The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  All those jingoist articles from the forties, fifties, sixties: state-sponsored propaganda.

  “The other op was a courier program: creating cover that allowed Americans to come and go worldwide without arousing suspicion. This was in the days when intelligence was passed hand to hand, people compromised face-to-face. Travelers was the ultimate back channel, all the more secure because the couriers—journalists and photographers and editors—had no idea whatsoever that they were spies. Had no idea who they were working for. What they were doing.”

  Malcolm fixes his gaze on Elle. “Do you know who you work for?”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “Are you going to tell us?” Malcolm asks.

  “Are you kidding? Of course not. Go on, keep explaining.”

  “The magazine was profitable, the clandestine courier service successful. So Benji started thinking about expansion, for the same reasons that all organizations undergo mission creep: to justify their own existence, to serve ambition. Benji was ambitious. And this was in the heyday of the corporation, the dominant idea that it wasn’t sufficient to thrive—it was necessary to expand, always. A flat year was failure. So Benji proposed a third operation: the actual gathering of intelligence, in small cadres that would parallel CIA stations. This was a tough sell in Langley, but eventually he received permission to try a test case, in 1949.”

  “The Paris bureau,” Will mutters, mostly to himself.

  “The focus was to monitor the immense disbursements of the Marshall Plan in Europe. This became the primary objective of Travelers’ bureaus for decades, in Hong Kong for Korea and Vietnam, in Beirut, in Mexico City: keeping track of the U.S. foreign-aid money, and who was spending it, in the name of advancing American interests.

  “Travelers recruited its own network of assets, and a team of agents to run them. A service that invented its own necessity, with a specialty in very local intel. A lot of this intel was gossip that could provide recruitment leverage: who was paying bribes to the police chief, and why; who seemed to have more money than his job paid; who was screwing whose wife.”

  Malcolm pauses, stares at Elle. “That was fucked-up.”

  She doesn’t respond. Will doesn’t understand.

  “Also less personal info,” Malcolm continues. “Where did the recent German immigrants resettle? Which metal-fabricating factory was doubling its workforce? This was all info best collected by locals whose publicly verifiable jobs were known to be collecting info.”

  All those bureau managers at their desks in Paris and London, Rome and Istanbul, all those people whose jobs it is to know everyone in town. All spies?

  “The foreign bureaus are CIA substations?”

  Malcolm nods.

  So Inez is a spy? Mumblemore?

  “After the Hoover-fueled FBI-CIA squabbles, the secrecy of Travelers became ever more crucial, and the editor started reporting to the director of Central Intelligence himself.”

  “Are you saying your boss is the DCI?” Elle asks.

  “Yes. Yours?”

  “I’m not the one answering questions here, Somers. What’s your mandate?”

  “There are operations that the CIA can’t handle for itself because it’s impossible to know who in the Agency is utterly trustworthy. Information too sensitive to entrust to normal channels—info about double agents, moles, interior investigations. That is, info about unreliable people. So Travelers’ primary task was to find people—to find ex-agents and current assets, foreign operatives, fugitives, criminals—who don’t want to be found.”

  “That’s pretty ironic, isn’t it? Jonathan Mongeleach created an op to find himself.”

  She’s right, but Malcolm doesn’t answer.

  “How do you transmit your intel to Langley?”

  “Dead drops. Men’s rooms in restaurants.”

  “And how does the funding get to you?”

  “A fake advertiser. A few of them, actually. Numbered accounts in Switzerland, most of which directly feed the bureaus, which are freestanding enterprises outside of the American system, with independent operational funds. The only money that comes back to New York is what we need to keep the magazine looking healthy.”

  Will can tell that Elle is impressed with the intricacies of the sham. She herself has been perpetuating a few labyrinthine hoaxes for a very long time.

  “Who knows about this?” she asks.

  “Practically no one. Most of the bureau personnel think they work for a travel agency.”

  “And the street network?” Elle asks.

  Will’s eye catches something, some movement, some shift of light or reflection in the window across the room. What was that?

  “All those informers—and the assets in the foreign governments and embassies, the businesspeople, the media—they all think we’re journalists. And that’s what we really are: journalists, like Will; editors, like me.”

  Will continues to scan the room, careful not to move his head, not to draw Elle’s attention. Everything seems to be as it was before. The fire has died down, just embers glowing in there. But is something missing?

  “And you?” Elle asks. “You’ve been CIA since your first job as a reporter, straight out of college?”

  “Sort of. Started with a year at the Farm and in Langley.”

  Elle looks over at Will. “What about him?”

  Malcolm too turns his eyes to Will. “I don’t know what he suspects. But until tonight, I don’t think he could’ve known anything about any of this. Unless his wife told him.”

  Malcolm is asking a question, wants an answer. Will shakes his head. But he’s distracted, having just realized that there’s definitely something missing, something that had been hanging from the wall before. He doesn’t remember Joe taking it. But it isn’t there now. The crossbow.

  —

  “There are no records of the network?” Elle asks, her spirits sinking. “Names, addresses, aliases?”

  “No.”

  Elle stands in the middle of the room, halfway between her two captives, looking at neither, weighing her options, none of them hugely attractive.

  “Why don’t you tell me who you’re looking for.”

  “I’m looking for all of them, Somers, that’s the point. I’m looking for the whole network. And I’m especially looking for Mongeleach. So where is he?”

  Both men shake their heads.

  “You understand that if you don’t tell me where Mongeleach is, you’re no longer any use?”

  Neither says anything.

  She has no choice. She has to kill Will. And Somers is here, so she has to kill him too. Loose ends. Will may not understand this, he’s still a novice. But Somers does.

  There’s no point in drawing this out. She turns to Will, looks him in the eye. She takes a step toward him, then another.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. And she pulls the knife out of her pocket.

  —

  Chloe throws the door open, bursts into the room, yells, “No!”

  The woman called Elle turns, knife in her right hand. It has a long blade, a heavy-looking hilt, a sharp curved tip, good for slicing or stabbing. But it’s no match for the crossbow that Chloe is aiming.

  “Well,” Elle says, “if it isn’t the wife.” The two women stare at each other from twenty feet apart, sizing up the competition. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  Chloe is not terribly confident with this weapon. She’d used a crossbow at summer camp, but that had been a much simpler contraption, twenty years ago. This one she dragged off the wall, along with the arrows, when the house was empty. She figured out how to load it, took a couple of silent practice shots out in the Icelandic gloaming. Her aim was not very good.

  She was hoping she wouldn’t have to use it; still is. What she wants is for this woman to just go away, leave them alone, let them pick up the pieces and get back to their lives. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

  “Tell me, Will, who’d you prefer f
ucking?”

  So that’s it. That’s what happened. That’s how Will got sucked into this, that’s how they all got here. Chloe turns her eyes to her husband, who looks absolutely devastated—pained and apologetic and deeply, unbearably sad.

  Chloe suspected as much. And she managed to convince herself that it didn’t really matter, that he’d been tricked by a wily professional, that he loved his wife and she loved her husband, that she’d get over it, maybe even had already. But now that it’s 100 percent confirmed, it hurts so much more than it had at 95 percent.

  Elle takes a sidestep toward Will. “Was it your wife?”

  She’s trying to rattle me, Chloe thinks. Don’t let her.

  “Or was it me?” Another step.

  “Stop moving,” Chloe says.

  “Or what, wife? Are you going to—”

  Chloe pulls the trigger. The arrow flies across the room, faster here in the enclosed space than it seemed in the wide-open dusk, a short whoosh and a wet-sounding sucking noise as it lands, followed instantaneously by a yelp.

  The arrow has missed the target, which was the center of this woman’s mass. But still the point has sunk into her side.

  Elle doesn’t fall. She looks at the arrow, long and straight, lodged in her flank. Then she looks back at Chloe.

  Just then the phone rings, echoing through the wood-walled house.

  Elle turns toward Will, and Chloe knows what’s about to happen. Chloe isn’t aware of dropping the crossbow but she does, and now her feet are flying across the floor, then she’s launching herself through the air—

  Two rings.

  Chloe crashes into Elle’s side just as the woman is thrusting her knife at Will, who’s trying to squirm his tied-up torso away.

  Three rings.

  Chloe is atop Elle. She seizes the wrist that holds the knife, digs her knee into Elle’s abdomen. The arrow is still jutting out of the woman’s side.

  The answering machine picks up. “Hi, this is Joe.”

  Suddenly Will manages to topple his chair, falling sideways, his feet up in the air, his tied-up arm falling directly onto the arrow, the weight of his body pressing—

  “Please leave a message.”

  —the sharp arrowhead deeper into Elle’s thorax, breaking through her ribs, up—

  Beep.

  —through her flesh, piercing her lungs.

  The knife topples out of Elle’s hand, clatters to the floor.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to go back to the house?” It’s the American who lives here, speaking to his own answering machine. “Listen: you have about ninety seconds. Then the house is going to explode.”

  —

  Chloe uses Elle’s fallen knife to slice through the line that binds Will to the chair, and he feels himself leaping up, running across the room, using the same knife to unbind Malcolm, dragging him out of the chair, the whiskey glass crashing to the floor, shattering, Malcolm moaning from the pain, his leg immobilized for the past half-hour, swollen and bruised, plus the gash ripped open again.

  “Come on!”

  Malcolm hobbles across the room, through the open front door, and Will and Chloe drag him across the yard, and the three of them stumble up the packed-dirt driveway, hearing nothing except the sound of their own ragged breaths and uneven footfalls, wondering how far they need to get, how much time is left, and Will sees the sky light up just the tiniest fraction of a second before the force of the blast propels him forward, and the sound bursts in his ears, and he’s flung forward, hits the ground belly-down, chunks of wood and stone and steel crashing all around him, ripping through skin and piercing flesh, until it’s suddenly over, just the crackling of fire, and he rolls onto his back, looks up at what passes for night in the Scandinavian summer, the sky suspended in permanent twilight, stars visible along the dark horizon to one side, a royal-blue sunset sky to the other, his boss and wife lying beside him, all three of them wounded, but still alive.

  KEFLAVÍK

  The American ex-spy watched through binoculars as his house was incinerated by the carefully arranged sequence of explosives and accelerators. He was a quarter-mile out to sea, and the house was high up on the bluff, a pyre surrounded by darkness, so he couldn’t tell if the people were alive; he didn’t even know how many there were. He didn’t especially care.

  He sped across the bay, dropped anchor in the secluded cove. He reclined, but he didn’t expect sleep. Sometimes rest is enough.

  In the morning he ran the boat up onto the beach, ditched it, hiked up to the road. He caught a bus to the city, made his way to the dumpy rooming house off Hverfisgata Street that always has vacancies. He napped.

  He’d lived his entire life as a clean-shaven, clean-cut man, suits and ties and white linen pocket squares, monthly haircuts, shined shoes, a steady sequence of interchangeable supervisors in Langley. Then a couple of years ago, on the long journey to Iceland, he grew a beard for the first time in his life; he let his hair grow long.

  Now he had to cut off that beard, a small sink filled with kinky white hair, a dozen nicks and cuts from the disposable razor on the unaccustomed skin. He buzzed his hair down to a half-inch of white, like a wall-to-wall carpet in a warm-weather McMansion. He bought a plain tee shirt and khakis around the corner.

  He’s recognizable from his old life, perhaps. But he’s unrecognizable from yesterday’s.

  He needs to run again—farther this time, and faster, and forever. Because it’s not just anyone who has found him, not some random travel writer who got manipulated by a run-of-the-mill corporate raider who’s looking for inside information on a media acquisition. No, that would have been a much easier problem to solve. That problem would already have been solved by escaping, by burning down the house.

  His unsolved, intractable problem is that what the corporate raider is actually looking for is the Travelers clandestine network—for the agents and the assets, for the whole apparatus, for the infinitely valuable secrets of the spies and their lies, for an American intelligence network that operates outside the purview of the CIA’s oversight. And he has found it.

  What’s even worse is that the corporate raider is also looking for Joe. The two have known each other for decades. The man’s name is Charlie Wolfe, and he’ll stop at nothing to kill his enemies. By disappearing, Joe became one of them.

  Joe has already arranged for his next home, a furnished apartment in the centre of Luxembourg, which has always been known as a good place to hide yourself as well as your money. A small quiet city filled with expats, with bankers and lawyers and accountants, not to mention good doctors, which he’s sure he’ll be needing.

  Unless he gets captured—or killed—first. Before he gets to Luxembourg, he needs to not get identified here. He isn’t yet out of these particular woods.

  So he catches a bus to the airport. He finds a round table in the far corner of the big café in the main terminal. He thumbs through magazines and newspapers, and he watches, and he waits.

  Then these three people arrive, looking like they’ve been dragged in from the end of the earth.

  —

  Chloe’s first instinct was to check on Will. He was a bloody mess, cuts and abrasions, but nothing gushing. He seemed to be moving his body okay, rolling onto his side, staring up at the sky. Malcolm also seemed fine, in a general sort of way.

  She let out a sigh of relief, not only for these men, relatively unharmed, but also for herself, that her first concerns were for the welfare of other people. Chloe had been worrying about her loss of humanity. For a long time she’d lived with the discomfiting knowledge that she was a liar; that she’d been a covert intelligence operative since before she’d met Will; that she’d never told him, not even after they got married, not even after he started working at Travelers, not even after she’d departed.

  Because she hadn’t really quit. Yes, she’d left the office. She’d left behind the piddling salary and long hours of a staff writer whose other responsibility was to look fo
r disappeared assets and agents. Instead, she took a new freelance position: analyzing leads, plotting contingencies, and then assassinating the disappeared operatives who were un-disappeared by people like her husband. By people who are her husband.

  So in addition to being a liar, she was now a murderer, and this wasn’t something she’d wanted to admit to her husband. She didn’t think this was something she’d need to admit, because Malcolm had promised that he would never bring Will inside. And he hadn’t. So this whole thing wasn’t really Malcolm’s fault.

  Was it Will’s fault? She didn’t know what exactly happened between him and that woman. But Chloe was pretty sure that it wasn’t a simple matter of cruel infidelity.

  Did she want to know the particulars? She’d already decided to forgive Will. Maybe the details would only get in the way.

  Chloe reached out to Will’s face, palm against his bloody cheek, and they stared at each other, lying there on the rough ground, side by side.

  She realized that she was crying, and she didn’t know when she’d started.

  —

  On the same day last spring when Will first met Elle, he mounted an electronic box on the dashboard of the rental Fiat that he was about to drive around southwest France. As a driving aid, this box was nothing special: no wide choice of voices, no exhaustive menu of map options, not very responsive to changing traffic conditions.

  But what the device did do that was very unusual was capture cell-phone signals, and transmit them via satellite to the mainframe computer in the cool windowless room on the deuxième étage of the Paris bureau, where an algorithm instantly recognized that a disposable mobile in the French Pyrénées placed a call to a mobile in central Moscow, which then connected to a landline a few blocks away. This was the event that caught Omar’s attention.

  The French mobile’s signal then disappeared. Two days later that same phone reappeared in Montpelier, where a bank’s security camera photographed a couple dozen different people who could be the phone’s operator. A highly effective facial-recognition program then matched one of those faces to a small, extremely secure database. After cross-referencing Will’s notes, Omar added the name Taylor Lindhurst as a known alias to this database; thanks to the bank’s records, the new name Sean Cullen too. These aliases filled out the file of a well-connected ex-Travelers asset who’d been suspected of selling secrets to the Russians, a suspicion that was confirmed when the man disappeared three years ago. Now, thanks to an unwitting Will, that traitor had been found.