The Accident (19 page)

And it all begins here, one person at a time reading something that can’t be put down. In the past year, Camilla began reading hundreds of manuscripts; she looked at hundreds of page 1’s. For at least half of those manuscripts, though, she never got to page 2.

When her boarding group is called, Camilla is on page 109. As the plane pulls away from the gate, her eyes are racing down page 138. At liftoff she’s on 145, and she holds her breath and feels a shiver run down her spine, and she knows that this is it.

This is how it happens: you spend your life reading, reading, and reading more, waiting, waiting, and waiting for something to be incredible. Each manuscript you start could be it, but thousands upon thousands aren’t. And then one day, always hoped-for but never expected, there it is.

When he finally stopped throwing up, Charlie plopped down onto the tarmac. He sat there in the drizzle, shaking his head in disbelief. “Fuck.” He wiped his chin with the back of his hand, cleaning away his vomit. “What happened, exactly?”

Dave turned away from the car and looked at his friend. “Don’t you remember?”

“Not entirely.”

“What? What
do
you remember?”

Charlie shook his head.

“Do you remember being back at the bar?”

“Yes.”

“What, exactly?”

“I remember a lot, up until I went to the bathroom … Then I couldn’t find you guys. I went upstairs and there you were, and some girl was talking to me but I was too drunk … So I left her, I went to sit down …”

Charlie put his head in his hands. “And I remember driving …” He started sobbing. “And then everything went black.… And then I killed her.”

Neither boy said anything for a minute. Then Dave said, “Yes. It looks like you did.”

Charlie wiped tears away from both cheeks, snuffled. He stood. He glanced around, then back at Dave. “We have to get out of here.”

Charlie walked to the front of the car, examined the grille, squatted down and looked at the undercarriage. He turned to the side of the road, looked at the heavy brush and trees. “We can … Let’s get her … let’s hide her.”

“What?”

“We have to get out of here, Dave. But first we have to get her out of sight. In there.” Charlie put his hand on Dave’s shoulder. “We have to get her body into the brush.”

“Why?”

“Goddamnit, Dave, we don’t have
time
to debate this. Just help me.”

“What are you talking about?”

Charlie looked Dave in the eye, searching. “You know what we have to do.”

“We’re going to hide the body and run away?”

“We don’t have a choice. I’m not going to jail for this.”

Dave opened his mouth slightly, but then shut his lips, clamped his jaw. He nodded.

Charlie knelt and grabbed the girl’s ankles. Dave clutched the wrists. Together they dragged her body, with her rear end scraping across the tarmac and then the weedy grass at the edge of the road.

Upon closer examination the first layer of brush wasn’t that heavy, certainly not dense enough to hide a body. They’d have to go into the dark underbrush, where it looked like after a few feet the land might drop off. Perhaps there was a ravine or something back there, the reason that the road curved, following the path of water. Maybe there was even a gorge, deep and untraveled.

“We have to go farther,” Charlie said. He pushed his way through the thicket, which after a few feet opened up into a moss-floored clearing, and then a few steps later there was indeed a steep drop. It was too dark to see the bottom.

“Okay,” Charlie said. They both took a final sidestep to the edge. “On three.”

The two boys looked at each other, a quick painful glance.

Charlie counted one, and they swung her outward. Two, and they swung her back. Three, swinging her out over the empty space, letting go, and then the lifeless body was flying through the air, and then they heard the sound of branches cracking and crunching, thuds and crushing and sliding, dirt and pebbles tumbling.

And then it was silent in the still night, but for the sickening sounds reverberating in their memories.

CHAPTER 24

“T
wo problems,” the man says, without any pleasantries. “First is that the young woman—the assistant—had to be, ah …”

Hayden covers his eyes with the hand that isn’t holding the satellite phone. He’s strapped onto a bench on a military transport that took off from northeastern Germany, a quick helicopter ride from Copenhagen across the Baltic to the airfield near the Polish border. This will be a long flight to New York, with no doubt a long night on the other end.

“What happened?”

“She returned home unexpectedly while the item was being recovered.”

“Un
expected
ly.” Hayden never kidded himself that there’d be no collateral damage, no civilians harmed. But he wasn’t expecting it this early, so far removed from the primary players. This doesn’t bode well. “What does that
mean
?”

Silence.

“Does that mean there was no
lookout
?” He presses his fingers into his brow, trying to massage away the pain of this bad news. “No
backup
?”

“Yes sir. That’s what it means.”

“I see. And the item?”

“Retrieved. Will be waiting for you upon arrival.”

Whew. At least there was that. “Okay. You said there were two problems.”

“That subsidiary-rights director at the publishing house? Camilla Glyndon-Browning? She’s on a flight to LAX. As far as we can tell, her first order of business is to meet with a film producer named Stan Balzer. The agenda of this meeting?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, yes. We were able to intercept her confirmation phone call, through sheer luck: she happened to be within range of the editor’s transmitter.”

“So the editor
gave
Glyndon-Browning a copy?” That wouldn’t make sense.

“Actually, it seems like she might’ve stolen it.”

“Oh for the love of God.” Do people in publishing houses really steal things from each other?

“What do you want to do about this situation, sir?”

Hayden allows his head to fall back, stretching his neck muscles. “Do we know what Glyndon-Browning is
do
ing, after she deplanes? I mean in terms of transport? Hotel?”

“Yes. We’ve located her rental-car reservation, and she’s booked into a small hotel in Beverly Hills.”

“And do we know what she looks like? What she’s wearing? Et cetera?”

“Affirmative.”

“Do we have someone on the ground in LA? To take care of this?”

“We have Cooper.”

Cooper; that’s too bad. The guy is dumb as a rock. Hayden’s mind runs rapidly through the alternatives. Or, rather, through the possible excuses to reject the only viable alternative. But he comes up blank. “That meeting can’t happen,” he concludes. “And that copy of the item must be retrieved. And destroyed. The woman too.”

“Yes sir.” A pause. “Lethal finding?”

This is not how it’s supposed to go, not at all. But the situation could spiral out of control, quickly. There’s no telling what other producers the woman may have lined up to pitch. One day, two days, and there would be nothing left Hayden could do to contain the manuscript. It would be out there, there would be a book deal or a film deal or both, the deal or deals would be reported same-day on some industry online gossip mill, and then picked up overnight and run in a New York tabloid in the morning, and by midday the online
Times
and AP would have run it, by afternoon it’d be on CNN and CNBC, and the major networks at the 6:30 broadcasts, all within twenty-four to thirty-six hours of this moment, this decision, right now, if he doesn’t give the instruction for some dimwitted goon to murder a poor civilian.

“Yes,” Hayden says. He has no choice. “Lethal finding confirmed.”

“N
othing.”

“Nothing?”
Hayden puts down his book, a new paperback in German, about a well-known nineteenth-century art dealer. He shifts the sat-phone to his other hand, his better ear. Not much of him is falling apart—he’s in remarkably good shape, better than he expected to be by this point in his life—but his hearing in his right ear isn’t as strong as it once was.

“Well,” Kate says, “not
zero
information. There’s plenty of material on Grundtvig’s hard drive about Charlie Wolfe and his company and associates and whatnot. But there’s nothing here that gives any lead on what we’re looking for. No record of his bank account, nor connections to anyone who could be our subject. At least none that I’ve been able to find so far. And I’m pretty sure I’ve unearthed everything recent.”

Hayden sighs.

“I’m not entirely finished, though,” she says, holding out the glimmer of hope. Kate isn’t an irrationally optimistic person, but she does try to
be supportive. Of Hayden, of herself. She doesn’t admit that something is a complete failure until it is a fully completed and indisputable failure.

“You someplace safe?” he asks.

“Safe. Quiet. Completely bereft of anything that could resemble charm.”

He can see it, the plasterboard walls and creaky plywood floors under musty orange wall-to-wall, a lumpy mattress, a tiny shower stall with a plastic folding door. There’s an awful lot of beauty in Europe, but there’s also no shortage of ugly.

Hayden is sure that Kate is wondering why she can’t be comfortably ensconced in the elegant apartment in downtown Copenhagen, instead of in some fleabag rest-area motel. But she understands that she’s not allowed to ask.

Which is good. Hayden doesn’t particularly want to lie to Kate more than is absolutely necessary.

“The tallest people in the world, Kate, are the Dutch. Average adult height is six-one—that’s men
and
women, combined average. And second are the Danish, at six-even.”

“Oh, come on,” she says. “People in Northern Europe are tall? You’re slipping, Hayden. I give that a three.”

“No one would
blame
you, Kate, for feeling particularly short in Denmark. Perhaps inadequate?”

She laughs. “I’ll call you if I find anything,” she says, and ends the connection.

When he rehired Kate last year, he never provided her with any specifics about what exact office she was working for, nor how she fit into the organizational structure of the Central Intelligence Agency’s European operations. She seemed to accept that she didn’t need to fill out any new paperwork, nor undergo any psychological exams or medical screening or physical training. After all, she’d been a CIA employee for nearly two decades before she resigned, and spent a couple of years as a stay-at-home expat mother. It made sense to her that she could be
rehired simply, without a lot of fuss and bother, by a man in Hayden’s position.

She has no reason to think that it isn’t the CIA she’s working for. But it isn’t. Langley doesn’t know a damn thing about Kate, or her team, or this mission. They never have, and Hayden hopes that they never will.

CHAPTER 25

H
e parks under a towering tree on the steep hill, and walks over to the pedestrian-only street called Oberstrasse, a sidewalk really, interspersed with stairs and switchbacks, with a street sign and a proper name, and a funicular running alongside. He opens the gate to the terraced garden, and attempts a half-smile at the belligerent-looking hausfrau who always seems to be lurking in the garden or the front hall, staring disapprovingly, nodding reluctantly. He takes the tiny lift up to the third floor of the tall house, terraces and turrets, dormer windows under gabled eaves.

There’s only one door up here, already ajar, awaiting the new client on the hour. The two men shake hands in the waiting room, then settle into the office.

“So.” The therapist pushes up his lips, pressing his cheekbones up under his eyes. But the result is more a squint than a smile; Dr. Studer isn’t very good at smiling. It doesn’t seem to be an area of particular expertise here in Zurich. “Tell me, Herr Carner: what is new?”

The author shifts in his chair. Even after a few months of this, he’s still uncomfortable with the practice of psychotherapy. He has never been a believer. Plus he can’t help but think that it’s futile, considering all the truths he cannot tell. But he grew up in New York City in the 1970s, when for certain types of people psychiatry seemed to be as required as inoculations
and preventive dentistry. So when he found himself with time on his hands, and emotional issues to tackle, and no price-sensitivity, he found Dr. Studer here. It has been of marginal benefit.

“Last week I completed that big project,” the author says. “After a long time working nonstop. It’s now off my chest, off my desk. In someone else’s hands.”

“And how does this make you feel?”

“At first I felt great. Elated. I felt … 
accomplished
. But then that happiness, it ebbed away quickly, over the weekend. The project that had been my mission was suddenly no longer the thing that defined my daily routine, my reason to exist in the world. And now I have none.”