The Accident (35 page)

“Car crash.”

“Good God. Does anyone else have a copy of the manuscript?”

She almost answers, It depends on your definition of
have
. But what she says is “Not from me. Did
you
give it to anyone besides Brad? Would he have given it to anyone?”

“I doubt it.”

Isabel nods.

“So there aren’t any other copies in the world?” he asks. “Besides the two that we have with us here?”

Isabel turns to Jeffrey, searches his face, wondering again how much she can trust this man in bed with her. It was her ex-husband who’d always
lived by the credo that you should never completely trust anyone, and always be prepared for betrayal; you never know when it’s going to happen. Over the years this cynicism rubbed off on Isabel. In hindsight, this pervasive worldview was one of the things she didn’t like about being married to him. But like it or not, there it is: she doesn’t really trust anyone.

“Not that I know of,” she says. “Though I’m assuming the author has a copy.”

The idea of the author hangs in the air between them.

“You know who it is, don’t you?”

“Well, there’s certainly one obvious possibility,” she admits.

Jeffrey nods.

“But he’s already
dead
.”

CHAPTER 44

T
he morning air is crisp and clean, the wind blowing cool from the snow-capped Alps in the south, blowing across the deep blue lake dotted with sailboats and ducklings and ruffled with whitecaps, making the tree boughs sway, heavy with the season’s new green leaves. The gravel-covered dirt path feels springy under the cushy soles of his new high-tech running shoes, and his legs have grown rubbery, in a not-unpleasant way. He leans into his jog, his torso pitched forward, propelling him onward, toward the simple squared-off clock towers of the tidy little downtown.

Although he slept only a few hours last night, he doesn’t feel particularly tired. He long ago became inured to sleeplessness; he can get by on three or four hours per night for weeks on end.

The author turns away from the lake, off the gravel path, running now on the hard pavement of the street, far less agreeable to his soles and knees and middle-aged frame.

His apartment is on the next block. He glances at the screen of the phone in his palm, the GPS-driven app that’s tracking his run, now at 7.8 kilometers. If he runs past his building, makes another lap around the block, that’ll get him past 8.0, a nice even number, a respectable goal.

He doesn’t even glance at his front door as he jogs past it, throwing
one leg in front of the other, the impact vibrating up his legs. He breathes in sets of two, a couple of short tight bursts of exhalation on consecutive footfalls, then a pair of shallow inhales on the next two strides, a mesmerizing rhythm that lulls him into a spaced-out zone in which he can almost forget all the things that keep him awake in the middle of the night. He wishes it was possible to sleep while jogging.

So at first he doesn’t register the two men sitting in the car on the corner, facing his direction. A rental car, a pair of clean-cut American-looking heads. No newspaper, no phone, nothing to occupy their attention in the front seat of the shiny white Opel at eight o’clock on a weekday morning, parked on a quiet block in a residential neighborhood.

Fuck.

He continues jogging to the corner, and turns left, picking up the pace unintentionally, adrenaline spiking in his bloodstream, no longer feeling the impact of his strides, nor the soreness in his quadriceps, his muscles growing stronger with the hormonal infusion, his hearing and vision sharper, a strange taste in his mouth.

He turns another corner, onto the block behind his own, and runs fifty more meters, then slows to a walk. He turns out of the street and enters an alley between two tall houses, a tight path with a bicycle rack, a quartet of garbage cans, a red hand-truck.

At the rear of the house he stops. He leans his hand against the coarse cool painted brick, and cranes his neck around the corner. He surveys the backyard of this house, with a low wood fence that separates this yard from his own building’s. He looks up at the fire escape, at his bedroom window.

A team could be up there in his apartment, waiting for him, one man hiding on the wall beside the door, another sitting on his sofa, holding a pistol. The two men in the car could be the backup. There could be others, in vans, on motorcycles, at the airport, the train station. He could be surrounded.

He waits one minute, two. He can see his downstairs neighbor
knotting his necktie; in the next building a young Dutch mother—in his brain, she’s called Dutch MILF—is trying to get her blonde children out the door.

He has anticipated this moment, the discovery that he has been blown, that the people who are looking for him—Charlie Wolfe and his handler at the CIA, or more likely some team of private contractors hired by one or the other of the motivated parties—has found him. He has planned for it. In his coat closet he keeps a go-bag, a nylon backpack with a change of clothes, and a disposable cell phone and its charger, and an empty thumb drive ready to copy his manuscript, and another new passport and credit cards plus a hundred thousand dollars worth of mixed currency—American dollars and euros and Swiss francs and English pounds—and a spare car key, and a dog-eared old wallet-size photo of a child.

He waits another minute. His breathing has slowed to nearly normal, and he can feel sweat cooling on his back, his chest, his lightweight T-shirt moist and heavy. He’s almost ready to move, to hop the low fence that separates the yards, to climb the fire escape, to fold himself through his bedroom window …

He walks across the yard, head swiveling left and right, back behind him. He climbs the ladder, hand over hand, up the exterior of the painted brick building to the fourth floor, high above these postage-stamp lawns in northern Switzerland.

He peers through his bedroom window. He can see an empty slice of living room, an angled view on the front door. Nothing looks out of the ordinary. But then again, there’s not much he can see.

As a rule he leaves this window unlocked, willing to sacrifice one bit of security for another, in this exact situation, right now. He’s not terribly afraid of getting burgled in Zurich; what he’s afraid of is getting apprehended by the CIA.

He applies pressure with the heels of both palms, pushing up on the old wood, the frame beginning to slide.

That’s when he notices the front door opening.

I
t was after midnight, and nearly all the other tables were empty, the kitchen closed, the restaurant winding down another busy night. The woman leaned back in her dining chair, and the author leaned toward her, anxious to hear what she had to say, desperate to not miss it.

A pair of waiters shared a joke at the service station, while on the other side of the room two busboys stood wearily, dead on their feet. The bartender was sliding a fresh drink across the bar, with a sly smile, to a woman who’d already slid off her stool at least once. The maître d’ was reading the
Post
from the back page forward. The music was louder than expected from a place this expensive, and it was Led Zeppelin, of all goddamned things.

And this woman was staring at Charlie. “Yes,” she said, “I know who you are.”

And Charlie was staring back at her, steely jawed, his whole body tensed, coiled.

And the author’s heart was beating so fast he thought he’d croak, right then and there, pitching forward onto the starched white tablecloth. He was holding his breath, running out of oxygen.

And then she said, “You’re on television, aren’t you?”

S
he’d had no idea whatsoever what was on the line, that night. She didn’t know that their first meeting in the bar had been staged; didn’t know that Charlie’s arrival to the restaurant had been orchestrated; didn’t know that the two men were on the edge of their seats, two unintentional murderers who were toying with the idea of the premeditated crime, against her. She didn’t know any of this, back then. Though now she most certainly did.

As it turned out, it wasn’t from Ithaca fifteen years earlier that she recognized Charlie. She knew his face from his on-air appearances. The domestic news station was just about to launch, and Charlie was already
well known in media circles. Now he was on the verge of being famous to the world at large, and it was apparently this woman’s job to be familiar with this ever shifting population. “People on the precipice of fame,” she said, “are my business.”

So she was not a witness. There was no witness.

The author’s relief was immense, an ecstatic relief, incomparable to any mere orgasm. He immediately invited the woman to a second date, the following week.

H
e scampers down the fire-escape stairs, grateful for the foamy rubber soles of his shoes, nearly soundless on the sturdy framework. He lands on the brick path, retraces his steps through the yards, the alley, running again down the middle of the leafy street, his pace quicker than before, faster than he’ll be able to maintain, fighting the urge to turn around, to look for pursuers. Innocent joggers don’t check to see who’s behind them. He needs to look like an innocent jogger.

He rejoins the stream of exercisers in the thin park along the lake, the sweat-drenched joggers, the middle-agers with their hiking poles, the beefy cyclists with spiky hair in full regalia of garish Lycra straining against sausages both consumed and concealed, interspersed with the business-attired on touring bikes and on foot, heading downtown.

He turns round the busy bend of Bellevueplatz to cross the river mouth at Quaibrücke, running out of steam, slowing down, panting. When he enters the Bürkliterrasse garden he stops, as if this is his purposeful destination, the end point of a planned route. He puts his right foot up on the edge of a bench, leans forward for a calf stretch, looking back in the direction from whence he came, scanning the crowds. He switches legs, looks in the other direction, while reviewing a mental checklist of his backup plan. His alternative backup plan.

He starts walking through Belvoir on the west side of the lake, the mirror image of his neighborhood, the two areas facing each other across
the water. He turns a corner and passes through a modern matte metal gate and continues around the side of the contemporary glass-and-steel building, on a paved path lined with high healthy shrubs. He kneels at the base of the third bush, reaches in to find the knobby trunk, strains his hand around the trunk.

He extracts his arm from the foliage, looks at his palm, holding the small metal hide-a-key box. He slides it open and removes two keys. One of them unlocks the rough-hewn slab of the building’s front door, and he walks through the airy lobby, up one flight of stairs to Apartment 4, a sans-serif brushed-steel numeral floating above the ebonized wood.

He leans against the door, straining his hearing, to try to pick up any sounds within the apartment.

Nothing.

He’s standing in front of Vanessa’s apartment, the sexy management consultant he’d met in the park and then picked up in the Widder for that threesome, who’s game for the occasional date, a casual dinner and a satisfying fuck, a quick congenial breakfast before work.

After one of these nights he’d managed to steal her keys, copy them, and return them a few hours later, standing in the lobby of her office building, with apologies; he’d picked up the wrong set on his way out the door. They shook hands when they parted.

Vanessa tends to leave home by 7:45 a.m., at her desk by 8:15 latest. It’s now 8:22. He slides that duplicate key into the lock, turns, clicks. The door swings open, heavy and smooth and silent on its well-oiled hinges. His eyes dart around the kitchen, dining alcove, living room, large window to a leafy yard, coffee table, wineglasses. Plural.

And a pair of men’s shoes.

CHAPTER 45

B
rad tries for the second time in ten minutes, but again his call is immediately connected to voice mail,
Hi this is Jeff—

He puts down the phone without leaving a message, and unpauses the music, halfway through what he still thinks of as the second side of
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
, even though he replaced his vinyl version with this CD … When was it? Twenty-five years ago?

He stares out the window of his home office tucked into what was built as a maid’s room, back in the days when everyone here on Park Avenue had a live-in maid. It’s a small room, big enough for only a loveseat and a few bookshelves and a desk with a banker’s lamp and a comfortable chair, a casement window that faces the courtyard, and the windows of dozens of other maid’s rooms and kitchens and bathrooms and the landings of the stairwells where the teenagers and some of the more desperate stay-at-home moms sneak cigarettes.

Brad had thought he’d been around long enough to see every circumstance in the book-publishing business present itself. He has seen surprise bestsellers come out of nowhere while supposedly guaranteed hits bombed, abysmally. He has encountered ecstatic authors and belligerent authors and authors who summarily broke contracts or initiated lawsuits
or committed suicide or simply flipped out. He has seen books with signatures bound upside down, books distributed with the author’s name misspelled on the dust jacket, books missing their final crucial pages or cataloging-in-publication data, books with factual inaccuracies and libelous misstatements and egregious errors of judgment and taste.