Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

“We’ve got our link!” Cowley exclaimed in quiet triumph.

“ A link,” cautioned Danilov. “Leading where?”

“To as far as it goes,” said the American.

The sound of renewed movement started in the Bay View clapboard at 5:20 P.M. Orlenko woke up irritable, complained Mary Jo should have called him earlier, and insisted he wasn’t taking the car, even though it was a long way to walk.

“Easier to see if we’re followed, going on foot.”

“For Christ’s sake, how long we going to go on with this shit!”

“Until I say so.”

“Can we go to the Odessa after you get your call? I like the blinis there. And I’m hungry.”

“Maybe.”

Forewarned, Cowley alerted the surveillance van and the agents in the four backup vehicles against any pursuit on foot. Working from the exhibit board map, he moved one car close to the junction with West 37 and Neptune and put another nearer to the Coney Island strip, at the join with Atlantic Avenue. Both vehicles, in constant radio contact with each other as well as with Manhattan, were able to see Orlenko’s constant turning, to check for followers.

The observer in the Atlantic Avenue car said, “From the look of things, Mary Jo’s giving him hell for making her walk.”

There were so many people along Surf Avenue and Riegelmann Boardwalk that there was no risk of Orlenko identifying any pursuit. There was still thirty minutes left of happy hour in the bar that Orlenko headed for so obviously that two agents from the Atlantic Avenue car, now on foot, were able to get in ahead of the Russian. The third man alerted the field teams to the location of the targets, so the surveillance could be rotated, which was an unfortunate professional precaution because it was a topless bar called Bare Necessities.

Orlenko drank beer, Mary Jo vodka martinis, straight up with a twist. They didn’t talk a lot. At precisely 6:25 he left her alone at a table by the stage on which a disinterested girl with a G-string and unmoving, rock-solid breasts was gyrating to “Simply the Best” and walked to the pay phone booth. He went in but didn’t attempt a call. At precisely 6:30 the telephone rang. The observers later reported that he appeared to listen more than he talked. The conversation lasted two minutes and thirty-five seconds. Orlenko didn’t bother to sit when he returned to their table but stood, waiting for his wife to finish her martini. He left his beer unfinished.

In the Manhattan office Cowley said, “It’s a pattern. But of what?”

As he spoke the fax machine began relaying what turned out to be the corporate record material on the Trenton, New Jersey, company that owned 69 Bay View Avenue.

“Here’s more to go with it,” said an agent, taking the sheets as they came off the machine. “Two of the listed directors have got Russian-sounding names.”

Anne Stovey decided to give it one more day before approaching Washington again. They’d probably laughed at her like everyone else. Foul-mouthed her, perhaps, for wasting their time. So what? She’d responded to an all-stations request and she deserved a reply, even if it was to go to hell and stop bothering them. Another written message or a phone call? No hurry. She had twenty-four hours to make up her mind.

In the bedroom closet Pamela Darnley discovered the green backpack with yellow buckles in which Lambert was later to isolate Semtex traces. It was when she was using the apartment telephone to obtain its billing records that she found the cassette had been removed from the answering machine. In a locked bureau drawer that one of Lambert’s technicians easily opened with a pick lock there was a series of photographs showing a child that could have been Roanne Harding in the arms of a man-quickly identified by the Roanoke team as her father, Albert Johnson Harding. It was posed in front of what appeared to be a shrine to Malcolm X. In two the child, whom Pamela guessed to have been no more than four, was aping her smiling father’s clenched-first, Black Power salute.

Pamela used the apartment telephone for a second time to run the check on bureau records, from which Albert Johnson Harding emerged a civil rights activist in the early 1960s. So did a woman in the photographs, whose name on FBI files was Angela Jane Roland. There was no criminal history against either.

There was no activist or criminal listing for the girl herself, under the name of Roanne Roland Harding or Joan Roland. She had lived in Lexington Place for only four months. Two of her immediate neighbors claimed not to have seen her at all since she’d moved in and the two others hardly ever. Roanne Harding had made no effort to be friendly-positively ignoring them when they had encountered her-and neither could remember her ever having visitors. The Realtor traced that first day admitted not having checked the woman’s tenancy references, from a credit rating agency and a law firm, both in Chicago and both, upon immediate check, proving to be forged. Roanne Harding had always paid her rent, in cash, on its due date and had given the required two months’ notice to terminate the tenancy three weeks earlier. There were no personal letters, credit card receipts, or bank statements anywhere in the apartment-or in her handbag found in the same closet as the backpack, with a discarded and empty wallet alongside as apparent evidence of robbery. The uncleared mailbox only contained advertising fliers and junk mail. There were no old newspapers, magazines, or any books. The clothes closet contained just two business suits and a dress, which had been left undisturbed in the phony ransacking. There were only three pairs of briefs and no bra, despite the girl being comparatively large busted. There was no computer or TV-nor obvious evidence of there having been either-in the apartment.

William Cowley had just learned of Arseni Orlenko’s 6:30 P.M. public telephone conversation in the Bare Necessities when Pamela came on the line from the J. Edgar Hoover incident room.

“Sounds like you’ve had a busy day, too,” he said after they’d exchanged accounts.

“More productive for you than for me,” said Pamela. “ Everything about Lexington Place is phony. She didn’t live there, not properly. It was like a hotel room. Nothing personal. The photographs were the only things.”

“You think they were planted intentionally to be found?”

“Could be,” accepted Pamela, wishing she’d offered the suggestion.

“You’ve done well in a few hours,” praised Cowley. “Realizing the place hadn’t really been trashed but getting it logged as an unconnected homicide was brilliant.”

“Like to know what was possibly on that answering machine tape.”

“And I’d like to have heard Orlenko’s incoming call at the titty bar,” said Pamela. “We’ve put a tap on Roanne’s line and another tape in the machine, just in case there’s a call. I’ve got a field team in Roanoke, which is our only positive lead, although mother and father died two years ago within six months of each other. I’m on my way to the Pentagon to talk to her work supervisor.” She hesitated. “The bastards are still so far ahead they’re out of sight.”

“There’s dust on the horizon,” said Cowley, gauging her depression.

“I can’t see it,” said Pamela.

The evening rush was easing by the time Pamela crossed the reopened Arlington Bridge to pick up the Pentagon feed road. Carl Ashton was waiting for her at the gate, as promised, and accepted without comment her insistence that she shouldn’t be introduced as bureau but as D.C. homicide.

“Looks like we got our intruder after all,” said Ashton. The self-satisfaction was obvious after all the criticism.

“I wish it told me more,” said Pamela. That’s what she needed, to deduce or find something that the director would recognize as taking the case substantially forward. “You sure we’ve got everything you had on her?”