NOBODY’S PUSHOVER, NOBODY’S FOE
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21
Elena knew that the West viewed the president of the Russian Federation as a Bond villain. The guy took out his political enemies with radioactive tea, for God’s sake. He had his intelligence agencies hack and release the e-mail of U.S. political parties to influence presidential elections. He was perceived at once as scary and comic. You took him seriously—very seriously—but you scoffed behind his back.
And she knew that while Canadian citizens had been welcoming Muslim immigrants in the worst of the refugee crisis a couple of years ago, an awful lot of everyday Americans had presumed that Islam was a synonym for ISIS. They were convinced that all mosques, whether they were in Fallujah or Florida, were breeding grounds for suicide bombers, and they armed themselves with semiautomatic weapons. They convinced themselves they were safe if they had guns and walls.
She wished the world were that simple. She thought of something one of her father’s FSB friends had said to her back in Sochi, when he was testing the waters with her—seeing if he might be able to recruit her. “It’s a terrible era when idiots are allowed to govern the blind,” he had said. “I’m paraphrasing Shakespeare—perhaps rather badly—but I’m sure you get my drift. The world is a madhouse, Elena. Always has been, always will be. And it’s a complicated madhouse. Now, our country has the potential to be the best, I feel. You know, after all we’ve been through. All that our people have endured. But it’s a very low bar.”
And yet there wasn’t a Cold War anymore. At least not the way that her father and her grandparents would have understood the term. There certainly wasn’t a World War. At least not yet. The United States and Russia had grown as nationalist as ever and, thus, rather testy with one another. At first that hadn’t been the case. For a time, the United States had shed great crocodile tears for the people of Aleppo, but they understood that Syria—and obviously Ukraine and Crimea—weren’t in their backyard. They were in Russia’s. And so other than the op-ed writers, for a long while no one in North America really cared all that much even when the Russian Federation deployed nuclear Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, or what had been Königsberg forever.
Good Lord, half of America was pretty sure their own president was a Russian puppet.
The truth was, very few men or women on the streets of Indianapolis or Kansas City fretted all that much when the Russians penetrated the country’s NSA computer system. No one lost sleep when they turned—converted—another contractor who hoarded boxes of files in his utility shed the way some people held on to old issues of Life magazine or plastic Star Wars action models or porcelain figurines of Siamese cats.
No more.
If any patch of sand in the world was capable of creating another world war, she believed, it was Syria. Oh, North Korea had the ICBMs and the nukes while the Syrian army was often—very often—reduced to pushing primitive barrel bombs from helicopters. But the Syrian skies were crowded, and the refugee crisis had the West on the edge. Nations great and small were terrified of the suicidal psychotics, sometimes homegrown and sometimes imports, with bombs strapped to their chests or automatic weapons in their arms or simply a very big truck they would use to plow through a crowd as if the pedestrians were merely raccoons crossing a country road in the still of night. They would appear from nowhere, human land mines, and butcher the unlucky women and men around them in the nightclubs and airports and movie theaters. They killed people by the dozens or by the hundreds. It was random. And then they killed themselves.
Were those crazies any worse than the Syrian soldiers who shoved the barrel bombs out the chopper doors? Perhaps, but only because they were suicidal. The Syrian army would drop a bomb on (for instance) a rebel-held neighborhood, wait twenty minutes for the rescuers to start pulling their neighbors from the rubble, and then drop a second one. The barrel bombs killed tens of thousands more civilians than the chemical weapons.
But it was the chemical weapons that caused voters in places like Munich and Manchester and Minneapolis to pay attention. It was the videos of the children choking to death and the adults vomiting and frothing at the mouth. If you want to get the attention of the White House, kill children with sarin. Send it via a surface-to-surface missile or drop it from a MiG.
The Russian drones moved slowly across the same skies as the Americans’. Distant pilots on the ground would guide them over their targets, and the unmanned machines would send back the video images and coordinates. This was how it worked in Ukraine, and this was how it worked in Syria. The Russian drones certainly weren’t low tech, but unlike the American and Chinese models, they were still capable only of surveillance.
Imagine: all that money to protect one pilot from having to fly a plane inside its cockpit. Meanwhile, you’re still savaging the civilians with tools as barbaric as barrel bombs and as brutal as sarin.
Sometimes she looked at Viktor or she looked at photos of the presidents in Washington and Moscow and Damascus and thought darkly to herself, this is where it all ends. Here.
But there was, alas, just no turning back.
And so she did what she could, which really wasn’t much and probably wasn’t worth the toll it exacted upon her mental health.
But unlike the terrorists and anarchists and jihadists, she could still count on one hand the number of people she had executed (though she did need her thumb). Most of what she did—and what she had been hoping to do in Dubai once Sokolov was dead—was rather bureaucratic. She could never tell Viktor or anyone else, but she lived with a certain amount of self-hatred, even if (so far) the dead on her conscience all needed to die. Even, just maybe, Sokolov. Both sides would have agreed.
But he was the least definite. Speaking objectively, he wasn’t evil. But he also couldn’t be trusted. You didn’t steal from Viktor. Still, he wasn’t like the slime she had executed in Latakia or the cretin she had executed in Donetsk: he’d simply paddled into white water he thought he could navigate. He was rather like her: a pawn. Square D2 or E2 on the chessboard. The pawn moved out to open clean attack lines for the bishop. Against most players, a pawn didn’t last long. He’d done his job and delivered the goods. She had to kill him for one reason and one reason only: because Viktor had asked.
She listened to the soothing hum of the engines in the dark and closed her eyes. She wished she could go back in time. She wished she could go back to the Royal Phoenician that night.
No, she wished she could go back to the moment before she had gone to the hotel. When she had called him.
Alex, hello! Lovely to know we’re going to meet tomorrow. Are you alone?
That last question? It hadn’t crossed her mind to ask it. She should have. Because then he would have answered, Actually, I’m not. I have a new friend with me. But, please, come over anyway.
But this time she wouldn’t have come over. She would have waited. Maybe she would have gone to the Royal Phoenician much later that night instead. Maybe not. Maybe she would have taken care of Sokolov the next day. Or the next night.
Alas, she couldn’t go back in time. She could only go forward. Do her job. Fix the mess she had made and then survey her options.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
Re: ALEX SOKOLOV
DATE: August 6, 2018
The Dubai Police alerted our legal attaché in the United Arab Emirates that this morning at 9:15 a.m. UAE time, a woman in housekeeping at the Royal Phoenician Hotel found a possible piece of additional evidence in the investigation into the murder of Alex Sokolov.
ILMA BAQRI, a part of the hotel housekeeping staff, was vacuuming on the northeast corridor of the fifth floor. When she moved the round couch there, she saw on the floor behind it a lipstick tube and a lip balm with the logo for CASSANDRA BOWDEN’S airline. It is the sort that is included in the first-class amenity kits.
Without a DNA sample or fingerprints, we cannot determine if e
ither item belonged to CASSANDRA BOWDEN, but the Dubai Police have retained both items.
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,” Cassi
e 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.