by Chris Pavone
It was the type of night that looks a lot like a romantic date, one that ends in bed.
“So,” she said to him in the hotel lobby, “what now?” Peter seemed like a man with something on his mind, a man who wanted to unburden himself, but needed to be given permission. Kate wanted to give him that permission, wanted him to open up, she wanted to be that sort of boss, that sort of friend, that sort of woman. She wanted to hear what it was he needed to say.
What else did she want? Yes, she did: she wanted him to make a pass. She didn’t want to accept it, no, she was sure of that. But she wanted him to try.
Kate already knew the risks people could take, the damage these risks could do. Her career in exploiting people often hinged on the discovery of extramarital affairs, or the invention of them, which could happen even when—especially when—they could be most damaging. There are so many ways it can turn out badly.
And badly is the only way it can turn out, isn’t it? In the end—and there’s always an end—it’s just a question of who ends up most hurt. But make no mistake about it: everyone ends up hurt.
“What,” he said, “are my options?”
She’d asked for that, hadn’t she? Kate turned away, fought a smile, felt herself blushing. She hated blushing; it made her feel exposed.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what I want,” Peter said. He took a step closer.
She kept her eyes averted, down at the floor, over by the door, anywhere else.
“I want you to come upstairs with me.”
That’s when she looked up. His eye was firm, he was absolutely sure of himself. This didn’t come as a surprise to her, neither his desire nor his declaration. She knew him pretty well at this point.
“I want you to come to bed with me.” He smiled. “Again.”
Absolutely sure of her.
It has to be admitted: at that point in her life, Kate preferred a good flossing to having sex with Dexter. She’d been doing everything possible to avoid him short of saying no point-blank; she didn’t want to create that rift in her marriage, possibly irreparable, a wife who denies sex to her husband. It was temporary, and she didn’t want to impose a permanent solution onto a temporary problem. This is what she told herself, staring in the mirror, wearing her most matronly nightgown, shapeless plaid flannel.
“I want you,” Peter said. “That’s what I want.”
38
PARIS. 12:51 P.M.
Two knocks in quick succession. Pause. Then three knocks. Pause. Four. Then Simpson unlocks the various mechanisms, pulls the heavy door open just wide enough to collect a bag from the uniformed policeman. “Merci,” he says, and shuts the door quickly. Reengages all three locks.
They have a code, this CIA dude and a local cop? That’s odd. Is this something they worked out just today? Or is it a standard spook-cop thing? If so, wouldn’t all the bad guys also know the code?
Bad guys. Did he really just form that phrase in his mind? Jesus.
“Sandwiches,” Simpson says. “And coffee. Water too.” He sets the bag on the table, begins unloading little wax-paper packets. “Jambon-beurre, I hope that’s okay with everyone.”
Hunter doesn’t want any damn ham-and-butter sandwich. He remains in his seat, dejected, slouched in this lumpy futon, with an out-of-date American gossip magazine in his lap. He has already leafed through all the more substantive publications; next is going to be fashion. Which will at least have the benefit of plentiful pictures of pretty women.
He watches his own pretty woman walk across the room. Though walk isn’t the right word for what Colette does. Saunter.
She picks up a bottle of water, sparkling. Hunter has been making an effort to catalog Colette’s preferences—whites from Burgundy, grilled loup de mer, triple-crème cheeses, swimming in the Mediterranean, Prada shoes. Sparkling, not still. He’s laying the groundwork to be an attentive, considerate husband.
It’s true that at this moment Colette already has a different husband, a guy—named Guy!—whom Hunter has researched exhaustively, exhaustingly. This Guy guy, a professor, apparently wrote the definitive biography of some long-dead French novelist—not Balzac, but another dude with a z—which makes him a writer who writes about other dead writers, which: for fuck’s sake. Guy’s headshot—turtleneck, long wavy hair, staring off into the distance—has Sensitive Guy written all over it, like a watermark in stationery.
Other than their mutual affection for the same woman, Hunter and Guy don’t seem to have anything in common. Hopefully Colette’s taste in men isn’t completely consistent.
Hunter has considered different strategies for wrecking her marriage, a few very different schemes. Weighing practicalities, challenges, likelihoods of success. He always comes back to his first, most obvious concept: entrap Guy into having an affair, and make absolutely sure he gets caught.
The main stumbling block to this scenario is super-ironic: the person Hunter would entrust to find the right seductress? Colette. She solves all the problems that aren’t the express domain of someone with a different specialty, and no one has this specialty.
In whatever way Hunter is going to ruin Colette’s marriage, he’d better start soon. It’s not as if he has forever. His sperm is fine—he had himself checked, that’s not the concern—but the rest of his body is definitely aging, and he wants to be able to play catch with his son, hit fungoes, toss a football. Who knows how many more years he’ll be able to rely on his body? Hunter’s own dad tore an ACL at age forty-eight, and never skied again; never did much of anything physical again. By that point, Hunter was sixteen and no longer wanted to do anything with Dad, except that one trip to the brothel near Tahoe, which he’d never before realized was an option as a father-son activity. And it turned out to be just the one time, not an ongoing hobby.
Hunter watches as Colette unscrews the water-bottle cap and tips the bottle into her mouth, her lips open and pursed, barely touching the plastic, certainly not engulfing it, not wrapping her mouth around the shaft of it—
Oh, God, it’s a physical ache he has for her, an actual generalized pain.
It really wasn’t supposed to be this way. For this Paris assistant, he’d made a special point of asking HR to send over an older woman. Not old, per se, but at least well into her thirties. Labor laws being what they are, sexual harassment suits, who knows about French customs; Hunter didn’t want to run any risks. This is a country in which every employee is guaranteed the right to not respond to work e-mails on vacation, of which everyone is guaranteed at least five weeks per year. Everyone! It’s insane.
He was already well aware of his own predilection for French women, and for twenty-five-year-olds. He was, frankly, terrified to combine the two.
For her job interview, Colette had worn a roomy pantsuit, her hair strangled up in a bun, thick eyeglasses. She barely smiled. She was clearly a good-looking woman, but not in any distracting way, nothing to worry about. And she was obviously a hyper-competent, super-efficient person. Maybe a bit of a pill, but that was okay. Hunter wasn’t trying to hire a friend. He’d learned that lesson already, more than once.
But it slowly became clear how obscenely clever Colette is. She’s unfailingly pleasant to everyone, without ever seeming insincere. Every once in a while she even displays a flash of a sense of humor, which Hunter never could’ve anticipated from that brittle, joyless interviewee.
Then that night last year.
* * *
It came out of the blue: Colette accompanied him for the short walk over to his drinks date, as she does. The street in front of the hotel was lined with luxury cars, including a matching pair of cherry-red Lamborghinis with Qatar plates, an ostentatious display of wealth that made Hunter feel downright middle-class. He’d heard that a sultan rented out the presidential suite for an entire month on the mere chance that his family would want to come to Paris for a few days. And t
hen never did.
Boss move.
That’s the sort of money Hunter wants. The sort that makes it okay to throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars for basically no reason.
He made his way to the terrace while Colette stepped inside to check for his guest. As she was reemerging, she came face-to-face with a friend—Mon Dieu, big hugs, big smiles.
Hunter was sitting at a table under the red awnings that matched the red blooms that cascaded from the flower boxes of every red-awninged window. At the next table, a Pakistani guy wearing a bright-pink jacket was reading a London paper. That type of crowd, of place, exuding money. Across the wide tree-lined street, exorbitant fashion boutiques beckoned. Come over here, they called. You belong here.
In places like this, Hunter hated staring at his phone. So instead he watched Colette, who was only thirty feet away but hadn’t seen Hunter sit, didn’t know how close he was. So she was interacting with this person from her private life as if out of her boss’s sight.
She was a completely different person. Her face was lit up in a wonderful smile, one that Hunter had never before seen. Those deep dimples, the rosy glow of her cheeks, the affectionate way she caressed her friend’s arm. Her eyes were twinkling. She pushed a wisp of errant hair away from the side of her neck. Her long, incredibly sexy neck.
It was like a flash of lightning, the immediacy of this epiphany, the drama of it, the irrefutability of this violent bolt of electricity exploding in the sky, making everything else look minor, irrelevant: Colette was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met. His assistant! How had it taken him three years to realize this?
Now it was like looking back on a time when he believed that the world was flat, that politicians were honest: inconceivable, from this vantage, to fathom how he’d been so completely wrong, for so very long.
* * *
“Can we get some light in here?” Hunter asks, flinging aside the heavy drapery—
He freezes, staring. Turns back to face Simpson. “What the hell?”
Simpson holds up a finger while he finishes chewing his ham sandwich, swallows. “Sorry,” he says. “I told you this place wasn’t much to look at.”
“But boarded-up windows?”
“For safety.”
Hunter’s first thought is about fire safety; there was an issue last year with inaccessible windows at the plant in Guangdong Province, six people died, or maybe it was eight? Some small, even number of dead Chinese people.
But this wasn’t the type of safety Simpson was talking about. “In today’s age of electronic intrusion, Mr. Forsyth, windows are too porous. With directional microphones, portable telescopes, night-vision goggles. Not to mention high-powered sniper’s rifles.”
Hunter’s mind roams to the bathroom, the small window there. Is that one boarded up too? The bedroom? “This is a super-cheerful place, isn’t it?”
“It’s not meant to be cheerful, Mr. Forsyth. It’s meant to be safe.”
Hunter has given up asking Simpson to call him by his first name. He prefers Mr. Forsyth anyway.
“Is there anything I can get for you? Try to get for you? To make you more comfortable while we’re here?”
Hunter fingers a section of sandwich, but doesn’t pick it up. “Can you please find out what’s going on out there?”
“The police who accompanied us have instructions to bring me any news immediately.” He shrugs. “They haven’t brought any news.”
Hunter examines this so-called Tom Simpson, a guy wearing a forgettable outfit, an unflattering suit and oxford shirt with repp tie, cap-toes that could use a shine, like a bureaucrat’s uniform. Maybe it is an actual uniform, guidelines in some handbook. But any guidelines would probably prohibit these grooming choices—the big beard, the large square eyeglass frames with amber lenses. Like a character from an old cop show, Kojak maybe, Columbo.
Plus there’s that scar on his cheek. Maybe the beard is there to hide others.
Barney Miller.
“You don’t seem particularly concerned. Or interested.”
“I’m concerned, Mr. Forsyth. And plenty interested. I understand that this situation is inconvenient for you, I really do. Today is not going how you planned, and it’s an important day. That’s true for lots of people. I hope for everyone’s sake—including my own—that we can normalize as soon as possible. But my job right now is to keep you out of harm’s way. In the meantime, we have to accept that everything else about the situation is out of our control.”
Do we? Acceptance is not Hunter’s style.
He looks around again, the boarded-up windows, the triple-locked steel-reinforced door, the magazines, the TV hooked up to a DVD player, the small stack of American movies, the shelf’s worth of paperback books. The bathroom has a bare-bones supply of toiletries, the single bedroom a queen-size bed. And that landline, plugged into the beige plastic box of a wall jack. It looks like an old piece of hardware, that box. Something from ten years ago, maybe more. Fifteen. Pre–fiber optic.
The phone unit also looks like it’s not especially new. He walks over to the console table, picks up the handset, checks that there’s still no dial tone. There isn’t.
It’s a model with two lines, an integrated digital answering machine. The kind of outdated phone you find in a mom-and-pop roadside motel, neither mom nor pop willing to invest in the latest communications systems, their clientele not in a position to care. Hunter has used a couple of those motels, once or twice.
This device is something that was bought from a consumer-electronics retailer, for your home office, for your kitchen counter. This handset wasn’t one element of a big network buy with a purchase order, a complex install sequence, coordination between IT and HR, a temporary outgoing message for everyone, memos, complaints…
It never ceases to amaze Hunter how anything can become a royal pain in the ass.
But this phone wasn’t. This was a quick inexpensive purchase, a one-minute install. He turns the base over, where MADE IN CHINA is die-cut into the beige plastic. He puts this down, walks away.
China…
Made in China…?
This phone was made in China?
39
PARIS. 12:58 P.M.
“Schuyler? Is Forsyth married?”
Schuyler is staring off at nothing, in stunned shock. She nods.
Kate retrieves her phone from the desk, glances at the screen. Yes, her intrusion has been successful.
“Happily?”
The woman looks at Kate. “Are you kidding me? How would I know?”
It’s certainly not unheard-of, especially in France, where extramarital affairs are practically a requirement, especially for powerful men. Perhaps Schuyler thought her boss was different—a visionary, a genius, a whatever, above all that. No one is above all that.
So, yes, that could be a possibility: an affair plus blackmail. But how could this garden-variety shakedown fit into a coordinated terrorist attack on multiple continents?
Though there haven’t been any actual attacks so far. No hostages taken. No networks breached, no systems crashed. No violence of any sort, physical or cyber. Although explosives have been planted at the Gare de Lyon, Arc de Triomphe, place Vendôme, and Notre-Dame, plus a suicide bomber in the middle of the Louvre, there have been no detonations. No trucks plowing through crowds. No deaths. No demands. No claims of responsibility. Just threats, strung like a necklace of menace across the city’s neck.
Kate brings to mind a map of Paris, and drops mental pins at the bomb sites. They surround this office.
“Where’s Forsyth’s apartment?”
The young woman doesn’t answer.
“Listen, I know you don’t want to—”
“No, that’s not it: I actually don’t know where it is?”
“You need to find out.”
“Sorry, and then what? Go there?” The young woman shakes her head. “No way.”
“You have to.”
“I have to? I don’t think so.”
“Then get me the address, and I’ll go.”
“That’s out of the question. Listen, Miss…What is your name anyway?”
“Lindsay.”
“Well, Lindsay, I have no clue who you are? Or what you’re doing here? Or what business this is—any of this—of yours? Seriously, who are you? A reporter?”
Kate doesn’t answer.
“Are you CIA?”
Kate remains silent.
“For all I know, maybe you’re involved in these attacks? Maybe you’re a Trojan horse? Maybe this whole thing is orchestrated to trick me into taking you to Mr. Forsyth’s apartment? Maybe you’re the enemy?”
Kate opens her mouth to explain how wrong this is, but then changes her mind. This young woman is better off not knowing Kate’s theory.
“Okay.” Schuyler gets up. “I’m going to have to ask you to wait in reception?”
“Come on,” Kate says. “What do you think I’m going to do in here? Steal your press releases?”
Kate holds up her phone, pretending to read messages so she can surreptitiously take a photo of the young woman.
“I can’t guess what you want to steal? But if you’re not planning on stealing anything, you’ll be just as happy to wait out in reception?”
She follows Kate like a prison guard back down the gray hall. Kate sends Schuyler’s photo to Inez, with instructions to follow her to Forsyth’s apartment.
“This woman is going to wait for me here? I’ll be back in fifteen minutes?”
“D’accord.”
“Hey,” Kate says. “Take my phone number. In case you need help.”
“What help am I going to need that you can provide?”
“You never know.”