by Chris Pavone
“The girl, Lauren. She was at the club with a friend.”
“Did this friend see you?”
Dave nodded.
“Did you talk to her?”
“No.”
“Do you think she could recognize you? Identify you?” Preston Wolfe glanced between the two boys. “Either of you?”
Dave shrugged. Mr. Wolfe turned to face his son. “Charlie?”
“I don’t know, Dad. I could barely see.”
Mr. Wolfe turned away from these boys, from this disaster, sitting side by side on the sofa of his suite. For a few minutes, nobody said anything, as Preston Wolfe stared out at the modest sights and lights of downtown Ithaca, late at night.
“Okay,” he finally said. “Charlie, you and I have to leave town.” He glanced at his watch. “At seven a.m. This will be before anyone at the girl’s dormitory knows she’s missing. Before any investigation could possibly start. But it’ll be late enough that we won’t arouse the suspicion of the hotel staff.”
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Charlie was leaning forward, elbows on knees. He nodded.
“I’ll take care of cleaning up the Jaguar, in New York. You’ll get on your plane to meet your mother at Cap Ferrat, as planned. You will of course say nothing about this to her. To anyone.”
“What about your meeting?” That was why Preston Wolfe was in town, to see the university president.
“I’m ill. I have to cancel.” He shrugged. “I’ll write a bigger check.”
Mr. Wolfe turned his attention to his son’s friend. “Dave, you’ll go back to the fraternity house, and pack your bags. You can catch another ride home?”
Dave nodded. At the end of the school year, the stream of students departing for the New York metropolitan area was constant, a sort of opposite Great Migration.
“As long as no one knows, it’ll be fine.” Mr. Wolfe was nodding, agreeing with himself, with this hope of his.
“Dad?”
Preston Wolfe turned his focus back to his son.
“We should give Dave something.”
Once again Preston Wolfe’s eyes narrowed.
“Maybe it should be annual,” Charlie added. “An ongoing, ah …”
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“Retainer.” Mr. Wolfe supplied the word.
Dave was stunned, aghast. “I don’t want any money.”
“Twenty thousand per year,” Mr. Wolfe said. “That sound right to you?”
Dave shook his head. “No.”
Preston Wolfe was still wearing his silk dressing gown, one hand in the front pocket. He looked like his other hand should be holding a pipe.
“Better make it forty. For, say, twenty years. No: twenty-five years. That’s a million dollars.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Because that implicates you,” Charlie said. He grasped this intuitively. Dave was at the time the more naive of the two.
“Because,” Charlie continued, “the money is evidence of wrongdoing. By you.” Charlie pointed at his friend, as if to clarify something. “In the event that you ever consider changing your recollection. About what transpired tonight.”
CHAPTER 31
He brushes his teeth and washes his face and returns to his office. He wakens his computer, and opens the video feed to Isabel Reed’s apartment. Her bedroom is dark, and empty. The living room too, and the kitchen, and the hall.
He opens the media folder of motion-activated footage. Since he last checked, there have been about ten minutes of motion, in one stretch, time-stamped beginning 3:08 p.m. New York time.
The first activated camera, as usual, is the one in the hall, as the front door opens. It’s a different man from the usual, this one tall and blond and muscular and wearing latex gloves, moving quickly, not pausing to listen for sounds, not hesitating, not sneaking around corners. This man, like the others, knows there’s no one home; he and his colleagues are keeping close tabs on Isabel, and they know where she is at all times. But also like the others, this blond guy doesn’t know about the surveillance cameras that are watching him while he’s spying on her.
These cameras are the author’s. He had them installed partly to monitor the agent, but mostly to keep track of these goons who come and go, to see what they do, to see if they ever walk away with a manuscript, or, worse, with the woman herself. One or another of these guys has been stealing into her apartment every few days for months. Checking on her submissions. Checking on her.
Today’s goon disappears from the hall’s camera and reappears in the bedroom’s, glancing around at the dresser, the end tables, the shelving. He stands there facing the wall of shelves, methodically scanning up and down and across the rows of manuscripts, each with an author’s name written on the side. After a couple of minutes he reaches up and grabs a stack of paper, and examines the covering page and the first page, but then returns this manuscript to its proper position, and continues scanning until he reaches the end of the wall.
He walks through the rest of the apartment, looking at surfaces, in drawers. Quickly examining every spot where a manuscript could be sitting, or casually hiding. But not finding what he’s looking for. Isabel’s apartment is clutter-free, no disorganized piles, no unsorted stacks of miscellany, no mess in which a manuscript could hide. Her fastidiousness makes the goons’ job easy.
The man leaves. A few seconds later the video file ends; no more motion.
It had been quick work to establish surveillance on Isabel Reed and her apartment, a three-man team who broke into Isabel’s apartment while she was on a four-day trip to a West Coast writer’s conference. The whole operation was not nearly as expensive as the author had been prepared for.
Over the course of his career, he’d amassed millions of dollars that he’d never gotten around to spending. At the beginning, entry-level television jobs for poverty-level pay, the only way he was able to pay the rent had been with the help of the Wolfe payoffs. It seemed like a fortune back then, when he had nothing. And those checks continued to arrive well past their financial relevance, as a matter of—what?—moral principle, would probably be how Charlie explained it, without acknowledging the irony.
Then the late-nineties startup years were a different type of lean, with the promise of a big payoff on the horizon, and the satisfaction of building something. And when it started to work, it happened quickly: a half-million one year, and a million the next, as the international websites exploded and the VC money came pouring in. His take from the IPO was over ten million, on paper at least, and he started earning a healthy seven-figure salary. Plus bonuses, of course.
As with so many people, the more money he made, the less time—or even inclination—he had to spend it. Sure, he bought a junky little airplane, and a nice new car, and a couple of houses. But by the time he signed the papers last fall to disentangle himself from Wolfe Worldwide Media, he had eight figures squirreled away, quite a bit of it well-hidden.
Now he needed to spend it. On the surveillance cameras for the literary agent’s apartment, though not for her office; the headquarters of an international literary agency would’ve been much more challenging, much riskier, for much less benefit. He knew the agent’s habits, and she took everything home with her. Home would suffice for the video.
He spent a hundred thousand on his own disappearance: the gear and the motorboat that he’d needed after the Piper crash, and the airline tickets and train tickets and rental cars and hotels, the clothes and luggage, the new identities. Another six-figure chunk for the Zurich setup—the apartment, the computer, the Audi, the gun.
A half-million on the whole medical aspect, and the discretion that he required to accompany the procedures and their recordkeeping.
Then there was the quarter-million for the Copenhagen setup, all for nothing more than misdirection. But the Copenhagen ruse was absolutely essential. Because the author knew without a doubt that after his departure from the office, after his death, Charlie Wolfe
would go looking for the book material. When he failed to find anything—when Charlie found a distinct and unequivocal absence of everything related to the book—he would suspect the truth: that his erstwhile right-hand man had not committed suicide, but had disappeared with all this material. And there could be only one reason to do that. The autobiography/memoir was the author’s idea to begin with; Charlie wouldn’t doubt the author’s eagerness to turn it into an unauthorized biography. An exposé.
So Charlie would dispatch someone to find the liar, the thief, the traitor. Most likely someone from Langley. Someone high up, someone who had the wherewithal to run a completely black operation, with no oversight whatsoever from any branch of government. Someone who was as motivated as Charlie to make sure that the manuscript was buried, and its author alongside it. There was only one such someone in the world, and the author was terrified of him.
“I don’t care how you handle it,” Charlie would say to this guy, “and I don’t want to know. Just make sure the book doesn’t see the light of day.”
This guy would know that it wouldn’t be enough to simply find the author and intimidate him, or even kill him. Because that wouldn’t necessarily prevent the disastrous story from being out there in the world. They’d have to find and eradicate all traces of the manuscript.
This Langley man would go on a manhunt, and he wouldn’t stop until he found something. Finding nothing wouldn’t dissuade him. He needed to find the wrong thing.
So the author had to create something to be found. Something credible. Something unfinished, in-process; something they wouldn’t interrupt. Something awaiting a resolution. Something that was getting more and more specific as time went on; a project that looked more and more like something to be investigated.
The author flew to Hamburg and rented a car and drove to Copenhagen, where he met with an Austrian skinhead who hired a strung-out Danish student named Jens Grundtvig to fact-check a manuscript about Charlie Wolfe. None of the damning bits; just the straight-up biography, thousands of little facts. No particular rush on this, take your time. New material will arrive on a regular basis over the next six months, maybe nine. And here’s an apartment you should work in, already equipped and wired. Yes, those are some shady Middle Eastern characters who hang out in the social club downstairs, but what do you expect for rent-free?
Those shady characters were in actuality bodyguards, after a fashion.
That’s how it came to be that poor clueless Jens Grundtvig trolled the Internet for old newspaper and magazine articles, and placed off-hour phone calls to the States, checking with primary sources, double-checking with secondary sources, jotting down dates and places and names.
The Agency guy and his freelance team would of course find Grundtvig. His phone calls and web history would be flagged and traced, then he’d be watched. The team would wait, and wait, and wait, until Grundtvig was finished, or until the author made contact, or showed up.
But Grundtvig wouldn’t be finished with his fake task before the author was finished with the real one; and the author would certainly never show up again in Copenhagen. So they would still be waiting, and watching, until it was too late.
Too late was yesterday, when the manuscript began to make its appearances in New York, and the black-ops people—a man and a woman—must have realized that they’d been duped. They stormed into Grundtvig’s apartment, and aroused the alarm of those militant Turks who congregated downstairs, all of which was according to the author’s plan. Not according to his plan, however, was that they both managed to survive. The best-laid plans. Oh well.
Now the Copenhagen chimera is finished, and the secret has begun its inexorable march toward the public, beginning, as all books do, with a hundred thousand words sent from one person to one other person.
And the person to whom this author sent his manuscript is on his computer screen, in this morning’s video feed. Reading in bed, and rising, and showering and dressing, and stepping out to the balcony for her cigarette and a couple of phone calls, and planting that kiss on the framed photo of the little boy, as she does every morning.
CHAPTER 32
Brad is partly proud but partly ashamed that so many of his employees are still in the office at 6:30 p.m. He makes his way through editorial and then the big open Mac-filled space for the designers, past the publicists on the phone and the marketing department gathered in a meeting, into the Lost Corridor, Chester’s team of language nerds, red Col-Erase pencils and glue-backed query flags and big thick reference tomes.
The copy chief is peering intently at his monitor, deep in concentration.
Brad raps gently on the door frame. “Hi.”
“Mr. McNally,” Chester says, looking up.
Brad inclines his head toward the pages on the beat-up old desk. “How’s the fact-checking coming along?”
“Rather well,” Chester says. “I haven’t been able to verify everything; a lot of this seems to be original source material. But what I have been able to verify has been accurate. And fascinating.”
“Thank you, Chester.” He holds out his palm. “I’ll take those pages back now.”
“Oh but I haven’t finished.” Chester looks panicked.
“That’s all right. I don’t need …” Brad isn’t sure what he doesn’t need, or does need. “It’s all right. I need the pages back.”
Chester nods. He’s an obedient character. He picks up the pages, straightens them into a neat stack, and reaches across the table, somewhat reluctantly. It’s hard to read just part of this book.
“Thanks again, Chester. Remember, not a word.”
Brad trudges up Park Avenue South, passing bars and restaurants with giant windows open onto the avenue, spilling out the sounds and bodies of young adulthood, every single person holding a cell phone, calling and e-mailing, texting and sexting, constantly communicating with people other than the ones they’re physically with.
This stretch of Park is traffic-choked, one of the last remaining two-way avenues on the island, its stoplights synchronized to neither direction. He doesn’t care for Park Avenue South, which is a very different street from the Park Avenue proper on which he lives. But it doesn’t occur to him to take a different, less direct route. Part of the New Yorker mentality of accepting the unpleasantness that’s always there, as if it’s inevitable, despite being avoidable.
It takes him thirty minutes to get to Midtown, a half-hour consumed with debate, with worry, with obsession. Wavering on what to do about this manuscript. What to do with his business.
He arrives at the narrow grimy side street off Grand Central Station, and the Maritime Club, an imposing limestone mansion, beautiful Beaux Arts, with a liveried doorman manning the brass-accented revolving doors, the marble-floored lobby, the dense floral arrangement on the polished circular table, the pennants and flags and black-and-white photos, the sweeping staircase to the oak-paneled bar, the leather club chairs and the Persian rugs, the ancient obsequious waiters in bow ties carrying silver trays to deliver short glasses of amber liquids. This is one of the last places in town where most of the drinks are brown.
This is also one of the last places where everyone who’s reading is holding printed paper instead of an electronic device. Trey Freeley himself is deep in a corner, sequestered-looking, draped in an unfolded Wall Street Journal, held aloft like a protective blanket.
“Trey, good to see you.”
Freeley pulls aside his newsprint, puts it down, shakes Brad’s hand. A waiter takes Brad’s drink order before he even sits down in a chair that matches Freeley’s, separated by a small table, a bowl of mixed nuts, a swizzle stick on a cocktail napkin, a mobile telephone turned upside down.
Brad had never been much of a drinker. He doesn’t enjoy the impairment, and he especially hates the hangover. A few times a year, at an awards ceremony or a book party or a benefit, he’ll mistakenly have a third drink, or even a fourth, and he invariably regrets it. Not just the physical feeling, but the thou
ghts he had, the decisions he made. On the other hand, he’s never regretted what he’s done when stoned. And he’s been getting high now for forty years.
Trey picks up his phone, opens the back, pops out the battery, and places the two pieces on the same table. “Would you mind?” he asks.
Brad, flummoxed, retrieves his phone, and removes the case, and turns the thing over, around, again. “I can’t …,” he shrugs. “I don’t see how …”
“Waiter?” Freeley beckons the old African American guy, bow-tied and stooped. “Could I ask you to safe-keep this at the maître d’ stand?”
The old guy nods, holds McNally’s phone as if it’s the pillow for the crown jewels.
“You never know” is all Freeley offers by way of explanation. “A few months ago, McNally,” the lawyer continues, without any further discussion of the phone, “I get a call from the DCI. Tells me that a guy would be callin’ me, and that I should take that meetin’. I of course do.
“So this man, he shows up with a phony name but a genuine cashier’s check for an hour of my time, wantin’ to learn about the book business. So I explain it to him. And then he admits that he’s wonderin’ about a very specific type-A situation. Interested to know how it would work.”
The waiter delivers Brad’s beer, and a fresh bowl of nuts.
“It’s a hypothetical biography,” Freeley continues, “of a media mogul.”
Brad blanches. “Who was this guy?”
“Dunno. Couldn’t find anythin’ on him.”
“Which means what?”
“My guess is that he’s workin’ for the Agency, in some type-A covert capacity. Maybe he’s ex-Agency, or somethin’ else in the national security apparatus. And I suspect that this guy’s job is to prevent this book from bein’ published.”
Brad fights the urge to panic. “Why do you think that?” As calmly as possible, which isn’t that calm.
“Because I know who wrote it, McNally.” The lawyer pops a cashew into his mouth.
