The Last Flight

It is mid-January, six weeks before the crash. Eva meets Agent Castro in a remote parking lot along the beach in Santa Cruz. Before Eva cooperates, she wants to know she will be protected, asking not for immunity but witness protection: a new identity, a new home, and a new life. Agent Castro is skeptical; Fish is too small an operator. He pushes Eva to cooperate, telling her it wasn’t her fault that she became involved in the drug trade. When Eva hesitates, he warns her that if she refuses to cooperate, they will arrest her and she will go to prison. However, he also promises to try to get her what she wants.

When Eva returns home, Liz comes by. Liz badgers Eva to trust her and tell her what is going on. Eva imagines telling Liz the entire story but says only, “I live in a world where I don’t belong” (189). Liz begs her to explain, but Eva does not, “terrified that her entire world was about to crumble because of Castro” (190).

When the woman calls her name at the party, Claire freezes, her legs turning to jelly. Then she realizes the hostess’s name is also Claire; she is safe. However, hearing the name throughout the evening leaves her feeling “battered and jittery” (192).

Kelly drives Claire home. She gives Claire her phone number and tells her to be safe. Claire then packs up what little she brought. As she prepares to leave Eva’s apartment, Eva’s phone buzzes. Claire listens to the message: “Mrs. Cook. It’s Danielle. I know you didn’t get on that flight. You need to call me” (194). Danielle was on her husband’s staff. Claire panics: If Danielle knows where she is, then so does Rory.

As Liz packs and prepares to return to Yale, Eva busies herself preparing for her departure, getting her bank accounts in order, and even having her records of Fish’s activities notarized. Before she leaves, however, there is one thing she wants to do. She Googles her grandparents’ names and where they live, finding an address in nearby Richmond. She drives there not entirely clear what she will do. When she knocks on the door, Eva falters and tells the old man, presumably her grandfather, that she has the wrong house. On the way back home, she dwells on her past—how she could have finished school and had a “legitimate life” (198). She lets the regrets go: “[T]he death of a dream can finally set you free” (198).

It is one week before the plane crash. Eva, alone now that Liz has returned to Princeton, receives a text message from one of her clients begging for drugs. She has glimpsed Castro following her, but she is not sure whether to feel relieved or paranoid. As she heads out with the client’s baggie of pills, Eva feels that she is “lost at sea with no hope of navigating back” (200).

Eva has agreed to meet Dex at a basketball game, so she arranges to see the client there at halftime. Dex shows up during the first half of the game, and Eva tells him she has a contact, a woman, who wants to secure a fake ID and hopes that Dex can help her. Dex suggests the woman simply find someone who looks like her and buy her ID from her. Eva worries that Dex sees through her flimsy lie.

At the rendezvous with her client, Eva finds Agent Castro instead. Certain she is being set up to be arrested with the pills in her pocket, Eva flees and heads back to her apartment.

Claire, reeling from the revelation that her husband’s secretary knows where she is, tries to calm down sufficiently to make a plan. She is curious why Danielle called and not Rory. She is sure of only one thing as she grabs the keys to Eva’s car: It is time to go. She neglects to pull the front door shut.

However, there is no car in the garage. When she returns up to Eva’s apartment, she finds a man with startling gray eyes waiting on the doorstep. Claire recognizes him as the man who bumped into her after she got coffee. Politely, the man asks whether he might inquire about renting an empty apartment; Claire tells him she doesn’t know because she is simply house-sitting for a friend, and the man asks when her friend is expected back. Claire says she is abroad, and the man thanks her and leaves, warning her that this is no neighborhood to keep your front door unlocked.

Back inside the apartment, Claire spills a Coke. As she mops up, she moves a shelving unit and finds a hidden door with a padlock. She uses Eva’s keys to unlock the door and finds the laundry room Eva repurposed into a chem lab. On a counter Claire finds a notarized letter in which Eva reveals her association with Dex and with Fish. Claire realizes that Eva was no criminal, but “a woman like [Claire] for whom the world will never bend” (209). There is a tape recorder also. Claire hits play and hears a conversation between Eva and a man whose voice she recognizes as the man who just inquired about renting the apartment. 

It is two days before the crash. Eva is to meet Agent Castro at a restaurant. Castro tells her right away that witness protection has been denied. The FBI can only offer her protection during the trial. Eva understands she has no choice: “The only way out is through” (213). Castro tells her she needs to wear a wire the “next time” she meets Fish. Eva assures him she has never met the organization’s shadowy kingpin. Castro drops a bombshell: The man Eva knows as Dex is in fact Felix Argyros, otherwise known as the notorious Fish.

Quickly, Claire gathers up what she can of Eva’s materials: the sworn deposition, the voice recorder, and the cell phone. She heads out, renting a hotel room just a few blocks away. She collapses on the bed, exhausted.

She wakes up famished. She needs something on Rory to use as a negotiating chip. She can feel her husband closing in on her. When she checks Rory’s email, she is stunned to read his last text: “I am going to handle this quietly. Let the NTSB keep thinking she’s dead. I’ve scheduled the plane for Oakland tonight” (218).

Claire is sure she is a dead woman. A chance noise in the hotel courtyard causes her fingers to accidentally hit a few keys as she is closing the laptop. She knows that the computer will register that she was online and reading Rory’s messages. She thinks Rory knows she has accessed his files. Even though she has found nothing substantial, Rory does not know that. If she “fabricate[s] across the blank spots” (221), Rory might believe she has something on him.

When she checks Eva’s phone, she finds another voice message from Danielle. This time Danielle assures Claire she is trying to help her and asks Claire to call her. To prove her sincerity, she attaches a voice message in which Bruce Corcoran tells Rory that Charlie is none other than Charlotte Price, the woman Rory was having an affair with when his first wife died. Charlie will testify that Rory was responsible for the fire that killed his wife.

Claire cannot understand why Danielle would send her such damaging material, but she now has her negotiating chip. She sends the voice clip to CNN, identifying herself as Claire Cook and identifying the voice on the clip as prominent philanthropist Rory Cook admitting to killing his first wife. a

It is two days before the crash during Eva’s meeting with Castro. Eva struggles to accept that the man she was working with (and sleeping with) was not an underling but the crime boss himself: “Eva felt her reality shift, pieces sliding into place in a different order” (225). Agent Castro suggests Eva hire a lawyer. It is then her phone rings: It is Dex reminding her of their meeting. Castro suggests a very public place. Eva agrees to meet Dex in a pub in Berkeley.

As she and Castro head to Berkeley, Eva begins to hyperventilate. Once in her apartment, she considers parking her car and slipping on to the public transportation train, escaping all of this. What momentarily stops her is the sight of the blue bird ornament Liz had given her, a gift “from the only person who ever truly cared about her” (228). Then she grabs her emergency cash (more than $5,000) and her computer but leaves behind her cell phone.

She slips on to the local subway train to the airport and there buys a one-way ticket on the red-eye to Newark, New Jersey—near where, she hopes, Liz lives. She recalls a chat she had with Liz two months earlier about Liz’s ugly divorce. She told Eva that night that Eva needed to find a way to forgive herself or that hate would consume her.