The Watchmen

21

In the bedroom closet Pamela Darnley discovered the green backpack with yellow buckles in which Lambert was later to isolate Semtex traces. It was when she was using the apartment telephone to obtain its billing records that she found the cassette had been removed from the answering machine. In a locked bureau drawer that one of Lambert’s technicians easily opened with a pick lock there was a series of photographs showing a child that could have been Roanne Harding in the arms of a man-quickly identified by the Roanoke team as her father, Albert Johnson Harding. It was posed in front of what appeared to be a shrine to Malcolm X. In two the child, whom Pamela guessed to have been no more than four, was aping her smiling father’s clenched-first, Black Power salute.

Pamela used the apartment telephone for a second time to run the check on bureau records, from which Albert Johnson Harding emerged a civil rights activist in the early 1960s. So did a woman in the photographs, whose name on FBI files was Angela Jane Roland. There was no criminal history against either.

There was no activist or criminal listing for the girl herself, under the name of Roanne Roland Harding or Joan Roland. She had lived in Lexington Place for only four months. Two of her immediate neighbors claimed not to have seen her at all since she’d moved in and the two others hardly ever. Roanne Harding had made no effort to be friendly-positively ignoring them when they had encountered her-and neither could remember her ever having visitors. The Realtor traced that first day admitted not having checked the woman’s tenancy references, from a credit rating agency and a law firm, both in Chicago and both, upon immediate check, proving to be forged. Roanne Harding had always paid her rent, in cash, on its due date and had given the required two months’ notice to terminate the tenancy three weeks earlier. There were no personal letters, credit card receipts, or bank statements anywhere in the apartment-or in her handbag found in the same closet as the backpack, with a discarded and empty wallet alongside as apparent evidence of robbery. The uncleared mailbox only contained advertising fliers and junk mail. There were no old newspapers, magazines, or any books. The clothes closet contained just two business suits and a dress, which had been left undisturbed in the phony ransacking. There were only three pairs of briefs and no bra, despite the girl being comparatively large busted. There was no computer or TV-nor obvious evidence of there having been either-in the apartment.

William Cowley had just learned of Arseni Orlenko’s 6:30 P.M. public telephone conversation in the Bare Necessities when Pamela came on the line from the J. Edgar Hoover incident room.

“Sounds like you’ve had a busy day, too,” he said after they’d exchanged accounts.

“More productive for you than for me,” said Pamela. “Everything about Lexington Place is phony. She didn’t live there, not properly. It was like a hotel room. Nothing personal. The photographs were the only things.”

“You think they were planted intentionally to be found?”

“Could be,” accepted Pamela, wishing she’d offered the suggestion.

“You’ve done well in a few hours,” praised Cowley. “Realizing the place hadn’t really been trashed but getting it logged as an unconnected homicide was brilliant.”

“Like to know what was possibly on that answering machine tape.”

“And I’d like to have heard Orlenko’s incoming call at the titty bar,” said Pamela. “We’ve put a tap on Roanne’s line and another tape in the machine, just in case there’s a call. I’ve got a field team in Roanoke, which is our only positive lead, although mother and father died two years ago within six months of each other. I’m on my way to the Pentagon to talk to her work supervisor.” She hesitated. “The bastards are still so far ahead they’re out of sight.”

“There’s dust on the horizon,” said Cowley, gauging her depression.

“I can’t see it,” said Pamela.

The evening rush was easing by the time Pamela crossed the reopened Arlington Bridge to pick up the Pentagon feed road. Carl Ashton was waiting for her at the gate, as promised, and accepted without comment her insistence that she shouldn’t be introduced as bureau but as D.C. homicide.

“Looks like we got our intruder after all,” said Ashton. The self-satisfaction was obvious after all the criticism.

“I wish it told me more,” said Pamela. That’s what she needed, to deduce or find something that the director would recognize as taking the case substantially forward. “You sure we’ve got everything you had on her?”

“You already asked me that,” reminded the security chief. “I checked, as I promised I would. You’ve got it all.”

“You spoke to her supervisor?”

Ashton shook his head. “Only told her Roanne’s been murdered. Her name’s Bella Atkins and she’s pissed being kept late.”

“Doesn’t sound like she’s sad about it.”

“Decide for yourself,” suggested the man.

Bella Atkins was a commanding, severely dressed woman with heavy features and graying hair. She was very obviously unmoved at learning that someone she’d known, albeit slightly, had been killed. She didn’t ask how it had happened.

“Shouldn’t have got past the entry qualification,” insisted the woman, as if it had some relevance. They were in Ashton’s office, overlooking one of the inner courtyards.

“How did she?” asked Pamela. It was hardly a homicide detective’s question, but it didn’t seem to occur to the other woman.

“You tell me,” said the supervisor indignantly, looking demandingly at the computer security chief. “She wasn’t right from the start. We’re working current Microsoft and she said she was only used to old systems, 3.1 stuff. So allowances were made when she first arrived. I had doubts by the end of the second week.”

“You’re in the ordering division. Supplies, stationery, office equipment,” Pamela said. “Did she have access to other departments?”

“Nowhere beyond her own room,” said the woman. “But she moved around that enough. I guessed she was asking for advice from other operators.”

Instead of which she was busily attaching phony antistatic bands, Pamela thought. “You say she didn’t really know what she was doing, working a terminal?”

“No, ma’am. She was hopeless. She hardly knew anything more than absolute basics: scarcely more than how to turn on and off, touch type-she was as slow as hell, needing to look at the keyboard all the time-and what a mouse was.”

“Are we talking about the Pentagon?” demanded Pamela, looking in disbelief at Carl Ashton.

“I filed a complaint at the end of those two weeks,” said the woman. “The process, against suit for wrongful dismissal, took another two and a half months. Would you believe she’d actually learned to type faster in that time!”

“What about people she met here? Made friends with?”

“She didn’t. Some of the other girls got to calling her “lonesome.” It was the same with guys, too. She was kinda pretty but as far as I know never agreed to date, not once. Never tried to share a table in the cafeteria or want to share hers with anybody else. Left promptly on time, catching the first staff bus into D.C.” Bella Atkins looked pointedly at her watch. “Even the last one’s gone now. Lucky I brought the car.”

“Always the first bus?” qualified Pamela. “Never volunteered to work late?”

“Asked her twice. Refused twice.”

“You had a girl who didn’t know her job, didn’t want to know her job, and didn’t want to make friends-acquaintances even-with anyone. Didn’t she strike you as one hell of an unusual girl?”

“Put it in my first complaint,” insisted Bella Atkins. “I know the sensitivity of this place, even though we’re low security. Suggested there should be a psychological assessment.”

Ashton nodded and said, “Bella did just that.”

And I’m only hearing it now, thought Pamela. She was supposed to be D.C. homicide, not FBI, she remembered. “That in the stuff you let me have earlier?”

“Personnel decided to let her go instead. Putting that on file might have affected her getting another job,” said the man.

Even though it was supposed to be a straight murder inquiry, it would be logical to ask about the computer intrusion, Pamela decided. “What do you think about the hacking?”

Again Bella looked accusingly at the security man. “Hardly surprising, when you think someone like Roanne Harding got in, is it?”

“It occur to you she might have been somehow involved?”

“Roanne! Don’t be ridiculous! I’m department supervisor because there’s nothing I don’t know about computers or can’t make them do, including jump through blazing hoops. And I didn’t even know there were such things as phony antistatic bands. A bunch of terrorists want to infiltrate the Pentagon-the Pentagon, for God’s sake! — they’re going to choose an expert, not someone as dumb as she was.”

She wouldn’t have thought so, either, conceded Pamela. But there was no benefit in discussing it further with this woman. “Doesn’t look as if you can help me, then?”

“Wish I could,” said the department head, letting a little stiffness ease away. “What actually happened?”

“Looks like a break-in that went wrong,” recited Pamela, sticking to the cover story. “Roanne was in bed, naked, asleep probably. Intruder rapes then shoots her.”

The older woman shuddered. “Poor kid.”

Who was part of a conspiracy to slaughter hundreds by blowing up the Lincoln Memorial, thought Pamela. “Yeah,” she said. “Poor kid.”

As Ashton walked her to her car, Pamela said, “So what about your worm or whatever you call your intruder?’

“We’re satisfied it was low level. Every VDU server has been swept. Twenty using hard disks have been replaced.”

“So you’re clean?”

Ashton paused as they reached Pamela’s car. “We hope so, inside here. But they got a hell of a lot from those goddamned bands.”

“What about your employment procedures?”

“There won’t be another Roanne Harding,” insisted Ashton.

“One was enough,” said Pamela.

Paul Lambert came on to her car phone as she was returning over the Arlington Bridge. “Didn’t know if you were coming back in,” said the man. “Thought you’d like to know we got a positive match with the fingerprints on Roanne Harding’s Pentagon file and several of the supposed antistatic bands. She was our girl, all right.”

“Was,” Pamela said heavily. So much for Bella Atkins’s doubt. But then what she appeared to have done didn’t amount to much more than wrapping a Band-Aid around a cut finger.

Waiting for Pamela at the J. Edgar Hoover building were the results of the CIA check suggested by Dimitri Danilov, which dated the intelligence agent photos published by the Watchmen to be almost exactly a year old: In the same month-May-there’d been a rotation of officers wrongly identified in the computer revelations as still being in Tel Aviv, Canberra, and Tokyo. Also on her incident room desk, marked for her personal attention, were the billing records of Roanne Harding’s Lexington Place telephone. From Manhattan Cowley had had transmitted the complete account of that day’s investigation there, so Terry Osnan could maintain up-to-date dossiers.

It was when she was preparing her own up-to-date file on Roanne Harding that Pamela stopped, although not immediately knowing why, just that there was a connection. For several moments she remained staring down, unfocused, at everything spread out on the desk in front of her and the adjoining evidence table. Comparisons. What was there-what could there be? — to compare with what had happened that day in Manhattan and here, in Washington? She couldn’t miss it again: Wouldn’t miss it again. What then? Where? A common denominator. It had to be a common denominator. And then she saw it and found what had registered, initially subconsciously, and felt the satisfied warmth.

Pamela put both sheets of paper on the desk in front of her, marking each, deciding as she did so against showing her excitement by first telephoning Cowley. Instead she had both faxed, timing her call to Manhattan to coincide with their arrival in the New York incident room.

“Roanne Harding made four telephone calls from Lexington Place to the same public booth in Chicago as Arseni Orlenko from Bay View Avenue,” Pamela announced triumphantly.

“And all on the same days,” agreed Cowley, looking at the telephone accounts.

Four hours later-at precisely 2:30 A.M. Moscow time-the projectile was fired from a car that paused briefly on Ulitza Chaykovskovo, near the U.S. Embassy. Part of the building is hedged by barbedand mesh wire netting. The missile ricocheted off the metal thicket, deflected completely from the legation toward the boxlike diplomatic compound at the rear. The deputy cultural attache, his wife, and their twin eight-year-old daughters were killed instantly. So flimsily constructed was the Russian-built complex that the rocket’s explosion destroyed two adjoining apartments, killing a further five Americans.

Dimitri Danilov was already awake when Yuri Pavin telephoned him at the UN Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. When he recognized his deputy’s voice Danilov cut him off and said, “I’ve already heard: I need to know everything you’ve got!”

“Mikhail Vasilevich Osipov got blown up last night. Three others died. But that could have waited until later.”

“What?” demanded Danilov.

Pavin said, “Olga’s dead.”