The Watchmen

by Brian Freemantle

  “I’ve been doing that for years,” said Danilov. “You want to get into a competition about who betrayed whom first, you’re welcome. I’m not interested.”

  “You’ve got more to lose than me,” threatened Olga. “You’ll become the joke, I won’t.”

  Patrick Hollis had been physically sick. Even now, hours later in his locked den, he still felt nauseated. On the keyboard of his for once ignored computer lay the drawing that had been waiting for him, mixed in with that morning’s mail. It showed a limp penis, the head drawn as a bespectacled, weeping face. Written beneath, in capital letters, was SORRY.

  The explosion that blew away three of the tiered steps running from the top to the bottom of the Washington Monument came at 1:00 A.M. the following morning.

  11

  From the initial—but instantly withdrawn—Parks Department inspection they knew the explosion appeared to have separated the stairs that spiral from the bottom to the viewing gallery at the very top of the 555-feet monument, leaving a metal-tangled gap where the 304th, 305th, and 306th levels had been. It would have been impossible for Cowley to contemplate trying to climb that high, but at that moment the entire Mall, from beyond the Lincoln Memorial at 23rd Street up to 3rd Street and between Constitution and Independence avenues, was sealed to anyone on foot except the bomb disposal unit.

  Cowley was as close as it was possible to get, in the team’s control scanner halfway between the monument and the Sylvan Theatre, watching the instant television relay and listening to its accompanying commentary. It was tightly crowded. Besides the normal three liaison men, Pamela Darnley was there with him, together with a Parks Authority inspector with every available plan—as well as personal knowledge—to guide the team on anything that needed explaining once inside the hollow obelisk.

  Which they weren’t yet. Painfully, quite literally, aware of the New Rochelle booby-trap, Cowley had disregarded the impatient assurance from the bomb squad leader that they didn’t require that sort of advice and urged that every inch of the surrounding ground be swept for mines, trip wires, or pressure sensors—for anything, in fact—before they even attempted to approach the monument itself.

  They’d been doing that now for an hour, the scene made glaringly white bright by the searchlights of a concentrated circle of police and military helicopters. Other official helicopters revolved around that inner core to keep media machines out of what had been declared a civilian no-fly zone. All incoming and departing aircraft to Reagan Airport had been warned or diverted.

  The body heat of three extra people inside the enclosed van was challenging its air conditioning. They were all in shirt sleeves—Cowley glad of Pamela’s perfume—and all wore headsets and mikes directly linking them to the outside crew.

  Just as he was beginning to be embarrassed by a feeling of boredom, the team leaders declared, “Nothing! We’re going in. The park man there? Like to go through what we shouldn’t be nervous about finding right inside the door?”

  Before the man to Cowley’s right could respond, another voice said, “Lambert here. It could help us if you filmed as much as possible as you go.”

  There was an overly heavy sigh from the team leader, Nelson Tibbert. “Trust us. We’ll try to beat Spielberg to the Oscar before we get blown to hell. Which we hope we don’t. And I wish to Christ people wouldn’t keep telling us our job.”

  “Just doing my job, too, buddy,” said Paul Lambert, who headed the FBI’s forensic team. They’d waited throughout the outside search in a larger van immediately behind that in which Cowley hunched. Lambert added, “We’re all holding our lucky rabbit’s feet for you.”

  “Thanks,” said the bomb disposal head. Nelson Tibbert was a black man as overpoweringly big as Jefferson Jones: Cowley hadn’t needed the reminding comparison or the memory of six tiny, tightly closed faces.

  Into Cowley’s headset came the voice of Michael Poulson, the parks official fortunately jammed against his left, good side. The man didn’t bother with his plans precisely to describe the entry vestibule, pay booths, and where the walkway would be found in relation to the central elevators. All the monument’s electrical power had been cut from the mains, against the possibility of further explosives being connected to its operating supply—the up-and-down elevator current being the most obvious. Poulson set out where the mains and generator-activated emergency systems would be found. He also itemized the emergency firefighting and medical equipment at the various levels up to the three hundredth level.

  “Followed you through on my plan,” confirmed Tibbert. “And the door’s open and welcoming.”

  It had been Cowley who’d ordered the service door left open by the quickly evacuated parks engineer who’d gone to investigate the alarm triggered by the explosion. Cowley’s head ached, despite a second Tylenol, and he’d already smiled and nodded his gratitude to Pamela for straining away from any contact with his injured side.

  The scene-recording cameraman was leading—with no one in view—and Cowley’s immediate impression was of the minimally lit underwater television footage of the finding of the Titanic, even to the man’s heavy breathing that interspersed his commentary. He matched his description to everything he closely filmed on the ground floor.

  The engineer had told them he’d trodden on every step both going up and coming down (‘You can’t manage six hundred taking them two at a time’), which would have tripped any wire, but the ascent was still slow, hands coming into the frame, touching and gently probing every step and running up each support to the handrails on either side. Each step was methodically counted off as it was climbed. The breathing became louder. Every man was dressed in the heaviest of armored protective suits, Cowley remembered.

  Cowley didn’t have any irrational feeling of boredom any longer but just as irrational was the demanding, intrusive thought that he’d missed something—misinterpreted or misjudged—and the perspiration was more at the fear of that misinterpretation causing further death and injury than from the claustrophobic heat of the van. Pamela turned to him questioningly when he took off his headset, silently mouthing “What?” He shook his head, not bothering to hide the grimace at the sharp jab of pain. He turned down the earpiece volume, for a moment not wanting the distraction of the commentary.

  Nothing had been overlooked—couldn’t have been overlooked! He hadn’t questioned the engineer alone, organized this alone. There’d been the bomb squad and their commander and a lot of other FBI personnel—Pamela among them—and the unseen, totally armor-suited men now groping with agonizing slowness around the pitch-black inside of the monument carried every sort and type of detection and neutralizing equipment. So there was nothing more. But Cowley couldn’t shake the conviction that there was.

  Pamela took her own headset off and leaned close to him, although still carefully not touching. “What?” she said again quietly.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling. What haven’t we done?”

  She frowned, silent for several moments. “Nothing.”

  “I think there is. Something we haven’t read properly.”

  Pamela laid her hand on his arm. “A lot of professionals are involved.” He shouldn’t be here! It wasn’t the deal. She’d done exactly what she thought they’d agreed, by calling him after she’d been alerted, but hadn’t expected him to come like this, not trusting her by herself.

  “They haven’t read it, either.”

  The gaping break in the stairway came abruptly into view. Cowley put his headset back on in time to hear the panting cameraman say, “Here!”

  “Careful!” came Tibbert’s voice. “Let me pass.”

  Cowley’s underwater impression increased when the squad leader came partially into view. The metalled fabric of his armor and helmet glistened in the camera’s strobe. From his back, which was how the man filled the lens, he actually looked fishlike: a prehistoric monster from some very deep lagoon. Adding to the imagery, Tibbert gently directed a heat sensor on the end of a hydraulically ext
ended arm, moving it like a patient fisherman over every part of the hole and its surroundings.

  “No register,” Tibbert reported.

  He repeated the process with what Cowley knew, from watching the equipment check, to be a device that could identify a variety of known explosive compounds from their odors.

  “No register,” he said again.

  “Is it structurally safe?” demanded Cowley.

  Tibbert probed with a stiff, rubber-encased rod before putting his weight on each of the intervening steps, until he reached the very edge of the break. “It would seem so. The perspective approaching the hole from below is confusing. The three steps have not been completely blown away. There is still some base left to every tread.” As he spoke, the camera came up alongside, illustrating what he was describing. The picture was repeatedly whitened as another member of the squad took flashlit still photographs. “The damage is substantial, but my assessment is that it was a comparatively small charge … . I can see what looks to be explosive debris—”

  “Please leave it in situ,” came the urgent voice of Paul Lambert. “We don’t want it moved. Touched.”

  Tibbert gave another of his heavy sighs. “Thank you for the timely reminder. We are now going to put an extension walkway over the damaged area to enable us to cross to continue the examination. And thank you in anticipation, guys, but we do know that they’d expect us to do exactly this, so it would be the place to set the trap.”

  But there wasn’t one. The ascent, afterward, was even slower, testing for wires or trips, and it was a further hour before they reached the top.

  Tibbert said, “I could never be bothered to wait in line with all the tourists, but this really is a hell of a view.”

  Relaxing too quickly, thought Cowley, unable to lose the foreboding. “This was obviously a timed detonation and there’s still a lot of places—the elevator shaft and its workings the most obvious—where God knows what else could be waiting to go off. Don’t you think you should get out of there?”

  “That Special Agent Cowley?”

  “Yes.”

  “We really do appreciate your concern, Mr. Cowley,” said the man. “But while I’m admiring the view, the guys with me are running all sorts of checks on every electrical box and installation we can find up here, like we did at the bottom. And we’ve got some dinky little gizmos that can actually check the wiring in the shaft itself, even with the power off, for any nasty things that might be humming along it. And when we’ve done all that we’re going to climb back down even more carefully, in case we missed something. ’Cause that’s our job and we know how to do it.”

  Cowley moved to speak, but before he could Paul Lambert said, “A lot of guys who were friends of mine thought they did, too, up in New Rochelle. You watch your ass, Nelson, you hear?”

  “I hear,” said Tibbert, no longer patronizing. “And I’m sorry. Everything checks out up here. We’re on our way down.”

  They did descend as carefully as the man promised. It took two more hours. By the time they emerged through the small service door it was daylight, and the only helicopters overheard were maintaining the air clearance. It was only when he stood that Cowley realized he seemed to ache in every part of his body, not just his ribs, from tensing against a fresh disaster. Pamela followed him from the van, stretching the cramp from her shoulders.

  “I seem to remember some promise that you weren’t going to get actively involved: just sit at a desk and think?” complained Pamela. If there was an understanding—or whatever the hell he chose to call it—then they had an understanding.

  “I forgot,” he said carelessly.

  “Thank God your premonition was wrong.” Son of a bitch! But it wouldn’t be politically—personally—right to protest any more. She needed to remember, though.

  Cowley shook his head. “There could still be enough explosives somewhere in there to blow away half of Washington. I want those forensic guys in and out of there in double-quick time.”

  A shout from one of the scanner operators stopped Cowley as he was about to join the FBI group, already in a debriefing huddle around the bomb disposal team.

  “There’s been a claim! And a message!” announced the duty officer at the bureau watch room when Cowley identified himself.

  “Where from?”

  “Bastards have hit the Pentagon again! But differently this time, thank God.”

  The message read:

  AMERICA AND RUSSIA ARE ENEMIES, NOT FRIENDS.

  AMERICA IS BEING DECEIVED BY THE EAST. TO REGAIN

  DOMINANT WORLD LEADERSHIP CANCERS NEED TO BE

  EXCISED AND DECEPTIONS EXPOSED.

  It was sighed THE WATCHMEN. Cowley and Pamela stood shoulder to shoulder, gazing down at the printout.

  “The Pentagon?” demanded Pamela, baffled.

  “And from the Pentagon they accessed www.fbi.gov—the bureau’s home page—and put themselves at the top of the Ten Most Wanted list,” said the duty officer. “They just don’t want to terrorize us. They’re humiliating us: showing the world how good they are and how bad we are. Which they’ve done, big time. They used the government’s address—www.fedworld.gov.—to get not just to us but on every other United States federal department and agency home page. Even as we talk, this is being read by thousands everywhere in the country—maybe in every overseas embassy beyond. They’re giving us the stiffest middle finger you ever saw.”

  “How can it be simple, breaking into what should be the most protected and secure system in the world?” challenged Pamela.

  “Because there’s no such thing as a perfect and totally secure system,” the man said patiently. “There’s always what’s known in the trade as a back door. And always someone clever enough to open it. We’ve had hackers get into the Pentagon before. Once there was a kid of fifteen who endangered satellites, for Christ’s sake! Anyone wrongly using an access is known in the business as a cracker!”

  “If the distribution is anything like you say it’ll leak to the media,” Cowley predicted wearily.

  “It already has,” said the man. “It was a flash on the six A.M. radio and television news, right on top of what you’ve been doing all night out there in the Mall.”

  “What about tracing them, through however it is they got into the Pentagon system?”

  “Forget it,” advised the man. “The military will try, obviously. Got to. But guys this clever will have come in from another unsuspecting cuckoo’s nest. We’re in shit, Bill. And sinking.”

  “I knew there was something wrong,” said Cowley, matching the cynicism. He said to Pamela: “The Watchmen?”

  “Never heard of them,” said the woman.

  There was a downside to every move they made. Switching the crisis venue to Pennsylvania Avenue because of its more guaranteed security was at once picked up by the vulture-hovering media as yet another example of the bureau’s reactive instead of proactive helplessness, but so overwhelming were the attacks that Cowley relegated them to the farthest edge of his consideration. At its forefront, while the conference was being organized, was the persistent nag that something had still been overlooked.

  After suggesting the obvious additional people necessary that day, Cowley left the actual organization to the bureau director’s assistant and Pamela Darnley at her own computer to return alone to the still-sealed Mall.

  Washington was virtually gridlocked by the closure of its very heart, so the only way to move was on foot. And that was like edging, with wincing nervousness, through a Super Bowl crowd so big it was virtually shoulder to shoulder by the time Cowley got to 14th Street. There was, fortunately, a barricade-free lane for official vehicles, which Cowley walked along after identifying himself at the police line. He was almost into the park before he was recognized by anyone in the crowd. At once his name began to be called and there were a lot of camera clicks and flashes. He ignored it all.

  Nelson Tibbert and his team were still there, although there were some new armor-sh
ielded men just going into the obelisk when Cowley reached the scanner.

  Tibbert recognized him and said, “Your guys have gone, with all they want. This is our fourth sweep. It’s a bastard, trying to climb that high in this sort of gear. I’m sure there’s nothing on the stairway itself. We’re concentrating on the electrics, stuff like that.”

  “You know what’s worrying me?” Cowley said, rhetorically. “Something going off when the elevator’s run, full of people: a charge big enough to bring the whole fucking monument down.”

  “Ahead of you,” assured the team leader. “The elevator is the most obvious. After this final sweep I’m going to crank the doors open manually, go through the shaft and the cabins. Actually using electricity is the last thing I’m going to do, and then by remote control. Take the elevator up and down, an itty bit at a time, in the hope of localizing any explosion.”

  Tibbert really did bear a remarkable resemblance to Jefferson Jones, thought Cowley. “How long?”

  The man gestured uncertainly. “Couple of days from now. I ain’t in no hurry.”

  “I don’t want you to be.” Looking at the solid mass of people lining every edge of the cordon he said, “If there is something in there the size of New Rochelle, those people going to be safe?”

  “The monument’s marble. Hard. If there’s a blow it’ll most likely be brought down, but the force will be contained. Maybe make their ears ring a little. Could do some damage to the White House glass.”

  A throwaway line to be taken seriously, recognized Cowley. “You got any kids?”

  Tibbert frowned. “Four. Why?”

  “Don’t want any more orphans.”

  “Don’t plan for there to be any more.”

  “You and me both,” said Cowley. He stood on the knoll upon which the monument was built, looking around again, guessing the faraway crowd had to be a thousand strong, maybe more. Where was it? Where the fuck, what the fuck, was it that had to be as obvious as the arrow-straight marble dart pointing up into the clear morning sky but which he couldn’t see, couldn’t realize?