The Flight Attendant(78)

Were those crazies any worse than the Syrian soldiers who shoved the barrel bombs out the chopper doors? Perhaps, but only because they were suicidal. The Syrian army would drop a bomb on (for instance) a rebel-held neighborhood, wait twenty minutes for the rescuers to start pulling their neighbors from the rubble, and then drop a second one. The barrel bombs killed tens of thousands more civilians than the chemical weapons.

But it was the chemical weapons that caused voters in places like Munich and Manchester and Minneapolis to pay attention. It was the videos of the children choking to death and the adults vomiting and frothing at the mouth. If you want to get the attention of the White House, kill children with sarin. Send it via a surface-to-surface missile or drop it from a MiG.

The Russian drones moved slowly across the same skies as the Americans’. Distant pilots on the ground would guide them over their targets, and the unmanned machines would send back the video images and coordinates. This was how it worked in Ukraine, and this was how it worked in Syria. The Russian drones certainly weren’t low tech, but unlike the American and Chinese models, they were still capable only of surveillance.

Imagine: all that money to protect one pilot from having to fly a plane inside its cockpit. Meanwhile, you’re still savaging the civilians with tools as barbaric as barrel bombs and as brutal as sarin.

Sometimes she looked at Viktor or she looked at photos of the presidents in Washington and Moscow and Damascus and thought darkly to herself, this is where it all ends. Here.

But there was, alas, just no turning back.

And so she did what she could, which really wasn’t much and probably wasn’t worth the toll it exacted upon her mental health.

But unlike the terrorists and anarchists and jihadists, she could still count on one hand the number of people she had executed (though she did need her thumb). Most of what she did—and what she had been hoping to do in Dubai once Sokolov was dead—was rather bureaucratic. She could never tell Viktor or anyone else, but she lived with a certain amount of self-hatred, even if (so far) the dead on her conscience all needed to die. Even, just maybe, Sokolov. Both sides would have agreed.

But he was the least definite. Speaking objectively, he wasn’t evil. But he also couldn’t be trusted. You didn’t steal from Viktor. Still, he wasn’t like the slime she had executed in Latakia or the cretin she had executed in Donetsk: he’d simply paddled into white water he thought he could navigate. He was rather like her: a pawn. Square D2 or E2 on the chessboard. The pawn moved out to open clean attack lines for the bishop. Against most players, a pawn didn’t last long. He’d done his job and delivered the goods. She had to kill him for one reason and one reason only: because Viktor had asked.

She listened to the soothing hum of the engines in the dark and closed her eyes. She wished she could go back in time. She wished she could go back to the Royal Phoenician that night.

No, she wished she could go back to the moment before she had gone to the hotel. When she had called him.

Alex, hello! Lovely to know we’re going to meet tomorrow. Are you alone?

That last question? It hadn’t crossed her mind to ask it. She should have. Because then he would have answered, Actually, I’m not. I have a new friend with me. But, please, come over anyway.

But this time she wouldn’t have come over. She would have waited. Maybe she would have gone to the Royal Phoenician much later that night instead. Maybe not. Maybe she would have taken care of Sokolov the next day. Or the next night.

Alas, she couldn’t go back in time. She could only go forward. Do her job. Fix the mess she had made and then survey her options.





FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION



Re: ALEX SOKOLOV


DATE: August 6, 2018


The Dubai Police alerted our legal attaché in the United Arab Emirates that this morning at 9:15 a.m. UAE time, a woman in housekeeping at the Royal Phoenician Hotel found a possible piece of additional evidence in the investigation into the murder of Alex Sokolov.


ILMA BAQRI, a part of the hotel housekeeping staff, was vacuuming on the northeast corridor of the fifth floor. When she moved the round couch there, she saw on the floor behind it a lipstick tube and a lip balm with the logo for CASSANDRA BOWDEN’S airline. It is the sort that is included in the first-class amenity kits.


Without a DNA sample or fingerprints, we cannot determine if either item belonged to CASSANDRA BOWDEN, but the Dubai Police have retained both items.





22




Cassie wasn’t averse to chaos when she was drunk; even sober, she knew, she was eminently capable of mind-numbingly bad decisions. Exhibit A? Friday afternoon at Federal Plaza with the FBI. But she realized that she couldn’t possibly reach Miranda while the other woman was in the queue at passport control. Crossing back past security wasn’t merely swimming against the tide: it was swimming into a wall of steel and glass cubicles, slender corridors, and armed women and men whose job was to spot (and stop) possible terrorists. Though she wanted—and she wanted desperately—to charge into the throng and then fight and claw her way through the crowd to Miranda, she didn’t dare. She’d be detained, perhaps even arrested, before she had gotten anywhere close to the woman. But she was almost visibly shaking, she was so agitated. And so she kept her eyes on Miranda and said to Makayla, “Can you ask the crew to stop for a minute? Just wait for me? And can you watch my suitcase?”