The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  She walks down the corridor, swipes the key, opens the door. Roger is sitting inside at the desk, a laptop in front of him. “He’s on a plane?”

  She nods.

  “That sure was close, wasn’t it?”

  Elle takes a seat on the bed, kicks off her shoes.

  “We could’ve gotten him killed.”

  “I don’t know about killed,” she says, rubbing the sole of her foot. “But anyway, it worked. Look at all the phone numbers we captured, all the calls that those people made after encountering Rhodes. This giant network, one, two degrees of separation…”

  On Roger’s screen, there’s a tree of phone numbers, with branches that extend all around the world.

  “Has everything been uploaded to the server?”

  “Yes, already being analyzed in Virginia.”

  Besides Elle, Roger is the only one on the team who has any contact whatsoever with Virginia, where all the data is collected, analyzed, and disseminated back out to the field, keeping the operatives in the loop about the past, present, and future locations of the mission’s assets and targets. This is how Elle knows where Will is traveling—his flight number and seat assignment, terminal and gate, hotel and restaurant, train reservation and rental car. Whom he calls, texts, emails. What he buys for his wife, where. Every piece of information in his vast digital footprint, constantly monitored in real time.

  “Look,” Roger says, “there’s one update now.” A small window appears next to a number, with a name, a headshot. It’s a man in Abu Dhabi.

  “You think this is going to work?” Roger asks.

  Miloshevsky’s party guests were exactly the sorts of people who can provide what Elle is looking for. This operation has been active for months already, with no real progress. Some ops get more secure and more fruitful the longer they go on; longevity is the actual goal. This isn’t one of them. This op is always on the verge of falling apart, every day a fresh opportunity to fail.

  But that’s not what she says, which is “Yes, I do,” and she tries to convince herself it’s true.

  NEW YORK CITY

  “I was terrified,” Will says.

  Gabriella is leaning on Will’s doorjamb, clutching a notepad, and a folder with spreadsheets and schedules, and her phone, screen facing up, poised to alert her to whatever crisis will arise next, even though the day is over for most people. Gabriella’s day is never over.

  What is it about her job that makes her an editor? Most days it’s hard to identify. Unless she revises the editorial functions of being an editor—edits out the editing—from her conception of her job, and recognizes that what she has is a management position, a job that’s exactly about these things she’s carrying around—budgets and schedules and crises—and not about the things she imagines, the things she used to do.

  She finally complained to Malcolm. “You’re looking at it the wrong way,” he said, shaking his head. “These meetings that you attend—meetings about process, about finances—and these hours you spend helping people with their problems, and these advertiser dinners and industry conferences…All these are not things that are interrupting your real work. They are your real work. Your job is about other people. Their performance is your performance.”

  And so she’s in Will’s doorway. “God,” she says, “that sounds awful,” trying to project sympathy, which she genuinely feels. Gabriella has been there herself, far from home, worried, alone, no one within hundreds of miles upon whom she could rely for anything. But not recently. Not since she became this type of suit. “Terrified of anything specific?”

  “Ebola, SARS.” Will smiles. “I don’t know, cholera. Typhoid. Whatever global epidemic is next.”

  “So what made you get on a plane?” She takes a seat in Will’s guest chair, looks around the always-spotless office.

  “Honestly, I just didn’t want to go to a hospital abroad. If I had something serious—if I was patient zero of the next contagion—I wanted to get diagnosed in New York. Get treated here. Quarantined here.”

  “And you did?”

  “Well, by the time I got home…”

  “You were better?”

  “Mostly. I still didn’t feel great, but I was no longer worried about dying.”

  “There’s always next time.”

  “Yup.”

  “So besides your contagion, you okay, Will?”

  He gives her a quizzical look, trying to pretend he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but she knows he does. She allows him his silent dishonesty without calling him out. “You seem, I don’t know, off these days. You angry at me about something?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then what’s up?”

  They’ve been friends for a dozen years. But Will’s marriage put up a wall, a much taller wall than Gabs’s own marriage had. There had always been a sexual tension between Will and Gabs, a real one, not just a reaction from her free-floating flirtations. There were a few near misses, late nights in faraway places, interrupted by other people, other circumstances. Nothing ever happened. But it could have, and—who knows?—maybe will. Life is long; marriages aren’t, not always. Hers wasn’t.

  “Nothing,” Will says. Gabriella is pretty sure he’s still lying. But now isn’t the time to confront him, and she’s probably not the one to do it.

  It’s a peculiar relationship between colleagues who are similar ages, with similar levels of experience, similar job responsibilities: sometimes allies, but also rivals. People can talk about teams, but every colleague is one of three things: a boss, an underling, or a rival. Will is neither a boss nor an underling.

  “Okay Will.” She gets up, walks to the door. “Tell Chloe I say hi.”

  Gabriella walks around the corner to reception, steps into the elevator. She examines herself in the wall of mirrors in there, aligns the slit of her skirt, fluffs her hair.

  Down on twenty-eight, with the archives and accounting, legal and IT, she nods at a couple of men she doesn’t really know, gives them the smile they want. She can practically feel their eyes follow her after she passes.

  She turns a corner, comes to a stop at the open door of an interior office. “Hey Stonely,” she says, “you got a minute?”

  “Sure thing.”

  She steps into the small cluttered room, its high shelves packed with keyboards, monitors, cords. “I’m wondering”—she shuts the door behind her, leans against it—“if you could take care of something for me.”

  —

  It’s a fine line between a rigorous workout and vomiting, and at least once a week Allison finds herself straddling that line. “Um,” she says, unsure what to order now that she’s standing at the juice-bar register.

  That’s when she sees the handsome headhunter, Steven Something-or-Other, a cleft chin, a lot of thick hair, you could lose solid objects in there. When they’d met, he’d introduced himself as executive VP of talent acquisition.

  “Talent acquisition? That’s a thing? A job function?”

  “For me it is.”

  He’s now staring down into his phone, fingers tapping away. He’s taller than she remembered—he’d been sitting during their first and only meeting, and she’d been wearing heels when they’d shaken hands hello-pleased-to-meet-you and then again good-bye-I’ll-be-in-touch. But then he hadn’t, in fact, been in touch.

  She might be too nauseated for this. But before she can decide anything—how to say hello, or maybe how to flee, to get the hell out of here—he looks up. “Oh, hello…”

  “Allison,” she helps him. “Allison Somers. Rabinowitz-Somers.”

  “Of course, hi Allison, nice to see you again. I’m Steven Roberts.” He has an easy smile, a surfeit of big white teeth. Nice suit and tie, briefcase. The whole handsome-adult-guy-with-job package. “Listen,” he says, “I can’t really talk now”—glancing down at his phone—“but seeing you reminds me that we have something, just came up.”

  “Oh?”

  He looks around, as if fo
r eavesdroppers. “Would you be interested in educational publishing?”

  She raises her eyebrows.

  “It’s okay if not—”

  “No, I mean, yes. Yes, I’d be interested. Definitely.” This is not strictly true, though since having kids she has become marginally less uninterested.

  He smiles wide, all those teeth. He must’ve had a really great orthodontist, she wants to ask if it was someone in the city, she can already tell that corrective dentistry is in her kids’ future. Waiting rooms, headgear, tears.

  “I’m absolutely interested.” She nods eagerly.

  “Good. Can you make it for a drink tonight? Say, seven?”

  —

  Will has lost track of what day it is, what time, lulled into a languorous stupor by the first-class barrage of second-class sandwiches and third-class wines, things he’d never consume had they not been exorbitantly paid for. By the CIA. How bizarre.

  Will walks into the sun that’s hanging low at the end of crosstown streets, nearly blinding, baking the city in early-evening heat. He occasionally stops abruptly, pauses at a shop window, ducks into a deli, trying to flush out tails, to remember the individuals who constitute the crowds.

  He has been increasingly successful at justifying his double life to himself. It’s just a job. A series of tasks that an organization pays him to do, like his employment at Travelers. One of his employers is a private enterprise trying to generate profit; the other, the government trying to maintain national security.

  But other aspects of his predicament still loom large. One is the lying—it makes Will feel dirty. And it has become a lot of lying, daily lying.

  Another is the danger. He’d been taking self-defense classes in the same way that he was paying for flood insurance: protecting against long-shot disaster. Until Barcelona, it hadn’t seriously occurred to Will that he’d actually need to defend himself against violent attackers; it didn’t seem like that type of role he was playing. And he didn’t wholly believe that Elle and her hidden colleagues could’ve kept him safe in the late-night streets of the Barrio Gótico. What if one of Miloshevsky’s goons had pulled a gun?

  Will is no longer confident that he knows what level of danger he’s in. Nor whom he can trust to protect him. Can he really believe the CIA? What’s more, is he definitely working for the CIA? There’s a lot of information about the Central Intelligence Agency floating out there, but it’s very difficult to know which of it is reliable. Will’s most trusted sources have been books written by verifiable authors and published by large, presumably responsible publishing houses. So far, everything he has learned about his operation seems credible. What he can’t find is any confirmation that Agency operatives have actual sex with potential assets; but he also hasn’t come across any refutation.

  Sometimes, the whole thing seems totally implausible. Sometimes, it seems completely credible. Either way, it increasingly seems dangerous, and indefensible.

  —

  “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Of course you can.” Elle smiles reassuringly. “You’re doing a great job.”

  They’re sitting in a booth at the back of an O’Somebody’s on the West Side, dank and cheap and geezer-filled. Will has already summarized his recollections of the yacht, the guests, his recital digitally recorded by the app on Elle’s phone, sitting in full view, not a suspicious item. This type of meeting must have been a lot more difficult before smartphones.

  The hard information—the photos of the guests, their names—has already been transmitted electronically. This meeting is sort of superfluous, overkill, which Will has begun to realize is the CIA’s MO. Redundancy atop repetition.

  “I could’ve been killed.”

  “Not so loud.” She glares at Will as a guy walks by, a bit too near, a Latino wearing a cheap black suit and a dingy white shirt, looks like a hired-car driver, bathroom-bound.

  “And what about Dublin? Have you found out what that was?”

  “I’m looking into it.”

  “That’s what you said last time. That’s what you always say.”

  “Because that’s what I’m doing.”

  “Not very well.”

  She doesn’t respond to this insult.

  Will glances across to the streaked mirror behind the bar, visible swirls where someone did a half-assed cleaning job. Will can’t see himself in the mirror, just the reflection of the men on stools, hunched over their pints of beer and shots of rye, their disappointments and despair. The bored bartender seems like an AA guy, someone who does this job to remind himself every day why he can’t drink, not even a cold one after a hard shift on a hot night.

  Will turns back to Elle, his bile rising again, his disappointment in himself, that he allowed his needy ego to drag him into this whole morass. “Who was that woman I met in France?”

  “That was me.”

  “Totally you? Only you? No acting?”

  “Is there such a thing?”

  “Of course there is.”

  “Really? Being completely natural, completely unguarded? No guile, no artifice, no agenda, no disingenuousness or dishonesty of any sort?”

  “You’ve never been married.”

  “Is that right?” She actually laughs at him. “You’re completely honest with your wife?”

  “I used to be.”

  “Bullshit. Everyone is acting all the time. Smiling and laughing, great to meet you, that’s awesome. Wearing this and not that, keeping quiet when you want to scream, saying things you know aren’t true. You do it every day, Will, and you did it before you ever met me. We all do. That’s what keeps society going. That’s what life is. Acting.”

  “You are one fucked-up person.”

  “Maybe. But who isn’t?”

  “Oh whatever. You know what? I’ve had enough of this. Of you. I don’t believe a damn thing you say about anything, and I don’t think you have any idea what the hell you’re doing, and you’re going to get me killed. I’m out.”

  He starts to stand, but Elle grabs him by the wrist, yanks him back down. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re safe. We’re not going to let you get hurt.”

  “I want out.”

  “Do you really?” She leans closer to him, her face just inches away. He realizes that they look like lovers having a spat. “And you’re willing to accept the consequences?”

  Of course not. Will has let this confrontation escalate too much, emotions getting the best of him. He needs to back down. But not all the way. He needs something, some reassurance that this is all real.

  “I want a sit-down with your boss.”

  —

  Allison’s first job-search meeting, with a career coach, began inauspiciously.

  “I don’t think,” Judah said, “that a director-level position is, um, a realistic expectation.”

  She glanced down at her résumé, one page, her professional life, a big ALLISON RABINOWITZ-SOMERS at the top. Malcolm had been dead-set against the hyphenate—“it sounds like the name of one of those Catskills camps: Rabinowitz Summers”—and had even offered, in a moment of inebriated chivalry, for their future children to use her name.

  “It would be one thing if you were a doctor. Or a teacher, or a, I don’t know, a carpenter.”

  A carpenter?

  “Those professions don’t change. But you worked”—past tense, brutal—“in marketing.” Judah shook his head. “You know, the last time you were really in an office, there was no such thing as social media. Do you understand how big that has become?”

  “Of course I do, Judah. I participate in the world.”

  “Have you given any thought to an internship?”

  The urge to punch Judah in the face was almost uncontrollable. She’d been taking boxing classes, combining her passion for vigorous exercise with her acute misanthropy.

  “An internship can be a wonderful experience, for someone in midlife transition.”

  She almost threw up, right then and there, expel
ling her all-greens juice onto his pleats.

  Then her second career-development meeting was with the handsome headhunter in the hotel coffee shop. The third is here, an elegant place with a long well-lit aggressively serviced bar, twenty-two-dollar glasses of Montrachet, high-quality mixed nuts, plush upholstered barstools, middle-aged people in suits and skirts, nothing seedy about it. Lovers don’t meet here. This is a place for business drinks, celebratory dinners, expense-account Bordeaux.

  Steven gets down to business immediately, and a half-hour passes quickly, during which Allison believes she’s at her most charming. Then suddenly, “I’ve gotta run.” He’s glancing at his phone; one of those obsessive phone-glancers. He tells her that she should make some small changes to her CV—“just a shift of focus.” Tomorrow would be better than the day after.

  Steven picks up the check, of course, please don’t be silly. Allison doesn’t quite understand who is working for whom, who’s the client, how he gets paid—by her, somehow, at some point? She has never known anything about headhunters.

  As she dismounts the barstool, she thinks she catches him checking out her legs, and she feels herself flush. He rests his hand on her upper arm, kisses her cheek. She feels the fine-grit sandpaper of his five-o’clock shadow as well as a small surprising thrill, which maybe isn’t so small after all, nor for that matter surprising.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asks, eyebrows raised, hopeful, though she’s not sure for what, exactly.

  “Definitely.”

  “Good.” He smiles, all those white teeth again, plus that little chin cleft, she can imagine putting the tip of her tongue in there, God, did she really just think that?

  —

  A man takes the empty subway seat beside Stonely. It’s a long stretch before the next station, a full mile, and the subway picks up speed, rocks back and forth. Then the train begins to slow into West Fourth Street, and Stonely glances over to confirm who’s next to him, but that’s unnecessary, because what other person would voluntarily take a seat next to anyone at this hour—at any hour—when there’s a car full of empty seats?