The Watchmen Page 3

  Where did that place him? wondered Danilov. Possibly between a rock and a hard place, he decided, calling upon an American axiom he liked. Once, when his career had been important, it would have been a worrying realization. Since the personal disaster, little mattered anymore. As he usually did these days, he felt an uninvolved observer, a one-man audience to a performance of others.

  “This is a crisis for the country, not of ideology,” opened Chelyag, at once moving to establish Russian White House control. “Our decision must be totally bipartisan.” Chelyag was a squat man of few facial expressions, least of all approval or condemnation.

  There were nods and mutterings of agreement around the table.

  “Let’s establish facts,” Chelyag continued briskly. “Is there a Plant 35 at Gorki?”

  “Yes,” said the already prepared deputy defense minister. He was a bull-chested, mottle-faced man who’d worn his uniform as a reminder of the importance of military support to a Russian government.

  “What’s its function?” persisted the presidential aide.

  “It’s a defense research establishment,” defended Gromov. “Against biological or chemical weapon attack.”

  There was a silence, which Yuri Kisayev hurried to fill to distance the Foreign Ministry. “If it is still operating, Russia has abrogated an international nonproliferation treaty to which it is a signatory.”

  Danilov glanced at the industrious note-takers, recognizing how effectively the outnumbered reformist faction was bureaucratically establishing potential responsibility.

  “Is it still operating?” demanded Chelyag.

  “I have no information about that,” the army general said uncomfortably.

  “The Defense Ministry is well aware of the terms of the biological and chemical weapons treaty, though?” pressed the blank-faced presidential chief of staff.

  “My understanding is that stockpiles were in the process of being destroyed, under the terms of the agreement,” said Gromov, in another prepared response.

  “We need that positively and provably confirmed,” declared Chelyag. “If necessary to open the facility to American inspection.”

  The announcement caused the second silence, longer this time. Viktor Kedrov said, “From which I presume there is to be every cooperation with America?”

  It was a protective qualification, but Chelyag threw it back at the intelligence chief, a sallow-featured man whose receding hair and round-rimmed glasses gave him a remarkable resemblance to Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s reviled pogrom-organizing security head. Chelyag said, “Do you know of any reason why we shouldn’t?”

  “Absolutely not.” Kedrov flushed. “I’m simply trying to avoid misunderstandings.”

  “There is also to be total cooperation and liaison between the departments assembled here,” ordered the chief of staff. “I want that completely understood and accepted.”

  As if in answer, maintaining the every-word-recorded formality, Kedrov said, “Which department or ministry—and who, from that department or ministry—is going to lead the inquiries here in Russia?”

  “If it did indeed come from Gorki, the warhead was stolen,” said Chelyag. “Which is a criminal act. And crime is the responsibility of the militia, which is why this meeting was convened here in the Interior Ministry.” The man looked for the first time directly at Danilov. “And you, Dimitri Ivanovich, have worked with American agencies, especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on previous occasions?”

  At last everyone’s attention concentrated upon Danilov. He said, “Twice.”

  “Which uniquely qualifies you to do so again,” decided Chelyag. “More particularly because such a theft would not have been committed by amateurs and you head the Organized Crime Bureau—”

  “Here in Moscow,” broke in Danilov.

  “You will operate directly and specifically with the authority of the White House,” Chelyag set out. “Everyone in Gorki—and anywhere else it’s necessary for you to go—will be made aware of that.” He paused, looking around the table again. “General Danilov is to get total and unimpeded cooperation.”

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt about the degree or extent of support that is being made available,” said Belik, speaking at last.

  Or whom the sacrifice would be in the event of a mistake or failure, Danilov realized. Once more he thought how irrelevant that seemed. On his way home he’d change the flowers on Larissa’s grave. He hadn’t been there for four days.

  “I think the bank imposes upon you too much,” complained Elizabeth Hollis. She was a tall, stiffly upright woman, close to being gaunt, her iron-gray hair in tightly permed ridges.

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” said Hollis.

  “You know how you’ve got to be careful.”

  Hollis winced at the reminder. Physically he was a complete contrast to his mother, a round-faced, bespectacled man overweight by at least twenty pounds, which he had been from grade school. As he felt about a lot of things in life, Hollis considered his size unfair. Because of it—and for what doctors labeled a weak chest, because it stopped just short of asthma—he’d been judged unfit for the army cadets and later for the National Guard and had long ago abandoned diets, none of which worked. He was still careful about what he ate, though, as he was careful about everything.

  “Dinner will be about half an hour. Steak,” said the woman.

  “Broiled,” Hollis insisted at once. “Trim the fat.”

  “I know how you like it!” said the woman in mock irritation. “What are you going to do?”

  “Work on my computer for a while.”

  “I don’t understand why you want to spend the time you do on a computer here when it’s all you do at work.”

  “It’s like magic, mother,” said the man in the awed voice of a committed cyber nerd. “There’s nothing I can’t do—nowhere I can’t go.” But some places he wouldn’t go again. He could go on playing the war games—retain his rank as the Quartermaster if he chose—but he wouldn’t maintain the telephone contact code worked out with the General through the personal columns of Soldier magazine. It had been a mistake but one easily rectified. Tonight he wouldn’t even go to war. Easily Hollis began cracking into unaware host systems, for them to be charged his usage time, burrowing through three before dialing up the porn channel. He took his time with his selection, too, and when he found the movie he wanted charged it against the credit card number he’d gotten from the issuing bank in Buffalo. The woman was blonde, and it was very easy for Hollis to imagine it was Carole Parker, not an actress.

  Clarence Snelling wasn’t enamoured of computers. He didn’t understand them and didn’t want to and thought of them as an enemy, technology that had made him redundant as a clerk, throwing him on the scrap heap on a pension so inadequate he had to scrabble around as a part-time bookkeeper for businesses too small to afford a screen and a keyboard. And those businesses seemed to be decreasing by the day.

  To Clarence Snelling a handwritten page of figures was a thing of beauty, art almost. It was nothing at all like the sterile electronically printed sheet he was studying at that moment, comparing it to the ledger into which he was carefully transferring it. He threw the bank statement impatiently aside and called: “Martha! They’ve done it again!”

  4

  William Cowley was discomfited by so many still and television cameras, particularly when he was recognized as the man who had gone into the UN building with the germ warfare scientists and became the filmed and question-shouted focus of the gathering. He tolerated the cameras but studiously ignored the questions. Most of the other public figures around him were self-consciously posing to appear unposed, irritated that Cowley’s sudden fame was deflecting attention—and the cameras—away from them.

  For the benefit of daytime newscasts and evening newspapers, Henry Hartz, the guttural-voiced, German-born secretary of state, stressed to the assembled journalists that the official status of everyone present showed the importa
nce America was giving to what he referred to as “this appalling near atrocity.” He held up what he claimed to be a personal assurance from the Russian president of complete cooperation, which in fact it wasn’t. It was notification from the Moscow ambassador that such a guarantee had been promised by the Russian Foreign Ministry. Hartz concluded with the promise of a longer statement at the end of the meeting.

  Cowley didn’t think, from an earlier breakfast discussion, that Leonard Ross had fully absorbed the horror of what might have been postponed only by a fluke. Even more certainly Cowley didn’t believe the bureau’s twitchingly eager, nervously laughing antiterrorist chief had, either. Burt Bradley was the first director of the bureau’s specially dedicated unit. There’d been the New York World Trade Center attacks and Oklahoma and before that the Beirut U.S. Embassy bombing, but the unit’s primary function had otherwise been liaising with other more frequently attacked European countries. Cowley’s impression wasn’t that Bradley was overawed, as he initially had been. He thought Bradley was positively frightened. And from his just completed personal analysis, he couldn’t condemn the man for it. Any more than he criticized anyone else in the room for what he regarded as performance warmup time, practicing posterity phrases and photo-shoot postures.

  “I want a complete update,” opened Hartz, without introducing people he expected already to know each other. His German birth precluded Hartz from ever running for the presidency, which he coveted, but he considered being secretary of state the next best political role and ran his Foggy Bottom fiefdom as he would have run a White House administration, with unquestioned, unchallenged autocracy. He knew—and didn’t mind—that he was referred to within the department as the Führer. Looking between Cowley and Schnecker he said, “Let’s have the scientific thinking first.”

  Unencumbered by his protective suit and domed helmet, James Schnecker was a surprisingly small man with an even more surprising tendency to squint, as if suffering unexpected pain twinges. He coughed, clearing his throat, and said professorially, “One warhead contained sarin, a known nerve agent produced in either liquid or vapor form. As liquid it’s absorbed through the skin or mucous membranes; as vapor it’s inhaled, obviously. In both states it attacks the respiratory and nervous systems. You’ll remember it was released on the Tokyo Underground in 1998 by a fanatical religious group. It’s a well known and long-standing weapon, first produced in Germany in 1937. The other warhead contained anthrax which you’re all familiar with after the events of September, 2001. Bacillus anthracio is again a pulmonary complaint. Biologically it’s most commonly found in cattle—although to a much lesser extent in sheep—and in Africa, where it is endemic, humans contract it from tics. It’s produced as a biological weapon as a plasma-encoded toxin by combining three bacillus proteins. Separately none of the proteins has a biologically harmful effect. Combined they create edema, the pathological accumulation of fluid in the body tissues and pulmonary collapse. There’s acute and agonizing swelling and hemorrhaging from all body openings. It attacks the spleen and causes splenetic fever. In weapon form, as it was in this warhead, it infects through inhalation. It’s almost invariably fatal to humans after an incubation period of between one to five days.”

  “So it was both a chemical and biological attack?” broke in Frank Norton. The president’s chief of staff was a former Pentagon general on the short list for when the present White House incumbent completed his second term of office. He’d already decided that the outcome of what had been thrust upon him now could determine whether there needed to be anyone else in the race. It had been Norton, who cultivated for its political appeal the appearance of the rawboned marine officer he’d once been, who’d proposed the media invitation. The concentration on the goddamned FBI man had been unexpected and annoying.

  “Absolutely.” Schnecker frowned, surprised at the question. “We’d never encountered a delivery system like it before at Fort Detrick. It seems to be a modification of a Russian missile known as the Grail or SA-7: two warheads attached to the body of a rocket intended to carry just one. Which probably prevented the catastrophe. It’s top-heavy, quite out of balance. All the forensic examinations we’ve carried out so far point to it spinning, top over bottom, instead of traveling in a proper trajectory. And to it, incredibly, striking glass through which it passed virtually unobstructed. The fins and the body sustained all the impact damage and in doing so snapped the detonation mechanism, which was extremely crude: percussion pins intended to shatter the containers to release their contents.”

  “Thank God for a bad design,” said Hartz.

  “An almost too obvious bad design,” Burt Bradley broke in quickly. “Bad enough to have been realized from its first test firing. Accepting that it’s Russian, what’s the chances of the warhead being put together here, by unqualified people?”

  “All our ferroalloy tests haven’t been completed yet,” the scientist said doubtfully. “So far all the metal is provably Russian. If it was a hybrid cobbled together here, there’d be some American components. I don’t think we should overlook the possibility that we’ve never seen anything like it before because it was a design that didn’t work and was abandoned after preliminary or failed tests. The date on the casing was 1974.”

  Cowley saw the overly ambitious antiterrorist chief wince at the rejection in front of the FBI director, a carelessly fat, carelessly dressed man. If Ross saw it as a rebuff he gave no indication.

  “Guide us here,” demanded the CIA director, John Butterworth, a retired navy admiral anxious to counteract criticism of naive amateurism from intelligence professionals at his Langley appointment. “What would have happened if the missile had missed the tower? Flown on?”

  Schnecker frowned at the hypothesis. “I can’t itemize every one, but there are quite a few skyscrapers after the UN building it could have hit. Had it done so, there probably wouldn’t have been the miracle of it going through window glass. Or tailfirst. If it missed all the high buildings, I guess it would have gone on into New Jersey. The single payload of the SA-7 is fifteen kilograms, with a range of ten kilometers, or 6.2 miles. This double warhead weighed twenty-two kilograms. That would have shortened the range, which would also have been affected by the top-over-bottom instability. And there was the crosswind. You want a ballpark guess, draw a line down from Newark to Trenton.”

  “And how likely would it have been that the warhead would have burst simply by impact against the ground, whether it hit nosefirst or not?” asked Butterworth, a bald, angularly featured man.

  Schnecker continued frowning. “It’s another hypothesis, but I would say a rupture of some sort, if not an actual detonation, would have been inevitable.”

  “What about the combined effect of both warheads, if they’d exploded?” asked Norton.

  “I’m not aware of any research that’s mixed the two. Scientifically it’s not possible to combine them. I think the idea was a double delivery of two separate agents.”

  “Are there antidotes, treatment?” said Ross.

  “There’s treatment for isolated cases, if it’s immediate. The casualty rate yesterday, if they’d activated, would have been overwhelming.”

  “How many?” demanded Norton, seizing the headline question. “The president guessed at a thousand dying.”

  Schnecker hesitated. “It could have been more than a thousand.”

  “How many more?” demanded the man. “Tens or hundreds?”

  “It could have gone as high as five, conceivably higher still,” estimated the scientist. “It wouldn’t have simply been the sarin or anthrax. It would have accelerated existing medical conditions from which people were already suffering. The vapor could have gotten into hospitals through the air conditioning.”

  “Jesus!” said Norton, the only sound in a long silence.

  Breaking it—and remembering his conversation with the UN secretary-general the previous day—Cowley said, “They meant to kill. Dramatically and hugely. Next time they will. A
nd people this determined will do it again, if they have a missile. Or a way to get another one.”

  “How’s an SA-7 fired?”

  “Shoulder-held portable launcher,” replied Schnecker.

  “All the statements aren’t in yet, but it’s obvious it was fired from a moving boat,” said Cowley. “Assuming that the UN tower was the target, which I think we must, the fact that it was hit at all from a shoulder-held rocket launcher fired from a moving boat—to some extent against the wind—surely indicates whoever did it has some military experience of missiles.”

  “I would say so, yes,” agreed Schnecker. “From which a working knowledge of missiles naturally follows.”

  Looking to the antiterrorist chief, Cowley said, “There are files on known or suspected terrorists, right?”

  “Yes?” Bradley frowned.

  “Anyone specifically listed with a knowledge of missiles would be worth publicly posting.”

  “The check’s already being made,” the younger man said impatiently.

  Then it would have helped if you’d mentioned it at the breakfast meeting, thought Cowley. To Schnecker he said, “What about something as practical as fingerprints on the missile?”

  Schnecker shook his head. “Clean.”

  “Knowingly to set out, as these people did, to kill thousands of people is fanaticism. Zealotry. Or total homicidal madness,” said the terrorist chief, who had a degree in forensic psychology. “Zealous fanaticism fits Islamic fundamentalism, which we’re all familiar with from the past.”