The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  The worst of it is that he slept with Elle. And that’s pretty goddamned bad. But is that marriage-ending bad? Maybe. Probably? Hard to tell.

  What if he omits that damning detail from what’s otherwise a completely true story? Is it a credible story without the sex?

  And if Chloe knows enough to be positive that Elle isn’t any ex-girlfriend from California, she might also know enough to be able to identify any part of his lie.

  He doesn’t want to lose his wife. He doesn’t have a choice.

  “Let’s sit down,” he says. “This is going to sound ridiculous.”

  —

  Gabriella shuts the door behind her, walks across Malcolm’s large office, takes a seat.

  “Will’s laptop is clean,” she says.

  “Do I want to know how you know?” Even as he’s asking the question, he realizes how ridiculous it is.

  Gabriella doesn’t even deign to answer. “There’s nothing there that shouldn’t be,” she says. “No content, that is.”

  “Oh?”

  “But he’s not very good about keychain security—”

  “Gabs, you know I don’t—”

  She holds up her hand. “He uses relatively unprotected passwords. Including for their bank accounts. It looks like they’ve become a lot more solvent in the past few months.”

  “A lot?” Malcolm cocks his head. “Well, he did get a raise, but that should be—what?—a couple hundred more per paycheck?”

  “It’s more than that. What about Chloe?”

  Malcolm doesn’t want to answer. But he knows that if he doesn’t, Gabriella isn’t going to simply drop it. She’ll be a pain in the ass, and she’ll find out sooner or later anyway.

  “Yeah. She did a big freelance job.”

  “For us?”

  “Indirectly.”

  Gabriella wants him to explain, but Malcolm isn’t going to. Chloe’s new position is, by necessity, highly compartmentalized information.

  “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  “And I appreciate your understanding, Gabs.”

  She scowls. “Okay, I found one other thing: Will has been going to a gym.”

  “Good for him.”

  “It’s an unregistered gym, Mal, just a guy in a warehouse, and it’s very inconveniently located, rendered even more inconvenient because Will makes sure he’s not being followed when he goes there.”

  Oh God, Will too? Why is everybody such a problem? “Wait,” Malcolm says, “let me guess: Rhodes is trying to hide that he’s learning to tap-dance.”

  “Mixed martial arts.”

  —

  Chloe’s mouth falls open. She’s standing extra-upright, spine straight, shoulders back, one of those stances Will sees all the time now that apparently all women practice yoga regularly, even when they’re not practicing yoga but instead are confronting their husbands with incontrovertible evidence of unacceptable duplicities.

  “Well, not a spy, exactly,” he says. “But I am working for the CIA. I was recruited to gather information. About the people I meet, when I’m abroad.”

  Will pauses, waiting for his wife to respond. It takes her a few seconds to say, “You understand that this sounds like utter horseshit, right?”

  “Yes, Chlo, of course. And that’s exactly why I haven’t told you. But it’s true. The woman you saw me with? She’s my handler. My case officer. I report to her.”

  Chloe raises her eyebrows as far as she can. She looks around, as if for physical support, but all she sees is their half-finished kitchen, the centerpiece of their half-finished lives.

  “Um, okay. I’ll play along.” But her facial expression doesn’t look as if she’s being magnanimous with her credulity. “When did this begin?”

  “A few months ago.”

  He has been dreading this moment since he stood in that hallway in St-Émilion, the taste of Elle on his lips, and the possibility—the certainty—that sooner or later, Chloe would find out.

  “They recruited me. When I was on a trip.”

  “Where?”

  “Argentina.”

  “How?”

  “There were two of them.” He feels his eyes flick away, then back. Damn, she’ll know he’s lying. “A woman who was pretending to be a journalist, she befriended me.”

  “Befriended you? What does that mean?”

  “She was joined by a man. They made me a proposal: money, in exchange for information. That’s where the money has been coming from, Chloe. Ten grand a month. That’s how I got the windows done, and the kitchen…” He gestures around at the significant progress. “And, y’know, other things.”

  She crosses her arms, not looking any less dubious. “The CIA is paying you ten thousand dollars a month? To do what?”

  “To tell them about the people I come across. The contacts from the Travelers files, and my own connections, and the people I meet, the expat Americans, the diplomats, the finance people, the mayors, the actors, the whoevers. Everyone who’s anyone, anywhere.” He watches as she processes this new paradigm.

  “Why does the CIA care about any of these people?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they won’t tell me. I’m not supposed to know why I’m doing what I’m doing. They’re not paying me to ask questions. They’re paying me to tell them about influential people who live abroad.”

  “What about in New York?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Meaning?”

  “They’ve asked about the people who work at Travelers. About the office.”

  “Have they asked a lot about New York?”

  “Yeah, actually. About the staff in the office, even the layouts.”

  “What about me? Have they asked about me?”

  “Yes. I think they’re trying to get a sense of me, my life. How I might get caught, maybe? How I might get manipulated. Honestly, I really don’t know.”

  Chloe squints at her husband. “I’m finding this very, very difficult to believe.”

  “I understand that. I do, of course. But it’s true.”

  “Uh-huh. So was it difficult to convince you to do this?”

  “No, not really.”

  Again she waits for Will to continue, but he doesn’t. He’s trying to tell the truth; he doesn’t want to intersperse lies in there, not if he doesn’t have to.

  “Why not?”

  “It seemed benign. In fact, it seemed sort of like a good idea. And we needed the money; still do. I didn’t see the harm.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I, uh…” This is one truth he cannot tell, and he has no idea how to answer. He should’ve prepared for this eventuality, he should have coached himself, rehearsed, sounded out the arguments, extended them to their logical conclusions. Why the hell didn’t he anticipate this eventual conversation? Hubris.

  “Because they ordered me not to” seems like the best answer.

  “Ordered?”

  “I should have told you anyway. And I’m very, very sorry.”

  She stares at Will, searching his face. “I don’t believe you.”

  “About what?”

  “About what? About all of this, Will. About this whole cockamamie story.”

  “What do you think is going on?”

  Chloe laughs. “I think you’re fucking her, that’s what I think.”

  “Then why did we meet in a dumpy bar and then not leave together? What type of tryst is that? Why would we do that?”

  “I don’t know, Will, you tell me.”

  “Because I’m not fucking her! That’s why. Because I’m working for her.”

  Chloe shakes her head.

  “But it’s true,” he implores. “I know it sounds ludicrous. But it’s all true. I’m sorry for not telling you before. But I’m telling you now.”

  —

  What a catastrophe.

  Malcolm has left the frying pan out there with Gabriella, wit
h whatever the hell is going on with Will, and into the fire that’s burning on the computer here in the secret office in the wall.

  How did he allow this to happen? How is he going to find out what exactly happened? Does it even matter how?

  He hits Rewind, and stops the herky-jerky reverse-action images when his wife gets off the couch. He hits Play, watches her cross the screen, naked. A second after Allison disappears from the frame, here he comes, this guy—who is this guy?—practically sprinting across the room, his still-semi-hard dick flopping around, bending down to reach into the pocket of his pants, removing a little something from the cloth. He takes a few quick steps to the desk, in the center of this footage’s frame. He bends over the computer, and inserts that thing—a duplicating device? a worm installation?—into a port in Malcolm’s laptop.

  The guy stands there and stares at his watch, the timepieced left hand held up at a right angle, the other on his hip, naked. If this weren’t deadly serious, it might be hilarious, a Monty Python skit, a laugh track, the crowd titters after ten seconds when the man yanks out the drive, chuckles as he replaces the device in his pants pocket, a more full laugh as he leaps back onto the couch. This guy is one athletic motherfucker. A literal motherfucker.

  Uproarious laugh, sustained applause, but then it dies down as we await the return of the clueless cuckolder, the woman who was seduced to be taken advantage of. Whatever reasons that compelled Allison to sleep with this man, whatever sadness and disappointment and dissatisfaction were behind that decision, this reality is worse, exponentially worse, immeasurably heartbreaking. The audience absorbs this reality, grows silent. Someone coughs.

  There’s almost no negative emotion that Malcolm isn’t feeling.

  He stares at the wall, at that outdated world map, his eyes hopping around all those cities and countries that don’t matter anymore. Bulgaria? It’s hard to believe that Bulgaria was once considered critical to America, a domino that needed to be propped upright. And now? Now what’s important to America? Is there even such a construct anymore? Or is there only what’s important to Halliburton or ExxonMobil, to Microsoft or Apple, to Coca-Cola and Walmart.

  Does anybody care? Does Malcolm?

  Or is there only what’s important to Malcolm Somers? Which is this, now.

  Malcolm picks up the landline, the big clunky handset attached by an accordion cord to the heavy base, a touch-tone keypad, a little protruding nub to release the connection. He dials the long string of digits, the call he’s been dreading. As each day has gone by, Malcolm has become more and more certain he’d have to make this call, while at the same time more and more unwilling to actually do it until he was 100 percent. So in the meantime he’d had his apartment swept—clean—by a pair of guys pretending to be measuring radon levels, and he has been checking the video feed obsessively, three, four times per day. And he’s been keeping a fairly close eye on his wife. But he can no longer keep this to himself. That’s the type of dishonesty that gets people like Malcolm killed.

  “Yes?”

  “Hi,” Malcolm says. “I’ve been compromised.”

  Malcolm can hear the man sigh audibly. “By?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Silence.

  “Data has been stolen from my home computer.”

  “Oh sweet Jesus.”

  Malcolm reaches back into his memory, plucks out the coded phrase that he’d never before had occasion to use, not in this context. “It’s an unmitigated disaster,” he says.

  This phone is supposedly as secure a landline as exists in the world, but Malcolm doesn’t believe there’s any such thing as a totally secure phone line, just as there’s no such thing as a secure email, a secure digital file, a secure computer. Which is the whole point of all of this, of everything.

  Nor for that matter a totally secure marriage.

  The man doesn’t respond to this code, but Malcolm has to assume that he understands what’s being communicated. That’s the way codes work, and you can’t double-check that they’re working as intended.

  “Do you have any idea how this happened?”

  “Oh, I know exactly how.”

  “Has that problem been solved?”

  “Er, not exactly. That problem is complex.”

  “Aren’t they all?”

  Malcolm doesn’t want to explain the problem. “No,” he says, “the problem has not been solved. But it is being managed. Monitored.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Seriously, I’ve got it.”

  “You’ll ask for help if you need it?”

  “I will. But it’s under control.”

  “Are you sure? It doesn’t sound like it.”

  Yes, Malcolm thinks, I’m sure: I’m sure I’m lying. Nothing is under control; nothing is ever under control. But if there’s one thing Malcolm has learned, it’s that no one wants to hear this, ever. “Yes,” he says, “I’m sure.”

  ÞINGVELLIR, ICELAND

  Over the course of his career, the American had occasion to use a variety of aliases. It had been challenging to remember what name he was supposed to use when, where, with whom. He always used generic American names, the one-syllable abridgements of biblical figures, Jim and Tom, Matt and Mike. But recently it had been Joe, an Average Joe, which was not him at all, and part of the private humor of it.

  Joe is probably what he’ll be till he dies. It is refreshing, relaxing, to not have to think about how to answer “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Joe,” he says to the young woman with a camera. “Nice to meet you.”

  They are standing in the seam between the tectonic plates of North America and Eurasia, a deep wide fissure between giant pieces of planet. On one side, the plate stretches all the way to the west coast of North America; on the other, the mass is uninterrupted till the Pacific Rim of Asia. Earthquakes rock California and Japan because these two plates here, on this volcanic protrusion jutting out of the North Atlantic, are pulling apart. The rift he’s standing in widens every year, and so does the island, growing incrementally, accompanied by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, by massive disturbances to the geological peace, all for the sake of a few millimeters per year.

  This spot is also the site of the world’s very first parliament, established A.D. 930, a settlement with a church, hiking trails, bridges over the waters of Lake Þingvallavatn. It’s photogenic here. There are always tourists, even in crappy weather like today. There’s a lot of crappy weather in Iceland.

  When he doesn’t live in a bustling Scandinavian city, he lives in the middle of Scandinavian nowhere. And he occasionally visits places like this, or the capital, or the geyser. He is always researching or rehearsing escape routes, contingency plans, alternative exits. He has no job, no responsibilities, other than to keep himself alive. He is fairly confident that one day, someone will come for him. Every single day, he wakes up prepared for that one day to be today.

  NEW YORK CITY

  The note is simple:

  Need time to think. Gone to visit Mom. —C

  Will flings aside the paper, which flutters past his wife’s unoccupied pillow in a miasma of dust particles, a miniature little snowstorm in the bright early-morning sunlight.

  He’d been up half the night, worried about what his wife was going to end up doing, or saying. After a certain point she’d been unwilling to continue talking about it, unwilling to listen to Will try to prove he was telling the truth, unwilling to absorb the details of his meetings, his countersurveillance training, his operations in Europe. He possessed so very much proof that he was a CIA asset, but she was unwilling to let him provide it.

  “Stop,” she’d said. “Enough. I’m going to bed.”

  “May I come?”

  She’d stared at him, making it clear that she was debating it. “I don’t want to continue talking about this. And I hope it’s obvious that you’re not welcome to touch me.”

  He’d tossed and turned till two, maybe three, before falling into
fitful sleep. But apparently not fitful enough to notice Chloe wake up, get out of bed, pack a bag, and walk out the door.

  His wife had left him.

  Chloe had always been a leaver, fleeing confrontations, fleeing uncomfortable situations, fleeing parties and movies and picnics, anything that she wasn’t enjoying. She apparently used to flee relationships too, at the first sign of trouble; she admitted fleeing from a couple of one-night stands, disappearing in the wee hours, and for one—in college—she actually climbed out of a window.

  But she wouldn’t flee a marriage, would she?

  Chloe would come back. Or Will would go get her.

  —

  It has been a long time since Malcolm waited for a weekend-schedule F train, which seems to be inhabited almost exclusively by men with beards. Hey, guys w big bushy beards! He two-thumbed-types. We get it – you’re virile! Enough already. Time to shave.

  It’s a slow ride, followed by a long, hot, monotonous walk from the station. He has plenty of time to consider what to do about the Allison aspect of her adultery.

  What he really wants is to contrive to catch her in the act. Outrage—“Oh my God! What’s going on here?!” But that might get violent. Plus her lover—ugh, he really hates that word—would then obviously know that they’d been caught, and might suspect that in actuality they’d been caught earlier, and wonder what that might mean…So that’s not a great plan. Instead:

  One: he could simply ask her. “Are you having an affair?” She’d deny it to Malcolm, but after the confrontation she’d be worried, she’d have doubts. She’d end up saying, “My husband suspects something, I’m sorry, I can’t do this anymore…”

  Two: Malcolm could try to bring about the affair’s conclusion from the male side of the equation. He could probably figure out some indirect way to dissuade this guy from continuing this relationship.

  Three: he could ignore it. Hope that the affair will fizzle of its own accord, as these things probably do. Except when they don’t, when they evolve into something else.

  But that won’t happen with this affair: it’s not possible that Allie will leave Malcolm, even if she wants to. This is perhaps the most degrading element of this whole situation, which is degrading on so many levels: the guy doesn’t even want Allison. When he’s finished with her—and for all Malcolm knows, the guy may be finished with her already, having already attempted to hack Malcolm’s computer—he’s going to toss her away. Will she be brokenhearted? Mildly disappointed? Are things going to get better for her? Worse?