The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  Dexter skied through the gates of the ski school, while Julia and Bill volunteered to go to the nearest café and claim a big table. Kyle and Kate were left alone, standing side by side in the middle of the main path, surrounded by thousands of people.

  “You’re not going to like this,” he said.

  Kate watched Dexter lean over to gather the children in big hugs, one in each arm. Even through the crowd and the gear, under the helmets and the goggles, Kate could see the giant smiles of unmitigated joy on the boys’ faces. Reunion.

  “What they’re investigating,” Kyle said.

  Kate turned to him. “Yes?”

  “It’s your husband.”

  KATE WISHED SHE was surprised; but she wasn’t. She also wished she wasn’t relieved; but she was. At least a little. Whatever her husband had done, it couldn’t be as bad as what she herself had done.

  “What do they think he did?”

  Dexter was removing the boys’ bright-yellow identifying vests—premier ski—that made them look like miniature contestants in a grand slalom.

  “Cyber theft.”

  “Of what?”

  Julia had suddenly returned. “We’re over there,” she said.

  Kate’s heart skipped a beat—a few beats.

  “That bistro with the green awning,” Julia continued. Kate could barely hear her through the din; there’s no way Julia could’ve heard their conversation. Could she?

  The children were approaching, carrying their skis across their chests, followed by a grinning Dexter. Kate gave the boys hugs, trying but failing to distract herself, even minutely, from the dreadfulness that was assailing her.

  Everyone trudged through the snow and crowds toward Bill, seated alone in the middle of a huge picnic table, like a disgraced executive at the end of a board meeting.

  Kate needed less than a minute more, maybe just a few seconds, alone with Kyle.

  They all settled at the rough-hewn table, accepted delivery of hot chocolates topped with whipped cream, and giant mugs of frothy beer, and plates of apple galette.

  “So,” Bill said, “Kyle, is it?”

  “That’s right, Bill.”

  “You live in Geneva?”

  “I do.”

  “Interesting town?”

  “Not terribly.”

  “You look familiar. Do we know each other?”

  Kate was going to explode.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Bill nodded, but it wasn’t a gesture of agreement. “What do you do, Kyle?”

  “I’m a lawyer. But you’ll have to excuse me,” he said, rising, “because I’m a lawyer who needs the men’s room.”

  Kate felt Bill’s eyes on her, felt his suspicion of Kyle oozing across the table, the slime of it covering herself. She pretended to people-watch, skiers in snowsuits and bright jackets and helmets, children in snowball fights, dogs barking, waitresses carrying trays filled with steins, grandmothers in furs, teenagers smoking cigarettes.

  Kate pushed herself across the bench. “Excuse me,” she said, not meeting any eye.

  She could feel Bill and Julia staring at each other, knew they were sending signals, having a whole conversation about whether to follow Kate to the restroom, and which one should do it, and whether it should be overt or surreptitious.

  “I’ll join you,” Julia said. Of course.

  Kate walked among tables, and waited for a horse-drawn carriage to pass, and a pair of squealing girls to run by, and one spun just in time to get hit in the face by a snowball, triggering an instant nosebleed and high-pitched crying. A big thick drop of blood hit the icy snow, and another drop, then a flurry of a few, a small splattering there at the girl’s feet. Her mother arrived, scolding what was obviously a pleased little brother, pressing a napkin to the girl’s injured nose, the blood spreading through the snow. That same pattern again, writ small. Spreading blood.

  KATE HAD PASSED a difficult night after the unpleasant conclusion to the unscheduled meeting with Torres at the hotel; she was without question afraid of him. It was a long painful night of hand-wringing and plotting and counterplotting.

  Kate hadn’t been able to fall asleep until she’d made up her mind, with a heart-stopping finality, at three in the morning. She was awakened two hours later, when Jake cried to start his day. She fed him, and sat with him, and cooed at him, staring off into the lightening sky over the stockade fence that separated her barely tended garden from the scrubby, weedy yard of the multi-unit rental to the east.

  Kate didn’t know it yet, but she was pregnant again. Not intentionally. But also not disappointingly.

  Twenty-four hours later she was on the Amtrak to New York, an unreserved seat purchased with cash at a ticket counter in Union Station, wearing oversize eyeglasses with clear lenses—her vision didn’t need correcting—and a blond wig. She then walked from Penn Station up- and across town, thirty minutes through the crowded meat of Manhattan, with a quick stop to buy a Yankees cap from a sidewalk shop exploding with China-produced merchandise. She wore the cap low, blond bangs brushing her eyelids.

  Kate entered the Waldorf-Astoria not on Park Avenue but through the quieter Forty-ninth Street entrance. She got off the elevator at a few minutes after nine. It was too early for there to be a large housekeeping presence on the floor—too many guests would still be asleep. But it was late enough that the businesspeople would be gone. It was a quiet time of day on a hotel guest floor.

  Kate knew that Torres was not an exception to the Mexican-time rule. He was often late for meetings, sometimes by as much as an hour. And he neither saw anyone nor did anything before ten in the morning. Kate had honestly never understood how they accomplished anything in that country.

  Kate knew he’d be alone in his room at a time like 9:08 A.M.

  She didn’t encounter anyone in the plushly carpeted hall until she came to the bodyguard who stood at Torres’s door. He was a squat, angry-looking man in a cheap black suit that was way too tight. The early-morning shift wasn’t the A-team, not the big imposing guys who would sit at restaurant bars at night. This morning guy was B-team. At best.

  When Kate was just a few feet away, she smiled demurely at the bodyguard without slowing down or breaking stride, to all appearances continuing on to some other room down the hall, drawing her hand out of her coat pocket, the switchblade already open, her arm shooting across her body, the knife sinking smoothly and quietly into the man’s trachea, his eyes wide, registering his dire situation, his arms attempting to rise but too late, his body slumping, sliding down the wall while she supported his weight under the armpits, to avoid the alarm-inducing thud of a heavy body hitting a hard floor.

  KATE NEEDED TO get Julia in front of her, and she was running out of space, out of time. Kate limped for a few steps. “Excuse me,” she said. “My sock has bunched up. You go ahead.”

  Kate leaned over, avoiding Julia’s gaze, which Kate knew would have been calling bullshit. But if Bill knew about Kate, then Julia knew about Kate. And Bill and Julia probably both knew who Kyle was, or some approximation of it. And they were either going to confront Kate now, or they weren’t.

  She was calling their bluff, in this transparent bit of playacting, leaning on a chair in an empty dining room. Kate dallied, unsnapping her boot slowly, waiting for Julia to move on, worried that she wouldn’t. Then she did.

  “SHHHH,” KATE HISSED, inclining her head toward the ladies’ room. “She’s in there.” Kate tugged Kyle down the hall, away from the doors. “Quick.”

  “They think he stole money.”

  Kate’s eyes were drawn to the goggles around Kyle’s neck, which made her wonder about hidden microphones, though she couldn’t imagine how anyone could gain anything from eavesdropping on her now.

  “How much?”

  “Fifty million.”

  “What?” Kate could barely prevent herself from staggering. “How much?”

  “Fifty million euros.”

  SHE SPLASHED HER face, st
ared at herself in the mirror, dripping wet.

  The things unsaid between Kate and Dexter were large beyond comprehension. They’d been growing every day for months, for years, for their entire relationship. But now the lies and secrets were accelerating. The growth was exponential.

  How could she not tell this to her husband?

  On the other hand, how could she tell him? How could she explain her suspicions, her actions, her contacts? Would she tell him about breaking into Bill’s apartment? Would she tell him about Hayden in Munich and the agent-chauffeur in Berlin and Kyle right out there, sitting at the table? With the children? How would she explain any of this without admitting that she was CIA? Without opening that bottomless can of worms?

  She was trapped—she had trapped herself—under an oppressive veil of silence.

  “WHAT YOU HAVE to do—what I have to do—is try to put myself in the mind of the attacker, the hacker. What would I do if I were trying to break into a system?”

  Dexter was leaning back in the banquette, unshaven and snow-burned and wild of coif and not exactly steady of eye, explaining his job to Kyle, of all people.

  “So I have to poke around, to find the weaknesses. Is it the system architecture? The firewall? The software-update protocols? Or is it the physical plant—the office layout, the mainframe access, the confusion of a lunchtime rush? Or is it social engineering that’s going to be too easy? Are the employees trained, at all, to be aware of security issues? Are there sufficient procedures for choosing and changing and protecting their passwords?”

  Kate glanced at the kids, obliviously eating, ravenous, digging into their thick soups like escaped prisoners, devouring fries and baguette between hearty slurps. Jake paused for water, came up gasping, and set upon his soup again.

  The children were red-faced and chapped-lipped, and the buxom waitress wore a low-cut gingham blouse, and the maître d’ was a picture of jolly rotundity. The people all looked like they’d been painted into the scene, itself set-designed with vintage sleds and wooden ski poles hanging on the walls, a person-high stack of wine bottles, a towering fire in the stone fireplace. Thick planks for tabletops, pots of fondues and bowls of potatoes.

  Dexter pushed aside the remainder of his tartiflette, another meal in shades of white, and took a long pull of beer from a huge mug, then continued pontificating. “The best hacker isn’t merely expert at the technical aspects of systems design and engineering, of ports and code and software vulnerabilities. No. That’s what makes a good programmer. What makes a good hacker is the devious social engineer who can identify and exploit the greatest weakness in every system, every organization: human frailties.”

  Kyle was rapt.

  “And once I’ve figured out a way for a hacker to get in, I have to think about how he plans to get out without being detected.”

  Julia and Bill exchanged a quick look that Kate barely noticed.

  “There are a lot of ways to get caught extracting anything from anywhere. Just ask the bank robber doing thirty years in a federal pen. Getting in and getting the money are the easy parts. The hard part, always, is getting out. Especially undetected.”

  KATE HAD TAKEN a deep breath and rapped—carefully—on the door, a soft polite knock-knock, like a room-service waiter, or a considerate spouse.

  This was the type of operation that needed to take less than a half-minute, quickly in and immediately out, completely reliant on the element of surprise. A hard knock on the door would’ve ruined the surprise.

  She counted the seconds—six, seven—while fighting the urge to knock again, another way to cede the surprise—eight, nine—until the handle turned, and the door opened a mere crack, and Kate threw all her weight into it, shoulder first, knocking Torres away.

  He stumbled backward into the suite’s sitting room, trying to avoid completely losing his balance and falling on his ass, while also coming to the horrifying realization that he had erred gravely. That somehow, of all the mistakes he’d made in his adventurous, eventful, and satisfying fifty-seven years, of all the many people—hundreds of them, thousands—he’d pissed off, it was astoundingly this chica who was finally going to kill him, right now. He should have never hired that photographer to take those pictures through her living-room window in Washington. Should never have printed up those glossies of the mother and her little boy, reading a book on the sofa. Should never have laid that picture on the table in the hotel lounge. Should never have made that implicit threat on her life, on the safety of her family.

  He opened his mouth to plead for his life, but didn’t get the chance.

  It was when Torres was still falling to the floor—two sound-suppressed bullets in the chest, one in the head, no way to not be dead—that Kate heard the baby cry, and looked up to see the young woman walking through the door from the bedroom.

  PART III

  TODAY, 12:49 P.M.

  “Kate! Hello!”

  Carolina is waving as she approaches. Another expat woman on another narrow Parisian sidewalk, smiling, this one a Dutch mom from school. Another woman who owns a large set of matching luggage, purchased somewhere within a mile of where they stand in the rue de Verneuil, a hundred yards from the somber Pont Royal that crosses the Seine to the Louvre and the Tuileries.

  Carolina starts talking, a gushing stream of enthusiasms and exclamations. She’s an excitable woman, socially ambitious and hyper-friendly, nearly pathologically outgoing, producing a constant stream of invitations across a broad swath of the Left Bank expat community. The Dutch, Kate has found, are very outgoing.

  Kate can’t quite pay attention to the chitchat, watching Carolina’s mouth but barely understanding the monologue, something about the refurbished café around the corner in the rue du Bac, and when they’d have their first moms’-night-out of the school year, and there was a new American from New York—had Kate met her?

  Kate stands there grinning and nodding at her friend, at this woman she has known for a year, this woman she sees nearly every day, sometimes two or three times per day, at the school’s giant green door in the cobblestoned street, and at the café next door and the restaurant up the block, at the tabac and the presse, in the playgrounds and parks, in the Musée d’Orsay and playing tennis and drinking coffee, shopping for children’s clothes and red wine, for shoes and handbags, curtains and candlesticks, talking about babysitters and housekeepers and the legroom on transatlantic flights, and ten-piece sets of matching luggage.

  This woman whom Kate may never see again, this conversation their last. This is the expat life: you never know when someone you see every day is going to disappear forever, instantly transmogrifying into a phantom. Before long you won’t be able to remember her last name, the color of her eyes, the grades that her children were in. You can’t imagine not seeing her tomorrow. You can’t imagine you yourself being one of those people, someone who one day just vanishes. But you are.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow?” Carolina asks. She thinks this is a rhetorical question.

  “Yes,” Kate answers, a thoughtless assent, but she realizes that in actuality she’s deeply agreeing with something else entirely, committing herself to a plan that has been batting around her brain for the past hour.

  Kate knows now she will not be needing the weekend bags packed for the forty-fourth time, nor the gassed-up Audi. Her family will not be going anywhere. Not tonight, nor tomorrow.

  There’s another life that Kate can live, here. And she now knows how to make it happen.

  22

  Pop!

  Kate spun, startled by the sound of another cork yanked out by Cristina, who was too rushed and maybe too drunk to twist it out slowly, instead just yanked the thing, letting the liquid effervesce into a towel, wiping down the bottle, pouring the wine quickly, sloppily, spilling. There must have been a lot of empty bottles lying around the kitchen.

  Tonight was their first social occasion since skiing and dinner with the so-called Macleans, a week ago. They’d returned to L
uxembourg yesterday.

  Cristina refilled Kate’s glass, a heavy crystal. Did these people really own dozens of crystal flutes? A thousand dollars’—more?—worth of glassware? For New Year’s Eve?

  Kate noticed Julia in the next room. The last they’d spoken had been standing in the flurries outside the restaurant at the resort, cold fake cheek kisses, distracted by the tired children and the surprisingly agreeable company of Kyle and the new knowledge that these FBI agents suspected her husband of stealing approximately seventy-five million dollars.

  Kate still hadn’t said anything about it to Dexter.

  The most common language at this party was English; everyone here spoke it. But since the hosts were Danish, there was a lot of that buzzing around too, indistinguishable to Kate from Swedish and Norwegian, barely separable from Dutch and German. Kate could deal with Romance languages; she could communicate in all of them, even in a pinch Portuguese, which had some wigged-out sounds. But these northern tongues? Gibberish.

  Julia made eye contact. Kate took a deep, calming breath.

  Dexter was wearing jeans and a black shirt, the same as a few other men here. But Dexter’s was the only black shirt that was untucked, while the others all wore thick belts with status-symbol buckles, silver or gold logos, a big serifed H, a boxed-in G; these buckles were the point. It would not have occurred to Dexter to buy a belt with such a buckle, to tuck in a shirt to display such a symbol. That was not her husband; she knew him, and that was not him. But of course she didn’t really know him.

  Kate looked around at the men. These bankers with their platinum watches and alligator wingtips, their stretch denim and silk-cotton blends with iridescent mother-of-pearl buttons and hand-stitched buttonholes, talking about their carving skis and fully catered Swiss chalets, their villas in Spain and first-class flights to Singapore, next year’s Audis and last generation’s Jaguars, the dollar versus the euro, earnings reports, short positions. Money: earning it, spending it. Eating it, drinking it, wearing it.