The crash of intrusion thundered onto the tape and a megaphoned voice echoed: “Down! FBI! Down on the floor! Down!”
Cowley drove. Pennsylvania Avenue was arrowlike ahead of them, rising up the hill to the domed seat of government.
Pamela said, “Anyone see anything that looks like a maroon Land Cruiser?”
“Too far to see,” dismissed Cowley.
“The missile will misfire, but if they’re Special Forces they’ll have a lot more besides,” said Schnecker.
“We’re armed,” said Pamela.
“Body armor?”
“No.”
“What about the guys who followed her?”
“I doubt it.”
“We’re going after guys trained for any reversal. There’ll be a lot of casualties. Wait for the SWAT team,” urged Schnecker.
The traffic was slow moving. Cowley beat his hands against the wheel in frustration.
Pamela said, “Capitol security should be warned.”
“They’d try to intervene,
become
casualties,” rejected Cowley.
“That’s wrong, Bill! That’s not a decision you can make.”
“They’d fuck it up.”
“You going to take the responsibility for that?”
“I’m not asking you to—not endangering your career.”
“That wasn’t what I meant, and it was a cheap shot!”
Cowley hammered the wheel again. “Any sign of a Land Cruiser? Of anything?”
“Negative,” Osnan crackled into the car. “Manhattan has got Orlenko and Leanov. Where are you?”
“Third,” reported Pamela.
“SWAT team is behind you,” said Osnan. “They say to wait.”
“I’ll tell the Barrymores that,” said Cowley.
They finally came to a complete halt.
“Shit!” said Cowley. He pulled out, then made a tight left across the horn-protesting traffic line, forcing his way through the downward flow to go up 2nd Street and out on to Louisiana. As he did so Pamela ducked out of sight behind the dashboard.
Osnan said, “Our guys have made a maroon Toyota Land Cruiser moving down from Union Station!”
“Got it!” responded Cowley.
The vehicle was already parked, two men in fatigues walking away across Taft Park. They were close together, with what had to be the missile between them, draped in a tan tarp with a makeshift rope handle. Without any recognition between them Bella Atkins was walking parallel with the road, easing herself into the driver’s seat of the Land Cruiser.
Cowley dragged on an FBI armband and spoke into Pamela’s cell phone. “Everyone identified. Go in to my command. NOW!”
Cowley emerged bent, running, Colt .45 muzzle upward with the safety still on. He was aware of the two agents from the pursuit vehicle seemingly a long way to his left. He was almost at the Land Cruiser before Bella turned. Immediately she slammed her hand flat on the horn. Her two brothers turned.
Cowley shouted, “Put it down! Go down! Down! FBI!”
He knew they wouldn’t have heard over the sound of the horn. It stopped abruptly as the woman fumbled beside her. He wasn’t aware of Pamela until she appeared beside him, her gun outstretched in both hands. She fired, intentionally sideways, blowing out the rear passenger window. That momentarily halted Bella, who was still swinging a MAC 10 machine pistol across when Pamela jammed her gun into the side of the woman’s head so hard the skin broke.
“LET IT GO! YOU DON’T LET IT GO, BELLA, I’LL BLOW YOUR FUCKING HEAD OFF! NOW!”
Just as loudly Cowley shouted again for the two men to drop the missile. They did, but not to obey. Their movements were practically choreographed, in perfect unison. One discarded the tarpaulin while the other smoothly took up the missile and its launcher and came up with it into a kneeling launch position. The first snatched another MAC 10 from inside their improvised carrying case as one of the FBI men who had followed Bella yelled something Cowley didn’t hear. The man with the pistol responded to the sound, scything the weapon crossways on automatic, virtually cutting both running agents in half. He continued the sweep toward the Land Cruiser.
“Down!” screamed Cowley.
He felt himself hit, from his left, and couldn’t stop himself falling. He landed on his side, his head protruding beyond the front wheel. A woman was screaming, but it wasn’t Pamela’s voice. Cowley had a perfect view of the two men in the middle of the park, as one of them had a head-and-shoulders view of him and began to aim the rapid fire weapon. Cowley tried to get his own gun up from under him but knew he wouldn’t be in time. Something was heavy, unmoving, beneath his feet, stopping him from crawling back. He tried to lever himself up, to get behind the vehicle, but then there was a blinding eruption of yellow fire and he saw the flame-out of the missile launch engulf the intended protective shield and then the man’s head behind it. There must have been a scream, because the second man turned in time to see what Cowley and Pamela were seeing, the brief unreal moment when a man remained totally upright but completely without a head before toppling backward.
From somewhere farther along the cruiser, Schnecker said, “We switched the heat shield. Put highly flammable plastic in its place.”
Cowley was up, using the hood of the car to steady his gun arm. As the man swung the pistol back toward them, Cowley fired, missed, and hit the second time, spinning the man back on top of the corpse. The wounded man rolled as he fell, keeping hold of the gun. Cowley stopped running toward him, firing and hitting again.
The man was still trying to move when Cowley reached him, kicking the MAC 10 away from the scrabbling hand. Cowley said, “You make a move for anything you might be carrying and I promise to God I’ll kill you. Your war’s over, asshole. You lost.”
They told Bella Atkins the same thing, several times, in their urgency to find the rest of the arms shipment. The second of Cowley’s two shots had punctured Peter Barrymore’s right lung, and he couldn’t be interviewed.
They interviewed her only after she had been read her Miranda rights and every other legal requirement had been complied with. When she rejected an attorney, Cowley ensured every utterance was recorded. Bella Atkins responded to the machine but not in the way they wanted, providing an indication of how she and her brother were later to use their trial, as a platform for the entire spectrum of far right bigotry. Her only sneering admission was that Roanne Harding had been totally duped, a sacrifice to mock her Black Power commitment.
In their desperation, Cowley and Pamela several times suspended the interview for legal guidance from the attorney general herself. They even suggested—and were refused—a plea bargain in return for being told the whereabouts of the explosives.
It was during the breaks that they learned of Harry Boreman’s initiative in Manhattan, ordering the SWAT team entry into Bay View Avenue when it became obvious that Yevgenni Leanov intended to kill Arseni Orlenko. And of the Russian president’s pronouncement, without the supposed prior consultation with Washington, of the roundup of everyone involved in Moscow and Gorki.
It was the media that answered the question Bella Atkins was refusing and by what was quickly labeled another miracle without the potential carnage. There were program-interrupting news bulletins on local radio and television stations within fifteen minutes of the Taft Park shootout and the harmless landing of the empty warhead in the Capitol parking lot. The only two maimed survivors of the eight-strong former Delta Force bombers said much later the attack was to avenge the capture of their leader—whom both respectfully referred to as the General—that they’d started to rig the explosives in a Maryland forest shack. They wanted to prepare to blow up the control tower and as much of the terminal buildings at Dulles Airport as possible. Two of the terrorists who died were engulfed in phosphorous fire from one incendiary device that James Schnecker and his team hadn’t managed to booby trap in Moscow.
It was from the late-night news coverage that Patrick Hollis finally discovered the identity of the General. His mother, who was watching with him, said, “Can you imagine the evilness of such people?”
“No, I can’t,” said Hollis.
The trials would take months, lawyers picking their slow and profitable way through the maze of international law, but the evidence emerged comparatively quickly through the almost immediate collapse of some of the arrested men.
Determined on maximum revenge against the man who’d intended to kill him, Arseni Orlenko set out in minute detail the snakepit double-crossing of the Russian arms smugglers. It had been Ivan Gavrilovich Guzov who’d plundered KGB files to discover the weaponry-seeking Watchmen. And Yevgenni Mechislavovich Leanov, his former KGB colleague, who’d said he could supply them for a 50 percent cut, through the Osipov Brigade. Viktor Nikov, Orlenko’s Gorki friend, had only wanted a 20 percent share. It had been Leanov who’d rid himself of a business rival by killing Nikov and his mistress’s husband by murdering Valeri Karpov—having sexually blackmailed Plant 43’s homosexual director into being their new supplier—and spread the story that it had been an American hit. Leanov also had had Mikhail Osipov blown up to clear the way for Naina Karpov’s takeover of the Osipov Brigade. His only regret, insisted Orlenko, was not being able to tell them the whereabouts of Guzov’s body, for a murder charge to be brought in America.
There was no way Danilov could have anticipated the extent—criminal as well as political—of Ashot Mizin’s babbled confession. He had, insisted the senior investigator, been promised personally by former Interior Minister Nikolai Belik that he would head the Organized Crime Bureau if he sabotaged Danilov’s investigation. In Gorki, Colonel Oleg Reztsov had been assured promotion to militia commissioner. While Danilov was in Gorki, with arrest warrants against Reztsov and Major Gennardi Averin for complicity in the murder of Aleksai Zotin and the Plant 43 employee who’d supposedly hanged himself, Nikolai Belik shot himself.
“You really did make the wise choice, didn’t you?” said Georgi Chelyak on Danilov’s return to Moscow with the two Gorki detectives in custody.
Cowley flew to Moscow for conferences three times with an American legal team, and Danilov returned twice to Washington for the same purpose. Pamela was obviously living with Cowley at his Arlington apartment in which Danilov ate several times. They didn’t explain and he didn’t ask. On each occasion he drank more than the American.
The first of the trials in either country was scheduled to be that of Robert Standing in the New York state capital of Albany.
“Legally it’s the simplest,” said Cowley. “There are no overseas complications with any of the charges. And we’ve got Peter Barrymore’s provable voiceprint on tape talking about the financing. A conviction against Standing—even if he persists in these denials—will be evidence against the leader of the Watchmen.”
Patrick Hollis decided not to wait for the trial. On the Saturday afternoon he took his mother with him to choose the new, replacement Jaguar and let her decide the color should be blue.
That night, while she prepared supper, he went into the den and roamed the server sites. He was in no hurry, and wanted to avoid one that Peter Barrymore might have used. When he was ready he hesitated, savoring the moment, before writing:
A GENERAL SEEKS RECRUITS FOR AN UNFOUGHT WAR
AGAINST CAPITALISM. FINANCIAL ABILITY IS ESSENTIAL.
He’d monitor every account he provided for his troops. Anyone disobeying orders by stealing more than a penny would be instantly court-martialed. The sentence would be exclusion from the elite force he intended.