The Flight Attendant(16)

“I’m not sure I’ve ever been that close to a person who was murdered.”

“Me, either,” she said, though she thought of her father and briefly her mind dissected the distinctions between manslaughter and murder.

Abruptly Jada looked over Cassie’s shoulder, her gaze intense and her dark eyes widening. Cassie felt a sharp spike of fear and turned around, convinced this was it, it was over, an air marshal was about to arrest her, just as Jada pushed past. And there she saw the other flight attendant helping a young mother with a toddler in her arms, lifting up the diaper bag that was twisting upside down on the woman’s shoulder, the diapers and wipes and the sippy cup in the shape of a bunny all about to tumble onto the floor of the aircraft right in front of the starboard-side first-class bathroom. The mom thanked her, rolling her eyes at the nearness of the disaster, and the two of them laughed. Jada was asking the little boy’s name as Cassie leaned against the wall with the trolleys and the trash bin, at once relieved and appalled. She wondered: was this sort of adrenal overreaction going to be the norm for the rest of her life?



* * *



? ?

As she was wrapping her shoulder harness around her in the jump seat in the front of the plane, as the Long Island coastline and beaches were racing below them, she thought of the three words she hoped never to say aloud or hear on an aircraft: brace for impact. That was the signal they were about to crash-land or auger in. Those four syllables? They were the cry of the raven. Imminent collision with the ground, best case a belly flop and worst case a head-on, nose-first crash that would cause the aircraft to break apart and explode, the bodies—the pieces of the bodies that were recognizable—small, charred briquettes.

The words came to her because the captain had informed the crew somewhere over New Brunswick that they were going to be met at the gate at JFK by the authorities. He didn’t say why and whether by “authorities” he meant airport or TSA officials or some other law enforcement group, and no one on the crew was going to ask him. But they all had their suspicions. Some guessed there was a possible terrorist on board, someone high on the watch list, and the passenger would be arrested the moment they landed, but Cassie had flown long enough to know this wasn’t the case: if the captain had been told there might be a terrorist on the plane, he would have informed the crew so they could keep an eye on him every single moment they were in the air. Instead, as they had prepared the cabins for arrival, Megan and Jada and Shane had speculated aloud that it had something to do with the dead American in Dubai. What else could it possibly be, Megan had asked? He’d been with them on the flight from Paris to the Middle East.

Cassie considered asking Megan to cover for her: not necessarily lie, but simply not volunteer the information that Cassandra Bowden had returned to the crew’s Dubai hotel in the morning barely twenty minutes before they had to leave for the airport. Cassie knew it would be easier to simply tell investigators that she had spent the night alone in her own room at the airline’s hotel than have to make up a man to account for her absence. But asking that of Megan would only implicate her further in the other woman’s eyes: it would convince Megan that she had indeed been with Alex the night he had died and very possibly had killed him. Already Cassie had felt her friend watching her as they had walked up the aisles, the two of them checking to be sure the passengers were belted in and their seatbacks were upright.

And so she focused right now on concocting two possible stories. If she had the sense from the questioning that Miranda had not yet come forward, she would share with the authorities another hotel and another man, molding him in her mind like a golem. She would keep it simple. Give them a name and admit that she was sure the fellow had made it up because she was sure he was married. She was going to say he was some sort of consultant and she thought he was South African. The hotel would be the Armani because it was big and it was in the opposite direction from the Royal Phoenician, and the floor with his room had been somewhere in the middle. Could have been on the sixth and it could have been on the eighth. She would confess sheepishly that she had been drinking, and she couldn’t remember very much. Surely there was a single man in a room on one of those floors who spoke English with an accent she could say later (if necessary) she must have mistaken for South African. But otherwise she would say almost nothing. That was what mattered. It would be much easier to keep her story straight if the details were few.

But what if Miranda had now told the Dubai police that she had met a flight attendant named Cassie the night before, and they had already informed the FBI in America? That would demand a very different lie, one that was more dangerous but in some ways a much easier one to pull off. That lie was simply this: Alex Sokolov had been alive when she had left his hotel suite.

Maybe, as a matter of fact, she should say that no matter what, because at some point Miranda would talk to the police, and Cassie knew that her stories should be consistent. So, yes, this was the tale. This was what had happened. This was the lie.

In the meantime, she would brace for impact. It was, she knew, inevitable.





FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION



FD-302 (redacted): CASSANDRA BOWDEN, FLIGHT ATTENDANT


DATE: July 28, 2018


CASSANDRA BOWDEN, date of birth—/—/——, SSN #————, telephone number (—)————, was interviewed by properly identified Special Agents FRANK HAMMOND and JAMES WASHBURN at JFK INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, immediately upon her flight’s arrival in the U.S.