Conspiracy in Kiev (24 page)
T
hey stood together on the freezing sidewalk. “I was worried about you,” Ben said. He pulled his gym bag off his shoulder and let it rest on the pavement. The bag was thick. He always carried his own basketball.
“Hey, we all know what happened. I can’t tell you how sorry we are. You got notes from us, right?”
“I have a lot of mail I haven’t opened,” she said.
“We’re all worried for you, Alex.”
“Thanks. I’ll be okay,” she lied.
“Uh, huh,” he said. “Well, I came over to make sure.”
“Make sure of what?”
“That you’re going to be okay.”
“What are you, my guardian angel?” she asked, barely able to control the sarcasm.
“If I have to be, I will,” Ben said steadily and without missing a beat. “I have a hunch you might need one right now,” he said. “So here I am right here in front of you, minus the wings and the halo because those things aren’t so fashionable these days.”
She stood uncomfortably but felt herself give a slight smile.
“I promise you I’ll be okay,” Alex said.
“It’s not that easy,” he said. “The guys at the gym. We heard you were on leave from work, but this isn’t right. We would all feel better if we saw you at the gym again. We’re not going to all stop talking when you show up.”
“I’m not feeling very social these days,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. I know. Hey. You think I don’t know maybe at least
a little bit
about being in a really stinking mental place? Heck!
”
He reached down and rapped his knuckles on the prosthesis that connected his right knee with his sneaker. Then, “You had dinner yet?” he asked.
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
“I didn’t ask if you were hungry, I asked if you’d had dinner yet.”
“What if I haven’t?” she asked.
“Then, I haven’t either, so why don’t we have some together? Please don’t say no.”
A long pause again. Then, “Okay,” she said. “ Maybe I haven’t had dinner.”
“Want some? Plus a sympathetic ear. And how ’bout a drink?”
She thought of the Glock upstairs. It was waiting for her. All she had to do was pick up that magazine, slap it into the butt, pull back the slide and chamber a round, flick the safety off, and that little number would be a hundred percent ready for business, just like it had been minutes ago.
“No, look …” she answered. “I—”
Ben motioned to the hotel across the street. “Come on. It’s on me and my guess is you need it right now. Just don’t walk too fast. I’m running out of legs, you know.”
S
he ordered some soup. He ordered a burger. They both ordered pints of draft beer, he a Sam Adams, she a Boddingtons, an English beer that had been fizzed up for the American market.
“I was going to leave a note with your doorman to ask you to call,” Ben finally said. “No one’s heard from you in weeks.”
A long pause from Alex.
“I was away,” she said.
“That’s no excuse. Your friends want to know you’re okay. And if you’re not okay, you got to let them know that, too.”
Something in her throat caught. She couldn’t answer. His gaze settled into her.
“I got to say, Alex, you look terrible right now.”
“I feel terrible.”
“Let me show you something,” he said.
She waited. He reached down toward his bad leg, or more accurately, his missing leg, or, more accurately still, the fake leg. She heard him fiddle with a couple of straps and buckles. He brought the prosthesis, detached from his knee, up to lap level so she could see it.
He put it on the table. There was no surprise, but she realized she must have made a short gasp, because he reacted to it.
“There,” he said. “How do you like that?”
“Would you put that back on!” she insisted. “People are staring.”
The waiter passed by the table, did a double take, then fled.
“Let the folks stare,” Ben said with a laugh. “It’ll do ’em good. They want to stare some more, they can go over to Walter Reed and look at a lot of ex-soldiers, men and women a heck of a lot worse off than me. Some of them got three or four limbs gone, burns all over their bodies, eyes blown out of their heads, and brain injuries. Now, my basketball buddy Alex LaDuca,” he asked with a smile, “how do you like my leg?”
“I like it. It’s a nice fake leg.”
“Want to try it on? It’ll make you taller, on one side at least.”
“Ben!” She already had her hand to her mouth, almost laughing.
“Please!”
“Please what?”
“I like it better when it’s strapped where it should be,” she said.
“Thank you. That’s the answer I wanted. So as a favor, just for you, I’ll get dressed again. I’m going to need the leg to walk home.”
She came out from hiding behind her hands.
“This is my ‘Transformer moment,’ ” he continued. “A couple of straps and buckles and I’m half a robot.”
She watched how quickly he buckled it back into place, dropping the trouser leg.
“I know what’s going on with you,” Ben said. “You never thought it would happen, but part of you is gone, just like part of what used to be me is gone. You woke up one day and looked around and something,
someone
, was missing that you never thought you could replace. And you still don’t see how you will.”
She felt something catch in her throat.
“You’re where I was two years ago, Alex. You’re hating life. It’s a bad place to be.”
“It’s not like that,” she said, her hand settling on the table.
“No? Look me in the eye and tell me that it’s not like that.”
She looked at him, opened her mouth to speak, then looked away.
Two beers arrived. The pints looked bigger than expected.
“When I lost my leg, I thought my life was over,” Ben said. “I wanted to kill myself. Tell me that hasn’t gone through your head.”
She looked back to him after several seconds. She still couldn’t speak. One of his strong hands settled on hers.
“It’s gone through my head,” she finally admitted.
“Has it gone
through
your head?” Ben asked. “Or is it still there?”
She didn’t answer.
“It’s there right now, isn’t it? That ‘I want to end it all’ feeling.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I know just by looking at you,” he said. “Answer me.”
“It’s there.”
“I can’t make decisions for you,” Ben said, “but, see, your life isn’t over. Not by a long shot. You’re on this earth for a reason. Right now, you need to get up off the floor and live the life God gave you.”
“I miss Robert horribly,” she said softly.
“Of course you do. You always will. My parents are both gone now. Think I don’t miss them every day?”
“Mine are gone too,” she said. “Long time ago.”
“Brothers? Sisters?” he asked.
“None.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said. “You come by and play some basketball tomorrow night. You’ll see whether you have brothers and sisters or not.”
She looked away for several more seconds as food arrived. She felt herself search for words and not find them. She was momentarily afraid to look back and didn’t know why, but when it popped into her mind, what Robert had once said about a guardian angel, she managed to gather herself and focus.
“Are you always so smart?” she asked, turning back to him.
He laughed. “Heck, no! I was dumb enough to get my leg blown off in a stupid useless war. Know what? For six months I sat around being bitter, feeling sorry, feeling that I couldn’t go on. I was a college dropout and just another wounded vet, battling with the VA for treatment. Well, you know what? I decided I wasn’t going to be just another college-dropout wounded vet.”
She found herself listening to him.
“When I lost my leg,” he continued, “the pastor at my church in Durham used to phone me every day. Make sure my messed-up head was getting back together. Make sure I didn’t go off the deep end. Know what I mean?”
“I know.”
Ben shook his head. “I know it’s corny, but my mom used to read the Psalms to us from the Bible. Three or four times a week, after dinner, we’d sit around the kitchen table; this is when I was growing up in Greensboro, and she’d read something from her family Bible. I always liked the psalm about lifting ‘my eyes up unto the hills, from whence—’ ”
“ ‘Cometh my strength,’ ” Alex responded softly.
“You know that one?” He was surprised.
“It’s Psalm 121,” she said. “I remember it from long ago. And, funny you should mention it, I had the occasion to use it myself in Kiev.”
Her fingers went to her neck, where the jewelry used to be, then returned empty.
“Then you should practice it. What goes around comes around. Lift up your eyes. The loss is always going to be with you, Alex. Without Robert, you’ll never walk quite the same way again. But you’ll walk.”
He paused. “Now here’s where my pastor connects to you,” he said. “After I was feeling better and got myself back into college, I called him up to thank him. He said, ‘Thank me by taking the word forward. When you see someone else who needs that call each day, that supporting hand,
you
take that first step.
You
help
that
person.’That’s why I’m here tonight, Alex,” he said. “That’s why I’m here in DC getting a college degree; that’s why I’m here offering you a hand. You’re not going to let my pastor down, are you?”
She smiled and pondered it.
“You’re not going to let
me
down. Who’d throw me those great passes?” he asked.
“Suppose I did want to walk again?” she asked. “How do I do it?”
“One small step at a time,” he said. “And keep your eyes lifted unto the hills. You’re on this earth for a reason, and it’s not just to throw me passes on the basketball court, though I wouldn’t mind some of those real soon.”
“I owe you,” she said.
“Then get over for some basketball tomorrow. I’m averaging a lousy ten points a game since you’ve been missing.”
“I’ll be there,” she said.
An hour later, she sat before the Glock on her living room table. Slowly, she lifted it.
She methodically removed the bullets from the magazine and put them in the cardboard box they came in. She placed the weapon back in its case and locked it. She put the empty magazine in a drawer in the kitchen that held odds and ends like packing tape and a nesting set of screwdrivers and an extension cord she didn’t need. Not that she couldn’t get it, but it would take effort and, more importantly, time and maybe reflection.
She walked back to the sofa, collapsed, and cried until there were no more tears.
She had promised. And she would go on.
The next day, she started going through the mail that had gathered for her. Her small mailbox in the lobby had filled up long ago, so the rest of her mail had been left at the desk. When the concierge gave it to her it filled a respectable-sized box.
The task took a while.
She played basketball again the next night. She received hugs and tearful embraces from everyone she knew. Never in her life had she so realized how valuable a network of friends could be.
She phoned her boss, Mike Gamburian, the following morning and told him she was ready to return.
There was a pause. “You’re sure?” he asked.
“Tell me I can come back before I change my mind,” she said. “Please, Mike?”
“You pick the day,” he said.
On Wednesday, March 25, she returned to work at Treasury.
She was ready to learn to walk again, one step at a time.
A
t a few minutes past 7:00 p.m., Alex sat at her desk, delaying before going home. Springtime had finally come to Washington, and the city enjoyed its best weather of the year. Then the heat of the summer gripped the city in mid-June.
She stared at her two computers. The ice of Kiev seemed a world away, a bitter memory. But it still haunted her. Evenings were difficult. She was afraid of loneliness, afraid that missing a certain someone would overtake her.
She had started to work past her grief. Now she wanted answers.
How long had it been since Kiev? There had been times in the last few weeks when she could have instantly given the answer. It’s been two days, it’s been three. It’s been a week, two weeks. A month. Then a second month. Then a third. Gradually, the story disappeared from the newspapers and the attention of the American public, replaced by other events, other intrigues.
This evening, on a whim, she entered her clearance for a secured Intranet site dedicated to the Kiev visit and the debacle that had transpired there. The screen went blank and she sighed. Then a dialogue box opened that asked for her name.
She entered it. If it was receptive to her name, no one could get on her case for getting access.
The dialogue window accepted her name. Surely someone had failed to purge her. But the next thing she knew, she was in the HUMINT—the human intelligence—leading up to the trip to Kiev.
Except, what was this she saw?
She leaned forward.
The file took new directions with new references. Surely further access codes would cut her off. But they didn’t. She kept exploring.
For the next hour, the files attached to the presidential visit to Kiev took up the known story of what had happened and its aftermath. It was typical of the code of conduct of such things that, having been a principal player in the events of Kiev, she had received no subsequent briefings of how things had gone down or why. She had answered plenty of questions but had received no explanations.
She read report after report, analysis after analysis, of what had happened.
Something bothered her immediately.
Almost everything was written by investigators who had not been there.
She began to notice strange small discrepancies, none that made any significant difference by itself, but enough to bring to mind the principle that if you pushed together enough grains of sand, you would build a beach.
The attackers who had fired the rockets, their weapons and their vehicles, were described differently than she had remembered.
A small mistake? Maybe.
But she recalled that five men had charged the presidential limousine and found it recounted in several records that there were four. The Secret Service detail assigned to the president was listed as twenty-four. She knew there had been twenty-eight.
The official record had been tweaked. Why?
Leaning forward, she attacked the keyboard with more gusto. She referenced names including her own. She traveled through cyberspace to the personnel files and biographies of the government people who had attended the visit to Kiev.
Thirty seven names in all. She scanned them, including her own again, to see if any backgrounds had been fudged. None had that she could see.
She went back and picked up the story. It was now past 8:00 in the evening. The disinformation was accelerating. She brought up her own name and factored in several cross references. She attempted to access the files that she herself had contributed in the lead-up to the trip, mindless low security stuff on trade delegations, black market currency issues, the penny-ante balance of payments stuff, and then the more substantial stuff on Federov.
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 fiancé 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
,
señorita
,” 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: O
PERATION
C
HUCK AND
S
USAN.
She heard her own voice fill the room “What the—?”
She tried to access it. Then the screen flashed again.
A
CCESS 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.