by Chris Pavone
“Nobody ever said anything about doing something like this.”
“Well, now I am.”
He wondered, for the hundredth time, what would happen if he refused. Was there a level of retaliation before the nuclear option? Was now the time to find out?
“Okay,” he said. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You’re going to a party that’s being thrown by one of the richest men on the planet, who’s also among the most corrupt. He’s in the process of showing off his newly immense wealth, buying yachts, buying islands. But it’s not really showing off if there’s no one there to see it, right? So he will undoubtedly invite his most important associates. Both the legal ones and the, uh, sublegal ones. We want to know who these people are. You’re going to help by taking pictures of them. Every single one of them, even those who don’t want to be photographed. Especially those.”
“Oh, sure, that sounds easy. Anything else?”
“Yes.”
“I was kidding.”
“I know. I’m not. We also need you to attach names to those faces.”
IBERIAN SEA
“You are journalist?”
“I am.”
The big Russian’s big hand is encircling Will’s, a handshake that seems to be achieving an unusual level of threatening permanence. Miloshevsky’s companions beat a hasty retreat, circling around themselves a few yards away, wanting nothing to do with any American journalist.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Señor Miloshevsky. This is certainly a beautiful boat.”
“Sure, Catherine is biggest yacht in Mediterranean. Not bad for poor boy from Smolensk, no?”
“No sir, not bad at all.”
“Is newspaper story about party, yes?”
“Magazine. Travelers is a magazine.”
“Am unfamiliar. Is magazine about travelers?”
“Traveling, I guess. Tourism. Hotels and restaurants, cruises and safaris.”
“I love safari.”
“Yes, it’s a very special experience. Do you entertain often on the Catherine?”
“Sure. Everyone loves party on yacht.”
One of the black-suited guards has edged closer, and Will is self-conscious about his hand in his pocket, fondling his phone. He doesn’t want to be dragged down to the engine room, beaten to a pulp. He takes his hand out of his pocket.
“You want I should give you tour?”
“Yes sir, I’d love that. If you have the time.”
“Sure. Always time for journalist.”
Miloshevsky beckons to someone over Will’s shoulder, a hand signal and a nod. They start walking together, trailed by a guard, not making any attempt to be discreet. That’s not how security works in this sort of crowd. It’s there to be seen.
The proud owner rattles off his yacht’s vitals, horsepower and water displacement, top speeds and refueling range, numbers that would no doubt be impressive if Will had context, but he doesn’t, so they’re abstract, like pi, Planck’s constant.
“You have phone? You take selfie with helicopter?”
Will glances at the helicopter. “Oh, that’s all right.”
“No? Everyone take selfie with helicopter. I take for you.”
“Oh, no, that’s very generous of you.”
“For article,” Miloshevsky says. “Give phone to me.” The Russian holds out his hand. “I insist.”
NEW YORK CITY
There’s a kid crying when Malcolm walks through the door. It seems as if there’s always a kid crying when he walks through the door, the tantrums and tears perhaps stage-directed by Allison—“Cue crying!”—performance art created both to shame him—do you see how difficult my life is?—and to annoy the living shit out of him. Killing two birds with one egg, as Sylvie likes to say, getting the metaphor so deliciously incorrect, like her half-correct facts about Greek myths, Krakatoa, the Lenape, bears.
Malcolm doesn’t need Allie’s passive-aggressive help; he already feels plenty guilty about all the things he misses, all the things he doesn’t do.
Allison is in the alarmingly messy kitchen, a space designed as one of those hypermodern affairs that look serene in magazines like Travelers. But once a stray crumb lands on the counter, the illusion shatters.
“Hi,” he says.
Allison turns to him just as a sizzling pop from the sauté pan pelts her with a globule of scalding oil. “Fuck!” She glares at Malcolm—his fault, apparently, the spatter—and turns back to the stove. “Can you deal with her, please?”
“Sylvie? Sure. What’s her problem?”
Allison doesn’t say anything, accentuating her focus on her martyrdom cooking. Dinner party for eight. Not his idea, not his friends, not his goddamned fault.
Malcolm walks to the living room, floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, the Midtown skyscrapers, the twinkling blanket beyond, all the way to the horizon, all those anonymous people living in their anonymous houses in the Bronx and Queens, while he’s up here, in a glass box in the sky, with a livid wife and a bawling kid.
His other, more emotionally stable child comes flying out of nowhere. “Daddy, can I have a lollipop?” Peter is already holding the lollipop in question, its wrapper halfway open.
“Why do you think it’s candy time?”
“Because yes.” Malcolm has to hand it to the kid, he makes a powerful argument. No extraneous information, no wasted time.
“Sure.”
“Thank you Daddy!” He flees before his father has a chance to change his mind.
Malcolm pours a scotch, takes a slug, deposits the tumbler on the coffee table. Then he reconsiders, finds a coaster, even though the liquid is room-temperature and the table is glass, and there’s no possibility of condensation damage. But Allison is a coaster fanatic, and he doesn’t need to go out of his way to drive his wife nuts; she’s more than capable of piloting herself to that destination all on her own.
Down the long hall. “Hey kiddo,” he says to Sylvie, facedown on her bed, sobbing.
She turns to her father, red eyes and splotchy cheeks and a big bubble of snot in one nostril, a balloon being inflated. “Daddy, I hate her!”
“You hate Mommy? That seems like maybe an overreaction. Hate is a very strong word. Why do you say that, pumpkin?”
“She’s mean. She yelled at me. She said I was in the way.”
“Were you?”
“She always says I’m in the way.” The crying has already stopped. “Even when I’m not.”
Malcolm kisses her on the head. “She doesn’t mean it, pumpkin. She just gets angry sometimes.”
“At me? That’s not fair.”
“Not at you. She just gets angry, in general.”
“Why?”
The answer is too long, too complicated, too sad, for an eight-year-old.
“It’s hard to explain, pumpkin. But I promise, it’s not you she’s angry at. You’re just there sometimes when she notices she’s angry. I’m sorry. And so is she, I’m sure.”
IBERIAN SEA
“Is new phone?” Miloshevsky turns the device over in his palm. “Looks new.”
“Um, yes.” Will feels the onset of the physiological symptoms of panic, which can be visible to someone who knows what to look for. He suspects that Miloshevsky is the type who’d know.
“Camera app is where?”
Miloshevsky is handling someone else’s possession with the blithe assuredness of a man who makes a habit of seizing the things he wants, surging past protestations and defenses, challenging anyone—everyone—to defy him. “Ah,” he says, “is here.”
In the rational part of his brain, Will knows there’s no way for someone to casually stumble upon the surreptitious photo stream, the one Will captured using the secondary camera app. Or even to find the app. Both the app and its image library are sitting on his fourth screen, one program disguised as the New York City bus map and the other as the Long Island Rail Road schedule, neither of which
anyone would consider consulting, least of all a Russian multibillionaire standing on his mega-yacht ten miles off the Barcelona shore.
There’s no way.
Miloshevsky swipes the screen, swipes again the other way, brow furrowed. “Is lot of apps.”
There’s also the remote possibility that Miloshevsky will find the hidden audio recorder, the app that’s activated by the camera, sixty seconds of sound triggered after every image, enabling Will to capture names that he’d otherwise have no way of remembering.
Finally Miloshevsky finds the default camera. He raises the phone and adopts the now ubiquitous pose, body language that hadn’t been coined a decade ago.
Will can see a guard, prison tattoos on his knuckles, a slightly misshapen ear, with a chunk of flesh missing from the top.
“Done.” Miloshevsky admires the screen. “Is good photo.” He lowers the phone, then rocks his arm back, and forward, and tosses the device the ten feet that separates him from Will, who responds an instant too slowly, manages only to deflect the thing’s flight path instead of catching the phone, which clatters to the deck and skitters across the smooth surface of the helicopter pad, very little in the way of friction to slow it down, metal on metal, spinning, approaching the edge of the deck—
Will lunges awkwardly, bending, stumbling, the phone slowing, three feet from the edge, two, and Will’s knee hits the deck while his hand reaches out, just inches remain, the thing approaching the edge and still just beyond Will’s reach, almost not moving at all, but not entirely not moving, and then a silent disappearance, over the edge, gone.
“Shit.”
His mind is hopping around all the ways that this is a problem, a dozen issues converging in his consciousness in a single second while he kneels there on the hot metal deck, the photos for the CIA, his digital train tickets, his two thousand contacts—how many are backed up?—and the unresolved emails and the text message from the general manager of the hotel in Salamanca, and how is Will going to replace this lifeline, and how is Miloshevsky going to respond?
“Am sorry.” Miloshevsky doesn’t look all that sorry.
Will turns toward the edge, no railing here. He leans forward, and looks down, expecting to see the churning sea. But that’s not what’s immediately below, which is another deck, high-gloss white fiberglass, a seating arrangement, couches and chaises and a couple of ottomans, on one of which sits Will’s phone, safe and sound.
—
It’s late. Will opens the wrong door. This cabin is done up like a bachelor pad from the 1960s, or rather a Las Vegas hotel’s re-creation of one, with low furniture and organic shapes and a white shag carpet, on which a young woman kneels on all fours, completely naked, with a bald man behind her on his knees, fully clothed except for his fly unzipped and his silk shirt unbuttoned to his stomach, a matt of white chest fur, one of his hands grasping her long black hair and the other pushing down on the small of her back, for leverage.
Both copulating people notice Will in the doorway. The woman winces at the shame of it, but the man thrusts out his chin in defiance of Will’s intrusion, continues to pivot his pelvis forward, taking a harder yank on the woman’s hair, a bonus degradation.
“I’m sorry,” Will says. As he pulls the door closed, he can see the woman’s eyes fall back to the carpet, to whatever world she’s trying to imagine instead of the one she inhabits.
Will is looking for the young British couple and an older Brit, also a Lord Something, they all wanted to sit down, and Lucia-Elena was going to find a place to watch a DVD of a situation comedy that they’d all been raving about, there was a screening room somewhere, but Will said he’d meet them, first he needed the restroom.
It wasn’t the toilet he’d wanted, it was the privacy. The chance to upload tonight’s photos to the cloud-based server using a complex set of instructions that Elle had made him memorize. But in the privacy of the neat little washroom Will discovered that the boat was too far from shore, too far from cell towers; there was no reception. Will couldn’t help but wonder if that, too, was purposeful, along with the near destruction of his phone, whose screen was cracked from hitting the helicopter pad.
Will is reluctant to open any more doors onto any more indignities, but he manages to stumble across the door with the CINÉMA plaque. Unfortunately, inside are a handful of tough guys watching The Godfather, as tough guys do.
Back outside, breezy and cool, house music, lots and lots of inebriated people.
“Do you see anything you like?” Lucia-Elena has found him. “Anything you want?”
Will is not sure what he’s being offered.
“There is Suzanna”—she nods in the direction of a tall blonde—“who is from the Czech Republic. And the full woman wearing the white bikini, she is Francesca, born in Italy. If these are not your preference, there are other girls”—Lucia-Elena looks around—“but I cannot see any now.”
“Um, I don’t…”
“Gratis, of course. Señor Miloshevsky would be happy to make this offer to you, as an apology, for the damages of your phone. And of course he will replace the phone. You are staying at the Hotel Atlántico, that is correct?”
Will doesn’t demur, but neither does he confirm. He’s pretty certain he didn’t provide this information to anyone in Miloshevsky’s employ.
“A new phone will arrive tomorrow, by noon.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary.”
“It is fair. Señor Miloshevsky has not achieved his level of success by being unfair.”
Will can tell that Lucia-Elena is intelligent, quick-witted, clear-thinking. She knows that what she’s saying is the opposite of true.
“Suzanna, then? Or Francesca? I have been told that Francesca is unusually skillful.”
—
The yacht docks at 2:00 A.M. Cars are waiting to shuttle the partygoers who are departing—quite a few are not—to whatever passes for home, grand hotels, Art Nouveau apartments in Eixample, tile-roofed houses commanding turquoise lagoons up the Costa Brava.
None of the cars is for Will. Plus he seems to have lost track of Lucia-Elena, who offered a ride, though maybe that’s for the best. He wants to get back to his hotel and go to sleep, without being forced to decline anything further. He feels like he has spent the past three hours saying no to things, drinks and drugs and hookers.
The carless make a mad drunken dash for the handful of taxis that have gathered, smelling expensive fares and exorbitant tips like sharks. There are more passengers than taxis, and within a minute the fleet has been hired.
The remaining partygoers whip out phones, calling for pickups, but Will decides to walk. Barcelona is a late place, compulsory naps in the evening, dinner at eleven. Two in the morning is early here. These streets are busy.
He strolls through La Barceloneta and into the Barrio Gótico. The medieval streets close around him, tight and dark and resonant with centuries of late-night revelry. In a small square, vagrants have established a community, smoke and music and untethered dogs, the sounds of amusement mixing with an aura of menace.
Will is aware of footsteps behind him, but he doesn’t want to turn to look. Chances are that it’s benign, and he shares with most men a deep antipathy against looking skittish.
At the end of a curving street he slows, not positive which way to turn, the curve disorienting his directional sense. He stops. Takes out his phone to consult the map. He doesn’t want to make the wrong turn, not at this time of night, at this level of fatigue.
The footsteps behind him have also stopped.
He holds up his phone, which now features a jagged Y-shaped crack on the screen. He forces his eyes into soft focus, trying to locate the reflection of the real world behind the graphic representation of it, behind the white streets and gray buildings and green parks.
There. There they are, two men, quarter-turned toward each other, one oval face clearly in Will’s direction. Fifty yards back? Seventy-five?
Will refocuses on th
e map, the streets, his hotel a half-kilometer away, maybe less, five minutes if he’s walking quickly and taking the shortest route. But that’s not what he’s going to do. His eyes follow a longer, circuitous route, a handful of turns, a kilometer. He memorizes the decisions, grateful that he stopped accepting alcohol two hours ago.
He sets off again, a right turn at the T, setting a quick walking pace.
Behind him, the footsteps resume clicking on the stones.
Will takes a turn down a very narrow street. Out of view of his pursuers, he breaks into a jog, setting a pace of ten miles per hour, perhaps six minutes to his hotel, and he won’t tire, in fact he’ll be able to speed up at the moment when his pursuers will be slowing; he has more adrenaline, and he’s a runner. His pursuers are paid to be strong, not fast.
He runs past the hippie-ish encampment again, feeling himself speeding up. A few of the smokers at the edge of the square cheer for him, or jeer.
The footsteps are still pursuing, but they’re not close, and not getting closer. They’re keeping his pace. But he’ll outlast them. He speeds up. Another turn at another quiet narrow street. His feet are not feeling great, sliding around in the thin dress socks. But at least the soles are rubber. This would suck in leather-soled shoes with hard heels.
Will accelerates again, now going maybe twelve miles per hour, a faster pace than a nonrunner will be able to maintain for more than a minute. His pursuers’ footsteps are falling farther behind.
This is his last turn, onto the narrow sidewalk of a street that’s busy during most of the day, but not now, quiet and nearly deserted, just a few souls in sight, the lights of one restaurant and a couple of hotels, a taxi idling.
Will has made it. Just another twenty seconds to his hotel door, to the desk clerk, a witness. Will starts to slow, takes a deep breath, filling his straining lungs with air.
That’s when the man steps into his path, just a few yards ahead, short of breath but otherwise big, tall, scary. Will comes to a stop.
These men must have known where Will was going, which hotel. That means they’re not muggers. They’re Miloshevsky’s men, people who’d known where Will was going; Lucia-Elena did. So why not simply wait for him at his hotel? Perhaps they weren’t sure he’d be returning to his hotel, and wanted to see where he went, wanted to monitor him. But they also wanted to capture him, didn’t they? Or why else would they chase him through the streets?