The Watchmen

19

It made operational sense to split up, Cowley and Danilov flying up to New York by bureau plane leaving Pamela Darnley in Washington to supervise the individual checks on the former Pentagon employees on the following day’s promised list.

A bureau lawyer flew with them to make the application for a search warrant and wire tap on 69 Bay View Avenue to a judge roused by the Manhattan office and waiting in chambers by the time they got to the city. By then two agents from the Manhattan office had driven out to Brooklyn and made one pass by the house, a neglected clapboard owned by a property company in Trenton, New Jersey. No lights had been burning and it looked deserted. On Cowley’s orders from the incoming plane from which he was coordinating everything, they hadn’t attempted any neighbor inquiries but parked as inconspicuously as possible to wait and watch. The police commander of the local precinct was called at home, told of the bureau presence-and why-and asked that no foot or vehicle patrol interfere if they realized a surveillance was under way. The police chief said there weren’t any foot patrols in the area but he’d alert traffic. If there was anything he could do, all Cowley had to do was ask.

The telephone company night-duty supervisor with whom Cowley discussed the telephone tap assured him that the billing records of calls into and from the Bay View Avenue house would be available within five minutes of the clerical staff arriving at 8:00 A.M. the following morning. The tap itself was installed by 10:30 that night, to be monitored around the clock by a rotating task force of eight operatives. Cowley took them with him on the plane, freeing up the Manhattan office for the twenty-four-hour surveillance for which Cowley asked for intentionally battered, Midwest registered and apparently much used communications and observation vehicles. They were to be driven up from Washington overnight, with the exception of the one available in New York, which Cowley rejected as too new and likely to attract attention in the neglected suburb. He also ordered six vehicles hired by the following morning-none four-door Fords, the too-recognizable federal pool choice-so that no regularly parked cars or vans would arouse any suspicion.

The largest room at the bureau’s New York office on Third Avenue was turned into an incident room. On the first of the exhibit boards were pinned a blown-up street plan of Bay View Avenue and its surrounding waterfront roads. There also appeared photographs of Viktor Nikolaevich Nikov, one official militia arrest photograph of the man when he’d been alive, two more of him after his body had been recovered from the Moskva River.

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.”

“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 motel, 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.