The Flight Attendant(101)

When she got out, she stood for a long moment and stared down the corridor. The hallway wasn’t as opulent as the Royal Phoenician, nor was it as long. But it was elegant: perfectly appointed for a lovely Italian boutique hotel. The carpet was a little frayed with age, but the patterns were reminiscent of a Renaissance tapestry. She thought of the clouds and sea in a Botticelli painting and imagined the work that went into making a color or dye five hundred years ago, the transformation of the pigments into the acrylic at the tip of the brush.

Then she started down the hallway. She felt a spike of unease, but she had lived with almost that sort of twinge since she had woken up beside a corpse, and so she disregarded it. She walked in silence down the corridor, lonely and alone, her room key in her hand, and stared straight ahead. She told herself that the air was not really charged and there was really nothing to fear, no reason to be morose. She was just going to a hotel room in the night by herself, as she had hundreds of times in the past, and there was no reason to be anxious or frightened.

After all, this time she was actually sober.

When that realization came to her, she smiled.

But the smile didn’t last long, because when she turned the corner she saw a man and she jumped. For a split second she feared that her anxiety had a specific cause: it was every woman’s fear when she’s alone and sees a man in her path. He was about twenty yards from her room, and she almost turned and ran. But then she realized that it was only Enrico, and she relaxed. He was sitting in a small chair against the wall, his face in the shadow from the sconce behind him. There was a table with a hotel phone next to him. He stood when he saw her and went to embrace her, but she pushed him away.

“You just scared the you-know-what out of me,” she told him.

“I thought I would be a nice surprise,” he said, his tone apologetic. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“God. It’s best if I’m alone, Enrico. I told you that.”

“And I was going to leave you alone. I was down at the bar when the fire alarm went off. I was helping them close. And I thought, my beautiful flight attendant must be terrified.”

“By a fire alarm? No.”

He shook his head. “By being outside in the dark—instead of safely in bed in your room.”

“I’m back now. I’m fine.”

“Then I will escort you to your room and leave you there.” He held out his elbow, and she took it. Together they walked down the corridor. Then she slid her key into the slot and opened the door.





33




He had just finished dragging Elena’s body into the bathroom and dropping it into the bathtub when he heard Enrico’s voice in the corridor. It didn’t give him time to rethink his plan. But at least he was ready.

The moment both the bartender and the flight attendant were inside the hotel room, the door shut behind them, he emerged from the darkened bathroom. He slammed the grip of his pistol into the back of Enrico’s skull with his left hand and rammed the tip of Elena Orlov’s stun gun against Bowden’s gauzy little dress—high on the rear of her thigh—with his right. The bartender instantly collapsed to the carpet, unconscious, his shirt sponging up wet remnants of Elena’s blood. The flight attendant grunted loudly, shuddered, and then went limp like a rag doll. Just melted against him. She stared up at him as he lowered her to the rug beside the bartender, and he could see the terror in her eyes. She would be able to speak soon enough, and he did want to talk to her. But first he had to reevaluate what he was going to do.

He dumped out the woman’s purse and saw that she had gotten a gun. Perfect. He didn’t care where she got it; he could use it. Elena had set the table rather nicely when she’d called the newspaper. The woman wouldn’t overdose on the barbiturates the American spy had brought. Instead he would leave behind a tableau for the world in which it seemed evident that Cassandra Bowden had killed her Italian lover and her new, wealthy Russian friend from Sochi, and then shot herself in the head with the gun she must have gone to such great lengths to acquire.

First, however, he had to transfer the silencer from his Beretta to hers.





34




The taser was excruciating, and Cassie wanted to scream—in her mind, she imagined a blue streak of expletives, a woman with a foul mouth and an impressive vocabulary unleashing it all in the throes of labor—but she could only moan, long and low. And then she was on her stomach on the hotel room floor, just outside the bathroom door, and there was Buckley crouching beside her.

Yes, it was the actor. Of course it was.

He was actually wearing that same black ball cap. Here she had been so obsessed with Miranda, and all along it had been a person she thought was sweet and well meaning and actually a bit of a puppy dog. It was a testimony to just how badly she appraised people and picked her friends, and it might have been comic if he weren’t going to kill her the way that he or one of his associates had, she presumed, killed Alex. He was going to grab a handful of her hair, pull back her head to expose her neck, and cut her throat—probably poor Enrico’s, too—and leave her facedown on the hotel room rug to bleed out.

Cassie hoped it wouldn’t hurt, but she knew it would. She realized that she was most afraid of the pain, the sharp, brief, razor-like sting of the blade slicing into her skin, and maybe that explained why she drank. Pain came in all colors and sizes, much of it far worse than the pricks and aches and fever dreams that affected the body. This was the pain that gouged out great holes in the soul, hollowing out self-esteem and cratering a person’s self-respect. This was the pain that caused you to gaze at yourself in the mirror and wonder why in the name of God you were here. Cassie understood that her life was a study in precisely this sort of palliative management. Or, to be precise, mismanagement.