The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  Would they have a life together anymore, after tonight? Or was this it? The end? Was she going to pack a bag, wake the boys, take them to the airport, get on an early-morning plane, and fly to … where? To Washington? Who would rescue her in D.C.? Who could she go cry to?

  Dexter was all she had. He’d been all she had for the entirety of her adult life. She remembered flying back from a mission in Guatemala, sitting on the cold military transport, staring at the riveted gunmetal wall, recognizing that there was only one thing, one person, she was looking forward to seeing in Washington.

  With her back to Dexter, she wiped her eyes, pushing back the tears. They put on coats and boots and stepped out onto the cold, windblown balcony that hung over the deep dark gorge. The light from inside was dim, but sufficient for Kate to read Dexter’s face. She saw that he knew exactly what was going on.

  “Dexter,” she said. She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself, but not much succeeding. “I know about the twenty-five million—or maybe it’s fifty million—stolen euros. I know about the numbered accounts, and LuxTrade, and the farmhouse. I know … Dexter, I know you’re not a security consultant for any bank here. I know that whatever you’ve been up to, you’ve been up to it for a long time.”

  The wind gusted into Dexter’s face, and he winced. “I can explain.”

  “I don’t want you to explain. I want you to convince me I’m wrong. Or admit I’m right.”

  Kate already knew the truth; that wasn’t what she was hoping to hear now. The first thing she wanted to learn was whether Dexter would deny it. Whether he would make the choice to add more lies. Whether all hope was lost.

  And for a split second, standing there fifty feet above the stone-paved path, Kate also wondered, however irrationally, whether Dexter would try to kill her, right now.

  KATE HAD IMAGINED the different possible paths of this conversation many times. If Dexter said A, then she would say B, and he would respond C, and on and on. She’d tried to imagine the best-case scenario, and the worst. She’d ranked their likelihoods. She’d considered a few exchanges that ended with her walking out the door with the children, never to see Dexter again; she’d even considered the possibility that her gun would be involved. The Beretta sat just inside the door, atop the radiator, hidden by a curtain that she’d bought at the Belle Etoile mall, hung from a rod she’d installed using the diamond-tip drill bits bought on her third visit to the big-box home-improvement store, not that long ago, but long enough that it was back when she was just another normal expat housewife. Back before her life had begun to unravel. Or before she knew it was unraveling.

  When Dexter opened his mouth, all the possible scenarios seemed to rush at Kate at once, making it hard for her to hear him say, “You’re right.”

  She didn’t respond, and he didn’t elaborate. They stood in the silent cold, not looking at each other.

  “Why are we out here?” Dexter asked, eyes still off somewhere else.

  “Because Bill and Julia are FBI agents, working for Interpol, investigating you. Our computer is, I’m positive, being monitored. Our car is bugged with a tracking device. Our phones are tapped. I’m pretty sure the apartment is wired.”

  He took a moment to digest this. “But it’s safe out here?”

  Kate shrugged. Then, finally, she turned to face her husband. His face was a worried wreck. This was good, she thought. If he was calm, if he didn’t care, that would be much worse.

  “Can I explain now?” he asked. “Please?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s not a short story.” Dexter gestured at the chairs and table, and waited for her to sit before he did.

  “You remember that my brother was in the Marines?”

  Where in hell was this coming from? “Of course,” she spat out, more angry than she intended. “Yes,” she added, trying to soften it.

  “You know he was killed during the Bosnian war. But I never told you how he died.”

  “You told me he wasn’t in the Marines anymore. He was one of those military advisers.” Kate knew all sorts of things about these guys. “He was captured, and killed.”

  “That’s right. Captured by a Serbian colonel named Petrovic. Ever heard of him?”

  Kate shook her head.

  “Petrovic wasn’t well-known outside Europe. But in the Balkans, he was famous. For being sadistic. He was a recreational torturer. Do you know what I mean by this?”

  “I can guess.”

  “He tortured solely for the fun of it. He got his kicks pulling out fingernails with pliers. Cutting off ears with butcher’s knives. He removed arms with machetes, Kate. He mutilated people, killing slowly and painfully with a maximum of blood. Not trying to collect intelligence, but just because he liked to. Because it built his reputation as a barbarian.

  “When they found my brother, Kate, he was missing all his fingers. And his toes. His genitals too. And his lips. His lips, Kat. Petrovic cut off Daniel’s lips.”

  A shudder ran down her spine.

  “Petrovic tortured my brother to death, just for the hell of it, then left his mutilated body to rot in a back alley, picked over by stray cats and rats and packs of wild dogs.”

  This was much more awful than Kate could have imagined. Nevertheless, she couldn’t connect this story and the millions of stolen euros. And she couldn’t imagine how she hadn’t learned this story before, back when she’d investigated Dexter’s background.

  “That’s horrible. And I don’t mean to be a totally impatient and unreasonable bitch about this, Dexter, but what the hell does that have to do with you stealing fifty million euros?”

  “It’s twenty-five.”

  “However-the-fuck-million euros! Goddammit, Dexter!”

  “Because”—he took a deep, quavering breath—“because Petrovic is the person I stole it from.”

  “OKAY,” SHE SAID, gripping the sides of her chair, willing herself to calm down. “Explain this to me. How did you know?”

  “How did I know what?” Dexter’s voice was trembling, and Kate could see he was on the verge of tears.

  “All of this? About your brother? About Petrovic?”

  Dexter took another deep breath. “To begin with, there were photos of Daniel’s body. In the original State Department report on his death.”

  “When did you see this report?”

  “Late-nineties. Someone from State got in touch with my parents. Said that documents from the war had been declassified, including the report on Daniel’s death.”

  “You saw this report?”

  He nodded aggressively, head bobbing up and down. “A photocopy. The report ended with the information that Petrovic was alive and well, and making an exorbitant living as an arms dealer, selling weapons to the worst people on earth: Mexican drug lords, genocidal Sudanese, the Taliban.”

  “This was in the report on Daniel’s death?”

  “No. Separate info, from the same guy who’d gotten in touch. I met him a few years later. This guy didn’t know much beyond what was in the report. But he did put me in contact with a Croatian émigré, a guy named Smolec, who knew a lot of military. And Smolec had the goods on the Colonel. They’d come up together in the Army, and Smolec knew everything the Colonel was up to.”

  This was the most cockamamie story Kate had ever heard.

  “So I sort of put Smolec on retainer,” Dexter continued. “To help me keep tabs on the Colonel. His comings and goings, his real-estate acquisitions, his weapons deals.”

  “Whose idea was that? For Smolec to monitor the Colonel? His? Or yours?”

  Kate could see the hint of a smile on Dexter’s face, a glimmer of relief. She knew what he was thinking: if she was asking questions like these, she was trying to understand. Trying to forgive him. He was right.

  “I don’t remember,” he said. “Maybe he alluded to how easy it would be, and I asked him to give it a try? It was a long time ago.”

  “Where did you meet with this Smolec?”
<
br />   “In a park. Farragut Square.”

  Of course: this is what Dexter was doing that cold day when Kate had noticed his red cap from across I Street, the previous winter.

  “Why were you doing this?”

  “Good question. The truth is I don’t really know. I had no plan, if that’s what you’re wondering. But the information was there, and it seemed like I should take it.”

  “Okay,” Kate said, momentarily putting aside the implausibility of this entire scenario. “Smolec was monitoring the Colonel for you, I vaguely understand that. But here’s what I don’t understand, Dexter: you never mentioned this to me? Even though I worked at State?”

  It occurred to Kate, despite the situation, that this was yet another chance for her to come clean. Just making a truthful clarification to this one sentence could be the pebble kicked off the mountain that started the landslide. But at this moment, the dirty one—the dirtier one—was still Dexter.

  “It all started before I knew you,” he said. “And what I was doing didn’t make an excessive amount of sense. So I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to know.”

  This struck Kate as stupid, but honest. “Okay. Then what?”

  “A few years ago, a totally unrelated development, in my professional world. In the course of testing a security protocol, I discovered a back door of how someone might steal money electronically, during transfers.”

  “You just happened to discover this?”

  “No. It wasn’t a coincidence that occurred while I was browsing eBay. This was my job. This is what I did. I looked for possible security breaches, and closed them.”

  “Right.”

  “So also, I knew that electronic transfer was how the Colonel conducted his business. Regularly transferring millions, sometimes tens of millions, into and out of numbered accounts, on a regular basis. Executing arms deals, from his home computer.”

  “And you decided to rob him blind?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t want merely to empty his bank account; that’s just thievery.” The tremble was gone from Dexter’s voice, and he was talking louder, quicker. Relieved to be able to explain this, to his wife. To his best friend. “What I wanted was to find a point when he was vulnerable, when he had a lot of money that wasn’t his, in the middle of a deal. When he possessed a huge sum that he owed someone else.”

  “Someone who’d be unhappy to not get paid.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So this wasn’t just a financial revenge you wanted to extract?”

  “No.” Dexter shook his head. “I wanted to get the Colonel killed.”

  Kate was surprised at Dexter’s forthright vindictiveness.

  “That’s the whole point of this, Kate: justice.” He forced a smile now, reinforcing the heart of his rationale. “I didn’t steal the money because I’m greedy. I did it to punish one of the worst people in the world.”

  Kate considered this semi-justifiable explanation. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “What’s another way?”

  “That you’re a thief.”

  “I’m meting out well-deserved punishment.”

  “You’re a thief and a vigilante.”

  “I’m making the world a better place.”

  “Possibly. But not in the way that we do things.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Americans. That’s not the American way of justice.”

  “The American way? You mean arrest, indictment, trial, sentencing, appeals, incarceration?”

  Kate nodded.

  “How do you pursue that for a Serbian citizen living in London?” Dexter asked.

  “Treat him as an international war criminal.”

  “So try him in the Hague. That’s not terribly American either, is it?”

  “It’s American to respect international law, yes.”

  He snorted.

  “Of course,” she said, “that wouldn’t get you twenty-five million euros.”

  A FREIGHT TRAIN rumbled over the rail bridge that spanned a spur of the gorge, cargo heading north, the train long and low and slow.

  “So what was your first step? When?” Kate was beginning to put distance between her sense of betrayal, her anger, and Dexter’s behavior. She was beginning to take his side. Or at least beginning to be able to see things from it.

  “About a year and a half ago, I registered a business here, an investment firm, a société anonyme. And I opened a numbered account for the S.A. I also began to closely monitor all the Colonel’s activities, his accounts, his various transfers, looking for the types of opportunities I’d have, trying to figure out how to exploit them.”

  “How’d you do this?”

  “On one of his business trips, to Milan, he used a hotel’s open-access point to execute a web transaction, and this connection allowed me to install and hide a program to his hard drive, one that created a record of his screens. Every night at four A.M. Greenwich Mean Time, if his computer was on, it e-mailed me a record of his screen activity for the previous twenty-four hours. This didn’t get me his passwords or anything like that; it just enabled me to see what he was doing. It enabled me to get my ducks in a row.

  “Then in early August—a half-year ago—I was ready. Everything was in place. Nearly everything. But first I needed to confirm that I really could do this.”

  “How?”

  “With a test. I was habitually hacking the firewalls of banks. One of them, in Andorra, was where a law firm parked funds before forwarding disbursements to its clients. The primary business of this firm was representing a single insurance company—a health-insurance company. A few years ago, in an egregious miscarriage of justice, this firm not only defended the insurer against a suit, but also held the plaintiff responsible for legal fees: a million and a half dollars. The firm kept their fee, a third of the total, in Andorra. Then they transferred the remaining two-thirds to the client. Or rather they attempted this transfer.”

  “A million dollars. You stole this?”

  “That’s right. Do you have any idea which insurance company this was?”

  Kate’s mind raced through the irrelevant possibilities, then realized it wasn’t irrelevant. She hadn’t given much thought to this company in a long time. Two decades.

  “American Health,” she muttered. One of Kate’s primary occupations had once been corresponding with AmHealth. Debating them, filling out their forms, asking for meetings, begging and pleading that it was their obligation to approve her father’s treatment, despite their fine print to the contrary. “You hijacked a million dollars from AmHealth.”

  “A million dirty dollars. That rightfully belonged to someone just like your father. Or rather just like you. The suit was brought by a daughter, on behalf of her dead father.”

  “This was your test?”

  “I figured I might as well use an evil guinea pig. And it worked. I was ready to take down the Colonel.”

  “That’s when we moved here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” she said, leaning forward. This whole thing was beginning to make sense. “Explain to me how it worked.”

  29

  Dexter wasn’t exactly the man Kate had thought he was. But it was becoming evident that he wasn’t as different as she’d feared.

  “First,” he said, “I needed better access to the Colonel’s computer. So I hired someone to help me, a young woman in London.”

  A wave of relief washed over her. “What’s her name?”

  “Marlena.”

  This was one of the two people Dexter called from his secret mobile phone. Kate imagined that Niko was the other one. “And what’s Smolec’s given name?”

  Dexter looked confused, but answered anyway. “Niko.”

  This was the other contact. Two for two. That explains that.

  “And this Marlena,” Kate said, “what did she do?”

  “She helped me access the computer.”

  “How?”

  “She had sex with
him,” Dexter said.

  “So she’s a prostitute?”

  “Yes.”

  “And have you been fucking her?”

  He actually laughed.

  “No, you do not have the right to laugh at any questions of mine whatsoever. You’re going to need to earn that back.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So? Have you?”

  He swallowed his smile. “You know what Marlena looks like?”

  “I’ve seen pictures, yes.”

  “I realize that I’m an incredibly good-looking man, Kate. You and I both agree about that. But do you honestly think a woman like Marlena would sleep with me?”

  “You’re paying her. To have sex.”

  Dexter gave her a gimme-a-break look.

  “Okay,” Kate relented. “Go on.”

  “Marlena is a twenty-two-year-old Russian. This is the Colonel’s, um, specialty. I put her in a situation—a hotel bar that was known as a place to find girls like her.”

  “So he knew she was a prostitute.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she just went to his apartment and hacked into his computer?”

  “No, this had to be more of a long-term thing. So when they met, she gave him her service’s number. He called—she’s a call girl—and she went over. That first night, she put on an extra-special performance.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The usual overacting. Plus a tender moment of pillow talk wherein she confided that even though she had sex with men almost every night, she’d never before in her life achieved such, um, satisfaction with a customer. She made it clear that she’d had a unique time, physically. And she’d love it if the Colonel could become a regular customer.”

  “He fell for this?”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  Kate was never going to understand the extent to which men were stupid.

  “It wasn’t until their fifth date when the Colonel left her alone long enough to ensure privacy, with the computer accessible. She installed something called a sniffer, which can find user names and passwords. By Marlena’s next visit—their relationship had become weekly—I’d created a software package that she installed, which included a keystroke logger, which recorded every keystroke, and e-mailed me the records every minute.