The Flight Attendant(51)
* * *
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Almost as soon as she was back in her apartment, her phone rang and she saw it was Megan. She paused for a brief moment but then answered it. “Hey, there,” she said. “Aren’t you in Berlin?”
“I am. The flight’s delayed, so I thought I’d check in with you. You okay?”
“Let’s see: I’m speaking again to the FBI this afternoon and I’m kind of wigged out by the newspapers. Other than that, what could possibly be wrong?”
“I get it. The FBI talked to me again, too.”
She stared at Hammond’s business card on her refrigerator. Suddenly she felt as if she had just dodged a bullet not saying anything more to Megan. She told herself that she was being crazy, but an idea came to her: this conversation is being recorded. The FBI was using Megan to get her to incriminate herself. And so, just in case, she responded, “I hope they get to the bottom of this soon. I feel so bad for that poor man’s family.” She said a small prayer that Megan wouldn’t bring up the fact that she had asked her friend to lie for her when they had spoken last.
“Vaughn feels that way, too,” Megan agreed, referring to her husband. “When he read the newspaper stories, he called and said he didn’t understand why it’s all about the mystery woman and not the guy who was killed.”
“How is Vaughn?”
“Good. Same old, same old.”
“What’s he working on these days?” she asked. She had no interest at all in what Vaughn Briscoe did for a living as a consultant, but the question struck her as innocuous and safe. She felt bad not trusting her friend, but just in case, she had to get this conversation as far from Dubai as she could.
“More government nonsense. He’s in Edgewater, Maryland, again. He’s happier when he’s with private-sector clients, but it makes our life so much easier when he’s working in Maryland or inside the Beltway. When the girls were younger and he was working for that pharmaceutical company in Colorado, childcare was a nightmare. He was always away. Always traveling. Kind of like me. Now he’s home every night, and this fall he’ll be able to pick them up from the ten trillion places they have to be after school when I can’t.”
“How was Berlin?”
“It was fine. Are you nervous about this afternoon?”
“No,” Cassie lied. “How many times and how many ways can they ask me about what Sokolov was like on the flight or whether he said anything of interest?”
“That’s all they’re asking?”
“So far. Maybe they’ll have more interesting questions for me this afternoon.”
“Look, Cassie…”
“Go on.”
“Do you need anything? Is there anything I can do?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I just feel so bad for you. I just—”
“I’m fine,” Cassie said. She wanted to cut her friend off before she could say something they both might regret. “I need to run. My family’s coming to town from Kentucky this weekend, and I have a thousand things to do. But I really appreciate the offer, and I love hearing your voice. I love it. But I’m okay.”
“If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
“Yeah. Berlin,” she answered, and she laughed ever so slightly. Her friend, if she needed her, probably would be on another continent and in a time zone six hours distant.
* * *
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To try and take her mind off the newspapers and what loomed that afternoon, she finished “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” on the couch, occasionally glancing up at the Empire State Building when her mind wandered from nineteenth-century Russia. She felt neither virtuous for reading Tolstoy nor relieved by Ilyich’s transformation: the way he went from fearing to welcoming that great, ineludible light. Mostly she continued to hope that Alex Sokolov hadn’t woke up when his throat was being cut.
* * *
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It was hot and sunny again that Friday, and so Ani directed Cassie to a glass table in a shady spot of the courtyard, and the two of them brought their street falafel there. The city felt quiet to Cassie, even for the start of a weekend in the middle of the summer.
“This building isn’t precisely a ghost town on August Fridays, but a lot of people clear out—especially the businesses on the other floors. Don’t even try and schedule a meeting after lunch on a Friday in August,” she told Cassie.
“We’re getting so Parisian in the two-one-two,” Cassie murmured. She was distracted. She hadn’t fallen asleep until, almost in desperation near midnight, she had done a couple shots of vodka, popped a pair of Advil PMs, and swallowed a few tabs of melatonin. Normally she didn’t need melatonin on this side of the Atlantic. But normally she wasn’t meeting with lawyers and then the FBI. She’d been fine—a little fuzzy maybe, but fine—when she had first crawled out of bed and walked to the Rite-Aid for the newspapers.
Ani smiled at her small joke, but Cassie could see concern in her eyes. “You look tired,” she said.
“I am.” She stared at the falafel and sauce in its pita. The wrap in its wax paper. She had no appetite today, and tried to decide if she was any less hungry than usual.