“Just in time,” the driver said softly. “That’s the FBI now.”
Olga stayed low. She preferred not to see. Her car proceeded without incident. They went to the intersection and turned. She watched the driver as he glanced in his rear view mirror. He moved quickly and deftly into traffic so it would be difficult to follow.
“We’re okay,” he said, continuing in Ukrainian.
The man on the shotgun side turned his head halfway around to talk to his passenger. “You’re a lucky lady tonight, Olga. Real lucky.”
Both men laughed.
They drove across the Key Bridge back into Washington. They navigated carefully through traffic. Olga sat up a little to watch where they were going. Within another few minutes, they entered Rock Creek Park. Its roads were dark and quiet at this late hour, which was what everyone there wanted.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, Olga. We’re going to move you to another car. You’re going to drive through the night. Your next driver will take you to Montreal and you’ll fly to Mexico. From there to Cuba. The Americans will lose track of you in Havana. But you’ll connect there for Brazil.”
The driver glanced at him and smiled.
Olga remained nervous.
“Where’s the money?” she asked.
From the front seat came the rest of her package. The nice plump packs of money. Enough to get her started. She was breathing a little easier, but not by much.
Olga’s vehicle pulled off the road. She looked around. Sure enough, there was another car waiting, its lights off.
The driver of Olga’s car flashed its lights. The driver from the other car gave a slight wave of recognition. A passenger side guard stepped out to cover the situation. Olga assumed everyone was armed. Well, that was fine because she was, too.
“There you go,” said the driver. “Don’t say we didn’t do anything for you. You’re on your way.”
“I’m on my way,” she nodded.
She checked her new passport again and stuffed the money in her purse. She stepped out of the car and closed the door behind her.
“Bye, Olga,” the man in front said pleasantly. “Good luck.”
She was too tense to answer. She gave a nod to the car that had brought her here as it pulled away. She started toward the other car.
The rear door opened and the driver beckoned to her again.
EIGHTY-THREE
One of the grand boulevards of Paris that leads to and from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is the Avenue de la Grande Armée, directly opposite the Champs Elysées. It travels eastward from Place de l’Etoile, where the arc stands, and rolls through expensive neighborhoods till it arrives in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
If a traveler stays on the boulevard, he or she passes majestic apartment buildings and mansions that smell of the money of all nations. One will also come to the American Hospital of Paris, which was where Alex arrived thirty minutes after the shooting incident in the Parisian Métro. Not only was there a wound in her chest from a bullet, but she had gone into cardiac arrest.
An intensive care unit in a hospital outside one’s native country is never a cheerful place. But the American Hospital of Paris has been an institution for a century. In a country of exemplary medical care, it remains one of the leading hospitals.
Hit in the center of the chest by a bullet, Alex’s body was moved there from the Métro’s Odéon station by ambulance. Her body was motionless beneath a sheet and a blanket, covered to the shoulders. Medics on the scene looked at the wound and tried to close off the blood, but given the force of the hit, they shook their heads.
The ambulance technicians who transported Alex to the American Hospital saw that her vital signs were almost nonexistent. When her heart stopped, electrical cardioversion was applied. Electrode paddles were applied to her chest and a single shock was administered.
She was unconscious at the time, somewhere between life and death, prepared to go either way. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, her heart flickered again. If she had been gone-wherever souls go to-she was back.
Or trying to get back.
She was admitted to an emergency room, where the bizarre nature of her injury was properly assessed for the first time. The bullet that had hit her had ricocheted off the Métro wall. Its impact had been greatly defused. And somehow, in the center of her chest, right above her breastbone, the bullet had scored a direct hit on the stone pendant that she had bought in Barranco Lajoya.
The stone had broken under the impact of the bullet, but it had defused the damage from the fired round. While there was a flesh wound and severe trauma to the breastbone, including a hairline fracture, the bullet had not broken through beyond the flesh at the surface. Contrary to how it appeared in the Métro, it had not entered her body.
Detectives who inspected the crime scene in the hours after the shooting found the spent bullet in the center of the tracks, in the spot to which it had been deflected.
The stone had saved her life.
On her first day in the hospital, she lay by herself in a private room under heavy sedation. She was groggy. She was on heavy pain-relief medication and an IV fed into her arm. Her chest throbbed. Under the bandages, the skin of her chest had turned the color of an eggplant. Every breath hurt. She was afraid to look at her wound. And above all, she was surprised to be alive.
On the second day she felt better. It was only then that she wondered whether anyone knew where she was, much less who she was. She inquired of one of her nurses.
The nurse informed her that people from the American embassy had arranged for her care, including the private room. Nonetheless, the pain and discomfort persisted. She was too distracted mentally and zonked out on medication even to read. She left the television on 24/7, the remote control at her bedside. All she had the energy to do was flick stations back and forth, the usual French fare-NYPD Blue reruns dubbed in French and a cheesy Gallic clone of The Jerry Springer Show were her grudging favorites-plus odd channels from CNN to Al Jazeera.
Her third day in the hospital was the first day when visitors were allowed. Mark McKinnon, the CIA station chief from Rome, was the first to see her.
McKinnon pulled a chair toward her bed and sat down.
“How are you feeling, LaDuca?” he asked.
“Surprised to be here.”
“You got very lucky,” he said. “Somebody sure is watching over you.”
“You could conclude that,” she said. Her chest still hurt. There were small burns where the electrode paddles had been applied. “Sometimes I wonder.”
She was also still groggy. The medication remained at its original strength.
“A bullet on a ricochet can kill someone,” McKinnon said. “Apparently you had some sort of pendant there on your chest? That’s what the doctors told me.”
“A pendant that I got in South America,” she said. “Very hard stone. It took the brunt of the impact. So they tell me.”
McKinnon was shaking his head.
“Lucky,” he said.
“Lucky,” she answered.
“What are the odds of that happening?” he asked.
“You tell me. I don’t have any answers anymore.”
He smiled and gave her shoulder a pat.
“I understand you’ll be here for a little while more,” he said. “Just rest, get your strength back. Eventually, the police are going to want to ask you questions. But we’re taking care of everything. Back channels.”
“Back channels,” she said. “Wonderful way to do things.”
He didn’t miss her irony.
“Banner year you’re having, huh?”
“Yeah,” she said.
He paused. “There’s still some outstanding business,” he said. “Yuri Federov may be dead. We don’t know. We have to assume that he’s still out there somewhere. You’re not completely safe until he’s completely out of business.”