The Fifth Horseman by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre Read Free Book Online Page A

tub, she gave herself an approving glance in the mirror: the taut, flat stomach, her firm buttocks, the defiant thrust of her breasts. For a long moment she lay there, luxuriating in the bath, caressing her skin with the bath oil’s thick, bubbly film, rubbing it through her earlobes, along the passageways of her neck, massaging it playfully over her breasts until her nipples stood erect. Lazily, she lifted one leg from the bath water and rubbed the foam along her thighs and inner legs. At the sight of her crimson toenails, she smiled. Imagine, she mused, a terrorist who paints her toenails.
    She was brushing out the long mane of her hair when the phone rang. Picking it up, she heard the din of voices in the background.
    “Where the devil are you?” she asked, a flashing undertone of anger in her voice.
    “We’re having dinner at Elaine’s.” Her expression changed the instant she heard the caller’s voice. “We’re going on to the Fifty-four. Why don’t you join us?”
    What better cover could she ask for? “Can you give me an hour?” Laila asked with a husky voice.
    “An hour?” the voice answered. “I’d give you a lifetime if you’d take it.”
* * *
    His usually bland features shrouded with concern, the President of the United States stared at the circle of advisers surrounding him. The last great crisis his nation had faced when the fanatical supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini had seized the U.S. Embassy in Teheran paled beside this threat. This was the ultimate act of political terrorism, the almost too inevitable conclusion to a decade of escalating terrorism. And, he reflected bitterly, if this really was true, a nation whose citizens were living in nomad tents barely a generation ago now possessed the power to destroy the most important city on the planet. Millions of people are being held hostage, he thought, to the extravagant demands of a zealous despot. He turned to Jack Eastman. “Jack, what contingency plans do we have to handle something like this?”
    It was a question Eastman had anticipated. Locked in a safe in the West Wing were the contingency plans of the U.S. and the Soviets could reach comparable firepower wrapped in its black imitation-leather jacket with gold lettering. They covered everything: the speed with which the U.S. and the Soviets could reach comparable firepower thresholds, possible Chinese reactions, NATO disagreements, the security of the sea lanes; right down to how many C rations were necessary to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division into the Panama Canal Zone or land a division of Marines on Cyprus. Their origins went back to Henry Kissinger’s days. Eastman had reviewed them an hour ago. They dealt with every imaginable world crisisevery one, that is, except the one which now confronted the President of the United States.
    “I’m sorry, sir,” Eastman replied, “we don’t have any.”
    Eastman noted the flicker his words produced in the President’s dark eyes, the “laser look,” the familiar warning that he was angry. He had folded his hands on the table before him. “All right,” he said. “In any event, whether this is from Qaddafi, whether it’s from some terrorist group, some crazy scientist, or someone else, I wish to make one thing clear to you all: the fact that this threat, real or not, exists is to be kept an absolute secret.”
    The President’s words reflected a U.S. government decision, taken during the Nixon administration and consistently adhered to since them, to avoid at all costs going public with nuclear threats. The knowledge that a threat existed in a given city could provoke a panicked reaction more devastating than the threatened explosion itself. Discrediting each nuclear hoax cost at least a million dollars, and no one wanted to see the government deluged by such threats. There was the danger that an irrational, semihysterical public opinion could paralyze the government’s ability to act in such a crisis. And in this case, the