The Watchmen

39

What everyone else regarded as yet another coup Pamela Darnley considered a failure. Why hadn’t she pursued her belief that she recognized the voice beyond the one comparison against the New Rochelle telephone call? Her anger at herself fueled the urgency as well as her need personally to organize the concentrated investigation.

The entire Washington, D.C., field office-which operates separately from the J. Edgar Hoover building-was assigned to Bella Atkins. To it Pamela added from Roanoke the four agents still working the Roanne Harding murder. Pamela summoned Carl Ashton from the Pentagon with the widowed Bella’s personnel file and warned the stunned man that every check he and his sweepers had been so confident of having completed, not just throughout the Pentagon but in all the other associated agencies, had to be repeated.

“She’s got Grade V clearance, so she’ll know that some codes at least have been changed. She’ll have been literally following in your footsteps all the way.”

“So she’ll know we think Roanne wasn’t the mole, that we’re still looking,” said Cowley, sitting in on the meeting.

“Not necessarily,” said Ashton. “It’s routine to change codes.”

“Make Challenger and the satellite navigational system your first rechecks,” insisted Pamela. “She’d go back to her sabotage-do it again-if she suspected we were looking.”

“It’s almost too fast to keep up,” protested the Pentagon computer specialist.

“Don’t let it be!” Pamela urged worriedly. “We’ll do all we can outside. But inside-which is where it matters-you’ve got to reverse what’s been happening. You’ve got to follow in Bella Atkins’s footsteps now. Whenever, however, she accesses a computer, you’ve got to be right behind her. You think you can do that?”

“Technically, yes.”

“What about practically?”

“I hope so,” said Ashton.

“She got a cell phone?” demanded Pamela, conscious of the continuing Trenton problem.

“Not Pentagon issued. She might have a private one; most people have.”

“We’re searching under her own name through all the providers,” picked up Cowley. “But if there’s a way you can find out without her knowing, we need it.”

There was a routine familiarity in attaching an exchange monitor on Bella Atkins’s telephone, which was as much as they could do overnight. From the surveillance already in place they knew that she was in her York Avenue apartment. The judge had also approved a search warrant, enabling them legally to enter the following day to install listening devices while she was at the Pentagon. And by the time she got to work that day a listening device would have been attached to her office extension.

“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.”