The Expats (26 page)

“Okay then.” Dexter glanced at his watch, turning his wrist jerkily to see the face. “So what are you kids doing? What should we do? Daddy’s home for a little while before dinner so we can do whatever you want so what do you want to do?”

“Lego!”

Dexter seemed nervous and edgy and filled with too much energy. Hopped up on something. Could he be doing drugs? That would certainly be an astonishing development.

“Okay, Lego it is! Let’s go.” He opened the closet door, grabbed the toolbox. “One of their bureau drawers is loose,” he explained, without
prompting. Kate hadn’t noticed any loose drawer. And she was surprised at this uncharacteristic interest in domestic repairs. “You boys get started on the Lego while I do something about the drawer.”

Dexter was not that type of guy.

“SO WHY ARE you two here? In Luxembourg?”

They were in a corner booth at a brasserie on the Place d’Armes. The plaza was being filled with the wooden stalls of the Christmas market, strung with lights, festooned with wreaths. The clamor of hammering and the hum of portable electric generators wafted through the doors whenever they opened, accompanied by a chill. You never really needed to take off sweaters and jackets in wintertime Luxembourg. A chill was never far away.

“My job,” Dexter said. “I work in banking.”

“Banking? No! There can’t be
banking
in Luxembourg!” Lester’s red-faced joviality and harmless sarcasm were straight out of the father-of-a-friend textbook. He had changed out of his golfing gear into a navy blazer, pressed khakis, a button-down oxford. Directly from the office, leaving the tie in the Buick. A caricature of himself.

“Where are you from, Les?” Kate asked.

“Oh, we got around, didn’t we, Julia-kins? But now I live near Santa Fe. You ever been down that way?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“What about you, Dexter?”

He shook his head. Dexter’s manic energy had been spent; now he was quiet, shy.

“Beautiful country,” Les said. “Just beautiful.”

“And you’re from Chicago?” Kate asked.

“We lived there awhile, that’s right.”

“I’ve never been there, either.”

“Huh. But I bet you all get around Europe? That’s what Julia tells me everyone does, here. That right?”

“I guess.”

“So I’m going to—where am I going? Let’s see: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm. You got any suggestions for me?” Les looked from Kate to Dexter to Kate again, acknowledging that right now, she was going to be the one speaking for her family.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“Hotels. Restaurants. Sights. What have you. I’ve never been up this
way before, probably never will again. Figured I’d see this part of the world before I die.”

Kate smiled. “Of those three, we’ve been only to Copenhagen.”

The food arrived, large plates filled with brown and beige—pork shoulders, lamb shanks. Kate’s came with buttered spaetzle
and
buttered potatoes. The minced-parsley garnish was the only green thing on the table.

“Where’d you stay?” Les asked. “Nice hotel?”

“Not bad.”

“How many stars?”

“Four, probably. Maybe three.”

“No, I’m ’fraid not. In my dotage, I’ve become strictly a five-star guy.”

“Can’t help you then, Les.” Kate glanced at Julia, who was also quiet, sheepish-looking.

“What about restaurants?” Lester asked. “That’s a good-eating town, isn’t it?”

She smiled. “Again, Les, we’re going to have to disappoint you. What with the kids, and a budget, we don’t really seek out the finest dining.”

“A budget? I thought all you Luxembourg bankers were richer than Croesus.” Looking at Dexter now.

“That may be,” Dexter said. “But I’m not a banker. I work
in
banking, but my job is really more like I.T.”

“I.T.?” Les looked shocked. “Well, I’ll be.”

“Is that so unusual?”

“No, no, not at all. It’s just I wouldn’t’ve expected that a Luxembourg bank would hire an American for any type of I.T.”

“Why’s that?” Dexter asked.

“It’s sort of become the specialty of the rest of the world, hasn’t it?”

Dexter cut his eyes down to his food. “Well, it’s more about security, what I do. I’m a security consultant. I help banks ensure that their systems are secure.”

“And how do you do that?”

“The main thing is I try to put myself into the mind of an attacker. What would he do? How would he do it? I try to orchestrate the attack myself, and find the points of weakness that a hacker would exploit. I ask myself, What is he looking for? How is he going to try to find it?”

“You talking about computer weaknesses?”

“Yes. But also human weaknesses.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning the types of weaknesses that make humans let down their guard. Trust people they shouldn’t trust.”

“You’re talking about manipulating people.”

“Yes.” Dexter and Lester were staring at each other. “I guess I am.”

IT WAS AFTER sex when Kate most wanted to talk to Dexter. To tell him that Bill and Julia were FBI agents. To tell Dexter that she knew he was lying to her about something, and demand he explain.

During her entire career at the CIA, pillow talk had never played a role. But now she understood what an asset it could have been, having sex with people to get information. She wondered whether this insight would’ve changed her past behavior.

She stared at the bedroom ceiling, again, failing to start the conversation. Even with the new possible opening of “Lester is not Julia’s father,” she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

Dexter would be going to London in two days. She could wait.

18

“You don’t have to do this,” Dexter said, gathering his things. “I can take a taxi.” He closed his carry-on bag, a quick aggressive zip. “Is it that you enjoy visiting our tidy little airport? Or are you really that desperate to get rid of me?”

“Counting the seconds,” she said, purposefully not looking at him.

He picked up his key ring from the hall table, slipped it into his computer case. It was the same sterling ring that the real-estate agent had presented to Dexter when they’d closed on the D.C. house, his initials engraved on an oval fob. Kate had received her own, but she’d long ago relegated it to her jewelry box. Matching key rings were an invitation to disaster.

Now Dexter’s ring held the Luxembourg apartment’s keys, and two unfamiliar keys that she assumed were for his office, and one small key that she knew was a bicycle lock, rarely if ever used. Plus a memory stick with a hardened case, tamper-resistant and tamper-evident, with secure encryption keys and even self-destruction circuitry. This device had not been casually purchased from Eurobureau; this was a serious little gadget.

“This trip is to London?” she asked, pulling the door shut behind her.

“Indeed.”

Down in the parking, Dexter deposited his computer bag and sturdy plastic Samsonite into the way-back, on the newly washed black carpet, professionally cleaned a few weeks ago in the parking of the
centre commercial
in Kirchberg, by appointment, while Kate shopped above—groceries and DVDs and Christmas toys, a twelve-pack of new underwear for the boys, growing too quickly to fit into anything for more
than a few months at a time, their old briefs obscenely small and tight, somehow embarrassing.

Kate opened the driver’s door but then paused, pretending to make the decision to remove her coat. She walked to the rear. She glanced at her husband, nervous, worried about the mirrors, despite her certainty that they were not angled for this, not the side-views and not the rearview; she knew positively that Dexter simply could not see her in the mirrors.

The garage’s overhead light extinguished itself, its automatic timer expired. Now the only illumination was from the tiny bulbs in the car, single-digit watts scattered at places where you might otherwise bump your head, or trip.

Kate reached across Dexter’s bags, and carefully put down her coat, the heavy pile of navy wool and silk lining and brass buttons. She coughed to cover the sound of opening the zipper of his nylon bag. She grabbed his keys tightly to avoid jangling. Coughed again to close the zipper, then slid his keys into her pocket in concert with slamming the door. She began to—

Dexter was beside her. Kate held her breath, frozen. Caught.

He stared at her, and she at him, for seconds. A dim forever. “What are you doing?”

She didn’t answer; couldn’t.

“Kate?”

In the dark, she couldn’t see the expression on his face.

“Kat?”

“What?”

“Can you move out of the way, please?”

She took a step back, and Dexter popped the hatchback. Grabbed his computer bag. He threw Kate a glance. The trunk light had gone on, and she could read his face: confusion, worry. She was paralyzed. What was about to happen here? To her whole life?

Dexter unzipped the bag. He reached his hand in, feeling around. Glanced again at her, quizzical, then continued to rummage around, his brow furrowed.

Kate couldn’t move a muscle.

Finally Dexter pulled his hand out of his bag, looking at it, at the thing he was holding: a piece of plastic wrapped with wire.

She still didn’t move. She still couldn’t.

“I thought I’d forgotten my charger.” He held the thing up for her to see: proof that he hadn’t forgotten it, for both of them, much to their vastly different types of relief.

KATE STAGGERED TO the front of the car, collapsed into the driver’s seat. She turned the ignition, shaky, and switched on the headlights, and hit the remote to open the garage door. She shifted into drive while Dexter was buckling his seat belt.

Kate had lied to many people in her life, profusely; she’d regularly been a breath away from getting caught. But it was very different when it was your husband, and the thing you’re lying about is no longer yourself, but him. It was inconceivable to treat it as a game; it was impossible to pretend that it wasn’t real life.

“You okay?” Dexter asked.

She knew that her voice still wouldn’t work. She nodded.

The drive to the airport took ten minutes. Dexter made a meager attempt at small talk, but Kate responded with grunts. So he gave up, granting her the space of her silence.

She spun the car around a short arc of a roundabout and cruised into the efficient little airport. It was a one-minute trip from the kiss-and-fly parking to the check-in counter. Almost never any queue—none—to check in, and rarely a soul waiting at security. Distances here measured in steps, instead of the kilometers marched in Dulles or Frankfurt. From the door of their apartment to any gate, the journey was twenty minutes.

“Thanks,” Dexter said, a peck and a smile, climbing out the door. Elsewhere in the kiss-and-fly other men were climbing out of the passenger seats of other German cars, gathering bags and feeling around pockets for passports, uttering variations of what Dexter said now, to his wife, “See you in a few days,” all with something else on their minds.