She was too depressed for the gym. Instead she went to a bookstore and browsed the shelves of paperback fiction, pausing in the aisles that held Chekhov and Pushkin and Tolstoy. She considered a Turgenev collection because Alex had mentioned him and she was unfamiliar with his work, but the only title the store had was Fathers and Sons, and that relationship held little allure for her that afternoon. Eventually she bought a small book by Tolstoy (small for Tolstoy, but still nearly four hundred pages), because the first story in it was called “Happy Ever After.” She suspected the title was likely ironic, but she could hope.
At home, however, she discovered the book was quite possibly the worst choice she could have made (which perhaps shouldn’t have surprised her, given her predilection for bad choices). At least the first story started out badly given her own personal history. On the very first page the narrator, a seventeen-year-old woman named Masha, shares that she is mourning the death of her mother. Cassie had been a teenager, too, when her mother had died. Masha also has a younger sister. Cassie didn’t get beyond the fourth page before putting the book down and taking a lint brush to her clothes, removing the evidence of her day at the shelter. But she didn’t change. Nor that night did she drink. Not a drop.
And so she was still dressed and sober and sad when she got the call from a fellow who introduced himself as Derek Mayes. She couldn’t put a face to the name, and she presumed it was a lover or Tinder score who didn’t realize or didn’t understand that she didn’t want to see him again and confront what they’d done, but hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings.
“I’m with the union,” he explained, his tone clipped, a trace of a New York accent. He said that two other members of the cabin crew on the flight to Dubai had reached out to him and he had already met with one of them: Megan Briscoe. He, in turn, had called the FBI, and it was clear that he needed to see her, too, and get up to speed fast on whatever she knew about the passenger in 2C. “I want to know what really went on between you two on the flight and what really happened in Dubai,” he said.
And with that there was a sudden ringing in her ears, her legs grew wobbly, and she wondered if this—this, not waking up beside the cold, still body of Alex Sokolov—was the demarcation between before and after. This, she thought with a terrible certainty, might really be the moment she would look back upon as the point where it all began to unravel.
Part Two
BURN THE CARBONS
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FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
FD-302 (redacted): MEGAN BRISCOE, FLIGHT ATTENDANT
DATE: July 28, 2018
MEGAN BRISCOE, date of birth—/—/——, SSN #————, telephone number (—)————, was interviewed by properly identified Special Agents ANNE McCONNELL and BRUCE ZIMMERUSKI at JFK INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, immediately upon her flight’s arrival in the U.S.
McCONNELL conducted the interview; ZIMMERUSKI took these notes.
After being advised of the nature of the interview, BRISCOE provided the following information.
BRISCOE said that she has been with the airline for 24 years. Prior to that, she had worked in guest services for DOVER STAR hotels in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, MD, and Pittsburgh, PA.
BRISCOE said that she had very little contact with ALEXANDER SOKOLOV on Flight 4094: he was being cared for by flight attendant CASSANDRA BOWDEN. She thought BOWDEN and SOKOLOV had flirted, but she said BOWDEN “was always a bit of a flirt.” She had seen BOWDEN flirt with other passengers on other flights. BRISCOE explained that she and BOWDEN are friends and sometimes work their schedules so they share the same routes and can fly together. Though she lives now in Virginia, her base remains JFK.
She did not know what BOWDEN and SOKOLOV may have discussed.
When asked whether she and BOWDEN saw each other in Dubai, she said no, they did not. She said there were thirteen crew members on the flight and they separated into different groups, which was normal. She herself went out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant with JADA MORRIS, SHANE HEBERT, and VICTORIA MORGAN.
She did not explain why she did not have dinner with her friend, CASSANDRA BOWDEN.
7
Elena’s mother always had corgis. These days she had three, one of which was a descendant of the two dogs she’d had when she divorced Elena’s father. She trained the animals to come with an antique silver summoner patterned after the onion-shaped domes that adorned St. Basil’s in Moscow or the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg. It predated the First World War and, thus, the revolution. According to the antique dealer, it may have belonged once to the Romanovs. (Elena presumed he was lying and her mother probably did, too. But that never stopped her mother from telling people that the summoner had resided once at the Winter Palace.) The nails on the dogs’ paws would click along the hardwood floors when they scampered to her across her palatial apartment near the Kremlin. If her mother was seated, they would stand up on their hind legs and put their front legs onto her lap, exactly the way she had taught them: her own lady-with-lapdog moment, but played to oligarchic excess.
The animals traveled with her on the plane she bought after the divorce. She had special in-seat safety harnesses created for them for the flights. The straps were lined with the same mink that adorned the safety belts on the Art Deco–inspired Manhattan airship seats she’d had designed for the humans.
Her mother never remarried. Neither did her father. Sometimes Elena would see her mother on the gossip or society pages in an evening gown with waterfalls of jewelry dangling from her ears and around her neck, a Moscow robber baron on her arm. Sometimes she would see a photo of her on the social networks that someone had taken at the Bolshoi or the botanical garden.
She knew that one of her father’s friends had suggested poisoning the dogs after the divorce. Now that gentleman assisted the Syrian government in Damascus; he’d helped Assad squirrel away sarin in 2013, when the international monitors were destroying the rest of the stockpile. But her father had refused to kill the animals. Unlike some of his friends—now, she guessed, some of hers—her father didn’t approve of incidental killing or the slaughter of noncombatants.
Elena had inherited that trait from him, she supposed. Certainly that was one reason why the flight attendant was still alive. In some ways, her mother had a far more entrenched killer instinct than her father. Exhibit A? The divorce settlement. She was ruthless.
And her mother had realized early on that her daughter was a daddy’s girl—though maybe that was inevitable given the woman’s disinterest in child-rearing. Or maybe that had been the plan all along. Her mother had visited her just the one time when she was a teenager in Switzerland, and she’d never once come to Boston when Elena went there for college. The truth was, Elena hadn’t seen her mother in years and really didn’t miss her. She doubted her mother missed her either.
She looked down once more at the Moscow newspaper she had opened a few minutes ago. More violence in Donetsk. The continued rebound of the ruble. An American drone strike in Yemen. She knew it was this last story that was most likely to catch Viktor’s interest: America and China remained the only countries in the world that had successfully weaponized drones, and America’s were far beyond China’s. It was among the reasons why the Russians had such pathologic drone envy and why Russian military intelligence was obsessed with the American program. It was why Viktor was spending so much time with the Emirates drone manufacturer. ISIS used toy drones as IEDs. Imagine a stealth drone or even a jet drone with a chemical payload.
She finished her tea and recalled her father’s samovar. It was rare, a tombac bronze, and once it had belonged to his great-grandmother. Somehow the family had retained it through both revolution and world war. Through Stalin and Malenkov and Khrushchev. It resided now with her mother. Of course. Somehow the woman had gotten even that, the samovar that neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis had been able to wrest from the Orlovs.
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