by Chris Pavone
“Who said anything”—she allowed a smile to spread across her lips, she couldn’t help it—“about a ransom?”
48
PARIS. 1:29 P.M.
As soon as the elevator doors begin to open, Kate can see that a security team is crossing the courtyard, headed in her direction—
She flattens herself against the wall, out of view, and reaches over to hit the door-close button, again, again—
Closing…closing…
Finally.
She presses −2, which is neither the next level down nor the lowest, both too obvious.
This building must have an exit other than the front door, a place for loading bays, service elevators, delivery entrances, fire exits, all accessible from the sous-sols levels, the garage, mechanicals, a warren of tunnels, of corridors that connect one wing to another. Kate has been beneath plenty of these old European buildings, and they’re all similar in their lack of similarity, their wildly disparate layouts and the incomprehensibility of their floor-plans, no rhyme or reason to what’s where, spaces that have been repurposed again and again for centuries.
Kate could easily find a place to hide down here, wait out the security team’s search. But there’s often no mobile signal in those deep levels; she’d be cut off from Inez, from Dexter, from school, from her kids. She wouldn’t be able to access any useful apps, any maps. She wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything.
So, no: Kate can’t afford to waste time hiding out down here.
She looks right, left. Right would be toward the front of the building. She turns left.
The rough-hewn stone walls are whitewashed, but that doesn’t totally disguise the dankness. At the end of the hall Kate turns onto another long stretch, plenty of doors on either side, but none of them marked for exit.
The police aren’t going to drop a dragnet on Kate today, but tomorrow might be different. There are the cameras in the elevator, at the security hut, in the waiting room. There will be a surfeit of footage of Kate gaining illicit entry to this building, sneaking through these halls. There’s also the beaten-up security guard, the receptionist, Schuyler. They’ll all be shown this footage.
Under close scrutiny, the wig will not help, nor the eyeglasses. Not if the investigators are diligent, not if they press these witnesses, not if they use software to remove these eyeglasses, to change this hair, to provide alternative superficialities to help focus on the bone structure, the shape of the face, the jawline, the eyes.
“Yes,” Schuyler will say, looking at a picture of Kate Moore. “That’s definitely her.”
* * *
SORTIE.
Kate opens the door gingerly, as if it’s an injured limb that she doesn’t want to move too quickly, it might hurt. She listens…listens…
Nothing.
The door closes behind her. She’s in an institutional stairwell, cinderblock walls, steel-tube handrails, emergency lights. Empty. Silent.
She drops her bag. Removes her jacket, throws it to the floor. Yanks her blouse over her head, rolls it up into a tight cylinder. She leans over, shoves the blouse—
What’s that?
Voices. A tinkle of laughter. Two people, up a few flights. The unmistakable click of a Zippo being opened, the scrape of the flint wheel, the whuff of the flame igniting.
“Merci.”
The lid clicks closed.
“De rien.”
Surreptitious cigarettes. They’re going to stand up there for five minutes, smoking.
Kate moves more carefully now, silently. Reaches into her bag, pulls out a different cloth cylinder, rolled up with a rubber band. She pulls this T-shirt over her head, shimmies in, tugs down the bottom.
Now she takes off the blond wig, the bobby pins, the clunky eyeglasses. She pushes her hands through her real hair, shakes her head. Runs bright lipstick across her mouth.
There: now she’s a Frenchwoman. No middle-aged American woman would wear this T-shirt proclaiming VIE DE MERDE, the Shitty Life, which encompasses so much disappointment in so many things, the way young people feel, always have, everywhere. But not well-off middle-aged American #expats; they want to message the opposite of VDM.
Kate tiptoes up to the next landing, another fire door with a narrow vertical panel of safety glass to provide a view out to a hall, a way to check for flames, smoke, assailants.
Nothing.
This door squeaks on its hinges, but there’s no one to hear it except Kate and the surreptitious smokers, and they’re not going to come investigating—
But damn, here comes another woman, turning at the far end of the corridor.
Kate doesn’t slow down. She smiles at this woman, says “Bonjour” while making firm eye contact, a preemptive attack of collegiality. Kate is a person who belongs here, who’s hiding nothing.
“Good afternoon,” the woman responds in English. The lingua franca here isn’t franca, it’s another place where English has taken over, another domino, one office at a time, city by city, country by country.
This woman doesn’t even think of challenging Kate.
Bluffing: it always works. Almost always. And if it hadn’t? Kate was ready—maybe eager—to use other means. One of the things Kate has learned over the past couple of years is that being the manager of other ass-kickers is not nearly as satisfying as doing the ass-kicking yourself. Not remotely.
* * *
The rear exit leads to a narrow side street lined with cluttered shops whose windows display ribbons and buttons and bolts of fabric, cash registers at the front, worktables in the middle. A specialty commercial strip that’s visited by the same people all the time, it’s a community that congregates here, coffee and gossip, draping saddle bags onto motorbikes or hopping into those little three-wheeled mini-trucks with a boxful of supplies, headed back to the dry-cleaner’s, the seamstress shop. Their day is going on, mostly as normal.
Kate is darting through the thick mid-afternoon crowds on the busy street, dodging businessmen whose eyes are taking in her VDM T-shirt stretched tight across her breasts, a double-distraction.
At one end of this street: police.
Kate heads in the other direction, past salons offering cheap haircuts, Chinese restaurants offering cheap lunches, eight euros for the menu rapide. She slows when she notices a trio of soldiers up ahead, olive-drab camouflage fatigues, blue berets. They’re scanning faces, body language, looking for something wrong, someone wrong.
But they’re not looking for her. It’s the Paris police whom the 4Syte receptionist called, not the French army. The army is looking for terrorists, and Kate isn’t one, and none of this has anything to do with her.
Though Kate is beginning to suspect that maybe this isn’t true.
* * *
She’d been blind before. She’d refused to be suspicious back when Dexter moved the family to Europe on short notice for a big new job—big client, big money, a big adventure. She’d been seduced by it all, by the prospect of living a different kind of life, of reinventing herself. As with all seductions, she chose not to see the inconvenient, the insincere, the incredible.
Dexter had no client. There was no job.
The real reason they’d come to Luxembourg was for Dexter to orchestrate a complex cyber-intrusion, to steal a fortune—fifty million euros—that he would split with his partner, an FBI agent who was investigating this massive theft in order to ensure, with absolutely certainty, that the crime would not be solved. That agent had followed Dexter to Luxembourg, where she was calling herself Julia MacLean; her bogus husband was Bill. The MacLeans infiltrated themselves into the Moores’ lives—Julia fashioned herself into Kate’s best friend; Bill, Dexter’s. Dinner dates and tennis matches, dancing in Paris and skiing the Alps, the fast friendship of fellow expats.
All four of them were pretending to be something they weren’t, s
omeone they weren’t, each lying to everyone else.
Those memories of Luxembourg are dimming. Time is speeding up, the kids are growing so quickly, details are beginning to dissolve—the wallpaper in the Luxembourg hall, the route Kate drove to the international school, her first meal with Julia.
Although some edges of memory have become dull rounded corners, other details are sharper than ever. If only Kate could choose which she would remember, and which she could forget.
* * *
A clear picture is forming in her mind, but Kate knows she’s painting with a strong bias, a suspicion based on previous events, which may have no objective connection to today. Facts, she tells herself. Focus on facts.
Fact: Hunter Forsyth is not at his office, where he really ought to be.
Fact: nor is he at his apartment, where he might have reason to be.
Fact: an American who claimed to be from the State Department escorted Forsyth somewhere that’s supposedly secure.
Fact: Forsyth brought along his assistant, who’d been with him since early morning. They’d had plenty of time for a quickie, if that’s what was going on, before Forsyth got down to the business of CEO’ing, preparing for an important press conference at which he’s going to announce a huge deal. It didn’t even need to be quick. A longie.
Fact: Forsyth has now been out of pocket for nearly five hours, and it looks like no one from his company has any idea what has happened to him, and they are beginning to panic.
So: who could have caused that? And why?
A few suspects come immediately to mind.
One: this assistant-concubine, the last person to see him on this day when his company is being assailed internationally, and the city engulfed in terror.
Two: the purported State official. The more Kate thinks about this, the more it’s clearly a lie. But just because the guy’s identity is false doesn’t point Kate in the direction of any particular truth.
One plus two: it’s possible that the State imposter and the assistant are in league.
Three: Forsyth himself. Is his disappearance connected to his press conference? His big deal? Is this a last-minute bargaining tactic? Has he orchestrated his own disappearance? As a response to the terror threats?
There’s a fourth suspect too. And a fifth. Both of them connected to each other. Both connected, intimately, to Kate.
* * *
She has to consider abandoning him, doesn’t she? And doing it right now, before a net can fall. Taking the kids, driving out of Paris into the rolling farmland, the yellow mustard fields and long rows of vineyards, stands of cypress trees along property lines, the monumental wind turbines presiding atop the ridges, the occasional castle clinging to a hillside, its keep crumbling, tumbling down to the red-tile roofs of the village below.
Out of France then, into Luxembourg, no border to cross but clean passports in the glove box anyway, a million euros in getaway cash stashed in the farmhouse. Just a couple hundred miles away, they’d be there by dinnertime, schnitzel and spaetzle at the quiet inn the next town over, she’d light a fire while the old radiators took their time.
Dexter would have to fend for himself. He’d come and join them when he could. If he could. And if he couldn’t? That would be because he’s guilty, and Kate and the kids will be better off without him.
She feels like a monster for admitting this into her consciousness. It’s deplorable. But she’d have no choice, if for no other reason than to protect the children.
Kate knows that Dexter isn’t guilty—she knows this, doesn’t she? He wouldn’t get himself involved in anything that would put the family at such risk, not again, not after Luxembourg. Would he?
She needs to get back across the river quickly, get to her husband. And she’s beginning to worry about what she’s going to find over there.
Favor? she types into her phone.
Inez responds almost instantaneously: Oui?
Meet at Palais-Royal?
OK. I am at the office. Dix minutes.
Kate locates the financial app on her phone, way back on the fourth screen; she consults it roughly never. So it takes her a bit longer than it would take most people to find what she’s looking for, but hoping not to find.
She does.
* * *
It won’t be difficult for the police to put it together.
Yes, Schuyler will say, nodding. That’s the woman who lied her way into our offices, then brutalized a security guard so she could escape.
Which that woman did just hours after 4Syte’s CEO was kidnapped.
Which combined with these international threats in Hong Kong and Mumbai—and this widespread attack across Paris—has caused 4Syte’s stock to crash.
Which was precisely the unlikely development on which this woman’s husband had wagered a substantial sum of money.
Which this husband just did after decades of a widely known, easily documented grudge against that very same kidnapped CEO.
Which is all an overwhelming volume of evidence.
49
PARIS. 1:44 P.M.
“Monsieur, I do not think this is a good idea.” Colette stares into his eyes. What is it she’s looking for? His resolve?
“I understand,” Hunter says, as quietly as possible without whispering; he doesn’t want to seem to be plotting anything. “But we have to try before it’s too late.”
“Too late? For what?”
“To survive.”
Colette is taken aback, but not convinced, at least not as immediately and unequivocally as she usually accepts his orders. Because they’re not at work, and if they’re not at work, then Hunter is not her boss, he’s just the guy whose fault it is that she has been kidnapped. He’s not necessarily part of the solution. He’s part of the problem, is what he is. Not just part of it, he’s the whole goddamned problem. Is that what Colette is thinking?
“Are you ready?” he asks. This is his subtle way of opening the door just a crack, enough for her to rush through with her strenuous objections, No, Monsieur, I am not ready, I am not going to participate in this horrible plan…
But she doesn’t, thankfully. She nods.
Hunter walks over to where Simpson sits, too far away to hear, but still observing with well-warranted suspicion.
“Listen, Simpson. My assistant has to go to her kid’s school. An important meeting with a teacher.”
Colette has a seven-year-old, or maybe it’s six, or five, Hunter can’t keep track; he doesn’t pay attention to any information about any children. Even though he wants to be a father, he can’t bring himself to get interested in other people’s kids. He doesn’t even pretend to try.
Simpson turns to Colette, standing a few meters away. “Son or daughter?”
“Fille,” Colette answers. “Séverine is nine years old.”
Nine? Okay, he was off by a couple of years.
“And you scheduled an appointment for a day that you knew was going to be very busy?”
That’s a good point.
“My husband Guy, he is the one who is planning to go. But I fear he will not arrive.”
Hunter is impressed with Colette’s on-the-feet thinking. As always.
“Why’s that?” Simpson asks.
“Guy is returning from Dubai on a flight that will arrive midday. But I believe that all flights will be diverted, n’est-ce pas? Certainly all flights from les pays arabes. And as you know, I have no way to contact him.”
Simpson considers this. “I can’t imagine that any schools in Paris will be having normal meetings this afternoon.”
“The school is outside of the city, Monsieur. We do not live in Paris.”
Simpson has no rebuttal to this.
“I cannot simply abandon my child, Monsieur!” Colette is growing self-righteous, angry, loud. “It is a ve
ry important appointment.”
Simpson sees that he’s trapped. He has no rational, humane reason to prevent this agitated mother from moving on with her life. Yes, Hunter realizes, this was a good plan; he’s proud of himself for thinking of it.
Hunter would be so happy to be wrong, for Simpson to relent, allow Colette to leave. Because if not, this guy will be acknowledging something else, and Hunter and Colette will have to initiate the only plan he has been able to come up with.
“I have sympathy, Madame Benoit. I really do—”
Hunter’s heart sinks while his adrenaline spikes. He knows that a minute from now, he might very well be dead.
“—but I’m sure your daughter won’t be the only such child, on an extraordinary day like today, plenty of parents will have trouble with transportation. The school will make arrangements.”
They are staring at each other, Simpson and Colette, both of them fuming, both of them lying to the other. Colette’s husband isn’t in Dubai, he isn’t flying back to Paris today, there’s no school appointment.
“It is necessary for me to leave.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t allow it.”
Colette glances quickly at Hunter, and he blinks once at her, a long blink. This is their signal. No turning back now.
* * *
She takes a deep breath, girding herself, and turns her eyes back to Simpson. “I will,” she says.
“No,” Simpson says firmly, “you will not.”
Colette starts walking toward the door, stomping. Everyone knows full and well that the door is locked, that Simpson holds the key, that she will not be able to open the door. But nevertheless both men watch to see what she’s going to do when she reaches the threshold.