Conspiracy in Kiev (35 page)
A
lex and Michael Cerny flew to Miami via American Airlines, then connected to New York. They stayed overnight in the city.
That evening, Alex met with Collins for an hour at his home, giving him her grave in-person account of what had transpired at Barranco Lajoya. She gave him all the photographs and notes she had taken. He listened quietly and seemed overcome by a great sadness.
Then he stood from behind a desk. They were in his study, a room that was high-ceilinged and elegantly furnished. With a stiff walk Collins crossed the room to a wide plate glass window that looked down upon Fifth Avenue. He stared downward for several seconds in silence, as if the view might give him some explanation of the craziness and brutality of the contemporary world.
There was no indication that it did.
The silence continued. There was a sag to Collins’ shoulders, one she had not seen before. She wondered what he might be thinking. “Presumably the Ukrainians had no intention to harm Barranco Lajoya before I sent you there,” Collins said softly. “So it seems my best of intentions have contributed to a tragedy, a catastrophe. There’s blood on my hands.”
“No one could have foreseen this, Mr. Collins,” she said. “No one.”
“Generous of you to say so, Alex,” he said, turning back toward her. “But I can draw my own conclusions and I’ll have to live with them.” He paused. “Call me a foolish old man,” he said, “but I feel I will now have a debt to those people from that village for as long as I live. I don’t consider the books closed on that place.”
“If it’s not presumptuous,” she said, “I feel much the same way.”
“You do?”
“At the appropriate time,” Alex said. “I’d like to return. Unfinished business.”
An ironic smile crossed his face. “Unfinished business,” he said. “Yes, we agree. You seem drawn to unfinished business, don’t you, Alex? Venezuela. Ukraine….”
“That does seem to be the path that’s before me right now,” she said. “It’s not where I thought I’d be right now, but it’s where I am.”
He nodded.
“I know how that works,” he said. “Show me someone for whom that isn’t the case, and I’ll show you someone who sat back in life and never took chances, never tried to do the right thing. I admire you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Be careful in Ukraine,” he said. “I’ve heard it’s a godless place.” “
I’ll do my best,” she said.
“I know that,” he answered. “Just while you’re doing your best, be careful also.” He moved back to his desk. “I have a check for you for your work in South America. I’ve rounded it up to fifty thousand dollars. Don’t protest. Try to find some time to enjoy it and a place to relax with it,” he said.
She accepted it in an unmarked envelope, which she wouldn’t open till later in the day when she would mail it to her bank in Washington.
“I’ll do my best,” she said again.
A few minutes later, she was out of his apartment and back down on Fifth Avenue, walking home slowly, enjoying the anonymity that a crowded New York sidewalk always afforded her.
T
he next morning, Alex and Michael Cerny were on an Air France flight from New York to Paris. Two hours into the flight, sitting side by side in business class, Cerny took out his Palm Pilot. He applied his fingerprint to the security section and powered it up.
“I want you to read some files,” Cerny said. “CIA and NSA stuff. They’ll tell you more about why we’re going to Paris.”
“Full disclosure?” she asked with an edge.
“Call it what you want,” Cerny said. “You need to know some backstory.”
He handed the Palm Pilot to Alex. She began with a CIA file that was, as much as anything, a continuation of what she had read on Yuri Federov back in January. But it added to her knowledge.
Federov had been on a CIA list for several months as a foreign national in whom the Agency had taken a “special interest.” At the same time, Federov had developed a long list of enemies in the underworlds of North America, South America, and Europe. So many, that fear of his enemies had impeded his movements for years. Thus from time to time, Federov had been in the habit of traveling through Europe in the guise of a priest.
But within the last eighteen months, Federov had taken the guise one step further. He had hired a double, a retired actor from the National Theater of Hungary. The double was a friend named Daniel Katzman. Katzman bore a resemblance to him. Hence Katzman traveled as Father Daniel, a Federov decoy-within-a-decoy so that Federov himself could move about the world more freely.
Daniel turned out to be in the role of a lifetime, or, more accurately, the last role of his lifetime. A pair of assassins shot him to death in a French café named
L’etincelle
during the first days of the new year. Alex noted the date. January 2. The French police were still working on the case, the file said, the one of the man in priestly garb shot dead over a cognac and a cigar at a café in the Marais.
From the shooting, a triple riddle posed itself:
Q1: When is a dead priest not really a dead priest?
A1: When the dead Russian mobster is not a Russian mobster either.
Q2: Then when is a dead Russian mobster not really a dead Russian mobster?
A2: When he wasn’t even a priest either. He was an actor and a friend of the man who was supposed to be shot.
And then the biggest question of all:
Q3: When is an underworld “hit” not an underworld “hit”?
A3: When neither the victim nor the perps are members of the underworld.
The electronic file ended abruptly. Cerny guided Alex to a second one that discussed a pair of agents who worked for the CIA, and not with great efficiency. Their names were Peter Glick and Edythe Osuna. They were married to each other, or seemed to be, but didn’t work at it very hard. They had picked up a trail that they felt belonged to Federov by monitoring flights from Kiev to the capitals of Western Europe, notably London, Paris, Madrid, and Geneva, places where Federov either had business interests, money stashed, or both.
They tracked their target to Paris and asked for permission from Langley to proceed with an “intervention.” The request went all the way up to cabinet level. Permission was granted. They acted. Next thing anyone knew, the secure faxes and phone lines were exploding between Langley and Paris and Langley and Rome.
Edythe and Peter fled to Madrid after Paris, then Rome. Yet for people who should have been disappearing into the background, they were reckless, physically incapable of keeping a low profile. Nor were they upstanding citizens. They moved in a shadowy world of illegal gun dealers, smugglers, swindlers, sexual merchants, and con artists. They frequented nightclubs in Paris and Rome where couples paired off with strangers. They lived on the social and political edge of the world.
They picked up a trail for Federov. But they picked up the wrong trail, one that was set out as a trap.
As soon as Alex saw those names, a bell rang within her. Her mind flashed back to the club in Kiev, her quasi-sober conversation with Federov, as well as the suggestive questions posed by her.
Federov
,
in Russian: “Have you ever heard of a pair of Americans named Peter Glick and Edythe Osuna?”
Alex: “New names on me. Should I know them?”
Federov: Maybe. They are involved in this visit by your president.”
Alex: “Part of the delegation?”
Her favorite gangster: “No. They’re a pair of American spies. They were recently retired.”
So the tale that followed made sense. Edythe and Peter established a procedure for a hit on Federov in Paris. They quickly wired Washington and Langley for approval. No one ever asked them if they were sure their target was who they thought it was. Accuracy of that sort was the least of the details attended to. Like much CIA intelligence over the last decade, it wasn’t just faulty, it had so many holes in it that a truck could have driven through it with its doors open.
Peter and Edythe were known in security circles in Europe and known by the underworld also. They were recognized to be Western operatives, most likely American.
After the mistaken killing in Paris, they were ripe for a setup.
Alex continued to read.
The setup came when Federov wanted to strike back. First, he had set up his old friend Katzman possibly to be whacked in his place. Then he took it as a personal insult that Katzman had been so victimized.
From his own experiences in European nightlife, Federov knew a young woman for the job. One night in Rome, Peter and Edythe met a young woman named Lana Bassoni who lived in Rome. She was very pretty, a sometime model and sometime artist’s model. But she was married to a musician who wasn’t going anywhere. There was also another detail about Lana that Peter and Edythe would never had guessed until it was too late. She had once worked for Federov at one of the after-hours mob joints he ran in New York. She had been a hostess-plus-a-bit-more, depending how much a client had to spend and what a client wanted. It all made sense.
The meeting at the club in Rome—Lana, Peter, and Edythe—was made to look like a coincidence. But it was anything but. About an hour after meeting, Peter and Edythe disappeared for a while. The next morning, Lana did too.
Alex looked up from the Palm Pilot. “I assume there’s more,” she said to Cerny.
“Of course,” he said. “Short and sweet. Do you want to read it in English or Italian?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Give me both in case I sense something wrong with the translations.”
“Smart girl,” he said. “That’s why you’re here.”
She took back the Palm Pilot. “If I were
really
smart, I
wouldn’t
be here.”
She opened the final files. There were a pair of homicide reports from the Roman newspapers from January, including that of a musician and his girlfriend found dead in their flat in Rome. Then some follow-ups from several weeks later. The final entry had to do with a pair of bodies found in the sandy bogs near Villa di Plinio. Two bodies had been found, not yet identified.
The file ended, as did the information Cerny accessed in his Pilot. He took the device back and tucked it away.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well what?”
“Show me that lightning intellect,” he said. “What do you make of all that?”
“Tie it together, you mean?”
“If you can.”
“But you know the correct answers already?” she said.
“I know answers that I believe to be correct,” he said. “There’s a difference. So put your thesis to me, and I’ll let you know if you’re in the right line of work or not.”
“I’ll give you a scenario that works,” she said. “Just as it came to me as I was reading.”
“Please do,” Cerny answered above the drone of the aircraft’s engines.
“First off, someone in Washington was dumb enough to order a hit on Federov. Someone wanted him killed, for whatever reason.”
“I could argue that by saying we don’t do things like that.”
“And I’d argue back that I know that you do, same as we never used to employ torture until we got caught doing it.”
“Keep going.”
“Peter and Edythe had the assignment to hit Federov. But they blew it and whacked his double, his imposter, instead. Since his double was his pal, Federov was pretty angry. He hit back. He had his moll Lena set up Peter and Edythe in Rome. My guess is they got hit by some Ukrainian gunmen that night on the via Trafficante. Do I know the principals?” Alex asked. “I’m guessing I do.”
“Twitchy Eye, that’s Anatoli,” Cerny said. “Then there’s Nontwitchy Eye, which is Kaspar.”
“And they killed Lana, why?” Alex asked. “To eradicate any links back to them? Keep her from ever talking?”
“It appears that way,” Cerny said.
“Federov ordered it?”
“The Ukrainians are not always so well disciplined. Anatoli and Kaspar could have been acting on their own when they took Lena out.
“Lena’s boyfriend? Collateral damage?” she asked.
“Apparently. Tough for him,” Cerny said. “But that completed the cycle of four deaths in twelve hours.”
Alex hit the end of her files. She looked up. Cerny was looking at her.
“So,” she said. “If I mentioned something called ‘Operation Chuck and Susan’ to you, presumably you’d know what I was talking about.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I already know,” she said. “Operation Chuck and Susan. My computer crashed when I tried to access that file. And it was related to Kiev. My guess is that Chuck and Susan were Peter and Edythe. And you were trying to keep it from me for as long as possible that you wanted to kill Federov. Who knows? Maybe he didn’t lift a finger to stop the attack on the president because he felt the United States kept trying to kill him.”
“We need to take him out,” Cerny said. “For all the reasons you know, plus the ones that I know, plus probably several more that neither of us know. Is that sufficient?”
“If we know all this, why are we going to Europe?”
“To put the final pieces in place,” he said, “and to finally eliminate Federov. As long as he’s alive, he’s a threat to you and to the United States.”
“What sort of threat to me?” she asked.
“For starters, he wants you dead.”
She thought about it. “I’m not sure I believe that,” she said.
“What are you saying? You didn’t see what happened in Venezuela?”
“I saw what happened,” she answered angrily. “For God’s sake, I was there, remember? I’m just not sure I’m buying that Federov was behind it.”
Cerny rolled his eyes. “You’re telling me that you know more than we do?”
“Maybe I do.”
“Don’t count on it.”
“I know how to judge a man. One of those first RPGs in Kiev hit right where I had been standing. Federov moved me away from that place.”
“Proof that he knew there was going to be an attack.”
“Everyone in the city knew of the possibility of an attack!” she snapped back. “If anyone in authority had had any common sense, the president would have skipped the memorial, citing security considerations. And then the president would have gotten out of the country as fast as possible. But I’m just an underling. I don’t plan these things. I had no opinion worth hearing at the time, right?”
“Sounds like I’m hearing one now,” he said.
“Yeah. You are.”
She handed the Palm Pilot back to him. He pressed his finger to its security patch, let it read his fingerprint, and shut it down.
“When we get to Paris,” he said an hour later, “we’ll deal with this. We have a meeting the day after arrival. One of our local people who’s familiar with the case.”
“What sort of ‘local people’?” she asked, fatigue in her voice. “Who is he?”
“You’ll like him,” Cerny answered, without giving a name. “He’s embedded with one of the European police agencies.”
“CIA?” she asked.
“Naturally.”
“French?”
“No,” Cerny said. “As a matter of fact, he’s Italian.”
