The Travelers (26 page)

She already achieved what satisfaction she’s going to achieve; Steven is adept with his tongue. Plus when he’s going down on her she can’t see anything except the top of his head, which helps revert this escapade to something more like an imaginary fantasy instead of a concrete enactment of adultery, with her lying on the couch in the family’s home office, at two-something on a weekday afternoon, with some strange man’s cock plunging inside her, and meanwhile she has to be at school in—how long? she glances at the clock—shit, twenty minutes.

“I want you to come,” she whispers into his ear, “in my mouth.” She really needs to get the hell out of here. “Are you ready?”

“Ungh.”

She rolls him over and finishes him quickly, wetly, using both hands and her mouth and an excess of saliva. Sex can be an awfully disgusting business, if you pay attention too closely, all these viscous fluids, yeesh.

“I gotta get going,” she says, getting up, repressing a shiver. “You want water?”

“I’d love some.” Steven is smiling, pleased with himself. “With ice, if that’s okay?”

She turns her back to him, not all that psyched that he gets to recline and watch her walk away. Allison knows exactly what she looks like full-frontal naked, and she’s fine with that, sort of. But the rear view is not something she can ever see, and she’s worried about it.

Then again, who gives a damn? She’s not going to be doing this anymore. She arrived at this decision an hour ago, sitting in that restaurant while Chloe was on the verge of falling apart because she suspected Will of cheating—
Chloe
, the least likely woman to fall apart in the history of the world—and Allison was trying her best to pay attention to Chloe while not obsessing about herself. What the hell is she doing with this guy? And why?

She had no answers—no good answers—then, and she still doesn’t now.

This is not exactly her proudest moment, standing naked in her kitchen, rinsing out her mouth at the sink, gargling and spitting, like at the dentist’s.

Mostly what she wanted out of this—this what? affair? she’s not sure it qualifies as something as grand as that—was simply being wanted, a deposit in the self-esteem bank, something she can consult whenever she’s folding laundry. But on the debit side, Allie now has to be worried about the shape of her naked ass retreating to fetch ice water from the kitchen, which is not something that particularly concerns her with her husband.

Do the daytime doormen know what’s going on up here? Of course they do. They’re chuckling about it down there, cigarette breaks, you know about Mrs. Somers, yeah man.

She doesn’t feel as bad as she might, as she suspected she would when she was riding up in the elevator that first time, thinking, huh, am I really going to do this?

But neither does she feel too good. There have been moments when she thought, there, this is justified, I’m getting back at Malcolm for his cheating, despite her lack of proof. She has long harbored a vague suspicion, one that she passively decided not to investigate.

Now look at her, here, the goddamned adulterer.

She has to end this carefully, gently.

Allison walks naked through her apartment, heading back to the man she wishes weren’t there, the ice water tinkling in the tall frosted glass. Damn, she thinks: I should have brought a coaster.

NEW YORK CITY

Will marvels at the resilience of his rosebush. Despite the long summer’s heat, despite the pollution of the city, despite his own passive neglect, the plant not only refuses to die, it even sprouts yet more fresh blooms, aggressively bright red, defying and taunting Will’s inattention.

He pauses at the bottom of his stoop. How many times now has he trudged up these steps with a fresh lie? Every time, he’s worried that it’ll be his last, that this time, he’ll be caught.

And this time, he is.

“Where were you Monday night?” Chloe is staring at him from the kitchen.

He shuts the door behind him, the heavy old glass shuddering in its decaying wood frame. “When?” He’s not sure if he should join her in the kitchen or run away, claim to need the bathroom, buy himself some time to compose himself, his story.

“After work. Before home.”

No, he can’t flee. He walks toward her, slowly. “Having a drink.”

“With?”

A couple of Chloe’s friends are habitual cross-examiners, women who are constantly trying to extract unforthcoming information from their husbands and boyfriends. But Chloe has claimed to not understand the impulse; she has never been a digger into Will’s business. Or at least not that he knows about.

“With Gabriella.”

“Okay.” Chloe folds her arms across her chest. “Let’s try this again. And please, Will, this time I need you to go with the truth. Who. Were. You. With?”

Will can see that she’s not taking her eyes away from his; she’s watching him intently. She’s not going to miss any detail, any nuance, in this conversation, this confrontation. She must know something.

“And before you answer, Will, I should tell you that I saw you with the blonde at the bar in Hell’s Kitchen.”

Ah—that’s what she knows.

He stares down at the floor of his own private hell’s kitchen. How did Chloe follow him? His surveillance-detection route was complicated, exhaustive, and
she’s
his wife.
Surely he could not have missed his wife following him?
For an hour?
He’s not that inept, is he?

“I, uh…”

He has prepared for this, he has a lie ready. The woman lives in San Francisco, he didn’t want to tell Chloe about the drink—or the coffee or the lunch or the whatever he was doing with Elle, whenever it was he got caught—because he knows he shouldn’t really be seeing this woman, she’s trouble, and their breakup wasn’t clean.

This is designed to be a scenario that makes him wrong, makes him guilty, but that doesn’t make Chloe leave.

“Listen.” He shuts his eyes, pretending to gather his courage, or his concentration. “I’m sorry. Her name is Lillian, and we used to date. She lives in San Fran—”

Smack.

Will doesn’t completely believe that just happened. Did his wife really hit him in the face? Or is he hallucinating?

He holds his hand up to his stinging cheek. Sure enough, that pain is real.

“Strike two, Will. So help me God, if you lie to me a third time, our marriage is
over
. Do you understand?”

No, he doesn’t understand. What is it that Chloe knows? And how? And does he have any alternative to telling Chloe the truth? And if he
does
have an alternative, should he tell her the truth anyway? What exactly is he so worried about?

The worst of it is that he slept with Elle. And that’s pretty goddamned bad. But is that marriage-ending bad? Maybe. Probably? Hard to tell.

What if he omits that damning detail from what’s otherwise a completely true story? Is it a credible story without the sex?

And if Chloe knows enough to be positive that Elle isn’t any ex-girlfriend from California, she might also know enough to be able to identify any part of his lie.

He doesn’t want to lose his wife. He doesn’t have a choice.

“Let’s sit down,” he says. “This is going to sound ridiculous.”

Gabriella shuts the door behind her, walks across Malcolm’s large office, takes a seat.

“Will’s laptop is clean,” she says.

“Do I want to know how you know?” Even as he’s asking the question, he realizes how ridiculous it is.

Gabriella doesn’t even deign to answer. “There’s nothing there that shouldn’t be,” she says. “No
content
, that is.”

“Oh?”

“But he’s not very good about keychain security—”

“Gabs, you know I don’t—”

She holds up her hand. “He uses relatively unprotected passwords. Including for their bank accounts. It looks like they’ve become a lot more solvent in the past few months.”

“A lot?” Malcolm cocks his head. “Well, he did get a raise, but that should be—what?—a couple hundred more per paycheck?”

“It’s more than that. What about Chloe?”

Malcolm doesn’t want to answer. But he knows that if he doesn’t, Gabriella isn’t going to simply drop it. She’ll be a pain in the ass, and she’ll find out sooner or later anyway.

“Yeah. She did a big freelance job.”

“For us?”

“Indirectly.”

Gabriella wants him to explain, but Malcolm isn’t going to. Chloe’s new position is, by necessity, highly compartmentalized information.

“That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

“And I appreciate your understanding, Gabs.”

She scowls. “Okay, I found one other thing: Will has been going to a gym.”

“Good for him.”

“It’s an unregistered gym, Mal, just a guy in a warehouse, and it’s very inconveniently located, rendered even more inconvenient because Will makes sure he’s not being followed when he goes there.”

Oh God, Will too? Why is everybody such a problem? “Wait,” Malcolm says, “let me guess: Rhodes is trying to hide that he’s learning to tap-dance.”

“Mixed martial arts.”

Chloe’s mouth falls open. She’s standing extra-upright, spine straight, shoulders back, one of those stances Will sees all the time now that apparently all women practice yoga regularly, even when they’re not practicing yoga but instead are confronting their husbands with incontrovertible evidence of unacceptable duplicities.

“Well, not a spy, exactly,” he says. “But I am working for the CIA. I was recruited to gather information. About the people I meet, when I’m abroad.”

Will pauses, waiting for his wife to respond. It takes her a few seconds to say, “You understand that this sounds like utter horseshit, right?”

“Yes, Chlo, of course. And that’s exactly why I haven’t told you. But it’s true. The woman you saw me with? She’s my handler. My case officer. I report to her.”

Chloe raises her eyebrows as far as she can. She looks around, as if for physical support, but all she sees is their half-finished kitchen, the centerpiece of their half-finished lives.

“Um, okay. I’ll play along.” But her facial expression doesn’t look as if she’s being magnanimous with her credulity. “When did this begin?”

“A few months ago.”

He has been dreading this moment since he stood in that hallway in St-Émilion, the taste of Elle on his lips, and the possibility—the certainty—that sooner or later, Chloe would find out.

“They recruited me. When I was on a trip.”

“Where?”

“Argentina.”

“How?”

“There were two of them.” He feels his eyes flick away, then back. Damn, she’ll know he’s lying. “A woman who was pretending to be a journalist, she befriended me.”

“
Befriended
you? What does that mean?”

“She was joined by a man. They made me a proposal: money, in exchange for information. That’s where the money has been coming from, Chloe. Ten grand a month. That’s how I got the windows done, and the kitchen…” He gestures around at the significant progress. “And, y’know, other things.”

She crosses her arms, not looking any less dubious. “The CIA is paying you ten thousand dollars a month? To do what?”

“To tell them about the people I come across. The contacts from the
Travelers
files, and my own connections, and the people I meet, the expat Americans, the diplomats, the finance people, the mayors, the actors, the whoevers. Everyone who’s anyone, anywhere.” He watches as she processes this new paradigm.

“Why does the CIA care about any of these people?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they won’t tell me. I’m not supposed to know
why
I’m doing what I’m doing. They’re not paying me to ask questions. They’re paying me to tell them about influential people who live abroad.”

“What about in New York?”

“No, not really.”

“Meaning?”

“They’ve asked about the people who work at
Travelers.
About the office.”

“Have they asked
a lot
about New York?”

“Yeah, actually. About the staff in the office, even the layouts.”

“What about me? Have they asked about me?”

“Yes. I think they’re trying to get a sense of me, my life. How I might get caught, maybe? How I might get manipulated. Honestly, I really don’t know.”

Chloe squints at her husband. “I’m finding this very,
very
difficult to believe.”

“I understand that. I do, of course. But it’s true.”

“Uh-huh. So was it difficult to convince you to do this?”

“No, not really.”

Again she waits for Will to continue, but he doesn’t. He’s trying to tell the truth; he doesn’t want to intersperse lies in there, not if he doesn’t have to.

“Why not?”

“It seemed benign. In fact, it seemed sort of like a good idea. And we needed the money; still do. I didn’t see the harm.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I, uh…” This is one truth he cannot tell, and he has no idea how to answer. He should’ve prepared for this eventuality, he should have coached himself, rehearsed, sounded out the arguments, extended them to their logical conclusions. Why the hell didn’t he anticipate this eventual conversation? Hubris.

“Because they ordered me not to” seems like the best answer.

“Ordered?”

“I should have told you anyway. And I’m very, very sorry.”

She stares at Will, searching his face. “I don’t believe you.”

“About what?”

“About
what
? About
all
of this, Will. About this whole cockamamie story.”

“What do you think is going on?”

Chloe laughs. “I think you’re fucking her, that’s what I think.”

“Then why did we meet in a dumpy bar and then not leave together? What type of tryst is that? Why would we do that?”

“I don’t know, Will, you tell me.”

“Because I’m not fucking her! That’s why. Because I’m working for her.”

Chloe shakes her head.

“But it’s true,” he implores. “I know it sounds ludicrous. But it’s all true. I’m sorry for not telling you before. But I’m telling you now.”

What a catastrophe.

Malcolm has left the frying pan out there with Gabriella, with whatever the hell is going on with Will, and into the fire that’s burning on the computer here in the secret office in the wall.

How did he allow this to happen? How is he going to find out what exactly happened? Does it even matter how?

He hits Rewind, and stops the herky-jerky reverse-action images when his wife gets off the couch. He hits Play, watches her cross the screen, naked. A second after Allison disappears from the frame, here he comes, this guy—who
is
this guy?—practically sprinting across the room, his still-semi-hard dick flopping around, bending down to reach into the pocket of his pants, removing a little something from the cloth. He takes a few quick steps to the desk, in the center of this footage’s frame. He bends over the computer, and inserts that thing—a duplicating device? a worm installation?—into a port in Malcolm’s laptop.

The guy stands there and stares at his watch, the timepieced left hand held up at a right angle, the other on his hip, naked. If this weren’t deadly serious, it might be hilarious, a Monty Python skit, a laugh track, the crowd titters after ten seconds when the man yanks out the drive, chuckles as he replaces the device in his pants pocket, a more full laugh as he leaps back onto the couch. This guy is one athletic motherfucker. A literal motherfucker.