Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

Cowley looked at the two of them, bewildered. “What are you talking about?”

Danilov unpicked the staple holding together the hard copies of the digitized pictures of the Russian and American intelligence officers, carefully laying them out so the entire collage was presented at once. “What do you see?” he demanded.

“Well, I’ll be …” Cowley smiled in instant awareness. “You think so?”

“Do I get to know the code we’re talking here?” protested Pamela, still confused and fervently-angrily-wishing that she wasn’t appearing so lacking in the presence of the two men.

“Look!” insisted Cowley. “What’s different between the photographs? In every case?”

“Too obvious to see!” Pamela recognized at last.

“Every picture, of every American, is snatched: not always sharp. Surveillance photographs. Every Russian is an official personnel file print.”

“You actually suggested a disaffected or disgruntled CIA officer might be involved,” remembered Cowley.

“Or former KGB,” said Danilov. “Which is where I think all these came from. From Lubyanka records, taken by someone who doesn’t have a job anymore because of the scaling down of the service.”

“As a result of the detente which the Watchmen are protesting against,” offered Pamela, anxious to contribute.

“Or someone still there with access,” suggested Cowley.

“And there’s a way of finding out which,” Danilov pointed out. “The CIA will know at once if all the officers exposed today are still on station. And if not, the date they were reassigned. And that date of reassignment will tell us how current these disclosures are. And a time frame against which to check KGB dismissal of officers with access to counterespionage archives.”

“Haven’t a lot of ex-KGB people crossed the street to join your mafias?” pressed Pamela.

“Most of them,” Danilov admitted easily. “Which, with luck, will continue taking us in the right direction.”

“What about the cooperation we’ll need from the FSB who took over your external intelligence service?” asked Cowley.

“I don’t know,” Danilov further conceded. The reasons for his returning to Moscow were building, and he’d scarcely gotten over his arrival jet lag.

“All this interrupted us downstairs,” reminded Pamela.

Danilov didn’t respond at once. Then he said, “I hoped-we all hoped-there was just one source for what was coming out of Russia. What your forensics found most obviously gives us two, but like a lot of what emerged in Gorki and Kushino, it might not be as obvious as it seems.”

“I can’t quite reconcile that to what you’ve already told us,” complained Pamela.

“The colonel in charge of organized crime investigation in Gorki drives a BMW he would need a lifetime’s salary to buy,” said Danilov. “When they realized I wasn’t part of the system, I had the constant attendance of him and the major supposedly in charge of the actual case. When I got back to my hotel room after picking up a comparison missile at Plant 35 I snapped off a detonating pin-just as it was snapped off the missile that hit the UN building-and scraped off a lot of paint.” He smiled bleakly. “It was switched: The one I took back to Moscow had both pins intact, but I’d kept the one I’d broken off and the paint with me. I detached a clasp off one of the mine casing samples I collected from Plant 43 at Kushino and scratched off more paint before they were delivered to the Foreign Ministry and from the ministry to your embassy. I kept that clasp and paint permanently with me, until I got here and personally gave them to Paul Lambert. From what Lambert said downstairs-what he didn’t find in what came ahead of me supposedly from Plant 43-they were switched too.”

“We talking crooked cops or official interference?” broke in Pamela.

“Crooked cops, certainly,” said Danilov. “But there’s a lot of people-some still in government and in ministries-who think communism worked better than the reforms that have bankrupted Russia: reduced it as a world power. And would be happy to return to the old ways and the old days. Who would, in fact, like the sort of confrontation the Watchmen seem to regret doesn’t exist between Moscow and Washington anymore.”

“Are you suggesting there might be a group in Russia linked to the Watchmen here?” demanded Cowley.

“I’m suggesting it wouldn’t be difficult to find people there thinking the same way, even if they aren’t definitely part of the same organization-certainly prepared to cooperate.”

“Wouldn’t that fit your theory of former KGB-succeeding FSB even-being involved in what we’ve just seen on all these screens?” wondered Pamela.

“Yes,” agreed Danilov.

“So now we’re into global conspiracies!” said Cowley.

“Put together what we know so far,” urged Danilov. “It’s not difficult to make that sort of pattern.”

“I wish it were,” said Cowley. “I’m not happy offering this to the director or the crisis committee, whether some parts fit or not. I want more before I throw this fox into the henhouse. Accepting the situation in Moscow-which I do-you think there’s a chance in hell of your getting anywhere?”

“A lot further than I have already,” promised Danilov. “And here’s another theory, based on the autopsies on Viktor Nikov and Valeri Karpov. They were horrendously tortured, half drowned, revived, and tortured again before finally being drowned and shot. I think that was done as an example to others. And Karpov worked at Plant 43 at Kushino.”

“So what’s the theory?” Cowley frowned.

“Gangs-brigades-falling out or fighting,” said Danilov. “I might have a way of infiltrating or exacerbating it.”

“That could produce something,” agreed Cowley.

“I’m not sure, though, that it would lead us to the connection we need between Russian suppliers and our unknown Watchmen,” cautioned Danilov. He was glad he’d taken the chances he had, in Gorki and in Moscow. He was sure he had unsettling bombs of his own to detonate to see which way people ran for cover. His bigger uncertainty was his own crisis group-even some of its members, maybe.

The door into the office opened and one of the incident room agents said, “There’s two guys downstairs think you want to talk to them. One’s wearing an army camouflage jacket.”

“Looks like we just hit another firewall,” said Pamela.

In the FBI office in Albany Anne Stovey was thinking roughly the same thing about her overnight communication with Washington, although she accepted that the day’s terrorist sensation would be occupying everybody at headquarters, to the exclusion of everything else.

Which it was. Her memorandum about missing pennies from banks had already been greeted with snorted derison and filed under nonaction miscellaneous by Al Beckinsdale, seconded on to the investigation from his normal role as agent in charge in Philadelphia.

Anne supposed she’d have to allow another day or two for a reaction, but she hoped it wouldn’t be any longer than that. Ridiculous though it might seem, she instinctively felt it was a significant lead.

There was a temptation to leave Robert Standing’s personal bank log-in on all the accounts he’d supplied to the General, but its being there had to look like Standing’s carelessness, so Patrick Hollis restricted himself to three. It meant accessing them, of course, and because he’d downloaded the accounts when he’d chosen them, he was easily able to see that amounts as high as fifteen dollars had already been withdrawn. It wouldn’t be long before the internal investigation began.

Pamela’s firewall prediction was right, and the rest of their day, until the very end, continued in another downward spiral.