The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  “Do you think a little fairy like Kyle Finley can access joint FBI-Interpol files and no one will know it?” Bill asked. “That no one will alert the field agents?”

  Kate stared at Bill, then at Julia, then back at Bill. Now she understood that they were confronting her, and she could get information from them. What she had to do was not give any. “What’s your point?”

  “Listen,” Bill said, “there’s no easy way to prepare you for this.”

  Kate actually laughed.

  “I guess you’re already prepared. So here it is: Kate, your husband is a thief.”

  Kate was surprised at how surprised she was to hear the allegation out in the open, from the investigators themselves. It was a rare moment of clarity, of certainty. If nothing else, at least Kate was sure that this man believed what he’d just said.

  “Tell me what you think you know.”

  “As far as we can tell, he committed his first crime last summer, when you were living in Washington. He stole a million dollars, hijacking an electronic transaction.”

  Kate didn’t respond.

  “There were certain markers,” Bill continued, “in the electronic trail, clues that the stolen money had made its way to Andorra. But that the theft had been initiated from a computer in the States. So we started reviewing the profiles of Americans who were arriving to the Barcelona airport, the nearest airport to Andorra, which doesn’t have one.”

  “One what?” Kate asked, buying herself a pause in this story so she could recall last summer, Dexter’s short-notice trip to Barcelona …

  “An airport,” Bill said. “Andorra doesn’t have its own airport. So, four days after the hijacking, one of the American arrivals to Barcelona was a man who happened to be one of the leading specialists, in the entire world, in the field of electronic-transaction security.”

  Kate crossed her arms across her chest.

  “This man hired a car to continue his journey from Barcelona, a three-hour drive, returning the next day. Expensive car. Do you know where he went?”

  She glanced at Julia, who was watching Kate intently.

  “This man took his hired car to Andorra for a day, then back to the airport and home to the States. Then this man bought plane tickets to Frankfurt. Four plane tickets: two adults, two children. He put his house on the rental market. He put his car up for sale; he recorded a title transfer with the DMV. And his wife? She quit her job.”

  Kate looked Bill in the eye, and saw that he knew who she was, what she did. What she used to do. Kate glanced at Julia. They both knew.

  “What does this sound like to you?” Bill asked.

  Kate looked away, watched a trio of cars heading down the hill. Traffic had picked up on this already busy road.

  “This looks like a criminal, fleeing,” he answered his own question. “We already had a team investigating the million-dollar hijacking, but we got in touch with Interpol, to make it a joint op, so we could follow the suspect to Europe, with full authority and access. We—”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you follow him? He stole—what are you claiming?—a million dollars? People steal a million dollars all the time. Why is this worth following someone abroad?”

  “Because we couldn’t figure out how he did it.”

  Kate didn’t understand; she knew she was missing something. She shook her head.

  Julia jumped in: “Since we couldn’t figure out how he’d done it, we also couldn’t figure out what would stop him from doing it again. From stealing any amount of money, anytime anyone was making a transfer, anywhere in the world.”

  Ah. That certainly was worth putting together a modest little covert op.

  “Which is exactly what happened.” Julia leaned forward. “In November—on Thanksgiving, in fact. Do you remember your Thanksgiving, Kate?”

  Kate glared at this woman. This home-wrecker.

  “I bet you were pretty angry. Your husband was off on a business”—air quotes—“trip. Did he claim to be alone?”

  Kate wasn’t going to give anything. She rubbed her hands together, for warmth. It seemed to be getting colder by the second.

  “Well …” Julia shrugged. She reached into her bag, pulled out a large manila envelope. She removed something, papers maybe, from the envelope.

  “He was in Zurich,” Julia said, thrusting the pile at Kate. “With another woman.”

  Kate took the stack, snapshot-size photos, annotated with a pen, scrawls of dates and locations and names. Dexter with shady-looking men in a café in Sarajevo, Dexter in banks in Andorra, in Zurich. Dexter in a nightclub in London with a stunning woman. Kate turned over this photo, saw the date and name: Marlena.

  “What is this?” she asked, struggling to maintain composure, to not fall apart completely and maybe permanently, right now. She hadn’t been expecting this Marlena character to be supermodel-caliber. “What does this prove?”

  “Each of those photos proves a different thing. All those things add up to the truth.”

  Kate couldn’t tear her eyes from a Zurich photo, from last June, Dexter at a jewelry counter, leaning on the glass, standing next to this beautiful creature, smiling at her. Marlena. And behind this photo were more Zurich scenes with Marlena, with Dexter, coming and going from a hotel lobby, the hotel elevator. Having a meal in the dining room. Having breakfast. And then London, in a restaurant, on the steps of a white-brick mews house.

  Kate shook her head. “Photoshop can create anything.” She wasn’t expecting to be this jealous, nor this worried. “With a decent printer, anyone can manufacture any history.”

  Kate’s phone was ringing: Claire. Kate hit Ignore.

  “You can keep those prints,” Julia said, ignoring Kate’s eminently ignorable objection. “Check them against your calendar. Your e-mails, phone records, whatever. You’ll find that Dexter has always been where we’re saying he’s been. Opening up bank accounts, one after the other, numbered accounts across Europe. And consorting with this woman.”

  “You could have set up all this, after the fact,” Kate said. But she was struggling to avoid believing that Dexter was living a double life as a criminal, with another woman who lived in Zurich or London. It wasn’t a totally inescapable conclusion, but it was damn close.

  “And while he was in Zurich,” Julia continued, “he did it again. But this time he stole twenty-five million euros.”

  Bill’s face flinched, a quick furrow of the brow, narrowing of the eyes.

  “How much?” Kate asked. She remembered to act surprised; she tried to paint surprise across her face.

  “Twenty-five million,” Julia repeated.

  Bill’s mouth opened slightly, his eyes darted to the side. But then he closed his mouth and turned his eyes back to Kate.

  “That’s a lot of money,” Kate said. Though not as much as Kyle had said was stolen. “Who’d he steal it from?”

  “A Serbian arms dealer.”

  Kate glanced down at the photo that she was still clutching. Spectacular Marlena. Plus twenty-five million euros. Tough to compete with.

  Kate pushed that thought aside. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “You know who we are.”

  “You’re FBI via Interpol?”

  Julia nodded.

  “You’re senior-level cyber-crime task force. You’ve followed my husband to Luxembourg, on suspicion of stealing twenty-five million euros last November, plus a million dollars last summer.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And it’s crucial to catch him because you have no idea how to stop him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  Neither answered, waiting for Kate to draw the conclusion. Kate looked from one to the other, and she knew that she’d been correct. Knew what they were trying to do.

  Kate’s phone was ringing again, Claire again. Could be something important. What isn’t important? She flipped it open. “Hi.” />
  “Kate? Is everything okay?”

  “Uh …” What a question. “Um …”

  “Your boys are the last ones. Everyone else has left.”

  Shit! Kate glanced at her watch: it was fifteen minutes past pickup. “I’m so sorry,” she said, apologizing to the wrong person, rising. Now she understood all the recent traffic on this street: moms driving from the mall to school pickup. “Thanks for calling, Claire. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  Kate pocketed her phone. “I have to go pick up my children.”

  Julia nodded, which looked like giving permission, which pissed Kate off. She turned and walked away, toward her car and the retrieval of her children, with her mind swirling, an eddy being spun around a new premise. A new plan.

  27

  Kate woke at two A.M. For a few minutes she tried to go back to sleep, but then admitted that she’d never succeed, and that she didn’t want to. She padded downstairs in robe and slippers, the apartment chilly and quiet and echoing with secrets, un-home-like. She stared out the window, the dark chasm of the deep gorge, the streetlights, the occasional car driving too fast on the winding hilly icy streets.

  She turned on the computer, and started opening files, again. All the same files she’d opened before, just last week. And rooting around the web pages of their bank accounts, again. She had found nothing last week. She would find nothing tonight. But this was what a suspicious wife would do, when her untrustworthy husband was asleep. This was what she had to do. Had to be seen doing.

  At four A.M. she closed the computer. She used a thick marker and large, easily readable letters to write a short note, which she carried upstairs. She looked in on the boys, as she always did when she passed their room in the night. She watched them sleep for a minute, soaking in their innocence.

  Kate returned to her bedroom, turned on a low-voltage reading light. She stood over the bed, staring at her husband, breathing deeply, mouth ajar, sound asleep.

  She nudged him.

  Dexter blinked awake, confused, staring at the piece of paper his wife was holding in front of his face.

  Silence. Follow me downstairs, put on coat, out to balcony.

  TEN HOURS LATER Kate climbed the steps into the tiled entryway, held up three fingers to the maître d’. “Trois, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Je vous en prie,” he said, arm extended, leading her through the dimly lit bar area, into the brighter back room.

  This was where Kate and Dexter had eaten the night they’d signed the apartment lease. A celebration, with the children asleep, under the care of hotel babysitting.

  Could that really have been less than a half-year ago? It had been warm. Outdoor seating straddled two sides of the cobblestoned street, a small plaza under a shade tree, perched at the edge of a cliff, a majestic view. Kate and Dexter ate at a white-clothed table under the gloaming, the street strewn with clusters of business-dressed young people, holding glasses, smoking cigarettes.

  After dinner Dexter had taken her hand, tickled her palm. She’d leaned against him, feeling the warmth of her marriage, the promise of sex, soon.

  That had been summer in Northern Europe. Neither of them had speculated what this place would be like in the dead of winter.

  Kate now slid into the window seat, sitting sideways, half-facing the window—snow beginning to fall—and half-facing the clubby room, somber wallpaper and shaded sconces and dark, heavy furniture, obliquely lit by the silvery sunless daylight. She put her bag on the bench beside her, heavy with the weight of the Beretta.

  The waitress deposited the menus on the table with the customary Luxembourgeois “Wann ech gelift.”

  Nearly all the tables were occupied by men, in pairs and quartets, neckties and jackets. Across the room, one woman sat by herself. She flipped her hair and glanced around, trying not only to attract attention but also to monitor whatever attention she could muster. A maneuver that would be attempted only by an unattractive single girl.

  Everyone played to type.

  Julia and Bill were standing in the doorway, grim-faced.

  Kate herself had to maintain her type, to stay in her character.

  “Hello,” said Julia, draping her coat on an empty chair. “So. You wanted to see us?” Behaving as if this were a confrontational business meeting, the airing-out of a long-standing grudge.

  The waitress was hovering. They ordered drinks. When the waitress was out of earshot, Kate said flatly, “You’re wrong.”

  Julia nodded, as if agreeing with a fine idea, a proposal for a lakeside picnic on a clear spring day. “The problem is, Kate”—condescending smile—“that we can’t locate any record of Dexter’s employment contract with any bank.”

  Kate was surprised by the irrelevancy of this administrative detail. She could still picture the employment contract in question, tucked away in that innocuous-looking file about refinancing their mortgage. But then her mind flashed back to the embassy functionary who claimed that the American authorities should have received a copy of Dexter’s work permit, from his employer. This was no minor administrative detail; this was part of their proof.

  “Dexter’s employment is confidential,” Kate added, her own irrelevancy.

  “Nor a record,” Julia continued, a freight train beginning to roll, “of how his income is being generated. We’ve checked your bank account, of course. That is, your normal bank account, the one you opened in both your names, with credit cards and cash cards and statements mailed to your apartment. So we can see the regular income coming in, and the regular expenses going out. But what we can’t see is where the income is coming from.”

  Julia paused, staring at Kate, letting this sink in before clarifying, “The transfers are being made from a numbered account,” Julia said. “Nameless, anonymous.”

  “That’s kind of the point of Luxembourg, isn’t it? Banking secrecy.”

  “Have you met any of his colleagues?” Julia asked, continuing to ignore Kate’s half of the conversation. “Have you ever seen Dexter’s employment contract?”

  This was the first allegation Kate could refute. Because she had in fact seen his contract, a brief, unremarkable document that he’d squirreled away inside a misleadingly labeled folder. But she stayed silent.

  “Have you seen a pay stub? Has he received anything in the mail from his employer? Has he filled out any paperwork? Life-insurance forms?”

  Kate stared at the battered old table. Of course the contract could be fake. Was fake.

  “A business card? A corporate credit card? A key-card to access the offices?”

  Their waitress delivered the drinks, loud thumps on the table, two Coke lights and a beer on the bare wood.

  “Have you ever seen anything whatsoever—anything—that would prove—not even prove, that’s too strong a burden; that would indicate—that your husband works for any company at all?”

  Julia picked up her soda, took a sip. Didn’t continue her attack.

  “That’s quite a collection of circumstantial evidence,” Kate said.

  “Circumstantial evidence may not be enough to convict. But it’s almost always enough to reveal the truth. Isn’t it?”

  “Circumstantial evidence to bolster wild conjecture.”

  “Inescapable conclusions, actually.” Julia was staring at Kate firmly with complete conviction, trying to convey her certainty across the table.

  Kate looked away, out the window at the swirling snow. “What do you want?” she asked. “From me?”

  After a long silence, Julia answered, saying exactly what Kate expected: “We want you to help us.”

  “DEXTER.”

  He looked up from spearing a forkful of amuse-bouche, a something-something with something sauce. This was supposedly the finest restaurant in the country. The chef had won the most prestigious award in the world. That bestowment had been long ago, but still.

  “I know,” Kate said. Her entire body was tingling, bristling with anxiety. This was going to be a diffi
cult conversation, with a lot on the line.

  “You know what?” Dexter popped the unidentified food object into his mouth.

  “I know you’re not a security consultant.”

  Dexter stared at her, chewing his UFO slowly. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I know about the secret bank account.”

  He stopped chewing momentarily, then started again, contemplatively.

  Kate held her tongue. It was now his move, and she was going to wait him out. He swallowed. He picked the napkin out of his lap, dabbed the corners of his mouth.

  “What,” he said, “do you think you know?”

  “Don’t try to deny this.” It sounded a bit more hostile than she intended.

  “Who has been telling you what, exactly?”

  There was ample space between tables. They had plenty of privacy, here in the middle of a formally dressed crowd, neckties and dark suits, pearls and quilted handbags.

  “Nobody needed to tell me,” she said. “I found the account with the twenty-five million euros, Dexter.”

  “No you didn’t,” he said, slowly and calmly, steeling himself. “Because it doesn’t exist. I don’t have an account with twenty-five million euros.”

  Kate stared at Dexter and his lie, and he stared right back. “Who spoke to you, Kat?”

  She mumbled.

  “Who?”

  “Bill and Julia, that’s who. They’re FBI, on loan to Interpol.”

  Dexter seemed to consider this.

  “They came here—to Luxembourg—chasing you, Dexter. This is a big operation, for a big crime, and you’re the suspect.”

  A pair of waiters arrived, bearing white plates under silver domes, sliding the plates onto the table, lifting the domes in tandem. One of the waiters explained the dish, in what may have been English, or possibly Swahili, for all Kate knew; she didn’t pay any attention.

  “Did you steal the money, Dexter?”

  He stared at her.

  “Dex?”

  He glanced down at his plate, picked up his fork. “After we eat this,” he said, “we’re going to the restroom for a minute.”

  DEXTER LOCKED THE door. “Show me you’re not wired.”