The Travelers by Chris Pavone

Author:Chris Pavone [Pavone, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, Espionage, Suspense
ISBN: 9780385348485
Amazon: B00ZNDVYEU
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2016-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

NEW YORK CITY

Another day has slipped away, and here it is nine-thirty, and Malcolm has never gotten around to calling his wife and kids, never had the chance to do half the things he thought he’d do, including check the security footage, which he should do every other day at the least, but now it’s been nearly a week, and tomorrow isn’t going to get less busy, so, fuck it, he’ll do it now. It’s too late anyway to score points for coming home; the kids are already asleep. He might as well try to bank whatever he can for being a workaholic.

Malcolm walks down the hall, nearing the predictably occupied office of the man whose nameplate says VITO PARNELL but whom everyone calls Veal Parmesan, a play on not only his name and his profession but also on his long-ago mistake of admitting that he loved the Italian-American breaded cutlet.

Vito is a food writer from back before food writing was fashionable, as well as the director of the test kitchen. Vito is a legend, well known throughout the industry for meticulous prose and exacting research, and famous in this building for his snail-like velocity. There is no piece of text, no matter how short and trivial, that Vito can dispatch quickly. He arrives at the office early and departs late.

“Veal,” Malcolm says from the doorway, not quite stopped. No one who’s still in the office at this hour wants to chitchat.

“Malcolm.”

At the end of the hall, the boss shuts his office door behind him, locks it. He doesn’t turn on the overheads. There’s plenty of light streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows that face the Avenue of the Americas, shining from the buildings across the avenue whose own windows present something like a performance-art exhibit of lonely late-night labor, aproned cleaning ladies pushing vacuum cleaners, and jumpsuited maintenance men on ladders, and bankers at desks with sentient-looking Equipoise lamps, takeout containers and partially crumpled cans of Diet Coke that didn’t quite make it to the trash bin, all of it a silent pantomime of isolation and alienation.

Malcolm unlocks the clandestine inner sanctum. He takes a seat at the small metal desk, opens the laptop. He accesses the folders for the compressed video files, and opens the first one, Monday’s. He doesn’t as a rule check the weekend footage.

He waits a few seconds for the file to decompress, then the video starts to play. It’s a static view of his guest room–cum–home office, captured from a lens that sits in an air vent in the crown molding, aimed at his desk, motion-activated.

Nearly all the motion is his wife, walking back and forth across the carpeted room, tending to a basket of laundry, yanking open curtains, tidying throw pillows. Late in the day he sees himself sitting at the desk, opening the computer, then a minute later closing it, lights out. That’s Monday.

Tuesday is not different in any meaningful way, except that for ten minutes Allison lies on the sofa, talking on the phone.

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