“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.”
Osnan did, within fifteen minutes of their arrival, while Cowley was on the telephone to Dimitri Danilov.
“What?” demanded Cowley, passing the Moscow connection to Pamela.
“Vyacheslav Kabanov got off the train from New York thirty minutes ago. Picked up his car and drove home like all the other commuters.”
“What about Guzov?”
“Didn’t show. Car’s still in the station lot.”
“He’ll be on his way here to Chicago for the Cidicj Star’s arrival,” predicted Cowley. “It’s going to be OK.”
40
The Cidicj Star had been allocated a berth beneath the main Customs building. A conference room directly overlooking the harbor was transformed into yet another incident room.
The freighter had been under continuous Customs air, sea, and radar surveillance from the moment, just before midnight, it passed through the Straits of Mackinac from Lake Huron into Lake Michigan and began to sail the final gauntlet between the states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Its estimated docking time remained the same, and its hourly progress was marked on a familiar map. Additional telephones, computer terminals, and a wide-screen television had been installed. Operating staff stood around with not enough to do.
Everyone assembled too soon, before midday, crowding the room unnecessarily. Cowley was reminded of the early need of people in high places to be seen to be involved. He was briefly concerned that Peter Samuels, who arrived from Washington before nine, might expect to take personal command until the Customs chief asked to be briefed and made it clear it remained a Bureau operations. The Chicago police commissioner, included as a Washington-instructed courtesy, arrived with his deputy and seemed surprised that at least a deputy FBI director wasn’t present.
James Schnecker and his team also flew in by midmorning, but with a reason. Both Cowley and Pamela went with them to the warehouse in which the OverOcean containers were to be bonded, again specially chosen because it could be entered through a series of corridors from dock authority administration buildings unseen by any OverOcean watcher on the dockside.
Schnecker immediately said, “Couldn’t ask for anything better, after how we worked in Moscow.”
“You won’t have any trouble identifying what’s outstanding?” queried Pamela.
“Just a question of finding it,” assured Neil Hamish.
“We’ll even have time to go over everything we’ve already done,” suggested Schnecker. “We’re looking good.”
Cowley thought
so, too, when he made his first contact of the day with Washington to be told there’d been no interference with the reprogramed Challenger or the navigational satellite. There’d been no telephone calls, incoming or outgoing, the previous night or that morning from Bella Atkins’s apartment. There’d been obvious cleaning sounds-almost a full fifteen minutes of vacuuming-the previous night. She’d hummed a lot, although not a recognizable tune. And laughed aloud at Friends.
“What’s Ashton say about watching her in the Pentagon?” asked Cowley.
“There’s an instant trace on her computer ID: comes up directly on Ashton’s monitor,” said Terry Osnan. “They’ve actually got one of those phony antistatic bands on her terminal lead as a backup.”
“Office phone?”
“Five calls so far this morning. All work related.”
“What do we know about her?”
“Still waiting to hear.”
“I’d like a preliminary biog early afternoon.”
Leonard Ross called thirty minutes later. When he heard Samuels and the police chief were already there, he spoke individually to both. When Cowley went back on the line, the director said, “Any jurisdictional problems?”
“None,” said Cowley.
“It’s our case.”
“Everyone’s accepting that.”
“Unfortunate about Guzov.”
“I’m expecting him to turn up here.”
“I’m expecting you to wrap this whole thing up. It’s time.”
There was California wine and hard booze for the buffet lunch set out in an adjoining room. Cowley drank mineral water, as Pamela did. Pamela ate a piece of fruit. Cowley didn’t bother with anything. The police commissioner wanted to know how quickly they expected to make arrests and the timing of their being publicly disclosed. To the man’s second and obvious disappointment of the day, Cowley made a lot of the difficulties of coordinating split-second seizures in America and Russia and of the disastrous consequences of premature publicity. It was even possible, after the international significance of the investigation, that the president himself might decide to make the announcement.
Cowley was about to call Washington when Terry Osnan came on to the line. “We’ve learned an awful lot about Bella.”
Hers was a family steeped in a military tradition stretching back to World War II, although Atkins was her married name. The family was Barrymore. The tradition had been established by her grandfather, who had been a major and served in Patton’s Third Army general staff all the way through to Berlin. The son-Bella’s father-had been a career soldier who’d served in Korea, remained there as part of the military administration in the south after the cease-fire, and been on his second tour in Vietnam when he’d been killed at Da Nang in the first Tet offensive.
Bella was the youngest of four children, the others all boys and all career soldiers like their father. George, the next in line to Bella and the Ranger in the York Avenue photographs, had died in Operation Desert Storm. So had Bella’s husband, a lieutenant in a tank unit. Her other two Special Forces brothers, Peter and Jake, had also fought in the Gulf. The operations they’d been involved in were classified, but an application was being made to get the security embargo lifted. Peter Barrymore was the one with the eagle tattoo.
Both had been invited to leave the service, to avoid the war hero publicity of a court-martial, after their membership in the John Birch Society had emerged when they’d been discovered trying to recruit within their own and other units for what had been described as an unacceptable right-wing offshoot. There was also an untraced, substantial loss of military equipment. Both had left the army with the rank of major. Peter Barrymore’s last known address was North Rush Street, Chicago, which Osnan had already told the Chicago office, direct. He’d also personally given Al Beckinsdale the army discharge address of Jake Barrymore on Reynolds Avenue, in the Point Breeze district of Pittsburgh.
Osnan said, “The army finally shifted their butts.”
Cowley saw Pamela talking animatedly on another telephone. The attention of everyone in the room was on both of them. To Osnan he said, “Bella’s voiceprint-and maybe the connection with the Roanne Harding murder-is reasonable suspicion for warrants.”
“Already being applied for.”
“Chicago and Pittsburgh know?”
“Told both myself,” said Osnan.
“Get hold of Anne Stovey in Albany. I reckon this is new information sufficient to get at Robert Standing again.”
“Will do.”
“Better warn Trenton. And tell Manhattan to get more people closer to Orlenko in Brooklyn. No one’s to move until I say so, but when I do say so there’s only got to be one sound from the trap snapping shut.”
“Moscow?”
“I’ll talk direct.”
Pamela was already walking toward him when Cowley put down the phone. She said, “Steve Murray called to say he was going to North Rush Street himself. Filled me in quickly. So I spoke to Pittsburgh. Beckinsdale’s going himself there, too.”
“Just a stakeout!” Cowley qualified hurriedly.
“That’s all,” assured the woman. “A look-see, then back to us. You organized Standing?”
“Yes.”
She grinned at him. “We work as well out of bed as we do in it.”
“Keep your mind on the job,” he said, but still smiled. For the first time he thought they really had a reason to smile.
Danilov expected a telephone call to be sufficient, but Georgi Chelyag insisted on seeing him.
“It’s not just the arrests that have got to be simultaneous,” said the chief of staff. “The president doesn’t want to follow any American announcement. He wants to make it and he wants it to be at precisely the same time-unarguable proof that it really has been a totally joint and coordinated investigation.” The man paused. “It’s as important to you as it is to us that it’s seen to be so.”
“I haven’t discussed that sort of detail with Cowley,” admitted Danilov. “I’m not even sure he knows the official thinking about public communiques; he’s not in Washington.”
“The alternative is for us to time our statement with the arrests here,” declared Chelyag.
“That’s not an alternative,” rejected Danilov. “The arrests are to be coordinated but unannounced, to ensure we get everyone. It won’t be simultaneous; logically it can’t be. If we go public too soon, we could ruin everything in America.” He hesitated, seeing how to strengthen the objection. “It wouldn’t achieve what you want if America publicly complained we wrecked the cooperation and the investigation, would it?”
“That argument applies equally here.”
“Isn’t it one you should be making politically? That’s what we’re talking: politics, not criminal investigation.”
The presidential advisor managed a bleak smile. “It is being made. But I want you to press it, as hard as you can, at your working level. It would be understandable for America to want to take all the credit.”
As you are straining to do, thought Danilov. “There’s going to be a lot more conversation tonight. I’ll talk it through as much as I can.”
“Could it all be over by tonight?” asked Chelyag.
“It’s possible,” said Danilov.
In Chicago the approaching Cidicj Star was being pointed out to Cowley and Pamela on a radar screen.
They saw it as a ship, although indistinctly, through binoculars from the top of the Customs tower, a black smudge at first, gradually forming into a recognizable vessel. Cowley had imagined everything would be in the holds but when it was clearly in view he saw a lot of containers were strapped on the deck, making the freighter appear top heavy.
They were back in the converted conference room, with its closer view of the dockside, for the arrival of the shipping agents. The two from OverOcean were identified by the two FBI agents who followed them from the importer’s office. Neither was Ivan Guzov or Yevgenni Leanov.
Pamela said, “This
is clerks’ stuff. They don’t need to show until tomorrow.”
It took a long time to reach the OverOcean shipment. It wasn’t part of the deck cargo, which had to be cleared before the holds could be opened, and it wasn’t in the first of those. It was sevenfifteen, although still light, before the containers were finally swung clear, already identified by a Customs officer inside the ship. Forklifts driven by bureau men materialized and were loaded. Other agents dressed as stevedores and dock workers watched the two importers briefly inspect the shipping documents. One agent was close enough to hear the arrangements made to collect from the bonded warehouse by eleven the following morning. Neither of the OverOcean clerks showed particular interest in either of the containers, apart from ensuring their storage.
It was another hour before they ventured into the warehouse. They used the rear corridor entrance. Schnecker implacably refused the police chief’s protests (“It’s live and dangerous and I’m responsible for everyone’s safety”) and limited those present at the container opening to just the two Customs officers who were going to do it without detection in addition to Cowley.
Schnecker also insisted on hand testing the heat of the steam gun intended to sweat off the container seals and ensured that no electrical drill would be used. He also made the two men wear face shields and body armor.
To Cowley’s unasked question the bearded team leader said, “We didn’t have time in Moscow. Here we work by the book.” He handed Cowley his protection. “It’s the biggest we’ve got.”
They all waited until the last-minute warning from the rummage team that the first container was about to be opened before putting on the protective gear.
Neil Hamish said, “If it’s the right one, we’ll be upstairs partying in an hour.”
It wasn’t. Each compartment inside the container held genuine American-manufactured engine parts for overhaul and reconditioning. The Customs experts were already working on the second container with their steam-hissing gun before Schnecker’s team completed their fruitless search.
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