by Chris Pavone
Adam wasn’t willing to take silence for an answer. “Why not?”
“As long as we didn’t talk about his work, we wouldn’t have to talk about mine.”
“And now?”
Kate stared across the table at this man, this stranger, asking her these intimate details, questions she didn’t even ask herself, answers she didn’t want. “Now what?”
“Now that you’re leaving us, will you tell him about your work?”
TODAY, 10:54 A.M.
Kate takes a step forward, and raises her arms to this woman. They embrace, but it’s guarded, cautious; maybe because they don’t want to crush each other’s obligatory scarves or perfectly arranged hair. Maybe not.
“It’s so good to see you,” the woman says, quietly and earnestly, into Kate’s hair. “So good.”
“And you,” Kate says, just as quiet, less earnest. “You too.”
As they break away, the woman leaves one hand on Kate’s upper arm. The touch feels like genuine warmth. But it could be that she’s preventing Kate from moving, pinning her in place with a grip that’s soft but unyielding.
Not only is Kate imagining that people are watching, she’s also doubting everything. Absolutely everything.
“Do you live here? In Paris?”
“Most of the year,” Kate says.
“In this neighborhood?”
Kate happens to be looking in the direction of their apartment, just a few blocks away. “Not far” is what she says.
“And the rest of the year?”
“We spent this summer down in Italy. A rented villa.”
“Italy? How wonderful. What part?”
“Southern.”
“Amalfi Coast?”
“Thereabouts.” Kate doesn’t elaborate. “And you? Where do you live now?”
“Oh …” A small shrug. “Still not completely settled. Here and there.” She smiles. Smirks, really.
“So”—Kate waves her arm at the little street, which is not exactly the Champs-Elysées or the boulevard St-Germain—“what brings you to this corner of Paris?”
“Shopping.” The woman hefts a small bag, and Kate notices that she’s wearing an engagement ring, a modest diamond, but no longer the gold wedding band that she used to wear. The disappearance of the band makes sense. But the appearance of the diamond is bewildering.
If there was one thing this woman enjoyed, it was indeed shopping, of the rue Jacob ilk: antiques, fabrics, furniture. Coffee-table books about antiques and fabric and furniture. But Kate had thought that was just an act.
It’s impossible to know which parts of the woman, if any, were real.
“Of course,” Kate says.
They stare at each other, smiles plastered.
“Listen, I’d love to catch up, y’know, fully. Is Dexter in town?”
Kate nods.
“Would it be possible to grab a drink tonight? Or dinner?”
“That’d be good,” Kate says. “I’ll have to check when Dexter can make it.” As she’s speaking, Kate realizes that the woman is going to press for an immediate phone call, so Kate preempts: “I can’t ring him right now.”
She rummages around in her bag for her phone, buying time while she thinks of a rational reason. “He’s at the gym” is what she comes up with. Good enough, and possibly even true. Dexter either goes to the gym or plays tennis every day. His full-time job of managing investments is, at most, a half-time job. “So give me your number.”
“You know what?” This woman cocks her head. “Why don’t you give me yours?” She reaches into her purse and removes a leather notebook and a matching pen. Precious little items, bought at the same boutique as the coat. This woman showed up in Paris and spent a fortune a couple blocks from Kate’s home. Can this be a coincidence?
“I can’t seem to find my charger,” the woman continues, “and I wouldn’t want a dead phone to cause us to miss each other.”
This is utter bullshit, and Kate almost laughs. But it’s fair turnabout. It’s tough to be angry with someone for lying while you yourself are also lying, for the same exact reasons. Kate rattles off her number, and the woman dutifully scribbles it down. Even though Kate knows full well that this woman doesn’t need to write down any phone number to remember it.
Kate marvels at how many layers of disingenuousness are passing between them.
“I’ll call by five, okay?”
“Wonderful.” They trade another embrace, another pair of fake smiles.
The woman begins to walk away. Kate finds herself watching her rear, larger than it used to be; this had once been a skinny woman. Not that long ago.
Kate turns and heads in the opposite direction, away from home, for no reason other than to put distance between herself and this woman. She struggles not to look back, not to follow her. She knows she shouldn’t. She knows she couldn’t.
“Oh, Kate?” The woman is walking back toward Kate, in no rush.
“Yes?”
“Could you give Dexter a message, from me?” Still walking slowly, nearing Kate.
“Of course.”
“Tell him,” she says, now upon Kate, one step away, “the Colonel is dead.”
4
“So,” Kate said, looking up from the coloring books she was arranging on the table in front of the boys. Another family dinner in another mid-price restaurant, the same three-week-old solution to the challenges of settling into a new life in a new home on a new continent. “You’ve already been working, quite a lot.”
Dexter raised his eyebrows, taken by surprise by the criticism—the complaint—in his wife’s comment. “There are a lot of things that I needed to take care of immediately.”
“And that’s going to quiet down, now.” A statement that Kate suspected was contrary to fact. But she wanted to make him refute it. Although their relationship had been good since the move, he hadn’t been as present as she’d hoped.
“Not really.”
“I thought you were going to be able to ease into this job. That you’d have time to help us get settled.”
After three hours’ worth of tours with a real-estate agent, they’d chosen a sprawling apartment in the city’s old center. Rental furniture had arrived within days of their signing the lease, and then they moved from the hotel. Kate started unpacking their ugly giant suitcases and their rented pots and pans, towels and sheets. Their shipping container of belongings was still at least a month away from arriving.
Kate had expected Dexter to join her in the unpacking, but he hadn’t. “You promised that I wouldn’t have to do all this alone, Dexter.”
He threw a noticeable glance at the children. “I want to do it with you. But I also need to work.”
“Why right now? Why right away?”
“Because I had to set up a secure office immediately. I needed to install security systems. I needed to buy devices and hire electricians and carpenters, to check their work. I needed to get all this done immediately, because I also needed to start working on something important that’s happening now.”
“What, exactly? What’s happening?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Can you try?”
He sighed. “Yes, I can try. But please, not tonight. Okay?”
Kate stared at him, not immediately answering, even though they both knew what she was going to answer, and that this silent pause was nothing more than her registration of protest. The longer she paused, the stronger the protest. “Okay,” she said, after a couple seconds. Not too long; not that strident a protest. “But I want you to tell me, at least, who your client is.”
He sighed again. “Katherine, I—”
“I told you: please call me Kate.”
He glowered. “Kate. I explained this already. Everyone in this city works in banking. It wouldn’t be good—it would be bad—if my client’s competitors knew that they’d hired a security expert from the States to analyze their procedures.”
“Why?”
“It’s a sign of weakness, of insecurity. It’s information that the competition could use against us, to lure clients away, by claiming we’re not secure enough. It would even be bad if people who worked at my client knew.”
“Okay, I get that. But why can’t you tell me?”
“Because there’s no upside to it, Kat. Kate. These bank names don’t mean anything to you now. But sooner or later, you’ll find that maybe your best friend’s husband works for my client. And she might press you, maybe after a few drinks. ‘C’mon, Kat, you can tell me.’ Then you’d be in an uncomfortable position. For what?” He shook his head. “It’s pointless.”
“It’s pointless? To be honest with your spouse?”
“No, sweetheart. It’s pointless to tell you something whose sole meaning will be that you have to keep it a secret. From everyone. That’s a pretty big downside. With no upside.”
Secrets. What did Dexter know about keeping secrets? “So what do I tell people?”
“You tell them the truth: that the terms of my contract prohibit me from disclosing the name of my client.”
“From your wife?”
“Nobody’s going to care. This whole economy is based on secrecy.”
“Still,” she said, “it sounds awfully—I don’t know—unmatrimonial.” She marveled at her inability to resist accusing Dexter of her own transgressions.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. “Trust me.”
DEXTER DROVE THE rented Volvo around the embassy in the gentle drizzle, circumscribing the compound in a wide and bumpy circle—not really a circle, but an uneven five-sided polygon, a misshaped pentagon—looking for a parking space. They finally found a tight spot under a heavy chestnut tree, the ground beneath littered with leaves and shells. The Brits called these conkers. When they fell, they conked you on the head.
There were a half-dozen people milling around the security hut, waiting for guards to beckon, dispatch their belongings through an X-ray machine, escort them across the garden to a tiny waiting room in the consular building, and wait five, ten, fifteen minutes.
Kate had visited this embassy once before, years ago, and hadn’t needed to wait.
They were summoned. Kate and Dexter entered a tiny room. One wall was dominated by a bulletproof window, with a uniformed man on the other side.
“Good morning,” he said. “Passports please?”
They slipped their passports through a slot. He examined the documents, then his computer. For a minute, maybe two, there was nearly complete silence. Kate could hear a clock ticking on the other side of the glass. The man clicked his mouse, moved his cursor, tapped his keyboard. A couple times, he glanced at Kate and Dexter through the thick glass.
Kate had no reason to be nervous, but she was.
“So how can I help you this morning, Mr. and Mrs. Moore?”
“We moved here,” Dexter said. “We arrived a few weeks ago.”
“I see.” The officer held Dexter’s gaze steady.
“Is there a problem?” Dexter was staring back through the glass, trying to smile, but managing only something that suggested he might need the toilet.
“Does one of you have a job here, Mr. Moore?”
“I do.”
Kate could feel her heartbeat racing. It’s very easy to get very nervous when you’re far from home and someone in uniform is in possession of your passport, on the other side of bulletproof glass.
The official glanced at Kate, met her eye. She hadn’t yet graduated from that phase of her life when as a rule she’d been worried about her own secrets. When it would never occur to her that someone would be suspicious of her husband, instead of herself.
He turned back to Dexter. “Do you have a work permit?”
“Yes,” Dexter said. “Yes I do.”
“We don’t have any record of it. Your work permit. But the Luxembourg government sends us copies. Of work permits newly issued to Americans.”
Dexter folded his arms across his chest, but didn’t say anything.
“When was it issued?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your work permit, Mr. Moore. When was it issued?”
“Um, I’m not sure … It was … recently.”
The men stared at each other through the thick glass.
“There must be some mix-up,” Dexter alleged.
“There must.”
“Do you need a copy of it? My work permit?”
“We do.”
Kate could feel the tension coming off Dexter, an electrical field.
“Then I’ll come back,” Dexter said. “With a copy. Do we both need to return?”
“No, Mr. Moore. Just you.”
“ONE LAST SUBJECT, Katherine.”
She’d been staring at the tabletop, unburdening herself of the proprietary information in her brain. There would be more of this tomorrow, and the day after, and for who knows how long, as someone ran through her files and projects and personnel, revisiting the same details again and again. Making sure she wasn’t lying.
“Is there anything further you want to add now, about your decision five years ago, to leave the field?”
She’d looked up at Adam, a challenge in his eye. She stifled a panic. A vision that she’d been unable to quash the night before, of being escorted to the parking lot, a windowless van supposedly on its way to another office but really to an airfield, a small private jet, accompanied by two burly guys on a nine-hour flight, deposited at the prison entrance in North Africa where she’d be beaten daily for the next month, until she died of internal bleeding without ever having seen her family again.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
Adam dropped both hands from the table down to his thighs, in exactly the type of pose he’d adopt if he were preparing himself to take physical action.
KATE SHOOK OUT the umbrella, left it on the welcome mat to dry. The message light was blinking on the telephone. First the children needed to be settled in front of the television, after finding appropriate programming in French. Groceries needed to be unpacked. Dinner needed to be started in the kitchen with the German appliances—the dozen options on her oven’s dial included the likes of Ober-Unterhitze, Intensivbacken, and Schnellaufheizen. She loved the sound of Intensivbacken, so she used that setting for everything.
Then she dropped a glass bottle of peach nectar. It shattered on the stone floor, sending not only chunks and shards and slivers of glass everywhere, but also sprays and drips and puddles and pools of thick, sticky juice. This took her fifteen minutes to clean up, on hands and knees, with paper towels and sponges and the cheap upright vacuum cleaner that had come with the rented furnishings.
It was impossible to overstate the extent to which she hated what she was doing.
A half-hour passed before Kate got around to pushing the message button.
“Hi, it’s me.” Dexter. “Sorry, but I’m not going to make it home for dinner tonight.” Again. This was a tiresome new development. “I have a six o’clock call, then an eight. I’ll be home about nine thirty. I hope. Tell the boys I love them.”
Erase.
“Hello, Kate, this is Karen from the AWCL.” What the hell is the AWCL? “Just wanted to touch base, and to let you know that another American couple just arrived in town.” Who cares? “Thought you should meet.”
“YOU’RE SURE?” ADAM had asked.
Kate had struggled to keep her breathing even.
This could be about that thing that happened in Barbados, which hadn’t been entirely authorized. Or it could be about the missing file on the Salvadoran goons, which she hadn’t had anything to do with. Or it could be nothing more complicated than that Joe didn’t trust her, pure and simple.
But most likely it was about Torres. For the past five years, Kate had been convinced that Torres would come back to haunt her. To take revenge upon her.
Or it could be about nothing other than protocol.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure.”
<
br /> Adam stared at her. She summoned the courage to stare back. Chicken, across a conference table. Five seconds, ten. A half-minute of silence.
He could wait forever. This is what he did for a living.
But so could she.
It wasn’t Torres himself who haunted Kate. It was the unexpected woman. That innocent woman.
“Okay then,” Adam finally said. He glanced at his watch, scrawled a note on his pad. “ID on the table.”
Kate removed the lanyard from her neck, hesitated, then set it down.
Adam tore the paper from his pad. He stood, walked around the table to Kate, his hand extended. “This is where you go tomorrow morning, nine A.M.”
Kate looked at the paper, still not understanding that this phase was over. Things always end more suddenly than expected.
The confrontation was not going to happen. Not today, not here. And if not today, and not here, then when? Where?
“Ask for Evan,” he said.
Kate looked up at Adam, trying to contain her amazement that the subject of Torres was not going to arise. “How long will this take?” she asked, in order to have something to say, to shift the subject away from her absolute relief. It was still not too late to screw this up. It would never be too late.
“At least a couple days. I don’t know how much more. You should set aside two full weeks, which is the amount of time that you’ll be continuing to draw a salary. It won’t take that long, but it’s a useful way to frame your schedule. It is, of course, the normal timetable.”
“Of course.”
“So that’s it.” Adam smiled, extended his hand again, this time for a shake. “You are no longer an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. Good luck, Katherine.”
5
“I’m Julia,” the woman said. “Pleased to meet you.”
“And I’m Katherine. Kate.” She took her seat in the caned café chair, and looked across the table at the new American, foisted upon her by the AWCL, which she now knew was the American Women’s Club of Luxembourg, which furthermore she’d joined. It was apparently what you did, if you were an American woman, in Luxembourg.