“I can’t say that I saw his two hoods that day,” she retorted. “They might have been there, they might not have been. They may have been part of the attack, but so might have two million other people in Kiev. Why do we keep going over this? You’ve asked me the same question seven times! What is it with these two guys that you keep harping on?”

Lee declined to answer. Instead, he wanted to know her theory about the RPG attacks. Who had been behind them?

She had no special theory to accompany her, no special knowledge.

“Did Federov ever mention anything about an American couple named Peter Glick and Edythe Osuna?” Lee asked out of the blue late one afternoon.

The reference startled Alex.

“Yes. I think he did,” she said after a moment’s thought.

“You think? Either he did or he didn’t.”

“He did,” she said. “He said they were a pair of American spies.”

“What else did he say about them?”

She searched her mind. She had many memories of the night club in Kiev and could recall much of the conversation. But she was drawing a blank here. “They were assigned to kill him?” she asked.

“He might have thought so. What else did he say about them?” Lee pressed.

“Honestly, it was a boozy evening. I’m not remembering.”

“Do you know who they are? Or who they were?”

“He said they were spies. I took everything Federov said with a few pounds of salt,” Alex said, “but looking back, I haven’t caught him in too many mistruths. If he said they were spies, my guess is they probably were.”

Lee’s finger was tapping lightly on the table, a little tic. “All right,” he said quietly. Then he moved on. Why did she suppose Federov had tried to move her position in the final seconds before the attacks? Was he sweet on her and trying to get her out of harm’s way? Or might he have been trying to move her into harm’s way for maybe the same reason?

She had no idea and told her interrogators exactly that.

The questions drove her into the ground.

The sessions were relentless.

Remorseless. Didactic. Unapologetic. Endless.

The direction of the inquiries always seemed to point in one direction. The official policy of the United States was to find the people responsible for the RPG attacks and bring them to some sort of justice. If official help was not forthcoming or significant enough from Ukraine, justice would be sought in the back alleys of the world. In fact, Alex sensed that this was the real way questions were pointing, the desired way of American officials to address their issues.

The sessions went on nonstop each day and continued until, with no explanation, they stopped completely. That was how things worked in Washington. Truth was like the smile of the mythical Cheshire cat. It receded as one approached it.

She went to trauma counseling with a top Washington shrink three times the first week back. Then she stopped. It was her feeling that the visits to the doc only made things worse.

Alex 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.”

The 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.