After all, this time she was actually sober.
When that realization came to her, she smiled.
But the smile didn’t last long, because when she turned the corner she saw a man and she jumped. For a split second she feared that her anxiety had a specific cause: it was every woman’s fear when she’s alone and sees a man in her path. He was about twenty yards from her room, and she almost turned and ran. But then she realized that it was only Enrico, and she relaxed. He was sitting in a small chair against the wall, his face in the shadow from the sconce behind him. There was a table with a hotel phone next to him. He stood when he saw her and went to embrace her, but she pushed him away.
“You just scared the you-know-what out of me,” she told him.
“I thought I would be a nice surprise,” he said, his tone apologetic. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“God. It’s best if I’m alone, Enrico. I told you that.”
“And I was going to leave you alone. I was down at the bar when the fire alarm went off. I was helping them close. And I thought, my beautiful flight attendant must be terrified.”
“By a fire alarm? No.”
He shook his head. “By being outside in the dark—instead of safely in bed in your room.”
“I’m back now. I’m fine.”
“Then I will escort you to your room and leave you there.” He held out his elbow, and she took it. Together they walked down the corridor. Then she slid her key into the slot and opened the door.
33
He had just finished dragging Elena’s body into the bathroom and dropping it into the bathtub when he heard Enrico’s voice in the corridor. It didn’t give him time to rethink his plan. But at least he was ready.
The moment both the bartender and the flight attendant were inside the hotel room, the door shut behind them, he emerged from the darkened bathroom. He slammed the grip of his pistol into the back of Enrico’s skull with his left hand and rammed the tip of Elena Orlov’s stun gun against Bowden’s gauzy little dress—high on the rear of her thigh—with his right. The bartender instantly collapsed to the carpet, unconscious, his shirt sponging up wet remnants of Elena’s blood. The flight attendant grunted loudly, shuddered, and then went limp like a rag doll. Just melted against him. She stared up at him as he lowered her to the rug beside the bartender, and he could see the terror in her eyes. She would be able to speak soon enough, and he did want to talk to her. But first he had to reevaluate what he was going to do.
He dumped out the woman’s purse and saw that she had gotten a gun. Perfect. He didn’t care where she got it; he could use it. Elena had set the table rather nicely when she’d called the newspaper. The woman wouldn’t overdose on the barbiturates the American spy had brought. Instead he would leave behind a tableau for the world in which it seemed evident that Cassandra Bowden had killed her Italian lover and her new, wealthy Russian friend from Sochi, and then shot herself in the head with the gun she must have gone to such great lengths to acquire.
First, however, he had to transfer the silencer from his Beretta to hers.
34
The taser was excruciating, and Cassie wanted to scream—in her mind, she imagined a blue streak of expletives, a woman with a foul mouth and an impressive vocabulary unleashing it all in the throes of labor—but she could only moan, long and low. And then she was on her stomach on the hotel room floor, just outside the bathroom door, and there was Buckley crouching beside her.
Yes, it was the actor. Of course it was.
He was actually wearing that same black ball cap. Here she had been so obsessed with Miranda, and all along it had been a person she thought was sweet and well meaning and actually a bit of a puppy dog. It was a testimony to just how badly she appraised people and picked her friends, and it might have been comic if he weren’t going to kill her the way that he or one of his associates had, she presumed, killed Alex. He was going to grab a handful of her hair, pull back her head to expose her neck, and cut her throat—probably poor Enrico’s, too—and leave her facedown on the hotel room rug to bleed out.
Cassie hoped it wouldn’t hurt, but she knew it would. She realized that she was most afraid of the pain, the sharp, brief, razor-like sting of the blade slicing into her skin, and maybe that explained why she drank. Pain came in all colors and sizes, much of it far worse than the pricks and aches and fever dreams that affected the body. This was the pain that gouged out great holes in the soul, hollowing out self-esteem and cratering a person’s self-respect. This was the pain that caused you to gaze at yourself in the mirror and wonder why in the name of God you were here. Cassie understood that her life was a study in precisely this sort of palliative management. Or, to be precise, mismanagement.
Her tongue felt thick and heavy from the taser, and as she watched the contents of her purse spilled out in front of her, she tried to turn her guttural moaning into words. She had one sentence she had to say, and she wished it was the two words, I’m sorry. Or maybe something more specific: I’m sorry I didn’t do more. I’m sorry I was unlovable or incapable of being loved. I’m sorry I never had children. Or even a cat of my own. I’m sorry, Rosemary, I’m sorry, Jessica, I’m sorry, Dennis, I’m sorry, Tim.
I’m sorry, Alex.
I’m sorry, Enrico.
God, Enrico. About to be killed for no other reason than that he was chivalrous. A young romantic who had walked her back to her room. She never should have let him. One more mistake of hers with consequences for others.
Would any of these people miss her? Would Megan? Gillian? Paula? Would anyone really and truly miss her? Supposedly, whatever we do that’s selfish goes with us to the grave; whatever we do that’s selfless lives on. She couldn’t imagine a single thing she had done, a single act, that had even hinted at immortality. Her legacy? She had no legacy.
She could feel her cheeks were wet and she was crying, which she hadn’t expected. She had been told over the years by pilots, usually when they were having a drink, that the last words of most captains before their aircraft augured into the side of the mountain or broke apart before breaking the plane of the sea were these: Mother. Mommy. Mom. That lovely woman who once upon a time had read to her from Beverly Cleary would have been devastated at the way her older daughter had followed so rigorously her husband’s swath of self-destruction. Any mother would.
Finally she found just enough motor control to form a sentence. But it was neither the two-word apology that was bubbling up inside her nor the plea to spare her or Enrico the pain that loomed. It was the deepest truth of who she was because it spoke to how she had lived, and the plain unvarnished reality that we cannot escape who we are and most of the time we die as we lived.
She turned her head as much as she could so she could meet Buckley’s eyes and asked, her voice still fuzzy from the shock and paralysis, “Please. Can I have a drink?”
He paused, seeming to give the request serious, genuine consideration, his eyes almost mystified, and for a long second Cassie believed that she had bought another moment of life. One last taste of the essentia, the ambrosia, the amrita that filled her veins and her soul and kept her pain at bay. But then he shook his head ever so slightly, almost wistfully, and attached a long, circular tube—a silencer, Cassie presumed—to the end of Enrico’s uncle’s Beretta.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
FD-302 (redacted): MAJOR DENNIS McCAULEY, ARMY CHEMICAL CORPS
DATE: August 6, 2018
DENNIS McCAULEY, date of birth—/—/——, SSN #————, telephone number (—)————, was interviewed by properly identified Special Agents RICHARD MARINI and CATHY MANNING in a private conference room at the BLUE GRASS ARMY DEPOT in Richmond, Kentucky.
MANNING led the interview; MARINI took these notes.