The Accident (29 page)

“So,” Hayden said, “I thought we were finished.”

In early autumn they’d had dinner in Berlin, and Charlie had brought their long, mutually beneficial relationship to a close. “It’s been only a few months, Charlie. Have you changed your mind already? Miss me that much?”

Charlie smiled, accepting the joke, but not enjoying it. “Did you know I was thinking about running for office? Senate?”

Of course Hayden had heard about that, and he’d thought it an absolutely terrible idea. He didn’t respond.

“I also started writing a book, which was a little bit of autobiography, plus a lot of my vision for the future of America. I was writing with Dave Miller. We would sit down together, Dave and I, for a half-hour at a time, or an hour, whatever we had, whenever we had it. I’d talk, and he’d type, and ask me questions. We’d work together on the phrasing of important passages. He did some interviewing of my family, and my old classmates,
gathering background …” Charlie trailed off, obviously coming to a part of the story he didn’t want to tell.

“Dave kept the working manuscript in his office, with some handwritten notes of mine, and contact information for sources, and law-school papers, and DVDs of my TV appearances. Et cetera.”

Charlie enunciated the Latin slowly and pointedly—
et cet e ra
.

“Then Dave was diagnosed with cancer—awful, really.” Charlie shook his head. “And then yet more awful last week, when I found out about the plane going down.”

Hayden felt that they were coming to the crux of things, and he watched Charlie’s face carefully. That phrase—“found out about the plane going down”—was a peculiar way to refer to his best friend’s suicide.

“It took a couple of days before it occurred to me that I ought to retrieve this book material; there’d been other things on my mind. So Monday evening, I went into Dave’s office, and had the file cabinet unlocked, and I looked around quickly. Then I looked around slowly, and carefully. Then I looked around exhaustively. But I didn’t find any trace of the material.”

“This was all hard copy? What about the digital files?”

“We didn’t keep digital files.”

Hayden looked uncomprehendingly at the digital-media mogul.

“Digital is too easily duplicated. Too easily
stolen
. Any digital storage device, no matter how secure, is in the end essentially insecure. What’s
not
insecure is a stack of paper that no one knows about. That no one will go looking for. So we typed, and printed, and destroyed the word-processing files. The manuscript exists only in physical form. Somewhere.”

“I assume you had his house checked?”

“Nothing there. Not in Georgetown, and not in his place at the beach.”

“Is it possible Miller destroyed it?”

“Sure. But why would he?”

Hayden shrugged.

“No manuscript anywhere. And,” Charlie said, leaning forward, “no
body
.”

Hayden stared off into the distance at the French Renaissance elegance of the Louvre looming above the rigid lines of the park. Behind them was the obelisk at the center of the place de la Concorde, and the Champs-Élysées, and the Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower, over which the dense clouds were draped in folds of gray.

They were sitting in the middle of everything, a wide-open vista, impossible for anyone to surreptitiously listen to their conversation.

“What’s your theory?” he asked.

Charlie stared at Hayden for a few seconds, a purposefully pregnant pause. “I think the suicide was faked, and Dave is hiding out somewhere, finishing the book.”

“Oh good grief. Why?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Don’t give me that crap. What
happened
?”

“Listen, Hayden, it’s complicated.”

Hayden’s first instinct when he’d received Charlie’s summons, two days earlier, was that this was going to turn out to be something disastrous. He’d learned over the years that his first instinct about these things was unfailingly correct. “So explain it, Charlie. You’re not stupid. Neither am I.”

Charlie shifted in his seat, uncomfortable. “Dave was always kind of jealous of me. Envious. Of the money, and, y’know, everything. And something happened back in college … that was …”

“What?”

Charlie leaned away, crossed one leg over the other. “There was an accident. A car accident. I was, um, drunk.”

“And?”

“And a girl died.”

Hayden chewed on this distasteful nugget. “Miller knows about it?”

“He was in the car.”

Oh fuck. “But he has remained quiet? For, what, a quarter-century?”

“We paid him.”

“Who’s
we
?”

“My father. And me. But I guess it was just my father who was doing the actual, um,
paying
.”

“You’re telling me that Preston Wolfe was involved in this?”

“My dad was in Ithaca, the night of the accident. After Dave and I, ah,
dis
posed of the girl’s body, we went to Dad. It was the middle of the night. We went to him for help.”

“For help doing what?”

“Deciding what to do. Deciding how to hide ourselves, and the evidence. Deciding to start paying Dave. Forty thousand per year. Not just to keep him silent, but to be able to prove that he was accepting money from us in return for staying silent. To make him a conspirator. In a crime. To ensure that he’d suffer unappealing consequences if he stopped staying silent.”

“This was your father’s idea?”

Charlie shook his head.

“You were a devious little bastard, weren’t you?”

“He needed the money. Did you know Dave was poor? His parents—his mother—a Communist? An actual
Marxist
?”

Hayden didn’t answer.

“And then, y’know, Dave helped me start the business, and everything.… We became sort of intertwined. And his relationship with me—our relationship, our business—made him rich. Richer than he ever thought he could be, or should be: he was always kind of uneasy with the money. His Communist mother was ashamed of him, and I think he was ashamed of himself. He had become everything he’d been raised to not become; to
despise
, in fact.”

“He was explicit about this?”

“No. But his self-loathing was pretty clear. And then his personal life certainly didn’t help. You know about that?”

Hayden nodded.

“Then we launched the cable division in Washington, and moved the HQ down there, and it was hugely successful …”

“And then?”

“And then Finland.”

Their first joint operation, fifteen years earlier, had been an Italian presidential candidate whose campaign imploded with the revelation that he was sleeping with a nineteen-year-old. Then there was the newly elected Liverpudlian MP who resigned after developing a debilitating cocaine habit, caught in the men’s room of a club in Greek Street. And the gun-running Dutch financier who was arrested in Athens, and within hours was murdered in jail.

Ruining ruinable lives, for profit and politics.

“I thought you said that was under control.”

“Well, I thought it was. Mostly.”

Because Finland was different. Not a great idea from the get-go: an unstable target, a web entrepreneur whose muckraking site was making America look bad, and challenging Wolfe’s market share, and breaking a lot of laws, all at once. It smelled a lot like a personal Charlie Wolfe grudge, and Hayden should’ve rejected the idea outright. In years past, he would’ve rejected it. But his moral compass had slowly been corrupted, eventually reset, and north was now pointing in a direction that wasn’t true. Compromise had been too good to Hayden.

“But then a few months later he announces he’s sick, dying, see ya.”

“You think he didn’t really have cancer? Doesn’t?”

“As far as I could tell, yes, he does. He saw specialists, took tests. He looked like shit, lost weight, color. He was definitely sick
ly
. But doctors and hospitals, y’know, don’t exactly part willingly with their patient records. Plus it’s not impossible to fabricate test results, or medical reports.”

“So if Miller really
does
have cancer, Charlie, is this what he’s doing on his deathbed? Exposing your accident, and his role in it?”

“Yup.”

“And what if he
doesn’t
have cancer?”

“Maybe he’s doing the same thing. Just not on a deathbed.”

This was a pretty unappealing situation. “Do you have any idea where he is, Charlie?”

“Me, I think he’s in Mexico. I had some tech guys go through his stuff. He’d deleted a bunch of files from his computer, erased his browsing history. But he neglected to delete the cookies.”

“The cookies.”

“Yeah, they’re a record of the websites he’d visited, which makes it—”

“I know what cookies are. That’s odd, no?”

“What?”

“That Miller trashed some files and wiped the history, but didn’t delete the cookies.”

“Dave wasn’t especially computer-literate. That was never his expertise.” Charlie shrugged. “Anyway, there was a lot of web-browsing history involving Mexico. Researching places—San Miguel de Allende, Cuernavaca, Oaxaca—where there’s a lot of expat infrastructure.”

“Why Mexico?”

“As I told you, his family is Communist.”

“And?” Hayden squinted. “Mexico isn’t Communist. Never has been.”

“I don’t know. It’s, um,
proletarian
. Whatever.” Charlie shrugged. “But anyway, he was looking at flights to Mexico. And buses, which are apparently the way people get around the country. Plus my guys are pretty sure he bought a first-class ticket from Miami to Mexico City.”

This sounded too good to be true. Sometimes too good to be true was, still, true. But there was no way that these supposed overlooked cookies were going to be the quick-and-easy solution. And Hayden was getting the sneaking feeling that there was another angle that was almost too bad to be true.

“Charlie, how much does Miller know about our business together?”

Charlie stared intently at the ground before answering, “A lot.”

Hayden felt his chest pushing in. He turned away from Charlie, whose
face was giving away nothing. He let his gaze wander across the fountain at the woman in sunglasses, still sitting there, face turned to the feeble Parisian winter sun.

“Everything?”

Charlie raised his eyebrows, but still didn’t meet Hayden’s eye.

There were a great many people in the Agency who would do anything to get ahead. Hayden had never been one of them, and he’d taken great pains to make that clear; he took pride in his paucity of institutional ambition. There were plenty of things that Hayden wanted out of life; he was not a man without ambition. But those things didn’t include sitting in any office in Langley, no matter how large. He never wanted to live anywhere near Washington, never wanted to be surrounded by the types of people who descend on the capital to try to make their mark in the world. He never aspired to be rich, or famous.

He wanted to live in Europe, amongst Europeans, in their languages and museums and cafés. He wanted to learn interesting things, to surround himself with interesting people, to sleep with interesting women. He wanted his life to be rich with experiences and exposures, with people and places. He wanted to work in the world of espionage, not politics. He wanted the career he already had.

To facilitate his own particular modest ambitions, other more commonplace ambitions had been thrust upon him. Hayden had never thought of himself as corruptible, yet he had allowed himself to be stealthily corrupted. So now there he was, sitting in the Tuileries, staring at the man responsible.

When Hayden had first struck up his arrangement with Charlie Wolfe, it was clear that every operation was on the correct side of the right-wrong line. No one was getting hurt who was completely innocent, and every outcome was to the strategic benefit of the US. This was Hayden’s job, and it was a worthwhile job, and he did it well, and he was rewarded for his success with promotions and autonomy. There was nothing wrong with any of that.

A certain degree of mission creep was, Hayden expected, unavoidable. But he now had to admit that he hadn’t been nearly vigilant enough, while on the other hand Charlie had been smoothly adept at obscuring the line between what was good for the United States of America and what was good for Wolfe Worldwide Media. In hindsight it was obvious that that operation in Finland was of far greater benefit to Wolfe. Plus, a little kid died.

“Can he prove any of it, Charlie?”

“Depends on your burden of proof, I guess. He can certainly create a convincing appearance.”

Hayden stared down at his wingtips, running through this new scenario.

“You know what needs to be done, yes?” Charlie asked.

Hayden turned to him with a scowl. If there’s one thing he didn’t need at this moment, it was to be condescended to by this prick.

“You should talk to an attorney in DC named Trey Freeley,” Charlie said, pushing himself up, out of the green metal chair. He pulled his overcoat closed around his torso, hugging himself in his tailored wool. It was nearly four in the afternoon, December in Paris; the sun would be setting any minute, and it was cold, getting colder quickly. “Trey knows a lot about the book business, and the people in it.” He held out his hand for a shake, and Hayden stood, took the hand.

“Thanks.”

Charlie nodded while blinking slowly, as if accepting well-earned gratitude for a deeply meaningful favor he’d done, when in fact the opposite was true. He was masterful. Charlie Wolfe would probably make a great politician, if he could get past the potential crisis that was looming. Maybe other crises, ones that Hayden didn’t know about.

On second thought, maybe Charlie Wolfe would be a disaster of a politician.

“I’m sorry about this, Hayden. Truly.”

Charlie turned and walked away, followed at a comfortable distance
by his clunky muscle, ascending the steps to the giant traffic circle of the place de la Concorde, then out of sight.

Hayden set off in the other direction, around the fountain, toward the Louvre, through the park, quiet and cold, little dogs on their late-afternoon walks, young mothers pushing prams, old men with their hands clasped behind their backs, wearing hats with brims, newspapers tucked under their arms, clouds of cigarette smoke.