The Flight Attendant(86)

She thought once more of her revelation on the plane last night, the idea that for so long she had had the Dubai seduction backward: she had been assuming that Cassandra Bowden had picked up Sokolov on the flight to the Emirates, when it was quite probably the other way around.

God, he’d been such a rank amateur. He was up against people who’d grown up in a culture in which paranoia was a survival skill.

After she’d killed him, she’d switched flash drives, giving Viktor one with dramatically dumbed-down data. It had specs on the stealth drone, but nothing that Russia probably wouldn’t have on its own or through NovaSkies within months. It was, they hoped, just enough to satisfy Viktor. They were wrong. Then she’d left the evidence that Sokolov was stealing from the fund on his laptop. No one could miss it. The CIA would know why he was dead, and eventually National Intelligence would share what they knew with the FBI. But the Dubai police would just see it as Russian business—cold-blooded and unflinching—as usual. The price for a regular hit when a deal went bad was pennies. Her father had once paid an underling a measly fifteen-grand bonus to execute a commodities trader who had tried (and failed) to bilk him out of the steel he’d bought from a Lipetsk mill. Another time, he’d paid a pittance—five thousand dollars—to have some poor British contracts manager in Donetsk killed when his bosses back in London had refused to renegotiate a contract. (They did after that. Right away.) The American agencies weren’t thrilled that Sokolov was dead, but he wasn’t an especially good egg, and no one wanted to see him on trial. He knew too much. Mostly they were just grateful that no one’s cover had been burned. It was weirdly polite. It also wouldn’t demand a public escalation, which nobody wanted.

She logged off her computer and tried to slip into place the last pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but there were too many and she was too tired. And so she willed herself to relax. She thumbed through the Italian and British fashion magazines she had bought at a kiosk on the street and read news stories on her tablet. But she kept coming back to the flight attendant and what she was supposed to do and what she had planned to do. There were just so very many ways to kill yourself. There were pills and there was bleeding out in the bath. There was falling from great heights and falling into oceans or rivers or deep, beautiful chasms. There were streetcars and subways and buses. There was hanging. There were guns—just so many kinds of guns.

She considered it likely that an absolute train wreck such as Cassandra Bowden might have one last surprise for her. If she had to bet, she would bet on the bartender; after all, he combined Bowden’s two principal interests in one tidy package. That, of course, would be a disaster. The last thing she wanted was him, too, on her conscience. Unfortunately, a murder-suicide involving Cassandra Bowden and some Italian hookup would look just as plausible to the world as a suicide, and it was possible that they might ask this of her.

She had promised herself a few days alone in Sochi when she was done, though of course she would not be completely alone. No doubt, some of her father’s old friends would come by. There would be someone who was long out of the loop and didn’t know how badly she had screwed up with the flight attendant. Maybe it would be someone who knew only that Sokolov was dead and wanted to thank her. It was pretty simple: you went for the jugular. It was—to use their old joke—cut and dried.

But she’d have plenty of time to watch the bears from the porch and listen to the owls as she dozed beneath the pergola. She would try to regain her emotional equilibrium after Diyarbakir and Dubai and now Rome.

She sat back against the headboard and closed her eyes, savoring the air conditioning in her hotel room but agitated because of all the things that she didn’t know and all the things it was possible they had chosen not to tell her.





26




In the hotel lobby, Cassie took a seat on a plush, ruby-red Renaissance fainting couch, perching herself on the end that was backless. She smiled at the concierge. She smiled at the handsome guy in the dark suit and earpiece who was clearly hotel security.

“So, are you in your room?” Ani was asking.

“Yes,” she lied.

“Good. I’m sure there are reporters ferreting out from the airline where you are. Someone will find your hotel. That’s another good reason to lay low.”

“Really? The crime occurred in Dubai, not Perugia or Rome. Why would an Italian reporter care?”

“Why would any reporter care? Sex and murder.”

“Oh. Of course.”

“I heard back from my investigator.”

“About the passenger manifests?”

“No. He doubts he can get us much there. But he has done some other nosing around.”

Cassie listened carefully, trying to focus. “And?”

“Here are a few of the things he learned. Remember what I told you the other day about the sorts of people who invest in that fund?”

“Yes. You said a lot of them are Russian.”

“Right. There are a couple on the Treasury Department’s OFAC list. Apparently a few are the sort of oligarchs who are just crazy wealthy. Some, he believes, are ex-KGB. Those are guys who made ridiculous amounts of money in the years after the Soviet Union collapsed. He thinks it’s possible that the FBI is investigating Unisphere and that particular fund.”

“Because Sokolov was killed?”