The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

—

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “Is it really, Will?” Elle stares at him for a second, perhaps waiting for an answer. Then she continues, “Do you carry sealed envelopes across international borders? Envelopes stamped Personal and Confidential?”

  “No one would hide anything in envelopes that scream out secrets!”

  “Oh no? Isn’t that exactly where it might make sense to hide something? And you’ve given these envelopes to people you don’t know. People in Paris and Dublin and Stockholm, in Berlin and Athens. People in Cairo, Will. In Beirut.”

  Will still doesn’t say anything.

  “Some of these envelopes come back. And you’re under strict orders to deliver them directly to Somers, and to Somers only. Why, Will? If these are human-resources forms, why not deliver them to human resources? Why is the editor-in-chief serving as an intermediary between foreign personnel and HR?”

  Elle seems to be waiting for an answer to this question. “I don’t know.”

  “I do: because what’s in the envelopes doesn’t have anything to do with HR forms.”

  “Then what is in the envelopes?”

  “What do you think, Will?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Elle stares, waiting for Will to hazard a guess.

  “What do you people want me to say?” he asks. “This is your ridiculous theory.”

  “How do you think Travelers stays in business? Ad pages are off by forty percent in the past five years. Subscriptions dropped by half. Newsstand sales…? Pfft. The business is in free fall. Yet there have been no budget cuts, have there? Is there something in particular that you think Travelers is doing right that all other magazines are doing wrong? Some special way that your employer—a print magazine, with an ancillary business in bricks-and-mortar travel agencies—is maintaining profitability?”

  Will doesn’t know. The business of the business is not his business.

  “And let’s for a minute consider Malcolm Somers himself. Your boss seems to have more money than a magazine editor should, don’t you think? That’s a fancy apartment he lives in, when he’s not at his summer house in the Hamptons.”

  “That’s just a rent—”

  “His wife hasn’t worked in—what?—a decade? Yet two children in private school. You know what the tuition is, Will? Forty-three K per year, per kid. Those must be some good lunches.”

  Will always assumed there was another source of income. Maybe Allison came from money? Personal finance is not something Will ever discusses, not even with his own wife.

  “And what about Gabriella? She’s at a professional level that’s similar to yours, so I’d expect her to be earning about what you earn. But she has a more exalted job title, so maybe a little more?”

  Will is not going to give Elle the satisfaction of agreeing with her. But she’s right.

  “Yet she too seems to be living a lifestyle that’s notably different from yours. Big apartment—huge—on the Upper East Side. No debt.”

  Will knows that her apartment is somehow connected to her dead husband’s family; it’s affordable for some reason. Or maybe that’s just what Gabs has always claimed…?

  “But you, Will? You live in a house that I think may actually be condemned. Is it?”

  Will doesn’t answer.

  “In a neighborhood in Brooklyn that—let’s face it—is a borderline slum. Plus you’re up to your eyeballs in debt. Why should this be? This gap between your lifestyle and Gabriella’s?”

  Elle waits for an answer. Or waits for these details to sink in, to form a narrative.

  “Are you getting a clearer picture, Will?”

  Will catches movement from Mike, who’s merely checking his wristwatch, a guy dragged out of his life to sit here and bear witness to a meeting. Will can barely make out the time on the white face of the watch, pale numbers, delicate hands: it’s about a quarter to nine. He can’t read the maker’s name, but the logo looks like J. Lindeberg’s, the J and the L back-to-back mirror images, JL. Mike doesn’t seem like the type of guy who’d wear a watch from a Swedish youth-oriented fashion label. It must be something else.

  “What do you think happened to Jonathan Mongeleach?” Elle asks.

  “Huh?” Will is still staring at the guy’s wrist.

  “A man like that, well known, well liked. Very social person, lots of friends, leading a big life. The type of life that gets reported in the papers, on Page Six and the, um, Styles section.” As if it’s distasteful. “A man like this just disappears?”

  Will shrugs.

  “This man who spent his entire career at the magazine, half of it in charge. And this man just one day vanishes. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “I don’t know anything about Jonathan.”

  “You must’ve had some guesses, though? This must’ve been something you and Somers discussed. After all, Jonathan’s disappearance did get the both of you new jobs, right? This was not an irrelevant event in your life.”

  “There were a lot of rumors.” Most of the rumors centered around Jonathan’s love life—he was known to have a taste for blondes of the Scandinavian sort—but of course the popular rumors would be about sex. Sex is popular. “I had no way of judging them.”

  “Sure, Will. But what seemed most likely?”

  Will had never come to any conclusion about Jonathan. “Listen, why don’t you just tell me what you’re driving at?”

  “Because we want you to figure it out yourself, Will. Surely you—”

  “What the fuck do you want from me?” Will screams this, and everyone at the table jumps. “Jesus fucking Christ, will you just tell me what’s going on? Please?”

  Elle leans away from the table, wearing a victorious smile. “Travelers is in the business,” she says, “of acquiring and selling stolen intelligence. That’s who you work for, Will: a mercenary spy ring.”

  Will doesn’t know how to refute this. It sounds true.

  “Which makes you guilty of treason. You know the penalty for treason against the United States, Will?”

  NEW YORK CITY

  Will approaches his dark house slowly, warily.

  The streetlamp has failed to ignite tonight, and the sconces on either side of the front door are still not installed, and there’s been no one home to turn on any lights. The house is creepy.

  Will finds his keys, looks over both shoulders before climbing the stoop, the very picture of the spooked-out urban dweller, eyes wide, shoulders tensed.

  Inside he turns on every light switch he passes. He pours himself three fingers of an eighteen-year-old single-malt from an obscure producer, swag from some party or presser or who-the-hell-knows. Will’s life is filled with swag, with booze bottles and beach towels, sunglasses and baseball caps, hotel rooms and tasting menus and all-inclusive luxury-resort weekends. But none of this shit-we-all-get pays the bills.

  He takes a big gulp, clunks the glass down on the island, honed black granite, quarter-inch corner radius, an extra hole drilled for the soap dispenser that Will still hasn’t procured, plugged with a wine cork. Will found the barstool on the street, large-refuse-collection night, a Post-it marked FREE! He lugged it home and washed it up, replaced the missing screw that was making the seat wobbly, perhaps the reason someone had thrown it away, too lazy or too indifferent to bother diagnosing such an easily treatable ailment. Or maybe they didn’t like the damn thing. It’s not particularly comfortable.

  Will can’t wrap his mind around the enormity of the CIA’s allegations: that Jonathan Mongeleach became a traitor-for-hire to support his extravagant habits—the women and gambling and parties and drugs, the whole big lifestyle, in a city populated by millionaires and billionaires and trust-fund babies and European nobility, where Jonathan’s magazine salary—inflated as it eventually became—never really amounted to more than a pittance, not in the milieus in which he circulated.

  During Reagan’s all-out dash to the Cold War’s finish, in the midst of the pervasive
greed of the eighties, an opportunity presented itself to Jonathan, in the same way that many opportunities present themselves to profiteers—to weapons manufacturers and aerospace engineers, to Central Asian drug dealers and Latin American labor leaders, and to the occasional opportunistic American civilian. War, even the cold sort, is always a boon to someone.

  No one knows if it bothered Jonathan—or encouraged him—that his opportunity came from the Soviets. He never made his political views known, not in speech. But in action, he became a traitor: a courier of purloined intelligence from Washington to Moscow, from crooked diplomats and compromised CIA operatives in foreign cities to their opposite numbers in Soviet embassies.

  Before long he expanded his role to include the ever-important service of collecting and reporting gossip: who was screwing whom, who had a problem with blow or junk, who was a closet queer. Jonathan became an indispensably well-placed, well-traveled source in the KGB’s permanent quest to ID vulnerable high-value targets, in exchange for money. It was a simple arrangement.

  When he ascended to the editorship of Travelers, it became more complicated. He was able to expand both the courier and intel-gathering operations to encompass the staff. The whole magazine became cover, its employees operatives—perhaps unaware of it, perhaps not. Jonathan recruited Malcolm; possibly Gabriella; maybe others.

  When the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union collapsed, Moscow didn’t become any less eager to buy whatever could be stolen from Langley. If anything, the post-Communist bureaucrats were even more avid consumers of other people’s secrets than the Soviet apparatchiks. This was a cadre who’d stolen their country’s wealth and power; these people saw stealing as a best practice, not as a last resort.

  According to Elle, the operation had been active for at least thirty years, during which Moscow had become reliant on—addicted to—an uninterrupted flow of pilfered CIA intel via Travelers. The Russians weren’t satisfied to let this river dry up; they took measures to ensure that it wouldn’t. When Jonathan began contemplating his eventual retirement, he started grooming Malcolm. And last year, Jonathan either met his demise or he demised himself. Either way, Malcolm stepped in, and soon hired Will, who became another in a possibly long line of unwitting spies.

  It all sounded thoroughly credible. Yet also completely implausible. And Will has no one to turn to, no one who can help him figure out whether it’s true. The one person he would want to ask—Malcolm—is the one person whose answer Will wouldn’t be able to believe.

  Will’s phone dings. Is it possible that Chloe is finally calling him back? No, it’s just the alarm, alerting him that his face has had fifteen minutes off. He replaces the ice bag against his aching jaw.

  When Elle finished her long recitation, Will stared at the wall, his eyes drawn to the large CIA seal hanging there, why, exactly? Reminding people where they worked?

  “So what happened to Jonathan?” Will asked.

  “We don’t know,” Elle said. “It’s possible he got spooked, afraid we were going to catch him. So he fled.”

  “To Russia?”

  “He doesn’t seem like the type of guy who’d live in Russia, does he?”

  Will didn’t know what type of guy Jonathan Mongeleach is. Or was.

  “It’s possible that he outlived his usefulness, or his reliability. That he was eliminated.”

  They all sat silent for a minute. Will had now gotten what he’d asked for: a meeting with the boss, and an explanation of what he’d become involved in. He didn’t know what else he should ask, what else he could expect.

  “Okay,” he said. “What is it you want from me?”

  —

  They all exhale as if they’ve been holding their breath for hours.

  “Wow,” Roger says.

  Elle nods.

  “Do you think it worked?” he asks.

  “Definitely.” Elle doesn’t believe this. But what is she going to say to these guys here, now? Criticism wouldn’t be constructive, not at this point.

  “That was close.” Roger is wearing a small smile, shaking his head in wonderment.

  “Yes, it certainly was.” She turns to face the other man. “Hey, Mike, thanks for getting here on such short notice.”

  “No problem. We were going to do this next week anyway, right?”

  “Right.” She smiles, but can’t help but glance again at his watch, his mistake. Mike had been in a bar when Elle had called, and he’d gone home to change into this suit, but he hadn’t had the presence of mind to remove his watch. Is this something Will would notice?

  “You think he’s going to do it?” Roger asks.

  “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  —

  Will hides from daylight under a pillow. He manages to push past seven o’clock, eight, in and out of fitful sleep, bothered by his swollen punched-in-the-face jaw and his dehydrated five-glasses-of-scotch head and his bewildered paradigm-shattered consciousness.

  He rousts himself at nine. The full-bore bustle of the Travelers day starts in earnest at ten, and by that hour he should be in his office. He doesn’t want to arouse any suspicion, any questions. Not after what he learned last night. Not after what he’s supposed to do today.

  Will roots around in the medicine cabinet. What is all this crap? Creams and lotions and gels, anti-histamines and anti-inflammatories and anti-septics and little blue anti-anxiety pills, hundreds—thousands?—of dollars’ worth of pharmaceuticals, but where the fuck are the painkillers? His jaw hurts like hell. He would really like to stop getting punched in the face.

  He locates the amber bottle in a far corner, a prescription from dental work that turned out to involve more excavating than expected. He wrenches off the cap, and finds…only one pill left. He swallows it. The label says one refill, and he’ll need it. He calls the pharmacy, the one on the Lower East Side that he and Chloe had been using for years. He hasn’t needed a pharmacist since they moved to Brooklyn, so he hasn’t yet found one.

  The pills will be ready in a couple of hours; he’ll collect them at lunchtime.

  While he’s holding his phone he tries Chloe’s, but once again the call goes immediately to voice mail. He calls her mom’s landline again, and has another brief, unsatisfying conversation.

  “Please tell her I called.”

  “Of course,” Connie says. Then, “Keep trying, Will.”

  He repacks the new device, handed to him last night in the CIA office, wedging it between a couple of magazines in his canvas-and-leather satchel. He learned a lot about this device last night, up very late. He couldn’t find an online user’s manual for this exact model. But he got the general gist. Enough, he hopes, to do what he needs to do.

  —

  “Does everybody remember that revised bios are due by Friday?” Gabriella looks around the conference table pointedly at a few of the most likely to ignore this deadline, this tiresome task. Everyone is required to sit for new headshots, to write exhaustively and shamelessly about themselves, to collect links to their TV clips and old articles, their author pages and personal websites, all this content shoveled onto the heaping pile of the magazine’s redesigned website, trying to make personalities out of staff, to celebritize themselves, puffing out their chests to appear more relevant, less shut-down-able.

  Will looks at Gabriella, presiding over the status meeting, a responsibility that Malcolm handed to her a few months ago, an augmentation of her managerial role. She was promoted to deputy editor when she came in from the field; she’d been the European correspondent before Will. But after what happened to her husband in Africa, she was no longer excited to hop on a plane tomorrow to anywhere, to wander the dark backstreets of questionable quarters. No longer enjoying it. No longer good at it.

  So she came in. She relinquished her correspondent responsibilities to newly hired Will, and took up scheduling responsibilities, logistics, budgets. She also became the promotional face of the magazine, at advertiser conferences, trade shows, TV studio
s. She collected a bigger paycheck, and she slept in her own bed nearly every night.

  But did she give up her job of shuttling state secrets to foreign agents? Does she now have other espionage responsibilities? Does she come to work every day and lie to everyone?

  Will had made a lifetime habit of giving people the benefit of the doubt, getting to know strangers, however briefly, trying to see the world through their eyes. He’d been almost universally relieved to find the essential humanity in even the most disagreeable-seeming people, his optimism warranted. But not anymore. Now all around him he sees distrust, liars, betrayals. His world is ruined. And he is too.

  “Have we decided yet,” Vito asks, “what’s going to be the next special, after food?”

  Gabriella directs her gaze to the other end of the table, and all eyes follow. Malcolm looks up. “I think you all know that no one finds this more distasteful than I. But in March”—he takes off his reading glasses, like Cronkite announcing Kennedy’s death—“we’ll be publishing our first-ever luxury issue.”

  Groans all around.

  “What can I tell you? This is the world we live in.”

  —

  Back in his neat little office, Will removes the device from his bag. It seems even larger now than it did last night, more noticeable.

  He looks at his watch, 11:52.

  His phone is ringing—an art-department assistant—but he doesn’t pick up. He grabs a handful of books from a shelf, puts them on his desk. He tucks the device into the middle of this stack, just another book. Takes out some files, strews them around, along with pens, issues of a competing magazine, a dictionary and a style manual, both open. Trying to manufacture disarray, in what’s normally a tidy environment.

  Will crosses the small room to the threshold of the door. He examines his work. The faux clutter doesn’t look quite right, but maybe that’s just because he knows it isn’t.

  It’s 11:54.

  His bag is open, on the floor next to his chair. He reaches into the bag, feeling around for the cord, but his hand doesn’t find it. Is it possible he left it at home? Shit.

  Will’s mind is racing through last night, and this morning: when might he have removed this cord from his bag? Where? And for the love of God why? Shit shit shit.