Countdown in Cairo (Russian Trilogy, The)

by Noel Hynd

  She cringed as she read them, but unlike the previous times she had visited these sights, the files had not been bowdlerized. They seemed complete and accurate.

  Okay, okay, she told herself. This might be a backdoor route to a background file on Michael Cerny. Maybe. Leaning forward, she attacked the keyboard with more gusto. She referenced names including her own. Robert’s. Embassy personnel who had died that day. She found everyone she looked for.

  Then she looked for Michael Cerny’s name. Like the last time she had gone this route, she found no reference. She tried to remember.

  Code names. Cover names. Cerny had had more working names than some men have underwear. What were they? She felt as if she were fighting a battle against her own memory. Part of her wanted to recall. Another part of her remained in denial. Wine. One of them sounded like a German white wine.

  Gewustraminer.

  Garfunkle. Gerstmann. Or was it Gerstman? That was the name that had been listed as her case officer before Kiev.

  She tried to access the cover names.

  Cerny, Gerstman, and Gerstmann.

  Nothing. The HUMINT system rejected her and returned her to START. She drew a breath. No real surprise that it should fight her. What she was searching for was not within the scope of her official duties. The system wanted to expel people on internet fishing trips. She booted up again. She laid in her codes and reaccessed her information system. She had a higher rank these days than she had had in the dark days of the previous March. So maybe she would be allowed to go farther.

  Maybe. Maybe not. Well, that was the binary rule of life, wasn’t it? Maybe, maybe not. He loves me, he loves me not.

  She pondered for a moment. Questions expanded exponentially within her head.

  What had she stumbled onto? How could Janet have seen Michael Cerny?

  Logic tried to beat her up.

  Michael Cerny is a dead man! You saw his body in the car on a quiet street in Paris. You were at his funeral the same way you were at Robert’s. You could go visit his tombstone if you want to, you could go have dinner with his widow and say hi to the kids who don’t have a father.

  There was an angel on one of her shoulders, a devil on the other, and increasingly a chip of suspicion in each.

  Sure he’s dead. And the rotten CIA plays unofficial games with stuff like this all the time!

  She kept busy at the keyboard, fingers flying a mile a minute now, trying to outflank the US intelligence system. She had a bit of conceit to her. Secretly, she felt smarter than the people who designed these infernal programs. She was sure she could outthink them.

  And for that matter, Alex continued to wonder, why was her own apartment bugged? Was the bugging part of a previous operation or part of something ongoing? The bugs were intrusive and insulting. What went on in her apartment was no one’s business other than her own. Where was this leading? She saw herself in Kiev with Robert again, the night before he died. She saw herself with Robert again on the last night they spent together in America as an engaged couple deeply in love. She saw herself as—

  Back she was in the darkest area of her psyche. She found herself sorting through the events of the previous February, then March, when suicide was imminent until Ben grabbed her one night and pulled her out of it. Thank God for Ben. By all accounts she should have been in love with him. Her guardian angel, if she had one.

  She glanced back to the monitor. The screen flickered. Then the window box reappeared again as the enemy.

  ACCESS DENIED

  She was ready to punch the monitor. There was information somewhere about Michael Cerny, and she now knew she was not going to get it without a fight.

  She stood angrily. She folded her arms and stared at the screen. She wasn’t ready to go home yet, but she was too frustrated to stay.

  So this IS something! Something IS going on, otherwise I would have access! What’s so secretive and important that people other than me know it and my fiancé was killed and I nearly died too?

  She stormed out from behind her desk, strode to her office door, yanked it open, and—with a startled audible half-scream, half-gasp that carried down the corridor—ran smack into Mike Gamburian so hard that she drove him backward several paces.

  “Mike!” she said. “Sorry! You startled me.”

  “Apologies,” he said. “Wow!” he said, rubbing his shin. “You pack a wallop!”

  “Sorry!”

  “I was just coming to see you.” He nodded toward her office. She picked up on the hint. They stepped in and he closed the door.

  “What have you been doing in here?”

  “Why?”

  “My telephone practically exploded ten minutes ago. I got a call from someone named William Quintero at CIA. Do you know him?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Well, he knows you.”

  “How?”

  “What did you try to access?” Gamburian asked, nodding toward her computer. “Within the last fifteen minutes. Were you checking the Guarneri files?”

  “Yes. No problem with them,” Alex said. “Then I moved on to Michael Cerny. And I got blocked.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “ ‘Uh-oh’ what?” she demanded.

  “You got more than blocked,” Guarneri said. “You just won yourself a personal invitation over to Langley to explain why you wanted access. They phoned me since you reported to me.”

  “Then what’s going on with Cerny?”

  “Alex, if I knew, I’d tell you.” He paused. “Honest. Here’s what I know: first, you’re invited to go over to Langley tomorrow morning and view the file in person at the CIA. Nine a.m. Be there tomorrow morning, not here.”

  “What’s the second?” she asked.

  “I’ve been asked to clear your schedule in this department so you can travel.”

  “The Venezuela trip?”

  “You wish,” he said. “Wrong direction, Alex. From the tenor of the very angry phone call I just received, you’re on your way to Egypt.”

  TWENTY

  Victor, one of the Russians Janet and Carlos had seen that evening at the Royale, was peaceably having his dinner in a café in Old Cairo when the men in police uniforms arrived to see him. The squad of eight men surrounded him. Although apprehensive, Victor reacted calmly and asked the policemen in Arabic what he could do for them.

  The alpha cop, the one with the ranking insignia on his sleeve, that of a captain, responded with equal calm. “Just a few questions, sir,” the cop said. “First, could we see your identification?”

  Victor drew a breath. The local police, he knew, were a nuisance that had to be indulged in order to get business done, especially these street patrols run by low-level officers. Institutionalized extortion was what it was, but it was also the way things worked in this part of the world. So Victor was sure this was a setup for some sort of bribe. Well, it was the cost of doing business, he told himself, and his own bosses back in Russia paid him well to get his job done. So there was nothing much he could do other than to indulge these local hooligans.

  Victor produced his Russian passport and handed it to the head man, who looked at it thoughtfully and then returned it.

  “Maybe a word with you in private?” the lead cop suggested. With his eyes he indicated a passageway that led to an alley behind the restaurant. Victor wasn’t happy. His meal was only half-finished. These Egyptians were a pain beyond belief sometimes.

  Victor rose. He followed the leader of the police squad. They went into a dark lattice-covered alley behind the restaurant. For good measure, Victor carried with him his knife from the dining table.

  “Now, captain,” Victor finally said. “Let’s get directly to your business. What do you and your men want from me?”

  The captain’s eyes lowered and saw the knife in the Russian’s hand. The Arab shook his head. “Please,” he said. “There is no need for that.” He held out his hand and expected Victor to turn over the utensil.

  Victor
gave it a long moment’s thought. He held out the knife, blade forward, as if deciding what to do. For a moment, he had the mad idea to plunge it through this pest’s palm. But he decided against that and gave the knife to the policeman.

  The man in the captain’s uniform accepted it with a smile. “Thank you for your cooperation, sir.”

  “Now,” said Victor, “perhaps you can finally tell me what you want.”

  There was a strange moment when nothing happened. Then Victor realized that the police squad had blocked all the doorways to the alley so no one could intrude on their meeting. Doors to restaurants were closed and curtains pulled for the men in police uniforms. In that moment, Victor suffered a flood of hot fear, but it was too late.

  From behind him a silk garrote was dropped deftly over his head. Two of the men surrounding him grabbed his arms. They held his upper body as he began to struggle. Someone else hit him in the face with a mallet, shattering his nose on impact, and then another person stuffed a rubber ball into his mouth so he couldn’t scream or breathe. Behind him, whoever was working the garrote yanked the noose tight.

  Victor’s powerful body kicked and fought, but the grip from behind was expert. The narrow cord cut like a razor into the flesh of Victor’s thick throat and severed all the important arteries. He was alive long enough to feel the excruciating pain that shot through him and the cascade of blood that burst from his wounds onto his chest.

  He dug his fingers into the area where the cord was, fighting for his life, violent curses bottled up in his throat but unable to burst free.

  Then he began to slump. Gradually, he stopped kicking. For Victor, there was unspeakable pain, then blackness.

  The noose was held in place for an extra half-minute just to make sure the job was complete. Then the body was left on the debris of the alley as the death squad moved away.

  Real Cairo police, who were not nearly as efficient as their imposters, would find the cadaver the next morning. An unmarked van would take it to the morgue and ready it for a speedy disposal.

  TWENTY-ONE

  At her uncle’s apartment, Janet stayed indoors. Her uncle was away for the day, catching up with some old friends from the State Department.

  She grew restless and depressed by the hour. She made herself a lunch and barely touched it. She watched Oprah, CNN, and a rerun of the previous night’s Washington Bullets game. She didn’t even like basketball. She watched anything that came across the television screen, but she wasn’t really watching.

  She read magazines, napped for a while, and browsed through her uncle’s library, which had books in seven different languages, including ancient Greek and Latin. She wondered why the old goat spent his declining years on such stuff when he could have been out romancing some wealthy widows. She spent time staring at the prints on the wall, a series of cool but sensual Cubist portraits of women from the 1930s. They weirded her out, as did many of her uncle’s tastes, even though the pop diva Madonna owned some of the De Lempicka originals. Well, if Madonna did something it was probably cool, and if her uncle did the same thing it was just terminally eccentric.

  But Janet did realize his apartment was her safety island. As far as she knew, no one who was after her knew where she was. And yet, when she wasn’t fighting fear, she was fighting boredom.

  Alex returned around 7:30 while Janet’s uncle was still out. Alex must have quickly picked up her protégée’s glum mood—she phoned her friend Ben and invited him to join them for an informal dinner. Ben, working on a law degree, said he could afford a break and would join them.

  After a long, depressing day, Janet was grateful for the company.

  Alex switched into jeans and pulled on a bulky sweatshirt that could conceal her Glock. She never went anywhere without the gun now; she had developed an affinity for it, like a favorite bracelet.

  Alex and Janet met Ben forty-five minutes later at the pub around the corner from the Calvert Arms. They started with beer and ordered burgers, all three of them. Alex’s head was still reeling from the day of reading and searching files. And then there was the sudden prospect of being sent to the Middle East.

  She wondered who was going to babysit Janet while she was away. She wondered if Ben could look after her a little, but she didn’t want to risk setting them up romantically. Then again, Alex didn’t entirely trust her own agency, and as she thought it through further, she didn’t trust anyone she didn’t know in the CIA at all. Not now.

  She wondered: could Janet take care of herself? Was Janet’s paranoia real or imagined? Could she get out of town for a while, maybe crash with her parents? But if any bad people were really after Janet, would they look there?

  Okay, reality check again: even if Janet had stumbled across something involving Michael Cerny, it was a stretch to think people were after her. Alex tried to downplay it while she, Ben, and Janet drank beer and waited for the burgers to arrive. But some scary scenarios would not go away. Obviously, by trying to access Cerny’s name, Alex had kicked over a hornet’s nest.

  Their food arrived. They munched their burgers. Janet obviously felt more like a human being for having gotten out and socialized. Though Alex tried to stay away from it, the subject of the Middle East came up in general and Egypt specifically, when Ben asked Alex what her next trip might be.

  Janet gave Alex a strange look. Alex gave her a pat under the table as if to say, “Don’t press me for details now, I’ll explain later.”

  Ben, aware of the recent tragedy in Janet’s life, was always able to reach for some comedic banter. He tried to keep the mood from getting too somber, making jokes and gestures about old 1940s and 1950s horror films involving mummies. He got both Janet and Alex laughing.

  “Hey, and then there was the old Steve Martin routine, ‘King Tut,’ ” he said. “You know? The song and dance. Check it out on YouTube if you’ve never seen it.”

  “How’s it go again?” Alex asked. “ ‘When I die, don’t want nothing fancy but, gimme a royal sendoff like they gave to old King Tut.’

  “ Ben laughed with them. “Something like that,” he said. “I think Steve Martin had a back-up group called the ‘Toot Uncommons’ for that.”

  The laughter grew louder, along with a second and third round of Pabst. The mood grew goofier.

  “How about this?” Alex said, moving her arms in the quirky parallel aloft motion of the ancient figures on the tombs. “Tell me where this is from. ‘All the swell paintings on the tombs,’ ” she sang, splitting up the other two with her brew-inspired riff on “Walk like an Egyptian.” “ ‘They do some silly dance, don’t you know …’ ”

  She rolled her eyes and gave it her best Bangles—Susanna Hoffs imitation. The people at the next table applauded.

  “Oh, my gosh,” said Janet. “Remember that goofy “Walk like an Egyptian” video with everyone walking around funny?”

  “I was a little kid,” Alex said.

  “I was in seventh grade,” Ben said. “I was in love with all four Bangles. Still am, actually.” Ben laughed. “I should have worn a fez tonight.”

  They riffed on Egyptian stuff for a while, from Nefertiti to Nasser. Ben did his walking-like-an-Egyptian imitation with his arms and the women laughed again.

  “When I was in Egypt, most people walked normally,” Janet said with a bittersweet grin. “Until Carlos’s car blew up.”

  “I walked normally too, until I ran into a roadside bomb in Iraq,” Ben said. He tapped on his prosthesis. “But then I would never have met Alex if I hadn’t been rehabbing on the basketball court.”

  “And I wouldn’t have been leading a normal life again if I hadn’t met Ben,” Alex said. “God works in strange ways, right?”

  They walked back to the Calvert Arms later in the evening, a slight mist falling. Ben walked along with them, and both women felt as if they had exorcised a few demons over the evening. Two hours of beer and laughter with friends, and the world didn’t seem to be such a scary place. Janet felt better for being
out of the apartment without incident, and Alex had calmed down a little concerning a possible trip to the Middle East.

  Let’s see if it even happens, she told herself.

  Alex watched the street just in case. She didn’t see any danger, but she continued to pay close attention to the configuration of cars on her block. That one car that she had been noticing recently, the battered old Taurus, wasn’t apparent when she did a quick scan of the block. A good sign perhaps. Potential stalkers, she reasoned, were illusory after all.

  They arrived uneventfully at the entrance to Alex’s building. Ben said good-bye.

  Janet and Alex entered the building.

  “Ben’s great,” Janet said. “He seems like a really good guy.”

  “He is.”

  “You’re lucky to have him.”

  “He’s a friend, not a boyfriend,” Alex answered.

  “So he’s available?” Janet asked.

  “Not for you.” She answered with half a laugh. “I might want to grab him for myself eventually.”

  “Got it. Well, you’re still lucky to have him,” Janet said.

  Against logic, Alex felt mildly taken aback by the question of Ben’s availability. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess he’s available. I know he’s got a job, goes to classes at law school on most evenings, and hits the gym two or three nights a week too.”

  “Wow.”

  “That doesn’t leave much time for dating, I’d guess.”

  The two young women stood for a moment in the lobby. Alex felt a little ill-at-ease with the personal topics. “Anything else you need to do?” Alex asked.

  “Like what?” Janet asked.

  “Any shopping?” Alex asked. “Groceries, maybe? How you doing on supplies?”