He was definitely not being taken off the case, Cowley realized. There was a relief that went far beyond his professional ability not being seriously questioned: that the Director was accepting errors were unfortunately inevitable this early in any investigation. He wanted to go back and start again and not make any more mistakes and be there when they manacled a killer. To prove what to whom? Himself to himself, he supposed: to show he hadn’t lost the edge, after three years out of the field. Who else was there, anyway? Absurdly Pauline’s name — Pauline herself — came into his mind. Why should he want to impress his ex-wife? Because it mattered to him to do so, pointless though it was now that she was married to another man. To clear his mind Cowley talked of the interviews and meetings he wanted to have, now he was back in America. Ross agreed to everything.
‘Other things first,’ cautioned Ross.
‘What?’
‘The reason I brought you back. We’re due at Langley in an hour.’
There was always a fluster about a Director’s departure from Pennsylvania Avenue, particularly from the main entrance within the inner courtyard, and today Cowley was part of it and was conscious of the attention of everyone in and around the vestibule and from the overlooking windows. Cowley knew just how quickly rumours cooked in the microwave of FBI headquarters and was curious about what was being said about him at that moment. Whatever, he would be labelled someone in ascendancy, because failures didn’t get to ride with the Director. The glass screen was raised between them and the driver, enabling unrestricted conversation, but the Director initially kept to small-talk, asking about Moscow and the embassy and the investigation methods of the Moscow police.
As the driver took Memorial Bridge, to get over the river, Ross looked directly across the car and said: ‘How’s it working out personally, with Andrews?’
‘Well,’ said Cowley. ‘He’s helpful in every way he could, within the embassy. We’ve been together socially. No problems at all.’
‘That’s good. No resentment at being restricted to the embassy?’
‘None.’
‘Personnel want to settle the reassignment. We’re moving Harvey Proffitt from California. Giving the guy a chance.’
‘Andrews talked to me himself about his tour being over.’
‘He say what he hopes to do next?’
Cowley didn’t think he should rely upon the conversation with Pauline, although he knew she would be right. He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Not anything about being attached to the Russian division back here?’
‘Nothing.’ Cowley waited for the Director to ask if he would have any personal feelings about it. Ross didn’t.
Instead he said: ‘Personnel have asked to bring him back, for discussions. Would that inconvenience you, at the moment?’
It would mean the complete burden of communications falling upon him, Cowley realized. But discussions were standard procedure in these sorts of career move. To object, as he was entitled to object, could hinder that career: the career of a man who’d cheated him and stolen his wife. Cowley wished the last thoughts hadn’t even occurred, especially as he’d already decided that hadn’t ever been the case. He said: ‘Of course he should come back.’
By the time the admission formalities to the Langley complex were completed, a man was waiting in the main foyer to escort them. There was no identification. Cowley was instantly reminded of Fletcher, back at FBI headquarters. Perhaps there was a cloning farm somewhere in the Mid-West producing featureless and characterless personal assistants for Washington chief executives. They went directly to the seventh floor, in the CIA Director’s personal elevator. There were three other men and a female stenographer with Richard Holmes. Cowley supposed the three unnamed men were part of the Agency’s Russian section. He would have thought the meeting could have been quite satisfactorily conducted between himself and them, without the presence of both Directors. And probably would have been but for Moscow telephone calls to the President from the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. He was aware of witnessing at first hand the Washington self-defence art known as Watching Your Ass.
‘I’ve indicated the concern,’ said Ross.
‘So?’ said Holmes.
Cowley was disconcerted by the cursory tone of the demand: maybe he should start watching his own ass. He definitely wasn’t going to respond in front of a recording stenographer to a single-word question like that. ‘What, precisely, are you asking me?’
‘Is Paul Hughes being set up by Russian intelligence?’
Cowley weighed his answer. ‘I have no idea,’ he said, finally.
One of the aides sighed, but Cowley didn’t detect which one.
‘We want the specific details of Hughes’s telephone interception,’ Holmes insisted.
Again Cowley hesitated, anticipating a later demand and aware he was going to look an inexperienced amateur, even a bungling one, in their eyes. He replied chronologically, trying to avoid the admission, talking of getting Hughes’s embassy telephone number as one Ann Harris had called, of Hughes’s lying explanation at their initial interview, but of the man’s collapse when the verbatim conversation was put to him at the later, early morning confrontation after Lydia Orlenko had been attacked.
‘Now let’s go back over all that again,’ said Holmes, with forced patience. ‘Why didn’t you challenge Hughes’s first explanation with the verbatim record?’
He was going to be shown up, Cowley accepted, desperately: there was no possible way he could watch — or save — his ass. ‘At the first interview I didn’t have a transcript: just the number.’
‘I don’t understand that,’ complained one of the aides.
‘That’s just how it happened,’ said Cowley, miserably. ‘We were following a normal investigation routine, trying to check out any known acquaintances of Ann Harris. At the beginning I was provided with Hughes’s embassy number, nothing else.’
‘By whom?’ demanded another aide.
‘Danilov, the Russian detective.’
‘Who produced the transcript?’
‘Danilov.’ It was already looking bad and was going to get worse. Not simply bad. Appalling.
‘Where is it, in full? I haven’t seen it. Just your verbatim note of what was put to Hughes at the second interview,’ intruded Ross, beside him.
Exposed by his own Director, thought Cowley: at the moment he felt he could have been exposed by a child of ten. ‘I don’t have it.’
‘You don’t have it!’ echoed both Directors, in unison and shared astonishment. The sighing aide sighed even more deeply.
‘Mr Cowley,’ said the Agency chief. ‘I’m trying very hard to follow what you’re saying. But you’re not making it easy. We know there’s an intercept direct into the offices of the head of the economic section of the US embassy in Moscow. We know the man had sex habits that expose him to blackmail. And we are being told — I think — that those intercepts could also throw up intimate facts about the dead relation of one of the most important people in Washington, someone who is going to become even more important. Let’s take it slowly, a step at a time, so it’ll all become clear to us. You said — your words — that Danilov produced the transcript. If he produced it, where the hell is it?’
Cowley waited a long time before speaking, not wanting to be caught out by a misplaced word any more than he already had been. ‘I would like to make something clear; something I think is necessary to explain. I am — was — in Moscow investigating the murder of the niece of someone you rightly describe as one of, if not the, most important politician in Washington. It’s already clear she’s the victim of a serial killer who’s also killed a Russian and is going to kill again, if he’s not caught. At one stage it appeared that killer was Paul Hughes. Can you imagine the fall-out of an American walking the streets of Moscow, killing people, one the niece of Senator Burden? I can’t! Of course I recognized by even getting the number that there was an intercept. But that was not my immediate concern: my immediate concern was getting an admission from the man. Arresting him …’ Cowley hesitated, aware that if he disclosed the moment he learned of the transcript — when the Militia Director and the Federal Prosecutor demanded a Russian presence at any encounter with Hughes — he would be admitting how he’d misled his own Director. He was soaked in sweat, able to feel the wetness beneath his arms and making its way down his back. Shifting the lie, anxious it would not be the misplaced word he was frightened of uttering, Cowley continued: ‘Danilov did not produce the transcript until we were facing Hughes, in his apartment, the second time. And not to me. To quote from, to break Hughes down.’