The Expats: A Novel
Page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Christopher Pavone
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pavone, Chris.
The expats : a novel / Chris Pavone.
p. cm.
Summary: “An international spy thriller about a former CIA agent who moves with her family to Luxembourg where everything is suspicious and nothing is as it seems.”—Provided by publisher.
1. Americans—Luxembourg—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3616. A9566E97 2012
813′.6—dc23 2011046207
eISBN: 978-0-307-95637-8
Title page photography by Satoru Murata
Jacket design by Christopher Brand
Jacket photography: Kristina Hruska/Millennium Images, UK (woman); Walter
Bibikow (Luxembourg); Jonathan Kantor (planes)
v3.1
TO MY LITTLE EX-EXPATS, SAM AND ALEX
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prelude: Today, 10:52 A.M., Paris
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part II
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part III
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Acknowledgments
TRUTH IS BEAUTIFUL, WITHOUT DOUBT; BUT SO ARE LIES.
–RALPH WALDO EMERSON
THE ONE CHARM OF MARRIAGE IS THAT IT MAKES A LIFE OF DECEPTION ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY FOR BOTH PARTIES.
—OSCAR WILDE
PRELUDE
TODAY, 10:52 A.M., PARIS
“Kate?”
Kate is staring through a plate-glass window filled with pillows and tablecloths and curtains, all in taupes and chocolates and moss greens, a palette that replaced the pastels of last week. The season changed, just like that.
She turns from the window, to this woman standing beside her on the narrow sliver of sidewalk in the rue Jacob. Who is this woman?
“Oh my God, Kate? Is that you?” The voice is familiar. But the voice is not enough.
Kate has forgotten what exactly she is halfheartedly looking for. It’s something fabric. Curtains for the guest bath? Something frivolous.
She cinches the belt of her raincoat, a self-protective gesture. It rained earlier in the morning, on the way to school drop-off, mist snaking in from the Seine, the hard heels of her leather boots clicking on the wet cobblestones. She’s still wearing her lightweight slicker, the folded Herald-Tribune poking out of her pocket, crossword puzzle completed at the café next to school where she eats breakfast most mornings, with other expat moms.
This woman is not one of them.
This woman is wearing sunglasses that cover half her forehead and most of her cheeks and the entire area of the eyes; there’s no way to positively ID whoever is under all that black plastic and gold logos. Her short chestnut hair is pulled back severely against her scalp, pinned in place by a silk band. She is tall and fit, but full through the chest and hips; voluptuous. Her skin is glowing with a healthy, natural-looking tan, as if she spends a lot of time outdoors, playing tennis, or gardening. Not one of those extra-dark deep-fries that so many French women favor, tans generated by the ultraviolet radiation of fluorescent lamps in coffin-like booths.
This woman’s clothes, while not actually jodhpurs and a show coat, are reminiscent of riding. Kate recognizes the plaid jacket from the window of a hideously expensive boutique nearby, a new shop that replaced a cherished bookstore, a swap that vocal locals claim signals the end of the Faubourg St-Germain they knew and loved. But the bookstore’s esteem was mostly in the abstract and the shop usually empty, while the new boutique is habitually mobbed, not just with Texan housewives and Japanese businessmen and Russian thugs, paying in cash—neat, crisp piles of freshly laundered money—for stacks of shirts and scarves and handbags, but also with the rich local residents. There are no poor ones.
This woman? She is smiling, a mouth full of perfectly aligned, brilliantly white teeth. It’s a familiar smile, paired with a familiar voice; but Kate still needs to see the eyes to confirm her worst suspicion.
There are brand-new cars from Southeast Asia that retail for less than this woman’s plaid jacket. Kate herself is well-dressed, in the understated style preferred by women of her type. This woman is operating under a different set of principles.
This woman is American, but she speaks with no regional accent. She could be from anywhere. She could be anyone.
“It’s me,” this woman says, removing her sunglasses, finally.
Kate instinctively takes a step back, stumbling against the sooty gray stone at the base of the building. The hardware on her handbag clanks alarmingly against the window’s glass.
Kate’s mouth hangs open, soundless.
Her first thought is of the children, a full-fledged panic coming on quickly. The essence of parenthood: immediate panic on the children’s behalf, always. This was the one part of the plan that Dexter never seriously considered: the compounded terror—the unconquerable anxiety—when there are children involved.
This woman was hiding behind sunglasses, and her hair is a new color in a new cut, and her skin tone is darker than it used to be, and she has put on ten pounds. She looks different. Even so, Kate is astounded that she didn’t recognize her at first glance, from the first syllable. Kate knows it’s because she didn’t want to.
“Oh my God!” she manages to sputter out.
Kate’s mind races, hurtling herself down the street and around a corner, through the heavy red door and the always-cool breezeway, under the portico that surrounds the courtyard and into the marble-floored lobby, up in the brass-caged elevator, into the cheery yellow foyer with the eighteenth-century drawing in the gilt frame.
This woman is holding her arms open, an invitation to a big American-style hug.
Rushing down the hallway to the far end, to the wood-paneled office with the rooftop-skimming views of the Eiffel Tower. Using the ornate brass key to open the bottom drawer of the antique desk.
And why not hug? They’re old friends, after all. Sort of. If anyone is watching, it might look suspicious if these two people didn’t hug. Or maybe it’d look suspicious if they did.
It hasn’t taken long to find herself thinking that people are watching. And that they always have been, all the time. It was only a few months ago that Kate had finally b
een able to imagine she was living a totally surveillance-free life.
Then inside the desk drawer: the double-reinforced steel box.
“What a surprise,” Kate says, which is both true and not.
Then inside the lockbox: the four passports with alternate identities for the family. And the thick bundle of cash doubled over with a rubber band, an assortment of large-denomination euros and British pounds and American dollars, new clean bills, her own version of laundered money.
“It’s so nice to see you.”
And wrapped in a light blue chamois cloth, the Beretta 92FS she bought from that Scottish pimp in Amsterdam.
PART I
1
TWO YEARS EARLIER, WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Luxembourg?”
“Yes.”
“Luxembourg?”
“That’s right.”
Katherine didn’t know how to react to this. So she decided on the default response, deflection via ignorance. “Where is Luxembourg?” Even as she was asking this disingenuous question, she regretted the decision.
“It’s in Western Europe.”
“I mean, is it in Germany?” She turned her eyes away from Dexter, from the shame at the hole she was digging for herself. “Switzerland?”
Dexter looked at her blankly, clearly trying—hard—to not say something wrong. “It’s its own country,” he said. “It’s a grand duchy,” he added, irrelevantly.
“A grand duchy.”
He nodded.
“You’re kidding.”
“It’s the only grand duchy in the world.”
She didn’t say anything.
“It’s bordered by France, Belgium, and Germany,” Dexter continued, unbidden. “They surround it.”
“No.” Shaking her head. “There’s no such country. You’re talking about—I don’t know—Alsace. Or Lorraine. You’re talking about Alsace-Lorraine.”
“Those places are in France. Luxembourg is a different, um, nation.”
“And what makes it a grand duchy?”
“It’s ruled by a grand duke.”
She redirected her attention to the cutting board, the onion in mid-mince, sitting atop the counter that was threatening to separate entirely from the warped cabinetry beneath it, pulled apart by some primordial force—water, or gravity, or both—and thereby pushing the kitchen over the brink from acceptably shabby to unacceptably crappy plus unhygienic and outright dangerous, finally forcing their hand on the full kitchen renovation that even after editing out every unnecessary upgrade and aesthetic indulgence would still cost forty thousand dollars that they didn’t have.
As a stopgap, Dexter had secured C-clamps to the corners of the counter, to prevent the slab of wood from sliding off the cabinetry. That was two months ago. In the meantime, these clumsily positioned clamps had caused Katherine to shatter a wineglass and, a week later, while slicing a mango, to bang her hand into a clamp, causing her knife to slip, the blade sliding silently into the meat of her left palm, bathing the mango and cutting board in blood. She’d stood at the sink, a dishrag pressed to her wound, blood dripping onto the ratty floor mat, spreading through the cotton fibers in the same pattern as that day in the Waldorf, when she should’ve looked away, but didn’t.
“And what’s a grand duke?” She wiped the onion-tears from her eye.
“The guy in charge of a grand duchy.”
“You’re making this up.”
“I’m not.” Dexter was wearing a very small smile, as if he might indeed be pulling her leg. But no, this smile was too small for that; this was the smile of Dexter pretending to pull a leg, while being dead serious. A feint of a fake smile.
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll bite: why would we move to Luxembourg?”
“To make a lot of money, and travel around Europe all the time.” And there it was, the full, unrestrained smile. “Just like we always dreamed.” The open look of a man who harbored no secrets, and didn’t admit the possibility that other people did. This was what Katherine valued above all else in her husband.
“You’re going to make a lot of money? In Luxembourg?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“They have a shortage of great-looking men. So they’re going to pay me a bucket-load for being incredibly handsome and staggeringly sexy.”
This was their joke; had been their joke for a decade. Dexter was neither notably good-looking nor particularly sexy. He was a classic computer nerd, gangly and awkward. He was not in reality bad-looking; his features were plain, an unremarkable amalgam of sandy hair and pointy chin and apple cheeks and hazel eyes. With the aid of a decent haircut and media training and possibly psychotherapy, he could become downright handsome. But he projected earnestness and intelligence, not physicality or sexuality.
This was what had originally appealed to Katherine: a man who was completely un-ironic, un-arch, un-bored, un-cool, un-studied. Dexter was straightforward, readable, dependable, and nice. The men in her professional world were manipulative, vain, ruthless, and selfish. Dexter was her antidote. A steady, unself-assuming, unfailingly honest, and plain-looking man.
He had long ago resigned himself to his generic looks and paucity of cool. So he emphasized his nerdiness, in the standard fashion: plastic glasses, frumpy and seemingly unchosen rumpled clothes, bed-heady hair. And he joked about his looks. “I’ll stand around in public places,” he continued. “Sometimes, when I get tired, I think I might sit. And just, y’know, be handsome.” He chortled, appreciating his own wit. “Luxembourg is the private-banking capital of the world.”
“And?”
“I just got offered a lucrative contract from one of those private banks.”
“How lucrative?”
“Three hundred thousand euros per year. Nearly a half-million dollars, at today’s exchange. Plus living expenses. Plus bonuses. The total could end up as high as maybe three-quarters of a million dollars.”
This was certainly a lot of money. More than she’d imagined Dexter would ever earn. Although he had been involved with the web since pretty much the beginning, he’d never had the drive or vision to get rich. He’d sat idly by, for the most part, while his friends and colleagues raised capital and took risks, went bankrupt or had IPOs, ended up flying around on private jets. But not Dexter.
“And down the line,” he continued, “who knows? Plus”—holding out his hands, telegraphing his coup de grâce—“I won’t even need to work that much.” Both of them had at one time been ambitious. But after ten years together and five with children, only Dexter sustained any modicum of ambition. And most of what remained was to work less.
Or so she’d thought. Now apparently he also aspired to get rich. In Europe.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“I know the size of the operation, its complexity, the type of transactions. Their security needs are not as intense as what I deal with now. Plus they’re Europeans. Everyone knows Europeans don’t work that hard.”
Dexter had never gotten rich, but he made decent money. And Katherine herself had risen steadily up the pay grades. Together they’d earned a quarter-million dollars last year. But with the mortgage, and the never-ending large-scale repairs to the small old house on the so-called emerging fringes of the supposedly rejuvenated Columbia Heights, and the private school—downtown D.C. was dicey, public-school-wise—and the two cars, they never had any money. What they had were golden handcuffs. But no, not golden: their handcuffs were bronze, at best; maybe aluminum. And their kitchen was falling apart.
“So we’ll be loaded,” Katherine said, “and we’ll be able to travel everywhere, and you’ll be with me and the boys? Or will you be away all the time?”
Over the previous two months Dexter had done an abnormal amount of travel; he was missing a lot of the family’s life. So at that moment, his business travel was a sore point. He’d just returned from a few days in Spain, a last-minute trip that had required her to cancel social plans, which were few and
far between, not to be canceled trivially. She didn’t have much of a social life, nor an abundance of friends. But it was more than none.
At one time, it had been Katherine’s business travel that was a serious issue. But soon after Jake was born, she had cut out her own travel almost entirely, and scaled back her hours drastically. Even under this newish regimen, she still rarely managed to get home before seven. The real time with her children was on weekends, wedged between food shopping and housecleaning and tumbling classes and everything else.
“Not much,” he said, inconclusively, nonspecifically. The evasion wasn’t lost on her.
“To where?”
“London. Zurich. Maybe the Balkans. Probably once a month. Twice.”
“The Balkans?”
“Sarajevo, maybe. Belgrade.”
Katherine knew that Serbia was one of the last places Dexter would want to visit.
“The bank has interests there.” He produced a half-shrug. “Anyway, travel won’t be a defining part of the job. But living in Europe will be.”
“Do you like Luxembourg?” she asked.
“I’ve been there only a couple times. I don’t have that great a sense of the place.”
“Do you have any sense? Because I obviously could’ve been wrong about what continent it’s on.” Once Katherine had begun this lie, she knew she’d have to play along with it fully. That was the secret to maintaining lies: not trying to hide them. It had always been disturbingly easy to lie to her husband.
“I know it’s rich,” Dexter said. “The highest per capita GDP in the world, some years.”
“That can’t be true,” she said, even though she knew it was. “That has to be an oil-producing country. Maybe the Emirates, or Qatar, or Kuwait. Not someplace that I thought, until five minutes ago, was a state in Germany.”
He shrugged.
“Okay. What else?”
“It’s … um … it’s small.”
“How small?”
“A half-million people live in the entire country. The size is Rhode Island–ish. But Rhode Island is, I think, bigger. A little.”
“And the city? There’s a city, isn’t there?”