“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.”
SEVENTY-EIGHT
Lt. Rizzo was the first to arrive, dressed sharply in a new suit, his hardcopy files under his arm.
The meeting was in the United States embassy in Paris just off the Place de la Concorde, in a secure room on the third floor. Cerny arrived with Alex. They took seats at a small conference table. A third man there was Mark McKinnon, who was the CIA station chief in Rome. He had made the trip separately from Rizzo so they would not be seen together. They had, in fact, not seen each other in person since talking over a glass of wine at the dark San Christoforo bar in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome.
Cerny handled the introductions. An embassy observer was present also, a young man fluent in English, French, and Italian.
“Signor Rizzo has been with the Roman police for twenty-two years,” Michael Cerny said to Alex. They spoke English. “Seventeen on the brigata omicidia.”
“Rough work,” Alex allowed.
“Gian Antonio has been a CIA asset for at last the last fifteen of those years,” McKinnon added. “High quality material, almost always accurate.”
“Thank you, Michael,” Rizzo said in perfect English. “Almost?” he laughed.
“No one’s perfect,” Mark McKinnon said. “Not in our line of work.”
Cerny looked to Alex. “I brought Ms. LaDuca up to speed on the flight over, vis-à-vis the two murder investigations in Rome,” Cerny said. “In terms of Federov and his bodyguards, where are we now?”
McKinnon opened a file and slid a photograph across the table to Alex. “Recognize this guy?” he asked.
She glanced at it. “That’s one of the men who came to the embassy in Ukraine with Federov,” she said.
“He’s one of Federov’s bodyguards,” McKinnon said. “He’s actually the remaining one.”
“Remaining?” she asked.
“The other one is currently deceased,” McKinnon said. “He had an accident in his home in London. Fell and hit his head.”
She shuddered.
“Yeah, right,” she said. “Careless of him.” She returned the photo. “That’s definitely the man, right? In the photo?” McKinnon asked. “From Kiev.”
“That’s him.”
McKinnon placed the photograph back in the file. “He’s in Paris right now,” he said. “His name is Kaspar Rodzienko. Ukrainian-born Russian. It’s our feeling that he and his boss were instrumental in the attacks on the president in Kiev. We’d like to wrap him up as quickly as possible. For that, we need bait for him to come forward.”