19

In the end, Elena chose the New York Post for the simple reason that the New York Times had covered the story responsibly. They understood the death of Alex Sokolov was not an act of terrorism and seemed, as far as she could tell now, to have moved on. They might be preparing a longer story on the hedge fund manager and Unisphere’s connections to select members of the Russian political leadership—there might be the usual innuendo about corruption and crime, intimations that the White House was indebted to the Kremlin—but the financial machinations of a hedge fund were at once too complex and too dull to ever elicit much readership or interest. And if they were preparing a story on the utter randomness of dying on a business trip far from home? Elena believed that reportage like that might be compelling and beautiful, but it would never gain traction in the Age of the Troll. In the Age of Mass Shootings. In the Age of the Suicide Bomb in the Crowd.

After planting her seed—her anonymous tip—she phoned Viktor. He was finishing dinner but took the call and went outside the restaurant. She wondered whom he was with and worried when he didn’t volunteer the companion’s name. Usually he did because most of the time it was someone she knew or at least knew of. It was a further indication of the sort of trouble she herself was in. He didn’t trust her. At least not completely.

“Are you going to go with the flight attendant?” he asked.

“Back to Italy?” She heard incredulity instead of obedience in her voice, a reflex, and took a breath to rein in her emotions.

“If that’s where she’s going, yes.”

“No. I hadn’t planned on it,” she admitted. She wasn’t a pilot or a flight attendant, and her body wasn’t wild about the idea of flying east to Rome days after flying west from Dubai.

“You might want to consider it.”

Might want to. Was there ever a more passive-aggressive phrasing? There was a threat behind it, only thinly veiled, but there was also a message. She was responsible for Bowden. This was a mess of her making. Their patience was almost up.

“Do you want me to finish the job in Rome?” she asked guardedly.

She heard him lighting a cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs. “Well, I like your idea of a suicide. In some ways, I like it even more in Rome than in New York. Just be sure that she has had time to really feel the pain from the media swarm. You know, cause and effect. But a hotel suicide in Rome the day the story appears in the New York Post? Makes perfect sense.”

“Then I’ll go.”

“Just don’t be on her flight.”

“Viktor?”

“Yes?”

She almost told him that she wasn’t born yesterday. She felt the need to defend herself and convey at least a hint of her annoyance at the imposition of another trip across the Atlantic. But she knew that sort of flippancy would be ill advised at the moment. And so instead she said simply, “You’re absolutely right. I’ll make sure I’m not.” It was the politic response, and she loathed herself for saying it.

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She flew out of Newark since Bowden was based at JFK. She didn’t want to risk the flight attendant spotting her at the terminal on Long Island.

She was stopped at security, a random pat-down and wanding. The TSA officer opened her leather duffel and commented on both the wig and the straw sun hat with pretend strands of hair attached to the side and rear panels. She volunteered that they were for her sister in Orvieto who was about to begin chemotherapy. On the other side of the full body scanners, people were standing like storks on single legs as they pulled their boots over their shins or slipped back on their sneakers and espadrilles.

A moment later when she was repacking the wig and the sun hat properly—the way she liked, not the way the TSA agent had mashed them inside her bag—she wondered if she wore them in Rome tomorrow or the day after tomorrow whether someone would recall them from a woman’s bag back in Newark. Not likely. They were all too busy looking for shoe bombs.

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There were actually a few empty seats in coach on the Sunday-night flight, including the middle seat beside her. She had grown interested in flight attendants in a way that she hadn’t been before Bowden had shown up in Alex’s hotel room, and now—almost curiously—she watched a slim woman with white hair and athletic calves work the aisles, asking passengers what they would like to drink as she stood behind the cart, but occasionally responding to lengthier questions about when the cabin lights would be dimmed and whether they could have an extra blanket or pillow.

When the beverage cart reached her row, the flight attendant looked down at her. Elena—who had donned the cosmetic tortoiseshell eyeglasses for the flight she’d bought months ago at a costume shop—glanced up from her Vanity Fair just enough to be polite, because rudeness was memorable. She asked (please) for a Diet Coke, no ice. From the corner of her eye she watched the woman pouring the can into the plastic cup and noticed that the flight attendant’s nails were almost the same shade of red as hers.

She placed her magazine in the seat pocket and unfolded her tray table for her soda. Then she logged on to the aircraft’s Wi-Fi and immediately went to the website for the New York Post. And there it was. The story was live. She stared for a long moment at Cassandra Bowden’s name as if the syllables were an incantation or the two words an eponym: she grew lost in her connection to the flight attendant. She blinked to regain her focus.

Bowden had offered no comment and the FBI had offered no comment, but an anonymous source with the Dubai police had confirmed that Cassandra Bowden of New York City was, at the very least, a person of interest. Another flight attendant could not corroborate the story but had volunteered that Bowden was “a bit of a party girl” and “kind of a wild woman.” She’d added something that on the surface sounded contradictory, but Elena understood how it made all the sense in the world and that in fact the woman had probably been coached: “Cassie is sweet and kind of a loner. When she’s home, she goes to this animal shelter a lot because she really likes the stray cats. I think sometimes she’s as depressed as they are. And when we’re working, she’s not always out somewhere going crazy until one in the morning. Sometimes she just clicks shut her hotel room door and sleeps. I mean, the job is just too demanding and that’s not how she’s hardwired.” Elena knew the ebb and flow of binge behavior, and the way a person sometimes just wanted to retreat into the bleached white sheets of a Hilton or into the fur of an equally needy, equally wounded cat. But she doubted that Bowden was actually depressed: that was expediency finessing the truth.

The article also quoted her lawyer: a woman named Ani Mouradian said that Bowden was cooperating fully with investigators and had absolutely nothing to do with Alex Sokolov’s death. Finally, a representative for the airline said the flight attendant had not been charged with a crime in either the United Arab Emirates or the United States and had violated no airline policy. And so they had no comment.

Nevertheless, the Post already had a nickname for Bowden and for the crime. Now that she was no longer a mystery woman, she was no longer a rather generic “black widow spider.” They knew she was a flight attendant, and so they had christened her the “Cart Tart Killer.”

It wasn’t brilliant, Elena thought, but it wasn’t bad. It had rhythm and alliteration, and best of all was the way it combined sluttiness and murder.

She closed the page on her phone and sat back in her seat. She thought of her brief time with Bowden back in Dubai: the woman was lit, sure, and dopey with drink. But so was Alex. But she’d also seemed rather kind and funny. And it was at that very moment, like a revelation, that Elena recalled the way Alex had become so attentive when Bowden said something about what her brother-in-law did for a living. It was the name of the army base. The fact, Bowden said, that he was more engineer than soldier.

She grimaced there in her seat at the obviousness of what she had missed. Sokolov already knew that. He knew all about Bowden’s brother-in-law. She must have said something on the flight to Dubai, and instantly he had connected the dots. It was why he had brought Bowden back to his room. This may have ended up a drunken romp with a hot mess, but that wasn’t how it had begun. She hadn’t seduced him; he, in fact, had seduced her. It was a move that simultaneously reflected his brilliance and his naïveté. The courier—whoever it was, because God forbid Viktor should ever violate his “need to know” policies of spy craft and secrecy and tell her—had sensed that the FBI was circling and grown anxious. So Viktor had enlisted Sokolov to make the handoff, an assignment he had gladly accepted because he knew how much trouble he was in with his Russian clients. And into his life walked a flight attendant with connections to Blue Grass who probably needed money. Bowden must have just screamed “recruit” to Sokolov; she was the perfect offering to bring to a Cossack crazy who was trying to weaponize a drone with chemical agents.

Elena’s father had one rule that he said had served him well both before and after the collapse: trust your instincts. He said it had saved his life when he was with the KGB, and it had saved his fortune when he was done.

The beverage cart was well behind her now, but another flight attendant appeared out of nowhere and offered to refill her glass. He was a handsome guy with a mane of tapered, coal-colored dreadlocks held back in an immaculate ponytail.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Absolutely,” he said, smiling. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

She raised her glass to him in gratitude, but already her mind was elsewhere. Nothing really was wrong, and nothing really was different, she told herself. But there it was, a beacon from deep inside her, a warning light now flashing red.