The Travelers (37 page)

He smiles shyly. “I have always sort of assumed that VDA is an arm of the NSA. Or perhaps the CIA.”

There are plenty of Americans who have reason to think they might be working for their government—bodyguards for State Department personnel in Latin America, foot soldiers in the Middle East, data analysts in the D.C. suburbs—but aren’t. This is another effect of the post-9/11 obsession with antiterrorism: untold billions funneled from taxpayers through the government to private contractors that employ the sorts of people who are drinking beer in this sad little apartment, clueless techs and cold-blooded mercenaries.

She takes another sip of beer, but doesn’t say anything.

“Am I right?”

He’s not. But she could see why he misunderstood. Because from any angle, VDA looks like it performs the types of functions that Americans would assume are the province of their government—that is, if Americans expect their government to monitor their travel, their phone calls, their text messages, their emails, their social-media interactions. To spy on them, in the name of national security. That doesn’t seem like the type of domestic surveillance that would be entrusted to the private sector.

“Yes,” she says. There’s no reason to disabuse him. He beams back at her, proud.

Elle had researched Raji thoroughly before handpicking him to be her point person on this job. His personnel file at VDA didn’t offer any especially useful information; it’s amazing how slapdash the screening process can be. But Elle was diligent, and followed the trail of Raji’s bank transactions to a hospital, to a cardiology practice, to a pharmacy, after which it wasn’t difficult to figure out what was wrong with his heart, the type of preexisting medical condition that a job candidate certainly wouldn’t divulge in a human-resources interview or questionnaire, nor something that would be detected in a routine employer-mandated urine test, whose primary concern is illegal drugs.

But Elle found it. It’s important to have an exit strategy.

She holds up her beer, reaches across the arm of the sofa toward his outstretched hand, clink. “Cheers.”

“Cheers.” Raji smiles, pleased, working for the CIA, he knew it all along.

“You know what, Raji?”

He looks at her, has no idea what’s coming.

“I think we should get drunk. What do you say?”

There’s no way this man is going to say no, with his video-game library and his spare tire and his web cache filled with porn. He takes another long drink, the dissolved pill cascading into his stomach, where it’ll take a minute or two to start being absorbed into his bloodstream. Then it’ll be another minute for the blood to be pumped through the entire circulatory system, to the heart.

Raji puts his empty bottle down. He stands. “You ready for another?”

Elle nods.

He disappears into the kitchen. She can hear the two new bottles knocking together as he removes them from their cardboard packaging, then the fizz as he opens one of caps.

“Aah,”
he says.
“Owww.”

She should call out something like “Are you all right?” But he’s not. And there’s no reason to pretend, not anymore.

She jumps in her seat as one of the bottles crashes to the floor, then the other.

“Ooooh.
I, uh—”

Everyone likes to imagine that what he or she is doing is noble, is good for humanity, for the planet. The parasitic bankers who congratulate themselves on their supposed creation of wealth, the health-insurance execs who pretend that their private jets aren’t paid for by the premiums of struggling wage-earners.

Elle has a hard time justifying herself, a hard time sleeping. Tonight is going to be particularly bad. Long ago she resolved to try to banish the good-bad dichotomy from her awareness; that she was living in an awful world; that she was merely surviving till the end of her time in it; that if it wasn’t her who did terrible things, it would only be someone else. The terrible things would still get done.

Elle looks around, scanning surfaces, double-checking that she didn’t touch anything except the bottles, which she’ll take with her, shatter far away. And the caps and bag, already in her pocket. And of course this worthless external drive, which she’ll also be bringing with her, presenting to someone else. How the hell is she going to explain this colossal failure?

She hears a loud thud from the kitchen. It must be Raji toppling, and something hard—an elbow? his skull?—hitting the floor.

Glass crunching.

“Aaaahhh.”

Labored breathing.

She’s relieved that this is happening in the other room, that she can sit on this cheap couch, not watching an innocent man experience severe cardiac arrest on the linoleum floor of his dingy kitchen.

This is how she describes it to herself, in her head: simplifying the mitigation of a disadvantageous eventuality.

It will take only a minute for Raji to die, from a cause that will appear to be completely natural, perhaps even inevitable.

PORTLAND

“Thanks for the info,” Chloe says.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I think I’ll travel for a bit.”

“Do you want to tell me—?” The look on her face cuts off his question. “No,” he says, “I guess not.”

“Listen, I’ll see you in the office in a couple of weeks, probably. Thanks again. This is a big help.”

He turns to leave, takes a couple of steps, then turns around. “Oh by the way.” He walks back until he’s just a foot away from Chloe, and speaks very softly: “I just wanted to tell you: that was
nice
work in Italy. Very nice.”

She’s too surprised to respond. She didn’t think anyone would discuss this. She didn’t even think anyone would know.

“Really impressive how you managed to hide what you needed to hide without going to the trouble of hiding it. Brilliantly done.”

She’d wanted it to take the Capri police as long as possible to find Taylor Lindhurst’s body. Not merely so she’d have time to escape—to flee Italy, to clean her identity through Istanbul, to get back to America—but also to ensure that the crime would be infinitely harder to solve, with witness memories no longer fresh, with any physical evidence compromised or obliterated, with her own trail gone completely cold.

“No one in the office can believe it was your first. Was it really?”

Chloe fights back a smile; it seems gauche to gloat about this sort of compliment. She nods.

“Well,” he says, “it looks like you’re a natural.”

PARIS

The Île St-Louis is just a few short blocks wide and a handful of blocks long. Some dozens of businesses, a couple hundred buildings, maybe a few thousand residents. This shouldn’t be hard.

Will is exhausted but also wired. He stops at a café, pretends to read the newspaper, chitchats with the waiter, pays his bill with a forced cheerful
“Merci, monsieur!”

“
Merci à vous
,” the waiter answers, unenthusiastically. It’s early morning on a weekday, very few customers, no one ordering anything more expensive than coffee. He’d had a long day already before he earned his first tip, which wasn’t even a full euro.

“Monsieur, une question, s’il vous plaît? Parlez-vous anglais?”

“
Bien sûr.
” The waiter drapes a dishrag across his shoulder.

“I’m looking for a man who used to work for the same magazine I do. It’s called
Travelers
, it’s an American magazine. Have you heard of it?”

The waiter looks like he didn’t entirely understand the question.

“Anyway, this man I’m looking for, he’s quite old,
quatre-vingt quinze.
He lives here on the Île St-Louis. His name is Jean-Pierre Fourier.”

“Jean-Pierre? Fourier?”

Will is trying not to let hope get the better of him. This would be too easy. The waiter squints, as if searching his memory. Will slips a twenty-euro note onto the tray. The waiter picks up the tray, folds the bill carefully, puts it in his pocket. Then says, “I am sorry,
monsieur
,
mais non
.” He shakes his head. “Ask Madame Bouchardeau, at the
épicerie
. She is working here forty, fifty years? She is knowing everyone on
l’île
.”

Five minutes later, Will is confronting a clerk who’s shaking his head. “
Je suis désolé, monsieur.”
Apparently, Mme. Bouchardeau will not arrive until midafternoon; the clerk is unwilling to specify what hour exactly. Mme. Bouchardeau is old, her hours cannot be predicted. Nor her moods for strangers with questions.

Will wanders the streets of the neat little island, the Seine at the end of every street, views of Notre Dame. He looks at doorbells, but that’s hopeless, or nearly so. He asks at the ice-cream shop, the brasserie, the wine shop, the cheesemonger. Some people have heard of M. Fourier; others know him personally. But no one knows where he lives.

NEW YORK CITY

“Hey, have you heard from Will?”

Gabriella looks up at her boss, away from her desk, a red pen poised above an article that’s too long. She’s trimming it down line by line, sometimes character by character. Every day she comes to the office and edits for space—cutting a sentence here, an adjective there, tighten the kerning on this line, boom, done, next.

“No, I haven’t.” She leans away from her print-magazine problem, considers her boss, this other problem. Problem after problem. “When’s the last you heard from him?”

“Yesterday late morning. He was headed down to art. Haven’t seen or heard from him since. He wasn’t at the ed. meeting, then we were supposed to get a drink, and he blew me off. Not answering texts or calls.”

That really doesn’t sound like Will. “Did you try Chloe?”

“Not yet. They’re, uh…She left him.”

“Really? Why?”

“That’s not clear to me. Do you know anything about it?”

“No. You need to call her, Malcolm. Or do you want me to do it?”

“You’re right. I’ll do it.”

“You worried?”

“Definitely.”

“About?”

He chuckles uneasily. “About everything. Okay”—he raps on the door frame—“thanks Gabs.”

PARIS

Will’s fingers keep finding the flash drive in his front pocket, and his mind keeps jumping to the one in the rear, the one he loaded yesterday afternoon, after his Prospect Heights sojourn to collect back issues from Bernie Katz. When Will returned to Midtown, he took an extra lap around the block, killing time to arrive at 4:05, by which point the weekly editorial meeting would be under way. He didn’t want to run into anyone.

He followed the complicated protocol he’d memorized the night before, via instructions he’d tracked down on the web. He opened the external drive. Scanned through the folders, found Malcolm’s files, and moved them from Elle’s large device onto his own small drive. He didn’t know what was going on between
Travelers
and the CIA, and until he figured it out he wasn’t going to help, or harm, either.

The file titles were all named according to company guidelines. He opened a few—old articles and research notes, photographs and expense reports. Almost none of the files had been altered recently, except Malcolm’s monthly front-of-book letters.

Will’s attention was caught by a folder with spreadsheets, all of them titled oddly: beginning with a pair of uppercase letters followed by a long string of numbers in groups of four, separated by spaces. These file titles had anywhere from sixteen characters up through maybe thirty. This was a familiar-looking pattern, but Will couldn’t place it.

He opened one of these files, found two columns. One was clearly dates; the other seemed to be currency amounts.

The same sort of thing was in a second file. And a third.

Will opened a dozen files, each containing two columns: dates and figures. Some of these spreadsheets had only a few lines, dating back a couple of years; others had hundreds of entries, going back decades.

These had to be financial records.

Will turned his attention to the file titles. They all started with a pair of letters, ES, GB, IL, GE, TR, CH…

Country codes! These were country codes. For what? Phone numbers? No, phone numbers would start with dialing codes. These had to be banking codes: IBAN numbers. Which meant that this was a record of bank accounts. And these bank accounts had to belong to people who were being paid by
Travelers.

There were accounts in every country where
Travelers
maintained a bureau, but also in countries where the magazine had no presence. There were of course accounts here in FR, the headquarters of Europe. But as far as Will knew, only two people worked in the magazine department of the Paris bureau, with another three downstairs at the travel agency. But here were a few dozen FR accounts, many being paid on a regular basis.

Who were all these people?

He’s sure that one is the old man who lives here, on this island. But no one seems to know where exactly. Until someone does. “
Oui, oui, certainement. Là-bas
”—it’s Will’s lunchtime waiter, pointing past the church. “
Sans doute.
”

Will pays the check in a hurry. He finds the doorbell—
Fourier!—
and buzzes. He forces patience upon himself, waits a full minute before he buzzes again. It’s an old man, Will reminds himself, who might take a long time to get to the intercom.

No answer, again.

Will buzzes a third time.

The door to the street opens. It’s an old woman.
“Oui?”

“Bonjour. Je cherche Monsieur Jean-Pierre Fourier.”

The woman says nothing.

“Do you know Monsieur Fourier?” Will continues, lapsing into English.

“Oui. Il était mon père.”

In his excitement, Will doesn’t notice the tense of her verb. “Could I speak with him? It’s important.”

She crosses her arms.

Will reaches into his pocket, removes a business card. “I work for
Travelers.
”

She examines the card.

“I’m trying to find a friend, a colleague of your father’s. I was hoping he might help.”

“I am sorry,” she says. “But my father, he is dead.”

NEW YORK CITY

Malcolm tries Chloe’s cell again, straight to voice mail. This time he leaves a message. “Hey, Chloe, it’s Malcolm. Sorry to hear that you and Will are, um…having a disagreement. But listen: Will has been AWOL for twenty-four hours, and I’m worried. Could you give me a call?”

He pockets the phone, looks out the car window. Literally everything is wrong here. The derelict Brooklyn street looks more like Baghdad in wartime than a New York that’s enjoying the lowest crime rates and highest property values in recorded history. On this particular block, crime is high, and property is worthless.

Malcolm walks around to the rear of the condemned house. He descends into the basement, past the stoic guard, through the door.

Here’s the man who’s been missing from his life for a day. This man is no longer bound to the chair, and he has used his freedom to retreat to the far corner, where he’s sitting on the floor, leaning against the masonry wall. He has been allowed to use the portable bathroom in the backyard; he has been given water and food; he is uninjured, physically. So far.

The man looks up as Malcolm enters, closes the door. Malcolm turns a chair around to face the man, takes a seat. “Your name is Timothy Dunne?”

The man nods.

“You’re from Nashville?”

“Yes.” Tears spring from his eyes.

A thorough search using the guy’s fingerprints and Social Security number yielded a completely viable biography, one that matches the guy’s claims in every detail. If this man is not actually who he’s claiming to be, he has a remarkable legend and is a spectacularly skilled operative, one whose proficiency wouldn’t be wasted on an operation so absurd. Certainly not within the borders of the United States, against a domestic target.

“Timothy Dunne from Nashville, you’ve gotten yourself into a bad situation.”

“I know.” He’s obviously trying to control his crying, to contain his abject terror, but he’s failing. “I’m sorry. But seriously, aren’t
you
the one who hired me?”

Malcolm hasn’t given this guy a chance to speak on his own behalf until now; he didn’t want to hear the shit until he’d gotten at least a broad understanding of the bull’s identity.

“That’s simply not true, Timothy.”

The guy now starts crying freely, floodgates wide open.

“Don’t fall apart here, Timothy Dunne. I need you to hold it together.” Malcolm is trying to sound encouraging and menacing at the same time. It’s a tightrope. “You’re going to tell me exactly what happened. From the beginning.”

Timothy is nodding, wiping tears away from his cheeks, snot from his nose, a blubbering mess. “I came to New York six years a—”

“No, not the beginning of your whole adult life.” In truth, Malcolm feels halfway bad for this guy. But now’s not the time to show it. “How’d this, uh, situation with my wife start?”

“I’m an actor. I answered an ad in the trades, for a part in an indie film. ‘Good-looking man,’ the notice said. ‘Late twenties to late thirties.’ It was a woman holding auditions. She said her name was Nancy? I guess that’s not her real name.”

Malcolm rolls his eyes.

“There were a lot of us, open casting. I saw a few guys I knew.”

“This was where?”

“Hotel suite, Theater District. My audition was five minutes, small talk, read a few lines. I filled out some paperwork. The film was going to be shot in Toronto, overseas travel, so the producers needed to make sure any actors were American taxpayers, with valid passports, whatever. There were forms.”

Why? Why get a bunch of strangers’ signatures and Social Security numbers and passport numbers? It must’ve been to do credit checks. And background checks. Assessments of financial stability, criminality. Looking for the right sort of candidate.

“You ever been convicted of a crime, Timothy?”

“Um…no.”

“You sure?”

“I didn’t say I’ve never been
arrested.
Down in Tennessee…it was complicated.”

“Isn’t it always? But I bet you can simplify it.”

“I was arraigned on extortion charges. Really just a misunderstanding. I cooperated, pled out to misdemeanor.”

So Timothy was a punk.

“That’s when I left Nashville. Came to New York.”

“Uh-huh. So, Timothy, back to the future: you got the part?”

“Yeah, I did. But work wouldn’t be starting for another month.”

“What did you do in the meantime? Any contact with this Nancy woman?”

“I kept my day job. Celebrated a bit. This was a big deal for me, my first film role. I’ve been in New York for six years, trying to do this…to act. Do you have any idea how hard it is? How many people come here to try this?”