11
Elena didn’t seriously believe that she had killed her father, but every once in a while, especially in the small hours of the night, she wondered if she had been the last straw. Years earlier, just as she was finishing her second year of college, her father suffered what everyone assumed was a stroke. He’d lived, but he was a frail shell of what he’d once been. He walked slowly and with a limp, the left side of his face sagged like badly bunched drapes, and his words—when he could find them—were barely comprehensible. Now she had flown to Sochi for a visit—the Olympic construction had begun, but his summer estate was on a small lake far from the madness—and had just helped him from the passenger seat of the BMW he could no longer drive, and either he had lost his balance or he had tripped where the asphalt met the first slate step, and suddenly he was falling onto the driveway. She managed to cradle his head just before it would have cracked onto the pavement, and for a moment was relieved at how quickly she had reacted. But certainly his fragile brain inside his fragile skull had been violently shaken. She knew it then and she knew it as the evening progressed. He’d seemed fine at dinner—or, at least, as fine as he ever was at that stage in his life, which meant that he spoke in drooling whispers and ate very little—but it would be later that night that he would be found unresponsive on the floor of the living room. It was his live-in nurse, a Georgian who coincidentally shared the name of a Russian football team her father followed, who had heard the fall, discovered him, and called upstairs to wake her. The nurse was a gentle giant with a chinstrap beard named Spartak. Elena had been nodding off in the very same bedroom she had lived in as a teenager those weeks or weekends when she would be sent to see him after her parents’ divorce. (Get to see him, really, because she missed him terribly after her parents separated.) He’d die at the hospital a few hours later. Cause of death? A cerebral hemorrhage. A burst blood vessel. Another one. This time his brain had drowned in its own blood.
It might have occurred moments before he fell in the living room. Most likely it did. But maybe not. Perhaps it had been a slow bleed that had commenced when he had nearly hit his head outside on his driveway.
He had always been such an old father: he was fifty-six when Elena was born, her mother thirty-five. She was an only child. Her parents had divorced when she was eight, and it had been nasty. Their marriage couldn’t survive the crazy amounts of money he made when, as a former KGB officer with boxes of surveillance files at his disposal, he was allowed to buy thousands of shares of the Yukos oil conglomerate at a fraction of their real value. He’d then invested in real estate in St. Petersburg, New York, Doha, and Dubai. There was the fund, some of which was fueled by all that bricks and mortar and some of it—and she didn’t believe this—pilfered from the Russian treasury in a complex tax scam. She didn’t believe that because she knew how close her father was to the president of the Russian Federation. The president had been a protégé of her father when they’d both been KGB. But then there were those who hinted that the president, too, had been involved.
Even years later, when she left her Swiss boarding school for college in America, her parents still spoke mostly through their few mutual friends. Neither remarried. And so she was the one who had had to figure out what to do with him when he had that stroke when she was twenty and it was clear he could no longer live alone in the apartment in Moscow or the dacha in Sochi. She’d come home from school and stayed nearly six months. She brought in Spartak and Spartak was wonderful. He was perhaps a decade older than she was, and he had sobbed and sobbed at her father’s small memorial for his Black Sea acquaintances in the woods behind the house. (The funeral had been in Moscow and it had been considerably larger. The Russian president himself hadn’t attended, but he had sent staff.) Spartak had cried in ways that she hadn’t; she had cried only when she was alone, because in public she felt the need to represent the strength of the Orlovs. But alone she had wept. She had loved him the way a girl can love both her father and her grandfather. She had loved him because he had spoiled her as his only child and because he had respected her intellect and her resourcefulness; he saw so much of himself in her and always, no matter what, had been proud of her.
Elena knew instantly why she was thinking of her father this evening, alone in her bed in Dubai. Part of it was the no-win situation that had greeted her when she had gone to Sokolov’s hotel room that first time. Yes, she could have killed him and that flight attendant together when she’d had the chance. Just taken the twenty-two and been done with it. The problem was that while Sokolov had to die, the flight attendant didn’t. The stakes were high and she probably could have rationalized the double hit. But there certainly would have been fallout from killing Bowden, too. In hindsight, the double bind was unsolvable.
Still, if Bowden hadn’t returned, she wouldn’t now be facing this fiasco. That was a fact. She honestly wasn’t sure how long she could forestall the inevitable.
Moreover, Elena knew there would be consequences for her, as well—mistakes were seldom forgiven in her line of work—and in the end the flight attendant might still be dead.
Be realistic: one of you has to die. I think it’s your choice.
Had her father been as cold-blooded as Viktor? Without a doubt. She just never saw that side of the man. She saw the doting father who would deny her nothing.
That afternoon she’d been scrolling through news stories on her phone and come across the assassination of a prominent Russian opposition leader on a sidewalk in Kiev. She had known it was coming. The victim had been a member of the Russian Parliament before defecting. His killer was a little younger than she was: twenty-seven years old. He’d shot the politician and his bodyguard on the street and disappeared. But he’d been recognized by a nearby politician, and a spokesperson for Ukraine’s interior ministry alleged that he was a Russian agent. The Russian president said that was absurd.
It wasn’t. She knew the executioner.
She turned over her pillow to the cool side, and rolled over. She wanted desperately the escape of sleep. But whenever her mind roamed from the flight attendant, it landed once more on her father. She missed him. She missed him as much as she missed anyone. And she always seemed to think of him when she was given an assignment like this. He was the first person she may have killed.
No, she had only finished him off. Maybe she hadn’t even done that.
She knew the real truth of that first stroke. It was why she did what she did. It was why she was who she was.
Nevertheless, memories of her father and the things she had done because she was his daughter kept her tossing and turning into the small hours of the morning.