“And what?”
“And no one gets you except people like you. No one gets the weirdness of the lifestyle. No one else could possibly understand.”
She sighed. “It’s inevitable we wind up together. It’s simply because we all work together. I’m sure ad people marry ad people, and lawyers marry lawyers. All professions have office romances.”
“Yeah, but you don’t all work together. You don’t. That’s the thing. You almost never have the same people on the same crew. I mean, you and Megan are bid buddies, and I guess she and Shane are bid buddies. But there were ten flight attendants on that airplane to Dubai, and seven of you had never seen each other before that JFK/Dubai sequence and may never, ever see each other again. Or, if you do, it will be years from now. And that’s just the cabin crew. Add in the folks in the cockpit. When will you fly next with any of those pilots? A year from now? Two? Ten? No, Cassie, sorry: you don’t work together.”
“Where is this going? I thought you wanted to help me.”
“I do. And that’s why I need to be sure that this Sokolov character didn’t tell you something meaningful or you didn’t learn something about him that you should be sharing with a lawyer or just maybe the FBI.”
“Nope.”
“Because by now the FBI knows you were flirting with him. And by now they know that you were not having dinner that night in Dubai with any member of the crew, including your friend Megan. If I know that from my limited conversations, then they do from their interviews.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Maybe it doesn’t. But just in case: anything you want to tell me about that night in Dubai?”
“I went to bed.”
“In the airline’s hotel?”
“Yes!”
“Did you go out to eat?”
“No,” she answered, wondering the moment the syllable had escaped her lips whether she had spoken too quickly. There surely were witnesses at the restaurant. But she also knew instantly that his next question would be about room service—and it was.
“So you had something sent up to your room?”
“No.”
“You didn’t eat?”
“I wasn’t feeling great. I ate some peanuts from the minibar. I fell asleep.” She couldn’t imagine they could actually check such a thing. How accurate really was hotel monitoring of the minibar?
“So you didn’t go out?”
“Did someone say I did?”
“Not to me.”
“Okay, then.”
“But according to two airline employees in the cabin with you, you were flirting with Alex Sokolov. And then, it seems, you weren’t hanging out with anyone from the flight crew that night. No one. You just disappeared—”
“Into my hotel room!” she snapped, cutting him off. She saw over Mayes’s shoulder that she had spoken so harshly that the two older men having breakfast together at the next table turned, their heads swiveling like owls’.
Mayes opened his hands, palms up, and sat back. “Got it,” he said. “Got it. But for all we know, the FBI is going to talk to the passengers who were seated near Sokolov on the flight, and it’s possible that one or more of them is going to say you and the guy were friendly. I don’t know yet if Sokolov was from some wealthy or well-connected family, or whether he just wasn’t what he said he was. I don’t know what he was really doing in Dubai. Maybe it really was just a meeting with investors. But this story has legs, so I want to be sure you do three things. Okay?”
“Fine. Tell me.” She hoped that her lies and her fear would be misconstrued for aggravation.
“I want you to get a lawyer.”
“I can’t afford a lawyer!” she said, even though she recalled vividly her vow in the hotel suite in Dubai that she would find one if somehow she made it back to America. “I can barely afford my apartment. You know what I make. I’m broke. We’re all broke. We all need more money than we have.”
“So does everyone, so relax. I can help you find a lawyer you can afford. Not a big deal. It’s what we do.”
“I’m not saying yes—because I don’t see why I need one—but what else?”
“Two, I want you to keep me informed with exactly what’s going on. Again, this is so we can help you.”
“Fine.”
“And, three, I want you to tell me the second a reporter calls you.”
She hadn’t imagined a reporter contacting her. But she realized that was na?ve. Of course one might, especially if Sokolov was from a prominent family or wasn’t really a hedge fund manager. “I can do all of that, sure,” she agreed. And perhaps because of the specter of a news camera in her face or the proximity of the New York Post that a fellow at another table was reading, she added, “And if you have a name for a lawyer, that would be great. Cheap, but good. But tell me something.”
“Name it.”
“If Sokolov wasn’t a money manager of some sort, then what was he? A spy?”
“He had a job that demanded he travel. That’s a great cover for a lot of things.”
“Is that a yes? He might have been an American spy?”
“Or Russian. Or German. Or Israeli. Or South African. I don’t know. Maybe he was some kind of go-between or courier.”
She thought of the paperback she’d bought yesterday. “He was into his Russian DNA—at least a little bit.” When she said the word DNA, she felt another one of those pinpricks of misgiving and fear: it was her lipstick. The lipstick she had lost somewhere in Dubai; the lipstick she had possibly left behind in room 511. She imagined a police tech lifting it off the hotel room floor with tongs and dropping it into a clear plastic bag. There it was, the smoking gun.
And there was something else: a lip balm. A lip balm with her airline’s logo. Sure, it was a generic, but she liked it and she used it, too. It had a coconut scent. When she had been emptying her purse before throwing it away in Dubai, she hadn’t seen it either. Sometimes she moisturized her lips with the balm before applying her lipstick. Had she done that in 511? Was there a lip balm somewhere in that room that had both her airline’s logo and her DNA?
“Maybe it’s just that simple,” Derek was saying about Sokolov. “Maybe he’s FSB.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“What used to be the KGB. Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. Counterintelligence. Spy stuff. Often very nasty spy stuff.”
“But he still seemed awfully American to me,” she told him, hoping Mayes hadn’t heard the small tremor in her voice.
“Means nothing. If you’re undercover, you want to seem American. But what do I know? He could just as easily be CIA. Or maybe he was a seriously nasty crook selling arms. Or girls. Or drugs. You know, whatever he was doing may have had nothing to do with espionage. I’m just saying, he may not have been what he said he was, given the way he was killed.”
“Didn’t some Dubai police officer say it was a robbery?”
“It wasn’t.”
“Really?”
“Nothing was stolen.”
“How do you know that?”
He shrugged. “I asked. I asked the FBI agent who interviewed Megan. The woman wouldn’t tell me much, but she said nothing was stolen. At least they don’t think anything was stolen. His wallet, his watch, his credit cards were all there, according to the FBI chief in the Emirates. His computer was still there. His briefcase was still there.”
She wanted to kick herself for not stealing Sokolov’s wallet and wristwatch and dumping them in the very same trash can in Dubai where she had tossed the washcloth and soap and the shards of the bottle of Stoli. It hadn’t crossed her mind to suggest that the poor guy’s death had been part of a robbery. But then she recalled an expression that a philosophy class had debated ad nauseam in college: you can’t prove a negative. In the end, the class as a whole had decided that you could. But the expression had stayed with her.