It was the Washington political carousel, finally and inevitably spinning up to the White House, rather than the more practical otherside-of-the-world logistics that created the twenty-four-hour hiatus. So frenetic was the activity that followed the attack upon the US Embassy in Moscow that none of those in the far from calm eye of the storm were aware of either a respite or even a delay. And that was minimized as much as possible by Cowley’s task force being allocated
Air Force Two
for the eventual flight to Moscow.
Some of the most outspoken critics declared from the very beginning that it was a diplomatic mistake for the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, with the personal authority of the president, to invoke international protocol in declaring the embassy and its compound technically U.S. territory and therefore beyond any Russian jurisdiction or entry. By so doing he adopted the same stance as the Chinese after the destruction of its United Nations quarters.
Deciding—and announcing—that stance after a series of White House and State Department meetings was the major cause for the delay in taking not just Cowley and Danilov as well as a full forensic team headed by Paul Lambert but also Secretary of State Henry Hartz. The aircraft was fitting transportation in which to return with sufficient state solemnity the coffins of the dead to their grieving relatives and a carefully modulated, unsteady-voiced president waiting at an Andrews Air Force base ceremony.
Lost in the Russian fury at the implied distrust of Moscow’s ability successfully to investigate the embassy attack was that by coming to them, Hartz overcame the still-unresolved Russian reluctance to appear the supplicant in meetings at secretary of state to foreign minister level. Also lost was the attempt to assuage the America-in-charge impression by having Dimitri Danilov publicly identified for the first time in the carefully choreographed arrival photo opportunity.
What wasn’t anticipated but perhaps should have been and what stoked the angry Russian resentment were the additional, although nonviolent, Watchmen attacks.
There were two, both equally humiliating to Washington and Moscow.
One of the first U.S. presidential decisions was that no details should be publicly released of the missile that wrecked the U.S. compound until the arrival of American investigators. Even before the team boarded the aircraft, the terrorists posted, not just on supposedly swept U.S. government sites but on Russian government screens as well the full specifications of the American-manufactured 66mm single-shot M72 A2s rocket, including its weight and the fact that it was shoulder-fired from a throwaway telescopic launcher. Within four hours of Washington’s diplomatic insistence of U.S. jurisdiction over the embassy—when the investigatory team was only just airborne—the second Watchmen statement was posted on official American and Russian websites.
It read:
SO RUSSIA SURRENDERS ITSELF TO BECOME A LICKSPITTLE COLONY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM. TWO WHITE HOUSES BUT ONLY ONE PRESIDENT.
On Russian screens it was in Cyrillic. And there was a computer graphic of the American Stars and Stripes fluttering from the Kremlin flagstaff.
By the time
Air Force Two
landed at Sheremet’yevo Airport, the American president had made another television address to the nation. In his anxiety to reassure the country after more American deaths he fueled the diplomatic outrage by allowing the assumption from his renewed arrest pledge that any trial would be under American, not Russian law. His attempt to ridicule the already posted Watchmen declarations was equally bad, almost an ambiguous confirmation rather than his intended denial.
Henry Hartz’s arrival statement was more carefully prepared—he had winced at the president’s efforts, patched into the aircraft television during the flight. In it he insisted that the investigation remained totally mutual and jointly cooperative. Danilov stood self-consciously next to him. But by the time the American cavalcade reached the heavily guarded embassy, the banner-carrying imperialism protesters were estimated at more than two hundred and growing. In the Duma, Russia’s lower-house parliament, a motion was tabled criticizing the Russian president for allowing an American investigation in the heart of the Russian capital. Its proposer talked openly of possible impeachment.
Dimitri Danilov did not travel in to the city with the American party but was met, by arrangement, at Sheremet’yevo by Yuri Pavin.
“Who have you assigned to the Osipov killing?” Danilov demanded as their car moved off.
“It happened during Mizin’s shift. He began before I was told. I left him heading the investigation until you got back.”
“There seem to be a lot of coincidences involving Ashot Yefimovich Mizin.”
“You want me to take him off it?”
“No. Leave it as it is. All the forensic samples sent to America were switched.”
Pavin nodded. “Mizin used a pool car to deliver the warhead to the Foreign Ministry. I checked the garage log. He was out for three hours. I could walk it in fifteen.”
“What about Gorki?”
“Reztsov says he’s got a definite suspect, from Plant 35. I told him I’d go if there was an arrest.”
“If there is one we both will,” decided Danilov.
The burly deputy said, “Chelyag’s demanding to see you immediately at the White House. But there’s time to stop at the Kliniceskaja Bolnica. Olga’s body is still there.”
Danilov guessed that despite the apparent acceptance—and sympathy—it had always been difficult for his deeply religious deputy to condone the situation with Larissa. Now the man would despise him further for imagining he’d maintained a married relationship with Olga—that he might even have known about the pregnancy before going to America.
The obstetrician, a young, fresh-faced man whose hair was so blond he appeared scarcely to have any, also despised him. There was no handshake, and the man said at once, “I opposed the termination. Your wife said you were insistent.”
“We hadn’t spoken at sufficient length about it,” said Danilov.
“That was obvious.”
“What was the cause?”
“Septecemia. It’s easier to get ill than get well in Russian hospitals. Once the infection began to spread we couldn’t stop it.”
“How pregnant was she?”
The doctor regarded him curiously. “Did you speak at
all
?”
“How pregnant?” Danilov repeated.
“Nine weeks. It should have been quite straightforward.” He paused heavily. “As a proper birth would have been.”
Whose baby would it have been? wondered Danilov. Igor, the hairdresser, who kept his own bouffant a better color than Olga’s? Or someone else he didn’t know about?
I want to try again,
Danilov remembered. And then
I mean you and me. Try to put our marriage back together.
She would have known then: hoped for them to make love, which they hadn’t done for years, to be able to claim he was the father. Which he was going to allow the few who needed to know to believe. For whose benefit? Olga’s, who might not even have known herself? Or his, to hide in death just how much and for how long he’d been cuckolded in life? For Olga, he decided. He had an abrupt recollection of Naina Karpov and her words echoed in his mind, too.
I don’t have anywhere else. Anyone else.
He said, “Did Olga come alone?”
“Yes. I told her there was still a lot of time—that she could wait until you got back—but she said she didn’t know how long that would be. And that you wouldn’t change your mind.”
Danilov ignored the open contempt. Poor, lonely Olga. It didn’t matter—hadn’t mattered for too long—how much she’d lied and cheated and whored, she hadn’t deserved, no one deserved, to die all alone. “No one came to see her? Inquired about her?”
“No one,” said the doctor. “It would have been a boy.”
Danilov nodded, not knowing what to say.
“There are formalities. Identification.”
“Yes,” accepted Danilov.
He walked, unspeaking, with the other man to the mortuary. Olga’s frozen pallor made her multihued hair look even worse than when she’d been alive. He nodded and said, “Yes,” and then, “I’ll make the arrangements. Get the body collected.”
“As soon as possible,” urged the man.
“By tomorrow,” promised Danilov. “And thank you for what you did.”
“It shouldn’t have happened. Any of it.”
“Far too many things happen that shouldn’t,” said Danilov.
“It’s my job to try to prevent them,” said the younger man.
“Mine, too,” said Danilov.
The American party divided immediately inside the embassy, Henry Hartz being hurriedly escorted to the waiting ambassador. The Moscow-based FBI agent, Barry Martlew, was also waiting and led Cowley, along with Lambert’s team, to the shattered compound.
At Lambert’s insistence everything had been left, except the bodies. The scientist patiently pointed out the shrapnel from the explosion and said, “The bastards were right, of course. It’s an A2 version of the M72, bazooka adaptation.”
“I didn’t doubt it would be,” Cowley said wearily.
From the dead children’s bedroom one of the team called, “Got a piece with markings here. Code designation is Mojave.”
“There’s an arms dump there,” Lambert said to Cowley.
“Hardly significant,” Cowley said dismissively. “Had a check run after the Watchmen identification. Seems we gave these things out like candy at an orphanage party, officially and unofficially. Equipped Israel with them, and the CIA supplied them to the muhajadeen during the Russian war in Afghanistan. And to the Kosovo Liberation Army in Yugoslavia. It could have come from anywhere.”
“That’ll be lost in the fine detail,” predicted Lambert. “The only fact that matters is that it’s American.”
Cowley nodded toward a burn-blackened piece of metal. “You likely to get anything from that?”
Lambert shook his head. “I doubt it.” He turned to Martlew, a heavily bespectacled, unsmiling man. “The launcher for this thing
is
throwaway. We got it?”
Martlew shifted uncomfortably. “Seems the Russian militia guard outside the embassy picked it up.”
Lambert groaned audibly. “They still got it?”
Martlew said, “They refused to hand it over after our announcement of jurisdiction.”
“Great!” said Lambert.
“There could be a lot of other forensic stuff apart from this we’ll need your help on,” said Cowley.
Dimitri Danilov had just finished setting out the differences between the Russian and American forensic findings in the White House office of Georgi Chelyag. For several moments the presidential aide remained silent. Then he said, “It would be deliberate, of course. The tampering as well as everything else.”
“It has to be,” said Danilov. He was not sure how much of a risk he’d taken detailing all the obstruction and misdirection he’d encountered. But if he had any chance of breaking through it, he needed authority at the highest level. He would have liked the conversation to have been protectively recorded but none of it had been.
“The Americans know about it?”
“The intended forensic deception, certainly.”
“Which they could make public totally to justify their carrying out their own embassy investigation?” accepted the politically astute chief of staff.
“Yes,” Danilov agreed.
“Might they?”
Danilov thought the question too sweeping. “Not at my level,” he restricted himself.
“I can’t risk their doing it at mine,” mused Chelyag, thinking aloud. He shook his head at a further awareness. “Or risk purging—arresting as they should be arrested—the militia people who’ve done what they have to you. If it become public that we had—as it could too easily do—it would be even more justification for America.”
“Yes,” agreed Danilov, intrigued by a different sort of mental deduction.
“So to the Duma—and the communists—we’ll appear to confirm their accusations of willingly being subservient to Washington.”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” said Danilov. Could he get an answer to another uncertainty?
“I’ll find one,” said the politician.
Danilov acknowledged that he’d fully committed himself, telling Georgi Chelyag everything he knew and what he suspected from it. He might as well take things as far as he could. He asked, “There was a lot of initial confusion at the Washington embassy?”
The humorless man allowed himself the briefest of smiles. “I needed to test others. It was obvious you’d come on to me as you did. It was the only thing you could do.”
“Test for what?” persisted Danilov.