Unless that dude was FBI. And maybe he was. She thought of how casually the air marshals always dressed on her flights.
In her compact she saw no one in particular on the sidewalk. There wasn’t a lot of traffic on the streets on a Sunday morning in August, and among the cabs and buses and delivery vehicles she noted nothing suspicious. Still, she trusted her instincts. There again was that gift of the amygdala, the gift of fear. Ahead of her was a corner convenience store with entrances on both the avenue she was on and the cross street she was approaching. She flipped shut her compact and went in. But instead of buying even a cup of coffee, she cut through the store and left through the other exit. A few yards down that cross street was a doorway for a dry cleaner that was closed for the day. She stood flat against the side wall, invisible from the avenue, and waited. She counted slowly to one hundred, adding the word Mississippi after each number, the way she’d been taught as a little girl. Then instead of returning to the avenue and continuing north to the shelter, she walked a block west. She’d head north at the next intersection. It was a long detour, but it dialed down her panic.
And she indeed felt safer when she was inside the shelter, though she knew that wasn’t rational. If they wanted to arrest her, they would: an animal shelter wasn’t an embassy in some faraway land giving her refuge. Likewise, if someone else was after her, they’d find her. Their…expertise…was evident.
She went straight to the community room where the older cats lived. This morning she counted eight, dozing or draped on the cat condos and the cat trees and on the cat beds on the bookcase. She saw Duchess and Dulci were still there, a pair of eleven-year-olds whose elderly owner had died and his middle-aged son had been unwilling to adopt. (She had never met the man who had brought the animals in, but Cassie loathed him and viewed his behavior as utterly despicable.) The cats recognized her voice and went straight for her lap when she sat on the floor. She brushed them and cooed, and they purred in response, the noise reminiscent of mourning doves, and they nuzzled against her and stretched out their legs and their paws. They looked a little thinner than the last time she was here, and she hoped they weren’t so sad that they weren’t eating. She reached into her shoulder bag and offered them some of the treats she had brought, and was relieved when their appetites seemed fine.
She sighed. Was there anyplace she was more useful than the shelter? Was there anyplace she was happier when she was sober? She knew the answer to both of those questions. There wasn’t.
* * *
? ?
As she was walking back to her apartment, once again she had the unmistakable feeling that she was being watched. She guessed she probably was. She recalled the way the half brother of the North Korean leader had been killed in broad daylight with a fast-acting nerve agent by a stranger in an airport concourse in Malaysia and found herself giving a wide berth on the sidewalk to anyone approaching her from the other direction.
And yet soon she was home and the walk had been, by any objective standard, uneventful. And still she hadn’t been arrested. She sat down on the couch and called Ani.
“Oh, I wish I could tell you that you’re off the hook and this all will pass,” Ani said. “Maybe it’s just taking time.”
“In that case, do I report to work and fly back to Rome? If so, I should be out the door in an hour.”
“Go.”
“Okay. And maybe I should just stay there. Never come back,” she said wryly.
“Maybe,” Ani agreed, but Cassie understood the lawyer wasn’t being serious.
“I did something stupid last night,” she confessed, and she told Ani what had occurred at the bar. But instead of firing or even chastising her, Ani sounded as if she had come to expect this sort of bad behavior from her client. There was an edge of disappointment to her response, but mostly she just sounded sad.
“Someday you’ll hit bottom,” she said. “For most people, that would have been Dubai. Not you, apparently. We’ll see.”
“How much trouble am I in?” she asked.
“For calling the Sokolov family in Virginia? Oh, probably no more than yesterday. You should be embarrassed, but I’m not sure it’s really possible to shame you, Cassie.”
“It is,” she said. “It really is.”
“Just…”
“Just what?”
“Just, please, act like a grown-up.”
* * *
? ?
While packing, Cassie called Derek Mayes.
“Have you heard anything from the airline about, I don’t know, their asking me to take a leave of absence?” she asked. “Are there any threats to my job?”
“Not yet,” he told her.
“Does the airline know I’m the woman in the photos?”
“They might. If I had to guess, I would guess yes. I’m quite sure that someone from the FBI has contacted them. But no one from the airline has gotten in touch with you?”
“Nope.”
“Well, they haven’t called me, either.”
“Your niece says I should go ahead and fly to Rome.”
“My niece is very smart. Listen to her in all things.”
“I will,” she said, though she instantly recalled how she hadn’t with the FBI agents that Friday afternoon.
A half hour later, unsure whether it was the August humidity or that nagging sense that there was always someone just beyond her gaze who was watching her, she said good-bye to Stanley, the doorman. Briefly she considered taking the subway to the Dickinson and hitching a ride with the crew for the Madrid flight, but she couldn’t cope. She just couldn’t. Instead she hailed the cab nearing her apartment building’s awning. Her instinct was to ask him to take her to Grand Central, where she would catch the Airporter bus, but she couldn’t face that, either. Not now. Not today. And so even though she couldn’t afford a cab to JFK—with tip that would cost seventy-five bucks—she asked him to take her to the airport.
And there in the cab, somewhere in the snarl of traffic that dogged the Van Wyck Expressway even on a Sunday afternoon in August, her phone rang. It was a number she didn’t recognize. When the woman said hello and introduced herself as a reporter, Cassie instantly forgot her name and had to ask for it a moment later, because her mind could focus only on the tabloid banner of the writer’s newspaper. When she recovered, she said she had nothing to say and hung up, blocked the number on her phone, and called Ani Mouradian.
19
In the end, Elena chose the New York Post for the simple reason that the New York Times had covered the story responsibly. They understood the death of Alex Sokolov was not an act of terrorism and seemed, as far as she could tell now, to have moved on. They might be preparing a longer story on the hedge fund manager and Unisphere’s connections to select members of the Russian political leadership—there might be the usual innuendo about corruption and crime, intimations that the White House was indebted to the Kremlin—but the financial machinations of a hedge fund were at once too complex and too dull to ever elicit much readership or interest. And if they were preparing a story on the utter randomness of dying on a business trip far from home? Elena believed that reportage like that might be compelling and beautiful, but it would never gain traction in the Age of the Troll. In the Age of Mass Shootings. In the Age of the Suicide Bomb in the Crowd.
After planting her seed—her anonymous tip—she phoned Viktor. He was finishing dinner but took the call and went outside the restaurant. She wondered whom he was with and worried when he didn’t volunteer the companion’s name. Usually he did because most of the time it was someone she knew or at least knew of. It was a further indication of the sort of trouble she herself was in. He didn’t trust her. At least not completely.
“Are you going to go with the flight attendant?” he asked.
“Back to Italy?” She heard incredulity instead of obedience in her voice, a reflex, and took a breath to rein in her emotions.