Conspiracy in Kiev

my first run-in was with those people?”

Alex sipped her drink and waited. “What?” she finally asked.

“I was in Bonn twenty-two years ago, as chief of the Political/Internal Unit,” the ambassador said. “I was the event officer to a boat trip on the Rhine that President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl of West Germany were taking. The ‘romantic’ part of the Rhine, the part with the mountains covered with vineyards with ruined castles on top, starts upriver, south of Bonn. The idea was for the president to fly down to Oberwesel-that’s this picturesque little town where the romantic crap starts-and board the boat there, along with Kohl. They’d sail north and then get off.”

Oberwesel, he explained, had no Nazi baggage from World War II and made for a great photo-op. Alex sipped and listened. Other members of the embassy staff gathered, carefully keeping away any members of the advance team.

“Now, every lousy little German town has a so-called Golden Book,”the ambassador continued, “where honorary citizens are inscribed. Naturally, the mayor of Oberwesel wanted his filthy fifteen minutes of fame with a book signing next to the gangplank. So this clown from the Reagan advance team sneered, ‘Out of the question,’ except he used an extra word before ‘question.’ He cited security considerations and the need not to waste the president’s time on what he called ‘a bush-league event.’ Well, I tried to advise this jerk of the symbolic importance of the Golden Book in Germany and the fact that the mayor belonged to Kohl’s party, and I was told to ‘keep it zipped.’ ”

The ambassador stirred his drink with a swizzle stick as he nursed along his story.

“Well, Helmut Kohl’s whole career was based on networking and an incredible memory of people,” Drake continued. “The man was like an elephant. He’d remember folks he’d met ten years earlier while soused at some podunk wine festival. So when the disappointed mayor called Kohl, the head of his party, Kohl apparently called Reagan personally. Of course, Mr. Reagan approved it. He loved stuff like that. The Golden Book was on. You can imagine how I relished this.”

The ambassador grinned and lurched slightly. Alex, with a sweet and friendly smile, sidestepped his advance and escaped from under his thick arm.

“Anyway, when the event finally happened, there was press aboard the boat, but their access to Reagan and Kohl was supposed to be limited. Naturally, no good reporter abides by this kind of fence, and soon Mr. Reagan was chatting with them. A member of the advance, the same bozo who’d been giving me all the trouble, was fuming about this. So I went over to him. I said, ‘President Reagan looks happy. Why aren’t you happy?’ The advance guy looked at me as if I’d punched him in the nuts. That the president could be content with something that hadn’t been planned to the minute by his staff was incomprehensible.” He paused. “Those advance people are mostly a bunch of weenies,” he concluded. “They couldn’t organize a cat fight in a bag.”

As Alex and the embassy staff laughed, the ambassador finished his drink and found a final one on one of the last passing trays of the evening. Apparently, a wave of nostalgia hit him at the same time also.

“Ronald Reagan,” he said. “I miss the man. Reagan looked the part, he acted the part. Hell, he was the part! Now there was a president!” he said.

And he drained the rest of his glass.

THIRTY-FOUR

Lt. Gian Antonio Rizzo stood in his office in Rome the next morning, the ninth of February. Around him at a rectangular table, he had grouped four of the best homicide detectives in his bureau. Rizzo was now attacking the two linked double-murder cases with a vengeance, while at the same time trying to keep a lid on the inquiries from his superiors, official and unofficial.

One of the four men around him had been recalled from a climbing vacation in Switzerland. A second detective, a woman, came back two weeks early from her maternity leave. Another man was taken off a juicy assignment involving a local radio personality whose drunken semiclad wife had recently “fallen off” a yacht-or was it jumped or pushed?-that belonged to a Marxist member of the Italian parliament. And the fourth had been on a winning streak at a high-rolling chemin de fer table at Monte Carlo when the call had come from Rome to report back to Bureau headquarters immediately.

Rizzo briefed them all. He asked them to not mention the linkage of these cases to anyone else in the department. In Rizzo’s experience, if he felt that he had an advantage in an investigation, if he knew something that was not yet known by the public, he was one step ahead of the people he was looking for. He never wanted to tip his hand.

He showed the computer mockups of the bullet fragments and presented all of the photographs taken at the two crime scenes. He asked if any of the people at the table had any initial notions as to where this might lead, how these slayings might be linked.

No one volunteered anything.

“Allora, bene,” he continued. “The Mafia guys like their small caliber.22s. They like to use a silencer from close range. Two behind the ear, am I not right? The South American drug scum, Colombians for example, like machine pistols and they blow away the victims with a hundred shots.”

His eyes roved the room. Not one of his detectives was willing to make contact.

“Our colonial friends the Ethiopians have no subtlety at all,” he continued. “They drag you to a warehouse, put a tire around you while you scream for mercy, ignite you with gasoline, then stand there and gape. But what was this all about? Who is doing this? What type of criminals are we looking for? Could I see some life, per favore, some reaction from this table, or should I find four better detectives?”

The two interlocking questions were barely out of Rizzo’s mouth when he realized that there would be no answer coming this morning. Business like this drove him crazy. Why had he even come in to work this morning? Sophie was off work today and they could have been spending the day together. Instead, he was chasing down the scum that brought crime to Italy while having to light a fire under those who should have been best equipped to help him.

“All right then,” he said in conclusion. “Foolish me, who thought that we might have some angle on these cases this morning from the four of you. I will be in this office working sixteen-hour days on these cases. I will also be monitoring the four of you closely.” Without consulting anyone’s files, he added, “It is not by coincidence, that I’ve assembled the four of you. I notice that each of you has recently put in for a major promotion. I will be watching your progress very closely. Be assured that the cases I’ve put before you this morning will directly impact both promotions and demotions. We will have success or failure here, I don’t know which. But as for your careers, I can promise you repercussions!”

He eyed them. “I want thorough reports from all of you by Friday of next week,” he said. “I want potential leads and connections for these two cases. I don’t care if you’re up all night every night and have to work all weekend to get this done. I want progress.”

Rizzo turned on his heel, left the conference room for the hallway outside, glowering in his usual bad humor.

Where were all the kids this morning, he wondered.

The interns. Maybe one of those bright kids would have something. They’d make great spies one day, those little imps, he thought.

But none did. Not today.

THIRTY-FIVE

Alex walked into a conference room at the embassy, followed by the two attaches who had been assigned to her. The first was Ellen Higgins, a dowdy middle-aged woman with thick glasses in a brown suit. The second was Phillip Ralston, whom Alex had met the previous day.