“Ah, honey, ah really have to-” Cindy began, hoping that coquetry might somehow spare her the ordeal her lover had just proposed.
“Shut up!” Crandell interrupted. “Just get your ass moving to New York.” He hung up, then decided to make a second call, this one to his real-estate agent at Douglas Elliman in New York. Finally, relaxed for almost the first time since this crisis had begun, he hurried up the stairs to the Blue Room.
Harvey Hudson, the New York director of the FBI, listened with growing concern to his deputy’s account of Grace Knowland’s conversation at the Seventh Regiment Armory. “How can we be so unlucky?”
His aide nodded sympathetically and continued his report. “So she got all excited when the MP said ‘snow removal.’ She pulled out her press card and insisted on talking to somebody. They finally gave her the cutout number we’re using to protect NEST. It’s a dummy line that’s supposed to go to First Armory PIO. Rings downstairs. She’s on the line now, insisting on a briefing on our `snow removal’ exercise tomorrow morning.”
Hudson clutched his head in dismay. “Can you imagine? Some fucking kid can’t get a tennis racket and we risk blowing the whole operation to The New York Times?” He tugged at the ends of his red-and-yellow bow tie, dangling like wilting vines from each side of his shirt collar. He seemed to have shrunk physically from the strains of this terrible day, from the horror that had come with each hour that had gone by with Qaddafi’s bomb undiscovered.
“Okay,” he ordered. “You stuff somebody into an Army uniform and get him up to that armory tomorrow morning. Give that woman the goddamndest song-and-dance briefing on snow removal that anybody’s ever heard. I don’t care what the hell you tell her, but make it good. The one thing we don’t need right now is to have The New York Times on our backsl”
In the Blue Room of the White House, a Marine Corps band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Smiling warmly, his wife the rigorous one pace behind him that protocol prescribed, the President strode into the diplomatic reception. Admiringly, Jack Eastman watched the couple drift through the room, shaking hands, chatting, laughing politely at the Bulgarian ambassador’s clumsy attempt at humor. Quite a performance, Eastman thought. You could fault the man for his infuriating tendency to vacillate, for his lack of personal warmth, but one thing you couldn’t take away from him was his icy self-control, his stoic front in a crisis.
Eastman was about to sip his grapefruit juice when he felt a slight pressure at his elbow. It was his wife, late as usual. He bent down to kiss her, smelling as he did the alcohol on her breath.
“Darling,” she whispered as he pulled away from her, “I’ve got to talk to you. Alone.”
Eastman wanted to laugh. Talking privately to your wife at diplomatic receptions was a privilege not accorded to high government officials.
Sally had him by the arm. “It’s about Cathy.”
Her husband tensed, then followed as she threaded deftly through the room seeking out an empty corner by the bar. When she found it she turned to him almost angrily. “She’s home,” she blurted.
“Home?” Eastman was stunned. “How come?”
“Because what you laid on me last night was too heavy, Jack.” Sally Eastman’s brief show of defiance had already passed and tears diluted her eyes. “I’m a mother, not a soldier.”
“Sal-“
She turned at his word, moved to the bar and thrust her glass at a bartender. “A vodka martini on the rocks,” she ordered.
Eastman stepped behind her, fighting now to maintain his own composure.
“Sally,” he hissed, “you had no right to do that. No right at all.”
His wife turned around. The mascara was beginning to run a bit as the tears started to unravel the careful fagade of her worn and tired face. She started to reply, but before she could, Eastman leaned and brushed his lips to her forehead. “But thank God you did,” he whispered. “Dab up the eyes. We’ve got to go back to the party.”
The battered Toyota slid silently past the deserted warehouses. Rico was in front, beside the driver. To his right, through the high wire fence wrapping the Bayonne docks, he could catch an occasional glimpse of the black sheen of the harbor and, in the distance, the gleaming lights of Manhattan.
“Aquf.”
The driver stopped and snapped off the headlights. They were in total darkness. The only sound the pimp could hear was the keening of the sea gulls down by the water’s edge.
The three men left the car and walked down a long alley toward the rear of an abandoned loft. At the end of the alley, the leader rapped on a door. It opened, and from the darkness inside a flashlight’s narrow beam trapped each face a brief instant in its glow.
“Venga,” a voice commanded.
As soon as he stepped into the loft, Rico knew why he was there. At one end a long wooden slab rested upon a pair of trestles. Five chairs were ranged behind it. A pair of kerosene lanterns were on the table, their flickering glow falling on two portraits on the wall, Che Guevara and the founder of the FALN.
The Puerto Rican movement was the only terrorist organization firmly implanted on the soil of the United States, and it had succeeded in maintaining its integrity there because of procedures as ruthless as the one about to begin. It was the trial of a traitor, and Rico noted to his intense relief that the accused was already in place, firmly bound and gagged, in a chair facing the trestle table.
Rico, as a senior member of the FALN, took his place in one of the judges’ chairs. He tried to avoid looking at the accused, at his wildly moving eyes, at the veins bulging in his neck as he strained to articulate through his gag the defense he would not be permitted to make.
The trial, which was nothing more than a ritualized justification for murder, was brief. The accused was a police informer, brought up from Philadelphia to be “tried” in Bayonne because it would be easier to execute his sentence here. When the evidence had been heard, the man in the center of the table polled his fellow judges. One after another they intoned, “Muerte.”
No one suggested clemency. With the exception of a few people like Rico, the leadership of the FALN was composed of lower-middle-class intellectuals, second-rate history instructors and professional graduate students, and mercy was not a feeling that registered in the sterile reaches of their academic, revolutionary minds.
On the table in front of the chief judge was a Walther P38. Wordlessly, he passed it along the table to Rico. This too was a FALN ritual. To kill deliberately in cold blood on the orders of the organization was the ultimate proof of a man’s loyalty.
Rico took the gun, got up and walked around the table. Trembling slightly, concentrating his eyes on a corner of the warehouse floor so that he did not have to look at his victim’s head, he drew the pistol up, pushed off the safety, felt briefly for the soft flesh of the temple and pulled the trigger.
There was a sharp click.
Rico looked down to see the mocking laughter in his victim’s eyes. Six men moved out of the shadows, thrust Rico into the chair, bound and gagged him.
“There is a traitor in this room,” the chief judge announced in Spanish.
“But it is not he.”
This time there was no need for a trial. It had already taken place before Rico arrived. The chief judge took back the Walther and drew out the clip.
Methodically, he filled it with 9mm. cartridges, then slapped it shut with the heel of his hand. He offered it to the figure who stepped from the shadows at the back of the loft. It was the man Rico had given to the FBI.