Noel Hynd - Conspiracy in Kiev

So he had come in after her. Or had followed her.

Her hand went to Robert’s. She was about to give him a signal, to ask him to check the guy out. But Gus wandered to their table to chat.

Gus embarked on one of his tamer political rants, something to do with a Michael Moore film. Alex nodded and refrained from joining in. Robert listened patiently. Alex watched the man at the bar while Gus was speaking, using the mirror above the bottles. The man kept watching her.

It wasn’t her imagination, she decided. He was watching her and she had seen him before. But where? When their eyes hit head-on a third time, he finished his drink and hurried out.

Gus talked them into the baklava for dessert. Alex was glad she had spent the time in the gym. Gus’s baklava was delicious but portions were huge. Gus left their table. Alex turned to her fiance. “There was a man at the bar watching me,” she said.

“Can’t say I blame him.”

“This isn’t funny, Black Dog.”

Robert looked to the bar. “Where is he?”

“He just left.”

“Okay, if he comes back in, I’ll pull the jealous boyfriend thing and shoot him. We might have to delay the wedding for twelve years while I serve the manslaughter charge.”

“That’s not where I’m going with this.”

“Okay, you shoot him.”

“Not funny,” she said. “He was watching me as if he had a reason. He just left. Fifteen seconds ago.”

His eyes slid to the doorway. “Okay,” he said. He got to his feet, went quickly to the door, opened it, and stepped out into the cold.

He was back in a minute. He sat down.

“Sorry. No one,” he said. “Just the usual muggers, junkies, and car thieves.”

“Not in this neighborhood,” she said.

“Okay. I didn’t see anyone.”

She settled slightly. “Thanks for looking.”

Being with Robert relaxed Alex, but through the whole evening there was only one thing she could think about.

Ukraine. She began to ask more questions.

“Look, normally they’d leave you alone after the Lagos trip,” he said. “But you know how the government works. Turn down the mission they want you to do and you don’t get the next one that you want to do.”

There was another quiet moment as she simmered. “Next you’ll tell me it’s not dangerous.”

“It’s very dangerous.”

“So why don’t they get one of those big six-foot-six guys in your department, the ones who block the view of the president when the prez is dumb enough to go shaking hands in hostile-action places like New York and Philadelphia?”

“They need a woman for this and all of the six-six ones are currently playing pro basketball.”

“Very funny,” she said. “Look, what do they want me to do? Go undercover at a night club in Odessa, swing around a pole, and listen in on gangsters?”

“I’d love to see that,” he said.

“Well, you won’t. And neither will anyone else.”

“Presidential visit,” he said. “That makes it top priority. The personnel computer spit out your name as someone who spoke Russian as well as the other major European languages. I saw your name because the list went by the Secret Service. They’re probably going to want you to learn some Ukrainian too.”

She groaned. “I was planning to spend the next few weeks planning a wedding, sitting around with my husband-to-be, going to movies, and maybe reading a trashy novel or two.”

He shrugged. “Sorry,” he said.

The more she thought about it this evening, the more the concept bothered her. She made a mini-decision. She would listen politely at State the next morning and then give them a firm but polite, “No way!”

There. That settled that.

Who was in charge of her life, anyway?

Her or them?

A lex returned home, picking up her mail in the lobby, giving a friendly nod to the concierge. She fumbled with two bags, flowers, and mail as she walked past.

Alex lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment in a modern building called Calvert Arms Apartments on Calvert Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, in the Cleveland Park neighborhood in the northwest quadrant of the city. It was a comfortable quiet building built in the mid-sixties, filled with young single people-students, interns, people just starting their first job out of college, and government retirees.

She waited at the elevator. It was stopped on the fifth floor. It seemed to be permanently stopped, as if someone was saying a longwinded good-bye.

She grew impatient. The elevator began to descend slowly.

Five, four, three…

She knew everyone on her floor, at least by sight. Who was making her day longer than it had to be?

Two, one…

The twin doors of the elevator opened. Out stepped a young woman who could hardly have been older than her early twenties, very pretty in a heavy parka and tight jeans. A student at one of Washington’s numerous colleges, Alex figured.

Students, along with career-beginners, were the Calvert Arms’ bread and butter. They coexisted with the old women in their seventies, eighties, or even nineties who had moved into the place when it opened forty years ago. At that time they had been middle-aged empty-nesters. Time had passed. They were still empty-nesters, just twice as old. Their ex- or late husbands had been pushing up daisies for decades.

The younger girl hurried to the front door. Alex stepped into the elevator and rode to the fifth floor.

Her neighbor across the hall had started out as a friendly nodding acquaintance and ended up becoming a good friend in a fatherly kind of way. He was a scholarly sixty-year-old who had worked for the State Department for twenty-eight years. Now he was a retired diplomat who played catchy pop music from Latin America each morning as she was on her way to work. The Calvert Arms was pretty well insulated, but you could hear music in the hallway through the doors.

Alex had on occasion met him going into or coming out of his apartment and had struck up a conversation in the laundry room, commenting on his choices. She too liked Lucero and the late Rocio Durcal. One day she couldn’t help asking, “Do you only listen to women singers?”

“Absolutely,” he replied. “My virtual harem.”

That conversation and similar exchanges had let to a curious kind of friendship with a man who could be friendly but was self-contained, seemingly content with his virtual harem. He had few visitors. They spoke only Spanish with each other and his was easily a match for hers. She called him Don Tomas, though he was no Latin. He had invited her and Robert in for brunch one Sunday. They had been fascinated by his collection of art deco prints from the 1920s and 1930s, notably some beautifully preserved works of the French artist Tamara de Lempicka. They were all stylized pictures of beautiful women.

“Another part of your virtual harem?” she had asked.

Don Tomas had replied in the most relaxed manner imaginable, “Absolutely.”

This evening no sound from the vocal part of the virtual harem was coming through the door as she passed. She hoped nothing had happened to him.

She glanced at her mail and dumped it on the dining table. Then she stood perfectly still. Was everything exactly as she had left it? Was there something that she sensed, but could not quite put a finger on? Alex was unsure. Coupled with the appearance of the man at the bar in the Athenian, the evening had taken on a strange spin. Or was she just overanxious about a Ukraine trip that she didn’t want to make?

She sighed. She dismissed it. She placed the flowers in a vase.

She was in bed by midnight. She set the alarm for 6:00 a.m. Then, as she settled in to sleep, her eyes shot open. A realization hit her.