The Paris Diversion

by Chris Pavone

  “Okay,” Kate says, taking a narrow wooden chair. Inez’s own chair is a large curvy plastic-mesh affair that suggests ergonomics, lumbar support, chiropractors, science. “What can you tell me about all this today?”

  Inez nods curtly, down to business. “At 8:41, the police received the following telephone call from a mobile.” She taps on her keyboard, clicks an icon and then another and another.

  A digitally scrambled voice speaks in a monotone: “A remote-detonated bomb has been placed in the main hall of the Gare de Lyon. If you attempt to disable the bomb, we will detonate. Await further instructions.” The recording ends. “And again, from twenty-four minutes later.” Inez cues up the second track: “A bomb has been placed at the Arc de Triomphe. Await further instructions. Another on the subject of place Vendôme, and finally Notre-Dame.”

  “Are there actually bombs at these locations?”

  “There are bags confirmed at the locations that could contain explosive devices.”

  “Or?”

  “Or the bags might not contain explosive devices.”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  “I am not suggesting that anyone has done that. I am saying that it is not yet confirmed that these bags are…comment dit-on?—weaponized.”

  This is a very precise woman.

  “Ensuite, as you know”—Inez indicates the TV—“a man arrived to the Louvre wearing a suicide vest, also carrying what has the appearance of a bomb in a briefcase.”

  Inez clicks around some more, opens a video feed from a camera that’s positioned high above the Louvre, aiming down at the man who’s standing between the pyramids. The scene appears unchanged since Kate was there an hour ago.

  “This is a livestream?”

  “Oui. The camera is from the police on the roof of the Louvre. The police are in command of the scene, but I do not doubt that at this moment self-important men are making arguments on the subject of who should make the decisions. Comme toujours.”

  “No group has claimed responsibility? No demands?”

  “Not that I know.”

  Kate stares at the monitor. She isn’t surprised that Inez managed to intercept the phone recordings, which had probably been forwarded to hundreds of people, sprayed out to law enforcement and national intelligence, the mayor and his deputies, local politicians and national ones, foreign embassies, even the CIA. A very wide and hasty distribution, with potential leaks aplenty. No way to keep it all secure.

  But this real-time video is not being e-mailed to anyone. This feed represents an impressive level of intrusion into the police’s security.

  Kate has no idea what size facility is here in this mansion, what resources, what personnel. This office doesn’t look like much, but it’s a big building, and Kate has seen only a small portion of it. There’s more.

  “How did you obtain this access?”

  “C’est pas important.”

  Of course it’s important. But Kate is a guest here, doesn’t have the right to make demands. In this business, everyone deserves to keep their own secrets, and everyone else knows it.

  These two strangers have been thrust into a position where they’re supposed to trust each other, in the same way that civilians are supposed to trust their bankers, their lawyers. But in Kate’s world the blind trust is not with some of your money, or elective surgery, but like trusting someone to catch you when you’ve made the deliberate choice to fall backward, without a net, off a cliff.

  * * *

  Hayden had let her dangle there in that Copenhagen apartment, grinning while Kate’s curiosity mounted.

  “Tell me,” she pled.

  “You’re going to adore this, Kate.”

  “Oh for the love of—”

  “The Travelers section is, in addition to being a courier service, also a complete parallel intelligence service. With officers, agents, assets, the whole shebang. This cadre occupies a thoroughly separate reporting structure, like us. But unlike us, their bureau chiefs report directly to someone in New York.”

  “New York? That’s nuts. What’s in New York?”

  “The editor of the magazine. He in turn reports directly to the DCI.”

  “The director himself? God. And did you say bureau chiefs, plural? There’s more than one of these bureaus?”

  “There are dozens.”

  Kate was having trouble grasping this. “How long has this been going on?”

  “The program began right after World War II, as solely the courier service. It evolved.”

  “That’s incredible. But how is this related to us?”

  “It’s not, other than our unusual level of independence from Langley. But we both operate out of Paris, so we’ve agreed to pool resources, in a pinch. If you ever find yourself in one, go there. Say you want to arrange a trip to Beirut…”

  That’s when Hayden explained how to make contact with the head of the Travelers’ Paris Bureau. But then he got pulled away by an urgent call, and the next time Kate saw him was when the action was beginning across the street in the hacker’s apartment, which spiraled out of control—a shootout followed by a frantic chase, a failed mission and dead bodies. Nørrebro turned out to be the last place Kate ever saw Hayden. He never did get around to telling her who it was back in America who provided Kate with her targets.

  In the weeks and months that followed Hayden’s disappearance, Kate began to suspect that he’d known exactly what was going to happen across the street, and then across the ocean. She kept remembering a piece of his advice, something he’d taught her when she was new and still figuring out how to make her way in the Agency, how to make things happen in the world: a carefully orchestrated disaster can be the perfect diversion.

  32

  VENICE. 11:37 A.M.

  She’s staring out at the sun-drenched campo, trying to appreciate the beautiful surroundings instead of the horrific noise. She’s failing.

  The boy’s midday nap was supposed to begin a half-hour ago, but Matteo is refusing vociferously, going red in the face, then purple. If she didn’t know better, she’d think that the baby was suffocating. But she does know better. That’s apparently what motherhood is: learning to know better.

  The kid doesn’t want to eat. He doesn’t need a new diaper, doesn’t want to be held or rocked. He doesn’t want anything that she can provide, and her attempts at soothing him serve only to antagonize.

  The decibel level is brutal. Like an enhanced interrogation technique, something outlawed by the Geneva Conventions.

  At least she doesn’t have to worry about bothering the neighbors. The apartment’s walls are thick plaster, the under-flooring solid beneath the elaborate parquet, everything efficiently soundproofed as a side effect of old-fashioned workmanship, a building that dates back at least six hundred years, maybe seven, it’s hard to be exact for some of these structures, which have undergone so many transformations over the centuries, transfers of ownership, major renovations, lost records.

  You wouldn’t think that such a tiny animal could make such a racket.

  How many babies have cried in this room? Renaissance babies, Baroque babies, Fascist babies. Thirty generations? Forty? Hundreds of babies have wailed here in this well-constructed room, each and every one of them driving their mothers up a tree.

  One of the things she has learned about the child-screaming sound is that it erodes rationality, compromises your ability to make lucid, purposeful choices. An evolutionary mechanism that prevents mothers from ignoring distressed offspring. Like the babies’ cuteness, from the other direction. Cuteness is the carrot. This screaming, this is the fucking stick.

  The kid screams yet louder, if that’s possible.

  * * *

  She bundles him up into a little pastel packet, a sweater that’s beginning to strain at the seams, a matching cap. She binds her
own long hair into a ponytail, puts on the oversize sunglasses that she wears for walks regardless of the weather, whenever she’s going out in public for a while, visible in the narrow pedestrian lanes of Venice where everyone looks everyone else in the face, at close range. It’s easy to be recognized here, if you’re recognizable, and if you don’t take precautions. If someone is looking for you.

  As soon as she moved to Italy, she dyed her hair, her eyebrows too. She can’t help but think she looks Italian now, from somewhere in the south. It makes her wonder if her Polish ancestry is more mixed than she’d been led to believe; almost everyone’s is. And even after all this time, she’s still not accustomed to this raven-haired look, still wonders Who the hell is that woman? when she catches sight of herself in a mirror. Not just the hair length and color, but also the big glasses, the absence of makeup, the loose flowing clothing. It would take a vigilant, focused eye for anyone to see under all that, to recognize her as the woman she used to be.

  The truth is that she no longer is that same woman, and not just in appearance. The baby changed so much, especially after all she’d been through to carry to term. The husband too, he’d necessitated a lot of changes in her, after so many years without one. And the end of her career, the dissolution of her identity as a respected professional. The setbacks she’d faced—the immense failure, the public disgrace, the hasty relocations, the itinerant lifestyle. Every single aspect of her life.

  But in some important respects, she’s still exactly the same. Her fingerprints, for example. Her dental records, the bright white mouthful expensively aligned by aggressive American orthodontia. Her ambition, and willingness to bend rules and laws to serve it.

  She double-checks that her primary phone has held its charge; now would be a terrible time to be unavailable. She jacks in the headphones, puts a little speaker into one ear, leaves the other free to hear the sounds of the world around her. Pats down her pockets for keys, wallet, the extra pacifier she always carries, diaper, wipes.

  She straps the baby into the Swedish baby-carrying contraption, clips clicking, tugging taut.

  Finally she pulls open the drawer of the small table next to the front door. She removes the tourism guidebook and the Italian-English dictionary, sets these heavy tomes atop the table, next to the bowl of coins, vaporetti tickets, a notepad whose top sheet is usually a shopping list.

  With the drawer empty, she runs her fingertip along a seam where the bottom panel meets the side, until she finds the narrow gap, just wide enough for a fingernail.

  Retrofitting this drawer was one of the first projects her husband tackled immediately after they moved into this apartment, fresh from their cleansing exile in the Wild West of southern Sicily, where she’d given birth to this baby boy. It was a carpentry job that took him a couple of days—sketching and shopping, sawing and sanding, gluing and clamping.

  They have been extremely careful. Every piece of furniture in this apartment came with the lease; the bed linens, the bath towels, the kitchenware, everything. They paid cash for the small additional items they’ve needed; they established telecom and utility accounts using airtight aliases. They use a rotating assortment of burner phones, replacing them on a regular basis. It’s fun, destroying phones. She uses a ball-peen hammer.

  Rural Sicily was much more third-world than first, agrarian and analog, sparsely populated and mostly poor and corruptly governed, a place where official favors can be bought from bank clerks, from state ministries, from hospital administrators, favors that can be used to construct new identities with all necessary documentation.

  Sicilians had become somewhat inured to illegal migrants, to undocumented people arriving by the literal boatload. But those were North Africans and Middle Easterns, desperate people escaping war-torn hellscapes, risking their lives on treacherous crossings in watercraft of questionable seaworthiness, with unknown prospects on the far shore. It was almost a relief for the Sicilians to be accepting substantial bribes from prosperous-looking Americans, even if these Americans were clearly up to no good. At least there weren’t any humanitarian dilemmas to consider, war crimes, genocides.

  She’d been gone from America for a half-decade now, except for that scant single year back in Washington when she discovered that while she’d followed her career out of the country, all her unmarried friends back home seemed to have stumbled into long-term relationships, and all her married friends had spawned children. Her college classmates, her work colleagues, her neighbors, everyone procreating all at once. A contagion.

  Here in Italy, she gave her own baby an Italian name, a name that might make it less obvious that the adults were a pair of Americans, that might make people wonder if she was of Italian heritage, speculate on some excuse for Americans to be living here, a story they could tell other than the truth.

  The drawer’s bottom panel pivots upward from a rear hinge. A few items are arranged in the false-bottom recess, each occupying its own carefully proportioned niche, the whole arrangement constructed from balsa strips and crushed velvet to prevent the contents from sliding around and creating noises that might make someone wonder what the hell is in this piece of occasional furniture, and where exactly, and why.

  She collects one of the items from its housing, slips it into the big pocket in her jacket, right there with the more usual things that a mom carries.

  She pulls the door closed behind her, double-checks that the lock engaged. With this kid screaming in her ear, it’s impossible to hear things like the clicking of locks. She squats to pick up a strand of her hair that’s resting on the door’s saddle. Licks the tips of her forefinger and thumb, and runs these moistened fingertips down the length of hair, which she saliva-sticks against the door and jamb, positioned at exactly the same level as the widest of five separate nicks in the wood.

  Every time she leaves the apartment, she uses this discrete privacy seal. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that anyone would still be looking for her, but that’s the sort of resigned, exhausted complacency that can lead to disaster.

  She walks down the well-worn stone staircase carefully; she doesn’t want to tumble herself and her baby headlong into the emergency room. Through the dark damp lobby, where the kid’s crying sounds extra-shrill, bouncing off the tall ceilings and stone walls and floors. She pushes open the gigantic slab of door, and bursts into the bright sunlight of the campo.

  If they ever move back to the United States—an unlikely eventuality—they’d have the option of shortening the kid’s name to Matt without the transformation seeming absurd to him, without it being something they’d need to explain with a series of unsustainable lies. Or he could simply remain Matteo, which at that point might be just as common in America.

  She still holds out hope that they’ll eventually live some version of a normal life, settled in one place, using one set of names consistently, telling mostly the truth to most people, most of the time. But she knows it’s a slim hope. Very slim.

  33

  PARIS. 11:39 A.M.

  “Alors.” Inez is staring intently at her screen. “Something in Hong Kong. A man was detained attempting to bring a bomb into an office.”

  “What type of man?”

  “What is it you are asking?”

  “Does he seem Muslim?”

  While Inez turns back to the screen, Kate glances around the cluttered office, paper everywhere. In Kate’s office, there’s practically none.

  “It seems he is American.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Inez gives her a look, What do you want from me?

  “Anywhere else, besides Hong Kong?”

  Inez clicks open a new window, scans line after line of incident reports—street-crime gunfire, a prison break in Kenya, a bank heist in Saigon. It’s still too early in the Americas for any law-enforcement alerts, although a hurricane is forming in the Gulf of Mexico. This time of year,
a hurricane is almost always forming in the Gulf of Mexico. The opposite of news.

  The Frenchwoman leans forward. “Voilà: Mumbai, a bomb threat is made to a building.”

  Another bomb in another office building? “Directed against any specific occupant?”

  Click, and click again. “Non, it does not appear so.”

  “You have the Mumbai address?”

  “Oui.”

  “Of the building in Hong Kong also?”

  Inez toggles to another window—“Voilà”—understanding what to do next, typing both addresses into a search, and it doesn’t take even a second for the results page to load, and there at the top, the very first commonality—

  * * *

  Kate feels the air sucked out of her through the hole in her soul that had been blasted open in Luxembourg, decimating the fortifications of truth and honesty and trust that we all rely upon to make it through the day. She’d thought that the hole had been repaired, but maybe it had been shoddy workmanship, bound to fall apart sooner or later.

  “This has importance for you?”

  Kate nods.

  “It is an American company, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Yes. Listen, would you mind?” She indicates the keyboard, the screen. Inez nods, stands, and the two switch places. Kate’s fingers clatter across the keyboard. A new page loads, displaying two hits, one address in La Défense, another in the huitième, with map windows. One of the red stars is a kilometer away.

  Kate can’t wrap her mind around what exactly this means. But it’s definitely not nothing.

  “Are any of your phone lines clean?” A plan is forming, a way to find answers.

  “Évidemment,” Inez says. “All of them.”

  Kate dials the main number of the company, and the line is answered before the first ring is complete. “Bonjour, thank you for calling 4Syte Paris, how may I direct your call?”