The Accident (12 page)

F
or a split-second that seems to last forever, everything freezes. Sound disappears.

Then Hayden can feel Grundtvig’s body relaxing, beginning to pitch forward, shot somewhere in the thorax. Hayden shoves the guy in the back, impelling his collapsing body forward, into the outstretched arm of the Turk, knocking his gun to the side, this armed intruder now paying the price for being an amateur who’d advanced too far, too close, too carelessly. Hayden takes a quick stutter-step with his right leg to achieve the correct distance to swing his left, a strong swift kick that explodes into the hand with the weapon, which goes flying, smacking against the far wall and then clattering on the tile floor, as Hayden hammers the now unarmed, stunned guy once, twice, three times in the jaw and nose, staggering backward, collapsing, and then Hayden kicks him again across the face, knocking him unconscious.

And then everything is silent except the sound of his own panting.

“You okay?” Hayden asks. His pulse is pounding in his head.

“Yes,” Kate answers, a muffled sound, as if underwater. “You?”

Hayden nods. He bends over to check Grundtvig for a pulse, finds none.

“Should we kill them?” Kate asks, panting herself from the quick
expenditure of energy, from the spike in heart rate, from fight-or-flight epinephrine levels.

Hayden glances from one fallen guy to the other. He doesn’t want these guys to die. Those types of deaths would get reported, investigated, and then he’d have to start lying about this—“Nope, wasn’t my people, don’t know a thing about it”—despite that he’s in Copenhagen under a pretty flimsy premise, so the whole thing would look questionable, at best.

As of right now, the scenario is nothing more complex than that some local kid—a habitual drug user, at that—got shot. That’s not international, not diplomatic, nothing to do with the CIA. But add a couple of Turkish immigrants with criminal ties, and three bodies at a shootout with no apparent motive, and people will start asking questions. Asking Hayden questions, ones he wouldn’t be able to answer.

He shakes his head, then looks around the room. He takes a couple of long strides to the desk and yanks an electrical cord out of a monitor and an outlet, and tosses the two meters of rubber-clad wire to Kate, who makes quick work of tying the hands of one unconscious guy while Hayden yanks another cord and ties the other. There’s nothing to be done about the dead one.

“Now we need a bag,” he says, fumbling to disconnect an external drive, then unplugging the power cord of a laptop, disengaging a hard line that connects to a telecom jack.

He can hear Kate rummaging around, then she arrives with a big shopping bag—recycled fibers, bright colors, a planet-saving slogan—just as he collects a stack of CDs, places them in the bottom of the sturdy bag. He looks around the desk, the shelves, for other data-storage media. He grabs a thumb drive and tosses that into the bag.

“Okay,” he says, walking quickly to the front door, Kate trailing. It’s been maybe ninety seconds since the shots were fired. “Let’s go.”

He takes the stairs two at a time, adrenaline coursing through his body, tense and quick, into the vestibule. “There’s a rear door,” he notices
and says at the same instant, looking at a fire door in the far corner of the shabby lobby. “You go that way”—handing her the bag—“and get started on the digital as soon as possible. Is there a place you can stop?”

“I’ll find one. But why can’t I go to the apartment?” The Agency apartment, on the other side of town, is what she means.

“You need to get out of Copenhagen,” he says. She looks confused, rightly so. What’s the point of a safe house if not this? “Find a place in the countryside, a motel,” he continues, not giving her time to question him. “Examine the hardware. Call me when you learn something.”

“And where are you going?”

“New York. Now
go
, Kate.” He squeezes her shoulder.

She turns and walks out the rear. He takes the front door to the sidewalk, back into another world, one that he hasn’t inhabited for what seems like an eternity, but has been only five minutes. If that.

He glances around. No one out here is screaming or running or pointing at him, just another man in jacket and tie, walking across a busy city street, climbing onto a bicycle, pedaling, turning a corner and crossing a bridge, tossing something over the ledge, something that breaks the surface of Peblinge Sø, a small splash and concentric circles of tiny waves as the weapon sinks, then settles into the muck at the bottom of the lake. That gun is not something he wants to bring with him.

And then he hears “I’m in the car” from his earpiece.

He can picture Kate cruising along the urban highway beside the train tracks, the low red-brick industrial buildings, the electricity wires, the trash-strewn scrub that lines train tracks everywhere. She’ll speed west across Zealand toward the Great Belt Bridge and over to wind-blown Funen Island and then sparsely populated mainland Denmark, where she’ll find a room and unpack the computer and start sifting through Grundtvig’s digital trails.

Tomorrow morning, she’ll check out, and pay in cash. She’ll drive into northern Germany, through Hamburg and Bremen, a route parallel to the North Sea coast, eventually across Belgium and finally into France.
There aren’t any guards at any of these intra-EU borders; there aren’t, really, any borders.

Tomorrow night she’ll be home with her family, after a long month on the road and in the Copenhagen apartment that’s now no use, never will be again. The total rent was nine thousand euros, paid by an interest-bearing checking account linked to the numbered one in Switzerland. The same account that pays Kate her two thousand per week year-round, plus the salaries and expenses for the other personnel on a week-by-week basis, and of course supplies like the weapons and computers and software, and modest hourly fees to computer engineers in Heidelberg, as well as electricians and telecom consultants, not to mention bicycles and sandwiches and museum tickets …

This operation incurs a lot of expenses. On the other hand, as Hayden expected when he opened the account, twenty-plus-million euros in capital also generates a healthy revenue stream, even when invested conservatively.

“I’m on the highway,” Kate updates in his ear.

Hayden is still the only person in the world who knows how to access this money. Indeed, he’s the only one who really knows it exists. Kate thinks she knows, but what she thinks is that the money is in a secondary account to the Agency’s general European operational fund. This is not exactly true.

“Good,” Hayden says. “Be safe, Kate.”

B
ack in Amalienborg, Hayden packs almost nothing, just a few items into a small canvas duffel. He leaves most of his clothing in the bureau, and the bulk of his toiletries in the bath; all his books on the coffee table, and his full-size bag in the closet. He removes his necktie, hangs it from a doorknob; he won’t be needing a tie. He gathers his Joseph Lyons passport and a wad of cash and a satellite telephone, all slipped into the duffel.

Hayden takes a seat in the unexpectedly comfortable wooden chair
near the front door. He removes his right shoe, holds it upside down. Grips the sturdy leather-and-rubber heel, pulls it away from the sole, and twists. The heel swivels open to reveal a tiny airtight compartment, into which he places a small silver key and an equally small thumb drive; a physical parachute and a digital lifejacket, both in miniature.

He quickly scans the living room. He’ll be able to collect the rest of his belongings when he returns, hopefully in a few days. And if he never returns, it will certainly not look like that was intentional.

On his way out the door, Hayden snatches up his Icelandic language text, which he tucks into the bottom of his neighbor’s rubbish bin, beneath a big moist bag that smells a lot like rotten fish.

CHAPTER 16

I
sabel massages the bridge of her nose, with both elbows resting on the desk, and her eyes closed. She takes a deep breath, and exhales. Deep breath, exhale. Trying to beat back the fatigue, the tension, the fear.

If Isabel does this for too long, she’ll fall asleep. Which might not be such a bad thing; she’s exhausted.

But no, she can’t take a nap at her desk. So she opens her eyes to her nearly empty desk, the few items arranged just-so. Isabel can’t tolerate anything out of place. It’s one of the things that made it difficult to live with her ex-husband—he was an unrepentant slob—after so many years living alone, in complete and compulsive control of her environment. Which was one of the things that made it difficult for him to live with her.

Isabel’s vision is blurred from the pressure of the rubbing, and the world returns to focus in layers, like peeling back the folded tissue paper under the gift wrapping on a professionally packaged present. With a startle she notices that her boss’s assistant is standing in the doorway. The poor girl has clearly been there awhile, waiting too patiently, too meek for her job. Angela will be fired, soon. Meg fires her assistants regularly, standard operating procedure.

“Isabel, hi,” Angela says softly. “Meg wonders if you have a minute?”

This can’t be good; it never is. Isabel stands, smooths her skirt. She
glances at Alexis’s empty chair in the cubicle, the desk and cabinets covered in stacks of manuscripts and contracts and reports and things to be filed, the piles that haunt publishing people for their entire careers. Sometimes the only way to escape your pile is to leave, to quit, squirreling away your pile somewhere—a supply closet, a book-storage room—until you’re safely out of the building, and have collected your final paycheck, and can leave a by-the-way message for your replacement.

Isabel stops at the adjoining cubicle, Ryan’s, who’s covering for Alexis today. All the assistants have coverage buddies, like kindergarteners’ hall partners, holding hands to make sure no one wanders off in the wrong direction. This ensures that no business is lost, no money is wasted, no call goes unanswered because some twenty-four-year-old is out with a head cold. The assistants answer every single call, 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., never taking off their headsets. Ryan is answering Isabel’s line today. “Going to see Meg,” she tells him. He blinks his understanding; he’s on a call.

It’s too bad Alexis is out today. The young woman has turned out to be one of Isabel’s smarter, abler assistants. Over the years Isabel has had a dozen of them, mostly women but also a few men, nearly all from upper-middle-class suburban families, on their second or third jobs after graduating from top-flight colleges with liberal arts degrees, hardworking and broke but not exactly poor, dining on four-dollar-per-plate rice and beans but also accompanying their parents on thousand-dollar-per-night vacations, and never worrying about catastrophic health problems.

Isabel sees bits of herself in every kid she hires, wide-eyed and eager, seduced by the glamorous aspects and not yet disenchanted by the quotidian, the crass, the ugly.

Despite their superficial homogeneity, each of these assistants has been remarkably distinct, with different results. Some have lasted only a few months, and a couple fled after a year to the security of law school, business school. A handful stuck it out in the media, at publishing houses and literary agencies but also at a news website and a branding firm and a Hollywood studio. One is a senior editor at a major publishing house,
a regular on Isabel’s submission list, capable of making mid-six-figure offers with bestseller bonuses, securely ensconced in an insular industry where you never stop running across your old bosses, or your old assistants.

Alexis will probably be one of them. She has the passion and the work ethic, she has a good critical eye, she recognizes the difference between beautiful writing and a viable book, and perhaps most important she understands the commercial nature of the enterprise: the publishing business is a business, and books are published for an audience to buy from bookstores, who buy units from distributors who order cartons from publishers who acquire titles from literary agencies who sign up careers from authors, money changing hands at every transaction.

Isabel follows Angela down the long gray-carpeted hall, around a corner, and into the boss’s large anteroom, where she sheds her young escort amid couches and coffee tables and carefully assembled displays of ATM’s recent bestsellers. Meg hired one of those stagers who style fancy—but not quite fancy enough—apartments for sale, rearranging the furniture and artwork.

A smug-looking Courtney emerges from Meg’s gold-painted double-doors, her layered blonde hair bouncing. Isabel’s hair used to do that; she used to have it styled for bounce; she used to walk for it too. But she doesn’t think she can pull that off, anymore. Or rather, she doesn’t think she should. There’s something suspect about forty-somethings with bouncing hair, something perhaps pitiable. Isabel doesn’t need to go out of her way to find new ways to be pitied.

But that’s not a consideration for Courtney and her Charlie’s Angels coif, her curves, her whole flirty demeanor, cocktail party catnip for socially awkward writers, young men with unfortunate complexions and ill-fitting clothing. Isabel has seen Courtney in action, titillating these men with the playful touch and the exaggerated laugh, the perfectly timed hair-toss and the coy little slap to the chest. They see what this is, these men, they know she’s toying with them, seducing them, but still
they’re helpless to resist; they will all go home and masturbate to the fantasy of Courtney. And when their manuscripts are finished, Courtney and her pendulous breasts and feathered hair will be riding at the top of their submissions lists.

The two women exchange tight-lipped smiles. Isabel imagines that the younger woman lives in perpetual fear of having her hyper-styled hair mussed, which Isabel has a nearly uncontrollable urge to do. Almost as if mind-reading, Courtney flips that hair, then walks away, bounce-bounce.

Now it’s Isabel who’s standing in someone’s doorway, waiting for a superior to notice, to tear herself away from the device in her lap, to acknowledge her presence. Isabel waits a few seconds, then a half-minute. She clears her throat.