The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Why didn’t she kill you?”

  “I don’t know! I’m telling you, I don’t know anything,” she whimpered.

  He stared at her and seemed to think about this. Then: “I almost believe you. Almost.”

  “Because I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Tell me about your brother-in-law.”

  “He’s in the army,” she mumbled. “He’s a major. He’s stationed at Blue Grass.”

  “What else?”

  “There is no what else.”

  He stood up, his feet on either side of her body, and aimed the Beretta straight down at her. “You are fast running out of time, Cassie. Why were you with Sokolov in Dubai?”

  “We met on the plane, that’s all there was to it,” she mewled. “Please don’t kill me.”

  “Why was he interested in you?”

  Why was any man interested in her? she wanted to ask in return. The answer was simple: because she was a drunk and she was easy. And while a small part of her understood the rightness of sarcasm and self-loathing when she appraised her life, there was a gun pointed at her. And so she replied simply, “He wanted a good time. I guess I did, too.”

  From the corner of her vision she saw that Enrico had moved his head. She didn’t dare turn her gaze on him because she didn’t want to draw Buckley’s attention to the young bartender, but Cassie noticed that one of his eyes was open. “He was just a guy on the plane,” she went on, hoping to hold Buckley’s interest. “Someone to drink with in Dubai. I didn’t think I’d ever see him again.” She didn’t know if there was any way in the world that Enrico could creep over to him without drawing his attention, but the idea gave her hope.

  “Did he mention the name of anyone else he was seeing in Dubai?”

  “No. I mean, I knew he had a meeting, but I assumed it had something to do with his hedge fund.”

  “Did he mention anyone else who worked at the airline?”

  “No, he didn’t.” She tried to watch Enrico with soft eyes: eyes that focused on nothing but took in everything. Her friend Paula had grown up with a horse, and it was how she was taught to ride: to see her surroundings without turning her head and thus confusing the animal beneath her by moving her body. Enrico had managed to inch a little closer to the bed from his spot outside the bathroom. Any moment, she supposed, he was going to dive at Buckley. When he did—if she could move quickly, which she was unsure if she could—she would try and help. She would attack too. Years ago she’d taken a voluntary self-defense course the airline had offered. She’d never needed to use anything she’d learned (or, alas, she’d been too drunk to realize that she should be defending herself), and she tried to recall what the instructors had taught in the class. There was something about pulling your assailant into you when he had his hands on you. Elbowing his head. Poking or punching his abdomen. She could do that. She would do anything to force the man by the bed to deal with multiple attacks.

  “I’m about to go through your suitcase and your kit. I am going to empty everything onto the floor. Sensation should be returning about now. Do not get up off the floor, and do not try and stop me. Are we clear?”

  She nodded.

  But then Buckley swung his arm as if swatting someone with the back of his hand—he’d seen Enrico—and calmly pulled the trigger of Uncle Piero’s Beretta.

  36

  The gun exploded, the silencer dampening but not eliminating the pop, and Cassie was aware that she had winced and cried out—and that Enrico was still alive. He had launched himself on top of Buckley, pinning him on his side on the mattress. There was a cut on Buckley’s cheek, the gash already puddling red, and he was holding his right hand with his left. The wound on his hand looked far worse than the one on his face: Cassie could see blood streaming down the man’s forearm, as well as the black burns along his fingers and thumb. His index finger was misshapen and either dislocated or broken.

  Their eyes met and he snapped at her. “You can’t even fucking load a gun!” And then Cassie saw the Berretta on the floor beside her, twisted metal shards rising like tentacles from the rear of the pistol, the silencer straight but dangling from the tip of the still-smoking weapon. They stared at each other, and Cassie understood that this was why Enrico was still alive: she’d failed to load the gun properly.

  “Call for help,” Enrico said to her. “Call downstairs.” He had wrapped his arms around Buckley, and they looked almost like lovers, and she recalled momentarily what it had been like when she had wrapped herself around him. Then she struggled to her feet, wobbly, her legs like licorice, but she held on to the side of the desk and reached gingerly for the phone.

  “Don’t,” said Buckley, and he spat something—a tooth, Cassie saw—into the carpet. Cassie paused long enough for him to continue. “I’m telling you, you can’t hide from us all. There’ll just be someone else after you tomorrow.”

  Outside they heard guests in the hallway, some returning from the street where they had gone when they had been evacuated from the hotel, some drawn by the sound of the gun exploding. It was clear, however, that none had any idea what that noise was or where it had come from. She heard someone suggest that it must have been something on television and someone else argue no, it was too loud, and speculate that it had something to do with the air conditioning. Maybe something to do with whatever had triggered the fire alarm that had sent them out into the night in the first place. Neither guest sounded concerned.

  Cassie continued to stare at Buckley. His right cheek was growing black and his right eye was disappearing into the swelling all around it. “Who are you?” she asked. “Tell me now: who are you really?” She kept her finger on the button for guest services.

  * * *

  « «

  Say it like you mean it.

  When had she said that, Cassie wondered, and then she remembered. She’d challenged her mother to reassure her that everything would be okay when Daddy was so drunk he couldn’t navigate his way up the stairs and kept falling down as if he were battling a degenerative muscle disease. Apparently, her mother had not been especially convincing when she’d said everything was fine.

  For a second, Cassie thought she must have said those words to an old boyfriend, too. Maybe he’d said he loved her in a joshing sort of way and she’d wanted more. Maybe she’d felt betrayed by the lightness of the way he’d spoken. Maybe she’d felt betrayed then, too.

  No, that wasn’t it.

  Because that had never happened.

  She’d never had a boyfriend who’d told her he loved her.

  Never.

  Cassie looked at the blood congealing on Buckley’s fingers. Clearly this was a betrayal of a new sort, at once bigger and smaller than any she’d experienced before in her life. It was bigger because the stakes were bigger; it was smaller because she hadn’t really known him.

  She’d only gotten drunk with him a couple of times. She’d only had sex with him a couple of times.

  Only. Only.

  The sad truth was, she really hadn’t known him at all.

  * * *

  « «

  She watched Buckley try once to extricate himself from Enrico, wriggling and struggling to free his arms or his hands, and she started toward the men on the bed to help keep him restrained, but it was evident that Buckley was in a lot of pain and Enrico was deceptively strong. Buckley wasn’t going anywhere. He ran his tongue through the slot where a moment ago he’d had an upper incisor. “It doesn’t matter. My name, I mean,” he said when the brief scuffle was done. He sounded—and the irony was not lost on Cassie—drunk.

  “It does.”

  “Then it’s Evgeny.”

  “Not Buckley?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not really an actor, are you? You’re not really from Westport? It was all a lie, wasn’t it?”

  He r
olled his eyes and then nodded.

  “And that was you following me around New York City,” she said, not a question this time.

  “It was.”

  “You work with Miranda?”

  “I thought I did. I didn’t. Not really. Her real name was Elena. Elena Orlov.”

  “Was?”

  “Was.”

  “She’s dead?” asked Cassie, at once relieved and strangely, unexpectedly saddened. “God, how? Why?” She noticed the blood on the carpet by the door as she spoke, recalled Alex’s on the sheets of that magisterial bed in Dubai, and had a feeling that the great stain this time was Elena’s.

  “Because she didn’t kill you. That was the first clue. We have a feeling she was turned when she went to school in Boston. She was working for you folks now.”

  “America?”

  “America.”

  “So you’re Russian intelligence?”

  “I’m nothing.”

  Enrico elbowed him hard in the back. He grimaced and then said, “Yes, FSB. I’m a Cossack. Google it.” Then he said to Enrico, “You don’t need to wreck my kidney, and you don’t need to suffocate me. I think we’ve established I’m not going anywhere. So, let up on the chest, okay, buddy?”

  “Call, Cassandra, call,” Enrico told her. “Don’t talk to this crazy person.”

  “No, Cassie. Don’t call. Put the phone down,” Buckley said. “You’ll find Elena’s purse in the bathroom. It’s beside her body. And in that purse is a gun. Another gun. It’s a Beretta that’s already loaded, and so, thank God, you won’t have to load it. You won’t have to do anything. There’s also a knife. Even if you really aren’t with the CIA, I’m sure by now you have some new friends with the FBI in New York. Call them. Tell them to call their legal attaché in Rome. Tell them that Elena Orlov is here in this hotel in room six twenty-one. She’s dead. Tell them Evgeny Stepanov is in room four zero six. I’m two floors below you. I’ll be waiting for the FBI attaché there. Then when I’ve left your room, count to thirty, fire the weapon, and scream for help.”

  Enrico shook his head. “Don’t do it, Cassandra. He’s just going to run away.”

  “No, man, I won’t. I have no place left to run.”

  “I want to know one thing,” Cassie asked. “Is my brother-in-law clean?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “So you have an inside elsewhere?”

  “So it would seem.”

  Cassie put down the phone. She took her finger off the button for guest services. The she retrieved Elena Orlov’s purse from the bathroom, careful at first to avert her eyes from the corpse in the tub, but then incapable of not glancing at it. There she was. Miranda. Elena. She was on her side, but Cassie could still see how deeply into her neck Buckley had run a knife and the blood that was pooling near the drain. She took the bag from the bathroom and in the hallway went through it. She wasn’t sure what to make of half of what was inside it—the pills, the restraints—but she found the knife and the Beretta. She flipped off the safety on the weapon.

  “Remember: that gun is properly loaded,” Evgeny said to her when she returned.

  “Go on.”

  “Point the gun at me. It’s fine. You’ll feel safer. Then your friend can let me go. He’ll stand next to you. You’ll hand me the knife. Or if you want to keep your distance, you can toss the knife onto the mattress. I think I’ve already left enough blood on the bedspread and the carpet, but a little more couldn’t hurt. And my tooth is already there—on the floor. So there will be plenty for forensics. Then I’ll go to my room, and you’ll call your FBI contacts and tell them where I am.”

  “And hotel security?”

  “No. Don’t call them. That will lead to the Italian police and a real investigation. I want the world—at least my world—to believe you shot me dead. You killed me.”

  Enrico was shaking his head no, his eyes imploring her not to do this. Cassie wondered if he’d even release Evgeny when she asked him to. He might not. She thought of all the mistakes she had made with her life—all the pain she had sown and reaped, all the things she would never have and never do—but she had a feeling now that listening to Evgeny wasn’t going to be one of them.

  “What about me?” she asked. “You said that even if I kill you or call the police, there will just be someone else coming after me.”

  “You’ll be someone new. Your people will see to it.”

  “I assume by my ‘people,’ you don’t mean the airline.”

  “Look, Cassie. Think about it. Do you really want to go through life as the Cart Tart Killer? I doubt it. Right now we share something I never expected when I followed you to that bar in the East Village: the need to start again.”

  FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

  FD-302: MEGAN BRISCOE, FLIGHT ATTENDANT

  DATE: August 7, 2018

  MEGAN BRISCOE was interviewed by properly identified Special Agents NANCY SAUNDERS and EMORY LEARY at the FBI office in Washington, D.C.

  SAUNDERS conducted the interview; LEARY took these notes.

  When asked point blank if she had ever acted as a courier or delivered classified documents or information to a foreign government, she broke down and said that she had. She admitted that she and her husband were both paid by the Russian Federation. He would use his security clearance as a consultant to bring her materials on, most recently, the U.S. chemical weapons defense program at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland, and she in turn would deliver them to her handlers overseas.

  She asked for a lawyer, and the interview ended with her arrest and the arrest of her husband.

  * * *

  = = = = = =

  Subsequent to the interview, BRISCOE’S home and garage in Centreville, Virginia, were searched, and two flash drives with classified chemical weapons information were found hidden in an electrical outlet box, behind the plate, in their master bedroom.

  Epilogue

  REMEMBER THAT PERSON YOU WANTED TO BE? THERE’S STILL TIME.

  «

  On the night flight to Moscow, Cassie brought the passenger in 4C his vodka and tonic and hovered over him an extra-long second, a noctivagant cat on the headrest of an easy chair. If she hadn’t known who he really was—or, at least, what the agency had told her about him—she would have pegged him for a retired ice hockey star. The sort of red-haired Russian Adonis who as a very young skater had led his own country’s team to Olympic gold and then taken the NHL by storm in his twenties. He’d clearly broken his nose at least once. His shoulders were still broad, but his hair was thin and his skin was leather. He used reading glasses. She guessed he was, much to her horror, her age.

  He wasn’t a hockey player, of course; he was Russian intelligence. Maybe a Cossack, but perhaps a part of the FSB’s Center 18: the cyber spies. After she had absorbed all she could glean from his tablet—two e-mail addresses and some names she barely could spell—she retreated to the first-class galley and wrote down what she saw. She presumed she was giving the agency nothing they didn’t already have. But you never knew. She liked this sort of walk-on role, which was about all they would offer her at this stage. She’d been sober two years now, but she had a long history of drinking to overcome, and so this special surveillance group was the extent of the leash. She had new hair and a new name. She had a new base. And when they needed a flight attendant, they used her. Apparently, they had an Aegean stable–sized pool of actors available for this sort of bit part. And she was good at the work: the circumlocutions of the functioning alcoholic were not unlike the daily subterfuge of a spy.

  The irony to this particular assignment, of course, was that an awful lot of what the agency knew about the gentleman in 4C they had learned from Evgeny—or Buckley as she still thought of him sometimes. The passenger was a friend of Viktor’s. Evgeny’s knowledge ranged from drop sites to bank account numbers. He
knew what everyone liked to drink and their tastes in women and men. He had a new identity, too, but they were still keeping him in a safe house just outside of Washington, D.C. His debriefing, given his history, could last a lifetime.

  Cassie had seen him just one time since Rome. Four months ago, when Masha was almost a year old, a handler had brought them together at an apartment near Dupont Circle. It was maybe a block from the Carnegie Endowment, and the handler had made it clear that this was not where Evgeny lived. The purpose of the meeting was for the Russian to share firsthand what he knew about a woman whom Cassie was supposed to watch on a flight to Beirut. They never told her Evgeny’s new name and he didn’t volunteer it, but his hair now was short, a creamy mix of white and blond, and Cassie wondered if it was bleached or whether the chestnut she recalled when they’d first met had been the dye. Probably his natural color was the shade she recalled from that summer: the nights when they’d danced together at a grunge bar south of her apartment and walked through the West Village beneath a perfect half moon.

  Or the night when he’d killed a woman named Elena and tried to kill a man named Enrico. The night when he would just as easily have killed her.

  When they met in Washington, Evgeny had struck Cassie as neither happy nor unhappy: mostly he seemed comfortable and businesslike in his new role.

  But when he smiled, she glimpsed the playfulness she remembered. Cassie had made a small joke about her boyfriend, a TV writer in L.A., and Evgeny confessed that he had watched a few episodes of the fellow’s show. For a moment Cassie had been taken aback that he knew so much about her, even now, but then she had nodded. Of course he did. Then he’d said, “They really should stick to family drama. WASPy family drama. And if they want me to play the rebellious son who becomes an actor, I’m their man.” His eyes went wide when he said that, and Cassie honestly wasn’t sure if he was pulling her leg.