The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  But God, look at this woman, her curves straining the confines of her suit. “Hullo McNally,” she says. “Just a quick check-in before I’m off. Anything?”

  It takes Brad a second to register what she’s announcing, and asking. Is this what Alzheimer’s feels like? But now he remembers: Camilla is leaving for one of her West Coast trips to meet with film producers, and agents, and whoever. Brad has never been entirely clear on the precise utility of these LA trips. Camilla explained it to him once, but he’d been too busy imagining her naked to accurately assess her argument.

  “No,” he says, instinctively glancing down at his desk, at the photocopied inch of Jeff’s manuscript. A hundred pages?

  “What’s this?” Camilla taps it with a recently manicured red nail, smiles coyly with freshly red-painted lips. “The Accident, by Anonymous. Intriguing.”

  “Nothing,” he says. “Something submitted to Fielder. We don’t own it yet. I don’t know what it is.” He shrugs, and gives his affable chuckle, the laugh he started using as a nervous teenager, and never stopped employing, even after he was no longer a teenager, nor especially nervous. He knows that everyone thinks he laughs too much, when things aren’t funny. But that’s sort of what it is to be affable, isn’t it?

  Camilla leans forward, affording—insisting upon—a resistance-melting view of her black lace bra. “Are you lying to me, Love?”

  “Come on.” He chuckles again. “Do I ever?”

  She straightens, languorously, pushing her chin up, breasts out. “Listen, McNally, I know my department have not been pulling our weight. And I won’t blame you for making me—as we say back home—redundant.” She purses her lips. God, those lips. “I’m not claiming it’s my fault. The business has changed. Musical chairs, and I’m odd chap out. Or will be, soon. So I’d understand.”

  He makes a noncommittal grumble. It’s true that much of the subsidiary-rights business has disappeared entirely, and most of what remains is controlled by literary agencies. Camilla is running out of relevancy.

  “But until that happens, please—please—give me every chance of surviving.” She inclines her head down at The Accident.

  “I wish I could, Camilla. But honestly, it’s just not ours to shop around, to anyone, for any reason. Also, as I said, I don’t even know what it is.”

  “Rubbish.” She smiles wider. “If you didn’t know what it is, it wouldn’t be here, on the middle of your desk. It’d be over there.” She nods at the coffee table piled high with stacks of manuscripts and book proposals and finished books and bound galleys. All the stuff Brad is supposed to read. Or review. Or whatever the hell he’s supposed to do with the tens of thousands of pages piled on that goddamned table.

  “Don’t forget,” she says, rising, reaching out across the desk to place her palm on his cheek. “I know you, Mr. Boss-Man.” She withdraws her hand, turns, and walks away, slowly and deliberately.

  And then he’s alone, for the first time all morning. Alone with this manuscript, and this decision. He turns to the small stack of pages that Jeff left for him, flips to the rear few, and starts reading.

  The Accident Page 130

  The bar had stopped serving alcohol a half-hour earlier. The deejay changed the soundtrack from fast dancing to slow going-home. The lights came up. People started shuffling to the doors, raucously or dejectedly, to the parking lot, to drive their third-hand Datsuns and their parents’ deaccessioned Acuras to the handful of college campuses within striking distance of this dance club on a quiet, rural road along the sparsely populated stretch of lakeshore.

  Charlie was on a bench against the wall, making out with a brunette, a girl who he’d acquired sometime in the past fifteen minutes. It always amazed all the fraternity brothers how quickly Charlie could find a girl, at the end of the night. “Swooping in” is what people called it. He’d done it again.

  The night hadn’t been unusual for an end-of-term blowout, with exams finished, and summer vacation about to start. Eric was headed to a newspaper internship in Cleveland, résumé fodder for an English major and school-newspaper writer. Dave was going to be staying at his mother’s house in Brooklyn, working a job at a Midtown advertising agency. Charlie was meeting his family for a few weeks in the South of France, followed by a month in East Hampton, studying for the LSATs when he wasn’t sailing or partying.

  This was the three friends’ last night together of their junior year, a night to celebrate. But also a bittersweet night. They were about to start their final summer as undergraduates. Everyone understood, in a nonspecific way, that this meant the end of something. The end of carefree childhood.

  The Accident Page 131

  At midnight Eric became morose, as he often did, and soon disappeared without notice, catching a different ride back to campus, which was not unusual for him.

  Dave sucked down the last of his Coca-Cola, striving for sobriety and alertness, determined to not allow Charlie to drive; Charlie was pretty much never in driving condition by last call. And Charlie did indeed hand over the car keys without argument, his arm wrapped around the waist of the girl, named Lauren.

  “One minute,” she said. “I need to say goodbye to my friend.”

  That other girl, slender and blonde and looking tightly wound, was leaning on the bar thirty or forty feet across the room, fending off a slobbering jock, a big Golden Retriever of a boy with meaty paws. As Lauren leaned in, giggling, that blonde turned to stare through the thick stratus of cigarette smoke, tinted blue by the beer lights, trying to assess the trustworthiness of the two cocky-looking boys. But she was too far away to tell anything.

  Lauren returned to Charlie, giddy, ready to ride back to Ithaca with the tall, handsome, rich boy. To be taken to that other more selective institution on that other nicer hill. To a towering Gothic fraternity house, to a secret basement tap room with more beer, to a balconied bedroom stocked with cocaine and condoms …

  The Accident Page 132

  Or that’s what Charlie thought the girl wanted. Because back then, that’s what Charlie always thought all the girls wanted.

  CHAPTER 12

  The elevator doors open, and Isabel steps out into the basement. She looks left, right. She walks toward the sign for SECURITY, a plain steel door at the end of a cinder-block-walled hall, painted beige, pipes hanging from the ceiling. The bowels of the office building. It couldn’t look more different down here than up on 58, in the plushly carpeted, floor-to-ceiling-windowed, glass-and-steel-and-leather offices, the hustling hubbub of a major international agency—all-in-one Literary and Talent, Motion Picture and Television, Commercial and Speaking and Brand Management. Hundreds of people in the New York headquarters, buffered from the public by a towering double-floor reception hall with cantilevered stairs and a wall of windows behind the desk, a million-dollar view of Midtown Manhattan. A billion-dollar view.

  The security chief opens the door to the surveillance center. “Hector Sanchez,” he says. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Isabel looks around the cramped, dark room. There are dozens of little screens streaming real-time video of public spaces, monitored by a morbidly obese uniformed guard. “This is Reggie,” Hector says. “Please”—beckoning off to the side, a stand-alone monitor on a small metal table—“have a seat.”

  Hector takes a stool next to Isabel, and they begin to scan through Friday’s footage, slowing down and speeding up to examine various men, suspicious-looking or merely unfamiliar.

  “Can you pause there?” Isabel asks. “That one?”

  They watch a portion of tape, then Sanchez shakes his head. “No, that’s a lawyer from the firm on fourteen.” He seems to know everybody who enters this building.

  “How do you recognize all these people?”

  “Guess it’s my job.”

  The fast-forwarding video continues. Five, ten, fifteen minutes. Isabel looks around, taking in this grim windowless room, the decrepit old monitor she’s been staring at, trying to identify a totally uni
dentifiable man. The more men she looks at, the more convinced she becomes that this is hopeless.

  She asks to take a closer look at what turns out to be another lawyer. She didn’t even know there was a law firm in the building. There are apparently nine of them.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re looking for?” Sanchez asks. He doesn’t sound frustrated, just curious. “Any identifying characteristics you’re looking for?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “So is there any chance we’re going to get anywhere?”

  “I highly doubt it.”

  But then a minute later, Sanchez notices something. He hits rewind. They watch a section of footage from the lobby. The revolving doors spin, and discharge a man, wearing a baseball cap low on his forehead, hiding his eyes. Medium build, Caucasian. But no defining features of his face are visible.

  There is no audio to accompany the video. This security room is eerily quiet, just the low hum of electronic equipment, the labored breathing of Reggie across the room. Hector clicks the mouse again, and the video switches to the high-rise elevator banks. The man swipes a key card at the turnstiles, enters the elevator waiting area.

  Different camera, in the elevator. The man’s face still not visible. And again at ATM’s main floor. The man moves quickly but calmly from one area to the next, never pausing, never stopping to talk to anyone, never looking around, never making eye contact. An anonymous man. Who seems to know exactly where he’s going.

  The camera in Isabel’s corridor is mounted high in the corner. She sees the man striding toward her office from the far end, toward her assistant’s cubicle. Alexis’s face is buried in a manuscript. The man barely slows as he slips a Jiffy bag into the in-box and continues down the hall, approaching the camera, nearer, nearer.

  “There,” Isabel says. “Rewind a sec.”

  Hector freezes the footage, clicks a mouse, scrolls back. Now the man is directly below the camera. The bill of his cap still obscures his forehead and eyebrows. But at this angle, for a split-second, they can see some of his face. He’s a complete stranger.

  This stranger is no ordinary messenger, and Friday clearly wasn’t his first visit to Isabel’s office; he knew where all the cameras were. Which means she’d been surveilled, stalked. Here, upstairs, this man had been on her floor. And he probably hadn’t limited himself to locating security cameras; he probably hadn’t confined his snooping to the hallways.

  This man had probably sat in Isabel’s chair, at her desk. He’d put his hands, and who knows what else, on her computer.

  “Is that him?” Sanchez asks. “That’s gotta be him. Do you recognize him?”

  Isabel looks at Sanchez, stupefied. What had she already explained? She couldn’t recognize the guy because she never saw him in the first place.

  Sanchez returns the video to the beginning, to the man’s entrance to the elevator banks. “Reggie?” Hector asks, over his shoulder. “You see this time stamp?” It’s 1:22, in the dead center of lunchtime.

  “Yup.”

  “Can you check the ID scan at the north elevator bank?”

  Reggie hits his keyboard, pauses, taps some more. “Sorry. There must be a mistake.” Reggie types again, shaking his head. “I don’t understand,” he says. “The ID he used? It’s Isabel Reed’s.” He turns to Isabel, points a finger at her. “That’s you, ain’t it?”

  CHAPTER 13

  This is not at all what Kate expected out of this operation in particular, out of this job in general, out of her life as a whole. She has her lovely little Jake and Ben, and a wonderful husband, and by any measure she leads an enviable expat existence in Paris. She doesn’t need to be standing here in Copenhagen, on the verge of being shot in the head, for something that has nothing to do with her.

  There was a long period when Kate was certain that she’d made the right decisions about what to do with her career, how to live her life. That certainty was a great comfort, lulling her to sleep quickly every night, getting her out of bed energized every morning.

  Then the husband and children introduced doubt, levels of qualms that waxed and waned over the years. Sometimes she has been deep under the doubt, drowning in it, unable to see daylight up above; sometimes floating on top of it, a gentle backstroke to stay afloat. But it has always been there, always threatening.

  Should she have a safe comfortable desk job instead of this dangerous operational fieldwork? Should she be home more? Home all the time? She wasn’t terribly satisfied with that life, for the couple of years that she experimented with the stay-at-home-parent lifestyle in Luxembourg and Paris. She was bored, and resentful, and unfulfilled. Not to mention constantly worried that when the kids had finally left the nest, she’d have spent a dozen years without a job, and for all intents and purposes she’d be unemployable. At least, unemployable in any capacity that would appeal to her. She’d be career-less, one of those at-sea middle-aged women grasping at a second act, a docent at a third-rate cultural institution, or teaching English to foreigners.

  On the other hand, it was indisputable that no one lies on her deathbed lamenting that she spent too much time with her children, and not enough time working. No one sane, that is. She’d like to think of herself as sane.

  Plus of course “working” doesn’t often mean—shouldn’t mean—getting shot in the head in a Danish apartment by Turkish drug dealers. If that’s what these guys are.

  She watches one of them take another step into the room, and another. His gun is trained steadily at Hayden’s head, above the shoulder of the hostage that Hayden is holding in front of him. She suspects that these Turks don’t have any particular interest in keeping Grundtvig alive, so perhaps “hostage” isn’t the operative concept for the poor student’s function in front of Hayden. The Dutch kid is merely a physical shield, a nice thick mound of bullet-absorbing flesh.

  This situation is very, very bad. Exactly the type of scenario that Kate envisages when she’s awake in the middle of the night, away from her family, pondering the question, What’s the worst that could happen?

  This. This is the worst.

  And this particular situation is probably not going to improve over time. Every second is working against her. She needs to make something happen, to change the course of this action.

  She mouths the number five at Hayden, and he nods infinitesimally, confirming his understanding of the tactic. He begins another countdown in his head.

  Four, he mouths, setting the pace.

  The first Turk is now just ten feet in front of Hayden, and continuing to move forward.

  Three.

  Kate inhales deeply, her shoulders rising with the effort, moving the barrel of the gun slightly off her skin, a half-centimeter.

  Two.

  Hayden blinks on the beat of the final second.

  One.

  Kate’s right hand shoots up across her face, to her left temple, and grabs the barrel of the weapon that’s resting on her skin, changing the angle just as an explosion rings in her ear, while at the same time throwing her left elbow backward, sinking deep into the paunch of the Turk behind her.

  Bits of the ceiling fall on her head, her shoulders, from the bullet’s damage. She spins around, still holding the barrel of the weapon pointed at the ceiling with her right hand. With the heel of her left hand she hammers this guy in the face, an upward thrust, but she misses somewhat and hits his lip, his front teeth gouging her, but she doesn’t pause, doesn’t give him time to recover, and strikes again, this time to the trachea, and he crumples.

  She seizes the weapon, just as she hears the other Turk’s gun fire twice, and every muscle in her body tenses, preparing to have been shot, to be about to die here, in what is now clear has been the wrong decision, the absolute wrong way to live her entire life.

  CHAPTER 14

  Camilla stands in the threshold of Jeff Fielder’s office. The editorial meeting is still in progress, so this end of the hall—the editorial department—is completely un
populated. She glances around Fielder’s assistant’s desk, looking for an appealing pile of manuscript, but doesn’t notice anything special other than the boy’s leather bag, which can only be accurately described as a handbag. A lamentable fashion trend.

  She wants to get the hell out of New York City, for good. After growing up in dismal England, then living in dismal New York, ça suffit, as the teachers used to say at boarding school. Enough of these tiny apartments and overpriced grocers, enough of these self-obsessed poufs with their hand luggage and these arrogant financiers with their trophy wives, enough of the crap weather.

  So she needs to get on this plane to LA, to continue her purported mission of trying to sell rights—UK book rights, domestic magazine rights, Canadian calendars, whatever derivative rubbish she can pitch—to raise emergency cash. She doesn’t need Brad to tell her that the situation is dire. She can feel the desperation hanging in the air, a miasma of impending financial apocalypse.

  The ruin sure did come upon her quickly, more a Pompeii than a Rome. Just a few years ago she was Ms. Midas, conjuring six-figure paperback deals out of thin air, being consulted on everything, courted, seduced. For a while, she looked totally vindicated in her rejection of the family concern, Papa’s string of shoe stores in the north, a Manchester lad made good enough to buy a house in the part of Pimlico that could pass for Chelsea for those who didn’t know better, and send his girls to school in Switzerland, and drive a pathetically endless string of new Jaguars.

  Boarding school backfired when she met an American cousin of her best friend, on ski holiday in Lech. It was love at first sight, nineteen-year-old style, and by May she was ignoring Mum’s entreaties and putting off university and securing a job as a summer au pair for one of those bankery families whose women and children spend their summer in Bridgehampton while Dad comes out at the weekend to get tight and grope the help in the butler’s pantry.