She nodded. She knew the story; they all did. The Dubai authorities were able to track the executioners with the cameras they had placed across the city. They followed them from the airport to a tennis club, where they rendezvoused, and then to the hotel where they executed the military commander. It was Mossad, of course—and Dubai was so furious that no one had told them the hit was coming that they had burned the agents. They’d published the security camera footage and outed them all. “It was more than a couple years ago. More like ten. I was still in college,” she corrected him.
“Of course you were. Of course. Your father was still alive,” he said, and he offered a smile tinged ever so slightly with meanness. Not outright cruelty, but spite: he didn’t like to be corrected. He knew how much she had loved her father, and reminding her of his death was a small rebuke. But once he had made his point, his face changed: “And Alex was asleep?”
“He was. Passed out would be more accurate.”
“You didn’t shoot him?”
“I brought the twenty-two and a silencer, but no, in the end I didn’t. I saw no reason to risk any noise at all. And, I imagine, this will be viewed in some circles as especially Arabian justice—and a more dramatic message.”
He dabbed at his mouth with the back of his hand, and then glanced at his watch. “I don’t like drama.”
On some level, she knew this. It was why she hadn’t yet told him about the flight attendant. She’d planned to, but couldn’t decide now whether she should. After all, the woman had been hammered; she’d barely remember anything from her one-night hookup with Sokolov. Besides, who would she tell? Why would she tell? When the woman announced that she was going to leave—return to her own hotel—because she had a flight to Paris the next morning, Elena had decided to wait. She’d leave, too, and return later to take care of Sokolov. He was at least as drunk as his new acquaintance, and so it had been easy to slide one of his room keys off the side table and into her purse.
“I was efficient,” she said. “Don’t worry.” She watched the bartender mixing chocolate liqueur and raspberries, and tried to pick out the lightweight in the bar who it was for. She decided the likely recipient was the American blonde with a man twice her age. In a moment, she saw she was right.
“I do worry. You should, too. It’s when we stop worrying that we grow careless and bad things happen.”
She hated it when he lectured her, but it never made sense to try and defend oneself to a man like Viktor—especially after a comment that was pretty damn innocuous by his standards. He was capable of far worse. He’d come of age in the Spetsnaz, the Soviet army’s special forces, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and had proven particularly adept at convincing Mujahideen to talk. In places like Kunduz and Faizabad, her father told her, Viktor’s superiors had often had to look the other way: he got results, but his methods were reminiscent of the Lubyanka basement in the 1950s. Today he was among those who didn’t give a damn about the Chemical Weapons Convention, and shrugged at the dead children of Khan Sheikhoun. Before traveling back to Dubai, he’d been in Damascus.
Moreover, it was certainly possible that she had been careless—though not in the way he was suggesting. The truth was, when she had discovered that Sokolov had company, she simply couldn’t bring herself to execute the pathetic, inebriated flight attendant who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That wasn’t what she did; that wasn’t who she was. Besides, there would have been blowback from that decision, too. “You’re right,” she said contritely. “I know you are.”
“And so Alex had been drinking when you met him. I imagine he did not make a very good first impression.”
“No, not really.”
He smiled ever so slightly. “You don’t approve of sloppy drunks, do you?”
“I don’t,” she replied. “I don’t approve of sloppiness, period.”
3
Cassie bought a bottle of Advil in a pharmacy on the way back to her own hotel and swallowed three pills without water. She didn’t want to wait until she got back to her room to start treatment. She put the washcloth and soap from the hotel into the trash can on the corner. In another one she threw away the towel and the remnants of the Stolichnaya bottle, including the broken shoulder. But then she realized that the bottom of her shoulder bag was still dotted with shards and smaller pieces of glass. The lining, no doubt, had yet more traces of Sokolov’s DNA. The bag itself was evidence. And so she removed her wallet and passport, her apartment keys and her phone. Her hairbrush. She retrieved her foundation and her mascara, and had a moment of panic when she rooted around inside it and couldn’t find her lipstick. But she couldn’t focus on that now, it was too late. She obviously wasn’t returning to the suite to see if she had left it there. Then she dropped everything she had retrieved into the plastic bag from the pharmacy. A block away, she tossed her shoulder bag into yet a third trash can.
As she walked, she wished she were one of the women lost but for their eyes in the dark folds of their abayas. She thought she might puddle in this crazy desert heat; she wondered if she might liquefy like a Popsicle.
She had been back in her own hotel room barely a moment—she had taken off her scarf and sunglasses and lifted her suitcase onto one of the two queen beds to begin packing, but that was all—when there was a knock on her door and her heart stopped. This was it: Hotel security. The Dubai police. Someone from the American embassy. When she peeked through the peephole, however, there was Megan, the flight attendant already in her uniform. Cassie was relieved, but felt a pang: Was this how she would feel for the rest of her life when there was a knock on her door or the phone rang? Once again she considered returning to room 511 at the Royal Phoenician and pushing restart.
But she didn’t. She opened the door and Megan stared at her for a long moment, studying her, before breezing past her into the room. Inside, the woman leaned against the dresser, appraising her yet again. Then she smiled ever so slightly.
“You know, Cassie, I kind of expected you to look worse,” Megan said. “Can I ask where you were? Dare I ask? I was actually getting worried.”
Cassie shrugged, pulling off her scarf and wedging it into a pocket in her suitcase. She kicked off her heels. Lord, what did it say about her that she continued to wear heels, even when she was planning (or, at least, expecting) to get sloshed? How many times had the combination of sangria and slingbacks turned a flight of stairs into Everest’s Hillary Step? “Seriously?” she asked, trying to make light of Megan’s concern. She stepped out of her skirt and began to unbutton her blouse. “Why were you worried?”
Instead of answering, Megan asked, “Were you with that young guy from the flight here?” She noticed Megan’s use of the word young. He was young. At least he had been. Megan was fifty-one, twelve years older than she was and at least a decade and a half—and very likely two—older than Alex Sokolov. “You know who I mean,” she went on. “The guy in two C.”
Cassie couldn’t risk the transparency of eye contact. Instead she rolled her blouse into a tight tube on the bed, folding it in half and pressing the air out, and placed it in the section of her suitcase she reserved for her dirty clothes. “Two C? God, no. Didn’t he say he worked for some kind of hedge fund? Sounds kind of boring. Not exactly my type.”
“Rich isn’t your type?”
“I have no problem with rich. But aren’t those guys crazy alpha?”
“You two were chatting each other up pretty seriously—especially before we started our descent.”
She sat down on the bed she had napped in yesterday afternoon to climb into the airline’s requisite black pantyhose. “Not really,” she said casually.
“So you weren’t with him?”
“I told you: no.”
“You hungover?”
“I’d nod, but it would hurt too much. Yes.”
“You going to be okay?”
“Of course.” She stood, adjusted her pantyhose, and leaned over gingerly, reaching into her suitcase for her return uniform. When she stood up, she stood up slowly, hoping to avoid (or at least minimize) the wave of nausea that tended to accompany moving her head at moments like this.
“Want an aspirin?”
“I’m good. I had some with me.”
“Of course you did. Can I ask you something?”
“Who was I with if it wasn’t that guy from the plane?”
“No. I wasn’t going to ask that.”