The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  Will peers up the block, back again. Just a few people are visible out here. None seems to be looking for him. Here comes an available taxi. Hand up, door opening, Will falling onto the sticky seat, ankle throbbing, not hearing himself announce his destination, hoping the words come out right.

  The taxi turns onto the avenue, and—shit!—there’s one of his pursuers, clear as day, a guy he recognizes from Midtown.

  Will sinks low into the seat, turns away from the window. But the taxi is stopped now for a red light, and Will knows that he’s in the guy’s line of vision. Will sinks lower, brings his hand to his face, shielding his features with an imaginary phone.

  “You okay mister?” The driver is watching him squirm in the rearview. “You ain’t gonna be sick, are you?”

  “No. Sick is not my problem.”

  “You got a different problem?”

  The light changes, and the car pulls away, through the intersection, out of danger.

  “Don’t we all?”

  —

  He descends to the crowded subway platform, a train arriving, pushing hot stale air into the station, Will stumbling into the car and tumbling onto a bench. Across the car, a man is talking at least 25 percent louder than necessary, overly enunciating, his mouth making acrobatic-looking movements, as if to prove to his companion his theater training, his expertise in vocal projection. Like the occasional waitstaff in French restaurants, so exacting and precise in their pronunciations of pot-au-feu and bouillabaisse that practically no customers know what the hell is on offer.

  Next to Will, a man is sighing heavily, one hand gripping his forehead in the classic woe-is-me pose, unashamed by his public display of distress, well past caring what anyone thinks of him.

  Will looks down at his feet, away from all these people, their distractions. He’s trying to follow the narrative he’s still constructing in his mind, following the thread, like training his eye on the wandering line in a Miró canvas, weaving in and out of shapes and forms on its way to nowhere, the destination irrelevant, nonexistent, the journey everything.

  He’s pretty sure that the thing he’s been told is going on isn’t really the thing that’s going on. Somebody has been lying to him—possibly everybody. It’s time to find out who.

  Will rides a few stops, consults the map over his shoulder. Yes, this is the spot.

  Between stations, he stands. The sigher ignores him; the enunciator notices. Will walks to the end of the car. He fights the urge to look around at his fellow passengers; he doesn’t particularly want to give anyone any reasons to notice him, to get a good look at him, to remember him when they’re being interviewed by the police.

  Will reaches up, takes hold of the emergency-brake handle, and pulls, and seven hundred thousand pounds of subway steel come to a screeching, shuddering halt.

  Will opens the door at the end of the car, walks onto the ridged gangway between cars. He climbs over the safety rail made of chains, jumps down to the floor of the tunnel. Identifies the third rail, 625 volts, thankfully on the other side of the train. Walks toward the rear, in the small sooty space between subway and tunnel wall, his path illuminated by the lights through the windows.

  At the back of the train he pauses, looks around. The station they just departed isn’t far away, just a city block or two, its light intruding on the dark tunnel, a bright serum at the end of a dark syringe.

  He sets off at a jog. Looks over his shoulder, doesn’t see anyone following, no one peering through the rear window of the last car.

  At the station, he walks up the steps, onto the platform. An Asian schoolgirl in a plaid uniform notices, but quickly turns her eyes back to the book she’s holding. No one else pays him any mind.

  He climbs the station stairs, transfers to another train that’s just pulling in. He rides under the East River tube into Brooklyn, then sits for one stop after another, through Brooklyn Heights and Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and Ozone Park and Jamaica, a trip that seems to go on forever. In London, where you can’t get anywhere quickly or cheaply, you can nevertheless take a nonstop train from Heathrow to Paddington in fifteen minutes. In New York you take the A train combined with the AirTrain for a slow, lurchy, and occasionally scary hour.

  He assesses his injuries: a twisted ankle, abrasions on both hands, a gash in the shin.

  “Yo, you all right? That looks nasty.”

  Will is dabbing at his bloody leg with the cuff of his jeans, trying to stanch the bleeding, though maybe all he’s accomplishing is staining his pants.

  “I’m okay,” Will says, nodding at the guy across the car. He’s finally on the loop that runs around the airport terminals, this strange subcity plopped onto the Jamaica Bay wetlands. Thirty-seven thousand people work at JFK, and this guy appears to be one of them, riding the AirTrain with no luggage. Just like Will.

  —

  He surveys the sprawling scrum of check-in—ticketing and bag-drop, customer service and security, thousands of people waiting, shuffling, complaining. All being observed by airline agents, by TSA personnel, by police, by surveillance cameras.

  He approaches a self-serve check-in terminal. Takes his passport out of his pocket, swipes it through the slot. The screen informs him that it’s Searching our records…Searching our records…

  Will feels eyes all around him, and it takes every iota of his self-control to not look around.

  Searching our records…

  This is taking too long. His heart is accelerating, again.

  This is taking way too long; something must be wrong. Maybe this kiosk is broken?

  Will looks up from the screen. He scans the terminal, his eyes drawn like magnets to the guards, to the police, who themselves are scanning the terminal, looking for people who are looking at them.

  Searching our—

  The screen goes blank. Shit. What’s about to happen?

  —Record located

  Will’s hand is trembling as he hits the touchscreen, checking no bags, not traveling with any infants, agreeing to this and that safety measure, whatever, come on—

  The kiosk finally spits out his boarding pass.

  He realizes that he needs to clean himself off; he shouldn’t go through security feeling like this, looking like this. He finds the restroom, washes the blood off his shin, his hands, applies some bandages from the first-aid kit in his go-bag. Runs water across his face, through this hair. Dabs himself dry with paper towels.

  It’s okay, he tells himself. I’m just a harried traveler, I’m sweating because it’s hot and I’ve been rushing, not because I’m nervous, not because I’m hiding anything.

  The queue is very short. He is, after all, a Trusted Traveler, according to the Transportation Security Administration’s background check.

  “Sir?”

  He shuffles forward, keys and watch and coins in the little plastic basket, hands out of pockets, patting himself down. Backpack and jacket on conveyor belt. Nothing metal in there. Nothing, just…just what? Just illegal travel documents and a large sum of cash…

  He should’ve kept his jacket on. He watches it glide into the X-ray machine.

  Shit.

  A TSA cop waves Will into the metal detector, and the thing starts beeping like mad. What? What?

  “Sir, do you have a phone in your pocket?” Oh shit, yes. Into another basket, onto the conveyor belt, which almost immediately comes to a stop. With his bag and his jacket in there.

  The X-ray operator is staring at the screen. The conveyor moves forward, then backward. The guy squints. Beckons over a colleague. They both stare at the screen. One says something to the other, who nods.

  Shit shit shit.

  The conveyor starts to move again.

  “Sir?”

  Oh good God. Will looks at the guards, these men standing between him and freedom. Who are these men? Why are they trustworthy? Who screened them? How? For whom do they work? Who are these people, to be given the power to hold Will’s life
in their hands?

  “Sir? Is this duffel bag yours?”

  Duffel? No, what duffel? I don’t have any—

  “Yes.” It’s the man standing next to Will who answers.

  “Sir, do you have a cigarette lighter in this bag?”

  Oh thank God. Will grabs his things, his contraband-stuffed jacket, and he gets the hell out of there, clutching his passport and boarding pass like life preservers.

  —

  Will gazes up at the departure board. The gate for the flight to Portland, Maine, is 34. Its status is boarding.

  His phone vibrates again, yet another text message from Malcolm: Hey Rhodes, what the fuck? Are we having a drink or what?

  He locks a stall in the men’s room. Gets undressed, changes into his spare clothes, jeans, tee shirt, cap. He removes the padded envelope from the rear of his jeans, and slides his passport inside, keeping company with a thick wad of twenties, fifties, and hundreds.

  Will extracts a different passport from the envelope, a Canadian document in the name of Douglas Davis. And a different boarding pass.

  He examines the two thumb drives in his hand. He puts one in his front right pocket, the other in his rear.

  He packs his old clothes into the bag, and exits the men’s room.

  “Paging Will Rhodes. Passenger Rhodes on the eight-fifteen bound for Portland. Please report to gate thirty-four immediately. This is your final call. Final call.”

  He looks up, locates gate thirty-four, a hundred yards to his right.

  Will turns left.

  SCARBOROUGH

  “Hello?”

  “Hey Chloe, it’s Dean.”

  She doesn’t respond. Is Dean really calling her? That takes a lot of nerve.

  “Dean Fowler,” he clarifies.

  “Yes, believe it or not, you’re the only Dean I know. Plus I recognize your voice.”

  “Glad to hear it. Listen, Chloe…”

  “Yes?”

  “Your husband came to me the other night, looking for something, um, unusual.”

  Oh. That’s why he’s calling. It’s not to proposition her. Or at least not directly. Maybe Dean is taking a more indirect approach. “Just tell me, Dean.”

  “I don’t have all the details, but I can probably get them, if you want.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  NEW YORK CITY

  He forces himself to stare at…at what? at his shoes? the back of the guy’s neck in front of him? No. More natural, he needs to find something else to stare at, a good-looking woman is what he should ogle, there, on the adjoining queue in a different boarding group, short skirt and high heels, too lip-glossed, too tacky, but whatever: he’d rather people think he’s a leering creep with bad taste than a fugitive.

  His boarding pass is tucked into the passport with a name and ID number that all belong to someone else, someone who’s not being hunted. Or at least that’s what Will hopes. He has never before used this fake passport—any fake passport. Maybe that Canadian tweeker has already reported it stolen? Or maybe he got arrested, convicted of a crime, his travel documents voided. Maybe it wasn’t a real passport to begin with. Or maybe it’s the other guy who betrayed Will, Mr. Ramones who sold him the passport in the dive-bar backroom in Bed-Stuy. Maybe he got arrested, and opted to trade his secrets for a reduced sentence.

  Maybe Will himself is about to get arrested right now, at an airport gate.

  He hands his documents to the gate agent, his heart racing, racing, racing. She glances down at the passport, at the photo, up at Will’s face.

  He can actually hear his heartbeat thudding in his ears. Can she?

  She puts the boarding pass down on the scanner, presses down to flatten the thermal paper’s bar code, and Will waits to hear the pleasant beep, the nice soft sound that’s coming from the adjoining station as the tanned woman passes, tossing Will a small smile, but instead of the nice beep he gets the deep buzz, the wrong-answer noise familiar to anyone who has ever seen a quiz show—

  Oh damn, this is it, the alarms about to start blaring, the lights strobing, the SWAT team rushing in, weapons raised—

  RESTON, VIRGINIA

  “Thanks again for taking care of this so quickly,” Elle says, pulling the door closed behind her. She looks around Raji’s sad little apartment, the pleather furniture, the humongous TV, the absence of any decoration of any sort hanging on any wall, the empty beer bottles that are arrayed on the kitchen pass-through, like troops defending a citadel. “Sorry about the hour.”

  “It is not a problem, you are the client, my job is to service you. Did you have a good dinner?”

  “Yeah, it was fine.” It was revolting. “Thanks for the suggestion.”

  Elle had noticed these bottles when she’d dropped off the disk drive, an hour ago. She’d decided to buy replacements, whose plastic bag she hoists now. “I come bearing gifts.” While she puts the six-pack on the kitchen counter, she can hear Raji in the other room, the creaking of his desk chair, the clacking of his keyboard.

  Elle uses a handkerchief to extract the cardboard container from the bag. Then she folds the plastic bag, puts it in her pocket, along with the handkerchief and her hands. She doesn’t want to touch anything here. Keeping her hands in her pockets is a good way to avoid touching things. Plus she’s wearing Band-Aids on the tips of her thumbs and forefingers.

  “So Raji, tell me: what did you find?”

  She can tell by his face that the news is not good.

  “I am sorry to say that if the records are here, they are extremely well disguised.”

  “You’re positive you’ve understood what I’m looking for?”

  “You are looking for files that were created or updated by Malcolm Somers, files that might contain records of aliases that match up with other names, or that match names with monetary amounts, or that match names with any numbers that could conceivably be monetary amounts, or that match names with locations.”

  “And you’ve found nothing whatsoever like this?”

  “No. Furthermore, I have found no files at all created or updated by Malcolm Somers.”

  “None?”

  “None.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Is it possible that Somers doesn’t actually have any files on his computer? Or on the server?”

  “Yes. But what is not possible is that he would not have a folder. Here, let me show you.”

  Elle leans down, looks over the guy’s shoulder at the screen.

  “Do you see this organizational tree? These branches? Those are departments within the magazine. Editorial, design, pro—”

  “I get it.”

  “Within each branch, the names of individual users. People.”

  “Yup.”

  “Here, freelancers. Here, archive.”

  “My God, archive is a big branch. Huge.”

  “Yes. Those folders contain files that have not been altered in three years, after which all files automatically migrate to archives. There are thousands of folders in that branch, representing any personnel who have ever created a file for this organization, since the advent of digital files, in 1988. There were very few back then, do you see, here?”

  “Yes.”

  “This man, Malcolm Somers, he has been working for this organization for a decade?”

  “That’s correct.” Her mind is racing to catch up with the likely explanation.

  “Yet he has no folders,” Raji continues. “None active. None archived.”

  “What can that mean?”

  “Two possibilities. One is that for some reason he does not maintain files, and has asked his administrator to remove the folders with his name, folders that probably would have been generated automatically with his employment. So these folders—one for active, one for archives—would need to be manually deleted by someone with administrator privileges.”

  “What’s the other possibility?”

  “That the folders do exist on the server, but are not here on this extern
al drive.”

  “Is it possible that this drive would fail to duplicate these folders, if they existed?”

  “No.”

  “So the only way that those folders are not here is if they were deleted?”

  “Correct. Either deleted directly from the mainframe source, or deleted from this drive after they were duplicated.”

  “Is there any way to tell which?”

  “With a high degree of certainty, I can say that the folders were deleted from this drive after they were duplicated.” Raji opens a new window, gibberish, strings of numbers. “Do you see this line?”

  “Yes.”

  “That means that the drive completed its duplication at 14:09:51 today. And this?”

  “Yes.”

  “That means that something was moved to the trash, and the trash emptied, at 16:20:11. This was an active function, initiated by a user. By a human being.” Raji turns from his screen, looks at Elle. “Whoever was in possession of this drive at four-twenty this afternoon? That is the person who deleted the Malcolm Somers folders, and any files within.”

  That duplicitous bastard.

  “And do you see this line?” He points at the screen again. “This means that before the data was moved to the trash, it was first copied to a different external device.”

  Huh? Will Rhodes copied the files and then deleted them? What the hell is he up to?

  “But the files are not on this drive,” Raji says. “I am sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  None of this is his fault, poor guy. The entire operation has hinged on Raji’s work, and he never knew it, and never will. Elle needed access to the satellites and databases and vast networks of nonstop surveillance of the American populace, which was not something she could arrange without the participation of a substantially plugged-in institution.

  So the operation didn’t really hinge on Raji himself; he’s not a uniquely qualified individual. But his employer is a highly qualified outfit, and Raji is a uniquely disposable individual. He has been Elle’s sole point-person since the inception of the project, working under the very specific, abundantly explicit mandate that he be the only person in his office with access to the operational details. Because although Virginia Data Associates takes great pride in its ability to gather secrets, and keep them, even VDA would have to comply with a court order, should it ever arrive. By keeping the VDA loop limited to just one person, Elle was simplifying the mitigation of that eventuality.