The Expats (39 page)

He broke into a broad smile. “That,” he said, “woould alsoo be fine and fayer compensation.”

KATE INSISTED THEY go to the science museum on a pier in the harbor. Then after lunch a flea market in a church, where she lingered and haggled and bought this and that, a porcelain platter and sterling serving utensils. Then she wanted to sit somewhere and have a coffee, with some pastries for the kids.

Under the table, the new Beretta sat heavy in the bottom of her handbag, even heavier in the top of her consciousness.

Dexter admitted that Brad had indeed become an insufferable bastard in the decade since they’d worked together. He had moved to New York to do something extra-bullshit-sounding for tech start-ups. Throwing around the title CMO, talking about loft-buying and Hamptons-summering and blah-blah-blahing. Kate had always thought of Brad as unbearable, and was gratified that Dexter could finally see it, now that Brad had fully bloomed into the exceptional prick that had always been growing within. New York had nurtured his prickishness.

If Dexter really had fifty million euros sacked away somewhere, he was doing an awfully good job of not becoming a self-satisfied prick.

Kate ordered another coffee. She was pushing back the day, one
o’clock to two, two to three, until she was assured that by the time the family returned to Luxembourg, it would be late, and the kids would have to go straight to bed, the lights in their room never even turned on. Dexter wouldn’t have a chance to be alone in the boys’ room, to examine the disassembled bureau, evidence of her suspicion, proof of her discovery.

They sped down the motorway in the flat Netherlands, an exit every couple of miles, a city at every exit. At sunset they were stop-and-go around the Brussels ring, then speeding south again through Walloon Belgium, sparse and dark and hilly, ravines and forests and nothing, nothing, more nothing.

Kate looked out the window into the darkness of the Ardennes, where the World Wars had been fought, hand-to-hand bloody. The Battle of the Bulge, the biggest and deadliest of World War II. That was sixty-something years ago. And now? Now there wasn’t even a border between Germany and France and Belgium and Luxembourg. All that carnage over sovereignty and the integrity of borders, and now you didn’t even need to show a passport to travel from Allied to Axis.

George Patton was buried in Luxembourg, walking distance to the kids’ school, along with five thousand other American soldiers.

The German car was humming at 150 kilometers per hour, cutting through the fast-moving fog slithering across the blacktop. Up and down the dark quiet hills, rarely coming across other cars or trucks, the middle of nowhere in the dark of night.

The perfect place to disappear.

25

Eight o’clock in the morning. Five after eight. Seven after. Time—
now
—to leave for school, already late, but Dexter still not out of the apartment, barely awake, in the shower.

If Kate left, then Dexter would have the run of the apartment. He could go anywhere, do anything. He could check the bureau and find that she’d disassembled it. He could check the bin in the back of the pantry and find the Beretta.

“Okay, boys,” she said from the kitchen. She pulled the gun out of the bin, dropped it into her bag. “Mommy’s ready.”

She couldn’t live like this.

“HELLO?”

She closed the front door slowly, quietly.
Click
. “Hello?”

She glanced at the ceramic bowl on the hall table, where he kept his keys. Empty. “Dexter?”

She walked upstairs, double-confirming, through the hall to the master bedroom, their bathroom. As she passed the boys’ room, she looked at the bureau, unchanged, unfixed. She’d get to that soon enough.

Down the stairs and the hall and through the living room. She poked her head into the kitchen, triple-checking. More nervous by the second, practically trembling.

She sat at the desk. She opened the laptop. She checked her e-mail, procrastinating. Responded to something trivial, read something irrelevant. Even emptied the spam folder.

Then there was nothing else to do, except what she’d sat down to do.

She opened the photo library of her telephone. She chose the image of
Dexter’s slip of paper, the account numbers and passwords. There were no bank names. But how many banks could there be? How long could this take? A half-hour? An hour?

She rose. She walked to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee. As if caffeine could possibly help.

She sat down again, hands poised above the keyboard, thinking. Start with the easiest: the bank where they kept their joint account.

She clicked the bookmark at the top of the web browser. The page jumped to the bank’s welcome page, asking for account number and password.

She glanced at her phone again, the image, the numbers …

She hit the computer key for the first number, an eight, her middle finger resting there under the asterisk atop the numeral … thinking of something … this computer …

Julia popped into her brain. The day when Julia visited this apartment, her Internet connection supposedly down, to check e-mail. When Julia sat in this chair, at this computer, hands on this keyboard.

Now Kate realized: Julia hadn’t been checking e-mail. She’d been inserting spyware, capturing Kate’s screens and logging her keystrokes, surreptitiously e-mailing whatever she typed to Julia and Bill, showing them whatever she saw, so they could steal the Moores’ account numbers and passwords, to monitor their bank balances and investment portfolios, to track their air-travel purchases and hotel reservations.

The Macleans had been tracking this computer’s activity. But it hadn’t been this computer that had booked the Amsterdam trip.

Of course! The Macleans didn’t know where the Moores were going, or for how long, or why. Because Dexter had made the hotel reservations from his office. From his ultra-secure office, and his impossible-to-access computer. So the FBI didn’t know if maybe Kate and Dexter were fleeing. On their way to the Isle of Man, or Hamburg, or Stockholm. Permanently moving, going into hiding, carrying false passports and duffels filled with cash.

So the FBI had pursued, nervous, making sure their suspect wasn’t disappearing.

Kate removed her hands from this tainted keyboard, this compromised position.

“HELLO, CLAIRE? IT’S Kate. Kate Moore.”

“Kate! How are you?”

“Well, thank you.” Kate watched a familiar face walk past her phone booth in the P&T. “Claire, I’ve an odd favor to ask.”

“Anything, dear. Anything.”

“Could I stop by and use your computer for a bit?”

CLAIRE’S HOME OFFICE was tucked into a corner behind the staircase, facing out onto the driveway, the least appealing room in the big suburban-esque house. Kate watched a car drive past, and wondered if Julia or Bill would end up coming by, crawling along the street, keeping tabs on her.

She launched the web browser. Began with the biggest banks, their names plastered everywhere around town, on the tops of buildings, on sponsor banners at festivals, on the jerseys of cycling teams.

There had been two account numbers on Dexter’s little slip of paper. The first number was paired with a user name and password and other information; the second had no accompanying information. Kate wouldn’t even try the second number; it made no sense.

But the first one did. It was almost too easy, too quick: ten minutes after she’d begun, the fifth bank she’d tried, the first account number was valid.

She sucked in her breath, held it as she entered the password … also valid.

Then she had to choose the correct image from a choice of maybe thirty, which explained the note “dog” on the slip of paper. And then she had to match a puzzle against a string of letters on Dexter’s slip of paper. Then a dialog box opened:

Accessing your account records
.
One moment, please
.

Accessing your account records
.
One moment—

The screen went dark.

Kate froze, panicked, looking around quickly, wondering what this could possibly—

The screen lit up again, the summary page of the account, scant information, bare bones only, her eyes flitting around the screen, taking in all there was to take in.

Account holder: LuxTrade S.A
.
Account address: rue des Pins 141, Bigonville, Luxembourg

There were no currency figures on the page, no amounts, just this inconclusive information, indicating nothing, proving nothing. Her spirits plunged.

Then she noticed the tab for assets, and she grabbed the mouse, and moved the cursor, and clicked, and waited the frustrating millisecond while absolutely nothing happened, then the terrifying microsecond when the screen went blank, then the new screen flashed, white and blue, two lines in the middle of the page:

Savings account balance
409.018,00 EUR

That was a lot of unexpected money. But it was a far cry from fifty million euros. Kate let out a deep sigh of relief, leaned back in the chair, away from the computer. Whatever Dexter was doing, it wasn’t stealing fifty million euros.

She stared at the screen, lost in speculation, her mind whirling … wondering what this could mean, the vast discrepancy between four hundred thousand and fifty million …

That’s when she noticed the tab for the other account.