Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

“Yes,” the man agreed doubtfully.

“Roanne shouldn’t have been allowed access, for instance, to the gatehouse ID computer system, should she?”

“No.”

“Remember you found a phony band on one of the garage terminals that shares the gatehouse database?”

The man nodded agreement.

“Although it’s part of the ordering division, the accounts and invoice office is separate, isn’t it? Actually on a different floor, according to the plan you gave me?”

Ashton nodded again. All the color had gone from his face. He was swallowing a lot, as if he were trying to force back the need to retch. His hands had gone back to the edge of the desk, holding on.

“There was a band there, you’ll remember. And that other one in the mail room: on the computer system that records incoming and outgoing mail-including the e-mail-in the building. Roanne shouldn’t have gotten anywhere near any of those: different floors, different security-classified divisions that her pass wouldn’t have accessed. And do you know what, there’s no forensic evidence that she actually did! Her fingerprints are over all the others, where her pass would have allowed her. But not on those three. There are prints, but they’re smudged too badly to be positive. But because there were so many elsewhere, we assumed she’d fixed those, too.”

“What are you saying?” demanded Ashton.

“I’m saying that Roanne, with a supposed Black Power background, was the deception, the decoy: like the virtually harmless explosion at the Washington Monument-with which she was also connected-was a deception. And littering the Pentagon with so many false antistatic bands was a deception.”

“To achieve what?”

“The concealment of the real cracker the Watchmen have here that we were never supposed to find: someone who really knows how to use a computer and is probably responsible for all the website postings that we’ve believed-because we were supposed to believe-came from outside, through all the back doors Roanne opened for them.”

The man looked solemnly at her for several moments. “How are we going to find who it is? Prove you’re right?

“I don’t know. But we might prove whether I’m right or not by checking the new antistatic bands at really sensitive levels-the ones you checked once and found to be safe.” She stopped, trying to think of something she might have missed. “The ones that, having been guaranteed safe, wouldn’t be checked again until the next regular security sweep.”

“You know what they could do-disrupt or destroy even-if they’ve penetrated the higher levels: gone sideways to one of our connected agencies!”

“Communication satellites: intelligence-gathering satellites?” guessed Pamela.

“Dear God, I hope you’re wrong,” said Ashton in a voice that sounded as if he didn’t think she was.

Danilov insisted they take what they considered quantum-leap discoveries back to the security-guaranteed U.S. Embassy, leaving Pavin to supervise the extended search through the remaining intelligence records. They did so discreetly and with Paul Lambert, the two breakthrough dossiers hidden in briefcases-one Lambert’s-before quitting the lecture room to go through the corridors of Petrovka. They avoided the chanting protesters just as discreetly by entering the legation from the bordering alley on which Aleksandr Pushkin’s house is preserved as a monument to the poet.

The date of his dismissal made Ivan Gavrilovich Guzov a victim of the KGB disbandment. The file picture was of a heavily built man with the swarthy skin and swept-back, deeply black hair of his Armenian ancestry. Compared against the snatched surveillance photograph Guzov had gained at least ten pounds, maybe more. From the listed date of birth in his dossier, he was now thirty-eight years old. He was described as a bachelor. When he read that Guzov had been a middle-ranking finance officer in the First Chief Directorate, with special responsibility for North America and Canada, Cowley, the counterespionage expert, said, “Paymaster for overseas deep cover or diplomatic agents.”

“Who as paymaster would have had details-and access to their archives-of all those agents,” completed Danilov.

“At last a shape, a pattern!” said Cowley.

“Was the realtor business from which Orlenko is renting Brooklyn the legitimate business he was referring to if anything happened to Guzov?” wondered Danilov. “If it is, there’s no purpose in continuing the company search in Chicago.”

Cowley considered the question. “It’s already been started. I’ll let it run. And add Guzov’s name. Chicago seems to come up a lot, and it is a shipping entry point into America.”

Yevgenni Mechislavovich Leanov had also worked at Lubyanka for the old KGB. He was forty-two years old and ironically had attended the same Moscow University language college as Dimitri Danilov, although two years later. Leanov had joined the intelligence organization directly after he had graduated, with distinction, and for two years acted as deputy supervisor for the English language department. The last listed Moscow address was Ulitza Krymskij Val.

Cowley said, “I’m surprised they let him go.”

“There’s never any logic in Russian bureaucracy,” said Danilov.

“The file says he’s married,” Cowley pointed out. “Be interesting to hear what his wife’s voice sounds like?”

“We’re getting a voice analysis from the intercepted conversation, incidentally,” came in Lambert. “Arriving in tomorrow’s diplomatic bag.” The forensic scientist stopped at the sudden expression on Danilov’s face. “What?”

Danilov frowned, shaking his head: “I just had the oddest recollection. Stupid. There was something about the tape when I first heard it: couldn’t think what it was, but now it’s come to me. I thought I’d heard the woman’s voice before.”

Now Cowley regarded the Russian quizzically. “How? When?”

Danilov was embarrassed, particularly in front of Paul Lambert, whom he scarcely knew. “It’s ridiculous. Forget it.”

Lambert said, “The analysis is that it’s a Muscovite accent. Age range between thirty-four and forty-five, which is pretty wide.”

Danilov shook his head again. “It’s ridiculous,” he repeated.

“You want to listen to the tape again?” offered Lambert.

“We’ve got more positive leads to follow,” dismissed the Russian.

That was Pamela Darnley’s thought when she got back to the J. Edgar Hoover building to further developments and a coincidence about voice recognition that had occurred to her and Danilov within an hour of each other.

Besides reacting to Cowley’s instructions to add Guzov’s name to the Chicago company search, Terry Osnan had liaised with Manhattan, from which the New Jersey surveillance was being coordinated, to suggest it be intensified. He handed Pamela the list she’d asked for earlier and said, “We could draw a total of fourteen people from Seattle, Austin, and Atlanta for that and to build up Chicago.”

“Let’s do it,” she decided. Pamela didn’t fill the incident room coordinator in on her Pentagon visit, wanting the further confirmation of Carl Ashton’s promised computer sweep to announce her deduction as an unarguable fact instead of a theory based for the moment on an inexplicable date difference.

Instead she went back to her earlier review. Because she’d urged the tapping of the public telephones, she concentrated on the billing from Bay View Avenue from which the calling pattern had first emerged. She began searching for patterns additional to those already established in the four cities, even though there’d already been a computer comparison that hadn’t thrown up any extra ones. She created her own handwritten pattern blocks, listing on a yellow legal pad Chicago, Manhattan, Pittsburgh, and Washington against the dates of the calls for more repetitions that hadn’t already been eliminated, curious now that she knew the added significance of the New Jersey property company that no calls were recorded to its number from Orlenko’s house. On impulse she even looked for a call from Brooklyn to the public booth at the New Rochelle mall from which the booby-trap massacre had been initiated. There wasn’t one.