She entered it. If it was receptive to her name, no one could get on her case for getting access.
The dialogue window accepted her name. Surely someone had failed to purge her. But the next thing she knew, she was in the HUMINT-the human intelligence-leading up to the trip to Kiev.
Except, what was this she saw?
She leaned forward.
The file took new directions with new references. Surely further access codes would cut her off. But they didn’t. She kept exploring.
For the next hour, the files attached to the presidential visit to Kiev took up the known story of what had happened and its aftermath. It was typical of the code of conduct of such things that, having been a principal player in the events of Kiev, she had received no subsequent briefings of how things had gone down or why. She had answered plenty of questions but had received no explanations.
She read report after report, analysis after analysis, of what had happened.
Something bothered her immediately.
Almost everything was written by investigators who had not been there.
She began to notice strange small discrepancies, none that made any significant difference by itself, but enough to bring to mind the principle that if you pushed together enough grains of sand, you would build a beach.
The attackers who had fired the rockets, their weapons and their vehicles, were described differently than she had remembered.
A small mistake? Maybe.
But she recalled that five men had charged the presidential limousine and found it recounted in several records that there were four. The Secret Service detail assigned to the president was listed as twenty-four. She knew there had been twenty-eight.
The official record had been tweaked. Why?
Leaning forward, she attacked the keyboard with more gusto. She referenced names including her own. She traveled through cyberspace to the personnel files and biographies of the government people who had attended the visit to Kiev.
Thirty seven names in all. She scanned them, including her own again, to see if any backgrounds had been fudged. None had that she could see.
She went back and picked up the story. It was now past 8:00 in the evening. The disinformation was accelerating. She brought up her own name and factored in several cross references. She attempted to access the files that she herself had contributed in the lead-up to the trip, mindless low security stuff on trade delegations, black market currency issues, the penny-ante balance of payments stuff, and then the more substantial stuff on Federov.
She found these files had been tampered with too. With a rush, she then went after the reports that she herself had filed in the aftermath of Kiev. These were missing entirely.
She leaned back from her screen.
What was she looking at?
Typical Washington bureaucratic bungling? Or a far larger issue?
She tried to work around the files. She was typing furiously now. Her fiancé was dead and someone-or some agency-was playing fast and loose with the official version of truth.
She reaccessed her own name. She brought up her own reports via a different cyber thread. She found key parts had been deleted.
Her fingers froze again on the keyboard.
She paused. Now her mind was in overdrive. She had been around the government long enough to know that when something came up missing, particularly where the official version of events was concerned, there was never much in the way of coincidence. Bureaucratic incompetence was coin of the realm in government circles, but official tampering always smelled of a rat.
A big fat filthy rat.
She circled back. She reexamined every oblique inference. She went back to the accounting of security people on the trip and counted again. Something smelled wrong here too. She looked for the transcript of the endless interviews she had done with that sick ape named Lee. They were classified elsewhere. Technically, they had never happened, even though she knew they had.
They were like Lagos, Nigeria, and those lousy 419 frauds. She wouldn’t have believed they existed except she had lived through them.
Then she looked for Michael Cerny’s name. She had not seen him for six weeks now. She found no reference. No Olga Liashko, either. Instead, there was a reference to Gerstmann-which was contradicted one page later when the spelling changed and Gerstmann became Gerstman-who had been listed as her case officer before Kiev. In itself, that wouldn’t have made much difference as frequently NSA or CIA people used their work names. It was just that they usually got the spelling of the name right.
She tried to access the work names, Cerny, Gerstman, and Gerstmann. It sounded like a law firm.
Nothing. The cyber-system returned her to “Start.” She glanced at the time in the lower right corner of her computer screen. It was now past 9:00 p.m. She wasn’t even hungry for dinner.
The Treasury corridors were quiet around her, aside from the cleaning crew. She looked up as one of the cleaning ladies went by. “Buenas noches,” she said.
“Buenas noches, señorita,” the cleaning lady said with a smile.
Then Alex jumped. Her computer, the small secure one, suddenly went down. She drew a breath, calmed herself, rebooted her computer and reaccessed her information system.
She had enough questions to fill a volume. Who could answer them? Who could even give her a clue?
She picked up her cell phone. She called the number she had for Michael Cerny. She would pick his mind, whatever his name was, Cerny or Gerstman or Gerstfogle or-
An electronic voice answered. It too startled her. The number she had for the man she had known as Cerny was invalid-a nonworking number.
Slowly, she put her cell phone back down on her desk.
She tried to be rational. Logical. Where was this leading?
A quite extraneous vision of herself assailed her. She pictured herself in Kiev with Robert, the night before he died. Now she kept trying to reconcile her own memory to what she read in the files. She felt a pounding headache creep up on her.
She plunged herself back into the darkest chambers of her memory and found herself sorting through the events of the previous February. She was in some of the worst reaches of her memory; when suicide scenarios tiptoed across her psyche every day.
“If I did die suddenly,” Robert had said not long before his passing, “I would want you to pick up and go on. I would want you to have a life, a family, a soul mate, happiness.”
It was almost as if he was in the room with her, invisible, a ghost, projecting such thoughts.
She glanced back to the monitor. It was alive again. She noticed a box concealed with the security issues. A menu item stared her in the eye: OPERATION CHUCK AND SUSAN.
She heard her own voice fill the room “What the-?”
She tried to access it. Then the screen flashed again.
ACCESS DENIED.
She returned again to “Start” and attempted to retrace her path. But the security system blocked her from her first strokes. In terms of intelligence pertaining to Kiev, she might have lived it personally, but she was now locked out.
FIFTY-THREE
The next morning at 10:00 a.m., Alex knocked on the door to the office of her boss, Mike Gamburian.
“Got a minute?” she asked.
“Uh oh,” he said. “Sure.”
She entered. He motioned that she should close the door.
“I have to tell you,” Alex said. “I think I came back here too soon.”
“We can’t blame you for trying,” he said. “And God knows the president wouldn’t be alive if you hadn’t reacted the way you did. So your government and your employer owe you a big one.”
She managed an ironic smile. “God knows a lot of things that I know,” she said, “but God also knows a lot of things that I don’t. Mind if I sit?”