“We forgotten anything?” demanded Pamela. It was past nine, dinner abandoned.
“I don’t think so,” said Cowley.
“You know what we’ve got?” Pamela said rhetorically. “We’ve got another loose end.”
There were more about to unravel.
It was the predictability that began the problems, which compounded themselves as the day continued. Ivan Gavrilovich Guzov and Vyacheslav Fedorovich Kabanov left their executive homes at the same time as they did every morning, and the discreet FBI surveillance slotted into place as it had done every morning since it had been imposed. Dutifully both observers reported that the two Russians were on their way, which was logged by the duty officer in the Trenton office. No one bothered anymore with tired airwave jokes or traffic complaints.
Kabanov lived closer to their office than the other Russian, so the first alert came from his followers, the sudden announcement that he wasn’t going in the expected direction, almost immediately followed by the similar realization from those behind Guzov.
“The station!” decided the first observer. “There’s the Amtrak commuter service to New York.”
The quickly summoned John Meadowcraft decided to wait until he reached the office before ringing any headquarter bells. By the time he got there both Russians were aboard a Metroliner due at Manhattan’s Penn Station at 10:15, which gave the New York office forty-five minutes to get into position. Meadowcraft told the protesting Harry Boreman it didn’t matter that the New York office didn’t have a full team available on such short notice. The two Trenton observers were three tables away in the approaching Metroliner club car, watching the serious-faced Russians drink Bloody Marys. Both were on their third.
Boreman himself was one of the four New York agents waiting when the train pulled in. All instantly identified Kabanov and Guzov from their photographs, without needing the additional marker of the two closely following Trenton officers. Boreman fell into step with one of the men as soon as the Russians passed, saying as unobstrusively as possible that he needed them as reserve backup but until that need arose for them to remain in the waiting surveillance vehicles so they wouldn’t be recognized from the train.
The Russians had to line up for a cab, so all six agents were distributed in three bureau vehicles by the time the Russians were moving. Boreman, in the lead vehicle, gave the commentary on the open line to the bureau’s Third Avenue office, from which it was simultaneously relayed to the Washington incident room on what had grown into a sophisticated electronics system manned by specialist officers.
When the arrival in the New York office of other agents was reported back to Boreman, Pamela said, “They weren’t ready! Why the hell weren’t they ready!”
No one answered her.
“Crossing Seventh,” Boreman was saying. “South now, downtown on Broadway, turning … we’re turning on to Twenty-third.”
“Heliport!” Cowley guessed at once.
As he spoke, Boreman said, “Could be a helicopter to the airports. Call our own helo, start moving from the office by road. I want agents on their way, direct to La Guardia and Kennedy.”
“They’ll never get there in time!” Pamela moaned, exasperated. “Won’t get anywhere in time.”
“There’ll have to be a helicopter flight plan,” said Cowley.
“To LaGuardia or Kennedy,” insisted Pamela. “Buy an internal flight anywhere within the United States for cash and you don’t show up on a passenger list or a credit card slip. They get to an airport, we’ve lost them. And we can’t risk airport police. Immigration doesn’t come into it. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
“Not the heliport,” came Boreman’s voice. “They’ve gone over FDR … . it’s looking good, going into Waterside apartments. We’re stopping short—” There was the sound of angry horn blasts and the muttered driver’s voice “Go suck pussy.” Then Boreman said: “Shit!” There was a momentary pause. “They’re going into the marina alongside the apartments. Got guys going on foot over the road bridge … . Let me talk on the phone … .” There was the muffled sound of a separate conversation. Then: “There was a cruiser waiting. One guy as far as they could see. Backing out. They’re trying for a name … I want a boat … . Get on to Customs for something unmarked. And a helicopter. I still want a helicopter. There’s enough in the air to cover us. We’ll pick them up.”
“I wouldn’t like to bet,” Pamela said dully.
Pamela would have lost, if she had. It took more than thirty minutes to get a Customs helicopter to the 23rd Street pad and longer—just under an hour—for a launch to reach them. The cruiser’s name wasn’t logged at the marina, because it only pulled alongside to pick up passengers, and no one remembered it by chance or could guess how many people were on board, apart from the two men who joined. The unmarked Customs launch and helicopter checked a total of twenty boats in a three-hour period. Neither Guzov or Kabanov was on any of them.
“Lost us without trying!” Pamela said incredulously. “The biggest, most concentrated investigation in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and two of the main targets just walk away!” She snapped her fingers. “Poofl Just like that.”
“We couldn’t have been ready, no matter how early the warning,” argued Cowley. “There’s no way we would have anticipated a boat.”
“It could have been the guy—the General, even—who fired the first missile,” said Pamela.
“Yes,” agreed Cowley.
“You think they could be casing the U.N. tower—planning a second hit?”
“If they are, there doesn’t have to be a public warning, any panic,” Cowley pointed out. “Their missile’s empty. But they’re not going to get the chance to fire it, are they?”
“You feel sure about that after today?”
“Yeah,” said Cowley. “I feel sure enough about that.”
“I wish I did,” admitted Pamela.
“You won’t have to wait long,” Cowley pointed out. They were flying to Chicago that night for the following day’s arrival of the Cidicj Star.
“You think we can both afford to go now that we’ve lost them?”
“Chicago is where it’s going to happen,” said Cowley. “It’s where we’ve got to be.”
The search of Bella Atkins’s treble-locked apartment just slightly lifted the depression beyond installing the listening devices, although the limited findings initially created more questions than they answered.
The place was almost too immaculate. Nothing had been left uncleared or unwashed in the kitchen—even the trash bin liner was clean—and all the pots and pans were meticulously in order, according to size, and every knife, fork, and spoon in its allotted part of the silverware tray. The label on every can in the pantry faced outward, instantly readable.
One of the dusting technicians said to no one in particular, “I’m going to be lucky to lift any prints at all from a place as polished and buffed as this.”
“Make sure you clean up well after yourself,” warned Paul Lambert. “Her alarm system is the cleanliness and neatness.”
There wasn’t the slightest disorder in the bedroom. Her clothes were hung in color coordinates, matching shoes laid beneath each outfit, and in bureau drawers sweaters and shirts and underwear each had its own drawer, in which items were crisply folded. The impression in the living room was of furniture being arranged to measurement, the easy chairs precisely the same distance from the sofa, each chair spaced the same around the table in the dining alcove. Books were shelved according to height and author; from the complete works of Elmore Leonard, she appeared a crime thriller fan. The video library was all wildlife or Discovery Channel programs. There were no messages on the answering machine and the recording tape was blank.
The most obvious discovery were the photographs. There were a lot of a smiling, younger Bella with men in army uniforms, jungle greens and camouflage and dress. There were several of her very young, a child, with an older dress-uniformed master sergeant
who could have been her father and then with three men in the same age range as herself. None was annotated with names or descriptions, but one of the men had an American eagle tattoo on his left arm. The searchers’ equipment included cameras and each print was copied.
There was a sofa bed in the second bedroom but otherwise it had been turned into a study, although surprisingly there was no computer. Neither were there any personal papers or correspondence, apart from bank statements into which the only income appeared to be Bella Atkins’s monthly Pentagon salary. Outgoing was limited to regular utility payments cross-referenced to supply company statements neatly clipped together in a bureau drawer. There wasn’t any billing record of a personal cell phone.
“Not as polished and buffed as I feared,” said the fingerprint specialist, hunched over the opened-up sofa bed. “Got a nice set that don’t appear to be Bella’s off this metal strut.”
“And there’s an interesting divide in the clothes closet,” said another of the team, emerging from the bedroom. “Most of the stuff is size fourteen, Bella’s size. But four outfits are size ten. There’s two pairs of shoes smaller than Bella’s, too. And in the underwear drawer there are three smaller bras than Bella seems to need.”
“According to the lease, she’s the sole tenant,” said Lambert.
“Then she’s got a smaller friend,” said the bedroom searcher.
“Wonder how difficult it’s going to be to find out who she is?” said Lambert.
It wasn’t, in fact, difficult at all. The fingerprints on the sofa bed were those of Roanne Harding. Her dress and shoe size matched what few items were found in the murdered girl’s Lexington Place apartment.
“And we’ve pulled up the photographs to get the units,” Lambert told Cowley and Pamela. “It looks like one was in the Rangers and the other two were Special Forces. And the old guy with Bella when she was a kid: He’s Special Forces, too. Got a Medal of Honor and a Bronze Star among all that stuff on his chest.”
“These guys had jungle training for sure,” remembered Cowley, aloud.
“What Jefferson Jones told you up in New Rochelle, just before the explosion,” said Pamela, matching the recall. “Let’s see how fast the military can move their asses when they get everything on a plate.”
“Time we moved ours,” reminded Cowley. To Osnan he said, “I’ll speak to Dimitri from the Chicago office. Anything I need to know, reach me there.”
Osnan did, within fifteen minutes of their arrival, while Cowley was on the telephone to Dimitri Danilov.
“What?” demanded Cowley, passing the Moscow connection to Pamela.
“Vyacheslav Kabanov got off the train from New York thirty minutes ago. Picked up his car and drove home like all the other commuters.”
“What about Guzov?”
“Didn’t show. Car’s still in the station lot.”
“He’ll be on his way here to Chicago for the Cidicj Star’s arrival,” predicted Cowley. “It’s going to be OK.”
40
The Cidicj Star had been allocated a berth beneath the main Customs building. A conference room directly overlooking the harbor was transformed into yet another incident room.
The freighter had been under continuous Customs air, sea, and radar surveillance from the moment, just before midnight, it passed through the Straits of Mackinac from Lake Huron into Lake Michigan and began to sail the final gauntlet between the states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Its estimated docking time remained the same, and its hourly progress was marked on a familiar map. Additional telephones, computer terminals, and a wide-screen television had been installed. Operating staff stood around with not enough to do.
Everyone assembled too soon, before midday, crowding the room unnecessarily. Cowley was reminded of the early need of people in high places to be seen to be involved. He was briefly concerned that Peter Samuels, who arrived from Washington before nine, might expect to take personal command until the Customs chief asked to be briefed and made it clear it remained a Bureau operations. The Chicago police commissioner, included as a Washington-instructed courtesy, arrived with his deputy and seemed surprised that at least a deputy FBI director wasn’t present.
James Schnecker and his team also flew in by midmorning, but with a reason. Both Cowley and Pamela went with them to the warehouse in which the OverOcean containers were to be bonded, again specially chosen because it could be entered through a series of corridors from dock authority administration buildings unseen by any OverOcean watcher on the dockside.
Schnecker immediately said, “Couldn’t ask for anything better, after how we worked in Moscow.”
“You won’t have any trouble identifying what’s outstanding?” queried Pamela.
“Just a question of finding it,” assured Neil Hamish.
“We’ll even have time to go over everything we’ve already done,” suggested Schnecker. “We’re looking good.”
Cowley thought so, too, when he made his first contact of the day with Washington to be told there’d been no interference with the reprogramed Challenger or the navigational satellite. There’d been no telephone calls, incoming or outgoing, the previous night or that morning from Bella Atkins’s apartment. There’d been obvious cleaning sounds—almost a full fifteen minutes of vacuuming—the previous night. She’d hummed a lot, although not a recognizable tune. And laughed aloud at Friends.
“What’s Ashton say about watching her in the Pentagon?” asked Cowley.
“There’s an instant trace on her computer ID: comes up directly on Ashton’s monitor,” said Terry Osnan. “They’ve actually got one of those phony antistatic bands on her terminal lead as a backup.”
“Office phone?”
“Five calls so far this morning. All work related.”
“What do we know about her?”
“Still waiting to hear.”
“I’d like a preliminary biog early afternoon.”
Leonard Ross called thirty minutes later. When he heard Samuels and the police chief were already there, he spoke individually to both. When Cowley went back on the line, the director said, “Any jurisdictional problems?”
“None,” said Cowley.
“It’s our case.”
“Everyone’s accepting that.”
“Unfortunate about Guzov.”
“I’m expecting him to turn up here.”
“I’m expecting you to wrap this whole thing up. It’s time.”
There was California wine and hard booze for the buffet lunch set out in an adjoining room. Cowley drank mineral water, as Pamela did. Pamela ate a piece of fruit. Cowley didn’t bother with anything. The police commissioner wanted to know how quickly they expected to make arrests and the timing of their being publicly disclosed. To the man’s second and obvious disappointment of the day, Cowley made a lot of the difficulties of coordinating split-second seizures in America and Russia and of the disastrous consequences of premature publicity. It was even possible, after the international significance of the investigation, that the president himself might decide to make the announcement.
Cowley was about to call Washington when Terry Osnan came on to the line. “We’ve learned an awful lot about Bella.”
Hers was a family steeped in a military tradition stretching back to World War II, although Atkins was her married name. The family was Barrymore. The tradition had been established by her grandfather, who had been a major and served in Patton’s Third Army general staff all the way through to Berlin. The son—Bella’s father—had been a career soldier who’d served in Korea, remained there as part of the military administration in the south after the cease-fire, and been on his second tour in Vietnam when he’d been killed at Da Nang in the first Tet offensive.
Bella was the youngest of four children, the others all boys and all career soldiers like their father. George, the next in line to Bella and the Ranger in the York Avenue photographs, had died in Operation Desert Storm. So had Bella’s husband, a lieutenant in a tank unit. Her other
two Special Forces brothers, Peter and Jake, had also fought in the Gulf. The operations they’d been involved in were classified, but an application was being made to get the security embargo lifted. Peter Barrymore was the one with the eagle tattoo.
Both had been invited to leave the service, to avoid the war hero publicity of a court-martial, after their membership in the John Birch Society had emerged when they’d been discovered trying to recruit within their own and other units for what had been described as an unacceptable right-wing offshoot. There was also an untraced, substantial loss of military equipment. Both had left the army with the rank of major. Peter Barrymore’s last known address was North Rush Street, Chicago, which Osnan had already told the Chicago office, direct. He’d also personally given Al Beckinsdale the army discharge address of Jake Barrymore on Reynolds Avenue, in the Point Breeze district of Pittsburgh.
Osnan said, “The army finally shifted their butts.”
Cowley saw Pamela talking animatedly on another telephone. The attention of everyone in the room was on both of them. To Osnan he said, “Bella’s voiceprint—and maybe the connection with the Roanne Harding murder—is reasonable suspicion for warrants.”
“Already being applied for.”
“Chicago and Pittsburgh know?”
“Told both myself,” said Osnan.
“Get hold of Anne Stovey in Albany. I reckon this is new information sufficient to get at Robert Standing again.”
“Will do.”
“Better warn Trenton. And tell Manhattan to get more people closer to Orlenko in Brooklyn. No one’s to move until I say so, but when I do say so there’s only got to be one sound from the trap snapping shut.”
“Moscow?”
“I’ll talk direct.”
Pamela was already walking toward him when Cowley put down the phone. She said, “Steve Murray called to say he was going to North Rush Street himself. Filled me in quickly. So I spoke to Pittsburgh. Beckinsdale’s going himself there, too.”
The Watchmen Page 45