The Flight Attendant(56)

“Where were you the night that Alex Sokolov was murdered?” Hammond asked.

“I am taking the Fifth.”

“Were you in your room that the airline had booked for you at the Fairmont Hotel? In other words, were you at the same place as the rest of the crew? Or did you spend the night elsewhere?”

“Again, I am taking the Fifth.”

“You know the Fifth is not some crazy magical bullet, don’t you?” Hammond told her.

She said nothing. She tried to breathe slowly. She tried not to think about the drink she would have when she got out of here, but to focus instead on this poker game, this chess match. Did they somehow know—and know categorically—that she had not been in the room the airline had provided her, or were they just presuming she was not there because of the Royal Phoenician security camera photos?

“No,” said Ani, answering for her, “it’s not. But it is her constitutional right.”

“And I hope you realize,” Hammond went on, “that by invoking the Fifth you are only giving me the impression that you really have done something incriminating—that you really do have something to hide.”

“I…” Cassie stopped. She didn’t know what she wanted to say.

“Look,” Hammond began, his voice growing a little more gentle. “Let’s just clear up the little things. The easy things.”

“Okay,” she said.

“When did you meet Alex Sokolov?”

For a moment the absurdity of the question confused her, and she had to think about it a second. “On the plane,” she said. “When he boarded.”

“You never saw him in New York?”

“No.”

“It’s a weirdly small city. And, of course, you did go by his office yesterday.”

She remained silent.

“Anyone tell you he was going to be on the flight?” he asked.

“No. Why would someone? That’s…”

“That’s what?”

“That’s not how it works. No one tells us who’s on the flight until we get the passenger list before takeoff.”

The FBI agent looked at her earnestly. “I’m trying to help you, Ms. Bowden. But I can’t help you if you don’t help me.”

“I think she’s being quite helpful,” said Ani.

He ignored the lawyer and continued. “The newspapers. I’m sure you’ve seen them. Is that you in the pictures, Ms. Bowden?”

“What newspapers? What pictures?” she asked. She was stalling and the two FBI agents had to know it—how could she not have seen the newspapers by now?—but her reflex when she couldn’t answer with a grandiose lie was to answer with a modest one.

Hammond was clearly going to play along. “Well, let me tell you. Some of the newspapers have published security camera photos from the hotel where Alex Sokolov’s body was found. Most have published two. One shows a woman on Sokolov’s arm the night before he was killed. The other shows that same woman leaving the hotel the next morning. Alone. She’s wearing the same clothes.”

Washburn opened a manila folder beside his pad and placed the two photos on the table in front of Cassie. “Here they are,” he said.

Ani smiled but didn’t glance at the pictures. “A walk of shame? Seriously? Why are we even discussing this?”

Hammond ignored her and elaborated: “The legal attaché in the Emirates says that the woman in these pictures matches the description of the woman—an American—who three different hotel employees say they saw with Sokolov the night before he was murdered. Apparently, she matches the woman with whom he dined at a French restaurant that evening.”

The photos were eight by tens. They were crisper than the reproductions in the newspaper or the images she had seen on her phone, but certainly not crystal clear. Was the woman indisputably her? Not indisputably. The first was a grainy, long-range profile. In the second, the woman was wearing sunglasses. In both she was wearing the scarf. But a reasonable person could reasonably suppose it was her.

“Recognize the scarf?” Hammond was asking.

She shrugged. She gazed for a moment at the arabesque, at the almost hypnotic array of tendrils and swirls.

“One of the flight attendants on the plane with you from Paris to Dubai recalls you buying one just like that when you landed,” Hammond said. “It was near the duty-free shop at the airport. Maybe even next to it.”

She wondered: Was this Megan? Jada? Shane? It could have been any of them or someone else. There were nine other flight attendants. “I may have,” she answered simply.

“So: is that you?”

She looked up at him and she looked at Ani. She glanced at Washburn. She held her hands tightly together, but she couldn’t stop her legs from shaking under the table. She knew she was supposed to take the Fifth. But, suddenly, she knew also that she wasn’t going to. She knew it. She thought once again of that old Beatles lyric, I know what it’s like to be dead, and understood with certainty that she was going to lie, because that was who she was, and you can no more escape your DNA than you can an Airbus that is pinwheeling into the ocean after (pick one, she thought to herself, just pick one) a cataclysmic mechanical failure, a suicidal pilot, or a bomb in the cargo hold. She was the lightning that brings down the plane, the pilot who panics on the final approach in the blizzard.