? ?
As she expected, Enrico was at the bar. But he wasn’t working. He was seated on a stool before the beautifully burnished mahogany slab. He was at the near end, across from the hidden sink and the impeccable row of shakers and jiggers and stirrers and spears. He was chatting with a petite young woman in the hotel’s requisite white button-down shirt and blue vest, her hair a magnificent dusky mane. She was the bartender on duty. Cassie guessed she was in her early twenties. The world, she thought, was just so young. The bar wasn’t deserted this time, because it was nearing late afternoon. But the guests—and she counted a dozen or so people—were at the tables, not that long, inviting counter.
Enrico noticed her right away, as if he had an eye on the entrance, and stood to greet her. He, too, was wearing a white shirt, but he had slithered inside a pair of tight jeans instead of the dressier black pants he had been wearing last week. He was gorgeous. She wondered if as soon as she’d had a drink—oh, maybe two or three or four—she would bring him upstairs to her room.
“I was afraid I wouldn’t see you,” he said, wrapping his arms around the small of her back and pulling her into him. He kissed both of her cheeks and then leaned back a little, appraising her. She felt the warmth from his fingers through the thin rayon of her dress. “You got more beautiful in the last week.”
“I didn’t. But I did get a week older.”
“And you were outside without sunscreen. Shame on you!”
She nodded sheepishly. It was easier to nod than explain she had been pepper-sprayed at the airport that morning.
“But that dress is perfect on you,” he continued.
“I’m probably too old for it.”
He released her and smiled. He motioned at the woman behind the bar, who was making Bellinis for a table of Brits in the corner. She had pureed fresh peaches for the drink and the Prosecco looked very good. “This is Sofia. She makes an excellent Negroni, too. I taught her myself. But let me make yours.”
She watched Sofia place the flutes on a tray and bring them to the guests’ table. When she was silent, Enrico asked, “Is it a Bellini kind of day? Would you prefer that to a Negroni?”
She met his eyes. Yes, she wanted a Bellini. She wanted him. She wanted to get lost in the booze and wrap her naked thighs around his naked ass and feel him inside her. She wanted to forget Alex Sokolov and Frank Hammond and the woman she had thought was Miranda. This was a new thing, this drinking to forget. Usually she just drank to get lost, which may have been a cousin in some way, but was most definitely different.
She heard the chime from her phone that informed her she had a new text.
“Sorry,” she told Enrico. “I should see what that’s about.” She reached into her purse and pulled out the device. The text was from Ani, and the lawyer was asking her to call back right away. Cassie took a long, slow breath to calm herself. She heard a slight ringing in her ears and felt her heart starting to race. “I need to phone my sister,” she said to the bartender.
“You look worried. Is everything okay?”
She watched the Brits raising their champagne flutes with their Bellinis and clinking them gently together. My life, she thought, is all hunger. Hunger and want and need. “I guess we’ll find out,” she answered, and she took her phone and retreated into the anonymity of the hotel lobby.
25
Elena got a spray tan at a salon across the street from Bulgari and Gucci, and she instructed the attendant to think Saint-Tropez. She wanted to look like an old Bain de Soleil ad. Then she went by a pharmacy—choosing one far down the Via Sistina from both her hotel and Bowden’s—and bought a pair of plastic gloves and a shade of hair color that was called “natural blue black.”
Back in her room, she meticulously worked the dye into her hair and set the timer on her phone for forty-five minutes. She had no gray yet, not a single strand, but she wanted to be sure that the color was solid. She thought she might enjoy having hair the shade of ravens’ wings for the rest of the summer and the beginning of autumn.
As she waited, she sat on her bed and used the encrypted network on her laptop to dig deep into Dennis McCauley. See if there was anything new. Anything they’d been unable to tell her. She went underground, hacking into his life through a variety of dark sites she accessed through the Lewis Carroll–like looking glass of RATs and rootkits the Cossacks preferred. She looked at the meetings on his calendar that week at the military base in Kentucky and the one the next week at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland. She noted his predilections in porn, which were far more conventional than a lot of guys in the military or the male defense contractors she had dealt with, and she saw that his fantasy baseball team had done especially well that week. She scanned his family’s bank and investment accounts.
But she could find no indication that he was a Cossack asset or that he was getting rich selling them what he knew.
She thought once more of her revelation on the plane last night, the idea that for so long she had had the Dubai seduction backward: she had been assuming that Cassandra Bowden had picked up Sokolov on the flight to the Emirates, when it was quite probably the other way around.
God, he’d been such a rank amateur. He was up against people who’d grown up in a culture in which paranoia was a survival skill.
After she’d killed him, she’d switched flash drives, giving Viktor one with dramatically dumbed-down data. It had specs on the stealth drone, but nothing that Russia probably wouldn’t have on its own or through NovaSkies within months. It was, they hoped, just enough to satisfy Viktor. They were wrong. Then she’d left the evidence that Sokolov was stealing from the fund on his laptop. No one could miss it. The CIA would know why he was dead, and eventually National Intelligence would share what they knew with the FBI. But the Dubai police would just see it as Russian business—cold-blooded and unflinching—as usual. The price for a regular hit when a deal went bad was pennies. Her father had once paid an underling a measly fifteen-grand bonus to execute a commodities trader who had tried (and failed) to bilk him out of the steel he’d bought from a Lipetsk mill. Another time, he’d paid a pittance—five thousand dollars—to have some poor British contracts manager in Donetsk killed when his bosses back in London had refused to renegotiate a contract. (They did after that. Right away.) The American agencies weren’t thrilled that Sokolov was dead, but he wasn’t an especially good egg, and no one wanted to see him on trial. He knew too much. Mostly they were just grateful that no one’s cover had been burned. It was weirdly polite. It also wouldn’t demand a public escalation, which nobody wanted.