Then she looked for Michael Cerny’s name. Like the last time she had gone this route, she found no reference. She tried to remember.
Code names. Cover names. Cerny had had more working names than some men have underwear. What were they? She felt as if she were fighting a battle against her own memory. Part of her wanted to recall. Another part of her remained in denial. Wine. One of them sounded like a German white wine.
Gewustraminer.
Garfunkle. Gerstmann. Or was it Gerstman? That was the name that had been listed as her case officer before Kiev.
She tried to access the cover names.
Cerny, Gerstman, and Gerstmann.
Nothing. The HUMINT system rejected her and returned her to START. She drew a breath. No real surprise that it should fight her. What she was searching for was not within the scope of her official duties. The system wanted to expel people on internet fishing trips. She booted up again. She laid in her codes and reaccessed her information system. She had a higher rank these days than she had had in the dark days of the previous March. So maybe she would be allowed to go farther.
Maybe. Maybe not. Well, that was the binary rule of life, wasn’t it? Maybe, maybe not. He loves me, he loves me not.
She pondered for a moment. Questions expanded exponentially within her head.
What had she stumbled onto? How could Janet have seen Michael Cerny?
Logic tried to beat her up.
Michael Cerny is a dead man! You saw his body in the car on a quiet street in Paris. You were at his funeral the same way you were at Robert’s. You could go visit his tombstone if you want to, you could go have dinner with his widow and say hi to the kids who don’t have a father.
There was an angel on one of her shoulders, a devil on the other, and increasingly a chip of suspicion in each.
Sure he’s dead. And the rotten CIA plays unofficial games with stuff like this all the time!
She kept busy at the keyboard, fingers flying a mile a minute now, trying to outflank the US intelligence system. She had a bit of conceit to her. Secretly, she felt smarter than the people who designed these infernal programs. She was sure she could outthink them.
And for that matter, Alex continued to wonder, why was her own apartment bugged? Was the bugging part of a previous operation or part of something ongoing? The bugs were intrusive and insulting. What went on in her apartment was no one’s business other than her own. Where was this leading? She saw herself in Kiev with Robert again, the night before he died. She saw herself with Robert again on the last night they spent together in America as an engaged couple deeply in love. She saw herself as-
Back she was in the darkest area of her psyche. She found herself sorting through the events of the previous February, then March, when suicide was imminent until Ben grabbed her one night and pulled her out of it. Thank God for Ben. By all accounts she should have been in love with him. Her guardian angel, if she had one.
She glanced back to the monitor. The screen flickered. Then the window box reappeared again as the enemy.
ACCESS DENIED
She was ready to punch the monitor. There was information somewhere about Michael Cerny, and she now knew she was not going to get it without a fight.
She stood angrily. She folded her arms and stared at the screen. She wasn’t ready to go home yet, but she was too frustrated to stay.
So this IS something! Something IS going on, otherwise I would have access! What’s so secretive and important that people other than me know it and my fiancé was killed and I nearly died too?
She stormed out from behind her desk, strode to her office door, yanked it open, and-with a startled audible half-scream, half-gasp that carried down the corridor-ran smack into Mike Gamburian so hard that she drove him backward several paces.
“Mike!” she said. “Sorry! You startled me.”
“Apologies,” he said. “Wow!” he said, rubbing his shin. “You pack a wallop!”
“Sorry!”
“I was just coming to see you.” He nodded toward her office. She picked up on the hint. They stepped in and he closed the door.
“What have you been doing in here?”
“Why?”
“My telephone practically exploded ten minutes ago. I got a call from someone named William Quintero at CIA. Do you know him?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Well, he knows you.”
“How?”
“What did you try to access?” Gamburian asked, nodding toward her computer. “Within the last fifteen minutes. Were you checking the Guarneri files?”
“Yes. No problem with them,” Alex said. “Then I moved on to Michael Cerny. And I got blocked.”
“Uh-oh.”
“ ‘Uh-oh’ what?” she demanded.
“You got more than blocked,” Guarneri said. “You just won yourself a personal invitation over to Langley to explain why you wanted access. They phoned me since you reported to me.”
“Then what’s going on with Cerny?”
“Alex, if I knew, I’d tell you.” He paused. “Honest. Here’s what I know: first, you’re invited to go over to Langley tomorrow morning and view the file in person at the CIA. Nine a.m. Be there tomorrow morning, not here.”
“What’s the second?” she asked.
“I’ve been asked to clear your schedule in this department so you can travel.”
“The Venezuela trip?”
“You wish,” he said. “Wrong direction, Alex. From the tenor of the very angry phone call I just received, you’re on your way to Egypt.”
TWENTY
Victor, one of the Russians Janet and Carlos had seen that evening at the Royale, was peaceably having his dinner in a café in Old Cairo when the men in police uniforms arrived to see him. The squad of eight men surrounded him. Although apprehensive, Victor reacted calmly and asked the policemen in Arabic what he could do for them.
The alpha cop, the one with the ranking insignia on his sleeve, that of a captain, responded with equal calm. “Just a few questions, sir,” the cop said. “First, could we see your identification?”
Victor drew a breath. The local police, he knew, were a nuisance that had to be indulged in order to get business done, especially these street patrols run by low-level officers. Institutionalized extortion was what it was, but it was also the way things worked in this part of the world. So Victor was sure this was a setup for some sort of bribe. Well, it was the cost of doing business, he told himself, and his own bosses back in Russia paid him well to get his job done. So there was nothing much he could do other than to indulge these local hooligans.