And so she said nothing, and the van inched forward and the police car inched forward, and Stewart continued to prattle on, and other small conversations began to bubble up among the crew.
“Do we even need pilots in bombers anymore? I guess we use them, right? But don’t we do most of our damage with drones?” wondered Shane.
“Ask Cassie,” murmured Megan. “Her brother-in-law is in the military.”
“Really? Air Force? Drones? I love drones. I think it’s so cool when there’s a drone at a wedding.”
“He has nothing to do with drones, at least as far as I know,” she answered. “He’s in the Army, not the Air Force.”
“Oh? Where’s he stationed? America or overseas?”
“These days he’s right where my sister and I grew up: Kentucky. That’s how they met. He’s a major at the Blue Grass Army Depot.”
“Sounds almost pastoral,” said Jada.
“Hah! It’s an old chemical weapons facility,” Cassie corrected her.
“An engineer at a chemical weapons plant? That sounds scary,” Shane murmured.
“I think he helps supervise the elimination of things that are scary. Our stockpile,” she answered, but she honestly had no idea. They didn’t talk about it. For all she knew, he supervised the production of sarin gas. Then, just as the traffic was finally starting to move, she heard the sirens. They all did.
“That can’t be good,” Stewart said.
“Fire trucks?” asked one of the other flight attendants, a fellow her age with whom she was flying for the first time. She hadn’t gotten to know him at all on the two flights here because he was working the economy cabin while she was in first.
“No,” the driver said. “Those are police sirens.” Almost on cue, the police car beside the van turned on its lights and started trying to extricate itself from the quagmire and perform a U-turn. “They’re south of us. They’re on Jumeirah.”
She felt herself growing flushed because the Royal Phoenician was on Jumeirah, and she had to reassure herself that Jumeirah was a main thoroughfare in the city and the driver was only speculating. All they really knew was that the sirens were heading for a destination behind them.
“I guess I shouldn’t have left a box with a little ISIS flag and a ticking clock in the lobby,” Stewart said.
“I really wouldn’t make jokes like that, Stewart,” Jada told him, reproachful and a little appalled. The flight attendant had a beautiful heart for a face, but now it registered only displeasure. “Certainly not these days and certainly not here—and certainly not if you want any of us to be your friend.”
“Too soon?” Stewart asked.
“Too tasteless. Too offensive. Too stupid.”
Megan turned toward her and whispered, “Did you forget your purse?”
Cassie rubbed her eyes. She couldn’t say that she lost it: she still had her passport and wallet and phone. “It’s a long story.”
“Tell me.”
“I spilled a glass of red wine on it. So I pitched it.”
“You threw it away?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Does it matter? Let it go.”
“You okay?”
She nodded. “Of course. Why?”
“You snapped at me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And you look a little clammy.”
“I’m fine.”
Nevertheless, she was relieved when Megan called to the front of the van and asked the driver if he could please get them a little more air here in the back.
* * *
? ?
The traffic wasn’t much better on the Sheikh Zayed, the highway, even when the loudspeakers on the minarets started to broadcast the muezzin’s midday call to worship. By the time they arrived at the airport, they had to rush straight to the plane. It was ready and, almost miraculously, they still had a shot at an on-time departure. Megan was the cabin service director on this flight and Shane was the purser. Once more, Cassie would be in first class. Her July bid included both the route (Paris, Dubai) and the cabin (first). The sky marshal, a heavyset American in a nondescript windbreaker with an aisle seat in the last row of the first-class cabin, seemed to be watching her as he settled in for the flight, but she took a breath and told herself that she was being paranoid.
The safety briefing was a video, but she was still expected to remain alert in the front of the aisle to encourage the passengers to actually pay attention. In this cabin, none ever did. Some wouldn’t even take off their headphones or look up from their tablets or newspapers. It wasn’t merely that they were all frequent flyers and knew the drill, it was that there was a certain machismo to not watching: to look up and listen suggested you were either afraid of flying or an outsider at thirty-five thousand feet. You were a newbie.
She started to turn back to the galley as the unduly cheerful video prattled on and caught the heel of her pump on the tacking strip, and stumbled. A Saudi executive in a pristine white thobe caught her with his left arm before she fell.
“Thank you,” she said. She was embarrassed. She couldn’t recall ever tripping on a plane when they were still parked at the gate. It was one thing to lose your balance when you were flying and there was turbulence. But on the ground? This was new. “That was unexpected.”
“I’m happy I could help,” he told her. He had a wide, magnanimous smile. He adjusted the gutra that covered his neck and hair, its iqal a thick, black halo. Then he returned to the business magazine he was reading on his tablet.
When she was back on her feet and standing with the galley and flight deck behind her, the only person watching her was the sky marshal. She wondered if he could sense, rather like a lion, her fear.
* * *
? ?
They were held at the gate and lost their on-time departure. She hadn’t seen a conga line on the runway, but the minutes ticked by. Then the captain told the crew and then he told the passengers the reason for the delay: thunderstorms across the eastern Mediterranean and southern Europe. They would be here perhaps half an hour. She tried to believe this was the case, that all that was holding them up was the weather. But her anxiety only grew more pronounced. Still she worked. She and Megan brought the first-class cabin drinks and more drinks, and then they brought them mixed nuts they warmed in the ovens. The passengers in economy could only suffer in silence and fret that they would miss their connections at Charles de Gaulle. Cassie would glance out the windows, half expecting to see police vans converging upon the plane from the tunnels that snaked underneath the airport. She would pause before the front cabin door, fearing there was someone on the other side signaling her to open it, open it right now—there in her mind was the captain, emerging from the flight deck, nodding, giving her permission—because airport security was about to pull somebody off the plane. Occasionally she checked her phone to see if there were news stories of a hedge fund manager from America found dead in a Dubai hotel room, but there seemed to be nothing on Twitter or any of the news sites—at least the English sites that she could Google and read.