Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

“You already asked me that,” reminded the security chief. “I checked, as I promised I would. You’ve got it all.”

“You spoke to her supervisor?”

Ashton shook his head. “Only told her Roanne’s been murdered. Her name’s Bella Atkins and she’s pissed being kept late.”

“Doesn’t sound like she’s sad about it.”

“Decide for yourself,” suggested the man.

Bella Atkins was a commanding, severely dressed woman with heavy features and graying hair. She was very obviously unmoved at learning that someone she’d known, albeit slightly, had been killed. She didn’t ask how it had happened.

“Shouldn’t have got past the entry qualification,” insisted the woman, as if it had some relevance. They were in Ashton’s office, overlooking one of the inner courtyards.

“How did she?” asked Pamela. It was hardly a homicide detective’s question, but it didn’t seem to occur to the other woman.

“You tell me,” said the supervisor indignantly, looking demandingly at the computer security chief. “She wasn’t right from the start. We’re working current Microsoft and she said she was only used to old systems, 3.1 stuff. So allowances were made when she first arrived. I had doubts by the end of the second week.”

“You’re in the ordering division. Supplies, stationery, office equipment,” Pamela said. “Did she have access to other departments?”

“Nowhere beyond her own room,” said the woman. “But she moved around that enough. I guessed she was asking for advice from other operators.”

Instead of which she was busily attaching phony antistatic bands, Pamela thought. “You say she didn’t really know what she was doing, working a terminal?”

“No, ma’am. She was hopeless. She hardly knew anything more than absolute basics: scarcely more than how to turn on and off, touch type-she was as slow as hell, needing to look at the keyboard all the time-and what a mouse was.”

“Are we talking about the Pentagon? ” demanded Pamela, looking in disbelief at Carl Ashton.

“I filed a complaint at the end of those two weeks,” said the woman. “The process, against suit for wrongful dismissal, took another two and a half months. Would you believe she’d actually learned to type faster in that time!”

“What about people she met here? Made friends with?”

“She didn’t. Some of the other girls got to calling her “lonesome.” It was the same with guys, too. She was kinda pretty but as far as I know never agreed to date, not once. Never tried to share a table in the cafeteria or want to share hers with anybody else. Left promptly on time, catching the first staff bus into D.C.” Bella Atkins looked pointedly at her watch. “Even the last one’s gone now. Lucky I brought the car.”

“Always the first bus?” qualified Pamela. “Never volunteered to work late?”

“Asked her twice. Refused twice.”

“You had a girl who didn’t know her job, didn’t want to know her job, and didn’t want to make friends-acquaintances even-with anyone. Didn’t she strike you as one hell of an unusual girl?”

“Put it in my first complaint,” insisted Bella Atkins. “I know the sensitivity of this place, even though we’re low security. Suggested there should be a psychological assessment.”

Ashton nodded and said, “Bella did just that.”

And I’m only hearing it now, thought Pamela. She was supposed to be D.C. homicide, not FBI, she remembered. “That in the stuff you let me have earlier?”

“Personnel decided to let her go instead. Putting that on file might have affected her getting another job,” said the man.

Even though it was supposed to be a straight murder inquiry, it would be logical to ask about the computer intrusion, Pamela decided. “What do you think about the hacking?”

Again Bella looked accusingly at the security man. “Hardly surprising, when you think someone like Roanne Harding got in, is it?”

“It occur to you she might have been somehow involved?”

“Roanne! Don’t be ridiculous! I’m department supervisor because there’s nothing I don’t know about computers or can’t make them do, including jump through blazing hoops. And I didn’t even know there were such things as phony antistatic bands. A bunch of terrorists want to infiltrate the Pentagon-the Pentagon, for God’s sake! — they’re going to choose an expert, not someone as dumb as she was.”

She wouldn’t have thought so, either, conceded Pamela. But there was no benefit in discussing it further with this woman. “Doesn’t look as if you can help me, then?”

“Wish I could,” said the department head, letting a little stiffness ease away. “What actually happened?”

“Looks like a break-in that went wrong,” recited Pamela, sticking to the cover story. “Roanne was in bed, naked, asleep probably. Intruder rapes then shoots her.”

The older woman shuddered. “Poor kid.”

Who was part of a conspiracy to slaughter hundreds by blowing up the Lincoln Memorial, thought Pamela. “Yeah,” she said. “Poor kid.”

As Ashton walked her to her car, Pamela said, “So what about your worm or whatever you call your intruder?’

“We’re satisfied it was low level. Every VDU server has been swept. Twenty using hard disks have been replaced.”

“So you’re clean?”

Ashton paused as they reached Pamela’s car. “We hope so, inside here. But they got a hell of a lot from those goddamned bands.”

“What about your employment procedures?”

“There won’t be another Roanne Harding,” insisted Ashton.

“One was enough,” said Pamela.

Paul Lambert came on to her car phone as she was returning over the Arlington Bridge. “Didn’t know if you were coming back in,” said the man. “Thought you’d like to know we got a positive match with the fingerprints on Roanne Harding’s Pentagon file and several of the supposed antistatic bands. She was our girl, all right.”

“Was,” Pamela said heavily. So much for Bella Atkins’s doubt. But then what she appeared to have done didn’t amount to much more than wrapping a Band-Aid around a cut finger.

Waiting for Pamela at the J. Edgar Hoover building were the results of the CIA check suggested by Dimitri Danilov, which dated the intelligence agent photos published by the Watchmen to be almost exactly a year old: In the same month-May-there’d been a rotation of officers wrongly identified in the computer revelations as still being in Tel Aviv, Canberra, and Tokyo. Also on her incident room desk, marked for her personal attention, were the billing records of Roanne Harding’s Lexington Place telephone. From Manhattan Cowley had had transmitted the complete account of that day’s investigation there, so Terry Osnan could maintain up-to-date dossiers.

It was when she was preparing her own up-to-date file on Roanne Harding that Pamela stopped, although not immediately knowing why, just that there was a connection. For several moments she remained staring down, unfocused, at everything spread out on the desk in front of her and the adjoining evidence table. Comparisons. What was there-what could there be? — to compare with what had happened that day in Manhattan and here, in Washington? She couldn’t miss it again: Wouldn’t miss it again. What then? Where? A common denominator. It had to be a common denominator. And then she saw it and found what had registered, initially subconsciously, and felt the satisfied warmth.

Pamela put both sheets of paper on the desk in front of her, marking each, deciding as she did so against showing her excitement by first telephoning Cowley. Instead she had both faxed, timing her call to Manhattan to coincide with their arrival in the New York incident room.