The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  What it didn’t sound like was corporate espionage, as this guy was claiming. He wasn’t telling her the truth about something, maybe about a lot of things. You didn’t hire someone like her for corporate espionage. You hired someone like her for real espionage.

  Since that first meeting, she’d expended a lot of effort trying to figure out why he so desperately wanted to acquire the magazines, and never did, not really. She discovered only what he’d been hoping to learn along the way. Not what he was going to do once he’d learned it.

  This guy was undoubtedly good at what he did for a living, was very successful. But you know who else was really good at his job? Adolf Hitler. He was really good at being a fascist dictator, and came closer to conquering the world than anyone in millennia. Good at your job does not equal admirable, nor trustworthy. She neither admired nor trusted this man. But she still wanted to do whatever this job was.

  “Everything,” she said, “is negotiable.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Make it a million,” she answered his unspoken question, “and you have a deal.”

  NEW YORK CITY

  Will boards the crowded downtown local to the East Broadway station on the fringe of Chinatown, where recent Asian immigrants mix with African-Americans and Latin-Americans and Orthodox Jews, a heterogeneity that looks almost stage-managed. The person here who stands out is Will. And whoever might be following Will.

  He hustles alongside the park, pickup basketball and kids on tricycles, girls jumping rope and a few youths who might be dealing drugs, or want to look that way. He steps into a tiny deli, security bars across the windows, bulletproof glass separating the cashier from the people who might try to rob her. He buys a bottle of water, returns to the sidewalk, pauses in front of the store to take a sip, to look around. Not a Caucasian in sight.

  The summer sun is lurking somewhere behind all these buildings, the low gritty ones in the foreground and the higher shiny ones that loom back there, a mile away—a very long mile—in the Financial District. Will walks quickly, making only a couple of turns and pausing once, almost positive that no one is following him.

  He arrives at their old block, and his confidence ebbs away. This is a known location, a place where he might be looked for, if anyone is looking for him.

  Will checks his watch: it’s been eighteen minutes since Elle left him. She could be in her office this very minute, scanning the disk.

  He enters another deli, buys a pack of gum. There’s no metal on the windows here, no bulletproof glass inside, and Will has a clear unobstructed view out to the street, a commercial stretch of bars and restaurants and independent retailers, a grocer and a liquor store, secondhand clothing and vintage vinyl, eyewear and housewares. Plenty of people are loitering out there, a nice summer evening, smoking cigarettes and staring at phones, waiting for the bus or hailing taxis. Any of them might be looking for Will.

  There’s no way to tell if anyone is watching him. The only thing Will can hope to discover is if anyone looks familiar. It’s not as if there’s a team of hundreds of people who might be following Will; he’s not a high-level Soviet defector, after all. How many people can be participating in this operation?

  His old building looks unchanged, six stories of red bricks crisscrossed with metal fire escapes and decorated with no shortage of stone details—cornices and lintels and architraves, the type of superfluous ornamentation that was once universal, even for slum housing.

  When the traffic light changes, Will dashes across the broad avenue midblock. The exterior door to the old building is always open, and he unlocks the interior door using the key that he never returned to the landlord. He was always finding strays in here, cold homeless people in the winter, kids smoking joints, drunk people groping, the occasional junkie with pockmarked skin and tattered clothing, just sprawled there on the grimy tiles. The building was dangerous, but romantic in a way that dangerous things can sometimes be, before they grow tiresome. Danger is exhausting.

  The lobby is just a long hallway, a rack of battered brass mailboxes, ten of them, all with broken locks. Legal notices are pushpinned to the wall. A Post-it announces that because of necessary repairs, there won’t be any hot water on Friday. The note is signed by Calvin, the elusive superintendant who works at a half-dozen buildings in this neighborhood, seemingly always on duty somewhere else.

  Will walks to the back of the building, to the stairs that lead to the basement, steep and dark and dirty. Tenants don’t have any business down there. No laundry room, no storage spaces, no rear exit, no nothing. Will would never have gone down here at all except he once needed to find a place to hide a large present for Chloe.

  He’d scouted the basement on a weekday morning, worried that Calvin was going to catch him, carrying a flashlight like a cat burglar, looking guilty of more than his crime, which was nonexistent. Still, it felt wrong. That’s how he’d found the spot under the stairs—dusty discarded bicycles, an old folding stroller, someone’s box of Christmas ornaments—where he hid Chloe’s skis.

  The stairs are framed from underneath by iron I-beams, creating cavities with ledges, unlit and hard to access, occupied possibly by cockroaches or rats or carcinogenic piles of asbestos dust. No one would voluntarily reach back into this creepy subterranean darkness.

  Will does. The third step from the bottom, slightly too low to be comfortable, for an extra measure of security. He feels around…left…right…

  Panic sets in immediately, accelerated by the adrenaline that was already coursing through his body thanks to his flight from Midtown, his countersurveillance maneuvers, his outsize irrational fear of getting caught by the deadbeat absentee super.

  His packet isn’t here. How can that be?

  He reaches again, leaning in farther, getting more complete coverage of the surface.

  Shit.

  He stands back, looks around. Is it possible that Calvin discovered his hiding spot? Someone else? His mind jumps to Elle, to Roger. To Chloe.

  Will hears the front door slam upstairs. Heavy footsteps. He cocks his head like a dog, listening, scared out of his goddamned wits.

  Why? What’s he scared of?

  Everything. This now, and all the things he has to do tonight, tomorrow, for the foreseeable future. This here is just the start, and it’s already going wrong. Which might make it the end.

  Will closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, counts to ten. Trying to calm himself down.

  He opens his eyes. Turns his attention back to the iron underside of the stairs. Counts up from the bottom again.

  Realizes that he’d been searching the wrong level for his go-bag, which is safely secured with duct tape, exactly where he placed it when he came back from Ireland, spooked. He rips off the tape.

  —

  Will’s hand is on the front door, ready to push it open, to exit to the street, to get the hell out of this building before he runs into Calvin, or a resident, or the police. But he hesitates. He brings his face close to the diamond-shaped window in the door, security glass with a half-torn-off sticker for a twenty-four-hour locksmith, a smudge of what might be snot, in the best-case scenario.

  There are just as many people outside as there were ten minutes ago, and a few look familiar: the crowd waiting for the bus is unchanged; the same scraggly middle-aged guy is hanging out in front of the liquor store, looking questionable, but it’s the type of questionable that should concern the police, not Will.

  Also a familiar-looking man in a lightweight suit, rubber-soled shoes, sunglasses that don’t manage to hide the direction in which the man is staring: directly at Will’s building. This guy would blend in perfectly in Midtown, but here on the Lower East Side? Sore thumb.

  Will spins away from the door, back into the makeshift lobby. He climbs the first flight of stairs, the second, the third and fourth and fifth. Rounds the landing of the top floor, to the stairs that lead to the roof, closed off with a gate that claims FIRE EXIT ONLY: ALARM WILL SOUND
IF OPENED.

  He wonders if this gate is truly wired. This is the type of apparatus that doesn’t necessarily work in a building like this. Broken, perhaps, or disabled, or never properly installed in the first place. Will had used this roof plenty of times, for impromptu spillover from parties, carrying ice and beer and bottles of wine, a tablecloth to serve as a picnic blanket, binoculars to watch Fourth of July fireworks. There’d been no such gate.

  And if the alarm does work? Will it be audible on the street? And if it is, will the team following him understand what it means? Will they understand immediately?

  He doesn’t have much of a choice. Will pushes forward on the red lever, releasing the lock, opening the door, and…?

  And, yes: sounding the alarm. An ear-piercing scream, harshly bright light flashing here in the half-lit gloom of a tenement’s top-floor hall, a full-scale sensory assault from a harmless-looking little box near the ceiling.

  Will takes the steps two at a time. Opens the big metal door at the top, steps out onto the squishy tar. There are a few lawn chairs up here, a hibachi. No people.

  He scampers to the front of the building, the very edge. Lies down on the tar. There are wide-diameter holes bored in the parapet, water drainage, little funnels that lead to gutters suspended on the façade. Will peers through one of these holes, locates the man in the suit across the street. He’s looking up and down the block, apparently aware of the alarm. He glances up, scanning the roofline—does he see Will? No, there’s no way. No way.

  The man takes his phone out of his pocket, holds it up to his face, says something, nods. Then he starts to cross the street.

  Will gets up. He jogs across the roof, climbs over a dividing wall, hops down onto an adjoining building. He does this again at the next one, and the next. Every building is six stories tall, the roofs all at similar heights, similar surfaces, similar evidence of unauthorized leisure use, cheap folding furniture and a big plastic bin, cigarette butts and beer bottles and a yellow cardboard condom box, ripped open jaggedly.

  Will arrives at the end of a building and stops short, out of breath: it’s a long drop down to the next rooftop, at least one full story. He looks around for a ladder, a rope, anything, but there’s nothing.

  He needs to get around this corner, needs to get off these rooftops and down to the ground and out to a stretch of street that isn’t being monitored.

  The volume of the fire alarm is suddenly louder, a grating layer atop the background hum of the city din, trucks and buses, a distant siren. He looks over his shoulder in the direction of the increased noise, sees the door swinging open.

  He’s out of time.

  Will jumps.

  —

  “But you”—the man coughs, his throat dry—“you’re the one who hired me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The guy was gagged for hours, and Malcolm has just uncorked him.

  “Please, can I have some water?”

  “No. What do you mean I’m the one who hired you?”

  The man bound to the chair looks pleadingly at Malcolm. “Please.”

  “Tell me what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “To get you out of your prenup.”

  Malcolm’s mind is trying to imagine what this could possibly mean. He can’t. And he shouldn’t bother trying to get an honest answer now. First he needs to do something else.

  He retreats to the door, knocks; it’s locked from the outside. Click, clack, squeak, the door swings open. “Yeah?”

  “It’s time to do the fingers,” Malcolm says.

  “What?”

  “Oye,” Alonso cries out to the yard, “ven acá.” Another guy trudges in, takes over as doorman. The door slams shut, the locks reengage loudly.

  Alonso, who was hired because of his willingness to mete out violence, lumbers toward the guy sitting in the chair.

  “What the hell do you mean, do the fingers?” The guy is panicking.

  Alonso reaches into the rear pocket of his baggy oversize jeans, which hang low off his ass. He removes a big leather sheath.

  “Oh God, no. Please.”

  Alonso pulls a knife out of the sheath. A black leather handle, long thick blade, serrated on the back. This knife offers options, a lot of ways to cut different sorts of things, to slice and stab and saw things, animals, people. This is a scary-ass knife.

  “Please,” the man in the chair begs. “No…”

  —

  As he launches into the air, Will’s mind flashes back to the long-ago weekend that he spent learning to skydive, another experience undertaken so he could write about it. The dull classroom instruction followed by the repetitive field training—jumping, tumbling, learning to land without breaking ankles or shins, flexed feet and soft knees, pitching forward and shoulder-rolling, spreading the impact across different bones, joints, muscle groups, bearing the load widely.

  It’s a long fall from one rooftop to another, and even as he’s still rolling forward onto the tarmac he has begun to assess his injuries, the integrity of his joints. When he comes to a halt on one knee, it’s his left ankle that doesn’t feel great. He stands upright, flexes that ankle. It definitely hurts. But it’s usable.

  He runs to the front of the building: nothing here, no way down the fifty feet to the city street. He sprints to the rear. There’s a ladder-and-stair fire-escape system back here, but it doesn’t start until a floor below, and there’s no way down to that top level, which is half-occupied by a collection of potted plants.

  Can he jump down? What is it, ten feet? Sure. But what if he misses?

  Will leans over the parapet, looking for a better option. Four houses up the block, there’s a fire escape that reaches the very top. Does he have time to make it over there without being seen? Will needs to get the hell off this rooftop before his pursuer locates him and alerts his street-level partner—or is there more than one?—to Will’s location.

  No, he doesn’t have time. Will has just a couple of seconds to get off this roof, out of sight.

  Again, he has no choice. Again, he jumps.

  NEW YORK CITY

  Alonso holds the horror-film knife in front of the man who calls himself Steven.

  “Please,” the man begs. “Don’t.”

  Malcolm ignores him, his fingers flying across his little touchscreen keyboard: Sorry, Rhodes, running late, can we make it 7:00? Then he slips the phone back into his pocket. “Come on,” he says to Alonso. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “No! Please!”

  With a lightning-quick upward flick, Alonso slices through the duct tape that binds Steven’s right hand to the chair. He repeats the maneuver for the left hand.

  Steven glances at his free hands, looking for wounds, for evidence that he wasn’t just unbound, but something worse.

  Malcolm hands the small metal box to Alonso.

  “What’s this?” Steven asks, his imagination taking a 180-degree turn back toward terror, toward all the horrible things that could be inflicted upon him from this small metal box. What in the name of God could be in there?

  —

  Will is falling through the air on a wider horizontal trajectory than intended, getting much farther from the rear plane of the building than he wants, and he can tell that this is going to be a problem, possibly fatal, and he tries to reverse his body back toward the building but that doesn’t work, and all this is happening so fast, and then somehow he does manage for his right foot to land directly on the handrail, midsole, and for a fraction of a second he’s balanced there, midfoot, on an inch-wide strip of painted iron, three feet above the fire escape’s landing, forty feet above the solid bone-crushing pavement of the backyard.

  That balance is illusory. Will’s momentum is carrying him forward, his weight shifting from the middle of the foot to the front, propelling his body away from the building, away from safety, out into free fall, obeying physics instead of volition, and there he goes, pitching into open air but reaching backward,
his descent slowed and his angle altered as his hand fumbles for the railing, but his fingers can’t find purchase, and he’s dropping again, his hand grasping for anything, anything at all, and he feels metal in his palm, and he closes his fingers, and his forearm immediately begins to burn, even before he fully realizes that he is successfully hanging there, dangling from the corner of the fire escape, no longer falling, no longer about to die, at least not in the next second, not if he can manage to hold—

  He flings his other arm into the same position, establishes a two-handed grip, more secure. He holds still. He gathers his strength. Swings his legs toward the building, then back out, then in again, his body a pendulum, and at the maximum amplitude he launches himself into open air again, but this time for a drop of just a few feet, clattering to the surface of the fire escape, crashing into a cardboard case filled with wine bottles.

  A cat in the window screeches at him.

  “Oh Gertrude”—it’s a woman’s voice inside—“what’s wrong? What’s out there?” This woman is not going to be happy to see Will on her fire escape; she’s going to scream her ass off.

  He hops out of the her sight line. Scuttles down to the next level, then down again, his feet clanking on the ladder, the whole structure jangling. Not making any attempt to be quiet here—let the residents scream, let them dial 911, let them gather their baseball bats and kitchen knives—but he’s getting out of here.

  It comes as absolutely no surprise that the final stretch of ladder down to ground level is stuck, unbudgeable, a code violation. Sometimes building codes are a bureaucratic pain in the ass, sometimes they’re the difference between life and death.

  Will swings his legs over this final railing, lowers himself, hangs from the bottom of the metalwork for a half-second. Lets go. Drops.

  This fall is the one that hurts the most.

  He limps through the yard, an open space common to a few buildings, unhealthy hostas and potted herbs interspersed with paved walkways and garbage cans, rat-bait dispensers and preschooler toys, and here’s a low dark loggia, an exit to the side street.