It was when the man was taking them through the unloading and dockside collection procedures that the opportunity became obvious to Cowley.
“A six P.M. arrival?” he pressed.
“Approximately,” confirmed the man. “It won’t be earlier. Add an hour, maybe.”
“Unloaded immediately?”
“That’s what I said.”
“But held in a bonded warehouse until clearance the following morning? No dockside clearance or collection
after
six?”
“That’s right.”
“You’ve got search specialists?”
“Rummage officers.” The man frowned.
“Could they breach a container and reseal it without OverOcean being able to tell?”
The man smiled, understanding the conversation. “No problem at all.”
Cowley turned to Pamela, smiling as well. “We can fix what we weren’t able to in Moscow.”
The police commissioner hosted that night’s dinner in a private dining room of Le Perroquet, on East Walton Street. Cowley wished Pamela had been next to him, although acknowledging the social need for them to separate. Besides the police division chiefs, Stephen Harding, the local bureau head, the Customs chief and his four most senior officers, and the commanders of the SWAT teams were invited. Cowley had one scotch for an aperitif and one glass of wine with the meal. He’d forgotten the publicity of his televised entry into the United Nations tower and the brief recorded appearances in Moscow, that concentrated the attention on him. Twice he caught Pamela smiling tolerantly toward him.
They’d booked separate rooms for propriety but ensured they were adjoining and used his. He wasn’t nervous anymore, and he hadn’t thought it could be any better than it had been the first time but it was. Afterward, in mock rebuke, Pamela said, “That wasn’t just great, it was reassuring. Guys are supposed to hit on me, not you.”
“If anyone had tried, I’d have torn their heads off.”
“Bit soon for jealousy, isn’t it?” She was still surprised at how fast everything had happened between them and how good she felt about it.
“You’ve got a lot to learn about me.” He waited for her to remark about his near abstinence but she didn’t. “I hadn’t expected to be able to get into the container. We’re safe now.”
“I’ve been thinking about their Pentagon access.”
“You got both of them.”
“That’s what I’m nervous about: that there might be a third but that the sweeps might start getting relaxed.”
“Talk to Carl Ashton.”
“We’ve got a couple of days and we’re going back to Washington anyway. Think I might just go over the river and satisfy myself no one’s laying back.”
“If you think you should,” he accepted.
“I know we’re looking good but we’ve got a hell of a lot of loose ends,” she pointed out. “We still don’t know by whom or from where the Pentagon entry is being made. We’ve run a blank on the General. We know there’s a Russian mafia man loose somewhere in America, and two others aren’t doing a thing wrong in New Jersey, and there’s a legal bar up against us sweating Robert Standing like he should be sweated. I don’t think we had much cause for all those toasts tonight.”
“I don’t need the reminder,” said Cowley. Which wasn’t true. With the speed with which everything seemed to be coming together in Chicago, he had put the other unresolved things to one side. Brought together, as Pamela had just brought them together, the mountain suddenly seemed much higher and steeper.
They were back in Washington by midday. Pamela remained only long enough for them to lunch together, leaving Cowley to brief Ross on the Chicago preparations and ask James Schnecker to complete the sabotage that he and his group had started, even though germ or biological weapons weren’t involved any longer.
Pamela had to drive around the Lincoln Memorial to get to the Arlington Bridge. As she did she added to her depressing list of things they still didn’t have their total unawareness of the Watchmen’s next target. There was a slight reassurance in telling herself that the net around it was going to be so tight they weren’t ever going to get the chance
to
use it.
Pamela had intentionally not notified anyone of her visit. Carl Ashton arrived flushed and frowning at the gatehouse to authorize her admission.
“Why didn’t you call?” he demanded.
“Driving back from the airport,” said Pamela. “Decided to drop in on my way into D.C. A bad time?”
“No, of course not.”
“How’s it going?”
“Scoring two out of two should win us the big doll on the back row.” Ashton smiled.
They
were
relaxing, Pamela decided at once. “You need three—four maybe—to get that sort of prize.”
Ashton stopped smiling. He stood back for her to enter his office ahead of him, and as he followed her into the room he said, “We’re keeping at it.”
She shook her head against the offer of tea or coffee and said, “Give me the overview.”
It sounded impressive. According to Ashton, they’d swept and confirmed clean all terminals at the four topmost levels of Pentagon security and changed all access codes. Checks on all satellite positional and operational programs would be completed by the week’s end. All silo and missile arming systems had been totally reprogrammed. The sweeping of the National Security Agency and NASA had been completed and every system recoded.
“So what’s left?” asked Pamela.
“Seaborne missiles, automatic submarine guidance systems, and the undersea tracking systems: We’re liaising with the navy at Annapolis. And some AWAK reconnaissance systems are outstanding.”
“It seems—” Pamela began but then stopped at the sound of the door opening behind her. She turned as Bella Atkins started into the room.
The woman stopped and said, “I’m sorry … I didn’t know—” Then: “Hi! You got something on Roanne?”
Pamela later congratulated herself on the smoothness with which she picked up her supposed role as D.C. homicide, not bureau. She rose, offering her hand to give herself a few seconds, and said, “That’s our problem, getting anything at all. That’s why I’ve come back. Running things by Carl again to see if there’s something we’ve missed.”
“Is there?”
“Doesn’t seem to be.”
“So what’s it look like?”
“As it looked from the start: burglar with a rape opportunity who took it.”
“Poor kid.” She looked at Ashton. “Funny thing, I was coming to talk about Roanne’s replacement, but it’ll hold. I’ll come back. Nice to see you again,” she said to Pamela from the door.
“And you.”
“I was about to say that you do seem to be on top of it,” resumed Pamela. “We’re making progress elsewhere. But not enough. It’s from here—or from one of the linked agencies—that the spectacular will come. It’s all our heads, Carl. We don’t want to lose any innocent ones.”
“I know. And I’ll remind everyone I think needs reminding.”
Pamela drove easily back toward Washington, deciding it hadn’t been a wasted journey. Ashton—and maybe too many others—
had
relaxed, sure they’d found everything. There was even a satisfied glibness about the security man’s recitation of all the precautions that had been taken. Pamela wished … It was as far as her reflection got. Her mind blocked abruptly, and she actually experienced a physical sensation, a tingling numbness that lasted almost all the way back to downtown Washington and the J. Edgar Hoover building.
She’d alerted Cowley and Osnan from the car, and both men were waiting for her. So were a team from the bureau’s Technical Division, who had already set up the recording apparatus in the office beside the incident room. They all backed out to give Pamela room when she dialed and was connected immediately to the extension she asked for. Pamela talked looking out of the small room, toward the forensic technicians. After little more than two minutes, one of the men began making throat-cutting gestures, indicating they had enough.
“How long?” demanded Pamela, the moment she replaced the telephone.
“Not long,” assured the technician leader. “Quite a simple electronic comparison.”
“How sure are you?” Cowley asked Pamela.
“Eighty-five, ninety percent.
Now!
Why the hell did it take me all this time!”
The technician returned to the incident room just short of one hour. He said, “Absolutely no doubt. A classic voiceprint, the peaks and troughs fitting perfectly over each other.”
Pamela looked at Cowley. “So Bella Atkins is the Pentagon mole?”
“And the first voiceprint comes from her conversation to Chicago with someone who’s more than likely the General.”
What everyone else regarded as yet another coup Pamela Darnley considered a failure. Why hadn’t she pursued her belief that she recognized the voice beyond the one comparison against the New Rochelle telephone call? Her anger at herself fueled the urgency as well as her need personally to organize the concentrated investigation.
The entire Washington, D.C., field office—which operates separately from the J. Edgar Hoover building—was assigned to Bella Atkins. To it Pamela added from Roanoke the four agents still working the Roanne Harding murder. Pamela summoned Carl Ashton from the Pentagon with the widowed Bella’s personnel file and warned the stunned man that every check he and his sweepers had been so confident of having completed, not just throughout the Pentagon but in all the other associated agencies, had to be repeated.
“She’s got Grade V clearance, so she’ll know that some codes at least have been changed. She’ll have been literally following in your footsteps all the way.”
“So she’ll know we think Roanne wasn’t the mole, that we’re still looking,” said Cowley, sitting in on the meeting.
“Not necessarily,” said Ashton. “It’s routine to change codes.”
“Make
Challenger
and the satellite navigational system your first rechecks,” insisted Pamela. “She’d go back to her sabotage—do it again—if she suspected we were looking.”
“It’s almost too fast to keep up,” protested the Pentagon computer specialist.
“Don’t let it be!” Pamela urged worriedly. “We’ll do all we can outside. But inside—which is where it matters—you’ve got to reverse what’s been happening. You’ve got to follow in Bella Atkins’s footsteps now. Whenever, however, she accesses a computer, you’ve got to be right behind her. You think you can do that?”
“Technically, yes.”
“What about practically?”
“I hope so,” said Ashton.
“She got a cell phone?” demanded Pamela, conscious of the continuing Trenton problem.
“Not Pentagon issued. She might have a private one; most people have.”
“We’re searching under her own name through all the providers,” picked up Cowley. “But if there’s a way you can find out without her knowing, we need it.”
There was a routine familiarity in attaching an exchange monitor on Bella Atkins’s telephone, which was as much as they could do overnight. From the surveillance already in place they knew that she was in her York Avenue apartment. The judge had also approved a search warrant, enabling them legally to enter the following day to install listening devices while she was at the Pentagon. And by the time she got to work that day a listening device would have been attached to her office extension.
“We forgotten anything?” demanded Pamela. It was past nine, dinner abandoned.
“I don’t think so,” said Cowley.
“You know what we’ve got?” Pamela said rhetorically. “We’ve got another loose end.”
There were more about to unravel.
It was the predictability that began the problems, which compounded themselves as the day continued. Ivan Gavrilovich Guzov and Vyacheslav Fedorovich Kabanov left their executive homes at the same time as they did every morning, and the discreet FBI surveillance slotted into place as it had done every morning since it had been imposed. Dutifully both observers reported that the two Russians were on their way, which was logged by the duty officer in the Trenton office. No one bothered anymore with tired airwave jokes or traffic complaints.
Kabanov lived closer to their office than the other Russian, so the first alert came from his followers, the sudden announcement that he wasn’t going in the expected direction, almost immediately followed by the similar realization from those behind Guzov.
“The station!” decided the first observer. “There’s the Amtrak commuter service to New York.”
The quickly summoned John Meadowcraft decided to wait until he reached the office before ringing any headquarter bells. By the time he got there both Russians were aboard a Metroliner due at Manhattan’s Penn Station at 10:15, which gave the New York office forty-five minutes to get into position. Meadowcraft told the protesting Harry Boreman it didn’t matter that the New York office didn’t have a full team available on such short notice. The two Trenton observers were three tables away in the approaching Metroliner club car, watching the serious-faced Russians drink Bloody Marys. Both were on their third.
Boreman himself was one of the four New York agents waiting when the train pulled in. All instantly identified Kabanov and Guzov from their photographs, without needing the additional marker of the two closely following Trenton officers. Boreman fell into step with one of the men as soon as the Russians passed, saying as unobstrusively as possible that he needed them as reserve backup but until that need arose for them to remain in the waiting surveillance vehicles so they wouldn’t be recognized from the train.
The Russians had to line up for a cab, so all six agents were distributed in three bureau vehicles by the time the Russians were moving. Boreman, in the lead vehicle, gave the commentary on the open line to the bureau’s Third Avenue office, from which it was simultaneously relayed to the Washington incident room on what had grown into a sophisticated electronics system manned by specialist officers.
When the arrival in the New York office of other agents was reported back to Boreman, Pamela said, “They weren’t ready! Why the hell weren’t they ready!”
No one answered her.
“Crossing Seventh,” Boreman was saying. “South now, downtown on Broadway, turning … we’re turning on to Twenty-third.”
“Heliport!” Cowley guessed at once.
As he spoke, Boreman said, “Could be a helicopter to the airports. Call our own helo, start moving from the office by road. I want agents on their way, direct to La Guardia and Kennedy.”
“They’ll never get there in time!” Pamela moaned, exasperated. “Won’t get anywhere in time.”
“There’ll have to be a helicopter flight plan,” said Cowley.
“To LaGuardia or Kennedy,” insisted Pamela. “Buy an internal flight anywhere within the United States for cash and you don’t show up on a passenger list or a credit card slip. They get to an airport, we’ve lost them. And we can’t risk airport police. Immigration doesn’t come into it. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
“Not the heliport,” came Boreman’s voice. “They’ve gone over FDR … . it’s looking good, going into Waterside apartments. We’re stopping short—” There was the sound of angry horn blasts and the muttered driver’s voice “Go suck pussy.” Then Boreman said: “Shit!” There was a momentary pause. “They’re going into the marina alongside the apartments. Got guys going on foot over the road bridge … . Let me talk on the phone … .” There was the muffled sound of a separate conversation. Then: “There was a cruiser waiting. One guy as far as they could see. Backing out. They’re trying for a name … I want a boat … . Get on to Customs for something unmarked. And a helicopter. I still want a helicopter. There’s enough in the air to cover us. We’ll pick them up.”
“I wouldn’t like to bet,” Pamela said dully.
Pamela would have lost, if she had. It took more than thirty minutes to get a Customs helicopter to the 23rd Street pad and longer—just under an hour—for a launch to reach them. The cruiser’s name wasn’t logged at the marina, because it only pulled alongside to pick up passengers, and no one remembered it by chance or could guess how many people were on board, apart from the two men who joined. The unmarked Customs launch and helicopter checked a total of twenty boats in a three-hour period. Neither Guzov or Kabanov was on any of them.
“Lost us without trying!” Pamela said incredulously. “The biggest, most concentrated investigation in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and two of the main targets just walk away!” She snapped her fingers. “Poofl Just like that.”
“We couldn’t have been ready, no matter how early the warning,” argued Cowley. “There’s no way we would have anticipated a boat.”
“It could have been the guy—the General, even—who fired the first missile,” said Pamela.
“Yes,” agreed Cowley.
“You think they could be casing the U.N. tower—planning a second hit?”
“If they are, there doesn’t have to be a public warning, any panic,” Cowley pointed out. “Their missile’s empty. But they’re not going to get the chance to fire it, are they?”
“You feel sure about that after today?”
“Yeah,” said Cowley. “I feel sure enough about that.”
“I wish I did,” admitted Pamela.
“You won’t have to wait long,” Cowley pointed out. They were flying to Chicago that night for the following day’s arrival of the Cidicj
Star.
“You think we can both afford to go now that we’ve lost them?”
“Chicago is where it’s going to happen,” said Cowley. “It’s where we’ve
got
to be.”
The search of Bella Atkins’s treble-locked apartment just slightly lifted the depression beyond installing the listening devices, although the limited findings initially created more questions than they answered.
The place was almost too immaculate. Nothing had been left uncleared or unwashed in the kitchen—even the trash bin liner was clean—and all the pots and pans were meticulously in order, according to size, and every knife, fork, and spoon in its allotted part of the silverware tray. The label on every can in the pantry faced outward, instantly readable.
One of the dusting technicians said to no one in particular, “I’m going to be lucky to lift any prints at all from a place as polished and buffed as this.”
“Make sure you clean up well after yourself,” warned Paul Lambert. “Her alarm system is the cleanliness and neatness.”
There wasn’t the slightest disorder in the bedroom. Her clothes were hung in color coordinates, matching shoes laid beneath each outfit, and in bureau drawers sweaters and shirts and underwear each had its own drawer, in which items were crisply folded. The impression in the living room was of furniture being arranged to measurement, the easy chairs precisely the same distance from the sofa, each chair spaced the same around the table in the dining alcove. Books were shelved according to height and author; from the complete works of Elmore Leonard, she appeared a crime thriller fan. The video library was all wildlife or Discovery Channel programs. There were no messages on the answering machine and the recording tape was blank.
The most obvious discovery were the photographs. There were a lot of a smiling, younger Bella with men in army uniforms, jungle greens and camouflage and dress. There were several of her very young, a child, with an older dress-uniformed master sergeant who could have been her father and then with three men in the same age range as herself. None was annotated with names or descriptions, but one of the men had an American eagle tattoo on his left arm. The searchers’ equipment included cameras and each print was copied.
There was a sofa bed in the second bedroom but otherwise it had been turned into a study, although surprisingly there was no computer. Neither were there any personal papers or correspondence, apart from bank statements into which the only income appeared to be Bella Atkins’s monthly Pentagon salary. Outgoing was limited to regular utility payments cross-referenced to supply company statements neatly clipped together in a bureau drawer. There wasn’t any billing record of a personal cell phone.
“Not as polished and buffed as I feared,” said the fingerprint specialist, hunched over the opened-up sofa bed. “Got a nice set that don’t appear to be Bella’s off this metal strut.”
“And there’s an interesting divide in the clothes closet,” said another of the team, emerging from the bedroom. “Most of the stuff is size fourteen, Bella’s size. But four outfits are size ten. There’s two pairs of shoes smaller than Bella’s, too. And in the underwear drawer there are three smaller bras than Bella seems to need.”
“According to the lease, she’s the sole tenant,” said Lambert.
“Then she’s got a smaller friend,” said the bedroom searcher.
“Wonder how difficult it’s going to be to find out who she is?” said Lambert.
It wasn’t, in fact, difficult at all. The fingerprints on the sofa bed were those of Roanne Harding. Her dress and shoe size matched what few items were found in the murdered girl’s Lexington Place apartment.
“And we’ve pulled up the photographs to get the units,” Lambert told Cowley and Pamela. “It looks like one was in the Rangers and the other two were Special Forces. And the old guy with Bella when she was a kid: He’s Special Forces, too. Got a Medal of Honor and a Bronze Star among all that stuff on his chest.”
“These guys had jungle training for sure,” remembered Cowley, aloud.
“What Jefferson Jones told you up in New Rochelle, just before the explosion,” said Pamela, matching the recall. “Let’s see how fast the military can move their asses when they get everything on a plate.”
“Time we moved ours,” reminded Cowley. To Osnan he said, “I’ll speak to Dimitri from the Chicago office. Anything I need to know, reach me there.”