The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  They leave the airport, and a few minutes later pull to a stop in the middle of a very long block dominated by a shuttered factory, completely deserted, except for a lone man waiting by the curb.

  “What’s going on?” Will asks.

  The driver doesn’t answer, but instead unlocks the doors, which Will didn’t realize were locked. The new man climbs into the backseat. “Hi,” the guy says. He’s holding something, a piece of black cloth. “I have to ask you to wear this hood. Security.”

  Will looks down at the cloth, then back up at this guy, buzz-cut and humorless. Will pulls the mask over his face.

  Within minutes they’re speeding along at a clip that feels like forty-five or fifty miles per hour, with occasional gusts of wind that shake the car, and air-pressure changes that must be a tunnel. They’re traveling over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, twenty-three miles over water from mainland urban to the peninsula’s rural.

  Back on land, they speed along the Eastern Shore, slowing and stopping at red lights, along what Will assumes is Route 13. He spent an hour studying maps, suspecting that this was exactly what was going to happen, trying to make practical use of his lifelong geography obsession.

  The car takes a turn onto a bumpy road, dirt and not exactly straight. After a couple of minutes the car stops, and Will can hear an electronic hum, a mechanical grinding, as they pass through what must be a security gate.

  “You can take off the mask.”

  Will removes the big hood and looks around, a tall chain-link fence to one side, a single-lane dirt road stretching ahead. They stop at a modest farmhouse, white shingles with green shutters, to which have been added two rear wings, low and long and windowless, big HVAC compressors sitting alongside.

  “Intake is in the front hall,” the man in the backseat says. He holds out his hand, and for a second Will thinks the guy wants to shake, but he just wants his mask back. “And I’ll need your phone.”

  Up a few stairs and across a porch and through the door. There’s a desk at the foot of the center-hall stairs, an unsmiling man who glances up at Will. “You’ll be in room six, upstairs. But right now they’re waiting for you at the outdoor gym.”

  EASTERN SHORE, VIRGINIA

  “I understand you practiced karate as a kid?” The man is wearing a skintight tee shirt and camouflage cargo pants and combat boots. His name is apparently Jim.

  Will had cycled through a variety of martial arts in elementary and intermediate school.

  “That’s a good start,” Jim says. “We can work with that.”

  Without any warning Jim lunges at Will, who shunts him aside with a decent semblance of a knife-hand block.

  “What the fuck?” Will yells.

  “Welcome to hand-to-hand training.”

  Jim takes another pass at Will, this time more aggressively, and hammers him in the chest. Will stumbles backward, finds his footing, takes a deep breath.

  Jim sets his feet again, with something that might be a little smile on his lips.

  Okay, Will thinks again, confronted with another man: here we go.

  —

  “Do you think you’ve memorized our codes?”

  Will nods.

  “Good,” she says. “Let’s go through them again.”

  He recites the keypad sequences he memorized, tested, and retested over the past day. Meeting times and places. Emergencies.

  “What types of emergencies?” he’d asked, when she introduced this idea.

  “If you think you’ve been discovered by your wife, that’s star-1. By your boss, star-2. By someone else, star-3.”

  “Is that really an emergency? If Chloe finds out?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. If you think some type of law enforcement is onto you, hashtag-1. Intelligence operatives, hashtag-2. Someone else, hashtag-3.”

  “Law enforcement? Am I going to be breaking any laws?”

  No answer.

  He regurgitates the codes, yet again: home, office, subway platforms near either. And then foreign codes: hotel lobby, the closest bar to the west, the information booth of the central train station, the first-class ticket counter of the national airline, ever higher numbers for the increasing physical distance from the emergency.

  “What about the American embassy?”

  “You won’t be going to any American embassy.”

  “What if I’m in trouble?”

  “Follow the protocol. We’ll help you.”

  “What if I’m in danger? Immediate danger?”

  “Try to get out of it.”

  He looks at her, worry etched across his forehead.

  “Let’s get this straight, Will: there’s a difference between you and me. I was recruited, interviewed, hired, trained. I get health insurance, a pension, security clearance. You don’t. That’s why we’re at this satellite training facility, instead of the Farm. You’re not an employee of the CIA. You don’t work for Langley. Who you work for is me.”

  —

  “Any identifying details,” she said. “Hometown, age, physical attributes, occupations. Also where you meet, what time of day, anything notable about the physical encounter itself.”

  “About everyone I meet?”

  “No. We don’t care about chefs, winemakers, farmers, any of that lifestyle bullshit.”

  “Gotcha. You don’t care about my actual job.”

  “What we’re looking for are people of importance, people who might become assets. Anyone in any embassy or any level of any government, obviously. Also high-ranking businesspeople. Media figures. Any criminals, definitely, but you probably don’t come across any self-identifying criminals, do you? And also any Americans.”

  “Americans? Why?”

  “Let’s get something clear: why is not part of the equation. Not now, not ever, not your business. Why isn’t even my business. Who, what, when, where: those are our concerns. Not why.”

  He didn’t understand why Elle always seemed to be so strident, as if she was angry at him. If one of them should be angry at the other, that was not the rational flow.

  “This is how intelligence works, Will: you don’t know the why, almost ever. You know what you’re supposed to do, and hopefully how to do it. But even if someone did tell you a why, you’d be a fool to believe it.”

  He opened his mouth to ask why, but shut it quickly.

  “Never ask why. If you want to guess, by all means go ahead, knock yourself out. But asking? That only makes you look naïve.”

  “I am naïve.”

  “I don’t think that’s quite true, Will. Not anymore.”

  —

  “How’s Virginia?”

  “Hot,” Will says. “Humid.” He doesn’t want to say too much; he doesn’t want to lie to his wife more than necessary. He’s supposedly on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay. This landline has been temporarily programmed to appear to be Will’s mobile number, to anyone in the outside world. To Chloe.

  Elle’s room is a few doors down the hall; she said she’s showering before dinner. Will imagines getting up off this lumpy mattress, walking down the hall, knock-knock, a pause, then wrapped only in a towel, wet, “Oh, hi, come on in…”

  “And you?” he asks his wife. “What’s been keeping you busy?”

  —

  The display shows two views of Will’s bedroom, from two different hidden cameras.

  “That’s his wife he’s talking to?” Roger asks.

  “Yeah.”

  The audio is surprisingly crisp, the matrimonial chitchat unsurprisingly empty. Elle and Roger are sitting in the security room downstairs, in front of a bank of screens that monitor whatever anyone wants to monitor on this two-hundred-acre, forty-bed facility.

  “But what I don’t understand,” Roger says, “is why we’re giving him the hand-to-hand training.”

  Elle sighs. She’d been hoping that Roger’s relative paucity of intelligence wouldn’t be a problem; his responsibilities required more physical than intellectual skills.
But now she was beginning to worry that he was a mistake, a liability.

  “We’re not really training him; Will isn’t learning anything out there in the gym. We’re assessing him.” She inclines her head at the monitor. “And we’re observing him.”

  LONDON

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Business.”

  “Your business is what, Mr. Rhodes?”

  “I’m a writer.”

  The immigration officer peers up from Will’s documents. “You don’t say?”

  Will doesn’t say again. He nods.

  “And how long will you be staying in the United Kingdom, Mr. Rhodes?”

  “Um…I’m going to Scotland day after tomorrow. And then to Ireland.” He can’t remember when. “In five days, I think?”

  Will considers taking a deep breath, but he doesn’t want to look like a man who needs to take a deep breath in front of a border agent. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m very tired.”

  The agent continues to stare at Will, no doubt wondering what needs to be done here, what level of crackpot he’s dealing with.

  But then without further incident, stamp, and, “Welcome to the United Kingdom.”

  A few minutes later Will collapses onto the train seat, trying to calm down, hurtling into Paddington, followed by a quick black-cab ride to his hotel in Mayfair, whose streets are being treated by Saudi princes like a Formula 1 course, yellow Lamborghinis and red Ferraris, screaming their immense wealth at the top of their lungs.

  “Hi,” he says to his wife’s voice-mail box. Chloe had never been a very good call-answerer, though she was for a long time a reliable call-returner. Recently she’s been neither, always in meetings, or at yoga, or on the subway, or on another call. “It’s me, arrived in London. Love you.”

  The OPEN sign is still hanging from a hook on the glass door to the London bureau. An aged American couple occupy the leather club chairs at the first desk, across from a competent-looking woman who smiles fleetingly at Will. His contact is the slightly older man at the rear desk, shuffling papers and talking on the phone, looking disagreeable. His name is Cecil Wilmore, but everyone in New York refers to him as Mumblemore.

  While Will waits, he reads a front-page newspaper article about the dead American who’d been discovered in Capri. Police are searching for anyone who might have any information about another hotel guest: a grainy image taken from a surveillance camera at a high angle, a woman in giant sunglasses, dark hair pulled back. Could be anyone.

  “Ah,” Mumblemore finally says, “there you are, mumble-mumble-mumble.” An accusatory tone, as if Will is late. He’s not.

  “So you’re off to Edinburgh? Right, mumble-mumble.”

  “Any advice for me?”

  “There’s a big castle? Go to it.”

  Will doesn’t know what he ever did to Mumblemore, but the guy certainly seems to hate Will’s guts.

  “What else? Mmm. Do try the haggis.” He turns back to his computer.

  “That’s very helpful.” This is the stupidest travel advice Will has ever received. “Thanks.”

  “Mmm.”

  Will removes an envelope from his jacket, trades it for Mumblemore’s, another list of new restaurants and renovated hotels, people to see places to go, just as he’s done dozens of times. But this time is different. This time he’s a covert asset of the CIA, gathering intelligence on foreign soil. This time he’s breaking the law.

  It’s not what you do that defines you. It’s why you do it.

  FALLS CHURCH

  Raji initiates another alert about U.S. passport number 11331968, a credit card run through a hotel. He opens the map app to find the hotel’s location, enters those details into his alert, thorough as ever, no shortcuts, never relying on just one source of information, always cross-checking, aiming for 100 percent accuracy on addresses and intersections and time zones and flight delays, anything that anyone could want to know about the peregrinations of the subjects on Raji’s newly narrowed segment of the watch list.

  It looks like a very nice hotel that this guy checked into. Raji has never stayed in a very nice hotel, and is fairly certain he never will.

  “Whassup Raj-man?” It’s his boss, Brock, leaning on the flimsy wall that separates Raji’s cubicle from Zander’s. “You goin’ to Scotland?”

  “Yeah right.”

  “Who is it?” Brock leans forward, getting a closer look at the screen, the small window with the subject’s details.

  Raji knows the protocol, Brock knows the protocol, everyone knows the protocol: no discussing the subjects. Especially for this new assignment for the mystery client. But no one follows the protocol. This job would be too boring if they couldn’t share irrelevant intel about meaningless strangers. “Some travel-writer dude.”

  Brock is disappointed. His interest is limited to female subjects. “All right then, Raj-man, keep on keepin’ on.”

  The boss walks away, continuing on his predictable rounds of checking in with his team, “my guys,” he calls them. Raji suspects that Brock adheres to a set of business-management tips that runs to a half-page, a listicle, maybe an off-topic feature in Guns & Ammo.

  Brock had been the middle of Raji’s job-interview sandwich, two years ago, after a human-resources specialist who’d asked for signatures on an assortment of waivers that Raji didn’t attempt to comprehend, including the release of his fingerprints and a urine-sample screening. A week later Raji returned to meet Brock, then waited in the very quiet reception area until the white-bread department head was available for a pro forma ten-minute vetting.

  Raji signed more waivers. Filled out more forms. Accepted the degradation of a physical exam from a supposed doctor who didn’t seem to know how to operate the blood-pressure cuff. Thank God the guy didn’t attempt to draw a blood sample.

  Then Raji was hired. He was issued an ID card with a magnetic strip that links to the database with his identifying statistics and physical report, his educational background and history of addresses, his parents’ Social Security numbers and the contact information for his previous employers.

  Raji doesn’t know if he has a security clearance, or if he does, at what level. And the truth is he doesn’t really know whom he works for, or what his office does, for which entity. He does care about these questions—he’d prefer to know, rather than not know—but this preference isn’t overwhelming. Raji cares much more about having a secure job with a biweekly check and airtight health benefits. The physical exam wasn’t very in-depth, not enough to identify what’s wrong with Raji.

  NEW YORK CITY

  “You’re not leaving,” Gabriella says.

  “You’re mistaken.” Malcolm snaps shut his briefcase, and drags it off his desk by the handle. “I am.”

  Gabriella is standing in Malcolm’s door, arms crossed, projecting hostility and disappointment. Even though Malcolm is her boss, Gabriella seems determined to try to undermine the hierarchy of that relationship, every day, in every way. In turn, Malcolm unwaveringly makes sure to thwart her subversion. It’s an uneasy professional dance, but not an unfriendly personal relationship.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, boss,” says Stonely Rodriguez, who’s sitting in Malcolm’s chair, staring intently at the computer screen, right hand on mouse, left hand supporting chin. “You got some crazy shit on your hard drive.”

  “Yeah, I know that. But what I don’t know is: can you clean it up?”

  “I can try. Yeah.”

  Stonely tugs on the bill of his Cincinnati Reds cap, the one that’s all red with a white C. He has a half-dozen Cincinnati caps through which he rotates. “I wear the Reds caps ’cause of the C,” he’ll say, to anyone who asks. “My real name is César. Stonely’s just a nickname I got, because I once went a week without realizing that I’d broken a finger.” Almost none of that story is true.

  “Thanks Stonely. Do what you can.” Malcolm turns back to Gabriella. “You can come with me, if you want. Take a ride downtown.�
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  “Really? You’ve become that type of asshole?”

  “Oh shit.” Stonely snickers, then covers his mouth. “Sorry, boss.”

  “What type is that, Gabs?”

  “The type who makes people ride in cars to have meetings?”

  “Darling, I became that type of asshole years ago. Isn’t that right, Stonely?”

  “Don’t know nothing ’bout that, boss.”

  “Anyway, are you coming with me or not? Because I’m leaving now. There’s a zero-tolerance policy for school-pickup lateness.” Although this is a new routine for him—a concession to Allison, once-a-week pickup—he has already gleaned the important conventions.

  Malcolm sees Gabriella do an emotional hiccup—just an involuntary wince—but she quickly regains her composure. “Let me grab my bag.”

  They ride the elevator in silence. There’s no one else in the big mirrored cabin, but Gabriella knows that Malcolm doesn’t talk in elevators. He uses the downtime to send a tweet. A few months ago, he’d been ordered by his CEO to start tweeting. Another social-media solution to a nonexistent problem. Malcolm had been about to ask, “Tweet about what? Why?” But he realized that if he didn’t ask, then he wouldn’t end up disobeying explicit instructions.

  His thumbs fly across his phone, tapping out: So proud of my wonderful team! You guys are the best!! #humbled. Many of Malcolm’s tweets consist of empty pandering, usually with no connection to any event in the real world. What amazes him is that people retweet this drivel.

  The car is waiting in front of the building. “School please, Hector,” Malcolm says. Then adds, “Thanks.” The type of asshole he doesn’t want to become is the one who doesn’t say thanks to his driver. But sometimes it’s difficult to remember. He’s still working through the adjustment of having become a guy with a driver, which itself is a de facto level of assholery with which he’s not entirely comfortable. There are plenty of guys like Malcolm who unabashedly embrace their douchebaggery—they own it, managing to convince themselves of something that Malcolm cannot.

  “Fucking traffic.” Malcolm scowls at the snarl, the inevitable midafternoon mess. Glances at his watch. “We should be on the subway.”