The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

For an eternal second, there’s complete silence.

  Then the footsteps resume. Will hears the big heavy door of the building swing open, then closed, with shuddering.

  That’s a lot of people upstairs, in the middle of the night, at what Will had thought was a sleepy little irrelevant outpost. They’re looking for him, they must be, he’s sure about it. Do they know that they have already found him? And why they are looking to begin with? Do these people work for Malcolm? Or is it Elle? Is it the CIA? Or the other side—whatever the other side might be?

  And who the hell is Will himself working for?

  PORTLAND

  Whenever the door opens, a stench wafts in from the fish market across the alley, ice in the gutter, gulls shrieking, fighting over scraps.

  Chloe nurses her beer and chowder, thin and bland, improved only slightly with a sprinkling of broken-up oyster crackers. In a town filled with great places to eat, this isn’t one. On the other hand it’s refreshing to be away from the vacationers and weekenders, the khakis and tattersall shirts and corporate-logo’d fleece vests favored by the white-haired captains of industry and finance who occupy her mother’s corner of Vacationland.

  A different sort of man struts up to the stool beside her. Run-of-the-mill small-town hood, tattoo sleeve on the steroid-enhanced muscles that push his arms out in a simian arc. He’s wearing cargo shorts, flip-flops, a battered Red Sox cap, a belligerent sneer. He doesn’t want anyone to make any mistake about his temperament.

  He up-nods at the bartender. “Draft.”

  The drink is delivered, overflowing its foam. The guy swallows half the glass in one pull, belches. “ ’Scuse me.” He looks around. Satisfied that he has sufficient privacy, he leans toward Chloe. “You the girl that called Danny about the thing?”

  “I am.”

  “Hey, how ya doin’.” He gives her a once-over, and she returns it with an are-you-kidding? look.

  “So the boat leaves at four in the morning, down at the end of the pier.”

  “What’s the name of the boat?”

  “Artemis.”

  “And the skipper?”

  “Connor.”

  “Anything else you can tell me?”

  “Whaddya wanna know?”

  “What do I need to know?”

  While he ponders this question, he takes another couple of gulps of beer. “If you’re the type to get seasick, you’re prob’ly gonna get seasick.”

  “Uh-huh. Anything else?”

  “It’s gonna be cold.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s about it,” he says, then drains the rest of his beer. “Beer’s on you.”

  What a charmer.

  “Oh,” he says, “one more thing. The two grand?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Cash only.”

  LONDON

  Elle emerges from the brightly lit Tube into the dim gray of Knightsbridge, dingy bricks and narrow sidewalks, quotidian Topshop and Boots interspersed with the extravagances of Harrods and Harvey Nichols, hotels and embassies, royalty and riffraff, the ever-present possibility of getting run over by a red double-decker bus hurtling from an unexpected direction. Those LOOK LEFT and LOOK RIGHT signs painted on the pavement have the opposite effect on Elle, they make her turn first in the other direction, the wrong one, obeying some involuntary reaction to potential deception, a pathological level of distrust that she suspects might one day get her killed.

  At a shop window she stops abruptly, pretends to consider the selection of shoes. Countersurveillance is always at its most tiresome when she’s in a rush. And it’s always pretty tedious.

  She turns back in the direction from which she came, scanning the crowd, looking for familiarity but finding none, unsurprisingly. She has been running this SDR for ninety minutes, in a taxi and three separate Tube lines broken up by a frantic walk through the suffocating morning-rush multitudes of the City, then of Fleet Street, a three-minute pause on the landing of the wide enclosed stairway from Farringdon Street up to the Holborn Viaduct, faded yellow bricks, iron handrails with chipped red paint. No one who was following her could’ve failed to pass her there in that stairwell, and no one passed her.

  Plus all this rigmarole was after her train ride from Heathrow, and a transatlantic flight from Washington. There’s no way that anyone has followed her. Enough already.

  This particular bazillion-star hotel is bedecked in plush red carpets and gleaming marble and enormous flower arrangements, a gaudy display of perishability. A horde of dark-skinned uniformed staff cast oblique eyes in her direction, unmoving in their stoic stances of subservience, but not unobservant.

  Elle feels like a hooker. Walking through a hotel lobby, carrying no luggage, she always feels at least a little like a hooker. Which in a way she is. There are many ways to be a prostitute, and Elle has been almost all of them.

  The list of things Elle wishes she hadn’t done is long, and continuing to grow. Icky things and stupid things and ill-considered things, as well as a few things—perhaps more than a few—that would be described by most people as very bad, as evil things. She’s beginning to suspect that what she’s been doing for the past few months might be an unparalleled amalgamation of many of the ways that an endeavor can be regrettable.

  She finds the ladies’ lounge, redolent of roses and cleanliness, soft music, a nice place to take a nap. She scrubs herself clean of the plane and the train and the city soot, attacks her hair with a brush and a barrette, applies blush and lipstick, mascara and rouge, a pair of cheap earrings that could pass as not, a scarf with a pattern that’s recognizable to the sorts of people who know these things; the sorts of people you run into at a hotel like this. She tightens her belt and loosens her blouse, leans in to the mirror, examines herself. Yes, she thinks, I just got as younger, as skinnier, and as prettier as I can get.

  The elevator attendant is wearing a costume-party-looking suit with big brass buttons, an outfit whose point seems to be to degrade everyone involved. “Your room please, madam?”

  “I’m visiting the, um”—she consults her phone—“Park View Suite.”

  “Of course.” The attendant nods, not in agreement. “And the name of our guest?”

  “Um…Chuck Worth.” That’s not the guy’s name. But like most obscenely rich or household-famous people, the man she’s visiting uses an alias at hotels, for security. If you’re coming to a hotel to see Angelina Jolie or Bill Gates or this guy, you’re asking for someone else.

  “Very well, madam.”

  At the end of a short hall, a security guard—a new face—stands at the suite’s door. “You are?”

  “His eleven o’clock.”

  “Your name?”

  “Elle.” She hasn’t really used any other name in the past year. She’s beginning to wonder if she ever will.

  “I’m going to have to frisk you.”

  She gives this goon a wry smile, as if he’d just told a joke that she’d already heard a thousand times. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

  One of the doors opens partway. Both Elle and the guard turn to the gap, the man saying, “It’s okay, Walt. Let her in.” He glances down at her handbag, big and black and stuffed with who-knows-what threat. “Though I’m going to have to ask you to leave your bag out here.”

  She shrugs it off her shoulder, and Walt takes it.

  “But I need that thing that looks like a book,” she says.

  Walt opens the bag, locates the odd device, holds it aloft for his boss, who nods.

  Elle enters the vast suite, giant windows with a view to Hyde Park, plush upholstery, a cocktail table covered in silver service and a pastry platter and a bowl of beautiful fruit, food that no one’s going to eat, the incessant wastefulness that’s heaped upon the ultrarich, all the time, everywhere they go, plied with things they don’t need, don’t want.

  “Please,” he says, “have a seat. Your phone?”

  She pops out the phone’s battery, leaves the two pieces next to the
pastries.

  “This drive”—she taps the device—“contains the files from the Travelers server that were duplicated during the system-wide backup.”

  “Excellent. Shall we take a look?”

  “Not so fast. It contains all the files except those belonging to Malcolm Somers. His files—his folders—were deleted. From this drive. Almost certainly by Will Rhodes. Who appears to have copied the files before he deleted them.”

  The man stares at Elle. “He found us out.”

  “It looks that way.”

  “How?”

  “I really have no clue.”

  “Is it possible he knew all along?”

  “I don’t think so, no. He’s not that good of an actor.”

  “How do you know? Maybe he’s been inside all along. Maybe he was inside before you recruited him. Have you considered that possibility?”

  She had. Way back at the beginning, when this operation was being planned, when she could’ve chosen anyone at Travelers to exploit. She’d investigated all of them thoroughly. The deputy editor with the dead husband, the IT guy with immigration issues, the gay African-American food editor who’s been writing an unpublished novel forever, the pompous art director.

  The main thing she was looking for was financial weakness. Many people assume that spies, traitors, and double agents are all motivated by political convictions. Not so. The vast majority of espionage is committed for a very simple reason: money.

  Will was motivated. He was more broke than he should’ve been, had gotten himself in over his head with an untenable—and pretty much irreversible—real-estate decision. But otherwise he was clean, a normal civilian with no connection to any intelligence services anywhere.

  Elle knew that Will might end up being untrustworthy, might turn out to be useless. But he definitely didn’t start off as a double agent. She was as certain of that as anyone could be about any asset.

  Will’s wife, though? She was a different story. But Elle’s plan, by definition, excluded Chloe’s involvement.

  “Will Rhodes wasn’t anyone’s spy,” she says. “Not until I recruited him.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Either he became suspicious of us—”

  “Of you.”

  “Of me. Or Somers is the one who became suspicious, and clued in Rhodes.”

  “Which do you think happened?”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “Maybe not. But don’t you want to know if it was you who screwed it up?”

  Elle looks away.

  “Okay,” the man says. “I guess it’s time to terminate this aspect of the operation.”

  “Well, that’s not going to be simple.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “We can’t find Will.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure how to make my statement more clear. Which part didn’t you understand?”

  The man smiles again, wide and bright and ready-made for television. “When did Mr. Rhodes disappear?”

  “Right after he handed over the drive.”

  “Well then, that’s certainly damning, isn’t it?”

  “I also can’t find Timothy Dunne.”

  “Am I supposed to know who that is?”

  “The man we hired to seduce Somers’s wife, to copy the contents of his home computer.”

  “Ah. Do you think this Timothy Dunne has also disappeared? Or maybe you just can’t locate him momentarily?”

  It’s remotely possible that Timothy is on a bender, a struggling actor who compromised his morals for cash, and has taken a bus down to Atlantic City to drink and gamble away his blood money till he has spent it all, and can return to his New York squalor and pretend that he’s just another broke artist, hardworking and idealistic and deserving of the fame and fortune that elude almost everyone.

  What seems more likely, though, is that Timothy was discovered by Somers. That Somers abducted the actor. That Timothy was tortured, or threatened with torture, and that he cracked quickly, spilled the truth about his end of the operation.

  Which means that Malcolm Somers knows that someone hired a handsome dim-witted actor to seduce his wife in order to steal his electronic files. And thus that Malcolm Somers is now aware that his entire operation is being pried open from the outside.

  But not necessarily from the inside. Would Somers suspect that the attack was two-pronged? One of the goals of the dual prongs was to make the other seem unlikely, in the event of one’s discovery.

  “Timothy can’t be tied to me,” Elle says, “much less to you.”

  The man shakes his head in disgust. “What an epic waste of time and money.”

  Elle can’t deny this. When Timothy presented her with the flash drive a week ago, Elle popped the thing into her laptop, which thankfully was protected with some of the most advanced malware-detection technology on the planet. Which is how the computer recognized that the drive contained a worm that instantaneously infested her hard drive. Somers was apparently prepared for this sort of intrusion. Aggressively prepared.

  “Shit!” she yelled.

  She yanked the device out of the port, her mind racing through all the bits of information that could have been remote-transmitted in the course of the few seconds between when the device was inserted and when it was removed, all the disasters that could befall her because of this bit of unprotected computer sex. Even her safe house was probably compromised, her secure location unsecured. She’d have to move, immediately. She’d have to destroy the computer. Everything went wrong, all at once.

  “It’s true,” she admits, “that tactic turned out to have been ineffectual. We always knew that it was a low-percentage play. But no stone unturned, right?”

  “Yes. But the duplication of the files? That was our boulder. And it looks like not only was there nothing under it, but now it’s rolling down the mountain. At us.” The man leans forward. “So what do you propose to do about it?”

  PARIS

  “I have something!” Unsurprisingly, it’s Omar who’s first.

  Inez gets up from the little desk in the corner, the spare workstation. All the techs have big desks filled with expensive digital equipment, but this little surface contains only an old laptop, and barely enough room for a mug of herbal tea and a notepad. She leans over Omar’s shoulder, examines footage from a security camera. “Where is this?”

  “Charles de Gaulle.” Omar hits a button, moves the cursor, opens another window, another. “This is footage from an arrivals gate, this morning. Or it is not today anymore. Yesterday morning.”

  “What passp—?”

  “One moment.” Omar is hitting keys frantically, one camera after another tracking Will through the terminal, corridors, escalators, and finally the queue at passport control, the window. But no camera has a good enough angle on the passport itself.

  “Quel dommage,” Omar says, continuing to hit keys.

  “We need to access the records,” Inez says. “Find his alias.”

  Omar shakes his head. “C’est pas possible.”

  “Do not say that,” she says. “Of course it is possible.”

  Omar turns to look at his boss.

  “It is possible,” she reiterates. “You need to figure out how, Omar; keep working on this. Parviz, pick up the physical trail.”

  Inez walks over to the desk of the Iranian, boarding school in England, university in Germany, a graduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Parviz is the most formally schooled of her techs, but also the least disciplined personally, late and erratic, hungover and sleep-deprived, an owl who sets an alarm for midnight, goes dancing at 2:00 A.M.

  “Here, he is getting into this taxi.”

  “Are you sure that is him?”

  Parviz opens another window, another, images of Will. “Yes.”

  “Okay, let us move to the satellites.”

  Parviz opens another application, a pull-down menu, then a screen full of pr
ompts to enter specific data. “This is going to take a few minutes.”

  LONDON

  “Me?” Elle snorts. “I propose to do nothing about it. My participation in this op has reached its conclusion.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Absolutely not. This is a bust.”

  There had already been a few near-misses. First was when the actual CIA interrogated Will in Dublin; the whole thing could have blown up then. Second was when Will was nearly pulverized by Russian thugs in Barcelona, which Elle doubts she could have prevented, even if she were willing to try. Third, the infected files from Malcolm’s home computer. Fourth, this compromised external drive. In fact, the whole goddamned op has been one failure after another. Almost as if it’s jinxed.

  “It’s time to cut and run before something disastrous happens.”

  “Something disastrous has already happened.”

  “Not to me it hasn’t. Nor to you. What’s the disaster? That you wanted to gather some inside dope about a company you want to buy, and it didn’t work out?”

  Elle knows that there’s a lot more to it than this cover story about sublegal due diligence of a corporate merger. But she doesn’t know what, exactly. She’d allowed herself to get sucked into something she didn’t understand. Always a mistake.

  “Why is that a disaster?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Are you going to tell me what the hell is actually going on?”

  “No. Not telling you is why I’m paying you a million dollars—”

  “Technically, you haven’t. Not yet.”

  “—plus expenses, which I might add have been considerable. To pay your partner Roger, to pay the rest of your team. Five full-time people, is it?”

  “Four.”

  “Plus an uncountable number of freelancers. And this missing actor, what’s his name? Timothy? And hotel rooms all over the world, and apartments in New York, and plane tickets and rental cars, and food and gas, and the huge fees to VDA.”

  “Expenses are expenses. None of that is money in my pocket.”

  “But you’ll walk away with a million dollars.”

  “If I walk away. That becomes less certain if I start killing Americans as a matter of course.”