by Chris Pavone
Kate had come to a complete stop in the middle of the road. There was no way to loiter here; no way to lay in wait for this house or its inhabitants or visitors. She looked around, left and right, front and back; there was no cover within a half-mile in any direction. There was no way to sneak up on this house.
This was an odd headquarters for a company worth twenty-five million euros. What this looked like was a safe house.
THERE WERE A dozen moms for moms’-night-out, seated on bar stools circling a high table. Before a half-hour was out, most of them were plastered.
This excursion was supposed to get Kate’s mind off her impossible situation. Plus she had to maintain a facade of a normal life. This had been part of her training, part of her career, part of herself: whatever was going on, live like a normal person. Do normal things, see normal people. Don’t give anyone a reason to question you, investigate you. Don’t give them any meaningful answers to prying questions that might be asked after you’ve disappeared. Don’t create any suspicion that you were not who you claimed to be.
The gossip was flying rampant around the table, unfounded, malicious. This one’s husband was diddling his secretary. That one’s babysitter was the school slut. The Czech family that seemed so rich? Destitute. That loud vulgar Texan with the three kids? Undergoing fertility treatments to have a fourth. That so-and-so was a such-and-such.
Kate couldn’t stop trying to piece together what her husband was up to, and where he could possibly have gotten millions of euros in any way other than exactly what the FBI suspected: stealing it.
She discreetly slipped ten euros on the table when no one was paying attention, and she walked away, as if to the restroom. But she went to the door and grabbed her umbrella from the stand and exited to the street and the mist, the vaporous streetlights, the static-like rattle of the river rushing by, fecund with melted snow.
There were a handful of pubs clustered around the bridge in Grund, each with its own discrete micro-atmosphere of smoke and noise, the sound of TV rugby in one, a Euro-pop jukebox in another, sloppily drunk teenagers in a third, where a sign clearly prohibited entry by anyone under sixteen years old, thus attracting every sixteen-year-old in the city.
Kate walked across the bridge, entered the long well-lit tunnel cut deep into the rock upon which the haute ville was built, the rough-hewn walls hung with derivative art, the faint stench of urine, as in every urban tunnel, even in the most well-kempt cities. It was a hundred feet worth of ascent to her neighborhood atop this rock formation, good exercise if she tramped up the hill of the rue Large, but tonight she didn’t want any. She wanted answers, not cardio; she wanted to be home, alone with her thoughts. There was a babysitter to pay and dismiss, a husband playing tennis with the FBI agent who was investigating him. What a goddamn mess.
A small crowd spilled out of the arriving lift, a pair of teenagers, a pair of banker types, a lone woman, meeting Kate’s eye in some type of solidarity.
Kate was alone in the elevator, waiting for it to depart. She heard footsteps in the tunnel, someone rushing. It sounded like a man—heavy footfalls, long strides. She pressed the button, again and again, an irrational and futile but still takeable action.
The doors closed just as the man arrived, trying to insert his arm into the closing gap between the dimpled-steel panels, a split second too late.
The elevator was slow, rumbling, groaning on its cables. Kate stepped out onto the St-Esprit plateau, the administrative complex, the courts and national agencies, the plaza in the middle of all the hyper-clean buildings, the whole area well-lit but empty, silent.
Kate hustled across the cobblestones. She passed a nightclub, thumping music within but no one without. She turned a corner, ascending now, into another plaza. A bar here, a fountain, a fancy restaurant, an idling taxi. A middle-aged couple walking out of the restaurant, into the taxi.
She glanced over her shoulder; no one there. She hustled through the place and into a street, the pavement torn up, construction equipment idle in deep dirty ditches. She heard footsteps behind her.
Kate hurried, walking as fast as she could. She broke into a jog for a step or two, then speed-walked, alternating modes of rushing. She passed an intersection, a busy Italian restaurant down to the right, the grand duke’s palace to the left, and she realized she was about to walk under the Macleans’ windows.
The person behind her was definitely a man, shoes clopping quickly on the stones, keeping pace with her. She glanced back. A long dark coat, a brimmed hat. Was he the same man from the tunnel? Indeterminate age and size, hidden in the night. Indeterminate everything.
Kate looked at the Italian restaurant, considered dashing in for asylum. But she kept walking, quicker, passing a Chinese restaurant, a bar, then cutting down a steep alley, the shortest path to her home, unfortunately the creepiest, and she broke into a proper run, uncomfortable and unsteady in heels on steep wet cobblestones, reaching out to a stucco wall to avoid falling, scraping her fingers on the rough surface, turning a corner at full speed, planting her full-size umbrella to help her pivot, all concentration forward, homeward, nearly sprinting now, glancing into a dark passage, and changing her mind.
She ducked into the passage, which led to the front door of a building similar to her own, another medieval structure that had been renovated beyond recognition, stone walls covered in stucco, timber replaced, new double-pane windows hung, modern flashing installed around the chimneys.
She pressed herself flush against the wall, waiting, hidden, silent.
The footsteps grew louder, clip-clopping on the stones, the sound of a slip on the steep slope, and then nearly upon her, three seconds away, now two, now—
Kate spun off the wall and into the narrow street, her right arm raised, the momentum of her spin helping her fling her arm around at maximal speed, her right hand lying flat on the horizontal, a firm swing, and when the hand made contact with the man’s neck she maintained the follow-through, chopping through the resistance of the flesh and bone.
The man dropped to his knees, hands grasping at his neck, struggling to breathe. She held her umbrella with both hands, and rotated it so the curve of the wooden handle faced the outside of the swing that she used to thwack him in the middle of the back of the skull, and he pitched forward, face-planting into the cobblestones, probably breaking his nose.
Kate knelt over him, confirmed he was unconscious, alive. She noticed he wasn’t wearing a hat. This wasn’t the man who’d been behind her thirty seconds ago.
She reached into his coat and pocket and removed his wallet, and quickly determined that she’d just beaten up a Swiss lawyer who lived on her block.
TODAY, 4:57 P.M.
It’s been a long time since Kate carried a gun, passing police and security cameras, trying not to be nervous. It’s a familiar sensation, like the aggravation of an old injury.
She glances at the screen hanging above the Métro platform. The next 12-train bound for La Chapelle is due to arrive in one minute, the following in four minutes. She will wait for the second. She’s supposed to be on the first of the 12s to arrive at five o’clock or later.
Kate looks around the platform. She toys with the idea of trying to figure out which is the person who’s following her, but it’s pointless. She understands the rationale behind the precautions. They need to make sure that she herself is not being followed, is not paired up with anyone unsavory, or indeed anyone at all. And she’s not trying to evade anyone or anything. So it doesn’t matter who’s following her.
She flips through the pages of Match, photographs of all the people she expects to find in the pages of Match. She used to suspect that French celebrity gossip was different from the American version, superior. After a year of living in France, she now knows that it’s not.
The second train is more crowded than the first was, the commuting crowd thicker with the turn of the hour. There is no seat for Kate. She leans against a wall near a door, shifting her weight, growi
ng fidgety.
She can’t help herself now: she wants to know who it is who’s following her. She considers the normal assortment of characters who can be found on a five o’clock Métro. No one meets her eye for very long, and no one pointedly avoids it. It could be any of these people. It could be none of them.
The train stops at Solférino, and nothing much changes. Then Assemblée Nationale; still nothing. Then Concorde, the Métro slowing into this large, busy station, the crowded platform, waiting passengers walking toward the train as it’s still moving. She hears a man’s voice, low and gravelly, just as the doors open. “Transfer here. Go to Beaubourg, top café.”
The door is open, and she is stepping out.
She never got a look at the man who gave her the instructions; she didn’t even try. He was turning away even as his last sound was still hanging in the air, determined to be a wisp of a whisper in the loud din of the crowd.
Kate wends her way through the correspondance, up and down steps, around corners, long tunnels merging into longer ones, until finally she’s on the platform as the number 1 is pulling into the station, jam-packed on this most central line, post-work crowds streaming into the car at each station, people pushing and rushing, five uncomfortable stops until she allows herself to be ejected with a thick mass, human effluvium, at Hôtel de Ville.
She is out on the street, walking away from the river, then without warning the hulking Tinkertoy behemoth of the Pompidou Centre is looming in front of her, primary colors and glinting steel against the bright blue late-afternoon sky.
Kate pays for her ticket, enters an elevator, its only passenger.
She knows her way around this museum. It’s one of the places she comes with Dexter, to look at a new exhibition for an hour before lunching on the rooftop with the best view on all the Right Bank.
She enters the restaurant, nods at a waitress, heads to the corner table on the far side. A bottle of mineral water sits on the table, two glasses, one patron.
A woman at another table glances at Kate, flickering eyes back down to her coffee cup, the man with her studying his fingernails. The backup.
Kate’s pulse is quickening. She’s fleetingly aware of the loaded weapon in the hidden compartment at the bottom of her bag, of the other concealed weapons scattered around the handbags and shoulder holsters up here on this refined rooftop, sport jackets tailored loosely to hide ever-present hardware.
Hayden rises to kiss her, cheeks brushing cheeks, his late-afternoon stubble scraping her skin, dried out from the long outdoor summer and her general disdain of sunscreen. His breath smells of coffee and the aftereffects of a mint.
“Another museum,” Kate says, taking her seat. “You’re a big art fan, aren’t you?”
“It’s one of the main reasons I live in Europe.”
“Yes.”
“What’s yours?”
“The adventure.”
“Ah. Of course. We all love adventure, don’t we?” Hayden pours her a glass of water, the bubbles hissing softly. He produces the tiniest of wry smiles, of which he seems to possess an infinite variety.
“So. You mentioned something about a bit of stolen money.”
Kate takes a sip of water, steadying herself, preparing to be firm, unwavering. To not allow herself to be manipulated or short-changed.
“Yes,” she says. She puts her glass down, turns her eyes to Hayden. “But I want something in return.”
He nods.
“A couple of things, actually.”
26
The door was labeled REGISTRE DE COMMERCE ET DES SOCIÉTÉS, in a small new low-rise office building, on a street that Kate had never before entered or considered. A woman sat behind a desk and a computer and an angular pair of magenta-framed eyeglasses.
Kate had memorized new vocabulary words, checked verb conjugations. She even had a pocket dictionary in, of course, her pocket. She was expecting a lot of unfamiliar language in the national registry of businesses. But after Kate’s first sentence in French, the woman responded in English. “Of course. Please, what is the name of the company?”
“LuxTrade.”
The woman typed, hit the Enter key with authority. “The président-directeur general,” she said, “is Monsieur Dexter Moore.”
“Is there anything you can tell me about the company?”
“It is described as an investor in the financial markets.”
“When was it founded?”
“I do not know.”
“I’m sorry, I meant when was it registered here in Luxembourg?”
The woman glanced at the screen. “Previous October.”
“Thank you. Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“There is nothing else at all.”
Kate turned to walk away, then stopped, turned back. “By ‘previous October,’ you mean three months ago, right?”
“No, madame. LuxTrade was registered in Luxembourg fifteen months ago.”
Fifteen months ago? That was a year before they moved to Luxembourg. That was when Dexter had left the bank job to go freelance.
That was apparently when he’d launched the plan to steal an immense amount of money and hide it in Luxembourg. Fifteen months.
IN A DAZE, walking back to the mall’s garage along the broad, fast-moving avenue JFK, surrounded by the glass-and-steel office buildings, the glass-and-steel cars, these different shapes and sizes of containers of human life, a pedestrian on an un-pedestrian street. Heading into the wind, stiff and cold, painful when it gusted.
The boulevard was lined with bank offices, the S.A.s and the Sàrls, the different configurations available for protecting profits from taxes and lawsuits. There were cranes and earthmovers everywhere, new construction on office towers surrounding the new art museum, the new opera house, the new sports center, all the new public spaces financed by the skimpy taxes levied on the new money that found its way here, every day, hiding. Like LuxTrade’s twenty-five million euros.
Kate climbed the steps and entered the glass-and-steel mall, among the living, breathing people for a few seconds, before descending in the big glass-and-steel elevator alone, not another person in sight.
Dexter registered LuxTrade, an investing company—or was it?—here in Luxembourg fifteen months ago. How could this be?
Kate heard the squeak of tires, the hum of an engine, the slam of a door.
She walked within the painted lines that demarcated the footpath, following the rules, looking around, listening.
The harsh clang, somewhere far away, of one shopping cart being slammed into a long row of others.
Kate walked toward where she thought her car was. She heard footsteps, not far away, but saw no one. She dismissed the fear that scampered across her brain, but then reconsidered, accepted fearfulness. She looked around again, more carefully, her ears alert for other sounds, preferably normal comforting sounds, but also abnormal terrifying ones.
It was a parking lot at midday in Luxembourg. This was safer than nearly anyplace in Washington, D.C., any time of any day. Not to mention all the other dangerous places she’d spent the better part of her career.
Kate’s key was in her hand, her eyes darting. She heard footsteps and a trunk slamming, a car accelerating up a ramp, the clanking of a cart with a wobbly wheel, and then she saw—thank God—her car, the thrump-thrump of the doors unlocking, her heart racing, sliding behind the wheel, turning the ignition, shifting into gear, releasing the brake and accelerating, getting the hell out of here, her fear getting subsumed by embarrassment—how could she be so scared of the Auchan parking lot?—lowering the window to insert the parking ticket, the barrier raising, the ramp ascending toward daylight, exiting to the—
A rustle and a movement and a voice from the backseat, a low growl.
“TAKE THE NEXT right,” he said.
Kate considered her options. She could slam on the brakes and open the door and jump out of the car, run down the middle of the street, flag down the police.
>
Or she could refuse to go anywhere until he explained.
Or she could reach into her handbag on the passenger seat, pull out the Beretta, spin around, and put a few bullets in this FBI agent.
Or she could hear him out.
“Where are we going?”
Bill didn’t answer, sitting in the middle of the backseat, eyes locked with hers in the rearview.
Kate turned the car as instructed, then again, around the monstrous roundabout with the steel sculpture in the middle. Someone claimed it was by Richard Serra, but that didn’t make much sense to her. She stopped the car where she was told, a few hundred yards past the traffic circle, beside a narrow stretch of open parkland, a long sloping hill, benches and lampposts, an old man walking a small dog.
“Let’s get out.” Bill led her to a nearby bench. This was in the wide-open, very public; it would be tough to imagine this wasn’t safe. That was, Kate was sure, the point.
Bill sat. Kate thought about heading to a different bench, randomly instead of purposefully chosen. But this was randomly chosen, wasn’t it? It was becoming difficult to separate her own decisions from those made by others, for her, on behalf of themselves.
A car drove past, close behind another. One of them looked like Amber’s. Kate had been on this street before, passed this park. Everybody drove this street.
“People will think we’re having an affair,” Kate said. She took a seat next to Bill on the cold slats of treated wood.
“That would be better than the truth.”
A familiar car approached. Kate tensed, her mind drawn back to the gun in her bag. Julia climbed out, walked to the bench, sat on the far side of Bill. “Hi, Kate.” The tight little half-smile of people greeting each other at a funeral.
Kate didn’t say anything.