The Watchmen cad-3

by Brian Freemantle

  “More seems to have happened there than here?”

  “They were lucky, preventing a terrible explosion. But nothing’s led them anywhere.”

  “Was that all it was, luck?”

  “Entirely. A park attendant saw something he didn’t understand on the statue.”

  She shuddered. “I still can’t believe that Valeri Alexandrovich knew gangsters-people who would do things like that. That’s what the papers said: that the man he was found in the river with was a gangster and that he worked for a crime group whose boss was killed, too. Is that true?”

  “We’ve nothing to connect your husband to the crime group, only the man who was killed at the same time,” said Danilov. “And we haven’t been able to find out how they knew each other.”

  “But it wasn’t another woman, was it?”

  Danilov had forgotten her persistence at their first meeting. “No. We’ve found nothing about another woman.”

  She looked at Pavin. “You said you had things to return to me?”

  “Your husband’s belongings,” said the colonel. “Wallet and what was in it. His watch, although it’s stopped. And your wedding ring.” He offered the plastic container.

  Naina Karpov looked briefly away, apparently composing herself, before reaching out to accept it. “Thank you.”

  “We didn’t think you’d want anything else … clothes …?” said Pavin.

  “No,” the woman said sharply. “Certainly not that. This is all I want.”

  “We’re sorry to have troubled you,” apologized Danilov. “If-”

  “I know.” she stopped him. “I’ve got the card.”

  “It’s her,” said Pavin, back in the car.

  “I know,” said Danilov. “And that’s only the half of it.”

  “Do you think she believed two supposed detectives couldn’t have made more progress than we said we had?”

  “Easily,” said Danilov. “This is Russia.”

  The technician hadn’t exaggerated. It hurt like hell when he pulled off the tape holding the wire in place.

  “How!” demanded Cowley. He’d insisted on opening the whiskey in his suite and given Lambert and the technician a drink before they returned to the embassy. Now only he, Danilov, and Pavin remained. They were on their second, and now the bottle was less than half full.

  “It was clearing up Olga’s things,” said Danilov. “I’ve kept our marriage certificate. And a photograph. In a box. Which was how Naina Karpov kept her things: She showed them to us when we saw her the first time. Then we were trying to find her husband’s connection to Viktor Nikov: find anyone who might have met Nikov when he arrived from Gorki. We had been told one might have been Igor Baratov, a name I thought I’d come across searching for Larissa’s killers-”

  “Wait!” stopped the American, holding up his hand. “I’m totally lost!”

  “It didn’t consciously register with me that I was keeping things in a box, the same as Naina Karpov. Not until this morning. It was only the coincidence, at first. Then I remembered her voice. But more important what I’d read on her marriage certificate.”

  “What?” Cowley frowned.

  “Baratov,” Danilov said simply. “It was Naina’s name before she married.” He paused. “She’s related to a man-a brother, I’d guess-who knew Nikov and who admits talking to him after he arrived from Gorki. But says he didn’t want to get mixed up in a deal he thought involved American cars. His full name is Igor Ivanovich Baratov, and he was a bull for the now supposedly broken up Osipov Brigade, before he almost got killed and quit to run a legitimate car business.”

  Cowley was smiling now. He topped off all their glasses and said, “Now the pieces are really fitting!”

  “If it’s proved scientifically to be Naina Karpov’s voice, which I think it will,” said the careful Pavin.

  Danilov said, “It took me a long time to realize it. Which was a mistake I shouldn’t have made.”

  “For Christ’s sake!” protested Cowley. “We’ve only had a voice to compare for forty-eight hours! Less.”

  “I meant the Baratov name. I shouldn’t have missed that.” His fixation with Larissa’s death clouding everything, he thought.

  “We’ve caught up now.”

  “Have we?” challenged Danilov. “None of us doubt it, so let’s work on the assumption it is Naina Karpov. We know, from the Golden Hussar tape, she can get another warhead. Who from, now that her husband, who worked at the plant, is dead?”

  Cowley stopped smiling. “We also know, from the tape, that there was a double cross. What if Valeri Karpov wasn’t his wife’s supplier?”

  “And she had him killed?” questioned Pavin, disbelievingly.

  “It was supposed to be someone from America,” reminded Danilov.

  “‘It was business: only ever business’” quoted Cowley, in reply. “Not heartbroken if she didn’t actually take out the contract.”

  Danilov looked at his deputy. “Do we know, definitely, that the Osipov Brigade broke up after his killing?”

  “No,” Pavin admitted immediately. “Like so much else, it came from Ashot Mizin.”

  “So it’s a lie,” dismissed Danilov, at once. To Cowley’s frown, Danilov said, “We know Mizin’s on the payroll, and I’m very glad I did nothing about it. You think it’s too much to speculate that Naina Karpov has become head of what was the Osipov family?”

  “It wouldn’t take a lot to convince me,” accepted the American.

  “It isn’t the most important question,” said Pavin. “We still don’t know who her supplier is.”

  “Or how to find out,” completed Danilov.

  Pamela Darnley immediately realized the leads made possible linking the two Russians with OverOcean Inc., the most obvious and important being the name of a consignee to whom anything might have been shipped from Russia.

  Yet another telephone tap was granted, after a bureau lawyer applied-and explained-to a judge in chambers. By the time that happened Frank Norton, at the White House, had invoked presidential authority to sweep aside the traditional obstructive hostility between the FBI and the IRS to get the company’s tax returns made available to one of the bureau’s few remaining auditors not involved in the embezzlement investigation, which had spread to sixty-four branches of four different banks operating in four eastern states.

  OverOcean’s accounts were immaculate and all its taxes fully paid up. Its complete financial returns provided a detailed record of the company’s operations over the preceding two years of its incorporation, from which a list was compiled of every shipping company it had ever used, particularly any with obvious connections with Eastern Europe. Very quickly it was seen that although there was no direct Russian trading during those two years, OverOcean had six times shipped cargo from the Polish port of Gdansk aboard freighters operated by the Cidicj line. The last had been one month before the attack upon the United Nations.

  With dates to work from, Pamela assigned four agents freed from the Lake Shore Drive public telephone tap to trace the cargo manifests declared to U.S. Customs on arrival. In every instance the cargo had been containerized and described as farm equipment returned for refurbishment. According to Customs’ records, no container had ever been opened for examination. Each had been marked for Chicago dockside collection, for onward delivery by OverOcean itself.

  A disappointed Pamela Darnley exclaimed, “As easy as that!”

  “Not next time,” promised Terry Osnan. “Now we know how to put the stopper in the bottle.”

  “We hope,” said the unconvinced woman.

  In his Moscow hotel suite, Cowley replaced the telephone and smiled at Danilov. “It’s definitely Naina Karpov’s voiceprint. Congratulations.”

  “There are two garages that we know about,” Pavin set out. “The larger is on Nikitskij Boulevard-that’s Baratov’s outlet for Mercedes. The other one is on Ulitza Kazakova. Mostly Zils from there.”

  “Selling or repairing?” asked Cowley.r />
  “Both,” said Pavin.

  “Stock?”

  “Seemed a lot available. I only went once to each place.”

  “And everything’s legit?”

  “Looked like it,” said Pavin. “But it wasn’t in any detail-not like the need is now.”

  “If he has a lot of stock, he’ll have other places to keep it,” guessed Cowley.

  “They’d suspect something if we openly approach him so soon after seeing the woman,” said Danilov. “We’ll have to split the Leanov surveillance.”

  “If they’ve taken over the Osipov Brigade, Anatoli Lasin would know about it,” Pavin pointed out.

  Cowley shook his head. “I don’t think we can risk going anywhere near anyone. It’s a bastard that even now, we still haven’t got anything legal we can move on spread like this between America and Russia!”

  “Sometimes,” said Pavin, “the law gets in the way of enforcing it.”

  The other two men took it as truism, not cynicism. Neither smiled.

  Pamela Darnley wasn’t smiling, either, because the development that should have been to her credit ended, in her opinion if no one else’s, in more frustration than the unqualified success it should have been.

  Because there was no precedent, it had been impossible to predict the volume of calls from or to the limited number of public telephones on the contact list from Bay View Avenue.

  It was so great that it overwhelmed every physical monitor; within two hours that had to be abandoned for duplicated sound recordings. The delay in reading the transcripts built up to three hours before one of the Washington technicians listening to the targeted D.C. phone heard what they were waiting for. By then the conversation-between the Washington telephone and that on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive upon which Pamela had reduced physical surveillance-was three hours and seven minutes old.

  Pamela wasn’t satisfied that the Washington voiceprint proved to be that of the woman who’d made the booby-trap call from New Rochelle. Or that they had a new voice trace from the man who’d spoken from Lake Shore Drive, who was obviously a leader-maybe the leader-of the Watchmen. And they’d lost him.

  30

  Once again there was no identification. The man said, “Any problem?” It was a deep bass voice. American. No discernible accent.

  “They haven’t got a clue.” Her voice was deeper than how she’d distorted it from New Rochelle.

  “They won’t find anything?”

  “No way they can until it’s too late. More surprises than they can ever guess.”

  “We’re going to mount another operation first.”

  “What?”

  “A warhead. One that works this time.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because we showed them last time what happens if it doesn’t.”

  “United Nations?”

  “Not decided yet. There’ll be some other stuff, too. I’ve got a lot coming in.”

  “Separate, you mean?”

  “One after the other, bang, bang, bang.” He laughed. “That’s good: bang, bang, bang!

  She laughed obediently. “I’ve been working my ass off getting the money.” There was another laugh. “Kinda fun, helping ourselves.”

  “How much are you taking, for yourself?”

  There was a pause. “Cab fare is all.”

  “That’s OK. And we’ve all been working at it.”

  “We got enough?”

  “Whatever we’re short I’m going to fine the asshole for going AWOL.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He had a virus.”

  “You think it’s true?”

  “He got chicken: changed his mind.”

  “You want me to go on having fun and helping myself?”

  “Gotta get a price from the Russians yet; maybe put it on hold for a coupla days.”

  “Any hard feelings there?”

  “I guess but so what? We’re the buyers, they’re the sellers. What choice they got, they want to make money?”

  “We would have been there by now, that fucking thing gone off like it should have.”

  “It will next time. And maybe we’ll do something else in Moscow. That worked better than we expected.”

  “What?”

  “Need to speak to them there: See what ideas they got.”

  “America taking over the Moscow investigation was good.”

  “You see the speculation there could be government changes there-the president even?”

  “I saw it. Be good to claim credit. Prove our strength.”

  “We will claim credit. We’ll deserve it.”

  “When do you want me to call?”

  “Friday. Same time. But not this number.”

  “Security change?”

  “It’s time. You got the next number?”

  “Of course. What about an announcement on the Net like before?”

  “Need to finalize the target first. Might even do Moscow before here. We’ll talk about that on Friday, too.”

  “Take care, brother.”

  “And you, sister.”

  Pamela was glad the director insisted on time to read everything. It gave her the matching space to talk it through with Terry Osnan-lessen her fury at the setbacks that couldn’t have been avoided and the stupidity that could-and read what had come in from Moscow. She also made several phone calls.

  When she did finally enter the fifth-floor office Leonard Ross greeted her with “We got a new ball game here?”

  “New game plan, certainly,” she agreed. There was no way to avoid some of the responsibility. It might be an idea, maybe, to admit at least to part.

  “Talk it through.”

  A sudden awareness further dampened her anger. She had made it! She’d attended the topmost planning session at the White House-and been acknowledged-and here she was, by herself, being asked for opinions by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who called her by her first name. Which made today such a bastard, she thought, the annoyance flaring again. She had to think of everything she said before saying it. “After all the effort, the public telephone taps are useless, now they’ve changed their numbers.”

  “What about picking the new ones up from Orlenko’s billing, like we did the others?”

  “Maybe, in time. But we don’t know how much time we’ve got. Or if Orlenko will call them, like he did last time. We can’t rely on it.”

  “Didn’t we have Lake Shore Drive under physical surveillance? Cameras?”

  Careful, Pamela warned herself: Apportion as much blame as possible away from herself. “With the tap in place-and Chicago stretched, checking out OverOcean-I agreed the surveillance could be reduced. I didn’t mean-or approve-that reduction in any way including cameras.”

  Ross regarded her steadily for several moments. “Nothing?”

  “I don’t know,” Pamela admitted. “We have the conversation specifically timed. The photographic coverage is estimated. There might be a half hour overlap.”

  “Damn!”

  “I know.”

  “That’s a bad mistake, Pamela. A hell of a bad mistake.”

  Pamela said nothing.

  Ross waved the transcript at her. “This could be the man in charge!”

  “I recognize that.” She didn’t think Damn. She thought Fuck! fuck! fuck!

  “What about the taps on OverOcean? And the Trenton company?” demanded Ross. He was only just controlling the anger.

  “Everything strictly business. Nothing relevant at all.”

  “And the two Russians, Guzov and Kabanov? What the hell we doing about them?”

  Still only just in control, judged Pamela. “Both houses bugged from the exchange. We didn’t think we could risk another entry like in Brooklyn.” William Cowley didn’t think, not “we.” Should she have qualified the decision? Too late now. The encounter was far more critical than she’d anticipated. Wanted. Hurriedly she added, “Twenty-four-hour physical surveillance, of c
ourse. Including communication vehicles. Nothing so far.”

  “I’d like a legal reason to bring the bastards in-cut the thing off at the head.”

  Could she risk the argument? She had to, because there was one to make and because there was more than enough in the conversation to stage at least a partial recovery. “We would not be cutting them off at the head. We don’t know who or what that head is.”

  “What the hell do we know, then? Know that takes us one inch forward!”

  Pamela snatched the chance. “We know the New Rochelle trap was baited from Washington, so if we identify the voice, we can consider multiple homicide as the legality you’re looking for. We’ve got positive confirmation that they are inside the Pentagon-or have access, at least-and that something’s already been set up that they don’t expect us to find: ‘more surprises than they can ever guess,’” she quoted. “That could mean more than one thing. We know that they intend using a warhead they don’t yet have in two, not one, separate attacks and that the UN could be one of the targets. We know they’re thinking of doing something else in Moscow and from that one remark-‘need to speak to them there: See what ideas they got’-I’d say there’s a contact route we don’t know about, not involving Brooklyn and the Golden Hussar. And I’d say it’s more than likely we’ve confirmed how they’re financing everything-” She straggled to a breathless but intentional stop, worried she had begun to sound too strident.

  “But what can we do about any of it?”

  “The finance guys we’ve got in the banks are setting electronic traps they say could give them a trace.”

  Ross lifted and dropped the transcript. “He just told her to stop.”

  “He doesn’t yet know the price Naina Karpov is asking, which we do. We still don’t have a definite figure, but the estimate is that from all the banks we know are being robbed, the total is just over a million. They’re short. They’ll have to start up again.”

  Ross smiled at last. “Yes they will, won’t they?”

  “And we’ve got OverOcean,” continued Pamela. “Chicago’s got to be their entry: their base, even, judging from this intercept.”

  The FBI director went back to it. “Who’s the asshole who’s got to be fined?”