The Watchmen

by Brian Freemantle

  At midnight Cowley demanded, “Anything not in place that should be at this stage?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Danilov. He was, in fact, awed by the speed and completeness with which the entire operation had been organized in little more than the three hours since Pamela’s paged alert in the Georgetown restaurant. At its fastest—and most unobstructed—Danilov couldn’t have achieved it in Moscow in under two days. He’d also adjusted to the now-familiar curiosity at his presence on an FBI investigation, although he didn’t think the Manhattan office had, not fully.

  “Let’s have a drink and make sure,” said the American.

  Their reservations were at the United Nations Plaza. Cowley had taken Danilov to the bar there on his earlier visits to show off its glass-and-chrome Americanism.

  Danilov said, “There’s a lot of this in Moscow now. And dollars—and crime—rule more than ever.” This time he joined Cowley in scotch. It would be the first time he could speak properly to the American, and Danilov wanted to. It seemed absurd, but he supposed Cowley to be his only real friend.

  “You really think Nikov’s our man?” said Cowley. He really did intend a review of all they’d done as well as having a drink: The lift he was getting was more from the adrenaline than from the booze. Why was he even thinking about it anymore? His drinking was under control.

  “Obviously part of it. It’s part of what that I can’t make up my mind about.”

  “We’ll give it twenty-four hours before we exercise the search warrant,” decided Cowley. “I’m hoping they’re still there. Will lead us somewhere.”

  “Don’t you intend picking them up if they are?”

  “I want all of them, not just one or two. People this determined wouldn’t give us the rest under questioning. They’d consider themselves prisoners of war: not even name, rank, and serial number.”

  “Dangerous strategy, if we lose them.”

  “Legally there’s no proof—no suggestion even—of a crime committed here in America,” Cowley pointed out. “Let’s hope we get enough for you to pick up in Moscow. And that people don’t get in the way.”

  “Nothing’s gotten any better there. Worse maybe.” Danilov hesitated, looking down into his drink. “The great anticorruption crusader stopped crusading. It was too much trouble.”

  Danilov wanted to talk, guessed Cowley. “What happened?”

  “I destroyed them,” Danilov declared, quietly, not looking at the other man. “The Chechen Brigade that ordered Kosov’s car bombed, with Larissa in it, for not earning the money they were bribing him with. Created a war between them and an Ostankino Brigade and watched them picked off, one after the other, until all the hierarchy we knew about were killed.” The Russian looked up at last. “Doesn’t that tell you how it is in Moscow: letting them kill each other because I knew they’d bribe or murder their way out of any charge I legally brought against them!”

  Cowley shrugged. “Not the first time a policeman’s done that anywhere in the world. You couldn’t have proved the guys in charge gave the order for Kosov to be killed.”

  “I wanted them dead,” said Danilov. “Would have killed them myself if any I knew about hadn’t been taken out.”

  “You sure about that?” Cowley queried, in disbelief.

  “Quite sure,” Danilov insisted at once, coming up from his drink again. “I’m still not satisfied. I broke the gang—destroyed the men responsible for Larissa being killed—but I never found the bull who actually planted the explosion.”

  “Stop it, Dimitri!” urged Cowley, although sympathetically. “You’re going to eat yourself away with hate like that.”

  “Maybe I already have.” The Russian shrugged. “After the gang war I gave up trying with anything else within the department or the militia. There’s too many and too much for one man—a squad of men.”

  “It was a vengeance crusade. Not the same thing.”

  “I still stopped.”

  “So start again.”

  “Maybe.” It wasn’t important enough—wouldn’t mean anything—to talk about the divorce from Olga. Danilov looked pointedly at Cowley’s gesture for refills and said, “How are you managing?”

  “OK,” Cowley said at once. Not for the first time—unaware of Danilov’s earlier, matching reflection—Cowley thought how odd it was that the only person aware of a problem that could end his career was a Russian who so few years ago would have been an enemy and considered the information a weapon. Instead of which Danilov had saved his career, smothering the sexual blackmail the Chechen gang had attempted during their last combined investigation in Moscow, posing him helplessly drunk to be photographed naked with a gymnastic hooker.

  “You sure?”

  “I haven’t slipped for over a year,” insisted Cowley. “I won’t, not now. I’m clean. Well and truly.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I think so. It’s good to be able to talk like this, too.” He paused, feeling he should offer something in exchange. “Pauline’s getting married again.”

  “You ever hope to get back together?” Danilov asked presciently. A dark-haired, slightly built woman, he remembered. Not unlike Pamela Darnley.

  “I’d thought about it after I got straight.”

  “What about her?”

  “We saw each other a few times as friends. Which we still are. But I let her down a lot when I was drinking. One girl in particular, but there were others I threw in her face. I don’t think she would ever have been able to believe I could change that much.”

  Danilov snorted a laugh. “Couple of maudlin old failures, aren’t we?”

  Cowley finished his drink, putting the empty glass down firmly on the table to make an unspoken statement. “No failure this time. There can’t be.”

  “No, there can’t be,” agreed Danilov. To which of them was it more important to prove themselves to themselves? About the same, he guessed.

  The Bay View Avenue clapboard remained empty throughout the night, which they knew before arriving at the bureau office because Cowley’s instructions had been for him to be called the moment there was any movement. The telephone billing records arrived exactly at 8:05 A.M. They were in the name of an Arnie Orlenko.

  “Orlenko’s a Russian name,” Cowley identified at once.

  “And Arnie is an easy Americanization of Arseni,” suggested Danilov.

  “Wouldn’t it be great to get a break just once?” mused Cowley.

  “That only happens in detective novels,” reminded Danilov.

  Pamela Darnley assembled her intended task force controllers before 8:00 A.M., too, which was a mistake because the expected list hadn’t arrived from the Pentagon. She started to fill the time briefing the eight male and two senior-grade female agents on what she knew from Manhattan, which was obviously very little. Even more obvious—she guessed to the rest of the incident room as well as to herself—was that she couldn’t possibly have answered at least three consecutive questions from Al Beckinsdale. Irritated, she acknowledged a fact she scarcely needed to remind herself about: that she was in sole supervisory control of a specific task force, without the physical authority of William Cowley, the case officer. She also acknowledged that Beckinsdale had to be at least fifteen years her senior. What she judged to be the first opportunity to justify herself to Leonard H. Ross, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, this chauvinistic son of a bitch saw as showoff sex challenge time. So be it.

  “Case this important, I’m surprised we haven’t been able to get things faster from the Pentagon or Immigration, that being the only lead we’ve got after all this time,” persisted Beckinsdale, a fat man who perspired and rarely fastened his collar or tightened his tie. He lolled back in his chair, legs stretched out in front of him.

  “The Pentagon computer was sabotaged, as you know,” Pamela said, evenly. “And Immigration’s a physical check through God knows how many individual pieces of paper.”

  “Can’t imagine that would have been
much reassurance to people who’d lost family if the Lincoln bomb had gone off. Could have killed a lot of people.”

  There was an uneasy shift from among the group facing her. One agent said something Pamela couldn’t hear to the man next to him, who smiled.

  Pamela said, “But it didn’t go off. We prevented it.”

  “Bill Cowley prevented it.”

  The two female agents were in head-bent conversation now, looking annoyed.

  “Prevented it brilliantly,” agreed Pamela. “But you’re right, Al. It has taken a hell of a time—too long—and none of us is doing anything at this very moment, sitting around here with our fingers up our asses. So here’s what I’d like you personally to do. I’d like you to get over to Immigration and you tell the superintendent in charge—his name’s Zeke Proudfoot—you tell Zeke Proudfoot how pissed off we all are that it’s taking him and his people so long and that’s why you’ve been seconded to them, to put a burr under their blanket. Let’s get that address off the visa application by the end of the day, OK?”

  The two female agents were smiling now. None of the men were.

  “Now let’s just wait a moment here—” began the man.

  “What, Al?” stopped Pamela.

  “I thought we had a specific role here. A task force?”

  “Of which I’m supervisor, like I’m deputy case officer of the entire investigation.” Pamela smiled. “Which has got to be flexible. I’m open to persuasion and you’ve persuaded me. You give me a call around midday, tell me how you’re getting on: If we’re all out, leave a message with Terry Osnan. If I’m here I’ll probably know the answers to those other questions you were asking earlier about Manhattan.”

  The man stood and remained staring at her for several moments before storming from the room. As the door slammed behind him Pamela said, “I mean it, about flexibility. Anyone else got any suggestions that might be useful?”

  No one spoke.

  “Here’s how we’ll do it then,” resumed Pamela. “I’m assigning each of you your own four-person group. The Pentagon is providing the personnel records of everyone it’s referring to us. The reason for their being let go is primary, obviously. Get everything checkable—Social Security number, medical details, everything and anything that is publicly traceable—you can use to find things they won’t have volunteered. Lied about. Like criminal convictions. Any previous military record is a concentration, among civilians. A hidden court-martial, you win the kewpie doll. Membership in all organizations if we can find them. The guy—or girl—we’re looking for is a computer freak, and all the steers we’re getting from the experts is that computer freaks are arrogant, sure they can never be caught. Check out every one if you can for an Internet address, through the telephone company against the addresses the Pentagon will have. We’ve got ten manned terminals here in the incident room, all ready to be used. I don’t want anyone confronted personally without our being able to catch the lie: We go in unprepared, they’re not going to be there waiting for us when we go back a second time.” She paused. “Anyone got any improvements on that?” Another pause. “And this time I am looking for input.”

  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.”