Cassie knew the departures for most of her airline’s overseas JFK flights by heart, and even which domestic sequences were likely to have a layover long enough that the crew would be staying in midtown. And she knew that frequently the airline used the Dickinson on Lexington and Forty-Ninth. So whenever she could, she would take the subway from her apartment three stops north to the hotel and hitch a ride with a flight crew to the airport. The alternative? Get off at Grand Central and take the Airporter bus. The Airporter only cost ten bucks with her airline discount, which was about what she could afford. But in the summer she would sweat like a marathon runner—the polyester uniform didn’t help—and her makeup would melt on her way to the subway. In the winter, she would freeze or her suitcase and clothing would be sprayed with road salt and slush. There were flight attendants who thought she was insane to live in Manhattan when her base was JFK, but Manhattan was everything that her childhood home in rural Kentucky wasn’t. She was never going to give up that apartment. Never. Besides, she knew lots of flight attendants who would waste a valuable day off or have to get up early commuting from Buffalo or Boston or Detroit to their base—including Megan, who came in from D.C.—and then spend a half day or an overnight in some squalid crash pad near the airport. She’d lived in one once, the bottom bunk in a basement bedroom in a ramshackle townhouse in Ozone Park, Queens. There were at least a dozen other flight attendants who lived there—or, to be precise, crashed there for a few nights or few days or few hours a month.
Today she didn’t waste time on a manicure, not after spending so much of the morning with the lawyer. But the subway was delayed, and the crowd on the platform grew as she stood there, her roller beside her and her phone in her hand. It wasn’t near rush hour, so the hordes from New York Life hadn’t yet descended into the tunnel, but still there were droves because this was Manhattan. And it was when she had been standing there nearly ten minutes that the claustrophobia was replaced by something deeper: unease. She began to inventory the people around her. There were the young mothers with their small children, the high school kids and the college students, the white collar and the blue collar and all manner of delivery women and men. It was just another midsummer melting pot of the aged and the youthful, an abstract of smileless faces above polo shirts and summer dresses, above blazers and sweats and tees for the local sports teams.
But she had the sense, real or imagined, that in this crush was someone who was there just for her. There was someone watching her. She could tell herself that this was mere paranoia, absolutely understandable after what she had seen in Dubai. It was, perhaps, an inevitable if mean-spirited trick of the mind.
But she couldn’t shake the feeling. She was a woman, and she had spent enough time alone on subway platforms or streets late at night to know when something was wrong. When someone approaching was sketchy. When it was time to move and to move fast.
And so she did. She put her phone in her purse and grabbed the handle of her suitcase and began to push her way through the throngs, plowing forward with her head up and alert, scanning for that single individual who saw her and knew her and…
And what? Was someone actually going to attack her?
She couldn’t say. Maybe she was just being watched. Maybe it was all in her head. But she wasn’t going to risk that.
As she struggled to pull her suitcase through the revolving bars, she glanced behind her to see if anyone else was trying to fight their way upstream on the platform. She checked again as she lugged her suitcase up the stairs. But a train hadn’t arrived at the station, and so she was all alone as she made her way back up to the sunlight on the street. There was a cab across Park Avenue, heading north and slowing for the red light at the corner. It hadn’t a passenger, and so she raced for it, climbing into it from the street side.
“The Dickinson, please,” she told the driver, and looked back at the subway entrance as the light changed and the vehicle started north. There, emerging onto the sidewalk was a solitary figure in shades and a black ball cap, the brim pulled low on his head. A man. She couldn’t see his face; already they were too far away. But he seemed to be scanning the sidewalks, and then his gaze paused on her cab.
She told herself it was nothing; it was a coincidence that someone else had grown impatient and decided to walk or take a cab rather than wait for the next train.
But she didn’t believe that.
* * *
? ?
By the time she got to the Dickinson, her own airline’s shuttle had left. She had missed it by no more than five minutes.
Fortunately, Lufthansa used the Dickinson as well. So, as she had at least three or four times in the past, she slipped the shuttle driver a ten and thumbed a ride with a German crew that was about to leave.
It was awkward: the pilots ignored her and the flight attendants whispered a few jokes to each other at her expense, but no one really cared. Mostly they understood because their salaries were as unimpressive as hers. A ride to the airport for a fellow flight attendant? Really, not that big a deal. Still, she stared out the window, half expecting to see a faceless man in a ball cap on the sidewalk snapping a cell phone picture of her in the van. When they had left the stop-and-start traffic of Manhattan, she read the paperback Tolstoy she had with her and tried not to be envious of the fact that she was not a part of the flock. She tried not to think paranoid thoughts, but she was sure she overheard one woman say something about Dubai to another. She feared she heard the syllable mord multiple times, and when she looked it up on her phone using Google Translate, it meant—as she suspected—“murder.” But she told herself that it was unlikely she had heard the word correctly. Why would they even be aware of Sokolov’s death? It would mean that someone in the shuttle had flown to Dubai recently, too, or would be flying there soon.
Which, alas, was possible. Very possible.
Before leaving her apartment, she had checked her computer one last time to see if the photos of her from the Royal Phoenician had gone viral. She’d done this every twenty minutes that day when she was home, it seemed. They hadn’t. At least not yet. But she knew that Ani was right and they would. She knew any moment she would get a text from Megan or Jada, because she had to believe that they were following the story, too—though, of course, not with her own vested interest.
She breathed in slowly and deeply and almost managed to convince herself that no one had been watching her on the subway platform. Almost. She took comfort in the fact that now she had a lawyer. She definitely felt better. But as the van inched its way along the Long Island Expressway, she sure as hell didn’t feel good.
* * *
? ?
For a moment she paused before the window and watched the winking light at the edge of the wing, the distinct blink-blink of an Airbus. She shook her head, coming back to herself before she grew lost in the slow, rhythmic strobe. She had coach on this flight because it was Rome and she didn’t yet have quite enough seniority to always hold business or first class en route to the Eternal City. Of course, a lot of flight attendants preferred coach. These days, no one felt entitled to anything in economy, and so the passengers—especially on an overnight flight to Europe—were rather docile: the airlines had beaten out of them the idea that they had virtually any rights at all. Moreover, most people checked their suitcases on international flights, unlike on domestic ones, and so there was far less stress as people fought and jockeyed for space in the overhead compartments. Her only issue with coach? You really couldn’t flirt. There were too many people and the aisles were too thin and there were just too many families. Of course, she wasn’t in the mood to flirt. Not tonight. She wanted a drink—she needed a drink—and so when most of the cabin was sleeping or reading or watching movies on their laptops or tablets and she had a moment alone in the rear galley, she did something she almost never did: she took a plastic Cutty Sark single and downed it in one shot. Then she filled her mouth with Altoids, crunching them into bits and using her tongue to run the sand over her teeth.
* * *
? ?
When they landed in Rome, it was still the middle of the night in America, and she had neither e-mails nor texts that were alarming. Mostly, she had e-mails from clothing and lingerie companies. The world had stood still.
* * *
? ?
In the van, traveling from Fiumicino Airport into Rome, some of the crew made plans to meet in the lobby and stroll to the Spanish Steps. Apparently the Spanish Steps weren’t far from their hotel, and the Steps, in turn, weren’t far from some pretty tony shopping. The extra, a young flight attendant who had been called up from reserve to work the route, had never been to Rome and was so excited to be there that he was orchestrating a group visit to the Vatican. He was at once so enthusiastic and so charismatic that even one of the pilots said he might go.