Countdown in Cairo

Alex shrugged her shoulders.

“Were you close to Mike Cerny? Did you know him well?”

“No one knew him very well,” Gamburian said. “He was a cipher to everyone he worked with.” Gamburian adjusted his glasses. “Why you asking?”

“Just curious,” she said. “I’ll look for the organized-crime file later.”

“Enjoy them. Order out for a slice of pizza to go with them.”

He flipped his classified folders back upright and returned to work as Alex’s footsteps receded down the hallway.

Later, past 6:00 p.m. on the same day, Alex was sitting at her desk. She leaned back in her chair and stared at her two computers. She had read everything that had been given to her about Paul Guarneri and his father, Vito Guarneri. The files intrigued her, but increasingly they were small change. Michael Cerny was on her mind.

It was one thing that Janet claimed to have seen him, a sighting linked to the car bomb that killed Carlos. That might have been chalked up to coincidence or an overactive imagination. But why, if someone who looked like Cerny had been seen by a credible source, would there have been a failure to get a file to Alex? Alex had been an integral part of Cerny’s “fatal” final mission. She should have been covered on it.

Incompetence? Maybe?

Was someone holding back because she was FBI and Treasury and not CIA?

Possible.

But overall, it didn’t make sense.

She leaned to her laptop, which had a higher security access code than the desktop console. She entered her primary security clearance code and then entered her second. Both cruised.

A slight tremor came over her. To revisit Michael Cerny via the files was to revisit her personal catastrophe in Kiev and all the sorrow it had brought into her life. It had been less than a year. Was she ready to have so much of it come tumbling back?

She drew a breath. She entered her clearance for the secured site dedicated to the Kiev visit. Another dialogue box opened and asked for her name. She entered it. She remembered how in the painful first weeks after Kiev she had made this same trip and run into cyber roadblocks. More anxiety built. The dialogue window accepted her name. With two tries, it accepted her ID. Then she was back in the HUMINT, the human intelligence, leading up to the presidential visit to Kiev. Files opened. Okay so far.

She cringed as she read them, but unlike the previous times she had visited these sights, the files had not been bowdlerized. They seemed complete and accurate.

Okay, okay, she told herself. This might be a backdoor route to a background file on Michael Cerny. Maybe. Leaning forward, she attacked the keyboard with more gusto. She referenced names including her own. Robert’s. Embassy personnel who had died that day. She found everyone she looked for.

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 fiance 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 cafe 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