Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

At the end of half an hour the only thing Pamela noted was the absence of contact between Trenton and Brooklyn. She noted it on her pad, although she was unsure of its importance or relevance. She was looking too hard, wanting too much, Pamela warned herself. If she was right about the Pentagon, which she was convinced she was, it would be her unqualified, unshared success-probably reaching the president himself, for the earthquake it would cause-and that had to be enough. Was enough.

It was probably because earlier she’d looked for the New Rochelle number on Orlenko’s records that Pamela played the Highway Patrol copy tape of the burning cruiser report. She did so absently; for the first few seconds of what lasted less than a minute Pamela only half listened. But then, abruptly, she rewound the tape to the beginning.

There’s what looks like a large fire in the woods by the New Rochelle creek …

Can you give me a name, madam …

It could be a boat with people on board. You’d better get there, check it out.

Madam …. ?

The sound of the telephone being replaced.

She’d heard the voice before. Just as quickly as the certainty came to her, so did the stupidity of it. She found the voiceprint analysis from Osnan’s meticulous indexing, the doubt growing with its first line that an obvious attempt had been made at disguising distortion, although the intonation had been from a Southern, not a northern, state. She listened to it several more times and then to the first eavesdropping on Bay View Avenue, concentrating on Mary Jo’s voice. Mary Jo, she remembered, who had been born in Atlanta, Georgia, but whose Southern accent was not immediately recognizable. There was a similarity, but … Looking too hard, wanting too much, she thought. But there was no record of a scientific comparison being made, when there should have been. Another oversight to be corrected.

It was midafternoon, long after she’d given the voice comparison instructions, when Leonard Ross personally told her the attorney general-and all four district attorneys, even the reluctant New York legal chief-had agreed to the requested taps on all the public telephones.

Carl Ashton’s contact was an hour later. “We found a phony band on a terminal line of one of the Joint Chief’s secretaries.”

“Oh, Jesus!” said Ross, when Pamela called him back.

Patrick Hollis had been particularly careful that the workstation allocated to the FBI auditor was directly outside his own glass-walled office. Mark Whittier was in his sight line at all times without Hollis appearing constantly to watch the man.

Hollis was sure he detected the physical reaction-a slight, pushed-back-in-his-chair start, then a quick coming forward over the keyboard-when Whittier detected the first intrusion. Because he was so attentive, Hollis saw the beginning of the instinctive glance of triumph toward him from the man and was able to turn away, appearing to look into a drawer, before it was completed. When he stared back into the open plan room, Whittier was already talking animatedly into the telephone.

To have registered as positively as it had with the auditor the transfer would have had to have been exactly what he’d warned against, dollars instead of cents, Hollis knew. What good was a general who ignored intelligence? That was the recipe for losing battles, not winning them.

The Pentagon discovery caused the earthquake Pamela Darnley anticipated, the aftershocks rippling from Washington to Moscow-and Henry Hartz-and back again. Crisis meetings were convened at varying levels in both capitals, for people unsure what to do to sound-to themselves, at least-as if they did.

Pamela rode expectantly to the American White House with Leonard Ross but was disappointed by the meeting. Although it established her personal recognition at the highest level, the encounter was chaired by Chief of Staff Frank Norton, not the president himself. She was ready, if a further chance came; prepared to make it, if it didn’t, although aware that she had to be careful of her self-promotion appearing too obvious.

Hartz was patched through-visually, by television satellite, as well as audibly-to announce he was informing the Russian president as a precaution against knee-jerk retaliation to whatever and however the terrorists utilized their access.

“They may not intend to, not immediately,” intruded the FBI director, briefed more completely than anyone apart from Pamela, whose presence was advisory. For the first time Ross outlined the intercepted conversation between Brooklyn and Moscow to the entire group. He said, “They’ve had the Pentagon access we didn’t suspect for a week. Instead of using it, they want more weapons, germ and biological as well as conventional. Which we believe we know how they’re financing. If they’d wanted to use the Pentagon access they could have done so already.”

“You got any more maybes, mights, and on-the-other-hands?” demanded CIA Director John Butterworth. “We can’t make any sensible decision based on those hypotheses!”

“We can,” insisted Ross, the calmest person in the room. “There’s one very necessary and very sensible decision that’s absolutely essential. It’s that the Russians mustn’t make our Pentagon disaster public. They must limit it, even within their own White House. If the terrorists get the slightest hint of how much we know, they won’t wait. They’ll use their Pentagon intrusion to do God knows what.”

It was Norton who posed the question to the Pentagon officials. “What could they do?”

“Virtually whatever they damned well like,” said General Sinclair Smith, making it an accusation against Carl Ashton, sitting beside him. “Realign-misdirect-satellites. Access operational secrets up to the security level of presidential decision. Send ships and aircraft around in circles with false orders.” He spread his hands helplessly. “Think of your worst-nightmare scenario. Treble it and try to imagine something worse. You’ll be getting there.”

“You’re telling us it’s out of control?” said Norton.

“Is that what I’m saying, Carl?” the general asked the man next to him.

Ashton said, “We’re working-already started-from the top down. All satellite operational and activating codes are being changed. Every password, entry code, and system is being switched and reprogrammed. And not just firewalled but iron-boxed-”

“What the hell’s firewalled and iron-boxed!” Hartz broke in impatiently from Moscow.

“A firewall is a barrier between a cluster of machines and outside use,” said Ashton. “An iron box is an added precaution that’s sometimes better described in hacker-or cracker-jargon as a flytrap. Any unauthorized entry is caught, and if the connection is long enough, it can be traced. Any unauthorized ID-which in this case would be the old entry codes and passwords, all of which we know-will be picked up immediately.”

“A question,” announced Butterworth. “You’ve been tricked, right? Some son of a bitch is still inside the Pentagon-some son of a bitch who really knows how to use a computer and can do what he likes with it. It doesn’t matter a damn how much we keep it all under wraps, hidden from the public. He’ll know, won’t he? But we don’t know who it is so we can’t stop him finding out.”

“All the satellite changes aren’t being made from inside the Pentagon for that very good reason,” said Ashton. “It’s being done by the National Security Agency, and it’ll be completed by midnight tonight. By dawn tomorrow-again by the National Security Agency-everything at presidential level will be reprogramed-”