There really was nothing here that she wanted, at least today. The apartment they had given her had a tidy kitchen, but she didn’t know yet how long she would be in Dubai. A week or two, she expected, but the next few days would tell. They wanted to be sure there was no fallout from Alex Sokolov that she would need to clean up.
God, she thought, imagine if they knew about the flight attendant. She felt a deep pang of disquiet—almost alarm—when she imagined the possible repercussions from her decision not to kill her, too. She took a breath to calm herself. To compartmentalize. It was, she understood, how she functioned. She was capable of focusing acutely on a problem and thinking many steps ahead. It was why she had been such a capable chess player. She could be farsighted to the point of prescience. But her mind also divided and conquered, squirreling away the nuggets she someday might need, while putting the fears that might paralyze her behind a firewall.
“Please,” the vendor was saying to her, “a beautiful woman like you? Surely there is something you want.”
She looked at him and then she looked around at his wares. In her opinion, the real fun of a place like the souk was not merely how fresh everything was, but the negotiating. The bargaining. It was rather like low-stakes diplomacy. Elena loved it. She was only thirty—barely thirty—but she had spent enough time in cities in the Middle East that she had grown accustomed to the haggling it took to buy a brick of halloumi cheese. So she guessed she would purchase something.
But then her phone vibrated. She thanked the vendor and turned away to read the text. It was from Viktor. Alex Sokolov had indeed missed the meeting that morning with the investors from Russia. They’d called his cell and they’d called the hotel and left messages. Most of the people in the room had no idea why he wasn’t there, but there were a few who did and they were grateful.
She took in his praise, but she didn’t smile. She knew that while she was indeed proficient—no, she was beyond proficient, she had (to use an expression a roommate from college rather liked) mad skills—second chances were few in her line of work. Especially with these people. Her father’s people. She knew the truth of what they had done to him. She wasn’t irreplaceable. The last thing she wanted was to be herself among the hunted.
But Viktor’s text was reassuring. He had even used the word grateful. And so she turned back to the vendor and pointed at a beautiful scarf so gloriously colorful and luminescent that she thought of Joseph’s dream coat. “How many dirhams?” she asked.
He told her. She scoffed and rolled her eyes, and he gave her a second price. And they were off.
5
The moment they had touched down at Charles de Gaulle and were taxiing to their gate, Cassie checked her phone for news from Dubai. She found none. It was possible—though unlikely, she believed—that Alex’s body had not yet been discovered. It was nearly eight thirty at night in the United Emirates. If his corpse (dear God, what a horrible word) were still in the bed where she had left it, that would mean that the Royal Phoenician housekeeping team had respected the “Do Not Disturb” sign through cleaning and turn-down service. Whoever delivered the complimentary fresh fruit and maamoul cookies late that afternoon had seen the sign and returned to the hotel kitchen. It meant that neither Miranda nor some other business associate had gone looking for him or questioned—at least with any resolve—his peculiar and unexplained absence.
In the end, she concluded that by now the macerating remains of Alex Sokolov had most definitely been found. Had to have been. In her mind, as she thanked the passengers as they disembarked, she saw a forensics team scouring the room, that body in the bed gone but the sheets a Rorschach of red.
Normally she would have viewed the scheduling gods as having been kind to her, because the airline was only required to give them ten hours of rest. But they had had twenty-one hours in Dubai, and they were going to have nearly fifteen here in France. Now, however, the duration only ratcheted up her anxiety. She wanted to be back in the United States. She wanted to be back in her apartment on Twenty-Seventh Street in Manhattan. She wanted to know that she would have access to American lawyers, if it ever came to that.
This crew—the thirteen of them—had one last leg together, the return to JFK tomorrow morning, and then they would scatter. Their paths might cross again in different combinations, especially she and Megan and Shane because they enjoyed each other’s company and occasionally worked their schedules so they could fly together, but this particular chemical arrangement of pilots and flight attendants would never be duplicated. The airline had nearly twelve hundred flight attendants based in New York, all of them bidding monthly on the routes and the cabins, and somehow she and Megan and Shane had all gotten Paris—though, in this sequence, the price had come with Dubai. Two nights ago, on the way east, the three of them had catnapped in the morning and then spent a lovely afternoon and evening at a bistro and then a nightclub with hipsters half their age near the Bastille. The overnight then had been a lot longer than this one. Cassie had drunk that evening, but not to excess, and she hadn’t separated from her friends.
It dawned on her that she shouldn’t return to Dubai, at least not in the foreseeable future. Probably ever. It wasn’t on her schedule next month, and she sure as hell wouldn’t bid on it for September.
“I don’t think anyone’s going into the city this time,” Megan was saying, as they emerged from the jet bridge into the concourse. Tonight the airline had them at an airport hotel because it just took too long to get in and out of Paris and the overnight was much shorter. “But there’s a pretty nice restaurant near the hotel we can walk to. Brasserie something. Anyway, some of us are meeting in the lobby at seven. Do you want to join us?”
“No. I think I’m going to rest,” she said.
“I think that makes sense,” Megan agreed. “Be a slam-clicker for a change. Get some sleep.”
They passed a Hermès boutique, and she recalled the leopard-print scarf that she had seen in a store last night at the Royal Phoenician. She thought of her neck; she thought of his. Alex’s.
“Treat yourself. Order something light from room service. Eat dessert first,” Megan went on.
“Yeah, I think that’s the plan.”
“God, you have no idea how nice it is as a mother of two hormonally insane teenagers sometimes just to have an evening alone in a hotel room. I might not go out, either. I might just Skype Vaughn and call it a night,” she said.
Cassie nodded politely. She’d met Megan’s husband a couple of times. He seemed nice enough. She remembered mostly the jokes he had made about being a consultant:
You really only need to get two things to be a consultant: Fired. And business cards.
You want to know the definition of a consultant? A guy who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.
But since the family had moved to Virginia he had worked a lot for defense department contractors, so Cassie presumed he was far more competent than his self-deprecation suggested. And his jokes certainly had been no worse than those of the first officer she was flying with that week. At that moment, Stewart was regaling the captain with yet another story that was, invariably, a little stale.
“Say hi to him for me,” she told Megan.
“I will. And you get some rest.”
Cassie nodded. She knew she would be tempted to order a glass of wine, but she was also confident that she would be able to resist: she reminded herself that she tended to binge-drink (and, yes, to binge-sex), but she wasn’t really a drunk like her father. Sure, that was the motto of unredeemed alcoholics everywhere: I’m not really a drunk. But she wasn’t. She went nights all the time without drinking. Hadn’t she vowed only hours earlier that she’d never drink again? She had.