Countdown in Cairo (Russian Trilogy, The)

by Noel Hynd

  “I don’t know,” Alex said.

  “Then on the third day I made a mistake. I mentioned the picture I took.”

  “What picture?” Alex asked.

  “When Carlos went over to try to take a look at the man we saw in the bar. I snapped a picture. I was tired during the interview. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. But they pressed me. They asked if I still had it. I thought it might get them off my case if I admitted it. So I said, yeah, I have it, it’s still on my camera. They asked if I had downloaded it onto a laptop or gotten prints. I said no.”

  “And?” Alex asked.

  “They went over to my apartment and broke in. They took my camera. I saw it was missing when I got home. And when I turned on my laptop, the memory was broiled. They had zapped it. Can you believe it?”

  “I believe it,” she said with feeling. She held a silence.

  “It became the big issue for the next two days. They kept hammering me. ‘Janet,’ they said, ‘where are the other copies? We know you must have made other copies. Where are they?’ ”

  “But if Cerny was dead, as they said he was,” Alex asked, “why on earth would they have cared about these pictures?”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” she said. “And I said that to them too, that it was pointless of them to care about the picture if they were so sure Cerny was dead. But they didn’t like the situation. Next thing I know, they called in another man. Big ugly SOB with a bad haircut and halitosis. A real thug! He just sat there with his arms folded and glowered at me. Never said anything. Then I started asking if I had the right to see a lawyer.”

  “You did.”

  “They told me I didn’t. They told me they could keep me locked up for weeks, and I’d do better just coming clean with them right away. They wore me down so much I started to cry.”

  “Got it,” Alex said. She looked to Don Tomás and then back to his niece. “I want to ask you two things,” Alex said.

  “Sure.”

  “You used to work for Mr. Cerny. And you knew me from being in this building to drop a bug on me.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “But how did you know I worked for Mr. Cerny?” she asked. “I could have been just someone that he wanted to eavesdrop on.”

  “I kind of figured it out,” Janet said sheepishly. “After that mess in Kiev in February, I saw you on the news a few times. TV, you know. I recognized you from the building here. And I recognized your name because they always had to tell us who we were dropping a bug on so we could find the right place. So Carlos and I were really following the whole Kiev case. I’ve known who you were since then. And there was this guy named Pete who was our supervisor. Pete talked too much when he gave out the assignments. We’d figured out his boss’s name. Pete had all these records in his office that he was supposed to keep confidential. But everything was all over his desk. So Carlos and me, we saw names. Then, follow this, we weren’t in line for this assignment to bug you here, but Pete knew that I knew the building. And he made a wisecrack. He said that you’d been a lousy employee and your boss wanted to drop a bug on you. Wanted to know about your social life or something. So I put it all together. This was even before Kiev.”

  “My boss? Mike Gamburian?”

  “No, no. Mr. Cerny wanted a special watch on you.”

  “Cerny?”

  “Cerny. That’s what Pete said.”

  “I see,” Alex said. But actually, she didn’t. Events and details seemed to float around as if in a fog, threatening to connect but failing to. Questions suggested themselves to her and then eluded rational resolution.

  Had Cerny been monitoring her out of some perverse personal interest, or had there been a professional agenda? And if it had been a professional agenda, whose was it? American intelligence or something farther afield?

  For the first time, Alex tried to examine the question by pulling it inside out and then apart.

  “And then when everything hit the fan about a week ago,” Don Tomás interjected, “I told Janet she could stay here. But I insisted that I know what sort of trouble she was in. That’s when so much of this came into view.”

  “Of course,” Alex said, finishing her scotch and putting the glass down.

  “Would you like another drink?” Don Tomás asked.

  “Maybe some other evening,” Alex said. “I want to keep a clear head.”

  “You don’t mind if I do?” Don Tomás asked.

  “Keep a clear head or have another scotch?”

  “Hopefully both,” Don Tomás said, rising. “But maybe just the scotch.”

  Alex turned back to Janet. “Did you finally convince them about the picture? That you didn’t have other copies?”

  “I did,” she said. “Or at least, I think I did.”

  Several seconds passed. “If I’m going to help you and hopefully protect you,” Alex said, “you know you need to be completely honest with me. Right? You understand that, correct?”

  Janet looked at her warily.

  “I don’t think you’re foolish,” Alex said. “I have a feeling you downloaded that photo somewhere. Just for safekeeping.”

  Another wary pause from Janet.

  “My guess is that you were, shall we say, one step ahead of them,” Alex continued. “You don’t have to admit it out loud. Just nod if I’m right.”

  Several seconds passed. Janet nodded.

  “Where is it?” Alex asked. “Stored in cyberspace maybe?”

  Janet grimaced and pulled a new iPod out of her backpack. She fired it up and brought up the photograph. She handed the iPod to Alex.

  Alex looked down and, on a two-by-three-inch screen saw the photo from the Royale in Cairo. The figures were too small to be of any value to the naked eye. The iPod was big-screen only if the viewer was a mouse. But Alex saw a small snapshot of two men facing and one, the Cerny clone, with his back to her.

  Alex looked back up. “Does anyone else know you have this?” she asked.

  “Just you and my uncle.”

  “I need to copy this,” Alex said.

  “Please be careful,” Janet begged again.

  “I’m not going to put it through any intelligence system or computer network at work. If Mike Cerny is alive, who knows what’s compromised and where? I just want to run it to my own iPod. All right? Please say yes.”

  Janet looked to Don Tomás, who nodded. “Yes,” she said to Alex.

  “I have a few people whom I know I can trust. They’re outside of Treasury and the CIA. They’re not even American. They might be able to help me, help you, while keeping their own hands personally on an inquiry. If there’s anything to this, that’s the route I might have to go.”

  Janet trembled. “Use your judgment,” she said.

  Alex nodded. “Now,” she said. “Let’s go back into my apartment and see if those eavesdropping devices are there. If they are there, we should leave them. No use alerting anyone now.”

  “None,” Don Tomás said.

  “Let’s go have a look,” Alex said.

  “Should I stay or wait?” the retired diplomat said.

  Alex gave him a wink. “Join the party,” she said. “No one say anything. We’ll just have a look.”

  They went out into the hall, which remained quiet.

  They crossed the hall and closed the door.

  Two minutes later, Nagib emerged from the service stairs that led from the garage. He walked down the hallway, his pistol under his coat. He arrived at the doorways to 505 and 506.

  He stood outside, listened, and waited. Then somewhere in the distance, he heard some sort of alarm go off.

  EIGHTEEN

  Janet’s recall was encyclopedic when it came to devices that she had planted. She could recall all of them, where in a room she had put one, what had been the problems of location.

  She had entered the apartment behind Alex, then stepped slightly ahead.

  In this case, it all seemed so simple. Janet went down to her hands and k
nees on the living room floor, then turned slightly to an angle as she neared a coffee table that stood in front of a sofa. Alex followed her to the floor while Don Tomás was content to stand and watch.

  Janet reached under the coffee table and quietly extended an index finger. Alex was next to her on the floor and positioned her head so she could see under the table. Her finger pointed to the listening device, still clamped exactly where she had put it several months earlier.

  Janet turned toward Alex and said nothing. Alex nodded, not with anger but with understanding. Then Janet sprung up again and went to the bedroom. They repeated the on-the-floor guidance. Janet showed Alex the transmitter that had been wedged under the headboard of her bed.

  Alex nodded. They left everything in place and returned to Don Tomás’s apartment. Down the hall, they heard Mrs. Rothman’s smoke alarm going off. They didn’t speak again until they were inside with the door closed.

  “That deaf old bat doesn’t even hear her own smoke alarm,” Don Tomás muttered. “Can you believe that?”

  But Janet was still dwelling on the electronic snooping.

  “I’m sorry,” Janet said to Alex. “I had a job to do. Nothing personal.”

  “I understand,” Alex said. “You’re forgiven. You had a job to do and you did it.” She paused. “Same as myself.”

  “Oh, and there’s one other thing,” Janet said. “I mentioned it to the interrogators. They laughed at me and said it was impossible. But I’ll mention it to you.”

  Alex waited.

  “The three men in the bar in Cairo,” she said. “Carlos got close enough to eavesdrop. He could hear them, but he couldn’t tell what they were saying. At the time he didn’t know what language they were speaking. Then afterward, he realized what it was.”

  “What was it?” Alex asked.

  “Russian,” she said. “The day before he died, Carlos said he was sure. They were talking Russian.”

  A few minutes later Alex was at the door. She stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

  From somewhere there was a noise in the hall. She turned around, looked in each direction, but saw nothing.

  She reentered her own apartment. It was past 1:00 a.m.

  She knew already that she was going to be sleep-deprived the next day. She would be dragging herself around as if she were dead.

  On the street five stories below, Nagib and Rashaad were arguing furiously. Someone on the fifth floor had set off a smoke alarm. Around the corner from where he stood, vulnerable to view, doors began to open and a few people walked into the hall. Nagib had turned immediately and left, rather than be seen.

  Rashaad was furious. The longer that it took to get the job done, the more chance that things would go wrong. They departed again, with their assignment still unfulfilled.

  NINETEEN

  Late the next morning Alex arrived at Mike Gamburian’s door and found it half open. She knocked. Gamburian looked up from his desk. “Hey, Alex,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “Got a couple of minutes?”

  “For you, always. Two, three, maybe even four and a half.”

  There were a trio of hardcopy classified folders on his desk. Alex could tell by the bold red binders. He flipped all three shut as she pushed the door closed and sat down.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

  “I had a meeting in New York two nights ago with Yuri Federov,” she said. “But you knew that.”

  “Of course. How’s our old friend Yuri?”

  “He’s been better in his life. In fact, I can’t figure out if he’s got a serious health problem of some sort.”

  “Usually with men like that, a health problem is if someone’s trying to shoot them.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “We had some drinks at the hotel bar and then went for dinner at an Italian place down around Mulberry Street.”

  “Well! What a New York gangsterismo evening that was,” he said.

  “Seriously,” Alex said, meaning yes. “And Federov introduced me to a friend.”

  “That’s where it often gets interesting,” he said. “A person of interest to us, perhaps?”

  “You never know. What do you know about the Mafia in Cuba, Mike?” she asked.

  “Now or in the past?”

  “Either or both,” Alex answered. “I’ve seen The Godfather II like everyone else, but aside from that the whole era is before my time. I assume we have files.”

  “Tons of them. You’ll be sorry you asked. You might need a special access with a cosigned request form to see the top stuff. But I can get it for you if you’re interested.”

  “I’m interested.”

  “Then I’ll try to get you some file-archive access by later today.”

  “Good. I’d like to run the friend’s name across the files,” Alex said. “Paul Guarneri. Name mean anything to you?”

  “Guarneri only means something as the patriarch of a seventeenth-century family of violin makers in Italy. I’m not up on all the current wise guys; there are too many of them, and it’s not my department.”

  “Paul Guarnari didn’t look personally that mobbed up to me,” Alex continued. “Or at least not on the surface. But his father certainly was. Then again, what’s he hanging around with Federov for if he’s not a mob guy? The only use Federov ever had for legitimate businessmen was to shake them down.”

  “Where exactly was this meeting again?” Gamburian asked.

  “A place called Il Vagabondo in Lower Manhattan. I did some asking around afterward. It’s a mob hangout, not that I couldn’t tell at the time.”

  “So as a Fed, if you don’t mind the metaphor, you must have felt like a mosquito at a nudist colony.”

  “Pretty much,” Alex said. “But I stuck with Guarneri. He said his family was from Cuba. His father was Italian but married a dancer who worked at one of the big hotel casinos. I think he has some major ideas about trying to get some old property back, including a pile of cash that was stashed somewhere. Does that make sense?”

  Gamburian laughed. “Some,” he said. “As soon as Castro is planted and pushing up daisies, all the old mob families are going to be looking for recovery of property. Then who knows what else they’ll be up to. Can you keep the contact alive?”

  “Sure,” Alex said. “In fact, I’d like to.”

  “Well, you were introduced, so you’d be wise to follow it up. You never know when something small cracks something big. The ‘French Connection’ case was made when two cops wandered into a nightclub and spotted some hoods. ‘Son of Sam’ broke over a parking ticket. You could have a career case over a veal scaloppini in Brooklyn.”

  “It was saltimbocca, and it was in Lower Manhattan, but I catch your drift.”

  “Speaking of Lower Manhattan, how did the interview go? At the Federal Building?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “So you’ll be leaving us and moving to New York.”

  “Let’s see if they offer me anything,” she said.

  “Ha! They will. New York steals Washington’s top employees all the time. We’re used to it.”

  “Thanks, Mike,” she said with irony. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “It was meant as one.”

  “I know,” she said. She rose from the chair and moved to the door. As she opened the door, she turned and asked a final question.

  “By the way,” Alex inquired, “what do you hear about Mike Cerny’s widow and family?”

  Gamburian reacted with surprise. “Not much,” he said. “They moved back to the Midwest somewhere from what I heard. That’s all I know.”

  “She got her widow’s benefits and pension?” Alex asked.

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  Alex shrugged her shoulders.

  “Were you close to Mike Cerny? Did you know him well?”

  “No one knew him very well,” Gamburian said. “He was a cipher to everyone he worked with.” Gamburian adjusted his glasses. �
�Why you asking?”

  “Just curious,” she said. “I’ll look for the organized-crime file later.”

  “Enjoy them. Order out for a slice of pizza to go with them.”

  He flipped his classified folders back upright and returned to work as Alex’s footsteps receded down the hallway.

  Later, past 6:00 p.m. on the same day, Alex was sitting at her desk. She leaned back in her chair and stared at her two computers. She had read everything that had been given to her about Paul Guarneri and his father, Vito Guarneri. The files intrigued her, but increasingly they were small change. Michael Cerny was on her mind.

  It was one thing that Janet claimed to have seen him, a sighting linked to the car bomb that killed Carlos. That might have been chalked up to coincidence or an overactive imagination. But why, if someone who looked like Cerny had been seen by a credible source, would there have been a failure to get a file to Alex? Alex had been an integral part of Cerny’s “fatal” final mission. She should have been covered on it.

  Incompetence? Maybe?

  Was someone holding back because she was FBI and Treasury and not CIA?

  Possible.

  But overall, it didn’t make sense.

  She leaned to her laptop, which had a higher security access code than the desktop console. She entered her primary security clearance code and then entered her second. Both cruised.

  A slight tremor came over her. To revisit Michael Cerny via the files was to revisit her personal catastrophe in Kiev and all the sorrow it had brought into her life. It had been less than a year. Was she ready to have so much of it come tumbling back?

  She drew a breath. She entered her clearance for the secured site dedicated to the Kiev visit. Another dialogue box opened and asked for her name. She entered it. She remembered how in the painful first weeks after Kiev she had made this same trip and run into cyber roadblocks. More anxiety built. The dialogue window accepted her name. With two tries, it accepted her ID. Then she was back in the HUMINT, the human intelligence, leading up to the presidential visit to Kiev. Files opened. Okay so far.