She found herself listening to him.
“When I lost my leg,” he continued, “the pastor at my church in Durham used to phone me every day. Make sure my messed-up head was getting back together. Make sure I didn’t go off the deep end. Know what I mean?”
“I know.”
Ben shook his head. “I know it’s corny, but my mom used to read the Psalms to us from the Bible. Three or four times a week, after dinner, we’d sit around the kitchen table; this is when I was growing up in Greensboro, and she’d read something from her family Bible. I always liked the psalm about lifting ‘my eyes up unto the hills, from whence-’ ”
“ ‘Cometh my strength,’ ” Alex responded softly.
“You know that one?” He was surprised.
“It’s Psalm 121,” she said. “I remember it from long ago. And, funny you should mention it, I had the occasion to use it myself in Kiev.”
Her fingers went to her neck, where the jewelry used to be, then returned empty.
“Then you should practice it. What goes around comes around. Lift up your eyes. The loss is always going to be with you, Alex. Without Robert, you’ll never walk quite the same way again. But you’ll walk.”
He paused. “Now here’s where my pastor connects to you,” he said. “After I was feeling better and got myself back into college, I called him up to thank him. He said, ‘Thank me by taking the word forward. When you see someone else who needs that call each day, that supporting hand, you take that first step. You help that person.’That’s why I’m here tonight, Alex,” he said. “That’s why I’m here in DC getting a college degree; that’s why I’m here offering you a hand. You’re not going to let my pastor down, are you?”
She smiled and pondered it.
“You’re not going to let me down. Who’d throw me those great passes?” he asked.
“Suppose I did want to walk again?” she asked. “How do I do it?”
“One small step at a time,” he said. “And keep your eyes lifted unto the hills. You’re on this earth for a reason, and it’s not just to throw me passes on the basketball court, though I wouldn’t mind some of those real soon.”
“I owe you,” she said.
“Then get over for some basketball tomorrow. I’m averaging a lousy ten points a game since you’ve been missing.”
“I’ll be there,” she said.
An hour later, she sat before the Glock on her living room table. Slowly, she lifted it.
She methodically removed the bullets from the magazine and put them in the cardboard box they came in. She placed the weapon back in its case and locked it. She put the empty magazine in a drawer in the kitchen that held odds and ends like packing tape and a nesting set of screwdrivers and an extension cord she didn’t need. Not that she couldn’t get it, but it would take effort and, more importantly, time and maybe reflection.
She walked back to the sofa, collapsed, and cried until there were no more tears.
She had promised. And she would go on.
The next day, she started going through the mail that had gathered for her. Her small mailbox in the lobby had filled up long ago, so the rest of her mail had been left at the desk. When the concierge gave it to her it filled a respectable-sized box.
The task took a while.
She played basketball again the next night. She received hugs and tearful embraces from everyone she knew. Never in her life had she so realized how valuable a network of friends could be.
She phoned her boss, Mike Gamburian, the following morning and told him she was ready to return.
There was a pause. “You’re sure?” he asked.
“Tell me I can come back before I change my mind,” she said. “Please, Mike?”
“You pick the day,” he said.
On Wednesday, March 25, she returned to work at Treasury.
She was ready to learn to walk again, one step at a time.
Part Two
FIFTY-TWO
At a few minutes past 7:00 p.m., Alex sat at her desk, delaying before going home. Springtime had finally come to Washington, and the city enjoyed its best weather of the year. Then the heat of the summer gripped the city in mid-June.
She stared at her two computers. The ice of Kiev seemed a world away, a bitter memory. But it still haunted her. Evenings were difficult. She was afraid of loneliness, afraid that missing a certain someone would overtake her.
She had started to work past her grief. Now she wanted answers.
How long had it been since Kiev? There had been times in the last few weeks when she could have instantly given the answer. It’s been two days, it’s been three. It’s been a week, two weeks. A month. Then a second month. Then a third. Gradually, the story disappeared from the newspapers and the attention of the American public, replaced by other events, other intrigues.
This evening, on a whim, she entered her clearance for a secured Intranet site dedicated to the Kiev visit and the debacle that had transpired there. The screen went blank and she sighed. Then a dialogue box opened that asked for her name.
She entered it. If it was receptive to her name, no one could get on her case for getting access.
The dialogue window accepted her name. Surely someone had failed to purge her. But the next thing she knew, she was in the HUMINT-the human intelligence-leading up to the trip to Kiev.
Except, what was this she saw?
She leaned forward.
The file took new directions with new references. Surely further access codes would cut her off. But they didn’t. She kept exploring.
For the next hour, the files attached to the presidential visit to Kiev took up the known story of what had happened and its aftermath. It was typical of the code of conduct of such things that, having been a principal player in the events of Kiev, she had received no subsequent briefings of how things had gone down or why. She had answered plenty of questions but had received no explanations.
She read report after report, analysis after analysis, of what had happened.
Something bothered her immediately.
Almost everything was written by investigators who had not been there.
She began to notice strange small discrepancies, none that made any significant difference by itself, but enough to bring to mind the principle that if you pushed together enough grains of sand, you would build a beach.
The attackers who had fired the rockets, their weapons and their vehicles, were described differently than she had remembered.
A small mistake? Maybe.
But she recalled that five men had charged the presidential limousine and found it recounted in several records that there were four. The Secret Service detail assigned to the president was listed as twenty-four. She knew there had been twenty-eight.
The official record had been tweaked. Why?
Leaning forward, she attacked the keyboard with more gusto. She referenced names including her own. She traveled through cyberspace to the personnel files and biographies of the government people who had attended the visit to Kiev.
Thirty seven names in all. She scanned them, including her own again, to see if any backgrounds had been fudged. None had that she could see.
She went back and picked up the story. It was now past 8:00 in the evening. The disinformation was accelerating. She brought up her own name and factored in several cross references. She attempted to access the files that she herself had contributed in the lead-up to the trip, mindless low security stuff on trade delegations, black market currency issues, the penny-ante balance of payments stuff, and then the more substantial stuff on Federov.
She found these files had been tampered with too. With a rush, she then went after the reports that she herself had filed in the aftermath of Kiev. These were missing entirely.
She leaned back from her screen.