by Chris Pavone
She hit the button with the green arrow, and waited …
“Code bon.”
The lock clicked. She exhaled, and pushed open the door.
Another man’s private office, private room, secret from real wives, pretend ones. Papers in here. Framed pictures, Kate and the boys, singularly and in groups. Even a wedding picture, a black-and-white, an unfamiliar print, something she didn’t even know he possessed, much less had framed and shipped across an ocean and hung on his secret wall. It relieved her, this picture, this proof of something good.
A desk, a desktop computer, a phone, a complicated-looking calculator, a printer. All the normal stuff, pens and a stapler, file folders and Post-its, paper clips and binder clips.
Bookshelves filled with file boxes, big handwritten labels on their fronts, TECH and BIOMED and MFTG and REAL EST DERIV. Piles of newspapers, The Financial Times and Institutional Investor.
She didn’t understand what this stuff was. No—she understood what it was, but didn’t understand why it was here.
Kate sat in the swivel chair, tall and ergonomic, breathable mesh and adjustable height. She looked at the display screen and keyboard and mouse and speakers and headphones and external drive and an odd track pad.
She pressed the power button, and listened to the hum, and watched the screen flash. At the prompt, she entered the user name and password, holding her breath, again worrying that the laptop and the desktop wouldn’t share the same security, but then again insisting to herself that they should.
They did.
The screen blinked from black to white, the hard drive hummed, and a dialog box opened, a red exclamation point, an instruction: AWAITING THUMBPRINT.
Kate looked at the odd pad on the desk, and understood it, defeated again.
She powered down the computer.
Kate stood at the bookshelf, pulling out the contents of file boxes, paging through the thick sheaves of professionally printed earnings reports, prospectuses, investor-relation brochures, shareholder-meetings minutes, glossy paper and multicolored pie charts and stock histories, x and y axes, big boastful numbers in bottom right-hand corners, measured in hundreds of millions, thousands of millions.
There were letter-size spreadsheets and graphs, annotated and folded, dog-eared and corrected. Numbers circled, arrows drawn. Margin notations scrawled.
This office? This was not the office of a security specialist. This was the workplace of an investment banker. Or a fund manager, or a financial adviser. This stuff belonged to someone who did something other than what her husband did; this room was inhabited by someone who was not her husband.
Kate looked again around the room, her eye running across the well-aligned tops of framed photos, to the windows facing out onto the slow-moving traffic, the office building across the street, similarly ugly but from a different architectural fad. Then she caught sight of her reflection, and the reflection distracted her from the real view, and she let her eye wander around the reflected room, the backward office, inverse-world, the corners at their opposites, and in one of them, in one of the corners was a thing, up there where two walls met a ceiling, and she spun around, panicked, panicked, at first turning to the wrong corner, then finding the correct corner, the thing, she took a single step to it, then another, and she realized—she confirmed—that the thing she was looking at, up there in the corner, that thing, a device, it was also looking down at her, a coin-sized piece of glass, encased in plastic.
A video camera.
FORTY MINUTES LATER and she was sitting in her car, waiting for three o’clock, again. The trifling rain had become a steady downpour, unignorable, frigid.
She watched the other mothers scurrying onto campus, gripping umbrellas, clutching raincoats closed against their bodies, water flowing off nylon and leather and rubberized canvas. Some of them were pushing infants and babies, in car seats and strollers, through the freezing deluge. How awful.
Because of the rain, the swarm was more concentrated around the precise turn of the hour. On nicer days, the women arrived on a staggered schedule, beginning as early as two thirty. On nicer days, it was less noticeable that they were a herd.
That video camera.
Kate couldn’t last a full minute without her mind returning to that camera. When would Dexter check the footage? Was the video streaming to a server, monitored by someone—who?—regularly? Or was the surveillance being recorded? Could Dexter check remotely, from London? Or would he have to wait until he returned to Luxembourg, to the physical office, which wouldn’t be for another two weeks, after New Year’s?
Were all those paper files even his property? Or were they owned by his client, whoever that was? Perhaps the security camera was the client’s as well? Perhaps the whole nonsensical contents of that office weren’t really Dexter’s?
Kate climbed out of her car full of unanswerable questions, into the rain, falling into step, joining the herd, turning onto campus just as the first children were being released through the garage-like glass-and-steel doors, stomping in the puddles, free, oblivious to the awfulness of the weather. Oblivious in general.
When exactly would she get caught? And by whom?
KATE KEPT RETURNING to the phrase benefit of the doubt. She should give it to Dexter; he should give it to her. This should be in wedding vows. More important than richer or poorer, sickness and health, have and hold, parting at death. Benefit of the doubt.
How could she explain? What rationale could she give him for why she stalked him to his office, stole his keys, broke in, snooped around?
Maybe she could maintain the farce that his keys had fallen in the trunk. Maybe she could claim that when he’d given her the codes over the phone, she couldn’t resist.
Or maybe she could go on the aggressive: she could blame her invasive curiosity on his excessive secrecy. If you had told me anything, she could say, anything whatsoever, then maybe I wouldn’t have felt the need. Your fault, she could accuse. You made me do it.
But how—how?—could she explain why she knew where his office was?
And, flipping the whole damned thing around, what could his explanation be?
He could be doing exactly what he claimed: he was a security consultant for a bank, and he worked exclusively electronically. All his work, all his information, was on the computer that she couldn’t access. Nothing professional was on paper. All that paper in his office? That was spare-time paper, amateur-hobby paper.
Or? Or what?
Dexter was definitely adding a consistent amount of money to their checking account every month, and not withdrawing anything abnormal. Someone was paying him to do something. Who?
And then of course there was the non-coincidence that Julia and Bill were FBI tasked to Interpol, in all likelihood investigating either herself or Dexter. Why?
Kate felt like she’d lived for so long when no one knew the truth about her, about who she was. Now the tables were turned, and all these people were arrayed on the other side, unknown, unknowable. What she did know, unfortunately, was that she had to reconsider everything she’d ever willed herself to believe about her husband.
She leaned over the boys, reaching across their laps to secure their seat belts, the hard cold metal of the buckles chilling her skin, the sharp edges digging into her flesh.
Of course, Dexter could be completely innocent. There could be the explanations she’d already thought of, or ones she couldn’t imagine, for his office. And the guilty one would be herself. She was Interpol’s target. The crime was Torres.
She climbed into the driver’s seat.
What she couldn’t figure out was how that old event would tie into any current investigation. There was either five-year-old evidence against her, or there wasn’t. But nothing about her life in Luxembourg was even tangentially relevant to what had happened in New York, the thing she’d tried hardest to bury. The thing that made her understand that she could no longer be an operations officer. Made her realize that she was n
o longer strong enough and rational enough to maintain objectivity. To separate her parental panics from her professional responsibilities. She could no longer trust herself to behave correctly; she could no longer be trusted. She had to resign. So she’d resigned.
But quitting didn’t change what she’d already done. The piece of her past that she’d never be able to outrun.
19
The ambassador stood at the rear of the entry hall, beside a round table with an oversize vase packed with a towering assortment of flowers, branches and limbs and fronds and blooms sprouting willy-nilly in all colors, shapes, and sizes. It was an utterly anarchical arrangement. A non-arrangement.
“Welcome,” he said, “I’m Joseph Williams,” extending his hand to Dexter. “And this is my wife, Lorraine. So pleased you could join us for our annual Christmas party.”
They all shook hands, two sets of two, crossing in an awkward X, awkward chuckles.
“Of course,” said the wife to Kate, “we’ve met.” She winked, as if they shared a secret, a history. But there was nothing to it; this woman was just one of those winkers.
“Of course,” Kate said, vaguely remembering a coffee morning, maybe at school. There had been so many. Coffee everywhere, all the time.
“So, Dexter?” the ambassador asked. “You new here?”
“Nearly four months.”
“Why, that’s an eternity in Luxembourg, isn’t it?” The ambassador shook with laughter at his own joke, which wasn’t really a joke, and wasn’t funny. “We’ve been here two years, feels like twenty. Isn’t that right, dear?” The ambassador didn’t wait for an answer, didn’t expect one. He put his hand solicitously on Dexter’s shoulder. “You settling in okay?”
Dexter nodded, visibly tired. He’d just arrived from London an hour earlier. He still hadn’t returned to his office since Kate had let herself in, looked around, been caught on candid camera. And he wouldn’t have that opportunity for another week and a half. They were leaving for Geneva in the morning.
“Good, good,” the ambassador said. “Well, we’re so glad you could come tonight. We have so few chances to gather the whole American community. Please, get yourself something to drink. The crémant is flowing freely.” He laughed again, red-faced and moist-looking, at another unfunny comment. He was either drunk or an idiot. Possibly both.
Kate and Dexter took their polite leave as another couple arrived, the blast of cold from the door, the booming voice of the ambassador’s forced jocularity following them into a sitting room, fussy furniture and precious bric-a-brac, little brass statues and plaques, etched glass and inlaid mahogany, a surfeit of throw pillows on striped-silk upholstery.
“Well, hello there.” Amber walked up with another woman, who Kate remembered was from somewhere in the U.S. totally unexpected. Oklahoma? She talked about church a lot. And described everything as super-something. She was super-psyched to have bought this super-cute blouse at this super-trendy store.
“Hi,” the woman said, too loudly. She stumbled, sloshing wine. “Oops!”
“Jesus,” Dexter whispered in Kate’s ear. “When did this party start? Yesterday?”
“I’m Mrrnda,” the woman said to Dexter. “Please-a-meecha.”
“Miranda?” Dexter asked.
“ ’S’right.”
“Nice to meet you. How’s the crémant?”
“Super-tasty.”
Kate looked around the room at this sea of mostly unfamiliar faces. This party was dominated by the sizable contingent who’d circled around themselves as Americans, exclusionary, flag-pin-wearing. Behaving as if they hadn’t chosen to live in Europe, but had been moved against their wills, and were putting up a brave resistance. Freedom fighters.
Kate, on the other hand, had made the decision to try to be friends with the non-Americans, with all the other people of the world she could meet in Europe. Somehow, though, Julia had happened. Had snuck in, around the perimeter. As if on a mission.
A waiter appeared with a silver platter of rolled-up ham. Everyone shook their heads, rejecting him and his cured meat.
Kate saw Julia in the next room, examining the commemorative photos that lined the wall. Kate scanned for Bill, her eyes skimming the peaks and valleys of the few dozen heads surrounding a buffet table and a bar. He was off in the far corner, next to a pretty woman who appeared to be seething at him, giving him the business at low volume. Bill looked marginally contrite; he looked like he was pretending to be contrite.
Jane, that was the pretty woman’s name. Plain Jane, who wasn’t so plain, wearing a beautiful green dress, slinky and low cut, shoulders bare. She was some type of officer in the American Women’s Club, her husband second-in-command—or something like it—here at the embassy. An alpha American couple.
Now Kate understood: Jane was the woman whom Kate had called from Munich, testing the phone number that she’d pilfered from Bill’s office. Kate had been to Jane’s house, for a coffee morning. That was where she’d met the ambassador’s wife.
Kate set off for the living room, and Julia. Their exchange would be impossible to avoid, so Kate wanted to get out in front of it, control it.
Julia felt her coming, or noticed through a reflection in a picture’s glass. She turned slowly when Kate was a few feet away. They cheek-kissed, left and right. Kate smelled gin. It would’ve been impossible to miss it. “Merry Christmas,” Julia said.
“You too.”
“So where have you been? I haven’t seen much of you.” Julia had left a few messages that Kate hadn’t returned; Kate hadn’t been able to figure out a way to interact with Julia, knowing what she knew.
“Oh, you know, the holidays.” Kate didn’t elaborate, and Julia didn’t ask for an explanation. Although they were operating at different levels of awareness, they both knew their relationship fell somewhere short of a truthful answer here. Somewhere that included the possibility that one woman would avoid the other, and not explain why. Somewhere that could just as easily be defined by dishonesty as by the opposite.
“It was nice meeting your father.”
Julia smiled. “Thanks. He sort of surprised me.”
“Ah.”
“So are you excited for the South of France?” Julia asked. “That’ll be a great trip.”
“Oh,” Kate said, “actually, we changed our minds.”
“Really?” There was something in Julia’s tone, in the forced curiosity on her forehead, that made Kate think this was not news.
“We’re going skiing instead.”
“Skiing? You’re kidding. So are we!”
The last Kate knew was that Julia and Bill were going home for the holidays. Back to Chicago. “Where are you going?” Kate asked, suddenly sure what the answer would be.
“French Alps. The Haute-Savoie.”
Sure enough. “You too?” Kate tried to muster an enthusiastic response. But she couldn’t get out from under a smothering blanket of paranoia.
“Incredible! We’ll have to get together. We’ll ski together. Bill will be so happy.”
Kate forced a smile. “Dexter too.”
“Dexter too what?” Dexter asked, ambling over. “Dexter is too handsome?” Leaning in to kiss Julia’s cheeks. “Dexter is too sexy?”
Julia slapped his chest. “Dexter too will be excited that we’re all going to be in the Alps together.”
His head swiveled to his wife, an accusation in his eyes.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Kate protested, “but this is not a conspiracy. I didn’t know a thing about this. Julia? Tell him.”
“She didn’t know a thing about this,” Julia agreed. “I promise. Bill and I just decided last-minute. A couple days ago.”
“You’re lying,” Dexter said, half playfully, half not. “I’m surrounded by women, lying to me.”
NO ONE REALLY ate. People picked and nibbled, but there was never a sit-down, never a required-dining moment, so for the most part the forks went untouched. All solid sustenance was
delivered with the fingers. But mostly what the partygoers consumed was liquid.
Kate wasn’t sure whether she’d had five glasses of wine, or six. The easy-jazz piano had been replaced by a light-FM assortment of classic rock, low volume. Then someone raised the volume on the easy-listening. Hotel California; you can never leave.
She stood in the center of the small sitting room, swaying slightly. A certain measure of clarity was cutting through the alcoholic fog, bringing into focus what might very well be an alternate reality, in which none of these people were who they claimed to be. Just as Kate knew that she herself had not been, for a very long time, who she claimed to be.
It was looking increasingly likely that Dexter was not who he claimed to be. What the hell was all that material in his office? What was he up to?
Kate looked around, and found Julia cornered by one of the fathers from school who everyone agreed was closeted-gay. She couldn’t see Bill anywhere. Nor Plain Jane, for that matter.
Kate grabbed a fresh superfluous flute from a tight grouping on the bar, inverted bowling pins. She wandered with purposeful aimlessness back through the small sitting room, letting her forefinger play against the tops of the tactile knickknacks, various varieties of cold and smooth, glass and brass and sterling silver. As she came around the corner to the hall, she pulled her phone out of her purse and pressed a button to ignite the screen. “Yes,” she said to a private Snuffleupagus, “is everything okay?” The dark-suited functionary guarding the door glanced at her, and she threw him an apologetic smile. “No, darling,” she fake-protested into the phone. “It’s not a bother, tell me what the problem is.” She wanted the guard to feel he was intruding, standing there where he was supposed to, listening to her listen to a problem, an intimate problem being explained by Darling. The guard pursed his lips, turned, and took a few steps out of the center hall, toward the kitchen, or office, or some type of service room, giving a woman some privacy. Social engineering indeed.
