The Paris Diversion

by Chris Pavone

  “A million dollars?” Hunter starts, leaving plenty of room.

  He’d flirted briefly with the prepper culture in the Valley, guys like him who were buying tracts of land in New Zealand, hardened bunkers in Nebraska, helicopters and motorcycles and private islands, stockpiling canned foods, water, fuel, ammunition. Like other guys with their hunting, their fishing: excuses to drink beer and talk gear.

  Hunter himself wasn’t going to build any bomb shelter, he didn’t go in for that level of alarmism; he was too confident in the durability of the world order, and his place in it. But this burgeoning panic did have an effect, along with less apocalypse-themed horror stories of people who’d confronted problematic situations with prostitutes, with drugs, with cops, with legitimate mistakes of their own doing as well as setups, entrapments, frame-ups. And then to exacerbate matters there’d been the election of that unqualified unprepared irresponsible lunatic as president, a man who’s capable of Lord knows what irrational behavior that could produce life-threatening conditions at any given moment, anywhere in the world.

  Hunter sent Colette out to find a gold dealer on the rue Vivienne to buy the Krugerrands, then a leather-craftsman to retrofit his wallet with special slits that are snug enough so the coins won’t slip out without requiring a bulky snap or zipper, but loose enough that the gold can be removed without destroying the wallet. Hunter never travels without this gold—anonymous, untraceable, universal liquidity, the sort of thing you can slip to a police officer, a prison guard, an immigrations official. “Look,” Hunter could say to anyone, anywhere in the world. “Google it.”

  He is always prepared to purchase his safety, to negotiate for his release. Everyone has a price, and Hunter is willing to pay it. But the Krugerrands are not the right order of magnitude for this situation.

  “Two million,” he counteroffers himself.

  “You think you can buy your way out of this?”

  “Why not? This is about money, isn’t it? Everything is.”

  “Okay, that’s valid. But if you’re really trying to buy your freedom, stop fucking around.”

  “Two million dollars is fucking around?”

  “We both know, Forsyth, that it is.”

  “So this is a negotiation?”

  “Not really. But maybe you’ll blow me away. Shift my paradigm, as they say. So go ahead, Forsyth: your very best number.”

  What should Hunter say? Should he offer everything he could possibly get his hands on? There’s no such definitive number, not without a timeframe. “How long do I have?”

  The guy thinks about it. “Forty-eight hours.”

  One of Hunter’s takeaways from those prepper dudes was that he needed to assess how much cash he could raise on short notice. Turned out it was only a couple hundred thousand, which wasn’t going to get him very far, not in a bona fide cataclysm. So he began shifting things around until he could reasonably expect to be able to walk out of a bank branch with a million cash on any given day. If he has a few days’ warning, a lot more; on the weekend, much less. He hopes the apocalypse doesn’t begin on a Friday night.

  “Okay: four million.”

  “Really? You’re telling me that’s your best number?”

  “Five?”

  “You disappoint me, Fors—”

  Pounding at the door startles both men. Colette too, who has been completely silent, sitting in the corner, bound but not gagged, her big eyes moving from one man to the other, both of them probably looking to her a lot like different varieties of enemies.

  Simpson undoes the locks and admits one of the French cops, with whom he confers at close range, low voices, then turns back to Hunter. “Listen: I need to run out for a few minutes. We’ll pick this up when I return. Meantime, if you make any trouble, Claude is fully empowered to pinch-hit for me. C’est vrai, Claude?”

  * * *

  Just the pleasure of your company—what can that mean? It must have some meaning, it’s not a random lie, it has a ring of truth, or partial truth, or—

  Yes.

  Hunter gets it all at once, the whole thing bum-rushes his brain—the early-morning terror attacks to draw away his police guard, to divert all police, and the telecom outage, the timing of it, and naturally there’d be no ransom, no interaction with the company or the family, with the police, with any authorities, with anyone at all, much safer without any communications, just remove Hunter from the office, from the press conference, from the multibillion-dollar merger, which will thus appear to be collapsing, speculation that the whole company is imploding, so inevitably the share price—

  Fuck.

  There is no transfer of any practical level of ransom that could possibly compare, no amount of cash inducement that Hunter could offer. Three million, five, ten: drops in the bucket. If his captors have access to real investment money—and they obviously do—they could make hundreds of millions today. Just like Hunter was going to.

  Yes, he can see the whole ploy now.

  Except one component. One not-at-all-minor detail that he can’t see clearly, perhaps because he really does not want to: how does it all end for him?

  56

  PARIS. 2:26 P.M.

  Wyatt walks quickly. The street is quiet but not completely unoccupied, with most but not all of the shutters closed. Someone might be observing him from any one of those apartment windows above, or from the stores below, the cleaning ladies who are mopping the bar’s floor, the café waiters cleaning up after lunch service, the attentive owner of the cramped little tabac.

  About a hundred meters up ahead, another pedestrian is walking away. Farther along, a lone man stands in a doorway, wearing a baseball cap, a bulky hoodie, sunglasses, though it isn’t sunny on this close stretch of street.

  Wyatt rubs his hand through his brand-new buzz-cut, self-administered fifteen minutes ago in the tiny bathroom of a brasserie that faced off against a bar-tabac on the far side of the intersection, the Métro station in between. The same setup everywhere. Wyatt is sick of Paris.

  Remember the money.

  He flushed his hair down the toilet, dropped the electric shaver in the trash. He took one final look in the dingy scratched-up mirror, nodded in appreciation: if anyone did a police sketch of the driver of the van, that sketch would not match the dude in the mirror. That driver doesn’t exist anymore, that guy who’d scouted sites all over Paris, taking notes on the number and location of police and military, on the positions of security cameras and anti-ramming bollards and steel-toothed wedge barriers.

  “Shouldn’t I be worried about being noticed?” he’d asked. “While I’m taking all these notes?”

  “No.” The bearded guy was not concerned at all. “These are busy places, tens of thousands of people pass through every day, everyone typing into phones, taking pictures. No one will think you’re doing anything unusual. Taking pictures of Notre-Dame? Please.”

  “But afterward? There are surveillance cameras.”

  “That’s why you’ll be wearing the eyeglasses, this hairstyle, these clothes.”

  It had been the same outfit on every recon mission, the same as this morning, this daily uniform. Except the few times when he’d been told to wear the athletic clothes with the cap, to carry the same canvas bag as he’d done this morning, that fucking bag.

  “After you change your clothes and cut your hair and throw away the glasses, everything about the surveillance footage will look like someone who’s not you.”

  As part of his interview process for this job, he’d needed to provide documentation that included a photo of himself. Which didn’t seem odd at the time.

  “Someone in particular?”

  “No. Just not you.”

  “But facial recognition soft—”

  “You’re an American. That’s not where they’re going to look. No one looks at white American men as
terrorism suspects. Not even in America, where practically all terrorism is perpetrated by white American men. Plus it’s not as if you’re going to be staring into the cameras, smiling for headshots.”

  Wyatt hadn’t been convinced.

  “Seriously,” the guy said, “I know what I’m talking about here.”

  “Isn’t that what everyone says who doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about? What makes you different?”

  The man nodded, respecting the question, the challenge. Then he leaned forward, elbows on the table, eyes boring into Wyatt. “Because,” he finally said, “I spent two decades working for the FBI.”

  * * *

  Wyatt turns into the passage, which is divided into two lanes. One lane is a narrow street, one of those ridiculously long Parisian blocks that can really piss you off if you discover yourself at the wrong end of it. The other lane is a tall, slim tunnel carved out of the ground floor of a concrete-clad hulk of a building, spray-painted graffiti and glued-on concert posters, chunks missing from the exterior to reveal the cinder block underneath and the brick under that, with cauterized electrical wires and a capped-off plumbing pipe, piles of dogshit and a chained-up bicycle that has been stripped of most of its parts, one flat tire resting in a pool of what smells like urine. Somebody pissed on this poor abandoned bicycle.

  This tunnel had once been the drive-through loading area for the building when it was a small factory, or a warehouse. The loading bays are now covered in plywood, the ground in trash: empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, a few hypodermics, condom wrappers, the full assortment.

  There’s no light in there.

  Wyatt doesn’t spook easily, he even relishes extracurricular violent encounters, muggers, panhandlers, junkies, he’s more than happy to kick anyone’s ass who even remotely merits an ass-kicking, plus plenty of people who don’t.

  Even for him, this is one scary-ass tunnel.

  Wyatt won’t be surprised if someday he ends up getting murdered. Hopefully he won’t see it coming, won’t feel a thing. One minute he’ll be minding his own business, and the next someone will have shot him in the back of the head. That would probably happen in a place like this. This is where he himself would kill a guy like him.

  He’s glad he still has the weapon. He’ll have to get rid of it soon, a firearm is not something he can take to the airport, and he probably shouldn’t even bring it to the train station. Maybe after the transaction he’ll leave it here in this tunnel.

  Wyatt is also glad he’d arranged for backup. A side deal that the boss wouldn’t know a damn thing about.

  “I don’t trust this dude,” Wyatt had said to Blake, in that nearly empty bar in the eleventh. They knew each other from Afghanistan, then both had migrated into similar private-sector arrangements. “I need someone to watch my back.”

  “No doubt,” Blake said sagely, then took a sip of beer. “You got it, brah.”

  “You’ll need a gun.”

  “Already have one.”

  “Don’t hesitate to use it.”

  “Dude.”

  They had a good laugh at that, both pretending it was funnier than it was, exaggerating their own heartlessness, their recklessness. In their line of work, it was worth actual money, this reputation, it was a bankable asset, like a hundred-mile-per-hour fastball, or a close friendship with a Trump. Things that could be relied upon to get you paid.

  Wyatt stands in the tunnel entrance, peers into the darkness. Then he glances up the street, where the man in the hoodie has started walking in this direction, closing the distance. But there’s no sign of anyone in the dark tunnel. Wyatt takes out his phone, composes another short text: Here. His finger hovers above the SEND button for a few seconds while he looks around, then his fingertip meets the touch screen—

  The flash of light is almost immediate, preceding the sound by a split-second, the unmistakable ding of an incoming message, just twenty meters ahead, the device’s light dimmed by a pillar but its sound amplified, bouncing off all the hard surfaces here, not quite an echo but something like it, an elongation, the psychological effect of sound in darkness.

  The bearded American is already here.

  Wyatt slides the phone back into his pocket, and replaces his grip around the handle of his pistol. He takes another step forward, deeper into the dark.

  Remember the money.

  57

  PARIS. 2:27 P.M.

  Kate accelerates, weaving through traffic once again, cars are stopped everywhere, complete impasses at major intersections, police redirecting this way and that. She wends a path between cars, up on sidewalks, through a pedestrian plaza, the police aren’t going to bother with some woman puttering around on a scooter, pleading about retrieving her children from school.

  Kate alights on the Left Bank where the Gare d’Austerlitz borders the Jardin des Plantes. The first time the family visited Paris from Luxembourg, they drove up to this very stretch of street, and Ben exclaimed from the backseat, “Mommy, look! There’s an ostrick over there!”

  “An ostrich?”

  “Yah! Right there!”

  She didn’t see anything except trees. “I don’t see it, Sweetie. Are you sure?”

  “Yah. But it went away.”

  She didn’t believe him; there weren’t ostriches roaming the streets of Paris. But Ben was four, alternative facts were still excusable, an understandably hazy line between real-life and make-believe. A year later, when they finally made a visit over to the ménagerie, there it was, an ostrich enclosure, right here abutting the quay.

  “You were right,” she said to Ben. She felt terrible for not having believed him in the first place. “There are ostriches here.”

  “Yah,” he said. “I know. Let’s go back to the baboons.”

  * * *

  Kate tried harder here. She became more patient, more present, more competent than she’d been in Luxembourg. Most days she could convince herself that it was fine—no, more: it was good, maybe great, yes, this was definitely what she should be doing with her life. Late at night, though?

  Yes, she had learned how to be an expat, friendly with strangers in cafés, in bookstores, at school, accepting every invitation, open to new people, to new experiences, the default position was yes. But what she had not mastered was how to be a full-time stay-at-home mom. Even on the days when she found it satisfying—and there were more of them as the children grew more manageable, and her existence more comfortable—she was also aware that this stage was so finite. In the blink of an eye, the kids would be grown. Then what would she do? And when would she do it?

  When she figured out what had really gone on in Luxembourg, she was able to come up with at least one of the answers: now. She would go back to work. Start fresh, wiser this time, better equipped to handle the problems, to attain the balance. This time, it would all work out.

  Now she understands that she was wrong. That she’d allowed herself to be deceived by selfishness, by vanity, by the delusional charade that she could have everything, that maybe she even deserves everything—the husband and kids and career and money.

  No.

  * * *

  There are two distinct possibilities, and Kate can’t quite decide which is worse.

  One: Dexter is part of—the architect behind?—an international conspiracy to kidnap 4Syte’s CEO while manufacturing terror threats at the company’s global offices and general terror in Paris to obscure the specifics while causing a widespread dip in securities valuation throughout the world’s markets and in particular an extreme loss of value in 4Syte’s stock, ensuring immense profitability for his 4Syte short-sell.

  Two: Dexter is being framed for all that. And there’s only one person in the world who’d be doing the framing.

  * * *

  Kate is almost home, taking a corner at high speed, when the Peugeot in front of h
er slams on the brakes, and she’s forced to slow down. She cranes her neck to peer up ahead, where a police car is parked partially on the curb, half-obstructing the traffic lane. The Peugeot overreacted, prematurely: the obstruction is still a couple hundred meters ahead.

  “Connard!” Kate curses, loudly.

  The profanities that Kate mutters to herself, that she sputters at strangers, these are mostly in French, like the numbers of the access code to her office building. This isn’t purposeful; it’s evolutionary. She can’t even say the word coffee anymore, it sounds ridiculous to her.

  She re-angles the scooter, trying to get a better view of what the cops are doing, why they’re blocking the street. There, she can see a pair of them at the entrance to a garage, it’s her own garage actually, and—

  Oh God no.

  Her stomach falls away.

  What the hell can she do about this?

  The simplest solution is impossible: she can’t just walk up to a pair of Parisian cops and shoot them. Not here in broad daylight. There’s a pedestrian halfway between the corner and the garage, a witness—

  Christ, did she really just formulate that thought? That she’s not going to shoot policemen because she’s afraid of getting caught?

  No, she needs to divert them, and she sees how immediately. She spins the Vespa back onto the cross street, just out of the police’s sight, then around again, ready to return. She has no time to waste; it could be too late already.

  Earlier this morning, Kate worried that at some point today, any given second might end up counting. This wasn’t what she was envisaging.

  She draws Inez’s gun out of her pocket. Kate glances around, there are a few people walking on these sidewalks, but no one is paying attention to her. Afterward they will. And then…?