“How many bombs would they be able to make with it?”
“They told me they were reprocessing two kilograms of plutonium a day.
Enough for two bombs a week. That was back in June. Altogether, allowing for error, I should say they should have been able to get enough for forty bombs out of there.”
Bertrand whistled softly, spilling as he did the ashes of his Davidoff.
“Mon Dieu! Could you recognize any of those people in a photograph?”
“Perhaps. The man I dealt with was a Palestinian, not a Libyan. Heavy fellow with a moustache. Spoke perfect French.”
“Get out of those clothes,” Bertrand ordered. “You’re coming to the Boulevard Mortier with me.”
The scientist staggered to his feet, vomit dripping from his filth-covered pants, and started for the door. “I’ll go and change.”
Bertrand followed him. “I trust,” he said, “that in the circumstances you won’t mind if I accompany you.”
There comes a time in every international crisis when the President of the United States feels the need to get away for a few moments from his formal circle of advisers, to isolate himself with the one or two intimates with whom he feels totally at ease, in whose judgment and candor his confidence is total. In the dark moments after Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt inevitably turned to the frail figure of Harry Hopkins. The voice that Jack Kennedy listened to in the White House corridors during the Cuban Missile Crisis was that of his brother Bobby. Now, in the aftermath of his disastrous phone call with Qaddafi, the President was alone with Jack Eastman, pacing slowly up and down the colonnaded terrace linking the West Wing to the Executive Mansion.
The afternoon sun was still warm, and all around them melting snowdrops pattered to the ground with the gentle rustle of a light rain. The President was silent, his hands thrust into his pockets. At the end of the colonnade, a Secret Service agent, arms folded across his chest, kept a discreet watch.
“You know, Jack,” the President said finally, “I got the feeling we’re like a guy who’s got some obscure virus and none of the miracle drugs his doctor recommends seem to do anything for it.” He stopped and looked across the White House gardens toward the Ellipse. Somewhere down there was the national Christmas tree he was supposed to light in a couple of hours, a reassuring annual demonstration of hope, an affirmation of the constancy of certain values his nation liked to think it stood for in good times and bad. Hope, it occurred to him, was in precious short supply at the moment.
He stopped and threw an arm around Eastman’s shoulder. “Where do we go from here?”
Eastman had been waiting for the question. “Well, one place I don’t think we go is back to him. You’d have to crawl. And despite what the doctors say, I don’t think he’s going to be reasoned out of this. Not after listening to him.”
“Neither do I―” The President withdrew his hand and ran it through his wavy hair. “That leaves us Begin, doesn’t it?”
“Begin or those people in New York finding that damn thing., The two men resumed their pacing.
“We offer Begin some kind of ironclad guarantee of his state inside the ‘sixty-seven borders if he’ll agree to get out of the West Bank. Get the Soviets to subscribe to it, which they certainly will. It’s the only reasonable solution to that damn mess out there anyway.” The President waited for his friend and adviser’s reaction.
“It is.” Eastman shook his head. “But in these circumstances? I just don’t see Begin agreeing. Not unless you’re prepared to pull out all the stops.
Remember what General Ellis said last night? Are you ready to go in there and get those people out if he refuses? Or at least threaten to?”
Again the President was silent. The implications of what Eastman had just said were not pleasant to contemplate. But, he thought grimly, contemplating the thermonuclear destruction of New York was far worse.
“I’ve got no choice, Jack. I’ve got to go after him. Let’s get back to the conference room.”
William Webster of the FBI was just hanging up his phone when they returned.
“What’s up?” Eastman asked.
“It was New York. There’s a bomb up there all right. They just picked up traces of radioactivity around a house out in Queens where it was apparently hidden for a few hours last Friday.”
By the standards of the city he administered, the office of the Mayor of New York was miniscule, smaller than that of many a secretary in the great glass sheaths of Wall Street and mid-Manhattan. Abe Stern sat in it now, staring at the oil of Fiorello La Guardia on the wall opposite him, fighting to control the anger and frustration surging through his nervous system. Just as the President was, he too was making a determined effort to put on a fagade of normality. For the past thirty minutes it had consisted of talking to the City Hall press corps gathered like a swarm of angry hornets around his antique cherry-wood desk, trying to explain the logistics of snow removal. He saw with relief the last of the reporters disappear and ordered in his next visitor, the Manager of his Budget Bureau. “What do you want?” he snapped at the mildmannered, bespectacled CPA.
“The Police Commissioner wants to mobilize his force for some kind of emergency, Your Honor.”
“Well, let him.”
“But,” the Budget Manager protested nervously, “that means we’ll have to pay them overtime.”
“So what? Pay it.” Stern was beside himself with exasperation.
“But, my goodness, do you realize what that will do to the budget?”
“I don’t give a damn!” Stern was almost shouting. “Give the Commissioner what he asks for, for God’s sake!”
“All right, all right,” the intimidated accountant said, opening his briefcase, “but, in that case, I’ve got to have your signature on the authorization.”
Stern grabbed the paper from his hand and stabbed at it with his pen, shaking his head in dismay. The last man on earth, he thought, the very last, will be a bureaucrat.
As the man left, Stern turned his back on him and looked out across the snow-covered lawn of City Hall down to the old Tweed Courthouse, an enduring monument to the potential for graft inherent in his office. I can’t stand this anymore, he thought. He jabbed at one of the buttons on his telephone console. “Michael,” he asked, “where the hell is that guy who was going to tell us how to evacuate this place?
“Tell him to wait,” the Mayor ordered when he heard the answer. “I’m coming, too.” In a flash, Stern was into the pantry beside his office-its refrigerator stocked with tomato juice, the only drink he consumed-down a flight of stairs and out of the building by his semisecret side entrance.
Five minutes later, he was being buckled into a helicopter on top of Police Plaza, Oglethorpe beside him, the Police Commissioner and Lieutenant Walsh in the back. Entranced, he watched as slowly his city took shape below him in pace with the chopper’s thudding ascent into the afternoon sky. He could see the tight cluster of Chinatown, so closely woven together that it looked as if it had been constructed with Tinker Toys; the Fulton Fish Market and the brownish-gray wakes of the shipping along the East River; then Wall Street and Exchange Place, and all around them, reflecting back the glory of the afternoon sun, the proud glass-and-steel cylinders of lower Manhattan. This city’s got so much going for it, Stern thought, so much energy, such strength and vitality. His eyes studied the rectangular canyons below, the yellow forms of the cabs clogging the streets, the scurrying figures of his people on the sidewalks, recklessly darting through traffic. Ahead, he caught a glimpse of a Staten Island ferry scuttling like a sand crab over the slate-gray surface of the harbor. It just wasn’t possible, Abe Stern told himself, it wasn’t possible that some distant fanatic would destroy all this. He blinked, feeling the sting in his eyes, hearing as he did the jabbering of the Civil Defense expert beside him interrupting his nightmare.