The Watchmen (24 page)

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Authors: Brian Freemantle

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Espionage

BOOK: The Watchmen
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Again no one spoke.
“Let’s find who we’re looking for,” Pamela concluded. She was on her own, in charge, and determined that everyone knew it, Leonard Ross most of all.
 
The couple—a dark-haired, big-busted girl of about twenty-five, the fair-haired, bull-chested man older, maybe thirty-five or even more—arrived at 69 Bay View Avenue by yellow cab at 10:45 A.M. They had luggage, a suit bag and a matching airline carry-on grip, in red tartan.
The photographer in the observation van got three exposures, one very good of the two of them full face. Another agent got the number of the cab and telephoned it to the first of the four backup cars parked the most convenient to the direction in which the taxi moved off. They identified it easily on Neptune Avenue but waited until it turned on to Copsey before pulling it in. The driver, a third-generation New York Italian, said he’d picked them up outside Terminal 2 at LaGuardia just before ten. They hadn’t talked a lot—not at all to him, apart from giving him the address—but when they had it had been in English. The girl had an American accent but the guy hadn’t, although he hadn’t been able to pin it down. German, maybe: guttural like Germans speak, from the back of their throats. He couldn’t positively remember anything they’d said. He thought there’d been a John or a Joe mentioned. Someone had been difficult: The girl had definitely called someone a son of a bitch. They hadn’t seemed particularly close, not sitting together or holding hands or anything like that, like he would have done, a girl with tits like that. He hadn’t seen—hadn’t looked for—a wedding ring. The driver demanded to know who was going to pay for his time when they asked him to follow them in to the Manhattan office to make a formal statement. They told him they would.
The observation photographer’s film was already there by then, ferried in for development and multiple printing by a second standby car. Within thirty minutes it led three other cars and ten agents back to Terminal 2 at LaGuardia. The third Brooklyn car had gone directly there the moment the cab driver named the airport, to hold as many of the terminal’s morning and already landed airline staff as possible.
During the two-hour period before ten there had been eight longhaul arrivals and five shuttles each from Boston and Washington. The FBI squad divided, half trying to prevent as many crew as possible from leaving the terminal—discovering at once that four shuttle crews were already returning on commuter nights—the other five attempting to shortcut the search by obtaining passenger manifests. Which paid off. A Mr. and Mrs. A. Orlenko had boarded an American Airlines flight in Chicago that had originated in St. Louis, and the crew was still in the building, waiting to return to the Missouri hub as passengers.
A sharp-featured senior stewardess named Mary Ellen Burford identified the couple from the photograph as having occupied seats H7 and 8 in her section. Two agents immediately began naming and trying to locate from airline records people who sat in every surrounding seat. Two others tried but failed to get aboard the aircraft before the cleaners reached row H. They still lifted five different sets of fingerprints from the plastic meal trays and from the magazines in the front pockets.
Mr. and Mrs. Orlenko were just ordinary, unremarkable people, said Mary Ellen Burford. As far as she could remember, the woman had refused breakfast and slept most of the way, using eye shields. The man had drunk two spicy Bloody Marys. When the woman had been awake, they hadn’t talked much. From her minimal contact—serving the drinks and breakfast to the man—she didn’t remember any discernible accent.
In the bureau’s Third Avenue office, from which Cowley was coordinating the investigation, the telephone records of 69 Bay View Avenue proved immediately productive and later curious. From the country and city codes, Danilov at once recognized the listed international calls—three outgoing, two incoming—as Russian. The two incoming and one outgoing were from the same number in Gorki. The other two outgoing were to Moscow. The last was dated two weeks before the attack on the United Nations.
When Danilov spoke to him, Yuri Pavin said he hoped to get names and addresses by the end of the day. He’d try, said the colonel, to bypass the Gorki militia and deal directly with the telephone authorities there. The wired photographs of the couple were already being run, with the names, against Moscow criminal records, and he wouldn’t have any alternative but to go to Reztsov and Averin for a Gorki comparison. He was ready for the aircraft fingerprints, when they were wired.
“Seems to be a lot happening there,” suggested Pavin.
“Routine but impressive,” agreed Danilov.
“The White House has been on—Chelyag himself. Wants to hear from you. Belik, too.”
“What’s the reaction to the intelligence exposure?”
“I’ve not been included officially. Newspapers and television have picked up the hypocrisy line.”
“The message of the Watchmen,” Danilov pointed out. An NBC survey that morning had discovered quite a lot of similar comments, mostly in the Midwest but some from the South, too.
“At least people aren’t dying.”
“Yet.”
Danilov hung up to find Cowley in deep discussion with the team leader supervising the trace of every American number on the Bay View Avenue listing. Cowley said, “Got ourselves a funny pattern.”
“What?”
The American offered a photocopy of the bill. Marked on it were several blocks of numbers, alphabetically identified. “All outgoing from the Orlenko house. All to public booths. Chicago, Washington, New York, and Pittsburg. How’d you read that?”
Danilov stared down at the paper for several moments. “I can’t.”
“We’ve got to work it out somehow. There’s a reason for it.”
Danilov remained looking down at the list again. “Repetitions, in every city. Any chance of getting taps at their end?”
Cowley shook his head doubtfully. “Public lines. Judges would take a lot of persuading. Our tap on the exchange should give us two-way conversation. But we need to get into the house now—get some microphones installed to hear all that’s said inside.”
Danilov tapped the paper. “If this
is
caution, we’ll need a lot ourselves to avoid them becoming nervous: certainly nothing as obvious as their telephone going out of order.”
Cowley regarded the Russian with a pained but unoffended look. “I’m not going to be as obvious as that. Honest!”
 
 
The planning came close to overwhelming its objective; certainly Al Beckinsdale wasn’t missed. Only nine names, accompanied by photographs and supplied biographies, arrived from the Pentagon. To Pamela Darnley’s furious, lost-chance silence, the exasperated Carl Ashton said, “They wrecked our goddamned systems! I told you that!”
“How many do you guess we lost?” she demanded, the telephone seemingly heavy in her hand.
“Maybe another nine.”
“
Maybe,
” Pamela repeated. “More than nine or less than nine?”
“Fifteen, certainly.”
“So we’re wasting our time, aren’t we? They’d have taken their own guy out first, wouldn’t they?”
“Maybe.”
“Carl! You want to do me a favor, for fuck’s sake stop saying “maybe” to everything I ask you! I want—I need!—a straight answer. What are the chances of the person we’re looking for being among the nine we’ve got? Against the chances of whoever it was wiping themselves first?”
“Not good,” conceded the Pentagon’s computer security chief. “But it’s possible. We put up firewalls in every system the first day—the first hour—we discovered the intrusion. The wiping would have been automatic, Trojan horse stuff, but it’s got to be triggered by a command. The nine you’ve got were behind three separate firewalls. They’d have gone if we hadn’t put the barriers up to stop the password getting through.”
“What chances of getting any of the rest—finding them somewhere?”
“Nil. The severance pay idea doesn’t work without a name. There is good news though. We’ve actually narrowed the penetration. It is low level: administration data, stationery ordering, car pool and parking records, stuff like that. Virtually no security risk at all. National Security Agency’s clean, all our sensitive areas.”
Pamela allowed another aching silence. “Carl! For the past week—using administration, stationery ordering, car pool and parking record computer access so unimportant it’s hardly got a clearance— some organization called the Watchmen has made the president, the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department look absurd. They’re responsible, at the last count I can remember, for the deaths, one way or another, of sixty-five people. They came close to killing hundreds more, the president among them. They’ve closed cities—and the government offices of this country—and cost millions of dollars. And we’ve most likely lost our chance of finding who the guy was, eating alongside you over there in the cafeteria, riding the elevator with you in the morning and at night. Now here’s my question. Take your time. Let’s get it right. I’d like you to tell me what you’d call
really
bad news and then what’s stand-up-and-cheer good news? You think you can do that for me?”
“You pull wings off butterflies when you were a kid?” demanded the defeated man.
“And then pinned them in the display case while they were still alive,” said Pamela, putting down the telephone.
She didn’t wait for any comment—curious if there would have been any after the earlier confrontation with Beckinsdale—but began the assignment distribution with the warning that what they had was the best they were going to get but they still had to run it into the ground, hopeless though it might be.
Only when she went one by one through the biographies and reasons for each of the nine Pentagon dismissals did Pamela fully recognize just how hopeless the selection seemed.
Two security duty marines on the list had been dismissed for two separate offenses, both for brawling in Crystal City bars while in uniform. One civilian suffered a broken jaw. A civilian male chauffeur had tested positive for marijuana during a random drug test, as had a twenty-year-old girl in the secretarial pool in another random sweep. A storeman had been caught on a security camera, stealing stationery for which he was responsible. He also was unable to account for two computer terminals for which he’d signed receipts. A security camera had provided the main evidence against a female army sergeant found responsible for thefts over a year from a women’s locker room. An army sergeant had been dismissed from the service and the Pentagon after being found guilty by a military tribunal of sexual harassment; four female employees under his command had complained. A female computer operator, judged incompetent, had been fired after her reference had been more thoroughly checked and found to be forged. Another chauffeur, a woman, had been replaced after twice being involved in accidents, one with a chief of staff general as a passenger.
Despite Pamela’s earlier warning, one of the male team leaders who’d been amused at Beckinsdale’s performance said, “Most of these wouldn’t know a computer if it came up and bit them in the ass.”
“How about one of those horny marines screwing some secretary and persuading her to get a few passwords he can hand on to someone who would know if a computer bit him in the ass!” demanded Pamela. “Or our light-fingered lady sergeant, forty-six and single according to her record, wanting to prove how good she is apart from in the sack to a younger stud? I told you: This is all we’ve got. I want everyone traced, the way I told you I want them traced, and by the end of every interview I want to know what their grandmothers had for breakfast the day they died.”
Cowley had just been alerted that Mr. and Mrs. Arnie Orlenko had been photographed outside 69 Bay View Avenue, when Pamela spoke to him for the first time.
She said, “Seems like it’s moving for you?”
“Too early to get excited,” cautioned Cowley. “You told the director about the Pentagon?”
“What’s to tell? It’s a mess. End of story.” She’d let him learn from others of her confrontation with Al Beckinsdale.
“Keep him informed,” advised Cowley. “The Pentagon will try to get out from under. Don’t get dumped on.”
Pamela smiled to herself in the office off the incident room. “You spoken to him yet?”
“Briefly. I want to let these two run, follow them. Ross isn’t so sure. I’m holding on to the argument that they haven’t committed an offense in this country.”
“What’s Dimitri think of the Russian connection?”
“That it might fill in a blank, but that there’s still too many.”
Pamela said, “From the look of things you’re likely to get more than me.”
He said, “You never know.”
Which was meant to be reassuring and turned out to be prophetic, although in the beginning it didn’t appear so. Keeping strictly to their brief, the assigned teams tried first for everything possible from public sources and records on their individual targets. The most consistent—and quickest—discovery was that during the two-year period covered by the Pentagon list, only four had remained in the D.C. area. Pamela personally briefed the necessary local FBI offices as each new location was found, e-mailing everything they had at Pennsylvania Avenue so far with specific instructions to do nothing more than confirm the new residence until all possible background was complete.

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