The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  From the convenience store he buys a cup of coffee, a snack bar, an apple. From the gift shop he buys a folding knife with a four-inch blade.

  After driving for two hours, he really needed that bathroom. Within a few years, he’ll probably prefer urinating to orgasms. Maybe he’ll divorce Allison, take up with a urinal.

  He stands near the window, surveying the big wide tarmac beside the busy two-lane road, sipping his coffee, waiting to see who arrives. A couple of cars drive into the service station, another couple leave. Nothing familiar.

  Malcolm returns to his vehicle, opens the fuel cap, starts to pump gas. That’s when he notices the black Ford sitting on the far side of the lot, parked around back of the building. Same year and model as Malcolm’s. Probably same rental company; maybe same pickup location. This car wasn’t here when Malcolm arrived, nor did he see it pull in; it arrived while he was inside.

  A woman gets out of the car. So she’s been sitting there for at least a few minutes, waiting for something. What?

  Waiting for Malcolm to exit the building, so she can enter.

  The woman is half-turned away from him, and doesn’t glance in his direction as she walks away, perhaps headed to the head. Malcolm doesn’t get a good look at her, but he feels as if he has seen her before.

  She disappears inside. Malcolm leaves the nozzle in his tank and walks across the paved plaza to the side of the woman’s car that’s shielded from view of the store. He makes sure he’s not being observed, then kneels at the rear tire. He plunges the souvenir knife deep between the treads, twists the blade, yanks it out. Repeats this in another section of the rear tire, then again twice for the front tire.

  There will be another one, he knows; there will be two vehicles. Malcolm has not completely shed his tails. But he has made it twice as hard for them to follow him.

  He returns to his own little Ford, caps the tank, climbs into the driver’s seat, and waits for the woman to emerge. He wants to get a good look at her.

  He waits one minute…two…

  Maybe there was a queue for the ladies’ room.

  Three minutes…four…

  Malcolm doesn’t want to risk being seen searching for her, doesn’t want her to know that he’s onto her. So he shouldn’t go inside to check. And he can’t just continue to wait here, because that wouldn’t make sense to the other person who’s watching him, whoever and wherever that is.

  Seven minutes have gone by.

  Malcolm walks back inside, establishes himself at a bank of refrigerated cases, squeaky-clean glass doors that he can use as serviceable mirrors. He pretends to browse the drinks, tilting his head this way, that—

  There she is. Not waiting in a bathroom queue, not in the bathroom. She’s doing the same thing as Malcolm: pretending to browse. Why? She must be waiting for him to leave, to pull out of the gas station. Which means that her partner, whoever’s in the second car, is also nearby, watching Malcolm watching her, keeping her apprised of his whereabouts.

  She definitely looks familiar. But from where? Not here in Iceland. Not on the plane either, nor at the airport. Not from his rearview mirror.

  This is bugging the shit out of him.

  Malcolm grabs a bottle, turns around, and that’s when he gets a good look at a nonreflected version of her face, and now he’s even more certain that he’s seen her before, that he maybe even knows her, is that possible—?

  No.

  Is this forgetfulness a function of age? The steep slope into the abyss of dementia?

  Malcolm unfolds a wad of bills, greens and purples, men in beards and women in hats, one of those currencies with a berserk valuation scheme, everything costs at least a hundred krónur, the everyday notes are in multiples of thousands, everyone is forced to do four- and five-digit math all the time. Malcolm recently learned from his eight-year-old that there are long-multiplication methods other than his, which is apparently called the U.S. Algorithm. This infuriated him.

  He turns away from the cashier, and on the way to the door gets a good full-frontal. He knows he has seen this woman before—

  But not, he suddenly realizes, in the flesh. Where he saw her was on a screen. It was a little screen.

  It was on the tennis court, last spring. This woman who’s following Malcolm is Will’s Australian temptress.

  —

  “Who are you?” the man yells from behind Will. “What do you want?”

  Will is suspended out over the edge of the cliff, his face pointed down toward the rocky beach. He doesn’t know how to answer, doesn’t know how to get to the point quickly and clearly and nonthreateningly enough to save himself.

  He knows how this would end up appearing, just another overconfident unprepared American with the wrong footwear on a muddy path at cliff’s edge, easy to slip and fall, no evidence to suggest otherwise, no one for miles around to offer an alternative scenario. He visualizes himself launched into space, flipping forward one and a half rotations, landing on his head, snapping his neck and spine, crushing his skull, his splintering ribs puncturing his lungs, being killed in many different ways all at once, right after he gives the wrong answer.

  “My name is Will Rhodes,” he yells into the wind. “I’m a travel writer. I’m looking for a guy who used to run my magazine, Jonathan Mongeleach.”

  “I’m not him.”

  “Okay!”

  Will feels his right foot giving way. It would be so very tragic if he died here by mistake. He tries to adjust his weight, to shift the pressure from his arch to his heel, to make his foot more secure. But this movement only serves to pitch him farther forward, and the man’s grip on his nape shifts, suddenly unsteady—

  Will screams—

  But he doesn’t fall. He’s still dangling.

  “Why did you come here?” The man seems less angry now; he’s not screaming.

  “An American guy in Húsavík, he thought you might be who I’m looking for.”

  The man doesn’t answer.

  “Listen, can you pull me in? I’m scared to death out here.”

  Still no answer, no movement. Then another shift of weight, of position, and for the slimmest of time frames Will thinks he’s being thrown over this cliff, but that’s not what’s happening, he’s being yanked to the safety of the muddy path, onto which he collapses in desperate relief, practically hugging the thick moist soil, like coffee grounds at the bottom of a French press.

  Will looks up at the man, grizzled and wrinkled, ropy-muscled and fully bearded. A mane of long gray hair, tending toward white, hangs from under a tight black watch cap. He bears a passing resemblance to the Gorton’s Fisherman on his day off, but none to Jonathan Mongeleach.

  “Don’t misunderstand,” the man says, “it’s still possible that you’re going to die today, in any one of a half-dozen ways that I can kill you. So get up, very slowly.”

  Will struggles to his feet.

  “Don’t even consider doing anything stupid.”

  Too late for that.

  —

  Malcolm’s cell phone is connected to the car’s Bluetooth, Gabriella’s disembodied voice coming through the tinny speakers. “It’s another thirty miles,” she says. “The driveway will be on your left, narrow, looks like it’s dirt, a quarter-mile long. The house is about eighty yards shy of the bluff, but there’s some stuff in between, it’s hard to tell what from the satellite image. Little hills maybe? It looks green, but not like trees or shrubs.”

  “It’s probably moss, covering volcanic rock. This whole island is a lava field.”

  “Okay. So there’s a path that winds through that stuff, from the house out to the bluff. The path continues east another few hundred yards, where a set of stairs goes down to a cove, a pier with a small motorboat.”

  “Do we have any hard evidence about the occupant?”

  “Not really, no. The house is owned by a local farmer, whose family has had the property for eighty years; electricity bill is in the owner’s account, which is sha
red with a few other properties nearby. No phone, no Internet, no cable.”

  “Jesus,” Malcolm says, “how monastic. Get it?”

  “Hilarious.”

  “Does someone definitely live there?”

  “I don’t know, Mal. Electricity is used. There’s a car there that’s not Will’s. But if you’re asking if I have access to twenty-four-hour surveillance of a secluded house in eastern Iceland for the past year?”

  Malcolm looks around at the landscape he’s hurtling through, the stark mountains, the fog draped over the bay, the sheep dotting the fields. His mind keeps articulating that there’s nothing here, a completely empty place. But that’s absolutely wrong, there’s plenty here; what’s missing is humanity. Iceland is filled with an absence of humanity.

  This is disappearing done right. It’s not surprising that this is what Jonathan Mongeleach would do, not at all. What’s surprising is that Will is the one who found him. And what’s unfortunate is that Malcolm has to kill him.

  “Okay Gabs, thanks. So the satellite will be out of range when?”

  “Already happened, two minutes ago. That’s it for the next hour, Malcolm, you’re blind. Do you think it’s really Jonathan out there?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, good luck. And Mal?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s be careful out there.”

  —

  The house is snug, tidy. There aren’t many things, and what few things there are aren’t particularly nice, but they’re all clean things, neat and arranged just so, squared-off corners and perfectly aligned piles, folded blankets and stacked plates and a handful of matching mugs all hanging at the same angle from a handful of matching pegs.

  The guy hands Will one of these mugs. “Why are you looking for this person?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  The man doesn’t look surprised. “Tell me.”

  Will takes a sip of the hot black coffee. “Who are you?”

  “That’s not important. What we’re discussing is who you are, and why you’re here.”

  Will is exhausted. He’s tired of running, and tired of lying, and tired of not trusting anyone. He’s tired of keeping secrets. Fuck it, he thinks. It’s time to tell someone.

  So he does, starting from the very beginning, from Elle baiting the hook in Bordeaux to reeling in the line in Mendoza, scaling and gutting him in New York and in Virginia, filleting him into something they wanted, something easy to chew, to digest, along the way discarding the bits they didn’t need—his marriage, his conscience, his good night’s sleep.

  The man interrupts with questions—very specific, very personal questions:

  “And this was full-on sexual intercourse?”

  “Did either of these people in the hotel room have a weapon?”

  “Approximately how many miles north of the bridge-tunnel was the training camp?”

  “Did you ever have sex with her again?”

  “Did you attempt to contact the real Elle Hardwick in Australia?”

  “For how long did your wife work at Travelers?”

  “How many times did you practice these surveillance-detection routes?”

  “What did the receipts look like for your monthly payments?”

  He also asks questions about the magazine, the merger—when did Will first hear the rumors, who’s the purchaser, what’s the timeline supposed to be.

  And then the man stops asking questions when Will relates the chase through the East Village, to Paris and Akureyri, to the long lonely drive through the uninhabited, unwavering twilight, to here, now.

  Will feels as if a huge weight has been lifted, as if he’s been trudging around with a lie-filled backpack for months, and has just slipped out of its straps, let the thing crash onto the floor, its contents spilling, being sorted through by this stranger.

  The man sits in his straight-backed wooden chair, leaning forward, hands steepled, staring at the fire through the glass door of the iron stove. He closes his eyes, and Will thinks he may have fallen asleep. Then he says, “This situation is complicated.”

  Will guffaws.

  “I don’t think those people in Argentina worked for the CIA.”

  “Why not?”

  “First, there’s no female employee of the Agency whose job it is to have sexual intercourse with men. Flirting, cockteasing, sure. And if a kiss or two is going to open doors that would otherwise be tightly closed, then who knows, some case officers would do it, and their superiors wouldn’t object. But intercourse?” He shakes his head.

  “Not for a black op?”

  “A black op? I don’t want to be unnecessarily condescending, but I have to tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Will can’t deny this.

  “You know what it’s called when people have sex for money, right?”

  Will doesn’t answer.

  “The CIA may do many unsavory things, immoral things, illegal things. Especially in what you call black ops. But the Agency isn’t a brothel, and its employees aren’t prostitutes.”

  Will nods.

  “No team would sit in Langley and rationally orchestrate an op that’s entirely premised on, one, paying a case officer to have sex with a potential asset, and, two, surreptitiously videotaping that sexual act, and, three, using that evidence to extort the potential asset into cooperating.”

  Now that a dispassionate observer is saying it aloud, it does sound ludicrous.

  “That breaks a half-dozen federal and state laws in one fell swoop. Plus it’s an op on a domestic target, taking place within the borders of the United States, which in and of itself is illegal. Highly illegal. The type of thing that would really antagonize the FBI.”

  “Well, to be fair, those crimes took place in Argentina. Does that matter?”

  “Plus—let’s be honest here—for what? For you? It’s not like you’re the premier of China or the director of Russian intelligence services. No insult intended.”

  Will shrugs, physically and emotionally.

  The man gets up, walks across the small room, past folded blankets, and a stack of books. “It’s obvious that someone thinks you have access to something extremely valuable, something worth considerable effort and expense to acquire. But whoever this is, it isn’t the CIA.”

  The man opens the stove’s little door. He picks up a poker, rearranges the wood amid crackling and sparks and a wave of heat that rolls across the room, rippling the cool air. Behind the stove, cross-country skis lean against a wall, on which hang a big crossbow, a tube of arrows, a pair of snowshoes.

  “Do you have any idea what that valuable thing might be?”

  Will does have an idea. In fact, he knows for certain. Elle—whoever she is, whomever she’s working for—is after the records of Travelers’ employees. Not the employees of the New York magazine, nor the travel agents abroad. All those people would be easy enough to identify without any complicated extortion schemes.

  What Elle must be looking for is the identity and location of the freelancers. Why? Only one explanation makes sense: because those people are spies. They must be.

  Both men jump at a shrill beep that’s suddenly emanating from the kitchen, like a fire alarm.

  “What’s that?” Will asks.

  “Someone’s coming.” The man hustles to the window, peeks out. “Why do you think you weren’t followed?”

  “I drove here from Húsavík and slept in the car by the side of the road. I would’ve noticed anyone following me.”

  “You rented this car in Akureyri?” The man is talking quickly, moving quickly. “Under what name?”

  “Fake name. Some Canadian’s passport and driver’s license.”

  “How’d you procure those?” The man pulls on his jacket, pats down his pockets.

  “Bought from some guy in Brooklyn.”

  “A guy you know well?”

  “A guy I don’t know at all.”

  “That guy screwed you o
ver.” He grabs Will’s jacket from where it has been drying, hanging from a hook by the stove, and tosses it to Will. He then walks over to the open closet, collects a backpack.

  “When whoever is coming arrives, I’m going to run down the cliff path. I’ll get chased, but I won’t get caught before I get into my boat, and I will be unfollowable. I’ll never return to this house again, and you’ll never see me again. You understand?”

  Will nods.

  “You, leave this house and do not come back. This is very important. Got it? Do not return.” He looks Will in the eye, awaiting confirmation. Will nods.

  “Take my car.” He hands Will a key. “Follow the path around the shed, you’ll see a dirt driveway, the car is around a bend. Hide in the car until you see whoever this is follow me. Then count to fifty and get out of here as quickly as you can.”

  Will pulls on his jacket, follows this guy to the back door.

  “Turn left onto the road, and take it all the way around the north side of the peninsula. Don’t stop anywhere, for any reason. Drive straight to a tourist destination. You know where Geysir is?”

  “Not exactly.” They step out the back door, into the wind and the rain.

  “What about Þingvellir?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What kind of goddamned travel writer are you?”

  Will smiles. He pulls up the waterproof zipper of his high-tech jacket, bought at the pier in Húsavík before getting on the whale-watching boat.

  “Þingvellir is easy to find, there’s a map in the glove box. Park the car in the lot with the tour buses. Find a bus that’s reboarding. Explain to the driver that you got lost on a path, left behind, here’s five hundred, can you take me back to Reykjavík? He’ll say yes.”

  They’re walking through the backyard, out of view from the driveway, but not necessarily of anyone who might be lurking somewhere else.

  “You understand all this? Don’t drive back to the city. There are choke points leading into Reykjavík that are easy to cover physically, to monitor electronically. They’ll find you immediately. Take a bus, sit away from windows.”