The Flight Attendant
She hadn’t needed any clandestine tools to research Piero Bianchi while she waited for them to emerge. She only wanted the basics. She learned he was a banker, though he didn’t seem to have much to do with foreign currencies or hedge funds or international banking. Mostly he financed local real estate—new commercial construction inside the Roman ring. This was comforting, though not conclusive. After all, much of the fund Sokolov ran was in real estate. It was possible that the manager had told Bowden something about his day job and Bowden had told the bartender, and the two of them had now gone to Uncle Piero for a tutorial. Any banker with Piero’s experience could answer basic investment questions or explain the bare bones of what Sokolov did at Unisphere.
But if Bowden had questions, she’d had plenty of opportunities to talk to bankers while she was home in Manhattan. Wouldn’t that lawyer of hers have been tracking them down? Wouldn’t Bowden have gone to speak to someone in America instead of going to the animal shelter or the zoo or hooking up with that actor?
No, Elena decided, the two of them had gone to see Uncle Piero for some reason that had absolutely nothing to do with the hedge fund.
She thought of something her father had told her: a smart girl is nobody’s pushover and nobody’s foe. A smart girl is both sword and smile. (At the time, she had considered countering that his ex-wife was all sword and seemed to do just fine, thank you very much, but she understood his message.)
Her handler in Abu Dhabi had postulated a theory to explain the connection between Sokolov and Bowden.
“Is it possible that this flight attendant is actually a whole lot smarter than the average bear?” he’d asked her. “Maybe she was working with Sokolov on the grift the whole time, and their inebriated debacle was a hoax.”
“Play this out,” she’d said to him.
“Okay. Bowden isn’t even in the room when you phoned five-eleven. She got there just before you did, and she and Sokolov concocted the ruse when they were caught. They portrayed their meeting as just some drunken debauch.”
“No, they were wasted,” she assured him. “They weren’t playacting.”
She told him her theory in return: Bowden had said something on the plane about what her brother-in-law did for a living, and Sokolov saw an opportunity. Here was a flight attendant who flew regularly into the United Arab Emirates, and she had a brother-in-law who was a major at an army base that was awash in chemical weapons. He was a destruction engineer. Perhaps the flight attendant could help them enlist or blackmail him. But Viktor already had his own asset inside the chemical weapons program; the FSB had their own courier with the airline. They didn’t need her.
The irony, of course, was that back in the United States the FBI now had to investigate Major McCauley. Make sure that he hadn’t violated his security clearance and told his sister-in-law something she might have shared with Sokolov. So they were talking to him. They were talking to his family.
Meanwhile, Viktor probably suspected—no assumed—that the flight attendant was either FBI and she was interested in Sokolov or she was CIA and hoping to use Sokolov to get inside the Cossacks. And even if she weren’t? She’d still been in the suite. She may have been merely a sexually voracious flight attendant in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she may also have been something rather more dangerous.
And so Viktor fully (and rightly) expected that his redoubtable protégée would have killed the woman when she found her in the room.
But she hadn’t.
Since Dubai, Viktor had been telling her they were worried that the flight attendant might reveal something compromising that Sokolov had shared while drunk. They had stressed that the flight attendant had seen her and, thus, could easily burn her. Certainly the crazy woman had recognized her at Fiumicino. So these were her fears, too. But there was something else going on, and it was now coming into focus. She had not merely failed Viktor by neither executing Bowden nor telling him initially that the woman had been in the room: she had irrevocably compromised his faith in her. Their faith in her. Their trust. They thought she had quite possibly spared an FBI asset or an actual agent. They’d never believe her, no matter how eloquently she explained the truth of what she knew or how many synonyms she found in English or Russian for the noun drunk.
They’d figured out that she was CIA; they’d figured out that she had turned.
Spies (and she always felt self-important and narcissistic when she thought of herself that way, but it was better than the alternative words, which stressed the more lethal aspects to her work) turned for a lot of reasons. Most of the time it was because they hadn’t a choice: they’d been compromised or were being blackmailed, and changing teams was the only play to keep out of prison. Or, in some cases, to stay alive. The rationale for her turn in America had origins both prosaic and profound. Yes, once she was ensconced in Boston she could see more objectively the corruption that had spread plague-like in the new Russia, and she refused to succumb to that unique hybrid of fatalism and cynicism that marked her people. She wanted her new Russia to be better than the old one, and that meant undermining the old guard. But that alone wouldn’t have been enough. There was also a man, a grad student five years her senior. An American. She was twenty-four, a young FSB agent. She would never know if the courtship had been recruitment all along, because in hindsight it never had been much of a romance: he’d been clear that they really couldn’t be seen together in the event one or the other ever was outed. But he was the one who broke the news to her that her father had not had a stroke when she was twenty. They’d poisoned him with methyl iodide, selecting the pesticide because the cause of death would mimic a stroke. The Cossacks had done this. Viktor Olenin. In his old age, her father was becoming too outspoken and too critical of the president of the Russian Federation. He was becoming a liability, a loose cannon. He knew too much to live.
But he had lived, despite the toxin. Barely.
Now that young man was a poli sci professor in Berlin. Elena stopped visiting his public persona on the social networks when she saw that his German girlfriend had become his German wife.
She sighed. She wondered if Viktor’s trust in her had begun to ebb even before she had chosen not to kill the flight attendant. If so, when had they come to doubt her devotion? Her fealty? It didn’t matter. What did was this: they believed she had spared Bowden for reasons far worse than mere kindness. It was possible they might kill her even if she did take care of the flight attendant—or, to be precise, as soon as she’d taken care of the flight attendant.
And yet when she surveyed the chessboard, executing the woman still seemed a viable move for everyone. She’d expressed her concerns to her handler, and Washington was deliberating whether it was time to come in. But she was far and away their most deeply embedded operative in the Cossacks, the only one inside the group who could tell them what Olenin was doing. And that mattered.
And she felt a tug in her heart for Sochi. It was in her blood, her DNA. She wasn’t prepared to give that up. Not yet.
Her father, as far as she knew, had never had a safe house: an apartment in Amsterdam or a cottage outside Johannesburg into which he could burrow. A secret chrysalis with food and money and yet one more passport, and from which he could emerge with new wings and a new identity. But just because she wasn’t aware of one didn’t mean that one hadn’t existed. You never told your loved ones you had one. It was how you protected them. She herself had never set one up, and she couldn’t help now but wonder if this bit of youthful hubris—I’ll never need one: I’m too smart and I have too many friends in high places—wasn’t now going to bite her in the ass.
She followed the bartender and the flight attendant at a careful distance. It was twilight, which was an easier time of the day to tail someone. Moreover, there were tourists and dinner crowds in this neighborhood, and she could blend in should Bowden suddenly turn around. But then, it was unlikely t
he woman would recognize her with her new hair color. She’d dyed it specifically because she couldn’t risk a repeat of what had happened that morning at the airport.
She noticed that the couple wasn’t touching as they walked, though it was still possible that they were returning to her hotel. Instead of cutting back through the Villa Borghese, however, they were strolling along the Via di Villa Ruffo, and so she assumed they would stop at a restaurant on the way.
Because they were dawdling, she had to dawdle, which meant that she also had to endure the occasional whistles and come-ons from young men as they passed on the sidewalk or as they drove by—slowing—on the street on their colorful Vespas. She smiled at the men whose remarks were less offensive because it was important not to make a scene, and she ignored the others.
It was in the Piazza del Popolo, as the bartender and the flight attendant passed a waist-high black fence with a beautiful cycloid of wrought-iron arches and neared the great obelisk in the center of the park, that she figured out why Enrico had brought Bowden to his uncle’s. Piero had a little place in the country. In Tuscany. No doubt the fellow had a hunting permit. Perhaps even a concealed carry license. His nephew had brought the flight attendant to his uncle’s apartment to get the woman a gun.
30
“So you’re really not going to allow me to make you one of my perfect Negronis?” Enrico asked her as they entered the lobby of the hotel where she was staying. Instinctively she looked around to see if any members of the flight crew were present. None were. The lobby was so small compared to the Royal Phoenician—more living room than ballroom—the ceilings low and the decor modest. She noted the faux Renaissance tapestries on the walls and the fainting couch where she had sat that afternoon.
“I’m not,” she said, though she glanced longingly at the bar as they approached the elevators, her ears alive to the clink of glasses and laughter and the music that occasionally bubbled up and over the bacchanal.
They had eaten dinner at a romantic trattoria with brick walls and lit candles in wrought-iron chandeliers where he was friends with the sous chef, and so they ate like royalty for almost nothing, which was about what they had for a budget. She had never had a panzanella salad so good, each tomato a different shade of orange or red. The house wines were excellent, Enrico told her, but Cassie insisted that she wasn’t going to drink, and so Enrico didn’t either. She sat with her back to the wall and sipped sparkling water, and stared at the entrance to the restaurant. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. She wasn’t sure who she was looking for. She didn’t honestly believe that Miranda—or someone—would appear in the dining room, but after Fiumicino she wasn’t willing to sit with her back to the door.
It had been a lovely evening, though it had been and (she told herself) would be almost stoic in its denial: no booze, no sex. She was bringing him upstairs to her room so he could hand her the gun. The fact was that she knew more about firearms than he did. But he didn’t dare bring out the Beretta at the restaurant, and so they had agreed they would retreat to her hotel room so he could give it to her there. She’d been clear that they weren’t going to have sex, but she knew that he nevertheless remained hopeful. He was charming beyond his years; he was as unaccustomed to someone saying no as she was to saying it.
* * *
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When they got to her room, she saw that the square red light on the desk phone was blinking. Instantly her anxiety rose. Enrico stood patiently by the window, his back to her as he stood bordered by the drapes, while she picked up the receiver and listened. It turned out that she had two messages.
“Hey, there. It’s Makayla. I’m just checking in. How did I not think to get your cell? I wanted to make sure you’re okay. Do you still want to have that drink? Do you feel up to joining some of us for dinner, maybe? I’m in room seven-thirteen. It’s a little before five.”
She made a mental note of the other flight attendant’s room number and then listened to the second message:
“Hi, Cassie, it’s me again. Makayla. Some of us are meeting in the lobby at seven thirty. Join us if you’d like. No pressure. Maybe text me when you wake up or get back from wherever you are,” she said, and this time she left her cell number. Cassie wrote it down and texted back that she was sorry she hadn’t gotten the messages. She wrote that she had gone for a long walk, but now she was back in her hotel room and she was fine. She was in for the night. She thanked her.
“Everything is okay?” asked Enrico.
“It is. That was just another member of the crew wanting to be reassured that I was safely back in my room.”
“Good.”
He picked up the paperback Tolstoy on the nightstand beside the hotel’s digital clock. “Did you ever read Carlo Levi?”
“No.”
“You should—if you like Tolstoy. He wrote beautifully about Italian peasants. My people, once. He had a soul like Tolstoy. ‘The future has an ancient heart.’ I think I have that right.”
“Thank you. I don’t expect I’ll find him with the paperbacks at the airport.”
“Look for him—when you’re home,” he said, and somehow his tone made the idea of home sound to her like an unattainable dream: a port she would not see again. Still, Enrico smiled and sat on the foot of the bed. He patted the mattress beside him, beckoning her. The bed was the unmade mess she had left it after her afternoon nap. She joined him there and he pulled out the handgun. He gave it to her and then reached into his front pants pocket for the bullets.
The gun was heavier than she expected, but she liked its simple solidity. Its heft. It actually felt sturdier than a rifle. And the smell—metallic, machinelike—instantly brought her back to the high school classroom those early autumn afternoons when she had taken the hunter safety course and been taught by a retired state trooper the three different types of magazines (tubular, box, floor plate with a hinge), and where the gunpowder sits inside a cartridge. Then she was back in the woods, with a whole other set of memories: the aroma of autumnal cold. Wet leaves as they began to merge with the mud. Decomposing trees. Damp clothes.
She thought of her father’s breath, beery, when he would point out the deer tracks in the soft earth or the deer scat in the midst of the leaves just off the thin path.
The Beretta was a compact 92, all black. She ejected the magazine to make sure it was empty. She racked back the chamber to make sure there was no bullet in there, either.
“The bullets are so little,” Enrico said. He poured four of them into her hand and rolled a fifth between his forefinger and thumb. She took it from him. “The gun will hold all five of them?”
She examined the magazine. “Yes. This magazine probably holds three times that many rounds.”
He shook his head. “I should have stolen more bullets.”
“God, no.”
Loading the magazine, she thought, was like loading a Pez candy dispenser one little sugar brick at a time. When she had the cartridges inside the clip, she used the heel of her hand to tap the clip back into the handle. She hoped she had done everything right. Then she placed it on the nightstand next to the telephone. She didn’t want to get comfortable with the grip while he was there beside her on the bed. She wanted to do that when she was alone.
“So what do we do now?” he asked.
They had bought a large metal tin of Perugia chocolates on the way back to the hotel. The plan was that in the morning when she and the rest of the flight crew checked out, she was going to leave the tin for him with a friend of his who was scheduled to be manning the reception desk. The gun would be at the bottom, unloaded, beneath the chocolates.
“I’m going to thank you and escort you to the door.”
“And eat the chocolates?”
She smiled at him. He was adorable. The perfect toy. “I’ll make a dent in the box, maybe. There has to be room for the gun, right?”
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“And you’ll try to get some sleep?” he asked.
“I guess. If someone wanted to kill me, they had every chance this afternoon and this evening.”
He took her hand in both of his and gazed at her. His eyes looked sleepy in the hotel room light. “But you’re scared. You wanted a gun.”
“I’m a heck of a lot less scared now.”
“But tomorrow? And the day after tomorrow? And the day after that? What is your plan?”
She lifted his fingers to her mouth and kissed them once. Then she kissed them a second time. “I don’t have a plan,” she answered. “I wish I did, but I don’t.” The truth was, she had been living almost hour to hour since she had woken up in Dubai and found Alex Sokolov dead. First she just wanted to get away from the corpse and the likelihood of prison and reach Charles de Gaulle. Then she just wanted to land in America. Then she just wanted to find a lawyer. Then she just wanted to survive the FBI. Then. Then. Then…
But she couldn’t tell him any of that because Enrico believed—or at least was pretending to believe—that Alex Sokolov had been alive when she had left the hotel room.
“Well, I have a plan,” he said, his eyebrows raised, his face playful.
She shook her head.
“I’m not thinking what you think I am,” he said.
“You’re thinking you’re so handsome that I’m going to fall under your spell. Well, you are that handsome, and I am under your spell. But I’m trying to do better. To be better. So, please don’t tempt me anymore because I’m really not known for my willpower.”
“No. I’m thinking that we turn on the TV and play video games or watch movies. I’m thinking that I call downstairs for a pot of coffee—for me.”