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 fiancé. 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 fiancé 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 fiancé’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
Two 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,