Countdown in Cairo

TWENTY-FOUR

Alex had phoned Mike Gamburian in the middle of the night from the hospital to bring him up to speed. She returned home by 5:00 a.m., Janet with her. Janet slept over at her apartment, the door carefully bolted.

Alex and Janet spent the better part of the next morning at the local police precinct, explaining what had happened and what they had seen. Other witnesses from the mini-mart verified Alex’s testimony. The story blazed all over the local news, but without Alex’s name attached to it. The public spin: a female off-duty FBI agent had intervened in a crime in progress, and a blazing “Old West-style” gun battle had ensued. The shooting was considered justified. More than justified, in fact. Yet viewers would shake their heads and wonder what was going on even in the capital’s better neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Alex could already see what was going to happen. There would be a lot of sound and fury for a day, it would recede a little the next day, and gradually more immediate local stories would eclipse the investigation.

But for Alex, like the long scar on her arm and the twenty-two stitches that had closed it, the story was not likely to go away.

Alex would need to take the rest of the next afternoon to further assist the local police with their initial inquest. Her appointment with a CIA representative was pushed back a day.

The two men who had been killed had yet to be identified conclusively, though an initial investigation suggested that they were both in the United States illegally. A trace on their firearms led to a Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, gun dealer who had accepted fake driver’s licenses.

Late the next afternoon, Alex slipped away and sat in a rear pew in St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square. She found the four walls of her adopted local parish again giving her solace when she needed it, an island of tranquility.

Her thoughts drifted inward. So often in life, people had reacted to her as too perfect; her easy fluency with so many languages, her mastery of so many volumes of literature, her athleticism in high school and college, her looks way above average, and her career paths that always seemed quick. Yet her father had died before she was ten, her mother when she was twenty. Her fiancé had died tragically, and now the scar on her arm was another stinging reminder of her own mortality.

But could anyone ever see the turmoil within?

She felt so vulnerable, so alone sometimes. Increasingly, she found solace in alcohol and felt a subtle attraction for men who probably ought to be locked up. She had a best friend, Ben, but only had him because she had been on the doorstep of suicide one night.

Where was it all going? Above all, as she sat in a pew in St. John’s, she asked herself questions, asked God questions, and was waiting for answers.

There are moments in the life of every human being, she knew, when one had the choice to go forward or retreat, to continue on one’s path or divert and choose another one. As a teenager away at boarding school in Connecticut, she had first been introduced to the poetry of Robert Frost, and she had always been fascinated by one poem in particular about a path through the woods. The poet had stopped to consider which way to go when the path diverged; he could not see where either new path led. He had chosen the one least traveled, and that choice had made all the difference.

Which path was she on? A good and righteous path? Would she be able to look back on her life in twenty years, or thirty, or fifty years, and be convinced that she had done the right things, that she had obeyed the principles of her faith and been a good and godly person?

She wondered. More and more, projects like Venezuela pulled at her-the chance to work against poverty, disease, and ignorance. And yet on a professional level, she was asked to carry a weapon, be an investigator, be a protector of the innocent. Eventually, she knew, the song became the singer, and she would become not who she wanted to be but what her job and her assignments had turned her into.

Was her path compatible with who she was, what she wanted to be? In the literature she had read, she wasn’t James Bond and she wasn’t George Smiley. She wasn’t Jason Bourne. She wasn’t even Jessica Fletcher in the old Murder, She Wrote reruns that she had watched as a kid.

And she wasn’t akin to any of those thugs at the CIA who could always march forward no matter what the orders were. Sometimes, like now, she just plain thought about things too much.

She listened to the steady rumble of the traffic outside.

One of the church sextons came down the center aisle of the pews and gave her a friendly nod. She nodded back.

In her mind, she replayed the events of the previous evening, every horrible detail. She had a freeze-frame in her mind of how she had cut down the assailant who had aimed weapons at her from the backseat of the lurching car, and she wasn’t even sure which shot fired at her had hit her. She knew she would be dead if she hadn’t used her own weapon so swiftly. But that didn’t mean that today she was any less traumatized.

For the first time, it sank in: she could have been killed. Her own sense of mortality was suddenly very real. It made her shiver. It made her cringe. Was her faith any stronger, or was it starting to come undone?

She wasn’t sure of the answer.

She thought back to the events earlier in the year, the catastrophe in Kiev. Then there had been the investigation of the missing Pietà of Malta in Madrid.

She wondered: why was God throwing all of this her way?

Was she strong enough to handle it?

She had no answer.

In her hand was her FBI/Treasury ID and shield. She turned it over and examined it.

Keep it? Chuck it?

Should she move forward or go back? Or should she find some other path that diverged to an unknown destination through the woods?

Could any human being answer questions like that?

Her eyes were looking straight ahead, toward the altar and the stained glass beyond. But her gaze was really upon an inner world. She was aware of her own breathing, calm and evenly paced. And she was further aware of an extraordinary stillness, almost trancelike, that overcame her.

Once again, she had killed someone. She didn’t like the feeling of it.

She closed her eyes.

An old habit kicked in. She reached to her neck and fingered the stone pendant that hung there on a gold chain, the pendant that had replaced the small gold cross she had worn as a child. She held her fingers to it, gripping it between a thumb and a forefinger. It was warm from her skin. Soothing. She allowed time to flow by. She didn’t know if it was a minute or five. It was as if she had a foot in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual. Then there was a sound, a clattering sound, that of a door closing. She opened her eyes and looked. She saw the sexton cleaning in the area where a side door led to the vestry and the quarters for the choir.

The trauma was still there, but she felt as if she had turned a small corner in dealing with it. She felt better. Something had changed. For the first time since the previous evening, she enjoyed an inner calm, a sense of peace.

There was no flash of light, no chorus of angels, no dramatic revelation. Rather, when she opened her eyes again, she felt as if God had wrapped himself around her and reassured her. She could live with what had happened. By all she believed in, she had done the right thing.

The question, which had been so perplexing just minutes earlier, seemed so simple now. She had acted in accordance with her faith and her interpretation of morality. She had defended herself and someone she was charged to protect. She had done what she had to do under the circumstances, unpleasant and violent as it may have been.

There then, she told herself. She would, of course, go forward.

She began to think of Egypt.