The Travelers (27 page)

Uproarious laugh, sustained applause, but then it dies down as we await the return of the clueless cuckolder, the woman who was seduced to be taken advantage of. Whatever reasons that compelled Allison to sleep with this man, whatever sadness and disappointment and dissatisfaction were behind that decision, this reality is worse, exponentially worse, immeasurably heartbreaking. The audience absorbs this reality, grows silent. Someone coughs.

There’s almost no negative emotion that Malcolm isn’t feeling.

He stares at the wall, at that outdated world map, his eyes hopping around all those cities and countries that don’t matter anymore. Bulgaria? It’s hard to believe that Bulgaria was once considered critical to America, a domino that needed to be propped upright. And now? Now what’s important to America? Is there even such a construct anymore? Or is there only what’s important to Halliburton or ExxonMobil, to Microsoft or Apple, to Coca-Cola and Walmart.

Does anybody care? Does Malcolm?

Or is there only what’s important to Malcolm Somers? Which is this, now.

Malcolm picks up the landline, the big clunky handset attached by an accordion cord to the heavy base, a touch-tone keypad, a little protruding nub to release the connection. He dials the long string of digits, the call he’s been dreading. As each day has gone by, Malcolm has become more and more certain he’d have to make this call, while at the same time more and more unwilling to actually do it until he was 100 percent. So in the meantime he’d had his apartment swept—clean—by a pair of guys pretending to be measuring radon levels, and he has been checking the video feed obsessively, three, four times per day. And he’s been keeping a fairly close eye on his wife. But he can no longer keep this to himself. That’s the type of dishonesty that gets people like Malcolm killed.

“Yes?”

“Hi,” Malcolm says. “I’ve been compromised.”

Malcolm can hear the man sigh audibly. “By?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Silence.

“Data has been stolen from my home computer.”

“Oh sweet Jesus.”

Malcolm reaches back into his memory, plucks out the coded phrase that he’d never before had occasion to use, not in this context. “It’s an unmitigated disaster,” he says.

This phone is supposedly as secure a landline as exists in the world, but Malcolm doesn’t believe there’s any such thing as a totally secure phone line, just as there’s no such thing as a secure email, a secure digital file, a secure computer. Which is the whole point of all of this, of everything.

Nor for that matter a totally secure marriage.

The man doesn’t respond to this code, but Malcolm has to assume that he understands what’s being communicated. That’s the way codes work, and you can’t double-check that they’re working as intended.

“Do you have any idea how this happened?”

“Oh, I know exactly how.”

“Has that problem been solved?”

“Er, not exactly. That problem is complex.”

“Aren’t they all?”

Malcolm doesn’t want to explain the problem. “No,” he says, “the problem has not been solved. But it is being managed. Monitored.”

“Hmm.”

“Seriously, I’ve got it.”

“You’ll ask for help if you need it?”

“I will. But it’s under control.”

“Are you sure? It doesn’t sound like it.”

Yes, Malcolm thinks, I’m sure: I’m sure I’m lying. Nothing is under control; nothing is ever under control. But if there’s one thing Malcolm has learned, it’s that no one wants to hear this, ever. “Yes,” he says, “I’m sure.”

ÞINGVELLIR, ICELAND

Over the course of his career, the American had occasion to use a variety of aliases. It had been challenging to remember what name he was supposed to use when, where, with whom. He always used generic American names, the one-syllable abridgements of biblical figures, Jim and Tom, Matt and Mike. But recently it had been Joe, an Average Joe, which was not him at all, and part of the private humor of it.

Joe is probably what he’ll be till he dies. It is refreshing, relaxing, to not have to think about how to answer “What’s your name?”

“I’m Joe,” he says to the young woman with a camera. “Nice to meet you.”

They are standing in the seam between the tectonic plates of North America and Eurasia, a deep wide fissure between giant pieces of planet. On one side, the plate stretches all the way to the west coast of North America; on the other, the mass is uninterrupted till the Pacific Rim of Asia. Earthquakes rock California and Japan because these two plates here, on this volcanic protrusion jutting out of the North Atlantic, are pulling apart. The rift he’s standing in widens every year, and so does the island, growing incrementally, accompanied by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, by massive disturbances to the geological peace, all for the sake of a few millimeters per year.

This spot is also the site of the world’s very first parliament, established
A.D. 
930, a settlement with a church, hiking trails, bridges over the waters of Lake Þingvallavatn. It’s photogenic here. There are always tourists, even in crappy weather like today. There’s a lot of crappy weather in Iceland.

When he doesn’t live in a bustling Scandinavian city, he lives in the middle of Scandinavian nowhere. And he occasionally visits places like this, or the capital, or the geyser. He is always researching or rehearsing escape routes, contingency plans, alternative exits. He has no job, no responsibilities, other than to keep himself alive. He is fairly confident that one day, someone will come for him. Every single day, he wakes up prepared for that one day to be today.

NEW YORK CITY

The note is simple:

Need time to think. Gone to visit Mom. —C

Will flings aside the paper, which flutters past his wife’s unoccupied pillow in a miasma of dust particles, a miniature little snowstorm in the bright early-morning sunlight.

He’d been up half the night, worried about what his wife was going to end up doing, or saying. After a certain point she’d been unwilling to continue talking about it, unwilling to listen to Will try to prove he was telling the truth, unwilling to absorb the details of his meetings, his countersurveillance training, his operations in Europe. He possessed so very much proof that he was a CIA asset, but she was unwilling to let him provide it.

“Stop,” she’d said. “Enough. I’m going to bed.”

“May I come?”

She’d stared at him, making it clear that she was debating it. “I don’t want to continue talking about this. And I hope it’s obvious that you’re not welcome to touch me.”

He’d tossed and turned till two, maybe three, before falling into fitful sleep. But apparently not fitful enough to notice Chloe wake up, get out of bed, pack a bag, and walk out the door.

His wife had left him.

Chloe had always been a leaver, fleeing confrontations, fleeing uncomfortable situations, fleeing parties and movies and picnics, anything that she wasn’t enjoying. She apparently used to flee relationships too, at the first sign of trouble; she admitted fleeing from a couple of one-night stands, disappearing in the wee hours, and for one—in college—she actually climbed out of a window.

But she wouldn’t flee a marriage, would she?

Chloe would come back. Or Will would go get her.

It has been a long time since Malcolm waited for a weekend-schedule F train, which seems to be inhabited almost exclusively by men with beards.
Hey, guys w big bushy beards!
He two-thumbed-types.
We get it – you’re virile! Enough already. Time to shave.

It’s a slow ride, followed by a long, hot, monotonous walk from the station. He has plenty of time to consider what to do about the Allison aspect of her adultery.

What he really wants is to contrive to catch her in the act. Outrage—“Oh my God! What’s going on here?!” But that might get violent. Plus her lover—ugh, he really hates that word—would then obviously know that they’d been caught, and might suspect that in actuality they’d been caught earlier, and wonder what that might mean…So that’s not a great plan. Instead:

One: he could simply ask her. “Are you having an affair?” She’d deny it to Malcolm, but after the confrontation she’d be worried, she’d have doubts. She’d end up saying, “My husband suspects something, I’m sorry, I can’t do this anymore…”

Two: Malcolm could try to bring about the affair’s conclusion from the male side of the equation. He could probably figure out some indirect way to dissuade this guy from continuing this relationship.

Three: he could ignore it. Hope that the affair will fizzle of its own accord, as these things probably do. Except when they don’t, when they evolve into something else.

But that won’t happen with this affair: it’s not possible that Allie will leave Malcolm, even if she wants to. This is perhaps the most degrading element of this whole situation, which is degrading on so many levels: the guy doesn’t even want Allison. When he’s finished with her—and for all Malcolm knows, the guy may be finished with her already, having already attempted to hack Malcolm’s computer—he’s going to toss her away. Will she be brokenhearted? Mildly disappointed? Are things going to get better for her? Worse?

Allison is gone for the weekend, out in Bridgehampton with the children and their activities, their play dates, kids in swimming pools, moms in rosé. In a week all three of them will move out east for the duration of the summer, surfing camp and tennis lessons, benefits at the library and the museum, parties for the horse show and the celebrity softball game. Maybe her affair will wither in the neglect of the hot summer sun.

This weekend, Malcolm begged off going east. “I’m sorry. I’ve fallen behind, and we’re closing on Wednesday
.
” He could see her suppress a giant shrug. The extent to which Allison gives a shit is limited to the minuscule embarrassment of her husband’s absence from whoever’s catered dinner party is on Saturday night. Tonight.

On the other hand, many in Allison’s crowd of Hamptons housewives basically compete about their husbands’ relative importance. Weekends “trapped in the city” are offered as evidence of the man’s exalted position in the firmament—a deal closing, a trial. In the midst of all the standard-issue Wall Street, Malcolm knows that Allison relishes being able to say, “He has to close an issue,” accruing a certain social currency via her husband’s marginally creative career. It’s what she has instead of actual currency.

Malcolm wonders if this is part of what’s bothering his wife: their relative lack of money. Money is nothing if not relative.

The idea of solvency reminds him to call Will; Malcolm has to get to the bottom of that. No answer. “Hey Rhodes, I’m in town this weekend, want to get a drink? Call me back.”

Malcolm surveys the massive complex of baseball diamonds and soccer fields, small portable grills and big orange coolers, taco trucks and shaved-ice carts, toddlers running around shrieking, red-faced middle-aged men leaning against chain-link fences clutching tallboys wrapped in crinkled brown bags, and everywhere the sounds of games, referee whistles and the cracks of bats, the groans of teammates and the cheers of spectators, and grown men in brightly colored soccer shorts and dingy dirty baseball pants, and nowhere in these fifty acres—in the geographical center of the most populous English-speaking city in the world—is anyone speaking a word of English.

PROVIDENCE

When the train pulls out of the station, the wi-fi connection revives itself, solid arcs on her laptop’s icon, and Chloe is able to complete her purchase, a round-trip ticket to Punta Cana, sugar-sand beaches and bath-temperature seawater, towering palms and frozen cocktails. It’s an unlikely destination for midsummer travelers from the American Northeast, so the plane tickets and hotel room are inexpensive.

She types in her Trusted Traveler number, her passport number, her telephone number. When it comes to her emergency contact, she automatically starts to type Will’s mobile number, then pauses, her fingers hovering—

No. She backspaces to the beginning.

FALLS CHURCH

As it turns out, Raji’s health insurance isn’t nearly as ironclad as he’d been led to believe. The HMO is now asserting that Raji’s heart problem is a preexisting condition, which of course is true. But isn’t nearly everything, in some way, a preexisting condition?

So Raji is now working for his thirteenth straight day, trying to amass overtime, to pay for the procedure. It has been easier to get OT approved since his watch list was winnowed down, with a vastly increased level of thoroughness. It’s a lot of work, at all hours, every day.

And this particular woman? She began her day very early, entering the New York City subway system via a MetroCard that she’d purchased a week earlier using an American Express card. Twenty-one minutes later, at Pennsylvania Station, she purchased a one-way Amtrak ticket to Portland, Maine. Aboard the train, she registered her computer with the wi-fi provider, then bought a plane ticket for a few days in the future, which are the details that Raji enters now:

U.S. passport number: 10414962

Flight: 83 BOS to GUA

Ticket category: D2

Seat: 39D

Alert code: 2

Raji pulls up this woman’s image on the screen. He remembers her from when he first started working here, tracking untrusted travelers, a couple of years ago. This woman used to travel a lot more, all over the world. But then she cut back dramatically, just a couple of international trips in the past year. Raji wondered what had happened to her, if she was okay. He’s relieved to see her on the move again.

She books a room at an all-inclusive resort. The hotel takes care of airport transfers, so Raji doesn’t expect that she’ll book ground transportation, and she probably won’t rent a car. For some trips, there can be a lot of reservations, a lot of deposits, a lot of prepaid—

Raji suddenly realizes something strange about her previous international trip. He does a quick search to confirm, then sits there staring at his screen, trying to figure it out.

He exits his cubicle. Halfway to Brock’s office, he pauses, thinking through again, reconsidering, but this time from another viewpoint: what’s in it for him? Why should he go out of his way, above and beyond the call? Open himself up to being wrong? To criticism? Or conversely to pressure, to a rush, to anxiety? Why? He has plenty of other problems.

He stands in the taupe corridor, surrounded by all this blandness, all these bland people doing all this bland work, his bland life. He turns back to his bland cubicle. To hell with them, he thinks. To hell with this.

Then he changes his mind again. He doesn’t have it in him to shirk responsibilities, even if no one gives a damn.

“Boss?” He raps on the door, soft knuckles.

Brock looks up, a scowl, interrupted from doing whatever the hell Brock does in here, which everyone suspects is watch porn, all day, every day.

“What’s up, Raj-man?”

“I think I found something.”

NEW YORK CITY

Stonely takes a few handfuls of ice cubes from the beer cooler. He puts the ice into a plastic deli bag, cinches a knot. He swings the bag against the fencepost, and again, a third time, crushing the ice, while glancing beyond the chain-link fence, taking a mental inventory of teammates, opponents, friends who are about to see him interact with this dude whom it’s impossible not to notice.

He presses this icepack against his aching misshapen finger, which he broke halfway through his second year at Triple-A, the season when he had his best shot, but not if he sat on the DL for two months. He’d known immediately that this finger was broken. But he refused to admit it, and just kind of hoped the finger would heal itself. It didn’t, of course. So when he eventually owned up to it, people started calling him Stonely, based on this ridiculous lie, this bogus macho, when it was really just fear and denial, aka being a pussy, which is the opposite of being hard as a stone-faced killer.

When the following season ended, riding the bus back from Toledo, he knelt beside Coach, sitting at the front, surrounded by paperwork. “Hey skip, I was wondering if you’d write me a recommendation letter?”

After a long-ass Greyhound-bus ride—from Louisville through Cincinnati and Columbus and Philly, twenty hours—and a few weeks of looking, he landed a temp job in a mailroom, then started taking computer classes. He got promoted, and promoted again. That was thirteen years ago.

“Hey boss. You came out to Brooklyn ’cause you need baseball but the Yanks are in Baltimore and you hate the Mets?”

Malcolm’s smile is the sort of a guy about to deliver bad news.

“You remember last year, Stonely, I asked you to take care of that thing?”

Stonely looks down at his dirty pants, his spikes, the mangy grass. There’s a cigarette butt down there, and a crushed piece of plastic that might be the cap to a crack vial. “Sure. How could I forget.”

“Well, I need you to do that again. Same type of thing.”

Stonely looks Malcolm Somers in the eye. He doesn’t like being a brown-skinned dude being hired by a white-skinned dude to commit a crime. But Stonely needs this job, and Malcolm is the one who keeps him in it, and Stonely likes Malcolm. Plus he could use the extra money. So of course he’s going to do it. But still, he doesn’t have to like it. That’s what makes it a job. “Who is it?”

“Some asshole who’s fucking my wife.”

Stonely can’t hide the look of surprise. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

“You sure this is a good idea, boss?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

Stonely doesn’t want this. But although Malcolm has a choice, now that Malcolm has made it, Stonely really doesn’t. “When?”