The Travelers (33 page)

He’s missing something, he’s sure of it. He turns back to the beginning.

Malcolm leaves a message—“Hey Will, Malcolm here, about that drink tonight: can we make it six o’clock? I’m out of the office for a couple hours, call me on my cell.”

The car stops on a busy corner in East Midtown. Hector cranes his neck around, looking at the busy intersection. “You sure this is it, boss?”

“Yes, thanks Hector, this is it,” Malcolm says. “See you tomorrow.”

Malcolm climbs out of the car, turns the corner onto the side street, and climbs again into the silver SUV, which has another of Stonely’s guys behind the wheel. Malcolm doesn’t know this guy’s name.

They drive down the river, over a bridge, into Brooklyn on an expressway. After a few miles they exit to traffic-free surface streets, bombed-out buildings, empty warehouses, vacant lots. The truck pulls to a stop in front of a decrepit row house, the front door plastered with stickers proclaiming
CONDEMNED
and
ORDER OF SHERIFF
, draped with a chained padlock.

Malcolm climbs out. In the distance he can see the full length of Manhattan’s skyline, even the top of his own apartment building. That’s a different city. Far more people live in this one.

He walks around to the rear of the building, a trash-strewn yard with the unlikely inclusion of a porta potty. Bangs on the reinforced steel door with the side of his fist, boom-boom. Sees the flash of the peephole before he hears the locks unclicking, a heavy deadbolt sliding, the squeak of the door opening.

A large man stands in the small, dark, tight vestibule, next to a barstool, with an electrical outlet occupied by a cell-phone charger, the phone itself on the floor; everybody everywhere is charging a cell phone. Alonso relocks the outer door, then uses a key to open the inner one.

Malcolm steps inside, and the door closes behind him with a firm slam, then click-clack-thud, locked again.

The windowless basement is spare, utilitarian. A boiler looms in the corner, with a hot-water heater, a big tank for something, all these pipes disconnected. A couple of buckets, a mop, electrical boxes spewing ganglia of frayed wires, a rubber garbage can.

In the middle, under a bare bulb, the guy who has been calling himself Steven Roberts is sitting on a wooden chair. His arms are bound to his body, his legs at the ankles and knees, all with copious lengths of duct tape. There’s something in his mouth that looks like balled-up sweatsocks, held in place with more duct tape, which has a smear of blood on it that spilled, apparently, from his right nostril. His shoes and socks have been removed.

“Hi,” Malcolm says. “My name is Malcolm Somers.”

Steven’s eyes widen in terror. A few feet in front of him is a folding table.

“As you are no doubt aware, you’ve been fucking my wife. I don’t blame you for that. My wife is a very attractive woman, isn’t she?”

The guy can’t answer, of course.

“Should I call you Steven? Or is that a name you use only with Allison?”

The guy watches Malcolm walk to the folding table, look down at the items arrayed across the surface, an assortment of tools, a hammer, wire cutters, a wrench, pliers.

“Honestly, Steven, I guess I’d fuck her too, if I were you.”

Malcolm picks up the wire cutters, holds them to his face. Watches the mechanism as he squeezes the handles. Puts down this tool, fingers the others. He picks up the hammer, hefts it, feeling the weight of the tool, its balance.

Steven has been sitting in this basement for three hours, with this table of tools in his field of vision, impossible to ignore. No one has said a word to him. He has been forced to imagine all the ways that his life can become a horror show, all the terrible disgusting things that can be done to his body parts with a hammer. With
pliers.
He has seen things on TV, in movies, maybe read them in congressional reports, maybe he’s heard rumors about them in real life, or even witnessed these things firsthand. Malcolm wouldn’t be completely surprised if this guy had participated in an enhanced interrogation before, from the other side.

Before he ever entered this room, and saw this table, this man already possessed an immense capacity to visualize the horrors that might be visited upon him by common household tools. The past hours have amplified that capacity. And now that he understands who has abducted him, he also has a pretty clear idea which of his body parts are likely to be targeted.

“In any case”—Malcolm starts walking toward him, the hammer hanging at his side—“this, um, fucking of my wife? That’s not why you’re here, Steven. That’s not your crime.”

Malcolm stops in front of the guy, eyes popping, squirming beneath his duct tape. “You know why you’re here, don’t you?”

Steven shakes his head.

“Of course you do. We both know that you know why you’re here. So what is it we’re here to find out?”

He continues to shake his head, more vigorously.

“I get the feeling you’re not going to make this easy, are you?”

Still head-shaking.

“That’s too bad, Steven. Then sorry to say, neither am I.”

NEW YORK CITY

The city can look gigantic, eight-million-plus people, an overwhelming volume of life, of noise, of skyscrapers and traffic and the incessant collisions of worlds. But every metropolis is also a collection of small villages, some of them geographical, some professional, some social, some overlapping.

The women Will has dated in New York all lived inside his discrete little villages. He didn’t go out with bankers or lawyers, with professors or doctors, with bus drivers or jewelry designers or elementary-school teachers. With one exception, every single woman Will went to bed with was college-educated, white, born in the seventies or eighties, living in Manhattan or Brooklyn, working in media or hospitality.

These villages aren’t hugely populous. So Will runs into them all the time, the women he has slept with. Sometimes he finds himself literally surrounded by them, at parties or conferences, around someone’s big dinner table in Brownstone Brooklyn.

Here comes one right now. This one, however, is the exception.

Will tries to remember what he was feeling when they met. Did he really believe that he was in love-at-first-sight with this woman? Does he remember correctly, that he was walking around France, lost in romantic reveries about the way she arched her eyebrow? How could he have been so goddamned delusional? He’ll never trust his penis again.

“Hi Will,” she says. She leans in, left-cheek kiss, right-cheek kiss, old friends, great to see you. Elle is carrying a cavernous bag that she drops on the floor next to Will’s canvas satchel and a plastic shopping bag from a drugstore, one of those chains you can’t walk three blocks without seeing. The streets of New York are beginning to look like a variation on the suburban four-lane thoroughfare, retail chains repeating one after another, an endless loop, up and down America’s clogged arteries.

“Everything okay with you?” she asks, perching herself on a barstool. “You had a good day at the office?”

“Nothing went wrong, if that’s what you’re asking.”

She laughs, probably for the benefit of other people.

The bartender asks if she wants something. “No thanks,” she says, “I was just saying hi,” They have nothing to talk about. This is not a debrief, not now. This is a handoff. “Nice running into you, Will.”

“And you.”

She leans down, collects her big handbag, as well as the ubiquitous drugstore bag, with the very unusual hard drive inside.

Well, he thinks, that was anticlimactic. Was that really the upshot of this whole convoluted operation? This wrecking of his entire life?

He assumes Elle will be bringing this package downtown straightaway, to her office, to whatever building they kidnapped him to last night, probably down near the other government buildings. It’s rush-hour busy out there on the streets, so she’ll probably take the subway, maybe a half-dozen stops, then perhaps a couple of blocks on foot. Fifteen minutes, twenty, before she plugs in the external drive. He doesn’t know how long it’s then going to take for her to fully examine the contents. Five minutes? Three days? But after she does, she’s going to be angry, and she’s going to come looking for him.

He doesn’t have much time. Nowhere near enough for him to run a proper surveillance-detection route, nor for that matter even a half-assed SDR. Will has insufficient time to detect surveillance. He needs to elude it.

SCARBOROUGH, MAINE

Chloe climbs down the attic’s folding stairs toting the dusty old backpack. It has been years—more than a decade—since she used the bag. Chloe still keeps things in her mom’s attic. Maybe this is what it means to not be fully grown-up.

She doesn’t want to bring a roll-aboard suitcase for the trip she’s undertaking; that’s not the type of traveler she wants to look like. She hoses down the backpack in the backyard, props it against a trellis to dry.

“I just need to get away, Mom. I’m going to spend a few days at a resort in the Dominican Republic—it’s practically free, this time of year—and then I’ll backpack. I’ve never been to Haiti.”

Chloe doesn’t have any intention of going anywhere near the Dominican Republic or Haiti. A few months ago she procured two passports for this type of clandestine travel. She ended up burning one of them in a trash can in Istanbul; the other is in her pocket.

“Just tell me if I can help. And please call sometime? Let me know you’re alive?”

That was going to be hard, maybe impossible. “I’ll try” is what Chloe says. “But don’t hold your breath.”

“All marriages have their problems, sweetheart.”

Chloe doesn’t respond to her mom’s daytime-television platitudes. Connie had never seemed like she would become the type of retired person who’d spend too much time watching TV, but she has.

“I’d be surprised if your problems are unique, or insurmountable.”

NEW YORK CITY

This is how a long-term operation can happen: it looks as if it’ll go on forever—the months or years of planning, the interminable setup, the slow build of execution. Then one day something transpires, and, boom, it’s over. For this op, that something may have just transpired; that one day could be today.

It has been a long year, and it began right here, just a few blocks away, where Elle spent a lonely night in a chain hotel in an unremarkable neighborhood. She’d been to the city only once before in her life, didn’t know her way around, didn’t much like the place, didn’t want to try. The world was already populated with plenty of people who were awestruck by New York; the city didn’t need another groupie.

The meeting was set for eleven
A.M.
, but the location was unspecified until ten, when she received a text message with the name and address of a hotel, a room number.

She walked to the part of town that occupies a large space in the world’s consciousness, where the greenery of Central Park meets the commerce of Fifth Avenue, horse-drawn carriages and sidewalk caricaturists, a golden statue and a tiered fountain and the Plaza Hotel, hordes of out-of-towner teenage girls posing for selfies in front of Abercrombie & Fitch, dowagers tottering into Bergdorf’s to finger seven-thousand-dollar off-the-rack evening dresses.

It was immediately clear that this hotel was no normal level of swank, even though she’d never heard of it. Elle was familiar with only those New York hotels that appear in popular contemporary movies.

At the door, a black-suited bodyguard stood in a familiar pose. She wondered if this guy had been in the Sandbox at the same time as she had, if he too had returned stateside unprepared for twenty-first-century civilian employment, disillusioned by the disconnect between the military’s promise of highly valued workplace skills and the private sector’s actual valuation of those skills. So he’d secured himself one of the few available jobs that valued his particular skill set, with a concealed-carry permit and a bulletproof vest.

The bodyguard maintained a permanent grimace while he frisked her, then opened the door.

There’s a certain type of good-looking man with perfect everything—perfect tailoring and skintone, perfect hair and shoeshine, posture and physique, smiling with a surfeit of white teeth and undisguised, untempered confidence, men who pay super-close attention to many details of their personal appearance. For women, it seems like the requirement is to try to look as good as you can look, seems like
not
making that effort is the contrarian statement. For men, though, Elle has always thought that the hyper-grooming is the exceptional statement, the aberration. She finds something appalling about these men.

This was one such man who was standing on the threshold, saying, “Thank you for coming.” He closed the door behind Elle. “And thank you for your discretion.”

She looked around the suite, which seemed to have been decorated by Liberace. “May I ask a question: Why are we meeting in New York? Isn’t your office in Washington?”

Even before Elle had gotten the summons from his minion, before she’d followed up with hours of research, she’d already seen this man’s face plenty of times, seen this smile again and again; he was well known. But still, she was unprepared for the brilliance of it, the quantity and alignment and brightness of his teeth, the shape of his mouth and the fullness of his lips, the squareness of his jaw. Elle had seen her fair share of extremely handsome men over the years, had even taken a couple of them to bed. But theirs had all been the attractiveness of youth and strength and toughness, and here this guy was in his mid-forties, none of those things, but still disarmingly good-looking.

“In a way, my office is a very public place. In fact, all of Washington is a small, gossipy town. But New York? New York can be very private, if you make a little effort.”

Elle suddenly questioned the advisability of being in a hotel suite with a powerful man who had an armed bodyguard at the door.

“Plus what I have in mind would take place, mostly, here in New York. Mine is a project that will need a very specific type of manager, with not only a specific background and specific expertise, but also specific, uh, physical characteristics. You come very highly recommended. So highly, in fact, that you’re the only candidate I’m currently interviewing.”

“I appreciate your confidence,” Elle said, but she didn’t. Flattery like this called into question everything else. “But do you want to tell me what the hell you’re talking about?”

He laughed. “No getting-to-know-you small talk for you, huh?”

“I’m pretty sure you’ve already gotten to know me, or I wouldn’t be here. And you won’t be surprised that I’ve gotten to know you.”

“Be that as it may. I don’t know everything I want to know.”

“Oh no?”

“Why’d you get kicked out of the CIA?”

“Who says I got kicked out?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Do you want to tell me why I’m here? Or should I leave now?”

He smiled patiently, leaned forward, looking earnest. “I’m in the middle stages of engineering the purchase of a group of magazines.”

“Yes. The American Periodical Group.”

He smiled. “That’s right. You’ve been reading the financial-gossip mills?”

“You don’t think I subscribe to
Forbes
? Just because I’m a broke blond thirty-two-year-old jarhead yokel?”

Elle had gone to two years of college, but she’d consistently discovered that the things she’d wanted to learn were not the things being taught in class; she preferred an autodidactic education, staying up all night to pursue one obsession or another, absorbing everything, then moving on.

“No, I don’t think you read
Forbes
because it’s for business professionals, and you’re not one. Just as I wouldn’t expect a cardiovascular surgeon or a rocket scientist or a Nobel-laureate mathematician to read
Forbes
. It’s not because those people are stupid.”

“Well, you’re right. I don’t read
Forbes
. But I did.”

“Then I guess you know that if this deal ends up going through, it’ll cost me somewhere north of two billion dollars.”

“Well.” She smirked. “
Cost
you?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It’s not as if you’re cutting a personal check for two billion dollars, money that you scrimped and saved, taking the bus, eating jam sandwiches. I know how the world works.”

“Please. Enlighten me.”

“You’re taking two billion dollars that you’ve borrowed from individual and institutional investors in the form of stock offerings and bank loans, on the backs of favorable regulations and legislation enacted by elected representatives to whom people like you contribute considerable sums to finance their campaigns so they can hold office and help you gain access to vast amounts of public and private money, of which you’re reallocating two billion dollars from one corporate entity over which you exert control to another over which you’d like to. But it’s not really your money—hell, it’s not even really money
—
and you’re not really spending it.”

He stared at her for a second. “Okay, I’ll put it another way,” he said, undeterred. “I’m responsible for overseeing a multibillion-dollar business transaction, affecting the livelihood of thousands of people. Would you agree that this is a fair description?”