The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  Another man walks up the block; this must be Anders, a steroids-y guy, disproportionate upper body straining at his tee shirt. There are an awful lot of this type in the world, and these guys all wear their hair the same, short and wet and a little angry.

  The man nods at the American, takes a seat. There’s an empty chair between the two men, and Anders places a small shopping bag beside it, a shirt store, tissue paper visible inside.

  “Tell me about this.”

  Anders glares at him for a second, then rolls his eyes. Shrugs, exaggerated, engaging every superfluous bulge and ripple. This guy makes a lot of movements whose primary goal is to accentuate his muscles.

  Anders sighs. “It is of the highest quality.”

  The American smiles. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

  Anders makes a quick nasal snort, then holds out both hands, resigned, if-you-must.

  The American places the shopping bag in the sink. He unfolds the tissue paper, pulls out the passport. The photo looks enough like him, with the long beard he has been wearing since he moved to Scandinavia. The age is a reasonable approximation. The pages include a not-unusual collection of stamps for a British tourist, a dirty sticker on back from a luggage tag. It looks perfect. But the most important elements can’t be seen.

  “Your turn,” Anders says, back at the table.

  The American folds back his newspaper just enough to reveal a corner of a padded envelope. Anders picks this up, disappears to the men’s room, to count his money. Neither party in this transaction is the trusting type.

  When Anders returns, the American is gone, around the corner, where he shrugs out of his navy oxford shirt, revealing a white tee shirt. He retrieves a cap and sunglasses from his bag, puts them on. He follows the surly thug from a safe distance, two blocks, three. No need to get too close. There’s a slender electronic tracking device slipped into the padding of the envelope.

  IRELAND

  “I’m writing an article about expat Americans.”

  The man is blocking his doorway, not looking like he’s going to change his mind about his unwelcoming attitude. The wind is blowing strong and salty off the Irish Sea, a churning gray at the end of the quiet street. Will pushes his fluttering hair out of his eyes.

  “And what did you say was the name of the magazine?”

  “Travelers. Have you heard of it?”

  The man nods.

  “So would you have a few minutes? I can keep this short.”

  “I’m sorry, how’d you find me?”

  This is not encouraging. “Some Americans down at the sports bar.”

  “Why do you want to talk to me?”

  “I’m trying to get a sense of what life is like here, as an American expat. Someone mentioned you watch a lot of football. Is that one of the main things you miss?”

  “Who, exactly, down at the pub?”

  Will stares at this man, this so-called Tom Evans, forgettable name, forgettable face.

  “I’m sorry to have bothered you, Mr. Evans. I guess this was a mistake.”

  PARIS

  Omar shares the office on the deuxième étage with Pyotr from St. Petersburg, Yang from Beijing, and Parviz from Tehran. Omar’s desk is the best, pushed up against a window that faces the simple garden in the rear of the Belle Epoque house near the Trocadéro. The array of monitors in front of him makes it nearly impossible to see out the window, plus the shades are almost always drawn. So it’s more the idea of a window than an actual view of the top of the Grand Palais a few blocks away, and the presence of natural light, that Omar finds pleasing, reassuring. His apartment in La Goutte d’Or is dark.

  He’d already hacked into the rental company’s antitheft tracking system, and launched his own map application to sync with the car’s GPS signal. He followed the rental’s progress, fits and starts out of the city, southerly, along the coast.

  It’s easy work to identify the landline of the house in front of which the car parked, as well as the IP addresses of the computers inside and the wi-fi network, which has a higher level of encryption than most civilians would use. It takes Omar another minute of scanning to ID the mobile-phone account that’s inside the house, the mobile that’s not his subject’s. Within three minutes Omar is confident that he’s monitoring all the communication channels that are operational at this house in county Wicklow. He pulls up the map, jumps around some photo links, a pleasant-looking street, cliffs at the end of the block. Yes, he thinks, Ireland looks nice. Couldn’t be more different from Libya, but maybe not terribly dissimilar to France, not in the overall scheme of global topographical differentiation.

  A half-dozen windows are now open on Omar’s screen, streaming a tremendous volume of information. But Omar is always looking for more.

  This time, it doesn’t take long: after just a couple of minutes, his subject’s phone starts moving away from the house, returns to the GPS signal of the car.

  As soon as the car starts moving, another mobile account suddenly appears in the house, a phone that must have been powered off until now. It’s a local Irish number, a disposable prepaid, and Omar has to hustle to locate the connection, clicking and typing frantically before the call ends—this is likely to be a short call—

  The line goes dead.

  Omar wasn’t able to ascertain the connecting number. But he did manage to identify the general location of the landline that was called by this Irish burner: Langley, Virginia.

  NEW YORK CITY

  It’s 4:00 A.M. when Gabriella’s alarm sounds. She immediately drinks an espresso, then does thirty minutes on the stationary bike, watching portions of yesterday’s late-night shows. This workout is mostly to get her blood flowing, to pump herself full of endorphins to deal with this new aspect of her job. Before she leaves, she takes a full-body selfie in the mirror, recording her outfit.

  The apartment’s walls are lined with prints, numbered and signed in thick pencil, Terrance Sanders, black-and-white photojournalism from Africa, the Mideast, Asia, agrarian life and poverty, the occasional scenic shot but always marred in some way—a dead tree, a piece of trash, a makeshift shack. There are no pristine compositions. The perfect images may have ended up on the magazine’s cover, because that’s what magazines want, but not here.

  It’s still dark outside. The Town Car is waiting in a cone of streetlight at the end of the kelly-green awning, a block-printed sign in its window, RIVERA. They speed downtown.

  She shows her ID to one heavy-lidded security guard, and another appears, escorts her the two dozen strides to the greenroom, convenient to the unmarked door on the side street, where liveried cars can wait unobtrusively, unnoticed by the hordes of fans of generalized fame who congregate at the studio windows, having traveled hundreds or thousands of miles and waited hours in the dark and sometimes rain to catch a close-up real-life glimpse of the actresses and chefs and singers they’ve seen thousands of times before, smiling out from every form of media, here in person, on the other side of a cordon, the line that separates the civilians who watch TV from the celebrities who appear on it.

  Gabriella sits on the sofa, reviewing her notes, mouthing her memorized sound bites. She fingers the ring that hangs from the thin gold chain around her neck. She digital-files this morning’s selfie in the folder for TV appearances. Gabriella never wants to wear the same thing on camera twice, so she keeps records. She doesn’t have a stylist, nor a wardrobe budget. She’s just a normal woman who fills a normal closet using a normal paycheck, who one day was told to go to a TV studio and talk. Then it happened again and again, again and again.

  “We’re ready for you in makeup.”

  Gabriella takes a seat in a cramped, excessively lit room, mirrored and cluttered and suffused with the aromas of a staggering array of beauty products—powders and glosses and aerosol sprays—arranged on tiered glass shelves, like the tools in a mechanic’s garage.

  “How you doing today, baby?”

  “I’m not bad, Charlene. You?�
�

  “Can’t complain, can I? Not with your beautiful skin sitting in my chair. Making me look like a genius.” Charlene starts dabbing powder. “Ms. Rivera, you mind me asking where you’re from?”

  “From? I’m from Brooklyn.”

  “Oh yeah? Me too. Where at?”

  “Canarsie. You?”

  “No! I’m from East Flatbush. But you know what I’m asking, don’t you?”

  “My grandparents were born in Puerto Rico and Guyana and the D.R. and Rhode Island. Their parents were from Norway and India and West Africa and Italy, plus God only knows what combination of bloods native to the Caribbean and Central America.”

  “That sure is a big mix.” Charlene is working on the eyes.

  “I have no clue how to answer the White-Black-Hispanic-Other question. I am postracial, like the ethnically indeterminate Jessicas Alba and Biel, or Vin Diesel, or the Rock.”

  “I think he’s going by Dwayne Johnson now.”

  “I could be a tremendous international box-office draw, you know that, Charlene? If only I could act.”

  “Oh I seen you on camera. You good!”

  “Thanks. It’s true I can manage a few lines without falling from my chair, but what I do here isn’t the same thing as acting. I tried it, in high school.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Murrow. You?”

  “Tilden.”

  “Tough school.”

  “You telling me.”

  “I even went on some auditions, in the city. But I knew I wasn’t a natural, and I didn’t last long. Acting is nearly impossible even if you’re great, and I obviously wasn’t.”

  “But you’re beautiful.”

  “Thank you.” Gabriella smiles. “But that’s not an actual skill.”

  Charlene stands back to examine her handiwork, which Gabriella will have to remember to remove before she exits into the real world today. She forgot last time, and out on the street she felt like a clown.

  “Okay baby, I’m finished. You’re now extra-perfect.” Charlene unclips Gabriella’s protective bib, tosses it aside. “Have a good segment.”

  DUBLIN

  “Will Rhodes?”

  Will turns, surprised and alarmed to hear his name spoken here. The guy is wearing a loose-fitting shirt that does nothing to hide his massive arms, a string of tattoos up the forearms.

  He now feels a firm hand in the small of his back, from the other direction, belonging to another man who’s cut from the same general die.

  “Can you come with us, please?” An American accent, hand extended, indicating a sedan waiting at the curb, back door open.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  Muscles doesn’t say anything.

  “Can I see some ID?” Will’s heart is racing; he’s thinking about his options for fleeing.

  “That’s an interesting idea,” Muscles says. “Or: how ’bout I beat the shit out of you?”

  The hand on Will’s back exerts more pressure. Will folds himself into the backseat while Muscles walks around the car and slides into the passenger seat. The other man joins Will in back. A third is at the wheel.

  Will’s mind races in dozens of directions, trying to figure out what could be going on here, what level of fear he should be experiencing, what he should be preparing himself to do. The car slows, nearing a red light, and Will glances at the door handle, the lock mechanism. Did he hear the lock engage after his door closed? He can’t remember. He looks out the window at the unpopulated corner, a row of houses, not an alley or open door in sight, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  They pull to a stop in front of a modernist building in an office park, a modest campus, brick-paved lanes that connect low-slung buildings surrounded by verdant trees and shrubs and grass, unremarkable and unimposing yet utterly terrifying.

  Will walks through a lobby, past a security guard who nods while Muscles swipes a keycard to open glass doors. They walk down a carpeted hall and into a conference room, an oval table, a half-dozen chairs.

  “Will Rhodes?” Another American walks in, this one wearing a suit and tie and highly shined shoes, salt-and-pepper hair, the brisk movements of a man who gets things done, and wants other people to know it. “Thanks for coming in.” He shuts the door behind him.

  “Did I have a choice?”

  This time, Will hears the lock. “No,” the man says. “No, I guess you didn’t.”

  NEW YORK CITY

  “And we’re live,” Gabriella hears in her earpiece.

  “We’re joined by Gabriella Rivera, deputy editor of Travelers.”

  The morning-show correspondent who’s introducing her is in another city, on some irrelevant mission to try to boost ratings, a never-ending, unwinnable struggle for a share of a market that’s irreversibly dwindling as Americans increasingly choose to do other things with their electronic attention at 7:00 A.M. on weekdays.

  “Gabriella joins us every month to share hot tips, money-saving deals, and fantastic ideas for your next vacation.”

  This has gotten easier over the past year, but Gabriella still wouldn’t say she’s comfortable on live national television. She wonders if she’ll ever be; if anyone ever is. Or maybe this is just one of those things that can never be totally comfortable, like dental work.

  “Good morning, Gabriella!”

  “Thanks Ted. It’s great to be here!”

  She beams her high-watt smile at the camera. The executive producer has told Gabriella that the camera loves her, that this is the rarest thing, rarer than a .300 hitter or a perfect high C. Lucinda was ambushing her with a job offer, at Michael’s amid all the media bigwigs, glad-handing and name-dropping and consuming exorbitantly priced foliage.

  “Well now with the heat waves in the forecast, Ted, we’re of course starting to look forward to winter getaways. And this month, Travelers is previewing ski resorts…”

  Then she’s on autopilot, cruising through her scripted spiel, punching syllables, tittering at Ted’s prattle. The more times she appears on camera, the more she understands how difficult it is to not appear and sound shifty, stupid, mean, ugly. It’s harder than it looks.

  Lucinda said the job offer was open-ended, if you ever change your mind. Then Gabriella walked in a daze across West Fifty-fifth Street, trying to conceive of a way she could wash her hands of the whole Travelers experience, go be a goddamned television personality—wouldn’t that be something?—and finally emerge from beneath her suffocating secrets.

  “Next time, Ted, Travelers will be focusing on Europe. Americans usually think of Europe for summer vacation, but fall and winter both offer excellent opportunities, Ted. Especially in the beautiful warm south, places like the Mediterranean coast of Spain…”

  It’s sentences like these, broadcast on network TV, live-streamed on the web, archived and recallable from any computer on the planet, seen by millions every day, available to billions, that are the real reason why Gabriella appears on television every week.

  STOCKHOLM

  The American is sitting across the street, up the block, at a small café. He has an outdoor table, an unobstructed view to the front door of the apartment building where Anders lives.

  He is not disguised in any way. He is himself, an old American man living in Stockholm, reading the newspaper, nursing an evening drink, watching the blondes go by.

  During the Cold War, this is what would happen to disgraced double agents, to the Americans who sold secrets, or to the Soviets who tried to defect and failed: they were repatriated to the Eastern Bloc, dark and gray, gruel-nourished and shabby-attired, and one day a sudden but not unexpected bullet to the back of the head on a busy city street, in broad daylight, an unmistakable warning to the living. This still happens, less frequently, today. This still might happen to him.

  But it won’t happen in Stockholm, and he won’t be living under the Jamaican passport he has been using for the past months. He’d rather be alive somewhere else than dead here.

  He h
as once again considered that maybe it’s time to try to trade his secrets for his safety. He has thought about doing this before—almost every week, actually. Whenever he gets lonely, or scared, or starts to feel the onset of some physical malady, each new ailment possibly the thing that’s going to kill him. In the middle of the endless dark of the Scandinavian winter, it was basically every night when he weighed the possibility of picking up the phone, calling the DCI, “Hey, I need to come in…”

  But who knew what level of disavowed he has become? Who knew what he was suspected of? Or guilty of? There was no way to know who had alleged what to whom. No way to know what they were thinking of him, what they’d do to him.

  Maybe running away hadn’t been the best idea. Is it ever? But it’s the sort of decision that you have to live with forever.

  He looks up as the door to the apartment building opens, but it’s not Anders, it’s a young mother with two kids.

  But then Anders does come out, a few seconds behind the family.

  This is no good.

  DUBLIN

  “Who are you?” Will asks.

  The man pulls out a chair, sits in it. He places a pad on the table, a pen on the pad, adjusts the angle of the pen. “I’m sorry, I guess I was unclear. I have a few questions for you to answer. Not the other way around. You’re here in Dublin why, Mr. Rhodes?”

  “Because I’m a travel writer, working for a travel magazine, writing a travel story.”

  “You getting smart with me?”

  “I like to think I’m always smart.”

  “Not at the moment. Why Dublin?”

  “Dublin is an appealing place, isn’t it? You’re here, after all.”

  The man stares at Will, taps his pen on the pad.

  “How’d you end up in the Yankee Doodle the other night?”

  “Not sure, exactly. A friend of a friend of a contact of a colleague. I’d have to consult my notes, which I don’t have with me. I’m sure your colleagues will find them when they rifle through my hotel room. So in the meantime why don’t you tell me who the fuck you are, and what the fuck you want from me.”