Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

She wasn’t unhappy to be tagged a ball-breaker. Rather it was the reputation-the fear-she wanted. All it needed for her to be sucked down into quicksand oblivion was one mistake-someone failing instantly to react or recognize, as Beckinsdale had failed. She hadn’t realized, in the beginning, how useful that episode would be.

Based on her newly acquired cover-your-ass headquarters’ expertise, she enclosed a copy of her Chicago authorization to Leonard Ross that a register check was a way to locate the U.S. entry route of the next germ warfare weapon. It wasn’t, however, her major communication. Aware of Cowley’s direct contact with the man, Pamela turned her memorandum accompanying the actual tape and its transcript into an analysis, stressing what she considered an overwhelming priority.

A tap on the now clearly abandoned Bare Necessities telephone would have provided the number from which the weapon ordering call had been made, giving them a voiceprint. Knowing now, as they did, that another combined germ and biological attack was planned, there surely couldn’t be any constitutional or legal argument against tapping the public telephones on the Bay View Avenue billing records not just for Chicago but for Washington and Pittsburgh.

Terry Osnan arrived while she was in the middle of composing the memo. Without stopping Pamela handed him the Golden Hussar transcript and companies’ search instructions to Chicago.

He waited until she’d finished before saying “If we’d spoken last night, I could have set this up then.”

“It was even later in Chicago and only eight A.M. there today-two hours before the company records office opens-when I organized it all. We didn’t lose any time.” She hoped the incident room coordinator, who’d argued against her Beckinsdale complaint, wasn’t going to become a carping pain in the ass.

“It could be good,” judged the man.

“I want the master file. I’m going to do a complete review personally.”

There was a visible stiffening in the slim, fair-haired man. “I review everything in context as it comes in.”

Pamela sighed. “This isn’t any sort of attack, criticism. I haven’t reviewed everything in context-know, properly, where the pieces fit and where they don’t. I’m the joint controlling case officer but I’ve only been involved in parts. I need to know- should know-everything as completely as I know just some. OK?”

“OK,” Osnan said doubtfully.

Feather-smoothing time, Pamela decided; ball-breaker was all right, scalpel-wielding emasculator wasn’t. “So help me, Terry. What have I missed out, failed to do?” Quickly she corrected, “What might Bill and I failed to have done?”

“Nothing,” the man said tightly. “If you had-either of you-I would have pointed it out, obviously.” He waved the transcript he still held like a flag. “And as I said, the Chicago lead here really could be a step-a lot of steps-forward.”

“Do me a favor,” said Pamela. “Run a check, where we’ve withdrawn people, where there’s people we could still bring in. Just in case we’ve got to build up even more.”

“Chicago’s isn’t the only complaint,” said Osnan. “I’ve had it from Los Angeles, Houston, and Minnesota. And that was before we virtually took over the entire fraud division for the bank investigation. And sent half of forensic to Moscow. We get a major, competing crime and the overstretch is going to snap.”

“What would you say is a major crime likely to compete with a biological germ attack on an American city?”

“Just doing what you asked me, flagging up the hot spots,” said Osnan.

“And I appreciate it,” said Pamela. “Anne sends her love. I’m recommending a commendation for her picking up like she did.”

Pamela read the master file steadily, unhurriedly, breaking off more than once to go out into the larger room with the folder in hand to look at the scene-of-crime photographs of the United Nations building, the New Rochelle massacre, and the Washington Monument bait for the failed Lincoln Memorial trap. Each had its own individual pinboard, but Pamela remained in front of photographs of Roanne Harding in her Lexington Place apartment longer than the rest, finally stepping back to see all the illustrations at the same time.

After returning to her office, she abandoned the master file for the complete evidence dossier of the murder, which was cross-referenced to her own inquiries at the Pentagon. There was still an FBI team on the case but as a murder investigation, it was totally stalled. As Paul Lambert had warned, the apartment had virtually been polished clean of any forensic evidence and the decomposition had destroyed any evidential medical finding, certainly semen traces for a DNA match if Roanne Harding had been raped, which he also couldn’t prove.

Although Roanoke did appear to have been her hometown, the bureau team there had failed to locate friends or anyone who remembered her in any useful detail, despite local newspaper appeals that included publishing the Pentagon personnel photograph. Her teacher (“a quiet child who had difficulty in learning”) believed she’d left the town after grade school (“I thought the whole family had moved on”), and whatever had attracted the FBI to the parents’ black protest activities hadn’t been registered by the local police, who had no record whatsoever of the family. The graves of the mother and father were in the Baptist cemetery. There was no reference on the headstone to the grief of any child at their passing.

It didn’t fit, Pamela decided abruptly.

The UN missile had failed to explode because of a fluke, and the Lincoln Memorial explosion had been prevented by William Cowley’s clever lateral thinking, but both had been painstakingly-brilliantly, by terrorist criteria-conceived. As had the New Rochelle booby trap and the monument lure. But somehow-she couldn’t at that moment decide how-killing Roanne Harding seemed different: unconnected, although it wasn’t. And despite the efforts of the killers to make it appear so.

So what didn’t fit? Roanne Harding herself, perhaps? A girl with two names but no friends, no family, no lovers, no past, no future. A good choice, objectively, to infiltrate the Pentagon and its computer systems and humiliate America throughout the world. Except that she hadn’t been a good choice. She’d attached the phony antistatic bands upon which her fingerprints had been found, giving the Watchmen incalculable access. But she’d drawn attention to herself-gotten fired-because she was so incompetent at the job she was supposed to do. Was that it? Was attaching the bands all she’d had to do? After which she became, quite literally, disposable? No, Pamela answered herself at once. Roanne had also had to wipe the personnel records of possibly disgruntled dismissed employees. But hadn’t erased her own. Predictable, typical incompetence? Or … Pamela experienced the briefest feeling of numbness. It took her only minutes to find the notes-her own-that she wanted. And after that Paul Lambert’s forensic reports on the antistatic bands upon which Roanne Harding’s fingerprints had been found.

Hurriedly she reached for the telephone.

There were 120 photographs of women-the majority accompanied by men-from the Golden Hussar. Having been there, Cowley openly admitted the impossibility of photographing everyone and demanded an honest assessment of how many more might have been missed. The combined estimate, from the front and rear surveillance, came to twenty. Bad light and obstructing vehicles and people blurred the definition of ten of the 120 beyond any reasonable identification and the quality on a lot of the others was bad. The bristlechinned Cowley said, “Another fucking waste of time! What’s going to tell us who she is, even if she’s on one that’s half good!”