The Watchmen (32 page)
Danilov tapped the transcript. “There’s a lot here, if we can see it.”
“Gavri?”
“Doesn’t sound Russian. Greek maybe.”
“Where’s that leave the theory of the intelligence agent identification being KGB?” queried Cowley. “KGB didn’t employ foreign nationals in Moscow Center, did they?”
“Not as far as I know, although Feliks Dzerzhinsky, who founded the service, was a Pole,” admitted Danilov. “I’ll check. If it turns out to be a working code name, we’ve got our KGB search down to one.”
There were only the two of them in the FBI section. Martlew, at Cowley’s suggestion, had provided a bottle before leaving to check the picture development. Cowley and Danilov were on their second drink.
“Gavri has to be in America if killing him risked bringing attention to Orlenko,” said Cowley. “But what legitimate business was Orlenko talking about? You remember any reference to a business in anything we’ve heard from Bay View Avenue?”
“Not from the bugging,” said Danilov. “But when we were wiring the house she told Harrison they’d been in Chicago seeing import-export business friends of Arnie’s. And that Arnie was always talking deals.”
“There’d need to be an import-export front to bring in weapons,” said Cowley. “And Chicago’s a port.”
“If Orlenko’s name was on the register of an import-export business based there we’d have the route,” said Danilov. “And Chicago’s on the telephone list.”
“About time,” insisted Danilov.
“The Watchmen are definitely a fanatical military group,” said Cowley, looking down at his own transcript copy.
“Operating like an insurgency group in enclosed cells: like the booby trap at New Rochelle was insurgency,” said Danilov.
“What’s
new
, leading us somewhere?” complained Cowley.
new
, leading us somewhere?” complained Cowley.
“Torture,” said Danilov, to himself.
“What?”
“It fits,” insisted the Russian, still reflective. “Remember I told you how Nikov and Karpov had been tortured before being tied together and finally thrown in the Moskva? As an example to anyone else? Now look at the conversation between Orlenko and the woman. There was a falling out: someone trying to cheat. I’d say that someone was Vitali Nikolaevich Nikov, who got mutilated and murdered for doing it.”
“With Valeri Karpov, who worked at Plant 43 and had access to double war-headed missiles,” said the American, going along with the reasoning.
“According to Lasin, the story is that the killings were carried out by Americans,” recalled Danilov. “You think some of the Watchmen came in personally to set the example of what happens when something goes wrong?”
“‘Hasn’t got time to come all the way here again’” quoted Cowley. “Could be interpreted that way.”
“And Nikov stayed at the Metropole Hotel, the favorite of American visitors,” filled in Danilov.
“So,” said Cowley, underlining passages in the transcript as he talked. “The Watchmen set up a deal to buy a germ war-headed missile. Get a better offer—they think—from Nikov, who supplies them with one that doesn’t go off. They also think it’s his fault, that he sold them a dud, so he gets tortured and killed. So does Valeri Karpov, his supplier, by a Watchmen group. Who then have to go back to their original source.”
“Problems,” cautioned Danilov, lifting the paper toward the American. “This is Arseni Orlenko, a boyhood friend of Vitali Nikov—to whose garages in Gorki we know calls were made, and received, from Bay View Avenue—talking to the Watchmen’s original supplier. So who’s Orlenko running with?”
“Both?” suggested Cowley.
“Wouldn’t he have been tortured and killed, as another example, if he was?” asked Danilov.
The room became silent, both men hunched over their transcripts.
“Why was Orlenko sorry?” demanded Cowley, not looking up. He quoted: “‘I’m sorry, incidentally … . It was business—only ever business … . Still unfortunate.’ What was? What’s that all about?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Danilov. “What we do know—can be positive about—is that for the moment there aren’t going to be any more outrages in America because their arsenal has gone.”
“It’s not empty here,” Cowley reminded. “Who are the outsiders she refers to? And the deal? She’s only interested in business, not in any revolutionary shit, so why’s she involved, as she obviously was, in the attack on the embassy?”
“Another question that has to go on hold,” said Danilov.
“Which plant are the warheads coming from, Moscow or Gorki?” demanded Cowley.
“Karpov had to be Nikov’s supplier: That’s why he died tied to him,” said Danilov. “Which points to Gorki. But the stenciling on the UN missile was wrong compared to the sample your forensic people checked. It could be either plant. Or one we don’t even know about.” He went to his transcript yet again. “She’s got virtually all the conventional stuff the Watchmen want. And the type of bazooka that hit your compound is everywhere—sixth line from the top.”
A gray dawn was spreading across the city outside, slowly, as if it really wasn’t interested in starting a new day. Cowley wasn’t sure if he was, either. He took a third scotch, ignoring Danilov’s look. Cowley said, “I think I’ll call the director.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
“That we know there’s most likely going to be another disaster and we don’t know how to prevent it.”
It wasn’t the defeatism of the remark that unsettled Danilov. It was the feeling that he’d missed the most important thing in the telephone conversation between Brooklyn and Moscow. As Cowley went into Barry Martlew’s office to make the Washington connection, Danilov pressed the replay button for the third time and listened to the tape in its entirety. The unsettled feeling didn’t go; it actually increased. “Told me to ask what the real political feeling was there: whether the Duma move against the president would come to anything” echoed in his mind and stared up at him from the printed page in his hand. Was that it? The reminder of what he’d done by ignoring not just the early-morning demand but the repeated afternoon telephone calls that Pavin had relayed from Interior Minister Nikolai Mikhailovich Belik?
Pamela Darnley was unsettled, too.
She’d carried a transcript and a copy of the telephone conversation with her on the first morning shuttle to Washington—calculating that professionally and politically the J. Edgar Hoover building was the place for her to be—refusing the irritation at Cowley talking directly with the director from Moscow, just as she’d discarded what she now embarrassingly accepted to have been an irrational disappointment that Orlenko hadn’t called Chicago.
There had been nothing to detract from what she’d achieved in sole command. From the long conversation she’d just concluded with a tired-sounding William Cowley, it appeared they were still going to need a miracle—several, maybe—to benefit from the tape or identify the unknown woman who’d featured on it. If anything concrete was going to emerge it would be linking Arseni Orlenko to a Chicago import-export firm. If she did that, it would again be to her credit, despite the lead coming from Moscow. Letting her mind run on, Pamela recognized that although, objectively, it would have achieved nothing—and risked destroying the only positive Russian lead they had—Cowley’s explanation why he and Danilov had not gone into the Golden Hussar, that they didn’t have the slightest clue to whom the woman was, had sounded lamely facile. She wondered if Leonard Ross had thought the same.
She had posed a number of questions to herself the previous evening in the Manhattan incident room. And she’d come up with some more since. Besides initiating the Chicago company search, it was time to regain a total overview: to look down from the top of the mountain of what they had, searching for what might have been overlooked.
“I’ll try not to get in the way.”
“There’s more than enough room,” said Patrick Hollis. He encompassed his office with a gesture. “If you like I could move out of here into the open room and you could have it all to yourself.” He felt totally relaxed, unfazed: enjoying it even. It was being interrogated by the enemy after being captured. Except that he hadn’t been captured. And wouldn’t be.
“That desk and the terminal out there are all I need,” Mark Wittier said. The FBI auditor was a dry, thin, bespectacled man whose overburdened briefcase sagged, strained against its side straps.
“You change your mind, all you’ve got to do is say. You think you’ll be here long?” Hollis had read books on interrogation technique: how to resist and throw questioners off the scent. This was classic so far. Affably willing to cooperate in every way, become the questioner rather than the questioned.
“Depends what we find. Sometimes it’s months.”
“What, exactly,
are
you looking for?” Still the questioner.
are
you looking for?” Still the questioner.
“What do you imagine?”
Careful: turned it back on him. “The gossip is that you’re in a lot of branches. If that’s true—a lot of branches, I mean—it’s a pretty substantial fraud.” He paused. “That’s what I’ve guessed.”
“You ever come across anything that seems out of order?”
Clever again. Avoid the question and ask another. Still not fazed, still in command. “Out of order?”
“Disparities. Things not quite adding up as they should?”
The moment for indignation. “Not in my department, Mr. Whittier! I’ve had Al in-house audits ever since I got appointed, and I’m proud of it. We talking a loan or securities fraud here? If we are, then I think I need to be told about it!”
Whittier’s supposedly reassuring smile clicked on and off, like a light switch. “Actually it’s customer accounts. Day-to-day transactions, things like that.”
Hollis was sure he allowed just the right amount of relaxation. “Afraid I can’t help you there. Not my division.”
“I know,” said Whittier. “That’s why it was thought best I work out of here: out of the way of everyone in the bank who deal day to day. Less upsetting.”
He had a reaction ready for that one. Hollis actually counted, in his head, stretching the apparent surprise. “You mean you believe the fraud is being committed from someone
within
the bank! An employee!”
within
the bank! An employee!”
“That’s how these things usually turn out.”
But not this time how the auditor imagined, thought Hollis. And even more certainly not how Robert Standing imagined, either.
When the Chicago agent in charge complained that the manpower drain to carry out a local shipping companies’ registration check, in addition to the rotating surveillance on the Lake Shore Drive public telephone, Pamela Darnley told him all other ongoing cases should be suspended and promised an immediate authorizing fax, which she sent with the promise to draft in more personnel if it became necessary. From the equally quick, unargued acceptance of everything she said, Pamela wondered if her confrontation with Al Beckinsdale had already been churned out through the gossip grinder. There was constant communication among Chicago, Washington, and New York, and from the hostility she could have bruised herself against in New York it was obvious it was common, apprehensive knowledge there.
She wasn’t unhappy to be tagged a ball-breaker. Rather it was the reputation—the fear—she wanted. All it needed for her to be sucked down into quicksand oblivion was one mistake—someone failing instantly to react or recognize, as Beckinsdale had failed. She hadn’t realized, in the beginning, how useful that episode would be.
Based on her newly acquired cover-your-ass headquarters’ expertise, she enclosed a copy of her Chicago authorization to Leonard Ross that a register check was a way to locate the U.S. entry route of the next germ warfare weapon. It wasn’t, however, her major communication. Aware of Cowley’s direct contact with the man, Pamela turned her memorandum accompanying the actual tape and its transcript into an analysis, stressing what she considered an overwhelming priority.
A tap on the now clearly abandoned Bare Necessities telephone would have provided the number from which the weapon ordering call had been made, giving them a voiceprint. Knowing now, as they did, that another combined germ and biological attack was planned, there surely couldn’t be any constitutional or legal argument against tapping the public telephones on the Bay View Avenue billing records not just for Chicago but for Washington and Pittsburgh.
Terry Osnan arrived while she was in the middle of composing the memo. Without stopping Pamela handed him the Golden Hussar transcript and companies’ search instructions to Chicago.
He waited until she’d finished before saying “If we’d spoken last night, I could have set this up then.”
“It was even later in Chicago and only eight A.M. there today—two hours before the company records office opens—when I organized it all. We didn’t lose any time.” She hoped the incident room coordinator, who’d argued against her Beckinsdale complaint, wasn’t going to become a carping pain in the ass.
“It could be good,” judged the man.
“I want the master file. I’m going to do a complete review personally.”
There was a visible stiffening in the slim, fair-haired man. “I review everything in context as it comes in.”
Pamela sighed. “This isn’t any sort of attack, criticism.
I
haven’t reviewed everything in context—know, properly, where the pieces fit and where they don’t. I’m the joint controlling case officer but I’ve only been involved in parts. I need to know—
should
know—everything as completely as I know just some. OK?”
I
haven’t reviewed everything in context—know, properly, where the pieces fit and where they don’t. I’m the joint controlling case officer but I’ve only been involved in parts. I need to know—
should
know—everything as completely as I know just some. OK?”
“OK,” Osnan said doubtfully.
Feather-smoothing time, Pamela decided; ball-breaker was all right, scalpel-wielding emasculator wasn’t. “So help me, Terry. What have I missed out, failed to do?” Quickly she corrected, “What might Bill and I failed to have done?”
“Nothing,” the man said tightly. “If you had—either of you—I would have pointed it out, obviously.” He waved the transcript he still held like a flag. “And as I said, the Chicago lead here really could be a step—a lot of steps—forward.”
“Do me a favor,” said Pamela. “Run a check, where we’ve withdrawn people, where there’s people we could still bring in. Just in case we’ve got to build up even more.”
“Chicago’s isn’t the only complaint,” said Osnan. “I’ve had it from Los Angeles, Houston, and Minnesota. And that was before we virtually took over the entire fraud division for the bank investigation. And sent half of forensic to Moscow. We get a major, competing crime and the overstretch is going to snap.”
“What would you say is a major crime likely to compete with a biological germ attack on an American city?”
“Just doing what you asked me, flagging up the hot spots,” said Osnan.
“And I appreciate it,” said Pamela. “Anne sends her love. I’m recommending a commendation for her picking up like she did.”
Pamela read the master file steadily, unhurriedly, breaking off more than once to go out into the larger room with the folder in hand to look at the scene-of-crime photographs of the United Nations building, the New Rochelle massacre, and the Washington Monument bait for the failed Lincoln Memorial trap. Each had its own individual pinboard, but Pamela remained in front of photographs of Roanne Harding in her Lexington Place apartment longer than the rest, finally stepping back to see all the illustrations at the same time.
After returning to her office, she abandoned the master file for the complete evidence dossier of the murder, which was cross-referenced to her own inquiries at the Pentagon. There was still an FBI team on the case but as a murder investigation, it was totally stalled. As Paul Lambert had warned, the apartment had virtually been polished clean of any forensic evidence and the decomposition had destroyed any evidential medical finding, certainly semen traces for a DNA match if Roanne Harding had been raped, which he also couldn’t prove.
Although Roanoke did appear to have been her hometown, the bureau team there had failed to locate friends or anyone who remembered her in any useful detail, despite local newspaper appeals that included publishing the Pentagon personnel photograph. Her teacher (“a quiet child who had difficulty in learning”) believed she’d left the town after grade school (“I thought the whole family had moved on”), and whatever had attracted the FBI to the parents’ black protest activities hadn’t been registered by the local police, who had no record whatsoever of the family. The graves of the mother and father were in the Baptist cemetery. There was no reference on the headstone to the grief of any child at their passing.
It didn’t fit, Pamela decided abruptly.
The UN missile had failed to explode because of a fluke, and the Lincoln Memorial explosion had been prevented by William Cowley’s clever lateral thinking, but both had been painstakingly—brilliantly, by terrorist criteria—conceived. As had the New Rochelle booby trap and the monument lure. But somehow—she couldn’t at that moment decide how—killing Roanne Harding seemed different: unconnected, although it wasn’t. And despite the efforts of the killers to make it appear so.
So what didn’t fit? Roanne Harding herself, perhaps? A girl with two names but no friends, no family, no lovers, no past, no future. A good choice, objectively, to infiltrate the Pentagon and its computer systems and humiliate America throughout the world. Except that she
hadn’t
been a good choice. She’d attached the phony antistatic bands upon which her fingerprints had been found, giving the Watchmen incalculable access. But she’d drawn attention to herself—gotten fired—because she was so incompetent at the job she was supposed to do. Was that it? Was attaching the bands all she’d had to do? After which she became, quite literally, disposable? No, Pamela answered herself at once. Roanne had also had to wipe the personnel records of possibly disgruntled dismissed employees. But hadn’t erased her own. Predictable, typical incompetence? Or … Pamela experienced the briefest feeling of numbness. It took her only minutes to find the notes—her own—that she wanted. And after that Paul Lambert’s forensic reports on the antistatic bands upon which Roanne Harding’s fingerprints had been found.
hadn’t
been a good choice. She’d attached the phony antistatic bands upon which her fingerprints had been found, giving the Watchmen incalculable access. But she’d drawn attention to herself—gotten fired—because she was so incompetent at the job she was supposed to do. Was that it? Was attaching the bands all she’d had to do? After which she became, quite literally, disposable? No, Pamela answered herself at once. Roanne had also had to wipe the personnel records of possibly disgruntled dismissed employees. But hadn’t erased her own. Predictable, typical incompetence? Or … Pamela experienced the briefest feeling of numbness. It took her only minutes to find the notes—her own—that she wanted. And after that Paul Lambert’s forensic reports on the antistatic bands upon which Roanne Harding’s fingerprints had been found.
Hurriedly she reached for the telephone.
There were 120 photographs of women—the majority accompanied by men—from the Golden Hussar. Having been there, Cowley openly admitted the impossibility of photographing everyone and demanded an honest assessment of how many more might have been missed. The combined estimate, from the front and rear surveillance, came to twenty. Bad light and obstructing vehicles and people blurred the definition of ten of the 120 beyond any reasonable identification and the quality on a lot of the others was bad. The bristlechinned Cowley said, “Another fucking waste of time! What’s going to tell us who she is, even if she’s on one that’s half good!”
“Maybe something we haven’t yet got,” said Danilov. An hour later he said, “And this could be it,” after Pavin called from Petrovka to say that the records of 230 former KGB and Federal Security Bureau personnel had been delivered, with a note from the archive supervisor that there could be that many more again still to come. Nikolai Mikhailovich Belik was also demanding contact.
Cowley said, “We’re being buried under paper.”
“Which might be the idea,” suggested Danilov. He thought the cynicism might actually be true when he returned to Petrovka. Some of the dossiers were more than two inches thick, and Pavin had taken over a small lecture room adjoining his office to accommodate them all.
Pavin said at once, “I’ve got the key and as far as I know there’s only one spare.” He extended his hand. “And that’s it. What about Mizin?”
“You know one of the favorite mottoes of the old KGB? The spy you know is better than the spy you don’t know. Mizin stays until there’s a use for him.”
Pavin said, “The minister’s called again.”
“It’s best I spend as much time as I’m doing at the U.S. Embassy: It distances you—you and the few others we might be able to trust here.”
“I didn’t realize you were that exposed.”
A totally unconnected thought suddenly presented itself. “Does your church do charity work?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve got all Olga’s things—dresses, stuff like that—in the car. Could you find a use for it?”
“That’s very thoughtful of you.”
He still had to give Olga’s photographs to Irena to pass on to Igor. Igor who? he suddenly wondered, realizing he didn’t know the full name of the man who’d made Olga pregnant. The name wasn’t important or necessary. He’d keep one, he decided—their wedding photograph. He didn’t know why. It just seemed the right thing to do. An easier decision than the one he’d made about choosing professional sides.
Danilov’s office television was showing the early-morning buildup of protesters outside the U.S. Embassy and promising coverage of the public appearance of Henry Hartz and the Russian president, expected later in the day. The alley beside the legation had been sealed off by Moscow militia, but it was still possible to see the blackened and burst-apart side of the compound over the shoulder of the CNN reporter who was suggesting that the absence of any FBI statement indicated a total lack of progress.
The American axiom Danilov had always liked about being caught between a rock and a hard place didn’t seem so slick now that he was the one in the middle. Committed, he reminded himself. Too late now to change his mind. All he could hope to do—
had
to do—was cushion as much as possible one of the hard surfaces between which he was being squeezed.
had
to do—was cushion as much as possible one of the hard surfaces between which he was being squeezed.
Danilov was connected at once to Georgi Chelyag, who listened without comment to his and Cowley’s interpretation of the intercepted telephone conversation. When they did start to discuss it, Danilov patiently put up all the middle-of-the-night arguments against sealing off both the Moscow and Gorki plants they knew to hold germ warfare weapons or doing anything to disclose the importance of the Golden Hussar.
“We know we’ve got time,” stressed Danilov, trying to direct the conversation. “There’s Chicago and now the intelligence files.”
“I can order Kedrov to produce Gavri—identify him—if it’s a code designation.”
“I don’t think it is. I don’t see the point of Orlenko and the woman continuing to use it and he’s in America, not here. All we’d risk is alerting them, if there is still a link with the Security Bureau.”
“I think we’re standing back too much,” protested the presidential aide.
“Is that the White House view? Or that of the rest of the control group?” demanded Danilov. The moment of truth or of suicidal self-destruction? He could easily have already pressed the self-destruct button.
A response was a long time coming. “The inference from that question—those
two
questions—is that one is very different from the other.”
two
questions—is that one is very different from the other.”
“They might be.”
“From what? Or whom?” demanded Chelyag.
There was no purpose in continuing the ambiguity. “I have been ordered to duplicate my reports to the interior minister.”
“Which I have forbidden.”
“And which puts me in the impossible position I feared would arise. And has.”
Nikolai Mikhailovich Belik’s call came within thirty minutes. “I warned you against choosing the wrong side.”
“I don’t regard it as choosing sides. I’m following orders.”
“Don’t you think you might have overlooked something?”
“What?”
“How long, constitutionally, a man is allowed to serve as Russian president. And how, when he leaves office, all his acolytes and supporters are swept away with him.”
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