The Fifth Horseman Read Online Free PDF Page A

reflection of the respect he, too, felt for the high office he held.
    “I want to thank you all for being here tonight,” he said in the studied, mannered tone he liked to employ for dramatic effect, “and ask you to pray with me that what’s brought us here is just a hoax because …” his voice trailed off “… because if it’s not, we’ve got a long, long night ahead of us.”
    He took his place in one of the inexpensive chairs upholstered in rust fabric ringing the oval conference table. The room was as unprepossessing, as unimaginative a place as the board room of a medium-sized Middle Western manufacturer of cardboard containers. Yet it was here that the thermonuclear Armageddon had been envisaged during the Cuban Missile Crisis; that the decisions which sent half a million Americans to fight and die in Vietnam had been debated; the plight of the fifty U.S. hostages seized by followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini pondered.
    Its banal appearance was deceptive. At the touch of a button a massive screen came down from one wall. Another button swept aside a set of curtains to reveal an electronic mapboard. Beside each seat was a drawer containing a secure red telephone. Most important were the facilities of the White House Communications Center just beyond, holding the room in an Ifshaped embrace. There, banks of communications consoles with television-like screens linked the room and the White House to every vital nerve center of the U.S. government: the Pentagon, the CIA, State, the National Security Agency, the Strategic Air Command, NORAD’s National Command Center in Colorado Springs. A call coming out of that conference room could be dispatched to any U.S. military base in the world, to the gunnery officer of a guided-missile destroyer cruising off GuantAanamo Bay in Cuba, to most U.S. military aircraft in flight.
    The President glanced at the two dozen people filling the room. The principals, seated at the conference table itself, constituted the inner core of the U.S. government, the same kind of ad-hoc emergency committee that had guided the government debates in the Iranian hostage crisis: the directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretaries of Defense and Energy and the Deputy Secretary of State, sitting in for the Secretary, who was on a tour of Latin America.
    The President turned first to William Webster, the soft-spoken Missouri jurist who led the 8,400 agents of the FBI. Since the Boston incident, his Bureau had had the primary responsibility for handling nuclear extortion threats. “Bill,” he asked, “what have you got on this?”
    “We’ve reason to believe, Mr. President, the extortion package was assembled outside the United States,” Webster began. “Our lab has established that the typewriter used for the note was Swiss made. An Olympic. Manufactured between 1965 and 1970 and never sold, as far as we’ve been able to determine, in this country. The blueprint paper is French.
    Available only over there. The cassette was a standard thirtyminute West German BASF. The complete lack of background noise would indicate it was made in a studio under at least semiprofessional conditions. Unfortunately, there were no identifiable fingerprints on any of the material.”
    The President’s next question was to a lean, bald man in a Harris tweed sports jacket and gray flannels sucking a pipe, on his right. Gardiner “Tap” Bennington, the heir to a Massachusetts textile fortune, had replaced Bill Casey as the head of the CIA six months earlier. The Yankee patrician was one of the last of the Agency’s old boys, a veteran of the OSS days when “Wild Bill” Donovan had plucked the nice young men off the playing field of Yale and Harvard and inspired them with the unseemly vocation of spying for their country.
    “Do we have any intelligence to indicate a Palestinian terrorist group might be ready to try