Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Hynd, Noel.
Conspiracy in Kiev / Noel Hynd.
p. cm. — (The Russian trilogy ; bk. 1.)
ISBN 978-0-310-27871-9 (pbk.)
1. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation — Officials and
employees — Fiction. 2. Shooters of firearms — Fiction. 3. Conspiracies — Fiction. 4. Life
change events — Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.Y54C66 2008
813’.54 — dc22
2008018529
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08 09 10 11 12 13 14 • 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13
for the last two evenings and didn’t seem to have any ulterior mo-
tives, something against which Daniel was always watchful. Surely
she wouldn’t mind having company again. He knew he wouldn’t. It
was tough these days to even find a woman who could tolerate a cigar,
much less a cigar smoked by a priest.
She was seated near the door. She smiled when she saw him.
He approached her table. “Mind if I join you?” he asked.
They spoke English, his with a trace of an accent that suggested
eastern or south central Europe. Hers was American, flat as corn
country. When she had asked about his accent, he had explained that
his roots were in Hungary.
“I was a boy in Budapest,” he had recounted. “That’s where my
parents had lived until 1956. When the Russian tanks rolled in, they
fled to England and then Canada.”
“Where did you go to seminary?” she had asked.
“Montréal. That’s how I speak French.”
She, in turn, explained that she had grown up in Kansas but now
lived in New York City. He knew all about New York, it turned out. He
entertained her with stories. She did likewise.
This evening, as always, Daniel folded his overcoat and placed it
neatly on an extra chair at their table. He sat down. Irène brought
him a cognac, gave him a cute smile, and quickly left to attend other
tables.
“You’re sure my cigar doesn’t bother you?” Daniel asked his table
companion.
“Not at all.”
They fell into a conversation easily. He noticed that she was watch-
ing his hands.
She was drinking a Coca-Cola with a twist of lemon. There was
music playing again tonight, so loud that one had to raise one’s voice
just to be heard. A friendly din. Lots of conversation in several lan-
guages, lots of glasses clinking and plates clattering. L’étincelle was a
cheerful upbeat joint.
A few minutes into their conversation, she raised a hand and
waved to a man who came in the door and surveyed the place.
“Oh! There’s a friend of mine!” she said. “He’s going to join us.”
Daniel didn’t like that. For no reason, or for every reason, he didn’t
quickly to the door. Only as they were going through it did they start
to hear a commotion behind them. Loud agitated conversation built
into shouting.
Several seconds later young Irène came to the table to see what
was wrong.
She saw the shattered brandy glass under Daniel’s lifeless head.
She saw his unfocused eyes and his blood mixing with the cognac on
the table.
Her hands flew to her face and she started to scream. The evening
manager, a fit young man named Gerard, rushed over. But by this
time, Daniel’s two acquaintances had disappeared into the dark side
streets and alleys.
They were gone into the icy night, leaving their victim behind.
A s the same cold midwinter gripped the eastern United States, Alex-
andra LaDuca sat at her desk in Washington DC, at a few minutes
past nine in the morning. Her desk, and her job, was at the main
building of the United States Department of the Treasury on Pennsyl-
vania Avenue and Fifteenth Street.
She pondered the fraudulent document before her, received via
the US mail by a citizen who had brought a complaint to the Treasury
Department. It was not that Alex hadn’t seen thousands of similar
pitches, and it was not that she hadn’t heard sob stories from people
who had been similarly swindled. And it wasn’t that such chicanery
so violated her sense of decency and fair play.
No, what bothered her most was that anyone would be so venal
as to make a living through such outright crookery . . . and that any
victim would be gullible enough to fall for it. The correspondence was
on a fancy letterhead:
There was the first duet of lies. There existed nowhere on the
planet, Alex knew, any such department or any such bank. She some-
times wondered if Lagos existed, other than in her own bad dreams.
But she knew Lagos did exist because she had spent a couple of weeks
there a year earlier investigating a similar fraud. The only success of
the previous trip had been in what hadn’t happened. She had success-
fully avoided getting killed.
The scam continued:
Dear Sir/Madam,
IMMEDIATE CONTRACT PAYMENT CONTRACT #: M AV/NNPC/FGN/
MIN/009 / NEXT OF KIN FUND/ US$16.3M
18
Yeah, Alex thought, shaking her head. Don’t even try to phone be-
cause a phone call can be traced. She skipped ahead. It was signed,
Regards,
Dr. Samuel Ifraim
Executive Governor,
Central Credit Bank of Nigeria
(CCBN)
Right. Sure. A fake name with a fake doctorate. And the “CC” in
the CCBN might just as easily stand for Crooks and Criminals.
The scam was known at FinCen as a 419, named after a widely
unenforced section of the Nigerian criminal code. Millions of these
stinky little con jobs circulated across the globe each year, most ema-
nating from West Africa.
They were all the same. They claimed that due to certain circum-
stances — disbursement of will proceeds, sale of a business, sale of
cheap crude oil, a winning email address in an Internet lottery, or
something similarly unlikely — a bank needed help to transfer this
money to the lucky recipient’s account in the United States. If the
recipient assisted them he or she would be entitled to a percentage
of the funds.
If contacted, the scam artists would request thousands of dollars
for various costs that were required before the lucky winner got the
share of the funds. Of course, the victim’s payment went through
but — surprise — the transfer of riches never happened.
The scam was as widespread as it was shameless. In 2002 the US
Department of Justice had gained a court order to open all mail from
Nigeria passing through JFK airport in New York. Around seventy-five
percent had involved scam offers. Much of it even bore counterfeit
postage.
And then there had been her nightmarish trip to Lagos the previ-
ous year. A mission from the United States Treasury had sought to
present evidence that much of the swindling was being done with the
apparent complicity of the Nigerian government.
The hosts in Lagos didn’t take well to that theory. While the Ameri-
cans were meeting with representatives of the government, their
hotel rooms were sacked and trashed. Their clothes were taken, their
suitcases slashed, and death threats scrawled on the walls. Of five
staff cars used by Treasury representatives and belonging to the US
Embassy, three were stolen and one was chopped apart with a chain
saw while their meeting was in progress. A fifth blew up, killing their
Nigerian chauffeur.
So much for a little international fieldwork. Most members of the
delegation felt lucky to touch down again physically unharmed on
American soil.
Alex filed the paperwork before her. The 419s would be around for
as long as people would fall for them. The fight against them would
continue. But in the absence of follow-up at the source — when a for-
eign government might be aiding the perpetrators — they could only
be contained, not defeated. Not that she was going to ignore them.
She wasn’t above a personal vendetta or two for criminals who de-
served to be put out of business. She had a long memory for such
things and could be stubborn as a bulldog once she got her teeth into
a case.
But she had more immediate dragons to slay. There was a messy
business involving untaxed wine imports from France. There was a
perplexing matter about some art stolen by the Nazis from a wealthy
Jewish collector who had died in the Holocaust; a Swiss bank denied
culpability despite the fact that a looted Pissarro had been hanging
in the New York office of the bank president for the last thirty years.
And then there was a whole sheaf of various non-419 Internet frauds
that seemed to be associated with an online casino operation in Costa
Rica.
If human beings invested the same ingenuity in eradicating dis-
ease and hunger that they did in swindling each other, the world
might be a better place . . . and she might happily be in another line
of work, one that would have put her on the front lines in the fight
against worldwide oppression, ignorance, disease, hunger, and pov-
erty, causes she felt were compatible with her guiding principles.
Sometimes she thought she should have become a doctor. She would
have been an excellent one and could easily have become one.
But human beings didn’t manifest such ingenuity and Alex hadn’t
become a doctor. So she did what she could. She enjoyed sticking up
for victims. Out in the field, she had several teams of investigators
who worked for her. The day was young. It was time to see what cases
were shaping up for arrests or prosecution. She dug in for a day of
combat, matching wits with various crooks across the world and on
the Internet.
23
“Yeah, sure,” she muttered, slightly louder. She had lately devel-
oped the habit of speaking to the computer, usually insultingly, when
she was not happy with what was on the screen. The final hours of a
long day often brought forth the habit.
But there was no changing the message. She had been summoned
to a specially arranged meeting at the State Department the next
morning. Main Building on C Street NW, only about a twenty min-
ute walk from Treasury along Pennsylvania Avenue and then down
Twenty-first Street. Room 6776 B. No further details. She was to be
there at 8:00 a.m.
She stared at the text for a moment. Was this email official or
some sort of late hours after work prank? The State Department?
Streamlined and reorganized in 2007, FinCen was a division of
Treasury, which interfaced with other American intelligence agencies:
27
the FBI, the National Intelligence Ser vice, the CIA, the recently over-
hauled Immigration and Naturalization Ser vice. It was through this
connection that Alex knew a man named Robert Timmons. Timmons
was an agent of the United States Secret Ser vice, assigned to the Presi-
dential Protection Detail at the White House. He was also her fiancé,
the wedding scheduled for the following July. On Alex’s left hand, she
wore the diamond that Robert had given her.
The Presidential Protective Detail, these days known as “Einstein
Duty.” All the presidents had their nicknames among the men and
women of the Secret Ser vice who guarded them. Clinton had been
“Elvis.” Clinton’s successor, Bush 43, had been the “Shrub.” This presi-
dent, newly elected the previous November, was Einstein, a tribute to
not how smart the president was, but how smart the president thought
the president was. That, and a certain distracted way with clothing.
A slight smile crossed her lips as she reconsidered this email.
Maybe . . .
She picked up the phone. She called Robert at the White House.
In addition to being one of the new president’s bodyguards, Tim-
mons was also a liaison officer between the United States Secret Ser-
vice and foreign protective ser vices. He wasn’t above sending her an
amusing personal message disguised as a work document. He came
on the line. His tone said all business.
“Hey,” she said. “Is this the Black Dog?”
His tone softened and changed as he recognized her voice.
“Hey,” he answered. “That’s what some people call me.”
“Know anything about this meeting I’ve been summoned to to-
morrow morning?”
A pause, then, “I know all about it,” he said.
“Why do you know all about it and I don’t?” she asked. “Or is this
a trick to get me to call you so we can have a late dinner?”
“I’ll accept the late dinner,” he said, “but the State Department
thing is legit.” A pause, then, “Think Orange Revolution.”
A beat, then she had it. “Ukraine? The old Soviet Republic?”
“Bingo. Presidential visit to Kiev in one month. I hope your pass-
port is current.”
“The passport is current, but I’m not. Can’t you scratch my name
off the list?”
golfer and an amateur guitarist. Unlike anyone else she knew in law
enforcement, he could play the opening riffs from Led Zep’s “Black
Dog.” This had given him a great nickname in his class at the Secret
Ser vice Academy in Turco, Georgia.
Black Dog.
Many of his peers still continued the nickname. It was often his
code name on assignments. Alex though it was funny. In many ways,
Robert was as white bread as it got. And he sure wasn’t any dog.
Hence the nickname, perfect in its imperfection.
Time out: Washington insiders knew Secret Ser vice personnel
to be very arrogant. Touchy. Showy. Difficult to deal with because
they always put agency agenda in front of everything, even personal
relationships.
Time back in: “People ask me what it’s like to date a Secret Ser vice
agent,” Alex would tell people. “I always say, ‘I’m not dating a Secret
Ser vice agent, I’m dating Robert Timmons.’ ”
Time out again: Secret Ser vice people were also known to be the
best shots in the federal ser vice. According to folklore, they could
knock a cigarette out of a chickadee’s beak at fifty feet and still leave
their little feathered pal chirping. The bird shouldn’t have been puffing
on a butt anyway.
Time back in: On the pistol range, Alex was better than Robert,
something he grudgingly admitted and admired.
So the relationship worked. He was everything to her and vice
versa. He was also something that no one else had ever been, the
one person who was always there for her and accepted her exactly
the way she was. He was also the guy she went to church with on the
Sunday mornings when he wasn’t on duty, which was something very
special to her.
They were completely compatible.
He set up a chessboard at her apartment. He liked the figures from
the Civil War and they always had a game in progress. Sometimes
when he would stop by they would do two moves each or four or six,
the game ongoing day-to-day.
He loved leaving affectionate or funny notes for her to find, nes-
tled into towels, under a piece on the chess board, in the medicine
cabinet, in the freezer, on a window.
Anywhere.
Then, while away, he would send her emails suggesting where to
look for the notes. “Look inside the Rice Chex box,” said one. “You
might want to look behind the television,” said another.
He could not travel without calling her. If they could, and they al-
ways managed some way, they always had a last kiss before he went
out of town on an assignment.
They both shared a soft spot for country music, to the horror of
many of their eastern friends. Heartfelt white soul music by people
whose names could be reversed and they’d still work just fine-and-
perfect, good buddy: Travis Randy, Tritt Travis, Black Clint, Paisley
Brad, Gill Vince.
Even Chicks Dixie.
“Waffle House music,” Robert called it. But he admitted that he
liked it too, with particular attention to early Cash Johnny.
Waffle House music. Robert always made her laugh, but they had
had their serious talks, too, both before and after deciding to get mar-
ried. Robert had talked with her once about dying young.
“If I’m going to go to my grave early, ‘in the line of fire’ isn’t a bad
way,” he said. He told her that if something should happen to him
after they married, she should allow a new husband to find her. It
was all hypothetical, of course. Neither of them ever thought disaster
would really strike. Horrible things like that only happened to other
people.