“Hey,” she answered.
She slid off the stool into his embrace. It was longer than it needed to be, but she went with it. She felt his lips linger on her cheek. Then he released her, and she installed herself back on the barstool.
“No hard feelings?” she asked.
“From what?” He eased onto the chair next to her.
“I didn’t like the way we said good-bye … in New York.”
“Nah.” He waved her off. “It’s forgotten. We’re friends.”
“You’re okay with that?”
He shrugged and winked. “I’m allowed to keep hoping that something might change, right?” he said, gently teasing. “I mean, no law against wishful thinking, right?”
“You’re allowed,” Alex answered.
The bartender appeared, and Ben ordered for himself and Alex. Alex glanced over at MacPhail and Ramirez. Ramirez gave her a goofy grin and a thumbs-up. She scowled back just as Ben turned back to her.
“So?” he asked. “What sort of trouble you in now?”
She blew out a long breath. “I’m making a trip out of the country. That’s all I can tell you. It’s against the rules even to say that much. I’m nervous and scared, and I need someone friendly to settle me down.”
“Okay,” he said. He put his hand on hers. “I’m here.”
“Thank you. That means a lot.”
“Between us, there were threats against me in New York. So I’m dropping off the radar and taking what might loosely be called a short-term foreign posting, also known as keeping my head down and trying not to get killed. If I seem blase about it,” she concluded, “that’s a huge feint, because I’m nervous as a dozen scared cats, but you’re the one person I can bare my soul to. How’s that?”
“Lousy,” he said. “And I know you well enough to see how shook up you are.”
“It’s that obvious?”
“To me,” he said. The drinks arrived. Ben continued, “You going alone?”
She hesitated. “I can’t tell you that.”
He looked at her strangely. “Someone you work with?”
“No. Someone I know. I can’t tell you the name.”
As he tried to decipher the situation, Alex began to feel the whole conversation was going the wrong way. “Someone you’re involved with?” he asked after a long pause.
“No,” she answered immediately. “And, Ben, don’t ask questions like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I asked you not to. Please?”
“Okay, okay,” he said.
“Ben, I need a friend right now. I need you to be that friend, to have a strong shoulder, and to believe in what I’m doing. Without asking questions. Can you do that?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I’ll try. It’s just that … you come to D.C., I see you, I think I’m over you and can accept the way things are, and I take one look at you, and it all goes in another direction. I’m not over you. That’s what.”
She steepled her fingers in front of herself. She didn’t know whether to cry or scream. She should have known this was a bad idea. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her two FBI guards. It was 11:00 p.m., and they were watching ESPN’s Sports Center more carefully than they were watching her.
“How long have you known this guy?” Ben asked.
She quickly calculated. “Just shy of a year,” she answered.
Ben leaned back on the stool. He seemed to stretch slightly, then settled again. “Wow,” he said. “That explains a lot.”
“What does it explain?” she asked, turning the conversation around.
“Why you were never interested in pursuing anything with me,” he said. “There was someone else. You might have at least told me. Or mentioned it.”
“Ben, I don’t need this right now. It’s not why I asked you to come over. And I’m not involved with Paul. It’s a professional assignment.”
“Yeah, right, okay,” he said sullenly, hearing but not listening. “We’ll just be buddies. I’ll listen to what you have to say. I won’t get mad, and I won’t tell you how much I burn with envy and jealousy over the guy you’re traveling with.”
She put a hand on him, but he seemed unreceptive. In the back of her mind, a voice told her that she should have left him alone this evening.
He looked down into his drink.
“I asked you over as a friend,” she said.
“Sure,” he answered. “But you just play around with me, you know that? Just play around.” He looked her squarely in the eye. “I’m in love with you. You know that.”
She was unable to respond.
“There,” he said, “I said it. It’s in the open. Do you think that’s meaningless? Does it bother you? Don’t answer any of this,” he continued quickly, “because anything you say will make things worse.” He paused. “But I’ve given you plenty to think about, haven’t I?”
“I already had plenty, Ben,” she said.
“And now you have more,” he said. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
“There,” he said. “That makes me happy and probably makes your FBI guys happy as well, or it would if they were paying any attention. The only person it doesn’t make happy, I’d guess, is you. But at least I told you. If you don’t come back from this trip, wherever you’re going, at least I got to say it once.”
He stepped from the stool and downed the end of his drink.
“Good night, Ben,” she said.
“Good night, Alex.”
She watched him in the mirror behind the bar as he disappeared out the door, his limp more pronounced than when he arrived. She stayed, in frustration. A lonely businessman at the far end of the bar sidled over to her and attempted a clumsy late-evening no-one-is-ugly-after-midnight pickup.
She indulged him with conversation for a few minutes, then went upstairs by herself. By then, the night team had relieved MacPhail and Ramirez. In her room, she lay awake, wondering what had just happened – and why.
Then she slept.
Alex woke up early the next morning and opened her laptop. There were documents in her secure email. Nothing of much importance from Rome. Gian Antonio Rizzo had managed to cadge a few files – a half dozen official ones plus one extra from his private stock. They reaffirmed what she already knew about Roland Violette. At least there were no glaring discrepancies. In his email, which was dated the previous evening, June 7, he sent these seven items along with a funny, literate, affectionate, flirtatious, mildly obscene and thoroughly decadent note in Italian. “Mia Carissima Alejandra,” he wrote in Italian,As you continue to contact me for sources and the deep dark background of these sordid matters, I conclude that you have chosen me to serve as your personal Mephistopheles. Elated at the anointment, I note that Mephistopheles first appeared in the Faustian legend as one of the seven princes of hell. There are seven deadly sins in the Bible. A Roman, I come from the city of “i sette colli”-the seven hills. Today is the seventh of June. Coincidences, Alex? I believe not! Hence, I forward these seven files to you, my wicked, divine, beautiful American friend, with only one regret – that they are transmitted electronically and not on seven ragged fragments of human skin, upon which they deserve to be. May these seven items bring you better luck than they brought to those discussed therein …
Rizzo then proceeded to regale her with personal news. He had apparently lost both his heart and the final vestiges of his common sense to his young associate Mimi, a girl one third his age, and one of his best code breakers in Rome. They were heading off on holiday together to Vietnam, stopping in Los Angeles on the way so they could both go to Disneyland. He noted in closing that he was booked on an Alitalia Boeing 777.
What a world. And this was how Alex’s friends behaved. She was disappointed that Gian Antonio didn’t have more, but at least he had made her laugh. When she closed out of that correspondence, she glanced at the time on her monitor. It was noon in Europe. Just now the U.S. Embassy in Madrid had sent their file on Roland Violette. It was from Peter Wilkins, her CIA case officer in Spain. There were some attachments of significant size.
Alex ordered breakfast from room service and scanned the new material. Breakfast arrived. She kept reading. One document considerably piqued her curiosity.Soviet espionage efforts against the United States via Roland Violette
Document USSR/2007/10/12/cia- Esp.hg.7
On July 9th, 1983, the US Central Intelligence Agency intercepted a series of memos in Caracas, Venezuela, in which two Soviet consular officials discussed the contributions of a compromised intelligence officer who had been formerly assigned to Central American affairs in Langley. They mused about the possibility of obtaining confidential files generated by Secretary of State George Schultz vis-a-vis continuing efforts against (a) the government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and (b) all upper-level government officials in Cuba, including Fidel and Raul Castro. One of the Soviet officials had commented that they may get the letter from “Vortex,” apparently a code name for the bribed CIA official in Langley, and belittled “Vortex” for his excessive and ostentatious display of personal jewelry, including a wristwatch that cost more than half his annual salary.Examining officer’s note: It has never been established when surveillance efforts actually commenced on Violette, but it is believed that attention settled upon him following the interception of the Cuban memos. He was tipped by the Israeli service he was supplying: GHL 01/23/05
Mention was also made that Vortex had married a Costa Rican woman with expensive tastes who was currently spending him into oblivion in “the best style of a devoutly capitalist Central American woman of a privileged family …”
None of this was new. The memo only put an exclamation point on what Alex already knew, rather than to add question marks. The fact that Violette had been a renegade agent was history. But the memo, she noted, was the beginning of crazy Roland Violette’s unraveling. It was curious that he had finally become undone by comments made by his Soviet handlers, rather than observation by his peers. In retrospect, to Alex’s suspicious eye, the man had been off-kilter twenty-five to thirty years ago. Why hadn’t anyone said anything, made inquiries, called in the attention of superiors?
Alex wondered who might have been protecting Violette, and why. Who had been the extra gardener for the corrupt little flower, if anyone? Under normal circumstances, she might have followed the flow of this and seen where it led. She made a mental note to examine this at greater length later on, if she ever had the time.
And yet, no matter what sort of nut case he had now turned into, she was increasingly steadfast in her desire to bring Violette back to the U.S. The Madrid files added a few tidbits. Fifteen agents, possibly as many as twenty-one, lay in Cold War graves due to this man.
At one time there had been a plan to send some Miami Cubans into Cuba, grab him, and return him, Eichmann-style, to the U.S. But that plan had been nixed at the cabinet level during the administration of Bush 41. Rendition, which would gain favor with a later administration, was considered downright impolitic and incorrect in the pre-9/11 world. That nixed the abduction plan, as did the fact that Violette had a few doubles at the time, and it would have been a further embarrassment to the CIA to have broken every rule of international law and emerged with the wrong individual.
Must be a great package of goods he’s planning to bring back, Alex concluded, if he’s really planning at all. Tempers hadn’t subsided over the years. There was an undertone of rage to almost all the notes on the case.
She was about to exit her email when another curious dispatch was smacked down in her account. It was a forwarded document from an anonymous sender within the FBI, a series of emails with names and addresses removed, forwarded to her as an “undisclosed recipient” from a sender who was equally undisclosed. It had to do with Paul Guarneri.
Overnight, some busybody – MacPhail? Ramirez? she wondered – had inquired from the U.S. Passport Service and subsequently the IRS – whether Paul Guarneri was eligible to leave the country, financially speaking. Did he have a valid passport, did he have any warrants outstanding, tax debts, civil liens, criminal investigations pending, child support overdue? Overnight, the gnomes of the IRS had been prowling, bureaucratic meddling and snooping at its finest. The inquiries stopped just short of investigating whether he had been good to his mother and was kind to animals. The inquisitors had failed to find anything. Paul Guarneri, in fact, seemed to have graduated from their probes with a certain fiduciary pedigree. He paid his taxes properly, had nothing derogatory lurking anywhere, and, from a quick assessment, was personally worth five to seven million dollars, while sitting astride a real estate empire worth several times that, even taking into account outstanding debt, which seemed to be minimal. In the end, the gnomes seemed to be on Paul’s side, cheering him on, if anything. Aside from the associations of his birth, if Paul had come off any cleaner, he would have been squeaky.
She finished breakfast and closed the files. She packed up the flash drives and the hard copy CIA file. She showered and dressed.
MacPhail and Ramirez were in the hallway and wished her a good morning when she popped open the door.
“Sleep well?” she asked. “Feel good?”
“No,” MacPhail answered.
“No,” Ramirez echoed.
“Me neither,” she said. “But I’m packed and ready. Let’s get out of here.”
That afternoon at Langley, Alex again spent time with Thomas Meachum in the Technical Resources Division on the second floor of the main CIA building. Meachum was in charge of providing her documents and equipment. From a file in his office, he pulled out an assortment of documents, all with recent photographs of Alex. On top was the forged Canadian passport in the name of Josephine Marie LeSage, the name she had used in Cairo. Beneath it was the U.S. passport that she had used in Ukraine. Meachum looked at the two passports, compared the pictures, glanced at Alex, and raised a bemused eyebrow.
“Do you remember the name you used in Ukraine?” he asked.
“Anna Marie Tavares,” she said.
“Very good,” he said. “Date of birth? Place of birth? Remember what we did last time you were Anna Tavares?”
It took her a second. Then she recalled the formula.
“I think you took my real normal birthday, December twenty-fourth, and cut it in half. Twelve twenty-four became six twelve. And I was born in Los Angeles, right?”
“Good memory,” he acknowledged.
From the folder, Meachum pulled a new item that the CIA had just concocted, using pictures on file. It was a Mexican passport in the name of Anna Marie Tavares, complete with a photograph of Alex.
