Poor bastard, Bennington thought, detecting a note of pride in his reply.
Probably so caught up with technology as a plaything that he keeps forgetting how far we’re ahead of him.
While the technician on the Doomsday jet prepared to set up a television link that would relay Tripoli’s signal to the Atlantic COMSAT satellite, then back to the antennas and communication discs in the spaceage garden adjoining the CIA’s headquarters, a pair of Agency scientists wheeled their eye scanner into the National Security Council conference room.
The conferees looked on, fascinated, as they set up this latest gadget in an arsenal of weapons designed by the CIA to break down the most resistant barriers of the human conscience and force men to divulge emotions so hidden they were sometimes unaware they had them. It looked vaguely like a portable X-ray machine. Two small black metal tubes like the eyepieces of a pair of fieldglasses protruded from the top. From these, two beams of light were already dancing over the television screen on which Qaddafi’s face was expected to appear. Highintensity laser beams, they would be trained on his eyeballs and would read for the minicomputer at the heart of the scanner the slightest variations in the size or shape of their surface.
The results would be instantly compared to the control data already stored in the computer bank, and be printed out on the mini-television screen attached to the scanner.
For a few seconds, Tripoli’s television signal expanded and contracted on the screen as haphazardly as a multiplying amoeba caught under a microscope’s glare. Then, suddenly, it coalesced into a sharp image of the Libyan leader. Curiously, the sight was almost reassuring. Qaddafi appeared so boyish, so timidly serious, that it seemed inconceivable that he could carry out his threat. In his simple khaki blouse with no decoration other than his colonel’s epaulets, he looked more like a professor of tactics at the infantry school than a man who would be the avenging sword of God.
Eastman could detect no hint of strain or tension on his face. Indeed, there was only one register of feeling there, the intimation of an ironic smile trying, with minimal success, to intrude on the precise set of his mouth.
The little pinpoints of light from the scanner skated over the screen, then came to rest astride each eyeball like a pair of contact lenses.
“We’re registering,” one of the technicians stated.
This time, you son of a bitch, we’ve got you, Bennington thought, taking as he did a long, satisfied puff of his pipe.
Opposite the President, a red light glowed on the television camera relaying his image back to Tripoli.
“They’re set,” Eastman whispered.
The images of the two leaders were now projected side by side on the screens of the conference-room wall, the President trying, despite the strain, to force some indication of personal warmth onto his face, Qaddafi’s regard as devoid of emotion as a Roman bust.
“Mr. Qaddafi,” the President said, resuming the dialogue, “I think we will both find this visual link we’ve established very helpful in dealing with the difficult problems we face. When we were speaking a few moments ago, I believe you had just told me that the bomb in New York is controlled by an automatic timing device which only you can alter by a radio signal from Tripoli. Is that correct?”
Every face in the room was turned to the image of Qaddafi on the screen, the two bright lights of the scanner riveted to his eyeballs. Before he replied to the President, his right hand reached up to the pocket of his battle blouse. He unbuttoned it with almost tantalizing slowness. Then he drew a pair of dark sunglasses from its folds and, while the audience in the White House looked on in dismay, placed them defiantly over his eyes.
“Son of a bitch!” gasped one of the CIA technicians.
The smile that had been struggling for ascendancy on the Libyan’s face burst forth. “Yes, Mr. President,” he answered, “you are correct.”
Compared to the National Security Council conference room the underground command post from which Muammar al-Qaddafi was addressing the President was almost spartan in its simplicity. Not much larger than a pair of double bedrooms, it was divided in half by a chest-high cement partition topped by a thick panel of glass. Qaddafi sat in one half at a simple wooden desk on which was trained the television camera transmitting his image to Washington. Just off camera was a twenty-eightyear-old Libyan graduate student from the University of Texas who was serving as his interpreter in much the same way as the State Department Arabists were serving the President.
In the second room, five men sat at a gray metallic desk. There were no maps on the wall, no blinking telephones at their elbows, no piles of secret cables offering advice stacked before them. There wasn’t even a rug on the floor. They included Qaddafi’s Prime Minister Salam Jalloud; his chief of intelligence; Vladimir Illitch Sanchez “Carlos,” the elegant Venezuelan terrorist; and a short man with thick eyeglasses and long, unkempt blond hair. He was a German, born in a little village in the Bavarian foothills, who had found his true vocation at West Berlin’s Free University in the early sixties as a professional student radical. Among his several degrees was a doctorate in psychology, and it was that which accounted for his presence in the Villa Pietri. In return for $50,000 in a Swiss bank, he had agreed to become Qaddafi’s psychiatric adviser. The fact that Qaddafi was even speaking to the President went against his primary recommendation. It was he who had persuaded the Libyan to reject the charge’s first initiative. Qaddafi’s reluctance to agree and his instant and irrational rage at sighting the Sixth Fleet on his radar had confirmed the German’s conviction that as his Washington counterparts had suspected, Qaddafi really did want to talk to the President.
“My time. Mr. President,” Qaddafi was saying, “is as valuable as yours. I have no intention whatsoever of becoming involved in a long and revealing dialogue with your adviser Eastman while leaving you free to concentrate your energies on other things.”
“But,” the President protested, “I’ve got to talk with Mr. Begin about your note.”
The German smiled. That was exactly the reply he had told Qaddafi the American would make.
The Libyan stared at the television camera from behind his dark glasses. A faint smile twisted away at one side of his mouth. “Surely, Mr. President,”
he said, his voice suddenly chill, “you don’t mean to tell me that fifteen hours have gone by since my explosion and you have not yet started discussing the implementation of my demands with the Israelis?”
The image of the President was being screened on an ordinary commercial television set, a twenty-four-inch Philips color receiver. The Americans were delivering a tight closeup of his head and shoulders. That was the shot the psychiatrists had recommended. A close visual contact with a figure of authority often aided a terrorist negotiation.
It aided, in any case, the task of the two young men manipulating the machine which fixed a pair of light beams to the eyes of the President on the screen before them. Manufactured by the Standarten Optika of Stuttgart, the machine had come to Carlos’s attention when the West German police had used it to interrogate the suspected killers of German financier Dietrich Vallmar. With the German psychiatrist’s help, he had brought it to Tripoli.
“Of course I have,” he answered. “At great length and in great detail. And I can assure you Mr. Begin’s initial reaction is very favorable. That’s why it’s so important that I resume my discussions with him.”
One of the two technicians training the eye scanner on the President’s face started. The green line darting across the oscilloscope of the screen of his machine had taken a jagged, sawtooth pattern as it ran over the high-speed computerized printout of the President’s words. He hit a red button that allowed him to speak to Qaddafi, isolated in the other room.