“OK,” Cowley said doubtfully.
“So don’t misunderstand.”
“What?”
“I want to stay over.”
Now Cowley was silent for several moments. “I’m not sure-”
“That a sofa bed?” she stopped him, pointing to where she had been sitting.
“Yes.”
“You look dreadful. That’s why I want to stay over, not to screw the boss. Who couldn’t anyway, because of a busted rib. Quite apart from the bad psychology of it all. I want to because I need you: The moment I’m up to your speed, I’m on my own, but I’m not there yet. What you’ve done today would exhaust a fit man and you’re not fit, whatever you say. So I think it’s a good idea for someone to be around: my own agenda, remember?” Could she be sexually attracted to him? In other circumstances-other jobs, other places-perhaps. But there were too many obvious barriers even to contemplate the question. Pamela was actually curious about her own sexuality, unsure of a criteria. She liked sex but hadn’t slept with anyone for the past six months, a mistaken weekend visit from an airline navigation officer trying to keep alive an already dying affair. Now, she supposed, she was repressing sex with her job determination. Sometimes she thought she would have enjoyed the singles’ bar era, able to make her own unencumbered, uninvolved choice. She added, “I’m not at all sure that came out in the right order, but I think you understood.”
“I think I did,” said Cowley.
“So?”
“I don’t know how comfortable it is.” All he did feel was exhaustion, but he liked the idea of her being in the apartment.
“One condition. I get the shower first.”
“OK.” Her night for apologies, his for agreeing to everything.
“Can I go on being presumptuous and give you some advice?”
“What?” he said.
“Shoot that sweater and those jeans: It’s the humane thing to do.”
Cowley awoke to the smell of coffee and a note from Pamela that she’d be back to pick him up by eight, which she was.
“I made it through the night,” he said.
“Loudly,” she said. “You snore.” She accepted the offered coffee. “And I’m glad I wasn’t needed.”
“Thanks just the same.” He wasn’t sure now why he’d agreed so readily to her staying and felt vaguely discomfited.
“The start of the routine slog,” she declared.
“It’s what solves crime, according to all the manuals.”
“Let’s hope they’re right.”
There was an attempt to ease the rush-hour congestion caused by the Mall and Arlington Bridge remaining closed by introducing a contraflow across the Roosevelt and George Mason bridges, but not enough commuters had heard the police announcement and the jams were worse than they might otherwise have been. They got to Pennsylvania Avenue only minutes before the Washington Monument guides and initially split, Pamela checking the incident room for overnight developments-which there hadn’t been-and Cowley escorting the guides to an interview room.
Regulations required that a tally be kept, so John Barclay, a timid man whose speech hesitation was only just short of a stutter, knew he’d taken fifteen people from the top of the obelisk on the 10:00 A.M. tour. There had been three teenagers-he guessed one at eleven, the other two slightly older-and thought the adults divided between seven men and five women. He couldn’t remember anyone behaving suspiciously during the descent or more specifically at the level where the bomb had gone off. The routine was to lead the party down, so he would have been looking back up at them, pointing out the gift stones, and could be expected to see anything unusual, which he hadn’t. He couldn’t recall how many people carried or used cameras, but most tourists usually did.
Janice Smallbone, who’d conducted the afternoon tour, was in fact a large black woman. There’d been seventeen in her group, all adults, seven women and ten men. She remembered one man wearing the sort of jungle-suit camouflage jacket veterans sometimes wore for their vigil at the Vietnam Memorial. She thought he’d been with another man. Both had short military-type haircuts, but that’s all she could remember and she didn’t think she could identify them again or describe them sufficiently for an artist’s or computer-generated impression. Neither they nor anyone else had acted in any way to attract her particular attention. There would have been cameras but she didn’t know how many and couldn’t remember any being used during the descent. There probably had been.
By noon four people-two men and two women-who had made the monument descent on foot responded to the FBI appeal to come forward. Unprompted, one of the women, a kindergarten teacher from Houston named Hillary Petty, talked of the man in the camouflage jacket. “It seemed such an odd thing to wear, to someone like myself, from Texas. He wore a black beret, too, as if it was part of a uniform.” There had definitely been a second man, who’d carried a satchel from a strap over his shoulder. She was sure they’d been the last of the group to come down because she’d been the next in line, at the rear, but she hadn’t seen either of them do anything to suggest they might have been planting a bomb. She guessed both their ages between thirty and thirty-five. Although both had military haircuts, she didn’t remember more than that to provide enough for a detailed description. She said of course she’d look at the photographs that Cowley was expecting sometime that day from the Pentagon-she wasn’t leaving Washington until the end of the week-but she really wasn’t sure she could identify anyone. She listened several times to the Highway Patrol copy tape of the New Rochelle cruiser fire report but wasn’t able to recognize the voice as being that of anyone she had heard during the tour. She’d taken several photographs herself on the way down and surrendered her film, which was immediately developed. Neither man was shown in any of the prints, but two more people in the afternoon group-a man and a woman-were sufficiently recognizable for the photograph to be published in a renewed plea to contact the bureau.
“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.”
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“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.
15
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.”
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