The Expats (40 page)

SPEEDING ACROSS LUXEMBOURG in Claire’s husband’s sports car, west-northwest, two-lane roads and a short spell on a proper motorway, through roundabouts, merging, accelerating and braking, passing. Nothing on the radio, no music and no French culture, lost in her own labyrinth of explanations, pursuing one dead end after another.

She’d stared at the computer screen, mouth hanging open, for a full minute.

Current account balance
25.000.000,00 EUR

Then she’d logged off the bank interface and cleared the web browser’s history and emptied the cookies and exited the program and restarted the hard drive, formulating her next steps.

She’d walked into the kitchen with a forced smile. Claire had been a
bit nonplussed when Kate asked if she could borrow Sebastian’s BMW. “My car has been making an odd noise,” Kate claimed, “and the conditions are dreadful out there. I’d hate to break down on a day like this. I’ll take my car to the garage tomorrow.”

The land fell as she headed west into the valley of the Petrusse that ran down the center of the country. On the other side of the river the soft hills began to rise again, long low-grade ascents, plateaus, dips down to cross creeks and streams before continuing up.

There was a big difference between the fifty million euros that the FBI thought Dexter had stolen and the twenty-five-plus million in his accounts. Half. But this difference was in degree, not order of magnitude. The general idea was the same: a huge amount of money. An unearnable amount.

Kate sped through the forest, the trees close against the road, slender white-barked trunks straining skyward, lightward. The trees suddenly became whiter, and brighter, one of those full-frost zones that cropped up regularly in the countryside on days like this, the temperature just below 0 Centigrade, predawn fog clinging to every plane of every surface, under and over and sides, then freezing, encasing everything—trees and shrubs, twigs and evergreen needles, street signs and lampposts—in cloudy white ice, brilliant and blinding. Otherworldly.

There had to be a justifiable reason. Dexter was a good man. If he’d done a bad thing, there had to be a legitimate reason for it.

After all, she herself had done the very worst thing imaginable. And she was a good person. Wasn’t she?

HALF OF FIFTY million …

The car hurtled through the distinctive desolation of farmland in winter, cut back and barren and low, even the shortest structures seemingly towering, barns and granaries and single-story stone houses built right against the road, which had been a medieval footpath, later widened to a Renaissance horse path, then widened again and ultimately paved in the twentieth century for cars, the current form its briefest incarnation, at most 5 percent of this byway’s lifetime, another sliver of Europe’s history, tucked away on—as—a narrow road.

Where was the other half …? It must be in that other account, the one whose number Dexter had written down without any other info, no user name or password. Why would he keep a written record of only one account? Of only half the money?

The car hummed on the weathered asphalt, in and out of forests, a preponderance of evergreens up in these highlands.

Because he had a partner. Marlena? Niko? Both?

Kate wasn’t using Sebastian’s GPS device. The whole point of driving his car was to avoid having her steps retraced. So she was using a map, which she now needed to consult regularly through the twisting unnumbered roads whose names changed every few kilometers, merging and dead-ending and doubling back.

Finally she was in Bigonville, on the rue des Pins, a supremely missable road, with no painted lines, thickly lined with evergreens. Street of pines, indeed.

Kate was now certain—99 percent, if not the full 100—that Dexter had illegally appropriated some large multiple of millions of euros. And this money was what was paying for her home and groceries and toys, for the diesel she’d put in the car yesterday morning, a sixty-three-euro fill-up, nearly a hundred dollars’ worth of gas for the secondhand Audi.

The used car. That was where two irreconcilable realities bumped up against each other: what man bought a used car when he had twenty-five million euros in the bank?

Kate had suffered through dinner with that prick Brad in Amsterdam. There was a guy with extra millions in the bank. And he spent all his free time, all his energy, spending his money. His cars, his houses, his vacations. Just like the rich bankers here in Luxembourg, whose business was making money and whose passion was spending it.

Her husband was not one of them.

This small narrow road twisted and turned, dipped and rose, patches of snow and ice, dense forests and a winding creek that the road shadowed, never had been any budget to build a bridge, never would be.

The whole thing just didn’t make sense.

The road abandoned the creek and began a steep climb, leveling at the top of another ridge, where the forest fell away, opening the landscape to a wide vista of repeating ridges, folds in the land covered in grayish white, the skin of an old sharpei. A rustic stone wall ran alongside the road, the big rocks cleared to make the field on the other side arable, the wall merely a byproduct, a place to put the rocks. It was an immense field, covered in low grass, brownish-green and fallow.

Kate saw the white-painted farmhouse with a black slate roof, just like every other roof in the entirety of the landlocked little nation, the
house bookended by coppices of leafless oaks, a shady spot in the summertime. The grounds surrounding the house were crisscrossed by a series of low, semi-crumbling stone walls, looking like the base of a Roman ruin, delimiting giant rooms—dining halls and vomitoria and grand foyers.

She slowed to a crawl, a glance in the rearview, confirming again that she hadn’t been followed. In every direction, there was no car or truck or tractor to be seen; the wooden shutters were closed. No sign of life or habitants, here at this protected house, secluded in the wide open by its coterie of deciduous bodyguards.

There was no space to pull to the side of the road, which fell precipitously into deep drainage ditches. The house’s driveway passed through a narrow opening in the stone wall, and was barred by a chain, which Kate could see was secured by a padlock. On one of the stone pillars, a small white-enameled plaque, the number 141 in black. This was definitely rue des Pins 141, Bigonville, Luxembourg. The headquarters of LuxTrade S.A.

Kate had come to a complete stop in the middle of the road. There was no way to loiter here; no way to lay in wait for this house or its inhabitants or visitors. She looked around, left and right, front and back; there was no cover within a half-mile in any direction. There was no way to sneak up on this house.

This was an odd headquarters for a company worth twenty-five million euros. What this looked like was a safe house.

THERE WERE A dozen moms for moms’-night-out, seated on bar stools circling a high table. Before a half-hour was out, most of them were plastered.

This excursion was supposed to get Kate’s mind off her impossible situation. Plus she had to maintain a facade of a normal life. This had been part of her training, part of her career, part of herself: whatever was going on, live like a normal person. Do normal things, see normal people. Don’t give anyone a reason to question you, investigate you. Don’t give them any meaningful answers to prying questions that might be asked after you’ve disappeared. Don’t create any suspicion that you were not who you claimed to be.

The gossip was flying rampant around the table, unfounded, malicious. This one’s husband was diddling his secretary. That one’s
babysitter was the school slut. The Czech family that seemed so rich? Destitute. That loud vulgar Texan with the three kids? Undergoing fertility treatments to have a fourth. That so-and-so was a such-and-such.

Kate couldn’t stop trying to piece together what her husband was up to, and where he could possibly have gotten millions of euros in any way other than exactly what the FBI suspected: stealing it.

She discreetly slipped ten euros on the table when no one was paying attention, and she walked away, as if to the restroom. But she went to the door and grabbed her umbrella from the stand and exited to the street and the mist, the vaporous streetlights, the static-like rattle of the river rushing by, fecund with melted snow.

There were a handful of pubs clustered around the bridge in Grund, each with its own discrete micro-atmosphere of smoke and noise, the sound of TV rugby in one, a Euro-pop jukebox in another, sloppily drunk teenagers in a third, where a sign clearly prohibited entry by anyone under sixteen years old, thus attracting every sixteen-year-old in the city.

Kate walked across the bridge, entered the long well-lit tunnel cut deep into the rock upon which the
haute ville
was built, the rough-hewn walls hung with derivative art, the faint stench of urine, as in every urban tunnel, even in the most well-kempt cities. It was a hundred feet worth of ascent to her neighborhood atop this rock formation, good exercise if she tramped up the hill of the rue Large, but tonight she didn’t want any. She wanted answers, not cardio; she wanted to be home, alone with her thoughts. There was a babysitter to pay and dismiss, a husband playing tennis with the FBI agent who was investigating him. What a goddamn mess.

A small crowd spilled out of the arriving lift, a pair of teenagers, a pair of banker types, a lone woman, meeting Kate’s eye in some type of solidarity.

Kate was alone in the elevator, waiting for it to depart. She heard footsteps in the tunnel, someone rushing. It sounded like a man—heavy footfalls, long strides. She pressed the button, again and again, an irrational and futile but still takeable action.

The doors closed just as the man arrived, trying to insert his arm into the closing gap between the dimpled-steel panels, a split second too late.

The elevator was slow, rumbling, groaning on its cables. Kate stepped out onto the St-Esprit plateau, the administrative complex, the courts
and national agencies, the plaza in the middle of all the hyper-clean buildings, the whole area well-lit but empty, silent.

Kate hustled across the cobblestones. She passed a nightclub, thumping music within but no one without. She turned a corner, ascending now, into another plaza. A bar here, a fountain, a fancy restaurant, an idling taxi. A middle-aged couple walking out of the restaurant, into the taxi.

She glanced over her shoulder; no one there. She hustled through the
place
and into a street, the pavement torn up, construction equipment idle in deep dirty ditches. She heard footsteps behind her.

Kate hurried, walking as fast as she could. She broke into a jog for a step or two, then speed-walked, alternating modes of rushing. She passed an intersection, a busy Italian restaurant down to the right, the grand duke’s palace to the left, and she realized she was about to walk under the Macleans’ windows.

The person behind her was definitely a man, shoes clopping quickly on the stones, keeping pace with her. She glanced back. A long dark coat, a brimmed hat. Was he the same man from the tunnel? Indeterminate age and size, hidden in the night. Indeterminate everything.

Kate looked at the Italian restaurant, considered dashing in for asylum. But she kept walking, quicker, passing a Chinese restaurant, a bar, then cutting down a steep alley, the shortest path to her home, unfortunately the creepiest, and she broke into a proper run, uncomfortable and unsteady in heels on steep wet cobblestones, reaching out to a stucco wall to avoid falling, scraping her fingers on the rough surface, turning a corner at full speed, planting her full-size umbrella to help her pivot, all concentration forward, homeward, nearly sprinting now, glancing into a dark passage, and changing her mind.

She ducked into the passage, which led to the front door of a building similar to her own, another medieval structure that had been renovated beyond recognition, stone walls covered in stucco, timber replaced, new double-pane windows hung, modern flashing installed around the chimneys.