The Expats (34 page)

Julia made eye contact. Kate took a deep, calming breath.

Dexter was wearing jeans and a black shirt, the same as a few other men here. But Dexter’s was the only black shirt that was untucked, while the others all wore thick belts with status-symbol buckles, silver or gold logos, a big serifed
H
, a boxed-in
G;
these buckles were the point. It would not have occurred to Dexter to buy a belt with such a buckle, to tuck in a shirt to display such a symbol. That was not her husband; she knew him, and that was not him. But of course she didn’t really know him.

Kate looked around at the men. These bankers with their platinum watches and alligator wingtips, their stretch denim and silk-cotton blends with iridescent mother-of-pearl buttons and hand-stitched buttonholes, talking about their carving skis and fully catered Swiss chalets, their villas in Spain and first-class flights to Singapore, next year’s Audis and last generation’s Jaguars, the dollar versus the euro, earnings reports, short positions. Money: earning it, spending it. Eating it, drinking it, wearing it.

Dexter had given Kate a watch for Christmas, gold, leather band, simple and elegant. The price was right there in the
vitrine
on the rue de la Boucherie, everyone in town could see it: 2,100 euros. All the husbands came shopping to the center streets twice a year, for Christmas and for their wives’ birthdays. They gazed in the windows of the same retailers on the same streets, considering the same prices that all the women considered, so everyone who cared knew exactly how much every bag cost—that midsized one was 990 euros, that one with the bigger pockets, 1,390.

And these women, all these mothers, all these ex-lawyers and ex-teachers, ex-psychiatrists and ex-publicists. Expat exes. Now they were cooks and cleaners; they went shopping and lunching. They carried price tags on their arms, projections of their husband’s income and willingness to spend it on nothing. On matrimonial goodwill.

Had Dexter become one of those men, behind her back? If so, he was still hiding it. And Kate was still letting him. Because she didn’t think that confronting him, when all she knew for certain was that the FBI suspected him, would do any good. She was going to need to be the one to discover the truth. And she had as good a shot as anyone. Better: she had access to his computer, his possessions, his daily schedule. His history. His mind.

“Hello, Kate,” Julia said.

Kate couldn’t read the look on Julia’s face. Couldn’t determine what
level of truth, or what depth of continued deception, they were agreeing to stand on, here in the middle of this crowded party. Honesty is a consensual continuum.

Did Julia know that Kate knew she was an agent? And also knew what her mission was?

Kate swallowed her pride, or disgust. Her protectiveness and hostility. “Hi Julia.”

WHAT COMPLETE LONELINESS is this? Surrounded by people, suffused with untruth, unable to tell anyone anything real. Vague acquaintances, casual friends, intimates, even her single soul-mate, the one person in the world, her partner, her ally, her everything. His head was thrown back in carefree laughter, his eyeglasses askew, hair mussed, crooked smile. She loved him so much. Even when she hated him.

Kate considered her husband, the secrets between them, the distance those secrets created. Her secrets: her secret life. The spying on him she’d already done and planned on doing, the massive wall of untruths that was growing taller every day, with every conversation they didn’t have, every admission she didn’t make.

Kate climbed the stairs. Quietly, alone, past the parents’ floor to the kids’, an out-of-the-way bathroom. Primary-colored plastic crap on the bathtub ledges, shampoo bottles decorated with unfamiliar cartoon images—TV shows produced in France, Germany, maybe Denmark. A few tubes of toothpaste in various stages of crusted-over sticky disgustingness, the universal uncontrollable in kids’ bathrooms.

Kate sat down. Across the tiled room, a full-length mirror, an invitation—a challenge—to observe your own nakedness. Kate stared at herself, fully clothed in black skirt and nylons, black sweater, ebullient necklace, excessive earrings, this brand-new expensive watch. Stupid jewelry.

It seemed so obvious now: of course she would be drawn to a man with a secret life. Of course she would be attracted to someone who had something slithering under the surface, something unseemly, somewhere secret.

She had forcibly willed herself to believe that she’d left this behind when she chose Dexter: a world where people were defined by their duplicities. And in her life, filled with deceptions, this had been her largest: self-deception.

Dexter had said that the best hacking is done by exploiting human frailties. Kate had always known, of course, that she had her own frailties. Everyone does. But she’d never before been aware of exactly what hers were. Now she was.

Did she know her husband, at all?

Kate began, once again, to cry.

THE CLICK OF the door, and Dexter was gone, back to the office for the first time since before Christmas. Back to that room that Kate had broken into. Back to the computer she’d failed to access, the files she’d riffled. Back to the video camera suspended in the corner.

It was the day after New Year’s. The first day back in the home routine since Kate had learned that her husband was probably some type of criminal. Back to grocery shopping, lugging, unpacking, stowing. Loading and unloading the dishwasher. Sorting and folding the laundry, tiny load after tiny load. Whites and lights, darks and brights.

There was black ice early in the morning, a thin sheet of invisible danger lining every paved surface, cars sliding and crashing everywhere, on small streets and highways, the steep ramps of driveways. Kate was thankful they lived in the center, where the early-to-work bankers’ traffic melted the downtown ice before she sank into the heated seats of her car at eight sharp, weaving in and out of the casualties. The Porsche that slid into a stone wall, the Ferrari towed from a tree trunk. Emergency lights glowing in the dark gray fog.

Dexter was at the office now. If the video was the first thing he checked, then he already knew.

Kate must’ve glanced at her mobile phone a hundred times, assuming that she’d missed Dexter’s call, with every glance expecting to see the new voice mail alert, listening to the message,
“What the
fuck
were you doing in my office?”
But the message never appeared. The only person who called was Julia. Kate didn’t answer, and Julia didn’t leave a message.

Dexter had gone to work later than normal, and now he was home earlier than expected. “I’m going to London in the morning,” he said. “This is my last trip for a while. My last business trip. But you remember we’re going to Amsterdam for the weekend, right?”

“Of course,” Kate said.

Dexter had made all the Amsterdam arrangements, because it was one of his old friends who was passing through on business, an early-career buddy from their shared days low in the ranks at an ISP.

They’d reconnected through social media. Thought it would be fun to see each other, after all these years, in Europe.

So it was the first of their family trips that Kate hadn’t booked from home. From the laptop computer that Julia had once used for ten minutes, to check her e-mail, when her Internet service had been down.

DEXTER AROSE WELL before daylight. Kate stayed in bed, unmoving, staring at the dark wall as he hurried through his shower, dressing. When she heard the door close, she got up.

Kate started her investigation in the predawn darkness with the computer. She accessed their aboveboard bank accounts, the one in Luxembourg and the one in Washington. The American checking account had minimal online security—nothing more complicated than a user name and a password. But the Luxembourg account required a long, abstract user name, a string of meaningless numbers and letters. Then a similar password. Then a complex access-code grid, to which Kate needed to insert the correct numbers and letters from a jigsaw-puzzle-like key.

If that was the security rigmarole for 11,819 euros, she could only imagine the complexity for a 50,000,000-euro account; 50,000,000 stolen euros. These types of codes were too complex for Dexter—for anyone—to memorize. There would have to be a record of the account numbers and security protocol somewhere. It wouldn’t be at his office, in an institutional building in the civic center surrounded by a variety of law enforcement. A place that could be raided, a building that could be shut down, a property that could be seized.

He must be keeping the information in the apartment.

Kate began to open and quickly close every file on the hard drive or the shared drives or the clouds, files that were not her own, looking for similar information for a different account.

When the boys woke up hungry, an hour later, Kate had still found nothing on the computer. This was what she expected. As Dexter had mentioned, any computer could be compromised. But Kate had to be thorough and patient.

It had to be here, somewhere.

IT TOOK TWO hours to make her way through the file drawer of the home-office desk, through every single piece of paper, every envelope and folder, looking for handwritten notes, A1-sized sheets that had been
output from their printer, scrawls on phone bills, anything on which Dexter could have recorded a code.

Nothing.

Kate turned her attention to the books he’d chosen to bring to Europe, a handful of novels, foreign-language dictionaries, travel guidebooks, technical manuals. All she discovered was that he particularly admired a few lines in
A Confederacy of Dunces
.

She examined every notebook scattered around the house—the boys’ tiny pads and midsized ones, big composition books and giant drawing pads, trying not to get distracted by their artwork. Ben in particular had gone through a phase of portraiture that was comically focused on socks.

American-bank checkbooks, deposit slips, check registers. Photo albums. The children’s passports. Bedside drawer. Medicine cabinet. Coat pockets. Kitchen drawers.

Nothing.