The Flight Attendant(98)
She was considerably more frightened of Viktor than she was of any man or woman she had ever met in the West.
* * *
? ?
Her mind, as it did often now, meandered to Sochi and her father’s dacha there. Her home there. Mostly it had been spared the madness of the Olympic construction, but the view of the mountains to the southwest had changed: you could see roads that had been cut through the forest in the distance, and in the winter you could spot the alpine trails that had been added when there was snow. Her father would have been appalled had he lived to see it. But the vista to the east was unchanged, as rustic and primeval as when Stalin had summered nearby, and she had a sense that despite his disappointment, her father would have adapted: perhaps he would have grown accustomed to sitting on the porch on the eastern side of the house instead of the one on the west, and arranged his days so he could bask in the sunrises instead of the sunsets. You didn’t survive in the Soviet Union if you didn’t adapt. You didn’t thrive in the post-Soviet world if you weren’t a chameleon. Certainly her father was. But he was also a realist and he was disciplined. It was one more reason why she had both respected and loved him.
And he was Russian: unconquerable by forces from beyond the border. The only person who had ever defeated him was his equally Russian wife.
* * *
? ?
She read the message from Washington twice to be sure. Then a third time.
There was no ambiguity. She was done. Finished. They agreed with her: the Cossacks knew she’d been turned.
Inside she was an uncharacteristic riot of emotions. There was (and it pained her to admit this, because she liked to believe that she was above an emotion as pedestrian as fear) relief, because she herself was evidence of Viktor’s brutality toward his enemies. She knew what loomed for her. But there was also shame, because she felt like a failure. She had failed the agency, yes, but more than that she had failed her father. She did what she did to fuck Viktor. And there were other discordant, confusing waves that broke over her, too, all of which began and ended with the unexpected fog that was her future.
Her orders were to get the flight attendant and get out. She was to get the two of them out.
She’d go ahead and pull the fire alarm as she had planned because she suspected that Bowden had a gun and she didn’t really want the woman to shoot her the moment she walked into her hotel room. But the rest of her evening was going to be rather different.
So be it.
How funny that she’d just been thinking about her beloved Sochi. She felt a pang in her heart, knowing she’d never see Russia again.
* * *
? ?
Elena understood that the blue dot on her phone could tell her more or less where the flight attendant was when it came to a street address, but it certainly couldn’t confirm whether the woman had left her hotel room. The frog’s heart was going to beat at this address, but it could not discern whether she was outside on the street or ensconced upstairs in her room.
And so she pulled the fire alarm on Cassandra Bowden’s floor, but along a different corridor. Then she went quickly to the flight attendant’s hallway and watched, occasionally moving with the herd as the guests emerged, hoping to blend in by looking as frazzled and sleepy as they. She was wearing a nondescript black hoodie and sweatpants.
It seemed as if most of the guests presumed this was either a drill or a false alarm, but she noted how most were obediently—albeit, begrudgingly—taking the stairs rather than the elevators to the lobby and exiting the hotel. Most had climbed back into their clothes, though none were as well dressed as they would have been just a few hours earlier. She saw women and men in blue jeans and sweatpants like her, their shirts untucked, their sneakers or shoes barely tied. She saw flip-flops. She saw women without makeup and men with their hair wild with sleep. She noted the couples who had clearly been having sex when they were interrupted, the evidence the way they looked at once sheepish and annoyed and clung a little hungrily to each other. She saw three children—all girls—and supposed they were sisters. The youngest was only three or four and was in her father’s arms, using her fists to wipe at her eyes.
And she saw Bowden. There she was. Alone. She was still dressed in the sundress she had worn to dinner with the bartender, but the bartender wasn’t with her. She couldn’t decide what that meant, but it would make her job easier.
The flight attendant had slipped on her sandals. She had with her a shoulder bag, which Elena was quite sure now held a gun.
This time the woman hadn’t noticed her. There would be no repeat of the madness that morning at Fiumicino.
It was then that her phone buzzed and she saw it was Viktor. She didn’t dare ignore Viktor, even now. So she took her phone and retreated into the stairwell, secure in the knowledge that Bowden was gone.
“Yes?”
“Where are you?”
She told him, and he responded by telling her in great detail what he had enjoyed that night at dinner.
“I should go,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed.
When she emerged, the corridor was clear, but the firefighters had not yet arrived to scan the hallway. She pulled the dry-erase marker from her purse and slipped the tip into the small hole with the power jack at the bottom of the lock on the flight attendant’s door. There was a satisfying pop as the bolt inside it opened.