by Chris Pavone
Steven has been sitting in this basement for three hours, with this table of tools in his field of vision, impossible to ignore. No one has said a word to him. He has been forced to imagine all the ways that his life can become a horror show, all the terrible disgusting things that can be done to his body parts with a hammer. With pliers. He has seen things on TV, in movies, maybe read them in congressional reports, maybe he’s heard rumors about them in real life, or even witnessed these things firsthand. Malcolm wouldn’t be completely surprised if this guy had participated in an enhanced interrogation before, from the other side.
Before he ever entered this room, and saw this table, this man already possessed an immense capacity to visualize the horrors that might be visited upon him by common household tools. The past hours have amplified that capacity. And now that he understands who has abducted him, he also has a pretty clear idea which of his body parts are likely to be targeted.
“In any case”—Malcolm starts walking toward him, the hammer hanging at his side—“this, um, fucking of my wife? That’s not why you’re here, Steven. That’s not your crime.”
Malcolm stops in front of the guy, eyes popping, squirming beneath his duct tape. “You know why you’re here, don’t you?”
Steven shakes his head.
“Of course you do. We both know that you know why you’re here. So what is it we’re here to find out?”
He continues to shake his head, more vigorously.
“I get the feeling you’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
Still head-shaking.
“That’s too bad, Steven. Then sorry to say, neither am I.”
NEW YORK CITY
The city can look gigantic, eight-million-plus people, an overwhelming volume of life, of noise, of skyscrapers and traffic and the incessant collisions of worlds. But every metropolis is also a collection of small villages, some of them geographical, some professional, some social, some overlapping.
The women Will has dated in New York all lived inside his discrete little villages. He didn’t go out with bankers or lawyers, with professors or doctors, with bus drivers or jewelry designers or elementary-school teachers. With one exception, every single woman Will went to bed with was college-educated, white, born in the seventies or eighties, living in Manhattan or Brooklyn, working in media or hospitality.
These villages aren’t hugely populous. So Will runs into them all the time, the women he has slept with. Sometimes he finds himself literally surrounded by them, at parties or conferences, around someone’s big dinner table in Brownstone Brooklyn.
Here comes one right now. This one, however, is the exception.
Will tries to remember what he was feeling when they met. Did he really believe that he was in love-at-first-sight with this woman? Does he remember correctly, that he was walking around France, lost in romantic reveries about the way she arched her eyebrow? How could he have been so goddamned delusional? He’ll never trust his penis again.
“Hi Will,” she says. She leans in, left-cheek kiss, right-cheek kiss, old friends, great to see you. Elle is carrying a cavernous bag that she drops on the floor next to Will’s canvas satchel and a plastic shopping bag from a drugstore, one of those chains you can’t walk three blocks without seeing. The streets of New York are beginning to look like a variation on the suburban four-lane thoroughfare, retail chains repeating one after another, an endless loop, up and down America’s clogged arteries.
“Everything okay with you?” she asks, perching herself on a barstool. “You had a good day at the office?”
“Nothing went wrong, if that’s what you’re asking.”
She laughs, probably for the benefit of other people.
The bartender asks if she wants something. “No thanks,” she says, “I was just saying hi,” They have nothing to talk about. This is not a debrief, not now. This is a handoff. “Nice running into you, Will.”
“And you.”
She leans down, collects her big handbag, as well as the ubiquitous drugstore bag, with the very unusual hard drive inside.
Well, he thinks, that was anticlimactic. Was that really the upshot of this whole convoluted operation? This wrecking of his entire life?
He assumes Elle will be bringing this package downtown straightaway, to her office, to whatever building they kidnapped him to last night, probably down near the other government buildings. It’s rush-hour busy out there on the streets, so she’ll probably take the subway, maybe a half-dozen stops, then perhaps a couple of blocks on foot. Fifteen minutes, twenty, before she plugs in the external drive. He doesn’t know how long it’s then going to take for her to fully examine the contents. Five minutes? Three days? But after she does, she’s going to be angry, and she’s going to come looking for him.
He doesn’t have much time. Nowhere near enough for him to run a proper surveillance-detection route, nor for that matter even a half-assed SDR. Will has insufficient time to detect surveillance. He needs to elude it.
SCARBOROUGH, MAINE
Chloe climbs down the attic’s folding stairs toting the dusty old backpack. It has been years—more than a decade—since she used the bag. Chloe still keeps things in her mom’s attic. Maybe this is what it means to not be fully grown-up.
She doesn’t want to bring a roll-aboard suitcase for the trip she’s undertaking; that’s not the type of traveler she wants to look like. She hoses down the backpack in the backyard, props it against a trellis to dry.
“I just need to get away, Mom. I’m going to spend a few days at a resort in the Dominican Republic—it’s practically free, this time of year—and then I’ll backpack. I’ve never been to Haiti.”
Chloe doesn’t have any intention of going anywhere near the Dominican Republic or Haiti. A few months ago she procured two passports for this type of clandestine travel. She ended up burning one of them in a trash can in Istanbul; the other is in her pocket.
“Just tell me if I can help. And please call sometime? Let me know you’re alive?”
That was going to be hard, maybe impossible. “I’ll try” is what Chloe says. “But don’t hold your breath.”
“All marriages have their problems, sweetheart.”
Chloe doesn’t respond to her mom’s daytime-television platitudes. Connie had never seemed like she would become the type of retired person who’d spend too much time watching TV, but she has.
“I’d be surprised if your problems are unique, or insurmountable.”
NEW YORK CITY
This is how a long-term operation can happen: it looks as if it’ll go on forever—the months or years of planning, the interminable setup, the slow build of execution. Then one day something transpires, and, boom, it’s over. For this op, that something may have just transpired; that one day could be today.
It has been a long year, and it began right here, just a few blocks away, where Elle spent a lonely night in a chain hotel in an unremarkable neighborhood. She’d been to the city only once before in her life, didn’t know her way around, didn’t much like the place, didn’t want to try. The world was already populated with plenty of people who were awestruck by New York; the city didn’t need another groupie.
The meeting was set for eleven A.M., but the location was unspecified until ten, when she received a text message with the name and address of a hotel, a room number.
She walked to the part of town that occupies a large space in the world’s consciousness, where the greenery of Central Park meets the commerce of Fifth Avenue, horse-drawn carriages and sidewalk caricaturists, a golden statue and a tiered fountain and the Plaza Hotel, hordes of out-of-towner teenage girls posing for selfies in front of Abercrombie & Fitch, dowagers tottering into Bergdorf’s to finger seven-thousand-dollar off-the-rack evening dresses.
It was immediately clear that this hotel was no normal level of swank, even though she’d never heard of it. Elle was familiar with only those New York hotels that appear in popular contemporary movies.
At the door, a black-suited bodyguard stood in a familiar pose. She wondered if this guy had been in the Sandbox at the same time as she had, if he too had returned stateside unprepared for twenty-first-century civilian employment, disillusioned by the disconnect between the military’s promise of highly valued workplace skills and the private sector’s actual valuation of those skills. So he’d secured himself one of the few available jobs that valued his particular skill set, with a concealed-carry permit and a bulletproof vest.
The bodyguard maintained a permanent grimace while he frisked her, then opened the door.
There’s a certain type of good-looking man with perfect everything—perfect tailoring and skintone, perfect hair and shoeshine, posture and physique, smiling with a surfeit of white teeth and undisguised, untempered confidence, men who pay super-close attention to many details of their personal appearance. For women, it seems like the requirement is to try to look as good as you can look, seems like not making that effort is the contrarian statement. For men, though, Elle has always thought that the hyper-grooming is the exceptional statement, the aberration. She finds something appalling about these men.
This was one such man who was standing on the threshold, saying, “Thank you for coming.” He closed the door behind Elle. “And thank you for your discretion.”
She looked around the suite, which seemed to have been decorated by Liberace. “May I ask a question: Why are we meeting in New York? Isn’t your office in Washington?”
Even before Elle had gotten the summons from his minion, before she’d followed up with hours of research, she’d already seen this man’s face plenty of times, seen this smile again and again; he was well known. But still, she was unprepared for the brilliance of it, the quantity and alignment and brightness of his teeth, the shape of his mouth and the fullness of his lips, the squareness of his jaw. Elle had seen her fair share of extremely handsome men over the years, had even taken a couple of them to bed. But theirs had all been the attractiveness of youth and strength and toughness, and here this guy was in his mid-forties, none of those things, but still disarmingly good-looking.
“In a way, my office is a very public place. In fact, all of Washington is a small, gossipy town. But New York? New York can be very private, if you make a little effort.”
Elle suddenly questioned the advisability of being in a hotel suite with a powerful man who had an armed bodyguard at the door.
“Plus what I have in mind would take place, mostly, here in New York. Mine is a project that will need a very specific type of manager, with not only a specific background and specific expertise, but also specific, uh, physical characteristics. You come very highly recommended. So highly, in fact, that you’re the only candidate I’m currently interviewing.”
“I appreciate your confidence,” Elle said, but she didn’t. Flattery like this called into question everything else. “But do you want to tell me what the hell you’re talking about?”
He laughed. “No getting-to-know-you small talk for you, huh?”
“I’m pretty sure you’ve already gotten to know me, or I wouldn’t be here. And you won’t be surprised that I’ve gotten to know you.”
“Be that as it may. I don’t know everything I want to know.”
“Oh no?”
“Why’d you get kicked out of the CIA?”
“Who says I got kicked out?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Do you want to tell me why I’m here? Or should I leave now?”
He smiled patiently, leaned forward, looking earnest. “I’m in the middle stages of engineering the purchase of a group of magazines.”
“Yes. The American Periodical Group.”
He smiled. “That’s right. You’ve been reading the financial-gossip mills?”
“You don’t think I subscribe to Forbes? Just because I’m a broke blond thirty-two-year-old jarhead yokel?”
Elle had gone to two years of college, but she’d consistently discovered that the things she’d wanted to learn were not the things being taught in class; she preferred an autodidactic education, staying up all night to pursue one obsession or another, absorbing everything, then moving on.
“No, I don’t think you read Forbes because it’s for business professionals, and you’re not one. Just as I wouldn’t expect a cardiovascular surgeon or a rocket scientist or a Nobel-laureate mathematician to read Forbes. It’s not because those people are stupid.”
“Well, you’re right. I don’t read Forbes. But I did.”
“Then I guess you know that if this deal ends up going through, it’ll cost me somewhere north of two billion dollars.”
“Well.” She smirked. “Cost you?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It’s not as if you’re cutting a personal check for two billion dollars, money that you scrimped and saved, taking the bus, eating jam sandwiches. I know how the world works.”
“Please. Enlighten me.”
“You’re taking two billion dollars that you’ve borrowed from individual and institutional investors in the form of stock offerings and bank loans, on the backs of favorable regulations and legislation enacted by elected representatives to whom people like you contribute considerable sums to finance their campaigns so they can hold office and help you gain access to vast amounts of public and private money, of which you’re reallocating two billion dollars from one corporate entity over which you exert control to another over which you’d like to. But it’s not really your money—hell, it’s not even really money—and you’re not really spending it.”
He stared at her for a second. “Okay, I’ll put it another way,” he said, undeterred. “I’m responsible for overseeing a multibillion-dollar business transaction, affecting the livelihood of thousands of people. Would you agree that this is a fair description?”
She shrugged.
“One aspect of my responsibility is due diligence. During which I learned, with a high degree of certainty, that one of the magazines is doing something illegal.”
“Oh yeah? How’d you find this out?”
“You don’t attain a position like mine without being able to learn things.”
“Fair enough.”
“So I’m required, as a legal matter of fiduciary responsibility, to exhaust every possible avenue of investigation to verify or disprove this allegation.”
“But you’re not required to report this illegal activity to law enforcement?”
He doesn’t answer.
“If this activity bothers you, why not just walk away from the deal? You’re right that I don’t know much about business, but I’m pretty sure you’ll survive fine if you continue to not own the American Periodical Group.”
“I don’t want to walk away, that’s why.”
“Is there something specific about APG that makes it so attractive to you? Something about the dregs of a dying industry that you find irresistible?”
“Because of the specific nature of the alleged activity,” he said, ignoring her question, “I find myself unable to utilize the resources commonly used in this type of situation.”
“Resources? Such as?”
“Forensic accounting. Mergers-and-acquisitions lawyers. Private detectives, the types with licenses.”
“So what are these allegations?”
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to disclose those details, at this time. I’m sure you understand.”
“No, I don’t think I do.”
He smiled again, a rich warm comforting smile, the type of smile that makes you want to curl up in it. “This isn’t a situation in which a nondisclosure agreement would make any sense.”
“Why not?”
“Nor is it a situation in which I’m willing to be, um, trusting. To a stranger such as yourself. No matter how highly recommended.”
“Okay,” she said, “how can I reassure you?”
“By accepting the job, and the fee that comes with it.”
“And that fee would b
e?”
“A quarter now. Another quarter when the project is complete. It should take somewhere between six months and a year.”
“Do you mean a total of a half-million dollars?”
“That’s right.”
“This is not a hit job, is it?”
He leaned back. “And if it is?”
They stared at each other for a few seconds. To replace her fleeting fear of physical assault, now she was assailed with the worry that she was being entrapped. But why would a man like this be involved in entrapping someone like her?
“No,” he eventually said. “It’s not a hit job.”
“I’m not going to kill anyone?”
“I hope not.”
That was not as definitive a refutation as she’d hoped. “A half-million dollars is a lot of money, to not kill anyone.”
“As I’ve explained, it’s a big deal.”
“Of course. What’s a half-million against two billion?”
“That’s right. But as you’ve mentioned, that two billion isn’t exactly my own money. The half-million is.”
“So you’re saying this fee is not negotiable?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”
She looked away from him, at the windows. She’d been expecting a sweeping view of Central Park, up here on a high floor on Fifth Avenue, but the shades were drawn. This guy must be one paranoid son of a bitch, to have the shades drawn in a situation like this.
“I’d like to think about it, but you haven’t given me much to think about.”
“As I mentioned, I’m not at—”
“—liberty. Yeah, I know.”
Part of her was attracted to the payday, of course; a half-million was certainly a good amount of money. But the bigger part of her decision-making matrix was that she was bored. For a decade she’d been addicted to the adrenaline; then for the past year she’d been going through withdrawal, adhering to a life that was like a recovery’s maintenance program, weaker substitutes and group meetings, affirmations and distractions. But this? This sounded like the hard stuff.