Countdown in Cairo

of the worst atrocities ever aimed at her country.

And then he moved along to Venezuela.

“In Venezuela,” he continued. “I had the local fascist militia come to try to kill you. I felt you were the instrument of the government, the representative of all my enemies. So they came for you; they murdered some other people, but you escaped again. It was only later that I understood that you were only doing a job. That Comrade Cerny was my enemy. And the disgraceful Putin as well.”

A long apologia followed but the words barely made any sense. After a few moments she was not hearing it.

Disgust. Resentment. Fury.

It all welled up inside her, those emotions and more. The monstrosity of all this brought her close to despair, a despair modified with rage, and almost a wish that this conversation had never happened, that she had heard none of it, that she might have lived a happier life never knowing the truth, never having heard this rambling deathbed confession.

And although one wave of angry doubt was in mutiny against another, her heart fought against what she had always known, always somehow suspected, yet found a way to deny until this moment, that Federov had taken Robert from her, that the man now dying before her had shattered her life and left it in small pieces that had been nearly impossible to piece back together.

“So I ask you now,” Federov finally said. “Where is your faith? What is it to you? What did your Jesus Christ teach you? Do you forgive me?”

She was angry. Resentful. Fearful. Every foul and vituperative emotion welled inside her.

Somehow she managed words.

“Forgiveness is not mine to give you, Yuri. Forgiveness is for God to give you.”

“Will he?’

“Ask him.”

“But will he?”

“You’ll find out.”

He took a moment, his strength almost gone. “But do you forgive me?” he asked.

She stood in silence, tears welling, not knowing whether she wanted to answer, to flee, or-as one horrible instinct urged-to shoot him herself in revenge, except something about that would have seemed both wrong and too good for him at the same time.

“Please answer me honestly,” he said. “Don’t give me the answer you wish me to hear, but the one that has the truth. I have little patience left for anything except truth.”

Federov paused. “So, I ask you again. Do you forgive me?”

Several seconds passed. Somewhere deep in her soul, in something that seemed to her too much like a spiritual abyss, she found an answer that she didn’t know was there.

“I think in time,” she said, “with the proper strength, I will be able to. Yes. Because I need to. Because everything in my faith tells me to. Because I don’t choose to live a life burning with hatred. So with time,” she said, “with time, maybe, yes. Right now, I do not know why God has put me on this path. I hope that eventually I will understand.”

He nodded weakly. “That is good,” he said. “That is as good as I could hope for, hey. In its way, it’s a gift. So thank you.”

Words had departed her.

“Look,” she finally said, her insides raging, “that’s really all there is here. There’s nothing more to discuss. We’re finished here, right?”

He nodded and his head eased back.

“You’re a good person,” he said. “I wasn’t always. I regret.”

He closed his eyes. He was dozing within seconds, transported to wherever the dreams, illusions, and drugs took him, his memory leaping through the past.

Alex stood, turned, and went to the door.

She pulled it open, but then, responding to some inner voice, looked back one final time at the now-quiet man in the hospice bed. Dying was sometimes an eloquent act, she mused. Men and women often died in accordance with their lives: in battle, home with their families, in transit, wracked with disease.

Federov’s body was very still, and despite her insides being in turmoil, she tried to assess him once more. And almost before her eyes, he shrank to something very small and mean, and something very mortal, flawed, and harmless. She tried to develop a hatred for him, but couldn’t.

His eyes opened a sliver and his hand came up almost imperceptibly. “Hey,” he said in a near whisper. Then he was quiet again, breathing lightly.

She stared for another several seconds. In the end, he was just a man. More flawed than most others, but just a man.

She gently closed the door behind her. It latched in complete silence.

FIFTY-FIVE

In the lobby of the hotel, she spotted Gian Antonio Rizzo not far from where she had left him. But she did not go to him, not immediately. She wasn’t ready to talk to anyone.

She spotted a small chapel in the hospital lobby and slipped into it. Like the doors to the hospital room upstairs, the chapel portals closed quietly. She wanted time to meditate and calm down. The chapel of the hospital was as good a place as any.

Her emotions were all over the place. Her spirit was exhausted. Taken as a whole, Federov’s confession contained the most monstrous words she had ever heard in her life.

Robert’s death… I was responsible… Do you forgive me?

It was too much to bear. For the first time since the dark days after Robert’s death, she put her head in her hands and cried. Long, hard, deep tears, tears she had fought back every lonely day for the past several months.

Several minutes passed, her mind awash in confusion, her entire soul lost in thoughts and prayer and spiraling images, all the way from the death of her grandmother and her funeral in Mexico, up through Kiev, and into the present. She tried to replay events and determine what she could have done differently, what might have put her in a different place today. But she was unable. She tried to push it all aside and tell herself that what was done was done and that it was God’s path for her, but she was unable to do that either. She wondered if she was on the right path or if she was a miserable failure.

And once again she felt very alone. Even in the chapel, she felt very alone.

At length, she realized that she wasn’t.

It was a sensation at first, a rallying of the spirit, perhaps, as she continued to lean forward, her face in her hands, her eyes closed. Then a small amount of additional time went by and she felt a spiritual presence, and then a physical presence to complement it.

It wasn’t something she heard or saw. It was something she could sense.

Moments after that, she felt the weight of another person settling onto the pew next to her. For a mad hallucinatory moment, she thought that it was Robert back beside her and that she had imagined all the horrid events of the last year. Then she thought it was Federov, that he had somehow managed to resurrect his energies, came down here, and found her. And then with an equally surreal jolt images came back to her, and she remembered how she and Robert had shared pews together in DC, back when she was several decades younger than she was now, just a year and a half ago. All of that seemed like a previous lifetime-and in a way it was, and in a way it wasn’t.

An arm wrapped itself around her shoulders. She didn’t resist. She knew who it was. She lifted her head and turned.

“You must have had quite a conversation,” Gian Antonio Rizzo said. “Quite a confession.”

“It was,” she said.

“Deathbeds will have that effect.”

She nodded.

“Life’s funny,” he said. “No matter where you are, there you are. So here you are.”

“Yeah. Thanks for being here with me,” she said.

Rizzo kept his arm wrapped around her. It was warm, comforting, and supportive. So were his eyes. She leaned to him and allowed herself to luxuriate in his embrace.

“You were wrong,” she said.

“About what?”

“I did manage to turn down the request of a dying man.”

“Oh. I see,” he said. At length, he asked, “Would it be vulgar of me to ask what the request was?”

“Marriage.”

“Marriage!” He seemed as stunned as she had been. “You and him?”

Alex nodded.

“You’ll excuse me, but, ha! ” he said. “The man was more of a deluded dreamer than I thought.”

“And that wasn’t even the worst of it,” she said.

“What was the worst of it?”

She told him. All of it. From Kiev through to the jungle of Venezuela, to Paris, back through recent days in Geneva, New York, and Cairo.

“Wow,” he said, blowing out a long breath.

“I’m wondering,” she said after a long, heavy silence, “if I had known along the way, if I had known for a fact what he just confessed to, that he