4

Elena supposed that among the reasons why she was good at what she did was the simple reality that she was neither beautiful nor homely. She could look pretty when she dressed well and wore the right makeup—and so she tried to do both—but the goal was not to stand out. She was five-foot-four with deep brown eyes and chestnut-brown hair, which she kept parted in the middle when she wasn’t working and in a French twist when she was. She rarely wore sunglasses in America and Russia, because she thought that sunglasses made you more noticeable. She realized here in Dubai that the opposite was true: it was the Westerners who didn’t wear sunglasses who were the most memorable, and so she bought a first pair soon after landing and a second pair at one of the hotel stores right after finishing her iced tea with Viktor.

She was walking through the souk, her head scarf pulled tight, and she rather liked the absolute anonymity. She stood in a narrow aisle of spices, unsure whether the smell nearest her was the cumin or the merchant. Elena didn’t cook much, but she had used cumin just enough to know that the stench could be either. He was standing behind the long buffet of containers rich with the phosphorescent colors of saffron and curry. On the racks behind him were small glass replicas of the most prominent new buildings in Dubai, each a little reminiscent of a chess piece. She’d loved chess as a child. She’d played it at school and at home with her father until she was sent away to a boarding school in Switzerland. She was rather good at it. Beside the trinket buildings were a variety of ornate, ocean-blue hookahs. She appreciated the way the market seemed to cater to both locals and tourists, though she could imagine tourists bringing home spices as well as a souvenir Burj Al Arab, the iconic Dubai hotel that looked like a gigantic—as in fifty-six-story gigantic—sail. She thought of the Eastern Market near the apartment she’d had when she’d been in Washington, D.C., a few years ago, and how you could find there fresh local fruit as well as paper-weight-size Washington Monuments and snow globes of the White House.

Now she looked up because the spice vendor was asking her if she spoke English. She nodded and smiled.

“What would you like?” he inquired. He was an older man, his beard trim and gray. His thobe was spotless: as white as the cherry blossoms and not a stain on it, despite the spices that surrounded him.

There really was nothing here that she wanted, at least today. The apartment they had given her had a tidy kitchen, but she didn’t know yet how long she would be in Dubai. A week or two, she expected, but the next few days would tell. They wanted to be sure there was no fallout from Alex Sokolov that she would need to clean up.

God, she thought, imagine if they knew about the flight attendant. She felt a deep pang of disquiet—almost alarm—when she imagined the possible repercussions from her decision not to kill her, too. She took a breath to calm herself. To compartmentalize. It was, she understood, how she functioned. She was capable of focusing acutely on a problem and thinking many steps ahead. It was why she had been such a capable chess player. She could be farsighted to the point of prescience. But her mind also divided and conquered, squirreling away the nuggets she someday might need, while putting the fears that might paralyze her behind a firewall.

“Please,” the vendor was saying to her, “a beautiful woman like you? Surely there is something you want.”

She looked at him and then she looked around at his wares. In her opinion, the real fun of a place like the souk was not merely how fresh everything was, but the negotiating. The bargaining. It was rather like low-stakes diplomacy. Elena loved it. She was only thirty—barely thirty—but she had spent enough time in cities in the Middle East that she had grown accustomed to the haggling it took to buy a brick of halloumi cheese. So she guessed she would purchase something.

But then her phone vibrated. She thanked the vendor and turned away to read the text. It was from Viktor. Alex Sokolov had indeed missed the meeting that morning with the investors from Russia. They’d called his cell and they’d called the hotel and left messages. Most of the people in the room had no idea why he wasn’t there, but there were a few who did and they were grateful.

She took in his praise, but she didn’t smile. She knew that while she was indeed proficient—no, she was beyond proficient, she had (to use an expression a roommate from college rather liked) mad skills—second chances were few in her line of work. Especially with these people. Her father’s people. She knew the truth of what they had done to him. She wasn’t irreplaceable. The last thing she wanted was to be herself among the hunted.

But Viktor’s text was reassuring. He had even used the word grateful. And so she turned back to the vendor and pointed at a beautiful scarf so gloriously colorful and luminescent that she thought of Joseph’s dream coat. “How many dirhams?” she asked.

He told her. She scoffed and rolled her eyes, and he gave her a second price. And they were off.