31

Who really burned most of Moscow to the ground in 1812? Tolstoy seemed to believe it was the occupying French army and it was an accident: too many soldiers starting too many fires. Myriad small blazes igniting one massive one that drove Napoleon from the Kremlin—though only briefly. He would return and reside there a month before the long French retreat would commence. But Elena knew that her father and her father’s friends thought otherwise: the Russians themselves, the few that remained in the city, set torch to the wooden buildings. Hadn’t the Russian commander himself demobilized the firefighting corps? Hadn’t he ordered that the firefighting wagons be wrecked? No one would ever know for sure where on the spectrum the inferno fell between suicide and sabotage, but Elena had grown up confident that it was the Muscovites themselves—citizens and soldiers alike—who had destroyed the great city.

Which, in her mind, fit the Russian character to a tee. She saw herself in the light from those flames. She knew her people, and she knew the way the West looked down on them: certainly the West had in 1812 and certainly the West did today. Hadn’t she felt that when she had been a student in Switzerland and Massachusetts, hadn’t she heard that in the derogatory comments in political science classes about serfs and gulags and oligarchs? Well, North Americans had their crimes, too: genocide and slavery and, yes, oligarchs of their own. So be it. She and her ancestors lived with a chip on their shoulders that made them at once defiant and fatalistic—and conquerable only by themselves. Always it had been Russians themselves who, in the end, vanquished or annihilated or finally broke Russians.

She was considerably more frightened of Viktor than she was of any man or woman she had ever met in the West.

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Her mind, as it did often now, meandered to Sochi and her father’s dacha there. Her home there. Mostly it had been spared the madness of the Olympic construction, but the view of the mountains to the southwest had changed: you could see roads that had been cut through the forest in the distance, and in the winter you could spot the alpine trails that had been added when there was snow. Her father would have been appalled had he lived to see it. But the vista to the east was unchanged, as rustic and primeval as when Stalin had summered nearby, and she had a sense that despite his disappointment, her father would have adapted: perhaps he would have grown accustomed to sitting on the porch on the eastern side of the house instead of the one on the west, and arranged his days so he could bask in the sunrises instead of the sunsets. You didn’t survive in the Soviet Union if you didn’t adapt. You didn’t thrive in the post-Soviet world if you weren’t a chameleon. Certainly her father was. But he was also a realist and he was disciplined. It was one more reason why she had both respected and loved him.

And he was Russian: unconquerable by forces from beyond the border. The only person who had ever defeated him was his equally Russian wife.

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She read the message from Washington twice to be sure. Then a third time.

There was no ambiguity. She was done. Finished. They agreed with her: the Cossacks knew she’d been turned.

Inside she was an uncharacteristic riot of emotions. There was (and it pained her to admit this, because she liked to believe that she was above an emotion as pedestrian as fear) relief, because she herself was evidence of Viktor’s brutality toward his enemies. She knew what loomed for her. But there was also shame, because she felt like a failure. She had failed the agency, yes, but more than that she had failed her father. She did what she did to fuck Viktor. And there were other discordant, confusing waves that broke over her, too, all of which began and ended with the unexpected fog that was her future.

Her orders were to get the flight attendant and get out. She was to get the two of them out.

She’d go ahead and pull the fire alarm as she had planned because she suspected that Bowden had a gun and she didn’t really want the woman to shoot her the moment she walked into her hotel room. But the rest of her evening was going to be rather different.

So be it.

How funny that she’d just been thinking about her beloved Sochi. She felt a pang in her heart, knowing she’d never see Russia again.

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Elena understood that the blue dot on her phone could tell her more or less where the flight attendant was when it came to a street address, but it certainly couldn’t confirm whether the woman had left her hotel room. The frog’s heart was going to beat at this address, but it could not discern whether she was outside on the street or ensconced upstairs in her room.

And so she pulled the fire alarm on Cassandra Bowden’s floor, but along a different corridor. Then she went quickly to the flight attendant’s hallway and watched, occasionally moving with the herd as the guests emerged, hoping to blend in by looking as frazzled and sleepy as they. She was wearing a nondescript black hoodie and sweatpants.

It seemed as if most of the guests presumed this was either a drill or a false alarm, but she noted how most were obediently—albeit, begrudgingly—taking the stairs rather than the elevators to the lobby and exiting the hotel. Most had climbed back into their clothes, though none were as well dressed as they would have been just a few hours earlier. She saw women and men in blue jeans and sweatpants like her, their shirts untucked, their sneakers or shoes barely tied. She saw flip-flops. She saw women without makeup and men with their hair wild with sleep. She noted the couples who had clearly been having sex when they were interrupted, the evidence the way they looked at once sheepish and annoyed and clung a little hungrily to each other. She saw three children—all girls—and supposed they were sisters. The youngest was only three or four and was in her father’s arms, using her fists to wipe at her eyes.

And she saw Bowden. There she was. Alone. She was still dressed in the sundress she had worn to dinner with the bartender, but the bartender wasn’t with her. She couldn’t decide what that meant, but it would make her job easier.

The flight attendant had slipped on her sandals. She had with her a shoulder bag, which Elena was quite sure now held a gun.

This time the woman hadn’t noticed her. There would be no repeat of the madness that morning at Fiumicino.

It was then that her phone buzzed and she saw it was Viktor. She didn’t dare ignore Viktor, even now. So she took her phone and retreated into the stairwell, secure in the knowledge that Bowden was gone.

“Yes?”

“Where are you?”

She told him, and he responded by telling her in great detail what he had enjoyed that night at dinner.

“I should go,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed.

When she emerged, the corridor was clear, but the firefighters had not yet arrived to scan the hallway. She pulled the dry-erase marker from her purse and slipped the tip into the small hole with the power jack at the bottom of the lock on the flight attendant’s door. There was a satisfying pop as the bolt inside it opened.

Then Elena slid into the room. Bowden had left the lights and the television set on. The drapes already were closed, which she deemed a lucky break. She was prepared to close them, but if she did there was the chance that the flight attendant would notice the change the moment she opened the door and either retreat or shoot. This was one less worry.

She surveyed the room carefully, noticing the open suitcase with the clothes rolled meticulously into tubes or folded and pressed flat. The woman may have been a mess in most ways, but she was one hell of a good packer. She saw the tin with Perugia chocolates on the dresser, the nightstand with her tablet and power cables, and the desk with a rather handsome pencil cup: it looked like the foot of an old Roman column. Like the vast majority of hotel rooms, the space was dominated by the bed, a queen with a faux headboard screwed into the wall. Most importantly, she noted the location of the two mirrors.

As she was positioning herself just inside the doorway to await the flight attendant’s return, the woman’s bathroom to her left, she felt the movement before she saw it and tried to turn. But it was too late. She knew that and was more dumbfounded by her stupidity than horrified by the realization that she was about to die. Someone had entered Bowden’s room when she had gone to the stairwell: when she had been drawn to the stairwell by the phone call from Viktor. There was the strong arm around her neck, the crushing vise of the V of someone’s arm against her larynx, as he pulled her into the bathroom. There was the agony of the knife in her lower back, the peculiarly sonorous grunt of her own gasp. She knew, despite the incapacitating pain, what was next, and it happened in seconds exactly the way she saw it in her mind: he withdrew the knife and ran it across her throat. Instinctively she tried to cry out, a reflex, but already she was gagging on blood—he had cut through the muscle and cartilage, exactly the way she had with Alex Sokolov—and so all she heard was the small sound of someone gargling with mouthwash. And, of course, this was not exactly the way she had executed Sokolov. He’d been asleep. Sound asleep. In her last seconds of life, in the midst of all that pain and all that surprise, she despaired mostly that they were killing her when she was awake.