The Arab hesitated. “It had to be Tuesday the first, because the meet was at Fifth Street.”
“Remember what she looked like?”
“Pretty. Long brown hair. She was wearing a fur coat.”
“An Arab?”
The prisoner shifted his regard from Angelo’s eyes, ashamed of his betrayal. “Probably. But we spoke English.”
“So what did she want?”
“Fresh cards. She told me to bring her fresh cards at ten the next morning.”
“And you went to Benny?”
The Arab nodded his head.
“Then what happened?”
“I gave her the cards. She said. ‘Come for a walk.’ We go a few blocks and we stop at a camera store. She told me to go in and buy a camera.”
“And you did?”
“I went to a bar first and practiced signing a few times.”
“Then you got the camera?”
“Yeah.” The Arab sighed, aware of how deeply he was involving himself in all this. “So she said, okay, it was good. She wanted more fresh cards and a driver’s license for Friday morning, ten o’clock. For a guy in his mid thirties. She gave me a thousand bucks. Friday the meet was over on Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn. She didn’t show up. A guy came instead.”
Angelo’s irritation at Dewing’s interruption of his interrogation was manifest. The FBI official walked authoritatively into the room, sat down in the chair beside his and took over the interrogation without even consulting him.
“Excuse me, Mr. Rocchia,” he said, “but I thought our friend here might look at some photographs for us. They’ve just come in from overseas.”
He passed the photo of Laila from the DST dossiers that Henri Bertrand had forwarded to the CIA barely twenty minutes earlier. “By any chance would this be the girl who contacted you?” he asked.
The Arab looked at the photograph, then at Angelo, wary and mistrustful of this intruder who had snapped the current developing between them. The detective, silently cursing Dewing, gave the Arab what he hoped was a particularly friendly smile.
“That’s her.”
Dewing passed Whalid’s picture to him. “Was this the guy you got the plastic for?”
The Arab laid the photo on the coffee table, shaking his head.
“How about him?” Dewing passed Kamal’s picture across the table.
The Arab studied it a moment, then looked up. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s him.”
The sight of the halfdozen exhausted, haggard men sitting around the National Security Council conference room in their dinner jackets would have been comical if the reason behind it were not so potentially tragic.
In a few moments, as part of their determined effort to conceal the crisis behind a fagade of normality, they would join their wives in the Executive Mansion for cocktails in the Blue Room. Then, in the State Dining Room, they would dine off the Lincoln gold service the Presi dent’s wife loved, at a banquet honoring the departing dean of Washington’s diplomatic corps, the ambassador of Bolivia.
Jack Eastman began their session by noting that nothing in the evening newscasts gave any indication the press was onto the crisis.
“Slender satisfaction,” the President remarked curtly and turned to the communication which had come in from the Israeli government while he had been changing his clothes. “I guess Begin leaves us no choice except to do it for him, does he?” The President’s voice was gruff as he asked the question, but he was a highly emotional man, and, looking at him, Eastman sensed how deeply pained he was. “What are the chances they’ll oppose our action?” he asked Bennington.
“More than fifty-fifty, I’m afraid, sir.”
The President slouched uncomfortably in his chair, his forefingers picking at his lips, his head bowed as though in prayer. He had laid claim to this office because he’d promised his nation a kind of vigorous leadership he sensed it needed and wanted. Yet nothing had quite prepared him for the lonely agony the exercise of power could-entail or for how complex issues that seemed simple from the outside became when you had to deal with them.
“We’re trapped between the fires of two fanatics, gentlemen. We can’t allow six million Americans to die because of their rigidity. If it comes down to it, we’ll have to act. Harold,” he said to his Secretary of Defense, “I want the Rapid Deployment Force ready to move at an hour’s notice.” The Rapid Deployment Force was a composite body of Army, Marine, Air Force and Navy units assembled after the Iranian crisis for swift movement to anywhere on the globe in a cris’s. “And Warren,” he ordered his Deputy Secretary of State, “you get to Hussein and Assad in total secrecy and make sure we can use their airfields as staging areas if we have to.”
He rose. His movements, Eastman observed, suddenly had the stilted, uncertain gestures of the elderly or the infirm. He had reached the door when Webster of the FBI called out, “Mr. President!”
The Missourian was holding his telephone in his hand, and his usually laconic features were alight with an excitement. “New York has made a positive identification of at least three of the people involved in this. They’ll have forty thousand people out looking for them at dawn!”
“Thank God!” Some of the color returned to the President’s face, and for just an instant an intimation of the shy smile the world associated with him reappeared. “Maybe now I’ll be able to digest my dinner after all.”
As he was leaving the National Security Council conference room for the reception upstairs, the Secretary of Energy paused a moment, then turned and walked determinedly to a public phone booth in the West Wing basement.
The number Delbert Crandell dialed rang interminably before a young woman answered. Her voice became sullen the instant she recognized her caller.
“What happened to you last night? I waited up for you until four.”
“Never mind that.” Crandell had no time to waste on explanations. “I’ve got something very important for you to do.”
The girl groaned and stirred in her bed, the rose satin sheets slipping off her naked breasts as she did. The litter, the charmless disorder, in Cindy Garrett’s bedroom was an accurate reflection of the disorder in her life.
She had come to Washington in 1976 from a small town near Mobile, Alabama, fleeing the stigma of a pregnancy brought on by the town’s deputy sheriff.
As a parting gift her former lover had landed her a job as a receptionist in the offices of an Alabama Congressman he had befriended in a hit-and-run investigation. Her employment had been abruptly terminated by his constituents’ angry protests after Cindy had appeared nude in Playboy magazine’s “The Girls of Washington Revisited.” Fortunately, a chance meeting with Crandell at a Georgetown cocktail party a few evenings later had opened the way to employment that was not only less demanding and better paid but, in Cindy’s case, infinitely more suitable.
“What do you want?” Wariness as thick as the wrinkle cream glistening under her eyes lurked behind her reply.
“I want you to drive up to New York right away. Go to the apartment and-“
“Ah cain’t go to New York,” Cindy squawked in protest.
“The hell you cain’t!” Crandell couldn’t abide the redclay accent that crept into Cindy’s voice after a few bourbons or in her unguarded moments.
“You’re going to do what I tell you to do. Get the car and get up there as fast as you can. You know the painting over the fireplace?”
“The icky one that looks like someone peed on it?”
“Yes.” The “icky” one was a Jackson Pollack appraised by Crandell’s insurance adjusters at $350,000. “And the one to the left of the television?”
“The one with those funny eyes?”
“Right.” That was a Picasso. “Get those two and the gray one in the bedroom.” Crandell did not need to identify his Modigliani further. “And bring them back down here. Just as fast as you can drive.”