The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  On the other hand, it’s true that Hayden too has a couple of swollen bank accounts. One of them is just a bit of family money, the proceeds from the sale of his parents’ Back Bay house. The taxes and maintenance were exorbitant on Marlborough Street, and his Boston-based sister wouldn’t deign to live in such a grand building, after Goo and Ga—their nicknames, for a half-century—died. Willa called the house a mansion, and it clashed with her career, and the persona that went with it, as a mediator, specializing in gang intervention and conflict resolution, driving around South Boston in a filthy banged-up Hyundai. And of course Hayden didn’t have any use for a tall gloomy six-bedroom townhouse in downtown Boston; neither did his other sister Ellen, a pampered Greenwich housewife.

  So they sold the big brick heap, paid the taxes, and split the proceeds. Which is how Hayden found himself with three-quarters of a million unearned dollars, parked in electronic records managed by private bankers. He has never felt the urge—and never really had the time—to spend it. So it’s still sitting there, more patient than he thought money could be, awaiting a catastrophic illness, or a late-life crisis. He’d long anticipated a debilitating midlife crisis, but midlife seems to be coming and going without incident.

  The other swollen account is a numbered one in Switzerland that contains roughly twenty-one million euros, or somewhere north of thirty million dollars, depending on exchange-rate fluctuations. This too is a chunk of unearned money, albeit from a completely different type of source.

  “Let me get this straight,” Hayden said, a year ago, in a different country. “Your husband is the person who stole fifty million euros from Colonel Petrovic?”

  Kate smiled, tight-lipped and joyless. Then she shrugged her shoulders, an afterthought add-on to the noncommittal smile.

  “And you want immunity for this? For Dexter?”

  “And for me.”

  “For you?”

  Kate nodded.

  “Did you play any role in the theft?”

  She shook her head.

  “But you knew about it?”

  “No, not … not at the time. It happened last winter.”

  He leaned toward Kate, his elbows on the table in the café atop the Georges Pompidou Center. “Then why do you need immunity?”

  “I don’t, really. But you never know.”

  This was bizarre. “And where is this money?”

  “Well, we have—that is, Dexter has—half of it. The other half is, uh, unavailable. At the moment.”

  Hayden raised his eyebrows.

  “Dexter had a co-conspirator. She has the other half. I think.”

  “You think?”

  Kate huffed, blowing a slow stream of air out of swollen cheeks. “I just discovered this, Hayden, and it sort of ruined my life. So give me a fucking break.”

  Hayden looked away from Kate, out over the café on the Beaubourg rooftop, off to the south, the picture-postcard images of Paris—the flying buttresses of Notre Dame, the severe geometry of the Louvre, the machine-age elegance of La Tour. This beautiful city, onetime capital of the world, center of high culture and international intrigue. Now a political backwater, an engine driven by food and fashion, by tourism, by the centripetal pull of the big city in a small country, irrelevant.

  Paris is still important to the French, but it’s no longer the European center of what matters to Americans. Germany is by far the biggest economy; Spain and Greece the loci of unrest; London the capital. There are Muslims growing militant in Scandinavia, and gangsters growing restless in Russia; there are the perpetually downtrodden and occasionally revolutionary hordes of Eastern Europe, the religious strife and ethnic tensions of Southern, the strategic oil reserves of Northern.

  There are always important developments in Europe to monitor, to influence; there’s a never-diminishing assortment of unsavory characters to handle. But there’s an increasing reluctance in Langley to prioritize, to authorize, to legitimize the European desk. In the wake of 9/11, all their focus shifted to the Mideast, and to American-targeted terrorism. The subtleties of Europe had been growing increasingly elusive and unmanageably intricate to the crop of Agency bureaucrats raised on MTV, with the attendant attention spans. They thought they understood the blunt dynamics of Middle Eastern conflict, short-form conflict; they had very little patience with the longer arc of the European narratives.

  Beginning in the late nineties, Hayden had run some extracurricular operations, a mutually symbiotic relationship with an international businessman; they helped each other create the news that Hayden, as a representative of the CIA, desired. But as that man grew more influential and visible over the subsequent decade, that business by necessity waned, and then disappeared entirely.

  Which is why Hayden had been toying with the idea of setting up something new, something different, an off-the-books fund to run a freelance team that he could use for the types of operations that would no longer get approved by cover-your-ass Washington oversight. Disinformation. Counterintelligence. Character assassination.

  Perhaps this was it, right here, falling into his unprepared lap in the soft early-fall gloaming, high above the busy streets of the 4ème arrondissement. Not only the operating capital, but also the point person, the most important personnel member. He could make some sort of deal with Kate. He could take her stolen millions in exchange for her husband’s immunity. Sort of. And he could give her the job she wants. Again, sort of.

  He considered Kate in the falling light, leaning away and breathing evenly, anxious for his answer but trying to hide it. A vulnerable woman, easily manipulated.

  “Okay, Kate,” he said, reaching across the table. Every once in a while, Hayden felt like both the luckiest and the cleverest man in the world. This was one of those moments, sealed with a handshake. “You have a deal.”

  “Are you going to tell me what the hell happened?” Kate asks.

  Hayden nods.

  “Thank God.”

  “Oh, please, feel free to call me Mr. Gray.”

  “Har-har.”

  He hands her the final stack of clothing. “It looks like our subject may not be the correct individual.”

  Kate stares at Hayden, uncomprehending. The freelance techs at the university in Heidelberg have spent months searching for this guy, mining the planet-wide ether for someone who could be fabricating a biography of one of the most powerful men in the world. Finally the German nerds found an IP address that was regularly clicking through to old newspaper articles, to video clips and photos, all consistent with researching Charlie Wolfe. They matched this web-access ID to a telephone number in the same location that had been placing calls to the States regularly. Calls to Wolfe’s family and classmates, to colleagues and politicians, to journalists.

  That’s when Kate descended on Copenhagen. She’d been chasing other leads around the Continent—an apartment in Seville and a farmhouse in the Dordogne, a cottage in the Cotswolds and a villa on Lipari—for the better part of the spring, and had been on the road full-time for a couple of weeks. She hastily rented this apartment across Nørrebrogade, moved in bare-bones furnishings, and hired the rest of the local team, freelancers. After a couple of days, certain that she’d found the author, she called in Hayden.

  “How is that possible?” She zips her bag closed.

  Hayden grabs the handle of Kate’s bag, hefts it to the floor.

  “Grundtvig is a diligent researcher. We’ve—I’ve—listened to all his calls.” She’s defending her own diligence, her tactics. Defending herself. “And what he’s researching is definitely Wolfe.”

  “Yes he is,” Hayden agrees. “And we’ve seen everything he’s done, correct?”

  She nods.

  “But somehow a few days ago a hard copy of his manuscript—what we have to assume is his finished manuscript—was delivered to the expected literary agent in New York, without any of us seeing him mail a hard copy. Without us having intercepted an e-mail with a manuscript attached. And most puzzling, with
out the researcher”—gesturing at the window—“ceasing to work on the manuscript.”

  Hayden can see Kate’s gears spinning, trying to figure this out, just as he himself was, an hour earlier.

  “What’s going on across the street,” she says, “isn’t what we think is going on.”

  He picks up a flat-head screwdriver from the kitchen counter. “No, it doesn’t look that way.”

  Hayden has always known that Grundtvig is not the real author. But he was hoping that Grundtvig would have regular—or at least occasional—contact with the real author, and would lead to him. It’s almost inconceivable that this hasn’t yet happened.

  He walks across the room. With a quick shove of his foot, he moves the mattress to an angle. He kneels on the bare wooden planks, and uses the screwdriver to pry up a board. He reaches into the floor cavity and removes two pairs of gloves. He hands one to Kate, then pulls on the other, tugging and twisting the snug leather into place.

  “What are we doing?” she asks.

  He reaches into the floor again and retrieves two inexpensive 9-millimeters, clean untraceable weapons with the identifying markings filed off. Hayden’s general conviction is that very few problems are solved with a gun. The violence just shifts the problem, usually compounding it. But sometimes there’s really no choice.

  “Our friend”—Hayden motions with one of the guns—“must have some connection to the actual author. We haven’t found that connection through his web or phone activity, but I have to imagine we’ll find it on his hard drive.”

  Hayden checks his ammunition clip, and screws on a sound suppressor. Kate does the same with her weapon.

  “We’re going to rob this guy?” she asks.

  Hayden laughs, and slips the weapon into the patch pocket of his herringbone sport jacket. “No, Dear. I’m going to rob this guy. You’re going to wait on the street, in case something happens. When I exit the building, I’ll give you the laptop. I’ll get on my bicycle. You’ll drive.” Hayden places a bud in his ear. “To leave Denmark, don’t take the ferry to Germany; go over the mainland.”

  She nods her understanding: avoid chokepoints.

  “Take your bag to the car now.” He connects the wire to his phone. “Then wait across the street, and watch.”

  They both look around the apartment, checking for stray items. There’s nothing.

  The stairs are worn and creaky, the banister wobbly. Hayden takes the stairs slowly, deliberately, aware of his gathering nerves, careful not to slip and fall, pointlessly.

  For the entirety of his adult life, Hayden has chosen to be an American abroad, meddling in the affairs of foreign governments. He bears culpability for the decision to live this type of life. If this gets him killed, he will not be a victim; you’re not a victim if you bring it on yourself. Hayden believes in self-determination, and self-responsibility.

  He will not blame the person who eventually kills him, in a situation like this. But he always hopes it doesn’t happen today.

  Hayden waits for a few small cars and a large flotilla of bicycles to pass, then walks across the street with a measured pace, trying to keep himself calm, or at least calm-looking. In front of the building next door, a cigarette-smoking man tosses his butt into the gutter, turns away, and steps through the glass door, which is covered in lace-trimmed curtains.

  Hayden pushes open the apartment building’s big wooden door, steps into the tiled vestibule, and confronts a modern glass-and-aluminum door, next to a panel of buttons beside name labels, half of them blank. He considers buzzing randomly until someone admits him, then decides against it. This door looks flimsy enough, and a couple of whacks with the pistol ought to disable the lock, or shatter the glass.

  But first he tries pulling on the handle, and sure enough the thing simply opens. Oh, Scandinavia. How trusting.

  He climbs another set of rickety wooden stairs, turns on the landing, approaches the door. He takes a deep breath, removes the weapon from his pocket, and uses the butt to knock.

  Nothing.

  He waits five seconds, ten. He bangs again. Then calls out, “FedEx!”

  “Jeg kommer!” comes the answer. He can hear the scraping of chair legs against the wood floor, then footsteps, then the click as the lock disengages—

  Hayden throws his shoulder and all his weight against the door and explodes into the room while grabbing Jens Grundtvig by the shirt and raising the pistol and placing the muzzle directly on the man’s forehead.

  “Shhhh,” Hayden hisses. He kicks the door closed. “You are very close to dying right now.”

  Grundtvig’s eyes are popping out of his head; he’s stumbling backward, losing his balance, but Hayden is holding him up by the shirtfront.

  “But I don’t want to kill you. What I want is to know what you’re doing.”

  The man opens his mouth, but no sound emerges.

  “Excuse me?” Hayden asks.

  “Please do not kill me.”

  They have moved all the way into the room, to the desk. “Sit down,” Hayden orders.

  The man collapses into his chair, panting.

  “Now tell me: what are you doing here?”

  “Research. I am doing research.”

  “For whom?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Who is paying you?”

  “I do not know his name. Or her name. I do not know. I am paid every week. Kroner are deposited into my account.”

  “You are researching Charlie Wolfe? His companies?”

  “Yes. That is all. Research.”

  “And what do you do with your information? Do you send it to someone?”

  “No I do not. My file is uploaded to a server every Friday night at midnight.”

  “How is that set up?”

  “I do not understand it. But the computer and the arrangement came with the job. The flat too. This is all I know.”

  Hayden takes a couple of steps away from this man, breathing space, and allows himself to look around this large cluttered room, office and living room and bedroom combined in one, with an untidy kitchenette in the corner—

  His earpiece crackles to life. “We have a problem from next door,” Kate says. The storefront to the west is a social club whose members appear to be primarily—perhaps exclusively—recent Turkish immigrants. A few small tables covered in oilcloth, an old television on a high shelf in the corner, a fat lazy cat, teapots and glasses.

  “Two men, possibly armed, entering lobby.”

  Until this moment it had been unclear if the club had any ties to questionable activities. It is still unclear what exactly is going on, but there must be some connection to Grundtvig, and it can’t be good.

  “I’ll bring up a rear position.”

  Hayden can see in his imagination Kate entering the building, holding her weapon carefully in front of her, creeping through the same door he entered a minute ago …

  His eyes dart around the room, looking for cover. He can hear the men trudging up the stairs. That’s when he notices the video camera that’s aimed at the front door.

  Grundtvig shifts in his chair. “Get up,” Hayden growls quietly.

  “Me?” Kate whispers in his ear.

  “No, I was talking to him.” Hayden grabs Grundtvig by the shoulder, makes the Dane face the door in front of Hayden. A human shield.

  The trudging stops. The men are just on the other side of the door.

  “Can you attain visual on the door in ten seconds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Starting now.”

  Hayden counts the seconds in his mind—one, two, three—his weapon aimed at the front door—four, five, six—

  The door bursts open. But there’s just one man standing in it, aiming a gun at Hayden. Six, seven—

  The two men stare at each other for a second—eight—before Hayden understands.

  “Kate!” he says—nine, ten—but realizes it’s too late.

  The man in the door smiles. Then he steps i
nto the apartment, making room in the doorway for Kate, held at gunpoint by the second man, who’d obviously lain in wait. Who’d known that another American would be coming up the stairs.

  They’d been set up.

  CHAPTER 10

  The author shuffles out of the exam room wearing supple leather slippers, wrapped in a cashmere robe, indulgent items he purchased at an efficient, well-edited little men’s shop off the Bahnhofstrasse, the highest high street in Switzerland, with the streetcars gliding by and the flapping canton flags above the clean wide sidewalks lined with a comprehensive collection of the most famous luxury brands in the world, a rich assortment of expensive-looking handbags dangling from the arms of expensive-looking women.

  He’s still occasionally caught off-guard by the staggering prices in Zurich, for taxis and coffee and groceries and socks, his sense of propriety offended at some unreasonable price tag or another. But what does he care, really? As they say, you can’t take it with you.

  This is one of the things he ended up thinking to himself over and over, as he was telling his same sad story again and again last fall, to hundreds of people over the course of an interminable week, in person and on the phone and even by e-mail. Explaining to all these shocked and sympathetic people that his diagnosis had come out of the blue, after a season of not feeling well, tired, flu-ish, losing weight, constantly sniffling, his systems compromised by something or other.

  But as he made sure everyone knew, he was one of those ostentatiously busy super-professionals who can never get around to vacations or automotive tune-ups or doctor’s visits, not until crisis hits, which was in the fall, right before Thanksgiving. Then it took just a few days, cycling through specialists and tests, until bam: stage IV.

  His mortality rate was supposedly higher than 95 percent, though no doctor or physician’s assistant or nurse would admit how much higher, exactly. Forty-four years old, would be lucky to see forty-five. Extremely lucky. It’d be a good idea to get your affairs in order.

  He went to New York for the holiday, as planned, as every year, the one weekend of the year when DC truly empties out, a few weeks after Election Day, when 100 percent of the people in the vast political machinery are willing to say “No thanks” to the producers of Face the Nation and Meet the Press, “I’m going home for the weekend.”