The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  What can they want? If they wanted to kill him, they would have.

  It has to be the phone. They’re supposed to steal Will’s phone, make it look like a run-of-the-mill late-night mugging. Maybe treat him to a nonlethal beating in the bargain, to lend an air of authenticity, plus teach him a lesson.

  This is all racing through Will’s mind, the brain astronomically fast, all these thoughts and calculations occurring so quickly, arguments begun and developed and dismissed in less than a second, including the argument that his brain doesn’t have the time to pursue that wonderment, not right now.

  So what if they take his phone? Beat him up? Besides the physical, emotional, and metaphorical black eyes, what will happen? Someone who works for Miloshevsky will find the clandestine apps, the photos, the furtive surveillance of the party. They will suspect Will of working for—what?—the CIA? Maybe. Or one of Miloshevsky’s business competitors. Or Interpol. They will have no idea whom Will is working for, and no way of finding out.

  And if they guess correctly? If Will’s cover is blown? Then maybe he’ll no longer be a useful asset. He’ll be let go, retired. Would the CIA have to kill him? No. Would they allow him to simply stop working for them, go back to his life, ten thousand dollars per month poorer, but simpler? Yes, that’s exactly what would happen. Probably.

  He can just stand here, and get mugged. Maybe punched in the face and kicked in the shin, a few stitches in a Spanish emergency room, a frustrating hour in a sleepy police station, a morning visit to the consulate.

  Then what? Then he’ll be finished. Finished with tradecraft and secret phones, with countersurveillance exercises and hidden compartments, finished memorizing faces and names and places, finished taking encoded notes and sending encrypted messages, finished with the CIA, finished with Roger, finished with Elle.

  While all these considerations are firing, his cerebellum is pursuing its own involuntary agenda. It turns out that it’s nearly impossible to voluntarily accept physical peril, to pursue a path of pain and possibly death if you can avoid it.

  He hears a sound behind him. He glances over his shoulder, sees the lone runner turn the corner, a pose of exhaustion.

  Will is running out of time. He turns to the man blocking the sidewalk. And he attacks.

  BARCELONA

  It’s after 3:00 A.M. when Will tiptoes down the hotel hall. There’s no light visible from under his room’s door, no noise audible. He pauses, his ear against the wood, straining to hear any sign of anything. Down the hall, a man is snoring; on another floor, a toilet flushes.

  Will presses his body against the wall. Extends his arm to wave his keycard across the sensor. The lock releases, but Will doesn’t open the door. He pulls back his arm, tensed and ready, and waits, listening intently. He hears nothing until the click of the door relocking.

  He continues to wait, and listen, for another minute. Nothing.

  He shouldn’t linger. The night clerk was quite possibly in on it, dialing his phone this very instant, reporting that the American has just returned to his room. Will needs to get in and get out quickly.

  He unlocks the door again, and this time opens it. Unsurprisingly, the room has been tossed, his clothes strewn everywhere, suitcase ripped open. The mattress has been tipped over, chairs upended. A thorough job, its intention undisguised.

  Whatever they were looking for, they didn’t find it, because there was nothing to find. But they wanted Will to know they’d looked.

  He quickly repacks his damaged luggage, exits the wrecked room. How is he going to explain this downstairs? Is he going to explain this? Or should he flee with no explanation, accept the exorbitant damage charge on his credit card, hope that Travelers—or the CIA?—covers it? Or should he not worry about the money, because his life is in danger?

  Will doesn’t want the elevator call to attract any attention, so he takes the stairs. The lobby is still empty except for the clerk, who’d given Will a dubious once-over when he walked in, disheveled, very late. The clerk is obviously considering whether to intervene in this guest’s hasty, unscheduled early-morning departure. By the time Will walks through the front door, the guy still hasn’t decided what if any action to take, his moment to be a hero past. Night clerks are probably not, as a rule, go-getters.

  The street is deserted. Will glances across to the alley entrance where he’d been lurking for a half-hour, watching the hotel for comings and goings, for anything suspicious. This is a location he’d scouted right after he checked in, garbage cans and motorbikes and nothing much in the way of light, a few deep doorways in which he could disappear into darkness, a second entrance on the next street to the north, which is how he accessed the alley, just a minute after he dispatched his assailant.

  “There’s very little substitute,” Will’s martial-arts instructor explained, “for a swift kick to the groin. If someone doesn’t know you’re going to attack, this is the way to go. Lots of people make the mistake of trying to punch adversaries in the face. This is hard to land effectively, and easy to see coming, easy to get out of the way. A kick to the balls, though? Easy to get that right. Very difficult to defend against.”

  So that’s exactly what Will did to the man who was blocking the sidewalk. And as the guy was still in the process of doubling over in exceptional pain, seeing stars, Will planted his groin-kicking leg, and brought his other leg up swiftly, kneeing the man in the face. He toppled over, writhing in agony, blood pouring from a broken nose.

  Will sprinted away. There was no way for the second pursuer to catch up: the guy was obviously a slow runner, plus exhausted after running a kilometer at a rapid pace. And probably at least a little scared, with his companion lying on the sidewalk, bleeding profusely from the face. This second guy wouldn’t be too eager to resume chasing someone he couldn’t catch, and who might break his nose if he did.

  At the end of the block Will turned right, then took another right, another, entered the alley from the far side. He crept down the damp passage to the deep dark shadows next to the delivery door of an espadrille shop. He watched his panting pursuer tend to the injured one, then make a phone call. A minute later a Mercedes arrived, and the two men climbed in, and sped away.

  Will uploaded the photos to the server, and sent an SOS message using the codes he’d memorized on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Then he waited. He examined every car parked on the block, every pedestrian, every motorcycle rider and taxi driver, everyone a potential adversary, a man passed out behind the wheel of a sedan, a streetwalker who strolled by a few times. Will allowed an uneventful hour to pass, then retreated to the far end of the alley, and eventually found a taxi, which he took around the block to the hotel.

  That taxi is still idling on the wide boulevard around the corner, as guaranteed by a torn-in-half hundred-euro note. Will climbs in. They speed through early-morning Barcelona, weaving past the trucks that are converging on the big food market, and the first commuters of the day riding bicycles and mopeds and fuel-efficient little cars.

  Will reclines in the taxi’s backseat, and can’t help but smile.

  NEW YORK CITY

  Stacey and Eric are the last to leave, both seven-figure-per-year attorneys, sixty-hour workweeks, one night a month when they can manage to leave their offices in time for dinner together, desperate to make it count, sure-I’ll-have-another. But still Malcolm finds Stacey in the hall, typing on her phone, thumbs flying furiously. “Work,” she says, shrugging an apology. “Don’t tell Eric, please.”

  Malcolm can’t imagine what secret Stacey thinks she’s keeping from her second husband. But he agrees anyway. “Why would I?”

  They finally leave at eleven, cheek-kisses handshakes this-was-greats. Then it’s time to deal with the mess. “I got this,” Malcolm says, removing his watch and rolling up his sleeves, taking stock. He doesn’t mind this after-dinner-party cleanup with his wife, moving silently through the kitchen in a dance of divided responsibilities, staying out of each other’s way
, taking care of what needs to be done, together. Marriage.

  “Do those two really strategize their Facebook posts?” he asks.

  “I guess.”

  “They actually discuss what they’re going to post? And which posts they should share? And like? That’s insane.”

  Allison seems to be ripping sheets of aluminum foil with an excess of ferocity. “Malcolm, did you remember the tuition bill?”

  “Tuition is due?” More than a hundred thousand’s worth of salary, poof. Like buying a new car every six months, every year, forever.

  “Was. Was due, last week.”

  “I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

  She snorts, dismissive, as if it’s impossible that he’ll remember to do it tomorrow. She isn’t necessarily wrong.

  “All right, I’ll take care of it after the dishes.” He fleetingly worries about the sum, realizes what he’ll need to do. “But in the meantime, do you want to tell me what’s bothering you?” Malcolm has had a few glasses of wine in addition to his few glasses of scotch. Otherwise, he doesn’t have the courage, or the energy, or the whatever he needs to confront his wife point-blank with a question like this.

  “Is it something I did? Or didn’t do, that I was supposed to? I mean, besides the tuition?”

  She shakes her head, hammers the heel of her hand against a plastic container. “I am not just some…housewife.”

  “No,” he says, knee-jerk. “Of course not.”

  “I have a master’s degree.”

  He’s heard this before, and not just from his wife. There’s no shortage of women whose graduate degrees have transmogrified into heavy chips on their Pilate’d shoulders.

  When they’re finished cleaning, Allison says, “I’m going to watch TV,” disappears.

  There was a time when sex always followed a dinner party; that aspect of being a couple turned Allison on. But now it’s the opposite. Allison is going through a bad time, and Malcolm doesn’t know how to help her fix it.

  He wonders if his wife loves him enough to make it—what?—another thirty years with him? Forty? Or if he loves her enough? Or if they’re going to agree—five or ten or twenty years from now, the kids grown, gone—that enough is enough, good-bye. Or maybe they won’t agree. But although it takes two people to marry, only one is needed to split.

  There’s really nothing encouraging that he could say to Allison, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of her life, that wouldn’t be some sort of lie. Lord knows he already does more than enough lying to his wife.

  He walks to the office. Above the desk, the bulletin board is festooned with the normal home-bulletin-board flotsam, children’s drawings and an after-school activity checklist, tickets to the opera and the Montauk-line train schedule, the odds and ends of life, punctured with pushpins.

  He can hear the hum of the television, theme music, canned laughter.

  Malcolm pushes the left edge of the bulletin board’s frame into the wall, releasing a magnetic catch. The board swivels open from hinges, revealing the rotary dial of an in-wall safe.

  This is not a very high-tech setup, as security measures go. Malcolm doesn’t want too high-end of a safe here, where if discovered it would arouse suspicion. Why, Mr. Somers, do you have such a sophisticated safe? What is it you’re protecting? Afraid of?

  He opens the safe. There’s not much inside, nothing particularly incriminating. He removes a little device that looks like a thumb drive, but isn’t.

  Malcolm sits down at the computer. He punches in the password, then signs out of the family account, and logs in under a different alias. He launches an obscure web browser, an application that’s buried in an irrelevant-looking subfolder. Types in a URL, then a long user ID. He picks up the device from the safe, and hits a button. On the device’s small screen, a long string of digits appears, a random-generated passcode that refreshes itself every sixty seconds. He uses this code to access the account, and initiates the transfer, moving tuition money to his checking account in the United States from this ultrasecure account in Switzerland, a numbered account that his wife has no idea exists.

  BARCELONA

  There’s always something shocking about the bustling alertness of a big-city airport at seven in the morning, when everything else is asleep or drowsy, sparsely populated, but here in some suburb off a highway there are tens of thousands of busy people.

  Will doesn’t know whom to expect; that was never specified. But he certainly didn’t think it would be Elle he’d see walking up to the ticket counter. She exchanges a couple of sentences with the Iberian Air rep, then both women laugh, and Elle walks away.

  When she has almost disappeared into the crowd, Will sets off in her wake, following her across the terminal to a café’s queue, which he joins, standing a few customers behind her, amid roll-aboards and hand luggage and a stroller with a peacefully sleeping baby.

  How should he act? How should he play this?

  On the one hand, he’s furious that he was so irresponsibly put in such extreme danger. Really, what the hell? He could’ve been killed. Maybe. He’s not actually certain what risk he was at, what those thugs wanted, what they would’ve done to get it.

  On the other hand, he acquitted himself admirably at every stage, from his surreptitious surveillance on the boat and the mortifying interaction with Miloshevsky to the well-executed flight through the Barrio Gótico and his decidedly competent self-defense, all the way up to his by-the-book SOS message and this meet right here, waiting patiently in this café queue. Will has done absolutely everything he was supposed to do, exactly as he was supposed to do it. And it has felt good, vigorous and exciting and satisfying. Like sex.

  Will collects his espresso, and scans the seating area. Elle is standing at a tall round table, and she meets his eye indubitably, the signal clear. “Buenos días,” he says, approaching, inclining his head at the expanse of empty table, the universal is-this-spot-taken? gesture.

  “Yo no hablo español,” she says in a thickly American-accented version of a language that, Will knows, she speaks fluently. “Do you speak English?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I’m American.”

  “Oh goody.”

  He takes a seat.

  “So why are we here?” She speaks in a quiet but normal voice, not a whisper. There’s plenty of ambient noise in here to cloak their conversation; it’s whispering that would be noticeable.

  He reaches into his pocket, extracts a typical traveler’s pile, guidebook and map, slips of scrawled-upon hotel stationery, a page ripped from a notebook.

  “The top piece of paper,” Will says, glancing down at his densely packed but neat handwriting, a narrative he composed in the back of the taxi during the ninety minutes that they drove around before Will thought he should arrive at the airport, not wanting to be too early, to spend too much time lurking around in public. He’d told the driver that he wanted to see sights, just show me around for a while, wherever you think is best.

  The page is already facing Elle. She doesn’t need to touch it, doesn’t need to make any visible effort other than to lower her eyes and start reading the carefully summarized story of Will’s past twelve hours. Meanwhile he pretends to read his guidebook. They’re just two strangers, sharing a cluttered table at a busy airport café.

  “Wow,” she mutters, but she doesn’t seem terribly surprised.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks. “You’re following me?”

  “Of course I’m following you. This was your first active operation. We needed to make sure you were safe.”

  “Then why weren’t you there last night?”

  “What makes you sure we weren’t?”

  Will thinks back to the streets, taxi drivers and vagrant hippies, the sleeping driver and the working girl. “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She shrugs. “You were never in any real danger. And if you had been, we would have helped you.”

  “And Miloshevsky’s thugs? What was tha
t about?”

  “They wanted your phone. To wipe your documentation of the partygoers. But Miloshevsky didn’t take you seriously, and he didn’t give serious orders, so those weren’t serious thugs. That was just his casual everyday security. You took care of them yourself, didn’t you? But today he’ll take you more seriously, so it’s best for you to leave.”

  She taps the piece of paper on the table in front of her. “You should get yourself through security ASAP. Like, don’t use the men’s room out here. Don’t step outside for a smoke.”

  “Smoke? I don’t—”

  “I know, I’m kidding.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “You all right?”

  He nods.

  “Good.” She knocks back her coffee, puts the cup in its saucer, a little clang. “And you did good, Will. Nice work.”

  He watches Elle walk away, and wonders if this is really the first time she has followed him abroad. Or has she been tailing him for months? Could he somehow be worth that type of effort, that type of expense?

  —

  Elle climbs out of the taxi and into the bright sunshine, another hot day on the way in Catalonia. A bellhop holds the door, and she strides across the cool lobby, closes herself inside the small elevator.

  Upstairs, the hall is long, dead-quiet, no room-service trays, no chambermaid carts, no nothing. The elevator doors whish closed behind her, and she stands unmoving, listening. She’s spooked. She really didn’t expect any of that to happen last night. Just as she didn’t expect Will to be interrogated in Dublin. It certainly seems like he’s drawing the intense curiosity of excessively prudent people. Which in a way is good: it means the op is working. But in another way is bad: Will may very well get himself into real trouble, the sort that Elle couldn’t mitigate.