by Chris Pavone
“I’m not telling you to do anything, Charlie. I’m never going to tell you to do anything. You don’t work for me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What I’m doing is mentioning that the United States of America would be better off if this particular candidate did not prevail.” Hayden handed over a small slip of folded paper. “It’s a complicated name. I’ve written it down, to help you remember.”
Charlie glanced down.
“Just as we’d prefer it if Saddam Hussein were ousted. If Hugo Chavez had not won that election in Venezuela. If we could do something about the mess down in Kosovo. The challenge in Italy is, by comparison, a much smaller one. But it would also make far juicier news coverage. Titillating.”
At that moment a dozen ducks emerged from the lake, most of them brightly plumed drakes, and set off across the paved path to a stand of shrubbery, in fresh bud. There must be nests in there, ducks sitting on eggs with infinite patience. There didn’t seem to be any ducklings about, not yet.
Charlie turned to watch the waterfowl waddle, as if they might be purposefully interloping in this conversation, perhaps eavesdropping.
“I’m just speculating, Charlie, about international events. And giving you a friendly alert to a news story that could develop. A story that your nascent Italian website might be in a unique position to break, which would certainly help launch that site with a bang. As it were.”
“Nice pun.”
“Thanks.”
Charlie looked off to the left, then the right, slowly. It was almost laughable.
“Listen, Charlie, if you’re going to be in this line of work, you’re going to need to be less obvious. Please don’t glance around like that. You draw attention to yourself, and you look like an idiot, and more importantly you make me look like someone stupid enough to deal with amateurs. So please.”
Charlie nodded. “And if I do this for you—”
Hayden held up his hand. “No, Charlie: if you do this for you, for your own benefit. Then I can assure you that you will not be investigated or pursued by us. And we will appreciate the outcome. So we will alert you to other similar opportunities, should they arise, in the future.”
“And by we, you mean …?”
“I mean me.”
Charlie’s eyes darted away again, increasingly nervous, but to his credit this time he didn’t swivel his neck.
“What did you think this was going to be, Charlie? That I’d tip you off to breaking international news because, why? Because I know your father? Because out of the goodness of my heart, I want to help you get rich?”
Charlie watched the ducks disappear into the underbrush, instantly hidden in there.
“You came to me, Charlie.” Hayden clapped him on the shoulder. “Think about it.”
Hayden set off, his leather heels loud on the hard damp walkway, the tip of his umbrella clicking, the sleeves of his new rubberized Mackintosh whooshing against his torso, a raincoat that he’d bought on the same Mayfair shopping expedition as the long expensive umbrella, when he acknowledged that this dismal weather was going to be a part of his life for a long, long time. He should make the best of it. Of everything.
He felt around in the cold but dry right pocket of the Mack until his thumb depressed the stop button, and the record button popped up, and the tape stopped turning.
Hayden glances over the side of the boat, white foam spraying from the black water, speeding toward the horizon’s thin string of lights, among which Isabel Reed and Jeffrey Fielder are shacked up somewhere, hiding from him, about to be discovered.
At first, Hayden was expecting this entire mission to be much shorter, more finite, infinitely simpler: find the author, and kill him, and destroy his manuscript. Each year it becomes easier and easier to locate people, anywhere, with cell phones that can be triangulated, with IP addresses that can be pinpointed, with bank cards whose transactions can be monitored, with security cameras at airports and train stations, at banks and gas stations. It’s extremely difficult to hide, unless you’re very smart, and very careful, and very well-funded.
Unfortunately, the author was all of those things, and hence probably unfindable within a reasonable time frame, using a controllable level of staff. So Hayden turned his focus to the demand side of the eventual transaction. He used Langley’s resources to set up round-the-clock electronic surveillance of Isabel Reed—all her computers, all her phones—fed to the desk of a freelance tech named Gunter who occupied a sixth-floor-walk-up garret near the university in Munich.
Because of the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping program, the systems were already in place to monitor any American, at any time; it wasn’t hard for someone in Hayden’s position to gain access. And because Isabel was only one person, who could really use only one device at a time, and who slept and ate and commuted and exercised and watched television, it was fairly undemanding to listen to absolutely every word she said on the phone, to read every e-mail she sent or received. Not exactly fun, but not particularly challenging.
Unfortunately, the months of eavesdropping on Reed’s New York book-publishing world had yielded nothing relevant. Not one message, not one call. Gunter wanted to shoot himself in the head. Hayden had needed to double the guy’s pay, twice.
Hayden packed the chic little nylon suitcase that he’d picked up on a whim in Milan, flew Lufthansa business class to JFK, then unpacked in a modest-size room at an immodestly priced hotel on the Upper East Side. He combated jet lag by pushing through the long afternoon walking around the Islamic Art galleries of the Metropolitan, grabbed dinner at the bar of an Italian restaurant, and forced himself to stay out until nine, when he allowed himself to collapse. He woke up eight hours later, sufficiently rested and adequately adjusted to GMT −5.
Every morning for a week he set out wearing one of his lightweight travel suits and French cuffs and a subdued silk tie, taking a taxi to a different neighborhood, trudging from publishing house to publishing house, through the winter slush and the surging crowds and the deafening traffic and the soaring skyscrapers, the relentless onslaught of New York City, tall and dense and severely gridded, right angles at nearly every intersection, completely unlike the haphazard layout of European cities with their dead-ends and diagonals and roundabouts, their predictable low-profile architecture and manageably narrow streets. The scale of Manhattan made Hayden’s pulse pound.
He walked deliberately, doubling-back on his own path, pausing at storefronts, ducking into delis, scanning and memorizing faces, suddenly hailing taxis. The endlessly exhausting slog of counter-surveillance, a study in the infinite patience required for unreasonable overkill.
Which is why he was taking all these meetings in the first place: overkill. Hayden was fairly certain that the author would entrust his manuscript to Isabel Reed, and he was equally sure that she’d submit it to Jeffrey Fielder. But the difference between fairly certain and completely certain could be the difference between life and death.
So Hayden found himself eluding nonexistent surveillance around Manhattan, pushing through revolving doors into soaring contemporary lobbies or streamlined Art Deco ones, into the Flatiron Building and Rockefeller Center, into squat grungy old buildings and soulless soaring skyscrapers. He’d approach the bunkered lobby desks, and smile at guards wearing navy blazers adorned with the names of security firms. He’d be issued a pass on a lanyard, or a little paper glue-backed badge to stick onto his lapel. He’d sit in the receptionist’s anteroom, legs crossed, leafing through a seasonal catalog of forthcoming books, waiting for a secretary to lead him down a book-lined hallway to the corner office.
Hayden would take a seat across from someone a few years younger than him, somber business suits and fashionable eyeglasses, soft fleshy middle-aged executives, impatient with this intrusion but also intimidated, and often bristling with something like contempt.
He would present a badge that identified him as an agent for the National Security Agency. He had business cards to
that effect as well, naming him Joseph Lyons. The NSA wasn’t the ideal cover for this situation, but Hayden’s experience was that absolutely everyone was not only intimidated by the NSA, but also confused by it, unsure of what exactly the agency did, for which branch of government.
He’d set his face into an approximation of moral indignation as he explained about the manuscript, about the hoax that was being perpetrated. When this manuscript did emerge, Hayden would say, it would be absolutely imperative that he be alerted, instantaneously. If these people were going to be caught, if the hoax was going to be contained and then quashed, time was of the essence, absolutely critical.
Hayden would shake hands firmly and leave behind his phony business card with a real phone number. He’d made a whole box of these cards, 250 of them, a couple of years earlier. They were almost gone.
One evening, he slipped one of these cards to a very likely confederate, and offered him a bribe.
Another evening he met up with a woman he’d known back when he was in Cambridge, a lifetime ago. They’d stayed in faltering touch. Bitsy had been divorced now for fifteen years. After dinner they walked around the block to her apartment, antique Persian rugs and Hudson River School landscapes in ornate gilt frames, a four-poster mahogany bed with obscenely soft sheets, a slow comfortable screw and a warming Armagnac nightcap wearing silk robes in front of the window facing the park, the galaxy of twinkling lights of the skyline, fuzzy from the fog that settled over the dark park like a cold wet blanket.
He snuck out at 3:00 a.m., struck out through the deserted uptown streets, the rows of green awnings of fortress-like apartment buildings, the ornate facades of limestone mansions, the flapping flags of museums and private schools, the pristine glass that fronted art galleries and clothing boutiques, the big black bags of rubbish on the curbs in front of restaurants, awaiting pickup from the army of garbage trucks that roamed the late-night city like a gang looking for an easy mark, grumbling and proprietary, unchallenged.
Hayden fell back into his hotel bed, wondering what would’ve been, could’ve been, if it’d been himself instead of Roger who’d married Bitsy, moved to New York, gone to law school or Wall Street, made this his town, this his life, the whole family together on Christmas ski vacations. He had spent last Christmas alone, in his apartment in Munich, listening to Wagner and reading about Egypt. He spent nearly every Christmas alone.
He left New York the next evening, confident that he’d been appropriately intimidating to the upper echelons of the book-publishing business. Confident that when the manuscript hit the marketplace, he would be alerted, by a variety of people.
On the other hand, it was also possible—it was likely—that the manuscript would never hit the marketplace, that this whole population of informants would never glimpse the thing. Hayden had planned for that contingency as well.
He had even planned for another contingency, one that he’d never fully admitted to himself. And it was clear to him now, while reading the manuscript in this stolen boat, that he was effectuating a plan he hadn’t even realized he’d formed.
Yes, he thinks, I know how this is going to end.
He returns attention to the manuscript.
The Accident Page 219
The deal with David Miller wasn’t the only one that Preston Wolfe struck that night.
“Dave, give us a minute, will you?”
Mr. Wolfe held out his hand, ushering Dave into the hotel hallway, where he leaned against the wall, then slumped to the ground, and waited.
It was only a couple of minutes.
“No more drugs,” Preston told his son. “No more drunkenness. No more lying, lazing around. No more.”
He poked Charlie in the chest, a quick hard jab of his forefinger.
“I will fix this. No one will ever know about it. Unless you defy me, Charlie.” Another poke, even harder. “And then I will have no mercy. None whatsoever.”
Preston Wolfe stepped back and looked at his son, a tall young man who was nevertheless not quite as tall as his father.
“Do we understand each other?”
CHAPTER 47
The phone rings, and rings, and rings, then voice mail picks up. Stan ends the call, and instead sends Jessica a text: Call me. Urgent.
Something catches his eye out the window, down the hill. It looks like headlights, coming up his long driveway.
There could be plenty of reasons for someone to come driving up to his house at this time of night. Could be the garrulous winemaker from the estate next door, who has a tendency to show up uninvited, not entirely sober. Could be some boyfriend—or girlfriend—of the cook Irene. Could be the ranch hand Logan, returning from wherever Logan goes at night. Could be cops. Could be killers.
It’s definitely a vehicle coming up the driveway. Stan wonders what the fuck happened to the security system at the front gate, which he had been assured was absolutely top-flight.
From the house, roads extend in three directions to different destinations on the property. But none offers any egress to the main road. None leads to escape, only to hiding.
As with employing a hot assistant, sometimes owning a thousand-acre ranch, with his nearest neighbors two miles away, has downsides.
Jessica wraps the throw blanket around her shoulders. She thinks she hears her doorbell ring. Could that really be her doorbell? She turns down the music, listens. Yes, it rings again.
“Hello?” She looks through the video-intercom’s screen: clean-cut guy, fit, late thirties or early forties, respectably but not fashionably dressed. A good-looking guy who asks, “Jessica Mendelsohn?”
“Yes?”
“This is Detective Dryden, with the Beverly Hills P.D.? We were on the phone a few minutes ago?”
The man steps back, away from the camera a couple of feet. In one hand, he’s holding a briefcase. With the other hand, he reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a wallet, flips it open, and holds it up to the camera. Sure enough, that’s a badge.
“Oh yes. Hi, Detective. How can I help you?”
“Can you let me in, please?”
She’s not too sure about this, not at all. But what’s she going to do?
“Sure!” she says, in the forced cheer that she uses to say thanks! to hundreds of people every day, in person and on the phone, as part of her performing-parrot act.
She waits by the door, then notices that she’s in her bathrobe, and turns to her bedroom to get dressed, but then realizes that she doesn’t have the time, and it’s better to be securely in a bathrobe than falling out of her clothing. She pulls the robe closed tightly against her chest, her thighs.
Knock. Knock.
She opens the door.
“Thank you. Sorry to bother you. Did Mr. Balzer tell you why we called?”
She shakes her head.
“It’s about Camilla Browning. Glyndon-Browning, I guess is her full name. You’ve met her?”
Jessica nods.
“Well, I’m sorry to tell you, but Ms., ah, Browning is dead. She was in a car accident tonight,” the detective continues. “I’m so sorry.”
“Oh my God!”
“Yes, it’s terrible. And because Ms. Glyndon-Browning—that’s what you say, right? Both names?—is not, ah, from the area …”
Jessica stares at him blankly.
“And with Mr. Balzer out of town …”
“Yes?” She feels like she should know what he wants, but she doesn’t. She has spent so much of her life immersed in the plots of movies, but she doesn’t realize when her life has slid into one.
“We’ve been unable to positively identify the body.”
Jessica nods, still not getting it.
“And we need to.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So,” he says, growing frustrated, “would you mind coming down to the station? It’ll only take a minute.”
Oh my God, she thinks: they want me to ID the dead British chick. “Really?” How gross. She wonders if there’s any
way she can get out of this. “Sure,” she says, forcing the cheer. “Give me a minute to get dressed?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll meet you on the street? I’ll pull my car out, to yours?” She places her hand on the doorknob, ready to push it closed.
But the cop keeps his body in the doorway. “It would be better if I waited here while you get ready.”
“Um …”
He smiles broadly. He really is very good-looking, for a cop. She opens the door and lets him in. “Two secs,” she says.
It’s when she’s in her underwear in her bedroom with the door shut that she hears her phone ringing, out there in the living room, sitting on the coffee table next to her mug of herbal tea and her stack of awesome manuscript. She hurries into a sweater, but there’s no way she’s going to make it out before voice mail picks up. Fuck it, she thinks. Even if it is Stan, he can wait five minutes.
Jessica emerges from her bedroom, pulling her hair out of the sweater, but doesn’t see the detective, and falls into a split-second of panic before she realizes that it’s entirely justified, because a wire has been pulled around her neck.
The ATV bumps along the rutted path alongside the vineyard, row after row of pinot noir, with clusters of pink roses trained to the stakes at the end of each, which Stan remembers are not purely for aesthetics, but serve some agricultural reason that may or may not involve fungus, or mold, or something disgusting that he didn’t expect to be associated with a vineyard, which in the end is perhaps the most surprising pain in the ass in his life, as well as a financial nightmare of epic proportions. Fucking vineyard.
Stan hasn’t turned on the headlights—lights would give away his location—and despite the strong moonlight he’s having trouble navigating this vehicle in the dark.
At the far end of the vineyard he turns onto the even cruder path that leads up the mountain, into wilderness. There are coyotes up there; he hears them every night. Bears too, sometimes. Wildlife is part of the appeal of this property, this area. Wildlife scares the shit out of Stan.
