Sleeper Spy (26 page)

Her fingers dug into his arm like talons.

“Somebody’s hijacked Air Force One. The President is aboard, and we’re going on the air right now. You have to come with me, talk about terrorism.”

“Oh-shit,” Irving said. “How’d he pull it off?” He made a lunge for a last handful of shrimp, realizing he had instantly identified with the daring hijacker. She dragged him up.

“Nobody knows anything yet.” She was strong, he had to give her that; his arm was in a vise. They hurtled down the hallway to a big blue door, a stagehand urgently motioning them in.

“Just sit by me,” she said, “and talk when I have nothing to say.”

“I’m with you—leggo my arm. But if we don’t know anything we’re gonna look like a couple of schmucks.”

“This is Irving Fein,” she said to the producer. “You know him, I’m sure he’s the greatest reporter ever, wrote a book about terrorism, including hijacking. Give him a lapel mike. We know anything more?”

“Thank God you’re here,” the producer said to Irving. To Viveca, he reported, “Whacka says they’re in touch with the plane and may give everybody a feed.”

Irving had a hunch Viveca did not know what Whacka was; for her sake, he asked the producer, “Who’s Whacka?”

“White House Communications Agency. You sure you know about terrorism, huh?”

“Not to worry.” They were at the news desk being wired up. He asked the producer if there was a telephone handy.

“You can talk to me on the earphone, here.”

The red light came on the cameras pointed at her, which Irving knew from slight experience meant they were on the air. Next to his knee, below the desk, was a telephone. He hoped he could get an outside line by dialing 9. The producer would be no help, except to passively let the news flow in. To Irving, the way to report a story was to get on the hook and find somebody who would advance the story. Viveca, next to him, was speaking.

“… now let me read you that bulletin again, exactly as we received it three—” she looked up at the clock—“four minutes ago from the Associated Press. ‘Hijacker seizes Air Force One, President and First Lady and top officials aboard.’ Now here’s a second bulletin, this from Reuters, just coming in. ‘President unharmed, press secretary reports from Air Force One. Lone hijacker in cockpit says he is loaded with explosives.’ And that’s all we have. With me here is Irving Fein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning expert on terrorism. Mr. Fein, what do you make of this?”

“Pretty daring maneuver,” Irving observed. “The hijacker must have stowed away while the plane was parked at Andrews Air Force Base. It’s been known that the President was flying tonight to a fund-raiser
breakfast tomorrow in Seattle, Washington.” He’d read that in the paper. “So this guy sneaks aboard—”

“How? Isn’t the plane tightly guarded?”

“Good question. But somehow, he did it.” He thought to add, “If it’s a he. A cleaning woman might be more credible. Anyhow, as soon as the plane, Air Force One—and we don’t know if it is the usual plane, it might be a backup, which then automatically becomes Air Force One when the President is on it.” He had all these extraneous facts in his head to draw on to fill the time until some news came in. He kept talking, recalling a previous hijacking in Cairo that he had covered, a similar one-man job in which the hijacker was talked into giving up by his mother or his wife.

Viveca interrupted him with “Now we’re going to our Washington bureau, where correspondent Mike Whelan has a report from the FBI.” She must have heard something in her earpiece. The FBI interview was just horsing around, no news, but it gave Irving a chance to get on the hook. Dialing 9 didn’t give him a dial tone. “You suppose you could fix this thing so I could make a call?”

“Give him an outside line, for God’s sake,” she said to the director. To Irving, she whispered, “Do you need to do that, Irving? Give me some questions to ask you when they come back to us. Wait, here’s another bulletin.” She cut abruptly into the Washington feed—“feed” was a word Irving noticed they used a lot, for people who were so dietconscious—to read what was on her screen: “ ‘The press secretary aboard the hijacked Air Force One reports that the President remains unharmed and the hijacker has demanded that the plane be turned around and headed across the Atlantic.’ And here’s a press advisory from Whacka—that’s WHCA, the White House Communications Agency,” she explained knowledgeably. “ ‘The press secretary will be patched through to the multplug in two minutes.’ That’s good news, don’t you think, Irving Fein?”

“It means the White House is functioning, yes,” Irving said, not wanting to contradict her. “As you know better than me, Viveca, the multplug is the device that sends a single signal to all the news media plugged into it. So we’ll be hearing from the horse’s mouth in a couple of minutes, unless there’s a delay, which there always is.”

She cut back to the Washington interview in the meanwhile; Irving was glad he didn’t have the producer giving him orders over the
earphone. He tried the telephone again, which was okay for local calls, but went with that awful noise when he tried long distance. “How do I get the operator?” he said to Viveca. “I got a credit card.”

“Make the goddam phone work anywhere in the world,” Viveca hissed to the director. To Irving, she whispered, “How’m I doing?”

“You might want to powder your nose,” he said. She was sweating; she looked good to him sweaty, as if she’d been making love. “Otherwise, you’re better than those guys.” He pointed to the monitors across the room of the competing networks, which had just begun covering the story. “They look like they’re phumphing.”

“Oh my God, I’m on without makeup. At the next break, send me Evelyn with whatever she can do in a hurry. Irving, what do you want me to ask you?”

“Ask me what if the guy blows himself up.”

“I’m going to ask him what if the hijacker blows himself up,” she said to the producer in the booth or wherever. “Right. I won’t.” She said, “He says that’s too alarming, scare everybody. What else?”

“What might the President do right now.”

Red light. “We’re back at the anchor desk in New York with Irving Fein, the antiterrorism expert. Irv, at this moment, we don’t have much information to work with. We’re waiting for a direct report from the press secretary aboard the hijacked Air Force One. And we should reassure everyone that the President, we are told, is unharmed. Unharmed. Let me ask you directly: What options does the President have at this moment?”

“Before doing anything, he should get hold of the Vice President and tell him to go to the Sit Room in the White House and stand by.” That sounded fairly stupid to him as he was saying it; what else would the VP do? “Then he could order the Secret Service to mount an assault—to shoot the terrorist in the cockpit—but that seems a little extreme. More likely, he’s telling them to humor him along, and turn the plane around like he wants, maybe only halfway, and play for time and slow down and conserve fuel”—he made a note on his pad to find out how long the plane could stay in the air on fuel it had for a crosscountry trip—“and get some talker-down shrink on the phone. If the hijacker speaks English. The first thing I’d find out is what languages this guy speaks, and what’s his gripe, what does he want.”

“In our Los Angeles studio,” she said, picking up on his reference to
a shrink, “I’m told we have a psychiatrist standing by with experience in dealing with hostage-takers. No—hold it—here’s the plane.”

“This is the President’s press secretary aboard Air Force One with the President and his party.” The director was ready with a still picture of the press secretary on the screen for a voice-over.

“We have a woman in the cockpit who is armed and says she has explosives on her person. The Secret Service has decided it would be prudent to believe her. She has handed us a note asking that the flight plan be altered to direct us toward the Atlantic, and we have acceded to her request. She apparently speaks no English, which makes communication difficult, but has handed us a statement in English, with a pamphlet attached, demanding the United States intercede immediately in the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh on the side of the Armenians, who the statement says are dying by the hundreds every day. We are in a tight spot here, but there is no cause for alarm. The President has spoken to the Vice President, who will monitor events from the White House. The President has appointed his National Security Adviser to be his second-in-command here on the plane, in constant communication with the pilot. The President and the First Lady are calm and unharmed. We will continue to be in touch with the White House in Washington, and will patch through to all of you as circumstances warrant. A press pool is aboard and will be permitted to broadcast as soon as our emergency communications can be interrupted. The President has asked me to forward this message: ‘Don’t worry, everyone, we’ll come through this fine.’ ”

As he listened, Irving beckoned to a stagehand and asked how to dial long distance. The man told him his phone was now programmed to let him call outside, and the code was double-zero, double-zero, then the area code and the number. He got out his address book and dialed the home number of a guy who had been a good source of his ten years before. The number still worked. “Ralph? You up and watching? Answer this lady’s questions.”

He put Viveca on to the retired Air Force officer who had been the pilot of Air Force One for nearly a decade. He printed a few questions on his pad for her: “How terrorist could get aboard? Fuel capacity of new AFI and how long can stay up? Pilot prep for this? Least bad place on plane for explosion? Best altitude? Gun in cockpit?”

The screen closed in on her face and the two voices in a pretty good
interview, certainly timely. The monitors of the other networks showed the anchors phumphing, recapping, adding little new. Off camera now, Irving called a source at the CIA at home, asked one question, was rebuffed, told the guy he would get him one day, and hung up. Riffling the pages of his address book—he had once tried one of those whizbang computer cards, but the book was faster—he called the duty officer at Langley, identified himself, and asked to be put through to Dorothy Barclay, the DCI, at home. In a moment, she came on.

“I’m in my car on the way back to the office, and this is an open line,” she said.

“I need Davidov’s home number, right now. It’s on your hotline card, about tenth down on the list, in the wallet in your bag.”

“It’s eight in the morning in Moscow, Irving. He may already be at work.”

“Not him. And it’s Saturday there. You know what’s going on, Dotty. We’ve known each other for a long time, and I really need this. I really … need … the number. I won’t tell where I got it.”

“I don’t have Davidov’s number. He’s too new.”

“You’re lying to an old friend, Dotty. I’m surprised at you.”

“I can give you Viktor Gulko’s home number. He’s the Russian President’s right-hand man. He has a red phone on his night table to the top man. I swear he’s better for your purpose than Davidov, who’s down the line at the KGB.”

She read off the numbers of the presidential aide’s home and private line at the office, and promised the same for anybody else if this aide was not available. Irving thought it odd she did not have Davidov’s number, but was glad to be given what amounted to an upgrade. He knew all along he had been smart to keep her secret years ago, at a time when her closeted lesbianism would have made her a security risk. Dorothy Barclay was a good investment. Few other reporters could call her at home at night for a piece of information, and nobody else dared call her Dotty.

He got Gulko on the line first crack, at his apartment; must have woken him up. The Russian had not yet heard about the hijacking, but he knew Irving’s name from his writings on counterterrorism, and was familiar with the mess in Nagorno-Karabakh. Irving filled him in on the bare details and told him what he had in mind. Gulko, who Dotty had
probably chosen because he was antibureaucratic, reacted swiftly and positively.

Irving tapped Viveca on the arm, interrupting her interview with the pilot. “I got somebody here, on the line from Moscow. He can help explain what’s going on in the place where the hijacker comes from. His name is Viktor Gulko, he’s the President of the Federation’s right-hand man. Mr. Gulko, you’re on the air to everybody in America. First tell us what’s the state of the war down in Nagorno-whatever.”

That was a softball to let the man wake up and gather his thoughts. Irving knew what he wanted Gulko for, and knew that what he would ask for was in the Russian Federation’s best interests. The question was a setup for a yes, would advance the story, and might even help the President in his tight spot. As the Russian aide sketched the outlines of the ethnic strife between Armenians and Azeris, it occurred to Irving that he could make a reporter out of the woman seated next to him. He wrote out for Viveca: “Bust in with—would you be willing to call your contacts down in that republic and get them to find someone who will try to talk the hijacker out of her plan? We can patch whoever it is through to the plane.”

One thing about Viveca—in a fluid situation, she took direction. She waited until Irving was in the middle of a question about the cause of the Armenian uprising to put her hand on his arm, on camera, and say: “Let me break in, Mr. Gulko, with this question: would you be willing, right this minute, to call your contacts down in that republic and get them to find someone who will talk the hijacker out of her plan?”

“Well, yes, of course,” Gulko said after the briefest hesitation, perhaps aware he was broadcasting to millions from his bed. “I will first call my superior, who will call the Russian President. I am sure he will be eager for us to do all we can to help avert this danger to the life of the President of the United States. When I get the Armenian leader who can help, or perhaps a relative of the hijacker, I will use the hotline to the White House?”

“The switchboard may be jammed,” said Irving, picking up on the Russian’s rising inflection. He wanted to maintain control of the communication. “Call this number, and we’ll patch you through to Whacka and onto the plane.” He took off his lapel mike and gave him the number, hoping it would not go over the air to let every nut call in.
Gulko would know what Whacka was; the KGB tapped its transmissions often enough.