The Accident (11 page)

“Do you have any idea what you’re looking for?” Sanchez asks. He doesn’t sound frustrated, just curious. “Any identifying characteristics you’re looking for?”

“Not that I know of.”

“So is there any chance we’re going to get anywhere?”

“I highly doubt it.”

But then a minute later, Sanchez notices something. He hits rewind. They watch a section of footage from the lobby. The revolving doors spin, and discharge a man, wearing a baseball cap low on his forehead, hiding his eyes. Medium build, Caucasian. But no defining features of his face are visible.

There is no audio to accompany the video. This security room is eerily quiet, just the low hum of electronic equipment, the labored breathing of Reggie across the room. Hector clicks the mouse again, and the video switches to the high-rise elevator banks. The man swipes a key card at the turnstiles, enters the elevator waiting area.

Different camera, in the elevator. The man’s face still not visible. And again at ATM’s main floor. The man moves quickly but calmly from one area to the next, never pausing, never stopping to talk to anyone, never looking around, never making eye contact. An anonymous man. Who seems to know exactly where he’s going.

The camera in Isabel’s corridor is mounted high in the corner. She sees the man striding toward her office from the far end, toward her assistant’s cubicle. Alexis’s face is buried in a manuscript. The man barely slows as he slips a Jiffy bag into the in-box and continues down the hall, approaching the camera, nearer, nearer.

“There,” Isabel says. “Rewind a sec.”

Hector freezes the footage, clicks a mouse, scrolls back. Now the man is directly below the camera. The bill of his cap still obscures his forehead and eyebrows. But at this angle, for a split-second, they can see some of his face. He’s a complete stranger.

This stranger is no ordinary messenger, and Friday clearly wasn’t his first visit to Isabel’s office; he knew where all the cameras were. Which means she’d been surveilled, stalked. Here, upstairs, this man had been on her floor. And he probably hadn’t limited himself to locating security cameras; he probably hadn’t confined his snooping to the hallways.

This man had probably sat in Isabel’s chair, at her desk. He’d put his hands, and who knows what else, on her computer.

“Is that him?” Sanchez asks. “That’s gotta be him. Do you recognize him?”

Isabel looks at Sanchez, stupefied. What had she already explained? She couldn’t recognize the guy because she never saw him in the first place.

Sanchez returns the video to the beginning, to the man’s entrance to the elevator banks. “Reggie?” Hector asks, over his shoulder. “You see this time stamp?” It’s 1:22, in the dead center of lunchtime.

“Yup.”

“Can you check the ID scan at the north elevator bank?”

Reggie hits his keyboard, pauses, taps some more. “Sorry. There must be a mistake.” Reggie types again, shaking his head. “I don’t understand,” he says. “The ID he used? It’s Isabel Reed’s.” He turns to Isabel, points a finger at her. “That’s you, ain’t it?”

CHAPTER 13

T
his is not at all what Kate expected out of this operation in particular, out of this job in general, out of her life as a whole. She has her lovely little Jake and Ben, and a wonderful husband, and by any measure she leads an enviable expat existence in Paris. She doesn’t need to be standing here in Copenhagen, on the verge of being shot in the head, for something that has nothing to do with her.

There was a long period when Kate was certain that she’d made the right decisions about what to do with her career, how to live her life. That certainty was a great comfort, lulling her to sleep quickly every night, getting her out of bed energized every morning.

Then the husband and children introduced doubt, levels of qualms that waxed and waned over the years. Sometimes she has been deep under the doubt, drowning in it, unable to see daylight up above; sometimes floating on top of it, a gentle backstroke to stay afloat. But it has always been there, always threatening.

Should she have a safe comfortable desk job instead of this dangerous operational fieldwork? Should she be home more? Home all the time? She wasn’t terribly satisfied with that life, for the couple of years that she experimented with the stay-at-home-parent lifestyle in Luxembourg and Paris. She was bored, and resentful, and unfulfilled. Not to mention constantly worried that when the kids had finally left the nest, she’d have
spent a dozen years without a job, and for all intents and purposes she’d be unemployable. At least, unemployable in any capacity that would appeal to her. She’d be career-less, one of those at-sea middle-aged women grasping at a second act, a docent at a third-rate cultural institution, or teaching English to foreigners.

On the other hand, it was indisputable that no one lies on her deathbed lamenting that she spent too much time with her children, and not enough time working. No one sane, that is. She’d like to think of herself as sane.

Plus of course “working” doesn’t often mean—shouldn’t mean—getting shot in the head in a Danish apartment by Turkish drug dealers. If that’s what these guys are.

She watches one of them take another step into the room, and another. His gun is trained steadily at Hayden’s head, above the shoulder of the hostage that Hayden is holding in front of him. She suspects that these Turks don’t have any particular interest in keeping Grundtvig alive, so perhaps “hostage” isn’t the operative concept for the poor student’s function in front of Hayden. The Dutch kid is merely a physical shield, a nice thick mound of bullet-absorbing flesh.

This situation is very, very bad. Exactly the type of scenario that Kate envisages when she’s awake in the middle of the night, away from her family, pondering the question, What’s the worst that could happen?

This. This is the worst.

And this particular situation is probably not going to improve over time. Every second is working against her. She needs to make something happen, to change the course of this action.

She mouths the number five at Hayden, and he nods infinitesimally, confirming his understanding of the tactic. He begins another countdown in his head.

Four, he mouths, setting the pace.

The first Turk is now just ten feet in front of Hayden, and continuing to move forward.

Three.

Kate inhales deeply, her shoulders rising with the effort, moving the barrel of the gun slightly off her skin, a half-centimeter.

Two.

Hayden blinks on the beat of the final second.

One.

Kate’s right hand shoots up across her face, to her left temple, and grabs the barrel of the weapon that’s resting on her skin, changing the angle just as an explosion rings in her ear, while at the same time throwing her left elbow backward, sinking deep into the paunch of the Turk behind her.

Bits of the ceiling fall on her head, her shoulders, from the bullet’s damage. She spins around, still holding the barrel of the weapon pointed at the ceiling with her right hand. With the heel of her left hand she hammers this guy in the face, an upward thrust, but she misses somewhat and hits his lip, his front teeth gouging her, but she doesn’t pause, doesn’t give him time to recover, and strikes again, this time to the trachea, and he crumples.

She seizes the weapon, just as she hears the other Turk’s gun fire twice, and every muscle in her body tenses, preparing to have been shot, to be about to die here, in what is now clear has been the wrong decision, the absolute wrong way to live her entire life.

CHAPTER 14

C
amilla stands in the threshold of Jeff Fielder’s office. The editorial meeting is still in progress, so this end of the hall—the editorial department—is completely unpopulated. She glances around Fielder’s assistant’s desk, looking for an appealing pile of manuscript, but doesn’t notice anything special other than the boy’s leather bag, which can only be accurately described as a handbag. A lamentable fashion trend.

She wants to get the hell out of New York City, for good. After growing up in dismal England, then living in dismal New York,
ça suffit
, as the teachers used to say at boarding school. Enough of these tiny apartments and overpriced grocers, enough of these self-obsessed poufs with their hand luggage and these arrogant financiers with their trophy wives, enough of the crap weather.

So she needs to get on this plane to LA, to continue her purported mission of trying to sell rights—UK book rights, domestic magazine rights, Canadian calendars, whatever derivative rubbish she can pitch—to raise emergency cash. She doesn’t need Brad to tell her that the situation is dire. She can feel the desperation hanging in the air, a miasma of impending financial apocalypse.

The ruin sure did come upon her quickly, more a Pompeii than a Rome. Just a few years ago she was Ms. Midas, conjuring six-figure
paperback deals out of thin air, being consulted on everything, courted, seduced. For a while, she looked totally vindicated in her rejection of the family concern, Papa’s string of shoe stores in the north, a Manchester lad made good enough to buy a house in the part of Pimlico that could pass for Chelsea for those who didn’t know better, and send his girls to school in Switzerland, and drive a pathetically endless string of new Jaguars.

Boarding school backfired when she met an American cousin of her best friend, on ski holiday in Lech. It was love at first sight, nineteen-year-old style, and by May she was ignoring Mum’s entreaties and putting off university and securing a job as a summer au pair for one of those bankery families whose women and children spend their summer in Bridgehampton while Dad comes out at the weekend to get tight and grope the help in the butler’s pantry.

By Labor Day, it was clear that the romance with the cousin was ill-fated. But the ghastly summer job led to a receptionist job at a literary agency—attractive young girls with English accents being the sine qua non of receptionist candidates—and Camilla rang home to announce that she wouldn’t be returning to England or Switzerland, refusing even a single quid from that belligerent insecure old man, thanks-I’ll-make-my-own-way. And she did, for a good long while.

But then that big bully of a beast rose up and ate her profession. First the web devoured book clubs, then magazines, and now its maw is agape, ravenous, ready to swallow the whole bloody publishing business. She had done nothing wrong, other than to not get out sooner. Now it’s almost too late.

Camilla takes a step inside Fielder’s office, then another, pulling in her wheeled luggage, setting her tote bag atop the suitcase.

It’s funny that no one in America has ever questioned her about her university degree. Just as no one looks down upon her for her class, because as far as they know she’s upper.

Camilla sees what she’s looking for: a tall stack of paper in the middle of the desk, Fielder’s antique pen sitting on the top sheet. She takes another
step. She cranes her neck forward, takes a step closer, to the edge of the desk, and thumbs through the stack to find the title page:
The Accident
, by Anonymous. The same thing she noticed on Brad’s desk.

Coincidentally—or not—this is the very same manuscript that Camilla heard about last night, at the party, from that high-energy assistant at Atlantic Talent Management. The girl had obviously been drunk, talking about something she shouldn’t have mentioned. She’d called Camilla first thing this morning—on Camilla’s mobile—to disavow last night’s conversation. Loose lips, apologies. Should’ve known better, and so forth.

“Of course, Love,” Camilla told the girl. “I won’t mention a thing to anyone.”

She looks over her shoulder, out the door into the quiet hall, a phone chirping. “Fuck all,” she mutters. If there’s one thing she has learned in her decade in the book business, it’s that this is the only type of book that
always
seems to work: the thing that one day, all of a sudden,
everyone
is talking about.
The Accident
is going to be that thing. Already is.

Camilla sweeps up the manuscript and carries it down the hall, around the corner to the photocopier. A young woman is standing at the machine, collating pages while talking on a cell phone. “Hullo,” Camilla says. She doesn’t know the girl’s name. “I need this.”

The girl scowls, but knows better than to engage a fight with a director, so picks up her papers and huffs away. Camilla feeds her stack through the machine, reading stray paragraphs while the copier gobbles in and spits out fifty pages at a time.

Still no one at Jeff’s office when she returns after five minutes. Camilla leaves the pile of paper as she found it, and takes a step out Jeff’s door, then stops. She returns to the office, the desk, trying to remember what bit of evidence she’s forgetting … the chair? … the mug …? No, it’s that old pen of his, which she left sitting near the mouse pad, instead of atop the manuscript. She reaches out to the pen, but is interrupted by her ringing phone, an incoming call from a 310 number. “Hullo, Camilla Glyndon-Browning.”

“Hi, this is Jessica calling from Stan Balzer’s office, confirming four-thirty this afternoon.”

“Looking forward to it.”

“I see that there are no agenda items. Would you care to add any?”

Camilla stares at the manuscript. In truth, this LA trip is serving a purpose that’s much more important than selling rights: Camilla is looking for a new job. She’ll always have a soft spot for Bradford. For a month, she was even in love with him. After a fashion. But she will not go down with his ship. She knows that loyalty is a virtue, and that betrayal is, well,
not
, but what is she going to do?

She is going to fly to California to find herself a new career. She has always wanted to try the film business, and now is the time. But she can’t just
land
in LA. She needs a parachute.

“Yes,” Camilla says, “a brilliant property called
The Accident
.”

CHAPTER 15