The Flight Attendant(77)
Now she was walking beside Makayla, and they were just beyond security, nearing the exit to the baggage carousels (which they did not need), and then the terminal exit, where they would meet the van that would bring them all into Rome. Makayla was telling her about a vegetarian restaurant she liked on the Via Margutta and suggesting they go there for dinner. Cassie was aware that one of the wheels on her roller was not quite right. The bag was dragging ever so slightly. She was trying to listen to the other flight attendant, but her mind kept wandering to what might be going on that moment in the cities of New York and Dubai. Yes, most of New York was still asleep, but perhaps not the FBI. In her mind she envisioned FBI investigators and Dubai detectives e-mailing or texting or sharing encrypted files. Videos of her. Photographs. Her e-mails, perhaps, which they had downloaded from a server. Interviews with hotel employees.
She imagined someone was somehow searching through a central trash repository on the outskirts of Dubai, looking for exactly the sorts of things she had thrown away. She wondered if they would take a screenshot from the security camera footage and enlarge her purse, and look for precisely that bag in the mountains of garbage in the desert somewhere. Or maybe they would look for the missing hotel towels. Or a knife. Could a coroner make a reasonable guess about whether it was a knife or a broken bottle based on the way that Alex’s throat had been cut? Probably. She told herself that no one could even begin to find something as small as a shoulder bag or the precise shard of glass in a city as big as Dubai. And so while the idea of a search caused her anxiety, she was mostly able to quell that fear.
And it was then that she stopped. She put her hand on Makayla to stop her, too. There, on the far side of passport control, in the lines and lines of passengers who were not from the European Union—largely Americans, mostly businesspeople arriving on a Monday morning, though certainly there were also some vacationers and people whose passports were from other non-EU nations—was a woman with auburn hair and a French twist. She was putting a pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses into her purse, and had a beautiful, calfskin leather duffel slung over her shoulder. When the traveler looked up, Cassie was sure she knew who it was, she hadn’t a doubt in the world. And so reflexively she whispered to herself one small expletive and the woman’s name: “Fuck. Miranda.”
Part Four
NOBODY’S PUSHOVER, NOBODY’S FOE
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21
Elena knew that the West viewed the president of the Russian Federation as a Bond villain. The guy took out his political enemies with radioactive tea, for God’s sake. He had his intelligence agencies hack and release the e-mail of U.S. political parties to influence presidential elections. He was perceived at once as scary and comic. You took him seriously—very seriously—but you scoffed behind his back.
And she knew that while Canadian citizens had been welcoming Muslim immigrants in the worst of the refugee crisis a couple of years ago, an awful lot of everyday Americans had presumed that Islam was a synonym for ISIS. They were convinced that all mosques, whether they were in Fallujah or Florida, were breeding grounds for suicide bombers, and they armed themselves with semiautomatic weapons. They convinced themselves they were safe if they had guns and walls.
She wished the world were that simple. She thought of something one of her father’s FSB friends had said to her back in Sochi, when he was testing the waters with her—seeing if he might be able to recruit her. “It’s a terrible era when idiots are allowed to govern the blind,” he had said. “I’m paraphrasing Shakespeare—perhaps rather badly—but I’m sure you get my drift. The world is a madhouse, Elena. Always has been, always will be. And it’s a complicated madhouse. Now, our country has the potential to be the best, I feel. You know, after all we’ve been through. All that our people have endured. But it’s a very low bar.”
And yet there wasn’t a Cold War anymore. At least not the way that her father and her grandparents would have understood the term. There certainly wasn’t a World War. At least not yet. The United States and Russia had grown as nationalist as ever and, thus, rather testy with one another. At first that hadn’t been the case. For a time, the United States had shed great crocodile tears for the people of Aleppo, but they understood that Syria—and obviously Ukraine and Crimea—weren’t in their backyard. They were in Russia’s. And so other than the op-ed writers, for a long while no one in North America really cared all that much even when the Russian Federation deployed nuclear Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, or what had been K?nigsberg forever.
Good Lord, half of America was pretty sure their own president was a Russian puppet.
The truth was, very few men or women on the streets of Indianapolis or Kansas City fretted all that much when the Russians penetrated the country’s NSA computer system. No one lost sleep when they turned—converted—another contractor who hoarded boxes of files in his utility shed the way some people held on to old issues of Life magazine or plastic Star Wars action models or porcelain figurines of Siamese cats.
No more.
If any patch of sand in the world was capable of creating another world war, she believed, it was Syria. Oh, North Korea had the ICBMs and the nukes while the Syrian army was often—very often—reduced to pushing primitive barrel bombs from helicopters. But the Syrian skies were crowded, and the refugee crisis had the West on the edge. Nations great and small were terrified of the suicidal psychotics, sometimes homegrown and sometimes imports, with bombs strapped to their chests or automatic weapons in their arms or simply a very big truck they would use to plow through a crowd as if the pedestrians were merely raccoons crossing a country road in the still of night. They would appear from nowhere, human land mines, and butcher the unlucky women and men around them in the nightclubs and airports and movie theaters. They killed people by the dozens or by the hundreds. It was random. And then they killed themselves.