The Accident Read Free Page A

to the authorities, explain what happened, let them handle it. Which authorities? Certainly not the CIA. The FBI?
    Or she could take this to the news media—the New York Times , CNN. Or even Wolfe, for that matter; that could be interesting.
    Or she could call the president; she could try to call the president. She spends a minute wondering whether it’s possible that she, a well-known literary agent at a famous agency, could get the president of the United States on the telephone. No.
    Or she could do what she knows she should, and wants to, do: get this published, quickly and quietly to protect herself, waiting for the inevitable ubiquity of the publicity—the public-ness of this book’s story, the weight of its accusations—to protect her. She can’t be arrested—or killed—in front of the whole world. Can she?
    Isabel picks up her phone, and plucks a cigarette from the silver box atop the marble mantel, under her one and only piece of fine art, hanging where everyone positions their nicest framed thing. She walks out to her terrace and lights the cigarette, inhales deeply, expels smoke into the sky. She leans on the parapet and stares out at the dark, sinister-looking greens and blacks of Central Park, across to the skyline of Fifth Avenue, to the azure sky and the fiery orange ball rising in the northeast. It’s a spectacular view from up here, on her plant-filled terrace jutting out from her professionally decorated apartment, swathed in calming neutral tones. It certainly looks like a nice life that she has.
    She knows that she is the obvious—the inevitable—literary agent for this project. And there’s also one very obvious acquiring editor for the manuscript, a close friend who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, no matter how ludicrous, no matter what level of lunatic the author. He used to have impressive success with this type of book, even by some of his less rational authors; there’s apparently a good-size book-buying audience out there that inhabits a space beyond the margins of sane discourse. He’ll be motivated to publish another. Especially this one, about these people.
    Isabel tries to fight off the fear that wells up inside her again. She takes a final drag of her cigarette, knocks the glowing ember off the butt, thenflicks the relatively harmless fiberglass filter out into the air above Central Park West, where it seems to hover for a split-second, Wile E. Coyote-like, before falling, fluttering out of sight.
    She scrolls through her phone’s address book, finds the number, and hits Call.

CHAPTER 2
    H ayden slips the bookmark into the Icelandic primer. He places the thick volume atop his spiral notebook, a short stack next to a taller stack of reference works, some newish vinyl-covered handbooks, some tattered paperbacks in various states of falling-apartness, held together by duct tape or masking tape, or bound by sturdy rubber bands. These references are increasingly available electronically, but Hayden still prefers to hold a physical book in his hands, to run his eye across the tops of pages, down the columns, searching for a word, an image, a fact. The effort, he thinks, reinforces the learning. He’s old enough to recognize that there’s a finite universe of information he’s going to be able to absorb in the remainder of his life; he wants to learn all of it properly.
    He drops to the floor, does fifty push-ups, fifty sit-ups; his late-morning mini-workout. He buttons a French cuff shirt over his undershirt, affixes his enamel cufflinks, knots his heavy paisley tie. Slips into his sport jacket, glances at himself in the mirror. Adjusts his pocket square.
    It was during his first posting overseas that he started wearing pocket squares, plain white linen handkerchiefs. He’d wanted to look like a young ambitious conformist American functionary, the type of guy who would proceed immediately from Groton to Harvard to Europe and always carry a white handkerchief, neatly