Countdown in Cairo

TWENTY-FIVE

Alex arrived by car at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on Thursday morning at 8:35. The meeting was in a small conference room on the third floor, west. A taciturn young assistant led her in. There was an oblong table with twelve empty chairs. The walls were bare, painted light green, with no windows. A series of prints on the wall showed embassies in various parts of the world. Near it was a valance, and next to it an American flag in a stand.

Idly, as she waited, she examined the flag. There was a small white tag on it. Made in China. Typical. She sat at the table and waited. Two minutes later the door abruptly opened and three men surged into the room. All three wore dark suits and had ID badges dangling in plastic holders across their ample midsections.

The mere sight of them reminded her of how much she disliked most of these CIA people: frequently wrong but never in doubt. Disliked, she mused, and distrusted.

“Agent Alexandra LaDuca,” said the leader, extending a hand. “I’m William Quintero, Assistant Director/DCA, Middle Eastern Affairs. These are my associates who’ll also be involved in this case.”

He introduced them. Ronald Strauss, who was in charge of technical support for Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and Miller Harris, whose official title suggested that he oversaw political officers and operations in the same region.

Handshakes went all around and the group of four sat down. The three men were on the opposite side of the table from Alex, with Quintero at the center.

“Well, now, Alex,” Quintero said to start, “heck of an incident the other night, wasn’t it? How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine.”

“The arm?”

“It is what it is,” she said.

“You’re quite a trooper,” Harris said with admiration.

“I’m more of a grouch and a sorehead today than anything,” she answered. “Why am I here?”

Quintero looked at her carefully. “Are you up to a new assignment?” he asked. He continued before she could answer. “This is going to dovetail into areas where you’ve already done some work. So it’s not entirely new.”

“I’m here,” she said.

“And ‘happy’ to be here?” he asked.

“Obviously not,” she said.

“And mentally, you feel ‘together’?”

“As much as any of us might,” she said. “How’s that?”

There was a moment, then all three men smiled.

“It’s a strange line of work we do,” she said. “There’s stress with any assignment.”

“Yes, but some more than others,” Quintero replied.

“I’m all right,” she said. “Tell me why I’m here.”

Another short beat, then, “Okay,” Quintero said softly. “We’re here to talk about your ex-boss, Michael Cerny.”

“He was never officially my boss,” she corrected. “I was asked by my own boss, Mike Gamburian, to work with him on one particular operation. There was no name to the operation, but it involved Yuri Federov. Kiev. You have files in front of you. You know all that.”

“Yes, of course,” Quintero said. To his left, Harris was looking at a file that he had opened, glancing up and down intermittently, while to his right, Strauss sat frozen in place, a similar file closed in front of him, his sleek hand upon it.

“But recently you were asking questions about Michael Cerny?”

“That’s correct.”

“Would you mind telling us why?”

“Curiosity,” said Alex.

“Curiosity?” Quintero pressed. “Or maybe something more specific?”

“Such as?”

Quintero leaned back in his chair. “Suspicion, for some reason?” he asked. “An inkling? Some insidious rumor that you may have picked up from somewhere?”

She took a more aggressive tone in return, truthful but keeping Janet at arm’s length. “I worked with Mr. Cerny on an operation that stretched from Ukraine to France and possibly incorporated a massacre in South America,” she said. “Several people lost their lives, including my fiancé. It’s only natural that I might want a final look at the files of some of the people involved. So I attempted to access those files.”

“For what purpose if the operation is over?” Quintero asked.

“I just answered that question,” she said. “That operation changed my life. Additionally, Mike Gamburian asked me once again to contact Mr. Federov. It’s only natural that I would wish to review.”

Quintero listened without speaking.

“Quite frankly,” Alex continued, “I’m resentful that I can’t access those files. I’m weighing resignation. There are a lot of other things I can do rather than put my life on the line here when I’m not getting the proper support and feedback from above.” She could tell from their expressions that her feint had worked. She spoke politely and calmly. “I’m sure you understand.”

Three pairs of eyes were steadily upon her.

“Of course,” Quintero said. “Let’s just not get ahead of ourselves.”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” she said not so politely. “You know as well as I do,” Alex added, “that operations evolve. They never completely end. But for personal reasons, I’d like some closure on this.”

Quintero snorted. “Well, wouldn’t we all?” he asked rhetorically.

He opened the file that sat in front of him and handed several sheets of paper across the table to Alex.

“Sorry,” he said. “I have to give you these.”

The papers were the confidentiality bonds. She knew the drill. She was about to be brought into a CIA operation, whether she wanted to be or not, or at least continued into an operation that was ongoing.

She looked at the documents. Alex scanned. “The usual crap, huh?” she said.

“The usual crap,” Quintero agreed.

She signed and handed the documents back across the table.

“Excellent,” Quintero said. He accepted the documents, made sure that Alex had signed the proper spots, and returned the documents to the file.

“Well,” Quintero said, “if you’re looking for personal closure, you won’t find it here.”

“What exactly does that mean?” Alex asked.

“Michael Cerny is alive,” Quintero said.

“How is that possible?”

“He was wounded in Paris,” Quintero said. “You saw right. He was hit as he sat in a car on the street. Our people did a follow-up and took him to a private medical clinic. And as things evolved, we realized, or maybe Michael realized and suggested it, that we were presented with an astounding possibility. Declare Michael dead, ship back to America a body that we bought from a local morgue, and have a cheerful funeral. Then give Mike a new identity, and he has the deepest cover that anyone in the world can have.”

“Brilliant,” she said, with an obvious edge. “And where did the best-made plans of men with mice-sized brains go off the rails this time?”

“What makes you think it did?”

“I wouldn’t be here if things were going smoothly,” she said. She glanced to the others at the table. “All four of us know that, and I have a scar in my left arm that tells me that I’m justified to think that.”

“Alex, do people ever tell you that you’re too clever sometimes and maybe just a bit too sarcastic?”

“Frequently. I’ve even told myself that from time to time. And my arm hurts this morning, and I’m still flying from the Vicodin, so I’d like some answers.”

She caught Harris glancing away, suppressing a grin.

Quintero glanced to the confidentiality bonds, double checking. “You signed everything, right?”

“No. I made paper airplanes out of it. Of course, I signed everything.”

Harris glanced at the papers and gave Quintero a nod.

“Michael threw the operation off the rails himself,” Quintero said. “Not with anything he did afterward. Not immediately, anyway. But with what he had done previously.”

“Namely?”

“We have a spy case going on in Federal court in Philadelphia right now,” Quintero said. “A military engineer has appeared in court in the US on charges of passing classified information to Israel. A man named Solomon Isaacman is charged with selling US military secrets involving information about nuclear weapons, fighter jets, and missiles to Israel in the years from 2003 to 2007. He has been charged with four counts of conspiracy to commit espionage, including disclosing documents relating to national defense and acting as an agent of Israel.”

“So he’s in custody?”

“He was released on $300,000 bail. His passport was taken also.”

“I haven’t seen anything in the press about this.”

“So far, it’s been under wraps because of its sensitive nature. But the Agency feels that Isaacson borrowed several classified documents related to national defense from the army’s research centre between 2003 and 2007, took them to his home in New Jersey, where he would then hand over the documents to an Israeli consular official, who would photograph them in the basement. He took documents linked to modified designs for F-15 jets and several others related to nuclear weaponry. Everything was classified as ‘Restricted Data.’ The documents contained information concerning the weapons systems used by F-15 fighter jets that the United States had sold other countries.”

“Which other countries?” Alex asked.

“Well, modified F-15s have been sold to Israel, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and South Korea.”

“So where does this come back to Michael Cerny?” Alex asked.

“Right here,” Quintero said, opening a second file. “Isaacman’s handler was someone operating in the United States under the code name of ‘Ambidextrous.’ Look at this.”

Quintero pushed forward a series of surveillance photographs taken at restaurant rest stops along the New Jersey Turnpike. He identified Isaacman in the photograph. With Isaacman was the man that the FBI had identified as “Ambidextrous.” “Recognize him?” Quintero asked.

Alex looked carefully. The man she saw looked like a younger version of Michael Cerny, from the years just before she had known him.

“I recognize him,” Alex said. “But I don’t get it. Was Cerny one of your CIA people or not?”

“Cerny worked for us as an outside contractor for many years,” he said. “He was recruited in the Czech Republic during the 1990s. In previous generations he would have been a Marxist and probably a KGB snitch. But by then there was no place for a good young Red to go, so he went into capitalism. Clever mind. Well, you had experience with him so you know. He had nothing to sell so he created his own product by spying on people. His mother was an instructor at the university in Prague, and his father was a dockworker on the Danube who hated educated people. Unofficial marriage, rocky relationship as you might imagine. The son of a dedicated teacher and an antiintellectual. Do you like that? Just think how screwed up the young man must have been.”

“I think I’ve seen examples,” Alex said.

“For the first few years he worked for us he always seemed to have an interesting bag of goods he was selling. He worked out well for many years. He had contacts all over Europe. He brought us useful snippets of gossip from embassies from Ankara to Amsterdam. Had an ear to the ground just about everywhere. So we bought a lot of what he was selling. We sent him to the FBI for a second look, and he passed their inspection too. He’d been involved in a lot of dirt, but nothing that had ever been worked against the United States. So for our purposes he was clean. Don’t take this the wrong way, but he was exactly the type of man we liked to recruit.”

“I’ll take that exactly the way you meant it,” Alex said. “And I couldn’t agree with you more.”

“Anyway, eventually Cerny expanded his range. He wanted his solo sessions. He volunteered to run operations against specific targets for us. Sometimes he even brought us the target and sold us on why we needed to hit it. He started getting expensive, but the yield was always good. Like Federov.”

“I assume that Federov might have been a target he brought to you,” Alex said. “Rather than vice versa.”

“I can’t really comment on that.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “I’m assuming I’m correct.”

“Should I refer back to my suggestion about your being too clever?”

“If you like.”

For a moment Quintero seemed ill at ease with her assumption.

“Don’t send yourself in the wrong direction,” he said. “We had no reason to suspect there was any vendetta between Federov and Cerny.”

“After working with him for how many years?” she asked.

Quintero glanced down for a moment at his files, as if to remind himself.

“Fifteen. And again, Federov had been convicted of felonies in US courts,” Quintero said. “He was guilty of far more than we ever convicted him on. He was a tax cheat who owed the government several million dollars, and he was involved in violence in Ukraine that put US lives and interests in jeopardy. He used to run whorehouses, fake charities, and had been arrested for assaulting family members and police officers. Don’t make a case for him, Alex.”

“I’m not. I’m just saying-”

“Cerny was an Eagle Scout compared to Federov. Cerny wanted to run an operation to put Federov out of business. Cerny may not have been the most shining knight in our court, but matched against Federov, Cerny was a no-brainer. We’d make that same call a hundred times out of a hundred.”

“And perhaps that’s why the Agency is overdue for reorganization,” Alex said.

Quintero sighed. He reached again into his file-his bag of tricks. More show-and-tell. He pulled out more photographs, these in color and of recent vintage.

“When Isaacson was arrested, Cerny went missing on us,” Quintero said. “He probably was afraid he would be prosecuted as well. He may have been right, or maybe we would have been willing to let him walk if Isaacson copped a plea and took the fall. We’ll never know. But then Cerny started turning up in another operation that we were shadowing. First he was in Beirut. Then Tel Aviv. Then Cairo. And he was meeting with Russians. The man could not stay away from Russians.”

Quintero laid out more photographs, a nice set from each of the aforementioned capitals. In the photographs she saw Michael Cerny again, flanked by two men whom Quintero identified as Russians, known as Victor and Boris. Both men favored Western suits with open collars. They had a thuggish look about them. Boris was the larger of the two, and each time they were seen with Cerny they appeared to be in the midst of negotiating something.

“Our theory is that Cerny made off with a basketful of goodies to sell,” Quintero said. “And he set up to sell them to his Russian friends. We’ve intercepted a few messages. He shuttles back and forth to Cairo from somewhere else in the Middle East. His code name, ‘Ambidextrous,’ is a self-congratulatory nod to his own abilities, I’m sure.”

“Ambidextrous,” she repeated. “Wonderful.”

“He probably has the information on a series of memory sticks, which I’m sure he has copied. Our guess is that this is his retirement plan. He’ll sell to the highest bidder, but he’s starting with the Russians because he knows them. We all know that the Russians are trying to beef up their nuclear clout again, so they’d be prime customers for anything Cerny might have stolen.” Quintero paused. “But here’s the other disturbing thing,” he added. “Cerny’s Russians have links to the Mossad.”

“Israeli intelligence?” she asked, surprised.

“That’s the way we’re reading it right now,” Quintero said. Then he pushed another file toward her.

“Sit here and read this,” he said. “Meanwhile, I’m going for coffee. May I bring you some?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

She accepted the files.

“I’ll be back in half an hour,” he said. “This should give you some background.”

Quintero departed from the room. Alex broke open the seals on the set of files and began to read.