by Chris Pavone
On occasion, she met her husband for a meal. But not often. Dexter worked a long day every day, and most evenings.
She looked forward to date night—ostensibly once a week but frequently canceled due to work, or travel. Date night in Washington hadn’t been important; it was optional. But now it was something she felt herself needing, the opportunity to share the detritus of housewifedom, to elicit and receive sympathy, validation.
So much of it seemed devoid of value. She walked around the apartment, picking up toys and clothing, straightening piles, filing papers. She washed the boys’ hair and soaped their armpits and supervised them on the fine arts of wiping their butts and brushing every tooth and peeing directly into the bowl, not just in its general direction.
She went grocery shopping and lugged bags. She prepared breakfast and packed lunches and cooked dinner and washed dishes. She vacuumed and mopped and dusted. She sorted laundry, dried it, folded it, put it into drawers and on hangers and hooks.
When she finished the chores, it was time to start each and every one of them again.
And her husband had no idea. None of the husbands knew what their wives did every day, during the six hours when their children were in school—not just the endless chores but the pastimes, the cooking classes and language lessons, the tennis instruction and, in special circumstances, affairs with tennis instructors. Meeting everyone for coffee, all the time. Going to the gym. The mall. Sitting around playgrounds, getting wet in the rain. One playground had a gazebo, where they could get less wet.
Dexter didn’t know about any of this. Just as he hadn’t known how Kate had truly spent her days back in Washington, when she’d been doing something completely different from what she’d claimed.
Just as Kate didn’t know, now, exactly what he did all day.
TODAY, 11:09 A.M.
“Bonjour,” Dexter answers. “Comment ça va?”
Kate looks around the gallery, empty except for the Spanish couple, the man running a constant low-volume commentary. He fancies himself a connoisseur.
“Ça va bien,” Kate answers.
They moved from Luxembourg to Paris a year ago, at the start of the new school year, in a new school in a new city in a new country. By New Year’s, Kate had concluded that neither of them was making sufficient progress toward fluency. So she convinced Dexter that they should speak only French on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Today is a Thursday, nine months later. But for this conversation, they need to speak English; they need to communicate on a different level.
“I just ran into an old friend,” she says. “Julia.”
Dexter is silent for a second, and Kate doesn’t push. She knows he’s considering the meaning of this woman’s arrival. “Quelle surprise,” he says flatly. “It’s been so long.”
Neither Kate nor Dexter had seen Julia since her hasty but not unexpected departure from Luxembourg, the winter before last.
“Can we make it for drinks tonight? Bill too is in Paris.”
Dexter pauses another beat. “Okay. It’ll be fun to catch up.”
“Yes,” Kate says. But she isn’t thinking of the fun they’ll have. “So how about seven o’clock, at the café in the Carrefour de l’Odéon?”
“Sure,” Dexter says. “That’s perfect.”
The café is around the corner from their parking garage, and a half-block from a busy Métro station. It has tiny windowless bathrooms, no back rooms, no back entrance. There is nowhere for anyone to hide, no way for anyone to sneak up from behind. The tables on the terrasse offer unobstructed views of the entire intersection. It’s the perfect place for a drink. And the perfect place from which to escape quickly.
“I’ll call Louis and reserve a table,” Dexter says. “I’ll let you know if there’s a problem.”
Kate knows there won’t be a problem, not with Louis and a table. But she can imagine many other problems, most of them ending with the pink fifty-euro note and the bill pinned under the heavy glass ashtray at the café, the hurried steps around the corner, the quick buckling into the soft seats of the station wagon with the kids already secured in the back, waving good-bye to Sylvie the nanny, the race to the Seine and across the Pont Neuf and onto the fast-moving roadway beneath the quais, streaming into l’autoroute de l’Est, light traffic and a wide highway east on the A4 and then north on the A31 and into a different nation and on different roads, eventually narrow and curvy and hilly, until finally, four hours after pulling out from the parking garage beneath the Left Bank, coming to a stop at the stone gates of the white-painted farmhouse on a tree-dotted plateau deep in the sparsely populated Ardennes Forest.
And in the downstairs washroom of the little stone house, behind the panel of the nonfunctioning heating register, a small steel box is affixed with strong magnets.
“Okay. And oh, Dexter? Julia told me to pass along a message.”
The hurried drive to the Ardennes is something they practiced. A test run.
“Yes?”
“The Colonel is dead.”
Dexter doesn’t respond.
“Dexter?”
“Yes,” he says. “I got it.”
“Okay then. A bientôt.”
And inside the box in the farmhouse’s bathroom, neat stacks of crisp bank notes, a million euros, untraceable cash. New-life cash.
The Spanish couple has left the gallery. Kate is alone, looking at the photographs, images of water and sand and sky, water and sand and sky, water and sand and sky. A relentless series of parallel lines in blues and tans, in shades of grays and whites. Hypnotizing lines, abstractions of place that are so abstract they’re no longer place, just line and color.
Maybe the beach, Kate thinks. Maybe a faraway beach is where we’ll live next. After we disappear from here.
9
It was tricky to call anyone in America, because of the time difference combined with the school schedule. All morning she was free, available; but everyone on the East Coast was asleep, at breakfast. By the time it was nine A.M. in Washington, she was picking up the children, she was with them, she was at the grocer’s and butcher’s and baker’s, on play-dates and at the sports center, driving and cleaning and cooking. By the time she was no longer busy—children clean and abed, dishes washed, house tidied—she was exhausted, introverted, watching last season’s HBO shows on iTunes, the laptop hooked up to the television via thick, multipronged cords, digital-media life support.
There was only one person in her time zone she could call. She dialed the long number, which was answered on the first ring. “Hello.”
“Hi,” she said. “I’m bored.” She didn’t say her own name, nor his. No names on the phone, ever. “In fact, more bored than I’ve ever been. In my life.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m doing laundry.”
“That’s good,” he said. “It’s important to dress your family in clean clothing.”
Kate realized that this conversation—lonely, laundry—sounded exactly like an asset reporting into a case officer, in code. “Tell me something interesting,” she said.
“Interesting? Er … let’s see. No American president has been an only child. They’ve all had siblings. If not biological, at least by marriage.”
She’d known Hayden since the beginning of her career. After all this time, it was easy to forget how noticeable was his world-weary drawl, his Locust Valley lockjaw. Nobody sounded like him, in Luxembourg. Not even British men.
“That’s a four.”
“Oh, not fair. Statistically, twenty percent of American children are singletons. But not one American president grew up that way? Come on.”
“Okay, I guess it’s a five,” she said, not fighting the impulse to smile, despite her awful mood. Hayden’s fun facts always cheered her. “I’m lonely.”
“I know it’s hard,” he said. “But it will get better.”
Hayden had lived his entire adult life abroad. He knew what he was talking about. “I promise.”
> “MAYBE DADDY WANTS to tell us what he did today.”
Jake and Ben didn’t look up from their brown slices of Böfflamott, My Bavarian Cookbook, page 115. Even if they’d known that an attack had just been struck by one of their parents, they’d also have known that it wasn’t their battle.
Dexter didn’t say anything.
“Or maybe Daddy thinks Mommy isn’t intelligent enough to understand his job.”
He stopped chewing.
“Or maybe Daddy just doesn’t care that Mommy’s curious.”
Jake and Ben exchanged a quick look, then both turned their eyes to their father.
Kate knew she wasn’t being fair. She shouldn’t be doing this. But resentment was getting the best of her. She’d scrubbed three toilets that afternoon. Toilet scrubbing was at the very top of the list of chores she hated.
Dexter put down his fork and knife. “What exactly do you want to know, Kat?”
She winced at this purposeful use of her ex-name.
“I want to know what you do.” Kate had never pried into Dexter’s work life, at least not to his face. They’d always been a couple who’d given each other a lot of space. It was one of the things she most appreciated about her husband: his willingness to not know. Now it was Kate who wanted to know. “What did you do today? Is that too much to ask?”
He smiled, for the benefit of the kids. “Of course not. Let’s see, today. Today I plotted out one phase of a penetration test that I’m going to perform in a couple weeks.”
That sounded like experimental sexual intercourse.
“A pen test is when a consultant like me tries to breach a system’s security. There are three main approaches to intrusion. One is the purely technical method: finding some hole, some tear in the system that you can get into, rip open, and march around at will.”
“Like what?”
“Like an unmonitored computer. One that’s hooked up to the system and not password-protected. Or if it is password-protected, the user name is something easily cracked, or still on its default setting. Like a user name of user and a password of password. Some systems can be cracked in a few hours. Others might take months. And the longer it takes, the more likely it is that a hacker will give up, look for an easier target.
“The second approach is purely physical: breaking into a facility. Sneaking past the guards, coming in the window, up through the basement. Or pure force: arriving with manpower and gunpower. The physical approach is not my specialty.”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. What’s the third approach?”
“The third is usually the most effective. Social engineering. This is when you manipulate a person to gain access.”
“How do you do that?”
“All the methods revolve around basically the same principle: making people think you’re on their team, when you’re not.”
Social engineering. That had been Kate’s career.
“And the most effective are a combination of all three—social engineering to get physically on-site, where you utilize technical skills. This is how you shut down governments, steal major industrial secrets, cheat casinos. And, most relevant to me, this is how you rob banks. This is a bank’s worst nightmare.”
Dexter took a bite of beef. “That’s why we’re here.” And a sip of wine. “This is what I do.”
KATE STARED OUT her window, over a cliff, down hundreds of feet into the Alzette gorge, across a quarter-mile of modern steel bridge, and old railroad aqueduct, and medieval fortifications and lush green lawns and dense forests and black-roofed houses and towering church spires and rushing river, across to the slope that fell from the Kirchberg Plateau’s glass-and-steel office buildings and, on top of it all, an immense amount of bright blue sky. It was a spectacular view, a view of limitless possibility. A view that encapsulated Europe.
Then she turned her eyes back to her computer. The website for Julia Maclean Interior Design was nothing if not well-produced. Professionally produced. It was heavily reliant on mood music and slowly fading images, on varied typefaces and banal phrases. There were a few dozen images of pleasant but unremarkable residential rooms. According to one of the pages, the aesthetic intent was “Eclectic Traditional,” which seemed to mean pairing expensive-looking American antiques with African tribal masks, Chinese stools, and Mexican ceramics.
There were no testimonials from clients. No celebrity endorsements. There was no page of local press mentions, no links to other features. The biography read:
Julia Maclean, an Illinois native, studied architecture and textiles at college, and has a master’s degree in fine arts with a specialty of interior design. She held a number of prestigious internships before launching her own firm, and in the past decade has earned a loyal following for her whimsical yet traditional approach to refined interiors. Equally at home amid the modernism of Lake Shore Drive or the traditionalism of the North Shore, Julia is one of the most sought-after decorators in the greater Chicago area.
On the contacts page, there was an e-mail address, but no brick-and-mortar location, no phone or fax numbers, no names of employees or colleagues, partners or references.
Across every attractive page of the entire website, there was not one piece of hard information traceable to any real person or place.
Kate had seen websites like this before. They were legends. Cover stories.
“BOYS!” KATE YELLED, ignoring her husband momentarily. Not ignoring; just not responding. “Breakfast!”
She put the crepes on the dining table, one spread with Nutella, the other with Speculoos, both rolled tightly. There didn’t seem to be any frozen waffles in this country; certainly no Blueberry Eggos. Luckily, the children were proving to be flexible when it came to eating different forms of sugar at breakfast.
What they weren’t flexible about was not seeing their father on a daily basis. Kate was discovering that she was unable to bear their complaints about his absences, which felt a lot like accusations of her unsatisfactory parenting. If the boys needed him so much, it must be because they didn’t love her enough. QED.
She knew rationally that this was not true. But she felt irrationally that it was.
“No.” Kate turned to Dexter, angry and showing it, purposefully. “I don’t remember you saying any damn thing about going to Sarajevo this week.”
She tried to settle herself, to remind herself that business travel was rarely if ever optional; it was stressful, not relaxing; lonely, not fun. And Sarajevo was one of the last places on earth Dexter wanted to go. He bore a grudge against the whole ex-Yugoslavia region for the murder of his brother.
“Well,” he said, “sorry. But I am.”
Kate shouldn’t resent him for leaving, for leaving her by herself with children in a strange land, alone and lonely. But she did.
“And when are you back?”
The children settled themselves into chairs, staring at the television. In Washington they’d never seen a single episode of SpongeBob SquarePants; they didn’t know it existed in English. What they were watching was Bob l’Eponge. A French invention.
“Friday night.”
“What are you doing exactly? In Sarajevo?” This would be Dexter’s second trip to Sarajevo, along with one each to Liechtenstein, Geneva, London, and Andorra.
“Helping some of the bank’s clients tighten their security.”
“The bank doesn’t have people for that?” she asked. “In Bosnia?”
“This is what they pay me for: to make customers comfortable. This is what I do, Kat.”
“Kate.”
He shrugged. She opened her mouth to scream at him, but couldn’t, wouldn’t, in front of the children.
Kate slammed the bathroom door. She leaned on the sink, scrubbed clean by none other than herself. She stared into the mirror, tears welling. She wiped one eye and then the other, but it was no use, she was crying now. Overwhelmed by the indelibility of her al
oneness, her outsideness. Unable to imagine how she will ever feel like one of those other women, content in this life, sitting at a café table and laughing at the trials and tribulations of unwanted-hair removal. Having a great time. Or at least creating the compelling appearance to her, to one another, to themselves, of having an enjoyable life.
Kate and Dexter didn’t have an enjoyable life, not yet. They’d procured notarized copies of their passports and birth certificates and marriage certificate, to apply for residency permits. They’d opened bank accounts and taken out insurance policies, bought mobile phones and small appliances and Ikea’s bureaus and frozen meatballs. They’d driven to the second-largest city in the country, Esch-sur-Alzette, to buy a used Audi wagon with an automatic transmission and under fifty thousand kilometers. It had taken a couple weeks of online browsing to find such a car, a time frame that corresponded precisely to the length of time they didn’t realize that the word break meant station wagon.
They were ticking off items on a to-do list that was magnet-attached to the fridge. There were nineteen items on the list. They’d crossed off fifteen.
The final item was underlined: Make a life.
Maybe this whole thing was a terrible mistake.
“I DON’T KNOW anything specific about Torres,” Kate had said.
“Anything nonspecific?”
Kate had struggled not to cut her eyes away from Evan. She’d been expecting this line of questioning since the very beginning of this process. She’d been expecting it for a half-decade.
“Torres had no shortage of enemies,” she said.
“Yes. But at the time of his demise, he was at a low ebb. It was an odd time for him to be taken out.”
Kate managed, barely, to maintain eye contact. “Grudges,” she said, “are timeless.”
Evan’s pen was poised above his pad, but there had been nothing worth writing down. He tapped the ballpoint against the paper, four slow taps, keeping a beat.