“God, it’s been years since I’ve been to the Vatican,” that captain said. He was an older guy who commuted to work from West Palm Beach. His hair was the silver she liked in a pilot, and his skin was dark and leathery from years in the Florida sun. “Sign me up.”
“I say we do the museum, too,” said the young guy masterminding the trip. His name was Jackson, and he had been working coach with her. He was from a small town in Oklahoma near the Texas panhandle—“Nothing but grain elevators, crazy preachers, and people looking for Route 66,” he’d said—and couldn’t have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five. He was a baby. From their conversations in the galley and while playing Words with Friends on their phones in their jump seats, she had come to believe that his childhood had been a thousand times better than hers, but in some ways just as provincial. Becoming a flight attendant was at once rebellion and escape.
“You know there’s a secret room at the museum with nothing but statue penises,” the captain added. “My daughter studied abroad in Rome for a semester and said this is no urban legend.”
“Yup. I think it was a pope who had their junk broken off and covered with fig leaves,” said another flight attendant, a part of the team who had been working the business class cabin. Her name was Erica and she was a grandmother, but that was all Cassie knew about her. “But they actually kept them? Had not heard that. Wow. Who knew?”
“Okay, I have a mission in life. It’s probably above my pay grade to get the marble men back their privates, but someday I will see that secret room,” Jackson told them.
“Imagine: the Vatican has secrets,” Cassie said. She hadn’t spoken in a while and found the good cheer in the van infectious. But her pleasure was short-lived.
“Yeah, imagine,” said Erica. “God, the whole world has secrets. We all have secrets. Why should the Vatican be any different? A friend of mine was working a flight from Paris to Dubai last week. When they landed at JFK at the end of the sequence, the crew was met by the FBI. Why? A guy on the plane to Dubai was murdered in his freaking hotel room!”
“I’m not following,” said Jackson. “A passenger was killed in Dubai. Why did the FBI want to talk to the flight crew?”
“Well, they’re saying it was just a robbery that went bad, but my friend doesn’t believe that. Not for a second. The FBI asked the flight attendants if they’d seen anything unusual on his laptop or noticed any papers on his tray table or he’d said something that might be helpful. She thinks the fellow was a spy or one of the other flight attendants was a spy. You know, CIA? KGB? Something like that. My point? There are people out there with pretty serious secrets.”
“An airline is still a great cover for a spy,” said the pilot. “Always has been, always will be. You have a reason to travel. It’s easy—easier, anyway—to smuggle whatever you’ve stolen from the Pentagon or the Kremlin from one side of the planet to the other.”
Cassie watched from her seat in the van as several members of the crew started searching their phones for news of a dead man in Dubai. She reached into her purse for her sunglasses. She stared out the window, wishing she had an excuse here in Italy to hide herself in a scarf.
* * *
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Cassie decided not to join any of the crew on their different excursions. She murmured that she just didn’t feel up to much that afternoon, but she told the group that was shopping closer to the hotel to let her know where they were having dinner: she might catch up with them then.
At the hotel, she didn’t set the alarm on her phone and she didn’t ask the front desk for a wake-up call, and she was sound asleep by eleven in the morning. She opened her eyes on her own a little before two in the afternoon, waking to an almost catlike contentment. She never slept better than those deep, late-morning naps when she landed in Europe. For a long moment she gazed at the large abstract of the Coliseum on the wall beside the bed, and then she watched the thin, laser-like strip of light from the drapes. Eventually her mind wandered back to the last time she had awoken in a hotel room bed and she grew a little queasy. She knew she should reach for her phone on the nightstand.
Still, however, she allowed herself a moment more to linger. She thought of the cats at the shelter and she thought of her nephew and niece. She wanted to fixate on things that she loved and the moments in which she was not a mess.
Finally she stretched out her arm and grasped her phone. She pulled the sheet back over her head and looked at the screen. Was it worse than she expected? Perhaps. Perhaps not. She saw that she had slept through a phone call from Frank Hammond of the FBI and texts—three of them—from Megan. The texts alone told her all that she really needed to know:
Don’t know where you are but I saw two photos online. Have you seen them?
Call me when you can. I’m still in U.S. Not flying out til tonight. I have your back.
Guessing you’re in Europe. Call me. Jada and Shane have seen the photos too.
She put her phone down on the pillow beside her and closed her eyes. It was interesting that Megan had been careful to text nothing incriminating—or, at least, not irrevocably damning. The short sentence “I have your back” was the only thing she had written that might even be problematic, but Cassie had watched enough legal dramas on TV to know (or, at least, to be able to reassure herself) that a remark like that could be construed a thousand ways.
But its implication was clear to Cassie: Megan believed that she was the woman in the security camera photos and likely had spent the night with Sokolov, and now Megan was willing to cover for her friend. She was willing to keep to herself the fact that Cassie had only returned to her hotel room in Dubai moments before the crew was supposed to be downstairs to leave for the airport. Perhaps she was willing to do even more than that: perhaps she was willing to be part of an alibi.
Either way, Cassie knew that she had to call Megan back. She wasn’t sure about Hammond. She should probably call Ani instead. Wasn’t that what lawyers were for?
Either way, however, first she needed a drink. She should probably eat something, too.
She climbed from the bed, surprised by how cold the room was, and saw the small refrigerator in the hotel room was empty. There wasn’t a minibar, which meant that she’d have to go downstairs. And while she guessed it was possible she’d run into someone from the flight, she thought it unlikely. By the time she had showered and gotten dressed and taken the elevator to the lobby, they’d be long gone—if they hadn’t left already.
* * *
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