by JC Ryan
Salome arrived in Denver at nine a.m., ready once more for a battle of wits with Alica. She took her place in the interrogation room and again waited for Alica to be delivered to her.
“This is your last chance to help me, Alica,” she began.
“Why would I do that?” Alica had made good use of her night of rest. She was as confident and uncooperative as ever. Salome wished she’d questioned her all night, without allowing her to sleep. That was a sword that cut two ways, though, and her main goal was to find the author of the network.
“Because, Oleg Zlatovski is known to eliminate people, even in custody, if he fears they may talk. We can protect you.” Salome had no idea if that were a trait of the Russian whose name she’d been given, but the slightest widening of Alica’s eyes at the mention of his name told her that they were on the right track.
“Tell me about him, Alica. Did you meet him in person? Is he as fearsome as they say?”
“I have nothing to say.” Alica had regained her composure, and was stonewalling again.
Switching tactics, Salome let that subject go. “They tell me you lost your husband and child in a car accident. That must have been very difficult for you,” she said. The husband was a minor official in an embassy in Tehran, she understood. “Is that why you took this job? Why didn’t you go home to Croatia?”
“There was nothing to return to,” Alica muttered, disarmed for the moment by her memories.
“Did you do this type of work before?” Salome pressed. Alica started to answer, but Salome interrupted. “Spying, I mean.”
Angered, Alica flushed, and Salome pounced. “Is Alica Cindric your real name? What would we learn about you if we checked Interpol?” As quickly as the flush had begun, it disappeared as Alica paled. Salome sat back, satisfied. There was something there, she was sure of it. She had a reason to keep Alica here for one more day.
Salome didn’t waste time returning to Boulder, even though she’d lined up a few interviews there for the afternoon. She called Lewis first, and told him what she’d learned. “Check with Interpol, but also check with the Russians. I have a feeling I know what she’s hiding, based on her age.” Lewis agreed to get right back to her.
While she waited to hear back from Lewis, Salome called the Rossler Foundation and made her apologies to the people she’d planned to interview that day. There was a very good chance that she wouldn’t have to bother them at all, if Oleg Zlatovski could be found.
~~~
June 27, 2020; D-day minus 33 Denver
Due to the time differences, it was morning before the FSB got back to Lewis. Salome had spent the night in a ready room that the Denver FBI office kept for agents working on time-sensitive cases like child abductions. The cot was adequate, but probably no more comfortable than what Alica had slept on, Salome figured. When Lewis called, though, all thoughts of her stiff back fled.
Alica was a well-known figure to the FSB, it turned out. Known as the ‘Beautiful Widow-Maker’, she was high on their wanted list for her role in the Chechnyan Separatist movement. She was linked to some very ugly bombing incidents that killed Russian civilians, even women and children. They’d tracked her to Iran, where they couldn’t touch her because of her husband’s diplomatic status. Then, during the virus crisis, they lost her. Her husband and child had died of the 9th Cycle flu, not a car accident after all. This, Salome intuited immediately, had given her the motive to involve herself in the spy network when Zlatovski recruited her. She suspected that Alica knew Zlatovski very well, and possibly even knew who was behind the project.
Salome quickly ate a fast-food breakfast that one of the agents brought her and grabbed a cup of almost decent coffee. She knew it would be lukewarm and bitter the next time she wanted a cup, so the fact that it was drinkable now was a welcome surprise. Alica would be enjoying a travel-sized box of cold cereal with skim milk. Salome wasn’t sure she wouldn’t agree to a trade, if it were offered. Cases like this were ruining her stomach, and would eventually ruin her figure if she ever stopped running in her spare time. Who am I kidding? she thought. There were no cases like this.
Setting the interview up as she had twice before, Salome waited for Alica and wished she’d gone back to her nice hotel bed in Boulder the night before. She needed some rest, preferably in a comfortable bed. She gave a moment’s thought to the idea that when it was over, she and a lot of other people would be dead. She sat up, alert, as the doorknob turned and the guard ushered Alica in.
“Well, well. Beautiful Widow-Maker, huh? You must have been quite the thing in your time.” Alica hadn’t even sat down when Salome threw the nickname at her. Alica’s only response was to falter a bit as she drew the chair in beneath her. She stared at Salome, saying nothing.
“You seem to have made a few enemies in your time, Alica,” Salome continued. “I understand some people in the FSB have a burning desire to get reacquainted with you.”
Alica was watching Salome’s every gesture, but remained silent.
“I have a small problem, hon,” Salome said in as kind a voice as she could muster. “You see, you are of no more use to us. We know who put the network together, now. You apparently don’t know anything else to tell us. I suspect that the FSB won’t treat you very well, but we have no choice. They’re our allies now. We’re going to have to turn you over to them.”
“No!” Alica said, the first word she’d spoken since coming in. “Don’t! They’ll kill me.”
Salome shrugged. “Sorry. No choice.”
“I know more,” Alica said. “A lot more. Keep me here, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“It will be in a prison,” Salome warned. “You won’t like it.”
“Make it a high-security prison, where they can’t get to me. At least I’ll be alive.”
Without answering, Salome got up and left the room, with Alica sitting in despair and wondering if she’d missed her chance to save her life.
Salome called Lewis while she was out of the room. “Our little bird is singing,” she said. “The threat to turn her over to the Russians did the trick. I want to send her to you, but make her think she’s going to be interrogated like the others and then turned over. She’ll be begging to tell you everything she knows.”
“That works. I’ll arrange for transport. Good job, Dr. Lane.”
“Call me Salome. Dr. Lane sounds so stuffy.”
When the details had been worked out and the connection ended, Lewis turned to Luke. “Do you think she was flirting with me?”
“Not a chance,” said Luke. “I’m sure she has better taste.”
Salome went back to the interrogation room to twist the knife just a bit more before turning Alica over to the CIA to be escorted to Washington and Sam Lewis’s interrogators.
“I’ve done all I can,” she told Alica. “I’m afraid it wasn’t enough. My boss agreed that you’re of no further use. I think they’ll take you to where they’re holding the others, and after you tell them everything, they’ll give you to Aleksandr Chustikov.” Chustikov had been the head of the FSB since 2008. He was not a nice man.
“Please, please.” Alica repeated her plea, even after Salome had left the room. By the time she landed in Washington, she would be, as Salome had predicted, begging to tell her story.
Salome hoped that the information she had would help the joint task force track down Oleg Zlatovski. There was no doubt he’d put the network together, Alica’s reaction to the name virtually assured it. Finding him may very well give them the information they needed to stop this diabolical plot. However, even he wasn’t the mastermind. That was someone else, and figuring out who it was had been Salome’s directive. She still needed to interview the Rosslers and their staff after all.
Since there was no time to waste, she drank a cup of the cold sludge that remained in the FBI break room coffeepot and set out for Boulder again. It was time to come up with a profile of a man who could conceive of a plot to destroy half the planet and get s
o far in the execution of it that it may not be possible to stop him.
~~~
June 27, 2020; D-day minus 33
The FBI didn’t rate a fighter pilot to transport two guards and Alica Cindric to Washington, DC for interrogation by the CIA, now that it was believed they had most of what she could give them. They caught a commercial flight in the afternoon after Salome was finished with her, her handcuffs covered loosely by a jacket. She was seated between two brawny FBI agents in a three-seat coach row, an uncomfortable three-and-a-half-hour flight ahead of her. Her request to be released from her handcuffs once they were seated and the exits sealed was denied. She resigned herself to taking her refreshment awkwardly, lifting both hands to sip at the plastic cup of ginger ale. Neither agent seemed willing to talk with her, so she closed her eyes and tried to sleep, concealing her fear of what was going to happen when she could no longer provide new information to the authorities.
If they turned her over to the FSB, she wouldn’t survive, she feared. Maybe not even long enough to be consumed by the nanonukes that the Sword of Cyrus would deploy in a month or so. To survive that, she would have to find a way to get to Iran or Turkey. Even if she were to escape custody and make her way out of a target city, the chaos in the countryside would be difficult to manage after the cities were destroyed. Alica drifted to sleep while planning how to use her feminine wiles to escape her FSB captors, for she was certain that it would be the only way. Once she escaped, she’d make her way to the Middle East by whatever means required, even if that meant sleeping with lorry drivers or taking someone’s car at gunpoint. Whatever it took, she would survive.
Shortly after five and a poor excuse for a meal that the FBI agents provided her, Alica was turned over to Sam Lewis at JOCC headquarters. Alica examined him to read his vulnerability, and found little to go on. His face revealed no emotion as he led her to a chair and handcuffed her to the arm of it.
“Luke, would you come in, please?” Lewis said into an intercom speaker embedded by a button on the wall that probably would summon help if Alica were to attempt escape. Nevertheless, she made a note of it. Perhaps it would come in handy. This detour from being given to the FSB afforded another opportunity to attempt escape. While Alica was looking around the room, another man came in, presumably the Luke that Director Lewis had addressed.
“Look familiar?” Lewis asked the man.
“Yeah,” Luke answered. “She worked for the Foundation; I’ve seen her around the building. Never met her in person before, though. Is this the famous widow-maker?” He put his hands behind him and leaned back against the wall, intending to intimidate Alica by his physical presence, which was impressive, she had to admit. Though his graying hair revealed him to be some years her senior, he was physically fit and still retained the looks that surely turned heads in his youth. Alica turned the full force of her sultry gaze on him and gave a slow smile.
“I can help you. I know what the Iranians are planning,” she said. “And I know who the leader is, at least one of his aliases.” She glanced at the other man, CIA Director Lewis and smiled at him as well. “I’ll tell you if you guarantee my safety from the FSB.”
Luke and Lewis traded glances. Could the woman be playing them? They had no compunction about lying to her, but before they guaranteed that she wouldn’t be turned over to Russia, they preferred to hear what she had to tell them. If it was good enough, they might even be able to keep her out of the hands of the FSB. But her willingness to talk had to be tested first.
“I’ll do what I can,” said Lewis. “But I’m going to need something to guarantee your good faith.” Negotiations would probably continue for some hours, with Alica demanding something in writing with a powerful signature on it, and Lewis working to get some idea of what the woman really had. “Tell us who trained you, and I’ll take your case to my boss.”
“And who is your boss?” Alica demanded.
“The President of the United States,” he said. “Nigel Harper is a man of his word. Even you must know that.”
“I’ve heard that,” she said. “The man who trained me is a dead man. How, you ask? Because he is not really dead, but you believe him to be.” Lewis leaned forward. He knew who she meant. Would she give a name, or only these silly riddles?
“His name,” he said, schooling his voice to remain neutral.
“Oleg Zlatovski,” she replied. The only expression of emotion in the room was Luke’s slightly raised eyebrows. Alica wasn’t looking at him, so he had the luxury of this silent communication with his old friend. Lewis sat back.
“Can you validate this?” he asked. “Are you able to give us something to prove you’re correct?” He turned slightly away from Alica to conceal the twitching of his eye, a response to the distress of confirming that the wily old spy was still alive after all.
“I think so. I’ll require a computer,” she said. Lewis sent for an IT specialist to bring in a laptop and stay to be certain that the woman pulled no tricks of subtle communication to her network.
With all three men looking on, Alica accessed a private website with nothing but a number to identify it. Using a password that she provided, the IT specialist signed in for her after warning Lewis that just accessing it could identify their whereabouts to the website administrators, and signing in would identify who it was, of course. Lewis considered the implications and decided that seeing what Alica had to show them was more important than worrying about a rescue effort, especially since they were deep within the Pentagon basement structure and any attack would be easily defended. The specialist made one more attempt, saying that wasn’t the danger. The danger in alerting the administrator would be the sudden disappearance of the site, locking them out of any hope of recovering the information it held.
“We’d better look quickly, then,” Luke answered. “It’s already done.”
They turned the keyboard back over to Alica, who made an adjustment to the keyboard software and then typed in a greeting, in Russian. “Wait!” shouted Lewis, but Luke put his hand on the Director’s arm.
“It’s okay, I can read it. It just says hello.”
“Switch to English,” Lewis directed. As he spoke, the screen filled with Cyrillic characters. Luke read them with ease, a result of his years of assignments that required him to learn the language.
“What does it say?” Lewis asked.
“Do you want me to read it?” Alica asked, directing her gaze to Luke.
“I’ll read it,” he answered. “It says ‘Why are you logging in from Washington, DC? What has happened? Communications compromised.’ We’d better answer quickly.”
Alica moved her hands quickly to the keyboard and typed. Luke read as the characters appeared. ‘Operation in Boulder discovered. Escaped, came here to find transport home. My darling, let me come to you.’”
Lewis nodded. For now, she was cooperating, but the tension was awful. At any moment, she could clue the person with whom she was communicating that it was a trap. Sweat began to roll down from his hairline. He was getting too old for this.
‘Alica?’ appeared on the screen.
‘Yes, of course. Oleg?’ she typed.
‘Affirmative. Can you get to Canada? I can bring you home from there,’ was the answer.
‘You’ll come for me in person?’
‘Yes. Meet me at the place where we danced, in Montreal.’
“He knows something is wrong,” she said to the others. “We never danced in Montreal.”
“Answer that,” Sam directed her.
‘My darling, you jest. We never danced in Montreal,’ she typed.
‘Thank you. I’m sorry, I had to verify it was you. Do you have a clean passport?’
‘No, everything lost in Boulder. Running out of money.’
‘Stay there. Contact me tomorrow at this time. I’ll have instructions.’
The screen went blank as Zlatovski disconnected Alica’s access. Everyone in the room sat back, exhausted with the tension.<
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“Do you think it’s gone?” Lewis asked the IT specialist.
“It is not gone,” Alica answered. “He would not have told me to contact him if he intended to take the site down. It is my only way to contact him now. Do you believe me now? Will you take my request to your president?”
“One more item I need first,” Lewis said. Alica turned huge, liquid brown eyes on him and accused him with them of bad faith. “Do you know who Zlatovski reports to?”
“I am not certain of his name, but I think I can find a picture of him on the internet,” Alica answered. She pulled the laptop back to a comfortable position, and typed in a query, hitting the enter key before Luke had a chance to translate it. A series of pictures appeared on the screen, and she clicked on the first one. It was a Wikipedia article on the newly-created Directorate of Reconstruction in Iran, with a picture of the director. Luke and Sam stared at her pointing finger in dismay. The leader of the plot to destroy the world was none other than their old employee and crony, Arsalan!
“It calls him Ahmad Ahmadi here,” Alica was saying, “but Oleg calls him Dalir Jahandar.”
Alica could not have made a bigger impact if she’d exploded one of the nanonukes in the room.
“He’s Dalir Jahandar?” Lewis yelled. Luke knew why he was so agitated, but neither the IT specialist nor Alica understood his agitation. Luke dismissed the IT guy, who went without protest despite the fact that Luke was a civilian. Luke checked Alica’s handcuffs, and then dragged the speechless Lewis out of the room. Behind the soundproof door, he whispered urgently to Sam.