Black Sunday (17 page)

"You'll have to come with me for a few minutes, ma'am. We'll have to ask you some questions."

She nodded. Sullivan put away his gun, but did not fasten the retaining strap. He told the security guard to check the other doors along the hall and unclipped his radio from his belt.

"Six-five, six-five."

"Yeah, John," came the reply.

"One woman in the lab. She says the perpetrator was here and left."

"Back and front are covered. Want I should come up? I'm at the third-floor landing now."

"I'll bring her down to three. Ask the complainant to stand by."

"John, the complainant advises no one should be in the lab at this time."

"I'll bring her down. Stand by."

"Who said that?" Dahlia asked hotly. "She---honestly."

"Let's go." He walked behind her to the elevator, watching her, his thumb hooked in his holster. She stood by the panel of buttons in the elevator. The doors closed.

"Three?" she said.

"I'll do it." He reached for the button with his gun hand.

Dahlia's hand snaked to the light switch. Black in the elevator. The sound of scuffling feet, rasp of a holster, a grunt of pain, a curse, thrashing, a wheezing effort to breathe, the indicator lights blinking in succession in the dark elevator.

On the third floor, Officer Sullivan's partner watched the blinking lights over the door to the elevator shaft. Three. He waited. It did not stop. Two. It stopped.

Puzzled, he pushed the "up" button, and waited while the elevator rose again. He stood before the doors. They opened.

"John? My God, John!"

Officer John Sullivan sat against the back wall of the elevator, his mouth open, his eyes wide, the hypodermic needle hanging from his neck like a banderilla.

Dahlia was running now, the long second-floor hall tucking in her vision, lights whipping overhead, past a startled orderly and around the corner into a linen room. Slipping into a light green surgical smock. Tuck her hair into a cap. Hanging the cloth mask around her neck. Down the stairs to the emergency room at the rear of the ground floor. Walking slowly now, seeing the policemen, three of them, looking around like bird dogs. Worried relatives sitting in chairs. The howls of a stabbed drunk. Victims of minor fights waiting for treatment.

A small Puerto Rican woman was sitting on a bench, sobbing into her hands. Dahlia went to her, sat down beside her, and put her arm around the plump little woman. "No tenga miedo," Dahlia said.

The woman looked up at her, tooth gold in her nut-brown face. "Julio?"

"He's going to be all right. Come, come with me. We'll walk around and get some air, you'll feel better."

"But---"

"Shush now, do as I say."

She had the woman up now, standing childlike under the comforting arm with her ruined, blown-out belly and her split shoes.

"I tole him. Ten times I tole him---"

"Don't worry now."

Walking toward the side exit of the emergency room. A cop in front of the door. A very big man, sweating in his blue coat.

"Why he don't come home to me? Why is this always to fight?"

"It's all right. Would you like to say a rosary?"

The woman's lips moved. The policeman did not move. Dahlia looked up at him.

"Officer, this lady needs some air. Could you walk her around outside for a few minutes?"

The woman's head was bowed and her lips were moving. Belt radios were crackling across the room. The alarm would be up any second now. Dead cop.

"I can't leave the door, lady. This way out is closed right now."

"Could I walk her around for a few minutes? I'm afraid she'll faint in here."

The woman was murmuring, beads between the thick brown fingers. The policeman rubbed the back of his neck. He had a big, scarred face. The woman swayed against Dahlia.

"Uh, what's your name?"

"Dr. Vizzini."

"All right, doctor." Leaning his weight on the door. Cold air in their faces. The sidewalk and the street lit in red flashes by the squadcar lights. No running, police around.

"Take deep breaths," Dahlia said. The woman bobbed her head. A yellow cab stopped. An intern got out. Dahlia caught the cabbie's attention, stopped the intern.

"You're going in, right?"

"Yeah."

"Would you walk this lady back inside? Thanks."

Blocks away now, on the Gowanus Parkway. Leaning back in the taxi, arching her neck back against the seat, eyes closed, she spoke to herself. "I really do care about her, you know."

__________

Officer John Sullivan was not a dead cop, not yet, but he was close to death. Kneeling in the elevator, ear against Sullivan's chest, his partner could hear a confused murmuring beneath the rib cage. He pulled Sullivan around and laid him flat on the floor of the elevator. The door was trying to close and the policeman blocked it with his boot. Emma Ryan was not a head nurse for nothing. Her liver-spotted hand slammed down the stop switch on the elevator, and she bellowed once for the trauma team. Then she was kneeling over Sullivan, gray eyes flicking up and down him and her round back rising and falling as she gave him external heart massage. The officer at Sullivan's head gave mouth-to-mouth artificial respiration. The aide took over from the officer so that he could radio the alarm, but precious seconds had been lost.

A nurse arrived with a rolling stretcher. They lifted the heavy body onto it, Emma Ryan hoisting with surprising strength. She plucked the hypodermic from Sullivan's neck and handed it to a nurse. The needle had stitched through the skin, leaving two red holes, like a snake bite. Part of the dose had squirted against the elevator wall after the tip of the needle exited. It had trickled down to form a tiny pool on the floor. "Get Dr. Field, give him the hypo," Ryan snapped to the nurse. Then to another, "Get the blood sample while we're rolling, let's go."

In less than a minute, Sullivan was in a heart-lung machine in the intensive care unit, Dr. Field at his side. Armed with the results of blood test and urinalysis and with a tray of countermeasures at his elbow, Field sweated over Sullivan. He would live. They would make him live.

CHAPTER 13

Attempting to kill a New York City policeman is like touching a lit cigarette to an anaconda. New York's finest have a sudden and terrible wrath. They never stop hunting a cop killer, never forget, never forgive. A successful attempt on Kabakov---with the resultant diplomatic flap and heat from the Justice Department might have resulted in news conferences by the mayor and the police commissioner, harangues and exhortations by Brooklyn borough command, and the full-time efforts of twenty to thirty detectives. Because a needle had been stuck in Officer John Sullivan's neck, more than 30,000 policemen in the five boroughs were ready to take care of business.

Kabakov, despite Rachel's objections, left the hospital bed she had set up in her spare bedroom and went to Sullivan's bedside at noon the following day. He was beyond rage and had throttled despair. Sullivan was strong enough to use an Identikit, and he had seen the woman, both full face and profile, in good light. Together, with the Identikit and a police artist, Kabakov, Sullivan, and the hospital security guard put together a composite picture that strongly resembled Dahlia Iyad. When the 3 P.M.

police shift turned out, every patrolman and every detective had a copy of the composite. The early edition of the
Daily News
carried it on page two.

Six policemen from the Identification Division and four clerks from Immigration and Naturalization, each with a copy of the picture, pored over the Arab alien file.

The connection between the hospital incident and Kabakov was known only to head nurse Emma Ryan, the. FBI agents working on the case, and the highest echelon of the New York Police Department. Emma Ryan could keep her mouth shut.

Washington did not want a terrorist scare and neither did the enforcement agencies. They did not want the media breathing down their necks in a case that could end as badly as this one. Police pointed out publicly that the hospital contained both narcotics and valuable radioactive elements, that the intruder might have been after these. This was not entirely satisfactory to the press, but in the crushing work-load of New York City news coverage, newsmen can easily forget yesterday's stories. Authorities hoped that in a few days the media's interest would flag.

And Dahlia hoped that in a few days Lander's anger would subside. He was enraged when he saw her likeness in the paper and knew what she had done. For a moment, she thought he would kill her. She nodded meekly when he forbade any further attempt on Kabakov. Fasil stayed in his room for two days.

__________

David Kabakov's convalescence in Dr. Rachel Bauman's apartment was a strange, almost surreal time for her. Her home was bright and oppressively orderly and he came into it like a grizzled tomcat home from a fight in the rain. The sizes and proportions of her rooms and furnishings seemed all changed to Rachel with Kabakov and Moshevsky in the place. For large men, they did not make much noise. This was a relief to Rachel at first, and then it bothered her a little. Size and silence are a sinister combination in nature. They are the tools of doom.

Moshevsky was doing his best to be accommodating. After he had spooked her several times, appearing suddenly in the kitchen with a tray, he began clearing his throat to announce his movements. Rachel's friends across the hall were in the Bahamas and had left their keys with her. She installed Moshevsky in that apartment after his snoring on her couch became unbearable. Kabakov listened respectfully to her instructions regarding his treatment and followed them, with the one angry exception of the trip to Sullivan's bedside. She and Kabakov did not talk much at first. They did not chat at all. He seemed distracted, and Rachel did not disturb his thoughts.

Rachel had changed since the Six-Day War, but the change was one of degree. She had become more intensely what she was before. She had a busy practice, an ordered life. One man, two men over the years. Two engagements. Dinners in smart and hollow places, where the chefs put coy signatures of garnishment on uninspired dishes---places chosen by her escorts. None of her experiences roared in her ears. Men who could have struck fire from her, she rebuffed. Her only high was the best one---working well---and that sustained her. She did much volunteer work, therapy sessions with ex-addicts, parolees, disturbed children. During the October War of 1973, she worked a double shift at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York so that a staff doctor with more recent surgical experience could go to Israel.

Externally she was molding fast. Bloomingdale's and Bonwit Teller, Lord & Taylor and Saks were the touchstones in her Saturday rounds. She would have looked like a trim Jewish matron, expensively turned out and just a little behind the trends, if she had not spoiled the effect with defiant touches, a hint of the street. For a time she had resembled a woman fighting her thirties with her daughter's accessories. Then she didn't give a damn what she wore anymore and lapsed into quiet business dress because she didn't have to think about it. Her working hours grew longer, her apartment grew tidier and more sterile. She paid an exorbitant price for a cleaning woman who could remember to put everything back precisely as it had been before.

Now, here was Kabakov, poking through her bookshelves and gnawing on a piece of salami. He seemed to delight in examining things and not putting them back where he found them. He had not put on his slippers and he had not buttoned up his pajama jacket. She would not look at him.

Rachel was no longer so concerned about the concussion. He did not seem to worry about it at all. As his periods of dizziness grew less frequent, then abated altogether, their relationship changed. The impersonal doctor-patient attitude she had tried to maintain began to soften.

Kabakov found Rachel's company stimulating. He felt a pleasant necessity to think when talking with her. He found himself saying things that he had not realized he felt or knew. He liked to look at her. She was longlegged and given to angular positions, and she had durable good looks. Kabakov had decided to tell her about his mission, and because he liked her he found it difficult to do. For years he had guarded his tongue. He knew that he was susceptible to women, that the loneliness of his profession tempted him to talk about his problems. Rachel had given him help when he needed it, immediately and with no unnecessary questions. She was involved now and could be in danger---the reason for the assassin's visit to the radiology lab was not lost on Kabakov.

Still, it was not his sense of justice that led him to tell her, no feeling that she had a right to know. His considerations were more practical. She had a first-rate mind and he needed it. Probably one of the plotters was Abu Ali---a psychologist. Rachel was a psychiatrist. One of the terrorists was a woman. Rachel was a woman. Her knowledge of the nuances of human behavior, and the fact that, with this knowledge, she was a product of the American culture, might give her some useful insights. Kabakov believed that he could think like an Arab, but could he think like an American?
Was
there any way to think like an American? He had found them inconsistent. He thought that perhaps when the Americans had been here longer, they might have a way of thinking.

Sitting by a sunny window, he explained the situation to her as she dressed the burn on his leg. He started with the fact that a Black September cell was hidden in the Northeast, ready to strike somewhere with a large quantity of plastic explosive, probably half a ton or more. He explained from Israel's point of view the absolute necessity of his stopping them, and he hastily added the humanitarian considerations. She finished the bandaging and sat cross-legged on the rug listening. Occasionally she looked up at him to ask a question. The rest of the time he could only see the top of her bent head, the part in her hair. He wondered how she was taking it. He could not tell what she was thinking, now that the deadly struggle she had witnessed in the Middle East had come home to this safe place.

Actually, she was feeling relieved about Kabakov himself. Always she wanted to know specifics. Exactly what had been done and said---especially just before the blast at Muzi's house. She was glad to see that his answers were immediate and consistent. When questioned at the hospital about his most recent memories he had given the doctor vague replies, and Rachel could not be sure whether this was deliberate evasion or the result of head trauma. She had been handicapped in evaluating Kabakov's injury by her reluctance to ask him specifics. Now, her minute questioning served two purposes. She needed the information if she was to help him, and she wanted to test his emotional response. She was watching for the irritability under questioning that marks the Korsakoff, or amnesic-confabulatory syndrome, which frequently follows concussion.

Satisfied with his patience, pleased with his clarity, she concentrated on the information. He was more than a patient, she was more like a partner as the story was completed. Kabakov concluded with the questions that were eating at him: Who was the American? Where would the terrorists strike? When he had finished talking he felt vaguely ashamed, as though she had seen him crying.

"How old was Muzi?" she asked quietly.

"Fifty-six."

"And his last words were 'First there was the American'?"

"That's what he said." Kabakov did not see where this was leading. They had talked enough for now.

"Want an opinion?"

He nodded.

"I think there's a fair probability that your American is a non-Semitic Caucasian male, probably past his middle twenties."

"How do you know?"

"I don't know, I'm guessing. But Muzi was a middle-aged man. The person I described is what many men his age call an 'American.' Very likely, if the American he saw was black, he would have mentioned it. He would have used a racial designation. You spoke English the entire time?"

"Yes."

"If the American was a woman, very likely he would have said 'the woman' or 'the American woman.' A man of Muzi's age and ethnic background would not think of an Arab-American or an American Jew as 'the American.' In all cases, black, female, Semitic or Latin, the word 'American' is an adjective. It's a noun only for non-minority Caucasian males. I'm sounding pedantic probably, but it's true."

Kabakov, conferring with Corley by telephone, told the FBI agent what Rachel had said.

"That narrows it down to about forty million people," Corley said. "No, listen, anything helps, for Christ's sake."

Corley's report on the search for the boat was not encouraging. Customs agents and New York City police had checked every boatyard on City Island. Nassau and Suffolk police had checked every marina on Long Island. The New Jersey state police had questioned boatyard owners along their coast. FBI agents had gone to the best boatyards---to legendary craftsmen like Rybovich, Trumpy, and Huckins---and to the lesser-known yards where craftsmen still built fine wooden boats. None of the yards could identify the fugitive craft.

"Boats, boats, boats," Rachel said to herself.

Kabakov stared out the window at the snow while Rachel fixed dinner. He was trying to remember something, going at it indirectly, the way he would, use peripheral vision to see in the dark. The technique employed in blowing up Muzi teased Kabakov ceaselessly. Where had it happened before? One of the thousands of reports that had crossed his desk in the past five or six years had mentioned a bomb in a refrigerator. He remembered that the report had an old-style jacket, the manila kind, bound along the spine. That meant he had seen it before 1972, when the Mossad changed the bindings to facilitate micro-filming. One other flash came to him. A memo on booby-trap techniques issued to commando units on his orders years ego. The memo had explained mercury switches, then in fashion among the fedayeen, with an addendum on electrical appliances.

He was composing a cable to Mossad headquarters with the scraps of information he recalled when quite suddenly he remembered. Syria 1971. A Mossad agent was lost in an explosion at a house in Damascus. The charge had not been heavy, but the refrigerator was shattered. A coincidence? Kabakov called the Israeli consulate and dictated the cable. The cable clerk pointed out that it was 4 A.M. in Tel Aviv.

"It's 0200 Zulu all over the world, my friend," Kabakov said. "We never close. Get that cable out."

__________

A cold December drizzle stung Moshevsky's face and neck as he waited on the corner to flag a cab. He let three Dodges pass and finally spotted what he was looking for, a big Checker barging through the morning rush. He wanted the extra room so Kabakov would not have to bend his sore leg. Moshevsky told the driver to stop in front of Rachel's apartment building in the middle of the block. Kabakov hobbled out and climbed in beside him. He gave the address of the Israeli consulate.

Kabakov had rested as Rachel prescribed. Now he would roll. He could have called Ambassador Tell from the apartment, but his business required the safest of telephones---one equipped with a scrambler. He had decided to ask Tel Aviv to suggest that the U.S. State Department approach the Russians for help. Kabakov's request must be cleared through Tell. Going to the Russians was not a pleasant thought from the standpoint of his professional pride. At the moment, Kabakov could not afford professional pride. He knew that and accepted it, but he did not like it.

Since the spring of 1971, the Soviet Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopastveny, the infamous KGB, has had a special section providing technical assistance to Black September through Al Fatah field intelligence. This was the source Kabakov wanted to tap.