Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

“The White House has been on-Chelyag himself. Wants to hear from you. Belik, too.”

“What’s the reaction to the intelligence exposure?”

“I’ve not been included officially. Newspapers and television have picked up the hypocrisy line.”

“The message of the Watchmen,” Danilov pointed out. An NBC survey that morning had discovered quite a lot of similar comments, mostly in the Midwest but some from the South, too.

“At least people aren’t dying.”

“Yet.”

Danilov hung up to find Cowley in deep discussion with the team leader supervising the trace of every American number on the Bay View Avenue listing. Cowley said, “Got ourselves a funny pattern.”

“What?”

The American offered a photocopy of the bill. Marked on it were several blocks of numbers, alphabetically identified. “All outgoing from the Orlenko house. All to public booths. Chicago, Washington, New York, and Pittsburg. How’d you read that?”

Danilov stared down at the paper for several moments. “I can’t.”

“We’ve got to work it out somehow. There’s a reason for it.”

Danilov remained looking down at the list again. “Repetitions, in every city. Any chance of getting taps at their end?”

Cowley shook his head doubtfully. “Public lines. Judges would take a lot of persuading. Our tap on the exchange should give us two-way conversation. But we need to get into the house now-get some microphones installed to hear all that’s said inside.”

Danilov tapped the paper. “If this is caution, we’ll need a lot ourselves to avoid them becoming nervous: certainly nothing as obvious as their telephone going out of order.”

Cowley regarded the Russian with a pained but unoffended look. “I’m not going to be as obvious as that. Honest!”

The planning came close to overwhelming its objective; certainly Al Beckinsdale wasn’t missed. Only nine names, accompanied by photographs and supplied biographies, arrived from the Pentagon. To Pamela Darnley’s furious, lost-chance silence, the exasperated Carl Ashton said, “They wrecked our goddamned systems! I told you that!”

“How many do you guess we lost?” she demanded, the telephone seemingly heavy in her hand.

“Maybe another nine.”

“ Maybe, ” Pamela repeated. “More than nine or less than nine?”

“Fifteen, certainly.”

“So we’re wasting our time, aren’t we? They’d have taken their own guy out first, wouldn’t they?”

“Maybe.”

“Carl! You want to do me a favor, for fuck’s sake stop saying “maybe” to everything I ask you! I want-I need! — a straight answer. What are the chances of the person we’re looking for being among the nine we’ve got? Against the chances of whoever it was wiping themselves first?”

“Not good,” conceded the Pentagon’s computer security chief. “But it’s possible. We put up firewalls in every system the first day-the first hour-we discovered the intrusion. The wiping would have been automatic, Trojan horse stuff, but it’s got to be triggered by a command. The nine you’ve got were behind three separate firewalls. They’d have gone if we hadn’t put the barriers up to stop the password getting through.”

“What chances of getting any of the rest-finding them somewhere?”

“Nil. The severance pay idea doesn’t work without a name. There is good news though. We’ve actually narrowed the penetration. It is low level: administration data, stationery ordering, car pool and parking records, stuff like that. Virtually no security risk at all. National Security Agency’s clean, all our sensitive areas.”

Pamela allowed another aching silence. “Carl! For the past week-using administration, stationery ordering, car pool and parking record computer access so unimportant it’s hardly got a clearance- some organization called the Watchmen has made the president, the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department look absurd. They’re responsible, at the last count I can remember, for the deaths, one way or another, of sixty-five people. They came close to killing hundreds more, the president among them. They’ve closed cities-and the government offices of this country-and cost millions of dollars. And we’ve most likely lost our chance of finding who the guy was, eating alongside you over there in the cafeteria, riding the elevator with you in the morning and at night. Now here’s my question. Take your time. Let’s get it right. I’d like you to tell me what you’d call really bad news and then what’s stand-up-and-cheer good news? You think you can do that for me?”

“You pull wings off butterflies when you were a kid?” demanded the defeated man.

“And then pinned them in the display case while they were still alive,” said Pamela, putting down the telephone.

She didn’t wait for any comment-curious if there would have been any after the earlier confrontation with Beckinsdale-but began the assignment distribution with the warning that what they had was the best they were going to get but they still had to run it into the ground, hopeless though it might be.

Only when she went one by one through the biographies and reasons for each of the nine Pentagon dismissals did Pamela fully recognize just how hopeless the selection seemed.

Two security duty marines on the list had been dismissed for two separate offenses, both for brawling in Crystal City bars while in uniform. One civilian suffered a broken jaw. A civilian male chauffeur had tested positive for marijuana during a random drug test, as had a twenty-year-old girl in the secretarial pool in another random sweep. A storeman had been caught on a security camera, stealing stationery for which he was responsible. He also was unable to account for two computer terminals for which he’d signed receipts. A security camera had provided the main evidence against a female army sergeant found responsible for thefts over a year from a women’s locker room. An army sergeant had been dismissed from the service and the Pentagon after being found guilty by a military tribunal of sexual harassment; four female employees under his command had complained. A female computer operator, judged incompetent, had been fired after her reference had been more thoroughly checked and found to be forged. Another chauffeur, a woman, had been replaced after twice being involved in accidents, one with a chief of staff general as a passenger.

Despite Pamela’s earlier warning, one of the male team leaders who’d been amused at Beckinsdale’s performance said, “Most of these wouldn’t know a computer if it came up and bit them in the ass.”

“How about one of those horny marines screwing some secretary and persuading her to get a few passwords he can hand on to someone who would know if a computer bit him in the ass!” demanded Pamela. “Or our light-fingered lady sergeant, forty-six and single according to her record, wanting to prove how good she is apart from in the sack to a younger stud? I told you: This is all we’ve got. I want everyone traced, the way I told you I want them traced, and by the end of every interview I want to know what their grandmothers had for breakfast the day they died.”

Cowley had just been alerted that Mr. and Mrs. Arnie Orlenko had been photographed outside 69 Bay View Avenue, when Pamela spoke to him for the first time.

She said, “Seems like it’s moving for you?”

“Too early to get excited,” cautioned Cowley. “You told the director about the Pentagon?”

“What’s to tell? It’s a mess. End of story.” She’d let him learn from others of her confrontation with Al Beckinsdale.

“Keep him informed,” advised Cowley. “The Pentagon will try to get out from under. Don’t get dumped on.”