It was while crossing Fifth Avenue near the library that she felt it: a prickle of unease along her skin. A shiver along the back of her neck. She knew the word from a psychology course she’d taken in college: scopaesthesia. The idea was you could sense when you were being watched. It was a cousin of scopophobia: the fear of being watched. She had the exact feeling now that she had experienced the other day when she had fled from the subway. She looked to her right and saw there in the other crosswalk, also walking east, a fellow in shades and a black ball cap. It wasn’t an uncommon look, not at all, but hadn’t the guy watching her on the subway platform—maybe watching her on the subway platform—been wearing a similar cap and similar shades? Of course he had. She tried to catch his hair color, but couldn’t. She tried to guess his age, but she couldn’t guess that either. He could be twenty and he could be fifty.
She continued walking and considered whether to confront him. If anyplace was going to be safe for this sort of engagement, it would be late on a summer afternoon in midtown Manhattan. She tried to imagine his response, and presumed the sort of denial she’d get from an FBI agent would be different from the kind she’d hear from a…
A what? An assassin? The person who’d killed Alex Sokolov?
She stopped at the corner of Madison, planning to cross the street to his side. At the very least, she would get close enough to see who he was. The idea that this might not be an FBI agent had given her pause, and she was less confident now that she would actually ask him why he was following her. But she had been emboldened by her visit to Unisphere. She’d gone there and was a little wiser now. Nothing cataclysmic had occurred.
But when she reached the far side of the street he was gone—if he had ever really been there at all.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
FD-302: JADA MORRIS, FLIGHT ATTENDANT
DATE: August 2, 2018
JADA MORRIS, date of birth—/—/——, SSN #————, telephone number (—)————, was interviewed for a second time by properly identified Special Agents AMARA LINDOR and JON NEWHOUSE at the FBI office in Melville, New York.
LINDOR conducted the interview; NEWHOUSE took these notes.
MORRIS said she was confident that the woman in the two security camera photos from the ROYAL PHOENICIAN HOTEL was CASSANDRA BOWDEN. She said she only learned that BOWDEN’s brother-in-law “had something to do with chemical weapons” on the morning of July 27, when the discussion among the cabin crew in the airline shuttle van in Dubai gravitated there.
She reiterated that she had met ALEX SOKOLOV for the first time on July 26, on the flight between Paris and Dubai.
MORRIS said she had bid on Moscow four times in the last year (and gotten the city twice) simply because she had never been to Russia. She claims to know no one there.
Her trip to Dubai on July 26–27 was her fourth visit that month with the airline, but this July marked the first time she had gotten the bid. She was able to account for her whereabouts the full time, including her dinner on Thursday night, July 26, at the KAGAYA Japanese restaurant with three other flight attendants.
She said she has lost touch with ELIZA REDMOND HOUGH, her classmate from Michigan State University, who married drone pilot CAPTAIN DEVIN HOUGH. She said she knows almost nothing about what her cousin, engineer ISAIAH BELL, does with stealth technology at WELKIN AEROSPACE SYSTEMS in Nashua, New Hampshire.
She claimed never to have heard of United Arab Emirates drone designer NOVASKIES.
13
The Dubai restaurant faced the harbor and had floor-to-ceiling casement windows, open now to catch the morning breeze off the gulf. There were white linen tablecloths that were pristine, as were the white leather banquettes on which the guests were sitting. It was part of a hotel with a marina. The buffet of pastries and cheeses and exotic fruits and vegetables was presented on white serving plates on white marble counters that were streaked and dotted with black: they looked to Elena like giant squares of stracciatella gelato. She and Viktor had shared a yogurt and purslane salad, but now he was waiting on the fried eggs and Turkish sausage he had ordered in addition. He had insisted they have breakfast before she followed the flight attendant back to America.
“They tell me the flash drive was worthless,” he said to her. “Nothing of value. Nothing NovaSkies can’t already do and nothing to help with a new sort of…payload.”
He wasn’t precisely chastising her, but there was more than mere disappointment in his tone. A thought passed through her mind, but she told herself that she was being paranoid and she should not allow it to take root: Did Viktor suspect that she had tampered with the flash drive Sokolov had been given? Did he believe that she had deleted the information they were expecting? “Really, nothing?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“We expected more.” He looked around and she saw why. The hostess was about to seat a couple of Western businessmen at the table beside them. Instantly he stood and asked the woman in Arabic if she could please seat them a little further away: he was discussing deeply personal family matters with his daughter and would be grateful for the extra privacy. The young woman, Indian or Pakistani, Elena presumed, smiled and obliged. The businessmen didn’t seem to care.
“Now I’m your daughter?” she asked Viktor when he sat back down.
He shrugged. “I would be proud to have you as my daughter.”
She didn’t believe him and rolled her eyes. He and her father had endured each other, little more. She knew, in the end, what Viktor had done to him. “Even after this fiasco?”
“Even after, yes. Even the most successful people in this world make mistakes. Often they’re just better at correcting them and moving on.”
His eggs and sausages arrived and he smiled happily at the waitress. After she had placed them before him and retreated, he continued. “Our job is to anticipate, and in this case you anticipated wrong. Now you are responding accordingly.”
“Yes. Of course.”
He motioned at his plate. “God, this stuff is good. You really should try some.” Despite his apparent enthusiasm for the entrée before him, however, almost delicately he sliced off a thin section of one of the sausages. He brought the piece to his mouth, chewed, and smiled a little too rapturously for Elena’s taste. If breakfast could make him this happy, she shuddered to think of what he might be like in bed. “I spoke to the police,” he said when he had finished chewing. “They interviewed most of us.”
“And?”
“It was fine. None of us are American women. But it could have been awkward. Another reason why you should have told me right away about the flight attendant.”
“I understand.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“How much time do I have?” she asked.
“How much time do we have,” he corrected her. “Don’t feel so alone out there.”
“I am so alone out there.”
“The woman is either a wild card or something far worse.”
“A wild card,” she repeated, mulling that over. She considered pressing him about what he meant by something far worse, but she recalled his remark about the worthless flash drive. If he really didn’t trust her—if he actually doubted her—the last thing she wanted to do was inadvertently force him to say such a thing aloud. Verbalizing it would make it too real, the accusation irrevocable.
“Yes. A wild card. She’s a drunk and, I have come to believe, a little self-destructive.”
“You mean in addition to her drinking?”
He put down his fork and looked at her intensely. “I’m not sure what I mean. I just know that I want her gone. It shouldn’t be difficult.”
“Probably not,” Elena said, though she didn’t completely agree. It wouldn’t be difficult operationally, but it sure as hell would piss people off and it sure as hell would exact a high price on her soul. Killing Bowden wouldn’t be like killing Sokolov, an opportunistic fuck who’d agreed to mule American data because he knew he was in deep shit for skimming and had now served his purpose. He clearly couldn’t be trusted. Nor would it be like killing that despicable colonel at Incirlik who was playing both sides and getting rich: that prick had just screwed some poor Yazidi girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old when she shot him. He was a pig. But this flight attendant? Not her usual quarry. It would be like drowning a kitten. But Elena was in survival mode herself, and so she added, “It’s mostly the travel that annoys me.”
“You really don’t like to travel?”