The Watchmen (19 page)
“How much credibility can we put on it?” asked Pamela.
“It’s more than enough to describe as a positive lead,” judged Cowley. “But cautiously. Not too much detail—not even whether it was on the morning or afternoon tour—for them to realize how little we have. Hillary’s photograph will help: We can talk about other prints, as if we do have pictures of the two men. We might just spook them into a mistake.”
At that moment Cowley’s direct line rang. Carl Ashton, the Pentagon’s head of computer security, said, “You won’t believe what the bastards have done. I don’t believe it myself. Call up the government’s home page.”
There were only two Words—THE WATCHMEN—replicated thousands upon thousands of times until the Pentagon’s VDU server was totally full, immobilizing the system. In doing so the virus infected subsidiary, linked programs, causing computer crashes in the Commerce, Agriculture, Welfare, and Social Security departments.
Cowley stood with the telephone cupped to one ear, not fully comprehending the screen in front of him. Ashton said, “What you’re seeing isn’t the worst of it.”
“What else?” asked Cowley.
“Computers generate static—glue, dust and hair, stuff like that, to the screen. So there’s antistatic bands that attach to the supply lines. Computer shops sell a gizmo identical to antistatic bands. It fits on to the main feed and can record, for later downloading, the ten most recent access numbers and entry codes dialed from a machine.”
“Jesus!” Cowley exclaimed, numbed. “How many?”
“We’re still sweeping,” said Ashton. “So far every lower-level VDU and fifteen stations with their own hard disks. There’ll be more.”
“Any way of knowing the complete access they’ve achieved?”
“Every operator keeps a work log, but it’ll take weeks. But all that will tell us—hopefully—is the last ten from each individual machine. Which they’ve had God knows how much time to get into and move on. They can just ride piggyback on any call that’s made, anywhere else from their new host number.”
“Make it simple for me,” said Cowley.
“The Watchmen could already be, unknown and undetected, inside as many as five thousand programs anywhere in the world. There’s not a chance in hell of tracing them. And they can cause the sort of blocking chaos they’ve done with the official government page whenever they feel like it.”
“How are they doing that specifically?”
“It’s called a Trojan horse, which is self-explanatory. There’s no way of telling when one’s been lodged in a system or when it’ll open up. That happens when a code word or phrase is entered. Once that happens it becomes, quite literally, a computer infection, compounding and compounding itself over and over again. People die from virulent medical infections; programs die from virulent computer infections. Same principle. And we probably caused it ourselves.”
“Help me with that, too,” demanded Cowley.
“It would have been their burglar alarm,” said Ashton. “I’ve got thirty operators sweeping everything it’s possible to sweep. When one of them got close to the dormant Trojan horse, the alarm would have gone off, opening it up. It’s an absolute disaster.”
“What about the disgruntled list?” asked Cowley. “That on hard copy or disk?”
“That’s part of the disaster,” said the computer expert. “We were a third of the way through printing it off.”
“Which could be what triggered the alarm,” Cowley suggested at once. “The closeness to a particular name.”
There was no reaction from the other end for several moments. Then Ashton said, “I didn’t think of that! But it could easily be the way it happened.”
“The list alphabetical?”
“Yes.”
“And there was no master, backup file?”
“There should have been. But there wasn’t. An inquiry’s already started.”
“What other way could there be?” said Cowley, the question as much to himself as to the man at the Pentagon.
“There isn’t one,” said Ashton. “We’re looking at the failure of modern technology.”
“No,” refused Cowley. “What’s the system for letting people go? They get severance, vacation money, stuff like … ?”
“That could be it!” accepted Ashton, understanding at once. “No idea how long it might take but it could be a cross-reference.”
“And there’s the photographs,” reminded Cowley, recalling the arrangement with Hillary Petty. “That’s another check, surely?”
There was another silence. “Part of the problem,” admitted Ashton. “They’re digitized.”
“You mean they’re on computer, too? No prints?”
“We’d run off some before the crash.”
“You know what I always thought?” said Cowley. “I always thought the Pentagon was the super-efficient institution that fought wars and kept the free world safe.”
“We had a mole in here,” said Ashton. “Someone we didn’t know about.”
“If that’s supposed to be an excuse, it isn’t,” said Cowley. “I wouldn’t offer it to anyone else if I were you.”
Pamela Darnley had stood at his side throughout the exchange, mostly staring at the screen. She said, “I heard enough to understand. Ashton’s right. It’s a disaster.”
“Not quite,” contradicted Cowley. “There hasn’t been another missile. Or any more bombs.”
“Yet,” qualified Pamela.
Dimitri Ivanovich Danilov eased the seat back and closed his eyes even before the plane leveled off, uninterested in seeing the Moscow hinterland disappear beneath him. He scarcely had sufficient data to justify the trip this soon, he knew. But equally—more so in fact—he needed personally to be in Washington to evaluate the forensic tests, even though he was sure what the results would be. The big uncertainty was what to do when he got the confirmation: assessing—if he could even then—the obstacles and obstruction he was facing. At least he’d be free of the distraction of Olga. Who was confusing him even further. There’d been no threatening belligerence before he’d left. She’d been positively docile and actually wished him a good trip as he was packing. He couldn’t remember her doing that when their relationship had been amicable. It probably would all be changed by the time he got back.
“There are certainly disparities,” said the head of bank security, a thin-faced, blinking man named Hank Hewitt.
“Thefts?” insisted Anne Stovey.
“The surprising thing is that apart from Mr. Snelling—and one or two people who believe there are discrepancies, since we’ve begun to check specifically—no one’s actually complained. There has to be a complaint to constitute a crime, doesn’t there?
“It’s a legal point,” said Anne. “How much, so far?”
“It’s still far too early to tell. As you yourself warned, the discrepancies never amount to more than a few cents, a dollar at the most.”
Anne refused to be irritated. She’d gotten the same reaction at three different banks she’d asked to check. One had even refused outright, if there hadn’t been a complaint from a customer. “If, over a long period, four or five cents have been taken from the checking accounts of all your bank’s customers, in all your branches, how much could have been stolen?”
The blinking man tried a disdainful laugh, which didn’t quite work. “That’s an impossible hypothesis. And an exaggerated one.”
“Indulge me,” coaxed Anne. “If it’s been going on for say two to three years, I think we could be talking of hundreds of thousands of dollars, don’t you?”
“I really won’t go into a hypothesis like that,” refused the security chief.
“It has to be a bank employee, doesn’t it?”
“Accounts never balance at the end-of-day trading.”
“What checks can you put in place?”
“I don’t know, apart from making a visual examination at the beginning and end of each day’s trading against deposits made during that day. It would be totally out of the question.”
“I’d like you to spread the inquiries through all your branches,” insisted the woman. It was time to respond to the memorandum about possible robberies that could be financing the terrorism.
In the locked study of the Rensselaer house Patrick Hollis surfed through the sites where he customarily played his war games. Posted on two was a message that read: THE GENERAL IS CALLING THE QUARTERMASTER AT THE USUAL PLACE AND TIME.
Hollis had been disappointed by his probe into Robert Standing’s background. The man had no medical history that could have been embarrassing and his financial records were haphazard but disclosed no excess or irregularity.
Hollis sat looking at the screen and its message for a long time before the idea began to germinate. Robert Standing was the sort of person whose account he plundered, Hollis recognized: someone who’d never be sure to the last cent—even the last dollar—what his balance was.
Hollis called up the screen-filling list of bank account numbers he had accumulated over the years, choosing at random. It was going to work, he knew; work very well indeed.
The photograph had given Pamela Darnley an identification but not an impression of Dimitri Danilov, and for a moment she remained unmoving by an arrivals hall pillar, studying the man. A good six inches shorter than Cowley and much slighter, thinning blond hair carefully combed to cover where it was already receding, Slavic cheekbones giving his face a leanness: inconspicuous but confident, at least outwardly, not looking around anxiously to be greeted, intentionally just apart from the bustle all around him, making his own space. A man accustomed to being alone; maybe preferring it.
Danilov’s look encompassed the hall at the same time as she picked up the taxi direction sign, toward which he moved after just the briefest hesitation. It brought him toward her, so all Pamela had to do was step out into his path.
“Dimitri?” she said. “Pamela.”
He took the offered hand, the direct, unsurprised look confirming her inference of confidence. He said, “Thank you for bothering.”
“It’s no bother. Bill’s become a little too publicly recognizable, and a hospital appointment clashed anyway.”
“Is there a problem?” The concern was immediate.
“Having his stitches taken out. He should be back at the bureau by now. You want to go straight there or stop off at the Marriott? It’s the nearest.”
Pamela had driven to Dulles in her own car and used the return journey to bring Danilov completely up to date. With the Arlington Bridge still closed, the traffic began backing up along the George Washington Parkway before they got as far as Langley.
Danilov said, “They’re being very successful at making everyone look ridiculous.”
“The fear is what they’ll do next,” said Pamela.
“Let’s hope Bill’s right about them exhausting their supply.”
“How do we block their resupply?”
“I wish I had a better idea,” admitted Danilov.
“Have you got one at all?” Pamela immediately demanded.
“I’ll be better able to answer that after talking to your forensic people,” said Danilov.
“They’ve already got what you shipped earlier,” said Pamela.
“But not the way I want it examined,” said Danilov. “How strongly are you treating this sighting of the man in the camouflage jacket?”
“It’s the most hopeful lead so far.”
“How many have you traced from both tours?”
“Six from the morning descent. Seven in the afternoon. And no useful photographs.”
Danilov slumped into such contemplative silence that Pamela wondered if he’d actually fallen asleep after the flight. But then she saw his eyes were open and realized he was someone not discomfited by silence. She said, “I hear it’s not easy for you to work properly in Moscow.”
Danilov looked at her across the car, caught by the directness. Cowley must be working very closely with her to have told her. Was their relationship entirely professional? Pamela Darnley in person was even more attractive than he had thought her to be from TV. The briefing had been impressive, as well: A succinct, factual account spared any unsupportable opinion or conclusion and gave Cowley the credit for preventing the Lincoln Memorial explosion. Danilov said, “Sometimes it can be useful.”
The Key Bridge was blocked, stopping them. She turned to look directly at him, expecting him to elaborate, but he didn’t. The traffic became freer after Washington Circle but clogged again at the detour that had been imposed around the White House.
Cowley was back at the bureau building. He held up a warning hand as Danilov entered the incident room and said, “No Russian bear hugs.” He touched his head. “And you might as well laugh at this and get it over with.”
No dressing had been necessary after the removal of the stitches, and the two-inch-wide furrow along the entire side of Cowley’s head, where the hair had been cut away, made it look as if his scalp had slipped sideways. Pamela did grin and said, “If it’s a fashion statement, I can’t say I like it.”
There was definitely an easiness between the two of them, Danilov decided. “It’s not as if I have that much hair to spare.”
The relaxation was brief. Cowley said, “I’d rather you gave me now what you couldn’t from Moscow.”
“I need to give it to the forensic team who’ve got what was delivered to your embassy.”
In Paul Lambert’s section they were greeted by a mixture of curiosity at Dimitri Danilov—a Russian in the heart of America’s counterintelligence organization—and undisguised amusement at Cowley’s appearance.
Danilov said, “You’ve tested what was sent from Moscow? Compared the paint and the metals?”
“Not a single match,” dismissed the scientist.
“Good.” Danilov smiled, although he’d already known there would be some disparity when there shouldn’t have been.
“That prove something?” demanded Cowley.
“I hope this will,” said Danilov, taking from his pocket the envelopes he’d carried with him at all times since Gorki and added to after collecting the samples from the Moscow plant. Opening two separate, carefully labeled envelopes he said, “Is that enough metal?”
“Should be,” said Lambert.
“What about the paint?” asked Danilov, opening the other identified envelopes.
“More than enough.”
“How long?”
“Twenty-four hours, to be absolutely sure.”
“That’s what I’ve got to be, absolutely sure,” insisted Danilov.
“What are you trying to prove?” demanded Pamela.
“Where the UN missile definitely came from,” replied Danilov. To the forensic scientist he said, “Have you made a positive comparison between the stenciling on the UN warhead and what was sent to you, marked as coming from Gorki—specifically the name itself?”
Lambert coughed uncomfortably. “I need to double check that.”
“Do,” urged Danilov. “Should you be able to tell if the template from the two separate Gorkis is the same or different?”
“A simple matter of enlarging photographs of both names sufficiently to compare their outlines,” said Lambert. “It will show up the imperfections in the manufacturing stamp for each letter. If the imperfections are different, then so are the templates.”
“Gorki is the important word but I’d like every letter checked. And those from the Moscow plant: the words on the mines as well as the warhead from Kushino.”
Back in his office Cowley said, “What do you expect to find?”
“Quite a lot of effort to lead me—us—in the wrong direction,” said Danilov.
“How?” asked Pamela.
It took Danilov almost an hour to explain. Even then he omitted the cell threat to Anatoli Lasin and the importance he attached to Ashot Mizin, the man who had eagerly volunteered to deliver the warheads and mines from militia headquarters to the Russian Foreign Ministry. Long before he finished he was aware of Pamela’s skepticism. When he did stop, she said, “It can’t be as bad as that.”
“I’d like not to think so. But I do. That’s what I meant in the car by saying how misdirection of which we are aware could sometimes be useful.”
“You any idea
how
to use it yet?” asked the less doubtful and more pragmatic Cowley.
how
to use it yet?” asked the less doubtful and more pragmatic Cowley.
“Let’s wait for the results of the scientific tests.”
“Is there anything else?” said Pamela, making no more effort to hide her disappointment than she had her skepticism.
“Viktor Nikolaevich Nikov made two visits to America, one in January, the second in August of last year,” disclosed Danilov. “He’d have had to complete a visa application form with a contact address in this country, wouldn’t he?”
Cowley smiled broadly. “Absolutely!” he said.
“Both visits were on a passport in the name of Nikov,” added Danilov. “But there’s a possible alias, Eduard Babkendovich Kulik. He had a Russian driver’s license in that name. Which—”
“—he could have used to rent a car, which a man with an interest in cars would almost automatically do,” completed Pamela excitedly. “And rental agreements require residency addresses!”
Although Danilov telephoned from the J. Edgar Hoover building to warn of his impending arrival, there was still confusion when he got to the new Russian embassy off Wisconsin. The obvious initial reaction was that he was a deluded imposter. The jet lag that began to engulf him didn’t help his heavy-eyed, disheveled appearance, either, and he began regretting not waiting until the following day, which Cowley had suggested, when there might have been more on the suspect in the camouflage jacket. He spent more than half an hour alone in a bare room into which he was shown by an unnamed and clearly disbelieving reception clerk who demanded his passport and militia credentials before the door abruptly burst open and a gray-haired man, red faced with anger, demanded, “What the hell’s going on!” It was the start of a further hour of outraged demands, anger, threats, and quite a lot of communication by telephone and fax with both the White House and the Foreign Ministry in Moscow.
“I forbid you to behave in such a manner, imagining you can work totally independently of this embassy and my authority,” declared the ambassador, Andrei Guliyev, virtually at the moment of their meeting. “You will communicate through me—and only through me—at all times and do nothing without my prior approval. It’s also ridiculous for you to expect to live outside the diplomatic compound.”
“Hasn’t there been notification of my coming from the president’s office?” queried Danilov. This far from Moscow he had no way of protecting himself between the conflicting pressure from the Duma and the White House.
Guliyev looked to his head of chancellery. Timor Besedin said: “Our notification came from the Foreign Ministry.”
Why hadn’t it come from Georgi Chelyag? thought Danilov. “At most I don’t imagine needing more than the intelligence bureau’s secure communication facilities.”
“I have not been officially informed of this,” protested the embassy’s security chief, Ivan Fedorovich Obidin loudly. “The militia has no right of access to my
rezidentura.
It’s out of the question. I expect, however, to accompany you on inquiries you make while you are here in America. I shall contact Moscow suggesting this. That way the secure
rezidentura
facilities can be used. By me, to relay what’s necessary.”
rezidentura.
It’s out of the question. I expect, however, to accompany you on inquiries you make while you are here in America. I shall contact Moscow suggesting this. That way the secure
rezidentura
facilities can be used. By me, to relay what’s necessary.”
Danilov sighed, holding back the irritation he felt for the president’s chief of staff not personally sending the message. He hadn’t expected to make friends but to make enemies here would serve no purpose. And there would, he was sure by now, have been a lot of separate conversations and instructions from Moscow to each of these men from their respective superiors. “I’m fully aware of the pressure you have personally been under since all this began. Which is precisely the reason
why
there has to be a separation. The FBI has no positive leads. Neither have I, from Moscow. There will be more outrages—atrocities even. If I am attached to this embassy and living in the Russian diplomatic compound—and my presence here in Washington becomes known—then it will be to this embassy and you, Mr. Ambassador, that fresh demands and criticism will be directed. Working independently of the embassy
is
diplomatically essential, in the opinion of the president.” He paused, confident the inference of ultimate, inner sanctum access was necessary. “I don’t need secure facilities to talk to Chief of Staff Chelyag. Any telephone will do.”
why
there has to be a separation. The FBI has no positive leads. Neither have I, from Moscow. There will be more outrages—atrocities even. If I am attached to this embassy and living in the Russian diplomatic compound—and my presence here in Washington becomes known—then it will be to this embassy and you, Mr. Ambassador, that fresh demands and criticism will be directed. Working independently of the embassy
is
diplomatically essential, in the opinion of the president.” He paused, confident the inference of ultimate, inner sanctum access was necessary. “I don’t need secure facilities to talk to Chief of Staff Chelyag. Any telephone will do.”
“I’m not being obstructive,” the local intelligence chief said uncertainly.
“No one is suggesting that you are,” Danilov said easily.
“If the purpose of the conversation with the president’s office is to ensure we each understand your position and function here, there’s surely no reason why we can’t hear it?” the military attaché, Colonel Oleg Syzdykov, said with a smile.
Danilov forced himself to smile back, recognizing the military intelligence chief to be the most formidable opponent and warmed by a further realization. Chelyag hadn’t personally sent the advisory cable, and they believed he was exaggerating his authority! “None whatsoever.”
Guliyev gestured toward the telephone bank beside his expansive desk.
Danilov booked the call in his name through the embassy switchboard, turning to face his audience. Who was calling whose bluff? Hardly a bluff, in his case. He’d made it quite clear to Chelyag how he needed to work in America, and at the very first crisis meeting the presidential aide had precluded the direct involvement of any other agency. But there was something close to overconfidence in the attitudes of the people facing him.
The telephone rang and the ambassador again held out his hand in invitation. It was a secretary, a voice he didn’t recognize. Danilov repeated his name, feeling the perspiration prickling his back, and said he would not give a message but that he wanted Chelyag to be told personally who was calling from Washington. It was difficult to keep his voice even. The line went dead, as if the call had been disconnected.
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