Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

“How pregnant?” Danilov repeated.

“Nine weeks. It should have been quite straightforward.” He paused heavily. “As a proper birth would have been.”

Whose baby would it have been? wondered Danilov. Igor, the hairdresser, who kept his own bouffant a better color than Olga’s? Or someone else he didn’t know about? I want to try again, Danilov remembered. And then I mean you and me. Try to put our marriage back together. She would have known then: hoped for them to make love, which they hadn’t done for years, to be able to claim he was the father. Which he was going to allow the few who needed to know to believe. For whose benefit? Olga’s, who might not even have known herself? Or his, to hide in death just how much and for how long he’d been cuckolded in life? For Olga, he decided. He had an abrupt recollection of Naina Karpov and her words echoed in his mind, too. I don’t have anywhere else. Anyone else. He said, “Did Olga come alone?”

“Yes. I told her there was still a lot of time-that she could wait until you got back-but she said she didn’t know how long that would be. And that you wouldn’t change your mind.”

Danilov ignored the open contempt. Poor, lonely Olga. It didn’t matter-hadn’t mattered for too long-how much she’d lied and cheated and whored, she hadn’t deserved, no one deserved, to die all alone. “No one came to see her? Inquired about her?”

“No one,” said the doctor. “It would have been a boy.”

Danilov nodded, not knowing what to say.

“There are formalities. Identification.”

“Yes,” accepted Danilov.

He walked, unspeaking, with the other man to the mortuary. Olga’s frozen pallor made her multihued hair look even worse than when she’d been alive. He nodded and said, “Yes,” and then, “I’ll make the arrangements. Get the body collected.”

“As soon as possible,” urged the man.

“By tomorrow,” promised Danilov. “And thank you for what you did.”

“It shouldn’t have happened. Any of it.”

“Far too many things happen that shouldn’t,” said Danilov.

“It’s my job to try to prevent them,” said the younger man.

“Mine, too,” said Danilov.

The American party divided immediately inside the embassy, Henry Hartz being hurriedly escorted to the waiting ambassador. The Moscow-based FBI agent, Barry Martlew, was also waiting and led Cowley, along with Lambert’s team, to the shattered compound.

At Lambert’s insistence everything had been left, except the bodies. The scientist patiently pointed out the shrapnel from the explosion and said, “The bastards were right, of course. It’s an A2 version of the M72, bazooka adaptation.”

“I didn’t doubt it would be,” Cowley said wearily.

From the dead children’s bedroom one of the team called, “Got a piece with markings here. Code designation is Mojave.”

“There’s an arms dump there,” Lambert said to Cowley.

“Hardly significant,” Cowley said dismissively. “Had a check run after the Watchmen identification. Seems we gave these things out like candy at an orphanage party, officially and unofficially. Equipped Israel with them, and the CIA supplied them to the muhajadeen during the Russian war in Afghanistan. And to the Kosovo Liberation Army in Yugoslavia. It could have come from anywhere.”

“That’ll be lost in the fine detail,” predicted Lambert. “The only fact that matters is that it’s American.”

Cowley nodded toward a burn-blackened piece of metal. “You likely to get anything from that?”

Lambert shook his head. “I doubt it.” He turned to Martlew, a heavily bespectacled, unsmiling man. “The launcher for this thing is throwaway. We got it?”

Martlew shifted uncomfortably. “Seems the Russian militia guard outside the embassy picked it up.”

Lambert groaned audibly. “They still got it?”

Martlew said, “They refused to hand it over after our announcement of jurisdiction.”

“Great!” said Lambert.

“There could be a lot of other forensic stuff apart from this we’ll need your help on,” said Cowley.

Dimitri Danilov had just finished setting out the differences between the Russian and American forensic findings in the White House office of Georgi Chelyag. For several moments the presidential aide remained silent. Then he said, “It would be deliberate, of course. The tampering as well as everything else.”

“It has to be,” said Danilov. He was not sure how much of a risk he’d taken detailing all the obstruction and misdirection he’d encountered. But if he had any chance of breaking through it, he needed authority at the highest level. He would have liked the conversation to have been protectively recorded but none of it had been.

“The Americans know about it?”

“The intended forensic deception, certainly.”

“Which they could make public totally to justify their carrying out their own embassy investigation?” accepted the politically astute chief of staff.

“Yes,” Danilov agreed.

“Might they?”

Danilov thought the question too sweeping. “Not at my level,” he restricted himself.

“I can’t risk their doing it at mine,” mused Chelyag, thinking aloud. He shook his head at a further awareness. “Or risk purging-arresting as they should be arrested-the militia people who’ve done what they have to you. If it become public that we had-as it could too easily do-it would be even more justification for America.”

“Yes,” agreed Danilov, intrigued by a different sort of mental deduction.

“So to the Duma-and the communists-we’ll appear to confirm their accusations of willingly being subservient to Washington.”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” said Danilov. Could he get an answer to another uncertainty?

“I’ll find one,” said the politician.

Danilov acknowledged that he’d fully committed himself, telling Georgi Chelyag everything he knew and what he suspected from it. He might as well take things as far as he could. He asked, “There was a lot of initial confusion at the Washington embassy?”

The humorless man allowed himself the briefest of smiles. “I needed to test others. It was obvious you’d come on to me as you did. It was the only thing you could do.”

“Test for what?” persisted Danilov.

“Loyalty. Attitudes,” the political aide said generally.

“And?” questioned Danilov. He’d known from the beginning he was the puppet, so it would be ridiculous to be irritated by the manipulation. Instead he had to use it in any self-protective way he could, as he was now sure that there was some official involvement in the switching of the warhead evidence.

“There’s a lot of support for the old ways over the new.”

Surprising honesty, decided Danilov. “How does it affect the investigation?”

“You have my total support,” declared Chelyag. “And there’ll be no more shared sessions with anyone else.”

“I am officially answerable to Interior Minister Belik,” reminded Danilov. “I’ve been summoned immediately after this.”

“It’s countermanded by presidential authority. Which Belik will be told,” said the other man. “The same authority will get-through me-the personnel dismissals and changes you believe important in the old and new intelligence service.”

He was, Danilov recognized, very definitely between a rock and a hard place.

Pamela Darnley was excited. Unable quite yet to believe how the opportunity had finally come about. Sufficient that it had. No point-no reason-for any analysis. She’d had time to learn from William Cowley’s leadership. Now, as she’d told him at the very beginning, she was going to run with her chance. Prove herself as head of the American part of the investigation. Alone. In total, unshared control. She wasn’t frightened or unsure. She knew she could do it. Even knew how she was going to do it, surprised that it hadn’t occurred to anyone else, Cowley or Danilov in particular.