Conspiracy in Kiev (23 page)

FORTY-SEVEN

A
lex 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
,
you! Yes
,
you
,
Alex! Why not jump?

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:
I wish Robert were here.

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 room or an office. She had isolated herself well.

She went to church each Sunday, sitting alone, avoiding the pew she used to share with Robert. Sometimes she would go on Wednesdays. Absently she wrote his name in the prayer books and the hymnals that she found before her. She offered prayers and didn’t hear answers.

Her pastor sought her out. They had discussions. No headway. The minister wanted to talk about God’s love and Christ’s forgiveness and her mission in life.

Her ears were deaf. She wasn’t ready to hear any of it, much less consider it.

She was an emotional basket case and she knew it.

Sometimes Alex would find herself in the parish chapel and not remember how she got there or how long she’d been there. Once she realized that she had left her car running, ran out for the keys, found them gone. The parish assistant minister had taken them for her.

During the second week of March, on a Thursday night, she found the final handwritten note Robert had left. It was in blue ink in bold penmanship, and he had slipped it into a pair of her shoes. Red high heels. The sexiest footwear she owned. She only wore them for him and on special occasions. It said simply, “I love you and I always will.”

FORTY-EIGHT

T
he phone call from Bernardo Santangelo came into Gian Antonio Rizzo’s office at half past eight in the morning.

“Sorry to have not gotten back to you sooner,” said the jolly keeper of cadavers at the city morgue. Today he didn’t sound so jolly. His voice was quiet and he sounded shaken. “You asked me to alert you if anything unusual transpired with the bodies of those two Americans, the couple I showed you?”

Rizzo answered quickly, his senses on full alert.

“Yes?” he said.

“We’ve been friends for many years, you and I,” he said. “So I’m doing you a favor. But you must never mention it.”

“Go ahead,” Rizzo said.

“Two things,” said Santangelo, who added that he was calling from a café around the corner. “A security team from the American embassy came by and picked up the bodies. They had all the paperwork, personal and legal, to remove the bodies. This was two days ago. They seemed to be in a hurry. I believe the corpses have been repatriated to America now.”

“And did you behave like their lap dog and give them all of the information that we have?” he asked.

“I had no other choice,” came the response.

“Wonderful!” Rizzo said. “Bloody Americans! How do they always know these things? Spies, they have spies among us!”

Santangelo allowed his friend to rant, saying nothing.

“And what was the second thing?” insisted Rizzo. “Is it anywhere near as pleasant as the first?”

“Perhaps,” said Santangelo. “I’m not supposed to give you any more information about the case,” he said. “In fact, I’ve been served with papers from a federal court. I’m not even supposed to speak to you.”

With that, he rang off, leaving Rizzo with a dial tone.

FORTY-NINE

E
very once in a while, Alex almost felt human again.

Instead of running or going to the gym, she went for long walks, an unusual activity in her neighborhood. On a whim, she booked a trip to Puerto Rico and went for what she thought would be a week. She used the fake passport and driver’s license that Cerny had issued because the government—with their usual bureaucratic diligence—had never asked for them back. She spent too much money and sat each day by a hotel swimming pool in huge dark glasses so she wouldn’t be recognized.

In Puerto Rico she spent time in the bars and in the casinos. She played blackjack one night, lost more than a hundred dollars, then won it back the following night at the roulette wheel. Then she went up by several hundred dollars by playing the thirty-three, the “double trinity,” as she thought of it. She drank way too much. The booze seemed to help even though deep down she knew it wasn’t an answer. The double trinity hit on the thirty-third spin after she sat down to play.

She took three ten-dollar chips from her pile of winnings, placed it on the double zero, gave the dealer a smile and a shrug.

“One more spin and I get up and leave,” she said.

“Good luck,” the dealer said.

Alex smiled back.

The ball clicked around the rim of the wheel, clattered noisily and came to rest.

Double zero. Two hits in a row. The table buzzed.

“That’s it. I’m done,” she said.

She tipped the dealer lavishly and got up and left. She was ahead by six hundred dollars. She put four hundred aside and vowed to not put it back on the tables.

On the next night, she played roulette again, then some keno, then blackjack and broke even. At least it wasn’t a loss. She must have looked much better than she felt because she was asked to dance by an attractive Canadian man. She obliged but declined to have dinner with him in his room, much to his disappointment.

“Something wrong with me?” he asked, teasing gently.

“No. Nothing wrong with you. My fiancé was killed in an accident recently.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“I understand,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I’m not much good company for anyone, much less myself,” she said.

“I understand that too,” he answered. “Hey, if things ever change …”

He handed her a business card. He was in film production in Toronto. She threw the card away.

Then she went upstairs and soon, inexplicably, found herself in tears again.

She came home a day early. Her home answering machine was loaded with twenty-six messages. She cleared it without listening to them. She felt as if she were about to hit bottom and fall through. She wasn’t that far wrong.

Two nights later, toward ten in the evening, she took out her Glock 9 and placed it on the coffee table in front of her in her living room. She took out a pen and pad and loosely constructed a suicide note. She put a fresh clip of bullets in the magazine and slapped it into the butt of the weapon. She pulled back the slide. It snapped back on its spring, pulling a round from the magazine, leaving the round in the firing chamber and leaving the hammer cocked. She clicked the safety catch to “off.” All that was needed now was a slight pull on the trigger.

Doggerel tiptoed across the fringes of her consciousness.

The time has come, the walrus said,

to speak of many things,

Of loaded guns and obscene puns

and whether pigs have wings.

Well, the time
had
come.

She walked her way through a suicide scenario. She set her suicide note aside on the table. She wondered if she was dressed appropriately to kill herself. She considered the mindless small details of who might find her. Or should she call the police first and then do it?

Alexandra’s gaze fell upon a small mirror on the table. It was chipped from a time several weeks earlier when Robert, who had come over for an early dinner had knocked it off the table.

She saw the chip and emotions and associations took over. How long could anyone be expected to live with such grief? She looked away, purposefully avoiding her own reflection. The awful truth was in that mirror and she didn’t need any reminders. Her skin was blotched with tension and fatigue. Her hair, which she hadn’t washed in three days—or was it four?—was dirty and stuck to her cheek and neck.

God, I’m a mess. God, I can’t deal with this. God, take me away from this.

She wished—she genuinely wished—she had died with Robert. Then they could have entered God’s heaven together.

Then she thought of the other people who had been killed in Ukraine and another wave of despondency washed over her. She was wishing she were dead and those poor shattered families were wishing that their lost loved ones were alive. She felt further guilt for just being alive.

Okay … she knew what she should do. This would be easier for everyone …

She fingered the Glock. She hefted it. The gun felt heavy in her hand. Heavier than it normally did with a full magazine, even though that made no sense.

She’d just run through the scenario. Who would find her? Who would bury her?

Who would even miss her?

The answer was obvious.

No one.

She fingered the gun. Yup. Round in the chamber, hammer cocked, safety on “off.”

Ready for business, as Robert used to say.

She had no family left. No parents, no children. She supported no one. She loved no one. No one depended on her.

She used to think she had come so far, done so well. It wasn’t so long ago that all systems were
go
and the future looked beautiful.

Yeah, well that was a previous lifetime, wasn’t it?

Previous lifetime. Her thoughts were skewed and out of kilter.

She reached for the little cross that she had for years worn around her neck and then, when it was gone, she was reminded why it was gone and what had happened. Ukraine had really ruined her, everything that had happened there, everything that she had lost. Her fiancé. Her religion. Her belief.

Her life? Just an afterthought. She had lost that in Ukraine too. This one single shot would merely be the final formality, the punctuation point that would complete the sentence.

She picked up the gun.

Her hand trembled. She turned it toward her temple.

Come on, Alex. Have the courage.

Do it. Do it!

She moved the nose of the pistol upward. She felt the cold black steel touch her temple.

She began a little countdown and the blessed eternal darkness became visible.

Five
,
four …

Time spiraled. So did thoughts. So did words.

She was a little girl again in Southern California, her mom and her dad nearby in the warm sunlight of Redondo Beach. Then she was a teenager in the south of France, riding a horse one summer.

Three
,
two …

Then she was in Russia, laughing with friends at the Café Pushkin. Then, finally, she was in Robert’s arms for a final time. And he was holding her so tightly that for a split second it didn’t seem like a fantasy anymore and she could actually hear his voice and he was telling her that he loved her and always would.

One …!

She could feel the touch of her finger against the trigger. Just a little more pressure and—

And then Robert was in front of her. And from somewhere he was talking to her, a voice as alive or real as anything in this room, telling her deep down what she knew he would tell her, what he would scream at her, if he could have seen her right now.

If anything should happen to me, if something bad, should happen, I never want you to be alone. Or unhappy.

You should go on … you should go on …

You must be brave and go on …

I will send a guardian angel to protect you …

Zero.

Her hand trembled horribly. Tears overtook her.

Her hand moved the Glock’s deadly muzzle away from her head. She cried uncontrollably. She flicked the safety to “on.” She pushed the eject button that popped the magazine partly out of the butt and took it the rest of the way by hand and tossed it across the room. She pulled back the slide and popped the round that had been chambered—the one that, if it hadn’t been for Robert, would now be in her head—out of the ejection port. The gun empty like that, the slide stayed back. Just reinserting the magazine and pressing the release button would cause it to travel forward and put another round into the firing chamber, and the hammer was still in the firing position. With her thumb she pressed the release button and the slide came forward with a sharp snap. She pressed the trigger and the cocked hammer fell with another snap. The gun was now harmless.

She sobbed.
Oh God. Oh God. Oh Jesus …

It was a prayer, not a curse, an incantation, not a blasphemy.

She sat. She leaned back. She thought.

She cursed herself violently.

She couldn’t even work up the courage to pull the trigger!

What a useless excuse for a human being she was, she thought.

She stood. She needed air.

That was it. Air.

She would go out for a breath of air. She would walk across the street to the Irish bar restaurant called Murphy’s just two minutes away and knock back some drinks in the bar, summon up all the courage she could, and come back. Then she would finish things off.

That would do it. That would get the job done.

She pulled on her coat and went out the door. No sound from Don Tomás across the hall. Well, who cared? Did he care enough about her? Maybe it would be Don Tomás who found her. Good for him.

She went downstairs, as bitter as she had ever been in her life. She was working up a rage again, against God, against everything and everyone, convinced that she could get this final job done tonight.

A few drinks and there would be no equivocating when she came back upstairs.

This is it for Alexandra LaDuca. No one lives forever, right?

She brushed past the concierge, barely nodding to him.

She went to the front door, her head down.

A large man with a pronounced limp was approaching, a duffel bag on his shoulder. She made no effort to get out of his way. At the last moment he saw her.

They collided. She threw a furious elbow at him. She connected solidly even though she was off balance.

She looked up, bitter and profane, ready to follow the elbow with a kick.

“Damn it!” she snapped. “Why don’t you watch where—?”

“Hey, hey?
Alex?
” said a friendly voice, the man she had hit. An accent from the Carolinas. He laughed. “Hey, easy, woman, easy. What the heck? Wow, that’s one nasty elbow you throw! Man!”

He reached out and steadied her with a strong arm.

“You okay?” he asked.

Two blinks. Then recognition.

“What are
you
doing here?” she asked.

A smile crossed his face. Concern with affection. “I was looking for you,” he answered. “But I never thought I’d see you.”