The Watchmen

by Brian Freemantle

  Danilov said, “You’re sure you never met any of Valeri’s friends?”

  “I asked, in the beginning. Wondered why we didn’t go out together. That’s when he told me it was business, but I didn’t believe him. Not that it was entirely business.”

  Despite the denial, Danilov took the Gorki police file picture of Nikov from his briefcase and offered it to her. “Do you know this man?”

  She dutifully studied it. “No.”

  “Did he ever speak about any of his friends by name?”

  “No, never.”

  “Does the name Viktor Nikolaevich Nikov mean anything to you?”

  “No, nothing at all.”

  “Did he ever talk about Gorki?”

  “No.”

  “Go there?”

  “Never, as far as I know.”

  Pavin looked to Danilov for guidance. Danilov said, “Is there a desk anywhere where Valeri kept his papers? Bills, official letters, things like that?”

  “A box in the bedroom.” Without being asked she led the way into a room off the entry hall of the apartment that they were in. Again the suite matched and there was a fitted, silklike cover over the bed. The box was at the bottom of the closet. When she opened the closet Danilov saw there were three good-quality suits—one with the familiar sheen—with a separate pair of shoes neatly arranged beneath each. The box wasn’t locked. There was the couple’s marriage certificate and birth certificates of both girls and some photographs. The leases for the two apartments were pinned together, and at the very bottom there were photographs of an elderly couple—the man in uniform—and old, tattered food allowance books.

  The woman said, “They’re Valeri’s parents. His father fought in the Patriotic War. He said he kept the ration books as a reminder: that he’d never let himself be as poor as they were.”

  “There’s no bank statements?” said Pavin.

  “Who trusts banks in this country!” she said almost indignantly. “Valeri certainly didn’t.”

  “Or letters?”

  She shrugged. “Who’s there to write to us? Both our parents are dead. Valeri always dealt personally, face to face, with anything official. There’s no point in writing.”

  “Have you got a car?” asked Pavin.

  “Foreign. An Audi. He was very proud of it.”

  “They’re not easy to get in Moscow. And they’re expensive,” said Danilov.

  “Valeri said they were easy to get when you had friends like he did. I told you, he sold metal to garages.”

  “Did he drive it last night?”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t like using it at night. Leaving it. Too easy to get it stripped.” She pointed toward the dressing table. “There are the keys.”

  Danilov led the way back into the main room. As they reached it, Naina Karpov blurted suddenly, “Was it a fight over a woman?”

  “No,” said Danilov. “It was a gang murder. Mafia.”

  For the first time she reacted, eyes widening. “Mafia! How could it be mafia?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Pavin. “And we’re going to have to ask you formally to identify the body. Not today. Possibly tomorrow or the day after.” It would take at least until then for the postmortem to be completed.

  “All right,” the woman agreed, retreating into resignation again. Then she said, “I know there was a woman. That there had to be. But”—she looked around the room—“I don’t have anywhere else. Anyone else. And now I don’t have him, do I?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Pavin.

  “Can you find out who did it? Have …” She stopped, groping. “People who saw it … witnesses … ?”

  “No,” admitted Danilov. “But we’re going to try very hard. It’s very important that we do. We’d like to look inside the car. Can you take us down to the garage?”

  At the apartment door Naina called out to her daughter that she would only be a few minutes, and they rode in silence to the ground floor. The garage, like the car, was immaculate. Danilov sniffed apprehensively, but there was no overperfumed deodorizer, just the smell of newness. The tachometer registered just over 1,500 kilometers. There was nothing in the glove box or side pockets—not even the car’s documentation—and only a forgotten doll, which the woman retrieved, on the backseat. The trunk was empty, apart from a quilted jacket.

  She said, “He kept it very tidy.”

  “I can see he did,” said Danilov. He handed her a card. “If you remember anything you think might help, will you call this number? Ask for me or Colonel Pavin?”

  “Yes,” she said emptily. “Yes, of course.” She paused. “If you find who the other woman was, will you tell me?”

  Neither man replied.

  “No,” she accepted. “No, there wouldn’t be any purpose in that, would there? It’s all over.”

  As he picked up the first of the two highways to take them back to Moscow Pavin said, “He told her he sold metal to garages. And Nikov had three garages in Gorki, from what you’ve told me. What better place to get a foreign car than a mafia garage?”

  “I made the connection,” said Danilov. “Not actually distraught, was she?”

  “She’d accepted the marriage was over. A lot of people—husbands and wives—go on doing that when they’ve nowhere else to go. Which she said she didn’t.”

  “There is—or had been—a lot of money,” judged Danilov. “I’ve never seen two apartments connected like that before. And nothing in it was cheap.”

  “Why torture them?” demanded Pavin. “I can fit everything else together, but I can’t see the reason for doing what they did to them before killing them. No one was coming to us with information. We don’t know anything more now than when we started.”

  “There’s one thing I’m anxious to establish from the Tushino plant,” said Danilov. As the new question came to him he said, “More than one, in fact. Several.”

  Plant 43 was almost—but not quite—a clone of its Gorki progenitor, which Danilov acknowledged to be hardly surprising in view of the centrally controlled, centrally designed, centrally dictated, early 1960s, Cold War fridgidity of communist collectivism. The Tushino installation was smaller than the enclaves at Gorki, and each of its three divided factories were connected by an internal road, which by security-separating standards was a waste of time in the first place. They took the publicly designated turnoff to the centrally located Plant 43 itself. There was still the combination of control tower and private road checkpoint, but the tower appeared unmanned and there was only one yawning man at the gatehouse who waved away their offered proof of official authority because their names were already on his approved entrants’ list.

  They were early by fifteen minutes and kept waiting a further thirty minutes by the plant director. Vladimir Leonidovich Oskavinsky was an emaciated, imperiously mannered man who was so obviously surprised by their authorized visit that he insisted upon telephoning the Science and Defense ministries extension to reaffirm the permission and still seemed to disbelieve the confirmation. He coughed a lot, and Danilov wondered if his earlier cynicism about a leak had been as rhetorical as he’d intended.

  “Of course I know why you’re here,” said the man, ahead of any explanation. “I’ve seen the pictures from America. It’s Gorki, not here. How do you imagine I can help you?”

  Instead of answering Danilov, just as impatient, offered the mortuary photograph of Valeri Karpov. The plant director’s face twisted in disgust. He came back up to them and said, “What’s this! Why are you showing me this?”

  Pavin said, “Don’t you recognize him?”

  “Why should I?”

  “He worked here. As a stores supervisor. Valeri Karpov.” Pavin put Karpov’s official pass beside the photograph.

  Oskavinsky frowned down again at both. “Over two hundred people are employed here.”

  “Don’t you recognize him?” asked Pavin.

  “I think so. Vaguely. What happened to him?”

/>   “I would have thought that was rather obvious,” said Danilov. He offered a second photograph, of the dead man’s balloon-size genitalia, and said, “He was working with organized crime: selling materiel from here.”

  “That’s absurd! I refute that absolutely.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Danilov, allowing his annoyance at official condescension to return. “You know—because you’ve just checked—the authority with which we are here. If you’re wrong you’ll be dismissed. As it is, I could have you suspended. I don’t want—won’t have—your arrogance. I want your total cooperation.”

  Momentarily Oskavinsky, king of his own tiny castle, was dumbstruck by the ramparts being breached. The coughing became more pronounced. Humbly he said, “How can I help?”

  “By not trying to avoid—or lie to—a single question,” bullied Danilov. Who didn’t think from then on that the cadaverous man did.

  After checking with his operational manager, Oskavinsky stated that there were 102 ineffectually designed double warheads at Tushino, conceding at the same time that while Valeri Karpov had no authority to go anywhere near the biological or chemical facility, it was conceivable that he knew the way to enter every facility.

  The director’s collapse continued when Danilov pedantically counted the racks of the identically stored weapons in their identically uniform racks in an identical subterranean cavern—at the fourth basement level once more—and only got up to ninety-eight. The side stenciling matched the size and print of Gorki but none of the numbering—for which Oskavinsky gave the same explanation—had the same sequence as the UN missile. Danilov didn’t even ask permission to scrape the lettering and base paint from a warhead into one of the unused envelopes he still had from the Gorki hotel. Oskavinsky insisted on again calling the Science Ministry before allowing Danilov to take possession of an empty warhead.

  Back in the director’s office, Danilov said, “I want to talk about the metal that is used to make both the warhead and the delivery systems. Is it specially forged—made—whatever the technical expression is?”

  “Yes,” Oskavinsky replied at once.

  “One metal? Or an alloy?”

  “Alloys, for both,” said the man, eager now to help. “There has to be a tensility to the missile base, to allow for the brief but extreme launch heat. If there weren’t it would melt, exploding the contents at source. The launch mechanism is basically nothing more than a disposable frame. Because the one we’re talking about was intended to be shoulder-mounted, it was made of lighter alloy—mostly aluminium, bronze, and copper. The faceplate, to protect the operator from the initial intense blast-back, was a laminate of heat-rejecting plastics with a bauxite infusion.”

  “As a stores supervisor, would Valeri Karpov’s job have been to order such metals?”

  “Various department requisitions would have been passed on to him, yes.”

  “Would the amounts he ordered have been cross-checked against the requisitions passed down after delivery?”

  Oskavinsky shifted uncomfortably. “That’s the system. Cost control.”

  “Was it observed?” persisted Danilov.

  “To the best of my knowledge, yes.”

  “By regular, specific audit.”

  “No, not by specific audit,” conceded the man. “By comparing the department request against the suppliers’ delivery figure.”

  “Which effectively put Karpov in total control of what he ordered?”

  “I suppose so, yes,” the scientist admitted. There was a sheen of perspiration on his forehead.

  “Is any of the metal alloyed here?”

  “No. It’s a precise process, needing specific expertise and a controlled environment quite different from anything we have here.”

  “These specifically produced, controlled environment alloys?” said Danilov. “Could they be used for anything else? Cannibalized for use in body repair work in garages, for instance?”

  Oskavinsky looked at him incredulously. “Of course not! It would be like”—he waved his arms, seeking a comparison—“like trying to attach soft curd to hard cheese. They wouldn’t mix. In laymen’s terms, they wouldn’t stick together.”

  “What do your other connected plants manufacture?” persisted Danilov.

  “Basic high-explosive artillery shells.”

  “Mines?”

  “Yes.”

  “Land? Or water?”

  “Both.”

  “What about the metal used in those? Could they be utilized in other industries? Car repairs particularly?”

  “No!” said Oskavinsky, exasperated.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Danilov. “I want empty mine casings—land and water—as well.”

  “I didn’t think so, either,” said Pavin, as they drove back along the M11 toward Moscow. “I also don’t think any of that takes us very far.”

  “Parts of a picture,” said Danilov. “A picture we can’t yet see. Which isn’t what worries me the most at the moment. What worries me is that we’ve no way of knowing just how many of these things—how many warheads or bombs or whatever else—have disappeared from these plants. Or where they are now.”

  It was a worry that increased an hour later when Pamela Darnley told him the metal of what was now estimated to be the four antipersonnel mines from New Rochelle had tested positive to be Russian.

  The conversation with Pamela Darnley lasted for more than an hour. This time Danilov was more forthcoming than he’d been from Gorki. He said he was wiring details and photographs of the two Moscow murders as well as summaries of his inquiries in Gorki and Moscow. There was some forensic evidence he wanted analyzed under superior FBI techniques that might confirm a source for the UN missile, one sample in particular he intended personally bringing to America.

  “What’s keeping you?” demanded the acting head of the bureau’s terrorism unit.

  “The need to get it right,” said Danilov. “I’ve more to do here first.” With the authority he had from the White House, he scarcely had to worry about legality. Which wasn’t a consideration anyway. The need was to make people feel complacent.

  “We’re under a hell of a lot of pressure here,” admitted the woman. She was sure the chauvinistic bastard was holding out on her.

  Danilov remembered that he had to report to the presidential committee the following day. “How’s Bill?”

  “Pretending to be getting better faster than he really is, according to the doctor.”

  “He is going to get back, though?”

  “Is our cooperation dependent on that?” Pamela demanded outright. She needed to get this man in her pocket if she stood any chance of properly using the opportunity she had.

  “You’ve got all I’ve got. Which doesn’t give us anything except my feeling that a lot more stuff could be missing.”

  “That’s what we’re terrified of here,” said the woman.

  “That’s what we’re terrified of here, too,” said Danilov.

  It was only when he pulled up outside their Kirovskaya apartment that Danilov realized he still hadn’t told Olga he was back. Wednesday, he remembered. Wednesday was Olga’s night at the movies with Irena. It was a fleeting thought, washed away by another, more personally surprising awareness. It hadn’t occurred to him to go to Larissa’s grave. He turned back to the car and then away again. Enough. It had to stop and now was as good a time—the right time—as any. It was maudlin. Ridiculous, actually talking to her by the graveside: a pretense for no purpose. Larissa was dead and he was alive, and he had to learn—was learning—to live with the emptiness. He wouldn’t stop going completely—that would be a pretense in reverse—but he’d mourn properly.

  There probably wouldn’t be any food in the apartment. There often wasn’t even when Olga knew he was coming home. He didn’t feel particularly hungry; could always go out later. At that precise moment he wanted to think through the uncertainties of Gorki and those of today, here, back in Moscow. Which is what they were�
�uncertainties, nothing more. It would be wrong, a mistake, to misconstrue Gorki and because of it misconstrue—or wrongly read—the two Moscow murders. The stenciling today had appeared identical to that at Gorki, so it would only have been necessary to switch the name if the missile had come from the Tushino installation. And he could be making the cardinal error of allowing personal feelings and attitudes at his being patronized by the Gorki militia chief to influence his thinking. Which was what he had to do tonight: Think, analyze, and be totally objective.

  The vestibule and the living room beyond were as Danilov expected, neglected chaos. He dropped his case and coat in the hall and went into the kitchen: He kept the vodka in the refrigerator. That was all there was in it, apart from two slices of curled-edged bread and an unopened can of fish eggs. The stalagmite of dishes had grown in the sink.

  It was as Danilov was leaving that he heard the noise. He stopped at once, listening, and heard it again. Nothing positive, identifiable. Just the sound of movement. Carefully Danilov stooped, placing his glass on the floor, and eased the restraining strap off the Makarov on its waistband holster. Why hadn’t he seen the marks of a forced entry—had difficulty with the key—as he entered? The noise came again, twice, louder the second time. The safety came soundlessly off the gun. He tested each step before making it, pausing, weapon ready, at what had appeared the empty main room. It was still empty. There was movement as he got to the bedroom door. He went in low, following his training, gun barrel upward but ready, back immediately and protectively to the wall.

  There was no one there. Just the jumbled, unmade disorder there always was. And then the disorder moved and a tousled head—Olga’s head—appeared from beneath the tangled bedding.

  She said, “It’s you! But you’re in Gorki!”

  Danilov slid the catch back on the Makarov and restrapped it. As he did so another head, a man’s head, eyes staring, appeared beside Olga’s. For a brief moment Danilov’s mind went totally blank, refusing any thought. His first realization, absurdly, was that he must be staring wide-eyed, too. Then he wanted to laugh, which was laughable in itself, but it was the only feeling that came to him and he only just prevented himself doing it.