The Paris Diversion

by Chris Pavone

  He wants her to say: do whatever you need, get to a hospital, save yourself, don’t worry about me. But that’s not what he expects, nor what he gets.

  “You’re prepared for that, right?”

  This is one of the contingencies they’d discussed: avoiding hospitals, their records, the police that can often be found in emergency rooms.

  He swallows back the nausea that accompanies his intense pain and dizziness. He has already thrown up, which hurt so much that he almost passed out again. “Yuh.”

  “Is there something I can do for you?”

  There isn’t, is there? “Don’t think so.”

  “Okay then.” She pauses. “Good luck.”

  He’s pretty sure this is the last conversation they’ll ever have, which makes this the last thing he’ll ever say to her: “I love you.”

  He hopes his wife makes the same choice. He waits, and waits, and wonders if the connection has been dropped.

  Then he hears: “I love you too.” And the line goes dead.

  63

  PARIS. 4:04 P.M.

  Kate rides past her building without slowing, searching for signs of surveillance, men sitting in cars, leaning in doorways, loitering in the lobby of the hotel at the end of the street.

  No one.

  She doubles back and parks the Vespa. Inside, she takes the stairs, creeping up, peeking down each hall, her hand in her pocket, resting on Inez’s gun. It’s a long climb to the top.

  Still no one.

  Her apartment door appears to be undisturbed. These are hard locks to pick, but not impossible. She opens the door slowly, just halfway, until right before the point in the arc where it squeaks.

  A few months ago, Dexter said, “I’ll fix that now. Just needs some oil.”

  “No, leave it.”

  He looked at her with furrowed brow.

  “It’s a good alarm.” Which she doesn’t want to trip now, in case someone is waiting inside. She tiptoes through the hall, skirting the creaky floorboard near the boys’ bedroom, down to the end, the office. She looks around carefully. No one has been here.

  She sets to work quickly, removing the screws from Dexter’s CPU, setting aside the panel. Then her phone rings.

  “Gunshots are reported,” Inez says by way of hello. “Witnesses say that the men who are shooting, they speak English. Two are dead. Another is injured, and he stole a car.”

  Kate isn’t sure exactly what this means, but it’s definitely not nothing. “Where?”

  “Le onzième.”

  “Exactly where?”

  “I will send the position to you.”

  * * *

  During Kate’s first months working for Hayden’s new Paris Substation, it slowly dawned on her that her manager wasn’t really monitoring almost anything she did, and neither was anyone else. She was, in effect, completely unsupervised.

  Maybe, she thought, this was a test. Of her dedication. Of her responsibility. Of her maturity. Doing what you’re supposed to do, even when no one could know if you’re not.

  Sometimes Kate believed that Hayden’s hands-off management style was because he liked to give his subordinates the freedom to make their own decisions, to succeed or fail based on their own actions and the ensuing consequences, enough rope. But in darker moments it occurred to her that Hayden’s scarcity reflected a more nefarious motivation: a deliberate attempt to maintain his own plausible deniability.

  Little by little, she began to act on the presumption of complete autonomy. She recruited assets that had nothing whatsoever to do with any of her active operations, nor any reasonable expectation of future ops. She pursued her own private interests, cautiously, always ready to get caught, to get called out—what the hell do you think you’re doing?

  It never happened.

  Her personal agenda was modest. It wasn’t as if Kate was trying to overthrow a democratically elected president. All she wanted was a single discrete piece of information.

  Kate’s search was both broad and narrow. Broad, because she could be looking almost anywhere in the world. Narrow, because she was looking for something very specific.

  And although in the abstract her target could be anywhere on the planet, Kate was confident that the effective search range could be much smaller. There were language considerations; Romance countries were most likely. And the quality of life, the rule of law, the general level of medical care, these were not irrelevant. There had also been a previous lifetime of living in the pampered plush of the United States, and now there would be a child too. A certain standard of living.

  These factors made Kate feel safe ruling out large swaths of the planet. Europe was by far the most likely, especially the Mediterranean. France, though, was unlikely. Luxembourg completely out of the question.

  Kate added one piece at a time. She recruited a functionary in the Turkish border control, a federal bureaucrat in Madrid, another in Switzerland. A Portuguese diplomat living in Brussels, a German police chief, a Greek mayor, an Italian minister’s assistant. She gained access to real-estate transfers, visa applications, immigration rosters, birth records. She hired a freelancer named Henri to sort through all of it. He came in one day per week, like the cleaning lady.

  It used to be easy to disappear; the main challenge was resisting the temptation to make contact with your old life. But the digital age shrunk the world exponentially, with every new database, every app, every electronic intrusion to which we voluntarily submit ourselves in exchange for the promise of a more convenient life, while in the meantime dragging everyone else into a global surveillance state.

  It’s impossible to completely hide. Not if you want to live any version of modern life, with a family, with the Internet, with bank accounts and airline tickets and healthcare records. There are cameras everywhere, digital footprints, satellite images, centrally collected phone records, all searchable and sortable. There are informants, hackers, leaks, spies. Any data can be bought, or stolen, every interaction that anyone has, every purchase, every e-mail, every phone—

  Yes. That’s the solution.

  Kate calls Inez again. “Can you access mobile meta-data?”

  “Oui, c’est possible.”

  “Sometime right after the gunfight, a telephone call was placed from that vicinity. Or soon will be.”

  “I am sure many.”

  “Can you get records of all of them?”

  Kate can hear Inez take a drag on a cigarette. Kate has never been a smoker, but she has always envied this thing smokers have, this tension release, this dramatic pause, this purchase of small bits of time, this thing to do after orgasm, when there’s otherwise nothing left to do.

  “Mais oui. You are looking for something specific?”

  “Yes. A call from that immediate area to one particular city.”

  * * *

  Kate continues to destroy evidence—disassembling Dexter’s computers, removing hard drives—with her phone on speaker. She can hear Inez barking commands, rapid-fire instructions—maintenant, vite, the voices of a couple of men responding.

  “Alors,” Inez says. “There has been none.”

  That doesn’t make sense. “She must be using more than one phone.”

  Kate can hear fresh commands being issued, gruff voices responding, non, désolée.

  “I am sorry,” Inez says. “We find nothing. But the records, they are not, how do you say, instantaneous? It is taking ten, twenty, maybe thirty minutes to appear in the database.”

  * * *

  Kate’s phone dings with a new text stream, an update. She responds quickly: Grazie. I will wire payment immediately.

  She dumps Dexter’s hard drives into her bag. She opens the bottom desk drawer, the combination-locked strongbox, and begins to transfer the contents to her bag: an extra burner, and all eight passports—the four real
ones and the corresponding fakes—and small bundles of various currencies.

  Her phone rings again.

  “It happened.”

  “The call?”

  “Oui. And then the phone in Paris, it is immediately dead. Powered down.”

  Who turns off a mobile on a day like today? Only someone trying to be invisible.

  “Do you have the last location of the Paris phone?”

  “I send it to you. Also, bad news. The police, I believe they are looking for you.”

  “For me?”

  “A woman of your description, who is riding a black Vespa, last seen in St-Germain-des-Prés, who is firing a gun.”

  The last item Kate retrieves from the strongbox is her own handgun. Now she has two.

  “This is you, n’est-ce pas?”

  64

  VENICE. 4:08 P.M.

  So. This is not the outcome for which she’d been hoping. Obviously. But it is one for which she’d planned.

  She stares at the phone, now a useless piece of garbage. No: worse than useless, this cheap electronic device has become a piece of damning physical evidence. She pops out the SIM card, cuts it in half. Opens a desk drawer and removes the ball-peen hammer, which she uses to pummel the phone into shards. She opens the window and tosses this shattered plastic into the narrow canal forty feet below.

  Don’t cry, she tells herself. You have things to do.

  She turns back to the computer, all those red numbers, all those downward-facing arrows. And in particular 4Syte, whose rate of decrease is continuing to accelerate. Perhaps trading will be suspended, any minute now.

  Goddamn it: Do. Not. Cry.

  This moment may not be perfect, but it’s more than good enough. An injured Chris could be taken into custody any second now, and you never know what someone is going to do when hurt and desperate. She doesn’t actually expect him to throw her under the bus, but she needs to be prepared for the worst case.

  She’s continuing to tell herself not to cry, like a mantra running in the background of her brain. But it’s futile, it’s counterproductive—

  Okay, she tells herself: go ahead, cry.

  For ten seconds.

  Then get your fucking money back.

  * * *

  “But…I don’t understand…”

  Richie looked at her like she was an idiot, or insane, how could she not understand what he doesn’t understand, the whole point of this whole endeavor, of every endeavor: “If there’s no ransom, how do we make any money?”

  That’s the question, isn’t it. That’s everyone’s question, what we all do, the paths we take, the decisions we make, the choices: what will I do, and who will I be, and how much will people pay me?

  She doesn’t know what level of deliberateness other people bring to bear while making their lives’ most important choices. For example, Richie Benedetti: did he sit in his childhood room, assess his skills and predilections, weigh his options, and come to the rational conclusion that, yes, I will become a professional hoodlum? Or did he stumble into a life of crime one half-assed ill-considered decision at a time?

  Not Susanna. Her choices were not a series of spur-of-the-moment schemes, not some opportunistic lark. She had a carefully considered, meticulously constructed life plan.

  At first she didn’t know exactly which exit she’d end up taking, but she did decide that the road to her destination would be the FBI. After a couple of years working at the Bureau, poking into one corner and another, it became clear that she should specialize in something with a very high barrier to entry, a niche that could endow her with an impenetrable cloak of specialized technical knowledge: cyber-crime.

  How long would the whole thing take? Five years, ten, thirty? She wouldn’t rush it. This was the work of a career, and as with any career she took the necessary steps—to pay her dues, to establish her reputation, to prove her work ethic, to develop her expertise, to rise to a position of authority, of independence, of unassailable integrity.

  She recruited a wide network of experts to help her identify money-laundering operations, illegal transfers to offshore entities, the kind of financial activities that have practically no legal justification, the proceeds of exactly the sorts of crimes, perpetrated by exactly the sorts of criminals, that she eventually intended to use: drug cartels, arms dealers, human traffickers, merchants of one type of death or another.

  Someday, she knew, the perfect situation would present itself, the culmination of this career-within-a-career. Her own version of partnership, corner office, golden parachute: she would get immensely rich by robbing a criminal kingpin.

  This was admittedly not exactly what the FBI was invented to do, but when it comes right down to it, it’s not that different.

  She’d probably have only one shot, but she was confident that she’d need only one.

  She was wrong.

  * * *

  It’s time to tie off the loose ends.

  She opens the messaging app on another mobile, finds the contact, types the short message.

  After this, she’ll walk out the door, lock it, leave the keys in the stairway’s light fixture. She’ll drop this phone into the water from the back of Lorenzo’s speedboat as they bump across the lagoon, on the first leg of her journey to a new life.

  She hits SEND.

  Events will now unfold quickly, and will mostly be out of her control. So far, she has been the one orchestrating the action, but as of this moment she’ll become just another private citizen, responsible for only herself and her baby.

  She bundles up Matteo again, straps him to her chest.

  Before the kid was born, she couldn’t have fathomed the extent to which parenting meant ceding control. For a long while, especially when you’re a child yourself, it looks like the opposite: parenthood is control. Untrue. So much of a parent’s life is determined by the biological imperatives and whims of this tiny inchoate animal. Trying to control it is an exercise in frustration.

  It’s one thing to learn this, another to live with it, to accept it. In general, Susanna has trouble accepting lack of control. She knows this makes her a difficult person to live with, and for a long time she didn’t give a damn. Then she realized that she wanted this man to be her husband; then she realized that if she wanted to keep this husband, she had to make some accommodations. More than none. That’s what it means to be married.

  She stands at the desk, leans over the keyboard to execute the trades, first one, another, another, dozens of them, small transactions and big ones and a number of midsize, nothing unusual, nothing noteworthy, using brokerage accounts connected to banks all over Europe, with untraceable aliases and shielded identities, LLCs and SARLs.

  As she waits for the confirmations to arrive, she rocks from one foot to the other, trying to keep the baby in his soothed state. There is no excuse for disturbing a contented baby.

  Secure messages begin to arrive to her in-boxes, confirmation numbers, amounts in US dollars, in euros, in British pounds, transferring funds from all these disparate sources into a single account at a Swiss bank whose originating branch is just over the Alps, a few hours’ drive.

  This whole process takes ten minutes.

  Almost finished.

  Finally she double-clicks the large black X icon on the bottom of her screen. The program launches, a dialog box opens, and she initiates a three-stage protocol that requires three different passwords, until at last:

  Are you sure you want to destroy this device?

  Her finger pauses for a second. The default answer—the button you’d hit by mistake—is NO.

  She clicks YES.

  Nothing happens. Her heart sinks, she can feel anxiety welling up, what if this doesn’t—

  The screen goes blank.

  Then she hears a soft fizzing noise, like a fresh soda bottle bein
g opened, slowly. A wisp of smoke appears from the side of the CPU, another from the bottom.

  The smell is acrid.

  The blank screen flashes, then goes dark again. Then darker.

  A loud pop, and it’s done.

  * * *

  The bulk of their belongings have already been packed, picked up by a moving company, sitting in a warehouse outside of Treviso, awaiting delivery instructions, which she will provide tomorrow. The ultimate destination depends on what else happens today and tonight.

  She’d picked out two different locations, in two different countries. The preferred scenario is that she’ll head east to a busy tourist town on the Croatian coast, just across the Gulf of Venice, a few hours away in Lorenzo’s speedboat, if the weather cooperates. Croatia is the option if everything has gone okay in Paris, and her husband escapes unscathed, hops a TGV to Nice tonight, then tomorrow morning a short flight to Zagreb.

  Happily ever after.

  The other option is to fly west to Spain, to a White Village in the sparsely populated Sierra de Grazalema Mountains of Andalusia, where she made a week-long reservation in a modest hotel in an area where vacation properties abound, month-long stays, year-long leases, she won’t have a problem finding a comfortable place to live. Her Italian will help her learn Spanish, and she will have an immense amount of money to help with everything else.

  What she won’t have in Spain is a husband. She’ll be a single mother of a young child. Life will be challenging, but people will have sympathy.

  Her husband doesn’t know anything about the Andalusian option. The White Village is in case of his capture, or his compromise, or his demise; it’s the option if she needs to cut connections. She has a pretty clear set of guidelines in her head, different scenarios, different levels of risk she’s willing to tolerate. If he’s detained by the police. If he’s questioned, but let go. If he’s identified, being hunted. If he’s dead.