The Watchmen Read online

  “Poor bastards,” said Hamish. “It would have been instantaneous, though.”

  Cowley realized that, incredibly, the missile had entered perfectly through an actual window, the glass of which would have presented no obstacle and probably accounted for the warhead remaining intact. All the other damage would have been caused by the peripheral shock waves. He said so and Schnecker agreed. Cowley was glad an astutely intelligent observation would go on record. He was at once embarrassed at the reflection in the close proximity of the dead people.

  There were creaks of further settling masonry and a slight fall of dust and grit from what had once been an adjoining office. Schnecker said, “Don’t touch anything that might be a support. It wouldn’t take much to bring the roof in on us.”

  Hamish edged in first with his camera, keeping as far away as possible from the needle points of the shattered door. He turned off the police camera and said, “It is a first. Nothing like it in any of our manuals. Double-aligned canister warhead, estimated meter in length, estimated fifteen millimeters in circumference—”

  “Damaged,” Schnecker broke in. “Indentation to the left nose cone. We’ll test before moving them. We can record the specifics from the pictures.”

  Burgess and Pointdexter stooped side by side, clicking their meter controls through test sequences. It was Pointdexter who said, “At nine thirty-two the warhead appears to be intact, with no evidence of leaking.”

  “Affirmative,” confirmed Burgess.

  Slowly, spacing the words, Schnecker said, “I am now going to move the warhead for the lettering to be deciphered. From the visual appearance, it looks as if it has snapped from the mountings of its delivery system, the fins and body of which are badly crushed and distorted. Hank … ?”

  “Providing it is structurally safe to do so, I intend examining what could be the entry trajectory,” took up Burgess. “I agree from what external examination is possible that at the soft point of impact, through the window, the device spun into reverse and that the inert delivery section of the missile and residual shock caused the damage.”

  “Which had the effect of shielding the nose cones and preventing the warhead from exploding to release whatever the contents are,” completed Schnecker. “Ready with the detectors?”

  “Affirmative,” replied Pointdexter and Burgess in unison. They set their meters side by side, against the nearest canister edge.

  From a bag he shrugged from his shoulder, Schnecker took matching, rubber-encased long-nosed pliers the mouths of which were adjustable by a shaft-mounted control knob to fit the diameter of an object. The team leader connected each grip individually to the top and bottom of the warhead, locking the jaws in place. He said, “Ten-oh-five. I am starting to lift. There appears to be no triggering attachment linking the warhead to its delivery rocket … no resistance from anything not externally visible … no register on any of the three detectors … . I am now turning the head, for the lettering to be visible …”

  “Gorki,” read Cowley, at once. “Plant 35. Numerals in spaced groups: 19 gap 38 gap 22 gap 22 gap zero. And sarin. The word is sarin, on the head nearest to me. Then comes the words poison, highly toxic. And an emergency telephone number: 8765323. The date is January 1974.” He strained, as Schnecker slowly rotated the warhead now totally removed from its pod. “It says Gorki on the second arm. Plant 35. Different numeral markings: 20 gap 49 gap 88 gap zero gap six … and anthrax. The word is anthrax. The same date as on the first. And the same poison and toxicity warning. The same emergency telephone number. Definitely sarin on one, anthrax on the other.”

  In front of him, Pointdexter and Burgess finally calibrated their detectors to the chemical and biological agents. Pointdexter said, “There is no leak.”

  “Affirmative,” said Burgess.

  For the benefit of the relayed recording, Schnecker said, “We have recovered intact a dual-headed missile of a design unrecognizable to us. Manufacturing designation is Gorki, Russia, Plant 35. With the missile separated from its delivery rocket, it is possible to see at the base to which the head was originally fixed what appears to have been intended puncturing detonator pins.” The team leader moved slightly for Hamish to bring his camera in closer. “Both are bent, one snapped completely off and lying on the floor below … I am now removing the warhead, separate from its delivery mechanism, from where it might be crushed by the further collapse of ceiling or room debris … . Technician Burgess will independently remove the delivery system.”

  Hamish said, “We don’t have a neutralizing container it’ll fit.”

  “We’ll have to take it as it is—” began Schnecker, jerking to a stop at a rasping, tearing noise and then a burst of dust from the most badly damaged, river-fronting office as more ceiling fell in. “All out, slowly,” he started again. “You really need that trajectory trace, Neil?”

  “I’ll be careful,” the ballistics expert replied.

  Everyone except Hamish walked back to the safety of the area immediately outside the elevator bank. Once there, Schnecker and Pointdexter transferred the warhead to a rubber-meshed carrying sling.

  Schnecker said, “I’d like to get this back and safely locked away without any Washington detours.”

  “There’ll be a lot for me to do here in New York, so I’ll stay,” said Cowley. Where should I begin? he wondered.

  Everyone turned at Hamish’s exit from the shattered offices farther along the corridor. At the empty door of the room in which the bodies lay, the man briefly crossed himself before coming toward them, patting the camera in satisfaction.

  To the FBI division chief Schnecker said, “We’ll have to stay suited up all the way back to Fort Meade, just in case this starts to leak, so you’ll be safer here in New York anyway.”

  “How’s that?” demanded Cowley.

  It was Burgess who reached out, touching the tear in the left sleeve of Cowley’s protective suit. Burgess said, “We probably could have saved you if only one had detonated, knowing what we were dealing with. But you’d have felt like hell for a very long time. Not so sure how you’d have been if both had gone off, like they were obviously intended to.”

  Furnishing his Ulitza Petrovka office with the latest available flatscreen television was one of several indulgences Dimitri Ivanovich Danilov allowed himself after his confirmation as operational director of Moscow’s Organized Crime Bureau. Another was ensuring it received American CNN newscasts, which enabled him to watch live the unfolding events in New York. He’d wondered if Cowley had been the unnamed FBI official to whom the helicopter-borne reporters had referred, long before the familiar, overpowering figure, space suit discarded over his arm, walked from the UN tower slightly behind the rest of the group still in protective clothing. With Cowley was a slightly built, immaculately dressed Mediterranean featured man whom the CNN reporter immediately identified as the UN secretary-general. The cameraman held the shot as Cowley tossed his suit and helmet into the helicopter before retreating under the entrance canopy with the diplomat.

  Danilov watched the running newscast for another hour before the summons came from the Interior Ministry. By then the death toll from traffic accidents and stress-related causes—mostly asthma seizures and heart attacks—had been established at fifty-four. One victim was the asthmatic member of the original NYPD bomb disposal squad. The Russian source of the missile had also been confirmed.

  For once there was no shuffled expansion to prevent his joining a crowded table, and Patrick Hollis slid gratefully into the sort of group from which he was normally excluded in the bank’s cafeteria. He let the discussion swirl around him, holding back from any opinion: Having gotten to the table, he didn’t want to be ridiculed.

  “Madmen!” declared Robert Standing, one of the senior clerks in the mortgage department and Hollis’s chief tormentor. “Deserve the chair when they’re caught.”

  “They’ll demand money,” anticipated Carole Parker, the blond counter clerk who was the latest focus of H
ollis’s fantasies.

  “That’s how they’ll get the bastards,” agreed Standing. “Set a trap with the money.”

  It would have been wonderful to contradict the man: show Standing up for the boastful, know-nothing fool that he was, with his hand up every willing skirt. Just as it would have been wonderful to let everyone around the table—Carole most of all—know how he’d amassed the fortune of nearly $2,000,000 that no one knew—or could ever know—he had.

  3

  Although slightly built, Ibrahim Saads, the secretary-general, was a tall man whose prematurely graying hair added to the ambiance of easily worn authority. At the moment of re-entry, however, both he and Cowley remained slightly uncertain. Saads said, “I’m glad there wasn’t an accident.”

  “Yes,” agreed Cowley. They hadn’t expected to find Saads when they emerged into the vestibule, the unguarded warhead still tentatively suspended in its sling between Schnecker and Hamish. The diplomat hadn’t known they were in the building, either, although it had been the noise of their arriving helicopter that brought him to the ground level. Cowley didn’t think the surprise would have been sufficient to startle Schnecker and Hamish into dropping the device but was still glad it had been Pointdexter who’d first confronted the UN chief, who clearly realized there had been a danger. It was his third reference to an accident being avoided.

  “There’s no contamination whatsoever?” asked Saads, another repetition.

  “None,” confirmed Cowley.

  “I’ve got calls to make,” said the diplomat.

  “So have I,” said Cowley. “I’d appreciate a phone.”

  This time Saads did use his own suite, gesturing for Cowley to take his pick from the immediately adjoining office and leaving the linking door open in invitation.

  The FBI director’s demand was immediate. “No doubt it’s Russian?”

  “The lettering certainly is,” Cowley said cautiously. “It was a design no one’s seen before.”

  “You know anything about a chemical or biological weapon facility at a Plant 35 at or near Gorki?”

  “I’ll start a records check when we’ve finished talking. We also—”

  “Need to check the CIA,” anticipated Ross. “I’ll speak to the director personally. And State and the White House.”

  “The secretary-general’s here. He’s making calls, too.”

  “Which have to be duplicated,” insisted Ross. There had been a period when he’d regretted leaving the New York bench, where he’d been the senior judge, for the FBI directorship, but he had become more comfortable after mastering what he considered all the necessary internal and external political footwork. “There’ll be meetings I’ll need you back here for.”

  “The city’s in chaos but the trains should work sometime later today. I’ll get the Metroliner.”

  “You got any thoughts so far?” asked Ross, knowing it was a question he was going to be asked as he climbed the political ladder.

  “Terrorist,” Cowley said shortly. “If it is there should be a claim for responsibility soon. Or a demand.”

  There was another momentary silence. “We’re going to need a task force,” decided the director. “Antiterrorism, scientific, you and your division … liaison, too, maybe, with the Agency and Customs. And diplomatically it’s going to be a bitch, so I guess State will be involved … .”

  Through the open door Cowley saw the secretary-general talking animatedly on the telephone, gesturing with his free hand, and thought they’d need the General Assembly chamber to accommodate the sort of task force Leonard Ross was imagining. Who, Cowley wondered, would be left to conduct the actual investigation while everyone else publicly made meaningful statements and promises? He said, “I need to start things here.”

  “Be back by tomorrow.”

  It would not have been politically correct to ask his director to transfer him. Cowley disconnected and immediately redialed his own department to research a Plant 35 anywhere in the Gorki area. He also asked for an independent bureau comparison of the warhead from TV freeze-frame pictures against anything similar in their files and for checks to be extended to all Washington-based technical publications and sources. He insisted the inquiry be spelled out in the greatest possible detail to their office at the Moscow embassy. There was no reply from the New York FBI office on Third Avenue, and the answering machine hadn’t been switched on.

  Ibrahim Saads saw Cowley hovering at the door and beckoned him in to the river-view suite. The Egyptian switched on a television preset to a scheduled NBC program, with Tom Brokaw promising a live telecast from the White House.

  The anchorman continued a voice-over commentary on earlier footage, initially of the car-abandoned, still-deserted Manhattan streets and then of the Secretariat Tower viewed from the river. Papers continued to flow in a slow stream from the hole torn into the side of the building. From the outside the hole looked far bigger than Cowley had imagined from the inside. It was more a horizontal, three- or four-meter tear than a direct hole, as if the initial shattering of the outer glass and fabric had rippled sideways in some seismic aftershock, buckling and distorting the metal and reinforced concrete frame. There were what appeared to be hundreds of fissured splits, a giant spider’s web, emanating from the main damage to the floors above and below.

  “No one can be allowed back in until engineers confirm it’s safe,” decided the international diplomat. “If it gives way at that level, the entire tower could collapse into the river. Which means the river will have to be closed, too, I suppose. Until we’re sure.”

  The picture abruptly switched to a boat and seaplane marina identified in the caption as Asharoken, on Long Island. The caption also named the fair-haired seaplane commuter pilot as Arnold Payne. He’d been coming in to land at the downtown terminal, bringing in his regular four Wall Street traders, when he’d been attracted by a flash. It appeared to have come from a cruiser, and his initial thought was that there had been an explosion on board. At once the side of the United Nations’ building had exploded. By the time he’d circled, it had been possible to see how much had been ripped from the side of the Secretariat Tower, although there was no sign of the fire or smoke that he’d expected. There had been at least seven vessels—three of them cruisers—in the East River vicinity, all heading toward Long Island Sound. None, certainly not any of the cruisers, showed any smoke or was firing distress signals, which he thought they would have done if there’d been an explosion to account for the flash he’d seen. He realized now, of course, what he’d seen had been the ignition of a missile he hadn’t seen in flight.

  Cowley made a note of the man’s name and seaplane base and added a reminder to himself to check with the New York Port Authority and however many other official bodies existed for the identification of as much river traffic as possible. He also made a note to discover what other seaplane taxis might have witnessed something.

  Watching at Cowley’s shoulder, Saads said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d like a drink.”

  “Scotch would be good,” accepted Cowley, as the other man went to an expansive cabinet on the other side of the room. Just one, Cowley told himself. Maybe two, if a second was offered. It wasn’t a problem anymore. Never had been. Stopped it before it became one. Too late to prevent some difficulties, but the job had never been endangered. Not true. Endangered but he’d gotten away with it, with a lot of help from a special friend.

  The diplomat was walking back across the room, glass in hand, when Brokaw announced the presidential address.

  There had, that day, been committed another outrage against the city of New York that only a miracle had prevented becoming a catastrophic disaster, declared the president. Had the missile, fitted with a combined chemical and biological warhead, detonated, hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives would have been lost. The missile had been recovered intact and was already safe in a specialized U.S. government installation. The emergency, although not the disruption, was over. The United St
ates of America regarded what had occurred as an attack upon the international community represented by the United Nations and was inviting international cooperation. Already, in these first few hours, there were important investigatory lines of inquiry, the most important being Russian markings on the warhead. The State Department was already in contact with Moscow. His thoughts and sympathy were with the relatives of those who had died as a result of the incident. The president personally praised Secretary-General Ibrahim Saads, who knowingly accepted the risk of agonizing and certain death to remain at his post, first to clear the UN buildings themselves and then to alert all emergency services to evacuate Manhattan and the surrounding New York boroughs. He acknowledged the bravery of the specialist American unit that, together with a senior FBI official, went into the Secretariat Tower to retrieve the warhead and render it harmless.

  At that point in the live transmission the picture briefly split to show Saads and Cowley walking from the building with the Fort Meade scientists carrying the warhead to the waiting helicopter.

  The president’s face filled the screen again. “No one, no group, should imagine they will go unpunished for mounting the attack that was attempted today. No matter how long it takes, wherever they try to hide, they will be sought out and brought to justice. Of that, my fellow Americans, you have my solemn pledge.”

  Saads said, “They would have intended the warhead to detonate. To kill as many people as they could.”

  “Yes,” agreed Cowley.

  “So if they’ve got another warhead—or access to one—they’ll try again.”

  “And succeed the next time,” predicted Cowley. “Miracles don’t happen twice.”

  Although a general in title, Dimitri Danilov was outranked in authority by everyone else in the baroque office of Interior Minister Nikolai Gregorovich Belik. Even the place accorded him was the lowest, close to the separate secretarial bank. It was a passing acceptance. The more important awareness was that he was physically between men representing the new Russia and those of the old, stillresistant regime. As the president’s chief of staff, Georgi Stepanovich Chelyag was the spearhead of the new in the sanctum of the old. The deputy defense minister, General Sergei Gromov, and Viktor Kedrov, chairman of the Federal Security Bureau, the intelligence service that replaced the KGB, were publicly known to be Belik disciples. Only Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Kisayev was a reformist.