Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

Pamela smiled to herself in the office off the incident room. “You spoken to him yet?”

“Briefly. I want to let these two run, follow them. Ross isn’t so sure. I’m holding on to the argument that they haven’t committed an offense in this country.”

“What’s Dimitri think of the Russian connection?”

“That it might fill in a blank, but that there’s still too many.”

Pamela said, “From the look of things you’re likely to get more than me.”

He said, “You never know.”

Which was meant to be reassuring and turned out to be prophetic, although in the beginning it didn’t appear so. Keeping strictly to their brief, the assigned teams tried first for everything possible from public sources and records on their individual targets. The most consistent-and quickest-discovery was that during the two-year period covered by the Pentagon list, only four had remained in the D.C. area. Pamela personally briefed the necessary local FBI offices as each new location was found, e-mailing everything they had at Pennsylvania Avenue so far with specific instructions to do nothing more than confirm the new residence until all possible background was complete.

The female army sergeant had a month to serve of her court-martial sentence in a stockade in Virginia. Her sexually harassing counterpart was an instructor in a health club in Baltimore, where he lived. The accident-prone chauffeur had a home in Frederick, where she now worked in a haberdashery shop. And according to the welfare agency details-she’d only left the Pentagon a month before and hadn’t gotten another job-Roanne Harding, the references forger, had an apartment actually in D.C., off Lexington Place close to Stanton Square.

Almost at once it emerged that her Pentagon references weren’t the only variable documents in Roanne Harding’s thirty-two-or sometimes twenty-eight-year life. She was only Roanne Harding on her Pentagon personnel records, which gave her age at twenty-eight and her birthplace as Roanoke, Virginia. The date on her birth certificate issued there made her thirty-two and included the middle name of Roland, which had been her mother’s maiden name. The computer-copied photograph accompanying the logged details of her Washington, D.C. driver’s license matched the Afroed, light-skinned black woman whose matching digitized picture had been supplied by the Pentagon. The license photograph of Joan Roland, from the same address in Roanoke as that of her parents, was of a woman with the same facial features but with long, straight, almost shoulder-length hair. Duke Lucas’s photograph of the girl who’d descended with them from the Washington Monument showed only the back of her head. Pamela decided at once the hair could be the same held back in a pony tail. She dispatched two agents to find Lucas and Piltone, she hoped at their motel, and three to Roanne Harding’s Lexington Place address-with instructions to make discreet neighbor inquiries but not make any direct approach. She also got Leonard Ross’s authority to brief a bureau lawyer for a search warrant and wire-tap application to a judge.

Piltone and Lucas were brought into the J. Edgar Hoover building and immediately-although separately, to avoid one influencing the other-identified the Roanoke picture of Joan Roland as the girl who’d been in their party.

The report from Lexington Place was that Roanne Harding hadn’t been seen for at least a week. Her mailbox hadn’t been cleared, and the janitor had had complaints of a gas leak smell from other residents.

William Cowley was patched from the Manhattan office to take part in the conference call discussion with Leonard Ross and Pamela Darnley. Cowley pleaded against immediately exercising the warrant, arguing that the woman was a more direct link to the Watchmen whom they should follow, not arrest. But he was overruled by the director, who insisted the publicity would have warned Roanne Harding and her group and that there was sufficient evidence to bring her in for questioning.

Pamela went to Lexington Place with the bomb disposal team and ordered no one clearing the apartment block and three immediately adjacent buildings to disclose it was an FBI operation before she authorized the entry. The door and its frame were X rayed for explosive devices or connections before the bureau locksmith even began to work, which he did with painstaking slowness and encased not only in protective armor but from behind a thicker, armored shield.

There was no booby trap but the smell of leaking gas was so overpowering that the coughs of two of the bomb disposal team turned into choking. Pamela, armored like the rest of the agents she was leading, wished they had nose clips. From the doorway where she was waiting, she could see that the main room had been trashed.

From another unseen room the bomb squad leader called: “It’s not leaking gas. In here.”

Roanne Harding was naked and on her back, legs splayed on a bed wrecked like the rest of the room. She had been shot twice in the head, and there were already maggots in the decomposing body.

In Brooklyn an electrical power cut followed at once by a surge totally distrupted the appliances in fifteen streets-including Bay View Avenue-in the Norton Point district. Deep freezers died, televisions blew, fire and burglar alarms went off, and a lot of home computers crashed.

The maintenance director of Con Ed said to Cowley, “You satisfied with that?”

“Completely,” said Cowley.

“I wish to Christ I was,” said the man. “And knew what it was all about.”

“If you did you’d be proud of the help you’ve given,” promised Cowley.

It was Dimitri Danilov’s idea (“if they’re worried and they’re both Russian that’s what they’ll speak in front of strangers”) to go into the Bay View Avenue house as part of a supposed repair team. There was confirmation from the surveillance vehicles that some genuine electric company vans were already in the Norton Point area and a lot of people were in the streets, Orlenko one of them, talking to neighbors on both sides. He’d hurried inside when a local news television crew had appeared. On the way to Brooklyn in the repair truck that was their necessary cover an enthusiastic professional linesman, Peter Townley, rehearsed Danilov and a bureau electronics technician, Jack Harrison. The technician, a lean-faced would-be stand-up comic, insisted he’d done this sort of thing a dozen times and didn’t need to be told how to appear as if he knew what he was doing, because he did know: All he needed was for them to distract the people so he could get his bugs in “to make the place one great big sound box.”

Townley said to Danilov, “You’re supposed to be my supervisor, OK? I’m doing the work, you’re making sure I do it right. I’ll throw in a lot of technical crap means nothing. If I ask your opinion about something, I’ll keep my left thumb on the piece of equipment or the wire it’s the correct one to choose. How’s that sound?”

“Fine,” said Danilov.

They passed a proper repair truck on West 37th Street, and Danilov spotted the FBI surveillance vehicle parked not in Bay View itself but on the corner of Seagate. In Danilov’s opinion the area wasn’t so much rundown as wind- and sea-swept, fronting on to Gravesend Bay: great in the summer, not so good in winter. He wondered what rent the Trenton company was charging. Arnie Orlenko certainly didn’t appear short of money: according to the LaGuardia taxi driver, he’d dropped a $20 tip on top of the fare.

They parked visibly but some way away from 69, and they didn’t go to it immediately. A man in the first house they called at said he’d already talked to his lawyer and was getting all his appliances checked by an independent firm and intended to sue for any that couldn’t be put right. A woman in the next said what could they expect, so close to all those Coney Island illuminations. It shouldn’t be allowed.