by Chris Pavone
Raji is also the only person at VDA who has ever seen Elle.
“Your boss doesn’t know anything about this, right?”
“About what?”
She points at the external drive. “These duplicated files.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Does he know anything about any of it, Raji?”
“Only the broad strokes: that I have been tracking the expenditures and movements of a small population of interconnected American citizens.”
“Anything more specific than that?”
He’s getting nervous. “Why do you ask?”
“Just to prepare my report. I didn’t find what I’m looking for, and I’ll need to explain why. But don’t worry, my report won’t reflect badly on you.”
He doesn’t look convinced.
“I promise, Raji. You’ve done a terrific job. But I do need to know if anyone else is aware of any sensitive details. I’m sure you understand.”
Raji looks down. “I did consult my supervisor, but just one time. It was about that woman who took an undocumented trip to Italy when she seemed to be pretending to be in Turkey. Chloe Rhodes.”
“Why?”
“I needed help. Although I’d figured out that the woman hadn’t stayed in Turkey, I didn’t have the personal bandwidth to spend the necessary time reviewing raw footage—vast amounts of footage, none of it high-quality, nor fresh—to find out where she had gone. Not without sacrificing all my other surveillance.”
“So what did you do?”
“I requisitioned a team of freelancers. They reviewed the entire day’s worth of footage from every available camera in the airport.”
“What background information did they have?”
“Nothing. Just a picture of her face. They didn’t have a name, an alias, a passport number, nothing. They were merely looking for a woman—here’s what she looks like, please find her in the Istanbul airport, then tell me. That’s it.”
“And you’re the one who tracked her to Capri?”
“Correct.”
“So none of these freelancers—and your boss—none of them know anything specific?”
“That’s right.”
“Wow. I really appreciate your discretion, Raji. Great work.” She turns toward the kitchen. “You want that beer now? I sure could use one myself.”
“Yes, thank you.” Raji starts to get up, but she stops him. “Please, it’s my turn to do something for you.” She walks to the counter. She removes two bottles with twist-off tops, which she twists off, puts the tops in her pocket.
From another pocket, Elle removes a tiny glassine bag that contains a single pill, small and white and seemingly benign, like any other prescription medication that someone might take to control hypertension or anxiety, for pain or allergies, to treat an infectious disease or prevent an unwanted pregnancy; the average American spends a thousand dollars per year on pharmaceuticals.
But this pill is different. The average American can’t get a prescription for it, can’t purchase it at a pharmacy, can’t be reimbursed for it by any health-insurance plan, can’t even buy it from the friendly neighborhood drug dealer.
Elle drops this harmless-looking little pill into one of the bottles.
NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
Will doesn’t have his sleeping pills, on which he normally relies to knock him out on these red-eyes to Europe. And he doesn’t want to put any liquor into his system. So his body is filled with unadulterated adrenaline, his imagination buzzing, keeping him alert, awake.
The loud horrible noise at the airport gate turned out to be nothing more than the exit-row protocol. But it nearly gave him a heart attack, and it takes hours for him to fully calm down. It’s not until halfway across the Atlantic that he manages to pass out.
Then he awakes with a startle, just west of Ireland, his brain unwilling to accept sleep.
He retrieves the two old Travelers issues, whose archives were eradicated to prevent the casual observer from uncovering their secrets. Will is almost positive that the secret buried in November 1994 is that Jonathan Mongeleach is currently living in Scandinavia.
And what of May 1992? Will is pretty sure that the salient item is a one-page profile of Jean-Pierre Fourier, the man who opened the very first overseas bureau of Travelers in Paris back in 1949, on the occasion of his retirement, which coincided with his seventieth birthday, as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union. Monsieur Fourier had lived in the same apartment on the Île St-Louis for nearly his whole life, and he was planning on dying there. Which, as of last year, when he gave a quote to Le Monde for an article about elite hotel concierges, hadn’t yet happened.
PORTLAND
“I have good news and bad news,” he says. “Which do you want first?”
Chloe glances around at this restaurant, which looks like half the restaurants in Brooklyn, with all the handcrafted this and fusion that.
“This woman who claims to be Will’s C/O? She doesn’t work for the CIA.”
Chloe assumes that this unsurprising revelation is what he means by good news, says “Okay” without any enthusiasm.
“But she did.”
“When did she leave?”
“Well, she didn’t leave, exactly. But her association, ah, self-terminated.”
“Huh? What happened?”
“Here’s the thing: she died. KIA, Libya, five years ago.”
RESTON
Elle takes a sip from the beer in her right hand, extends the one in her left toward Raji, holding the bottle by its neck with the Band-Aided tips of her fingers.
“Again,” he says, “I am sorry.”
She takes a seat a few feet away from him. “Can I ask you a question, Raji?”
“Of course.”
“Who is it you think you work for?”
“I work for Virginia Data Associates.”
“Yes, but what do you think VDA is?”
His face is blank.
“Do you think it’s a privately held company? Family owned? A subsidiary of a publicly traded corporation? A government contractor?” It doesn’t make any difference what Raji thinks, but Elle is curious, and this will be her last chance to find out. “I guess what I’m asking is: who’s benefiting from your work, Raji? Is it private profit? Or public good?”
He smiles shyly. “I have always sort of assumed that VDA is an arm of the NSA. Or perhaps the CIA.”
There are plenty of Americans who have reason to think they might be working for their government—bodyguards for State Department personnel in Latin America, foot soldiers in the Middle East, data analysts in the D.C. suburbs—but aren’t. This is another effect of the post-9/11 obsession with antiterrorism: untold billions funneled from taxpayers through the government to private contractors that employ the sorts of people who are drinking beer in this sad little apartment, clueless techs and cold-blooded mercenaries.
She takes another sip of beer, but doesn’t say anything.
“Am I right?”
He’s not. But she could see why he misunderstood. Because from any angle, VDA looks like it performs the types of functions that Americans would assume are the province of their government—that is, if Americans expect their government to monitor their travel, their phone calls, their text messages, their emails, their social-media interactions. To spy on them, in the name of national security. That doesn’t seem like the type of domestic surveillance that would be entrusted to the private sector.
“Yes,” she says. There’s no reason to disabuse him. He beams back at her, proud.
Elle had researched Raji thoroughly before handpicking him to be her point person on this job. His personnel file at VDA didn’t offer any especially useful information; it’s amazing how slapdash the screening process can be. But Elle was diligent, and followed the trail of Raji’s bank transactions to a hospital, to a cardiology practice, to a pharmacy, after which it wasn’t difficult to figure out what was wrong with his heart, the type of preexisting
medical condition that a job candidate certainly wouldn’t divulge in a human-resources interview or questionnaire, nor something that would be detected in a routine employer-mandated urine test, whose primary concern is illegal drugs.
But Elle found it. It’s important to have an exit strategy.
She holds up her beer, reaches across the arm of the sofa toward his outstretched hand, clink. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.” Raji smiles, pleased, working for the CIA, he knew it all along.
“You know what, Raji?”
He looks at her, has no idea what’s coming.
“I think we should get drunk. What do you say?”
There’s no way this man is going to say no, with his video-game library and his spare tire and his web cache filled with porn. He takes another long drink, the dissolved pill cascading into his stomach, where it’ll take a minute or two to start being absorbed into his bloodstream. Then it’ll be another minute for the blood to be pumped through the entire circulatory system, to the heart.
Raji puts his empty bottle down. He stands. “You ready for another?”
Elle nods.
He disappears into the kitchen. She can hear the two new bottles knocking together as he removes them from their cardboard packaging, then the fizz as he opens one of caps.
“Aah,” he says. “Owww.”
She should call out something like “Are you all right?” But he’s not. And there’s no reason to pretend, not anymore.
She jumps in her seat as one of the bottles crashes to the floor, then the other.
“Ooooh. I, uh—”
Everyone likes to imagine that what he or she is doing is noble, is good for humanity, for the planet. The parasitic bankers who congratulate themselves on their supposed creation of wealth, the health-insurance execs who pretend that their private jets aren’t paid for by the premiums of struggling wage-earners.
Elle has a hard time justifying herself, a hard time sleeping. Tonight is going to be particularly bad. Long ago she resolved to try to banish the good-bad dichotomy from her awareness; that she was living in an awful world; that she was merely surviving till the end of her time in it; that if it wasn’t her who did terrible things, it would only be someone else. The terrible things would still get done.
Elle looks around, scanning surfaces, double-checking that she didn’t touch anything except the bottles, which she’ll take with her, shatter far away. And the caps and bag, already in her pocket. And of course this worthless external drive, which she’ll also be bringing with her, presenting to someone else. How the hell is she going to explain this colossal failure?
She hears a loud thud from the kitchen. It must be Raji toppling, and something hard—an elbow? his skull?—hitting the floor.
Glass crunching.
“Aaaahhh.”
Labored breathing.
She’s relieved that this is happening in the other room, that she can sit on this cheap couch, not watching an innocent man experience severe cardiac arrest on the linoleum floor of his dingy kitchen.
This is how she describes it to herself, in her head: simplifying the mitigation of a disadvantageous eventuality.
It will take only a minute for Raji to die, from a cause that will appear to be completely natural, perhaps even inevitable.
PORTLAND
“Thanks for the info,” Chloe says.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I think I’ll travel for a bit.”
“Do you want to tell me—?” The look on her face cuts off his question. “No,” he says, “I guess not.”
“Listen, I’ll see you in the office in a couple of weeks, probably. Thanks again. This is a big help.”
He turns to leave, takes a couple of steps, then turns around. “Oh by the way.” He walks back until he’s just a foot away from Chloe, and speaks very softly: “I just wanted to tell you: that was nice work in Italy. Very nice.”
She’s too surprised to respond. She didn’t think anyone would discuss this. She didn’t even think anyone would know.
“Really impressive how you managed to hide what you needed to hide without going to the trouble of hiding it. Brilliantly done.”
She’d wanted it to take the Capri police as long as possible to find Taylor Lindhurst’s body. Not merely so she’d have time to escape—to flee Italy, to clean her identity through Istanbul, to get back to America—but also to ensure that the crime would be infinitely harder to solve, with witness memories no longer fresh, with any physical evidence compromised or obliterated, with her own trail gone completely cold.
“No one in the office can believe it was your first. Was it really?”
Chloe fights back a smile; it seems gauche to gloat about this sort of compliment. She nods.
“Well,” he says, “it looks like you’re a natural.”
PARIS
The Île St-Louis is just a few short blocks wide and a handful of blocks long. Some dozens of businesses, a couple hundred buildings, maybe a few thousand residents. This shouldn’t be hard.
Will is exhausted but also wired. He stops at a café, pretends to read the newspaper, chitchats with the waiter, pays his bill with a forced cheerful “Merci, monsieur!”
“Merci à vous,” the waiter answers, unenthusiastically. It’s early morning on a weekday, very few customers, no one ordering anything more expensive than coffee. He’d had a long day already before he earned his first tip, which wasn’t even a full euro.
“Monsieur, une question, s’il vous plaît? Parlez-vous anglais?”
“Bien sûr.” The waiter drapes a dishrag across his shoulder.
“I’m looking for a man who used to work for the same magazine I do. It’s called Travelers, it’s an American magazine. Have you heard of it?”
The waiter looks like he didn’t entirely understand the question.
“Anyway, this man I’m looking for, he’s quite old, quatre-vingt quinze. He lives here on the Île St-Louis. His name is Jean-Pierre Fourier.”
“Jean-Pierre? Fourier?”
Will is trying not to let hope get the better of him. This would be too easy. The waiter squints, as if searching his memory. Will slips a twenty-euro note onto the tray. The waiter picks up the tray, folds the bill carefully, puts it in his pocket. Then says, “I am sorry, monsieur, mais non.” He shakes his head. “Ask Madame Bouchardeau, at the épicerie. She is working here forty, fifty years? She is knowing everyone on l’île.”
Five minutes later, Will is confronting a clerk who’s shaking his head. “Je suis désolé, monsieur.” Apparently, Mme. Bouchardeau will not arrive until midafternoon; the clerk is unwilling to specify what hour exactly. Mme. Bouchardeau is old, her hours cannot be predicted. Nor her moods for strangers with questions.
Will wanders the streets of the neat little island, the Seine at the end of every street, views of Notre Dame. He looks at doorbells, but that’s hopeless, or nearly so. He asks at the ice-cream shop, the brasserie, the wine shop, the cheesemonger. Some people have heard of M. Fourier; others know him personally. But no one knows where he lives.
NEW YORK CITY
“Hey, have you heard from Will?”
Gabriella looks up at her boss, away from her desk, a red pen poised above an article that’s too long. She’s trimming it down line by line, sometimes character by character. Every day she comes to the office and edits for space—cutting a sentence here, an adjective there, tighten the kerning on this line, boom, done, next.
“No, I haven’t.” She leans away from her print-magazine problem, considers her boss, this other problem. Problem after problem. “When’s the last you heard from him?”
“Yesterday late morning. He was headed down to art. Haven’t seen or heard from him since. He wasn’t at the ed. meeting, then we were supposed to get a drink, and he blew me off. Not answering texts or calls.”
That really doesn’t sound like Will. “Did you try Chloe?”
“Not yet. They’re, uh…S
he left him.”
“Really? Why?”
“That’s not clear to me. Do you know anything about it?”
“No. You need to call her, Malcolm. Or do you want me to do it?”
“You’re right. I’ll do it.”
“You worried?”
“Definitely.”
“About?”
He chuckles uneasily. “About everything. Okay”—he raps on the door frame—“thanks Gabs.”
PARIS
Will’s fingers keep finding the flash drive in his front pocket, and his mind keeps jumping to the one in the rear, the one he loaded yesterday afternoon, after his Prospect Heights sojourn to collect back issues from Bernie Katz. When Will returned to Midtown, he took an extra lap around the block, killing time to arrive at 4:05, by which point the weekly editorial meeting would be under way. He didn’t want to run into anyone.
He followed the complicated protocol he’d memorized the night before, via instructions he’d tracked down on the web. He opened the external drive. Scanned through the folders, found Malcolm’s files, and moved them from Elle’s large device onto his own small drive. He didn’t know what was going on between Travelers and the CIA, and until he figured it out he wasn’t going to help, or harm, either.
The file titles were all named according to company guidelines. He opened a few—old articles and research notes, photographs and expense reports. Almost none of the files had been altered recently, except Malcolm’s monthly front-of-book letters.
Will’s attention was caught by a folder with spreadsheets, all of them titled oddly: beginning with a pair of uppercase letters followed by a long string of numbers in groups of four, separated by spaces. These file titles had anywhere from sixteen characters up through maybe thirty. This was a familiar-looking pattern, but Will couldn’t place it.