Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

Brad Piltone wore his camouflage jacket and the same shaved haircut as his friend, Duke Lucas, who carried his shoulder satchel. Beneath their respectful demeanor-awe at actually being in the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation-there was the faintest indignation at the thought of their setting a bomb at the monument to America’s first president. Piltone said the sons of bitches who’d do a thing like that needed punching out and he’d like to do it, and Cowley believed him. They were both twenty-eight and lived in the same street in San Antonio, Texas. Piltone was a linesman for the telephone company, Lucas was a body repairman in a garage. The jacket had belonged to Piltone’s father who’d been killed in Pleiku, Vietnam (which Piltone called Nam) and whose name inscribed on the Constitution Gardens Memorial Wall was the main reason for their first, week-long trip to Washington. They’d gone to the memorial before going to the Washington Monument. Lucas had taken several photographs of Piltone pointing to his father’s name on the camera he had in the satchel and which he willingly handed over for the film to be developed.

Pamela took it to the bureau laboratory and continued on to the incident room from where she called the FBI office in San Antonio. Agents there took only fifteen minutes to confirm both men’s addresses, employment details, and that neither had any local police record. Lucas’s film had four frames of Piltone in front of the Vietnam shrine-his father’s name clearly visible in two-three from the top of the Washington Monument, and three of their descent on foot. One showed the half face of the man who hadn’t yet been traced, the other partially the back-but nothing of the face-of the still-unknown woman, who was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt and had her dark hair in a pony tail. Neither man had seen anyone behave suspiciously as they walked down the monument stairs or remembered anything particular about the untraced man or woman or anyone else in their group.

“I wish I had,” said Piltone, to his friend’s nodded agreement. “It would have helped, wouldn’t it?”

“Probably more than you can ever know,” said Cowley.

Within an hour the last remaining unknown man called the FBI’s Charleston, North Carolina, office to say he wasn’t sure if he was one of the people for whom they were appealing. He was wearing the same windbreaker as in Duke Lucas’s wired photograph when he arrived, as requested, at the local bureau building. Part of the identification procedure for the morning and afternoon descents had been to photograph everyone who had willingly come forward. Hans Bohl, the taxi driver son of a German immigrant, positively remembered eight from among his afternoon group. Prompted by Lucas’s picture, he thought the pony-tailed girl had been around thirty years old and “not American,” Hispanic or maybe Asian. He also recalled her bending to do something to her shoe as they came down, because he was at the back of the line and now he remembered her running to catch up. She’d been carrying in front of her the backpack that wasn’t visible in Lucas’s snapshot: He thought it had been green, with yellow buckles. Bohl spent a long time with a facial reconstruction technician trying electronically to re-create an image of the girl, which Cowley thought looked like the Disney animation of Pocahontas when it was wired down to Washington. Both Pamela and Danilov agreed it was unpublishable in a fresh appeal. Instead Cowley wired it, along with Lucas’s partial picture, to every regional office to which identified tour participants had come forward. He sent incident room agents to the hotel and motel addresses of those still in Washington to get their impressions and improvements.

When he spoke, quite alone in Cowley’s permanent office, to Georgi Chelyag in the Russian White House, Danilov claimed it was an American conclusion that the intelligence officer identification was from an official Russian source and that they hoped to establish a time frame from CIA records.

“Is there going to be an open accusation?” demanded the presidential aide at once.

“I don’t know,” admitted Danilov.

“Do you think it valid?”

Danilov smiled to himself. “Very much so.”

“It would put even more pressure on us here.”

“Deservedly, if it’s true. What’s the reaction to the disclosures?”

“There’s already been a formal protest note from Beijing. Everyone named is being expelled. We’ll do the same to their agents here, of course. And bring everyone back from everywhere else. What’s Washington doing?”

“I don’t know that, either,” admitted Danilov.

“You learning enough from being there?” Chelyag demanded pointedly.

“I think so,” said Danilov, who hadn’t told the man of the American forensic findings. “The CIA reassignment check could produce an important lead.”

“Leads here in Moscow, if Moscow is the source,” said Chelyag. “If it does I want you back here, handling it personally.”

“What about Chairman Kedrov?” Danilov asked uneasily. Once more in the firing line, he thought.

“I’ll want you back here,” insisted the chief of staff, refusing the question. “If we’re the source of everything that’s happening there, this is where you should be. Finding it.”

How positive-and determined-would Georgi Chelyag be when he discovered it? wondered Danilov. The qualification was immediate: If he discovered it. It came to Danilov again when he got back to the incident room at virtually the same time that Cowley returned from briefing the FBI director. Pamela Darnley looked at the two men and said, “Immigration says it’ll take at least another three days to find the visa applications for Viktor Nikolaevich Nikov. And neither Hertz nor Avis has come up with any rental in the Nikov or Eduard Kulik names. The only glimmer is that Ashton says he’ll have some of the possible disgruntled Pentagon dismissals by tomorrow.”

CIA Director John Butterworth was furious that the suggestion of the Internet’s disclosure source-and possibly how to date it-had come from Leonard Ross and not from anyone within the counterintelligence unit of his own agency. “It’s certainly a simple check to make,” he had to concede.

“Then let’s make it,” urged Frank Norton. “We could turn this back on the bastards! Could be our first break.”

“Beijing has formally complained about American spying,” said Henry Hartz.

“Posturing, for public consumption,” dismissed Ross. “My people had already identified every Russian agent from Wisconsin Avenue on today’s list. So will every counterespionage agency in every other country.”

“I’d like to think my agency is more successful overseas,” said Butterworth.

“You might like to think so,” said Ross. “Surely what we all sat and watched this morning shows you’re not.”

“It’s public consumption we’re here to discuss,” said the White House chief of staff. “What’s our response?”

“We’re in a bind with a Russian detective actually here, cooperating with the bureau,” said Hartz. “What I’ve proposed to Moscow, through Ambassador Guliyev, is that instead of formal, tit-for-tat protests and expulsions they simply withdraw their people and we withdraw ours.”

“That sounds the most practical,” agreed Norton, although looking at Ross. “What we really need is something positive in the actual investigation.”

“We’ve narrowed the Washington Monument list down to one suspect,” said the FBI director. “By tomorrow we might even have an eyewitness compilation good enough for an electronic reproduction and a physical description.”

“We could go with that now,” Peter Prentice said quickly. Sonorously, as if reading a headline, he said, “Washington Monument Bomber Known!”