Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

They told Bella Atkins the same thing, several times, in their urgency to find the rest of the arms shipment. The second of Cowley’s two shots had punctured Peter Barrymore’s right lung, and he couldn’t be interviewed.

They interviewed her only after she had been read her Miranda rights and every other legal requirement had been complied with. When she rejected an attorney, Cowley ensured every utterance was recorded. Bella Atkins responded to the machine but not in the way they wanted, providing an indication of how she and her brother were later to use their trial, as a platform for the entire spectrum of far right bigotry. Her only sneering admission was that Roanne Harding had been totally duped, a sacrifice to mock her Black Power commitment.

In their desperation, Cowley and Pamela several times suspended the interview for legal guidance from the attorney general herself. They even suggested-and were refused-a plea bargain in return for being told the whereabouts of the explosives.

It was during the breaks that they learned of Harry Boreman’s initiative in Manhattan, ordering the SWAT team entry into Bay View Avenue when it became obvious that Yevgenni Leanov intended to kill Arseni Orlenko. And of the Russian president’s pronouncement, without the supposed prior consultation with Washington, of the roundup of everyone involved in Moscow and Gorki.

It was the media that answered the question Bella Atkins was refusing and by what was quickly labeled another miracle without the potential carnage. There were program-interrupting news bulletins on local radio and television stations within fifteen minutes of the Taft Park shootout and the harmless landing of the empty warhead in the Capitol parking lot. The only two maimed survivors of the eight-strong former Delta Force bombers said much later the attack was to avenge the capture of their leader-whom both respectfully referred to as the General-that they’d started to rig the explosives in a Maryland forest shack. They wanted to prepare to blow up the control tower and as much of the terminal buildings at Dulles Airport as possible. Two of the terrorists who died were engulfed in phosphorous fire from one incendiary device that James Schnecker and his team hadn’t managed to booby trap in Moscow.

It was from the late-night news coverage that Patrick Hollis finally discovered the identity of the General. His mother, who was watching with him, said, “Can you imagine the evilness of such people?”

“No, I can’t,” said Hollis.

The trials would take months, lawyers picking their slow and profitable way through the maze of international law, but the evidence emerged comparatively quickly through the almost immediate collapse of some of the arrested men.

Determined on maximum revenge against the man who’d intended to kill him, Arseni Orlenko set out in minute detail the snakepit double-crossing of the Russian arms smugglers. It had been Ivan Gavrilovich Guzov who’d plundered KGB files to discover the weaponry-seeking Watchmen. And Yevgenni Mechislavovich Leanov, his former KGB colleague, who’d said he could supply them for a 50 percent cut, through the Osipov Brigade. Viktor Nikov, Orlenko’s Gorki friend, had only wanted a 20 percent share. It had been Leanov who’d rid himself of a business rival by killing Nikov and his mistress’s husband by murdering Valeri Karpov-having sexually blackmailed Plant 43’s homosexual director into being their new supplier-and spread the story that it had been an American hit. Leanov also had had Mikhail Osipov blown up to clear the way for Naina Karpov’s takeover of the Osipov Brigade. His only regret, insisted Orlenko, was not being able to tell them the whereabouts of Guzov’s body, for a murder charge to be brought in America.

There was no way Danilov could have anticipated the extent-criminal as well as political-of Ashot Mizin’s babbled confession. He had, insisted the senior investigator, been promised personally by former Interior Minister Nikolai Belik that he would head the Organized Crime Bureau if he sabotaged Danilov’s investigation. In Gorki, Colonel Oleg Reztsov had been assured promotion to militia commissioner. While Danilov was in Gorki, with arrest warrants against Reztsov and Major Gennardi Averin for complicity in the murder of Aleksai Zotin and the Plant 43 employee who’d supposedly hanged himself, Nikolai Belik shot himself.

“You really did make the wise choice, didn’t you?” said Georgi Chelyak on Danilov’s return to Moscow with the two Gorki detectives in custody.

Cowley flew to Moscow for conferences three times with an American legal team, and Danilov returned twice to Washington for the same purpose. Pamela was obviously living with Cowley at his Arlington apartment in which Danilov ate several times. They didn’t explain and he didn’t ask. On each occasion he drank more than the American.

The first of the trials in either country was scheduled to be that of Robert Standing in the New York state capital of Albany.

“Legally it’s the simplest,” said Cowley. “There are no overseas complications with any of the charges. And we’ve got Peter Barrymore’s provable voiceprint on tape talking about the financing. A conviction against Standing-even if he persists in these denials-will be evidence against the leader of the Watchmen.”

Patrick Hollis decided not to wait for the trial. On the Saturday afternoon he took his mother with him to choose the new, replacement Jaguar and let her decide the color should be blue.

That night, while she prepared supper, he went into the den and roamed the server sites. He was in no hurry, and wanted to avoid one that Peter Barrymore might have used. When he was ready he hesitated, savoring the moment, before writing:

A GENERAL SEEKS RECRUITS FOR AN UNFOUGHT WAR

AGAINST CAPITALISM. FINANCIAL ABILITY IS ESSENTIAL.

He’d monitor every account he provided for his troops. Anyone disobeying orders by stealing more than a penny would be instantly court-martialed. The sentence would be exclusion from the elite force he intended.