by Chris Pavone
Other scenarios revolved around flight. But could these people really be fugitives?
Or of course the worst-case scenario: could they be in Luxembourg for Kate?
Only a single thread of her past could extend to the present, reaching out across five years and the Atlantic to yank her back, to wrap itself around her neck and strangle her.
Kate had always known that she hadn’t heard the last about Eduardo Torres. There were loose ends, unanswered questions; there was evidence. Plus no one had ever unearthed Torres’s fortune, which was widely believed to be tens of millions of dollars. The money was assumed to be squirreled away in a European numbered account.
And here Kate was, newly retired before forty, living in the world headquarters of numbered accounts, with a husband who was an unparalleled expert in the security of numbered accounts.
Kate looked awfully suspicious.
But so did Bill and Julia. She needed to dig deeper.
12
It was lightly drizzling, or misting, or whatever it’s called when minuscule bits of water, too fine to feel distinct drops, are drifting down out of the sky.
The wipers were on their slowest setting. Three seconds between swipes, during which the windshield clouded up, became almost too wet to see through, and then swoosh, clear again.
The ignition was ignited, the headlights lit, the tuner tuned to France Culture. Kate was having a tough time following the thread of the talk radio. The general subject seemed to be Baudelaire. Or at least Baudelaire was the word she recognized, repeated over and over. Or it could’ve been beau de l’aire they were talking about, perhaps some type of beautiful atmosphere. Which was sort of the opposite of Baudelaire.
A business card from a podiatrist was posed in the passenger seat. She could claim that she was early to her appointment. She’d say she had maybe a heel spur, wherein her heel hurt, but there was no exterior evidence that any non-physician could visually check. So she was sitting in her warm and dry car, trying to learn French by radio osmosis, listening to impassioned academics wage the obscure but apparently permanent Baudelaire war—what were the sides? what were the issues?—while she waited for whatever half-hour-on-the-dot was next. That’s when her pretend appointment was.
No, she would answer, she had no idea that Bill’s office was here. How could she? She’d memorized this address from the envelopes in his guest room.
Tall stone town houses were flush up against the sidewalk, with almost-gardens in front, tiny patches of grass, the stray denuded shrub. The buildings were gray or tan or putty; the sidewalk was paved in light gray concrete, the street in dark gray asphalt. The cars were shades of silver and gray and sometimes black; the sky a sodden slate. It was a colorless landscape, washed out by rain and the expectation of it, designed and constructed to match the dismal weather.
Kate had been sitting there for nearly an hour, and she still had more than three hours before she needed to be on her way to pick up the children. Three hours, and no one would know what she was doing, or where she was doing it, or for the love of God why.
Unless someone had tampered with her car, and for example installed a battery-operated GPS transmitter in the hollow under the supple gray leather of the passenger seat.
Bill emerged at 11:40. He looked both ways before descending the small staircase to the sidewalk. He had changed into tennis clothes, white shorts and a warm-up jacket with red and blue racing stripes down the sleeves. In this cold rain he looked comically incongruous, a Monty Python skit.
He hustled to his tidy little BMW, a plaything of a car. He gunned the engine, shifting gears aggressively, tearing through the quiet streets, on his way to a twelve o’clock court in Bel-Air. And then lunch. All with Dexter.
It had been Julia’s suggestion, proffered to Kate—“Don’t you think they should play during the day? So they could be with us at night?”—who in turn had passed it to Dexter. “It will do you good,” Kate had said, “to get some exercise.” In Washington, Dexter had exercised in the evenings. But now he was usually working after dark. And when he didn’t need to be working, Kate wanted him home, with the children. With her.
That’s how it came to pass that Kate had two luxurious hours when she knew Bill would not be in his office, at this building. So she waited another five minutes, to make sure he hadn’t forgotten his water bottle or can of balls, his cell phone or knee brace, anything; then she waited an extra five, just to be extra-sure. And to procrastinate.
She glanced at herself in the sun-visor mirror.
This was a bizarre moment: this crossing-over from a hypothetical plan to a concrete caper, giving in to what may turn out to be an utterly outlandish idea, possibly letting go of some important tether to sanity. Deciding yes: I will do this. But not deciding it 100 percent, because that would be admitting too much to herself, about herself, that she didn’t want to admit. But deciding it 95 percent, enough to take the possibly outlandish action, but not enough to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that this wasn’t just a goof, a lark, but an actual non-insane plan.
Kate pulled the brim of her new rubberized yellow rain cap as low as it would go. Her normal cap, bought in Copenhagen a month ago, was a vivid multicolor. There was a lot of attractive foul-weather gear in Scandinavia; there was a lot of foul weather. But today’s cap was a cheap something she bought yesterday, at a discount store in Gare. She would throw it away later today.
She picked up the envelope from the passenger seat, and wrote Bill’s building address on it; inside was a special offer from a bicycle shop, a 20 percent discount on any bike. She’d picked up this flyer at the bike shop yesterday, when she was still debating this possibly insane plan.
She got out of the car, tugged on her leather gloves, and walked across the street.
Of the five buzzers, the fifth was unlabeled. The first had a Luxembourgeois or German name; the second an easily pronounced French name, Dupuis; the third was Underwood. The fourth read WJM, S.A.
She wrote Underwood on the envelope.
She rang Bill’s bell. If someone unexpectedly answered, she’d claim she was looking for Underwood. But the only other activity she’d seen of this building was a dowager who’d left at eleven, carrying a folded-up shopping bag, and returned an hour later with the same bag, now looking far heavier than possible, the old woman listing to one side, tottering under the weight. Kate had watched her struggle up the slope of the street, an interminable climb, while the woman’s mouth constantly moved, her lips pursing, her cheeks dimpling: the contortions of a native French speaker, keeping the facial muscles toned for all those nasal vowels that can be properly pronounced only with strong lips. This must have been Mme. Dupuis.
Kate rang again. There didn’t seem to be any security cameras here at this door. But these days, cameras could be anywhere. She kept her eyes well below the brim of the cap.
She rang Dupuis.
“Booooooooon-jourrrrrrr!” Yes, that was the voice of the old lady.
“Bonjour, madame,” Kate answered. “J’ai une lettre pour Underwood, mais il ne repond pas. La lettre, elle est très importante.”
“Ouuuuiiiiii, mademoisselllllllllle.”
The old woman buzzed. Kate pushed open the windowed door, then let it swing shut of its own accord; it closed with a noticeable rattling of the window.
Kate climbed the stairs, turned a corner, and saw Mme. Dupuis waiting at her door.
“Merci, madame,” Kate said.
“De rien, mademoisselllllllllle. Au deuxième étagggggggge.”
Kate climbed to the second floor, pushed the envelope under the Underwood door, then hustled down the stairs. She opened the front door, let it rattle closed. But she stayed inside. She stood still for a minute. Then she crept back up the stairs.
As she was rounding the corner toward the second flight, she heard voices, a man and a woman. Damn. Kate spun her head around: nowhere to hide. She could run to the basement, but what if they were going down to the garage
? If there’s one thing Kate didn’t want, it was to be caught hiding.
She would bluff her way past them. She turned the corner, and started climbing the stairs. As the couple turned into the stairwell, Kate glanced up, feigning surprise, smiling. “Bonjour,” she said.
“Bonjour,” the man said. He was echoed quietly by the woman. The pair waited at the top of the narrow stairwell, allowing Kate to pass.
“Est-ce que je peux vous aider?” the man asked.
Kate returned a blank stare, even though she knew exactly what he was asking.
“Can I ’elp you?” he tried in English.
“Oh!” Kate smiled. “No, thank you. I’m visiting Bill Maclean?”
The man gave her a tight grin; the woman remained silent.
Kate brushed past them. “Merci!”
Her heart was racing. And this would be the easy part.
BILL’S OFFICE WAS on the top floor, one of two doors in a short, well-lit hall; the first door was unlabeled. She tried his door, but of course it didn’t open. She walked to the window at the end of the hall, and turned the handle to open It—all the windows in Luxembourg worked the same way, with side hinges and top hinges.
She swung open this window, leaned out, surveyed the windows and ledges, possible means of entry. Evergreens shielded the view from the neighboring building.
Kate retreated through the stone-tiled hall. There was a mat at Bill’s door, the name of his company on a brass plaque, a buzzer. There were three locks, and one of them looked like a doozy. The lighting came from two upward-facing sconces, and the big uncurtained window. Nothing in this hall was immediately apparent to be a security camera.
She knelt at his door. She reached into her back pocket and took out a small leather pouch, well-worn covers bound by a no-nonsense rubber band, holding an assortment of miniature screwdrivers and rubber-handled pins and needle-nose pliers. She set to work intently with the tiny tools in her fingers, her face just inches away. She wouldn’t bother with the two easy locks—low-grade pieces of security, more deterrents than preventatives—unless she could pick the high-end one.
While it was true that she had privacy up here on the top floor, and the luxury of uninterruptable time, she didn’t have forever. And lock-picking had never been an area of particular expertise for her. Locks were not an important part of the Latin American experience—anything worth locking was worth guarding with a live armed body.
What had been important in her line of work were maps, which she was expert in reading. And guns, which she was expert in cleaning, repairing, and firing. She’d needed to master a variety of Spanish dialects, with special emphasis on slang, especially the many vulgar words for genitalia. She’d grown up in a declining city in coastal Connecticut that was undergoing a massive influx of Latin Americans. She’d had plenty of opportunity to learn gutter Spanish, on the streets, as well as proper Spanish, in her own home, from the low-paid babysitters whom Kate’s parents had been able to afford for after-school care, back when she and her sister were still innocent little girls, released from first or third grades at three o’clock into the waiting arms of short, round women named Rosario and Guadelupe.
It had been sporadically necessary for Kate to pilot civilian helicopters and propeller planes. She’d learned how to do both, but not exhaustively, in addition to the standard-issue paramilitary training that she’d undergone during her months on the Farm.
She’d tasted, tested, and snorted small quantities of cocaine from different geographical areas, as well as smoked a sampling of the hemisphere’s marijuana. She knew what it would feel like if someone slipped her a roofie or a dose of LSD.
She could memorize any number up to ten digits long, after hearing it once.
She could kill a person.
But what she couldn’t do was pick this lock, and she didn’t want to waste time on a lost cause.
She approached the second door, the unmarked one. The same brass handle as Bill’s, the same buzzer. No plaque, no mat. She reached up to the molding that surrounded the door frame, and ran her finger slowly along the half-inch-wide horizontal surface up there, hoping to find a key to this uninhabited space. No such luck.
She stood stock-still, listening for noises.
Nothing.
Kate set to work quickly but calmly on this lock, an easy one. Within thirty seconds the off-the-shelf apparatus clicked quietly open.
She entered a large, dusty, empty room with one window. She opened the window, and leaned out. As expected, there they were: the windows to Bill’s office. In between was a narrow ledge that ran across the bottom of all the windows. This could be done; she’d done something like this before. She took a deep breath and climbed out the window.
KATE STOOD ON the nine-inch-wide ledge in the rain, clinging to the side of the building, three stories above the ground.
There was a lot that could go wrong here. One was that someone would see her through the thick stand of evergreens that separated this building from its neighbor, so she had to move quickly.
Another was that she could fall and die, so she had to move carefully.
She side-shuffled a few inches at a time, her face pressed up against the damp stucco.
She heard a sound behind her and below. She turned her head too fast and too carelessly, and scraped her cheek against the wall. The sound was a tree limb brushing against the roof of a car.
It now felt like her cheek was bleeding, but there was no way to check. She couldn’t get either hand up to her face without losing balance.
She kept going, another few inches, and another, staying balanced, steady, slowly … and another few inches … and then she was there, at the sill to Bill’s window.
Kate paused, allowed herself a few seconds of respite before moving on to the next task.
She was scared, but she felt comfortable with her fear, like the strange pleasure of rubbing a sore muscle, which doesn’t accomplish anything except make you more aware of the pain.
This is where she belonged, up here on this ledge. This is what had been missing from her life.
She removed the tiny flat-head screwdriver from her tight back pocket. She ran it alongside the seam of the window, carefully, smoothly, until she found the catch.
She paused, then gently pulled the screwdriver up.
The lock didn’t release.
She tried again, pulling even more gently.
Again, nothing.
Kate willed herself not to panic, in this panic-worthy predicament. Yet more slowly, she ran the thin, sharp head between the jamb and the frame.
She’d practiced this, on her own window. In the middle of the night, when no one could see. It had taken her twenty minutes, out on that sill, forty feet above the cobblestoned path, but she’d finally figured out how to move a screwdriver up against the catch, and rotate the head ever so slightly, to not only release the catch but also to unlock the window so it would swing open on the vertical hinge, not tilt open on the horizontal.
This window mechanism was the same as her own; they were all the same.
She’d practiced. This had to work.
This had to work.
She tried again, slowly, slowly, gently … click.
Kate applied pressure with her knee into the hinge side of the window, and the whole panel swung open slowly. She crouched on the sill, her hands flat against the exterior stucco for balance. She paused, then dove forward into the room, breaking her fall with her hands, rolling softly over yet another polished stone floor, large marble tiles, just like everywhere else in Luxembourg.
She lay still, catching her breath, trying to slow her racing heart. She’d expected that her pulse would accelerate, but this was too much; this was more than she could remember in a long, long time.
Kate shouldn’t continue while in such a thorough state of panic; she didn’t want to make any stupid mistakes. She closed her eyes and lay still, willing her body to calm itself.
Then she stood and
looked around.
ON THE FAR side of the room was an exercise bike, parked in front of a small television; also a weight bench and a collection of dumbbells, barbells, and plates, all on a rubberized mat.
There was a desk with a laptop computer, a printer-scanner, a telephone, a scratch pad, a few ballpoints. Some sheets had been torn off the pad. Kate removed the topmost remaining sheet, folded it, put it in her backpack; she’d examine the paper later.
The laptop was open but asleep. She pressed a key to wake it up.
This computer is locked. Please enter your user ID and password. No sense even trying.
Inside the desk, language dictionaries, more pads and pens. Files hung in a drawer made for hanging files: bank records. A few different accounts, with money flowing back and forth among them, a few hundred thousand total, the sums moving up and down, down and up, over and over, the cycle of investments and dividends, withdrawals and transfers.
The name was Bill’s, the address this apartment’s.
There were magazines, journals, newsletters. General-interest business, and specialized business, and technology, and news. Stacks of them. Kate reached into a pile and pulled out an issue of The Economist. All the paper smooth, unruffled, un-dripped-upon with coffee, un-ring-stained by a water glass. Unread, maybe. Or maybe read neatly, without sloppy spillage of beverages. Bill seemed like a neat guy.
Kate leaned back in the swivel chair, looking around without focus while her mind drifted, trying to stumble upon what she should be looking for.
There was a small bedroom. Queen-sized bed, made up sloppily. Soft sheets. Four standard pillows and a large sham. Another spare bed, rumpled. Who sleeps here?
In the drawer of a bedside table, a box of condoms. A depleted box that once held two dozen prophylactics, with only a handful remaining. Who screws here?
Kate lay down next to the condom drawer but kept her feet off to the side, not sullying the sheets. She pressed her face against the top pillow. It smelled like shaving cream, or aftershave or cologne. It smelled like Bill.
