Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

“Both?” suggested Cowley.

“Wouldn’t he have been tortured and killed, as another example, if he was?” asked Danilov.

The room became silent, both men hunched over their transcripts.

“Why was Orlenko sorry?” demanded Cowley, not looking up. He quoted: “‘I’m sorry, incidentally …. It was business-only ever business …. Still unfortunate.’ What was? What’s that all about?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Danilov. “What we do know-can be positive about-is that for the moment there aren’t going to be any more outrages in America because their arsenal has gone.”

“It’s not empty here,” Cowley reminded. “Who are the outsiders she refers to? And the deal? She’s only interested in business, not in any revolutionary shit, so why’s she involved, as she obviously was, in the attack on the embassy?”

“Another question that has to go on hold,” said Danilov.

“Which plant are the warheads coming from, Moscow or Gorki?” demanded Cowley.

“Karpov had to be Nikov’s supplier: That’s why he died tied to him,” said Danilov. “Which points to Gorki. But the stenciling on the UN missile was wrong compared to the sample your forensic people checked. It could be either plant. Or one we don’t even know about.” He went to his transcript yet again. “She’s got virtually all the conventional stuff the Watchmen want. And the type of bazooka that hit your compound is everywhere-sixth line from the top.”

A gray dawn was spreading across the city outside, slowly, as if it really wasn’t interested in starting a new day. Cowley wasn’t sure if he was, either. He took a third scotch, ignoring Danilov’s look. Cowley said, “I think I’ll call the director.”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“That we know there’s most likely going to be another disaster and we don’t know how to prevent it.”

It wasn’t the defeatism of the remark that unsettled Danilov. It was the feeling that he’d missed the most important thing in the telephone conversation between Brooklyn and Moscow. As Cowley went into Barry Martlew’s office to make the Washington connection, Danilov pressed the replay button for the third time and listened to the tape in its entirety. The unsettled feeling didn’t go; it actually increased. “Told me to ask what the real political feeling was there: whether the Duma move against the president would come to anything” echoed in his mind and stared up at him from the printed page in his hand. Was that it? The reminder of what he’d done by ignoring not just the early-morning demand but the repeated afternoon telephone calls that Pavin had relayed from Interior Minister Nikolai Mikhailovich Belik?

Pamela Darnley was unsettled, too.

She’d carried a transcript and a copy of the telephone conversation with her on the first morning shuttle to Washington-calculating that professionally and politically the J. Edgar Hoover building was the place for her to be-refusing the irritation at Cowley talking directly with the director from Moscow, just as she’d discarded what she now embarrassingly accepted to have been an irrational disappointment that Orlenko hadn’t called Chicago.

There had been nothing to detract from what she’d achieved in sole command. From the long conversation she’d just concluded with a tired-sounding William Cowley, it appeared they were still going to need a miracle-several, maybe-to benefit from the tape or identify the unknown woman who’d featured on it. If anything concrete was going to emerge it would be linking Arseni Orlenko to a Chicago import-export firm. If she did that, it would again be to her credit, despite the lead coming from Moscow. Letting her mind run on, Pamela recognized that although, objectively, it would have achieved nothing-and risked destroying the only positive Russian lead they had-Cowley’s explanation why he and Danilov had not gone into the Golden Hussar, that they didn’t have the slightest clue to whom the woman was, had sounded lamely facile. She wondered if Leonard Ross had thought the same.

She had posed a number of questions to herself the previous evening in the Manhattan incident room. And she’d come up with some more since. Besides initiating the Chicago company search, it was time to regain a total overview: to look down from the top of the mountain of what they had, searching for what might have been overlooked.

“I’ll try not to get in the way.”

“There’s more than enough room,” said Patrick Hollis. He encompassed his office with a gesture. “If you like I could move out of here into the open room and you could have it all to yourself.” He felt totally relaxed, unfazed: enjoying it even. It was being interrogated by the enemy after being captured. Except that he hadn’t been captured. And wouldn’t be.

“That desk and the terminal out there are all I need,” Mark Wittier said. The FBI auditor was a dry, thin, bespectacled man whose overburdened briefcase sagged, strained against its side straps.

“You change your mind, all you’ve got to do is say. You think you’ll be here long?” Hollis had read books on interrogation technique: how to resist and throw questioners off the scent. This was classic so far. Affably willing to cooperate in every way, become the questioner rather than the questioned.

“Depends what we find. Sometimes it’s months.”

“What, exactly, are you looking for?” Still the questioner.

“What do you imagine?”

Careful: turned it back on him. “The gossip is that you’re in a lot of branches. If that’s true-a lot of branches, I mean-it’s a pretty substantial fraud.” He paused. “That’s what I’ve guessed.”

“You ever come across anything that seems out of order?”

Clever again. Avoid the question and ask another. Still not fazed, still in command. “Out of order?”

“Disparities. Things not quite adding up as they should?”

The moment for indignation. “Not in my department, Mr. Whittier! I’ve had Al in-house audits ever since I got appointed, and I’m proud of it. We talking a loan or securities fraud here? If we are, then I think I need to be told about it!”

Whittier’s supposedly reassuring smile clicked on and off, like a light switch. “Actually it’s customer accounts. Day-to-day transactions, things like that.”

Hollis was sure he allowed just the right amount of relaxation. “Afraid I can’t help you there. Not my division.”

“I know,” said Whittier. “That’s why it was thought best I work out of here: out of the way of everyone in the bank who deal day to day. Less upsetting.”

He had a reaction ready for that one. Hollis actually counted, in his head, stretching the apparent surprise. “You mean you believe the fraud is being committed from someone within the bank! An employee!”

“That’s how these things usually turn out.”

But not this time how the auditor imagined, thought Hollis. And even more certainly not how Robert Standing imagined, either.

When the Chicago agent in charge complained that the manpower drain to carry out a local shipping companies’ registration check, in addition to the rotating surveillance on the Lake Shore Drive public telephone, Pamela Darnley told him all other ongoing cases should be suspended and promised an immediate authorizing fax, which she sent with the promise to draft in more personnel if it became necessary. From the equally quick, unargued acceptance of everything she said, Pamela wondered if her confrontation with Al Beckinsdale had already been churned out through the gossip grinder. There was constant communication among Chicago, Washington, and New York, and from the hostility she could have bruised herself against in New York it was obvious it was common, apprehensive knowledge there.