The Fourth of July embassy picnic that must have seemed, given a country in which any American citizen who happened to be in the vicinity happened also to be in the official or covert employ of one or another branch of the embassy, a trying tradition at best.
She needed, she had said, to replace a lost passport.
She did not want to interrupt the picnic, she had said, but she had gone to the consulate and the guard at the gate said the consulate was closed for the holiday, and she needed her passport replaced immediately.
She needed her passport replaced immediately because she needed to return to the United States immediately.
The woman had seemed, according to the consular officer who was finally located to deal with her, “a little confused,” and “unable or unwilling” to accept his “offer to try to clear up the confusion.”
The confusion of course was that this woman already had her passport.
Her presence inside the tented area was proof that she already had her passport.
The confusion with this woman had begun at the gate.
She had also told the marine on duty at the gate that she had lost her passport, and when he told her to return the next morning when the consular office reopened she had insisted that tomorrow would be too late, she needed to see a consular officer now.
The marine had explained that this would be impossible because all the consular officers were at the Fourth of July picnic.
The Fourth of July picnic that unfortunately she could not attend because guests were required to present an American passport.
At which point this woman had produced her passport.
And left it, as any other guest not known to the embassy would have left his or her passport, with the guard at the entrance to the tented area.
This woman had left her passport and signed the embassy guest book.
There it was, he could show it to her, her signature: Elise Meyer.
Here it was, the guard could and would return it to her, her passport: Elise Meyer.
That was the confusion.
According to the consular officer she had taken the passport and held it out, as if she were about to show or give it to him. There had been a moment of silence before she spoke. “This was just to get me in because I need to explain something,” she had said, and then she had fallen silent.
She had been looking across the tent.
The steel band had stopped playing.
The woman had seemed, the consular officer reported, “very interested in some of our Salvadoran friends.”
“Neat idea, by the way, the steel band,” the consular officer had added, “but next year it might be appropriate to tell them, ‘Rule Britannia’ isn’t ours.”
It was at the point when the steel band struck up “Rule Britannia” that the woman had put the passport in her bag, closed the bag, and walked out of the tent and across the lawn and out the gate.
“You were about to explain something,” the consular officer had said as she started to walk away.
“Forget it,” she had said without turning back.
That was the reason for ordering the background.
The background that was ordered to get a line on who she was and what she was doing there.
The background that threw up the glitch.
The background that turned up flat.
No history.
The passport bearing the name Elise Meyer showed that it had been issued on June 30 1984 at the United States Passport Agency in Miami, but the United States Passport Agency in Miami reported no record of having issued a passport in the name Elise Meyer.
That was the glitch.
11
The young FBI agent who had flown down from the Miami office had opened the initial interview by mentioning the glitch.
She had looked puzzled.
The discrepancy, the anomaly, whatever she wanted to call it.
He was certain that she could clear this immediately.
He was sure that she would have a simple explanation for the glitch.
The anomaly.
The discrepancy.
She had offered no explanation at all.
She had merely shrugged. “At my age I don’t actually find discrepancies too surprising,” she had said. “You must be what? Twenty-six, twenty-seven?”
He was twenty-five.
He had decided to try another tack.
“Assuming for the moment that someone provided you with apparently inauthentic documentation,” he began.
“You’re assuming that,” she said. “Naturally. Because you haven’t had a whole lot of experience with the way things work. You still think things work the way they’re supposed to work. I’m assuming something more along the lines of business as usual.”
“Excuse me?”
“I guess you must work in an office where nobody ever makes a mistake,” she said. “I guess where you work nobody ever hits the wrong key because they’re in a rush to go on break.”
“I don’t see your point.”
“You don’t think it’s possible that some low-level GS-whatever in the passport office accidentally deleted my record?”
This was in fact a distinct possibility, but he chose to ignore it. “Apparently inauthentic documentation is sometimes provided for the purpose of placing the carrier in a position where they can be blackmailed into doing something they wouldn’t otherwise do.”
“Is that something you learned at Quantico?”
He ignored this. “In other words,” he repeated, “someone could have placed you in such a position.” He paused for emphasis. “Someone could be using you.”
“For what,” she said.
“If there were a plot,” the agent said.
“That’s your invention. This whole plot business. Your movie. Not anybody else’s.”
The agent paused. She had agreed to the interview. She had not been uncooperative. Because she had not been uncooperative he let this pass, but what she had said was not entirely accurate. The plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw was not his invention at all. There were various theories around the embassy and also in Miami about whose invention it was, the most popular of which was that Alex Brokaw himself had engineered the report in an effort to derail a certain two-track approach then favored at State, but the existence of a plot, once it was mentioned by what the cable traffic called “a previously reliable source,” had to be accepted at face value. Documentable steps had to be taken. The record at State had to duly show the formation of a crisis management team on the Caribbean desk. The paperwork had to duly show that wall maps had been requisitioned, with colored pins to indicate known players. The concertina perimeter around the embassy overflow office structures had to be duly reinforced. On the record. All AM/EMBASSY dependents and nonessential personnel had to be duly encouraged to take home leave. In triplicate. All American citizens with access to AM/EMBASSY personnel and uncleared backgrounds had to be interviewed.
Duly.
Including this one.
This one had access to AM/EMBASSY personnel by virtue of being on the island.
This one had thrown a glitch.
Something about this one’s use of the phrase “your movie” bothered him but he let that go too.
“If there were a plot,” he repeated, “someone could be using you.”
“Those are your words.”
In the silence that followed the young man had clicked his ballpoint pen on the table. There were other things about this one that bothered him, but it was important to keep what bothered him out of this picture. It was possible they might be experiencing a syntactical problem, a misunderstanding that could be cleared up by restatement. “Why not put it in your own words,” he said finally.