25
Elena got a spray tan at a salon across the street from Bulgari and Gucci, and she instructed the attendant to think Saint-Tropez. She wanted to look like an old Bain de Soleil ad. Then she went by a pharmacy—choosing one far down the Via Sistina from both her hotel and Bowden’s—and bought a pair of plastic gloves and a shade of hair color that was called “natural blue black.”
Back in her room, she meticulously worked the dye into her hair and set the timer on her phone for forty-five minutes. She had no gray yet, not a single strand, but she wanted to be sure that the color was solid. She thought she might enjoy having hair the shade of ravens’ wings for the rest of the summer and the beginning of autumn.
As she waited, she sat on her bed and used the encrypted network on her laptop to dig deep into Dennis McCauley. See if there was anything new. Anything they’d been unable to tell her. She went underground, hacking into his life through a variety of dark sites she accessed through the Lewis Carroll–like looking glass of RATs and rootkits the Cossacks preferred. She looked at the meetings on his calendar that week at the military base in Kentucky and the one the next week at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland. She noted his predilections in porn, which were far more conventional than a lot of guys in the military or the male defense contractors she had dealt with, and she saw that his fantasy baseball team had done especially well that week. She scanned his family’s bank and investment accounts.
But she could find no indication that he was a Cossack asset or that he was getting rich selling them what he knew.
She thought once more of her revelation on the plane last night, the idea that for so long she had had the Dubai seduction backward: she had been assuming that Cassandra Bowden had picked up Sokolov on the flight to the Emirates, when it was quite probably the other way around.
God, he’d been such a rank amateur. He was up against people who’d grown up in a culture in which paranoia was a survival skill.
After she’d killed him, she’d switched flash drives, giving Viktor one with dramatically dumbed-down data. It had specs on the stealth drone, but nothing that Russia probably wouldn’t have on its own or through NovaSkies within months. It was, they hoped, just enough to satisfy Viktor. They were wrong. Then she’d left the evidence that Sokolov was stealing from the fund on his laptop. No one could miss it. The CIA would know why he was dead, and eventually National Intelligence would share what they knew with the FBI. But the Dubai police would just see it as Russian business—cold-blooded and unflinching—as usual. The price for a regular hit when a deal went bad was pennies. Her father had once paid an underling a measly fifteen-grand bonus to execute a commodities trader who had tried (and failed) to bilk him out of the steel he’d bought from a Lipetsk mill. Another time, he’d paid a pittance—five thousand dollars—to have some poor British contracts manager in Donetsk killed when his bosses back in London had refused to renegotiate a contract. (They did after that. Right away.) The American agencies weren’t thrilled that Sokolov was dead, but he wasn’t an especially good egg, and no one wanted to see him on trial. He knew too much. Mostly they were just grateful that no one’s cover had been burned. It was weirdly polite. It also wouldn’t demand a public escalation, which nobody wanted.
She logged off her computer and tried to slip into place the last pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but there were too many and she was too tired. And so she willed herself to relax. She thumbed through the Italian and British fashion magazines she had bought at a kiosk on the street and read news stories on her tablet. But she kept coming back to the flight attendant and what she was supposed to do and what she had planned to do. There were just so very many ways to kill yourself. There were pills and there was bleeding out in the bath. There was falling from great heights and falling into oceans or rivers or deep, beautiful chasms. There were streetcars and subways and buses. There was hanging. There were guns—just so many kinds of guns.
She considered it likely that an absolute train wreck such as Cassandra Bowden might have one last surprise for her. If she had to bet, she would bet on the bartender; after all, he combined Bowden’s two principal interests in one tidy package. That, of course, would be a disaster. The last thing she wanted was him, too, on her conscience. Unfortunately, a murder-suicide involving Cassandra Bowden and some Italian hookup would look just as plausible to the world as a suicide, and it was possible that they might ask this of her.
She had promised herself a few days alone in Sochi when she was done, though of course she would not be completely alone. No doubt, some of her father’s old friends would come by. There would be someone who was long out of the loop and didn’t know how badly she had screwed up with the flight attendant. Maybe it would be someone who knew only that Sokolov was dead and wanted to thank her. It was pretty simple: you went for the jugular. It was—to use their old joke—cut and dried.
But she’d have plenty of time to watch the bears from the porch and listen to the owls as she dozed beneath the pergola. She would try to regain her emotional equilibrium after Diyarbakir and Dubai and now Rome.
She sat back against the headboard and closed her eyes, savoring the air conditioning in her hotel room but agitated because of all the things that she didn’t know and all the things it was possible they had chosen not to tell her.