The Travelers (35 page)

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Authors: Chris Pavone

Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Espionage, #Suspense

BOOK: The Travelers
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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.

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?

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