Next Cassie visited the Unisphere website and typed the word “Miranda” into the search box. Nothing came up. The company was too big to include an employee directory. But there was a list of offices around the world, and while they didn’t have individual websites, they did list phone numbers. She glanced at the clock on the oven and saw that even eight time zones to the east no one would be in the Dubai office yet. But she could call them later and ask for Miranda. See what happened.
She refilled her glass a third time and placed Mayes’s business card directly beside Frank Hammond’s on her refrigerator. She had scribbled on it the phone number of the lawyer he had recommended, a woman with the melodious name of Ani Mouradian. She hadn’t heard from any reporters. The FBI hadn’t contacted her again. She tried to convince herself that Derek Mayes was wrong and she would never hear from the FBI again and she would never need to call this Ani Mouradian. But she guessed she would have to be a good deal drunker to believe that, and so she ran herself a bath and brought the bottle and the glass and her phone into the bathroom with her. There was no reason to be sober: she was alone, and she hadn’t touched alcohol since the small hours of Sunday morning. Forty-two hours. Almost two days ago now.
When she was settled under the bubbles, she closed her eyes and tried to lose herself in her ablutions—clearing her mind was of more importance to her tonight than cleaning her body—but it was impossible. She kept thinking of Alex and she kept wondering what would have happened if she had called the front desk at the hotel. But she knew. At least she thought she knew. Everyone would believe that she had killed the poor bastard—which, she had to admit, would be very difficult to refute—and she would be in jail in Dubai. She would know someone from the U.S. embassy very, very well, probably having grown acquainted with him or her from behind bars.
She noticed that the polish on her nails was reminiscent of the Chianti and that it was starting to chip. She would have to get a manicure tomorrow. The flight to Rome didn’t leave until seven p.m., so she could sleep late and still go to the gym and the salon. Easy.
She reached down and put her wineglass on the floor beside the tub and grabbed her phone. She decided to search Twitter for news stories about Sokolov, see if there was anything she might have missed, and scrolled through the ones that had been online for a day that she’d scanned just a few minutes ago in the kitchen. But then she saw a tweet from a news agency in Dubai that was only seconds old. She clicked the link and instantly felt her stomach lurch as if she were on a plane that had just dropped a thousand feet in a wind shear. There she was. There she was twice, as a matter of fact. There were two images of her. She wasn’t recognizable—at least not really recognizable, because the photos were grainy stills taken from the Dubai hotel’s security camera footage, and because in both images she was wearing sunglasses and the scarf she had bought at the airport when they had landed. In the first she was in the lobby, meeting Sokolov before they went out to dinner; they were near the entrance and she had hooked her arm around his elbow. She was smiling; they both were. In the second she was alone, exiting the hotel the next day. This time, her jaw was set. It was the scarf that had likely led the investigators to pick her out the second time.
The sunglasses were pretty common Ray-Bans—one of their classic black frames.
But the scarf? It was distinct. It was a red and blue arabesque with one large cluster of tendrils and palmettes in the center, and then a series of smaller versions framed along the four sides. Also, it had a series of small red tassels. The footage was black and white, but the pattern was vivid.
She’d been with Megan and Jada when she bought it. She’d been wearing it when she’d returned to the airline’s hotel. She’d been wearing it in the van with the entire crew Friday morning.
The article said the woman was not considered a suspect, but was merely wanted for questioning. Not a suspect? Ridiculous. Of course, she was. There was an image of her with Sokolov at the hotel at night and then another one of her leaving the hotel alone the next morning.
Almost desperately she reached for her wine, and in her haste, as she transferred the goblet from her left hand to her right, she managed to clang it against the porcelain soap dish built into the tile wall, shattering the glass and spilling the wine into the water. The soap bubbles had long vanished, and so she watched, absolutely immobile, as the red wine spread and then dissipated, leaving the water and the shards of glass—some resting on her thigh, some on her abdomen, some sunk to the bottom where she could feel the edges like pinpricks or rough sand—a soft, almost soothing pink.
It was only as she started to carefully pick the glass from her body that she saw the two long cuts on the side of her hand.
9
Elena watched half a dozen U.S. sailors laughing and cavorting on the sidewalk from Viktor’s window on the fifth floor—the top floor—of the nondescript little office building, and knew right away they were lost. This neighborhood had a Sikh temple, a Coptic Orthodox church, a Greek Orthodox parish, and the Dubai Evangelical Center. It also had dentists and accountants. It did not have the gold or jewelry or electronics stores that usually drew the sailors north from the port at Mina Jebel Ali. The carrier battle group was due in tomorrow, and so the day after tomorrow the city would be awash with American seamen and women.
Now she turned away from the window and leaned against Viktor’s credenza. His office here was an amalgam of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. There was dark wood paneling on the walls and a silver tray with crystal cognac snifters emblazoned with the two-headed eagle on a side table, but there was also a flip-top panel for video conferences and a touch-screen computer built into a chrome and walnut desk. “She wasn’t there. I swept the room,” she said to him, hoping she didn’t sound defensive. She was just stating the facts. Unfortunately, this was getting messy and had the potential to spin wildly out of control. One’s vision was always crisper in hindsight, but Elena knew now that she’d made an egregious mistake. It would have been terrible, but perhaps she should have killed the flight attendant with Alex when she’d had the chance—when she’d come to the room and found that Alex had brought a little arm candy from the airline upstairs. If she’d wanted, she could have made it look like a murder suicide. A crime of passion. She could have left behind the knife.
But she hadn’t, because this flight attendant wasn’t her usual sort of game. She didn’t kill bystanders. She didn’t kill innocent people.
And now Viktor was furious. She knew that look. He was rather like her father when her father felt that someone had failed: he didn’t rant, he didn’t vent, he didn’t throw tantrums. He seethed. It was far more unsettling. But the ramifications for whoever had screwed up? Just as deadly.
“Oh, I believe you. I believe you swept the room. But the security photos on the news sites are clear. You’ve seen them, Elena. The woman was definitely at the hotel in the morning and she was wearing the exact same clothes from the night before,” Viktor reminded her. “Alex never told you he had company when you called?”
“No. I wouldn’t have gone to his room if he had.”
Viktor seemed to think about this. “Had he done this sort of thing in the past?”
“If he did, no one told me. He was never part of a honey pot.”
“That’s true.”
She heard the sailors outside on the street laughing a little too boisterously. If the latch mechanism on the window weren’t so complicated, she would have opened it and pointed them in the right direction for the sorts of stores they were after. “Look, I almost took care of business then and there. When we were drinking. But I didn’t want to risk a scene. I didn’t want to risk the noise. Two people? Who knows what could go wrong. The woman said something about going back to her own hotel because of her flight the next day, and so I left and waited for her to leave.”
“And then you returned to Alex’s suite,” Viktor murmured.