Brian Freemantle: The Watchmen

To the FBI division chief Schnecker said, “We’ll have to stay suited up all the way back to Fort Meade, just in case this starts to leak, so you’ll be safer here in New York anyway.”

“How’s that?” demanded Cowley.

It was Burgess who reached out, touching the tear in the left sleeve of Cowley’s protective suit. Burgess said, “We probably could have saved you if only one had detonated, knowing what we were dealing with. But you’d have felt like hell for a very long time. Not so sure how you’d have been if both had gone off, like they were obviously intended to.”

Furnishing his Ulitza Petrovka office with the latest available flatscreen television was one of several indulgences Dimitri Ivanovich Danilov allowed himself after his confirmation as operational director of Moscow’s Organized Crime Bureau. Another was ensuring it received American CNN newscasts, which enabled him to watch live the unfolding events in New York. He’d wondered if Cowley had been the unnamed FBI official to whom the helicopter-borne reporters had referred, long before the familiar, overpowering figure, space suit discarded over his arm, walked from the UN tower slightly behind the rest of the group still in protective clothing. With Cowley was a slightly built, immaculately dressed Mediterranean featured man whom the CNN reporter immediately identified as the UN secretary-general. The cameraman held the shot as Cowley tossed his suit and helmet into the helicopter before retreating under the entrance canopy with the diplomat.

Danilov watched the running newscast for another hour before the summons came from the Interior Ministry. By then the death toll from traffic accidents and stress-related causes-mostly asthma seizures and heart attacks-had been established at fifty-four. One victim was the asthmatic member of the original NYPD bomb disposal squad. The Russian source of the missile had also been confirmed.

For once there was no shuffled expansion to prevent his joining a crowded table, and Patrick Hollis slid gratefully into the sort of group from which he was normally excluded in the bank’s cafeteria. He let the discussion swirl around him, holding back from any opinion: Having gotten to the table, he didn’t want to be ridiculed.

“Madmen!” declared Robert Standing, one of the senior clerks in the mortgage department and Hollis’s chief tormentor. “Deserve the chair when they’re caught.”

“They’ll demand money,” anticipated Carole Parker, the blond counter clerk who was the latest focus of Hollis’s fantasies.

“That’s how they’ll get the bastards,” agreed Standing. “Set a trap with the money.”

It would have been wonderful to contradict the man: show Standing up for the boastful, know-nothing fool that he was, with his hand up every willing skirt. Just as it would have been wonderful to let everyone around the table-Carole most of all-know how he’d amassed the fortune of nearly $2,000,000 that no one knew-or could ever know-he had.

Although slightly built, Ibrahim Saads, the secretary-general, was a tall man whose prematurely graying hair added to the ambiance of easily worn authority. At the moment of re-entry, however, both he and Cowley remained slightly uncertain. Saads said, “I’m glad there wasn’t an accident.”

“Yes,” agreed Cowley. They hadn’t expected to find Saads when they emerged into the vestibule, the unguarded warhead still tentatively suspended in its sling between Schnecker and Hamish. The diplomat hadn’t known they were in the building, either, although it had been the noise of their arriving helicopter that brought him to the ground level. Cowley didn’t think the surprise would have been sufficient to startle Schnecker and Hamish into dropping the device but was still glad it had been Pointdexter who’d first confronted the UN chief, who clearly realized there had been a danger. It was his third reference to an accident being avoided.

“There’s no contamination whatsoever?” asked Saads, another repetition.

“None,” confirmed Cowley.

“I’ve got calls to make,” said the diplomat.

“So have I,” said Cowley. “I’d appreciate a phone.”

This time Saads did use his own suite, gesturing for Cowley to take his pick from the immediately adjoining office and leaving the linking door open in invitation.

The FBI director’s demand was immediate. “No doubt it’s Russian?”

“The lettering certainly is,” Cowley said cautiously. “It was a design no one’s seen before.”

“You know anything about a chemical or biological weapon facility at a Plant 35 at or near Gorki?”

“I’ll start a records check when we’ve finished talking. We also-”

“Need to check the CIA,” anticipated Ross. “I’ll speak to the director personally. And State and the White House.”

“The secretary-general’s here. He’s making calls, too.”

“Which have to be duplicated,” insisted Ross. There had been a period when he’d regretted leaving the New York bench, where he’d been the senior judge, for the FBI directorship, but he had become more comfortable after mastering what he considered all the necessary internal and external political footwork. “There’ll be meetings I’ll need you back here for.”

“The city’s in chaos but the trains should work sometime later today. I’ll get the Metroliner.”

“You got any thoughts so far?” asked Ross, knowing it was a question he was going to be asked as he climbed the political ladder.

“Terrorist,” Cowley said shortly. “If it is there should be a claim for responsibility soon. Or a demand.”

There was another momentary silence. “We’re going to need a task force,” decided the director. “Antiterrorism, scientific, you and your division … liaison, too, maybe, with the Agency and Customs. And diplomatically it’s going to be a bitch, so I guess State will be involved ….”

Through the open door Cowley saw the secretary-general talking animatedly on the telephone, gesturing with his free hand, and thought they’d need the General Assembly chamber to accommodate the sort of task force Leonard Ross was imagining. Who, Cowley wondered, would be left to conduct the actual investigation while everyone else publicly made meaningful statements and promises? He said, “I need to start things here.”

“Be back by tomorrow.”

It would not have been politically correct to ask his director to transfer him. Cowley disconnected and immediately redialed his own department to research a Plant 35 anywhere in the Gorki area. He also asked for an independent bureau comparison of the warhead from TV freeze-frame pictures against anything similar in their files and for checks to be extended to all Washington-based technical publications and sources. He insisted the inquiry be spelled out in the greatest possible detail to their office at the Moscow embassy. There was no reply from the New York FBI office on Third Avenue, and the answering machine hadn’t been switched on.

Ibrahim Saads saw Cowley hovering at the door and beckoned him in to the river-view suite. The Egyptian switched on a television preset to a scheduled NBC program, with Tom Brokaw promising a live telecast from the White House.

The anchorman continued a voice-over commentary on earlier footage, initially of the car-abandoned, still-deserted Manhattan streets and then of the Secretariat Tower viewed from the river. Papers continued to flow in a slow stream from the hole torn into the side of the building. From the outside the hole looked far bigger than Cowley had imagined from the inside. It was more a horizontal, three- or four-meter tear than a direct hole, as if the initial shattering of the outer glass and fabric had rippled sideways in some seismic aftershock, buckling and distorting the metal and reinforced concrete frame. There were what appeared to be hundreds of fissured splits, a giant spider’s web, emanating from the main damage to the floors above and below.