed her her glass, then lay down on the bed beside her. For a moment they lay there in silence, Michael’s hand slowly, distractedly almost, running over the surface of her breasts.
“Michael?”
“Yes, darling.”
“Come to Quebec tomorrow.”
Michael propped himself up on his elbow and stared down at Laila. Even in the half-light of his bedroom, he could see the sorrow on her face, the nascent sparkle of tears rising in her eyes.
“Linda, for Christ’s sake, what is it with this Quebec thing? You’re obsessed with it.”
Laila rolled over, squashed out her cigarette, pulled a new one from her pack and lit it. “Michael, I told you I was superstitious, didn’t I?”
Michael let his head sink back onto his pillow. So that’s it, he thought.
“There’s an old Egyptian fortuneteller I go to over in Brooklyn. An incredible place. Once you get inside you’d think you were on the banks of the Nile. His wife is all done up in black like a Bedouin woman. Her face is tattooed. She brings you a cup of masbout, Arabic coffee.” She paused.
“He takes your cup and holds it. He asks your name, your mother’s name, your date of birth. Then he goes into a kind of trance, praying. You’re not allowed to smoke or cross your legs or your arms-that cuts the current between you. Every so often, he stops praying and talks to you.”
Laila sat up, leaning against the backrest of the bed, smoking intently.
“Michael, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you some of the things this man has predicted for me.”
“Like a secret rendezvous in Quebec?”
She ignored him.
“I went to him this morning. At the end, just before I left, he tensed up as though something terrible was happening. He said, `There is someone very close to you. A man. A young blond man.’ He said in Arabic, `He’s a messawarati.” Michael, do you know what a messawarati is?”
Michael rolled his head on his pillow. “A lecherous infidel?”
“Please, darling. Be serious. A photographer: How could he possibly have known that, Michael? He said, `He’s in very great danger here. Very soon.
Tomorrow. He must leave New York before tomorrow.”’
Laila clasped his hand, awed by the chance she was taking. “Michael, please. Go to Quebec tomorrow.”
Michael rose up again on one elbow, looking at her sorrowful face, at the two tears glistening on her cheekbones. What ridiculous, superstitious creatures women can be, he thought.
Tenderly, he kissed away each teardrop. “You’re sweet, my darling,” he said, “to think of me like that.” Then he laughed softly. “But realty I haven’t got room in my life for the prophecies of old Arab fortunetellers.”
Laila rolled over on top of him, her back and shoulders raised so that the long swirls of her hair hung down around his face, enclosing it in an auburn canopy. I tried, she thought, gazing solemnly at her lover, God knows I tried.
“Too bad, Michael,” she whispered. “Oh, too bad!”
In Washington, the President was trembling. Qaddafi’s reference to Samson’s destruction of the Temple had shaken him as nothing had since he’d watched the Libyan’s fireball exploding on the Pentagon’s screens at midnight.
“Jack,” he ordered, his words coming in a hoarse whisper. “Tell the Doomsday to arrange for some communications problems over the next few minutes. I want some time to think about this.”
When the squawk box fell silent the Chief Executive studied the faces around the table. They too were aghast. It was as if the full measure of the drama they faced had only just become apparent in the obduracy and fanaticism of the man in Libya.
“Gentleman,” the President asked, “what do you think?”
At the end of the table, Admiral Fuller seemed to pull his head down into his shirt collar like a wizened old sea turtle withdrawing into his shell.
“Sir, I think he’s only going to leave us one option-military action.”
“I don’t agree.” The Secretary of State, had intervened almost before the Admiral had finished. “There is another option, and I think we should make a decision to act on it very quickly. Instead of going on trying to reason with a very unreasonable man, we must use the precious time we have left to force some kind of an accommodation out of the Israelis that will satisfy him and save New York.”
“That, at least, has the advantage of being an initiative that requires very little time,” Bennington noted sarcastically. “Only the thirty seconds it’s going to take Begin to say no. The Agency has been pointing out for the last five years that those damn settlements were a menace to peace and were going to land us in serious trouble one day. Unfortunately, no other agency in the government wanted to do anything about them.”