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

arrived.
    He dabbed at his damp brow. Don’t think, they had told him. Don’t think of anything but your mission. But how did you not think? How did you force from your mind what you’d seen: the faces, the seas and seas of faces, young faces, faces of misery and indifference, faces of laughter and happiness? The faces of little girls on their sleds in Central Park; of the black policeman telling him where to get off the subway; of the newsstand vendor, half snarling, half laughing “Good morning,” selling him his paper.
    How could he not see the crowds, the buildings, the rushing cars, the lights that represented so many lives? Behind him, Whalid heard the cot creak as his brother got up. “I’m thirsty,” he mumbled. “Anyone want a Coke?”
    Dazed, Whalid shook his head. Kamal stepped to a carton by the wall and pulled out a bottle of Chivas Regal whiskey. “Maybe this is the medicine you need.”
    “God, no.” Whalid grimaced. “Not while my ulcer’s bothering me like this.”
    Laila stirred impatiently. “How much time do we have left?”
    “Enough,” Kamal answered. He picked a piece of cold pizza from a flat cardboard box by his cot. As he did, his sister noticed the name and address of the restaurant where he’d bought it printed on the carton.
    “Are you sure no one’s going to be able to identify you in those places?” she asked.
    Kamal gave her an angry glance. The constant boss. “Let’s set up our firing circuits,” he said.
    “Why?” Whalid protested. “We still have plenty of time.”
    “Because I don’t want anything to go wrong.”
    Whalid sighed and walked over to a gray metal case the size of a large attach6 case resting on the floor beside his bomb. Nothing could have looked more innocent, more benign, than that case. Decals from TWA, Lufthansa, half a dozen of Europe’s best hotels were stuck to it. Indeed, the Customs officer at JFK had stopped Whalid as he was entering the country with it on Thursday bearing a Lebanese passport identifying him as Ibrahim Abboud, an electrical engineer.
    “It’s a microprocessor tester,” Whalid had explained, “to check to see if computers are working properly.”
    “Ah,” the Customs officer had remarked admiringly, closing the case that was designed to help destroy his city, “complicated, isn’t it?”
    Just how complicated he could not have imagined. The case had-indeed been adapted from a microprocessor tester, a U.S.-made Testline Adit 1000. One blazing summer’s day in July, the technical director of the Libyan telephone system had showed a Testline 1000 to Ishui Kamaguchi, the resident director of Nippon Electric, the Japanese firm which had installed Libya’s telephones. What he wanted, he had explained, was an adaptation of the device which would offer a means of remote radio control of an electrical discharge, a system that would be both infallible and absolutely inviolable.
    Six weeks later, Kamaguchi had presented the Libyans the case now on the garage floor and a bill for $165,000. Only the genius of the Japanese for miniaturization could have produced the array of fail-safe devices built into the case to frustrate any attempt to tamper with its functioning. It was equipped with a magnetic-field detector that would order it to detonate instantly if it picked up any indication of an attempt to burn out its electronic circuitry with a magnetic field. There were static filters to counter any efforts to jam its radio receiver. Three tiny tubes sensitive to pressure changes protected it against the danger of gunfire or an explosion. Once it was hooked up, the pressure change caused by a New York telephone book falling toward the case would be sufficient to activate its circuits.
    While his brother watched intently, Whalid opened its triple locking system and folded back the case cover to reveal a pale-blue control panel. On it was a cathodetube screen, a keyboard and five keys bearing specific commands: END, AUTO, INIT,