The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  He opened one of these files, found two columns. One was clearly dates; the other seemed to be currency amounts.

  The same sort of thing was in a second file. And a third.

  Will opened a dozen files, each containing two columns: dates and figures. Some of these spreadsheets had only a few lines, dating back a couple of years; others had hundreds of entries, going back decades.

  These had to be financial records.

  Will turned his attention to the file titles. They all started with a pair of letters, ES, GB, IL, GE, TR, CH…

  Country codes! These were country codes. For what? Phone numbers? No, phone numbers would start with dialing codes. These had to be banking codes: IBAN numbers. Which meant that this was a record of bank accounts. And these bank accounts had to belong to people who were being paid by Travelers.

  There were accounts in every country where Travelers maintained a bureau, but also in countries where the magazine had no presence. There were of course accounts here in FR, the headquarters of Europe. But as far as Will knew, only two people worked in the magazine department of the Paris bureau, with another three downstairs at the travel agency. But here were a few dozen FR accounts, many being paid on a regular basis.

  Who were all these people?

  He’s sure that one is the old man who lives here, on this island. But no one seems to know where exactly. Until someone does. “Oui, oui, certainement. Là-bas”—it’s Will’s lunchtime waiter, pointing past the church. “Sans doute.”

  Will pays the check in a hurry. He finds the doorbell—Fourier!—and buzzes. He forces patience upon himself, waits a full minute before he buzzes again. It’s an old man, Will reminds himself, who might take a long time to get to the intercom.

  No answer, again.

  Will buzzes a third time.

  The door to the street opens. It’s an old woman. “Oui?”

  “Bonjour. Je cherche Monsieur Jean-Pierre Fourier.”

  The woman says nothing.

  “Do you know Monsieur Fourier?” Will continues, lapsing into English.

  “Oui. Il était mon père.”

  In his excitement, Will doesn’t notice the tense of her verb. “Could I speak with him? It’s important.”

  She crosses her arms.

  Will reaches into his pocket, removes a business card. “I work for Travelers.”

  She examines the card.

  “I’m trying to find a friend, a colleague of your father’s. I was hoping he might help.”

  “I am sorry,” she says. “But my father, he is dead.”

  NEW YORK CITY

  Malcolm tries Chloe’s cell again, straight to voice mail. This time he leaves a message. “Hey, Chloe, it’s Malcolm. Sorry to hear that you and Will are, um…having a disagreement. But listen: Will has been AWOL for twenty-four hours, and I’m worried. Could you give me a call?”

  He pockets the phone, looks out the car window. Literally everything is wrong here. The derelict Brooklyn street looks more like Baghdad in wartime than a New York that’s enjoying the lowest crime rates and highest property values in recorded history. On this particular block, crime is high, and property is worthless.

  Malcolm walks around to the rear of the condemned house. He descends into the basement, past the stoic guard, through the door.

  Here’s the man who’s been missing from his life for a day. This man is no longer bound to the chair, and he has used his freedom to retreat to the far corner, where he’s sitting on the floor, leaning against the masonry wall. He has been allowed to use the portable bathroom in the backyard; he has been given water and food; he is uninjured, physically. So far.

  The man looks up as Malcolm enters, closes the door. Malcolm turns a chair around to face the man, takes a seat. “Your name is Timothy Dunne?”

  The man nods.

  “You’re from Nashville?”

  “Yes.” Tears spring from his eyes.

  A thorough search using the guy’s fingerprints and Social Security number yielded a completely viable biography, one that matches the guy’s claims in every detail. If this man is not actually who he’s claiming to be, he has a remarkable legend and is a spectacularly skilled operative, one whose proficiency wouldn’t be wasted on an operation so absurd. Certainly not within the borders of the United States, against a domestic target.

  “Timothy Dunne from Nashville, you’ve gotten yourself into a bad situation.”

  “I know.” He’s obviously trying to control his crying, to contain his abject terror, but he’s failing. “I’m sorry. But seriously, aren’t you the one who hired me?”

  Malcolm hasn’t given this guy a chance to speak on his own behalf until now; he didn’t want to hear the shit until he’d gotten at least a broad understanding of the bull’s identity.

  “That’s simply not true, Timothy.”

  The guy now starts crying freely, floodgates wide open.

  “Don’t fall apart here, Timothy Dunne. I need you to hold it together.” Malcolm is trying to sound encouraging and menacing at the same time. It’s a tightrope. “You’re going to tell me exactly what happened. From the beginning.”

  Timothy is nodding, wiping tears away from his cheeks, snot from his nose, a blubbering mess. “I came to New York six years a—”

  “No, not the beginning of your whole adult life.” In truth, Malcolm feels halfway bad for this guy. But now’s not the time to show it. “How’d this, uh, situation with my wife start?”

  “I’m an actor. I answered an ad in the trades, for a part in an indie film. ‘Good-looking man,’ the notice said. ‘Late twenties to late thirties.’ It was a woman holding auditions. She said her name was Nancy? I guess that’s not her real name.”

  Malcolm rolls his eyes.

  “There were a lot of us, open casting. I saw a few guys I knew.”

  “This was where?”

  “Hotel suite, Theater District. My audition was five minutes, small talk, read a few lines. I filled out some paperwork. The film was going to be shot in Toronto, overseas travel, so the producers needed to make sure any actors were American taxpayers, with valid passports, whatever. There were forms.”

  Why? Why get a bunch of strangers’ signatures and Social Security numbers and passport numbers? It must’ve been to do credit checks. And background checks. Assessments of financial stability, criminality. Looking for the right sort of candidate.

  “You ever been convicted of a crime, Timothy?”

  “Um…no.”

  “You sure?”

  “I didn’t say I’ve never been arrested. Down in Tennessee…it was complicated.”

  “Isn’t it always? But I bet you can simplify it.”

  “I was arraigned on extortion charges. Really just a misunderstanding. I cooperated, pled out to misdemeanor.”

  So Timothy was a punk.

  “That’s when I left Nashville. Came to New York.”

  “Uh-huh. So, Timothy, back to the future: you got the part?”

  “Yeah, I did. But work wouldn’t be starting for another month.”

  “What did you do in the meantime? Any contact with this Nancy woman?”

  “I kept my day job. Celebrated a bit. This was a big deal for me, my first film role. I’ve been in New York for six years, trying to do this…to act. Do you have any idea how hard it is? How many people come here to try this?”

  “Yes, it’s a well-known predicament. Did you start spending this money?”

  Timothy nods. “The job was going to pay a thousand dollars per day, for probably ten days of shooting. That’s a lot of money for me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “After a couple weeks she got back in touch, set another meeting. Now she told me something completely different: there was no film. She wasn’t even a film producer. She was a private detective. Her client wanted to do something dicey, though not illegal, not really. This job would pay twice as much as the nonexistent acting role, and it would be easier. She wouldn’t tell me exactly wh
at I’d have to do until I accepted the job, signed a contract with an NDA, took some money.”

  This was brilliant. She set him up with the expectation of money, she made him count on it, then she took it away, while also promising more.

  “I tried to get assurances that it wouldn’t be violent—I’m not violent. I was in a bad spot. I’d already spent some of the money, I really needed it. She showed me an envelope with five grand in cash, tax-free. Right there in the room, for me to walk out with.”

  “So you accepted.”

  He nods. “The scheme was that her client was a rich man who wanted a divorce, but there was an ironclad prenup. The only way to void it was to catch the wife committing adultery.”

  “I see. So your job was to seduce my wife?”

  Timothy’s eyes widen again. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what?” Malcolm shakes his head. “Listen, don’t try to justify yourself to me. Just tell me what happened, okay?”

  Timothy nods.

  “So how’d this work?”

  “Another help-wanted. An advertising trade magazine. Ad World? Ad Age? Something like that. I guess it was a notice tailored to attract, um…what should I call her?”

  “Who, my wife? What do you think your choices are?”

  “Mrs. Somers? Allison? Your wife?” Timothy is obviously worried that making the wrong decision is going to get him hurt. “So she, um…Allison…had just met with a career counselor? And she’d taken out a subscription for this magazine, Ad Whatever. She was obviously looking to restart her career, which I’d guess she’d put on pause to, um…”

  “To raise our children?”

  “Yeah. So she responded to this ad, and we set up an interview.”

  “You used an office?”

  “No, we met in a hotel. Not like a hotel hotel, but a hotel’s coffee shop. A nice coffee shop. I was a headhunter, the type of person who meets in coffee shops, hotel lobbies. I told her she was a terrific candidate, but this position wasn’t exactly right. But I was impressed with her, and I’d see if we could find something else. I let her dangle awhile.”

  “This was at your discretion?”

  “No. It’s what Nancy told me to do. Then I contrived to run into Allison, which supposedly jogged my memory about an opening. We met for drinks. Then lunch, where I told her that the position had already been filled, but I didn’t cancel lunch because I really wanted to see her. That what I really wanted, more than anything…Do you really want to hear this?”

  “I do.”

  “That I really wanted to see her again and again, every day. That I couldn’t stop thinking about her…Listen, man, I really don’t want to, um…please…I’m so, so sorry.”

  Malcolm waves it off. “Tell me about the thumb drive.”

  “Nancy said that in order to make absolutely sure that the prenup would be voided, her client needed to have his wife admit to infidelity. The husband knew that the wife kept a diary, electronic, which she typed on the computer in the home office.” Timothy raises his eyes at Malcolm, asking if this is true. Malcolm shakes his head.

  “Anyway, the computer was password-protected, and the client couldn’t ask his wife for the password so he could snoop through her private shit.”

  “So you’d have to steal it.”

  “Right. I had to insert this thumb drive, wait ten seconds, and remove it. All the files would be copied. And that would be that.”

  “Was it?”

  “Uh, yes, actually. When we met yesterday, I was all set to end it with her, to tell her that I’d crossed an unacceptable line, it was unprofessional, I could lose my whole career, et cetera. But I never got the chance.”

  “Why not?”

  “She dumped me.”

  PARIS

  “I’m so sorry, madame. When did your father die?”

  “It was one month,” says Mme. Fourier, with a resigned smile.

  Will’s heart sinks. Did someone kill this old man, to bury his secrets? “Was he very ill?”

  “No, monsieur, he was very old.”

  “Did he happen to leave anything?”

  “Of course. He left everything.”

  “I mean anything unusual; anything you wouldn’t expect a man like him to have.”

  “I am surprised to find that he is having a mobile phone.”

  NEW YORK CITY

  This backyard is as un-backyard-like as possible while still being a plot of land behind a house, which would be more accurately described as an ex-house. Malcolm didn’t grow up wealthy—far from it—but there’s a big difference between his working-class-suburb upbringing thirty miles east and this permanent-underclass urban hellscape here, ravaged by a half-century of abject poverty and drug epidemics, exacerbated by police brutality and its attendant backlashes, by the empty promises of pandering politicians and the irreversible trend of income disparity.

  Alonso is out here smoking a cigarette, asks, “Want one?”

  Malcolm shakes his head. Then changes his mind. “Actually, do you mind?”

  Alonso knocks a smoke out of the pack, cups his hand over the lighter. Menthol, wow, that feels strange, and cigarettes are pretty strange to begin with.

  “Thanks.”

  They stand in silence, both gazing out at the unmistakable arrangement of low-rise housing projects in the near distance.

  “Where you from, Alonso?”

  “Born in Mexico.”

  “Oh yeah? Where?”

  “Campeche.” Alonso spits. He’s one of those recreational spitters, hocking up unnecessary phlegm every couple of minutes, as if to say, Hey, world, fuck you.

  “That’s the Yucatán, right?”

  Malcolm suspects that Alonso doesn’t want to make small talk with this guy who’s his boss’s boss’s boss, this white guy doing strange shit to this other white guy, for something that doesn’t seem to involve drugs or money. Alonso doesn’t know what’s going on, and doesn’t want to.

  “We’re done here,” Malcolm says, tossing the nearly finished cigarette. He’s briefly afraid that his smoldering butt is going to start a fire, but that would be doing this place a goddamned favor. “Get rid of him,” Malcolm says, “like we discussed.”

  PARIS

  “No, I do not want it, certainly. I do not believe it is the phone of my father.” She shrugs. “Keep it.”

  Will does. It takes a few minutes to revive the uncharged device at a small table in a crowded café, with a waiter who makes a big show of his forbearance for the American who needs an electrical outlet.

  While Will waits, he uses an old pay phone near the restroom to try Chloe, yet again. She doesn’t pick up.

  “Hi,” he says to the empty void of voice mail. “I miss you.”

  Will opens Fourier’s flip phone, scrolls through the contacts. A dozen of them, most in Paris, except a number in New York City with a 347 area code, a relatively recently issued exchange. There’s also a phone number in Iceland.

  SCARBOROUGH

  It’s just a few minutes after the voice mail from Will—from an unrecognized number in Paris—that Chloe’s phone rings again. This time she answers: “You’re the last person I want to talk to.”

  “Me? What did I do?”

  She turns away from the direction of her mother inside the shingled house, toward the bushes and trees, the obstructed view of the beach, the limitless ocean. “Don’t give me that shit. You know exactly what you did.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Will told me.”

  “Told you? Will told you what?”

  “You promised me, Malcolm. Promised you’d leave him out of it.”

  “And I have.”

  “Then what the hell was that new assignment you gave him?”

  “Well, yeah, okay, I did do that. But seriously, Chloe, he doesn’t know what that is. Far as he’s concerned, that’s just a new column, nothing more. I gave him a raise!”

  “And the blonde? Who’s that?”


  Malcolm doesn’t respond for a second. “Blonde?” Another silent beat. “Honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “And what’s this shit about him being recruited?”

  “What?”

  Malcolm sounds legitimately surprised. Chloe almost believes him, but she can’t. Malcolm is a professional liar. It’s his actual job to lie—to the people he works with, the people he works for, his wife, his friends, everyone.

  “You’re telling me you don’t know anything about this? About her?”

  The wireless line is filled with a low static hum. Chloe wonders if Malcolm is trying to figure out whether or not to tell her the truth. Or maybe what he can say aloud, on the telephone.

  “Mal?”

  “Will hasn’t been in the office since yesterday morning, Chlo. No one knows where he is.”

  She feels like she’s going to throw up.

  “No one has heard from him,” Malcolm continues, explaining into Chloe’s terrified silence. “He’s not answering texts or calls.” Making it worse and worse.

  “He’s not on assignment?” Chloe knows this is irrational, desperate. “Catching up on something old?”

  “He was in the office yesterday, we spoke, he didn’t say anything about going anywhere. We were supposed to have a drink. But he didn’t show.”

  This is her worst nightmare: that her job will get her husband killed.

  “I was going to tell him, Chlo. Bring him inside. Last night.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “Everything.”

  “About me?”

  “No, everything else, but not that. That’s your decision.”

  “Why? What happened, Mal?”

  “I’m afraid we’ve been, uh, penetrated. Everything might be compromised.”

  Her fear turns to anger, as if one emotion says to the other, here, let me get out of your way: “You fucking asshole.”

  Malcolm doesn’t defend himself.

  “I put my life on hold, Mal. You know why?”

  He still doesn’t answer. She knows that he knows.

  “Because I was worried that this is exactly what would happen. That you’d lie to me—”