by Noel Hynd
“I’ll stay here. I-”
“Get in the chopper,” he said.
“I-”
“Get your ass in the chopper! Orders! There’s only one seat left!”
“Okay.”
She took a step. He reached out and put a hard hand on her shoulder. “I’ve never seen you before, but you sure done good today.”
“Thanks.”
She turned and ran to the ramp. The ramp came up practically while she was still on it. She found the remaining seat on the helicopter and slid into it. Seconds later, the helo lifted off.
Her head was pounding. Her insides were ready to explode. Though no one could see it, fear riddled her and she kept repeating prayers in her head. The gun weighed heavily in her pocket and the images of the carnage on the ground in Kiev kept spiraling back to her, as did the visions of the two faceless men she had shot.
She closed her eyes, drew a breath, prayed that Robert had gotten out the same as she had, and she opened her eyes.
She hadn’t realized it, but she was sitting right across from the president, who was staring at her.
The chopper lifted higher into the sky and headed for Air Force One, which was just a few minutes away at the international airport at Borispil.
Her heartbeat plunged back into double digits. The president nodded gently at her. “Thanks.”
“Yeah,” was all she could say.
She tried to look out the window but there was no visibility. She remembered the dark clouds that had covered Kiev on arrival and realized that was exactly where she was right now.
On the flight to the international airport, no one spoke. What was there that could be said after what everyone had witnessed, after what had happened?
Alex leaned back and closed her eyes. Her hand drifted to her neck, searching for the small cross to touch, to massage.
Somehow somewhere in all the horror, the chain must have broken. The cross was gone. It wasn’t in her blouse or anywhere on her or on the floor of the chopper.
It was just plain gone.
FORTY-FOUR
T he president boarded Air Force One at Borispil amidst vast confusion. Alexandra found a seat by herself in the passenger section.
She closed her eyes, and much as she had done before leaving on this trip, she tried to disappear into prayer, beseeching heaven that what had happened back in Kiev hadn’t looked as bad as she thought it had.
Sometimes prayers are answered. Other times they are not.
Much of the time, human events have no order, no logic, no good side. They can only be as good as is made of them afterward.
So it was today.
The flight back to Washington was fourteen hours. Before arrival, news of the terrible toll on the ground in Kiev had made its way through those survivors on Air Force One.
There were already forty-two confirmed fatalities on the ground. Injuries were still being tabulated.
Seven were members of what appeared to be a filorusski assassination squad.
Twenty-three were Ukrainian civilians, including eleven Foreign Service nationals who worked for the embassy.
Twelve remaining casualties were American citizens.
Of those, seven were embassy employees whom Alex didn’t know.
Then there were the five whose names did mean something to her.
The ambassador, Jerome Drake, was dead.
So was Richard Friedman, her control officer.
The note taker from the meetings, Ellen Higgins, had come out at the last minute to get a look at the president and take a photograph. She too had been killed.
So had Reynolds Martin, a.k.a., “Jimmy Neutron,” who, along with another agent, had immediately blocked access to the president when the first RPG had landed.
That left one casualty, of which Alex was informed an hour before landing in Washington.
Special Agent Robert Timmons, partnered with Reynolds Martin, had been the other agent to immediately protect the president. He too had been hit with shrapnel at the outset of the attack. And he too had died on the spot.
FORTY-FIVE
I n a private room at Josephs Air Force Base when Air Force One returned to Washington, spokes people for various government agencies had sought to give out proper information updates and make some sense out of chaos and tragedy. Meanwhile, Secret Service agents in Washington, picking up the fallen standard, whisked the president to the well-fortified compound in the Catoctin Mountains of western Maryland.
In a first-floor corridor at Josephs, banners welcoming home the travelers were torn down and replaced with long sheets of paper. Magic markers were stuck with Velcro to the wall under the paper, so that anyone could write tributes to those who had died in Kiev.
Then, in the tragedy-numbed days after Kiev, Alex assumed the role of a widow to her late fiance. She phoned his parents in Michigan and broke the horrible news to them, rather than have them hear it from someone they didn’t know. She talked to a small crowd of distraught Secret Service employees who had gathered on the tarmac in Washington when Air Force One returned. The death of her own fiance barely sinking in upon her, she shared what Robert had told her to say if disaster struck, that he had died doing what he had wanted to do, that he had given his life in service to a country he loved.
News media made much of Alex’s personal story. They wanted to talk to her. So did the radio and TV talk shows. Publishers contacted her about possible books.
She wanted none of it. Fame, if that’s what it was, had been thrust upon her at a terrible price. She declined all the offers. She tried to disappear from public view, but reporters waited for her at Treasury and at her apartment complex. With the loss of the man she had so deeply loved, all sense, color, and flooring dropped from her days.
She was put on mandatory administrative leave with full pay. She was debriefed several times, by Treasury, by the FBI, and by Michael Cerny.
Then, a week after her return to the United States, Alex flew to Michigan for Robert’s funeral. Like Kiev on the day he died, it was bitterly cold. The arctic wind swept down from central Canada to drop the entire state well below freezing. But it felt even colder because Robert’s parents had to do what no parent should ever have to do: bury a son.
Robert Timmons’ parents stood in the front row of two hundred mourners at the graveside in a snowy Lutheran churchyard in Saginaw. The sky was clear, but the air was touched with ice. The sun ducked in and out from the occasional cloud.
Alex stood beside her slain fiance’s parents. Robert’s father managed to hold his emotions together. His mother had stopped trying. Alex had cried so much in the last seven days that, for this day at least, for this particular service, she had no tears left. She still had a deep hollow feeling, one of shock and disbelief.
She felt betrayed. Betrayed by life, betrayed by God, betrayed even by the people she had worked for. Betrayed by her own emotions. She had allowed herself to love, and now, with the same passion that she had loved, she felt the loss of Robert.
A man had died. Her man had died. It pained her now to think what a poor part she had played in his life. It agonized her to wonder what she could have done differently in Kiev. Could she have done something that might have removed him from that terrible spot at that fatal moment?
Logic told her there was nothing. Her emotions pulled her in a different direction.
Alex was already living in what was to her the new reality, the one where someone’s passing had left a hole in the heart and a deep wound in the soul. Back home in DC, there was no one on the other side of sofa for TV in the evening, no discussion of weekend plans, no one to discuss a new book with, watch some baseball or football, or to swap insights or rude remarks about the national news.
With Robert gone, there was no one next to her in the usual pew at church. No one with whom to plan a beautiful future. Instead, there were the lonely moments at home alone, reading and rereading the last email messages from Robert. “I can’t wait to see you in
Kiev! Let’s sneak away and go out for vodka and caviar,” he had written.
On some evenings the new reality was about gazing endlessly at the old photographs or not being able to look at them without breaking up. It was about hearing old messages on the answering machine and knowing she would never be able to erase them. “Hey, Alex. On our honeymoon, let’s find a secluded beach on Maui and-”
She tore her thoughts away from the past and into the present.
The coffin was beside an open grave, draped with the fifty-star flag of the United States of America. The Timmons’ family pastor presided. He wore an overcoat worthy of Kiev but was already frozen.
The minister spoke softly, rapidly muttering a prayer that no one could hear because of the harsh wind. Words danced on the icy air, brief and appropriate.
Alex stared at the flag that covered the coffin. Robert’s mother clutched her hand. They exchanged squeezes. Alex’s eyes drifted. A few places away from her, at graveside, there was an open space, where someone could have been standing but wasn’t.
She pictured Robert there, young, strong, and handsome, as he would now always be in her memory.
“I love you so much,” she said to him.
He nodded back. On his lips, she saw the same words.
She blinked back the tears and held them.
“You were such an all-American guy,” she said to him. “And you know what your death certificate says?”
“What?” he answered.
“ Place of death: Myhaylavski Platz, Kiev, Ukraine.”
She saw him laugh. “But I’m in a good place now,” he answered. “With God.”
She nodded. His mother glanced in her direction, and she felt a squeeze of her hand again. Robert’s spirit coming through his mother, she wondered? She preferred to believe so.
As his coffin was lowered into the earth, as mourners stepped forward to drop flowers into the grave after him, time stood still.
The fact that those who died were Secret Service agents would always be a piece of the equation for anyone who loved them. But for Alex, when it came down to the everyday reality of what happened, it was about life without Robert, not life without the Secret Service agent.
Robert had left so much of himself behind. Yes, he had died doing what he loved doing, serving his country, protecting the president. But her heartache was that she could no longer touch him. The unending heartache was that he was gone forever.
On the flight from Michigan back to Washington, Reynolds Martin’s widow, who had brought her young daughter, Tina, to the memorial, sat with Alex. Tina sadly played with the matryoshka doll that her father had bought for her. As the airplane flew up out of Dulles and over the Atlantic, Tina suddenly started waving out the window.
“What are you doing?” Mrs. Martin had asked.
“I’m saying good-bye to Daddy,” said Tina.
Somehow, maybe by coincidence, maybe not, she was waving in the right direction, eastward over the ocean, toward Kiev.
“How did you know the direction?” Alex asked.
“I saw him in the sky,” the girl answered.
Alex put a hand across the girl’s shoulders but had to look away.
It was then that Alex finally lost her composure.
FORTY-SIX
T wo days later, back in Washington, Alex met again with Michael Cerny.
Cerny informed her that Yuri Federov had not been seen since the day of the attacks. No one knew if he was dead or alive or somewhere in between. The Caspian Group seemed to be continuing in business, but so had Howard Hughes’ enterprises long after Hughes ceased to be a rational factor.
Alex hardly cared about any of this anymore. But Cerny took her over and over the small painful details of her time in Kiev. What had she seen, what had she felt? Was there anything-however small-that she might have neglected to mention? Mentally, she was now so blitzed that she couldn’t handle the inquiry. She was beyond overload.
Cerny turned her over to other inquisitors, less gentle ones, including one whom she only knew as “Lee.” Alex had the impression that she had been passed along to Cerny’s higher-ups, or at least someone representing them,
Lee was a large, dour, nasty-looking man with a big head, long fingers, and remote blank eyes in a fleshy face. He was in his mid-forties and had a Marine Corps dishonorable discharge look to him. He came across as an articulate thug. She wondered if he had been assigned to her with some subtle physical intimidation in mind, the coarse six-four male debriefing the overeducated five-seven female.
Well, she decided quickly, if that was the game plan, if her own government was turning on her and holding her up to unnecessary scrutiny, she was having none of it. She would dish it right back.
The questions from Lee were interminable. He worked without notes or an assistant, which told her that they were being recorded. One grim debriefing session focused entirely on the subject of Ukrainian energy power plants, nuclear and otherwise, something that had hardly come up at all in the discussions Alex had had with Federov.
Q (Lee): Alex, do you feel he was avoiding the subject?
A (Alex): How could he avoid it if it didn’t come up?
Q: Was there a reason you didn’t steer things in that direction?
A: Yes. No one from this or any other department had asked me to.
Q: But you knew he had brokered a submarine to the Cali drug cartel.
A: What in God’s name does that have to do with Ukrainian electricity?
Q: It’s in the realm of exports.
A: So is vodka. So is caviar.
[Pause noted]
Q: Alex, you seem defensive. If there’s something you may have neglected previously to mention, some scrap of information that might have seemed meaningless at the time, now would be a good time to-
A: [Interrupting, manifesting anger] Look! I was told to pursue him as a tax cheat. Those were my instructions. If there was another agenda-
Q: There was no other agenda. But we feel you may have learned or seen more than you realize you might have. [Pause] Did he mention anything about business with Asia?
A: Nothing of merit.
Q: Japan. China. Either Korea. Vietnam.
A: You’re wasting your [expletive deleted] time! Am I under suspicion for something?
Q: Should you be?
A: Of course not!
Q: Then why would you be?
A: [Expletive deleted]
Q: What about his bodyguards? Kaspar and Anatoli?
A: What about them?
Q: Did they seem loyal to him, men he relied on?
A: I’m not sure he trusted anyone.
Q: Really? Why not?
A: If you were Federov, would you trust anyone?
Q: That’s not the point of the question.
A: Then what is?
Q: Did he mention any attempts on his life?
A: Only in theory.
Q: Did he think the US was trying to kill him?
A: He gave me that impression.
Q: Why do you think he thought that?
A: Because he might have been right. I don’t know.
Q: How was his health?
A: It seemed pretty good, even though he drank a lot and smoked a lot. But I’m not a doctor.
Q: By the way, what is Federov?
A: What do you mean, “what is he”?
Q: Russian? Ukrainian?
A: Don’t you read your own files?
Q: I’m asking you. Set me straight.
A: [impatience noted:] The difference between being Ukrainian and Russian in Ukraine is one of ethnic identity. In the eastern provinces, everyone, Russians and Ukrainians alike, speaks Russian and the people live intermingled. But of two neighboring families, if one is ethnically Ukrainian and the other ethnically Russian they know it. That doesn’t mean they can’t be friends or intermarry. In Soviet times people had to carry “internal passports” and these listed one’s ethnic nationality. I don’t think this is listed o
n Ukrainian ID cards, but I’m not sure. So Federov would be an ethnic Russian but Ukrainian citizen.
Q: That’s how he would describe himself?
A: Why don’t you find him and ask him?
Q: You’re making this more difficult. Why are you hostile to questions about Federov?
A: I’m not.
Q: Then answer mine.
A: How he would describe himself would depend on the circumstances of the question. If a foreigner asked, “Where are you from?” Federov would probably say, “I’m from Ukraine.” If he wanted to stress his ties to Ukraine he might say, “I’m a Ukrainian.” Presumably he would be aware that the answer, “I’m Russian” without more ado would mislead the interlocutor into thinking he was a Russian citizen. If the question was ethnically focused, “I understand there are Russians and Ukrainians in Ukraine, Mr. Federov. Which are you?” he would presumably say, “I’m Russian, though a Ukrainian citizen.”
Q: So even you aren’t sure which he is?
A: [pause, angrily] That’s my answer.
Q: I’ll note that you didn’t answer the question and we’ll move on…
And so it went, the logic of the questions elliptical and constantly turning back upon itself, Alex’s patience a thing of memory.
Lee pressed further on the subject of Anatoli and Kaspar. Who were these two associates who had turned up at her embassy meetings with Federov? Any unusual mannerisms? Were they cleared-eyed gunmen, or did they hide behind dark glasses? How did they sound? Like Russians? Ukrainians? Something of other origin?
She had no idea. Federov’s humanoid bookends barely grunted, much less spoke, and aside from the fact that one seemed blinky from the dry air in the embassy, they seemed to see as well as anyone.
Who had she seen at the nightclub? What were the women like? Did they carry weapons to go with their Donna Karan suits and their Jimmy Choo shoes? By chance, had Alex gone to the ladies room and seen anything there of note?
No, Alex answered with an increasing edge, there was nothing special in the ladies’ pissoirs unless unusually located tattoos or the latest in European lingerie was of interest to the interrogator. Or how about the fact that the ladies’ room was dim and stank of Lysol? And as far as the clientele of the club, it was as unremarkable as that to be found at any other velvet-roped mob joint.
