by Noel Hynd
She found these files had been tampered with too. With a rush, she then went after the reports that she herself had filed in the aftermath of Kiev. These were missing entirely.
She leaned back from her screen.
What was she looking at?
Typical Washington bureaucratic bungling? Or a far larger issue?
She tried to work around the files. She was typing furiously now. Her fiance was dead and someone-or some agency-was playing fast and loose with the official version of truth.
She reaccessed her own name. She brought up her own reports via a different cyber thread. She found key parts had been deleted.
Her fingers froze again on the keyboard.
She paused. Now her mind was in overdrive. She had been around the government long enough to know that when something came up missing, particularly where the official version of events was concerned, there was never much in the way of coincidence. Bureaucratic incompetence was coin of the realm in government circles, but official tampering always smelled of a rat.
A big fat filthy rat.
She circled back. She reexamined every oblique inference. She went back to the accounting of security people on the trip and counted again. Something smelled wrong here too. She looked for the transcript of the endless interviews she had done with that sick ape named Lee. They were classified elsewhere. Technically, they had never happened, even though she knew they had.
They were like Lagos, Nigeria, and those lousy 419 frauds. She wouldn’t have believed they existed except she had lived through them.
Then she looked for Michael Cerny’s name. She had not seen him for six weeks now. She found no reference. No Olga Liashko, either. Instead, there was a reference to Gerstmann-which was contradicted one page later when the spelling changed and Gerstmann became Gerstman -who had been listed as her case officer before Kiev. In itself, that wouldn’t have made much difference as frequently NSA or CIA people used their work names. It was just that they usually got the spelling of the name right.
She tried to access the work names, Cerny, Gerstman, and Gerstmann. It sounded like a law firm.
Nothing. The cyber-system returned her to “Start.” She glanced at the time in the lower right corner of her computer screen. It was now past 9:00 p.m. She wasn’t even hungry for dinner.
The Treasury corridors were quiet around her, aside from the cleaning crew. She looked up as one of the cleaning ladies went by. “ Buenas noches,” she said.
“ Buenas noches, senorita,” the cleaning lady said with a smile.
Then Alex jumped. Her computer, the small secure one, suddenly went down. She drew a breath, calmed herself, rebooted her computer and reaccessed her information system.
She had enough questions to fill a volume. Who could answer them? Who could even give her a clue?
She picked up her cell phone. She called the number she had for Michael Cerny. She would pick his mind, whatever his name was, Cerny or Gerstman or Gerstfogle or-
An electronic voice answered. It too startled her. The number she had for the man she had known as Cerny was invalid-a nonworking number.
Slowly, she put her cell phone back down on her desk.
She tried to be rational. Logical. Where was this leading?
A quite extraneous vision of herself assailed her. She pictured herself in Kiev with Robert, the night before he died. Now she kept trying to reconcile her own memory to what she read in the files. She felt a pounding headache creep up on her.
She plunged herself back into the darkest chambers of her memory and found herself sorting through the events of the previous February. She was in some of the worst reaches of her memory; when suicide scenarios tiptoed across her psyche every day.
“If I did die suddenly,” Robert had said not long before his passing, “I would want you to pick up and go on. I would want you to have a life, a family, a soul mate, happiness.”
It was almost as if he was in the room with her, invisible, a ghost, projecting such thoughts.
She glanced back to the monitor. It was alive again. She noticed a box concealed with the security issues. A menu item stared her in the eye: OPERATION CHUCK AND SUSAN.
She heard her own voice fill the room “What the-?”
She tried to access it. Then the screen flashed again.
ACCESS DENIED.
She returned again to “Start” and attempted to retrace her path. But the security system blocked her from her first strokes. In terms of intelligence pertaining to Kiev, she might have lived it personally, but she was now locked out.
FIFTY-THREE
T he next morning at 10:00 a.m., Alex knocked on the door to the office of her boss, Mike Gamburian.
“Got a minute?” she asked.
“Uh oh,” he said. “Sure.”
She entered. He motioned that she should close the door.
“I have to tell you,” Alex said. “I think I came back here too soon.”
“We can’t blame you for trying,” he said. “And God knows the president wouldn’t be alive if you hadn’t reacted the way you did. So your government and your employer owe you a big one.”
She managed an ironic smile. “God knows a lot of things that I know,” she said, “but God also knows a lot of things that I don’t. Mind if I sit?”
“I can use the company,” he said.
Alex sat. “Why am I a pariah?” she asked.
Mike Gamburian looked at her curiously. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Don’t play games, Mike. You’re my boss. If my access to information has been curtailed, you would know about it. If you know about it, you would also know why. That’s why I’m in your office right now, and that’s why I’m going to present you with my resignation in one minute.”
He sighed. “Let’s go downstairs for a smoke,” he said.
“Neither of us smoke,” she said.
“I just started,” he said. “Bad habit, I know. I need to quit. So let’s go have a cigarette.”
At the same time he made a gesture with his hand, pointing to the two of them and the doorway. She got it. They went down the elevator together in silence, not a single cigarette between them.
Then they stood on the outside of the front entrance of Treasury, standing a careful distance away from those who really were smoking.
They talked around the issue for several minutes.
“Look,” Gamburian finally said, “the first thing… I’m your friend. You’re a great woman and a fantastic employee. If you need to leave, I don’t blame you, but I want you to know I’d hire you back in a flash any day of the week.”
“I can’t do my job if I can’t access information, Mike. And I resent being excluded from an investigation of an incident that cost Robert his life. I want answers and I’m not getting them here.”
“Okay,” he said. “I understand. There’s been some talk. Crap I can’t do anything about. No one in the Western Hemisphere has a single negative thing to say about you. The way you handled things in Ukraine was beyond reproach. The first thing I need to tell you is that you can stay here. There’d be a promotion coming your way, added pay, the works.”
“In a job with no responsibility, right? Where someone’s going to be looking over my shoulder the whole time, right?”
He blew past her point.
“The second thing is that if you wanted to take more time off, with pay, that option is open to you too. No one’s going to hold it against you.” He paused. “I had a talk with the big boss. You could take up to a year if you wanted without a problem.”
“You’re talking in circles, Mike. If everything is hearts and flowers, what is the problem? ”
“They think you know something,” he said. “Something more than you’re telling them.”
“Why would I conceal anything?”
“That’s what I asked them also.”
“Who’s ‘them’?” she snapped. “Who are we talking about?”
“The powers that be.”
“CIA? NSA? White House? Secret Service?”
He blinked twice. “I honestly can’t answer that.”
“You don’t know or you can’t answer?”
“I can’t answer,” he said crisply.
She seethed and stifled a profanity. “I’ve told them everything I know. Probably about three times with every detail I can remember.”
“I’m sure you have,” he said. “Thing is, they think you might know something that you’re not even aware of.”
“Have they questioned you?”
“Quite a bit.”
She sighed. She nodded. “Okay,” she finally said. “Then I want to clear out of here. I’ll accept that leave of absence.”
“Where will you go?”
“I received a message from Joseph Collins after Kiev. The businessman. You know who he is.”
“ Everyone knows who he is,” Gamburian said. “He’s like Donald Trump but without the funny hair.”
“Mr. Collins has contacted me three times since Kiev.”
“How do you know him?”
“I worked for him several years ago. He mentored me in a way. Summer of 2001.”
Gamburian nodded.
“He’s a decent man and a good employer. He has an offer he wants to make to me. A job. I don’t know anything about it, but somehow he knew I might want to take leave of here.”
“He’s savvy to the ways of the world, Collins is, which is why he’s so wealthy. He also knows how the government works.”
“The job would take me back to New York. I should listen to what he has to say.”
“You’d be a fool not to.” Gamburian nodded sadly. “What type of job? Do you have any idea?”
“Mr. Collins is in his seventies now. He’s been using a lot of his fortune to help the Christian churches fight poverty and disease in the Third World,” she said. “That has its appeal to me right now. So I’m going to listen to what he has to offer, do some soul searching, look for some divine guidance if I can get some, and then see where I am.”
Gamburian followed.
“Hopefully at the end of the day I’ll be in the right place,” she said.
“I have no doubt you will. No doubt at all.”
He embraced her.
“I’m sorry it turned out like this here,” he said. “Really, I am.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”
FIFTY-FOUR
L t. Rizzo finally was making progress. Or at least he thought he was.
He remained visibly furious that people from the US Embassy had removed the two bodies from the morgue and sent them back to America. But he was not about to let that stop his investigation. Inside, he didn’t care much what they did with those corpses, but he was not shy about vocalizing his stated displeasure.
Allora bene, he thought to himself. Very well. If they wanted to block his direct access to resolving four murders by blockading his route to two of the bodies, he would pursue the matter from a different direction. Over the last decade, the Americans had been directed by a bunch of know-nothings who lacked the sophistication to understand how other countries, other governments, worked. He would fly under their radar, he told everyone he worked with, then bored everyone with another rant about American duplicity and interference.
Accordingly, his people had tracked down the drug-addled musician by going through pay receipts in the apartment where he had lived. Rizzo personally had interviewed the dead guitarist’s disgusting band mates and the owners of the club where he had played. He had even found the marriage license of the girl who had died with him in the apartment and now knew her name was Lana Bissoni and she was indeed from Toronto.
From there he had the location of the wife’s family back in Canada. Rizzo was not surprised to learn that they hadn’t heard from her in five years. Nonetheless, Rizzo allowed her body to be shipped to Ontario.
Rizzo and his other detectives spent hours canvassing the building where the couple died and the club where the musicians had played. He knew that the key to any criminal investigation was talking to the day-to-day people who are in the same place every day. The people who see things and eventually tell you something.
From there he accessed some of the girl’s friends and people who knew the couple from the nearby cafes. Apparently, Lana and her husband had had some fallings out of late. She hadn’t been in the habit of showing up in the clubs where he was playing. In turn, she seemed to have fallen in with some of the Eastern European underworld that populated Rome.
Well, no wonder she “woke up one day and was dead,” as Rizzo liked to say. You can’t sleep with a dog without waking up with fleas. And certainly, in his opinion, many of these Eastern Europeans from the old Soviet republics were packs of mutts.
Now at least he had a direction to send his investigators.
He called another special meeting at his headquarters. He assembled all four of his newly acquired homicide people. They were each allowed to select one top assistant. So now he had eight people on this case, in addition to the ragazzi in the computer rooms, the interns, who acted as wild cards and who knew when they were going to come up with something good.
Then, finally, he used the extensive contacts he had with the underworld to make inquiries about the mafia ucraina in Rome. Had there been any special activity, he asked. Did anyone know of any shooters who had come into the city, done a job, then vanished? The local Italian hoods had no love for the foreigners who were coming into the city and cutting into their rackets. They hated the Russian and Ukrainian mobsters almost as much as Rizzo did. They would welcome the opportunity to put the heat on some of them.
But the inquiries turned up nothing. Whenever Rizzo and his people mentioned the Ukrainians, someone always changed the topic to the near-death of the American president in Kiev.
A lawless place and a lawless people, the Italians said. A true frontier of civilization. Dangerous.
FIFTY-FIVE
T he Stanhope Hotel was on Fifth Avenue at Eighty-third Street, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a regal old building dating from the 1920s, parked on some of the world’s most expensive real estate. Its open-air terrace on street level stretched to the neighboring building that was every bit as distinguished.
The terrace was a relaxing place for drinks. In the middle was an island bar, surrounded by tables. Thick dark wood, accented by potted palms.
Alex arrived a few minutes before noon. Her one-time employer, the entrepreneur Joseph Collins, arrived almost simultaneously from the opposite direction, walking briskly.
Collins was a sturdy man for his age. He had led a good life, staying away from vices and excesses, active in the Methodist Church all his life. He had been married to the same woman for forty-two years, a woman whom he still referred to affectionately as “my best girl” and whom he described as “a cookie-baking Methodist.”
The clean living showed. Collins possessed an easy grace. He kept one of his many residences a few blocks up Fifth Avenue, a co-op encompassing the top three floors of one of Manhattan’s most exclusive buildings. He owned an even more impressive spread in London, and then there was his “little boat,” as he liked to call it, the two-hundred-foot one, in Key Biscayne.
Mr. Collins’s bodyguard, burly and pink-faced, in dark wraparound shades, a suit, and an open-collared shirt, took up an unobtrusive position by the front entrance, saying nothing. The bodyguard buried himself in a New York Post as he kept one eye on the entrance to the terrace. To Alex, the bodyguard had ex-NYPD written all over him. An even closer glance told her that he carried his weapon on the left side under the arm.
Alex and Joseph Collins found places at a reserved table on a far edge of the terrace, recessed back into a carefully secluded corner.
A waitress, young and pretty, cleared the extra place settings and brought them coffee. They ordered fruit and a plate of breakfast rolls. The waitress wore a name tag that said Priscilla. Her softly accented
English suggested that she came from somewhere in the Caribbean.
“So,” Alex said at length, turning to her former boss and breaking the ice, “normally when we meet you tell me ahead of time what’s on your agenda.”
“Well, first I wanted to know how you might be feeling, how you were recovering,” Collins said. “God knows, you’ve been through hell and back, haven’t you?”
“The answers are ‘okay’ and ‘okay,’ ” she said.
“So I see,” he answered.
“I appreciated the flowers and the notes. And the calls. Honestly, I did.”
“The least I could do. I know how horrible it must have been,” he said. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention it.”
“Thank you. I’m trying to move on.”
“Is the government seeing after you?” Collins asked.
“To the extent that they ever do,” she said. “There are some wrinkles.”
“Anything I can help you with? I know the president personally, plus both of the current New York senators.”
“I’ll be okay,” she said with a sigh. “It’s just going to take me some time.”
“What are you planning to doing with yourself other than meditate, haunt art galleries, and go to Yankee games while you’re in New York?” he asked.
“It depends how long I can use your son’s apartment. Very generous of you, by the way. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“He’s away on one of his missionary visits?” she asked.
“Yes. We have a few places around the world, as you know. He’s in Brazil right now. Rough posting. He brought it on himself. It’s the work he wants to do.”
She smiled.
“Okay,” he finally said. “Let’s talk about why you’re here.?Que tal tu espanol? ”
“ Buenisimo. Excelente. Hablo muy bien todavia.?Y por que? ” Very good. Excellent. I still speak well, I think. Why?
