“It was an out-of-town salesman, came in to his office every Friday, remember?” Angelo said. “Come up with the kind of car because his brother-in-law had one just like it.”
“Yeah.” Keegan smiled at the memory, its pain washed away by time. “And the guy walked on us anyway because his lawyer said the other guy died of a heart attack.”
Angelo was stretching, yawning. “All the work that went into that one horseshit collar.”
“You imagine the overtime we’d make if we bad that kind of a case today?”
“Shit,” Angelo sighed, “they never put that kind of effort into a case anymore.”
Keegan disappeared and Angelo stepped to the window for a last glimpse of his city. He thought of that barrel of gas someone had hidden somewhere out there. What kind of guy would do something like that? he wondered. Could he look at the pictures of the people he’d killed in the papers the next day? Could he stand to watch kids, parents, relatives crying their hearts out on television for the people he’d killed? He shook his head. So much had changed since he had come up, the world was so different now.
He turned out the light and lay down on his camp bed, letting the kaleidoscope of oncoming sleep tumble the images before his mind, of Grace looking up at him in Forlini’s, of his reproachful young FBI partner, of a frightened Arab and a handsome young detective, his hair as black as the shadows of the night, stopping the cars on the West Side Highway so long ago. _
PART VII
The President allowed the icy jets of water to batter him, savoring the numbness their chill streams inflicted on his exhausted body. His shower stall adjacent to the Presidential bedroom suite was still referred to in the White House as “Lyndon Johnson’s wakeup shower.” The Texan had ordered it installed during the Vietnam War, cursing as he did the inability of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to force the water pressure high enough to satisfy him. The current Chief Executive had every reason to be thankful for its presence. He’d been living on black coffee and its periodic assaults for twentyfour hours. At 4:30 A.M. he had finally left the NSC conference room to return to the living quarters in the hopes of getting a couple of hours’ sleep. His gesture had been futile.
Toweling himself dry, he reviewed for the hundredth time the terrifyingly few assets and options the United States possessed to meet Qaddafi’s threat, hoping against all reason to discover somewhere in the recesses of his mind the one solution they had overlooked. Amin, Khomeini and now this man: zealots menacing the whole fragile balance of international conduct and behavior. And why? He couldn’t help thinking of the words he had read trying to force sleep onto his racing mind last night, a fragment of Aeschylus he’d found in the Wisdom of the Ages he kept by his bedside:
How prophetic, he told himself again. Because it is with our feathers that their arrows are made, all the arms, the science, the technology we in the West have thrust at Qaddafi and everyone else who wanted them in our gluttonous, uncontrollable appetite for energy and capital.
His mess steward had set his usual breakfast on his bedroom desk: coffee, grapefruit, two softboiled eggs and a slice of wholewheat toast. He gulped the juice and the coffee and ignored the rest. He had no stomach for food this morning. Then he punched the remote-control panel that allowed him to watch, simultaneously, the three television sets at the foot of his bed.
Listening to the opening sequences of Good Morning America, The Today Show and The CBS Morning News, he noted with relief that no hint of the crisis had leaked to the media-despite the notorious permeability of his capital.
Before going downstairs, he opened the door to his wife’s bedroom and tiptoed to the bed where she lay crumpled in sleep. He bent down and kissed her, savoring as he did the comforting warmth of her sleeping body.
Her eyes blinked open. She reached for his hand. “Darling,” she whispered, “are you all right?”
The President nodded grimly.
“Is there anything new?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
With his hand, she patted the sheets by the side of the bed. Gratefully almost, the Chief Executive sat down beside her. There was no one, not even Eastman, in whose wisdom and judgment the President had greater confidence.
Half a dozen times since the crisis had begun, he had unburdened himself to her here in this bedroom or the sitting room next door, relieved in those intimate instants of the need of maintaining the stern, composed faBade he felt forced to give to his advisers.
For a moment he was silent, his hands clasped between his knees, his shoulders slumping forward. Then he shuddered, depressed by the weight of his thoughts.
“What is it, my love?”
The President reached for his wife’s hands. She could see, despite the dimness of her bedroom, the patina of tears in his eyes. She pressed his flesh to her. He began to tremble, ever so faintly, like the ground tremor provoked by a distant explosion.
“I’m afraid,” he whispered. “My God, I’m so afraid it’s going to go wrong.”
His wife sat up and wordlessly slipped out from under her bedcovers. For an instant she sat beside him, a comforting arm thrown around his shoulders.
Then, with her husband beside her, she turned and slipped to her knees.
There, in his wife’s darkened bedroom, his face in his hands, the President began a private, desperate prayer for the strength he would need in the hours ahead.
In New York, it was 7:15 A.M. when Abe Stern, numb with exhaustion, sat down at the dining-room table in Gracie Mansion and began to poke at the scrambled eggs his housekeeper had set before him. Next to his plate was a one-page summary of the events of the last four hours. One word would have been sufficient “nothing.” Stern had returned at 3 A.M. to the Federal mansion that had sheltered New York’s mayors since 1942. He might just as well have stayed downtown-like the President, he hadn’t been able to sleep.
The discovery of traces of radiation, first out in Queens, then in the truck that had picked up the missing barrel, the knowledge that two Palestinians involved in Qaddafi’s nuclear program had picked up the Dionysos’ cargo, had shattered the one hope Stern had clung to all during the desperate hours of Monday, the illusion that somehow, maybe just somehow, the bomb wasn’t there.
From the transistor beside him the WNYC Travelers’ Timetable droned out early traffic advisories for the first commuters heading into his city.
Stern sickened listening to them. Three million people heading into the city, perhaps to die, totally ignorant of the menace threatening them. That had led to the bitterest argument he had had with the President since the crisis had begun. Confronted with the certainty that there was a thermonuclear device in Manhattan, he had asked the White House at midnight for permission to seal off Manhattan to incoming traffic, close down every bridge, tunnel, and railroad line into the city.
The military bad backed him up; barring New York’s three million commuters from the city would have brought the potential American loss from the explosion of Qaddafi’s bomb much closer to the even-tradeoff point at which the Libyan would lose the advantage he held. The President and the rest of the Crisis Committee had all opposed him. There was no way Manhattan Island could be cut off from the rest of the world in silence, and the risk that the implacable zealot in Tripoli would detonate his device as soon as he found out what was happening was too great to be acceptable. You could not, the President had argued once again, take the chance of condemning five million New Yorkers to death to save three million commuters. Everyone threatened by this terrifying end act of political terrorism would have to share the risks equally, the President had ruled.