Brian Freemantle - In the Name of a Killer

‘I don’t understand that,’ complained one of the aides.

‘That’s just how it happened,’ said Cowley, miserably. ‘We were following a normal investigation routine, trying to check out any known acquaintances of Ann Harris. At the beginning I was provided with Hughes’s embassy number, nothing else.’

‘By whom?’ demanded another aide.

‘Danilov, the Russian detective.’

‘Who produced the transcript?’

‘Danilov.’ It was already looking bad and was going to get worse. Not simply bad. Appalling.

‘Where is it, in full? I haven’t seen it. Just your verbatim note of what was put to Hughes at the second interview,’ intruded Ross, beside him.

Exposed by his own Director, thought Cowley: at the moment he felt he could have been exposed by a child of ten. ‘I don’t have it.’

‘You don’t have it!’ echoed both Directors, in unison and shared astonishment. The sighing aide sighed even more deeply.

‘Mr Cowley,’ said the Agency chief. ‘I’m trying very hard to follow what you’re saying. But you’re not making it easy. We know there’s an intercept direct into the offices of the head of the economic section of the US embassy in Moscow. We know the man had sex habits that expose him to blackmail. And we are being told — I think — that those intercepts could also throw up intimate facts about the dead relation of one of the most important people in Washington, someone who is going to become even more important. Let’s take it slowly, a step at a time, so it’ll all become clear to us. You said — your words — that Danilov produced the transcript. If he produced it, where the hell is it?’

Cowley waited a long time before speaking, not wanting to be caught out by a misplaced word any more than he already had been. ‘I would like to make something clear; something I think is necessary to explain. I am — was — in Moscow investigating the murder of the niece of someone you rightly describe as one of, if not the , most important politician in Washington. It’s already clear she’s the victim of a serial killer who’s also killed a Russian and is going to kill again, if he’s not caught. At one stage it appeared that killer was Paul Hughes. Can you imagine the fall-out of an American walking the streets of Moscow, killing people, one the niece of Senator Burden? I can’t! Of course I recognized by even getting the number that there was an intercept. But that was not my immediate concern: my immediate concern was getting an admission from the man. Arresting him …’ Cowley hesitated, aware that if he disclosed the moment he learned of the transcript — when the Militia Director and the Federal Prosecutor demanded a Russian presence at any encounter with Hughes — he would be admitting how he’d misled his own Director. He was soaked in sweat, able to feel the wetness beneath his arms and making its way down his back. Shifting the lie, anxious it would not be the misplaced word he was frightened of uttering, Cowley continued: ‘Danilov did not produce the transcript until we were facing Hughes, in his apartment, the second time. And not to me . To quote from, to break Hughes down.’

Silence iced the room.

‘And you just made notes?’ sneered an aide.

‘At that time, yes.’

‘That explanation could be considered a speech of mitigation,’ said Holmes, joining in the sneer.

‘It was intended to make clear what I considered perfectly acceptable circumstances,’ said Cowley, careless of the taut faces of the men sitting opposite. He’d lost so much there wasn’t a lot more he could lose.

‘Have you seen any part of the transcript?’ asked one of the unnamed Russian experts. He spoke breathily, identifying himself as the one who sighed.

‘No,’ admitted Cowley.

‘Didn’t you think the transcript important to have?’

‘Not at that exact moment!’ said Cowley, regretting the indignation sounding like a plea. ‘I was doing my job, not yours. And at that moment I was trying to get a confession.’

‘So you don’t have the sequence of the conversation, to know who was calling whom?’

Cowley looked steadily at the CIA Director. ‘I did not tell you — neither did I suggest in any report I sent from Moscow — that it was Hughes’s embassy telephone that was tapped. You’ve inferred that. I understood from Danilov that the calls to Hughes were outgoing , from the girl’s apartment …’ He suddenly decided that he did have cause for indignation. The meeting — perhaps interrogation was a better description — was turning events into an unjust accusation of his ineptitude. ‘Why is the sequence important? You know, from what I’ve told you, that there is a tap.’ Just as Andrews had told him, on the night of his arrival, that there were taps in the new embassy building, he remembered.

‘From his office telephone Hughes presumably speaks to a lot of others far more important than his kinky bed partners,’ suggested Holmes. ‘The Berlin Wall might be souvenir pieces now and the Cold War supposedly history, but we’re not shutting up shop, any more than what was the KGB. Economics — just how fast and how far Russia is going down the financial tube — is the prime target. We want to know how big a damage limitation we might be looking at here.’

‘Maybe as extensive as the one the Bureau would have been involved in if Hughes had been the killer,’ said Cowley, wanting to score if he could.

There was more face tightening. The sighing man said: ‘Can you get the transcript?’

Cowley glanced worriedly at the stenographer, unsure of the commitment. If the Russian investigator had intended the promise to abandon the personal competition. And if Russian intelligence didn’t insist that whatever it provided was excluded from any cooperation. Too many ifs. ‘I would hope to be able to.’

‘Is Danilov truly Moscow Militia? Or could he be from the Cheka?’

‘We’re working from Militia headquarters. His is in a used office, occupied a long time.’

‘That doesn’t mean it’s his office. Why can’t it be a prop?’

‘He knows his way around it: is familiar there. He acts like someone accustomed to investigating crime,’ insisted Cowley. Imagining another scoring point, he said quickly: ‘If Danilov were an intelligence officer, why would he blow Hughes, if Hughes were targeted or already suborned? Why, for that matter, would they let him?’

‘To bring about exactly what’s happened,’ said the CIA Director. ‘It doesn’t matter if Hughes comes through the polygraph tests like George Washington and the apple tree. Or goes on to resist all the other questioning there’s going to be. We’re not going to be able to believe him. So we and the State Department are going to have to go back through everything the man has ever provided during the time he’s been in Moscow and reassess and re-analyse and adjust every decision that might have been made, based upon it. It’s called disinformation and it’s a bastard.’

In the car returning to Washington, Cowley said: ‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t very good back there, was it?’

‘No,’ said Ross, shortly.

‘Do those guys look for microphones in the john, before they sit down?’

‘For cameras, too,’ said Ross. ‘It’s the way their minds work.’ He hesitated, thinking how good it would be to get out of Washington permanently. Pointedly he added: ‘I’d like to do better, if there’s a next time.’

When Cowley called Quantico from his hotel, a behavioural psychologist named Peter Meadows said the profile was complete with the additional material about the failed attack and that he’d be happy to discuss it. Judy Billington said on the telephone she didn’t know how she could help. Cowley said something might come up, as they talked. She said it would have to be after the funeral, naturally. Naturally, Cowley agreed.