The Watchmen (4 page)

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Authors: Brian Freemantle

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BOOK: The Watchmen
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“What did they see?” broke in Butterworth.
“Two people—the second commuter pilot thought one was slim enough to have been a woman—both in unmarked bill caps and boat anoraks, again unmarked, no distinguishing color: dark blue or black maybe.”
“I can’t understand if they looked in the direction of the flash why they didn’t see one of the two still with the rocket launcher,” protested Hartz.
“The missile hitting the UN tower appeared practically simultaneous with the flash,” said Cowley. “All three witnesses say they thought that was what caused the flash. They virtually ignored the cruiser after the initial seconds.”
“How many more potential witnesses could there be?” demanded the CIA director.
“We’ve got from the New York Port Authority the names of three cargo barges that were on the river at the time.” Cowley paused, looking at Peter Samuels, the Customs and Excise director who had been silent so far. “And Customs is checking reported yacht and cruiser arrivals in the East River back five hours from the time of the attack.”
“But our records would only be of incoming boats
reporting
their arrival,” qualified Samuels. “There’s no legal requirement for a yacht or cruiser to do that if it merely came down from an upriver mooring and turned back before exiting the river. At least half the craft that leave the river to go up and down the coast don’t report their return anyway.”
“The missile is Russian, whether it had one or two warheads,” said Bradley. “And by sea is the likeliest way of smuggling it into the country.”
“There’s something like four thousand miles of U.S. coastline, and that’s a straight measurement, not including about a million creeks and inlets and navigable rivers,” said the Customs director. “Of course I’ve issued watch orders at every major port, but the reality is that’s about as practical as trying to check every yacht and cruiser between Boston and Washington. It’s being done, because it’s got to be done, but no one should expect a quick result. No one should expect a result at all, unless the miracles continue.”
Once again there was silence. This time it was the CIA director who broke it. Butterworth said, “We don’t have enough to make a row of beans.”
“Everything that can be done has been done to initiate the most comprehensive investigation in the bureau’s history,” Ross said defensively.
Hartz concentrated on the CIA chief. “What about Plant 35, at Gorki?”
The bald man shifted uncomfortably. “Throughout the Cold War Gorki was a closed city. We know there were extensive armament and weapon facilities there but we have nothing specific about a Plant 35.”
“
We
have,” announced Ross, to an immediate stir around the table. “Our files have it as a conventional weapons facility at which production began to be wound down in 1994.”
Butterworth’s face blazed at what he regarded as territorial intrusion. “I was under the impression that this was a totally shared investigation.”
“It is,” said the disheveled Bureau director. “I’ve just shared.”
There was a ripple of forced laughter. Flushed because of it and trying to recover, Butterworth said, “If the Russians still possess the sort of warheads fired yesterday—which they clearly do—they are in provable breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention that was internationally concluded, with them as signatories, in 1993.” He answered Hartz’s look. “Are we making diplomatic representation about that?”
“I don’t think our two countries need to get into that sort of exchange at this stage,” the presidential chief of staff warned sharply.
“I agree,” said Hartz just as quickly and as diplomatically rehearsed. “I spent an hour with the Russian ambassador last night and spoke to him again on the phone before this meeting. They’re as concerned—as frightened—about this as we are. We need to cooperate, not confront.”
“As we’ve done before,” reminded Ross, indicating Cowley by his side. “And as we need more than ever to do again now.”
 
The connection an hour later between the FBI headquarters on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue and the Moscow Militia building on Ulitza Petrovka was immediate. Dimitri Danilov said, “On television it looked as if you’d put on weight.”
“I’m already losing it,” said William Cowley.
“I’m glad it’s you,” said the Russian. He was, genuinely. It made a change for him to have anything like a personal feeling about anything.
“And I’m glad it’s you.” Having been in Moscow when Larissa had been killed and knowing the other man’s devastation, Cowley said, “How’ve you been?”
“So-so. You?”
“So-so. You in operational charge?”
“Officially appointed by the White House, with a remit as wide as the Volga itself,” confirmed Danilov.
“The assurance here is total cooperation?”
“Here, too,” said the Russian. From his just-concluded conversation with the Gorki Militia detective chief, Danilov suspected the working relationship was going to be more difficult there than with Washington. He said, “What have you got?”
“Two intact warheads, one containing sarin, the other anthrax. And a smashed up SA-7 delivery system.”
“I’ll need the details.”
“I’ll fax it all now. And wire photographs. What about Plant 35?”
“Includes a facility for defensive chemical and biological weapon research,” Danilov admitted at once.
Normal voices, conversational voices, Cowley thought: How’s the weather with you, raining here, good to hear everything’s all right with you. Except that
nothing
was all right. At this very moment, while they were talking, two other cans of topsy-turvey shit capable of killing thousands of people might already be slotted into a delivery system aimed at a building anywhere … . Cowley stopped the drift. Not
anywhere.
The United Nations complex had been chosen for exactly what it was, the one—the most—internationally attention-attracting target in the world. The next, inevitable attack would be on a similarly focused site. Which could only be Washington itself. Security alerts had gone out throughout the country, but Cowley was suddenly convinced they needed to be concentrated in D.C. “You coming here or am I coming there?”
“Let’s decide the order of priority first,” said Danilov.
“The priority is the priority,” said Cowley, and immediately wished he hadn’t. It echoed like a soap opera sound byte just before the credits ran, to bring viewers back for the next episode. Hurriedly he added, “Whoever, wherever, gets the first break.”
“Let’s hope one of us recognize it,” warned Danilov.
 
Someone had stolen Larissa’s flowers, which didn’t surprise Danilov. The daffodils he’d brought now would probably go within a day. He cleared the fallen leaves and twigs from the Novodevichy Cemetery grave, unashamedly talking to her as he always did, imagining her replies in his mind.
Remember Bill, the American … big man? That’s right … good to go to America again … get away. Olga’s Olga, just the same … . Of course I miss you—ache for you. Don’t feel like being careful … . All right, of course I will be … . Why couldn’t you have been … . I know, I’m sorry. Not your fault. Yevgennie’s fault—your cheating, bastard militia colonel husband, failing his Mafia masters. Why did you have to be in the car, though? Leave me? I won’t be long … . Wish I could bring you something … see you … be with you. No, I’m all right. No, not all right: able to handle it. Sorry about the flowers. It’s Moscow—Russia. Good night. I love you.
Danilov rose, just as unashamedly staring back at another mourner looking curiously at him. He drove without hurry or interest to Ulitza Kirovskaya, knowing the sound was from his apartment as he stepped out of the elevator. His wife sat in front of the new, blaring set that had been her latest insistence, initially oblivious to his entry. She became aware of it when he went in front of her to reduce the volume.
“It’s too loud!” It was a Russian subtitled Australian series that had been running for weeks. There was a kangaroo that did tricks.
“I like trying to hear the English words.”
“You don’t speak English.”
“Irena says this is a way to learn.”
“She’s wrong.” Irena, who worked in the same ministry office as Olga, claimed to have learned her English from American movies. Danilov, who’d studied languages at the university, reckoned she knew about a dozen words, most of which she mispronounced.
The kitchen sink still had the stalagmite of unwashed dishes that had been there that morning, and on his way to the bathroom to wash Danilov saw the bed was in the upheaval in which she’d left it when she’d gotten up. The Australian soap had ended when he returned.
He said: “What words did you learn?”
“You interrupted me. I couldn’t concentrate.”
“I’m going away.”
“Where!” she demanded, suddenly attentive, turning to him.
“Gorki. What happened to your hair?”
“Igor said I needed this color, while the other tints grew out. What’s in Gorki?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out.”
“Any point in my making a present list?”
“None.”
“That American you worked with was on television before my program. Something about a missile.”
“I spoke to him today.”
Olga’s interest returned. “You’re going to America!”
“Maybe.”
“So I
can
write a present list!”
Danilov realized for the first time she was wearing a shirt he’d brought back for her the last time. Two buttons were missing and the stain over her left breast looked old and ingrained. Larissa had been wearing the bracelet he’d given her from the same trip. It had been one of the few things that had been identifiable after the bombing of the car.
 
“It’s the fifth time it’s happened in the last six months!” protested Clarence Snelling.
“The bank’s extremely sorry,” apologized the desk assistant, who’d dealt with the man’s previous complaints. “Computers do make mistakes.”
“No, they don’t!” Snelling replied. “It’s the people who handle them who make the mistakes.”
“It’s twenty-two cents,” the bank official pointed out. “It’s never been more than fifty. And as before, I’ll see that the amount is immediately restored.”
“I want an assurance that it won’t happen again!” insisted Snelling. “And this time I want it kept, which so far you haven’t done.”
“Sir,” said the man, “I promise you we’ll do our very best.”
 
Dimitri Danilov’s plane came in directly over the joining of the Volga with the river Oka. Briefly it was impossible to see both banks of the waterway that flows for more than two thousand miles from the frozen north to the subtropical Caspian Sea, to separate European from Asiatic Russia. It narrowed nearer to Gorki itself, but there were so many boats and ships—two cruisers large enough to be considered liners—that they looked from the air like discarded debris, without any regulated direction. He tried to locate the canal from the Volga to Moscow that Stalin forced his gulag prisoners to scoop from the earth with their bare hands but couldn’t and decided it must be farther downstream. The vast, flat hinterland of taiga forests was black, not conifer green, pockmarked in a lot of places into total baldness by clear-cutting without replanting. There were also the huge interruptions of uniform, regimented weapons and military materiel manufacturing buildings, each visibly divided from its matching neighbor by watch-towered, fenced perimeters. Two actually on the riverbank were on either side of an enormous man-made canal he could see humped with the pens in which the submarines now hemorrhaging their nuclear core into Murmansk harbor were originally housed, ready to fight America into mutual atomic annihilation. Which factory below was known simply by the number 35 and specialized in another sort of annihilation? Danilov wondered.
The aircraft, surprisingly, arrived exactly according to the schedule he’d given Colonel Oleg Reztsov, head of Gorki’s serious crime division, but there was no greeting officer. There was no waiting militia car outside, either, and Danilov accepted both, sadly, as an augury.
The smell of stale tobacco competed with the even staler stink of body odor in the rattling, sag-seated taxi festooned with dangling trolls and head-nodding toy animals. One had a broken neck. Danilov had forgotten the horizon-to-horizon taiga-covered mosquito bog and marsh. Flying things feasted off him, despite his lowering the window as far as it would go. The incoming breeze didn’t disperse the smell, either. When he told the inquiring driver, who’d smiled expectantly at Danilov’s American-bought suit bag, that he wasn’t going to pay in dollars, the man said having luggage inside the car would cost an extra fifty rubles. Danilov told the driver who he was, and the man said there wasn’t an extra charge for carrying a militia general.
Danilov’s room at the National Hotel overlooked a trash-strewn square at the rear, next to an air-conditioning or heater unit the throbbing of which reverberated into his room. Cockroaches killed by whatever was in an upturned cardboard container in the closet lay atrophied, legs stiffly in the air. There was no soap or sink or bath plug, which Danilov knew he should have anticipated and was annoyed that he hadn’t.
Colonel Reztsov wasn’t available when Danilov called. The woman who answered the telephone said she didn’t know where he was or when he would be back. Danilov suggested she find out to tell the president’s chief of staff when he called from the White House in Moscow in fifteen minutes, and in ten Reztsov came thickvoiced on the line.
“I didn’t think you were arriving until tomorrow.”
“I sent a fax.”
“It must have been mislaid.”
“You do understand how seriously it’s being treated?”
“I’ve got a squad on it already.”
“I’d like whoever’s in charge waiting when I get to your office. Which I will do in thirty minutes.”
“That—” the man began but stopped.
“What?” demanded Danilov.
“Nothing. I’ll send a car.”
Danilov parted with another ten dollars to get his room changed to one with soap and a bath plug and without mummified cockroaches. The mystery throbbing was less intrusive, too. The promised driver waiting in the lobby was a woman and blonde, and the car was a blue BMW. Danilov stopped momentarily—stupidly, he recognized at once—halted by the unneeded and unwelcome déjà vu: The vehicle in which his mafia paymasters had blown up Yevgennie Kosov had been a BMW, blue like this one, and Larissa, who’d died with him, had been blonde, although slim and poised and beautiful, not at all like this woman, who was plump and round-faced and waddled. The obvious comparison made his reaction even more stupid. It had to stop, as the one-sided graveside conversations had to stop. He was hovering, Danilov supposed, on the edge of a nervous breakdown—close to some sort of breakdown. Time—long past time—to take hold of himself. Learn to live with the grief, as sensibly mature adult people adjusted to loss, no matter how traumatizing or unbearable it first appeared.
The driver took Danilov’s hesitation to be admiration and said it was Colonel Reztsov’s personal car. Danilov decided Reztsov was either a fool or very arrogant to show off a vehicle that would have cost the man a lifetime’s salary if he’d bought it honestly. And then Danilov accepted that Reztsov was probably neither. What the police chief was, in fact, was a typical senior Russian militia officer, living more than comfortably on a mafia payroll, and eager to show a visiting senior Moscow militia officer he imagined similarly cared for that life was as sweet in the provinces as it was in the capital.
What about his own foolishness? Danilov demanded of himself, settling into the squeaking leather upholstery and initially savoring the aroma from an unseen, perfumed deodorizer after the gagging journey from the airport. Danilov wasn’t a rarity in Moscow policing. He was now an arm’s-length, ostracized oddity, as unknown in modern Russia as the Neolithic long-haired mammoths occasionally found frozen in perfection in Siberian glaciers. So why had he come—alone—expecting honest, find-the-truth cooperation from a major provincial militia? He should, at least, have brought Yuri Pavin, whose apparent elephantine slowness belied a mind of jaguar speed. On something as high profile as this he should have risked the very real and constant backstabbing danger of an unsupervised department to bring his trusted deputy with him. Although Pavin
was
his deputy, now with the rank of senior colonel, he was still a street-level, gutter-thinking policeman who could smell a lead, like a bloodhound scenting a trail. It was the sort of expertise Danilov suspected he was going to need.
If Reztsov’s car hadn’t been a sufficient pointer, the police chief’s appearance would have been. Danilov wondered if it was an institutionalized psychology for men whose supposed function required uniforms to dress like the mobsters with whom they exchanged money-filled, back-alley handshakes. Reztsov’s single-breasted Western-style suit was blue, practically a match with the car, and had a silky sheen. The watch and its band was gold, balanced by the gold identity bracelet on his right wrist. On the man’s right hand the diamond shone with lighthouse brightness from a knuckle-reaching gold band. Major Gennardi Averin, the other man in Reztsov’s opulent office—which smelled of the same perfume as the car—was a clone of his superior, although the shiny suit was gray and Averin didn’t have a gold identity bracelet.
Both men were as sleek as their clothes, smooth-faced, well barbered, confident of their surroundings and their domination in it. The handshakes were effusive, Reztsov actually retaining Danilov’s hand to lead him away from the officialese of the grandiose desk to a lounge-chaired, plant-dotted informal area close to a book-lined cabinet. There was Chivas Regal as well as vodka already set out. The glasses were cut crystal. Danilov accepted vodka, going along with the charade. Reztsov and the major both had whiskey.
Danilov said at once, “How can you help me?”
“We’ve come up with something from records,” announced Reztsov. “An arms smuggler.”
“What sort of arms?”
“Conventional,” said Averin. “Not something either of us have personally dealt with.”
“What have you done?”
“Waited for you.”
“Was any loss reported from Plant 35?”
“No,” Reztsov said immediately.
“Have you spoken to Plant 35 directly?”
“Decided to wait until you got here,” parroted Averin. “Got an appointment for us with the director tomorrow, at ten.”
“But you
have
spoken to him?”
“By telephone,” said Averin. “Just to make the appointment.”
“You didn’t ask him if there was anything missing?”
“He said he’d check. Tell us tomorrow.”
It was difficult for Danilov to curb the anger. He wasn’t sure if he should bother, confronted by this almost smirking contempt. “How much conventional weaponry disappears from the establishments here?”
Reztsov made an uncertain movement. “Can’t remember the last time we were called in. Security’s very good.”
“How many official crime families do you have in Gorki?”
Reztsov made another shrug. “Hardly families. Just one or two loose-knit groups.”
“As well as the last case of known thefts from factories here, I’d like all your intelligence on organized crime groups,” set out Danilov. “Particularly those with known links to families in Moscow. I’m having checks carried out there, for connections here. Most particularly—and obviously—I want any known association with America … any supposedly genuine America joint venture businesses here. You’ll put that in hand right away, will you?” The condescension began to go, and Danilov was glad he’d kept his temper.
“That could be quite an undertaking—” Reztsov began to protest but Danilov overrode him.
“If it’s too much for your department, I’ll move militia personnel from Moscow,” he said. “Normal local authority and jurisdiction doesn’t apply. I want an office to work from, and I’d like to start on the organized crime material right away.”
“Yes, of course,” said the now-subdued local police colonel.
 
Dimitri Ivanovich Danilov read the intelligence dossiers on organized crime in Gorki with the expertise of a detective who had once been on the take and could learn as much from what was not recorded as he could from what was. The slimmest and most inadequate file was on a group headed by Mikhail Sidak, the thickest—and the most actively investigated—on the family led by Aleksai Zotin, which told Danilov they were the biggest two in the city, in turf competition with each other and that Reztsov had most probably earned the sweet-smelling BMW from Sidak for harassing the opposition. There had been prosecutions against four low-level members of a third family headed by Gusein Isayev for importing drugs along the Volga from the opium-producing south. Danilov surmised it was a business in which Sidak was eager to expand.
Both trials of the already identified conventional weapons trafficker, Viktor Nikolaevich Nikov, had failed through lack of evidence. Nikov was described as a bull—the Russian underworld term for a hit man—predictably in the family, or brigade, of Aleksai Zotin. The cases had involved a consignment of Kalashnikov rifles and antipersonnel mines. The chief prosecution witness had been the storeman at Plant 20, a conventional weapons factory, who’d retracted a sworn statement that Nikov had been the man to whom he’d sold the guns and mines. Three defense witnesses had testified that Nikov had been with them in Moscow, buying imported foreign cars for his garages, when the prosecution claimed he had been in Gorki. None of the Moscow defense witness names meant anything to Danilov, but that was hardly surprising, considering the number of brigades in the capital. The only names he knew—ingrained in his memory—were the crews of the Chechen and Ostinkono families whose territorial war had led to Larissa being killed. Some—too many—had escaped, were still alive.
“There’s the sort of Moscow connection you were asking about. I’d momentarily forgotten about it,” said Reztsov. Apologizing that it might take several days to find an available office, the local police chief had insisted that a desk, chair, and filing cabinet be moved into his own suite and remained attentively close to Danilov, even selecting and offering the folders.
“Considering how big the arms industry is here, I’m surprised there’s been so very little crime—leakage—involving it, particularly now that so much is superfluous with the end of the Cold War,” said Danilov.
“I told you, security’s good,” reminded Reztsov. “It’s directed from Moscow.”
“There’s no more than this?” pressed Danilov. Their attitude wasn’t patronizing but their selection was. It had taken less than an hour to produce.
“This is what I understood you wanted,” said Major Averin. “How else can I help?”
“Zotin is the foremost family?”
“We’ve moved against them a lot,” Averin pointed out.
“You got any feedback from informants that they might be connected with what happened in New York?”
“Not yet,” said the major. “My task force was only formed two days ago. We’ve spread the word.”
“We should talk to Nikov,” said the local police chief, as if it were a decision no one else would have reached.
“Does he still run the garages referred to in his file?” asked Danilov. They’d sell cars stolen in Western Europe and smuggled in largely through Poland.
“When we last heard,” Averin said carelessly.
“You haven’t checked the whereabouts of someone who twice escaped arms-dealing prosecution?” Danilov demanded sharply.

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