by Chris Pavone
She reached her hand out to the bedside table, around back of it, feeling … feeling … nothing there. She slid her hand underneath the table, patting down the particleboard of another piece of Ikea furniture … nothing.
She bent her arm, reached her hand under the bed, under the wooden slats that supported the mattress … and there she felt something, leather … and she moved her hand a few inches …
Kate yanked, knowing exactly what she was pulling out to the side of the bed, then up in front of her. She could see through the bedroom door in a direct sight line to the front door, where, without even intending to, she was now instinctually aiming the Glock 22 that Bill kept in a holster taped to the underside of this bed.
PART II
TODAY, 12:02 P.M.
Kate stands in the French doors of the sitting room, rugs piled upon rugs, high ceilings, wedding-cake moldings, shelves filled with books and bowls, vases with cut flowers, ornate frames for small oil paintings, distressed gilt-edged mirrors.
This thing has been bothering her, rooting around in her subconscious, bumping against the facts and suppositions down amid the foundations of her current beliefs about her life, her husband, how their history came to pass. This thing knocks against memories, forcing her to reexamine them, from the new vantage of another possible explanation to everything. Something about college …
Kate strides across her living room to the oversize books, bunched together on an extra-tall shelf. She pulls down Dexter’s yearbook. She takes a seat on the settee, the book heavy in her lap.
She thumbs the corners, following alphabetical order, then opens the book prematurely, turning one page and another, until she finds a much younger version of Dexter Moore. The puffy haircut, skinny tie, unlined forehead.
She’s now become convinced that she will indeed find what she’s looking for.
That duplicitous bastard.
Kate heard the name only once, nearly two years ago, in Berlin. She’s almost positive that it ends in owski, which will help her confirm, when she eventually finds the right face.
She turns to the beginning of the head shots, last names beginning with A. She closely examines each image, all these two-decade-old pictures, girls and boys who are now men and women, her age. Page after page, patiently. Suddenly this thing seems so obvious, so inevitable.
It doesn’t take her long to find it. Not long at all. Except of course the two years that she didn’t know she was looking for it.
Now, a total paradigm shift. All the pieces of the puzzle are moving, swirling, disorienting. Kate had been under the impression that she’d solved this puzzle long ago.
She gazes down at the familiar face staring back at her, the optimistic look of a college senior, posing for posterity.
The possible explanations are bombarding Kate, machine-gun fire, too heavy to evade, nothing to do but hide and wait till it subsides, and she can come up for air.
Kate catches sight of movement across the sitting room, quickly realizes that it’s herself, a small tuft of her hair in the mirror on the far wall, a tiny corner of herself moving, detached from the whole invisible part. She stands, carries the heavy book back to its unremarkable space on a shelf in the middle of her family room, in the middle of her family’s life. The best hiding spots are not the most hidden; they’re merely the least searched.
Now that Kate possesses this new information, now that the yearbook has given up its secret, now that Kate recognizes this new reality, she feels unparalleled betrayal. But she also feels new options presenting themselves. New doors opening. She can’t make out what’s beyond these doors, but she can see the light streaming through.
This has changed everything.
13
Kate was annoyed with Dexter. It had taken him too long to increase the cruise-control setting to 160 kilometers per hour, up from the default 130 of the speedometer’s red line. But still, at a hundred miles per hour on the A8, half the cars on the road were going faster.
She was annoyed with the children in the backseat, complaining about the mediocre movie on the portable DVD player that kept toppling over whenever Dexter took a turn too sharply, causing them to shriek.
But mostly Kate was annoyed with herself. She was obsessing about all the mistakes she’d made. Her shoe print in the mud; her muddy footprints in the dust of the vacant next-door suite; her moist footprints on the clean floors of Bill’s. Her hair and skin fibers in his bed—maybe actual hairs on his pillow, just lying there in high relief, begging to be picked up, examined, DNA-mapped. What other moronic mistakes could she have made?
She’d even scraped her face, a splotchy raspberry on the cheekbone. The injury was easily explained to Dexter—a mishap in the garage, while unloading groceries—but nevertheless suspicious. Not to mention careless and stupid.
She’d behaved like a goddamned amateur.
Plus there’d been the two neighbors on the stairs, as well as old Mme. Dupuis. Witnesses, easily findable; practically inevitable.
Kate watched the unremarkable German countryside roll by. The Saar Valley, hulking industry and glass-and-steel office parks scattered among thick rolling forest, with big-box stores and auto dealerships snug against the autobahn, smokestacks and warehouses and access roads converging at traffic-choked intersections.
This had been the messiest mission of her career. But this wasn’t her career anymore, was it? She’d resigned three months ago.
ROTHENBURG OB DER TAUBER in the biting cold, half-timber everywhere, painted facades, lace curtains, beer halls, sausage shops, an immense Christmas market, medieval fortifications, stone walls with arches and turrets. Another version of a fairy tale, another postcard of a place. Another town-hall tower to climb, entertainment for little boys: going high or going fast. The stairs—how many? Two hundred? Three?—wound around the increasingly narrow walls of the tower, worn and uneven and rickety. At the top, they had to pay a guy, semiofficial, with a missing eye. The children couldn’t stop staring.
Then they were outside on a tight catwalk, in a gusting, biting wind, high above the town square and the streets that radiated out to the city walls and the countryside, the river, the hills and trees of Bavaria. Dexter pulled down the earflaps of his hat, a red plaid hunting cap lined with rabbit fur, something Kate had bought him for Christmas a half-decade ago.
Kate looked down at the market stalls, the tops of the tourists’ heads, ski caps and green felt fedoras, laughably easy to kill.
So what if the Macleans were assassins? What was her responsibility? This was not her job, not her problem. They were not going to kill her, or Dexter. So what business was it of hers? None.
And if they’d come to Luxembourg to kill someone, who?
And who were they? They certainly weren’t Mob; there was no way that Julia, at least, was in organized crime. They weren’t Islamic militants. They had to be American operatives of some sort. Maybe they were Company, or Army Special Forces, or Marines black ops? Private contractors? Were they in Europe to do the dirty work of covert American foreign policy? To assassinate someone who came to Luxembourg to hide ill-begotten money—a Ukrainian oligarch, a Somali warlord, a Serbian smuggler?
And what did she care about the irrelevancies of dirty money?
Or was it someone whose death would be more immediately relevant to American interests? A North Korean diplomat? An Iranian envoy? A Latin president with a Marxist agenda?
Or were they merely hired guns on a civilian mission, a grudge, a corporate intrigue? A CEO? A bank president? A private banker who’d embezzled a fortune from a now very angry billionaire?
Maybe it was something utterly convoluted. Maybe they were going to assassinate an American—the secretary of the treasury? of state?—then frame it on a Cuban or Venezuelan or Palestinian, create the excuse to grandstand, to retaliate, to invade.
There were so many people to be assassinated for so many reasons.
Here a few hundred feet above Germany, she felt like Cha
rles Whitman atop the observation deck in Austin, figuring out whom to pick off with a rifle.
Even though she’d made an unconscionable number of mistakes, it had still felt good out there at Bill’s window; it felt like that’s where she belonged. Not in a sports-center basement, talking about the loyalty programs of grocery stores. But out on a ledge, without a net.
Kate was increasingly convinced that she was never going to be a happy stay-at-home mom. If there was such a thing.
“Come on,” she said to her family, eager to move on, to control what she could. Dexter was snapping pictures of the shivering children, bundled against the cold, red-faced and runny-nosed. “It’s freezing up here.”
“I’LL SEE YOU back at the hotel at six.”
“Okay,” Dexter said, meeting Kate’s kiss but barely glancing at her; it was just a pursing of the lips, not even a proper perfunctory peck. He was sitting on a window ledge, on the ground floor of the science museum.
Kate now had her four hours of liberty. Some of the mums in Luxembourg called this “being let out,” like a high-strung terrier released through the kitchen door into the fenced-in yard. They went together, little groups of three or four women without husbands or kids, to London or Paris or Florence: forty-eight hours to shop and drink and eat, perhaps to meet a stranger in a bar and, under cover of a false name and inebriation, take him back to her hotel room for as much and as varied sex as possible before it was time to kick him out and order room-service breakfast. Suited and booted.
Kate made her way through the cold hurrying lunchtime crowds of downtown Munich, through the food vendors in the Viktualmarkt, the town-square Marienplatz and its Rathaus glockenspiel, the pedestrian-only high streets—was there a single city left on the continent without an H&M and a Zara?—and up to ritzy Maximillianstraße, leading away from the opera, as ritzy streets do, sprouting fur coats and fur hats, giant sedans idling at the curbs with liveried drivers behind the wheels, boutiques manned by multilingual salesgirls conversant in the vocabulary of silk and leather in English and French and Russian, neatly packing sturdy, recognizable little shopping bags.
Kate strolled into an opulent hotel lobby, and found a pay phone, and dropped in coins, and dialed the number that she’d lifted from Bill’s office, 352 country code first; she imagined the number would be a local Luxembourg one. The piece of paper she’d stolen had been blank, but bore the imprint of what had been written on the prior sheet, easily retrieved with the side of a pencil tip, lightly brushed.
She was correct. “Hello,” the woman answered, in American, “this is Jane.” Upper Midwest accent, mildly familiar, though Kate couldn’t picture the owner of it. “Hello?”
Kate didn’t want to risk this woman recognizing her voice.
“Hello?”
Kate hung up. So: Bill was calling an American woman in Luxembourg named Jane. Kate had the definite sense that this was sexual. A sense heightened by being alone in this sexy, swanky hotel, the possibility of taking the elevator upstairs, opening a door to …
Of course it would be Bill. Now more than ever, now that she knew he was dangerous. He was a criminal, or a cop, or maybe, like many people she’d come across, he was both. He was handsome and sexy and charming, and brave, and he kept a gun under the bed where he had sex with women who weren’t his wife. Women perhaps like Kate.
She left the hotel, trotted across the street to a taxi stand, climbed into one. “Alte Pinakothek, danke,” she said. She looked out every window, in all directions, satisfied that no one was following. Even so, she asked the driver to pull over on Ludwigstraße.
“Is half-kilometer to museum,” he said.
“Is good,” she said, handing over ten euros. “I want to walk.”
Up ahead, the university Metro station beckoned with the lights and movement of the bars and shops and restaurants that cluster at subway stops everywhere. But the sidewalks near Kate were unpeopled. She walked past the thick, forbidding stone buildings, the wind whipping around corners, freeze-burning her ears and nose.
Kate was excited but in control. She felt good again, as she had out on that ledge, her pulse quickened, walking purposefully through unfamiliar foreign streets, all her senses attuned, her mind sharp. People had written her off when she’d left the Directorate of Operations to become an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence. When she’d taken herself out of the field, out of the danger. When she’d written herself off, sitting in a comfortable chair behind a smooth desk.
Again she felt a tingle, her libido coming alive with the rest of her sensory input.
Suddenly, perversely, she blamed Dexter for her attraction to Bill. If Dexter were around more, if he were more attentive in every way—in any way: if he said thank you more, or called once in a while to do something other than say he wasn’t coming home, or fucked her more frequently or more passionately or more creatively, or if he would just fold a single goddamned load of laundry—then maybe she wouldn’t be walking down this street, fantasizing about getting into that bed with the gun strapped to the bottom.
This was all nonsense, she knew. Transference of her own guilt onto an innocent party, an excuse to be angry at someone who wasn’t herself. She told herself to focus.
She traversed the windswept plaza in front of the Old Picture Gallery with not another person in sight. The crisscrossing paths created oversized angled shapes of grass, giant geometry, punctuated by far-flung metal sculptures, bordered by leafless trees. It seemed to get colder as she approached the imposing building; its arched windows looked lightless within. She felt as if she were going to a mysterious court, presided by an omniscient judge.
Off to see the Wizard. She’d attempted to show the movie to the boys, giving into Jake’s insistence. But both children fled the room within the first ten minutes, terrified.
Kate paid for her ticket and declined the audio tour; she held on to her handbag and coat. She climbed the stairs, wide and airy expanses of gleaming marble, step after step. She began at the beginning, with the Early Dutch and then Early German Painting, not particularly interested. She moved into the big galleries filled with oversize works by blockbuster artists—Raphael, Botticelli, da Vinci. A pair of Japanese tourists were in here, as everywhere, engrossed in their headsets, cameras dangling.
A man alone, his wool overcoat draped over his arm, stood in front of a da Vinci Virgin and Child.
The sun was skimming the southern skyline of downtown Munich, casting distinct rays through the massive windows. She checked her watch: 3:58.
Kate moved into the gallery in the dead center of the building, packed with big Rubens canvases. The Death of Seneca, the philosopher surprisingly buff. The Lion Hunt, brutal, barbaric. And the biggest, The Great Last Judgment, a heaping pile of naked humanity, being judged from above by Christ, in turn judged from above by His Father.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?”
She glanced at the man from the other room, overcoat over arm, wearing a sport jacket and necktie and pocket square, flannel trousers, and suede shoes. Horn-rimmed glasses, carefully groomed silver hair. He was tall and slender, looked like he could’ve been anywhere between forty-five and sixty years old.
“Yes.” She turned her eyes back to the massive canvas.
“It was commissioned for an altar in Neuburg an der Donau—the Danube, to Yanks like us—Upper Bavaria. But the people—the priests, that is—weren’t crazy about all this nudity.” A flick of the hand at the painted flesh. “So the painting hung in the church for only a few decades, often covered, hidden from view, before they got rid of it.”
“Thanks,” she said. “That’s interesting.”
She looked around the room. No one else here. She could see a security guard in one of the adjoining galleries, keeping a close eye on a family with a pair of young children, schoolboys, a whiff of wildness coming off them, menaces to museums, to the weltanschauung of a German museum guard.
“Actually, it’s only semi-interesting. No
t more than a four. A generous four.”
The man laughed. “Good to see you, my dear.”
“And you. It’s been a long time.”
14
“So are you still enjoying Munich?” Kate asked. “It’s been forever, hasn’t it?”
Hayden let out another burst of laughter. He had indeed been in Europe forever, his whole career. He’d been in Hungary and Poland for the thick meat of the late Cold War. Here in Germany—Bonn, Berlin, Hamburg—for the arms buildup under Reagan, the ascent of Gorbachev, the collapse of the USSR, the post-Soviet readjustments, German reunification. He was in Brussels for the birth of the EU, the dissolution of borders, the euro. Back to Germany when the whole continent started to respond to the influx of Muslims, the reassertion of reactionary forces, the reemergence of nationalism … Hayden had arrived in Europe at the Berlin Wall’s midlife; it had now been gone for two decades.
Kate had arrived at the Company with the Wall already down. Latin America was the future—our hemisphere, our borders—even though the Sandinistas had been defeated and Clinton was making noise about normalizing with Castro. It didn’t seem at the time that she was walking into that book in the middle of the final chapter. It just seemed like the middle, with the ugliness of the Iran-Contra debacle behind them, the abstractness of the Communist threat dissolved. The future would be concrete, action-oriented, home-turf-relevant results.
And it was. But little by little, year after year, Kate felt herself—her sphere within her directorate—becoming increasingly pointless, a sinking feeling of inefficacy that was hyper-accelerated on September 11, when it could not have mattered less who was in the ascendancy for mayor of Puebla. Although the CIA as an institution rededicated its mission on September 12, Kate as an operations officer never recovered her sense of relevancy. Or irrelevancy.
