The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  They arrive at the relative irrelevance of Men’s Accessories, and exit through revolving doors back into daylight. Across a street and around a corner and through the cavernous lobby of a recently constructed tower, glass and steel and marble and soaring negative space, an architecture that reeks of the relentless optimism of 2005, the cockiness that there would never be anything other than reliably and rapidly escalating real-estate values, ever again.

  Out the far side and around a corner and suddenly out of Midtown, on a completely residential block, nineteenth-century brownstone town-houses and linden trees and small fluffy dogs at the ends of expensive leather leashes.

  Isabel climbs a wide staircase to an etched-glass doorway flanked by ornate topiary. She rings the doorbell, and barely a second passes before the door is opened by an explosively smiling young man, all white teeth and an aggressive flip of blond, holding an iPad.

  “Isabel Reed?!” he exclaims, and leans in for a cheek kiss, sort of, with skin not quite grazing, lips barely pursing, and no part of him actually touching any part of Isabel. “She’s expecting you?!” Glancing down at his touch screen, panicked.

  “She’s not. I’m sorry. But it’s, um, urgent.”

  “Absolutely! Give me two shakes?!”

  The guy turns and takes a couple of steps away and covers his mouth to speak, indecipherable, into his headset. Isabel notices that his suit pants are cuffed high above the ankle, and he’s not wearing any socks under his wingtips. “Isabel?” He turns back. “It’s no problem! She’s down in the office?!”

  They walk through the marble-floored foyer, between identical console tables with matching arrangements of densely packed purple tulips.

  The assistant turns a carved brass knob and opens a painted paneled door, and the three of them descend to the garden level, glossy white tile floors overlaid by matte white rugs, white furniture with glass and steel, white flowers in white vases, a half-dozen cubicles on either side of a long white-walled corridor. An iOffice. And taking up the full width of the rear of the house, the main suite is another study in various gloss levels of white, and opens through a massive wall of casement windows to the garden, teak furniture and stone statuary and rows and layers and heights of greens.

  It’s a serene garden back there, behind this perfect house presided over by this shockingly attractive woman who’s now embracing Isabel, more air kisses, smiles, an upper-arm rub, “So good to see you.”

  “Judy Thompson, this is Jeffrey Fielder.”

  The doyenne reaches out her braceleted hand for a handshake, a smile, a nod. Judy turns to Isabel. “He’s cute. Is he yours?”

  Isabel glances at Jeffrey, who’s suddenly staring at his feet, blushing.

  “I guess.” Isabel herself can’t help but smile. “Sort of. Now and then.”

  “Please,” Judy says, “have a seat.”

  The personal assistant plus a couple of other minions retreat wordlessly down the corridor.

  Isabel takes a white leather chair, soft armrests, perfectly shaped back.

  “Patrick tells me it’s something urgent, Isabel. How can I help?”

  Isabel takes a deep breath. “I know this is strange, Judy, but: could I borrow the beach house, for a night, or two?”

  Judy has offered this house before; Isabel is pretty sure she’s welcome to it, circumstances permitting. “Of course, Isabel. Of course.”

  Isabel has sometimes found it difficult with her clients to clearly demarcate the line between professional and personal. But it only ever seems to be a problem with the ultra-successful, filthy rich clients, whose fame and fortune don’t come from their books; rather the books follow as a consequence of their other successes. Isabel has quite a few of these clients, Judy here first and foremost among them. Some agents—and some editors too—conflate the relationship with these types of celebrities, and begin to imagine that they too belong in the same summer-house communities, tasting-menu restaurants, and airplane cabins as their multimillionaire clientele. Isabel is conscientious about not making this pretense. But she really needs Judy’s resources, now. And not for rubbing shoulders.

  “And I know this is, um, unusual, but what about a car?”

  Judy snorts a laugh, a surprisingly indelicate noise coming from this famously proper woman. “Please, don’t be shy. Is there anything else I can offer?”

  “Now that you mention it,” Isabel says, “I wouldn’t mind any cash you happen to have.”

  Judy laughs again, but Isabel doesn’t.

  “Are you serious?”

  Isabel nods.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Listen, Judy, I’m scared,” Isabel says. “I have a dangerous manuscript, and I’m worried that people are following me. That they want to kill me.”

  Judy’s eyebrows raise. “What’s the book about?”

  “I’d rather not say. For your safety.”

  Judy knows Charlie, of course. Judy Thompson herself is a version of Charlie Wolfe, a different type of media mogul, with an eponymous magazine and a television show and consumer product lines and prepared foods, plus a decade’s worth of book deals on five continents. She hasn’t written a single word of any of her dozen books, possibly not even the acknowledgments. But she has deposited a lot of large checks.

  “Fair enough,” Judy says. “You’re afraid to go to the police?”

  “For all I know, it’s the police who’re following me. Some form of police, anyway.”

  “What about going on television? I could help with that, you know.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t have any actual proof of anything. All I have is a manuscript by an anonymous author, and—”

  “Anonymous? That’s unfortunate.”

  “And a murdered assistant.”

  “What?”

  Isabel struggles to take a deep breath, without crying. She doesn’t want to break down now, tries to prevent it, but doesn’t really succeed, and the tears spring out of the corners of her eyes, start streaming down her cheeks. “Someone shot Alexis, in her apartment. This morning.”

  “Oh my Lord. Who?”

  Isabel shakes her head, swallows her tears. “And Judy, it’s okay if you don’t want to be involved … I know this is a lot to ask.”

  Judy gives her a what-are-you-kidding look. “So who’s this?” Judy gestures toward Jeffrey, who’s standing at the window, staring into the backyard, silent and unmoving.

  “Jeffrey is an editor, and a good friend. I submitted the manuscript to him, this morning. Before I knew that people were going to start dying. So I have to assume that Jeffrey also is in danger.”

  “Did you give a copy to anyone else?”

  “I didn’t. Jeffrey, did you?”

  “Not really,” he says, still facing the window.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I gave Brad a small chunk.” Jeffrey turns away from the window, worry etched across his forehead. “Should we warn him?”

  “Oh. God, I don’t know,” Isabel says. “What would we—what would you—say?”

  “The truth, I guess.”

  That makes sense, but Isabel doesn’t say anything. Instead she leans over Judy’s desk and scribbles on a scratch pad, then tears off the sheet. She hands the paper to Judy, who reads it quickly—it’s just a couple of lines—and nods.

  “Then what?” Judy asks. “Do you have a plan?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I just want to … I want to go hide.”

  “Hide? And wait for what?”

  Isabel shrugs, then lies: “I’m not sure.”

  CHAPTER 27

  “Hello?”

  “Hi Bradford. I don’t know how to say this in a way that won’t make you panic—”

  “Jeffrey, what’s—?”

  “In fact, actually, you should panic.”

  Brad stares at the LED screen displaying the ten digits of a mobile number. “Jeffrey, what’s going on?”

  “That anonymous manuscript? It was submitt
ed to me by Isabel Reed. You know her?”

  “Sure, I know Isabel.”

  “What about her assistant, Alexis?”

  “What about her?”

  “Do you know Alexis?”

  “No.”

  “Well, she was murdered this morning, in her apartment.”

  Brad’s heart skips a beat. He forces himself to ask, “You think that has something to do with the manuscript?”

  “I do. Isabel does.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because it can’t be coincidence that the morning after the girl finishes reading this bombshell, someone shoots her in the head. In her own apartment.”

  Brad leans back in his chair, closes his eyes. Is this really happening? “Jeffrey, where are you?”

  “Um … I’d rather not say.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my phone might be bugged. Or yours, for that matter.”

  “Bugged? By?”

  “Who knows. Listen, Brad, I’m calling to tell you that you might be in danger. I certainly think I am. Be very careful.”

  Brad stares out at the picture-perfect urban renewal of Union Square. When he was growing up in the 1970s, this park was just another derelict space in a city filled with unsavory places. The graffiti’d subway was untenable after dark. Times Square was a pornographic, prostitute-filled cesspool. Most of the major squares—Bryant Park, Tompkins Square Park, Union Square—were Needle Parks, populated by toothless junkies and gold-toothed dealers, broken glass and glassine bags, discarded needles and crumpled packets of Cheetos, menacing teenagers mugging you at knifepoint, taking your wallet, your jacket, your sneakers. “Yo, lemme check out that bike …”

  Then Brad left for college, followed by a few years bumming around. When he returned to New York, things had changed. Reagan’s eighties had deregulated and broadened the paths to extreme wealth while also widening the many routes to abject poverty. There were more rich people in Manhattan, and they were richer than ever, interspersed with new armies of hopelessly poor—homeless, panhandlers, car-window washers. The rich needed new places to live, an expanded geography of luxury. So new residential areas were carved from old industrial ones—SoHo, Tribeca—and gentrification spread like wildfire. An entirely new neighborhood was even constructed in what used to be the Hudson River, built upon landfill excavated to build the World Trade Center.

  And Union Square, right here across the street, was cleaned up, anchored by the city’s newest largest bookstore on one end and a mega-music store on the other, a farmer’s market, a multiplex. Seemingly every retail space alongside the park was replaced; the park itself was replanted and relandscaped, reimagined. The junkies were evicted, mostly, and the square repopulated. To cap it all off, Whole Foods showed up.

  McNally & Sons was again in the center of Downtown, just as it had been when it was founded in the 1920s. It had been a long trip to come full circle.

  And then a few months ago the agent from the National Security Agency called for the founder’s grandson, and asked Sheila for an appointment, but refused to say what it was about. Brad had been curious and a little worried, plus not entirely sure he had the right to refuse. Was it possible that he was employing a suspected terrorist? His mind raced down the hallways, poking in and out of the offices, peering over the dividing wall of every cubicle, trying to remember each face of the hundred people who worked for him.

  He thought of one: that junior accountant, Middle Eastern. Brad couldn’t remember the guy’s name, nor where he was from; probably never knew the latter. He had a vague sense of Lebanon or Syria, but it could just as easily have been Israel, Turkey, Iraq; what the hell did he know from Middle Easterns? Or the guy could’ve been from Queens, or Atlanta. Brad felt deeply ashamed.

  The agent entered politely, giving Brad something of a bow that felt insincere. “I’m Joseph Lyons,” he said, shaking hands. The man was older—early sixties, probably—than Brad had expected, which for some reason had been a young thug. And this Lyons was wearing a paisley pocket square, of all damn things.

  “Thank you for taking the time, Mr. McNally.”

  Brad didn’t equate pocket squares with badges and guns.

  “So, Mr. McNally, I’ll get right to it.”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “It has come to our attention that some type of biography is being written of the CEO of Wolfe Worldwide Media.”

  Both men were sitting in wing chairs on either end of the coffee table. Neither had chosen the sofa, whose welcoming embrace projected a certain weakness.

  “This manuscript, Mr. McNally, is being written by a freelance journalist who’s in hiding in Europe. The project is being directed by a rival media empire, who are paying the journalist what we believe is a million dollars to create this book.”

  Brad shifted in his seat.

  “We suspect that in nearly all respects the eventual manuscript will be true. Meticulously researched and factually unassailable, a thoroughly credible book.”

  Brad now understood that whatever this conversation was about, it was not his employees, nor any existing problem in his private life or his business. No one was working in this office who needed to be watched or fired. Nothing had crossed Brad’s desk that needed to be turned over to the feds. This conversation was about something that had yet to enter his world; this conversation was its entrance.

  Brad relaxed his shoulders, and released his death-grip on his pen. He glanced down to see that his knuckles were white.

  “But there will also be fabrications. We don’t have any idea what those fictions will be, but we suspect they’ll be designed for maximum impact.” The agent leaned forward. “The manuscript, Mr. McNally, will be a hoax.”

  “Why?” Brad was feeling less uncomfortable, enough to start participating in this conversation, albeit monosyllabically.

  “The goal is to scandalize Charlie Wolfe, and in fact the whole international enterprise of Wolfe Media, to stage a hostile takeover.”

  “What? How?”

  “By instigating a stock crisis. Wolfe shares are being shorted now, as we speak, building a portfolio that can be cashed out after the crisis hits, for immense profit. Which in turn can be used to take over a company in a calamitous predicament.”

  “Uh-huh.” Brad leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, and tried to maintain eye contact with Lyons. “What does this have to do with the National Security Agency?”

  “That’s classified. But as I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. McNally, our collective safety requires everyday people, civilians, to occasionally play a role in law enforcement. Maybe even people in the publishing business.”

  Brad realized what was going on.

  “This is one of those if-you-see-something-say-something situations.”

  “Are you asking me? Or telling me?” Brad asked. Then he quickly looked away, avoiding the man’s stare. Brad still had the occasional urge to Stick It to the Man. And if there ever was such a thing as the Man, it was this agent sitting here, asking him to do something that smelled a lot like snitching at best, stifling freedom of speech in any case, and at worst suppressing information that was in the public’s interest.

  Lyons was smiling, the small, condescending grin of someone who knows he will win, and that it will not even be close. “I guess, Mr. McNally, this is more of a demand than a request.”

  “I see.”

  Brad had asked the in-house lawyer to wait in the conference room next door, in case of any unforeseen circumstances. Foreseen circumstances, actually. Foreseen and undesirable.

  Brad looked Lyons in the eye, trying to stare hard into a hardened face. “And how did you learn all this?”

  “The specific details of intelligence-gathering operations are, of course, confidential. But I can reveal that we intercepted telephone calls between the journalist and the, uh, commissioning enterprise.”

  “Intercepted phone calls? You’re talking about the domestic wiretapping program?”


  “That’s right.” That small smug smile, again. “Although we refer to it as the homeland surveillance program.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Brad was slowly becoming outraged. And cocky. “And so why is this journalist supposedly abroad?”

  “To elude our surveillance. And our law enforcement.”

  “I see. So what is it you want, exactly?”

  “I do not want anything. But what the NSA requires, as a matter of national security, is for you to alert us—me—if such a manuscript arrives here, to your company.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That is correct.”

  “And how will I know? If a given manuscript meets these criteria?”

  “That would be pretty easy, I should think.”

  “Ten editors work here. Each receives twenty submissions in a week, of full manuscripts and book proposals.”

  “This will not arrive as a proposal.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I do.”

  The two men stared at each other, then Brad broke the standoff. “As I was saying, two hundred prospective books arrive here every week. That’s, um … that’s ten thousand per year.”

  Lyons nodded.

  “And you’re asking me to find one? One out of ten thousand?”

  “I’m sure, Mr. McNally, that it will not be nearly as difficult as you’re pretending.”

  After fretting about it for a few hours, months ago, Brad decided that he didn’t need to make any decision, at the time. This preposterous predicament was purely hypothetical. He didn’t even bother to consult the in-house lawyer, who was a contracts and intellectual-property specialist, and not exactly an expert in this type of situation. Nor did he call the outside counsel; Brad didn’t need to waste the guy’s exorbitant billable hours on a long fruitless abstract conversation about the First Amendment.

  He had more concrete and actionable issues on his desk, every single day. Until today, when that manuscript became no longer abstract. So Brad places the call, the one he was hoping not to make, but somehow knew he’d need to.

  “Bradford McNally?” The voice on the other end of the line is a slow, rich Southern drawl, and you can practically hear the belly protruding through the phone. “So nice of you to call.”