“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.
The female army sergeant had a month to serve of her court-martial sentence in a stockade in Virginia. Her sexually harassing counterpart was an instructor in a health club in Baltimore, where he lived. The accident-prone chauffeur had a home in Frederick, where she now worked in a haberdashery shop. And according to the welfare agency details—she’d only left the Pentagon a month before and hadn’t gotten another job—Roanne Harding, the references forger, had an apartment actually in D.C., off Lexington Place close to Stanton Square.
Almost at once it emerged that her Pentagon references weren’t the only variable documents in Roanne Harding’s thirty-two-or sometimes twenty-eight-year life. She was only Roanne Harding on her Pentagon personnel records, which gave her age at twenty-eight and her birthplace as Roanoke, Virginia. The date on her birth certificate issued there made her thirty-two and included the middle name of Roland, which had been her mother’s maiden name. The computer-copied photograph accompanying the logged details of her Washington, D.C. driver’s license matched the Afroed, light-skinned black woman whose matching digitized picture had been supplied by the Pentagon. The license photograph of Joan Roland, from the same address in Roanoke as that of her parents, was of a woman with the same facial features but with long, straight, almost shoulder-length hair. Duke Lucas’s photograph of the girl who’d descended with them from the Washington Monument showed only the back of her head. Pamela decided at once the hair could be the same held back in a pony tail. She dispatched two agents to find Lucas and Piltone, she hoped at their mo
tel, and three to Roanne Harding’s Lexington Place address—with instructions to make discreet neighbor inquiries but not make any direct approach. She also got Leonard Ross’s authority to brief a bureau lawyer for a search warrant and wire-tap application to a judge.
Piltone and Lucas were brought into the J. Edgar Hoover building and immediately—although separately, to avoid one influencing the other—identified the Roanoke picture of Joan Roland as the girl who’d been in their party.
The report from Lexington Place was that Roanne Harding hadn’t been seen for at least a week. Her mailbox hadn’t been cleared, and the janitor had had complaints of a gas leak smell from other residents.
William Cowley was patched from the Manhattan office to take part in the conference call discussion with Leonard Ross and Pamela Darnley. Cowley pleaded against immediately exercising the warrant, arguing that the woman was a more direct link to the Watchmen whom they should follow, not arrest. But he was overruled by the director, who insisted the publicity would have warned Roanne Harding and her group and that there was sufficient evidence to bring her in for questioning.
Pamela went to Lexington Place with the bomb disposal team and ordered no one clearing the apartment block and three immediately adjacent buildings to disclose it was an FBI operation before she authorized the entry. The door and its frame were X rayed for explosive devices or connections before the bureau locksmith even began to work, which he did with painstaking slowness and encased not only in protective armor but from behind a thicker, armored shield.
There was no booby trap but the smell of leaking gas was so overpowering that the coughs of two of the bomb disposal team turned into choking. Pamela, armored like the rest of the agents she was leading, wished they had nose clips. From the doorway where she was waiting, she could see that the main room had been trashed.
From another unseen room the bomb squad leader called: “It’s not leaking gas. In here.”
Roanne Harding was naked and on her back, legs splayed on a bed wrecked like the rest of the room. She had been shot twice in the head, and there were already maggots in the decomposing body.
In Brooklyn an electrical power cut followed at once by a surge totally distrupted the appliances in fifteen streets—including Bay View Avenue—in the Norton Point district. Deep freezers died, televisions blew, fire and burglar alarms went off, and a lot of home computers crashed.
The maintenance director of Con Ed said to Cowley, “You satisfied with that?”
“Completely,” said Cowley.
“I wish to Christ I was,” said the man. “And knew what it was all about.”
“If you did you’d be proud of the help you’ve given,” promised Cowley.
20
It was Dimitri Danilov’s idea (“if they’re worried and they’re both Russian that’s what they’ll speak in front of strangers”) to go into the Bay View Avenue house as part of a supposed repair team. There was confirmation from the surveillance vehicles that some genuine electric company vans were already in the Norton Point area and a lot of people were in the streets, Orlenko one of them, talking to neighbors on both sides. He’d hurried inside when a local news television crew had appeared. On the way to Brooklyn in the repair truck that was their necessary cover an enthusiastic professional linesman, Peter Townley, rehearsed Danilov and a bureau electronics technician, Jack Harrison. The technician, a lean-faced would-be stand-up comic, insisted he’d done this sort of thing a dozen times and didn’t need to be told how to appear as if he knew what he was doing, because he did know: All he needed was for them to distract the people so he could get his bugs in “to make the place one great big sound box.”
Townley said to Danilov, “You’re supposed to be my supervisor, OK? I’m doing the work, you’re making sure I do it right. I’ll throw in a lot of technical crap means nothing. If I ask your opinion about something, I’ll keep my left thumb on the piece of equipment or the wire it’s the correct one to choose. How’s that sound?”
“Fine,” said Danilov.
They passed a proper repair truck on West 37th Street, and Danilov spotted the FBI surveillance vehicle parked not in Bay View itself but on the corner of Seagate. In Danilov’s opinion the area wasn’t so much rundown as wind- and sea-swept, fronting on to Gravesend Bay: great in the summer, not so good in winter. He wondered what rent the Trenton company was charging. Arnie Orlenko certainly didn’t appear short of money: according to the LaGuardia taxi driver, he’d dropped a $20 tip on top of the fare.
They parked visibly but some way away from 69, and they didn’t go to it immediately. A man in the first house they called at said he’d already talked to his lawyer and was getting all his appliances checked by an independent firm and intended to sue for any that couldn’t be put right. A woman in the next said what could they expect, so close to all those Coney Island illuminations. It shouldn’t be allowed.
Arnie Orlenko opened the door. He was wearing the same shirt and jeans of his morning arrival but his hair was wet and he was barefoot. There was a heavy smell of cologne. His accent was quite pronounced when he asked what the hell was going on. Danilov, who’d studied linguistics at the university with the original intention of using a natural talent before deciding on a police career, guessed English was a comparatively new language for the man. Danilov easily adopted his supervisory role. It was, he apologized, a major breakdown they didn’t yet know the reason for. Although the power was restored, they needed to check for line faults to prevent it happening again. The whole area had been affected and so far a cause hadn’t been found.
The woman met them in the hallway. She’d changed from the arrival picture. The bulging breasts were straining a halter top that left her midriff bare, and she wore tight, knee-length shorts. Like the man, she was barefoot. The blond hair was a bubbled explosion around a surprisingly freckled, ready-to-smile face. She wasn’t smiling now. She said, “Everything’s gone. The television went bang.”
Danilov decided there was no foreign intonation in the voice. She smelled freshly showered, too. Conscious of the FBI man’s need, he said to Townley, “Maybe we could specifically look at the TV, try to help.”
“You’re the boss, so if it’s all right with you,” said the man. “Right now or shall I look at the boxes first?”
“I can do the boxes,” offered Harrison, on cue. To Orlenko he said, “You want to show me where they are?”
The living room had an odor of a place stale and unused and was untidy, which was useful because Danilov immediately recognized the Cyrillic print of two discarded newspapers as well as the English of that morning’s Chicago Sun Times. As he passed, he saw the Russian newspaper was Moskovsky Vedomosti. He was aware that Orlenko had remained with Harrison. So far there was none of the hoped-for Russian between the man and the woman and after hearing her speak Danilov didn’t expect it.
Townley had the back off one of the largest television sets Danilov had ever seen—much larger than his indulgence at Petrovka—with separate speakers on either side. The woman was leaning across from the other side, showing an appreciative Townley a deep cleavage valley.
Townley unclipped a circuit board and went through the charade of testing it with a power meter. He said, “This could be it.” He allowed himself a cleavage glance and called, “Sir. Sir, can I see you? And Jack …?”
The FBI man, carrying his toolbox, came in just moments after Orlenko. Townley gestured to Harrison with the microchip board and said, “You think this could be it? It doesn’t give a reading.” To Orlenko he said, “You get the set locally or in the city? You might have to go back to them.”
“Rented locally,” said the man.
Harrison almost had his head inside the set. Emerging, he said to Danilov, “Don’t you always say go for the most obvious?”
“Always,” agreed Danilov, following the lead.
“Then why don’t we check the plug fuse?” Harrison shuffled on his knees to the wall socket, dragging his box, and within
seconds turned triumphantly holding up a blackened fuse. “And I’ve got another one with me! Why don’t you put the circuit board back, Pete?”
Danilov said, “That’s a helluva set: never seen one that big. Shouldn’t you check for overload?”
“Not a bad idea,” agreed the FBI man. “I’ll do that. Wouldn’t mind you running over the boxes. I think they’re all right but we need to be sure, don’t we?”
“Can you show us?” Danilov asked the hovering Orlenko.
The electrical boxes were in a closet by the stairs, and it was a tight squeeze for two of them, with an attentive Orlenko wedged half in as well, to see what they were doing. Danilov responded to a lot of left-thumb guidance from Townley, who attached a variety of meters to a variety of wires for the needles to rise and fall impressively.
“Looks like Jack did all he had to here,” said Townley. “This where all the boxes are as far as you know?”
“As far as I know,” said Orlenko, looking back in the direction of the living room in which he’d left Harrison. “This going to take long?”
“Gotta be sure,” said Townley. “No point in rushing it and getting it wrong.”
It was fifteen minutes before they returned to the main room overlooking the bay. Neither Harrison nor the women were there, but there were voices from the kitchen. Townley said, “Better see if Jack needs a hand.”
As Orlenko moved to follow, Danilov pointed to the pulled apart Moskovsky / Vedomosti and said, “Foreign, right? What’s the language?”
Orlenko stopped uncertainly, aware Danilov wasn’t going with them. “Russian.” He looked back and forth between Danilov and the kitchen. There was a laugh from the woman.
“You from there!” demanded Danilov, emphasizing the interest. “How long in this country?”
“Coupla years,” said the man.
“Is it as bad as they say it is? Nothing in the shops, lotta crime?”
“It’s better here. What’s your accent?”
“German,” said the linguistically able Danilov, prepared and able to speak it if the other man spoke it, too, and tried to test him. “Came here as a kid but my parents spoke it at home. Useful. Gave me a second language. Your English is good.”
The Watchmen Page 25