The Expats (31 page)

“When you’re speeding down, not sure what you’re going to encounter next.”

The chair passed the dale and climbed another rocky face, then a long rough slope, icicles and snowdrifts, immense boulders strewn, balls tossed around by giants. They were now very high from the ground, one of those spots in a two-thousand-foot ascent when the lift is more than the normal twenty feet up, but rather fifty, sixty feet.

The chair slowed. Then stopped.

Exposed to the wind, the cold. Swinging back, an equal and opposite reaction to what had been their forward momentum. Newton’s Third Law, here above the mountain. Swinging forward, then back. Forward, back.

Creaking.

A shudder ran down Kate’s spine. This was a mistake. She shouldn’t be here, alone with Bill.

The wind picked up, howling, pushing the swing of the chair into a bigger arc, the hinge’s creak louder. The extra-harsh coldness of a stalled lift on a windy day; raw exposure.

Kate looked up, to where the chair was connected to the cable by a clasp that looked like the end of a shoelace.

“Sorta scary, isn’t it?”

It was called an aglet, the shoelace tip.

Bill leaned forward, looked down. “If you fell from here, do you think you’d die?”

The aglet-like fixture was clamped to the cable as if with giant pliers. Kate could see the seam where it could be opened.

“What do you think?”

Kate looked at him. She could see through her rose lenses something new in his face, an expression she hadn’t seen before. Something hard.

“You ever been afraid for your life, Kate?”

EDUARDO TORRES HAD been living in a suite at the Waldorf, the hotel where presidents stay when they stop in New York for photo ops at the United Nations and a Broadway theater, a game at Yankee Stadium. Torres, however, wasn’t staying in the presidential suite. He wasn’t a president, never had been. But he thought he should be. And not just president of Mexico. Torres had a grandiose vision for a pan–Latin American supra-state—el Consejo de las Naciones, the Council of Nations—of which he would be leader, in effect the head of the western hemisphere and the half-billion people who lived south of the U.S. border.

But first he had to mount a triumphant return from unofficial exile. When he’d lost the election, he’d not conceded graciously; instead he’d objected vociferously. He’d incited violence, which in turn instigated revenge violence, and led to a generally unsafe environment for the ex-general. So he’d fled his Polanco compound to Manhattan, where he didn’t need to employ an entire regiment merely to make a restaurant secure for dinner. In America he could feel safe with a handful of bodyguards.

Torres had spent the previous year trying to build alliances and raise money for the next election, or a coup, or who knew what path he imagined for his ascendancy; he was delusional. No rational players were willing to offer him any support of any sort.

He was getting desperate. His desperation was making him
increasingly unviable, which in turn was making him increasingly desperate. A vicious cycle.

Kate, meanwhile, had just taken a trip to southern Mexico, which would turn out to have been her final overseas mission. She’d held a series of not particularly clandestine meetings with local politicians, trying to befriend—or at least un-alienate—whoever would be next, the generals and entrepreneurs and mayors who would mount their own presidential campaigns, sooner or later. Kate sat in courtyard gardens, purple bougainvillea climbing whitewashed walls, sipping cups of strong coffee in colorful ceramics delivered on hand-forged silver trays, absorbing their bombast.

Then she returned to Washington, to her husband and six-month-old firstborn. She was walking on G Street, returning to the office from lunch, when a town car pulled to the curb. The driver lowered his window.

“Señor Torres would appreciate a few minutes of your time.”

Kate quickly weighed her options, her responses. No matter how irrational Torres was becoming, there was no way he would do harm to a CIA officer in Washington.

“He is at the Ritz. He is available now.”

Kate climbed into the backseat, and five minutes later walked into the hotel lobby, where a bodyguard met her and directed her to Torres’s suite.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “He can meet me in the bar.”

Señor joined her in the lounge and ordered a bottle of water and asked about her well-being, a grace period that lasted thirty seconds before he began to pontificate. She listened for a half-hour to his tale of woe, to his vision for Mexico, and Latin America. He made an impassioned yet wholly ludicrous case for why the CIA should support him.

As an audience, Kate strove to seem dubious and pessimistic but fundamentally noncommittal and decidedly nonconfrontational. She’d known Torres for a decade. She didn’t want to piss him off unless she had to.

Torres asked the waiter for the bill. He told Kate he’d be returning to New York in the morning, and looked forward to their next conversation at her earliest convenience. She said she’d discuss it with her superiors.

He nodded slowly, closing his eyes, as if expressing deep gratitude. But he didn’t say thank you.

Kate rose.

That’s when Torres reached into his jacket and removed something from his breast pocket. He laid it on the gleaming cherry table, but said nothing.

She glanced down. It was a three-by-five print, glossy paper. She leaned over to get a closer look at the sharp, clear image, obviously taken with a powerful telephoto lens.

Kate straightened her back, deliberately slowly, trying to stay calm. Her eyes flickered up from the photo to the man across the table.

Torres was staring into the distance, as if this implicit threat had nothing to do with him. As if he were merely a messenger, and this were an ugly business between Kate and someone else.

21

Bill slid in front of Kate, down a steep, ungroomed trail, thick woods on one side, the other a rocky cliff lined with trail-limit poles—black-tipped poles, expert-slope poles, well beyond Kate’s abilities. He seemed determined to take her to the next level, or she was going to refuse to be taken there, or she was going to try and fail. But in any case, it would be different.

Kate struggled down the mogul-infested slope. A pair of fearless teenagers zoomed past and were gone within seconds. Kate and Bill were alone again in the deep silence of a tall snowbound mountain on the French-Swiss border.

She traversed the bumpy field to where the mountain came to an abrupt end at the intersection with the sky. As she neared the cliff’s edge, she could see more of the view out beyond the mountain, but she couldn’t see any of the side itself; the drop-off was too steep. A fantastically terrifying sign was planted here, a pictogram of a skier falling, windmilling, one ski off, a pole in the air. Certain death, is what this sign promised.

Bill was tight behind her. “You’re doing great,” he said.

Kate wasn’t reassured. She decided to stop but then didn’t, kept going, and decided to stop again but again didn’t, went faster, and faster, getting more nervous, and she could hear Bill’s turns behind her, and she could see the fall-away off to her left, thirty feet down to an outcrop of boulders, another twenty to the bottom of the ravine, and her left ski slipped out, toward the edge, nearing air …

She turned sharply toward safety, digging into the snow with her edges, pushing hard with her downhill ski, quickly coming to a snow-throwing stop—

Realizing, too late, that she was stopping with too little warning. She
was still in the microsecond process of this realization when she heard yelling—

Felt his pole trying to knock her out of the way—

His ski tip rushing across hers—

The full collision, the impact on her hip and torso and shoulder and arm, then she was airborne, being propelled toward the edge of the trail, the ledge of the slope, falling down the piste and sideways, in the direction of a long, fatal drop, the poles no longer in her palms but still attached by nylon straps to her wrists, spinning batons, only one ski still secured to her boot, and she tried to remember if she’d ever heard any advice—anywhere: in Girl Scouts, or at training on the Farm, or even on ESPN or who knows maybe PBS—about what is the best position to be in when you fall fifty feet off a cliff onto a rock?

KATE TRIED TO lift her head, but couldn’t. She couldn’t move her neck, her shoulders, her arms. She couldn’t see anything except a faint tinge of rose to the near-total blackness. Her face was pressed into the dense granular snow. The cold had suffused her skin, and she imagined her face muscles chilling, being flash-frozen, like sockeye salmon on a North Pacific trawler, their eyes permanently immobilized while looking off to the side.

It felt like a tremendous weight had pinned her at the spine, paralyzing her.

She tried to wiggle her toes, but couldn’t tell if she succeeded; goddamn ski boots.

She began to hyperventilate.

And then the weight on her spine might have shifted. And then it definitely did shift, at first increasing in pressure, then decreasing, then disappearing completely.

Kate heard something.

She thought she could move now. She did, turning, rolling her torso and shoulder and neck, turning her face from the snow, her goggles still mostly covered but not completely, so she could make out the world again with her eyes, and that thing she’d heard before, she heard it again, and it was a voice, and she could see through the patches of snow that it was Bill, and he was standing above her, asking if she was okay.

And she was.

DARKNESS ADVANCED QUICKLY in the mountains. By three, the sun’s angle had become oblique, the blue-tinged light flat, shadowless.

Kate arrived by herself to the bottom of an easy cruiser trail, a respite from Bill’s aggression. She hustled to the gates of the high-speed quad while there was no one waiting, intending to get on alone. But another skier pulled up to her side.

It was a man; it was Kyle. Finally.

The gates opened, and the two of them pushed up to the red line painted on the rubber matting, turned to face the oncoming chair. Then another skier arrived to Kate’s other side, invading their privacy. Damn.

The three sat down with a group thud. Kyle closed the safety bar.
“Bonjour,”
he said, barely audible through the grating of the chair pulling out.

Kate lifted her goggles off her face. She looked over at this Kyle character from Geneva, then stole a glance to her other side, at the third skier. She did a double take as she realized it was Dexter, grinning at her.

“Sweetheart,” she said. “You snuck up on me.” Loud enough to ensure that Kyle heard, unmistakably.

“Yes I did,” Dexter said, exultant in his sportiness. “How’s it going?”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. Wondering if Dexter had heard Kyle’s hello.

Dexter was leaning forward, looking over Kate, at Kyle. Double-damn. “You two know each other?”

Please, Kate thought—prayed—let Kyle not be an idiot.

“No,” Kyle answered.

“You said hello.”

“Just being friendly.”