The Flight Attendant(94)

“Play this out,” she’d said to him.

“Okay. Bowden isn’t even in the room when you phoned five-eleven. She got there just before you did, and she and Sokolov concocted the ruse when they were caught. They portrayed their meeting as just some drunken debauch.”

“No, they were wasted,” she assured him. “They weren’t playacting.”

She told him her theory in return: Bowden had said something on the plane about what her brother-in-law did for a living, and Sokolov saw an opportunity. Here was a flight attendant who flew regularly into the United Arab Emirates, and she had a brother-in-law who was a major at an army base that was awash in chemical weapons. He was a destruction engineer. Perhaps the flight attendant could help them enlist or blackmail him. But Viktor already had his own asset inside the chemical weapons program; the FSB had their own courier with the airline. They didn’t need her.

The irony, of course, was that back in the United States the FBI now had to investigate Major McCauley. Make sure that he hadn’t violated his security clearance and told his sister-in-law something she might have shared with Sokolov. So they were talking to him. They were talking to his family.

Meanwhile, Viktor probably suspected—no assumed—that the flight attendant was either FBI and she was interested in Sokolov or she was CIA and hoping to use Sokolov to get inside the Cossacks. And even if she weren’t? She’d still been in the suite. She may have been merely a sexually voracious flight attendant in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she may also have been something rather more dangerous.

And so Viktor fully (and rightly) expected that his redoubtable protégée would have killed the woman when she found her in the room.

But she hadn’t.

Since Dubai, Viktor had been telling her they were worried that the flight attendant might reveal something compromising that Sokolov had shared while drunk. They had stressed that the flight attendant had seen her and, thus, could easily burn her. Certainly the crazy woman had recognized her at Fiumicino. So these were her fears, too. But there was something else going on, and it was now coming into focus. She had not merely failed Viktor by neither executing Bowden nor telling him initially that the woman had been in the room: she had irrevocably compromised his faith in her. Their faith in her. Their trust. They thought she had quite possibly spared an FBI asset or an actual agent. They’d never believe her, no matter how eloquently she explained the truth of what she knew or how many synonyms she found in English or Russian for the noun drunk.

They’d figured out that she was CIA; they’d figured out that she had turned.

Spies (and she always felt self-important and narcissistic when she thought of herself that way, but it was better than the alternative words, which stressed the more lethal aspects to her work) turned for a lot of reasons. Most of the time it was because they hadn’t a choice: they’d been compromised or were being blackmailed, and changing teams was the only play to keep out of prison. Or, in some cases, to stay alive. The rationale for her turn in America had origins both prosaic and profound. Yes, once she was ensconced in Boston she could see more objectively the corruption that had spread plague-like in the new Russia, and she refused to succumb to that unique hybrid of fatalism and cynicism that marked her people. She wanted her new Russia to be better than the old one, and that meant undermining the old guard. But that alone wouldn’t have been enough. There was also a man, a grad student five years her senior. An American. She was twenty-four, a young FSB agent. She would never know if the courtship had been recruitment all along, because in hindsight it never had been much of a romance: he’d been clear that they really couldn’t be seen together in the event one or the other ever was outed. But he was the one who broke the news to her that her father had not had a stroke when she was twenty. They’d poisoned him with methyl iodide, selecting the pesticide because the cause of death would mimic a stroke. The Cossacks had done this. Viktor Olenin. In his old age, her father was becoming too outspoken and too critical of the president of the Russian Federation. He was becoming a liability, a loose cannon. He knew too much to live.

But he had lived, despite the toxin. Barely.

Now that young man was a poli sci professor in Berlin. Elena stopped visiting his public persona on the social networks when she saw that his German girlfriend had become his German wife.

She sighed. She wondered if Viktor’s trust in her had begun to ebb even before she had chosen not to kill the flight attendant. If so, when had they come to doubt her devotion? Her fealty? It didn’t matter. What did was this: they believed she had spared Bowden for reasons far worse than mere kindness. It was possible they might kill her even if she did take care of the flight attendant—or, to be precise, as soon as she’d taken care of the flight attendant.

And yet when she surveyed the chessboard, executing the woman still seemed a viable move for everyone. She’d expressed her concerns to her handler, and Washington was deliberating whether it was time to come in. But she was far and away their most deeply embedded operative in the Cossacks, the only one inside the group who could tell them what Olenin was doing. And that mattered.

And she felt a tug in her heart for Sochi. It was in her blood, her DNA. She wasn’t prepared to give that up. Not yet.

Her father, as far as she knew, had never had a safe house: an apartment in Amsterdam or a cottage outside Johannesburg into which he could burrow. A secret chrysalis with food and money and yet one more passport, and from which he could emerge with new wings and a new identity. But just because she wasn’t aware of one didn’t mean that one hadn’t existed. You never told your loved ones you had one. It was how you protected them. She herself had never set one up, and she couldn’t help now but wonder if this bit of youthful hubris—I’ll never need one: I’m too smart and I have too many friends in high places—wasn’t now going to bite her in the ass.