T
he heavyset woman came down the stairs of her apartment building in a hurry. She carried one large suitcase and struggled with it. Three flights down the back stairs and she was sweating beneath her tan raincoat. But she had been sweating since before she had finished backing.
Short notice, long trip. But a big payoff. It would all be worth it. She was going to get a new passport, a new identity. And a free trip out of the country. She would get more money in cash in the next few hours than she would by keeping her lousy government job for another twenty years. So it hadn’t been much of a decision when she had made it several years ago.
Still she was nervous. She had heard horror stories about people who got involved in this type of thing. But there was no turning back now.
It was nearly midnight.
She stepped out from the front door of her middle class building in Alexandria, Virginia. A few parking spaces down, in front of a hydrant, a car engine started up. The car slid forward a few parking spots and gently came to a halt.
She recognized two of the men in the front seat. The front window rolled down.
Handsome men. Smiling faces. The faces of her homeland.
“Hello, Olga,” the man in the shotgun seat said.
She answered in Ukrainian. “Do you have the money? Do you have my passport?” she demanded.
The man opened an envelope that sat on his lap. There were some huge bricks of money and some banking information where the rest could be found. He handed her a Brazilian passport.
“See if you like your picture,” the man answered. “But I wouldn’t advise you to stay too much longer. FBI. They’re probably on their way.”
The mere mention of American police was enough to make her heart jump. She had known of other CIA employees who had sold out over the years. Most of them went to federal prisons and didn’t emerge until they were very old or until some other more patriotic prisoner stuck a shiv in their backs.
Olga glanced at the passport. Her picture. A new name. She was now Helen Tamshenko and she was a resident of São Paolo.
Good enough. She reached for the back door and slid into the car. She slumped low. No one would spot her as a passenger.
The driver pulled away from the curb. An oncoming pair of headlights swept the street. Then a second. Two big unmarked Buicks, traveling fast.
“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.
O
ne 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.”
“Killed, you mean.”
“That’s another word for it.”
“And that all ties into Kiev, doesn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“Which in turn ties in how and why my fiancé got killed.”
He nodded.
“Someone betrayed me, didn’t they?” she said. “That’s why Maurice got killed. And Cerny. There’s a traitor somewhere on our side, and he’s got allegiances to the Ukrainian mob.”
“That’s a subject for future discussion,” McKinnon said.
“So the answer is
yes
?” she said.
McKinnon nodded.
“We had a leak in Washington,” McKinnon said. “Poor Mike Cerny. Cynical chap that he was, he hadn’t vetted all his assistants as well as he should have. Everything was getting to Federov almost before it happened.”
“Olga?” Alex asked.
“You said it. I didn’t.”
Alex shook her head in disgust.
“Anyway. Olga is someone you won’t be seeing again.”
“Arrested?”
“The opposition got to her first.” McKinnon said. “But we’ll discuss this later.”
“When I’m healthy enough,” she said, “we’ll go back at Federov, assuming he’s alive. And we’ll find any other traitor too. How’s that?”
“Federov is out of business, at least,” McKinnon said.
“How do you mean that?”
“He was deposed from his own businesses by his own peers,” McKinnon said. “That’s how it always works in the underworld. He drew too much attention to himself. If he’s not dead, he’s in deep cover. Like back into one of his priest outfits or something.”
“I’m sure,” she said, not really meaning it.
“One thing’s certain.
You’ll
never see him again.”
“I’m grateful,” she said.
“Federov’s still on our lists, though. Retired or not, if he’s alive we’ll go after him. But as I said, it’s no longer your problem, Alex.”
There was a pause while she remained silent. McKinnon stood.
“The French have posted an extra pair of their police in the lobby,” he explained. “
Policiers en civil.
Plainclothes. They look like a pair of bouncers. Then we’ve posted two of our own as guards on this floor also. Don’t know whether you’ve seen them.”
“I haven’t been out of this room since they wheeled me in,” she said.
“Of course.”
She gave everything some thought.
“I have some unfinished business in Venezuela too,” she said. “Barranco Lajoya. Those people. I’d like to do something.”
“Tough to accomplish much in that part of the world, isn’t it?” he commiserated.
She shook her head, the images of the carnage relentlessly replaying themselves in her mind’s eye. “Before I die, I want to go back and do what I can for those people. They deserve better.”
“You know what your boss, Mr. Collins, would say,” McKinnon said out of nowhere. “He’d say that’s where Jesus would be. Comforting the downtrodden and the desperate.”
She nodded. It suddenly hurt too much to speak.
“We’ve had discussions with Mr. Collins about Barranco Lajoya, by the way. Something may already be in the works. He’s willing to chip in heavily on an international relief effort.”
“God bless him,” she said.
“I know he’s going to phone you in the next few days.”
“That’s good,” she said. “We can talk.”
A nurse appeared. She looked at McKinnon, shook her head and tapped her wristwatch.
“I guess that’s my five minutes,” McKinnon said.
“And I guess I have a lot of work to do when I get out of here,” she said.
McKinnon left a calling card, a nondescript CIA thing with a fake name, a fake title, and a real phone number. The card cited him as a cultural attaché to the embassy in Paris, with an office in Rome. His cover job was overseeing the exchange of French and Italian filmmakers and American filmmakers.
She was left with a lot of time to think. Too much time, really, but no one ever remarked that time went quickly in a hospital. Federov played over and over in her mind, as did Barranco Lajoya.
Here she was alive again. Why?
What was she to do with the extra years she had been given?