The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  “I didn’t—”

  “—and Will would end up lying to me, and my whole goddamned marriage would be ruined. My whole life, Mal.”

  This is why she’d been taking birth-control pills behind Will’s back, unwilling to get pregnant while her husband was becoming immersed in the world of Travelers, and possibly drawn into all its ugly dangerous complications. She was worried that Will would get distorted, compromised. Worried even that he’d get killed, like Gabriella’s husband: kidnapped abroad, held for ransom, murdered. At the time, Gabriella had just found out she was pregnant. The evening after Terrance’s funeral, she suffered a miscarriage. Chloe sure as hell wasn’t going to put herself through that. Certainly not for a job.

  “Chloe, do you have any idea where he might be? I’m worried.”

  “Me too.” But she doesn’t think that telling Malcolm what she knows is going to be a solution; in fact, it might complicate the problem. So she says, “I have no idea where he is.”

  “You haven’t heard from him?”

  Chloe is halfway afraid she’s walking into a trap here. Does Malcolm already know the truth? Has he been monitoring her cell phone?

  “No,” she says. “I haven’t.”

  Chloe had tried to talk Will out of it, told him that if he joined Travelers she’d have to leave. So she did.

  But she didn’t leave the organization. She merely went to a different section, run out of a different office, with very different responsibilities.

  NEW YORK CITY

  “Hey boss?”

  “Hi Stonely. Everything okay?”

  “Uh, not really.”

  “Is it the guy?”

  “No, boss, that’s taken care of.” The terrified kidnapped guy was dealt a perfunctory ass-whupping by that psychopath Alonso, then released on his own recognizance, with the promise of more serious violence unless he cooperated. “How do I cooperate?” he asked, through bleeding mouth.

  “Disappear.”

  And to the guy’s credit, that’s what he did: packed his shit and got on a Greyhound bus. There was no guarantee he wouldn’t be back, eventually, but Stonely suspected no one would care. Stonely certainly doesn’t. Then again, Stonely doesn’t know what the hell is really going on with this guy.

  There’s a lot Stonely doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why all the tight security for a magazine. Doesn’t know why the secretive meetings with the boss. Doesn’t understand the abductions and interrogations and break-ins—of their own staff. All Stonely knows is that these things are required by the boss. It’s a very abstract concern, a generic version of the fundamental employment relationship.

  It isn’t completely satisfying to Stonely, being this much in the dark. But Stonely doesn’t think that completely satisfying is a reasonable expectation. Even being a professional baseball player hadn’t been completely satisfying. And here at Travelers, he has job security and health insurance, paid holidays and vacation, a 401(k) with matching contributions, no threat of physical injury, none of which was on offer in the minor-league system.

  Almost everyone Stonely knows has a worse job.

  —

  “No, boss,” Stonely says, “it’s something here in the office.”

  Oh good God, what now? Will has disappeared. Chloe has fled town and is lying to him. Allison got seduced by a guy who’s trying to steal Malcolm’s files. What the fuck else can happen?

  “Yesterday, during the system’s routine daily backup, someone copied all the files.”

  “All what files, Stonely?”

  “All our files. Everything created by users here at Travelers, in every department. Including the archives.”

  “What? Who did this?”

  “I don’t know who, for certain. But I do know where: Will Rhodes’s computer.”

  Stonely stands there, awaiting further instruction, but not asking.

  “Okay Stonely, thanks. See you tomorrow.”

  Malcolm sits at his desk, head in hands, puzzling what this could mean, what he needs to do about it. Is it time to admit to his own boss that things have gotten out of control? What would happen to him?

  He might be killed. And it might happen immediately. Tonight.

  So no, that’s not a great option.

  He needs to try to solve this himself, quickly.

  Malcolm unlocks the bookcase door, steps into the wall, shuts himself into the hidden office. He takes a seat at the narrow desk, and picks up the landline, hardwired to a dedicated line that falls through the wall cavity directly to the trunk in the basement, a line that’s swept clean every week by a taciturn tech named Ivan, of all things.

  Malcolm checks his watch. It’s late, the first place he’s calling. He’s going to wake her up, which in a way is regrettable. But in another way it’s not. It’s sometimes useful to yank people from unconsciousness, to thrust them into a heightened form of consciousness, immediately hyperaware. Waking someone up sends a message, gets things done.

  He dials the long number from memory, and waits a few seconds for the line to connect across the ocean.

  She answers on the first ring.

  PARIS

  It’s much later than Will intended. After he’d spent the better part of the day tromping around every inch of the Île St-Louis, his feet ached, his twisted ankle was swollen, his bruises were sore. He was unbearably tired. He found an hourly-rate hotel between Pigalle and the Gare St-Lazare, a tiny room facing an air shaft, a lumpy mattress on which he reclined, just for a few minutes, uninterrupted by any intrusion like turn-down service, devoid of street noise, a quiet cocoon in an unlikely location. A quick nap turned into a six-hour coma.

  So now it’s the middle of the night. Will has been standing in a deep doorway for fifteen minutes, watching the Paris bureau. No sign of life anywhere on this long quiet block.

  He’s wearing an oversize black cap with a stiff bill and a ridiculous logo, hiding not only his face but also disguising his personality; he looks like a thirty-something who’s trying to look like a club kid.

  His heartbeat quickens as he approaches the front door, keycard already out of his wallet, floating loose in his pocket. He waves the card against the surface of the reader, nothing.

  He looks at the magnetic surface, waves the card again, and again, then remembers: he pushes the card flat against the reader. A click as the lock releases.

  Through the door, up the grand staircase, around to the office door. He presses the button to release the second card reader, slides his card through the slot. Steps inside.

  Alone in offices late at night, Will has always felt a little wrong, a sense of trespass, even in places where he belongs. Here, he feels even more wrong. He is.

  Will strides to Inez’s desk, takes a seat. His fingers hover above the lock’s keypad, nervous. He’s not sure how many chances he’ll have to be wrong. Maybe none.

  He’d practiced on the phone in his hotel room, hitting the touch-tone keys until he’d found the familiar-sounding sequence. He was reasonably confident that he’d narrowed it down to one of two possibilities, unsure of only the final note. But in truth he was unsure about the whole thing, worried that maybe his imagination had conflated the touch-tone sequence with the Pearl Jam phrase that he’d learned to pick on a guitar eighteen years ago.

  He hits the first five notes with confidence, then pauses before the sixth. One or the other, 7 or 8. He hits 7.

  It doesn’t open. But neither does any alarm sound, not that he can hear.

  He tries again, ending this time with 8.

  Click.

  He pulls open the drawer. His eyes scan the tabs, and he finds the files he wants.

  Will removes one of them, opens it on the desktop, begins to copy information into his little notebook. For better or worse, there aren’t that many contacts in this folder.

  It’s almost completely silent in here; he can hear his pen scratching on the paper.

  And then something else, something louder, outside: a vehicle
with a small motor. The sound grows louder, settles on a constant volume for a few seconds, then gets louder again, then dies.

  What?

  Will jumps out of the chair. A couple of strides to the window, a sidelong glance out to the street.

  Damn.

  What should he do? He doesn’t want to steal these files—doesn’t want their absence to be noticed—but he needs the information. Maybe Inez won’t notice. Maybe her arrival is mundane: she lost her house key, and keeps a spare here in her desk. Or maybe it’s New York who called her in, they need something—what? a photograph? an interview?—asap. Maybe she won’t even open this drawer. Maybe this has absolutely nothing to do with him.

  Will gathers his things, and some things that are not his: a couple of files, and, as an afterthought, Inez’s extra-sharp letter opener.

  —

  Inez climbs off her Vespa, stows her helmet. She scans one way up the deserted street, then down the other. She yawns.

  She lets herself in the front door. As she climbs to the premier étage, she thinks she hears a noise. She pauses, listening, turning her head this way, that, aiming her ears at who-knows-what.

  Nothing.

  She continues up the stairs, walking softer now, her heels making quieter clicks.

  At the top of the stairs she pauses again. She looks both ways down the hall, a few closed doors, one lit sconce and two dark ones. She peers up to the second floor, back down to the ground floor.

  She unlocks the door. She looks around, her vision flowing across the room, over surfaces, between pieces of furniture, to the windows, the chairs, the doors to the bathroom and kitchenette and coat closet and storage room. All looks correct.

  Her large desk dominates the middle of the room, attracting clutter as if magnetically, pulling in piles of paper from the periphery. She powers on the computer. Punches in a keycode, reaches her right hand into the top drawer, plants her fingertips on the little scanner in there. On the monitor, a dialogue screen opens. She types in the first password, then another. The system admits her.

  The first thing she does is locate Will Rhodes’s personnel file. She prints out a few copies of his most recent contributor photo, full size, glossy paper, high quality. She looks through the other JPEGs in Will’s folder, finds a profile shot, prints out copies of that too.

  She checks the time. The others will start arriving soon.

  Inez opens a different drawer, removes a toilet kit. At home she’d been too dazed to put herself together. But her day has now started, and she’s going to be here for the next—who knows?—eighteen hours? She needs to brush her teeth, wash her face, apply some makeup. She doesn’t want to look like she just rolled out of bed.

  She steps into the bathroom and leaves the door open, because why wouldn’t she?

  —

  It’s an old door, big and heavy, six inset panels bordered by solid molding, brass hardware, a dented knob, a large figure-eight-shaped keyhole, which Will looks through with one eye. He needs to move his entire head to change his angle of vision, watching feckless befreckled Inez carry what looks like a makeup bag to what must be the bathroom.

  Will turns the knob slowly. Pushes the door gently, just wide enough to step through.

  The sound of water running, a triangle of brighter light on the floor. She won’t be able to hear him above the sound of the water, and he needs to take advantage of that, right this instant.

  Will pushes the storage-closet door closed quickly, lets the lock engage. Rushes across the room, still careful not to clomp his feet, moving the purloined files from his right hand to his left, to facilitate opening the door and pulling it closed, but the handoff is not clean, and he drops the files.

  He kneels, gathers the contents in an anxious rush, letter-size pages and three-by-five glossies, index cards, long folded-over sheets, fumbling, vibrating.

  The sound of the water stops. A big glurp of a drip.

  Will, crouched on the floor, looks over his shoulder. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if Inez emerges from that door.

  He remains frozen, staring at the bathroom door. There’s a shift in the triangle of light on the floor; she has moved in there.

  Surely she’s going to do something after the running-water task. What was that? Face-washing? Teeth-brushing?

  He waits a second. Another. The light shifts again. But still no sound.

  Will double-checks that the files are secure in his left hand. Stands up. It’s only another couple of steps to the door. He lets his feet fall as gently as possible on the marble floor, rolling from heels to toes, as if blotting ink, careful not to smudge. He closes his hand around the knob, this one also brass, but smooth, undented, shiny, new.

  Slowly, slowly. Silently.

  A soft click as the lock disengages. He freezes, looks over his shoulder. Still nothing.

  He pulls the knob. The door swings open silently. He takes a step, another. Pivots on his heel, pulling the door toward him now, closing it, but then he hears a different sort of click, and his eyes dart again to the bathroom door, where the triangle of light has suddenly disappeared—

  He thinks he closed the door in time.

  —

  The office door opens, admitting Omar and Pyotr, “Bonjour” all around.

  The two men live relatively near each other. Pyotr is the only one of the Paris bureau employees who’s irrational enough to own a car, which does come in handy a few times a year, when on short notice Pyotr can give Omar a middle-of-the-night ride.

  Pyotr busies himself in the corner, making a pot of coffee, a caffeine junkie.

  Omar takes a seat across from Inez, leafs through yesterday’s newspaper.

  Then Parviz arrives, yawning, an explosion of bed-head hair and crooked eyeglasses and disheveled clothing, followed eventually by utterly fastidious Yang.

  They all gather around Inez’s desk, pulling chairs, rubbing eyes. It’s 3:04 A.M.

  “Okay,” Inez says in English, “thank you all for coming so quickly.” She distributes the photos to the assembled tech team. “This is Will Rhodes.”

  She’s more than willing for anyone who visits to think that she’s the secretary here, knows nothing, just the girl who hands out info packets that were put together by someone else, someone smarter, someone more important.

  But there isn’t any such someone. These four data techs all report directly to Inez. As does Barry, her American assistant here in Paris, as well as the chiefs of the eight other European bureaus, and by extension the vast network of hundreds of freelancers—train-station gypsies and tourist-spot panhandlers, taxi drivers and border functionaries, hotel concierges and crooked cops—who provide piecework information to the Travelers network in exchange for fifty euros here, a hundred quid there, a get-out-of-jail pass every now and then.

  Inez is not the secretary, she’s the director of European operations.

  “Last night, Will Rhodes did not board his scheduled flight from New York City to Maine. This afternoon, he left a voice-mail message for his wife, from a pay phone on the Île St-Louis. He is here. He is in Paris.” She jabs a forefinger on Will’s photograph. “Go find him.”

  —

  Will is halfway down the stairs when he hears the front door opening again, the voices of two men. He spins on his heels, dashes up the stairs.

  What the hell is going on? Are these colleagues of Inez? Or is it possible they’re unconnected, going someplace else in this building, in the middle of the night?

  No.

  Will rushes down the hall, trying other door handles, but none open. He looks up the staircase. He has never been up there, has no idea.

  Heels on the stairs, one of the men muttering something in French, indecipherable to Will, but getting louder.

  He runs up the stairs.

  There’s a window at the landing between the floors, not a large window, but large enough. He pulls the brass latch. There’s a small ledge out there. A downspout from the gutters. The ground
is twenty-five feet below.

  Not this again.

  The voices grow louder.

  Will removes his small backpack, tucks the purloined paperwork inside. He hops up on the sill, climbs out. As he’s pulling the window closed behind him, he realizes he won’t be able to engage the latch. If the men come up this way, they’ll notice the unlocked latch. Which means Will can’t simply hide out here. He has to flee. And he has to do it quickly.

  He swings his leg to the far side of the gutter, grabs hold of it. Is this length of pipe sturdy enough? Secured to the wall sufficiently?

  His thighs grip the steel tube, his ankles push in. He shimmies down, knee bumping against the wall, wrist getting snagged on a bolt, pain atop pain, adrenaline rushing, his feet hitting the pebbled ground with a crunch, falling backward onto his ass, careful to keep his head from thudding into the ground, again.

  That was a lot of noise.

  He hops up, looks around. It’s dark. He doesn’t see a way out of the backyard, but there must be one. He walks the perimeter, hugging the walls, and here, a wooden door, a breezeway.

  It’s pitch-black. He waits for his eyes to adjust, but there’s no light, nothing to adjust to.

  He shuffles his feet, hopefully in the right direction, hands in front of him, groping blindly. He finds a wall, a corner, another facet, a door, a handle. He turns it, and pulls, and pushes, but it won’t budge.

  He runs his palms over the surface, finds the deadbolt. He slides it open. Finds the knob again, pulls again, nothing. Pushes again. That does it.

  The streetlight seems massively bright, the flash of a nuclear bomb. He leans his head out the door frame, surveying the sidewalk—

  Shit!

  Will ducks back inside, pulls the door closed behind him. There’s someone else walking up the street, another man, his footsteps approaching the door. Louder, and louder.

  The man is right in front of the door. His footsteps slow.

  Will reaches into his pocket, retrieves Inez’s sharp letter opener.

  The footsteps stop.

  God, he really does not want to do this.