The Flight Attendant(27)

Mayes opened his hands, palms up, and sat back. “Got it,” he said. “Got it. But for all we know, the FBI is going to talk to the passengers who were seated near Sokolov on the flight, and it’s possible that one or more of them is going to say you and the guy were friendly. I don’t know yet if Sokolov was from some wealthy or well-connected family, or whether he just wasn’t what he said he was. I don’t know what he was really doing in Dubai. Maybe it really was just a meeting with investors. But this story has legs, so I want to be sure you do three things. Okay?”

“Fine. Tell me.” She hoped that her lies and her fear would be misconstrued for aggravation.

“I want you to get a lawyer.”

“I can’t afford a lawyer!” she said, even though she recalled vividly her vow in the hotel suite in Dubai that she would find one if somehow she made it back to America. “I can barely afford my apartment. You know what I make. I’m broke. We’re all broke. We all need more money than we have.”

“So does everyone, so relax. I can help you find a lawyer you can afford. Not a big deal. It’s what we do.”

“I’m not saying yes—because I don’t see why I need one—but what else?”

“Two, I want you to keep me informed with exactly what’s going on. Again, this is so we can help you.”

“Fine.”

“And, three, I want you to tell me the second a reporter calls you.”

She hadn’t imagined a reporter contacting her. But she realized that was na?ve. Of course one might, especially if Sokolov was from a prominent family or wasn’t really a hedge fund manager. “I can do all of that, sure,” she agreed. And perhaps because of the specter of a news camera in her face or the proximity of the New York Post that a fellow at another table was reading, she added, “And if you have a name for a lawyer, that would be great. Cheap, but good. But tell me something.”

“Name it.”

“If Sokolov wasn’t a money manager of some sort, then what was he? A spy?”

“He had a job that demanded he travel. That’s a great cover for a lot of things.”

“Is that a yes? He might have been an American spy?”

“Or Russian. Or German. Or Israeli. Or South African. I don’t know. Maybe he was some kind of go-between or courier.”

She thought of the paperback she’d bought yesterday. “He was into his Russian DNA—at least a little bit.” When she said the word DNA, she felt another one of those pinpricks of misgiving and fear: it was her lipstick. The lipstick she had lost somewhere in Dubai; the lipstick she had possibly left behind in room 511. She imagined a police tech lifting it off the hotel room floor with tongs and dropping it into a clear plastic bag. There it was, the smoking gun.

And there was something else: a lip balm. A lip balm with her airline’s logo. Sure, it was a generic, but she liked it and she used it, too. It had a coconut scent. When she had been emptying her purse before throwing it away in Dubai, she hadn’t seen it either. Sometimes she moisturized her lips with the balm before applying her lipstick. Had she done that in 511? Was there a lip balm somewhere in that room that had both her airline’s logo and her DNA?

“Maybe it’s just that simple,” Derek was saying about Sokolov. “Maybe he’s FSB.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“What used to be the KGB. Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. Counterintelligence. Spy stuff. Often very nasty spy stuff.”

“But he still seemed awfully American to me,” she told him, hoping Mayes hadn’t heard the small tremor in her voice.

“Means nothing. If you’re undercover, you want to seem American. But what do I know? He could just as easily be CIA. Or maybe he was a seriously nasty crook selling arms. Or girls. Or drugs. You know, whatever he was doing may have had nothing to do with espionage. I’m just saying, he may not have been what he said he was, given the way he was killed.”

“Didn’t some Dubai police officer say it was a robbery?”

“It wasn’t.”

“Really?”

“Nothing was stolen.”

“How do you know that?”

He shrugged. “I asked. I asked the FBI agent who interviewed Megan. The woman wouldn’t tell me much, but she said nothing was stolen. At least they don’t think anything was stolen. His wallet, his watch, his credit cards were all there, according to the FBI chief in the Emirates. His computer was still there. His briefcase was still there.”

She wanted to kick herself for not stealing Sokolov’s wallet and wristwatch and dumping them in the very same trash can in Dubai where she had tossed the washcloth and soap and the shards of the bottle of Stoli. It hadn’t crossed her mind to suggest that the poor guy’s death had been part of a robbery. But then she recalled an expression that a philosophy class had debated ad nauseam in college: you can’t prove a negative. In the end, the class as a whole had decided that you could. But the expression had stayed with her.

“Well, if something was stolen, it wouldn’t be in the hotel room, so you wouldn’t know it was gone,” she said.

“Agreed. I’m sure the authorities in Dubai, ours and theirs, will compile an inventory as best they can of what he had brought with him. I’m sure they’re talking to everyone at the hotel. I’m sure they’re talking to everyone who was supposed to be in the meeting with him—assuming there really was a meeting. In any case, the vibe I’m getting is pretty clear: this wasn’t a hotel room robbery that went bad. This was an execution.”