The Travelers (29 page)

“Oh fuck you,” he says, and starts to turn away.

Then two things happen more or less simultaneously: a car screeches to a halt at the curb, with one of its rear doors flying open; and someone grabs him from behind, firmly.

Will tries to turn around, but whoever’s holding him is big, and strong. Will can’t spin, can’t punch, can barely move his arms. Instead, he raises one knee high, then brings down his heel with all his strength, stomping his abductor’s foot. The man’s grasp eases—not a full release, but enough for Will to wriggle his arm semi-free, to thrust back his elbow, which sinks into the man’s gut with a loud “Oof.”

Now Will can spin around. Rears his right arm back, ready—eager—to hit this person—Roger, of course it’s Roger—as hard as he can, again.

But that’s when the woman who calls herself Elle Hardwick punches Will in the face, laying him out for the second time in their brief, tumultuous relationship.

NEW YORK CITY

Will’s hood is yanked off.

He looks around, squinting in the brightness of overhead fluorescents. He’s seated at a conference table, with a complicated-looking phone in the middle. A credenza is stacked with office supplies, a few reams of paper, a box of binder clips.

There are no windows. A dormant LED screen dominates one wall; on another is a framed photograph of the president of the United States; a third wall contains the door, flanked by frosted glass panels. Hanging on the fourth wall is a three-foot-diameter laminated-cardboard circle, blue ringed in gold, an eagle in profile, a white shield with a red starburst, the words
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
across the bottom arc. Along the top,
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
.

Roger is at the far end of the table, holding the felt hood, which had been pulled over Will’s head in the back of the car for a fifteen-minute ride, which felt and sounded like a journey back over the bridge, then onto Manhattan streets, potholes and short stops, a sharp turn then a steep slope, probably the ramp to an underground garage.

At the beginning of the ride, Elle had made a quick phone call. “Sorry to bother you,” she said, “but we’re on our way in.” She then listened for the space of a couple of sentences. “Again, I’m sorry, but it has to be tonight.”

Will was pulled from the car, led to an elevator, a whoosh, a ding. Guided by the elbow to walk thirty paces, with a trio of ninety-degree turns, before being deposited into this chair, and his vision returned, a gift.

Now someone knocks on the door. Roger rises, leans his large frame through the door’s, collects something.

“Here.” Roger gives Will a makeshift icepack, paper towels cinched with a rubber band. Will brings this up to his face, to his nose, which he now realizes is bleeding; his lip seems to be split; and it feels like a tooth might be loose. It’s almost funny: these people keep punching him in the face, then giving him ice.

Ten minutes later, the door opens. Elle walks in, followed by an unfamiliar man who’s wearing a suit but no tie.

“Will Rhodes,” the man says, “I understand that you have, uh,
adamantly requested
to meet C/O Hardwick’s supervisor. Correct?”

Will glances at Elle, who’s taking a seat at the far end of the table. She doesn’t speak, but she does make a face that says, Well, go ahead, you asked for this.

“That’s right.”

“My name is Mike Russell.” Holding out his hand. “Pleasure to meet you.”

Will shakes the guy’s hand without getting out of his seat. “Are you going to tell me your job title?” Will puts down the ice pack. “Give me your business card?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“And if I call the CIA tomorrow, and ask to speak to Mike Russell? Are they going to put me through to your line?”

“That’s not the way it works, Mr. Rhodes.”

This Mike character is wearing an ill-fitting suit, taupe, low-cut single-lapel, two-button. It’s a starkly unfashionable suit, a poorly paid bureaucrat’s suit, ninety-nine dollars at one of those discount emporiums that surround the bureaucracies’ offices. It’s a caricature of a bad suit.

“You want something to drink, Mr. Rhodes? Some water?” Mike indicates his own plastic bottle, a sweating little price sticker at the neck, $1.29, a corner-deli bottle.

Will shakes his head.

Mike sits down, halfway between Will and Elle, who says, “I’m afraid I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

Will snorts, no shit.

“I’ve given you the impression that you were recruited to provide info about the people you meet during your travels abroad. People who might turn out to be valuable intelligence targets. Well, that’s part of the story. A small part. Actually, it’s an insignificant
part of what we really want from you, Will.”

Will glances again at Mike. It’s unclear whether the guy’s shirt was at one point white or whether it’s supposed to be this color, a sort of washed-out yellowish gray. It’s a hideous shirt, under a cheap suit. The type of outfit that a Hollywood wardrobe department would create for a central-casting character one-word-described as
loser.

And from this angle, it seems that Mike is sporting a once-pierced earlobe, which doesn’t really go with the rest of the persona. But everybody had his youth.

“The real target of our operation—
your
operation, Will—is much closer to home, and much more finite: it’s
Travelers
.”

Will can feel his eyebrows climb his forehead.

“We recruited you because you were new to the magazine. So we knew you hadn’t yet been admitted to the inner circle. You didn’t really know what was going on, and you weren’t yet fully invested in feeding the beast.”

“Huh?”

“Organizations are like organisms, Will. They have deeply ingrained survival instincts. Which isn’t surprising, is it? After all, organizations are made up of people, and people are motivated by self-interest. We’re all self-preservationists. First and foremost, what people want is what’s best for themselves. We want to survive, we want to flourish. We get jobs, then we develop loyalty to our employers, and our loyalty helps our employers achieve success, which in turn helps us people survive. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I work for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Will. I’m loyal to the Agency, not just because the CIA does important work, for an important cause, but because it provides my livelihood. I want the Agency to succeed, because that’s how I survive.”

The ice begins to burn.

“I’m sure Malcolm Somers feels the same way about
Travelers.
He’s been working there a long time. Gabriella Rivera too. I have no doubt both of them are loyal to
Travelers,
because their loyalty helps the magazine stay in business, which helps them survive. You follow?”

“This isn’t exactly quantum theory.”

“Sometimes, our divergent goals of self-preservation put us into conflict with one another. You can assign value judgments to these conflicts, or not. But moral or ethical opinions don’t change the essence of the situation, which is conflict. Simple. Universal.”

“Are you going to get to the point anytime soon?”

“You got somewhere you need to be, Will? Date night with the wife?”

“Fuck you very much.”

Will thinks he catches Mike suppress a smile.

“You’re very welcome,” Elle says. “So the CIA and
Travelers
are in conflict with each other, Will. Because one of these organizations is a governmental agency that collects and analyzes intelligence that’s essential to the national security of the United States of America. And the other is sort of the opposite.”

The secret office has no windows, no natural light, no time of day, no year. It’s buffered from the world by the more public office, the big airy light-filled room lined with shelves packed with books, and walls decorated with blowups of magazine covers, and the Wall itself, a forty-square-foot schematic of the future.

But not in here. This little room is the past, just as it has always been, since the inception of
Travelers
three-quarters of a century ago. A place to communicate with one other place, a space invented for one man to talk to one other man.

“My problems,” Malcolm says, “seem to be multiplying.”

“Tell me what you need to solve them.”

“I need to bring Rhodes inside.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“It’s necessary.”

“What if he balks? Decides to talk?”

Malcolm would like to say something along the lines of “We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it,” but that’s not the way this world works. “We’ll detain him. Until he changes his mind.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“I know what we need to do.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“All right. When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Not tonight?”

Tonight there’s a piano recital that Malcolm has to attend, a command performance to make up for one he had to miss, months ago. Sylvie has begun using the pedals as well as both hands. He can’t reschedule.

“Tomorrow,” Malcolm says, “will be better.”

There’s a complex lie he could tell to justify this statement, but better not to, unless he’s asked. He’s not.

“That’s preposterous.”

“Is it really, Will?” Elle stares at him for a second, perhaps waiting for an answer. Then she continues, “Do you carry sealed envelopes across international borders? Envelopes stamped
Personal and Confidential
?”

“No one would hide anything in envelopes that scream out
secrets!
”

“Oh no? Isn’t that exactly where it might make sense to hide something? And you’ve given these envelopes to people you don’t know. People in Paris and Dublin and Stockholm, in Berlin and Athens. People in
Cairo
, Will. In
Beirut
.”

Will still doesn’t say anything.

“Some of these envelopes come back. And you’re under strict orders to deliver them directly to Somers, and to Somers only. Why, Will? If these are human-resources forms, why not deliver them to human resources? Why is the editor-in-chief serving as an intermediary between foreign personnel and HR?”

Elle seems to be waiting for an answer to this question. “I don’t know.”

“I do: because what’s in the envelopes doesn’t have anything to do with HR forms.”

“Then what
is
in the envelopes?”

“What do you think, Will?”

“
I
don’t know.”

Elle stares, waiting for Will to hazard a guess.

“What do you people want me to say?” he asks. “This is your ridiculous theory.”

“How do you think
Travelers
stays in business? Ad pages are off by forty percent in the past five years. Subscriptions dropped by half. Newsstand sales…?
Pfft
. The business is in free fall. Yet there have been no budget cuts,
have there? Is there something in particular that you think
Travelers
is doing right that all other magazines are doing wrong? Some special way that your employer—a
print magazine
, with an ancillary business in
bricks-and-mortar
travel agencies
—is maintaining profitability?”

Will doesn’t know. The business of the business is not his business.

“And let’s for a minute consider Malcolm Somers himself. Your boss seems to have more money than a magazine editor should, don’t you think? That’s a fancy apartment he lives in, when he’s not at his summer house in the Hamptons.”

“That’s just a rent—”

“His wife hasn’t worked in—what?—a decade? Yet two children in private school. You know what the tuition is, Will? Forty-three K per year, per kid. Those must be some
good
lunches.”

Will always assumed there was another source of income. Maybe Allison came from money? Personal finance is not something Will ever discusses, not even with his own wife.

“And what about Gabriella? She’s at a professional level that’s similar to yours, so I’d expect her to be earning about what you earn. But she has a more exalted job title, so maybe a little more?”

Will is not going to give Elle the satisfaction of agreeing with her. But she’s right.

“Yet she too seems to be living a lifestyle that’s notably different from yours. Big apartment—
huge
—on the Upper East Side. No debt.”

Will knows that her apartment is somehow connected to her dead husband’s family; it’s affordable for some reason. Or maybe that’s just what Gabs has always claimed…?

“But you, Will? You live in a house that I think may actually be
condemned
. Is it?”

Will doesn’t answer.

“In a neighborhood in Brooklyn that—let’s face it—is a borderline slum. Plus you’re up to your eyeballs in debt. Why should this be? This
gap
between your lifestyle and Gabriella’s?”

Elle waits for an answer. Or waits for these details to sink in, to form a narrative.

“Are you getting a clearer picture, Will?”

Will catches movement from Mike, who’s merely checking his wristwatch, a guy dragged out of his life to sit here and bear witness to a meeting. Will can barely make out the time on the white face of the watch, pale numbers, delicate hands: it’s about a quarter to nine. He can’t read the maker’s name, but the logo looks like J. Lindeberg’s, the
J
and the
L
back-to-back mirror images,
JL
. Mike doesn’t seem like the type of guy who’d wear a watch from a Swedish youth-oriented fashion label. It must be something else.