Noel Hynd - Countdown in Cairo

Alex turned back to Janet. “Here’s what I’m having some initial trouble with though. I worked with Michael Cerny in Paris. The last I saw of him he was slumped low in the front seat of a car, blood on his body, with a broken windshield and a bunch of bullet holes in the glass.”

“He’s alive,” Janet said. “Sure as I’m sitting here, he’s alive and I saw him.”

Following the two days she had had in New York, meeting Paul Guarneri, spending time with Yuri Federov, and interviewing for a new job, Janet’s assertion had a kooky Twilight Zone ring to it. Alex felt a strange rumbling in her stomach and didn’t know if it was nerves or fear or just outright disbelief.

“Why don’t you tell me what you want to tell me, Janet,” Alex said.

Janet led Alex through the story of what had happened in Egypt, how they had gone from their hotel one night to the Royale, the joint with the crunchy floors, the stinking cigarette smoke, the fake luxury scotches, and the Cerny clone with his two friends, one of them named Victor.

Then there had been the trip to the men’s room, a few days of peace while they speculated on the sighting, and then the explosive device that killed Carlos.

Janet finished. Alex gave her a moment to recover. Janet used the time to fetch herself another beer. The room was silent for several seconds, aside from the refrigerator closing and the cap from a beer bottle coming off.

Alex turned to Don Tomas. “If my apartment is bugged, how do you know yours isn’t?” Alex whispered.

“Janet checked,” Don Tomas answered. “She has some equipment on permanent informal loan from her former employers.”

“I get it,” Alex said.

Janet returned and sat down.

“This bomb that went off,” Alex inquired gently to Janet. “You think it was intended for the two of you?”

“Absolutely,” Janet answered.

“Might it have been intended for Carlos alone?”

“We were with each other the entire time. If Carlos had enemies from here, why would they trail him all the way to Cairo? It was in response to what he’d seen, what we’d seen, in Cairo. At the Royale.”

“Did the police tell you anything about the bomb? In Cairo?”

“No. They treated us like a couple of dumb young Americans who’d brought trouble on themselves. They accused us of dealing drugs and all sorts of things. I was scared. Real scared. I got out of the country as soon as I could.”

“Janet phoned me from Cairo,” Don Tomas said. “I arranged for one of the consular officers to come see her at the police station. Otherwise, they might still be holding her.”

“And what happened when you returned to America?” Alex asked.

“The people I worked for debriefed me for hours,” she said. “Even the evening after the memorial service for Carlos. I told them what I knew; I told them what I thought. They told me I was crazy. They told me that Mike Cerny being alive was the most preposterous thing they’d ever heard.”

“That’s my initial reaction also,” Alex said. “But that’s also a rather strange approach on their part.”

“That’s what I thought,” Janet said, angry and defiant.

Mystified, Alex took a moment to catch up with her own thoughts. “I’m losing you a little here. Who did the ‘debriefing’?”

“CIA,” she said. “CIA?”

“That’s who we worked for, once removed.”

“Do you have any names?”

Janet gave some. Alex was suckered in by now. She glanced around for a notepad. When she didn’t see one, Don Tomas provided one, plus a pen.

“They treated me like a hysterical woman,” Janet said. “It was as if they had an agenda, you know? The longer it went on, the longer they kept trying to tell me that I was mistaken, that I couldn’t possibly have seen Mr. Cerny. First, they were patronizing. ‘Really, Janet,’ they said. ‘You mustn’t make up stories like that.’ ‘Really, you’ll start all kinds of trouble if you start going around Washington saying things like that. People will think you’ve lost it.’ I know how the head games work. They were trying to see if they could convince me that I’d been mistaken. I mean, I was traumatized and vulnerable. So they were trying to get inside my head and move the mental furniture around. Then within a few days, the tune had changed. I got another team of interrogators. The lead guy, he was almost threatening. Check that, he was threatening,” Janet said. “He told me that Michael Cerny was buried in a family plot in Muncie, Indiana, and his wife had moved back there with a generous widow’s pension. He told me that obviously I was under great stress from having lost my fiance, but that made no difference. If I kept saying things like that, they were going to invoke one of the psychiatric codes on me and have me locked up. ‘For your own good,’ he said. He floated the idea of sending me back to Egypt and letting the local police take care of me. I said he couldn’t do that and he laughed and said he could do anything he wanted to. Patriot Act. National security. By this time, my head was really spinning. He even claimed at one point that he was a shrink and he could have me committed to a mental cracker box on the spot and then sent to Egypt. Well, bull! This guy wasn’t any shrink. I could tell. I’ve been to shrinks and they’re not like this guy.”

“What was this interrogator’s name?” Alex asked.

“Evans,” she said. “That was the name he gave. John Evans. But with those people, who knows? I figured it was a fake.”

“What about the other ones? The previous interrogators?”

“The first one called himself Fisher,” she said. “Mr. Fisher. Like in ‘Fisher of Men.’ He was a rude bastard,” Janet said. “In a way the first guy wasn’t as bad as the ones who followed. But probably none of them used their real names.”

“Would all of those be fake names?” Don Tomas asked.

“Most likely,” Alex said with a sigh. “That’s how these creeps work. The scotch is excellent, by the way.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

“Worth every dime of the five hundred dollars.”

“Let’s try not to drink the whole bottle this evening,” Don Tomas said. “It’s always nice to have some left over for breakfast.”

Janet forged on. “They kept asking if I had seen him myself, Cerny, if I could pick him out of a lineup, for example.”

“And what did you tell them, Janet?” Alex asked.

“I said I could.”

Alex was still processing the bulk of this when Janet sent the dialogue in a different direction. “I’d like to show you where the listening devices are,” Janet said. “The ones in your apartment. I remember when we dropped them on you. Did you ever discover them?” she asked.

“No. I had no idea there was anything in there. How do you know if they’re still there?”

“Most likely they are,” Janet said.

“Keep in mind I’ve been away from Washington for several months over the last year,” Alex said.

“I know. I know all about you,” Janet said.

A feeling of indignation washed over Alex, first being bugged by the very people she worked for. Second that this girl, Don Tomas’s niece, knew all about Alex and Alex knew nothing about her in return. And third that the devices were still there.

“How do you know they might not have been removed?” Alex asked.

“They normally send the same team back to do the retrieval,” Janet said. “We never got sent. But with Mr. Cerny’s disappearance, ‘retirement,’ death, or whatever you want to call it, assignments got confused and overlapped. But they still might have sent…” Here her voice trailed off and cracked. “They still might have sent Carlos and me here to take the bugs out. But they didn’t. Still, I hear stuff from the other teams we work with. We’re not supposed to talk about it. We’re not even supposed to know the people in the other teams. But we do. Most of us know each other. The bosses are careless. The whole operation is careless. And we all talk. Covering our backside, know what I mean?”