The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  “Killing Americans? Who said anything about killing anyone? I certainly didn’t ask you to do that.”

  Elle’s stomach does a somersault. Why would he issue a denial like that? Fuck, she thinks: has this guy been recording this whole conversation? He looks incredulous, but she can’t tell if it’s genuine incredulity or Captain Renault’s version of moral outrage.

  “Just kidding,” he says. “Of course you need to kill Rhodes. You know you do.”

  It hadn’t previously occurred to her that this guy was a psychopath, just a very successful sociopath. Does he really think it’s a joke to not kill someone?

  She has been in plenty of dicey situations in her life, and she’s beginning to believe that this hotel room is another. Is it possible that this man is not only a psychopath, but one who’s going to try to kill her? Now?

  No, she thinks, not here. Not in an ultra-luxury hotel suite in Kensington. But would he have someone else kill her, somewhere else? Yes, she thinks. Definitely. Obviously.

  Elle had already considered the possibility that this operation might come to a fatal conclusion for her. In Virginia, after she permanently silenced the only person at VDA who could identify her and the details of her operation, she thought about fleeing this clusterfuck, driving the rental car on a bland American four-laner to the interstate, to the airport, to anywhere.

  She had disappeared before. Disappearing would definitely be harder this time, with someone actively looking for her, someone who had already displayed an unwavering commitment to locating people who were trying to disappear. Hence this entire operation, a whole year of her life.

  What she needed to do was make them not want to kill her. She needed to stand her ground, assert herself, protect herself with the force of her will and the strength of her character, try to intimidate the person who’d be trying to intimidate her. The person who’s staring at her right now.

  “What does Rhodes know?” she asks. “Nothing, really.”

  “But he can be tied to you. And he knows what’s going on, doesn’t he?”

  This is probably true, she knows it, but she shakes her head. Although she’d rather kill Will than get killed herself, she really doesn’t want to kill Will. Over the past months, she found herself growing fond of him. Fond enough, at least, that she doesn’t want to kill him, not if she can avoid it. That’s something.

  “Are you saying there’s no footage of you and Mr. Rhodes together somewhere?” the man continues. “That’s not possible? Or that no one at the training camp would ever talk? No one in Falls Church? In France, in Argentina, in Spain? You’re telling me that if he takes this story to Langley, no one on the sixth floor would ever believe him? No one would start looking for you? No one would find you?”

  “I don’t exist. That’s why you hired me in the first place, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s true only if the world continues to believe that you’re dead. But if people start looking, and cross-checking postmortem photos against your pre-death records? Well then, your demise will prove to be unverifiable, won’t it? And evidence to the contrary will mount.”

  “That isn’t likely.”

  “He’s a loose end, and you know it. And you know that you need to tie it up.”

  She pushes out a disgusted chortle, trying to sound dismissive, but she knows that this is a battle she’s going to lose.

  This operation has been a long one, with a vague time frame, an undisclosed objective, and a questionable outcome. But she certainly didn’t expect it to come to this: afraid for her life, once again.

  It has been five years since the dusty encampment in Libya where her unit got ambushed—it must’ve been a sellout—and half of them were killed. The other half scattered to the winds.

  A few days later, she learned that she’d been presumed dead. She decided not to unscatter herself, at least not for the moment, not until she figured out what exactly had happened—who’d betrayed them, and why. But she never did find out. So she never did reemerge as alive.

  Instead, she seized the opportunity of an undocumented existence, to become a more extreme version of the person she’d been tending toward, untethered from a name and Social Security number and tax returns, from rules and regulations, from forms and reports, from the lifelong slog of a wet-work operations career in the Central Intelligence Agency.

  She let herself remain dead.

  Little by little, word got out that there was this woman—this highly capable, morally flexible American woman—who could take care of things that other people couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

  “Either Will Rhodes is the loose end”—he leans forward—“or you are.”

  PARIS

  “Got him!”

  Inez hustles to Parviz’s workstation, leans toward the oversize monitor, where blurry satellite images offer disorienting views from directly above—the black spots of chimneys, the triangular shadows cast by pitched roofs and dormer windows, the dark green-blue of the Seine, the rectangles of cars, like this one, making a left turn off the Quai des Célestins.

  “Merde,” she mutters, realizing where it’s going. The car crosses the Pont Marie, comes to a stop. The door opens. A person emerges.

  Inez is surprised that Will Rhodes knows to go to the Île St-Louis but apparently not the exact location of Jean-Pierre Fourier’s flat.

  It is with difficulty that they continue to follow the figure’s movements through the streets, in and out of buildings, crowds gathering. Eventually they lose him completely, midafternoon yesterday, when he becomes one of too many different possibilities to follow, small dots of persons, impossible to distinguish from one another. From hundreds of miles in the sky, all people look the same.

  “Phone me if you discover anything,” Inez says, walking out the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To find him.”

  LONDON

  The man is standing at the picture window overlooking the London park, turned away from Elle. She uses the opportunity of this semiprivacy to examine the silverware, wondering if she should palm a knife, a fork, something she could jam into someone’s eye. She’s getting a bad vibe.

  “You’re positive Rhodes is running?” he asks the window. Can he see her, in the reflection? Yes, probably.

  “We’ve had round-the-clock on his home, office. He hasn’t been to either. No electronic records—no credit cards, no passport swipes, no bank transactions. He’s obviously traveling under an alias.”

  “Unless he’s not traveling.”

  “Yes, but I’m fairly certain he is.”

  “Time is of the essence.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Where do you think he is?”

  “I don’t have any idea. None whatsoever. And I have no idea how to go about looking for him.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “Listen,” she says, “I know this operation isn’t about any corporate takeover. And unless you tell me what the hell is really going on, I don’t see how I can be of any further use.” She stands up. “So start explaining, or I’m leaving.”

  He turns to her, a threatening pose.

  She smiles. “And don’t think I’ll hesitate to kill Walt on my way out.”

  GULF OF MAINE

  The fishing boat is heading in the direction of the barely lightening horizon. It’s a cluttered arrangement of gear and men out there on the deck, and Chloe is relieved to be in the cabin, wrapped in a moth-holed woolen blanket, out of the way, out of the cold wind.

  She notices something on the horizon, up ahead and to the port side. She checks her watch. This might be it.

  She shrugs off the blanket, picks up the binoculars. It’s hard to tell in the dark, the distance.

  The crew is busy, ignoring her, as they’d mostly been since she boarded, handed the envelope of cash to Connor the captain, who opened it and counted it, no level of trust here. There were no introductions, no handshakes. This crew was apparently accustomed to the occasional un
explained passenger, undocumented cargo. Connor counted out bills, handed each man his bonus for seeing nothing.

  Chloe opens the door, yells, “Hey!” Inclines her head toward this incoming boat, which it’s now clear is moving pretty fast. Connor turns to look.

  “That it?” she asks, and he shrugs.

  If this isn’t the boat that she’s waiting for, it’s a problem. And while problems are also something that this crew is prepared for, she really hopes it doesn’t come to that, a sea battle here in the Wilkinson Basin.

  She returns her eyes to the binoculars. Yes, this must be it, her ride out of the country without passing through an American airport, across the gulf to Nova Scotia, to the world beyond. Chloe zips her bag, hoists it onto her back. It has been fifteen years since she backpacked, since the relative innocence of traveling for the pure adventure of being a traveler. Like every type of innocence, impossible to recover.

  HÚSAVÍK, ICELAND

  There’s nothing elegant about the weather-beaten boat, dingy white with faded blue trim, rigging and winches and thick ropes everywhere, a stolid sixty-foot workhorse, ramming against the choppy waves of the incoming current.

  From the stern Will watches the mist-shrouded village recede, corrugated steel that’s painted in bold solid hues, brick reds and royal blues and the minty green facets of the church roof, set off from the backdrop of the lumpy brown mountain called Húsavíkurfjall.

  The boat turns starboard, headed north in the Skjálfandi Bay, out into the open water of the Norwegian Sea. Will continues to face south, watching the land shrink away while the boat chugs toward nothing, no landfall ahead until the polar icecap.

  A couple dozen passengers are scattered around the decks, perched on high wooden benches or leaning against the hard metal gunwale, their gazes washing over the churning gray water, watching for whales. This is what the town is known for, tourist-wise. People come here to climb into bulky foul-weather gear, thick and rubberized and bright orange, the better to see you with if you fall overboard, not a terribly long time before hypothermia sets in. The Arctic Circle is fifty miles away.

  There are three crew on this boat. The skipper is in the wheelhouse, younger than you’d expect a skipper to be, tall and fair-skinned and icy-blue-eyed. There’s a middle-aged woman, broad-shouldered and beautiful in a hale, unadorned way, who helped everyone get into their inmate-like jumpsuits, and is now handing out hot chocolate in paper cups. And there’s the man in the crow’s nest, holding military-looking binoculars to his face, white stubble along a strong jaw, a dark tight watch cap. It’s hard for Will to get a good look at him, standing fifteen feet above in the slate-gray sky.

  Forty-five minutes out, it starts to rain, wind-blown and face-pelting and bone-chilling, the boat pitching and rolling. Will can no longer see any land in any direction.

  “There!” the man cries from the crow’s nest, his arm outstretched. Everyone looks up at him, then follows his pointing finger to the whale a couple hundred yards to port. The crowd oohs and aahs—these are the actual sounds—and the boat turns, accelerates, giving chase toward an animal that appears to be the same size as the boat. Jesus that thing is huge.

  The whale breaches again and again while the man in the crow’s nest recites cetaceous trivia, mating habits and pup rearing, flukes and baleen, lobtailing and spyhopping, a whole argot. Suddenly a handful of people start scuttling, and it takes Will a few seconds to realize that they’re fleeing from a woman who’s leaning overboard, throwing up, vomit spattering soundlessly into the sea, the mustard-colored sick washed quickly from the hull by a wave. Water crashes over the gunwale with regularity, sloshing around the deck before draining back into the big cold drink.

  The whale breaches a dozen times while the boat keeps it company, but then after one dive it doesn’t rematerialize. Five minutes later the skipper gives up, turns the boat back toward land, wherever that might be. There’s no sun visible, no stars, no horizon, no nothing to indicate which direction is where.

  PARIS

  “Madame Fourier? My name is Inez d’Auvergne.”

  The old woman squints at Inez, but doesn’t say anything.

  “I work at Travelers.”

  “Ahh, Travelers. It is a busy day for you people.”

  “Yes, I am sorry to disturb you. My colleague who was here earlier—”

  “The American?”

  “Yes, the American. What did you two discuss?”

  “Why do you not ask him?”

  “Because I am asking you.”

  Mme. Fourier looks like she’s about to slam the door in Inez’s face. But she doesn’t. “Not much. He did not know that my father was dead, so I told him.”

  “Is that all?”

  “The American asked if I found anything unusual in my father’s possessions. I told him there was a mobile phone that I did not know about.”

  “May I have a look at that phone?”

  “No.”

  “May I ask why not?”

  “Because I gave it to him.”

  “To the American?”

  “Yes, of course.” Mme. Fourier shrugs. “He wanted it. I do not.”

  HÚSAVÍK

  The boat is bumping against the pier. The passengers shed their foul-weather gear, disembark, relieved to be on solid ground, hustling to find shelter from the rain, a toilet that doesn’t lurch from side to side, a dry place for a hot lunch.

  The expedition was a success. The whale was captured on thousands of frames of still images plus hours of video, blurry and out of focus, the horizon not horizontal, devices shaking and tilting with the boat’s pitching and rolling, lenses spattered with spray and blocked by humans, the audio garbled and static-riddled.

  Will loiters until he finds his opportunity, asks the grizzled guy if he has a few minutes to spare for a travel writer, and do you mind if I take some notes?

  “Okay,” the man says. “You can keep me company while I tidy up.”

  “So you’re American? How’d you end up here?” Will’s pen is poised, reporter pose.

  “Got sick of it.”

  “Of what?”

  “America.” The man is coiling a big heavy rope, wrapping it around itself. Passengers continue to shuffle past, handing over coins as gratuities.

  “What about America?”

  “The whole thing. The consumerism, the capitalism, the politicians and their bullshit, the health-care system, the war on drugs, the mass incarceration, the permanent underclass…Need me to go on?”

  Will shakes his head. “When did you leave?”

  “Five years ago.”

  “Why Iceland?”

  The man inclines his head toward his coworker, who’s folding the jumpsuits, stacking them. “We met on a hiking trail. In Utah.”

  “And you followed her here?” Will puts his hands out, the dark gray, the rain, the workmanlike little harbor.

  “Love is more important than weather, isn’t it?”

  Will takes notes for another five minutes, nothing much of interest, not from his current perspective.

  “Listen,” he says. “I’m looking for an American. About your age, maybe older. East Coast guy. Would have arrived about a year ago. You know of anyone like that? Hear of anyone?”

  “In Húsavík?” The man laughs. “No. Americans don’t just show up in Húsavík. Have you seen this place? There are like eight people here.”

  “I think that’s exactly what this man might be looking for. A place to disappear.”

  “Well, there’s nowhere and there’s nowhere. Húsavík would not be a good place to disappear. Too many people would notice you. And too many tourists show up, hard to keep track of people who might have come here to find you.”

  “So where in Iceland would you go instead? To disappear?”

  The man drops the giant coil of rope with a deep resounding thud. “Sorry,” he says, “I really wouldn’t know. And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.”

  NEW
YORK CITY

  “You all set?” Lucinda asks.

  “Thanks again for this,” Gabriella say. “I owe you.”

  “I appreciate that, but no, you really don’t. This is a fair bargain: you do the sixty seconds on the cruises, then you can say whatever the hell you want as long as you don’t break any FCC regulations.” Lucinda smiles broadly. “Seriously.”

  Lucinda is a reasonable person. This doesn’t necessarily look like a reasonable place to work, but who knows? Looking in from the outside, absolutely no one would suspect that Travelers is the sort of workplace it is. The sort where employees get killed.

  Terrance’s abduction hadn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, not a low-percentage scenario. In fact, the contrary: something they’d anticipated, discussed, planned for.

  He was one of the staff photographers, as well as the magazine’s African correspondent. It was a good job for him, and vice versa. But it was a dangerous position, everyone recognized that. And the thing they were most worried about—politically motivated kidnapping—is exactly what happened. It wasn’t the first time in the magazine’s history.

  Travelers never got the chance to pay the ransom. Terrance was held in captivity for barely forty-eight hours before he was killed, gruesome footage that eventually made its way to the web via a fringe sect of Sudanese radicals. They denounced Terrance as an American spy who’d gotten what he deserved while trying to steal state secrets; the president of Sudan apologized for the regrettable incident. The magazine unwaveringly maintained that he was an innocent photojournalist. The State Department condemned the terrorism, and issued a new travel advisory. The CIA denied any knowledge of the man.

  And Terrance’s widow, Gabriella Rivera, traumatized, asked her new boss for a new job, a desk job. She put away her various passports, picked up the editing pencil. She took over the long-standing TV-morning-show gig, the latest incarnation in a half-century’s worth of coded electronic communications that were broadcast one way or another—radio-drama advertisements, network evening news, daytime talk radio—out to the Travelers network of operatives, alerting them to the location of the next mission, relaying instructions from someone Gabriella would never meet to an unknown number of assets in undisclosed locations.