by Noel Hynd
“We’re okay,” he said, continuing in Ukrainian.
The man on the shotgun side turned his head halfway around to talk to his passenger. “You’re a lucky lady tonight, Olga. Real lucky.”
Both men laughed.
They drove across the Key Bridge back into Washington. They navigated carefully through traffic. Olga sat up a little to watch where they were going. Within another few minutes, they entered Rock Creek Park. Its roads were dark and quiet at this late hour, which was what everyone there wanted.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, Olga. We’re going to move you to another car. You’re going to drive through the night. Your next driver will take you to Montreal and you’ll fly to Mexico. From there to Cuba. The Americans will lose track of you in Havana. But you’ll connect there for Brazil.”
The driver glanced at him and smiled.
Olga remained nervous.
“Where’s the money?” she asked.
From the front seat came the rest of her package. The nice plump packs of money. Enough to get her started. She was breathing a little easier, but not by much.
Olga’s vehicle pulled off the road. She looked around. Sure enough, there was another car waiting, its lights off.
The driver of Olga’s car flashed its lights. The driver from the other car gave a slight wave of recognition. A passenger side guard stepped out to cover the situation. Olga assumed everyone was armed. Well, that was fine because she was, too.
“There you go,” said the driver. “Don’t say we didn’t do anything for you. You’re on your way.”
“I’m on my way,” she nodded.
She checked her new passport again and stuffed the money in her purse. She stepped out of the car and closed the door behind her.
“Bye, Olga,” the man in front said pleasantly. “Good luck.”
She was too tense to answer. She gave a nod to the car that had brought her here as it pulled away. She started toward the other car.
The rear door opened and the driver beckoned to her again.
EIGHTY-THREE
O ne of the grand boulevards of Paris that leads to and from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is the Avenue de la Grande Armee, directly opposite the Champs Elysees. It travels eastward from Place de l’Etoile, where the arc stands, and rolls through expensive neighborhoods till it arrives in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
If a traveler stays on the boulevard, he or she passes majestic apartment buildings and mansions that smell of the money of all nations. One will also come to the American Hospital of Paris, which was where Alex arrived thirty minutes after the shooting incident in the Parisian Metro. Not only was there a wound in her chest from a bullet, but she had gone into cardiac arrest.
An intensive care unit in a hospital outside one’s native country is never a cheerful place. But the American Hospital of Paris has been an institution for a century. In a country of exemplary medical care, it remains one of the leading hospitals.
Hit in the center of the chest by a bullet, Alex’s body was moved there from the Metro’s Odeon station by ambulance. Her body was motionless beneath a sheet and a blanket, covered to the shoulders. Medics on the scene looked at the wound and tried to close off the blood, but given the force of the hit, they shook their heads.
The ambulance technicians who transported Alex to the American Hospital saw that her vital signs were almost nonexistent. When her heart stopped, electrical cardioversion was applied. Electrode paddles were applied to her chest and a single shock was administered.
She was unconscious at the time, somewhere between life and death, prepared to go either way. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, her heart flickered again. If she had been gone-wherever souls go to-she was back.
Or trying to get back.
She was admitted to an emergency room, where the bizarre nature of her injury was properly assessed for the first time. The bullet that had hit her had ricocheted off the Metro wall. Its impact had been greatly defused. And somehow, in the center of her chest, right above her breastbone, the bullet had scored a direct hit on the stone pendant that she had bought in Barranco Lajoya.
The stone had broken under the impact of the bullet, but it had defused the damage from the fired round. While there was a flesh wound and severe trauma to the breastbone, including a hairline fracture, the bullet had not broken through beyond the flesh at the surface. Contrary to how it appeared in the Metro, it had not entered her body.
Detectives who inspected the crime scene in the hours after the shooting found the spent bullet in the center of the tracks, in the spot to which it had been deflected.
The stone had saved her life.
On her first day in the hospital, she lay by herself in a private room under heavy sedation. She was groggy. She was on heavy pain-relief medication and an IV fed into her arm. Her chest throbbed. Under the bandages, the skin of her chest had turned the color of an eggplant. Every breath hurt. She was afraid to look at her wound. And above all, she was surprised to be alive.
On the second day she felt better. It was only then that she wondered whether anyone knew where she was, much less who she was. She inquired of one of her nurses.
The nurse informed her that people from the American embassy had arranged for her care, including the private room. Nonetheless, the pain and discomfort persisted. She was too distracted mentally and zonked out on medication even to read. She left the television on 24/7, the remote control at her bedside. All she had the energy to do was flick stations back and forth, the usual French fare- NYPD Blue reruns dubbed in French and a cheesy Gallic clone of The Jerry Springer Show were her grudging favorites-plus odd channels from CNN to Al Jazeera.
Her third day in the hospital was the first day when visitors were allowed. Mark McKinnon, the CIA station chief from Rome, was the first to see her.
McKinnon pulled a chair toward her bed and sat down.
“How are you feeling, LaDuca?” he asked.
“Surprised to be here.”
“You got very lucky,” he said. “Somebody sure is watching over you.”
“You could conclude that,” she said. Her chest still hurt. There were small burns where the electrode paddles had been applied. “Sometimes I wonder.”
She was also still groggy. The medication remained at its original strength.
“A bullet on a ricochet can kill someone,” McKinnon said. “Apparently you had some sort of pendant there on your chest? That’s what the doctors told me.”
“A pendant that I got in South America,” she said. “Very hard stone. It took the brunt of the impact. So they tell me.”
McKinnon was shaking his head.
“Lucky,” he said.
“Lucky,” she answered.
“What are the odds of that happening?” he asked.
“You tell me. I don’t have any answers anymore.”
He smiled and gave her shoulder a pat.
“I understand you’ll be here for a little while more,” he said. “Just rest, get your strength back. Eventually, the police are going to want to ask you questions. But we’re taking care of everything. Back channels.”
“Back channels,” she said. “Wonderful way to do things.”
He didn’t miss her irony.
“Banner year you’re having, huh?”
“Yeah,” she said.
He paused. “There’s still some outstanding business,” he said. “Yuri Federov may be dead. We don’t know. We have to assume that he’s still out there somewhere. You’re not completely safe until he’s completely out of business.”
“Killed, you mean.”
“That’s another word for it.”
“And that all ties into Kiev, doesn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“Which in turn ties in how and why my fiance got killed.”
He nodded.
“Someone betrayed me, didn’t they?” she said. “That’s why Maurice got killed. And Cerny. T
here’s a traitor somewhere on our side, and he’s got allegiances to the Ukrainian mob.”
“That’s a subject for future discussion,” McKinnon said.
“So the answer is yes?” she said.
McKinnon nodded.
“We had a leak in Washington,” McKinnon said. “Poor Mike Cerny. Cynical chap that he was, he hadn’t vetted all his assistants as well as he should have. Everything was getting to Federov almost before it happened.”
“Olga?” Alex asked.
“You said it. I didn’t.”
Alex shook her head in disgust.
“Anyway. Olga is someone you won’t be seeing again.”
“Arrested?”
“The opposition got to her first.” McKinnon said. “But we’ll discuss this later.”
“When I’m healthy enough,” she said, “we’ll go back at Federov, assuming he’s alive. And we’ll find any other traitor too. How’s that?”
“Federov is out of business, at least,” McKinnon said.
“How do you mean that?”
“He was deposed from his own businesses by his own peers,” McKinnon said. “That’s how it always works in the underworld. He drew too much attention to himself. If he’s not dead, he’s in deep cover. Like back into one of his priest outfits or something.”
“I’m sure,” she said, not really meaning it.
“One thing’s certain. You’ll never see him again.”
“I’m grateful,” she said.
“Federov’s still on our lists, though. Retired or not, if he’s alive we’ll go after him. But as I said, it’s no longer your problem, Alex.”
There was a pause while she remained silent. McKinnon stood.
“The French have posted an extra pair of their police in the lobby,” he explained. “ Policiers en civil. Plainclothes. They look like a pair of bouncers. Then we’ve posted two of our own as guards on this floor also. Don’t know whether you’ve seen them.”
“I haven’t been out of this room since they wheeled me in,” she said.
“Of course.”
She gave everything some thought.
“I have some unfinished business in Venezuela too,” she said. “Barranco Lajoya. Those people. I’d like to do something.”
“Tough to accomplish much in that part of the world, isn’t it?” he commiserated.
She shook her head, the images of the carnage relentlessly replaying themselves in her mind’s eye. “Before I die, I want to go back and do what I can for those people. They deserve better.”
“You know what your boss, Mr. Collins, would say,” McKinnon said out of nowhere. “He’d say that’s where Jesus would be. Comforting the downtrodden and the desperate.”
She nodded. It suddenly hurt too much to speak.
“We’ve had discussions with Mr. Collins about Barranco Lajoya, by the way. Something may already be in the works. He’s willing to chip in heavily on an international relief effort.”
“God bless him,” she said.
“I know he’s going to phone you in the next few days.”
“That’s good,” she said. “We can talk.”
A nurse appeared. She looked at McKinnon, shook her head and tapped her wristwatch.
“I guess that’s my five minutes,” McKinnon said.
“And I guess I have a lot of work to do when I get out of here,” she said.
McKinnon left a calling card, a nondescript CIA thing with a fake name, a fake title, and a real phone number. The card cited him as a cultural attache to the embassy in Paris, with an office in Rome. His cover job was overseeing the exchange of French and Italian filmmakers and American filmmakers.
She was left with a lot of time to think. Too much time, really, but no one ever remarked that time went quickly in a hospital. Federov played over and over in her mind, as did Barranco Lajoya.
Here she was alive again. Why?
What was she to do with the extra years she had been given?
EIGHTY-FOUR
I n a private search chamber at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, Sammy Newman-better known to the world as the singer Billy-O-stood with his hands in his inside-out emptied pockets and wondered how things could have gone so terribly wrong.
In front of him, two US customs agents, with their mulish dedication to their job, went through every bit of his luggage, examining the linings, his dirty socks, and underwear. One was a no-nonsense guy with a trim moustache and glasses. The other was an even-less-nonsense female with a big midsection and pinned-back hair. They said nothing as they methodically disassembled his luggage. A Beatles tune, “Yellow Submarine,” mutilated into Muzak, played softly over the sound system.
Meanwhile, Sammy could have used a yellow submarine to get out of there. The flight from Nice, premiere classe all the way on Air France, had been a sweetheart. Hardly a bump, great food, and there had been two flight attendants who had caught his eye, beautiful Gallic girls with dark eyes, slender builds, and sultry legs. They had pushed their phone numbers into his hands. Sammy had booked a week at the Carlyle in New York and was thinking of inviting both girls over and extending the stay to two weeks. He had some fun planned before having to return to Los Angeles and finding out what his agent had lined up as his next film.
But now, this!
He was breaking a major sweat.
The agents had gone through the lining of his leather suitcase and had found the extra twenty-thousand dollars that he always carried, a violation of currency transfer regulations. He met that with a shrug. He knew his lawyer could get him out of that one.
“Hey. It’s dangerous to show a lot of cash these days,” he said. “Know what I mean?”
“Currency transfer violation, sir,” the male agent said. “Sorry.”
“Aren’t you from this area?” the woman asked. “New Jersey or something?”
“Westbury, Long Island.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Knew it was something.”
She then returned to her business of putting Sammy in jail.
The money was just the small stuff. Now, as the perspiration moved from his brow to the side of his face, and as it flooded from his palms, these lousy agents were invading his medicine kit.
He watched. They opened his pill containers and examined the contents. They showed the contents to each other. They glanced at him and didn’t say anything.
“I got a prescription somewhere for everything,” Sammy said, “even if some of the pills got messed up. You know, wrong bottles.”
The agents didn’t say anything.
Sammy was already wondering which of his lawyers he would call, or maybe his manager Adam Winters in Santa Monica, when and if they gave him his phone back. Actually, he pondered, thinking it through further, he might need someone in New York. And fast.
Then Sammy’s spirits hit the floor and shattered. The female agent found what would be the grand prize for her today.
She opened a small vial that was within a larger prescription vial. In the smaller container, there were two little tightly folded packets of aluminum foil, thick and plump, and double wrapped.
“Hey. Gimme a break, could you?” Sammy asked. “Please?”
The agents unwrapped the foil. The contents of the first packet looked like oregano. Or catnip. The agents sniffed. It didn’t appear to be catnip or oregano and it wasn’t basil, either. Well, a pot bust was a pot bust. Worse things could happen.
Then a worst thing did. The second agent unwrapped a smaller packet that had escaped notice at first. The contents this time was a single small cube.
“I don’t know how that got there,” Sammy tried meekly.
“Right,” the male agent said.
The female reached for a pair of handcuffs. All three of them knew what hashish looked like when they saw it. And they saw it right now.
“Sorry, Billy,” she said. “And you know what? This is a real shame. I always liked your music.”
EIGHTY-FIVE
Woman’s body found in Rock Creek Park
POSTED: 4:55 p.m. EST August 21
UPDATED: 7:33 p.m. EST August 21
WASHINGTON (The Washington Post)-A woman was found dead in Rock Creek Park near Walter Reed Hospital on Thursday. Police familiar to the case confirm that it was a homicide from gunshot wounds.
The body was found by a jogger at 9:12 a.m. It was about 30 yards off Sherill Drive near 16th and Aspen streets in Northwest.
Police said the woman appeared to be in her late 50s and was of European descent. She was wearing a tan raincoat and appeared to have a valid passport from a South American country.
“A possibility is that the individual came into the woods to walk and was met by a robber. There were no other signs of trauma other than the gunshot. Her purse was open and there was no money or identification in it, other than her passport,” DC Police Inspector Jerome Myles said. “We just don’t know any more at this time.”
Police said they are awaiting further results from the medical examiner and are attempting to locate any relatives of the woman. Her name has not yet been publicly disclosed.
EIGHTY-SIX
O n the morning of the next day, the doctors at the American hospital moved Alex out of critical care into a private room on a regular ward. Late that same afternoon, a nurse came in with a name on a piece of paper to see if she would recognize, to see if a prospective visitor would be allowed.
She recognized the name and was very pleasantly surprised. “ Oui, bien sur,” Alex answered.
“ Cinq minutes seulement,” the nurse said, limiting the visit to five minutes.
“ Oh, mais pour lui, dix? ” she asked. For him, ten? “ S’il vous plait? ”
The nurse rolled her eyes, gave a slight smile, and shrugged, which meant, yes, okay.
The nurse left. A moment later the door eased open. A large man with a slight limp entered the room, carrying a huge bouquet of fresh flowers and a small shopping bag. He wore a dark suit and a dress shirt open at the collar and was a day or two unshaven. More importantly, he was walking very well on one real leg and one fake one.
