He ignored the lawyer and continued. “The newspapers. I’m sure you’ve seen them. Is that you in the pictures, Ms. Bowden?”
“What newspapers? What pictures?” she asked. She was stalling and the two FBI agents had to know it—how could she not have seen the newspapers by now?—but her reflex when she couldn’t answer with a grandiose lie was to answer with a modest one.
Hammond was clearly going to play along. “Well, let me tell you. Some of the newspapers have published security camera photos from the hotel where Alex Sokolov’s body was found. Most have published two. One shows a woman on Sokolov’s arm the night before he was killed. The other shows that same woman leaving the hotel the next morning. Alone. She’s wearing the same clothes.”
Washburn opened a manila folder beside his pad and placed the two photos on the table in front of Cassie. “Here they are,” he said.
Ani smiled but didn’t glance at the pictures. “A walk of shame? Seriously? Why are we even discussing this?”
Hammond ignored her and elaborated: “The legal attaché in the Emirates says that the woman in these pictures matches the description of the woman—an American—who three different hotel employees say they saw with Sokolov the night before he was murdered. Apparently, she matches the woman with whom he dined at a French restaurant that evening.”
The photos were eight by tens. They were crisper than the reproductions in the newspaper or the images she had seen on her phone, but certainly not crystal clear. Was the woman indisputably her? Not indisputably. The first was a grainy, long-range profile. In the second, the woman was wearing sunglasses. In both she was wearing the scarf. But a reasonable person could reasonably suppose it was her.
“Recognize the scarf?” Hammond was asking.
She shrugged. She gazed for a moment at the arabesque, at the almost hypnotic array of tendrils and swirls.
“One of the flight attendants on the plane with you from Paris to Dubai recalls you buying one just like that when you landed,” Hammond said. “It was near the duty-free shop at the airport. Maybe even next to it.”
She wondered: Was this Megan? Jada? Shane? It could have been any of them or someone else. There were nine other flight attendants. “I may have,” she answered simply.
“So: is that you?”
She looked up at him and she looked at Ani. She glanced at Washburn. She held her hands tightly together, but she couldn’t stop her legs from shaking under the table. She knew she was supposed to take the Fifth. But, suddenly, she knew also that she wasn’t going to. She knew it. She thought once again of that old Beatles lyric, I know what it’s like to be dead, and understood with certainty that she was going to lie, because that was who she was, and you can no more escape your DNA than you can an Airbus that is pinwheeling into the ocean after (pick one, she thought to herself, just pick one) a cataclysmic mechanical failure, a suicidal pilot, or a bomb in the cargo hold. She was the lightning that brings down the plane, the pilot who panics on the final approach in the blizzard.
They’d probably found her lipstick in Alex’s hotel suite already. Or, perhaps, that lip balm. They’d found it where she had left it or where it had fallen out of her purse. They’d found it beside a mirror in the bedroom or the bathroom or on the carpet near the chair where she had tossed her purse. They’d found the incontrovertible evidence that she had been with Alex the night he was killed.
“Well?” Hammond pressed. Ani was mouthing the three syllables Take the Fifth, her eyes wide and intense.
Instead, however, Cassie gazed for one long, last moment at the images on the table, savoring these final seconds before the plane hits the earth, unsure whether the next few words would result in a successful crash landing or the aircraft would break apart and explode upon impact. She took a deep breath through her nose, exhaled, and then said, “Of course, it’s me. Alex and I met on the plane, we had dinner in Dubai, and then we went back to his hotel room. We made love in the bedroom and in the bathroom—in the shower. And in the morning, when I left, he was still very, very much alive. I can assure you of that. He kissed me once on the forehead before I said good-bye, and then said he was about to get up himself. But I swear to you on my life: when I left the hotel, he was perfectly, totally fine.”
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
FD-302—EXTRACT: CASSANDRA BOWDEN, FLIGHT ATTENDANT
DATE: August 3, 2018
Although BOWDEN had pled the Fifth multiple times in the interview, including one time when asked if SOKOLOV had told her the name of the hotel where he was staying, when shown the hotel security camera photos, she admitted that she was the woman in both of them.
She said that she and SOKOLOV had dined at LA PETITE FERME before returning to his hotel room at the ROYAL PHOENICIAN HOTEL. There they had consensual intercourse two times before going to sleep. She says that when she left his room on the morning of July 27, he was alive. He was awake and kissed her.
She acknowledged leaving about 10:45 a.m. She didn’t believe he had any meetings that day until lunchtime, which was why he had suggested she shower and get dressed first, while he “lolled” in bed a few more minutes. He had even joked, “After all, you have a plane to catch. I don’t.”
Finally, she said that a woman came to SOKOLOV’s hotel suite the night before. SOKOLOV introduced her as MIRANDA (LAST NAME UNKNOWN). She seemed to be American, roughly thirty years old, brown eyes, auburn hair, medium height for a woman. No eyeglasses. Baggy black slacks, red and black tunic top. The woman brought a bottle of vodka with her, and the three of them shared it.
At the time, BOWDEN thought MIRANDA had something to do with UNISPHERE ASSET MANAGEMENT. She presumed she was either an employee or she had money invested in a fund. (BOWDEN insisted that she visited UNISPHERE on August 2 hoping to learn more about the woman or about SOKOLOV.) BOWDEN thought that MIRANDA may also have been involved with real estate in Dubai. She said she had a sense that MIRANDA was going to be in the same meeting (or meetings) as SOKOLOV the next day.
She did not believe that SOKOLOV and MIRANDA were close friends or had known each other very long. It was even possible that they were meeting for the first time that evening.
BOWDEN believes that MIRANDA probably stayed less than an hour, but she was intoxicated by then and unsure. She recalled they talked a little about her work as a flight attendant (SOKOLOV and MIRANDA were interested), but not their own work. The conversation was difficult for BOWDEN to recall in any detail because she was drinking.
* * *
= = = = = =
FOLLOW-UP: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has informed us that Alex Sokolov’s computer showed seven Russian investors in the Unisphere Stalwarts Fund who have been singled out by OFAC, including Viktor Olenin. Withdrawal and transfer records suggest Sokolov’s theft from the fund may have exceeded two million dollars.
ODNI said there were two e-mails with Russian operatives we believe were affiliated with the Syrian chemical weapons program, one of whom is believed to be a COSSACK, but the content was routine business about the fund’s returns. There were no specific mentions of sarin, VX, or the compounds at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky in the e-mails, nor was there any reference to chemical weapons defense tools.
There was no reference to the stealth drone or jet drone projects.
But there was information on the flash drive that seems to have come from the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (though we cannot yet rule out a source at Blue Grass).
Finally, there were no e-mails or documents or references anywhere on the computer to the flight attendant.
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