Conspiracy In Kiev Part 28

At a few minutes past 7:00 p.m., Alex sat at her desk, delaying before going home. Springtime had finally come to Washington, and the city enjoyed its best weather of the year. Then the heat of the summer gripped the city in mid-June.

She stared at her two computers. The ice of Kiev seemed a world away, a bitter memory. But it still haunted her. Evenings were difficult. She was afraid of loneliness, afraid that missing a certain someone would overtake her.

She had started to work past her grief. Now she wanted answers.

How long had it been since Kiev? There had been times in the last few weeks when she could have instantly given the answer. It's been two days, it's been three. It's been a week, two weeks. A month. Then a second month. Then a third. Gradually, the story disappeared from the newspapers and the attention of the American public, replaced by other events, other intrigues.

This evening, on a whim, she entered her clearance for a secured Intranet site dedicated to the Kiev visit and the debacle that had transpired there. The screen went blank and she sighed. Then a dialogue box opened that asked for her name.

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 princ.i.p.al 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, a.n.a.lysis after a.n.a.lysis, 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 a.s.signed 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 cybers.p.a.ce 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 fiance 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 cla.s.sified 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, seorita," 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 a.s.sailed 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 pa.s.sing, "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 G.o.d 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. "G.o.d knows a lot of things that I know," she said, "but G.o.d also knows a lot of things that I don't. Mind if I sit?"

"I can use the company," he said.

Alex sat. "Why am I a pariah?" she asked.

Mike Gamburian looked at her curiously. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"Don't play games, Mike. You're my boss. If my access to information has been curtailed, you would know about it. If you know about it, you would also know why. That's why I'm in your office right now, and that's why I'm going to present you with my resignation in one minute."

He sighed. "Let's go downstairs for a smoke," he said.

"Neither of us smoke," she said.

"I just started," he said. "Bad habit, I know. I need to quit. So let's go have a cigarette."

At the same time he made a gesture with his hand, pointing to the two of them and the doorway. She got it. They went down the elevator together in silence, not a single cigarette between them.

Then they stood on the outside of the front entrance of Treasury, standing a careful distance away from those who really were smoking.

They talked around the issue for several minutes.

"Look," Gamburian finally said, "the first thing ... I'm your friend. You're a great woman and a fantastic employee. If you need to leave, I don't blame you, but I want you to know I'd hire you back in a flash any day of the week."

"I can't do my job if I can't access information, Mike. And I resent being excluded from an investigation of an incident that cost Robert his life. I want answers and I'm not getting them here."

"Okay," he said. "I understand. There's been some talk. c.r.a.p I can't do anything about. No one in the Western Hemisphere has a single negative thing to say about you. The way you handled things in Ukraine was beyond reproach. The first thing I need to tell you is that you can stay here. There'd be a promotion coming your way, added pay, the works."

"In a job with no responsibility, right? Where someone's going to be looking over my shoulder the whole time, right?"

He blew past her point.

"The second thing is that if you wanted to take more time off, with pay, that option is open to you too. No one's going to hold it against you." He paused. "I had a talk with the big boss. You could take up to a year if you wanted without a problem."

"You're talking in circles, Mike. If everything is hearts and flowers, what is the problem?"

"They think you know something," he said. "Something more than you're telling them."

"Why would I conceal anything?"

"That's what I asked them also."

"Who's 'them'?" she snapped. "Who are we talking about?"

"The powers that be."

"CIA? NSA? White House? Secret Service?"

He blinked twice. "I honestly can't answer that."

"You don't know or you can't answer?"

"I can't answer," he said crisply.

She seethed and stifled a profanity. "I've told them everything I know. Probably about three times with every detail I can remember."

"I'm sure you have," he said. "Thing is, they think you might know something that you're not even aware of."

"Have they questioned you?"

"Quite a bit."

She sighed. She nodded. "Okay," she finally said. "Then I want to clear out of here. I'll accept that leave of absence."

"Where will you go?"

"I received a message from Joseph Collins after Kiev. The businessman. You know who he is."

"Everyone knows who he is," Gamburian said. "He's like Donald Trump but without the funny hair."