by Chris Pavone
“Status?” the man asks.
“Huh?” Jeff says, then realizes that the guy is speaking into some microphone, somewhere. Pinned to his jacket? Implanted in his jaw? Who knows. Who cares.
“Status?” the man repeats, but doesn’t get an answer. “Ms. Reed doesn’t have a firearm here, does she, Mr. Fielder?”
“I don’t think so,” Jeff says. “But what the hell do I know? Nobody seems to tell me a fucking thing.”
“Is that right?”
A few seconds pass in silence.
“Is the manuscript true?” Jeff asks.
“Don’t know.”
Jeff stares at this guy, this unlikely-looking armed intruder, in the middle of the night in a beach-house living room, protecting the secrets of powerful people.
“Who are you?”
“Who do you think I am?”
“FBI?”
“Close enough. What’s the difference to you anyway?”
Jeff doesn’t know. He guesses the guy is right; it doesn’t make any difference what organization he works for. “Is your job to prevent this manuscript from getting published?”
“Yes.”
“By any means necessary?”
The guy smiles. “That’s correct, Mr. Fielder.” He brandishes the pistol. “Any means. Have you destroyed your copy?”
Jeff inclines his head at the smoldering fire, burned down to low hot flames, the small logs fully engulfed in dancing tendrils of blue.
“Does anyone else in your office have a copy?”
“I gave some pages to my boss, Brad McNally. Not much. Not enough to be a problem.”
The man nods.
“It would have been irrational—suspicious—if I didn’t give him something,” Jeff continues, defending himself unnecessarily. “But that part of the manuscript doesn’t contain anything particularly …” He doesn’t know how to characterize what those opening pages don’t contain, in contrast to the rest of the book. “Damaging, I guess.”
“Anyone else?”
“No one.”
“How did Ms. Glyndon-Browning get a copy?”
“I don’t know. I certainly didn’t give it to her.”
“And Ms. Reed’s copy?”
“It’s …” This is it, the moment when he can complete the sellout, or not. When he can betray Isabel, or not. “I burned it too.”
The two men stare at each other.
“There are no other copies here in this house?”
Jeff shakes his head. “So is our deal still, um …?”
“Well,” the man says, “that depends.”
Jeff doesn’t know what this means, and is about to ask for clarification when the veranda door opens.
In an instant the man has taken the three steps that separate them, and has raised his pistol to Jeff’s temple. A hostage.
Then both men turn their eyes to the door, and they see Isabel limping through, disheveled and bleeding and scared out of her wits, holding a handgun in front of her.
CHAPTER 54
The author takes his foot off the accelerator, but doesn’t move it to the brake, unsure of his predicament. Yes this car is stolen, but the police can’t know that, not yet. Yes there are murder weapons in the bag in the passenger seat, but the police can’t know that yet either. Yes he’s a fugitive, a fraud, living under a false name. Can the Swiss police possibly know that?
He looks in the rearview again, his foot still floating between the two pedals, the car incrementally slowing.
Then he decides to floor it. Because there’s very little chance that any type of police interaction here on this winding road in the Alpine foothills will not end with him in custody. And custody would lead, almost immediately, to his assassination, a bullet to the brain while he was wearing handcuffs, shaking his head no, a beseeching “Please” his last word.
He feels the accelerator under his sole, and engages the ankle and calf muscles to press the foot down on the grooved rubber panel, tentatively at first, gaining just a few kilometers per hour—
Then his attention is drawn by wild movement in the rearview, the cruiser moving into the left lane, accelerating violently, a bullet shooting past … ahead of him … and past him, not cutting him off but picking up speed on the straightaway and quickly disappearing from sight, gone, onto business that’s not him.
Standing there by the side of the dark Ithaca road in the light rain, Dave realized what was going on, but he couldn’t quite believe it. He turned to Charlie, mouth hanging open, unable to say anything, just staring at his friend sitting there, head hanging, devastated.
“I killed her,” Charlie concluded, stunned, eyes flat and dead.
Holy shit, Dave thought: Charlie believes that he was the one driving.
What was the right thing to do here? For himself, for his friend, for this dead girl, for the world? The car was Charlie’s car, the girl was Charlie’s girl, and the drunken bad behavior that caused her death was Charlie’s, all of it. If someone was going to have to pay a penalty of any sort for this accident, it should be Charlie. That would be justice. Wouldn’t it?
Dave, on the other hand, hadn’t done anything wrong, not really. He was the responsibly sober one. He was the one who put a stop to the molestation. He was the one who got the dangerous guy from behind the wheel. He was the one with good intentions here. He was not the one who should be punished. No.
Dave looked at the rear of the car, beneath it, the mangled body, blood everywhere.
If Charlie believed he killed this girl, what would happen to him? Would he go to jail? Probably not, this political scion. Would this tragedy force him to change his ways, sober up? Possibly.
On the other hand, what if Dave took the blame for this? What would happen to him? Him, David Miller, he’d go to jail. For a crime he didn’t commit, not in intent. And Charlie Wolfe, on the other hand, believed he’d been behind the wheel; believed he’d killed the girl.
It was only for a few seconds that Dave struggled with the decision of whether to tell Charlie the truth. To admit that it was Dave’s hands on the wheel, Dave’s foot on the gas pedal, when the old Jaguar ran over the young woman.
“Yes,” Dave said, completely unsure of this course of action, “it looks like you did.” And then Charlie took it upon himself to make the unanimous, unequivocal decision to hide the body. To keep the secret. To cover up the crime he thought he committed. Charlie Wolfe, it was clear in that moment, was a heartless bastard, and Dave felt completely vindicated by his decision to let this heartless bastard believe he was a killer.
Over the years Charlie made a great many similar decisions, and Dave had sat idly by, and let him. Dave had unwittingly hitched his wagon to Charlie’s star, without ever explicitly intending to. It happened one obvious-seeming choice at a time, one practical consideration after another over the course of a quarter-century, sliding down the slippery slope of convenient amorality, becoming a person he couldn’t have ever imagined becoming, until he just couldn’t stomach it anymore. That’s when he started typing.
Dave had given it a lot of thought over the years, that choice he’d faced on the quiet rural roadside. What was the worse crime: the split-second of unintentional, unavoidable inattention while driving a car? Or the purposeful decision to cover up a vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, to run away to a luxurious summer vacation in France, letting the dead girl’s body rot in a ravine?
Who was the villain in this story?
It had been almost unbearably painful to write the passage in The Accident about the accident itself, to revisit the minute details, the sounds and sights, the feeling of the light night rain. Dave was overwhelmed by guilt, and again furious at the unfairness that it was himself behind the wheel, instead of the person who’d been the rapist, the drunk driver, the conspirator to flee from the scene of the crime, to bury the evidence.
So last week he’d sat there at his sleek little computer, facing out onto the glittering Swiss lake, and tried some
thing else: he revised the pages so they conformed to Charlie’s understanding of what had happened on that road, formalizing the lie that they’d been living with for the entirety of their adult lives. The lie would live on, in print, in perpetuity.
It was just a couple of pages of text, representing a couple of minutes of life, and death, and a couple of minutes’ time it would take to read the passage. Just a dozen alterations, changing the name of the driver from Dave to Charlie.
Dave re-read the passage over and over, debating whether to revert to the actual truth, or whether to disseminate this improved truth, this more true truth, in which it was the bad person who’d done the bad thing.
He hit Save, and closed the document.
He forces himself to concentrate, to try to calm down, to slow the little roadster to 80 kph, humming steadily on the smooth pavement, through the flickering sunlight under the dense tree canopy in the hills above Zurich.
He’s still shaking when his phone vibrates, a heart-stopping startle after the adrenaline rush of the police car. The phone is upside down in the passenger seat, and he can’t see the screen. He reaches to turn the device, but his jittery right hand knocks the thing to the floor. He reaches farther, taking his eyes away from the windshield for a split-second. He can’t quite reach—
No, he thinks. Too dangerous.
It must be Isabel. Does she have news? An offer from a publisher?
He glances over, sees the device lying there on the clean gray carpet. No one has ever sat in the passenger seat, the floor mats have never been sullied with the soles of shoes.
He reaches down again, loses sight of the road again, feels his fingers wrap around the device. As he starts to straighten, his shoulder bumps into the leather-clad steering wheel, and his head too, and he’s briefly trapped, panicked—
He frees himself, pops up, straightens his back quickly. He brings his eyes above the level of the dashboard, and sees, too late, his car crash through the low metal rail, out over the side of this mountain …
It doesn’t surprise him that it’s an image of his ex-wife’s face that he now sees. Not the age-lined, saddened, tragic face he saw last winter, standing in her uptown hallway, listening to him claim that he had cancer, was dying. But her face from that night years ago, sitting across from him at that Italian restaurant off Washington Square with the grappa and port glasses and plates of cookies and chocolates cluttering the table, leaning away with a playful dimpled smirk on her face, her cheeks flush with all the wine and all the attention, the closing hour of a long first date, before either of them realized this was the beginning of a romance, a proposal, a wedding, a beautiful baby boy …
And for a few days back then, he thought he might have to kill Isabel Reed. But he ended up marrying her instead.
It would be ironic if he’s really about to kill himself, too, in a car accident.
CHAPTER 55
For a few seconds nobody says anything, or moves, staring at one another in the dim light from the smoldering fire and a single low-watt bulb behind a parchment lampshade.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Hayden asks.
“Put down your gun,” she says.
He can see that Isabel’s knee has been torn open, a flap of gory flesh at the patella, blood streaming down her shin, around her ankle, the top of her foot.
“I don’t think so.” Hayden can’t ignore that her hand is shaking; she may very well shoot him by mistake. That would be an awful shame. He’d considered many possible closing moments to this complicated charade, but getting killed by mistake wasn’t one of them.
He feels much calmer than he thinks is appropriate, for the gravity of this situation. He wonders if this is his version of suicide-by-cop. Suicide-by-victim.
“Have you thought this through?” he asks. “Do you imagine I’m going to just walk out of here, and leave you alone?”
She doesn’t respond, doesn’t even open her mouth.
“You understand that in all likelihood you will miss? It’s not as easy as you may think to shoot someone from forty feet away.”
Hayden presses the barrel of his pistol tighter against Fielder’s head, and tightens his grip. Projecting his willingness to shoot the editor in the head, even though he’s not at all willing to do this.
“On the other hand, it’s really impossible for me to miss.”
Isabel is still silent, motionless. Making no attempt to advance her position, or change the situation in any way. Which doesn’t make much sense. And she’s not a senseless person.
“The only question is where, exactly, Mr. Fielder’s brains will end up. Spattered on that wall? Or spread across the coffee table? Or just sort of oozing out onto the floor?”
Hayden is pretty sure that this woman is trying to trick him again, now. But how? What could she be doing, just standing there …?
She must be killing time. Which means she’s waiting for something to happen. Which means she’s waiting for someone. She’s keeping Hayden’s focus aimed at this end of the house, because someone else will be coming from somewhere else. From behind.
“Get up.” He yanks Fielder by the hair.
“Ouch!”
Hayden drags Fielder backward, to the side of the living room, a wide wall that’s hung with a giant jumble of framed photographs, some of which come crashing down at his feet when he leans his back against the wall, with Fielder in front of him as a shield, and beyond the tinkling of broken glass Hayden hears another sound, a creak, and he turns his eyes and his weapon away from Isabel to the far side of the house, the dark hall and the wood-paneled foyer and the front door, which is opening, and he squeezes the trigger and gets off four rounds of splintering wood and shattering glass, a man’s yelp and a thud as the guy’s body hits the floor, and Hayden repositions his aim and squeezes three more rounds into what’s now clearly a dead person, and he rapidly returns the weapon to Fielder’s temple as Isabel screams, quick and piercing. And then everything is silent.
“Are there more?”
She doesn’t answer, quaking. She’s not even aiming her weapon at anything other than the floor.
“Are there more of them?” Hayden yells.
She nods. “Another one, shot. I think dead. On the beach.”
“Who are they?”
“Bodyguards.”
“You have bodyguards? You hired bodyguards?”
“I didn’t even know about them. Till a couple of minutes ago.”
He understands: the author hired these guys, to watch the agent. To protect her. Not shocking, after all.
Hayden didn’t want this to turn into a goddamned bloodbath, but look at this. Blood is pouring out of the holes in that guy in the doorway, dripping off Isabel’s gashed knee, no doubt drained out of Tyler somewhere down on the beach, along with this dead guy’s partner. And now Hayden notices that blood is also trickling around his own left wrist, his thumb and palm, falling drop by drop to the floor from the tip of his pointer finger. His shirtsleeve feels moist. His left arm has begun to burn.
Hayden has apparently been hit in the arm. Fuck.
He has always expected to get shot, and is surprised that it hasn’t happened until now. He’s almost been shot plenty of times. Hell, he was almost shot earlier today—or was that yesterday?—in Copenhagen. But almost shot and shot are very different things.
He needs to get the hell out of here.
“Where is it?” he asks firmly.
“What?” Barely audible, shaking her head. “I don’t know—”
“Where’s the goddamned manuscript?” At the top of his lungs.
She cries out, again. Then she whimpers, “Not here. Somewhere safe. In New York.”
Hayden turns to Fielder, frozen like a worthless lump of nothing. Hayden can see the plea in the guy’s eyes, Please don’t tell her. PLEASE. Hayden swings the weapon and hits Fielder in the jaw with it.
The guy crumples, crying out in pain.
“You lying idiot.” He kick
s Fielder in the abdomen. But not as hard as he could’ve. He turns back to Isabel. “And you’re lying too.”
His left arm has begun to throb. He’s running out of time, and patience. “WHERE IS IT?”
Hayden drops his right arm and squeezes the trigger and there’s an explosion and a crack of the wood floor and Fielder screams, a hole in his foot. Hayden returns his aim to Fielder’s face, now contorted in pain, and absolute terror.
“I will kill him,” Hayden says, with as much conviction as he can muster. He’s not killing anyone else tonight. Hopefully never again.
“No,” she says, fighting through tears, “you won’t. Look”—she’s pointing—“the bookcase. Fourth shelf from the floor, next to that book with the thick red spine.”
Hayden’s gaze finds the spot on the shelf, a dark glossy circle.
“And there—” She points at a wicker bowl on a console table. “There are others. Motion-activated. Video cameras.”
Hayden takes a step toward the bookshelf, as if to yank the thing off and stomp on it. “Don’t bother,” she says. “They’re networked to a laptop that’s streaming the video to a server that’s, well, somewhere else.”
Hayden turns to face the woman, considers coming clean, telling her that she’s wrong. Telling her that he’d already disabled this complicated video system, disconnected the cameras from the laptop, wiped the laptop clean. Which he did because he knows why she’s here in this house, because he’d listened to her phone conversation with Naomi, because he knew she’d be coming here, even though she’d pretended to go somewhere else, and he pretended to be fooled by that, and unaware of what she did in the copy shop, this morning. Because even though she is very clever, he is more clever.
But the person he needs to fool is not her.
He starts walking toward Isabel.
“You would be filmed committing cold-blooded murder,” she says.
Hayden is standing just a few steps from her. He admires this woman, her bravery, her deviousness, her diligence. He pities her too, the bad luck she has faced in her life, the death that has surrounded her for two decades now. He wants to explain it to her, wants to tell her that it will be all right. That she will win.
