9

Elena watched half a dozen U.S. sailors laughing and cavorting on the sidewalk from Viktor’s window on the fifth floor—the top floor—of the nondescript little office building, and knew right away they were lost. This neighborhood had a Sikh temple, a Coptic Orthodox church, a Greek Orthodox parish, and the Dubai Evangelical Center. It also had dentists and accountants. It did not have the gold or jewelry or electronics stores that usually drew the sailors north from the port at Mina Jebel Ali. The carrier battle group was due in tomorrow, and so the day after tomorrow the city would be awash with American seamen and women.

Now she turned away from the window and leaned against Viktor’s credenza. His office here was an amalgam of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. There was dark wood paneling on the walls and a silver tray with crystal cognac snifters emblazoned with the two-headed eagle on a side table, but there was also a flip-top panel for video conferences and a touch-screen computer built into a chrome and walnut desk. “She wasn’t there. I swept the room,” she said to him, hoping she didn’t sound defensive. She was just stating the facts. Unfortunately, this was getting messy and had the potential to spin wildly out of control. One’s vision was always crisper in hindsight, but Elena knew now that she’d made an egregious mistake. It would have been terrible, but perhaps she should have killed the flight attendant with Alex when she’d had the chance—when she’d come to the room and found that Alex had brought a little arm candy from the airline upstairs. If she’d wanted, she could have made it look like a murder suicide. A crime of passion. She could have left behind the knife.

But she hadn’t, because this flight attendant wasn’t her usual sort of game. She didn’t kill bystanders. She didn’t kill innocent people.

And now Viktor was furious. She knew that look. He was rather like her father when her father felt that someone had failed: he didn’t rant, he didn’t vent, he didn’t throw tantrums. He seethed. It was far more unsettling. But the ramifications for whoever had screwed up? Just as deadly.

“Oh, I believe you. I believe you swept the room. But the security photos on the news sites are clear. You’ve seen them, Elena. The woman was definitely at the hotel in the morning and she was wearing the exact same clothes from the night before,” Viktor reminded her. “Alex never told you he had company when you called?”

“No. I wouldn’t have gone to his room if he had.”

Viktor seemed to think about this. “Had he done this sort of thing in the past?”

“If he did, no one told me. He was never part of a honey pot.”

“That’s true.”

She heard the sailors outside on the street laughing a little too boisterously. If the latch mechanism on the window weren’t so complicated, she would have opened it and pointed them in the right direction for the sorts of stores they were after. “Look, I almost took care of business then and there. When we were drinking. But I didn’t want to risk a scene. I didn’t want to risk the noise. Two people? Who knows what could go wrong. The woman said something about going back to her own hotel because of her flight the next day, and so I left and waited for her to leave.”

“And then you returned to Alex’s suite,” Viktor murmured.

“Yes.”

He sighed and she felt a flicker of unease. It grew more pronounced when he said, “Obviously it would have been better if you’d taken that risk, Elena. If he was as drunk as you say he was, who knows what he told her. Who knows what she knows now.”

“I don’t think we need to worry,” she tried to reassure him, but she could feel his disapproval. She knew how much trouble she was in.

“I do worry. And, frankly, I am”—and he paused, allowing the moment to grow ominous as he pretended merely to be searching for the right word—“vexed by the fact that you didn’t tell me there had been someone with him in the first place.”

“I should have,” she admitted. “I know.”

“Yes. You should have.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So what did you find? When you returned to his hotel room?” he asked.

“Alex was already passed out in his bed. He was out like a light. The suite was even worse than it had been when I’d stopped by earlier in the evening. Both rooms. It was squalid, it really was. He or that idiot woman had managed to break the bottle of vodka I’d brought and one of the hotel’s glasses.”

“This was after you left.”

“Correct.”

“But she definitely wasn’t present when you took care of our Mr. Sokolov.”

“I’m positive.”

“So, it would seem that she did indeed return to his room afterward and find him dead,” said Viktor.

“But she didn’t call the front desk or the embassy. She just…what? Found the body and did nothing? Spent the night with a corpse?”

He gave her a dark, lopsided smile, but remained silent.

“The suite was pretty large,” Elena told him, but she knew she was grasping a little desperately for vines around the quicksand. “Maybe she only went back to the living room. Maybe she forgot something in the living room and didn’t even peer into the bedroom.”

Viktor folded his arms across his chest dismissively and rocked back in the chair. “You can’t possibly believe that. The surveillance cameras suggest she was there all night. She knows he was dead. She saw the body.”

“In that case, is it actually possible that she believes she killed him?” Elena asked, thinking aloud.

“Oh, come on.”

“I’m serious. This flight attendant struck me as a pretty serious party girl. Think ‘Chandelier.’ ”

“I suppose that’s a club drug?”

“It’s a pop song. Sia. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has serious memory problems when she drinks.”

He steepled together his fingers. “I guess it’s conceivable.”

“So maybe this works to our favor. It shouldn’t take long for the police to figure out that she was in the room with Alex and pin the murder on her. My impression of the woman is that she’s a disaster, she lacks all common sense.”

“Maybe. But it’s complicated. I spoke with our lawyer here.”

She waited.

“Alex wasn’t a citizen of the United Emirates,” he continued. “He was an American. It would take a lot of work to bring this woman back to Dubai and put her on trial, and the authorities here don’t have an especially vested interest in this case.”

Outside one of the sailors screamed something in frustration about how lost he was and how his phone wasn’t helping. She realized they, too, had been drinking. How was it that Russians had been saddled with the reputation for inebriation? “Is there any chance she might be tried in the U.S.?”

“Only if someone thought Alex’s death was a terrorist act,” he replied, and then he scoffed. “Can you imagine? A terrorist stewardess.”

“Flight attendant,” she corrected him reflexively.

There was a long beat as he raised one eyebrow. “Flight attendant,” he repeated finally.

“No one will view his death as a terrorist act,” she said. “No one will view this flight attendant as a terrorist.”

“I agree. Which is fine. Frankly, a trial does no one any good. Not us. Not them. And speaking frankly, Elena, not you.”

“I understand.” She couldn’t bear the ruckus outside on the street any longer. She vowed that when this meeting was over, she was going to march downstairs and tell the sailors precisely where to go.

“I’m not sure you do. The problem, as you have made very clear from your time with Sokolov, is that he was drunk. Peasant drunk. The toxicology report will confirm that, I’m sure. God knows what he might have shared. I think we all need to move forward on the assumption that he said something—that he told her something. You’ve said yourself that she’s an irresponsible drinker, too.”

She knew this was coming, but still her heart sank. “Does she have any family?” she asked.

“Have you grown a conscience, Elena Orlov?”

“I simply want to understand what we have to contain,” she said.

“No. She has no children and no husband. Not even an ex-husband. It should be very easy for you to fix this. She should have an accident. A terrible, unforeseen, but eminently realistic accident.”

“I just…”

“You just what?”

“I just feel bad. She did nothing wrong. She’s just a pathetic drunk who got in bed with the wrong man on the wrong night.”

“She’s dangerous,” Viktor reminded her.

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps? You should have taken care of them both when you found them together. You know that. I know you do. Besides…”

“Besides what?”

“She saw you, Elena. She saw you. Be realistic: one of you has to die.” He shrugged. “I think it’s your choice.”