The Watchmen

27

“I didn’t think it fit because it wasn’t as cleverly planned as everything else. But now I’m sure it is! I even think it’s brilliant.” They were in Ashton’s inner courtyard office, Pamela leaning forward eagerly to convince the Pentagon computer security chief. She didn’t feel numb anymore. She felt excited.

Ashton sat behind his desk, blank faced, her first, gabbled explanation beyond him. “Run it by me again.”

Pamela sighed. “Roanne Harding was the one person who risked being identified from planting the Semtex in the Washington Memorial.”

“Right,” accepted Ashton. “That’s why they killed her. If you’d arrested her, she could have led you to them.”

Pamela smiled. “Obvious conclusion-my conclusion, your conclusion, everyone’s conclusion. What about their accepting that we’d find her and setting everything up to lead us away!”

“This is where you lose me,” protested Ashton. His hands were constantly moving about his desk, as if he were physically groping for something.

“And where I need your guidance to tell me I’m understanding it at last,” encouraged Pamela. “When did you start looking for the worms inside your computer systems?”

“The day the first Watchmen message was posted, when we realized there’d been an unauthorized entry. I told you that.”

“The fifteenth?”

“Yes.”

“That was the actual intrusion. When did you discover the list of possible security risk employees had been wiped?”

“Not until the eighteenth.”

“Why did the nine-including Roanne Harding-survive?”

“I told you that, too. By then we’d put up firewalls.”

“We had a spat, remember? You kept saying ‘maybe’ and I asked you to be specific and you said fifteen names had been erased. How did you know it was precisely fifteen?”

“I’m beginning to understand.” His nervous fingers stopped. Now he gripped the edge of the desk as if he needed to hold on.

“How, Carl?” she persisted. It had to be spelled out, the pieces numbered.

“The suspect dismissals were on a separate program. Sometimes, when information has been deleted, it can be recovered simply by hitting undelete; it’s a built-in fail-safe. We didn’t get the files back-they’d been properly wiped-but we recovered the date of the deletions.”

“Which was?”

Ashton was flushed now, acknowledging the oversight. He groped into a drawer, taking out his own investigation records and thumbing through them for several minutes. He looked up, swallowing. “All on the same day. The thirteenth.”

“How long would it have taken to wipe the entire program?”

“Seconds.”

“How many seconds?” pressed Pamela.

“Not seconds,” the man corrected. “It’s instantaneous.”

“So, on the thirteenth-two days before you put up firewalls-fifteen names were erased instantaneously. Five days later you were still able to find nine more names, Roanne Harding’s among them?”

“Yes.”

“You remember agreeing with me, during that argument we had, that logically the identity of the person who’d planted the Watchmen worms would have been the first thing to go?”

“Yes,” the man, said tightly.

“How can you explain those nine still being in the system if it would have taken less than seconds on the thirteenth to take them out, as well? And destroy the link between Roanne Harding and the Pentagon from which we made the connection to the Washington Monument?”

“I can’t.”

“Her name wouldn’t have meant anything to you if she had been identified in newspapers as a murder victim?”

“No.”

“So we had to be led to her: and from her, led here, to the Pentagon.”

“Why?”

“To make us think-as we did think-that Roanne Harding was the only Watchmen intruder.”

“She has to be!” It was a groan.

“The message after the Moscow embassy attack was posted on your site.” She felt very sure of herself, convinced she was right.

“The phony antistatic bands!” Ashton threw back. “I told you we’ll never be able to calculate how many passwords and codes Roanne made available by fixing those damned things. The fact that the Moscow message was posted from here proves we haven’t kept the bastards out by changing the lower security systems!”

“That’s one of the cleverest things,” said Pamela. “I went through our forensic findings, location by location, before coming here. And then read again what you and Bella Atkins told me-Bella in particular. She told me Roanne Harding’s access was officially restricted to the stationery and office ordering division, which was her workplace, but that Roanne had obviously moved far beyond that. Roanne’s fingerprints were everywhere, on all the bands.”

“Yes,” the man agreed doubtfully.

“Roanne shouldn’t have been allowed access, for instance, to the gatehouse ID computer system, should she?”

“No.”

“Remember you found a phony band on one of the garage terminals that shares the gatehouse database?”

The man nodded agreement.

“Although it’s part of the ordering division, the accounts and invoice office is separate, isn’t it? Actually on a different floor, according to the plan you gave me?”

Ashton nodded again. All the color had gone from his face. He was swallowing a lot, as if he were trying to force back the need to retch. His hands had gone back to the edge of the desk, holding on.

“There was a band there, you’ll remember. And that other one in the mail room: on the computer system that records incoming and outgoing mail-including the e-mail-in the building. Roanne shouldn’t have gotten anywhere near any of those: different floors, different security-classified divisions that her pass wouldn’t have accessed. And do you know what, there’s no forensic evidence that she actually did! Her fingerprints are over all the others, where her pass would have allowed her. But not on those three. There are prints, but they’re smudged too badly to be positive. But because there were so many elsewhere, we assumed she’d fixed those, too.”

“What are you saying?” demanded Ashton.

“I’m saying that Roanne, with a supposed Black Power background, was the deception, the decoy: like the virtually harmless explosion at the Washington Monument-with which she was also connected-was a deception. And littering the Pentagon with so many false antistatic bands was a deception.”

“To achieve what?”

“The concealment of the real cracker the Watchmen have here that we were never supposed to find: someone who really knows how to use a computer and is probably responsible for all the website postings that we’ve believed-because we were supposed to believe-came from outside, through all the back doors Roanne opened for them.”

The man looked solemnly at her for several moments. “How are we going to find who it is? Prove you’re right?

“I don’t know. But we might prove whether I’m right or not by checking the new antistatic bands at really sensitive levels-the ones you checked once and found to be safe.” She stopped, trying to think of something she might have missed. “The ones that, having been guaranteed safe, wouldn’t be checked again until the next regular security sweep.”

“You know what they could do-disrupt or destroy even-if they’ve penetrated the higher levels: gone sideways to one of our connected agencies!”

“Communication satellites: intelligence-gathering satellites?” guessed Pamela.

“Dear God, I hope you’re wrong,” said Ashton in a voice that sounded as if he didn’t think she was.

Danilov insisted they take what they considered quantum-leap discoveries back to the security-guaranteed U.S. Embassy, leaving Pavin to supervise the extended search through the remaining intelligence records. They did so discreetly and with Paul Lambert, the two breakthrough dossiers hidden in briefcases-one Lambert’s-before quitting the lecture room to go through the corridors of Petrovka. They avoided the chanting protesters just as discreetly by entering the legation from the bordering alley on which Aleksandr Pushkin’s house is preserved as a monument to the poet.

The date of his dismissal made Ivan Gavrilovich Guzov a victim of the KGB disbandment. The file picture was of a heavily built man with the swarthy skin and swept-back, deeply black hair of his Armenian ancestry. Compared against the snatched surveillance photograph Guzov had gained at least ten pounds, maybe more. From the listed date of birth in his dossier, he was now thirty-eight years old. He was described as a bachelor. When he read that Guzov had been a middle-ranking finance officer in the First Chief Directorate, with special responsibility for North America and Canada, Cowley, the counterespionage expert, said, “Paymaster for overseas deep cover or diplomatic agents.”

“Who as paymaster would have had details-and access to their archives-of all those agents,” completed Danilov.

“At last a shape, a pattern!” said Cowley.

“Was the realtor business from which Orlenko is renting Brooklyn the legitimate business he was referring to if anything happened to Guzov?” wondered Danilov. “If it is, there’s no purpose in continuing the company search in Chicago.”

Cowley considered the question. “It’s already been started. I’ll let it run. And add Guzov’s name. Chicago seems to come up a lot, and it is a shipping entry point into America.”

Yevgenni Mechislavovich Leanov had also worked at Lubyanka for the old KGB. He was forty-two years old and ironically had attended the same Moscow University language college as Dimitri Danilov, although two years later. Leanov had joined the intelligence organization directly after he had graduated, with distinction, and for two years acted as deputy supervisor for the English language department. The last listed Moscow address was Ulitza Krymskij Val.

Cowley said, “I’m surprised they let him go.”

“There’s never any logic in Russian bureaucracy,” said Danilov.

“The file says he’s married,” Cowley pointed out. “Be interesting to hear what his wife’s voice sounds like?”

“We’re getting a voice analysis from the intercepted conversation, incidentally,” came in Lambert. “Arriving in tomorrow’s diplomatic bag.” The forensic scientist stopped at the sudden expression on Danilov’s face. “What?”

Danilov frowned, shaking his head: “I just had the oddest recollection. Stupid. There was something about the tape when I first heard it: couldn’t think what it was, but now it’s come to me. I thought I’d heard the woman’s voice before.”

Now Cowley regarded the Russian quizzically. “How? When?”

Danilov was embarrassed, particularly in front of Paul Lambert, whom he scarcely knew. “It’s ridiculous. Forget it.”

Lambert said, “The analysis is that it’s a Muscovite accent. Age range between thirty-four and forty-five, which is pretty wide.”

Danilov shook his head again. “It’s ridiculous,” he repeated.

“You want to listen to the tape again?” offered Lambert.

“We’ve got more positive leads to follow,” dismissed the Russian.

That was Pamela Darnley’s thought when she got back to the J. Edgar Hoover building to further developments and a coincidence about voice recognition that had occurred to her and Danilov within an hour of each other.

Besides reacting to Cowley’s instructions to add Guzov’s name to the Chicago company search, Terry Osnan had liaised with Manhattan, from which the New Jersey surveillance was being coordinated, to suggest it be intensified. He handed Pamela the list she’d asked for earlier and said, “We could draw a total of fourteen people from Seattle, Austin, and Atlanta for that and to build up Chicago.”

“Let’s do it,” she decided. Pamela didn’t fill the incident room coordinator in on her Pentagon visit, wanting the further confirmation of Carl Ashton’s promised computer sweep to announce her deduction as an unarguable fact instead of a theory based for the moment on an inexplicable date difference.

Instead she went back to her earlier review. Because she’d urged the tapping of the public telephones, she concentrated on the billing from Bay View Avenue from which the calling pattern had first emerged. She began searching for patterns additional to those already established in the four cities, even though there’d already been a computer comparison that hadn’t thrown up any extra ones. She created her own handwritten pattern blocks, listing on a yellow legal pad Chicago, Manhattan, Pittsburgh, and Washington against the dates of the calls for more repetitions that hadn’t already been eliminated, curious now that she knew the added significance of the New Jersey property company that no calls were recorded to its number from Orlenko’s house. On impulse she even looked for a call from Brooklyn to the public booth at the New Rochelle mall from which the booby-trap massacre had been initiated. There wasn’t one.

At the end of half an hour the only thing Pamela noted was the absence of contact between Trenton and Brooklyn. She noted it on her pad, although she was unsure of its importance or relevance. She was looking too hard, wanting too much, Pamela warned herself. If she was right about the Pentagon, which she was convinced she was, it would be her unqualified, unshared success-probably reaching the president himself, for the earthquake it would cause-and that had to be enough. Was enough.

It was probably because earlier she’d looked for the New Rochelle number on Orlenko’s records that Pamela played the Highway Patrol copy tape of the burning cruiser report. She did so absently; for the first few seconds of what lasted less than a minute Pamela only half listened. But then, abruptly, she rewound the tape to the beginning.

There’s what looks like a large fire in the woods by the New Rochelle creek …

Can you give me a name, madam …

It could be a boat with people on board. You’d better get there, check it out.

Madam ….?

The sound of the telephone being replaced.

She’d heard the voice before. Just as quickly as the certainty came to her, so did the stupidity of it. She found the voiceprint analysis from Osnan’s meticulous indexing, the doubt growing with its first line that an obvious attempt had been made at disguising distortion, although the intonation had been from a Southern, not a northern, state. She listened to it several more times and then to the first eavesdropping on Bay View Avenue, concentrating on Mary Jo’s voice. Mary Jo, she remembered, who had been born in Atlanta, Georgia, but whose Southern accent was not immediately recognizable. There was a similarity, but … Looking too hard, wanting too much, she thought. But there was no record of a scientific comparison being made, when there should have been. Another oversight to be corrected.

It was midafternoon, long after she’d given the voice comparison instructions, when Leonard Ross personally told her the attorney general-and all four district attorneys, even the reluctant New York legal chief-had agreed to the requested taps on all the public telephones.

Carl Ashton’s contact was an hour later. “We found a phony band on a terminal line of one of the Joint Chief’s secretaries.”

“Oh, Jesus!” said Ross, when Pamela called him back.

Patrick Hollis had been particularly careful that the workstation allocated to the FBI auditor was directly outside his own glass-walled office. Mark Whittier was in his sight line at all times without Hollis appearing constantly to watch the man.

Hollis was sure he detected the physical reaction-a slight, pushed-back-in-his-chair start, then a quick coming forward over the keyboard-when Whittier detected the first intrusion. Because he was so attentive, Hollis saw the beginning of the instinctive glance of triumph toward him from the man and was able to turn away, appearing to look into a drawer, before it was completed. When he stared back into the open plan room, Whittier was already talking animatedly into the telephone.

To have registered as positively as it had with the auditor the transfer would have had to have been exactly what he’d warned against, dollars instead of cents, Hollis knew. What good was a general who ignored intelligence? That was the recipe for losing battles, not winning them.