The Paris Diversion

by Chris Pavone

  What forethought, planning, legwork. Investment of money too. The payoff must be commensurate.

  “The malware is just waiting for my—”

  “Enough,” Kate says, firmly but perhaps too quietly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s enough.” A few decibels louder. “What do you want?”

  “Are you kidding? You know exactly what I want.”

  She does. “And what do I get in exchange?”

  “Certain tips will not be called into the police. Instead, evidence will be destroyed. And other evidence provided, constructing a different, equally credible narrative. Pointing to a different suspect.”

  Kate is not in any position to bargain; this isn’t a negotiation. She has been outplayed. The patrolmen have already interacted with Dexter, and unless the cops start searching somewhere else, they’re going to track him down and look at him ever more closely. It won’t take long.

  She has to capitulate, or flee. At this moment, Kate still has the choice. “How do I know you’ll keep your end?”

  “The normal way.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Half now.”

  Half?

  “The other half after the second suspect is ID’d, exonerating Dexter.”

  Half doesn’t make sense. What this woman wants from Kate—what Kate can provide—is a bank account number to go with the password that the woman already possesses. This account number is stored on Kate’s phone, in her notes app, on a page that seems to be filled with details about the kids’ teachers, and a few school administrators, and the kids’ American social security numbers and passport IDs, and Ben’s doctors’ names and specialties and addresses. This page is a one-stop resource for all this parental data, the items that Kate used to have to hunt for every single time the need arose, which was always in situations that were unpleasant to begin with.

  It had taken Kate a few years to realize that there was a simple solution to this recurring problem, if she’d only recognize that it wasn’t a one-time problem that just happened to repeat itself, unexpectedly, again and again. It was an expected, ongoing state of affairs. And the only person who could mitigate it was herself.

  The long string of digits is labeled SCHOOL ID. No one who glanced at this page could have any idea what that could mean. There’s no such thing as a school ID number.

  The code is a simple one. If you knew you were looking at a code, and you knew anything about cracking codes, you could do it in minutes. But even if you succeeded in decoding the number, you’d still have only half of the puzzle, with no way to obtain the other half. Not unless you were the sole person in the world who already knew it.

  If Kate provides this number, the woman she once knew as Julia MacLean will have access to a bank account containing twenty-five million euros. You either have access to the account, and everything in it, or you don’t. There’s no possible half about it.

  “Half? What are you talking about?” But even as she’s asking it, Kate realizes with a sinking heart what the only possible explanation is.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “We don’t have—”

  “I’m assuming you spent—how much? That’s a nice apartment of yours, fancy vacations, et cetera. But you’re not profligate, I know that about you. Maybe you’ve spent two million? Three?”

  It has been only one. Not even spent; just set aside.

  “So, tell you what, Kate: for that second payment, I’ll take just twenty.”

  “Are you out of your mind? We don’t have any of that money anymore.”

  “Then find it. Twenty-five million right now, twenty by the end of tomorrow. Forty-five million euros, or Dexter goes to jail.”

  “I don’t…I can’t…”

  “I guess you have to ask yourself, Kate: what’s your husband worth?”

  76

  PARIS. 7:20 P.M.

  Hunter is hailed as a hero by the staff who still remain, the vice-presidents and lawyers who have spent the afternoon fighting the fire of his disappearance, plus the handful of assistant-levels who understood that they should not leave the office until their bosses do, all these people gathered in the conference room, everyone except the young guy with the spotty beard and eyebrow ring and tattoos—the full complement of millennial self-adornments—whom Hunter sent to the apartment to pick up a clean suit and shirt and tie.

  “I’ll explain everything later,” he says to the assembled. “But our first priority is to reverse the stock slide.” The stock did not slide so much as fell off a fucking cliff, but Hunter is in spin mode now.

  “Let’s do everything we can, as quickly as we can, to reassure shareholders, investors, the international financial community, our business partners, our employees. Let’s get a teaser out that I’ll be making an announcement”—he checks his watch—“at eight-thirty local.”

  “That’s too late for legacy press.”

  “Of course. So we’ll need to do this live on 4syte.com, and feed the video to all digital and social. Georges and, um, Ninon, you two collaborate on the asset. Élodie, put together distribution lists for text-messages.”

  “Oui Mons—”

  “Something like this: due to terrorist attacks and personal safety concerns and inconvenient luck, CEO was forced to take precautionary measures that unfortunately rendered him unreachable for some hours, a situation that was one hundred percent unrelated to 4Syte business or its major announcement, which has been rescheduled to, um”—he pauses, recalculates—“let’s make it eight P.M. Central European. Not eight-thirty.”

  “That’s too long for Twitter.”

  “Fix it, split it, do what you need to do. Get me language within five minutes. Then start working on a revise of the release, a new top graph with apologies.” He looks around the room. “Everyone help everyone, we’ll get through this, and you can all go home at a reasonable hour.”

  The stock slide will halt within minutes. Maybe even begin to climb again, baby steps first, then a giant leap after the announcement.

  “Someone order some food,” he says. Leave it to them to figure it out.

  Hunter reminds himself that he has not yet lost any actual wealth today. He still has time to turn this day completely around, and fall asleep an enormously rich man.

  “Let’s go,” he urges, and for good measure claps his hands, the quarterback breaking up the huddle, and winces from the pain in his swollen knuckles. “Time is—literally—money.”

  77

  PARIS. 7:28 P.M.

  What’s that noise? Dexter holds his breath, listening, seized by fear. He approaches the door, puts his ear to the wood—

  It’s people. Women, talking. The plunk as a cork is pulled, the glurp of wine pouring.

  He walks down the hall. Three young women are sitting around the table, a baguette, a pile of pink ham, a wedge of pale-yellow cheese, an open bottle of red. Dexter is hungry.

  “Evening,” says one of the young women. She has a laptop open in front of her.

  “Is there any news?” Dexter doesn’t know what’s happening out there, and he can’t go see for himself. “My phone is out of juice.”

  “Not really, no.”

  The window faces the Seine, the cathedral of Notre-Dame. A tourist barge floats by. Things must be getting back to some level of normal. “Mind if I take a look?”

  “Be my guest.”

  He leans over the laptop, types in a search, looking for—

  Shit.

  “Sorry, could I use this for a few minutes? I really need to take care of something.”

  “Sure,” she says.

  Dexter logs onto his account, fingers flying, desperate to get to the transaction window, to confirm, to unload his position before it’s too late. The share pri
ce has been inching up, but it hasn’t gotten very far. Not yet.

  He executes the first trade, doesn’t waste any time figuring out his profit, he has no time for that now, he logs onto the other account, he can see the share price has already ticked up again, but—what?—Access denied.

  Fuck. He clears all the fields, and starts afresh, typing slower, precisely.

  Whew.

  He looks up. The young women are all pretending they weren’t staring at him.

  “Thanks.” He closes the window, quits the browser. “That was really helpful.”

  Now he allows himself to calculate, quickly. Then a second time, carefully. Both times, the result is the same.

  “You want a glass of wine? You seem like you need a drink.”

  He smiles at this small kindness, at these young people just starting out, embarking on this adventure, they haven’t yet made any major mistakes, even if they think they’ve faced disasters—that year wasted on the wrong major, or the wrong boyfriend—they don’t realize how eminently overcome-able it all is, even while in the middle of overcoming it.

  “Thanks,” he says. Dexter’s mistakes have been much bigger, much harder to overcome. But with a couple of clicks, he just did.

  Harder, but not impossible.

  78

  PARIS. 7:39 P.M.

  Paris is on the same latitude as Vancouver; north of basically everywhere in the United States that’s not Alaska. Seasonal daylight swings are extreme. In spring, in early summer, dusk seems to last forever, the sun just hanging there, reluctant to dip below the horizon, the last drunk guest to leave a raucous party. Then after sunset, the sky continues to clutch onto last light, and it doesn’t get fully dark till ten at night, after all the blue has slowly drained away.

  But in autumn and winter, the opposite: nightfall jumps out of nowhere, a predatory mugger lurking in a doorway, attacking with quick furtive movements before anyone has time to react. That’s what happened while Kate was on the Métro: night fell.

  “Okay,” she said as the train sped under the city. Kate had weighed her options, and realized she had none. The only thing she could do was surrender—or pretend to—and buy herself time. “But I don’t have the number with me.”

  “You have thirty minutes.”

  Then the line went dead.

  Kate’s eyes were fixed fifty yards down the train, at the man slumped in the seat. Was it possible that Julia just offered to throw him under the bus? Her own husband? Is he the other suspect? Or is there no other suspect? Is she bluffing?

  But of course there must be another suspect, because Dexter is not guilty, and someone obviously is. That guilty someone must be Julia’s husband. So who else could she offer…?

  There must be another man whom Julia set up to look guilty, a man with Dexter’s build who wore Dexter’s clothes, his cap, and bought a bunch of mobiles on the boulevard, and loitered around landmarks, and delivered bombs. That’s the man who will look guilty. That’s the man who already does, if only people will search for—

  Kate’s mouth fell open; she actually muttered “Oh” to herself. She realized that she doesn’t need to find this alternative suspect. He’s not going anywhere. He’s already dead, killed in that gunfight in the onzième. His opponent is right here, wounded.

  For much of her life, Kate had been reluctant to ask for help, she’d seen it as a sign of weakness, a fatal flaw for a woman in her career, working for her organization, all the men would say, That’s exactly what we thought, women can’t hack it, always need help.

  It took her a long time before she was able to stop worrying about what all the men thought. That’s when she realized that asking for help wasn’t a weakness.

  She sent Inez another message: One more favor?

  * * *

  He staggers into the park. Kate follows at a safe distance.

  She realizes that her children are not far from here, this is Hailie’s neighborhood off the Champ-de-Mars, the rue St-Dominique is Hailie’s hashtag high street, with her daily bakeries and boucheries, the same expat-housewife life as Kate’s. Almost.

  Kate checks her watch. There has been more than enough time to arrive at Le Bourget and then drive into the center of Paris. That woman could be right here, now. She could be waiting up ahead, or following from behind—

  But no, she isn’t going to preemptively kill Kate. She can’t get what she wants from a dead Kate. After she gets her money, though? That’ll be different.

  Kate feels the weight of the two guns, one in each pocket.

  She still thinks of the woman’s name as Julia MacLean, though for years now Kate has known that Julia is not her real name. That real name is Susan Pognowski, an ex-FBI agent who has recently been living in Italy as Susanna Petrocelli with identity documents procured in Sicily. Her husband is now called Cristoforo. Their newborn son is Matteo.

  Julia MacLean had been nothing more than a character, a role this woman played in Luxembourg. Julia MacLean had been Kate’s friend, her best friend, briefly. Her BFB, her frenemy, then her arch enemy. A relationship that was always on its way somewhere, though Kate never knew exactly where, until now. Here.

  It ends tonight.

  * * *

  Kate sends another ping of her location. It won’t be hard to triangulate the path she’s on.

  The queues to ascend the Eiffel Tower are staggeringly long; there’s no way that’s his destination. Kate had briefly imagined this was where he was heading, tricked by a lifetime of movie-watching experience to expect that real life might look that way.

  He passes the tower, and exits the park. Across the street, the small carousel is packed, the concessions mobbed, everyone wants ice cream. Kate pauses, watches him turn, make the descent to the riverbank. She looks left, looks right, and here it comes, the lime-green Vespa, puttering near the curb, pulling to a stop.

  “He went down to the quay,” Kate says.

  “Oui.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Inez gives a what-are-you-kidding smirk. Kate recognizes the attitude: obviously I’m willing to do this, more than willing, this is what I do. Kate too.

  “Merci,” Kate says. She reaches into her pocket, where she retrieves Inez’s gun, wrapped in a silk scarf. “I got my own.”

  * * *

  Down on the riverside, there are more long queues for the bateaux-mouches, hundreds of people waiting to board the barges for nighttime cruises under the bridges, past the islands, the grand monuments, the splendid museums, the elegant apartment buildings, the busy boulevards, everything lit up in full glory. It was Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann who ordered more than fifty thousand gaslights installed as part of his ambitious plan to transform a dirty diseased agglomeration of villages into the world’s metropolis—mapping a new street plan, erecting train stations, parks, boulevards, row upon row of apartment buildings, a central market, everything. This one man Haussmann created this City of Light.

  Kate unlocks another bicycle, and pedals along the street, high above the riverside quay. Beyond the barge docks, the crowds dwindle quickly, just a few couples strolling hand-in-hand, sitting along the embankment, drinking, kissing, until finally it’s just the one lone man, walking slowly.

  There’s limited egress down there, ramps or steps every few hundred meters. He has nowhere to go but straight along the riverside. To where? Why is he down there?

  He walks past a houseboat, seemingly unoccupied. And another. Is he going to a houseboat?

  A bridge is looming. A lot of bridges cross the Seine, and their undersides tend to be well lit, well maintained, for obvious safety reasons. But the lights under this particular bridge seem to be out, it’s dark under there, though not completely, Kate can still see vague forms, the line of the embankment, a supporting pillar, and—

  Damn.

  * * *


  She pedals furiously to the bridge, abandons the bike at the top of the stairs, and scampers down, spins around a landing, down again to the bottom.

  This is a wide, low bridge, with a big dark space underneath. Plenty of room to shelter from the elements, to hide from people, to wait unobtrusively. To rendezvous in a prearranged fallback position. To tie up a motorboat, like the one right there.

  Kate can see someone standing in the bow, a man holding a gun.

  Shapes resolve themselves, backlit by the indirect ambient light of a big city. A person is bent double at the waist, reaching down to the paving stones. It’s her—Julia, Susanna, Susan. She’s trying to pull up someone, it must be her husband, he has apparently collapsed.

  They are just steps from the boat, mere seconds from escape.

  Kate raises her weapon, and creeps forward in the darkness that clings to the embankment. She can barely hear Julia’s voice. “Come on, you can do it,” she implores. “Get up.”

  Julia can’t hoist him all by herself, not the dead weight of a full-grown man.

  “I…can’t.”

  “Richie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Help me.”

  The man in the bow tucks his gun into his waistband, and gingerly steps up onto the gunwale, careful to keep his balance, this guy doesn’t want to stumble, to tumble into the Seine, he’s preoccupied at this moment, and so is Julia—

  Now is Kate’s chance.

  She charges forward, gun sighted in front of her. “Stop!” she yells. “Don’t move!”

  Everyone freezes. A long second passes before Julia asks, “What is it you think you’re going to do here?” She lets go of Bill’s arm, stands.

  The three people in front of Kate form a dimly backlit tableau vivant. On the street above, the traffic light changes, and now there’s the noise of engines, the thrumming of wheels.

  “Lie down on the ground,” Kate orders, continuing to advance.