“Ya sidi,” he said, “the President is lying!”
The Libyan didn’t move a facial muscle. He took off his dark glasses and leaned to the camera. “Mr. President,” he said, “I thought you were an honest, decent man. I find out you are not. Not only are you despising of our abilities to cope with the technology of your world, but you have lied to me. Further conversation between us is useless. You now have twentyfour hours left in which to put the terms of my letter into effect or the bomb will explode.”
From inside his red Avis Econoline van, the technician of the first NEST team to reach Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue surveyed the broad steps of the New York Public Library. The oscilloscope of his detector registered a steady gross gamma count of .14 millirads an hour. Yet, to his utter astonishment, there were no other trucks, no cars immobilized in front of the library. Nothing stood between the pods of his detector and its monumental staircase.
“What in hell is going on?” the uncomprehending scientist asked rhetorically.
He did not have time to answer his question before John Booth had climbed into the front of the van. He studied the oscilloscope, then the view from the van, as wholly mystified as his scientist. From the radio net, he got the helicopter confirmation: the telltale emission was coming from somewhere across the street. By now, the area was full of unmarked FBI and police cars. Two more NEST vans had driven up behind his. Each confirmed the first van’s reading.
Booth studied the scene, completely baffled. Was it possible that someone had carried a ton-and-a-half device into that building before the first van had reached the spot? He looked at the building. No, he told himself, the radiation would never get through its thick floors and ceilings to the choppers.
“Shit!” he growled. “Maybe we’ve been following some guy who had a barium milkshake who’s just got off the bus here.”
He ordered four scientists with portable detectors across the street, then followed himself in the footsteps of their FBI escort. The four men drifted through the kids on roller skates gliding along the sidewalk, earphones glued to their ears so that not a note of the disco rhythm to which they moved eluded them, past a pair of handsome blacks in Afros and a sidewalk vendor selling kitchenware.
They worked in a kind of triangular pattern, approaching the steps from different angles so that they could converge on the direction from which their readings were coming.
“It’s over there,” said the technician beside whom Booth was walking. He tilted his head toward Prudence, one of the two stone lions guarding the steps. Half a dozen people reading the morning paper or a paperback book or just staring into space sat along the granite wall behind the lion.
“It’s got to be one of them,” Booth said.
As they approached, the emanation shifted. Sure enough, one of the people on the wall, an elderly, stooped woman in a frayed black coat, had begun to shuffle down the steps. Indicating to the others to move back, Booth, the scientist and an FBI agent followed her, then as discreetly as possible drew around her. She had a gaunt, waxen face, colored only by two russet circles of rouge on her sunken cheeks; sad, jaded reminders of what might have been her vanished beauty. At the sight of the agent’s shield, she clutched to her shrunken bosom the black plastic shopping bag she was carrying. A hurt and bewildered air seized her features.
“I’m very sorry, Officer,” she stammered. “I didn’t know it was wrong to do it. I’m on welfare.”
With one of her bony hands she brushed at the wisp of gray hair dangling from under a cloth stocking cap and smiled imploringly at the bulky agent.
“Times are fearfully bad and I, I …” she stammered again, “I just didn’t see no harm in pickin’ it up to take home. I didn’t know they were government property. Honest, I didn’t.”
Booth leaned forward. “Pardon me, ma’am, what did you pick up?”
Timidly she opened her plastic shopping bag and offered it to Booth for his inspection. He looked in and saw a gray mass. He plunged in his hand and drew out the still-warm body of a dead pigeon, recognizing as he did the deadly substance dangling in the ring on its leg.
“Oh, my God!” he exclaimed. “How long ago did you pick this up?”
“Only about five minutes ago. Just before you folks come up the steps.”
Dear Christ, Booth thought, staring down at the tablet in its metallic ring. So that’s it. That’s why all those readings kept disappearing on us.
He looked pityingly at the old woman. “Ma’am, we’d like to ask you, for your own good, to come with us to the hospital. You see, some of these pigeons have bad diseases”-he patted her arm reassuringly-“but they’ll give you a fine dinner there tonight, you’ll see.”
For the third time in barely five hours, the men responsible for the search for the bomb in New York City were gathered around the desk of Quentin Dewing in the underground emergency command post.
“Harvey,” Dewing asked the director of the FBI’s New York office, “have you picked up any trace of that guy from Boston that trained in Qaddafi’s camps?”
Hudson shook his head. “Negative. And we’ve had fifty guys pounding the pavements over there in Brooklyn for the last two hours. The dockers who handled those barrels at the Brooklyn Army Terminal didn’t recognize him, either.”
“Well, widen the search. I want every belly-dancing joint and Arab restaurant from New Haven to Philadelphia checked out. I still think that’s the best thing we’ve got going.”
There was a sharp cough from the far end of the conference table. “What’s the matter, Chief?” Dewing asked Al Feldman.
The Chief of Detectives plucked at one of his nostrils avith a forefinger.
“If these guys are half as smart as you people tell us they are, the last place they’re going to be eating lunch is in some Arab restaurant. They’re probably going to a pizza joint or a Hamburger Heaven.”
“Well, we’ve got to cover everything. How about our forensic operations?
What do we have on the house where the barrels went, Chief?”
Dewing had assigned the job of sifting through the Queens house for clues to the NYPD’s forensic unit. The Hertz van that had picked up the barrel he’d turned over to an FBI forensic team flown up from the National Crime Laboratory in Washington. Both groups were responsible for picking through their targets in painstaking detail, searching for anything, a fingerprint, a hairpin, a matchbox, soil on the doormat or grease caught between the treads of the van’s tires, that could reveal something about the people who had used them.
Feldman took a black notebook from his inside pocket and laid it on the desk. “The place belongs to a retired stockbroker out in Bay Shore.
Inherited it from his sister. Woman rented it from him last August. She gave him a year’s rent in cash, so he wasn’t inclined to ask her too many questions. We had an Identikit drawing on that Arab lady who checked out of the Hampshire House this morning done up from the clerks and the maid who knew her and ran it past him. He thinks it was her.”
“The embassy in Beirut finally came up with her visa application,”
Salisbury of the CIA interrupted. “The name she registered under at the Hampshire House, the whole thing’s a fake. They’ve sent us her picture, but none of our intelligence sources have anything on her. The only thing we know is she came into the country at JFK on TWA Flight 701 November twenty-sixth.”
Dewing grunted. “Keep after her. How about the house itself, Chief?”