15

Elena really wasn’t afraid that the passenger in the lavatory was a terrorist. He was a Sikh in an orange turban. He had to have been close to seventy. But this was a U.S. carrier flying from Dubai to Amsterdam, and a fellow with a beard and cloth on his head had been in the bathroom nearly ten minutes now. The Americans on board were starting to fret. “I am really not going to be happy until that guy gets the heck out of there,” she heard one woman saying. A man joked to the passenger beside him, “Yeah, it’s a long drive, but right now we’re at thirty-five thousand feet and I kind of wish I’d rented a car.” Even the flight attendants—a pair of middle-aged guys who were still pretty buff and clearly knew what they were doing—were conferring. Elena was in the bulkhead seat in coach, which was about as good as it got in that cabin, and so she could see and hear the business class passengers trying to encourage the flight attendants to do something, but parsing their words to dial down their racism and paranoia:

“I’m sure he would come out if he knew he was inconveniencing people,” said a mother Elena speculated was a decade older than she was and had a son seven or eight years old sitting beside her.

“It’s probably just all that Middle Eastern food,” said the gentleman across the aisle. She guessed he was the woman’s husband given the way that he reached over and patted her arm.

Even the casually dressed dude who Elena was sure was an air marshal had grown sufficiently alarmed that he had unbuckled and was leaning into the aisle, staring, poised to assist the flight attendants if it came to that.

But Elena suspected it wouldn’t. Terrorists weren’t seventy-year-old Sikhs.

Finally, when she counted five people clogging the front of the cabin, one of the flight attendants knocked on the door and asked the fellow inside if he was all right. When he didn’t immediately respond, she watched the heads pop up over the wider, cushier seats in business. Some of those passengers very likely were imagining the explosion that would take out a part of the port-side fuselage and the flight deck, sending them all plummeting to their deaths somewhere over Hungary or Romania. The flight attendant began knocking a little more determinedly, but his voice was still cool. The last thing he wanted was to overreact.

It made her wonder what Cassandra Bowden would do. Had she ever been in a situation like this? No doubt, she had. The woman clearly had a fight-or-flight mechanism that was either uncannily precise or badly off kilter. If Elena had to choose, she would bet on the latter: A broken magnet. A shattered gyroscope.

It was just then that the Sikh emerged, and he looked a little irate that his personal space had been, in his opinion, seriously violated. The air marshal sat back, and one of the flight attendants said to the passengers in first who were watching, “He had something disagreeable for breakfast.” The Sikh glared back at him and took his seat.

Elena recalled what Viktor had said about Cassandra Bowden: She’s a drunk and a little self-destructive. When her father had formed the Cossacks a quarter century ago, choosing the most patriotic (translation: old-school Russian) officers he knew in the KGB, Viktor had been about her age right now. It was Yeltsin who’d seen the iconic power in Cossack culture and first allowed for the rehabilitation of one of the Bolshevik party’s fiercest opponents during the early days of the revolution. Now the Cossacks were among the darkest arms in the FSB, the successor to the KGB. They worked often with Russian military intelligence, the GRU, as they were on this project. And, yes, they were among the most corrupt. Elena knew that. Her father had known that. And clearly the Americans knew it. The Cossacks were ruthless and they were rich.

Viktor was smart. He’d probably moved all of his money from Sokolov’s fund already. They all had. It had probably disappeared before she had even been dispatched to room 511 at the Royal Phoenician. Oh, the investigators would try and follow the money, but eventually they’d hit a wall, an impenetrable coral reef somewhere in the Caribbean. They might find Sokolov’s: she’d left plenty of breadcrumbs on his computer. But not Viktor’s.

Elena had a pretty good idea what would happen to her if she didn’t kill the flight attendant: Viktor had been eminently clear. But she knew there would also be violent aftershocks even if she did take care of this loose end. She guessed it depended on what—if anything—Sokolov had told Bowden, and what the woman remembered. What she was telling everyone.

But Elena would never forget the rage she had felt when she’d finally understood what the Cossacks had done to her father. Methyl iodide. For years she had thought it was a stroke.

Elena tried to analyze precisely what it was that she herself didn’t know, which was a lot. It was all a bit like the wooden nesting doll she’d had as a child. The figure sat on her dresser, first in Moscow but then in Sochi, a smiling peasant in a colorful sarafan. She would separate the top from the bottom, and inside there was a smaller doll, a smaller figure. And inside that doll was a third, more petite peasant still. Altogether, there were four dolls nestled inside Matryona, the tiniest one the only one that wasn’t hollow.

She sighed. Viktor would have someone looking over her shoulder in America. She was positive.

Now she gazed down at the in-flight magazine that was open in her lap. Her eyes rested on a photograph of Sylvia Plath and an idea came to her. Bowden’s death shouldn’t look like an accident. It should look like a suicide. This way everyone on both sides of the Atlantic would have plausible deniability. She should wait for the newspapers and the news channels to out the flight attendant as a drunk and a murderer who wouldn’t (at least right away) be extradited to face trial.

Then, publicly shamed, Cassandra Bowden would kill herself.