She opened the box and immediately let him place it on her wrist.
“Just one more thing for me to remove on our wedding night,” he teased her. They laughed together and embraced.
“Wear it in Ukraine,” he said. “When I see you in Kiev I’m going to look for it.”
“It’s a promise,” she said.
“You also have to promise to return safely,” he said. “I don’t like the fact that you’ll be there for three days on your own.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“I don’t like Cerny either,” he said.
She was startled. “I thought he was your friend,” she said.
“No. I only know him. Met him twice. I don’t have anything against him, but he’s an acquaintance, not a friend.”
“Did you ever have a chance to-?”
“Oh, yeah I ran their names against the personnel computers,” he said. “I didn’t find anything that I didn’t already know.”
She asked directly. “Is he CIA or not? And that battle-ax who works with him. Countess von Olga. What about her?”
“No entries on her,” he said. “If he’s CIA, he’s at a high enough level so that my own access to it is blocked. I can’t find anything further than that. But that doesn’t address the ‘blue card-green card’ situation,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Back in 1992 after the CIA was hit with major budget cuts, they started contracting out a lot of special assignments. A CIA officer could turn in retirement papers and his blue ID badge one day and go to work for a military contractor the next day. He or she would come back into the same Langley building with a green ID the next morning at a higher salary but with no government oversight. After September of 2001, the outsourcing went completely nuts. Green-badge bosses were recruiting blue-badge employees right in the CIA cafeteria.”
“And no one stopped it?”
“Who would stop it during that era? Figure that the federal budget includes about five hundred million for intelligence gathering, but now the CIA only gets one percent of that. The Pentagon gets the rest and pays the military contractors. The taxpayers get three times as high a bill, but if there’s a screwup, the Pentagon ‘classifies’ it so no one can investigate. So even if Cerny has a State Department ID, who knows who’s really running his operation?”
“Got it.”
“Take it from there.”
“Got it,” she said again, nodding, and not reassured in the least.
She arrived home past 1:00 a.m. She organized her apartment, wrote out checks to pay bills, and dropped them in the mail chute in the hallway.
She walked back into her own apartment, closed the door, stopped, and listened.
There was something about her own place that was giving her the creeps these days. She couldn’t place it, but it was there.
She stood perfectly still and cocked her head.
Man, this was driving her nuts.
There was something! There absolutely was!
She put her ear to the wall, then the floor. She opened the window and listened. She couldn’t find it. She went out to the hall and then she picked up on it.
She looked at her watch. Okay. It was late. So to be safe, she went back into her apartment and found her Glock. She loaded it and put it in a holster. She pulled on her UCLA sweatshirt so the gun wouldn’t be visible and went for a walk.
Out the door. Down the hall. Past the utility closet that the phone and cable people used to repair things when the service was screwed up.
Down the stairs. Onto the floor below her. Then down to the third floor.
Then she had it.
Two apartments under her.
Music. Voices. Whoever lived there was jamming late. She sighed. It was bad manners to be making such a racket at a late hour.
Okay. She was turning into a nut case. Her nerves were shot for this undercover assignment and this proved it. Worse, she realized that there was something else unsettled in her spirit too.
She went back upstairs and crashed into bed, leaving the Glock on the bedside table and the final packing to the next morning. There would be one unscheduled stop tomorrow morning and no one she worked with would know about it.
TWENTY-THREE
On the morning of her departure for Kiev, Alex drove to her parish, St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square. St. John’s was a tall building from the early 1800s, with a handsome white steeple and light yellow exterior. There were white columns at the entrance and stone steps leading upwards. The church was on a busy urban corner, two blocks from the White House. Many presidents had worshiped here.
She was lucky with parking, finding a place less than two blocks away. The morning was cold, but there was no precipitation. The sun, in fact, was breaking through clouds for the first time in several days.
Alex had joined St. John’s when she came back to Washington after accepting her job at Treasury. She felt comfortable here. The atmosphere mixed just the right amount of Protestant tradition and reverence with inclusiveness.
She found her way to a pew halfway down the center aisle.
She knew most of her friends would smirk at her habit, her belief, her “superstition,” as they might call it. She knew what people sometimes said about “faith” behind her back, but it was a free country and she felt comfortable with her beliefs.
She felt better being here. There were a handful of other people in the church, including an assistant pastor who recognized her, nodded, and gave her a warm smile. There were a few tourists at the front.
She prayed for Robert. She prayed that God would watch over her. She could hear her own words echo in the old church, and she didn’t care who else could hear her if the Almighty could.
She prayed so hard that her eyes almost hurt and began to tear. She prayed as if the act of supplication was something new, or something renewed or reborn. She prayed to Jesus and to God. And then she realized something about herself and about the present.
She was deeply frightened for one of the first times in her adult life. She deeply feared something about this trip, and there was no way now to back out.
She prayed out loud and she listened and she didn’t hear anything in return except the distant drone of DC traffic in the distance.
Then she sat up. She felt better. She drew a deep breath and composed herself.
In a few hours her taxi would arrive.
She had done everything she could to prepare for this trip.
Whatever God’s plan was for her, she told herself, she would have to go down that road.
She was finally ready to travel.
TWENTY-FOUR
Lt. Rizzo parked his car in the entrance area to Le Grand Hotel on the via Vittorio Emanuelle. He brushed away the doorman, flashing his police credentials. For a moment, the career cop stood in front of the hotel and took in the grandeur of the place.
Le Grand Hotel was more luxurious than any other in Rome. Not even the Excelsior or the Eden could match its excesses. Its only drawback was the gritty Stazione Termini nearby, the Roman railway station, a bustling intersection of business people, excited travelers, pickpockets, creeps, hookers, and weirdoes. But once inside Le Grand Hotel, all thoughts of trains and of the people at the station vanished.
The lobby was resplendent with sparkling Murano glass chandeliers, white columns, marble busts, and grinning cherubs, a lavish but tasteful explosion of French and Italian styles in muted gold and pastels. Rizzo had been in a few of the bedrooms over the years, on official business and otherwise, and remembered them being recently restored in what the hotel called the “Barocco” style, a mongrel blend of baroque and rococo.
Everywhere one stepped there were plush carpeted floors. Everywhere one glanced, antiques and artwork. Everywhere one turned, a different hand-painted fresco showing a Roman scene. The place had come a long way since 1890 when it first opened, and its luxurious pitch had included a private bath and two electric lights in every room.