The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  The light changes. He jogs across the avenue, elbows his way through the throng on the far side, up the crowded side street to Fifth Avenue, which is even busier than Sixth, with Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Saks, an immense swarm of humanity.

  Will turns around, scans the crowd, looking for anyone who might be watching him.

  He retreats to Sixth. Descends to the plaza under Rockefeller Center, the subway station and the shopping arcade, pizza parlors and shoeshine shops, six-dollar umbrellas. He hustles through the busy space, then up the stairs on the far side of the avenue, now walking uptown. He pauses at a magazine stand, examines a few covers, turns downtown. Onto a side street, a long block to the avenue, around another corner, onto a different side street.

  Will does this for thirty minutes, scanning sidewalks, past gift shops and jewelry stores, Indian restaurants and newsstands, a grimy Irish pub where he pauses at the door, seems to consider going in, then changes his mind, backtracks to a two-story glass wall of a mega-deli with seating on a mezzanine, a pair of knee-high leather boots visible up there.

  In the bright fluorescent light inside, Will is hyperaware of the physiological effects of his first ever surveillance detection route, his racing heartbeat, sweaty palms, his whole body vibrating.

  Will orders a coffee, even though a stimulant is really not what he needs now. Should’ve gotten a cold beer. It’s evening, after all. Who the hell stops at a deli like this for a hot coffee, on a warm day, at dinnertime?

  He tosses the coffee into the garbage, pays for a beer, absorbs the quizzical look of the cashier. Walks past the sneeze-guarded steam tables, suffused with the ineffable sadness of dinners plucked from a cheap deli’s salad bar.

  Will walks upstairs, to the far corner of the mezzanine, an empty table surrounded by a buffer of other empty tables. He takes a seat that faces the rear.

  He can’t help but glance over at the woman, dredging a teabag in a paper cup.

  Will forces his eyes to move across lines of newspaper type, but this isn’t reading he’s doing. He turns a page, repeats the sham on A3. Something perhaps about Pakistan, or West Africa. He takes a sip of beer, doesn’t particularly taste it. He takes a gulp.

  He remembers his phone, removes the battery, just as she’d instructed, down in the Southern Hemisphere, two days ago. He puts the pieces in his pocket, takes another sip of—

  “Will Rhodes?”

  She’s standing at his table, smiling down at him.

  “Is that you?”

  He gets up from the plastic chair, manages a smile, forces a cheek kiss.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me to join you?”

  Will gestures at the chair. “Please.”

  She’s carrying a handbag and a magazine and a banana and a napkin and a cup of tea, and she dumps all these items on the table, instant mess. Her hair is pulled back again, her face almost entirely makeup-free. She’s wearing a shapeless sweater over a staid skirt, no longer a meticulous construction of a sexpot fantasy.

  He still can’t believe any of this is happening. Has happened.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” he says.

  “Of course you can. The first time is the hardest, as with everything. And good news, Will: I already know everything about your Argentinean trip. I don’t need any report.”

  “Then what’s this meeting for?”

  She begins to unpeel the banana. “Test run.”

  “Testing what, exactly?”

  She removes another strip of peel, and another. “Our process.”

  “You mean my willingness to follow your orders? To come when beckoned?”

  “Yes.” She takes a bite of the banana, chews, swallows. “Also testing your first attempt at a surveillance-detection route.”

  Elle and Roger had spent hours explaining it to him at the hotel, then practicing on the streets of Mendoza.

  “And how’d I do?”

  “Not so great.”

  “Okay, glad to hear it, another shortcoming of Will Rhodes. Can I go now?”

  “Really? Are you really going to act like that?”

  Will glares at her. He finds it hard to remember how much he adored this woman, just a few days ago, back when he believed she adored him. Now he loathes her.

  “Does anyone suspect anything?” she asks. “Chloe?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “What about your boss? Malcolm, right? Malcolm Somers?”

  Will doesn’t answer.

  “What’d you tell him about your trip? Did you tell him about us?”

  He still doesn’t say anything.

  “Show him any pictures? Me on the beach in that bikini, maybe?” She leans away, takes another big bite of banana. “I’ve never actually been to Australia. That was Photoshopped.”

  “What are we, friends now?”

  “Why not? Do you think your life will somehow be improved if you make a grand show of hating me? How exactly would that make your life easier? Listen.” She leans forward, lowers her voice. “We had a good time together. France, Argentina. Putting everything else aside, those nights were genuinely enjoyable for me. Even though it was my job, the fun was real.”

  He snorts. She ignores it.

  “Anyway, nice to see you again,” she says, somewhat loudly, now performing for a wider and probably nonexistent audience. “I’ve got to run.” She stands, gathers her things, but leaves the banana peel on a napkin on the table. “I’ll see you in a week.”

  “You will?”

  She taps something—what’s this? an envelope?—which she seems to have deposited along with her trash. Then she leaves.

  Will waits a couple of minutes, as he’s supposed to. He tucks the envelope into his jacket, then steps out of the bright surgical-room silence of the nearly empty deli into the loud dirty rush hour, all these people with their headphones and backpacks, their secrets and lies.

  And look at this, across the street: Elle’s partner, the man who calls himself Roger, leaning against a doorway, one ankle crossed in front of another, a phone in his hand, looking like any other guy who’s standing on the sidewalk, killing time. How much has this guy watched here, today? Has Roger been following Will all day? And Will didn’t notice?

  Will sees the wire running from Roger’s phone to his ear. Roger listened to the whole conversation, of course he did. And he probably wasn’t the only one.

  Will glances at his watch. Plenty of time to meet his wife for dinner. If he’s not mistaken, Chloe is ovulating.

  MENDOZA

  “Your job,” she said, “is to ID targets for recruitment.”

  “Targets?”

  “Foreign journalists,” she said. “Politicians. Policemen. Businessmen. Whoever, wherever, whenever. If they’re important people, or if they have access to important people, then they’re of potential interest to us. You already spend half your life with these people. You’re a verifiable international journalist, but you’re lightweight—”

  He sat up straighter, insulted. But he couldn’t deny it.

  “—and no one would worry about you, no one would suspect that you’re not exactly who you say you are. You’re perfect. And it will be easy. And lucrative. And who knows? Maybe it’ll even be fun. Exciting.”

  Will examined his breakfast plate, heaped high with food he hadn’t touched, his second breakfast with this woman. Last time, he’d been ravenous.

  “We don’t expect you—we don’t want you—to decide who’s important. It’s my job to assess the value of targets; my boss’s job. Not yours. Your job is to report. To scout.”

  “But what am I scouting?”

  “Weaknesses.”

  “Is that what you call what you do?”

  “That’s what we all do, Will. It’s just that only some of us admit it.”

  —

  “Here.” She handed Will a small sheet of paper.

  He looked down at the neat handwriting, Arthur’s Alehouse and Bridget’s Saloon, Caf
é Fifty and Drinkwaters, an alphabetized list, one item for every letter of the alphabet, each business name accompanied by a general location, 49th St off 10th, Lex near 37th.

  “This is a list of the places we’ll meet. You’ll memorize this, then destroy it.”

  Will continued to scan the page, looking for something familiar, some anchor to his old reality, but there was none. “These are all in New York? I haven’t heard of any.”

  “That’s the point. These are dive bars, convenience delis. Subsistence eating, subsistence drinking. You’re unlikely to run into anyone you know. Unlikely, but not impossible. So if you happen to notice someone you do know, we signal to abort. You’ll sneeze, to draw my attention, then wipe your nose with the back of your hand, to confirm.”

  “Okay.”

  “Show me.”

  “What am I, a moron?”

  “God, I certainly hope not. So show me.”

  He fake-sneezed, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Good. Wherever we are, whenever, that’s abort. If we’re already in the same room, I probably won’t leave immediately. I’ll just sit there doing whatever I’m doing, reading my newspaper, scrolling through Twitter, eating my hot dog.”

  “You eat hot dogs?”

  “If we’ve aborted, but I’m still there, leave me alone. Don’t come near me, don’t try to make eye contact. Likewise, if I sneeze and then wipe my nose, you stay away.”

  “What if I just have to sneeze for normal reasons?”

  “Don’t.”

  They were walking on a dirt path, out past the working-ranch part of the finca, the horses and cows, barns and chutes and long feeding troughs, a half-mile from the guest rooms, far enough to get a hint of barnyard aroma, when the wind was right, but not too much. The constant smell of cow shit would definitely deduct a star from the luxury rating, maybe two.

  “To set up our meetings, I’ll text you on this.”

  She handed him a flimsy little flip phone.

  “What’s this?”

  Elle looked at him like he was a dimwit. “It’s indistinguishable from your basic burner. But this is a very precise GPS tracking device, which will allow us to pinpoint your location to within a couple of meters.”

  “Well that’s comforting.”

  “The point is not to locate you, but rather to capture the other mobile-phone signals around you, whose numbers will be transmitted by an app on your device to headquarters, where the numbers’ accounts will be traced and then monitored in the hours immediately following contact with you.”

  “Why?”

  “To see who you spook. And to see who those people choose to call, when they’re spooked. That’s one of the ways we’ll assess the potential targets’ value.”

  He examined the thing, which did in fact look like a convenience-store disposable.

  “It’s also an actual phone, for you to communicate with me, and only with me. If you need to contact me, text or call anytime.” She opened the back, removed the battery. “But when you’re in America, keep the battery out. Once a day, midday, pop it in, power up, and check messages. When I want to meet, I’ll send you a text with a code word—evasive, or ignominious, or anything.”

  “Ignominious?”

  “Focus on the first letter. We’ll meet at the establishment whose first letter immediately follows the first letter of the code word. So if I text you, say, Deuteronomy.”

  “What the hell kind of words are these?” He glances down at the list in his hand. “Our meet will be at Edgecombe’s in, um, Murray Hill. What if I don’t show?”

  “Then I’ll be pissed off.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay, when?”

  She looks perplexed. “I’ll be pissed off immediately.”

  “I mean, when will these meetings be?”

  “You’ll respond to my text with the hour you can make it, cleanly, allowing plenty of time to run a proper surveillance-detection route.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “You’ll learn. So when you send me the reply text, you’ll choose the time, which in actuality will be two hours past whatever time you send me. So if you text me four-thirty?”

  “We meet at six-thirty.”

  “See? You’re a natural.”

  He looked at her sidelong, confused, unsure what sort of relationship they were supposed to have. She’s going to tease him? “Okay. This happens after every trip?”

  “Correct.”

  “How will you know when I’ve come back from a trip?”

  She laughed at this, at him, his cluelessness. Then she continued without answering. “When you arrive to the bar or deli or whatever, don’t make eye contact; I won’t either. Order something, and find a place to sit. By yourself. Not near me. You’re just a guy getting a drink, at the beginning or end of a workday, sitting alone, at a table that offers privacy, and always facing away from the door, the window, the street. You understand?”

  “Yes. I don’t want anyone who’s passing to be able to notice me.”

  “When I’m confident no one is following, I’ll join you. Or I’ll beckon you to me.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll make eye contact. But this is important: if I don’t definitely—beyond any shadow of a doubt—make eye contact with you, and hold it for a couple of seconds, do not come to me. There may be times when I never make contact. Instead, after five minutes I may sneeze, wipe my nose, and leave, without ever having any interaction with you. Do not follow me. That meeting is not going to happen. Understand?”

  He nodded.

  “You understand why?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What don’t you understand about it?”

  “Why anybody would be following me.”

  “Maybe they’d be following me.”

  They walked in silence, the reality of these future activities sinking in. Overhead, a hawk was circling, floating on air currents, looking for prey. Will hoped he wouldn’t be mistaken for prey. Hoped it hadn’t already happened.

  —

  Was this a commonplace experience for her? Did she do this same thing last month? Would she do it again next?

  “Your name’s not really Elle Hardwick, is it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But there’s a real Elle Hardwick? Someone who’s actually a journalist in Australia? I’ve read some of her articles. I stalked her, online.”

  “The real one lives in Sydney with a lot of cats. And I mean a lot. Not just real-live pet cats. Also cat photos, cat paintings, cats crocheted on sweaters, cat-shaped ashtrays.”

  “What should I call you?”

  “If we’re being formal, I guess C/O Hardwick. Case Officer Hardwick. But I think Elle will suffice. We’re journalists, Will. We met in France? Surely you remember.”

  She was his CIA case officer? But she was still an Australian freelance writer? She was someone he went to bed with last night? Or not? “You’re saying we pretend to know each other?”

  “Pretend? We do know each other, Will. Obviously. Empirically. There are witnesses on two continents, people you’re likely to see again. So pretending we haven’t met, that might get us into completely unnecessary trouble. Our story is simple, Will, because it’s true. We know each other exactly how we know each other. We met in St-Émilion, and again—surprise!—here in Mendoza. Last night, we had a drink together, alone.”

  “And?”

  “And what? You’re a happily married man, right?”

  Did she really expect an answer?

  “You made an understandable—a predictable—mistake.” She continued to explain it away, a natural story, one she’d heard before, maybe one she’d told before. “If I were you, I’d not mention it to anyone. Unless you start seeing a therapist, which frankly I’d recommend.”

  “I don’t understand. Is this part of the cover?”

  “Do you want it to be?”

  He was unsure what they were talking about. His real life? Or
the fictional legend they were constructing? Or was there any meaningful difference? He felt frustration welling up within him, anger.

  “I never cheated before. Not once, not even so much as a kiss.”

  She turned to face him, ready to hear him out, to let him vent.

  “How could you do this to me?” He felt so wronged. “What type of a person does this to someone else?”

  “It wasn’t personal.” An explanation, not an apology.

  “Of course it was fucking personal!”

  She put her hands up. “Hey, no one forced you to do anything. You were corruptible, Will, and I corrupted you, because that’s my job. And let’s remember that it wasn’t that difficult.”

  “That’s horrible. You’re horrible.”

  “You may not be one hundred percent guilty, Will, but neither are you anywhere near one hundred percent innocent.”

  He knew this was true. He was just as angry at himself as he was at her. More. He’d screwed up, and he’d done it because he was weak, because he was vain.

  “And you know what, Will? Everyone is corruptible. So don’t beat yourself up.”

  He turned from her, off toward the facsimile of a farm, a sanitized, idealized version of what’s really a messy, difficult life. They’d spent the whole day together, just as they’d done in Bordeaux a few weeks earlier, back when Will thought they were two people who were unexpectedly falling in love, as falling in love always is. But they weren’t. And today they’d been talking about his new job, his new life, his new relationship to telling the truth to the people around him, to his colleagues, his friends, his wife.

  “Speaking of beating up, Will: I’m sorry about punching you in the face.”

  NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

  Peaceful countryside Argentina was just a couple of weeks ago, but a world away. Here, evidence is everywhere that this is the largest naval base in the world, one of NATO’s strategic command centers: aircraft carriers and submarines, destroyers and cruisers, eighty thousand personnel, big thick necks and wraparound sunglasses and the rigid, upright bearing that you just don’t find in magazine offices in Manhattan.

  Will is met at the airport by an unremarkable, unmarked gray SUV, civilian Virginia plates, rear windows tinted an impenetrable black. The driver takes Will’s bag, says hello, doesn’t offer a name.