Countdown in Cairo (Russian Trilogy, The)

by Noel Hynd

  “Right,” she said.

  “You are unconvinced?”

  She slid off the bed. Her arm buzzed when she used it. As a counterpoint, her head pounded. She also had a bandage on her knee and various other points on her body that had obviously taken some sort of hits.

  The wound to her arm would have buzzed worse but she knew she was on a major painkiller. She had a prescription to continue it, along with antibiotics against a possible infection.

  “No, I’m not unconvinced,” she said. “I appreciate your concern. As well as your care tonight. Thank you. And I hope your father didn’t carry a gun for a living like I do so that he lived to a ripe old age.”

  Ben stepped forward, and Janet rose.

  “He’s ninety-two and lives in Mumbai,” the doctor said. “He was a soldier for fifty years in the Indian National Army. He retired as a general.”

  “Bless him,” Alex said.

  “God already has,” replied the doctor.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Alex had phoned Mike Gamburian in the middle of the night from the hospital to bring him up to speed. She returned home by 5:00 a.m., Janet with her. Janet slept over at her apartment, the door carefully bolted.

  Alex and Janet spent the better part of the next morning at the local police precinct, explaining what had happened and what they had seen. Other witnesses from the mini-mart verified Alex’s testimony. The story blazed all over the local news, but without Alex’s name attached to it. The public spin: a female off-duty FBI agent had intervened in a crime in progress, and a blazing “Old West—style” gun battle had ensued. The shooting was considered justified. More than justified, in fact. Yet viewers would shake their heads and wonder what was going on even in the capital’s better neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Alex could already see what was going to happen. There would be a lot of sound and fury for a day, it would recede a little the next day, and gradually more immediate local stories would eclipse the investigation.

  But for Alex, like the long scar on her arm and the twenty-two stitches that had closed it, the story was not likely to go away.

  Alex would need to take the rest of the next afternoon to further assist the local police with their initial inquest. Her appointment with a CIA representative was pushed back a day.

  The two men who had been killed had yet to be identified conclusively, though an initial investigation suggested that they were both in the United States illegally. A trace on their firearms led to a Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, gun dealer who had accepted fake driver’s licenses.

  Late the next afternoon, Alex slipped away and sat in a rear pew in St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square. She found the four walls of her adopted local parish again giving her solace when she needed it, an island of tranquility.

  Her thoughts drifted inward. So often in life, people had reacted to her as too perfect; her easy fluency with so many languages, her mastery of so many volumes of literature, her athleticism in high school and college, her looks way above average, and her career paths that always seemed quick. Yet her father had died before she was ten, her mother when she was twenty. Her fiancé had died tragically, and now the scar on her arm was another stinging reminder of her own mortality.

  But could anyone ever see the turmoil within?

  She felt so vulnerable, so alone sometimes. Increasingly, she found solace in alcohol and felt a subtle attraction for men who probably ought to be locked up. She had a best friend, Ben, but only had him because she had been on the doorstep of suicide one night.

  Where was it all going? Above all, as she sat in a pew in St. John’s, she asked herself questions, asked God questions, and was waiting for answers.

  There are moments in the life of every human being, she knew, when one had the choice to go forward or retreat, to continue on one’s path or divert and choose another one. As a teenager away at boarding school in Connecticut, she had first been introduced to the poetry of Robert Frost, and she had always been fascinated by one poem in particular about a path through the woods. The poet had stopped to consider which way to go when the path diverged; he could not see where either new path led. He had chosen the one least traveled, and that choice had made all the difference.

  Which path was she on? A good and righteous path? Would she be able to look back on her life in twenty years, or thirty, or fifty years, and be convinced that she had done the right things, that she had obeyed the principles of her faith and been a good and godly person?

  She wondered. More and more, projects like Venezuela pulled at her—the chance to work against poverty, disease, and ignorance. And yet on a professional level, she was asked to carry a weapon, be an investigator, be a protector of the innocent. Eventually, she knew, the song became the singer, and she would become not who she wanted to be but what her job and her assignments had turned her into.

  Was her path compatible with who she was, what she wanted to be? In the literature she had read, she wasn’t James Bond and she wasn’t George Smiley. She wasn’t Jason Bourne. She wasn’t even Jessica Fletcher in the old Murder, She Wrote reruns that she had watched as a kid.

  And she wasn’t akin to any of those thugs at the CIA who could always march forward no matter what the orders were. Sometimes, like now, she just plain thought about things too much.

  She listened to the steady rumble of the traffic outside.

  One of the church sextons came down the center aisle of the pews and gave her a friendly nod. She nodded back.

  In her mind, she replayed the events of the previous evening, every horrible detail. She had a freeze-frame in her mind of how she had cut down the assailant who had aimed weapons at her from the backseat of the lurching car, and she wasn’t even sure which shot fired at her had hit her. She knew she would be dead if she hadn’t used her own weapon so swiftly. But that didn’t mean that today she was any less traumatized.

  For the first time, it sank in: she could have been killed. Her own sense of mortality was suddenly very real. It made her shiver. It made her cringe. Was her faith any stronger, or was it starting to come undone?

  She wasn’t sure of the answer.

  She thought back to the events earlier in the year, the catastrophe in Kiev. Then there had been the investigation of the missing Pietà of Malta in Madrid.

  She wondered: why was God throwing all of this her way?

  Was she strong enough to handle it?

  She had no answer.

  In her hand was her FBI/Treasury ID and shield. She turned it over and examined it.

  Keep it? Chuck it?

  Should she move forward or go back? Or should she find some other path that diverged to an unknown destination through the woods?

  Could any human being answer questions like that?

  Her eyes were looking straight ahead, toward the altar and the stained glass beyond. But her gaze was really upon an inner world. She was aware of her own breathing, calm and evenly paced. And she was further aware of an extraordinary stillness, almost trancelike, that overcame her.

  Once again, she had killed someone. She didn’t like the feeling of it.

  She closed her eyes.

  An old habit kicked in. She reached to her neck and fingered the stone pendant that hung there on a gold chain, the pendant that had replaced the small gold cross she had worn as a child. She held her fingers to it, gripping it between a thumb and a forefinger. It was warm from her skin. Soothing. She allowed time to flow by. She didn’t know if it was a minute or five. It was as if she had a foot in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual. Then there was a sound, a clattering sound, that of a door closing. She opened her eyes and looked. She saw the sexton cleaning in the area where a side door led to the vestry and the quarters for the choir.

  The trauma was still there, but she felt as if she had turned a small corner in dealing with it. She felt better. Something had changed. For the first time since the previous evening, she enjoyed an inner calm, a sense of peace.

  There was no
flash of light, no chorus of angels, no dramatic revelation. Rather, when she opened her eyes again, she felt as if God had wrapped himself around her and reassured her. She could live with what had happened. By all she believed in, she had done the right thing.

  The question, which had been so perplexing just minutes earlier, seemed so simple now. She had acted in accordance with her faith and her interpretation of morality. She had defended herself and someone she was charged to protect. She had done what she had to do under the circumstances, unpleasant and violent as it may have been.

  There then, she told herself. She would, of course, go forward.

  She began to think of Egypt.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Alex arrived by car at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on Thursday morning at 8:35. The meeting was in a small conference room on the third floor, west. A taciturn young assistant led her in. There was an oblong table with twelve empty chairs. The walls were bare, painted light green, with no windows. A series of prints on the wall showed embassies in various parts of the world. Near it was a valance, and next to it an American flag in a stand.

  Idly, as she waited, she examined the flag. There was a small white tag on it. Made in China. Typical. She sat at the table and waited. Two minutes later the door abruptly opened and three men surged into the room. All three wore dark suits and had ID badges dangling in plastic holders across their ample midsections.

  The mere sight of them reminded her of how much she disliked most of these CIA people: frequently wrong but never in doubt. Disliked, she mused, and distrusted.

  “Agent Alexandra LaDuca,” said the leader, extending a hand. “I’m William Quintero, Assistant Director/DCA, Middle Eastern Affairs. These are my associates who’ll also be involved in this case.”

  He introduced them. Ronald Strauss, who was in charge of technical support for Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and Miller Harris, whose official title suggested that he oversaw political officers and operations in the same region.

  Handshakes went all around and the group of four sat down. The three men were on the opposite side of the table from Alex, with Quintero at the center.

  “Well, now, Alex,” Quintero said to start, “heck of an incident the other night, wasn’t it? How are you holding up?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “The arm?”

  “It is what it is,” she said.

  “You’re quite a trooper,” Harris said with admiration.

  “I’m more of a grouch and a sorehead today than anything,” she answered. “Why am I here?”

  Quintero looked at her carefully. “Are you up to a new assignment?” he asked. He continued before she could answer. “This is going to dovetail into areas where you’ve already done some work. So it’s not entirely new.”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “And ‘happy’ to be here?” he asked.

  “Obviously not,” she said.

  “And mentally, you feel ‘together’?”

  “As much as any of us might,” she said. “How’s that?”

  There was a moment, then all three men smiled.

  “It’s a strange line of work we do,” she said. “There’s stress with any assignment.”

  “Yes, but some more than others,” Quintero replied.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “Tell me why I’m here.”

  Another short beat, then, “Okay,” Quintero said softly. “We’re here to talk about your ex-boss, Michael Cerny.”

  “He was never officially my boss,” she corrected. “I was asked by my own boss, Mike Gamburian, to work with him on one particular operation. There was no name to the operation, but it involved Yuri Federov. Kiev. You have files in front of you. You know all that.”

  “Yes, of course,” Quintero said. To his left, Harris was looking at a file that he had opened, glancing up and down intermittently, while to his right, Strauss sat frozen in place, a similar file closed in front of him, his sleek hand upon it.

  “But recently you were asking questions about Michael Cerny?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Would you mind telling us why?”

  “Curiosity,” said Alex.

  “Curiosity?” Quintero pressed. “Or maybe something more specific?”

  “Such as?”

  Quintero leaned back in his chair. “Suspicion, for some reason?” he asked. “An inkling? Some insidious rumor that you may have picked up from somewhere?”

  She took a more aggressive tone in return, truthful but keeping Janet at arm’s length. “I worked with Mr. Cerny on an operation that stretched from Ukraine to France and possibly incorporated a massacre in South America,” she said. “Several people lost their lives, including my fiancé. It’s only natural that I might want a final look at the files of some of the people involved. So I attempted to access those files.”

  “For what purpose if the operation is over?” Quintero asked.

  “I just answered that question,” she said. “That operation changed my life. Additionally, Mike Gamburian asked me once again to contact Mr. Federov. It’s only natural that I would wish to review.”

  Quintero listened without speaking.

  “Quite frankly,” Alex continued, “I’m resentful that I can’t access those files. I’m weighing resignation. There are a lot of other things I can do rather than put my life on the line here when I’m not getting the proper support and feedback from above.” She could tell from their expressions that her feint had worked. She spoke politely and calmly. “I’m sure you understand.”

  Three pairs of eyes were steadily upon her.

  “Of course,” Quintero said. “Let’s just not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” she said not so politely. “You know as well as I do,” Alex added, “that operations evolve. They never completely end. But for personal reasons, I’d like some closure on this.”

  Quintero snorted. “Well, wouldn’t we all?” he asked rhetorically.

  He opened the file that sat in front of him and handed several sheets of paper across the table to Alex.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I have to give you these.”

  The papers were the confidentiality bonds. She knew the drill. She was about to be brought into a CIA operation, whether she wanted to be or not, or at least continued into an operation that was ongoing.

  She looked at the documents. Alex scanned. “The usual crap, huh?” she said.

  “The usual crap,” Quintero agreed.

  She signed and handed the documents back across the table.

  “Excellent,” Quintero said. He accepted the documents, made sure that Alex had signed the proper spots, and returned the documents to the file.

  “Well,” Quintero said, “if you’re looking for personal closure, you won’t find it here.”

  “What exactly does that mean?” Alex asked.

  “Michael Cerny is alive,” Quintero said.

  “How is that possible?”

  “He was wounded in Paris,” Quintero said. “You saw right. He was hit as he sat in a car on the street. Our people did a follow-up and took him to a private medical clinic. And as things evolved, we realized, or maybe Michael realized and suggested it, that we were presented with an astounding possibility. Declare Michael dead, ship back to America a body that we bought from a local morgue, and have a cheerful funeral. Then give Mike a new identity, and he has the deepest cover that anyone in the world can have.”

  “Brilliant,” she said, with an obvious edge. “And where did the best-made plans of men with mice-sized brains go off the rails this time?”

  “What makes you think it did?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if things were going smoothly,” she said. She glanced to the others at the table. “All four of us know that, and I have a scar in my left arm that tells me that I’m justified to think that.”

  “Alex, do people ever tell you that you’re too clever sometimes and maybe just a bit too sarcastic?”
/>   “Frequently. I’ve even told myself that from time to time. And my arm hurts this morning, and I’m still flying from the Vicodin, so I’d like some answers.”

  She caught Harris glancing away, suppressing a grin.

  Quintero glanced to the confidentiality bonds, double checking. “You signed everything, right?”

  “No. I made paper airplanes out of it. Of course, I signed everything.”

  Harris glanced at the papers and gave Quintero a nod.

  “Michael threw the operation off the rails himself,” Quintero said. “Not with anything he did afterward. Not immediately, anyway. But with what he had done previously.”

  “Namely?”

  “We have a spy case going on in Federal court in Philadelphia right now,” Quintero said. “A military engineer has appeared in court in the US on charges of passing classified information to Israel. A man named Solomon Isaacman is charged with selling US military secrets involving information about nuclear weapons, fighter jets, and missiles to Israel in the years from 2003 to 2007. He has been charged with four counts of conspiracy to commit espionage, including disclosing documents relating to national defense and acting as an agent of Israel.”

  “So he’s in custody?”

  “He was released on $300,000 bail. His passport was taken also.”

  “I haven’t seen anything in the press about this.”

  “So far, it’s been under wraps because of its sensitive nature. But the Agency feels that Isaacson borrowed several classified documents related to national defense from the army’s research centre between 2003 and 2007, took them to his home in New Jersey, where he would then hand over the documents to an Israeli consular official, who would photograph them in the basement. He took documents linked to modified designs for F-15 jets and several others related to nuclear weaponry. Everything was classified as ‘Restricted Data.’ The documents contained information concerning the weapons systems used by F-15 fighter jets that the United States had sold other countries.”