The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian

  Cassie almost said that she was from Kentucky, a reflex. She stopped herself just in time. Instead she said, “He introduced me to Russian literature. I hadn’t read Tolstoy, not even in college, until we met.”

  Jean smiled. “He was weirdly bookish.”

  “Weirdly?”

  “The sort of man who runs a hedge fund isn’t usually the sort of man we think of curled up with a book.”

  “What books did he talk to you about?”

  “Oh, you know…”

  Cassie waited, hoping Jean would elaborate, but she didn’t. When she remained silent, Cassie said finally, “He loved Tolstoy and Pushkin. Turgenev. We talked about whatever he was taking with him to read on airplanes all the time.”

  “I’m glad you two shared that.”

  “He had a girlfriend in Dubai—a friend who was a girl. Her name was Miranda. Any idea who that might be? He ever mention her when you two would…visit?”

  “Why?”

  “He told me he was going to have dinner with her when he was there. He was looking forward to it. They were just friends, but he was hoping it would become something more. He had a crush on her. You said you knew him a bit. Did he ever talk about her? Miranda?”

  Jean looked at her a little more intensely now. “What’s her last name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t, either,” she said. “But I’ll be sure and tell the police about her. The FBI, actually. I think you need to speak to them, too.”

  “Yes, of course. Absolutely.”

  “Tell me, why were you supposed to meet with Alex today? His assistant had nothing on his calendar this afternoon. He wasn’t even supposed to be in America today. I asked her on my way downstairs.”

  “Was he supposed to be in Dubai still?”

  “Moscow.”

  “He traveled a lot.”

  “He did. Was your meeting today a personal thing, Alessandra? Is that why he didn’t tell his assistant?”

  She shrugged. “We’re friends, yes. We were friends. Sorry. But I was also a client of his. Of yours.” She recalled his obituary. “I’m invested in the Stalwarts Fund.”

  Jean seemed to take this in, absorbing the information. Cassie considered the possibility that she simply didn’t look wealthy enough to be an investor. But then Jean said, shaking her head ever so slightly, “That is such an old boy fund. Such an old man fund. Why did you invest in it?”

  “Alex recommended it.”

  She sighed. “I thought we’d called every one of his clients to tell them what had happened to poor Alex.”

  “Maybe I have a voice mail I missed.”

  “Maybe. But we were persistent,” Jean said, and for the first time she sounded slightly dubious. “I really was under the impression that we’d spoken with everyone. Everyone.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Would you like me to schedule a meeting for next week with someone about your account? Or a phone call tomorrow?” She pulled a phone from her blazer pocket and opened a calendar app. “We can do this right now.”

  “Yes. Certainly. Who would that be?”

  “We have a couple of managers who are diving in. You tell me what’s convenient for you.”

  “Okay,” she agreed, and she suggested anytime on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon, and then offered a fake phone number and a fake e-mail address. When Jean stood, Cassie stood with her and exited back into the summer heat, aware that the executive probably was memorizing every detail about her that she could. She guessed the woman would be on the phone with the FBI before she had even crossed the street.

  * * *

  « «

  As she walked south, she inventoried in her mind the little she had learned: Alex was going to Moscow from Dubai and he had never mentioned a person named Miranda to this other Unisphere employee. He ran a fund that, at least in the opinion of this woman from personnel, had a select group of investors: old boys. She couldn’t fully translate what that meant, but she had a sense it meant Russian. Old Russians. In her mind, she saw a portrait of the Politburo, circa 1967. A lot of bald white guys with bad haircuts.

  It wasn’t much, but it was something, and she was glad she had gone there.

  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 t
ablecloths 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?”

  “I was looking forward to spending a little time here. Or going home to Sochi for a bit.”

  He seemed to relax a little bit. He picked up his fork and gazed down at his breakfast. “You will. All in good time. This is a speed bump, that’s all. No, it’s a detour. A detour to America. You like America,” he said, the last sentence a small, slight dig. “But then you’ll come back. Or go home. Whichever you want.”

  “Okay.”

  He looked over her shoulder and pointed. She turned and saw a pair of myna birds on an outside railing just behind her, their yellow beaks phosphorescent in the sun. “Even the birds here eavesdrop,” he said, smiling. But then his tone grew serious. “You asked me how much time you have,” he said. “The fact the flash drive was of no value—no use—doesn’t reflect well on you. You should know that no one is happy about that. I am just being honest. So, I think you should move quickly. For your own sake, Elena. For your own good. Soon would be best—for everyone.”

  14

  Cassie saw that she was on page nine of the New York Post and page eleven of the Daily News. At the same time that she bought the two newspapers at the Rite-Aid a block from her apartment, she bought new sunglasses: big and bulky and a completely different shape from her old ones. The ones in the photograph. On her way back to her building, she threw away the sunglasses she was wearing in Dubai, as well as the scarf with the arabesque patterns. It was pretty and she knew she would miss it. She deposited them into an overflowing trash can on the corner, because the garbage would be collected later that morning.

  The article was identical to the version she had read online, and she was rather surprised by how tame it all seemed now that she had read Sokolov’s obituary. Usually the Post wrote the worst or the wildest things that anyone thought or suspected but would never say aloud. But there was no conjecture that Alex was CIA or KGB, no innuendo at all that he was a spy. Alex was portrayed as just another hedge fund guy who happened to go to places like Moscow and Dubai for work.

  On the sidewalk near her apartment, she saw three schoolgirls walking toward her in matching plaid uniform skirts and white blouses, and guessed they were close to her nephew’s age: they looked about eleven. Each was using her phone as a compact, flipping the camera lens as if taking a selfie, but she could tell by the anxiety in all of their eyes that they weren’t merely checking their makeup—were they wearing anything more than lipstick?—but were instead examining their faces for uncorrectable imperfections. One of the girls had twin constellations of freckles on her cheeks. Another, who looked closest to tears, had a slight bump along the ridge of her nose. They were pretty girls, and their self-doubt and their fear seemed needless. But Cassie understood. She had no idea where they were going because she doubted even private schools started this early in August. Perhaps it was some sort of summer program or summer day trip. It didn’t matter. She recalled feeling the way they did herself. She knew her niece would soon. All of Jessica’s confidence woul
d disappear like a helium balloon released on a blustery autumn afternoon. Maybe some of it would return, but it would never be as bold and pure as it once was.

  When the children were behind her, Cassie looked again at the picture of herself in the tabloid. Utterly disgusted, she shook her head exactly like the girl with the freckles.

  * * *

  « «

  Almost as soon as she was back in her apartment, her phone rang and she saw it was Megan. She paused for a brief moment but then answered it. “Hey, there,” she said. “Aren’t you in Berlin?”

  “I am. The flight’s delayed, so I thought I’d check in with you. You okay?”

  “Let’s see: I’m speaking again to the FBI this afternoon and I’m kind of wigged out by the newspapers. Other than that, what could possibly be wrong?”

  “I get it. The FBI talked to me again, too.”

  She stared at Hammond’s business card on her refrigerator. Suddenly she felt as if she had just dodged a bullet not saying anything more to Megan. She told herself that she was being crazy, but an idea came to her: this conversation is being recorded. The FBI was using Megan to get her to incriminate herself. And so, just in case, she responded, “I hope they get to the bottom of this soon. I feel so bad for that poor man’s family.” She said a small prayer that Megan wouldn’t bring up the fact that she had asked her friend to lie for her when they had spoken last.

  “Vaughn feels that way, too,” Megan agreed, referring to her husband. “When he read the newspaper stories, he called and said he didn’t understand why it’s all about the mystery woman and not the guy who was killed.”