Noel Hynd - Countdown in Cairo

“Thank you. You are more kind to me than I deserve,” he said. “Will you also forgive me? ” he asked.

“For what?”

“For my greatest sin, my greatest malefaction ever.”

“I’m not following,” she said.

“No?” Federov asked.

“No.”

“I thought you might have figured it out by now.”

A deep feeling of unease began to creep over her, as if deep within her she knew what was coming next.

“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alex said. “Figure what out?”

“Robert’s death,” he said. He held a long beat, and then he said very clearly, “I was the person responsible.”

“What?”

“And the attack on Barranco Lajoya, also,” he said. “Completely responsible.”

An extraordinary silence crashed down upon the room.

“I ordered the attack in Kiev,” he continued. “I ordered it, organized it, and financed it. Then I did everything I could to blame it on my opposition, the filoruskies. I wanted to get back at your government for the war they waged against me, for expelling me from America, for siding with that swine Putin, for driving me out of business, for making me into an exile in my own land.”

With wide eyes and a sense of disbelief, Alex listened to him, his familiar voice, now racked with pain that was as severe spiritually as it was physically. He was assuming complete culpability for the carnage in Kiev that had shattered her life as well as so many others, the attack that had rewritten in blood one of the worst atrocities ever aimed at her country.

And then he moved along to Venezuela.

“In Venezuela,” he continued. “I had the local fascist militia come to try to kill you. I felt you were the instrument of the government, the representative of all my enemies. So they came for you; they murdered some other people, but you escaped again. It was only later that I understood that you were only doing a job. That Comrade Cerny was my enemy. And the disgraceful Putin as well.”

A long apologia followed but the words barely made any sense. After a few moments she was not hearing it.

Disgust. Resentment. Fury.

It all welled up inside her, those emotions and more. The monstrosity of all this brought her close to despair, a despair modified with rage, and almost a wish that this conversation had never happened, that she had heard none of it, that she might have lived a happier life never knowing the truth, never having heard this rambling deathbed confession.

And although one wave of angry doubt was in mutiny against another, her heart fought against what she had always known, always somehow suspected, yet found a way to deny until this moment, that Federov had taken Robert from her, that the man now dying before her had shattered her life and left it in small pieces that had been nearly impossible to piece back together.

“So I ask you now,” Federov finally said. “Where is your faith? What is it to you? What did your Jesus Christ teach you? Do you forgive me?”

She was angry. Resentful. Fearful. Every foul and vituperative emotion welled inside her.

Somehow she managed words.

“Forgiveness is not mine to give you, Yuri. Forgiveness is for God to give you.”

“Will he?’

“Ask him.”

“But will he?”

“You’ll find out.”

He took a moment, his strength almost gone. “But do you forgive me?” he asked.

She stood in silence, tears welling, not knowing whether she wanted to answer, to flee, or-as one horrible instinct urged-to shoot him herself in revenge, except something about that would have seemed both wrong and too good for him at the same time.

“Please answer me honestly,” he said. “Don’t give me the answer you wish me to hear, but the one that has the truth. I have little patience left for anything except truth.”

Federov paused. “So, I ask you again. Do you forgive me? ”

Several seconds passed. Somewhere deep in her soul, in something that seemed to her too much like a spiritual abyss, she found an answer that she didn’t know was there.

“I think in time,” she said, “with the proper strength, I will be able to. Yes. Because I need to. Because everything in my faith tells me to. Because I don’t choose to live a life burning with hatred. So with time,” she said, “with time, maybe, yes. Right now, I do not know why God has put me on this path. I hope that eventually I will understand.”

He nodded weakly. “That is good,” he said. “That is as good as I could hope for, hey. In its way, it’s a gift. So thank you.”

Words had departed her.

“Look,” she finally said, her insides raging, “that’s really all there is here. There’s nothing more to discuss. We’re finished here, right?”

He nodded and his head eased back.

“You’re a good person,” he said. “I wasn’t always. I regret.”

He closed his eyes. He was dozing within seconds, transported to wherever the dreams, illusions, and drugs took him, his memory leaping through the past.

Alex stood, turned, and went to the door.

She pulled it open, but then, responding to some inner voice, looked back one final time at the now-quiet man in the hospice bed. Dying was sometimes an eloquent act, she mused. Men and women often died in accordance with their lives: in battle, home with their families, in transit, wracked with disease.

Federov’s body was very still, and despite her insides being in turmoil, she tried to assess him once more. And almost before her eyes, he shrank to something very small and mean, and something very mortal, flawed, and harmless. She tried to develop a hatred for him, but couldn’t.

His eyes opened a sliver and his hand came up almost imperceptibly. “Hey,” he said in a near whisper. Then he was quiet again, breathing lightly.

She stared for another several seconds. In the end, he was just a man. More flawed than most others, but just a man.

She gently closed the door behind her. It latched in complete silence.

In the lobby of the hotel, she spotted Gian Antonio Rizzo not far from where she had left him. But she did not go to him, not immediately. She wasn’t ready to talk to anyone.

She spotted a small chapel in the hospital lobby and slipped into it. Like the doors to the hospital room upstairs, the chapel portals closed quietly. She wanted time to meditate and calm down. The chapel of the hospital was as good a place as any.

Her emotions were all over the place. Her spirit was exhausted. Taken as a whole, Federov’s confession contained the most monstrous words she had ever heard in her life.

Robert’s death… I was responsible… Do you forgive me?

It was too much to bear. For the first time since the dark days after Robert’s death, she put her head in her hands and cried. Long, hard, deep tears, tears she had fought back every lonely day for the past several months.

Several minutes passed, her mind awash in confusion, her entire soul lost in thoughts and prayer and spiraling images, all the way from the death of her grandmother and her funeral in Mexico, up through Kiev, and into the present. She tried to replay events and determine what she could have done differently, what might have put her in a different place today. But she was unable. She tried to push it all aside and tell herself that what was done was done and that it was God’s path for her, but she was unable to do that either. She wondered if she was on the right path or if she was a miserable failure.

And once again she felt very alone. Even in the chapel, she felt very alone.

At length, she realized that she wasn’t.

It was a sensation at first, a rallying of the spirit, perhaps, as she continued to lean forward, her face in her hands, her eyes closed. Then a small amount of additional time went by and she felt a spiritual presence, and then a physical presence to complement it.