The Expats (49 page)

A car made a turn that threw headlights in Dexter’s eyes. “What did you do?”

“Mostly I met with people,” Kate said. “I encouraged them to do things that we—the United States, or at least the CIA—wanted them to do. I persuaded them.”

“How?”

“I gave them money, and information. I helped them organize. Sometimes I threatened them with bad outcomes if they were uncooperative.”

“Such as?”

“Mostly the absence of things they wanted. Money, or weapons, or the support of the U.S. government. Instead their rivals would get that support. Or money, or weapons.”

“But sometimes it was something else?”

“Sometimes I told people that they’d be killed.”

“By you?”

“I usually left that part vague.”

“And were they? Killed?”

“Sometimes.”

“By you?”

“Not really.”

“What does that mean,
not really
?”

Kate wanted to not answer this question. So she didn’t.

Dexter looked away, about to ask a question he didn’t want to. “Was it part of your job to have sex with people? ”

“No.”

“But did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Sleep with other people?”

“No,” she said. “Did you?”

“No.”

Kate took a final sip of her cappuccino, now room temperature, stasis
with the ambient atmosphere. This was an unexpected turn into the irrelevant realm of sexual fidelity, the one deception in which neither had engaged.

“Did you ever kill anyone?” he asked point-blank.

She knew this was coming—she’d dreaded this—but still she hadn’t settled on her answer. On how complete her answer would be. “Yes.”

“How many?”

She didn’t want to give a number. This was one of the main reasons she’d never told Dexter the truth. It wasn’t merely the Agency’s code of secrecy that she didn’t want to break, and it wasn’t her reluctance to admit that she’d been lying all those years. The primary reason she never wanted to have this conversation was she didn’t want to answer this question, asked by this man, who would never again look at her the same way.

“A few.”

His face asked for a greater degree of specificity, or honesty. But Kate shook her head. She would not give him the number.

“Recently?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“Meaning?” There was impatience in his voice, exhaustion with her evasions.

“The last time was a few months after Jake was born. It was someone I’d known in Mexico.” If she was going to have to tell him this, she was going to tell him the whole story. Nearly.

“He was a politician who’d lost a presidential election. He was planning another try, and wanted our support. My support. I’d written him off, and in fact that final trip I took to Mexico was to meet with other politicians, other guys who were considering a run. He found out about that. And when I came home, he kind of forced me to take a meeting with him.”

“Forced you? How?”

“He sort of abducted me. Off the street. It wasn’t violent, but there was definitely a threat to the situation. The meeting turned into a long harangue about why we—why
I
—should support him. Then he showed me a photo, taken through our window, of me with Jake in our living room.”

Dexter cocked his head, asking to confirm if he understood.

“He was threatening me. If I didn’t support him, harm would come to my family. I couldn’t decide how credible this threat was. I wouldn’t
have taken it seriously at all, except for the fact that this man was a deeply irrational player. A delusional guy. And I had a baby. My first. Our first.”

“So.”

“So I couldn’t see clearly any way to ensure that he left us alone. A guy like that, his reach is far longer than deportation, or imprisonment, or … or anything. If he wanted harm to come to us, harm would come to us.”

“Unless you killed him.”

“Yes.”

“How? Where?”

She didn’t want to give the murder-pornography frame by frame. Didn’t want to recite her route across Manhattan, the length of the knife blade and the number of times she pulled the trigger, the color of the blood-splattered wallpaper in the hotel room, the man falling to the floor, the baby crying in the next room, the woman emerging and dropping the bottle, its nipple popping off and the milk spilling onto the carpet, the woman pleading
“Por favor,”
her hands up, shaking her head, asking—begging—for her life to be spared, her big black eyes wide, deep sinkholes of dark terror, while Kate trained the Glock on her, a seemingly eternal internal debate, while the baby sounded like he was the same age as Jake, late infancy, and this poor woman the same age as Kate, a different version of herself, an unlucky woman who didn’t deserve to die.

“Dexter, I don’t want to get into all the details.”

She didn’t want to tell him about the blood that was spreading through the carpet fibers from the tremendous hole in the back of Torres’s head. Damn’d spot.

“Maybe someday,” Kate said. “But not now. Okay?”

Dexter nodded.

“And what I realized,” Kate continued, “was that it had become too easy to get to me, to rattle me. To make me behave in ways I shouldn’t. I knew I had to leave the field; I had to stop interacting with assets.”

That young woman had seen Kate’s face. She’d seen that Kate had killed Torres and the bodyguard. That woman, that witness to cold-blooded murder, could send Kate to jail. Could wrest Kate from her baby, her husband. From her life.

“So after I killed this man, I went back to my office, and I asked for a reassignment.”

Kate was aiming the gun at the woman’s chest, holding her right wrist steady in her left palm, beginning to panic, wondering if she had the strength to do this. Wondering if she had the strength to not do this.

And in the next room, the baby cried out again, louder.

IT HADN’T TAKEN very long to come clean, after so many years of so many lies. It was surprising how undifferent she felt, now that everything—nearly everything—was out in the open.

They both had a legitimate right to be furious with the other. But their separate self-righteous indignations seemed to be canceling each other out, and neither was angry. Worry was etched in Dexter’s face. Kate thought this worry was for their future. Maybe he was wondering if they could make it, such liars, together. A marriage based on so many things that were not true. A life lived so falsely, for so long.

Kate didn’t know that Dexter hadn’t admitted all his lies. Just as she hadn’t revealed every one of her secrets.

He opened his mouth, let it hang silently, struggling with something, then gave up. “I’m sorry too, Kat. I’m so sorry.”

Sitting there in that rest area, she later realized, Dexter had been struggling with whether to admit the deepest layer of his deception. But he had decided against it.

And so had she.

31

Kate felt her way through the hall, fingertips trailing the pebbled wallpaper, to the glowing door of the boys’ room. When she’d left before dinner, distracted, she’d failed to close their blinds. The streetlight streamed into their bedroom, bathing everything in a silver tint, a powder-coated world of little clothes and little toys and innocent little boys, with unlined foreheads and impossibly slender shoulders.

She walked to their beds, junior-size mattresses barely bigger than crib mattresses, but nevertheless referred to as big-boy beds. She kissed each head, fresh-smelling silky hair. Both children were sprawled in different ludicrous positions, limbs akimbo, as if they’d been dropped onto these small beds from a great height.
Plop
.

Kate looked out the window before closing the blinds. The babysitter was climbing into the passenger seat, Dexter behind the wheel, about to drive her across the bridge to the Gare, to her tight little street crammed with mediocre Asian restaurants. Luxembourg is a place where a great steak au poivre is half the price of awful Chinese food.

A taxi was parked at one end of the block, the driver blowing cigarette smoke out the half-open window, billowing up in violent-looking bursts, the dense warm smoke cohering in the cold night air.

In the other direction, Kate could barely see the outline of a figure under an oak planted in a clearing, the soil covered with a black iron grate. He’d probably be there till dawn—or maybe they’d take turns on this overnight sentry duty—making sure the Moores didn’t flee. Standing uncomfortably on the cobblestones, leaning against a sharp-edged iron rail, bundled and shivering, feet aching, tired and hungry and cold and bored.

But this was his job. And although Kate didn’t know it at the time,
he’d recently made a discovery that had amplified his motivation, which was now at a level that could be fairly characterized as obsession. So he had passion, to help him through the long dark night.

KATE WAS AGAIN sitting on the balcony when Dexter returned. He dropped his keys in the bowl on the hall table, where he always dropped his keys. He walked across the polished stone tiles, the same tiles as on every other floor in Luxembourg, through the half-light. He stepped out onto the balcony, and shut the door behind him.

The rain and clouds had blown by. The night was now clear, stars twinkling.

“You can have me,” Kate said, “or you can have the money.” She’d made her decision, and it was nonnegotiable. She was convinced that she knew Dexter’s essential character. Which was not a man who wanted to buy yachts and sports cars with a fortune’s worth of stolen blood money. He’d wanted, simply, to steal it. “But you can’t have both.”

They faced each other across the cold darkness, for the second night in a row, a tremendous distance traveled in the intervening hours.

Dexter let his head fall back, stared at the sky. “Do you really need to ask?”

“I wish not. But I do.”

He understood: the ground had shifted beneath their feet. It was now impossible to know exactly where she stood.

“You,” he said, looking at her. “Obviously, I choose you.”

She returned his gaze. Something passed between them that she couldn’t put a name to, an acknowledgment, a resignation, a gratefulness, a hodgepodge of emotion between two people who’ve been married a long time. He reached his hand out, took hers.

“We leave that twenty-five million in that account,” she said, “and never touch it.”

“Then why keep it? Why not give it away? Build a school in Vietnam. An AIDS clinic in Africa. Whatever.”

It had never occurred to Kate that she’d be able to dispose of a huge sum of money. That she’d be able to donate anything to anyone. She reconsidered her plan, her options, in this odd new light. They were silent for a few moments, lost in thought.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “We’ll need to keep a cushion. A large stash of getaway cash. Enough to build a whole new life, from scratch, instantaneously.”

“Why?”

“I’m not convinced there’s no way for you to get caught. There’s always a way to get caught. There might be evidence you don’t know about. There’s the girl in London; there’s your Croatian source, wherever—whoever—he is. There’s whoever those people spoke to, whoever they slept with. There are those FBI agents and their records. There’s Interpol.”

Dexter slumped low in the chair. It was one o’clock in the morning.

“We’ll need to be on the alert, for years,” Kate continued. “Maybe forever. We’ll need to be ready to disappear with a suitcase full of cash.”

“Okay. But that’s, what? A million? What about the rest of it?”

“We need to leave it alone. Sort of like escrow.”

“Why?”

“Because someday, we might need to give it back.”