The Watchmen Page 12

  The Russian president’s chief of staff spoke looking directly at Danilov, focusing everyone else’s attention. Each man sat in his same assigned seat. So did the stenographers, faithfully recording the eagerness to avoid blame. Danilov accepted that the risk in exceeding his rank or authority was awesome, but he couldn’t think of another way. He was, he realized, the only man in the room whose political allegiance wasn’t known. He was supposed to be apolitical, concerned only in the crime he was investigating, but then the Russian militia was supposed to be made up of honest men. He wished he could decide which faction to back.

  Yuri Kisayev said, “The relationship between us and Washington is at a very crucial stage. Our UN ambassador expects China to initiate a formal protest debate about the attack in the General Assembly. And that America is privately going along with the idea, because of the extra pressure it would put on us.”

  “Let’s retain some objectivity,” said Danilov’s immediate superior, Nikolai Belik. “America’s made absolutely no progress whatsoever. It’s politically expedient—politically obvious—to try to divert criticism on to us.”

  “Tell us, Dimitri Ivanovich,” demanded Viktor Kedrov, personally identifying Danilov for the note-takers, “exactly how far forward is our investigation?”

  Easily, prepared, Danilov recounted the previous day’s murders that linked the assassination of an accused weapons smuggler to a man who worked for a chemical and biological weapons establishment on the Moscow outskirts.

  General Sergei Gromov said, “From which plant did the warhead come? Surely you’ve been able to determined that!”

  “No,” Danilov replied, a decision forming in his mind.

  “The lettering—and where it was manufactured—was on the side of the damned thing!” attacked Gromov, with forced impatience. “That’s identification.”

  “No, it’s not,” replied Danilov. “The only apparent proof is the name of Gorki itself.” He pause. “Which is why I’m hoping you can help us, General.”

  The soldier’s face clouded at the sudden switch of attention. “Me! How!”

  “Control and distribution of these warheads was centralized. The letter and numbered designation was strictly controlled from your ministry here in Moscow. So it’s from here that the source will be positively established for the missile used in the UN attack.”

  The older man’s face blazed. Chelyag smiled very slightly.

  Gromov said, “What evidence—authority—do you have for saying that?”

  “The principal of the Gorki factory, confirmed yesterday by the professor in charge of Plant 43 here in Moscow,” Danilov stated flatly.

  “What’s the importance?” demanded Gromov.

  “From what I understand from both plants, this particular weapon—despite not working—was manufactured in their thousands, not just in Russia but in several of the republics that were part of the Soviet Union. Knowing that the canisters would survive, it would make every sense to mislead by stenciling the name of a Russian city from which it did not come, wouldn’t it?”

  The presidential chief of staff looked directly at Gromov. “But with everything being centralized, under military control, you should easily be able to find out from the numerical markings where it came from, shouldn’t you?”

  Gromov started to speak, changed his mind, and said on the second attempt, “From what Dimitri Ivanovich says, it was a long time ago.”

  “But the White House expects you to do it,” insisted Chelyag.

  “Perhaps there is something else your central records could help with?” pressed Danilov. “That emergency number, 876532. It’s Moscow. But the telephone authorities say it’s out of service and they can’t trace to whom or to what it was originally allocated. But your records should tell us that, too, shouldn’t they?” He was appearing almost too obviously to align himself with the new against the old.

  Gromov’s face was white now, not red, in his fury at virtually being questioning by someone he considered a subordinate. “I’ll make it part of the inquiry,” he said, recognizing that he had no alternative.

  “And I’ll raise it from the White House with the telephone authorities,” Chelyag said.

  Danilov had a professional detective’s ear for false notes in a rehearsed performance and located an undertone among the anti— White House group. To test the impression he had to appear to be opposing them, a chance he had to take because it was directly relevant to his ability to do his job properly. Confident he couldn’t be caught out with the lie, Danilov said, “The Americans have asked for an undamaged warhead, if one exists. I brought one back with me from Gorki … obtained another from Plant 43 yesterday—”

  “No!” interrupted Gromov, before Danilov finished. “That’s admitting we’ve breached the chemical weapons agreement.”

  Too quick, too defensive, judged Danilov. “With respect, I don’t believe it is. Everyone in this room knows we have breached it. I saw hundreds still stored both here and in Gorki. But the ones I am talking about are empty. We could relieve the diplomatic and political pressure by publicly announcing that by responding to the American request, we’re proving our compliance with the disposal treaty: that this is a museum example of a weapon created too long ago for the current government to be held in any way responsible and just as long ago abandoned.”

  “I like that argument!” Chelyag declared, at once.

  “What possible reason could they want them for?” demanded Kedrov.

  “Metal and size comparison,” responded Danilov, the improvised reasoning becoming clearer in his mind. “So we’re giving nothing away: There can’t be any dispute that the UN missile was ours.”

  “I think it’s a good idea, a gesture without substance,” said the deputy foreign minister. “It would certainly provide the ambassador with a response.”

  “And yourself,” encouraged Danilov. “To achieve the publicity—photographs even—we could announce in advance your personally delivering them to the U.S. Embassy.”

  “We’ll do it!” decided Georgi Chelyag, the man of ranking authority.

  “I want it officially recorded that I oppose it,” insisted Gromov.

  “As I do,” said Kedrov. “It’s a pointless gesture.”

  “Which is precisely why it’s so easy to make,” reminded the president’s advisor. To Danilov—but directing the remark to the stenographers—he said, “I want it recorded that Dimitri Ivanovich has made an extremely valuable contribution to today’s discussion.”

  Only a few days ago it hadn’t mattered to him whether he was vilified or not, thought Danilov. Now it did. It was like waking up from a sleep that had gone on too long. But still with too many terrifying nightmares.

  Yuri Pavin waited until Danilov had finished his account of the meeting before saying “Do you want me personally to deliver the warheads to the Foreign Ministry?”

  “No,” said Danilov. “Someone else from the department.”

  Pavin frowned. “Is that a good idea?”

  “I’m going to make it one,” said Danilov. “Before you hand it over—before you even take it out of your car—I want you to scrape off some paint samples and break off some metal that won’t be obvious. Keep one sample for me. Give the other one to forensics”—he took two envelopes of Gorki samples from his pocket, passing them across to the other man—“with these. I want them very specifically and separately marked and signed for as being from Plant 35 at Gorki, from Plant 43 here, and from the empty warheads going to the Americans.”

  Pavin didn’t speak for several moments. “You think it’s that bad?”

  “Yes,” Danilov said flatly.

  “Then we’ll never get anywhere with this investigation.”

  “We will,” insisted Danilov. “People are trying to make me look stupid. I’m going to prove that I’m not.”

  “The pathologist says there are definitely two distinct sets of lung hemorrhage lesions,” announced Pavin, moving on. “The worst torture both Ni
kov and Karpov suffered was to be partially drowned, revived into consciousness, and then brought to the point of drowning a second time.”

  Danilov stared down at the pathologist’s report that Pavin put in front of him, carefully going through the injuries. Looking up to the other man he began, “That doesn’t make sense,” but stopped. “The same!” he started again. “Each was tortured in exactly the same manner and to exactly the same extent.”

  “Yes?” Pavin frowned, doubtfully.

  “Nikov was a bull, a professional killer. Used to violence,” reminded Danilov. “He’d have tortured like this himself, held out under questioning much longer than Karpov. But if Karpov had been interrogated about some information he had he would have broken, told whoever it was what they wanted to know long before so much was done to him. These were example killings, to warn others.”

  “It was good of you to come,” said Cowley.

  “I tried yesterday but it took this long to get a security clearance,” said Pauline. “And there’s a guard in the corridor. You really think they might try to get to you here in the hospital!”

  “I don’t. The bureau does. There’s a lot the bureau and I don’t seem to be agreeing about.” Her hair was much shorter than she’d worn it the last time they’d met, and it was colored a deeper auburn. He thought she was slimmer, too. And looked terrific in the matching sweater and slacks.

  “So how are you?”

  “Better. The battle lasted all afternoon, but I compromised with the specialist in the end. I stay overnight and I can discharge myself tomorrow. He wants a waiver though. Which I’m giving him.”

  She sniggered, embarrassed. “You look funny with that great pad on your head. And you’re going to look funnier when it comes off. They’ve shaved off half your hair.”

  Cowley laughed with her. “I did a deal on the waiver. Tomorrow I get a much smaller, less dramatic dressing. I’ve got a meeting with the director.”

  Pauline’s face straightened. “You can’t be well enough to go back to work, William!”

  He’d always liked the way she’d called him William, never Bill. “I can see perfectly and my hearing’s coming back. The head’s practically healed and so’s the rib.” He hesitated, seeing the opportunity. “I could just maybe do with a little home help.”

  His former wife didn’t pick up on the remark. Instead she said, “I think you’re crazy.”

  “I sit in an office and make plans for other people to carry out.”

  “You walked into a building that might have been full of fatal germs and escaped being blown to pieces by a fucking miracle!”

  “Rare,” he said with attempted lightness.

  “Don’t, William. What have you got to prove?”

  He felt warmed by the concern. “It’s not proving anything. There needs to be a more experienced case officer: The panic’s percolating down. And there seems to be a problem with Dimitri in Moscow.” They’d met when Danilov had been in Washington the last time.

  “I thought you got on well with him. Partners, you said?”

  “I do. Others don’t seem to. If there’s a reason he’d tell me, because it’s like partners. He trusts me. Not anybody else. It’s instinctive in Moscow, in his position, not to trust people.”

  Pauline nodded to the bedside telephone. “You could call Moscow from here.”

  “Not a secure line,” Cowley said glibly. “Let’s stop talking about me. How about you? How’ve you been?”

  “Fine. More than fine, I guess. Terrific.”

  “That sounds … I’m not sure what it sounds like.”

  “I was going to call, suggest we meet, before all this.”

  “Why?”

  Her shoulders rose and fell. “It might seem funny, us so long over I mean, but I wanted to tell you myself. Not, I suppose, that you’d have heard from anyone else.” She smiled. “I’m getting married again, William.”

  “That’s wonderful!” he forced himself to say. “Really great.”

  “His name’s John,” she said. “John Brooks. He’s an orthodontist. That’s how I met him, at a dental practice. Can you believe that! He’s just bought into a partnership on the West Coast, San Diego. So we’ll be moving to the sunshine.” She smiled. “Sunshine’s good for people getting older, so they say.”

  “So they say,” he agreed. “I wish you all the luck and love.” Cowley had to force that, too.

  “I knew you would.”

  Hollis had gotten to work intentionally early that morning, to be there when Carole arrived, which he watched her do from his window overlooking the parking lot, and called her extension the moment she reached her station. He’d rehearsed what to say—written it down, against his breath tightening—but she’d said she was busy for the rest of the week and didn’t want to plan the next this early, so why didn’t they take a raincheck and talk later. When he’d gone for coffee, she’d been sitting with Robert Standing and didn’t even acknowledge him.

  10

  Cowley took the Tylenol the nurse offered and went to the bathroom to take another from the bottle with which they discharged him. As the bureau car drove downtown from the George Washington Hospital, Cowley gazed out at the White House and across the parks to the needle-like monument and the other memorials. He could see the nipple of the Capitol dome, too, over the far closer Treasury Building, and felt a lurch of despair at so many targets laid out like ducks at a shooting gallery. There seemed to be far more demonstrators than usual outside the White House. One of the banners read “Avenge the Innocent Dead” and the red paint had been allowed to drip, like blood. “Justice not Inaction” was written on another.

  The car shuddered over the bureau’s tire-tearing security ramp, jarring Cowley’s chest. Just before he got out of the car he took another Tylenol. It was difficult to swallow without water, and the coughing hurt.

  There was a lot of glad-handing in the entry lobby, where Leonard Ross’s personal assistant was already waiting. On the way up in the elevator the man said he looked great, which Cowley knew he didn’t from examining himself in a hospital mirror just before he left. Illogically, his size seemed to make the weight loss more obvious, and instead of minimizing the head injury the smaller dressing drew attention to how much hair had been cut away. Cowley thought that rather than look like a covering, the dressing itself looked like a deformity growing from the side of his head. Which throbbed, as his chest did, despite the Tylenol.

  There was coffee and Danish already set out in the lounge area of the director’s suite. Ross came across the room to greet him and afterward personally poured the coffee. Cowley tried to prevent any awkwardness—certainly any facial reaction to the jab of pain—as he came forward to accept the cup. He had wondered if Pamela Darnley would be included and was glad she wasn’t: glad, in fact, that there was no one else except himself and the director.

  The no-nonsense former judge said, “You look like shit.”

  The tone of the meeting had been quickly established, Cowley accepted. “Surface appearance. I’m fine. I told Pamela I wouldn’t risk this investigation by not being fit enough to go on with it.”

  “And she told me,” said Ross. “Your neurologist also told me he would have liked you to have stayed for another week.”

  “Every doctor’s worried about his malpractice insurance.” Pepper’s parting words had been that he expected him to be readmitted in two or three days.

  “I can’t risk it, Bill. You any idea the sort of heat we’re under? The bureau most of all.”

  “I’ve seen the coverage. Which is why I want to get back.” He shook his head against an offered Danish and wished he hadn’t.

  Ross took one, crumbling it on his plate. “You want to explain that?”

  “OK. I’m still slow, physically. But I can sit at a desk, think things through. You see that half-assed discussion on television after the funeral, some guy suggesting these bastards had frightened themselves so badly they wouldn’t do it again?” He hoped h
e had properly understood the tone of this meeting.

  “I heard about it.”

  “That really the guidance from here?”

  “No!” Ross said positively. “I’m guessing at political pressure from the White House, although Norton denies it. Necessary for people to feel they can sleep safely in their beds at night.”

  “So by how much is the heat going to be turned up on us—you—here at the bureau when the next attack comes, which it surely will, and the fact that we didn’t think another attack would happen is thrown right back at us!” demanded Cowley.

  “I’m ahead of you.” The director sighed.

  “Doesn’t the fact that I’m making the point prove I’m fit enough to come back here and think of things as a whole and not in panicked isolation?”

  Ross smiled fleetingly. “Clever argument.”

  “Valid argument,” insisted Cowley. He cautiously waved an arm toward the city outside. “You have any idea how many targets there are out there after the U.N. tower and the trade towers before that!”

  “There’s already extra security around all the obvious ones.”

  “Which again was leaked, from here, to the Post two days ago. So when the hit comes that’ll be thrown back, too.”

  “Providing you’re right.”

  “I am,” said Cowley. The headache had gone and his chest was easier, scarcely any discomfort. “But there’s an even stronger, practical reason for my being back here. Pamela doesn’t think she’s getting the cooperation from Moscow.”

  “That’s why I agreed to see you today,” disclosed Ross. “I thought there was a special relationship?”

  “There is, between Danilov and myself,” said Cowley, deciding that to succeed he had to go as far as he could and exaggerate as much as was necessary—knowing the conditions in Moscow, there was hardly cause to exaggerate. “Moscow isn’t Washington and their Organized Crime Bureau isn’t like us.” He hesitated. The director set the tone, he reminded himself. “Here the only corruption is ambition, which I guess is how it should be. At Ulitza Petrovka virtually everyone from the janitor upward is on the take: Capone’s Chicago was a kindergarten by comparison. More people—politicians as well as his own organization—are working against Dimitri than with him.”