WIN

by Coben, Harlan

  “Give me an hour then.”

  Kabir nods and hands me a water bottle. It is a cold beverage with the latest NAD molecules, which help slow down aging. I am provided the latest compound from a longevity doctor at Harvard. The elevator takes me down to the private workout room in the basement. There are free weights, a boxing heavy bag, a speed bag, a grappling dummy, wooden practice swords (bokkens), rubber handguns, a Wing Chun dummy with hardwood arms and legs, you get the idea.

  I train every day.

  I have worked with some of the best fighting instructors in the world. I have practiced all the fighting techniques you know—karate, kung fu, taekwondo, krav maga, jujitsu of various stripes—and many you don’t. I spent a year in Siem Reap studying the Khmer fighting technique of Bokator, which roughly though aptly translated means “pounding a lion.” I spent two college summers outside of Jinhae in South Korea with a reclusive Soo Bahk Do master. I study strikes, takedowns, submissions, joint locks (though I don’t like them), pressure points (not really useful in a true battle), one-on-one combat, group attacks, weaponry of all kinds. I am an expert marksman with a handgun (I am proficient with a rifle, but I rarely find a need for it). I’ve worked with knives, swords, and blades of all sorts, and while I greatly admire the Filipino form of Kali Eskrima, I’ve learned more from our Delta Force’s elite blend of styles.

  I am alone in my gym, so I take off everything but my underwear—a boxer-brief hybrid for those who must know—and start running through a few traditional katas. I move fast. Between sets, I work three-minute rounds with the punching bag. Best cardio conditioner in the world. In my youth, I trained five hours a day. Now I still go a minimum of an hour. Most days, I work with an instructor because I still thirst to learn. Today, obviously, I do not.

  Money, of course, makes all this possible. I can travel anywhere—or I can fly in any expert for any length of time. Money gives you time, access, cutting-edge technology and equipment.

  Don’t I sound a bit like Batman?

  If you think about it, Bruce Wayne’s only superpower was tremendous wealth.

  Mine too. And yes, it’s good to be me.

  Sweat coats my skin. I feel the rush of that. I push harder. I’ve always pushed myself. I’ve never needed to be pushed by anything external. The only training partner I ever worked with was Myron, but that was because he needed to learn, not because I needed motivation.

  I do this for survival. I do it to keep fit. I do it because I enjoy it. Not all of it, mind you. I enjoy the physical. I don’t enjoy the obsequious “yes, sensei” patriarchal nonsense that certain martial arts thrust upon their students, because I bow to no man. Respect, yes. Bow, no. I also don’t use these techniques, per the platitude, “only for self-defense,” an obvious untruth on the level of “the check is in the mail” or “don’t worry, I’ll pull out.” I use what I learn to defeat my enemies, no matter who the aggressor happens to be (usually: me).

  I like violence.

  I like it a lot. I don’t condone it for others. I condone it for me. I don’t fight as a last resort. I fight whenever I can. I don’t try to avoid trouble. I actively seek it out.

  After I finish with the bag, I bench-press, powerlift, squat. When I was younger, I’d have various lifting days—arm days, chest days, leg days. When I reached my forties, I found it paid to lift less often and with more variety.

  I hit the steam room, sauna, and then, when my body temperature is raised, I jump into a freezing cold shower. Putting the body through certain controlled stresses like this activates dormant hormones. It’s good for you. When I exit the shower, three suits wait for me. I choose the solid blue one and head back to my office.

  Kabir holds up his phone. “The story’s hit Twitter.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “Just that the Vermeer was found at a murder scene. I’m also getting a ton of calls from the press interested in a quote.”

  “Any porn magazines?” I ask.

  Kabir frowns. “What’s a porn magazine?”

  Today’s youth.

  I close the door. My office has an enviable view and oak wood paneling. There is an antique wooden globe and a painting of a fox hunt. I look at the painting and wonder how the Vermeer might look there instead. My mobile rings. I look at the number.

  I should be surprised—I haven’t heard from him in a decade, not since he told me he was retiring—but I’m not.

  I put the phone to my ear. “Articulate.”

  “I can’t believe you still answer the phone that way.”

  “Times change,” I say. “I do not.”

  “You change,” he says. “I bet you don’t ‘night tour’ anymore, do you?”

  Night tour. Back in the day, I used to put on my dandiest suit and stroll through the most crime-ridden streets in the thick of the night. I would whistle. I would make sure all could see my blond locks and alabaster-to-ruddy complexion. I am rather small boned and, from a distance, appear frail—a bully’s irresistibly tasty morsel. It is only when you get close to me that you sense there is considerable coil under the clothes. But by then, it is usually too late. You’ve seen the easy mark, you’ve laughed about me with your friends, you can’t back out.

  I wouldn’t let you even if you tried.

  “I do not,” I tell him.

  “See? Change.”

  I stopped night touring years ago. It was oddly discriminatory and all too random. I am now more selective with my targets.

  “How are you doing, Win?”

  “I’m fine, PT.”

  PT has to be in his mid-seventies by now. He recruited me for my brief stint with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was also my handler. Very few agents know about him, but every FBI chief and president has met with him their first day on the job. Some people in our government are considered shadowy. PT is shadowy to the point of nonexistence. He barely makes a blip on anyone’s radar. He lives somewhere near Quantico, but even I don’t know where. I also don’t know his real name. I could probably find out, but while I enjoy violence, I don’t relish playing with fire.

  “How was the basketball game last night?” PT asks.

  I stay silent.

  “The NCAA finals,” he says.

  I still say nothing.

  “Oh, relax,” he says with a chuckle. “I watched the game on TV. That’s all. I saw you sitting courtside next to Swagg Daddy.”

  I wonder whether this is true.

  “I love his stuff, by the way.”

  “Whose stuff?”

  “Swagg Daddy’s. Who else are we talking about? That song where he juxtaposes bitches ripping out a man’s heart to bitches ripping off a man’s balls? I feel that. It’s poetic.”

  “I’ll let him know,” I say.

  “That would be great.”

  “Last time I heard from you,” I say, “you told me you retired.”

  “I did,” PT says. “I am.”

  “And yet.”

  “And yet,” he repeats. “Is your line secure, Win?”

  “Do we ever know for certain?”

  “With today’s technology, we do not. I understand the FBI located your property today.”

  “For which I’m grateful.”

  “There is more to it, however.”

  “Isn’t there always?”

  “Always,” he agrees with a sigh.

  “Enough to get you out of retirement?”

  “Tells you something, doesn’t it? I assume there is a reason you aren’t fully cooperating.”

  “I’m just being careful,” I say.

  “Can you stop being careful by the morning? Let me rephrase.” His tone did not change—nothing you could hear anyway—and yet. “Stop being careful by the morning.”

  I do not reply.

  “I’ll have a plane meet you at Teterboro at eight a.m. Be there.”

  “PT?”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you identified the victim?”

  I hear a
muffled female voice through the line. PT tells me to hold on and calls to the woman that he’ll only be a moment more. A wife maybe? It’s shocking how little I know about this man. When he comes back on the line, he says, “Do you know the expression ‘this one’s personal’?”

  “When you trained us,” I say, “you stressed that it was never personal.”

  “I was wrong, Win. Very wrong. Tomorrow, eight a.m.”

  He hangs up.

  I lean back, throw my feet on the desk, and replay the conversation in my head. I am looking for nuance or hidden meanings. None come to me other than the obvious. There is a knock-pause-double knock on my office door. Kabir sticks his head through it.

  “Sadie wants to see you,” he tells me. “She sounds…unhappy.”

  “Gasp oh gasp,” I say.

  I take the elevator back down to Sadie’s law office, where I’m greeted by the receptionist-cum-paralegal, a recent college graduate named Taft Buckington III. Taft’s father—he is known to all as Taffy—is a fellow member of Merion Golf Club. We play a lot of golf, Taffy and I. Young Taft meets my eye when I enter and shakes his head in warning. There are four attorneys in total at Fisher and Friedman, all female. I told Sadie once that perhaps she should hire one man to make it look good. Her response, which I loved, was simple:

  “Shit no.”

  Instead the sole male is the receptionist-cum-paralegal. Make of that what you will.

  When Sadie spots me standing next to Taft’s desk, she beckons me to her office and closes the door once we are both inside. I sit. She stands. This was Myron’s old office. Sadie kept Myron’s desk. It was still here when she took over the lease and so she asked whether she could purchase it. I called Myron to see what he’d charge, but as I expected, he said to give it to her. Still, it’s disconcerting to be in here because nothing else is the same. The small refrigerator where Myron kept his stash of Yoo-hoos has been replaced by a printer stand. The posters from Broadway shows—there is no straight male in North America, with the possible exception of Lin-Manuel Miranda, who loves musicals more than Myron—are gone now. Myron’s office was eclectic and nostalgic and colorful. Sadie’s is minimalist and white and generic. She wants no distractions. It’s all about the client, she once told me, not the attorney.

  “I have permission to tell you this,” Sadie begins. “Just so we are clear. It’s no longer attorney-client privilege because, well, you’ll see.”

  I say nothing.

  “You know about my hospitalized client?”

  “Just that.”

  “Just what?”

  “That you have a client who was hospitalized.”

  This isn’t true, by the way. I know more.

  “How did you find out?” Sadie asks.

  “I overheard someone in the office talking about it,” I say.

  This is also a lie.

  “Her name is Sharyn,” Sadie continues. “No last name for now. It doesn’t matter. Names don’t matter. Anyway, her case is textbook. Or it starts out textbook. Sharyn is doing a graduate degree at a large university. She meets a man who works at the same university in a somewhat prestigious job. It starts off great. So many of these do. The man is charming. He flatters her. He’s super attentive. He talks about their grand future.”

  “They always do that, don’t they?” I say.

  “Pretty much, yeah. It’s not fair to label every guy who starts sending you flowers and showering you with tons of attention as a psycho—but, I mean, there is something to it.”

  I nod. “Not all overly attentive boyfriends are psychos—but all psychos are overly attentive boyfriends.”

  “Well put, Win.”

  I try to look modest.

  “So anyway, the romance starts off great. Like so many of these do. But then it starts to grow weird. Sharyn is in a study group that includes both men and women. The boyfriend—I’m going to call him Teddy, because that’s the asshole’s name—doesn’t like that.”

  “He gets jealous?”

  “To the nth degree. Teddy starts asking Sharyn a lot of questions about her guy friends. Interrogating her, really. One day, she checks the search history on her laptop. Someone—well, Teddy—has been looking up her guy friends. Teddy shows up at the library unannounced. To surprise her, he says. One time he brings a bottle of wine and two glasses.”

  “As cover,” I say. “A faux romantic gesture.”

  “Exactly. The behavior escalates, as again it always does. Teddy gets upset if her study sessions run too late. She’s a student. She wants to go to a campus party or two with her friends. Teddy, who works as an assistant coach, insists on going. Sharyn starts to feel the walls closing in. Teddy is everywhere. If she doesn’t respond to his texts fast enough, Teddy throws a fit. He starts accusing her of cheating. One night, Teddy grabs Sharyn’s arm so hard he bruises her. That’s when she breaks up with him. And that’s when his psycho stalking starts.”

  I am not a good sympathetic ear, but I try very hard to appear like one. I try to nod in all the right places. I try to look concerned and mortified. My resting face, if you will allow me to use that annoying colloquialism again, is either disinterested or haughty. I struggle thus to engage and look caring. It takes some effort, but I believe that I’m pulling it off.

  “Teddy shows up unannounced begging her to take him back. On three separate occasions, Sharyn has to call 911 because Teddy’s pounding on her door after midnight. He’s pleading with her to talk to him, says she’s being unfair and cruel not to hear him out. Teddy actually cries, he misses her so bad, and eventually he convinces her that she”—here Sadie makes quote marks with her fingers—“‘owes’ him the chance to explain.”

  “And she agrees to meet?” I ask, mostly because I worry I’ve been silent too long.

  “Yes.”

  “This,” I say. “This is the part I never get.”

  Sadie leans forward and tilts her head to the side. “That’s because while you’re trying, Win, you’re still too male to get it. Women have been conditioned to please. We are responsible not just for ourselves but everyone in our orbit. We think it is our job to comfort the man. We think we can make things better by sacrificing a bit of ourselves. But you’re also right to ask. It’s the first thing I tell my clients: If you’re ready to end it, end it. Make a clean break and don’t look back. You don’t owe him anything.”

  “Did Sharyn go back to him?” I ask.

  “For a little while. Don’t shake your head like that, Win. Just listen, okay? That’s what these psychos do. They manipulate and gaslight. They make you feel guilty, like it’s your fault. They sucker you back in.”

  I still don’t get it, but that’s not important, is it?

  “Anyway, it didn’t last. Sharyn saw the light fast. She ended it again. She stopped replying to his calls and texts. And that’s when Teddy upped his assholery to the fully psychotic. Unbeknownst to her, he bugged her apartment. He put keyloggers on her computers. Teddy has a tracker on her phone. Then he starts texting her anonymous threats. He stole all her contacts, so he floods mailboxes with malicious lies about her—to her friends, her family. He writes emails and pretends he’s Sharyn and he trashes her professors and friends. On one occasion, he contacts Sharyn’s best friend’s fiancé—as Sharyn—and says she cheated on him. Makes up a whole story about some incident in a bar that never happened.”

  “Imaginative,” I say.

  “You don’t know the half of it. He starts sending Sharyn messages, pretending to be her friends saying what a fool she is to let a sweet guy like Teddy go.”

  I frown. “Imaginative albeit pathetic.”

  “Beyond pathetic. These men—sorry, I don’t want to sound sexist, but they are almost always men—are insecure losers of biblical proportions.”

  “Does Sharyn go to the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that doesn’t prove helpful, does it?”

  Her eyes light up. Sadie is in her element now. “This is
why we exist, Win. The law as it is now can’t really help the Sharyns of the world. It hasn’t yet caught up to technology, for one thing. Teddy hides himself using VPNs and burner phones and fake email addresses. It’s impossible for anyone to prove who is stalking her. That’s why the work we do, it’s so important.”

  I nod for her to continue.

  “So now that he’s been dumped again, Teddy doesn’t let up. He sends a naked picture of Sharyn to her ninety-one-year-old grandmother. He makes up a video filled with lies about Sharyn—that she hates Jews, that she’s into all kinds of weird sex, that she’s a white nationalist, you can’t imagine. And get this. When Teddy is confronted with what he’s done, he claims that Sharyn is setting him up. That he dumped her and she can’t move on and this is her way of getting back at him.”

  I shake my head.

  “Anyway, that’s when Sharyn finally learned about us.”

  “How long ago?”

  “February.”

  I wait.

  Sadie swallows. “Yes. I know, I know, it’s a long time.”

  “And?”

  “And we were trying, Win. We dug in deep and found out Teddy has done this before to at least three other women—it’s one reason why he keeps moving from college to college.”

  “The colleges know?”

  “Institutions protect their own. So he agrees to resign quietly and they agree not to say anything. On at least one occasion, money exchanged hands, and the victim signed a nondisclosure agreement.”

  I frown some more.

  “So anyway, we do what we can for Sharyn. We get her a temporary order of protection against Teddy. I told her to write down everything she remembers—everything Teddy did—and to keep a diary of everything he does from here on out. This is key—to keep a record from the get-go if you can. We go to law enforcement, just so we are on record, but like I said, this is why our work is so important. Police aren’t really trained in digital forensics.”

  I lean back and cross my legs. “So far, this sounds like a classic case for your firm.”

  “You’re right.” She smiles sadly. “Teddy is textbook. He sounds like my ex.”

  Sadie’s stalker had taken it to the next level too, but this is not the time to bring that up. I sit back and wait. I already know the bare bones of this story, but she is filling in the details. I am also not sure where she is going with it.