Brian Freemantle: The Watchmen

“Absolutely not.” Kedrov flushed. “I’m simply trying to avoid misunderstandings.”

“There is also to be total cooperation and liaison between the departments assembled here,” ordered the chief of staff. “I want that completely understood and accepted.”

As if in answer, maintaining the every-word-recorded formality, Kedrov said, “Which department or ministry-and who, from that department or ministry-is going to lead the inquiries here in Russia?”

“If it did indeed come from Gorki, the warhead was stolen,” said Chelyag. “Which is a criminal act. And crime is the responsibility of the militia, which is why this meeting was convened here in the Interior Ministry.” The man looked for the first time directly at Danilov. “And you, Dimitri Ivanovich, have worked with American agencies, especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on previous occasions?”

At last everyone’s attention concentrated upon Danilov. He said, “Twice.”

“Which uniquely qualifies you to do so again,” decided Chelyag. “More particularly because such a theft would not have been committed by amateurs and you head the Organized Crime Bureau-”

“Here in Moscow,” broke in Danilov.

“You will operate directly and specifically with the authority of the White House,” Chelyag set out. “Everyone in Gorki-and anywhere else it’s necessary for you to go-will be made aware of that.” He paused, looking around the table again. “General Danilov is to get total and unimpeded cooperation.”

“I don’t think there’s any doubt about the degree or extent of support that is being made available,” said Belik, speaking at last.

Or whom the sacrifice would be in the event of a mistake or failure, Danilov realized. Once more he thought how irrelevant that seemed. On his way home he’d change the flowers on Larissa’s grave. He hadn’t been there for four days.

“I think the bank imposes upon you too much,” complained Elizabeth Hollis. She was a tall, stiffly upright woman, close to being gaunt, her iron-gray hair in tightly permed ridges.

“Nothing I can’t handle,” said Hollis.

“You know how you’ve got to be careful.”

Hollis winced at the reminder. Physically he was a complete contrast to his mother, a round-faced, bespectacled man overweight by at least twenty pounds, which he had been from grade school. As he felt about a lot of things in life, Hollis considered his size unfair. Because of it-and for what doctors labeled a weak chest, because it stopped just short of asthma-he’d been judged unfit for the army cadets and later for the National Guard and had long ago abandoned diets, none of which worked. He was still careful about what he ate, though, as he was careful about everything.

“Dinner will be about half an hour. Steak,” said the woman.

“Broiled,” Hollis insisted at once. “Trim the fat.”

“I know how you like it!” said the woman in mock irritation. “What are you going to do?”

“Work on my computer for a while.”

“I don’t understand why you want to spend the time you do on a computer here when it’s all you do at work.”

“It’s like magic, mother,” said the man in the awed voice of a committed cyber nerd. “There’s nothing I can’t do-nowhere I can’t go.” But some places he wouldn’t go again. He could go on playing the war games-retain his rank as the Quartermaster if he chose-but he wouldn’t maintain the telephone contact code worked out with the General through the personal columns of Soldier magazine. It had been a mistake but one easily rectified. Tonight he wouldn’t even go to war. Easily Hollis began cracking into unaware host systems, for them to be charged his usage time, burrowing through three before dialing up the porn channel. He took his time with his selection, too, and when he found the movie he wanted charged it against the credit card number he’d gotten from the issuing bank in Buffalo. The woman was blonde, and it was very easy for Hollis to imagine it was Carole Parker, not an actress.

Clarence Snelling wasn’t enamoured of computers. He didn’t understand them and didn’t want to and thought of them as an enemy, technology that had made him redundant as a clerk, throwing him on the scrap heap on a pension so inadequate he had to scrabble around as a part-time bookkeeper for businesses too small to afford a screen and a keyboard. And those businesses seemed to be decreasing by the day.

To Clarence Snelling a handwritten page of figures was a thing of beauty, art almost. It was nothing at all like the sterile electronically printed sheet he was studying at that moment, comparing it to the ledger into which he was carefully transferring it. He threw the bank statement impatiently aside and called: “Martha! They’ve done it again!”

William Cowley was discomfited by so many still and television cameras, particularly when he was recognized as the man who had gone into the UN building with the germ warfare scientists and became the filmed and question-shouted focus of the gathering. He tolerated the cameras but studiously ignored the questions. Most of the other public figures around him were self-consciously posing to appear unposed, irritated that Cowley’s sudden fame was deflecting attention-and the cameras-away from them.

For the benefit of daytime newscasts and evening newspapers, Henry Hartz, the guttural-voiced, German-born secretary of state, stressed to the assembled journalists that the official status of everyone present showed the importance America was giving to what he referred to as “this appalling near atrocity.” He held up what he claimed to be a personal assurance from the Russian president of complete cooperation, which in fact it wasn’t. It was notification from the Moscow ambassador that such a guarantee had been promised by the Russian Foreign Ministry. Hartz concluded with the promise of a longer statement at the end of the meeting.

Cowley didn’t think, from an earlier breakfast discussion, that Leonard Ross had fully absorbed the horror of what might have been postponed only by a fluke. Even more certainly Cowley didn’t believe the bureau’s twitchingly eager, nervously laughing antiterrorist chief had, either. Burt Bradley was the first director of the bureau’s specially dedicated unit. There’d been the New York World Trade Center attacks and Oklahoma and before that the Beirut U.S. Embassy bombing, but the unit’s primary function had otherwise been liaising with other more frequently attacked European countries. Cowley’s impression wasn’t that Bradley was overawed, as he initially had been. He thought Bradley was positively frightened. And from his just completed personal analysis, he couldn’t condemn the man for it. Any more than he criticized anyone else in the room for what he regarded as performance warmup time, practicing posterity phrases and photo-shoot postures.

“I want a complete update,” opened Hartz, without introducing people he expected already to know each other. His German birth precluded Hartz from ever running for the presidency, which he coveted, but he considered being secretary of state the next best political role and ran his Foggy Bottom fiefdom as he would have run a White House administration, with unquestioned, unchallenged autocracy. He knew-and didn’t mind-that he was referred to within the department as the Fuhrer. Looking between Cowley and Schnecker he said, “Let’s have the scientific thinking first.”

Unencumbered by his protective suit and domed helmet, James Schnecker was a surprisingly small man with an even more surprising tendency to squint, as if suffering unexpected pain twinges. He coughed, clearing his throat, and said professorially, “One warhead contained sarin, a known nerve agent produced in either liquid or vapor form. As liquid it’s absorbed through the skin or mucous membranes; as vapor it’s inhaled, obviously. In both states it attacks the respiratory and nervous systems. You’ll remember it was released on the Tokyo Underground in 1998 by a fanatical religious group. It’s a well known and long-standing weapon, first produced in Germany in 1937. The other warhead contained anthrax which you’re all familiar with after the events of September, 2001. Bacillus anthracio is again a pulmonary complaint. Biologically it’s most commonly found in cattle-although to a much lesser extent in sheep-and in Africa, where it is endemic, humans contract it from tics. It’s produced as a biological weapon as a plasma-encoded toxin by combining three bacillus proteins. Separately none of the proteins has a biologically harmful effect. Combined they create edema, the pathological accumulation of fluid in the body tissues and pulmonary collapse. There’s acute and agonizing swelling and hemorrhaging from all body openings. It attacks the spleen and causes splenetic fever. In weapon form, as it was in this warhead, it infects through inhalation. It’s almost invariably fatal to humans after an incubation period of between one to five days.”