FIFTY-ONE

On the third day after Cerny’s apprehension, Alex’s cell phone rang in her room at the Metropole. She answered quickly, thinking it was her arrangements to return to America. She had an evening flight that day and was anxious to get home.

But the call had little to do with travel. It was Bissinger at the embassy. Her request had been granted, Fitzgerald told her, and she could have thirty minutes to speak directly to Michael Cerny, one-onone in his cell. But he was about to be moved, Bissinger explained, so it would have to be today.

“Moved to where?” she asked.

“Just moved,” Fitzgerald said.

“Right. When do I get to see him? I have a flight tonight to Rome.”

“Now,” Fitzgerald said. “There’s a man in the lobby waiting for you. You’ll recognize him.”

“Thank the powers that be for me.”

“Personal courtesy of Voltaire himself,” Fitzgerald said. “Call it professional courtesy. The best of all possible worlds.”

“I’ll thank him when I see him.”

“You won’t see him. Unless you do. But I’m told you’ll see his handiwork-and have some closure.”

For some reason that gave her a little cringe. “Why does that sound so ominous?” she asked.

Bissinger ignored the question. “It’s a rough place where you’re going. Proceed accordingly,” he continued.

“Is my visit with the prisoner official or unofficial?” she asked.

“Unofficial. No notes. No recording devices. It’s strictly off the books. Don’t sign in. There’s a window of twenty minutes. The prisoner is supposed to be alone in his cell; you’re going to keep him company.”

“Got it,” she said.

“I hope so.”

“Gun?” she asked.

“Bring it along, but you’ll have to check it before you go onto the dance floor. I need it back here anyway, and you can’t take it on the plane no matter who you know or work for.”

“Good point,” she said.

She threw on a pair of jeans and a jacket, kept her Beretta in her shoulder bag, stuffed the rest of her belongings in a travel duffel, and went down to the lobby. An SUV was waiting for her. She recognized Tony, who had by now become her favorite chauffeur in all of North Africa, and possibly the entire continent.

Tony drove her to yet another seedy area of the city, and soon they were going through checkpoints-first police, then military. Before long they were going down a remote highway through the sand, the scorching road seeming to go from nowhere to nowhere.

Along the sides of the road were trenches, with wire and an occasional sentry post. They were in a no-man’s-land of some sort, and Alex was already looking forward to leaving. Scenes like this made her love America and its freedoms all the more.

Then they arrived at a final gate, which was manned by soldiers. Tony seemed to know them. Alex looked at them carefully. She saw rank and insignia on their uniforms, and they appeared to be Arab. But she couldn’t tell exactly what they were, and she knew better than to ask. They were on a paramilitary site of some sort, one of those official unofficial brigades one finds in certain nondemocratic countries.

Everyone, everything, was unmarked. There were sentries and soldiers all over the place. Most of the buildings looked like guardhouses, tan walls set on sand with high barred windows. It looked like something from the cold war, but when the SUV pulled up to a stop and she stepped out, it wasn’t cold at all. It was easily a hundred and ten degrees in the broiling sun.

Tony said little, though he did ask her for her gun. She handed it over, holster and all.

“Can you have it returned to Mr. Fitzgerald at the embassy?” she asked.

“I’ll give it to my boss,” he said. “I think that would put it in the right channels.” His “boss” meant Voltaire.

“I think it would,” she agreed.

He walked her to one of the guardhouses and knew exactly where he was going. He led her past three guards with automatic weapons, into a building where a distant air-conditioning unit rumbled and kept the heat down to about ninety, plus the humidity. The architecture reminded her of the morgue where she had posed as dead. She cringed.

She went through two more locked gates and then into a cell where Michael Cerny was sitting on a cot. There was a steel table bolted to the floor, a plastic chair, and a pair of rings on the wall that could accommodate wrists. The area below the rings was stained. Alex had to tamp down her disgust when it dawned on her that the stains were from many years of blood.

Cerny saw her. First he looked at her in surprise, then fear.

Alex sat down on the chair.

Cerny continued to stare at her. He was sweating as if someone had opened an invisible faucet above him.

“Hello, Michael,” she said.

“I have nothing to say to you,” he said. “I don’t know why you came.”

“I’m here to talk anyway,” she said.

“It’s not you who worries me,” he said.

“Maybe it should.”

“It still doesn’t,” he said. After another empty moment, he said. “I understand they’re moving me.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” she said.

“Where to? Do you know that?”

She shrugged.

“Figures,” he said.

She had been thinking, as she entered this chamber, on what she really had to say to him-how she might have lectured him on a sense of decency or blamed him for the death of her fianc'e. But none of those words came to her, and the clock was ticking from the time she sat down.

“Quite a difference between here and when we first met, isn’t it?” she asked. “Or even between here and the last time we saw each other.”

“Nothing personal, you understand,” he said after several distant seconds.

“No. Of course not,” she said. “And I’m not an official inquisitor. The local man allowed me a few minutes with you, just to satisfy myself.”

“Pretty generous of him,” Cerny said. “What did you have to do in return?”

“Ask nicely,” she said, dishing it back. “What occasions this is that I saw an old friend of yours the other day. And after a conversation with him, almost everything fell into place.”

“What old friend?” he asked, as if surprised to learn that he had any.

“Yuri Federov.”

Cerny shook his head.

“He’s still alive? I’m surprised.” He snorted.

“I’m going to describe to you my sense of the big picture,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ll want to comment, but I’m going to entertain you with it, anyway.”

“Suit yourself.”

“It was the Russians who put you up to getting rid of Federov, didn’t they?” she began. “They sent you to the United States many years ago, back when Vladimir Putin was holding together remnants of the old KGB. Sell a little bill of goods here, another one there. You were Putin’s man in Washington and Langley-or more likely one of Putin’s men-going all the way back to the 1990s when you first appeared hawking your bag of tricks. Didn’t much matter who you were selling out to start with, did it? Langley was always buying the act. But then, as years went by, and the goals got bigger, every person you compromised was in some way inimical to Vladimir Putin.”

He shifted on his cot. There seemed to be some swelling on the side of his head, and he kept touching it.

“I even reviewed all the cases you worked, right up to the one about Dr. Ishraf Kerwidi, the fellow who went out the window in London. That served a whole host of interests, didn’t it, Michael? Putin. The Israelis. Maybe even the Americans.”

“Kerwidi had it coming,” Cerny said.

“By your way of thinking, I’m sure he did,” Alex said.

“You might want to watch out for open windows yourself,” he added, “if you keep making enemies all over the place. Got to be people who think you have it coming too, Alex.”

“Just like the people around here think you have it coming as well.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“I just wouldn’t want to be you right now,” she said.

“Who would?” he asked with a final dash of irony. “Certainly not me.”

“So then I would be correct?” she said, glancing at her watch and backtracking. “You were a Russian agent, going back at least a decade. And the whole operation in Kiev was put forth primarily to take Yuri Federov out of the picture for Putin. I talked to Yuri about this. He’s not well, by the way. Federov, by his own admission, had become too powerful following the Ukrainian gas crisis of 2005. So in a strange way, American interests and Russian interests-Putin’s interests-merged. He was on the US hit list for gangsterism, arms dealing, and tax evasion. But worse for him, he was on Putin’s hit list for just being too powerful. So you came to the CIA with a plan to take him out. First by an assassin in Rome who hit the wrong person. And then later in Kiev.”

Cerny exhaled a long breath, one of resignation.

“It was an easy sale,” Cerny said. “The CIA wanted Federov gone. Who really cared if Putin wanted him gone too?”

“Poor me. Poor Robert. Poor everyone else who got killed in Ukraine that day. We were all caught in the middle,” Alex said. “Do you remember a Colombian cocaine lord named Pablo Escobar?” Alex asked.

“Sure, I do,” Cerny answered.

“Escobar once planted a bomb on an Avianca-jet-just to kill one specific person,” Alex said. “The plane blew up and eighty-six people died. Collateral damage. That’s what we’ve all been. Collateral damage for the games nations play.”

“That’s how life is. You’d do the same if you were assigned to do it.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” she said. “I’d like to think, in fact, that there’s a special place in hell for people who do things like that.”

“Well,” said Cerny. “I told the inquisitors everything, so why shouldn’t you know too? So I serve a few years in prison. Putin’ll get me back. They always do. That’s all I’m going to say.”

“That’s all I’m going to ask,” she answered.

By then, time was up and Alex had had quite enough. Two military men in blue berets were at the cell door. They clanked the door noisily and said something in Arabic that Alex didn’t understand. She was more than ready to leave. The door opened with a metallic groan.

She left the cell without saying anything further. If Cerny had anything more on his mind, and she was sure he did, he wasn’t going to talk about it.