The Flight Attendant(57)
They’d probably found her lipstick in Alex’s hotel suite already. Or, perhaps, that lip balm. They’d found it where she had left it or where it had fallen out of her purse. They’d found it beside a mirror in the bedroom or the bathroom or on the carpet near the chair where she had tossed her purse. They’d found the incontrovertible evidence that she had been with Alex the night he was killed.
“Well?” Hammond pressed. Ani was mouthing the three syllables Take the Fifth, her eyes wide and intense.
Instead, however, Cassie gazed for one long, last moment at the images on the table, savoring these final seconds before the plane hits the earth, unsure whether the next few words would result in a successful crash landing or the aircraft would break apart and explode upon impact. She took a deep breath through her nose, exhaled, and then said, “Of course, it’s me. Alex and I met on the plane, we had dinner in Dubai, and then we went back to his hotel room. We made love in the bedroom and in the bathroom—in the shower. And in the morning, when I left, he was still very, very much alive. I can assure you of that. He kissed me once on the forehead before I said good-bye, and then said he was about to get up himself. But I swear to you on my life: when I left the hotel, he was perfectly, totally fine.”
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
FD-302—EXTRACT: CASSANDRA BOWDEN, FLIGHT ATTENDANT
DATE: August 3, 2018
Although BOWDEN had pled the Fifth multiple times in the interview, including one time when asked if SOKOLOV had told her the name of the hotel where he was staying, when shown the hotel security camera photos, she admitted that she was the woman in both of them.
She said that she and SOKOLOV had dined at LA PETITE FERME before returning to his hotel room at the ROYAL PHOENICIAN HOTEL. There they had consensual intercourse two times before going to sleep. She says that when she left his room on the morning of July 27, he was alive. He was awake and kissed her.
She acknowledged leaving about 10:45 a.m. She didn’t believe he had any meetings that day until lunchtime, which was why he had suggested she shower and get dressed first, while he “lolled” in bed a few more minutes. He had even joked, “After all, you have a plane to catch. I don’t.”
Finally, she said that a woman came to SOKOLOV’s hotel suite the night before. SOKOLOV introduced her as MIRANDA (LAST NAME UNKNOWN). She seemed to be American, roughly thirty years old, brown eyes, auburn hair, medium height for a woman. No eyeglasses. Baggy black slacks, red and black tunic top. The woman brought a bottle of vodka with her, and the three of them shared it.
At the time, BOWDEN thought MIRANDA had something to do with UNISPHERE ASSET MANAGEMENT. She presumed she was either an employee or she had money invested in a fund. (BOWDEN insisted that she visited UNISPHERE on August 2 hoping to learn more about the woman or about SOKOLOV.) BOWDEN thought that MIRANDA may also have been involved with real estate in Dubai. She said she had a sense that MIRANDA was going to be in the same meeting (or meetings) as SOKOLOV the next day.
She did not believe that SOKOLOV and MIRANDA were close friends or had known each other very long. It was even possible that they were meeting for the first time that evening.
BOWDEN believes that MIRANDA probably stayed less than an hour, but she was intoxicated by then and unsure. She recalled they talked a little about her work as a flight attendant (SOKOLOV and MIRANDA were interested), but not their own work. The conversation was difficult for BOWDEN to recall in any detail because she was drinking.
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FOLLOW-UP: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has informed us that Alex Sokolov’s computer showed seven Russian investors in the Unisphere Stalwarts Fund who have been singled out by OFAC, including Viktor Olenin. Withdrawal and transfer records suggest Sokolov’s theft from the fund may have exceeded two million dollars.
ODNI said there were two e-mails with Russian operatives we believe were affiliated with the Syrian chemical weapons program, one of whom is believed to be a COSSACK, but the content was routine business about the fund’s returns. There were no specific mentions of sarin, VX, or the compounds at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky in the e-mails, nor was there any reference to chemical weapons defense tools.
There was no reference to the stealth drone or jet drone projects.
But there was information on the flash drive that seems to have come from the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (though we cannot yet rule out a source at Blue Grass).
Finally, there were no e-mails or documents or references anywhere on the computer to the flight attendant.
15
Elena really wasn’t afraid that the passenger in the lavatory was a terrorist. He was a Sikh in an orange turban. He had to have been close to seventy. But this was a U.S. carrier flying from Dubai to Amsterdam, and a fellow with a beard and cloth on his head had been in the bathroom nearly ten minutes now. The Americans on board were starting to fret. “I am really not going to be happy until that guy gets the heck out of there,” she heard one woman saying. A man joked to the passenger beside him, “Yeah, it’s a long drive, but right now we’re at thirty-five thousand feet and I kind of wish I’d rented a car.” Even the flight attendants—a pair of middle-aged guys who were still pretty buff and clearly knew what they were doing—were conferring. Elena was in the bulkhead seat in coach, which was about as good as it got in that cabin, and so she could see and hear the business class passengers trying to encourage the flight attendants to do something, but parsing their words to dial down their racism and paranoia: