The Flight Attendant(99)

Then Elena slid into the room. Bowden had left the lights and the television set on. The drapes already were closed, which she deemed a lucky break. She was prepared to close them, but if she did there was the chance that the flight attendant would notice the change the moment she opened the door and either retreat or shoot. This was one less worry.

She surveyed the room carefully, noticing the open suitcase with the clothes rolled meticulously into tubes or folded and pressed flat. The woman may have been a mess in most ways, but she was one hell of a good packer. She saw the tin with Perugia chocolates on the dresser, the nightstand with her tablet and power cables, and the desk with a rather handsome pencil cup: it looked like the foot of an old Roman column. Like the vast majority of hotel rooms, the space was dominated by the bed, a queen with a faux headboard screwed into the wall. Most importantly, she noted the location of the two mirrors.

As she was positioning herself just inside the doorway to await the flight attendant’s return, the woman’s bathroom to her left, she felt the movement before she saw it and tried to turn. But it was too late. She knew that and was more dumbfounded by her stupidity than horrified by the realization that she was about to die. Someone had entered Bowden’s room when she had gone to the stairwell: when she had been drawn to the stairwell by the phone call from Viktor. There was the strong arm around her neck, the crushing vise of the V of someone’s arm against her larynx, as he pulled her into the bathroom. There was the agony of the knife in her lower back, the peculiarly sonorous grunt of her own gasp. She knew, despite the incapacitating pain, what was next, and it happened in seconds exactly the way she saw it in her mind: he withdrew the knife and ran it across her throat. Instinctively she tried to cry out, a reflex, but already she was gagging on blood—he had cut through the muscle and cartilage, exactly the way she had with Alex Sokolov—and so all she heard was the small sound of someone gargling with mouthwash. And, of course, this was not exactly the way she had executed Sokolov. He’d been asleep. Sound asleep. In her last seconds of life, in the midst of all that pain and all that surprise, she despaired mostly that they were killing her when she was awake.





32




Cassie stood in the crowd that had spilled out onto the street and the sidewalk across from the hotel and watched the fire trucks arrive and the firefighters race into the building. She was grateful that when the siren in her room had started to shriek and the alarm began flashing bright red, she had still been dressed. She had just started to doze off; she had just lost track of whatever was occurring on the sitcom. And so it had taken almost no time to slip into a pair of sandals and toss the gun into her shoulder bag with her passport and wallet and room key. She was glad this was August in Rome. It was the middle of the night, yes, but it was rather pleasant outside. She guessed there were close to two hundred people milling about, none of them alarmed in the slightest, most in some version of nightclothes or sweatpants. She was among the few women she saw in a skirt or a dress. For a moment she watched a gorgeous young couple nuzzling, and grew at once envious and happy for them. The guy could pull off a vandyke beard without looking like Satan, and she was clearly naked (or almost naked) underneath a bright orange shawl she had wrapped loosely around herself. They noticed her gaze and he smiled at her, so she quickly glanced down at her phone. She was scrolling through the spam that had come in when she heard her name and looked up. It was Makayla. She had climbed into a pair of black leggings and a white T-shirt. Cassie saw that she slept in braids.

“Well, this is fun,” the other flight attendant said, joining her by the streetlight where she was standing.

“Were you asleep?” Cassie asked.

“I was. Sound asleep. I assume it’s a false alarm.”

“Yeah. I do, too. I don’t see anything that would suggest there’s a fire. No smoke. Nothing.”

“Unless maybe it’s something stupid and minor in the kitchen.”

“That could be.”

The woman leaned against the lamppost and surprised Cassie when she said, “It’s times like this I wish I still smoked.”

“You used to smoke?”

Makayla nodded. “I stopped when my husband and I decided we wanted to start a family.”

“Was quitting hard?”

“Not at all. I thought it would be, but it wasn’t. I just stopped. We said it’s time for kids, and the next day, when I came out of an ATM before heading to the airport, I smoked what I knew was my last cigarette. There were nine or ten left in the pack, and I pitched them. I pitched my lighter. Of course, I’d always been a pretty casual smoker. I only started because of a high school play.”

“You’re kidding.”

She rolled her eyes. “Nope. A Raisin in the Sun. I was Ruth. And the director had me smoking these stage cigarettes. They have chalk or something in them so it looks like there’s smoke. But I had no idea how to hold a cigarette. So, after rehearsal one afternoon I bought a pack of real cigarettes to practice. It was kind of a drama diva move.”

“When would you smoke?”

“You mean years later?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Usually at times like this.”

Cassie raised an eyebrow. “Fire alarms?”

“When I was bored. Or walking. Or after sex.”

“Alex Sokolov was like that.” She hadn’t planned to say it out loud. She wondered a little why she had.