22

Cassie wasn’t averse to chaos when she was drunk; even sober, she knew, she was eminently capable of mind-numbingly bad decisions. Exhibit A? Friday afternoon at Federal Plaza with the FBI. But she realized that she couldn’t possibly reach Miranda while the other woman was in the queue at passport control. Crossing back past security wasn’t merely swimming against the tide: it was swimming into a wall of steel and glass cubicles, slender corridors, and armed women and men whose job was to spot (and stop) possible terrorists. Though she wanted—and she wanted desperately—to charge into the throng and then fight and claw her way through the crowd to Miranda, she didn’t dare. She’d be detained, perhaps even arrested, before she had gotten anywhere close to the woman. But she was almost visibly shaking, she was so agitated. And so she kept her eyes on Miranda and said to Makayla, “Can you ask the crew to stop for a minute? Just wait for me? And can you watch my suitcase?”

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I know someone in passport control: line six. I have to talk to her.”

She wondered briefly about the eyeglasses she had spotted Miranda putting into her purse, because Miranda hadn’t been wearing them when they had met in Sokolov’s hotel room in Dubai. But perhaps she didn’t wear contact lenses on overnight flights so she could sleep. Or they were reading glasses. Didn’t matter. Cassie speculated that the woman wasn’t wearing eyeglasses in her passport photo, and so she didn’t want to be wearing them now when the security officer looked up at her and did the obligatory compare-and-contrast with the thumbnail image in her navy blue book.

If it was a navy blue book. For all she knew, it was red or black or green. She realized she had presumed the woman was a regular American with a regular passport. Maybe not. Maybe she wasn’t American. Or maybe she was, but she had some sort of diplomatic stature.

“Who?”

It would have taken too long to explain to Makayla specifically who the passenger was, and so Cassie answered simply, “Someone from Dubai. Someone who’s part of the shitstorm that’s my life right now.” All she had to do was say the word Dubai and she guessed that everyone in the flight crew would have a pretty solid inkling of what she was talking about. Adding shitstorm had been a reflex, an uncharacteristic flicker of self-pity. But it was also unnecessary: they all had their theories about what might or might not have occurred in Dubai—what she might or might not have done—and if only out of a gawker’s curiosity they were not about to desert her right now.

She watched the woman stand before the passport officer, watched him stamp her passport (though the color remained a mystery), and then she raced to the end of the funnel where the passengers exited into baggage, frustrated that it meant taking her eyes off Miranda. But she hadn’t a choice: she couldn’t risk allowing her to disappear into the hordes of travelers who weren’t slowed by lines or checked bags. All her postflight exhaustion was gone, her eyes were alert, and she didn’t worry about what she would say or what she would ask. Because she knew. She knew.

While she waited, she sent Ani a text telling her that she understood she was sound asleep in New York, but she was about to confront Miranda at Fiumicino. She was going to ask her who Alex Sokolov really was and who she really was, since the woman sure as hell didn’t work for his hedge fund. A part of Cassie understood well that she was playing with fire: if Miranda had killed Alex, who knows what she might do if she felt cornered. But Cassie was ready. She told herself the woman was likely unarmed because she had just disembarked from a transcontinental flight; even if, somehow, she had snuck a weapon onto the aircraft, how could she possibly attack her amidst the baggage carousels in a crowded—packed—international airport?

But the seconds went by, and she didn’t emerge. The people kept coming, an endless, steady stream, and there was no sign of Miranda. Cassie considered whether she might have missed her while she was texting, but she didn’t believe that. She had only looked down at her phone for milliseconds at a time; she’d always been watching. She craned her neck to see back toward passport control, but there was no sign of her. She scanned the area for a ladies’ room where she might have gone, but there wasn’t one between security and baggage. There was only one behind her.

Then, however, she saw the bag—that beautiful calfskin leather duffel. It was over the shoulder of a woman who had indeed walked right past her, a woman with blond hair and sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw sun hat who was already beyond the first baggage carousels. Cassie once more scanned the exit from passport control, and when she didn’t see Miranda, she made a decision. She turned and ran after the woman in the sun hat, well aware that she must have looked like a madwoman, but no longer caring.

Cassie reached her well before the passenger had exited. She grabbed her from behind, taking her shoulder and spinning her around to face her. She couldn’t see the woman’s eyes behind her sunglasses and what she could see of her hair beneath her hat was so much lighter than Miranda’s. She couldn’t decide if it really was her or not. She tried to recall whether this was the same blouse—white and a little baggy—that Miranda had been wearing a few minutes ago while in line, but it was so drab and nondescript that Cassie wasn’t sure.

The woman looked past her, offering not the slightest hint of recognition.

“It is you, isn’t it?” Cassie asked, pleading, and though she hadn’t shouted, she had the sense that if anyone were listening they would think she was hysterical.

“Pardon me? Have we met?” The tone was light and unflappable. Had Cassie heard it before? Maybe. Maybe not.

“You’re Miranda, aren’t you? You have to come with me to the police.”

“I’m sorry, but my name isn’t Miranda. Is there something I can do to help you?” she asked.

“Dubai! Room five-eleven at the Royal Phoenician!” Cassie insisted, her voice almost a wail.

“I don’t know what any of that means,” she replied. “I’ve never been to Dubai.”

So Cassie shook the woman, not because she still believed that it was Miranda but because she understood that it wasn’t. It wasn’t. Either she’d never actually seen Miranda or she’d gotten away, and Cassie feared in her heart that it was the former. In her despair, she was more violent with this stranger than she had intended—she was even about to reach for the brim of the woman’s hat and whip it aside, one last pathetic gesture, one last hope—when she saw someone else from the corner of her eye, another passenger, and this person was turning a small red tube of lipstick toward her. And even before Cassie could respond, she knew what was going to happen. What was happening already. She felt the spray on her face, the sting more excruciating than a sunburn, and though she had closed her eyes and brought her hands to her face, instantly her eyes were running and her nose was a melting glacier and every breath was a raspy, asthmatic wheeze or a cough. She collapsed to her knees, she used the kerchief around her neck to wipe her face. She tried to call out, to speak, to apologize. Instead she was aware of someone standing over her as if she were a vanquished pro wrestler, and sensed it was the Good Samaritan who had pepper-sprayed her. The passenger was calling out for help, and Cassie heard people running—the tile floor was vibrating beneath her—and then the woman with the pepper spray was pulled away from her.

“She was attacking that lady, I saw it,” she was explaining in English, her accent vaguely Boston. Cassie heard Italian, too, police officers, and then she felt hands on her shoulders and rubbing her back, and somewhere very far away she heard Makayla’s voice and Brandon the cabin service director’s voice, and they were saying something about bringing her to a bathroom right now and irrigating her eyes and finding the airport infirmary. But the police—no, they were actually soldiers—were going to have none of that. They had other plans for her.

“Please, tell her I’m sorry,” Cassie begged, “please,” but it was already too late. She opened her eyes, despite the pain, and the woman in the sunglasses and the sun hat was nowhere in sight. She’d vanished. And with a pang of despair Cassie realized that if the encounter had been caught on a security camera, it would look like a crazed flight attendant—the one who may have nearly decapitated a young American in Dubai—had attacked a traveler in sunglasses and an elegant straw hat as she emerged from passport control, and someone with a vial of pepper spray in a lipstick tube had come to the poor woman’s defense.

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Makayla stayed with Cassie, but the rest of the crew went ahead and took the van into Rome. At one point when the dust had settled and Cassie was still kneeling on the floor of the baggage section, she had looked up and through watering, searing eyes seen three tall, trim men in camo fatigues and flak jackets, each with an assault rifle—Italian soldiers—standing like a phalanx around her, and she was reminded of the three-column sculpture outside the FBI building in lower Manhattan. The Sentinel. Then she had blinked shut her eyes and felt Makayla putting her arms around her and asking her if she was capable of walking. She said she was. Tenderly the other flight attendant helped her to her feet, her arms around Cassie’s waist.

Someone had already escorted the Boston woman somewhere else. They had thanked her and said now they needed to get a statement from her. She was, Cassie knew, going to tell the story of her remarkable heroism on her first day in Italy for the rest of her life to anyone who would listen. Cassie hated her.

Makayla and one of the soldiers brought Cassie first to an infirmary, where a nurse with rugged scruff along his cheeks and chin and breath that oozed peppermint numbed her eyes with anesthetic drops and then irrigated them until he believed that the worst of the spray was gone. He washed her face with a solution that he said was actually very much like watered-down dish detergent, and then gave her a skin cream to apply in the evening. One of the soldiers who had brought her there had remained, occasionally speaking to his superiors in Italian on his radio, at one point taking her passport and making a photocopy before returning it to her. When the nurse was done, the soldier escorted her and Makayla to a windowless conference room where they were met by a pair of men in crisp suits and brilliant white shirts. They worked for airport security and offered her water (which she accepted) and coffee (which she declined). If her throat weren’t so sore, she might have asked for anything alcoholic and strong. Then they asked Makayla to wait outside while they sat Cassie down in the middle of a long conference table. They both sat opposite her, and one had a laptop open beside him. She couldn’t recall their last names, but she remembered that the taller fellow with the meticulously shaved and tanned head—the one who was apparently in charge—was Marco. The other fellow, who seemed to be responsible for the laptop, might have been named Tommaso.

“Please, tell us exactly what happened,” Marco was saying. His English was excellent, though his accent was thick. “There were passengers in the area who feared that some sort of attack was in progress—a terrorist attack. One said she expected explosions and gunfire. Another Amsterdam. Another Istanbul.”

Cassie had felt the adrenaline draining like water from an unstoppered tub as the nurse had treated her for the pepper spray, and now she wanted nothing more than to go to the airline’s hotel and sleep. She had been awake roughly twenty-four hours and the result was the sort of bedlam that she wrought usually when she was drunk—not sober. But she was also anxious to talk to Ani and tell her what had happened. There were three points that she wanted to make: She had seen a woman with an uncanny resemblance to Miranda in passport control, and the woman had vanished before exiting into baggage. She had spotted a second woman with the same carry-on duffel near the luggage carousels, and she had also looked a bit like Miranda, but with different-colored hair. Then she had accosted that second woman by mistake—and wound up pepper-sprayed by a third.

She was not quite ready to admit that she had not seen Miranda at the airport. She thought it unlikely that she had, but a small part of her still believed (or at least tried to believe) that she had indeed spotted her and the woman had managed to disappear. It was that same part of her that had the distinct sense she had been tailed in Manhattan and someone was watching her. And so she wanted to learn if there was any way that Ani could check the passenger manifests of the flights that morning into Fiumicino and see if there was a traveler with that name on a plane. She also wanted to ask Ani this: if it was Miranda, why would she be here? It couldn’t be a coincidence. It had to mean that the woman had followed her to Rome.

She tried to recall details of Miranda’s face from her visit to Alex’s hotel suite—her eyes, her lips, the way she was wearing her hair—piecing them together with the person she had glimpsed that morning in the passport queue. The truth was, she had already been well beyond blitzed by the time she had met Miranda in Dubai. How accurate was her memory, really? And now she had just accosted some poor, innocent woman who simply had a passing resemblance to the individual she’d met one time in circumstances that were (as they frequently were in her life) clouded by alcohol. Meanwhile, it was possible that the actual woman had eluded her and gotten away.

“Late last month,” she began, “I spent the night in Dubai with a man I had met on an airplane earlier that day. I was in his hotel room. After I left the next morning to catch my flight to Paris, someone murdered him. And that woman I was trying to talk to in baggage…she reminded me of someone who had come to his hotel room the night before.”

Marco raised an eyebrow: “She spent the night, too, so it was the three of you?”

“No. Not at all. She just came by for a drink. Then she left.”

“What’s her name?” he asked.

“I don’t know her last name. But she said in Dubai that her first name was Miranda.”

“And you attacked a passenger this morning because you thought it was her?”

“I didn’t attack anyone. That woman with the pepper spray overreacted and attacked me.”

Marco and Tommaso exchanged a glance, and instantly she felt judged. Tommaso looked at something on his laptop. “I will rephrase,” said Marco. “And so you approached a passenger this morning because you thought it was her?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I was trying to stop her.”

“Stop her from what?” Marco inquired.

“From getting away. She—”

Marco put one hand up, palm flat, quieting her. “Please,” he said firmly. Then he leaned forward and clasped his hands together on the table. “Please, let’s start again. If you don’t mind, let’s go back to the beginning. To Dubai.”

“Do I need to call the American embassy? Do I need a lawyer?”

“Why? We’re not arresting you. The woman who you…approached…isn’t even here. She’s probably left by now. She’s probably begun her vacation here in Italy.”

“She left?”

“Yes.”

Again Cassie felt a surge, as if she had just pressed her foot down hard on the treadle that powered her angst. The fact the woman had fled meant something. Wouldn’t a normal person have stayed? “Can you find her?”

“I doubt it.”

“Will you try? Maybe use the security camera footage and the witness descriptions? You must have both.”

“Her back was to the camera in that section. It’s not as well lit as we’d like. And she was wearing a beautiful hat and sunglasses. We can’t even say for sure what color her hair was.”

“It was blond.”

“Fine. You think it was blond.”

“And you have witnesses. God, you have that nut ball with the pepper spray!” she said, and she heard a quiver in her voice. She knew that sound: it was exhaustion and frustration mixing rather toxically together. She considered adding, illegal pepper spray, because pepper spray—especially one disguised as a lipstick—wasn’t allowed in a carry-on bag.

“We do,” he answered. “And they—including the American with the pepper spray—can describe you beautifully. And, yes, they can describe the way you threw yourself on the lady.”

“I didn’t throw myself on her.”

Again the two men glanced at each other. She realized that while they weren’t going to arrest her, neither were they going to help her.

“Can we go back to Dubai?” Marco asked. “Tell us about that night.”

“I think I should just go.”

“We want to understand what happened.”

“Then call the U.S. embassy or let me call them. I’m too tired to talk to you right now without someone from the embassy with me.”

“It will take at least an hour—maybe more—for them to get here. And that assumes someone is available. I’m sure you don’t want to wait that long.”

“Then I’m just going to leave, thank you very much. You said you’re not arresting me.”

“No.” There was a long beat, and then Marco lifted from the table a photocopy of her passport and waved it almost dismissively. “But we know exactly who you are, Ms. Bowden. Interpol knows exactly who you are.”

“Then why did you waste my time asking me about Dubai?” she snapped. “I’m exhausted, and I was just attacked!”

“When people are exhausted, they are often the most cooperative. The most talkative.”

“So, what’s next? Waterboarding?”

He shrugged. “Your country does that. Not mine.”

“I’m leaving.”

“As you wish,” he said. He asked her for the name of the hotel where she was staying and her cell phone number, which he wrote down on the copy of her passport. Tommaso typed it into the laptop.

“How long will you be in Rome?” he asked.

“Until tomorrow. Late morning.”

“Flight two-ten to JFK, right?”

“Right.”

He nodded a little smugly. “I know your airline’s schedule well. I know most airlines’ schedules well.” Then he stood and Tommaso stood, and so she rose from her chair as well. “We’ll call you today if we need to talk to you again. But Ms. Bowden?”

“Yes?”

“Please, for your own sake, don’t attack—pardon me, approach—strange women while you’re here.” He was smiling, but there was a cloying, ominous lilt to his voice, and she felt his words were more threat than advice.