Read Online The Fifth Horseman by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre - Free Book Online
Authors: Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre
Tags: thriller
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incidents headed by the most dreaded occurrence of all, Presidential assassination.
Sixty times in the years since, the agents at that desk had been confronted with nuclear threats. Most had been the work of cranks or demented ideologues, the “don’t touch the Alaskan tundra or we’ll put a bomb in Chicago” sort of thing. But a significant number of those threats had seemed deadly serious. They had included threats to blow up bundles of radioactive waste in Spokane, Washington, and New York City; warnings of nuclear bombs alleged to be hidden in Boston, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and four other American cities, and in a Long Beach, California, oil refinery. Some had been accompanied by designs of nuclear devices that had also been deemed “nuclear capable” by the weapons analysts of Los Alamos.
The Bureau’s response to those threats had, on occasion, included the deployment of hundreds of agents and technicians to the threatened cities.
Yet no word of their activities had ever reached the public.
Within half an hour of receiving the first alert from the White House, two teams of agents were onto the problem, a Crisis Assessment Team whose task was to determine whether the threat was real or not, and a Crisis Management Team responsible for dealing with it if it was. The fact that the extortion message was in a foreign language had immensely complicated their job. The first rule in an extortion case is to look at the extortion note or telephone call for clues. The Bureau employed a Syracuse University linguistic psychiatrist whose computers had proven to be remarkably accurate in providing a thumbnail description of an extortioner based on the language he had used in his threat note or phone call. In this case, however, his talents had been useless.
As soon as the first warning had come in, a team of agents had gone to the Carriage House Apartments, a four-story yellow stone apartment house at the junction of L and New Hampshire, abutting the building housing the Libyan Embassy. Two of its occupants had been relodged in the Washington Hilton, and listening devices trained on the embassy next door had been placed in the walls of their apartments. The same thing had been done to the Libyan UN embassy in New York. Taps had also been installed on the phones of all Libyan diplomats accredited to either the United States or the United Nations.
That operation had provided its first fruit while the NSC was discussing the consequence of Agnew’s report. Two Libyan diplomats, the ambassador to the United Nations and the first secretary of the Washington embassy, had been located. Both had vehemently denied that their nation could be involved in such an operation.
At 2031, just after Agnew had given his conclusive determination that the design was for a viable thermonuclear device, an “All Bureaus Alert” had been flashed out of the Bureau’s sixth-floor communications center. It ordered every FBI office in the United States and overseas to stand by for “emergency action demanding highest priority and allocation of all available manpower.”
FBI liaison agents to Israel’s Mossad, France’s SDECE, Britain’s MI5 and West Germany’s Landswehr were ordered to go through files, pulling out descriptions and, where available, fingerprint records and photographs of every known Palestinian terrorist in the world.
One floor above the communications center, Quentin Dewing, the FBI assistant director for investigation, was in the midst of organizing the mobilization of five thousand agents. Agents shoeing horses in Fargo, South Dakota, catching the last of the day’s sun on Malibu Beach, walking out of Denver’s Mile High Stadium, washing up the supper dishes in Bangor, Maine, were being ordered to leave immediately for New York, each order accompanied by a vital closing injunction: “Extreme, repeat, extreme discretion must be employed to conceal your movements from the public.”
Dewing concentrated his efforts
Sixty times in the years since, the agents at that desk had been confronted with nuclear threats. Most had been the work of cranks or demented ideologues, the “don’t touch the Alaskan tundra or we’ll put a bomb in Chicago” sort of thing. But a significant number of those threats had seemed deadly serious. They had included threats to blow up bundles of radioactive waste in Spokane, Washington, and New York City; warnings of nuclear bombs alleged to be hidden in Boston, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and four other American cities, and in a Long Beach, California, oil refinery. Some had been accompanied by designs of nuclear devices that had also been deemed “nuclear capable” by the weapons analysts of Los Alamos.
The Bureau’s response to those threats had, on occasion, included the deployment of hundreds of agents and technicians to the threatened cities.
Yet no word of their activities had ever reached the public.
Within half an hour of receiving the first alert from the White House, two teams of agents were onto the problem, a Crisis Assessment Team whose task was to determine whether the threat was real or not, and a Crisis Management Team responsible for dealing with it if it was. The fact that the extortion message was in a foreign language had immensely complicated their job. The first rule in an extortion case is to look at the extortion note or telephone call for clues. The Bureau employed a Syracuse University linguistic psychiatrist whose computers had proven to be remarkably accurate in providing a thumbnail description of an extortioner based on the language he had used in his threat note or phone call. In this case, however, his talents had been useless.
As soon as the first warning had come in, a team of agents had gone to the Carriage House Apartments, a four-story yellow stone apartment house at the junction of L and New Hampshire, abutting the building housing the Libyan Embassy. Two of its occupants had been relodged in the Washington Hilton, and listening devices trained on the embassy next door had been placed in the walls of their apartments. The same thing had been done to the Libyan UN embassy in New York. Taps had also been installed on the phones of all Libyan diplomats accredited to either the United States or the United Nations.
That operation had provided its first fruit while the NSC was discussing the consequence of Agnew’s report. Two Libyan diplomats, the ambassador to the United Nations and the first secretary of the Washington embassy, had been located. Both had vehemently denied that their nation could be involved in such an operation.
At 2031, just after Agnew had given his conclusive determination that the design was for a viable thermonuclear device, an “All Bureaus Alert” had been flashed out of the Bureau’s sixth-floor communications center. It ordered every FBI office in the United States and overseas to stand by for “emergency action demanding highest priority and allocation of all available manpower.”
FBI liaison agents to Israel’s Mossad, France’s SDECE, Britain’s MI5 and West Germany’s Landswehr were ordered to go through files, pulling out descriptions and, where available, fingerprint records and photographs of every known Palestinian terrorist in the world.
One floor above the communications center, Quentin Dewing, the FBI assistant director for investigation, was in the midst of organizing the mobilization of five thousand agents. Agents shoeing horses in Fargo, South Dakota, catching the last of the day’s sun on Malibu Beach, walking out of Denver’s Mile High Stadium, washing up the supper dishes in Bangor, Maine, were being ordered to leave immediately for New York, each order accompanied by a vital closing injunction: “Extreme, repeat, extreme discretion must be employed to conceal your movements from the public.”
Dewing concentrated his efforts
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