by Chris Pavone
“The rest.” He flicked his fingers at her. “Take off the rest.”
“Fuck you.”
“Whot you need a gun foor?”
She wanted desperately to put her clothes back on, but she also felt a small victory with every passing second that she kept them off, gathering strength from her humiliation.
“Colin? Whot we got fer ’er?”
Colin was zipping up his black jeans, walking over, shirtless, his whole torso covered in an indecipherable jumble of faded ink. He leaned over the mirror-topped table and took a bump. Then he rose, walked across the room. Opened a desk drawer, looked inside.
“Beretta,” Colin said.
“Oooh.” Red smiled. “That’s a nice goon. Just foound that on the street last week.”
Kate didn’t want to hear what bullshit story he was peddling to disavow this weapon.
“Let me see it.”
In one fluid motion Colin popped the clip out of the Beretta and tossed the gleaming steel fifteen feet across the room, a perfect throw to Kate, who caught the thing easily. She took a moment to examine the weapon, partly to examine it, partly to convince Red that she was not to be fucked with. The 92FS was the Toyota Corolla of handguns. This one seemed to be in fine condition.
“Two thousand,” she said. She didn’t want to ask his price, didn’t want to give Red the opportunity to frame the negotiation. The eventual price was pure negotiation, not tethered to any objective value. It could be worth fifty euros or twenty thousand; it was worth the intersection of whatever he could get her to pay with whatever she could get him to accept.
“Git the foock ootta ’ere. The price is ten.”
She bent forward, picked up her skirt. Zipped it.
“Eight,” he said, and she knew she would win. She put back on her sweater.
“Twenty-five hundred.” She pulled her hair out of the collar.
“Git the fuck oout, you foockin coont.”
She picked up her jacket, pulled it on.
“I woont take a penny less than five.”
“I’ll give you three.”
“Foock you.”
She shrugged, turned away.
“Four,” he said.
“Thirty-five hundred. Take it.” She smiled. “Or leave it.”
He tried to stare her down, but then realized it was futile.
“Thirty-five hundred,” he said. “Ploos a bloo job.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “Fuck you,” she said.
He broke into a broad smile. “That,” he said, “woould alsoo be fine and fayer compensation.”
KATE INSISTED THEY go to the science museum on a pier in the harbor. Then after lunch a flea market in a church, where she lingered and haggled and bought this and that, a porcelain platter and sterling serving utensils. Then she wanted to sit somewhere and have a coffee, with some pastries for the kids.
Under the table, the new Beretta sat heavy in the bottom of her handbag, even heavier in the top of her consciousness.
Dexter admitted that Brad had indeed become an insufferable bastard in the decade since they’d worked together. He had moved to New York to do something extra-bullshit-sounding for tech start-ups. Throwing around the title CMO, talking about loft-buying and Hamptons-summering and blah-blah-blahing. Kate had always thought of Brad as unbearable, and was gratified that Dexter could finally see it, now that Brad had fully bloomed into the exceptional prick that had always been growing within. New York had nurtured his prickishness.
If Dexter really had fifty million euros sacked away somewhere, he was doing an awfully good job of not becoming a self-satisfied prick.
Kate ordered another coffee. She was pushing back the day, one o’clock to two, two to three, until she was assured that by the time the family returned to Luxembourg, it would be late, and the kids would have to go straight to bed, the lights in their room never even turned on. Dexter wouldn’t have a chance to be alone in the boys’ room, to examine the disassembled bureau, evidence of her suspicion, proof of her discovery.
They sped down the motorway in the flat Netherlands, an exit every couple of miles, a city at every exit. At sunset they were stop-and-go around the Brussels ring, then speeding south again through Walloon Belgium, sparse and dark and hilly, ravines and forests and nothing, nothing, more nothing.
Kate looked out the window into the darkness of the Ardennes, where the World Wars had been fought, hand-to-hand bloody. The Battle of the Bulge, the biggest and deadliest of World War II. That was sixty-something years ago. And now? Now there wasn’t even a border between Germany and France and Belgium and Luxembourg. All that carnage over sovereignty and the integrity of borders, and now you didn’t even need to show a passport to travel from Allied to Axis.
George Patton was buried in Luxembourg, walking distance to the kids’ school, along with five thousand other American soldiers.
The German car was humming at 150 kilometers per hour, cutting through the fast-moving fog slithering across the blacktop. Up and down the dark quiet hills, rarely coming across other cars or trucks, the middle of nowhere in the dark of night.
The perfect place to disappear.
25
Eight o’clock in the morning. Five after eight. Seven after. Time—now—to leave for school, already late, but Dexter still not out of the apartment, barely awake, in the shower.
If Kate left, then Dexter would have the run of the apartment. He could go anywhere, do anything. He could check the bureau and find that she’d disassembled it. He could check the bin in the back of the pantry and find the Beretta.
“Okay, boys,” she said from the kitchen. She pulled the gun out of the bin, dropped it into her bag. “Mommy’s ready.”
She couldn’t live like this.
“HELLO?”
She closed the front door slowly, quietly. Click. “Hello?”
She glanced at the ceramic bowl on the hall table, where he kept his keys. Empty. “Dexter?”
She walked upstairs, double-confirming, through the hall to the master bedroom, their bathroom. As she passed the boys’ room, she looked at the bureau, unchanged, unfixed. She’d get to that soon enough.
Down the stairs and the hall and through the living room. She poked her head into the kitchen, triple-checking. More nervous by the second, practically trembling.
She sat at the desk. She opened the laptop. She checked her e-mail, procrastinating. Responded to something trivial, read something irrelevant. Even emptied the spam folder.
Then there was nothing else to do, except what she’d sat down to do.
She opened the photo library of her telephone. She chose the image of Dexter’s slip of paper, the account numbers and passwords. There were no bank names. But how many banks could there be? How long could this take? A half-hour? An hour?
She rose. She walked to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee. As if caffeine could possibly help.
She sat down again, hands poised above the keyboard, thinking. Start with the easiest: the bank where they kept their joint account.
She clicked the bookmark at the top of the web browser. The page jumped to the bank’s welcome page, asking for account number and password.
She glanced at her phone again, the image, the numbers …
She hit the computer key for the first number, an eight, her middle finger resting there under the asterisk atop the numeral … thinking of something … this computer …
Julia popped into her brain. The day when Julia visited this apartment, her Internet connection supposedly down, to check e-mail. When Julia sat in this chair, at this computer, hands on this keyboard.
Now Kate realized: Julia hadn’t been checking e-mail. She’d been inserting spyware, capturing Kate’s screens and logging her keystrokes, surreptitiously e-mailing whatever she typed to Julia and Bill, showing them whatever she saw, so they could steal the Moores’ account numbers and passwords, to monitor their bank balances and investment portfolios, to track their air-trave
l purchases and hotel reservations.
The Macleans had been tracking this computer’s activity. But it hadn’t been this computer that had booked the Amsterdam trip.
Of course! The Macleans didn’t know where the Moores were going, or for how long, or why. Because Dexter had made the hotel reservations from his office. From his ultra-secure office, and his impossible-to-access computer. So the FBI didn’t know if maybe Kate and Dexter were fleeing. On their way to the Isle of Man, or Hamburg, or Stockholm. Permanently moving, going into hiding, carrying false passports and duffels filled with cash.
So the FBI had pursued, nervous, making sure their suspect wasn’t disappearing.
Kate removed her hands from this tainted keyboard, this compromised position.
“HELLO, CLAIRE? IT’S Kate. Kate Moore.”
“Kate! How are you?”
“Well, thank you.” Kate watched a familiar face walk past her phone booth in the P&T. “Claire, I’ve an odd favor to ask.”
“Anything, dear. Anything.”
“Could I stop by and use your computer for a bit?”
CLAIRE’S HOME OFFICE was tucked into a corner behind the staircase, facing out onto the driveway, the least appealing room in the big suburban-esque house. Kate watched a car drive past, and wondered if Julia or Bill would end up coming by, crawling along the street, keeping tabs on her.
She launched the web browser. Began with the biggest banks, their names plastered everywhere around town, on the tops of buildings, on sponsor banners at festivals, on the jerseys of cycling teams.
There had been two account numbers on Dexter’s little slip of paper. The first number was paired with a user name and password and other information; the second had no accompanying information. Kate wouldn’t even try the second number; it made no sense.
But the first one did. It was almost too easy, too quick: ten minutes after she’d begun, the fifth bank she’d tried, the first account number was valid.
She sucked in her breath, held it as she entered the password … also valid.
Then she had to choose the correct image from a choice of maybe thirty, which explained the note “dog” on the slip of paper. And then she had to match a puzzle against a string of letters on Dexter’s slip of paper. Then a dialog box opened:
Accessing your account records.
One moment, please.
Accessing your account records.
One moment—
The screen went dark.
Kate froze, panicked, looking around quickly, wondering what this could possibly—
The screen lit up again, the summary page of the account, scant information, bare bones only, her eyes flitting around the screen, taking in all there was to take in.
Account holder: LuxTrade S.A.
Account address: rue des Pins 141, Bigonville, Luxembourg
There were no currency figures on the page, no amounts, just this inconclusive information, indicating nothing, proving nothing. Her spirits plunged.
Then she noticed the tab for assets, and she grabbed the mouse, and moved the cursor, and clicked, and waited the frustrating millisecond while absolutely nothing happened, then the terrifying microsecond when the screen went blank, then the new screen flashed, white and blue, two lines in the middle of the page:
Savings account balance
409.018,00 EUR
That was a lot of unexpected money. But it was a far cry from fifty million euros. Kate let out a deep sigh of relief, leaned back in the chair, away from the computer. Whatever Dexter was doing, it wasn’t stealing fifty million euros.
She stared at the screen, lost in speculation, her mind whirling … wondering what this could mean, the vast discrepancy between four hundred thousand and fifty million …
That’s when she noticed the tab for the other account.
SPEEDING ACROSS LUXEMBOURG in Claire’s husband’s sports car, west-northwest, two-lane roads and a short spell on a proper motorway, through roundabouts, merging, accelerating and braking, passing. Nothing on the radio, no music and no French culture, lost in her own labyrinth of explanations, pursuing one dead end after another.
She’d stared at the computer screen, mouth hanging open, for a full minute.
Current account balance
25.000.000,00 EUR
Then she’d logged off the bank interface and cleared the web browser’s history and emptied the cookies and exited the program and restarted the hard drive, formulating her next steps.
She’d walked into the kitchen with a forced smile. Claire had been a bit nonplussed when Kate asked if she could borrow Sebastian’s BMW. “My car has been making an odd noise,” Kate claimed, “and the conditions are dreadful out there. I’d hate to break down on a day like this. I’ll take my car to the garage tomorrow.”
The land fell as she headed west into the valley of the Petrusse that ran down the center of the country. On the other side of the river the soft hills began to rise again, long low-grade ascents, plateaus, dips down to cross creeks and streams before continuing up.
There was a big difference between the fifty million euros that the FBI thought Dexter had stolen and the twenty-five-plus million in his accounts. Half. But this difference was in degree, not order of magnitude. The general idea was the same: a huge amount of money. An unearnable amount.
Kate sped through the forest, the trees close against the road, slender white-barked trunks straining skyward, lightward. The trees suddenly became whiter, and brighter, one of those full-frost zones that cropped up regularly in the countryside on days like this, the temperature just below 0 Centigrade, predawn fog clinging to every plane of every surface, under and over and sides, then freezing, encasing everything—trees and shrubs, twigs and evergreen needles, street signs and lampposts—in cloudy white ice, brilliant and blinding. Otherworldly.
There had to be a justifiable reason. Dexter was a good man. If he’d done a bad thing, there had to be a legitimate reason for it.
After all, she herself had done the very worst thing imaginable. And she was a good person. Wasn’t she?
HALF OF FIFTY million …
The car hurtled through the distinctive desolation of farmland in winter, cut back and barren and low, even the shortest structures seemingly towering, barns and granaries and single-story stone houses built right against the road, which had been a medieval footpath, later widened to a Renaissance horse path, then widened again and ultimately paved in the twentieth century for cars, the current form its briefest incarnation, at most 5 percent of this byway’s lifetime, another sliver of Europe’s history, tucked away on—as—a narrow road.
Where was the other half …? It must be in that other account, the one whose number Dexter had written down without any other info, no user name or password. Why would he keep a written record of only one account? Of only half the money?
The car hummed on the weathered asphalt, in and out of forests, a preponderance of evergreens up in these highlands.
Because he had a partner. Marlena? Niko? Both?
Kate wasn’t using Sebastian’s GPS device. The whole point of driving his car was to avoid having her steps retraced. So she was using a map, which she now needed to consult regularly through the twisting unnumbered roads whose names changed every few kilometers, merging and dead-ending and doubling back.
Finally she was in Bigonville, on the rue des Pins, a supremely missable road, with no painted lines, thickly lined with evergreens. Street of pines, indeed.
Kate was now certain—99 percent, if not the full 100—that Dexter had illegally appropriated some large multiple of millions of euros. And this money was what was paying for her home and groceries and toys, for the diesel she’d put in the car yesterday morning, a sixty-three-euro fill-up, nearly a hundred dollars’ worth of gas for the secondhand Audi.
The used car. That was where two irreconcilable realities bumped up against each other: what man bought a used car when he had twenty-five million euros in the bank?
Her husband was not one of them.
This small narrow road twisted and turned, dipped and rose, patches of snow and ice, dense forests and a winding creek that the road shadowed, never had been any budget to build a bridge, never would be.
The whole thing just didn’t make sense.
The road abandoned the creek and began a steep climb, leveling at the top of another ridge, where the forest fell away, opening the landscape to a wide vista of repeating ridges, folds in the land covered in grayish white, the skin of an old sharpei. A rustic stone wall ran alongside the road, the big rocks cleared to make the field on the other side arable, the wall merely a byproduct, a place to put the rocks. It was an immense field, covered in low grass, brownish-green and fallow.
Kate saw the white-painted farmhouse with a black slate roof, just like every other roof in the entirety of the landlocked little nation, the house bookended by coppices of leafless oaks, a shady spot in the summertime. The grounds surrounding the house were crisscrossed by a series of low, semi-crumbling stone walls, looking like the base of a Roman ruin, delimiting giant rooms—dining halls and vomitoria and grand foyers.
She slowed to a crawl, a glance in the rearview, confirming again that she hadn’t been followed. In every direction, there was no car or truck or tractor to be seen; the wooden shutters were closed. No sign of life or habitants, here at this protected house, secluded in the wide open by its coterie of deciduous bodyguards.
There was no space to pull to the side of the road, which fell precipitously into deep drainage ditches. The house’s driveway passed through a narrow opening in the stone wall, and was barred by a chain, which Kate could see was secured by a padlock. On one of the stone pillars, a small white-enameled plaque, the number 141 in black. This was definitely rue des Pins 141, Bigonville, Luxembourg. The headquarters of LuxTrade S.A.
