The Expats (27 page)

KATE EXITED HER building just as her phone began to ring, another incoming call from Julia Maclean. Kate hit the Ignore button, again.

She set off in the light drizzle of a cold December rain, a degree too warm for snow. Retracing the footsteps of the previous time she’d followed her husband across town. This was the same route as her walk to French class, or the good butcher, the post office. The same walk that launched her daily peregrinations, the myriad missions of the housewife. But today Kate was something else.

She marched through the lobby without a glance at the guard, punched the elevator button, rode to the third floor with a pair of
Italian bankers on their way to five. She didn’t know where Dexter’s door would be—she hadn’t followed him into the elevator, back when she’d followed him—but she suspected it would have no label, no plaque, no name on the door. She quickly found such a door, near the end of the fluorescent-lit corridor. The first key she tried opened the lock—easy!—and she pulled the door.

Kate stepped into a tiny vestibule, dimly lit, another door a few feet in front of her, room enough for two people in here, tops. Designed for one.

A keypad, numbers glowing red, confronted her on the opposite wall.

How many combinations would she be allowed to try? The system would shut down after what? Three false tries? Two? Would she get the chance to be wrong even once, before the system turned off, or sent an SMS to his phone, or an e-mail to some account?

Numbers were streaming through her head, or ideas of numbers: their anniversary, their children’s birthdays, his own birthday, hers, or possibly his mother’s or father’s, his childhood phone number, an inversion of any of these, a replacement code …?

The only way it would be possible to guess his code? If he were a moron.

SHE WAS HOME again when her mobile rang, an unfamiliar number, a long string of digits, must be from a different country.

“Bonjour.”
She didn’t know why she answered in French.

“It’s me.”

“Oh, hi.”

“I forgot my key ring,” Dexter said. “Or, worse, I lost it.”

“Oh?”

“I need it. I need something from the flash drive on it.”

She glanced at his keys, sitting in the ceramic bowl on the hall table, exactly where he would have left them, if he had left them, on purpose or by accident.

“What do you propose?” she asked, trying to keep her voice flat, unemotional, uninvolved in what he should imagine was his own private drama.

“Are you home?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Can you look for them?”

“Where?”

“Where I keep them.”

“Okay.” She walked through the hall, stood at the table, staring at the keys in the bowl. “No, they’re not in the bowl.”

“Can you check the car? Maybe they fell out when I was looking for my charger.”

“Sure.” She went to the basement, looked in the empty trunk. “They’re here.”

“Thank God.” His voice was crackly; phone reception was poor, down in the garage.

She didn’t respond. Walked back to the elevator.

“Listen,” he began, but didn’t continue.

“Yes?”

He was thinking, she guessed. She let him do it. “Do me a favor.”

“Of course.”

“Take the key ring to the computer.”

“One minute.” Kate walked into the guest room. Sat at the laptop. “Okay.”

“The computer on? Pop in the memory stick.”

She slipped the device into its slot. “Done.”

“Okay. Double-click it.”

A dialog box popped open.

“The user name,” he said, “is AEMSPM217. Password is MEMCWP718.”

What the …? She jotted down these sequences before typing them, keeping a record for herself; these were too complex to memorize on the spot. Her mind was racing, trying to figure out what these numbers could mean, but nothing was occurring to her. Nothing familiar in any of that. “What
are
those numbers?”

“They were created by a random-number generator. I memorized them.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the only way to get a totally unbreakable code. Now, please, double-click the top icon. The blue I.”

This launched an application, the screen blinking on an unfamiliar logo, then a small window, another series of letters and numbers, gibberish.

“Read it to me.”

“Is this randomly generated?”

He didn’t answer.

“Why do you need it?”

“Kat. Come on.”

“Goddammit Dexter. You tell me
nothing
.”

He sighed. “This is a program that creates dynamic passwords. It’s how I unlock my computer. A new code every day.”

“Isn’t this a little ridiculous?”

“It’s what I
do
, Kat. It’s ridiculous?”

“No, not—I didn’t mean … I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Can you read me the code, please?”

“CMB011999.” She jotted it down as she read it, and he repeated it.

“Why don’t you keep this program on your computer?”

He sighed again before answering. “It’s crucial to silo the components of a multi-stage security apparatus. No matter how good the security, any computer—mine included—is hack-able. Any computer can be stolen. Seized by law enforcement. A computer can be exploded, or imploded. Set on fire with a liter of kerosene, bludgeoned with a nine-iron, erased with a portable low-voltage electromagnetic pulse.”

“Huh.”

“So that’s why I memorized the randomly generated codes, and that’s why I use dynamic passwords created by an external device. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

“Yes.”

“Wonderful. Then can I get back to work now?”

They hung up. Kate stared at the dialog boxes, then sprang out of her chair.

OUTSIDE AGAIN, SLICKENED cobblestones and dense cold fog, through the quiet blocks near home and across the somber Place du Théâtre, a concrete cap to the public parking beside the small theater, into the narrow tree-lined sidewalks of the rue Beaumont, expensive children’s clothing, expensive chocolate, expensive antiques, expensive women walking in and out of the expensive restaurant doors at lunchtime, Japanese and Italian, then the busy intersection with the avenue de la Porte Neuve, then back on the charmless boulevard Royale, nervous.

Kate pulled on her gloves.

Back in the concrete bunker of an office building. Back in the empty elevator, the long gray hall; back in the small dark vestibule. The fingers of her right hand hovering next to the glowing keypad. She could feel the electricity from the keys, jumping the centimeter to her fingertips, coursing through her. The tingle of anticipation.

The code couldn’t be today’s daily code; it wouldn’t make sense that Dexter would need to rely on the flash drive to get into his office. It would be—it should be—something he’d memorized; it would be the same every day. It would be the password he’d revealed to her, reluctantly. She’d told this to herself ten times, twenty, on the short walk over here: it would be the same password. It had to be.

Was it impossible that entering a wrong code would lock her into this tiny room until the police arrived? Or
electrocute
her?

She didn’t need to look at the slip of paper in her left hand. She typed the M, then the E, and then in a rush the MCWP, the 718.

She hit the button with the green arrow, and waited …

“Code bon.”

The lock clicked. She exhaled, and pushed open the door.

Another man’s private office, private room, secret from real wives, pretend ones. Papers in here. Framed pictures, Kate and the boys, singularly and in groups. Even a wedding picture, a black-and-white, an unfamiliar print, something she didn’t even know he possessed, much less had framed and shipped across an ocean and hung on his secret wall. It relieved her, this picture, this proof of something good.

A desk, a desktop computer, a phone, a complicated-looking calculator, a printer. All the normal stuff, pens and a stapler, file folders and Post-its, paper clips and binder clips.

Bookshelves filled with file boxes, big handwritten labels on their fronts,
TECH
and
BIOMED
and
MFTG
and
REAL EST DERIV.
Piles of newspapers,
The Financial Times
and
Institutional Investor
.

She didn’t understand what this stuff was. No—she understood what it was, but didn’t understand why it was here.

Kate sat in the swivel chair, tall and ergonomic, breathable mesh and adjustable height. She looked at the display screen and keyboard and mouse and speakers and headphones and external drive and an odd track pad.

She pressed the power button, and listened to the hum, and watched the screen flash. At the prompt, she entered the user name and password, holding her breath, again worrying that the laptop and the desktop wouldn’t share the same security, but then again insisting to herself that they should.

They did.

The screen blinked from black to white, the hard drive hummed, and a dialog box opened, a red exclamation point, an instruction:
AWAITING THUMBPRINT.

Kate looked at the odd pad on the desk, and understood it, defeated again.

She powered down the computer.

Kate stood at the bookshelf, pulling out the contents of file boxes, paging through the thick sheaves of professionally printed earnings reports, prospectuses, investor-relation brochures, shareholder-meetings minutes, glossy paper and multicolored pie charts and stock histories, x and y axes, big boastful numbers in bottom right-hand corners, measured in hundreds of millions, thousands of millions.

There were letter-size spreadsheets and graphs, annotated and folded, dog-eared and corrected. Numbers circled, arrows drawn. Margin notations scrawled.

This office? This was not the office of a security specialist. This was the workplace of an investment banker. Or a fund manager, or a financial adviser. This stuff belonged to someone who did something other than what her husband did; this room was inhabited by someone who was not her husband.

Kate looked again around the room, her eye running across the well-aligned tops of framed photos, to the windows facing out onto the slow-moving traffic, the office building across the street, similarly ugly but from a different architectural fad. Then she caught sight of her reflection, and the reflection distracted her from the real view, and she let her eye wander around the reflected room, the backward office, inverse-world, the corners at their opposites, and in one of them, in one of the corners was a thing, up there where two walls met a ceiling, and she spun around, panicked,
panicked
, at first turning to the wrong corner, then finding the correct corner, the thing, she took a single step to it, then another, and she realized—she confirmed—that the thing she was looking at, up there in the corner, that thing, a device, it was also looking down at her, a coin-sized piece of glass, encased in plastic.

A video camera.

FORTY MINUTES LATER and she was sitting in her car, waiting for three o’clock, again. The trifling rain had become a steady downpour, unignorable, frigid.