Conspiracy in Kiev (28 page)
M
imi was dressed to kill when she arrived at the Club San Remo shortly before midnight. Sailor Moon all the way. Blue and white blouse. Red shoes and knee-high red socks. She wore a blue miniskirt, which normally was eight inches above the knee but she had used pins to take it up another two inches. Two ponytails, one to each side. Blue tint in her hair. The works.
Her escort was a handsome young plainclothes member of the
carabinieri
, a guy named Enrico. If he was going to get paid for escorting girls to clubs like this, well, he had the best job in the world. And Mimi, she liked the looks of her escort right away. He wasn’t the smartest guy she’d ever met, much less the most sophisticated. But he sure was well put together. She had hit the daily double on this assignment, she reasoned. She would get paid
and
have some fun.
They had another man in the club to watch their backs, but Mimi never even knew who he was. All she knew was what her job was, how to dress so a guy couldn’t miss her, much less say no, and then how to get the job done.
Enrico worked a cell phone once they were inside the club. The contact had been shadowing Anatoli all day.
Enrico sat at a table with Mimi and they sipped scotches. Mimi kept crossing and uncrossing her legs, enjoying the growing attention from her escort. Finally, Enrico turned to her.
“That’s him,” he said, indicating to his left. “That’s Anatoli.”
Enrico closed his phone. Mimi leaned over and put an arm on Enrico’s shoulder, but her real intent was to look past him and get a better view of her mark.
Anatoli, Federov’s onetime sidekick and bodyguard, sat at a corner table with two beautiful young women. He wore a leather jacket, his hair was cut short, almost an old-style KGB cut.
“He’s nice looking,” Mimi said in Italian. She recognized him from his picture.
“What did he do?” Enrico asked. “Why are we watching him?”
“I think he killed someone.”
“Oh,” Enrico said. “After we’re finished here, want to go get some food?”
She looked at Enrico. She smiled. “Sure,” she said. The nice thing about Enrico to Mimi, aside from how good looking he was, was that he was with the national police, so if he had killed anyone it was probably legal and he wasn’t in any trouble for it. Unlike Anatoli.
“Then let’s get this done and let’s get out of here,” Enrico said.
“You don’t like the music?”
“No.”
“You don’t like the drinks?”
“They’re okay.”
“But you do like me?” she laughed.
“A lot. Let’s go somewhere.”
“Your place?”
“Maybe.”
“Okay,” she said. “Keep me covered.”
She gave him a kiss on the cheek and went to work.
She fingered the small tacklike transmitter that she had concealed at the waist of her skirt. She pulled out a change purse that was filled with small coins. She unzipped it partially and stood.
She worked her way toward the ladies room, which, by good fortune, took her past Anatoli’s table. As she passed the table, she unzipped the purse. The contents, entirely coins, spilled out. As they fell, in the erratic light of the club, she whacked them so that they’d roll under Anatoli’s table.
Mimi then let loose with a loud profanity in Italian. Now she had Anatoli’s attention. He stared at her as did the women at his table. She had
everyone’s
attention now.
Her hands went to her face as she surveyed the loss of her coins with feigned horror. Anatoli, checking her out, slowly started to smile.
“
Oh
,
scusi
,
scusi
,
scusi!
” she pleaded.
Anatoli laughed. He didn’t speak much Italian. He gestured with his hands that it wasn’t a problem.
More sign language. Mimi pointed to herself and then under the table. “
Voi permette?
” she asked. She gave him her sexiest most excited smile. Could she maybe crawl underneath and pick things up?
Anatoli nodded. Mimi went down to her hands and knees, a flurry of bare arms and legs, and disappeared headfirst under the table to retrieve the coins and conduct her larger bit of business.
She crawled around between four bare female legs and two male legs in jeans. Working quickly, she picked up coin after coin. She got Anatoli and his two female friends quickly conditioned to feeling her movements, brushing against them, reaching past their shoes and boots. Anatoli was predictably amused and fresh, giving Mimi a solid pinch on her butt. She gave his hand a playful slap, which only encouraged him more. Then his hand came to rest on her butt and gave it a squeeze.
Perfect timing, just what she wanted. It gave her the opportunity to “retaliate” by holding his foot. At exactly the same moment he was examining her backside, she withdrew the little homing device from her waist and shoved it firmly into the heel of his boot. Then she wriggled free and emerged with a laugh from beneath the table.
The two women with Anatoli glared at her. But he was all hearts and flowers.
“
Va bene?
” he asked. Find everything?
“
Suffisamente
,” she answered. Enough. “
Grazie mille.
”
“
Prego.
” He answered.
She turned and sauntered back to Enrico, feeling Anatoli’s eyes on her backside as she left. She slid into the seat next to Enrico.
“Got him,” she said. She wasn’t nervous at all. Inside, she felt remarkably cool. “We can get out of here,” she said.
“No, no,” Enrico answered. “We wait a few minutes. No reason to make him suspicious if he sees you leave right away.”
“Then I’ll have another scotch,” she said.
In fact, she had two of them. Both doubles.
Thirty minutes later, they were back out on the street. They walked a block. There they found Rizzo in a car, waiting. He was just putting down a cell phone when they approached.
“Perfect,” he said. “The signal is strong.”
“It’s in the heel of his right boot,” she said.
“I won’t ask how you did that,” Rizzo said.
“Use your imagination.”
“Mimi, you’re a genius. And I love your outfit.”
He handed her an envelope. Impetuously, she opened it. There were five hundred Euros in it in cash, ten bills of fifty Euros each.
“Anytime,” she said. This was the easiest money she’d ever made.
“I’m off duty now?” Enrico asked Rizzo.
He gave the handsome young man a nod. “Just see that Mimi gets home safely,” he said. “Eventually.”
“Eventually,” Mimi said, hanging on Enrico’s arm now.
They all laughed.
Rizzo pulled away from the curb. Enrico took Mimi under his arm, and, mission accomplished, they went their own way for the rest of the night.
T
he formal way for the US government to persuade a foreign government to do something is through a
démarche
, which can be made either in Washington to the foreign embassy or in its capital or in both places at once.
It can be done at any level, up to and including “calling in” the foreign country’s ambassador for a senior state official to deliver the request or having the US ambassador approach the host country foreign minister or even prime minister.
In the case of the American couple who had been shot to death on a cold evening in January, the American government needed to be coy in its handling of the case. The Italians were already fuming over American handling of several intelligence issues, and there were still warrants out for several CIA agents concerning “renditions” carried out in Italy. Worse, the Italians knew that the CIA had embedded some excellent contacts in Rome right under their noses within the various Italian police agencies.
Hence, a prickly problem it was. The CIA station chief in Rome informally approached his contacts in Italian intelligence and began to exert whatever informal influence could be brought to bear upon the Roman police. The scandals about CIA flights with disappeared persons transiting Italian airspace did not make this any easier. Similar contacts were made in Washington through the Italian ambassador.
An additional complication was that the Italian government was, as always, a delicate coalition. Such requests reaching the public, or at least certain members of parliament, could actually blow apart the ruling coalition.
Nonetheless, the matter of Lt. Rizzo’s investigation went through the usual back channels. Rizzo felt he had made highly praiseworthy progress on the case. So when he found himself summoned to the office of the minister of the interior, he should have beamed with pride, expecting to be congratulated upon his fine work. But one never knew which way these meetings with bosses would go. Nor, in any way, could he expect to know where his investigation would be headed next.
M
onday morning. Alex stood in the security line at JFK in New York, waiting to check in for her flight.
Time for everyone to be searched. She read all the signs. Every bag to be X-rayed. Take off your jacket. Take off your socks and shoes. High risk of terrorist attack. Drop your slightly used undergarments in a one-pint ziplock and turn them over to the baggage handlers.
Hey, got a steel pin in your hip? Take it out so we can check it.
What nonsense. Okay, okay. She knew she was anxious over this new trip, and she tried to cool it. But what was her country coming to? Give me your tired, your poor, your teeming masses, your fingerprints.
Signs, signs. Everywhere there were signs, as the old pop song went. Messing up the view. Messing up everyone’s mind. No cigarette lighters on the aircraft. No scissors. No knives. No booze. How about a numchuck or a Tai Chi sword?
Yeah. Long-haired freaky people didn’t need to apply, but they were actually going though the security line just fine. A woman who looked like someone’s great grandmother was being searched, however. A security person was examining her roll of lipstick. Alex sipped from a fresh bottle of cold water that she knew she was going to have to relinquish.
The fear had taken root all over America by now, planted by excessively reckless people in the government. Having been in Ukraine on the day of the RPG attacks, having had to fire lethal weapons at other human beings and shoot her way out, she knew what real fear was. She knew what it was like to be scared, to understand what a true threat feels like, to be a moment away from a painful death or perhaps permanent disfigurement if she acted wrong or was just plain unlucky. She knew what it was like to lose someone she loved in an attack that made no sense.
But on American soil, she didn’t want to live in constant fear. She resented the signs. Who the heck was going to make a bomb out of Scope and Pepsodent, anyway?
Alex took off her shoes, belt, and jacket and put them in one bin. Her computer came out of her backpack and went into another while the backpack itself went into a third. Then she dumped her wallet, change, keys, passport, and boarding pass into a fourth. Then she graduated to the hallowed grounds of a “five binner” as she dropped the black duffel bag stuffed with a week’s worth of clothes in the fifth.
A security person watched her uneasily, and she was ready for him to say something. She preempted him. “Why don’t we all just wear transparent plastic raincoats when we travel,” she said. “It would speed things up and make things much easier, wouldn’t it?”
He looked at her and muttered something about regulations. He was about to wave her through when a TSA agent stopped the screening counter.
“We’ll need to search this backpack,” he said to Alex. “Is this yours?
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
Whatever it was, it drew a second TSA person, a supervisor. They opened the bag and pulled the rest of her things off the carrier. How she longed right then to have a Federal ID, her old Treasury Department or FBI identification. But she was as naked and vulnerable as any other American.
The first agent reached in and pulled out a half-finished bottle of Diet 7-Up. He smiled, shrugged, and tossed it into a bin that was already overflowing with other half-dead plastics of liquid.
She smiled back. “Oops. Sorry,” Alex said.
“It happens all day,” the guy said. A job well done, that capture of a 7-Up bottle.
She repacked and pulled her backpack onto her shoulder.
What was the last thought of that song?
Thank you, Lord, for thinking of me, but I think I’m doing fine.
Trouble was, Alex wasn’t so sure how her country was doing. Billions spent to inconvenience travelers, and where was the real fight against the real enemies of modern civilization? Just one woman’s opinion as she grabbed her duffel and hooked her backpack onto her left shoulder. She turned toward her gate.
At a newsstand on the way, she bought another drink and a paperback novel in Spanish, one of those Nobel Prize—winning South American works where the women turn into butterflies. Might as well get into the mood.
A
few hours into the flight to Caracas, as the aircraft passed above the Caribbean, the pilot announced that passengers on the right of the plane could see Cuba. Alex glanced out her window, and sure enough, there it was, nestled in the blue water about a hundred miles to the east.
She had never been there, wished she’d be able to visit sometime, and took a long look as her plane passed. It was hard to believe the political issues at play. She felt sorry for the Cuban people, who had been under one oppressive regime or another for more than a century. When would the world again be able to celebrate the classic poetry of José Martí or the music of the modern-day Cuban
trovador
Silvio Rodríguez?
Christian missionaries were not allowed to visit the island, for example, even to bring clothing or medical assistance. The Cuban people deserved better, as did all the people of Central and South America. Having had a mother from Mexico, Alex felt very close to these people. She made a note to include them in her prayers.
The island passed. The jet continued its path southward over the Caribbean. Alex slipped into headphones and dozed. She missed Robert horribly. A wave of sadness remained, but at least she felt she was moving forward, starting to get a grip again on her life. She wondered how Ben was doing as well as her pals at the gym.
Note to self. Work my way back into basketball when and if I get back to Washington.
She slipped off into a light nap.
She drifted. She opened her eyes. It had seemed like only a few minutes, but she had fallen asleep for the better part of an hour.
The plane was descending now into Maiquetía, Caracas’s airport. The airport was called that after the village that once stood there, rather than “Simón Bolívar International Airport,” its real name.
The aircraft went into a sharp bank as it angled in from the sea, with mountains on one side. The aisle-seat passenger in Alex’s row was an older woman who gave a nervous glance at her seatmate. She shook her head. “Scary, no?” she asked. She looked to Alex for comfort as well.
Alex smiled.
“And you haven’t flown into
La Carlota
,” the man in the middle seat said. He spoke with a Spanish accent.
“Where’s
La Carlota
?” Alex asked.
“The old downtown airport in Caracas. It’s mostly used for general aviation now. Coming in you’re almost kissing the Ávila, the mountain range that forms the southern border of Caracas. As a young man I remember coming in there in fog. You felt the pilots were just sensing where the Ávila was.”
Alex nodded and shook her head. The aircraft eased into a further descent.
“President Chávez often still flies out of there,” the other passenger said. “Hopefully one day his pilot will get it wrong.”
Moments later, they were on the ground, taxiing to the terminal.
Maiquetía airport was astonishingly modern. Alex retrieved her bags and cleared customs easily. Outside the gates, the steamy Venezuelan heat was waiting for her. She was struck by the contrast with Kiev, where everything had been frozen. The clothing she had worn from New York was already uncomfortably heavy.
She scanned a crowd waiting for arriving passengers. There was a well-dressed man with a sign that had her name on it.
Alex approached him in Spanish. “
Buenas tardes. Soy Señorita LaDuca.
”
“
Mucho gusto
,” he answered.
They continued in Spanish. Alex slipped into the flow of it with ease.
“I’m José Mardariaga of the Mardariaga limousine service,” he said. “I’ve been sent by Señor Collins to pick you up. Let me take your bags.”
The man took her to a new Lexus with air conditioning that worked. A blessing.
“Is it always this hot this time of year?” she asked, making conversation.
“Down here on the coast,
sí
,
claro!
” Señor Mardariaga said. “But not in Caracas, which is up high. The Spaniards usually built their colonial capitals in the mountains away from the coast for this reason. For instance in Chile, I’m a Chilean myself, the port is El Paraíso, but the capital of Santiago de Chile is inland, in the mountains.”
“Nice airport.”
“There’s even a TGI Friday’s,” the driver said, as if that was the height of current civilization. Perhaps it was, Alex reflected.
“Chávez’s doing?” she asked.
“Not a bit of it! The project of replacing the old airport terminal predates him.”
Hearing him, Alex thought back to her phone conversation with her friend Don Tomás, just before leaving. He had discussed attitudes toward Hugo Chávez based on social class.
Venezuelan sociologists traditionally divided society into five classes. A, B, C, D, and E. A were the rich, B were those who could have an American middle-class lifestyle, C were people what the Venezuelans called “middle class” but had an American lower-middle-class lifestyle at best. D’s were working class people with very modest income but steady work, and E’s were the people on the bottom.
Seventy percent of Venezuelans were D’s and E’s. They were Chávez’s unconditional supporters. The C’s were torn, but many were anti-Chávez, if for no other reason than the classic desire of their class to seek to distinguish itself from the classes below. The A’s and B’s loathed Chávez. The B’s were in the toughest position, because this was the country they were stuck with. The A’s, the truly wealthy, already had their bolt-holes in Miami and their assets stashed in American and Swiss banks.
Clearly, Alex thought, her driver with his own limousine service was an anti-Chávez C.
The ride to the city went quickly. Alex came out of her daydream as they went through a tunnel, and then on the other side they were on the expressway that ran the length of the long, narrow city. Before her, Alex saw high-rise office buildings and, on some of the hills, obvious condos. But on other hills there were cinderblock shacks piled one on top of the other.
“
Estoy curiosa. ¿Dondé está Petrare?
” Alex asked, remembering Don Tomás’s description of the city. Where’s Petrare?
“That hill right in front, in the distance. You won’t want to go there,” the driver said.
“I know,” she said. “A friend warned me.”
The car turned off the elevated freeway onto the parallel street running under it. The driver executed a hair-raising U-turn in the middle of traffic, then turned right up a well-manicured driveway with palms in the center strip.
The Lexus came to a plaza with a white, low-lying building and stopped at the door. “
El Tamanaco
.” the driver announced. “
Su hotel
,
Señorita
.”
Alex checked in. She found a suitcase waiting for her in her room, courtesy of Sam and his operatives. Jungle clothing and a weapon. Shirts, hiking boots, shorts, a rain slicker, and a Beretta. She tried things on. She checked the weapon. She also found a small digital camera and three extra memory cards. A thoughtful addition.
She showered, ordered a light meal from room service, and realized she was exhausted. Toward ten in the evening, she collapsed into bed and slept.
