there of note?
No, Alex answered with an increasing edge, there was nothing special in the ladies’
Was it a sex club? Lee wanted to know. Dancers? Topless?
It was nothing of the sort, Alex answered sharply. It was music, dining, and drinking, not necessarily in that order. Topless in this joint meant some Slavic wise guy wasn’t wearing a shoulder holster.
“Did Federov try to seduce you?” Lee asked.
“Is the pope German?” she answered.
Could she look through some surveillance photos taken by contacts in Kiev?
She could and did.
Did she recognize anyone?
She didn’t.
Not even Kaspar and Anatoli, Federov’s two bodyguards?
Not even them.
Did she have last names on the bodyguards? Anything extra she might remember?
Nothing.
Did she see them the day of the RPG attacks?
No.
“So Federov would have been out without his bodyguards that day?” Lee pressed. “That seems strange.”
“I can’t say that I saw his two hoods that day,” she retorted. “They might have been there, they might not have been. They may have been part of the attack, but so might have two million other people in Kiev. Why do we keep going over this? You’ve asked me the same question seven times! What is it with these two guys that you keep harping on?”
Lee declined to answer. Instead, he wanted to know her theory about the RPG attacks. Who had been behind them?
She had no special theory to accompany her, no special knowledge.
“Did Federov ever mention anything about an American couple named Peter Glick and Edythe Osuna?” Lee asked out of the blue late one afternoon.
The reference startled Alex.
“Yes. I
“You think? Either he did or he didn’t.”
“He did,” she said. “He said they were a pair of American spies.”
“What else did he say about them?”
She searched her mind. She had many memories of the night club in Kiev and could recall much of the conversation. But she was drawing a blank here. “They were assigned to kill him?” she asked.
“He might have thought so. What else did he say about them?” Lee pressed.
“Honestly, it was a boozy evening. I’m not remembering.”
“Do you know who they are? Or who they were?”
“He said they were spies. I took everything Federov said with a few pounds of salt,” Alex said, “but looking back, I haven’t caught him in too many mistruths. If he said they were spies, my guess is they probably were.”
Lee’s finger was tapping lightly on the table, a little tic. “All right,” he said quietly. Then he moved on. Why did she suppose Federov had tried to move her position in the final seconds before the attacks? Was he sweet on her and trying to get her out of harm’s way? Or might he have been trying to move her into harm’s way for maybe the same reason?
She had no idea and told her interrogators exactly that.
The questions drove her into the ground.
The sessions were relentless.
Remorseless. Didactic. Unapologetic. Endless.
The direction of the inquiries always seemed to point in one direction. The official policy of the United States was to find the people responsible for the RPG attacks and bring them to some sort of justice. If official help was not forthcoming or significant enough from Ukraine, justice would be sought in the back alleys of the world. In fact, Alex sensed that this was the real way questions were pointing, the desired way of American officials to address their issues.
The sessions went on nonstop each day and continued until, with no explanation, they stopped completely. That was how things worked in Washington. Truth was like the smile of the mythical Cheshire cat. It receded as one approached it.
She went to trauma counseling with a top Washington shrink three times the first week back. Then she stopped. It was her feeling that the visits to the doc only made things worse.
FORTY-SEVEN
Alex officially returned to her job at Treasury on Monday, March 2. She was offered a further paid leave of absence by her boss, Mike Gamburian. She declined it and tried to bury herself in Internet frauds.
Gamburian gave her a handful of new cases. Easy stuff. But nothing made sense.
Her focus was shot.
She would be driving and couldn’t breathe. She would pull off the highway and gasp for breath. For a month, she couldn’t sleep at night. But during the day, walking, in the office, in a supermarket, in a park, she would fall asleep on her feet. Twice she fell, helped up once by a passerby, another time by a suspicious cop who suspected she was a closet junkie.
At night, when she finally could doze off, her sleeping was safest on the living room floor. She had tried the sofa but kept falling off. At least on the floor, there was no falling off. She was convinced there was some high- pitched whine somewhere in the building. But she had greater worries than that.
A destructive voice within her became strident as the sorrowful days passed.
Why not end it all?
Why not be with Robert in heaven, if that’s where he is?
Hey,
Your parents, your grandparents, everyone you love, hey, they’re all waiting for you on the other side. Come on. Cross over. Death is as easy as a swinging gate in an old churchyard. Come on. What are you waiting for?
God is waiting. Do it!
Suicidal fantasies filled her days. The occasional homicidal one took up where the suicidal ones took a breather. She tried more therapy. It didn’t help.
A friend brought her to a writers’ group, but she kept writing the same thing over and over in a notebook:
She’d watch TV for hours and would have no memory of what she’d seen. It was a living hell on earth, a fog that refused to lift.
Friends would phone. She jumped each time the phone rang, monitored the messages, rarely picking up, then erased them.
Friends from work.
Friends from the pickup basketball games at the gym.
Some of Robert’s peers in Secret Service.
Her buddy Laura Chapman at the White House.
She avoided her friends and didn’t want to be helped. At work, she quietly went through the motions, doing her job competently and engaging in no extra discussion. Soon, others would stop talking when she came into a
