by Chris Pavone
Dexter holds up his hand. “Let me get this straight.” He glowers at Julia. “You fabricated the State phone call that alerted me to the fiction that the Colonel killed my brother. You fabricated his death report, and you fabricated an official to give me that report, and to connect me with a fabricated Croatian expat, who over the course of—how long? a decade?—supplied me with fabricated information about the Colonel?”
“In a nutshell,” Julia admits.
No one says anything.
“The Croatian word niko,” Julia adds, “means nobody.”
Dexter lets out a loud, ugly guffaw.
“But I want to clarify,” Julia continues, “that most of the information about the Colonel was accurate.”
“Just not the parts that had anything to do with Daniel. And thus with me.”
Kate glances over at Bill, silent. She’s guessing that he too didn’t know anything about this aspect of the backstory. But he doesn’t particularly care; this sideshow is pure entertainment for him. He has his own fundamental dishonesties to protect.
“You funneled updates to me via so-called Niko,” Dexter continues, “getting me further and further on the hook, more and more invested in the story of this illegal arms dealer who’d supposedly butchered my brother. All so that I’d be motivated—I’d be compelled—to help you steal from a rich man. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“So you hatched this plan a dozen years ago?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand,” Dexter says, wearing his bewilderment all over his face. “What would you have done if in the meantime the Colonel got killed? Or went broke? Or what if I didn’t cooperate? After all that time invested in me?”
“What makes you think,” Julia asks, “that you were the only one?”
“Monsieur,” Julia calls out as the waiter passes. “Une carafe d’eau, s’il vous plaît.”
Kate notices that Julia’s French accent has improved markedly, now that she’s no longer pretending to have a bad one.
“What do you mean?” Dexter asks.
“I’m rather thirsty,” Julia says to her companions, killing time before their privacy is reinstated. The waiter pours two glasses, for the ladies. Julia takes a long drink, emptying her glass. She refills it, leaving everyone on the hook, bated breath. A strange uncomfortable cloud crosses her face. Then she says, “You weren’t my only option.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You and the Colonel weren’t the only antagonists I set up.”
Now it’s Kate’s mind that’s racing to catch up. But she doesn’t get there before Julia starts talking again. “Dexter, you’re not the only person in the world who could’ve pulled off this intrusion. In fact, I’m sorry to tell you that in many ways you’re the least qualified. Frankly, I’m surprised it turned out to be you.”
“Huh?”
“I spent years—I spent my career—identifying the most clever, most out-of-the-box thinkers in the field of online security. And then I met with all of them. I asked them about their deepest, darkest secrets. Their greatest fears and strongest desires. Their simmering resentments and uncontrollable hatreds. The pressure points at which they could be manipulated.”
“How did you manage this?”
“It’s pretty easy and completely justifiable to ask anyone anything, when you work for the FBI and you’re interviewing job candidates, or conducting an investigation.”
At every turn, Kate has become more and more awed.
“In the end, I had a half-dozen of you hackers on the hook.”
“If I’m the least qualified, then why’d you choose me?”
“I didn’t. I proposed this scheme to all of you. Whoever got there first won.”
“And I discovered it first?” Dexter is trying to suppress his pride, mere seconds after digesting a soul-crushing insult.
“Yes. But in the meantime I discovered a bit of a problem.” Julia turns to Kate. “Until we set the wheels in motion, I didn’t know about you, Kate. I’d done my background on Dexter, of course. But I didn’t bother with deep investigations of all my candidates’ wives and girlfriends and mothers’ ex-boyfriends. But when he showed up with his dual-intrusion gambit, I did.”
“And?”
“And I honestly had to consider ditching the whole plan. Or just ditching Dexter, coming up with a reason why it wasn’t going to work out with him, pass along his idea to someone else to execute. I also had to consider that maybe I was being set up; a sting. But then I realized that, remarkably, Dexter didn’t know about you.”
Kate didn’t like hearing this bit out loud, here in semi-public. She herself felt entitled to humiliate her duplicitous husband. But she didn’t want Julia to be able to do it. He’d already been humiliated enough, by Julia.
“Dexter was too legit,” Julia continued. “His life was too verifiable, too aboveboard. He was nobody’s spy, nobody’s mole, nobody’s rat. He was who he is. And he didn’t know that you weren’t.”
“So what did you do?”
“I told him.”
“Why?”
“I had no choice. Dexter was the guy who had the answer. He was the guy who could get the money. It had taken a long time to arrive at that point, and I wasn’t confident that any of my other candidates would be able. I would have to go with Dexter and his plan. Or I’d have to extract his whole process from him, then kill him.”
Dexter blurts out a laugh, then realizes this wasn’t a joke. He frowns.
“But of course killing the spouse of a CIA analyst was ill-advised. So instead I needed to make sure Dexter was extra-careful around you. However secretive he thought he had to be, he had to double it. He had to initiate no contact with me, ever. He had to follow every instruction exactly to the letter. He had to know that however serious he’d thought this was, it was much more serious.”
“How did you know he’d believe you?”
“Hey, I’m sitting right here.”
“Why did you believe her?” Kate asks.
“Because why would she lie about that?”
“Why couldn’t you just tell me?”
It’s Julia who answers, with a snort. “C’mon,” she says, “tell a CIA officer that we’re plotting to hack into banking transactions and steal a fortune?”
“Valid point. So then what?”
“So we—that is, I—set up the whole series of transactions to be traceable to Dexter only. He would be the only person who saw a penny, for a long time. He was the one who’d be guilty of the major crimes and the associated misdemeanors: the falsification of records, the break-ins, the frauds, the American Health theft. Which provided the operational budget, including your family’s funds. Which also served as the initial crime that I unearthed—rather easily, obviously—and reported to my superiors, to get myself assigned the case of investigating this new type of problem. This unstoppable form of electronic hijacking. I even had a prime suspect, who I predicted would flee the country. As it turned out, I was right. That cemented that the case was mine. I clearly had a nose for what was going to happen next.”
“This whole thing seems to depend on you being the one leading the investigation,” Kate says. “Why?”
“Because Dexter can get caught.”
“I can?”
“Of course you can. There’s a tremendous amount of evidence that incriminates you, Dexter. Records of you opening and closing the accounts—even some photos and videos of you at the banks—through which the stolen money was routed.”
Dexter looks confused, again.
“There are records of your relationship with that call girl you hired to commit prostitution, fraud, and theft. There’s the girl herself, obviously, and her wildly damaging testimony that you conspired to do exactly what you did, actually, do.”
Dexter shakes his head.
“This is convincing evidence. Of serious crimes.”
“I don’t understand,” he says.
But Ka
te does. “It’s her insurance policy, you nitwit.” Poor guy.
“Is this true?” He is stunned anew by Julia’s duplicity.
“I needed to make sure that you’d live up to your end of the bargain,” Julia admits. “I needed to be able to compel you. And in the meantime I also needed to be the one at the Bureau, so I could make sure that no one else discovered what I knew was out there—because I created it—to be discovered.”
Kate perks up at the end of this little speech, exactly the type of admission she’d been waiting to hear. “So then me,” Kate says, looking to drive some nails into the coffin, as part of her own bargain.
“Yes, you,” Julia says. “The wrench in my machine. Well, I had to make sure this CIA wife wouldn’t rat out her husband. I didn’t think she would; I couldn’t imagine that a woman would ruin her own life just because her husband was a thief. After all, he was stealing from someone who he thought was the very worst scum of the earth—the man who murdered his brother. Talk about a justifiable crime. And of course that first million, from the shit-heel mouthpieces of the heartless insurance company, was a no-brainer.
“But I had to be sure, didn’t I? Positive. I had to test the wife. Had to lure her inside, make her realize that her husband was guilty. That the FBI was pursuing him, and they were right. Had to let her discover the truth, and see what she did with it.”
“I’m flattered you took me so seriously.”
“Well, to be honest, I also had another motivation for confronting you.”
“Which was what?”
“Which was,” Bill pipes up, “me.”
Kate continues to be impressed with this woman’s extraordinary acts of deceit, tucked into her massive web of falsification.
“So the whole time you were in Luxembourg,” Kate says to Bill, “you thought you were on a legitimate investigation?”
“I did.”
“Hah!” Kate turns to Julia. “Well done, Julia. Absolutely brilliant.”
“Thank you.”
“So the mission you two were on,” Kate says, “totally aboveboard, properly authorized by the FBI: you were investigating that first million that Dexter stole. Julia, you were the lead investigator. This handsome clown was your partner.”
Julia nods.
“So you two were sent”—air quotes—“to Luxembourg. Posing as a couple. Keeping your eye on my poor husband, seeing what money he was spending, watching his lifestyle. Was this a guy who just stole a million dollars? Was this the guy who had figured out how to steal limitless amounts of money, anytime he wanted?”
Kate shakes her head. “He was living in a modest apartment. He stayed in cramped rooms in midrange hotels, flew coach, went to the office every day. His wife was scrubbing her own toilets. He went to Esch-sur-Alzette to purchase a used Audi. Millionaires don’t go to Esch at all, much less to buy secondhand station wagons.”
That same secondhand Audi was still their car. They hadn’t gotten around to buying anything new. Or perhaps they’d simply decided, without discussing it, that the old Audi was nice enough. It was just a car, after all.
“No, you determined, this guy was not that criminal mastermind, and this family was not rich. Nevertheless, your job was to be positive. Because sooner or later you needed to go back to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, a full report in hand, with your career on the line. So what did you do?”
The waiter comes by with a replacement carafe of water, and Kate waits for him to back away down the Parisian sidewalk, dusk falling, lights coming on. The dinner-hour crowd promenading through the carrefour is thick, jostling, merry. Kate feels a rush of well-being, in this pleasant place with these clever people, whom she finally understands fully, and this plot that she finds herself appreciating more every second, as if she’s not a participant. The whole thing is goddamn brilliant.
“I give you credit,” Kate says. “I love this bit. What you did was you tried to turn the suspect’s wife. First, you erected a flimsy cover, one you knew would make me suspicious: Chicago. Then you allowed me to know exactly when I’d have the opportunity to break into Bill’s office—you manipulated me into suggesting their midday tennis date, didn’t you?”
Julia picks up her wineglass and takes another minuscule sip, savoring the drop of wine. Savoring the story being constructed around her, about her own ingenuity.
“And in this office, I found nothing much to support your cover story. Which would’ve been easy to fabricate. Yet you did not. Instead, you left a weapon lying around, along with a bunch of condoms. You constructed a fake office that looked exactly like a fake office, for a fake profession. You were from a fake place that I knew would be fake, and you had a fake marriage that looked exactly like a fake marriage. You led me by the hand to all these fakeries. Why?”
“Because I wanted you to find them.”
“Yes. But why?”
“So I could control your discoveries. So you would find out who we were, what we were doing. You would discover that your husband was guilty; the one with the money. The one who could be arrested, indicted. I needed you to get invested in being a part of this crime. His crime. And I needed you to be able to figure that out for yourself.”
Kate grins at the irony.
“Well, not exactly for yourself,” Julia admits. “But close enough.”
Kate feels her eyes drawn to the metal dispenser that holds the sugar cubes where, an hour ago, she discreetly inserted Hayden’s transmitter. Her end of the bargain.
“So who was Lester?” Kate asks. “Your fake father not from New Mexico?”
“Les is our boss.”
“Why was he here?”
“This was right after the big theft. Les wanted to see our suspect and his wife, for himself. Were these the people who had just stolen fifty million euros? He quizzed the wife about her dining-out habits in foreign capitals. He wanted to know how many stars the hotels posted. The answer: it was pretty unlikely that these were the thieves. Nevertheless, Dexter was still the prime suspect. The only suspect, considering of course that he was guilty. So Lester gave it another month to bring the investigation to a close.”
“That’s when you decided to confront me.”
“Yes. You used to be a patriot, after all.” Julia smiles. “And plus we could show you evidence that looked an awful lot like your husband was having an affair with a beautiful young woman in five-star Swiss hotels. You yourself had never slept in a five-star hotel. They don’t have those in Nicaragua, do they?”
“No, they don’t.”
“So we confronted you, to see what you’d do, and bring it to a close.”
Kate remembers that early-January day, the three of them sitting on the cold park bench. When Julia said aloud the wrong number—twenty-five million. The look on Bill’s face as he tried to figure out what that discrepancy could’ve meant. The amount of stolen money, he knew, was double that.
Bill looks at Kate now, the same open, unabashed stare that she’d seen before, in the nightclub in Paris, on the Grand Rue in Luxembourg. A look that admits, You know who I am. But that also challenges, What are you going to do about it?
Kate had underestimated Bill. He’d known the truth well before Julia told him.
Once again, Kate realizes that she’d totally missed a big piece of the puzzle. And this piece? That Bill had been running his own private con. And the person he’d conned was Julia.
34
TODAY, 5:50 P.M.
“You’re kidding.” Hayden had the tiniest of smiles playing across his lips.
“No,” Kate said. “I’m not.”
It was nearly six o’clock. After-work tipplers had begun to arrive at the Georges, tourists with early dinner reservations. One of Hayden’s colleagues had slipped the maître d’ a twenty to buy a perimeter of privacy. But that wouldn’t last long.
“What do you imagine you’d do?” Hayden asked.
“I’m fluent in Spanish. And now I’m passable in French. I know a bit about Europe. I ca
n make my way around an embassy, or a consulate, or an NGO office. I haven’t forgotten how to do the things that need doing.”
“Except you don’t know anyone. You don’t have any contacts.”
This was exactly why Julia claimed she couldn’t be a decorator in Luxembourg. A short-term excuse. A bogus rationalization. “I realize I’d have to start low on the totem pole. And probably stay there, near the bottom. Forever.”
Hayden leaned away from the table. “Why would you want to do this?”
It had taken Kate so long to admit that she’d no longer wanted her job, her career. That she’d wanted to be a full-time mother. But over the past two years she’d discovered that she’d been mistaken. This wasn’t, after all, what she wanted.
“My kids are in school, my days are … they’re empty, unless I find ways to fill them. But I need a reason to fill them. A reason better than boredom.”
She knew it wouldn’t really be her old job. She’d probably never again carry a weapon; she’d never feel the intense rush of mortal danger lurking outside the door of the next asset meeting. So it would be a weak approximation of her old life, her old career, her old adrenaline. But it would be more than nothing.
On the other hand, it would be a more civilized work environment. Plus she now had a lot of money, and lived in Paris, and her increasingly independent children no longer wore diapers, and she had a closer relationship with her husband … she had a lot. She wanted just a little more.
“What I don’t want,” she continued, “is to worry about my children being abducted by some Latin psychopath. I’m more than willing to have a soft, quiet job.”
Hayden started. “So that was it?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Torres threatened your family?”
Kate didn’t answer. She wasn’t going to admit to a cold-blooded, premeditated assassination of a foreign national on American soil. “I’m willing to make compromises,” she said, pushing past that old transgression, knowing that Hayden too would allow this large sleeping dog to lie unmolested. “And I’m here to make a deal.”
