Gone Before Goodbye

Chapter Twenty-Two

Inside the elevator Nadia keeps the gun pointed at Steve’s head. “Zip-tie him,” she tells Maggie. “Take his phone, just in case.”

Maggie is about to ask what’s going on — why does Nadia still have the gun up and in Steve’s face? — but the answer is frighteningly obvious.

The elevator has a camera.

It probably has sound too. Nadia is continuing to sell it. Steve plays his part too: “Please, don’t shoot me.” Maggie is about to take out the zip tie, but the elevator stops.

They are already at the garage level.

When the doors open, Maggie expects there to be men with guns or police cars or sirens or something waiting for them. But there are not. There is nothing. The garage is silent. She gives Steve one more look, trying to say thank you with her eyes. He answers back with the most imperceptible of nods. Maggie doesn’t know Steve’s fate. Will Malik and Big Mustache believe whatever story of abduction he comes up with — or will they realize he was in on this?

No time to worry about it.

Nadia grabs Maggie by the arm and pulls them out of the elevator. They hurry-walk (not run because that would draw attention) toward the car ramp. No one stops them. Again the element of surprise. Whatever Big Mustache or Malik had in store for them, there would have been no need to surround the perimeter of the building or get men to the garage. The elevator, like every elevator in Dubai, was superfast. It had been only ten, maybe twenty seconds since Less Beefy started to call for help. Even if he was heard immediately, they’d have to figure out where the cries were coming from. Once they did, they’d probably call for the elevator. But of course, the elevator was already taken. So it would take time to get up to their floor. Maybe some of them would choose to run down the stairs...

All of that takes time.

Maggie and Nadia slow their steps as they reach the ramp. They stroll up it and out. Simple as that. No one gives them so much as a second glance. The sun is at full power, blinding, debilitating, unbearable, but right now Maggie feels fine with it. Nadia is speaking Arabic into her phone. They move quickly down the street and enter the palatial shopping mall next door.

As they walk, Nadia pulls the phone away from her face and says to Maggie, “You told me Charles gave you a second passport.”

“Yes.”

“Give it to me.”

Maggie does. Without slowing, Nadia opens it to the front page, takes a photograph with her phone, hands it back to her.

“What’s going on?” Maggie asks.

“I saw the news report right before they caught me. Oleg’s body was found in the Dubai Water Canal.”

“Wow.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I should just go talk to the police—”

“No.”

“Why not?” Maggie asks. “I’m the one who called them. They can’t think I’m involved.”

“You’re being naive,” Nadia says.

“How so?”

“You fly into Dubai for sketchy reasons. On your first night here, you, a single American woman in her forties, go to a nightclub alone. You claim you saw the stabbing of a rich man who no one else saw, who you happened to bump into and whose house you happen to have just been staying in before you arrived — and this all happened right after you met with his mistress at the same club... Do I need to go on?”

“You do not,” Maggie says. “You’re good at this.”

“I’ve had some practice.”

“You want to explain?”

A small smile plays on her lips. “Another time. Now give me your phone.”

Maggie does. Nadia presses it up against hers, transferring data from one to the other. “I’ve uploaded a mobile boarding pass in the name Emily Sinclair into your phone’s wallet. It’s for the Emirates flight to London — that’s the next international flight out of Dubai. It leaves in an hour.”

They rush through the corridor, take the escalator down the steps and past an ornate fountain into the parking garage. There is a sign with an arrow for Uber and Bolt riders. Nadia gestures toward it.

“I ordered you an Uber to the airport. It’ll be downstairs in two minutes. The ride should only take fifteen minutes. There won’t be time for the police to have covered the airport yet. They may have time to put your real name in the system.”

“But not Emily Sinclair’s.”

“Exactly.”

“And what about your name?”

“I’ll definitely be in the system,” Nadia says. “That’s why I’m not going with you. I’ll figure another way out and meet you when it’s safe.”

They head down toward the rideshare pickup zone. Three vehicles are waiting. Nadia checks the license plate on the app. “That’s yours,” Nadia says, pointing. “The blue one.”

“Got it.”

Maggie slides in, and Nadia closes the car door. The Uber pulls away. When the Uber hits the highway, Maggie takes out her phone and calls Porkchop.

He answers on the first ring. “Where are you?”

“On my way to London.”

“Flight number?”

She tells him.

“Once you land,” Porkchop says, “I’ll have you covered.”

“How?”

“Let’s pretend you didn’t ask me that. No contact until you arrive.”

He hangs up.

Porkchop.

But he’s right. Every word she says is being heard by Charles Lockwood. Does she care? Who knows? But the thing is, Porkchop doesn’t want Charles Lockwood to hear. He isn’t saying why. Not yet. But right now, that’s enough for her.

As promised, the drive takes fifteen minutes. The Uber drops her at Terminal 3. She hops on what they call an APM — Automated People Mover — though Maggie has no idea what the difference between an APM and a small train is, and gets to Concourse A in three minutes. The security line is short and moves fast. Maggie is on full alert as she makes her way through it, sure that every employee is looking at her. She feels exposed. She wishes she had a hat or sunglasses or something, though that just usually makes a person stand out more.

When she reaches her gate, her flight to London is already boarding. She gets on the queue. Part of her keeps waiting for someone to grab her arm and pull her out of the line. There are, of course, plenty of security officers walking about the gleaming terminal. When she scans her boarding pass, the Emirates employee at the gate asks to see her passport. Maggie has it opened to the right page. It’s the same photo as the one in her real passport — Charles had just had it duplicated to create “Emily Sinclair’s” — but the agent seems to be taking a longer time than she should studying it. The gate agent looks at the photo, then at Maggie, then back to the photo.

“Have a nice flight, Ms. Sinclair,” the agent finally says, handing her back the passport.

Maggie hurries to her window seat. A man in a “groutfit” — gray sweatpants, gray hoodie — drops into the seat next to her. He says “Well, hello there” with a little too much enthusiasm. Maggie isn’t a plane-engager under the best of circumstances. Engaging with a plane passenger is up there with her major phobias, the most terrifying being when you get an aisle seat at a Broadway show and the actors come offstage for audience participation.

Shudder.

Still, she gives the man a tight-but-polite nod back. Then she stares out the window and doesn’t relax until the plane taxis down the runway. She closes her eyes and flashes back to one of her first flights with Marc. In a surprise move, Marc gripped her hand tightly and asked her:

“Why do we say we ‘taxi’ down the runway?”

“Good question. Well, not good, really. Pretty inane as a matter of—”

“I mean, when else do we use the term ‘taxi’ as a verb to describe movement? Why only with air travel? What else besides airplanes ‘taxi’ and why do we use that term for it? Sorry, I babble when I’m nervous.”

“You’re nervous?”

“Maybe a little.”

“But you ride motorcycles.”

“Which, you may have observed, stay on the ground for the entire ride.”

“I didn’t have you pegged as a nervous flyer, Marc.”

“It’s kind of sexy, right?”

“Would you settle for barely cute?”

“I would, yes.”

She shakes her head, and a sad smile, the only kind she had known for the past year now, comes to her face. The next time she and Marc flew:

“I looked it up, Mags. Why they use ‘taxi’ for aviation.”

“God, you’re a dork.”

“So in the early 1900s, two French aviation pioneers named Blériot and Farman started using the term ‘taxi’ to describe how primitive aircraft moved slowly across an airfield because it seemed similar to the way a taxi moves through city streets. Ergo ‘taxiing’ on a runway and whatnot. What do you think?”

“Barely cute. But also, okay, kind of sexy.”

The pang — that ever-present Missing Marc pang — strikes deep in her chest. This is how grief works, isn’t it? Grief doesn’t attack her on Marc’s birthday or their anniversary or any of that. Grief knows you are expecting it on those days. So Grief bides its time. It lulls you, makes you think it’s not such a threat anymore, and then when your defenses are down — when a plane simply starts down a runway, for example — boom, it attacks.

Marc.

When the plane’s Wi-Fi comes up, Maggie tries to read all she can on the death of Oleg Ragoravich. They don’t call it a murder yet. Just a dead body. They don’t even say foul play suspected or any of that. Like maybe Oleg was taking a swim and drowned.

Dubai just being Dubai, Maggie figures.

But some of the details bother Maggie. The articles note, for example, that Ragoravich was “positively identified by close colleagues.” That seems an odd thing to mention. It’s not like the body was found after years underwater. Why mention that? The article also notes that “hundreds of guests recently saw the normally reclusive Oleg Ragoravich at an extravagant ball” — yep, they actually use the word “ball” — “he hosted at his private residence in Russia.”

Again: Why mention that?

The wording was odd. Something about it gnaws at the back of her brain.

She’d done a quick search on Oleg Ragoravich during her flight from Teterboro when she still wasn’t sure of his identity, and found very few photographs of him. At the time, she’d figured that was a normal, rich-guy privacy issue. The rich, especially those who have reason to stay in the shadows, often paid to have their online presence scrubbed or manipulated.

Which led to a host of related questions:

Why are there so few photographs of Oleg Ragoravich online?

Why would Oleg Ragoravich have wanted plastic surgery now?

Why would he have decided to throw a “ball” the night before his surgery?

Why had he stayed up in the hidden room at the top of the ballroom? How had Charles Lockwood put it?

“I’ve still never seen him in person. Not even at that crazy ball...”

Something isn’t adding up.

Her phone battery is low. She doesn’t know what brand of phone this is — it isn’t Apple and doesn’t seem to be Android. The better for Charles to bug her, she figures. Still, she signs on to her email and sends Sharon a short message. Porkchop, she assumes, has been keeping Sharon in the loop, so Maggie keeps the email short:

Something is starting to click.

Maggie turns off the Wi-Fi for a bit, trying to preserve battery. Does that work or is that a myth? She doesn’t know. Every half hour she checks to see whether Sharon has written her back. Eventually, Sharon does:

But Maggie doesn’t need more photographs. She sees it right away.

“Oh, shit,” she says out loud.

The Groutfit next to her stirs.

The photographs Sharon found are on the older side. At a quick glance, there’s nothing to see here.

Superficially.

It’s the third photograph, the clearest facial shot, that seals the deal for Maggie.

She’s seen this picture before, albeit in a very different form.

It’s an official-looking black-and-white portrait from the military. Maggie would guess that it’s thirty or forty years old, maybe more. Oleg Ragoravich is in uniform. He stares straight into the camera, his expression blank, a stone.

Oh, no. It can’t be.

It’s then that Maggie feels her phone vibrate with a text. It’s from Nadia:

Nadia included a screenshot of a map. Maggie zooms in with her fingers. When she sees Brovski’s exact location, Maggie’s head starts spinning anew.

Damn, Maggie thinks. I had it wrong the whole time.