doors for her, not the least of which was even more financial aid for her academics.
“When I was at UCLA,” she said, “I started Russian, then accelerated my study by taking a summer semester in Moscow. It was an exciting place to be, during the Gorbachev era, perestroika, and all that.”
Cerny nodded. “Have any Russian boyfriends?” he asked.
“Is that any of your business?”
“No. Just curious.”
“An American girl in Moscow who spoke Russian?” She laughed. “I got a lot of offers,” she said, “but didn’t accept very many of them. Too much vodka,, too many late nights at the Cafe Pushkin after going to the clubs, can interfere with a girl’s studies.”
He raised an eyebrow in mild disbelief. “Sure,” he said. Then he moved on.
The following summer, she worked in New York for a big time entrepreneur named Joseph Collins. She worked in his international finance section. Her work was so diligent that he took personal note of her. Collins promised her a job after university, if she was interested.
She switched her course of study to a five-year program that led to a master’s. By the time the University of California awarded her an MA, she was fluent in five languages, had a thorough understanding of modern European politics, art, and history, and had a master’s degree in finance.
After UCLA she turned down an offer to return to New York and work for Joseph Collins, who was expanding his business in Latin America. Instead, she wanted to stay in California. She worked for Wells Fargo for eighteen months in one of their international divisions, overseeing
She used her Spanish daily.
“I was bored stiff,” she said. “But I stumbled across a few cases of bank fraud in the mortgage division. So I grew interested in law enforcement. I applied for a job with the FBI.”
“And they hired you,” Cerny said.
“About two weeks later,” she said. “I filled an immediate need.”
The FBI sent her to their academy in Virginia. She excelled at all aspects of her training, from the book- learning to firearms to the bone-crunching unarmed combat.
She advanced quickly. Her linguistic skills were of immense value. She was assigned to Internet rackets and bank frauds in her first years, initially working out of the Newark, New Jersey, office, then moving around the country on a case-to-case basis.
She was socially traditional as an adult, which meant she didn’t have affairs all over the place, same as she had been as a student. But she liked looking good. She wore sharp suits, blouses and skirts that appealed to men. She worked hard at the gym to maintain a good physique. So her clothes flattered her, and she chose them carefully, same as the men she went out with.
In recounting this part of her life to her interviewer, small scenes in her past played out in her mind. She had realized as an adult that her late father had had his quirks. He had not been a faithful churchgoer but he had been a believer nonetheless. At Alex’s twelfth birthday, her father had given her the small gold cross on a delicate gold chain that she continued to wear around her neck. It was the only thing of substance that he had given her that she still owned. As jewelry went, it was modest, more meaningful in what it represented than its actual monetary worth. But she had worn it now for almost eighteen years.
Wear it in good health, he had told her, in good health and in good fortune.
So far, she always had.
And over the years, she had even developed this inadvertent habit of taking the cross between her thumb and forefinger; she would hold it and touch it thoughtfully at times when somehow she sought guidance or when she was deep in thought. For whatever reason, emotional, spiritual, or just plain quirk of habit, it comforted her. The cross was something that had once been in her father’s hand. It represented both his and her beliefs and kept his spirit close.
“Someday,” her dad had once said to her many years ago, “your faith will be challenged. You’ll think it has been destroyed. You’ll think your world has come to an end. That’s when this cross will mean more to you than you’ll ever know. When that happens, find your way back to the cross.”
This advice had come from a casual Methodist who wasn’t the best at showing up for Sunday services. Faith survived, she had concluded, in some strange dark places. It was a conversation she would never forget. Ever since that day, the small gold cross had been part of her.
Sitting in the small office at the State Department, her thoughts came back to the present. As she sat in front of Michael Cerny and concluded her dialogue in rapid now-excellent Russian, she realized she was fingering the small gold cross as she spoke.
If it bothered him, he didn’t mention it. But she knew he had noticed.
“That’s really about it,” she said with a shrug and a smile, switching back to English. “What else can I tell you?”
NINE
Extraordinary,” Cerny finally said, following Alex back to English.
“Thank you,” she answered. “But let’s get real. I don’t speak any Ukrainian. Drop me down in Odessa and I’d be unable to find either the bathroom or the railroad station.”
“Oh, I disagree,” he answered. “You speak Russian. Odessa is an almost one-hundred percent Russian- speaking city. It was part of Russia until given to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by Khrushchev in the early fifties as a PR move,” Cerny said.
“Touche,” she said. “I warned you I didn’t know the area.”
Cerny enjoyed scoring the point. Then he got back to business.
“Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t think a three-week crash course in Ukrainian language and culture would do much good,” he said. “But you’re not the normal student and you’re not being primed for a normal task. How much do you know about the relationship between the Russian and Ukrainian languages?” he asked.
“I know they have a similar grammar, a common root, and a similar vocabulary, while sounding quite different,” she said. “I traveled in eastern Hungary and Poland the summer I was in Russia. I heard some Ukrainian near the borders. I could understand a little. They’re similar, much like French and Spanish are similar.”
“Good start,” he said. “Assume that Ukrainian assumes the role of Spanish in your analogy and Russian is in the role of French. The river that runs through Kiev is known in Russian as the Dnieper. The
“When were you there?” she asked.
“From 1996 to 2005,” he said. “Due to Soviet dominance, every Ukrainian, at least in Kiev and the eastern Ukraine, is usually able to speak Russian fluently even if he regards Ukrainian as his native language. I would have meetings at the foreign ministry and speak in Ukrainian, and then on the way out, my interlocutor would turn to his secretary and speak in Russian. Typical.”
Alex nodded.
Cerny continued. “How much do you know about the great famine of the 1930s in Ukraine-the so-called ‘fake famine’?”
“Again, I’m not an expert,” she said, “but I’ve read my history.”
In truth, she knew quite a bit. The 1930s were the bleakest years in Ukraine’s modern history. The famine of 1932 and 1933 killed up to ten million people. Largely unknown beyond Europe, the famine was still called the ‘fake famine’ by older Ukrainians. Fake, because it was manufactured in Moscow and didn’t have to happen.
The Ukraine had normally been a fertile agricultural region. But the harvests of those years were confiscated by the Soviet Red Army under orders from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator. Under the new policy of Soviet agricultural collectivization in the 1930s, all grain from collective farms in Ukraine was shipped back to Russia,
